Veracity

by Laura Bynum

  She's all muscle. Every ounce. Abdomen, arms, chest, nothing but shadowed clefts and bundled sinew. Her shoulders are broad, distended away from her collarbone, showing their knobby ends. A line marks the division between her breasts, or where her breasts would be if she had any. Most of her wardrobe is slight of material. It's amazing such physicality doesn't show.

  Before I can process it, Ezra's running toward me, her tight white body a blur against the dark walls. She knocks me off center but I don't lose my footing. As I right myself, she uses the backward momentum to spin into a perfect fighting stance. I sidestep so I won't fall. Ball up my hands and raise them in front of my face. There's not going to be a warm-up.

  Ezra throws a fist that catches my forearm. The pain is immediate.

  "Jesus Christ!" I jerk away, expecting she'll give me leave to nurse my injury, but she doesn't.

  Ezra uses the distraction of my pain to punch me repeatedly. Three more crisp, potent jabs. Kidneys. Back. Side.

  Christ.

  "Come on, Adams! Fight me!" She doesn't even sound winded.

  Ezra steps forward again, drives a fist into my shoulder, twice into my ribs. God. What if they snap?

  I twist away. Offer up my back. She lands more blows on my shoulder, a few close to my spine. One tags me on the hip, right on the bone, and the pain is like fire on an exposed nerve. I step back and gather myself. Sufficiently pissed to finally get in the game.

  "Come on!" Ezra shouts, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  I mimic her position. Turn my body sideways to narrow her field of contact and lash out with my left fist. It lands solidly in the cup of her hand. She pitches it away like it was nothing.

  "Come on! I don't have all fucking day!"

  "I'm trying!" I shout back.

  "Bullshit! Hit me!"

  I throw out my right. She's fast and is long gone by the time my shoulder is jarred by the effort of finding no resistance. Her next punch lands on my side, letting me know all the ones that came before were giveaways. She turns her knuckles against my ribs and the pain of nerves being rubbed against bone drives me to my knees.

  "Stop it!" I wrench away. Curl up into a ball and wait for her to start beating me on the neck and head, the only places left for her to bruise. But she doesn't.

  "Get up." Ezra sounds like I've let her down. The others standing against the walls are the same. Deflated. Disappointed. Some wander away.

  I expected Ezra to be pleased at having given me such a beating. But she has one hand on the back of her neck and both eyes on her feet. Worry. Ezra's worried. She thinks I'm not ready. Or just not strong enough. It makes me want to start over. To land a few blows and remove the wind and the worry from her person. But standing is easier than it sounds. When I go to push upright, the pain in my ribs gets sharp and I have to stay hunched.

  "If you stand up quick it'll go away faster."

  Hesitant, I try it her way and find Ezra is right. A flash of pain passes and is gone. She walks over and I instinctively move.

  "Hold still!"

  I do as I'm told and she puts the flat of her hand over my ribs. On the place she's just brutalized.

  "Now pay attention. Location's the key. If a Blue Coat's thin you can usually get them with that twisting move. But you have to be right on the boniest part. If they're fat, forget it. There's too much padding." She moves to my side and we focus on the far wall. "Do what I do without looking at me. You need to get used to following movements with your peripheral vision."

  We practice this for a while. Ezra bending her knees and Ezra rising. Ezra's arms moving gently up, Ezra's hands floating back down again. I follow her with some difficulty until I learn to trust what I can't quite see. After a while it becomes normal. Following Ezra, feeling which way she's going to go.

  "Women need this skill more than men," she says. This knowing what's around us. Finding the flow and jumping in. She says we're more likely to be in closer proximity to Blue Coats than men are. Beneath them, faceup or facedown, half dressed or nude. We'll have to learn different mechanisms of escape, an alternate set of distances between our bodies and theirs. In certain ways, such intimacy gives us an advantage, like biting off appendages. Twisting, knuckling, elbowing areas of particular vulnerability, some less obvious than others. Like the wrists. Not the targets I'd have first considered.

  "Go for what's offered," Ezra suggests.

  She shows me how to break a choke hold, break an arm, dislocate a shoulder, dislocate a knee, smash a windpipe, shove the nasal bone up into the brain, and, if need be, rip off a penis. She assures me this last trick will work if done correctly, with a twisting, snapping motion.

  "Even if it doesn't work entirely," she adds, "it will make you his second priority instead of his first." I don't ask how she knows.

  Next, Ezra shows me a set of rigorous exercises, each of which I'm to perform one hundred times while she stands at the head of the room, smoking. We do this for four hours until she's out of cigarettes and I'm out of oxygen and have been given leave to collapse on the dirty floor. I'm covered in the slime of filth, sweat, and blood, all of it my own.

  "We'll start with these exercises every morning," Ezra says from above me.

  Her bra has been pulled out of place and I'm able to see a rounded row of small, purplish bruises above one breast. Fingers that have squeezed too hard, left their identity in the prints.

  Goddamned Jingo.

  I nod okay and Ezra stands up. She rolls back her shoulders and stretches out her neck, turning the little purple ovals pink.

  I don't want to ask, but have to. I'm not in this alone. "Ezra." I point and she looks down. Sees what everyone else is seeing, having followed the extension of my hand.

  The remaining onlookers shuffle away, but she doesn't look up. Won't give them notice of their leave, won't reach up and haul her bra back into place.

  "It's nothing you need to worry about." She grabs her shirt off the floor and starts down the hallway. "I'm taking care of Skinner."

  "Yeah? Who's taking care of you?"

  Ezra stops and turns around. "What about those walls, Adams? They stopped closing in yet?" She pulls out a cigarette and disappears.

  apostasy

  discriminate

  ego

  fossil

  heresy

  kindred

  obstreperous

  offline

  veracity

  kin-dred: a person's relatives collectively; kinfolk; kin; having the same belief, attitude, or feeling.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AUGUST 8, 2045. EARLY EVENING.

  After going rounds with Ezra first thing in the morning, training with Noam, and studying with Lazarus, I'm to work in the library until almost midnight. Watching the government feeds.

  "It's a little of the up top to keep you sane," Lazarus says, but he's a bad salesperson. It's the worst part of the up top. I'm supposed to cull through the Confederation's regurgitated truths. See if I can't separate the wheat from the chaff.

  I sit in front of a screen for five hours every night, watch the Confederation's bullshit government line presented in two radio feeds and one television station. Lazarus doesn't tell me about these duties until he's buttered me up with the art. It starts like this.

  After my morning session with Noam, he takes me to the kitchen for a quick bite. We fill up one tray with both of our meals and eat on our way back to the main hall. There isn't even time to sit down. It's a few bland spoonfuls of oatmeal and two pieces of toast and then our tray is slid onto a table--Betsy, can you take that back for us?--and we're back out in the long hall again, my fingers greasy from the buttered toast.

  At the mouth of the rear hall, I'm passed off like a baton. Lazarus swoops out of the darkness to take my hand and nods at Noam, who falls back, waving. Lazarus knows about my failure in yesterday's test. In today's test, too. But he's not fazed.

  We walk down the back tunnel for a good half mile. Stop in front of another
solid wood door. This one is more elegantly adorned than the one hung in my training room. It has a lever for a handle and has been piped all around with weather stripping. It's the wood that catches my eye. Hard years for this tree have produced in it beautiful, layered eyes of orange and amber.

  "This is our library. Two full levels." Lazarus punches in a number on an access panel affixed to the wall and wraps his hand tightly around the door's lever. A blue light comes out through the handle's upper lip. It rolls over his thumb and the four tips of his fingers that have been pressed with some difficulty along its underside. The light blinks and goes out and, with a loud whooshing sound, the door moves inward. The heat of the hallway is sucked into the library as cooled air rushes past.

  We are in a foyer sandwiched by tall-backed seats. We sit down, remove our shoes, and put on bright blue footies with white plastic stripes sewn into the soles. I look around while waiting for Lazarus, who performs this chore slowly. Beyond this small foyer are two floors. They travel well beyond the boundaries of what would have been any natural part of Lilly's property. Here, every bit of floor space is carpeted. Each wall surface covered with paint. It's finished, meticulous. Necessary for the machines that would choke on the dust so prevalent in the rest of our bunker.

  The lower level is filled with humming computers and work spaces that remind me of the Murdon Building. The upper level appears to be made up of shelves. Tall and columnar, they run the length of the space, save for the absolute center, which is dotted with rectangles of color hung against the wall. On the shelves are books. Thousands of them. I imagine their pages leached with age. Yellow and brittle, dripping flakes of story onto the floor below.

  Lazarus is trying to push his second shoe off with toes from the opposite foot. I kneel down and help him and, in doing so, see a large gap in the hard sole that's been replaced with an old box top.

  "Someday, the things in this room will be a part of the first library this country has seen in over three decades," he says. "A library, by the way, is a place you can go to find books, reference materials, and works of every type of art."

  I stand up and offer Lazarus a hand. Follow him up the stairs, looking down on the first floor as we go. There are a dozen heads bent over their screens. Some people are out of their seats. They're collecting books from a stack and laying them, flattened, on a scanner. The machine blinks and the page is turned. The process is repeated. They're digitizing books. A flash drive the size of a fingernail could hold thousands of them. We could carry this library in our pockets if we needed to. I suspect it is their intention.

  All we have up top are What to Do books. Or What Not to Do books. Or the Confederation Bible, which is both, and the longest at 288 pages. I can't quite grasp why Lazarus and Lilly are so fond of what they call fiction novels--books about things that aren't true. Maybe once I read one, I'll understand.

  Lazarus steps onto the second-floor landing. He points past the voluminous shelves toward the clearing in the middle. "Over there." He's worn out from the climb. Waves me ahead with a flapping hand.

  Past the shelves are tall, wide patches of color pressed against the wall. They're pictures that aren't photographs, or maps, or images to be used for. The first one is a woman drawn in ridiculous lines with her heart broken and her face bowed. I've never seen anything like this before. Shadows and valleys making a neck, lips, and eyes.

  Lazarus has caught up with me. He puts a hand on my shoulder. "It's called a painting."

  I move to the next canvas. This one is a picture of a man. Gold and cream whorls stand in for his features. Up close, they look like scales. A few steps back, they form a nose, a chin, the curve of a cheek. A smile. I go to put my finger on the paint, tipped up like a wave, and Lazarus stops me. No touching.

  I follow the movement of this man's body with my eyes. "How would a person know to do that?"

  "An artist," Lazarus says. "And if I could answer your question, we'd all be this good."

  I look closer, mystified. To have painted on his face a peach. A piece of fruit to imply the cheek. And his hair. In segments, it's blue. Blue to show me a spiral where the rest is straight. It's nothing but paint, yet my mind is deceived. Happy to be taken in. It's as if we're sharing a private moment, this artist and me. As if he or she painted this man for us to discuss all these years later.

  The next few paintings are nonsensical. Combinations of flowers and skulls. Childlike drawings of squares and triangles. Then we're on to photographs unlike any I've ever seen. The Confederation of the Willing uses photographs for informational or identification purposes only. So the Human Resources person knows our names in the hallway. So Blue Coats can yank us out of crowds. In these, something mystical is happening. Bits of light have been captured, the secret insides of people and places are showing.

  Lazarus taps me on the shoulder. "Come on," he says, walking to a desk pushed against the wall. He pulls open a drawer and comes back with a heavy, oversize book, already flipped open. "Here."

  The presenting page is upside down. But it's obviously a picture of a man being tortured. Shot through with pipes or knives, blood is everywhere, leaking from his face, hands, and feet.

  "Who's that supposed to be?" I give Lazarus my hardest stare.

  "Jesus Christ," he says.

  "Jesus Christ?"

  "Yes."

  He turns round his book and I see the irrefutable halo of light. The large, understanding eyes. But the other aspects of this Christ would never be sanctioned by the Confederation. Our Lord and Savior died a clean, painless death. Had short, clean hair, a wide-shouldered, muscular physique, and a freshly pressed blue suit. The Confederation savior climbed up onto a cross and kicked away the ladder. On the third day, God waved his hand and the ground shook, opened wide, and swallowed the tongue of our world--birdsong, the whistle of wind through well-canopied trees, words--then all was brought forth anew. To that end, our only image of Christ, inserted in the center of each Confederation Bible, is of a glowing man in a blue suit, always after the event, on its glorious other side. Our resurrection was all rapture and no pain--a thing reserved for the wicked. Our lord was born under a shining star. He came into the world recognized and was ceded all power. No struggle required.

  "The cross you know, the one used as a symbol of the church, is also a symbol of something called crucifixion." Lazarus taps a finger on the picture. "Criminals would hang suspended by their wrists and ankles and sometimes their more intimate parts until dead. It was an excruciating way to die. Had Christ been born into the Confederation of the Willing, he would have met the same fate. Only this government would have known better than to provide his followers a public execution."

  I look back down at the picture. There's a halo of gold around this Jesus's head, much like the colors I see. And a crown of thorns. His hands and feet have been punctured by nails.

  Lazarus has already begun down the stairs. He stops in the foyer and sits down to peel off his footies. "They kept this Christ out of Sunday school because he wasn't good press. 'Love one another' and 'Stand up for your beliefs' don't do the Confederation much good. The machine that is this country runs on prejudice and censorship."

  Before I can ask what censorship means, Lazarus disappears through the door in his ruined shoes.

  Lilly's been waiting her turn on the first floor. She motions me toward a chair with worn armrests, above which is a computer with a screen as wide as the table on which it sits. Immediately, she begins pointing out the buttons I'm to push and the notes I'm to take on what I hear and see. I'm to listen and watch for developments. For mentions of BodySpeak and SKEYE. Anything having to do with us.

  We're referred to by a number of terms. Members of the resistance. Terrorists. Recruiters of the young and innocent. If any television or radio feed says there have been developments, I'm to find Lilly and Noam. Then they'll go alert Lazarus.

  I watch Lilly's skinny arms poke and jab as they connect three pairs of headphones to my terminal.
Somehow, I'm supposed to listen to all three media feeds at the same time. Lilly flips a switch and the television screen lights up.

  "Watch now!" She jabs me in the arm. "They shouldn't be broadcasting them this late, but just in case you see any Red Listed words come round, you write them down, then come find us fast." Lilly turns and pads off on blue footies. Doesn't ask if I have any questions.

  Hours later, a young woman taps me softly on the back. She's young with bright blue eyes. "I'm the night shift," she says, scooping up my notes. "Let's take these to Gene."

  My first shift has been uneventful and there are only two pages. Daily updates provided by Tracking and Data regarding their progress on the SKEYE and BodySpeak programs. But nothing we didn't already know. Nothing that sends up any red flags.

  The girl walks me around the room to Gene, my pass-off partner. He'll type up my notes and enter them into the system, checking them as he goes. Like the young lady, this young man looks fresh. They must sleep all day to work all night. Down here, it doesn't make much difference.

  I go back to my station and clean up an empty package that contained cookies someone brought me earlier in the night. Retrieve a mug containing the sludge of my last cup of coffee.

  The night-shift girl has followed me. "I can take care of those." She pulls the mug out of my hand. Even the garbage I was about to tuck inside a pocket.

  "Thank you." I turn and start toward my shoes. "Good night."

  I'm halfway there when she stops me.

  "Harper!" she calls nervously.

  I wait as she jogs across the room, her moonshine eyes as big as stars.

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  Her chin wobbles some. It dimples her white cheeks. "Are you really . . ." She can't think of the word. Is hoping I know it.

  "What?"

  The girl looks around at the others who're watching from behind their desks. "Are you our Sentient?" she asks. All big eyes and quivering lips. "You know . . . the one here to help us?"

  I have no idea what she's talking about. "What?"