by Laura Bynum
My legs bend and punch, stamp down the uneven earth. It's always the small things that trip people up. I see it all the time. If it's the Blue Coats, they'll see the things I've left out and the fresh pleat I'm leaving in the field. If I get to the kitchen in time and manage to grab the matches, I won't get far enough away. Even if I get back to the creek, the other side of the waterline is steep. It's a hundred feet of no cover before I'd find the skirt of the neighboring crops. And I'll only be able to run as fast as my water-starved muscles will go.
If it is the Blue Coats, I'm dead. I run faster.
The car is taking the curve around the tree too quickly. The tires bark as they fall off the shoulder. I pick up speed, clear the grass, leap onto the rocked drive. I fumble my way through the porch door, run to the next, the one leading to the kitchen . . . the car is on the drive. I burst in. Rocks are pinging against the car's undercarriage. It's halfway to the house.
"Where are . . ." The matches.
The car slides past the window just above the sink. If I leave right now, right now, I can make it out the front door and head the other way.
God help me. I see the the matchbox on the counter. Fly across the room, tuck it into the hollow of my hand.
A car door closes.
I race back through the kitchen entrance and push open the rusting porch door. That goddamned squeaky hinge. It's too late. Whoever's come is already out of his car and would have heard me. Before I can clear the porch, someone steps around the corner. I bolt off the concrete slab and run toward the crops. Behind me, the person is yelling. It is a man's voice, repeating my name over and over.
In the faded light, the stalks resemble people. I thrust myself into the crowd of them, pushing aside their sharp limbs as I stumble forward. With no light to guide me, I misjudge the placement of each row and crash into one bristling bunch of ears after another. They tear my pants, my shirt, my skin. Pull out chunks of my hair as I pass.
I've gone a good way before I hear the man behind me. The sound of him running quickly down the trail I've created interrupts my focus. I turn my head just in time to catch him coming up at me through the crops. His fists wrap themselves in my clothes and I'm pulled toward him, then slammed to the ground. He places either knee on my thighs and either hand on my wrists, then leans down into the shadowed trough and speaks to my turned cheek.
"Harper . . ." It's the Blue Coat who pretended to rape me. John Gage.
I shake my head, trying to catch some part of his face with my upturned chin.
"Harper! Hold still!"
I continue flailing back and forth until his nose is hit hard and something warm spills onto my shoulder.
"Stop it, goddamnit!"
Gage removes one hand to attend his bleeding nose and it's all the opening I need. Up goes one knee into his groin and down goes the man onto his belly. He falls onto the space I've made warm as I begin running back toward the house.
It's easier going in this direction via the path the two of us have cleaved into the harvest. I erupt onto the farmhouse lawn and make it only two or three strides when my feet suddenly find no earth. I'm hauled up onto the man's shoulder and thrown hard to the ground. I lay blinking dumbly at the stars while working to get air back into my shocked lungs.
Still bleeding, the Blue Coat paces back and forth at my feet. "Now just lie there for Christ's sake!" he shouts, removing a cloth from a trouser pocket and pressing it to his nose. "My name is John Gage." He stops pacing and comes over, leans down so I can see his face. "I'm your recruiter."
No. I take in his wide eyes. The slightly too long, curling hair. The same chin, same lips. Same look. So this is why Ezra didn't want to tell me. It's the Blue Coat who killed Candace. The man who shot her in the head. And the man who comforted me in the alley.
I turn away so he can't see the tears stacked up behind my lashes.
"Harper," he says quietly. "I'm safe. I'm with the resistance."
"You killed Candace! You tried to rape me!"
A pause. "I saved both of you from far worse things."
Intuitively, I know it's true. All I can think to say is, "You're a Blue Coat."
"How else did you think I'd be able to get to you?"
My heart is beating so hard in my chest, I want to throw up. "What are you here for?"
Gage repositions himself so I'll have to see him or turn my head. It's an effort not to look away. "I'm here to take you to the bunker," he answers with his eyes on mine. He's worried. About me or my abdication from the movement, I'm not sure. The concern softens him, turns him momentarily into the man I'd envisioned.
I have to sit up.
Gage puts out an assisting hand I don't take. I roll myself off the grass and stumble away. Past his State car. On through the line of tall grass that leads to my creek sanctuary. I want out of this fear that's always with me, away from this moment and the joy-filled future that can no longer be. I've romanticized my recruiter. Turned a Blue Coat into a good man. A savior. A soul mate. The idea of such ebullient self-deceit is like a kick in the gut.
I sit by the creek for a few long moments, absorbing as much of this nocturnal peace as I can. Hoot owls help me reassemble my thoughts. They call to me from the wireless trees. Fly out and swing down toward my head like bats.
Gage never comes to find me or starts his car to leave.
When I'm as full up as I can get, I wind my way back to the house. Find the Blue Coat sitting in the kitchen, Frog and Toad spread between his large hands.
"Where'd you get this?" he asks, voice dim.
"Upstairs."
I try not to notice, but this man's colors have begun to turn. His natural blue-green aura becomes a deep violet with small cores of amber, the colors of a bruise.
John Gage sees me watching and pushes away from the table. "Let's go."
I follow him to the car and, without protest, get in.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MAY 22, 2045. MORNING.
Helen Rumney has sharp knees. They peek out in turns beneath her skirt as she drives, left then right. Gas then brake. She's a two-footed driver, and on an automatic. A woman like this, with more lust for power than any human I've ever met, and she can't manage the road. Candace and I are floored.
"How are you this morning, Harper?" Helen asks. She's aware of my eyes on her legs, the one foot always hovering over the brakes. A rabbit runs across the road in front of us and down goes Rumney's pointed black boot.
"Fine, ma'am."
"Nervous?" She smiles, producing slightly long white teeth.
Next to me, Candace lets out a soft grunt. I shift on the leather seat, press into her side with a hand. Don't.
"No, ma'am," I say, speaking over Candace's muttered Don't what?
"Good," Rumney responds. "I'm confident in your capabilities." She shifts her eyes left in the rearview mirror and gives Candace her obligatory attention. "And you, Candace? You doing okay?"
Candace leans forward. Shows Manager Rumney a few of her own teeth, mostly the lower ones. "Never better."
Candace and Helen Rumney do not like each other.
Today's test will determine which of us will be the Alpha Monitor and which of us will be the Beta. To Candace and I, it doesn't matter. But to everyone in the Murdon Building, to President, and especially to his beady-eyed, potbellied Press Secretary, it will mean a great deal. In addition to handling files requiring the very highest clearance, the Alpha Monitor will act as the Chief Operating Officer of the BodySpeak program and be its liaison to the public. Who it will be after today's test, neither of us know. Our abilities are very nearly the same. I'm slightly better at reading scenes, while Candace has superior powers of prognostication. We both see auras with the same clarity and come away with the same textual analyses of these scenes. Our abilities to see residual energy seem to last for roughly the same amount of time. Which of these abilities will come into play during our testing is yet to be seen.
Next to me, Candace has her eyes
locked on a pair of buzzards circling so close we can see the red skin of their hairless heads. "What happens today?" she asks.
Manager Rumney shrugs. "You'll do what you did last time, just without the pulse box. It won't be that different."
Without the pulse box? I don't understand.
A pulse box is a small black computer the size of a fist. It's programmed with a specific identity, someone we can find. It even throws off electronic pulses--the closest thing BodySpeak programmers could get to an artificial aura. Candace and I have never worked with live targets before. Something about it makes my stomach ache.
"We're not going to inject you with anything," Helen says. "If that's what you're thinking, don't. It's not an issue." It isn't what Candace or I are thinking, but Rumney's immediate turn to this denial tells me it's on the schedule. Someday we're going to get a veinful of modifier. Something that will enhance our perception or reduce our guilt.
Candace turns away from the circling birds and leans over the front seat. "So we'll be hunting real, live people now?"
Helen Rumney disapproves of the question. And of Candace. "Monitor Hillard, you know I can't answer that. And you also know better than to ask." It's a part of our Disassociation Protocol. If it doesn't begin with a How do I, When do I, Where do I, the question's not allowed.
We stop at a checkpoint a half mile outside the compound. Helen smiles through the driver's-side window, rolled halfway down. "Morning, Carl."
"Morning, Manager Rumney." Carl is wearing military blues with two guns strapped across his back. Behind him, there are four more just like him. He flashes a reader over Helen's slate and clears us to go through. "Have a nice day, ma'am."
We drive another mile to the hut where we train. It's hidden and huge. Extends forever alongside an artificially straight creek bordered on each side by tall oaks. All you'd see from the air are their wide arms stretching.
We nod at the guards piled ten deep behind the front doors. Then follow Manager Rumney down a corridor to a changing room, where we take off our clothes and put on the regulation testing suit. A white jumper with a high neck worn rolled up over our slates, even though, for the duration of these tests, they've been turned off.
"This way." Manager Rumney motions us toward the far end of the building, where men and women have come out of their offices to watch us pass.
Some of them wave, as if we know them. Most of them stare blankly, voiding themselves of thought. They worry we might try to break into their heads and read their secrets. See the things they're guilty of. The same things we struggle each visit not to see.
For the last few weeks, we've worked out of a small twenty-by-twenty-foot room barely large enough to hold two desks and two terminals. As of this week, we have our own place. The whole southern half of the building.
"Watch your step," Helen says. "We're running dark until after." She opens up the single door and disappears inside. Tells us to follow the white of her blouse.
We're on a long cement landing that, twenty feet in, cascades away into nothing. There's a post every foot with a chain strung between, a railing meant to keep us from falling over. The soft glaze of reflection is on every link, showing me the outline of a football field-size hole. Our platform sweeps down into it, extending out for a long way. I can tell by the echo of Helen Rumney's clicking heels. Each step takes long seconds to come back.
There are people out there. I can feel them in the dark, buzzing. Humming for me without a sound. The waves coming off of them make me dizzy. They know exactly what we're here to do. Some of them are terrified.
Jesus Christ. I turn to Candace, who's already turned to me.
Can you feel them? she's asking me with her green eyes.
I nod just barely. Helen Rumney's watching.
"Murphy!" she shouts to a woman standing near the rail. "Start the clock now! We need to get this prepped better for next time, people. They've already begun!"
The blackness is interrupted by dozens of staff members scrambling to attention. These people are here to take notes, control the atmosphere, God knows what else. I can see them moving in the dark as waves of dull pink, beneath which are suddenly wide blue lights dimmed by black shielding hoods. These covers are meant to harness the luminescence of their electronic notepads. Keep it off those others meant to serve as our subjects.
Before we can ask questions, Candace and I are ushered into place on a makeshift podium of uneven boards that have been secured on the prow of the landing. We face outward, toward the hollow space. It gives the feeling of being about to step off a cliff.
"Ladies, what we're doing today is not remote viewing. Today, we're working on a more proximal stage. Before you is a bunker thirty yards wide by seventy deep. And directly in front of you is a schematic. Murphy, light it up."
I see Rumney's assistant move and a piece of floating plastic blooms into view. It separates into two pieces, each traveling on invisible cords toward us. Mine stops a foot in front of where I stand. It's been angled like the top of an old-fashioned school desk and shows the room before us in miniature. More than two hundred boxes have been drawn in luminescent blue ink. Someone steps forward and puts a stylus of the same color in my hand. When brought close to this map, the working end catches light.
Helen Rumney clears her throat, drawing our attention back to her. "Before you are two hundred and eight spaces and, in them, one hundred and ninety-eight targets. Some have volunteered. Some have been drafted, thus the Blue Coats you noticed coming in. We'll be keeping the lights off and you'll be wearing earphones to prevent any attempts at echo-location." Rumney pauses as a black drape is lowered between Candace and me. She continues with her pale face dipping in and out of view. "You have ten minutes to put a mark over each square of space you determine as occupied. If it's a woman, we'd like you to use an O. If it's a man, an X. If you have trouble finding the spaces, you can ask your assistants for a correct location and they'll direct you. But you are to make your own marks and to never speak about them out loud."
Helen moves closer until her nose is almost touching the black drape. "If you pick up any colors of interest to the Confederation, anything that may represent a potential terrorist within this group, you are to forgo the use of an O or an X and put down a number. The number one represents a minimal threat and ten represents a certain and aggressive threat. Your time begins now."
I startle as headphones are clamped over my ears. I thought there'd be time for questions, of which I have many. Time to meet my assistant, a woman already here to my left. She's featureless in the dark, an outline wearing an oversize watch that ticks down the seconds. The assistant moves nearer, scoops away my hair, and adjusts the headphones so they're tight against my skin, and taps a short-nailed finger against the time. Ten minutes. I'm flashed so many fingers to confirm. She steps toward my shining map and her uniform comes into view. She's a Blue Coat. Shit. I focus on Candace and her beautiful blue-purple aura already beginning to grow. On how pleasant the air-conditioning feels on my skin, the perfect temperature of the room. Anything to help me put away this woman's profession and the distaste that will color my results.
Tap, tap, tap, my assistant prods. Hurry it up.
Candace is thinking what I'm thinking. I can feel it through the drape. Helen Rumney's crazy if she thinks we can be timed. Time isn't a part of the process when we're out of our bodies, looking for whomever they've prescribed. But how to explain? There are no words for what we do.
I breathe in and breathe out. Soften the muscles of my eyes so no one thing is in my sights. It's pitch-black out where the people are standing. There is no ambient light to differentiate them from one another. The first thing we have to do is stop trying to see. To stop placing the matrix of expectation over ovals of black wanting to be faces or figures. Even under bright lights, we never get it right anyway. We see in two dimensions and use conjecture to bridge the gap. The biggest part of letting go is remembering this. That most of what we consume as tru
th skips sight and sound and goes right to becoming what we just know.
I breathe in and out until my palms grow hot. There is no building. No cement landing. No us and no them. We are an atomic family, these people and I. Things circling things circling things. I ignore an itch on the back of my shoulder. The pull of the headphones on a few strands of hair. Next to me, my assistant glares hard at her watch. Her impatience is distracting.
Each ball of light begins small. Not anything bigger than the glow of a cigarette. Each inhalation makes them brighter. Their breaths or mine, I don't know, an insignificance. How suddenly these sparks become observable clouds of energy always surprises me.
The room is glowing. Blinking like a Christmas tree. Blobs of color are everywhere, of nearly every hue. Dull red fear and deep red anger. Mustard-yellow self-concern. Dull blue arrogance. Light pink guilt. The prolific mold-brown of confusion. There is a woman in the front row drawing my attention. She wears a veil of black. Throws up contrails of smoky puce as she fidgets in her space. She's afraid of what we'll see. And she should be. We can both read her like a Confederation manual.
This woman is a Manager, maybe of Blue Coats. The things she's done are marked on her body like open sores. They leak patches of burgundy into the roiling black storm that surrounds her, mapping the unthinkable things she's done. She's killed people. Kills people, present tense. So often, it's become a chore. The ubiquity of it bores her, so she tortures them first. And she'll keep doing this forever until she's locked up. Candace and I have been empowered to stop her. All we need to do is write down the number ten on her square and she'll be put away. It would be easy. Good for the people she works with, best for her future victims. But it would also be bad and for far more people. Really, for everyone. The program would receive too many funds, too many green recruits anxious for too much power. It would be straight to the gallows for anyone standing at the end of a pointed finger. So the question becomes, Should we?