Infraction

by Annie Oldham

  All the soldiers in the yard make their way over to the huge gate and stand at attention while it creaks open. A truck rumbles back into the loading bay against the building. We watch as the truck's doors open to the center part of the building. It's shielded by fence and barbed wire, but I can see the boxes' labels: shrimp, oranges, chocolate. I know they're not for us, but that doesn't stop my mouth from watering any less.

  Jack rips his gaze away and focuses on me again. “It will take longer to kick in because it's being ingested instead of injected directly into the blood stream. Maybe an hour or two. What time does the staff eat?”

  Mary glances over to where Madge stands with Kai, Jane, and a few other inmates. She waves Madge over. Madge pretends to huff about it, but I know it's just a show for the soldiers.

  “When's dinner for the agents and soldiers?”

  “Kai says around seven-thirty. They eat when we're done.”

  “Then they should start feeling it around nine-thirty, maybe sooner, maybe later. But they all have to take it around the same time so no one sees the others start hallucinating and realize what's going on.”

  Madge nods and blows warm air on her fingers. “From what Kai says, just about everyone is in there. Some come in closer to seven, and then the majority at seven-thirty.”

  Jack frowns. “I think it's close enough. There's not much choice, is there?”

  “How's it coming with the keycard?” Madge asks.

  It's not in the cabinets or top drawer of his desk.

  “Not in the bottom two drawers either,” Mary says.

  Madge frowns. “I don't know how much more access we'll get.”

  It'll work. I'm sure of it. Dr. Benedict will want to see me several more times before the day of our escape, and Kai has a prenatal exam somewhere in those seven days as well. I'll see him before then.

  Jack can see the words I'm writing, and concern lines his face. He's about to speak when I put my hand on his.

  I'll be fine.

  “I don't think you can trust him, Terra.”

  I don't. That's not entirely true: I want to trust him. I know I shouldn't, but there's this insane part of me that wants someone here to not be all bad, someone who cares just a little. I guess it's the need to know that they're not all monsters, that somewhere there's some hope for the citizens of New America. It may be the tiniest fraction of hope—he's only a doctor after all, and he makes it sound like no one listens to him—but I need that right now. I think we all do.

  So instead of spilling this to Jack, I write, I'll be careful.

  He puts his fingers in my hair and gently pulls me to him so that our foreheads touch through the chain link. His hands are cold but his face is warm, and even though he's been through detox and living in a cell and working, I swear I can still smell the woods on him, and he smells so familiar, so like home, that I could stay this way forever. I want to do nothing but breathe him in and feel his skin against mine. How did I ever wish that he wouldn't touch me?

  Jack doesn't let go until the intercom tells us the men's yard time is over. When he pulls back, I see him differently. I see the trust I need to earn back, but there's also loneliness in his eyes. I recognize the ache from my second injection, but it's real this time, not some bizarre imitation of sadness with empty tears. I realize how much I've wanted Jack next to me, needed his words, the richness of his voice, the gentleness of his hands. How did I miss this? How did this sudden longing sneak up on me so quickly?

  My fingers are laced in his. When he pulls away, our fingers are the last to part. He turns and joins the men filing back into the building. We walk from the fence before the soldiers sweeping the fence line can harass us.

  Mary shakes her head and smiles to herself as we walk back to our group.

  What?

  “I had no idea how you and Jack felt about each other.”

  What do you mean? I've suspected he's loved me for a while. That shouldn't be a shocker.

  Mary rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on. Are all colonists so dense? Well, I won't be the one to tell you if you haven't figured it out yet.”

  We spend the rest of yard time talking about where the keycard might be. Kai, Mary, and I come up with a strategy for searching Dr. Benedict's office. I hate conspiring against him this way. He's been genuinely kind to me, and I feel like I'm betraying him somehow. I have to turn my back on that thought. Getting all of us out is more important than worrying about hurting his feelings. I feel like I'm eight years old again when Gram lectured me about including everyone after I told another girl she couldn't play with me and Jessa. Dad tried to butt in with something about 'equity for all,' but Gram silenced him with a look. Even as a kid, I couldn't stand the rhetoric he spouted, and Gram—more than anyone else back then—knew it.

  Still, I can't help the guilt that curls around my stomach. Ignore it, I tell myself. It'll just get you in trouble.

  The piles in reclamation have dwindled, and they move us into the sewing room. Sewing room is pretty much a euphemism in this case. There are rows and rows of brown sewing machines. They look nothing like the sleek, silver machines used the colony. These sit on tiny tables. The room has a low ceiling and a row of small windows along the top. Even though the weather is chilly and I could see my breath in the yard, this room manages to be hot.

  “We're above the kitchen,” Jane whispers out the corner of her mouth when I wipe the beads of sweat from my forehead. I see the heavy pipes that run from holes in the floor up into the ceiling where they vent out the roof. “Don't touch the pipes.”

  No. I can already imagine the blisters that would form.

  We file in and each sit at a table. I stare at my machine. It's a brown rectangle with a few knobs and a needle above a small hole in the bottom. Two large spools of thread—one gray, one yellow—sit on spindles next to me. I have no idea what to do here. A few workers walk up and down the aisles, distributing armfuls of clothes.

  Help, I mouth to Jane. She keeps the hopeless look in her features, but I see something different in her eyes.

  “Mend them. Look for holes or split seams.”

  I pick up a yellow shirt. The seam along one of the arms has come apart. How?

  But Jane doesn't see me because her deft fingers have already found the flaw in a pair of pants, put the pants under the needle, and fly it through the machine. I study her for a few minutes until there's a rough shove on my shoulder.

  “Get to work,” says the soldier behind me.

  A girl in the desk next to me says, “She doesn't know how,” without even looking up from her machine. I suck in a breath at her boldness.

  The soldier grabs her arm. “Don't speak unless asked.”

  She doesn't say anything more, just hunches down and resumes feeding clothes through the machine, dropping the finished ones in a basket.

  “This is not a sewing class, worker. Figure it out. Now.”

  I nod, so glad the serum from yesterday has worn off and won't make me do something stupid like try to bash his face in. I purse my lips in concentration and try to mimic Jane's movements, but her fingers fly so fast over fabric, thread, and knobs that I have no hope of keeping up. It doesn't help that the soldier looks over my shoulder, waiting for me to mess up.

  Finally I manage to thread the machine and put the split seam underneath the needle. I watch Jane press her foot on the pedal and the fabric flies through.

  Well, here goes.

  I push down way too hard, and the shirt pulls from my slippery fingers and zips under the needle, bunching in huge puckers and completely sewn down the seam and then across the back.

  “You have to wear these clothes, you know.” I swear the soldier—and the soldiers here have no sense of humor whatsoever—laughs at me. He quickly snaps to attention when the sharp click of an agent's heels bear down on us.

  “What's going on here?” the agent snaps.

  “This worker doesn't know how to use the machine.”

  “And why is
this amusing?”

  I don't know how she knows he's smiling, but something about his posture changes, like the smile is wiped clean from him.

  She looks at the mess of yellow fabric on the table in front of me. “Twenty-four hours solitary confinement. Maybe that will teach you to be more thoughtful in your work.”

  Jane looks up from the pants she's sewing.

  The agent turns on her. “And if you don't mind your own work, you'll be there too.”

  Jane's head snaps down and she runs the pants through her machine. They fall into the basket with a thump, and it sounds like my heart beating against my ribs.

  “Get up. Now.” The agent turns and stomps away, and the soldier rips me to my feet.

  He marches me out of the heat of the sewing room and down the corridor. The cool air would be a welcome relief if it weren't for where we are headed. I can't keep the broken-down posture about me now. I'm frightened and I really don't care if the soldier sees it. I've been bottling myself up for so many days here—I've lost track of them—and I'm not sure I can keep anything hidden for much longer.

  The soldier leads me to a stairwell, and we go down three flights to the basement. It's cold, and I can taste the damp in the air. Bulbs hang from the ceiling every few yards, and the light they cast is full of shadows. It's not as hospitable, but the oppressive dark reminds me of the colony more than any other place I've been here.

  Our footsteps echo down the hall, and every few feet metal doors hunker into the concrete walls. I hear moaning or scraping or something from one of them. I guess solitary confinement isn't really solitary; I'll have neighbors.

  The soldier leads me to a door, swipes his keycard, and swings the door open. I instantly gag at the smell that slams up against me, and when I hesitate at the threshold, the soldier pushes me into the room and slams the door. The smell of human excrement forces my back up against the door. There's a small slit in the door that opens into the hallway, and the dim light shines into my eyes. The soldier retreats back the way we came, but I don't care about any of that. All I care about is the wisp of fresh air—well, as fresh as anything is down here—that wafts into my face.

  The scraping in the cell next to mine gets louder, and then I hear the hushed sounds of controlled sobbing. The small hiccups in breath, the sniffles, the sighs. I want to curl up in a ball, but do I dare sit down? I take a deep breath of the dank hall air and then look around. The small sliver of light barely traces outlines on the cell.

  There's a bucket in one corner—I don't have to wonder what it's for—and a drain in the middle. That's it. The floor doesn't look too bad, but I can't really see it very well. I'm not going to stand for twenty-four hours, so I slide down onto the floor, trying to keep my nose as close to the opening in the door as I can. As gross as it is, though, I'm starting to get used to the smell. I wonder if they'll feed me while I'm here. I doubt I'd have much appetite for it even if they offer.

  I think the only good thing about being down here is I didn't see a single watcher in the halls. I study the seam where the walls meet the ceiling and don't see the tell-tale gleam of a watcher lens in here either. Maybe I'll go through this without someone spying on me.

  I can hope.

  I wrap my arms around my legs. The cold of the floor seeps through my pants, and I wonder how long I'll be able to sit here before my legs go numb. Maybe I will stand for more of the twenty-four hours than I thought. I wonder who's in the cell next to mine, and what she did to be put here. I feel so cut off, though, because I can't ask her a single question. I've never felt more alone.

  I don't know how much time goes by as my mind drifts. I see Dr. Benedict softly touching my face, but I can't read his eyes. They hide everything from me, and there's something in them I'm supposed to be seeing, but I just can't break through. Then Jack appears behind him, and I can't help the smile that races across my cheeks.

  I remember what Mary said in the yard about how I feel about him. I can't deny the pull to him, like swimming for the surface when my lungs are about to burst and he's my breath. But what does it mean? I remember the way Brant and Jessa used to look at each other, the way they were lost from the rest of the world. I don't feel that, though. I feel that when I'm with him, instead of being the only two people on Earth, the rest of the world comes into sharper focus, and I can see things more clearly. It doesn't make any sense.

  Maybe colonists are dense.

  A hoarse whisper cuts through my thoughts. “What's your name?”

  The person in the cell next to me. The voice sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't place it. Even if I could, I can't say anything. I wish that I could so she wouldn't feel so alone down here either. Instead I knock twice on the door and hope she gets some kind of message from it.

  She's silent for a long time, and I wonder if she's decided to ignore me. Then she says, “Can't talk?”

  I knock again.

  “You're not the first.”

  I lean my head against the door.

  “I've been down here a week and a half.”

  So long? The only thing I can think of is why? but I can't ask her that.

  “Stupid accidents. It'll get you thrown down here every time.” Her voice creaks over the last word, and I wonder when the last time was that she spoke to someone. She coughs. “Not the first time. I stole food from the commissary after I had been at this camp for about a week. You know, the agent's dining hall. I just wasn't used to being quite so hungry.”

  I think of Kai working there tonight, making a dinner for the agents and soldiers that's a hundred times more extravagant than what we get in the mess hall.

  “I took a whole roasted chicken. They knew it was me because the bird was so juicy it dripped all the way down the hall and into the supply closet I jimmied. I managed to eat half of it, though, before they found me. It was the best chicken I've ever had. I was in for three weeks that time.”

  I wonder if three weeks of being here in the stink and the darkness was worth half a chicken.

  “I shouldn't have done it for the chicken. No few bites of food are that good. But I'd do it all over again just to have that sense of power over them. Knowing that for a few minutes, I was in control.” She sighs and sounds almost content.

  Her voice nags at me. I've heard it before, maybe once. I wish I could see her face. If she was older or younger than I am; tall or short; dark or fair. I imagine she looks a lot like Jessa, and the thought makes me sad. I wish I knew what Jessa was doing. I wish I knew if she was happy, if she was still with Brant, if she was planting new crops in Pod #3, if she let her hair grow out. I run my hand over my own scalp. The hair has grown longer since I came here. It's maybe a quarter inch long now and doesn't feel quite so prickly.

  Why am I even here? Because I didn't know how to use a sewing machine, and the agents couldn't stand to teach me? That's not right. It would be more worth their time to let Jane teach me instead of letting my work hours waste away down here in the dank. There's something they need from me, something they want. There are so many things I could tell them. They'll never hear them from me.

  I curl my hands into fists. They'll never hear them from me. I repeat it to myself again and again. When I was in the settlement, the only thoughts that I could repeat over and over to myself were thoughts about blood and death. I don't know if it's a good thing I've moved past that, but I have. Now the only thoughts I have are how to get away from them, how to get others away, how to keep us all safe. I'm not doing much good down here.

  My neighbor's words ring deep into my heart. Knowing that for a few minutes, I was in control. That's what this escape is about. Taking the power from the government for just a few hours as we race away from the camp, knowing that they'll have no more power over us.

  I will get one more vial of serum, I will find the keycard, and I will get us safely out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I must have fallen asleep—I'm amazed I did, with the smell and the cold and the hard floo
r—because I wake to the sound of boots.

  “Get away from the door,” a soldier says through the slot.

  I scoot far back. I hear the keycard slide through the reader and the lock slide back with a click.

  “Get up and follow me.”

  Has it really been twenty-four hours? I guess that's the good thing about solitary confinement: the sleep, even though every bone in my body aches from the hard floor. I didn't realize I was so unbearably tired.

  I hunch after him, limping as the blood returns to my right leg. He must be smiling behind his mask at how pathetic I look. Let him smile. It's only five more days, and then for a brief moment, I'll be in control. I need to tell myself this because for the past twenty-four hours I've been completely at their mercy: having to use the bucket, sitting with that smell, hearing my stomach snarl at me so loudly there could have been an animal in the room with me. Even now my stomach growls, and I wrap my arms around my waist, trying to contain it.

  As we pass my neighbor's cell, the gleam of two eyes peers at me through the slot in the door. I nod my head to her—just barely—so she knows that at least I know she's there and that I care.

  We climb up the stairs that lead away from the wet and the smell and into the cold light of the corridors. The soldier leads me toward the medical area. Maybe it's standard procedure to have Dr. Benedict examine everyone who comes out of solitary, but I doubt it.

  We go in, and the door to the exam room is closed. The guard motions me to a chair, and I sit. He waits with me for Dr. Benedict to come out. When he does, I'm shocked to see Jane behind him.

  “Oh hello, Terra. I'll be with you in a moment.”

  I'm even more shocked when he steps away from Jane and I really see her. Her hair hangs down over both sides of her face, but it doesn't hide the hideous purple bruises or the way her left eye is swollen shut. When the guard turns to leave with her, she gives me an unmistakable smile. What is with her? She's been beaten to a pulp and she looks happy about it. It's the only communication she offers me, though, as she follows the guard.