by Lyga, Barry
“Look, jackhole,” Lio said with heat, “are you some kind of idiot? If you want to work, you get scanned.”
“Why?” Rose asked mildly.
Lio threw his hands up in the air. “So you can get your ration, dumbass! If we don’t know how long you worked, how the hell do we keep track?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Rose said. “I’ll be here every day.”
“Great. Good to know. Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“My name is Rose.”
A chorus of titters rippled through the Bang Boys. Except for Kent, who openly guffawed.
“Are you kidding me?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
“That’s a girl’s name,” Lio said, still chuckling.
“Which girl?” Rose asked.
Lio did a double take. “What?”
“You said it’s a girl’s name. Which one? I’m curious. I’ve never met someone with my name before.”
“That’s not what I…” Lio fumed. “Are you a smart-ass?” he demanded, and banged his pipe against a nearby fence post. Clong!
Rose didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as twitch a muscle. “Am I supposed to be afraid of you?” he asked.
No one had ever asked that before. The answer had always been so obvious. So the question threw Lio off, and he gabbled for a few seconds, searching for the best response.
“Shut your hole,” Kent advised, picking up the slack. He thwacked his pipe into his palm for emphasis. “You don’t scan, you ain’t comin’ in here. Now buzz away; you’re holding up the line.”
“But I want to work. I want to contribute.”
“Then scan your brand.”
“No.”
“Look, you’ve got the brand. Just scan it! Scan it and work.”
“What does one thing have to do with the other? Why do you care if I get my ration or not?”
Kent grunted something unintelligible. Rose didn’t move, and for a second Deedra thought the Bang Boys would—all of them at once, maybe—take a swing at him. But a voice sounded out from a speaker mounted on a nearby pole, a speaker adjacent to one of the security cameras.
“Let him in,” said Jaron Ludo’s disembodied voice. “And bring him up to the office.”
Inside, she strained to listen through the air duct. But as usual, she could pick up only the sense of voices, nothing specific. Down on the floor, they ran through the Patriot Oath, swore fealty to the Magistrate, then got to work.
Deedra had trouble focusing. The conveyor belt zipped by her station, and she worked as quickly as she could, but she couldn’t help tossing furtive, useless glances upward, toward the office into which Rose had disappeared, escorted by Lio and Hart. Kent and Rik stayed on the floor, occasionally living up to their group name and startling anyone within hearing distance. Which, given the loudness of the pipes, was everyone.
After a little while, Rose exited the office with Lio, strode from the catwalk to the stairs, and came down to the factory floor. Lio banged his pipe three times in rapid succession, setting up a tooth-jarring chain of echoing clangs that stopped everyone at their stations.
“Listen up!” he shouted. “I need a volunteer to show Rose”—he couldn’t say the name without a chuckling sneer—“the ropes.”
Deedra’s hand was in the air before the sentence finished, and soon Rose was deposited with her.
“I don’t get you,” Lio snarled before leaving them. “We got a system, you understand? You work, you eat. Simple. It’s worked for a long time. I don’t see why you have to go mucking with it.”
Lio stalked off, and Deedra found she’d been holding her breath the whole time. She let it out in a silent whoosh.
“So here we are,” she said.
“Indeed.”
She’d never taught anyone how to work before. She wasn’t sure where to start. “Have you ever done this before?”
He looked at the conveyor belt as it chugged by. Paying only half-attention, Deedra was bolting a housing onto a cylinder. “No. Nothing like this. What are you building?”
“An air scrubber,” she said. “See the fan blades?” She pointed to the cracked, dusty screen mounted at her workstation, which displayed a graphic of the various components coming together, a visual cheat sheet if any of the workers lost their place. Air scrubbers were probably the most important pieces of machinery in the world. Without them, even staying inside would provide no respite from the oft-poisonous air.
“I see,” Rose said. He picked up a screwdriver. “So each piece comes down the line.…”
“And you do whatever the schematic says needs to be done.” She installed another housing. “Today I’m doing this, for example.”
He nodded. “All day?”
“Pretty much.”
They fell silent for a while as she guided him through the steps. He learned quickly, and soon she was able to take a step back and watch him do her job as efficiently as she could, with much less time to learn. A vague and indistinct part of her thought she should be aggravated or maybe even jealous, but she couldn’t muster either emotion. Rose was whistling as he worked.
She was pretty sure he didn’t even realize he was doing it. It wasn’t a loud, piercing, attention-getting whistle. Or tuneless and random. There was purpose and pattern to it. Low and rhythmic, it was just loud enough for her to hear, and it lulled her into a sense of safety and security.
He interrupted her almost trancelike state to ask, “What does ‘Waiting for the Rain’ mean?”
It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about. WAITING FOR THE RAIN was graffitied all over the Territory. The Magistrate kept ordering it scrubbed clean, but it was everywhere, to the point that Deedra hardly noticed it anymore.
“The Red Rain,” she said. “Some people think it will come back.”
He frowned. “I see.”
“I don’t know why people worry about it,” Lissa said. She’d overheard them. “That was a while ago. What are the odds?”
“Don’t sound so sure.” It was a new voice—a man across the belt from them, slight and pockmarked. His name, Deedra remembered, was Lanz. That was all she knew. He could have been fifteen or thirty-five. “It happened once,” Lanz said, “it can happen again. And the last time, fifty billion people died.”
Deedra shook her head. So he was one of those. The Red Rainers. The Doomsdayers. Lanz was one of those people who believed in God. They went around exchanging bizarre, meaningless quotations with one another, bits of nonsensical stories they’d memorized and passed down from generation to generation.
“No,” she told him, “that’s not what happened. Fifty billion people died, and then the Red Rain came.”
“No, no,” Lanz chided. “The Red Rain killed those people. And it could come back for us. It’s the power of God.”
“That’s not what I was told,” Lissa said, jumping in. “It wasn’t God.” She snorted at the word. “And the rain wasn’t even red. That’s just what they call it.”
“It was red,” Lanz insisted. “My parents were alive at the end of it. They saw it. And it was the wrath of God. Matthew 24:30 to 36—‘At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.’” Lanz nodded smugly.
“Oh, please,” Lissa said, rolling her eyes. “Spare me that crap. It was aliens.”
Deedra blinked. This was the first time she’d ever discussed this with Lissa. Aliens?
Lanz smirked in disbelief, so Lissa went on: “There’s all kinds of evidence for it. My dad told me about it. Everyone knows. There were these big ships. People saw them. They flew below the clouds. And they were shaped like cigars, with lights along the sides, and moved with a low-pitched humming sound.”
“Where
do you get this nonsense?” Lanz asked snidely.
“My dad,” Lissa shot back. “I said that already. And it’s true.”
“It’s not. Acts 1:9—‘After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.’ That’s—”
“That’s just religious garbage you found on the wikinets. I’m talking about the truth. Aliens came and took people away and used the Red Rain as a distraction. Tell him, Dee.”
Deedra held her hands up. “Don’t get me involved.”
“What do you think?” Rose asked her.
She was keenly aware of his eyes on her. Lissa and Lanz had already become exasperated with each other and with the conversation—they were focusing on the belt again. Deedra shrugged and watched Rose as he did her job. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“Not really. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“What if it happens again? Wouldn’t you want to know what’s coming?”
“Really, there’s nothing I can do about it. So what’s the point?”
“Tell me what you think.”
She blew out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know, okay? You hear all kinds of things. People say stuff. I’ve heard it all. Like, some people say it was just nature. Just part of the environment dying. And that all the people who disappeared had nothing to do with it—they just went away in the confusion. Or maybe Lissa’s right—maybe it was aliens.”
“It was,” Lissa chimed in. “And when they come back, this time the rain will be black. And they have stretched-out bodies, but without noses, and they don’t have the black part of the eyes—it’s just all one color.”
Sounded convincing to Deedra.
“How do you know that?” Rose asked quietly.
“Everyone knows that.”
“So maybe that’s it,” Deedra said. “And then, yeah, there’s nothing we can do about it, so why worry about it?”
“What if it’s not aliens, though?” Rose asked.
“You mean what if it’s God?” Deedra barked a laugh. “Well, we can’t do anything about that, either. And what if it’s just the world? That’s another one I’ve heard. That it was the world itself, scrubbing people off the planet the way you would sweep away roaches. There were too many people, so the planet itself just wiped away half of them.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Why do you care what I believe?”
“Don’t you care what you believe?”
“No, because it doesn’t matter what I believe!” she exploded at him. Why was he goading her like this? “It happened. And now it’s over. And it’ll either happen again or it won’t, but either way, there’s nothing I can do about it. I try to focus on things I can do something about.” A thought occurred to her. “If you’re so interested, what do you think it was?”
Rose took a half second to abandon his work, gazing at her. Then, without even looking back down at the belt, he nimbly assembled the fan housing.
“I don’t know what it was,” he admitted, “but I know what it wasn’t. It wasn’t aliens. Or God. Or the planet itself. It was something else. I’ve seen a lot in this world, and I’m sure of this: It was something else entirely. There’s no shame in admitting we don’t know—it’s the only way to learn.”
You have to decide which one you believe.
How? How was she supposed to do that?
“And let me tell you something else,” Rose said. “I don’t think we’re building air scrubbers.”
Clong!
Hart was right behind her; she not only heard the bang of his pipe but also felt it vibrate her entire body, starting with the soles of her feet.
“Does Rose have the hang of it? Good. Then get him over to the other end of the line and get back to work. You don’t get rations for standing around.”
Rose went where he was directed to go, and Deedra took up her spot on the line again just as Dr. Dimbali’s perambulations brought him close to her station, shouting about valences and electron shells and the weak nuclear force.
“And Jaron has a message for you,” Hart continued.
“For me?” Deedra asked.
“Yeah. He said to tell you that when nothing happens, nothing will happen. Got it?”
“What does that mean?”
“He just told me to tell you. Now get back on the line.”
Next to her, Lissa whispered, “What’s going on?”
Deedra knew, though she couldn’t tell Lissa. It was about the rooftop. What had happened and almost happened and not happened. Jaron must have been worried about the drone. If its video feed came to light, he would probably get some very uncomfortable questions, questions he wouldn’t want to answer. Questions that would make him look bad. The video itself would be inconclusive, but if they asked her what had happened… A factory supervisor accused of forcing himself on a subordinate would be one thing. Add in that it’s the son of the Magistrate…
And so, a threat. So that she would keep her mouth shut. Well, fine. She’d half-expected some kind of punishment from Jaron today, but he’d done nothing. She could say nothing for a very, very long time if it meant keeping the peace.
She fumbled through the rest of the day, constantly looking up at Rose. As if he could tell when she was looking, he glanced up at her each time. And smiled.
A part of her was angry. So angry. Why had he pushed her about the Red Rain? Why did it matter anymore? Who cared?
But she had to admit: A part of her had been glad he’d done it. He’d made her think. In fact, she spent the rest of the day thinking about everything she’d heard about the Red Rain, the theories, the notions, the people who were so certain they were right.
Rose was right: There was no shame in saying, “I don’t know.” At least she was thinking about it.
But there was one thing she had to know. And only Rose could tell her.
When the second shift came in, Deedra caught up to Rose as they left L-Twelve. “What are you doing here?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“Working,” he said plainly.
“No kidding. You’re not from around here, right? So you don’t have to work. Especially for nothing.”
“Nothing?” He took a step away from her as they walked, keeping a bit of distance between them. She closed the distance again so that no one could overhear.
“Yeah, nothing. You didn’t let them scan you, so you don’t get a ration for what you did today. It’s free labor for them. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
“I don’t mind. I don’t want anything from them.”
“Then why are you here? And what happened up in Jaron’s office?”
“Not much,” he said in a tone that revealed that quite a bit had happened. “He wanted to know why I was here. He’d never seen me around the factory before.”
“Did you tell him you’re not from around here?”
Rose hesitated. “I may have neglected to mention that. There are so many people in the Territory, he can’t know all of them. It seemed wise.”
“Good call.”
“So then he told me I was the worst kind of citizen, one who didn’t contribute.”
Deedra winced.
“He said, ‘We all contribute. What are you contributing, you freak?’” Even though it had happened hours ago, the insult still stung, Deedra could tell. Rose’s whole demeanor changed when he said the word freak. He stiffened and squared his shoulders and crammed his fists into his pockets. “I told him I wanted to work. I said I could contribute twice as much as anyone else.”
“And what did he say to that?”
Rose’s lips quirked into a smile. “‘We’ll see.’”
He stopped and she wondered why, then she realized they had reached her building. “Good night,” he said, and walked off before she could respond.
She was already inside and nuking a block of turkey steak when she realized that she had originally asked him two questions. A
nd one of them—“Why are you here?”—he had never answered.
CHAPTER 8
Sunday.
That was the name given to this day of the week. Sunday.
Rose peers up at the sky and tries to imagine why the day has been named so. There is no sun on this day. Nor did the sun shine for more than five minutes at a time on any other day, but the name Sunday seems to demand sunshine, and it inevitably disappoints.
Still, he convinces himself that if he only waits long enough, the sun will break through the clouds. And so he stands. And waits.
Rain showers greet him instead. Gray, not red. Dirty rain from a dirty sky the color of old bruises.
When the rain ends, he sighs and thinks for a moment of the girl—Deeee-draaa —and then he continues in his labors, in his secret work, the task he has set for himself.
The task of changing everything.
CHAPTER 9
The arrival of Rose, the mystery of him, should have marked something of a change, she thought. After a lifetime under an oppressive cloak of sameness, something had changed, radically. But all too quickly that same cloak was dragged over her days again.
Days became weeks, a month, then more. She kept her mouth shut, and there were no more threats from Jaron. No communication from him at all, actually. In some part of her mind, she began the process of erasing the memory of that day on the rooftop.
Rose was just a part of her life now. On the days when they shared a shift, he met her to walk to work together, waiting on that patch of denuded dirt outside her building. She came to realize that his expertise at dodging questions trumped her obstinacy in repeating them. So often he whistled as they walked, and she discovered that the walk to work seemed shorter and more pleasant when he did so.
He tried to teach her how to whistle, puckering his lips to lead by example. She couldn’t make her mouth contort like his, so he reluctantly took her face in his hands, pinching her mouth into an unfamiliar oval.
“Now blow.”
She blew, spraying him with spittle. Far from being annoyed or angry or offended, he burst into laughter, high and uncontrollable. And that just set her off, and soon the two of them were convulsed with laughter as Territory citizens jostled past them on the way to L-Twelve, staring at them with confusion or muttering about their lunacy. She didn’t care.