by Maggie Ray
If he’s displeased by this, he doesn’t show it.
Once we're seated, the smart-car starts with a gentle sigh, and as we drive away, I keep my eyes trained ahead, focused on making my expression neutral. With every exhale, I imagine I'm emptying myself, letting the humanity drain out.
I don’t look, but I can feel the peacekeeper making a study of me with those accusatory eyes.
“It went well?” His tone suggests it didn't.
I straighten my back. “Yes, thank you.”
“What did the healer say?”
“She said everything was good.”
“Did she say you can go back to work?”
“She didn't mention it.”
He exhales. “I’ll consult the report when we get home.”
He sounds so convinced there’s something wrong, I'm worried Corinne's plan has already failed, but either way, I have to try.
Because I'm so focused on sitting still and keeping my eyes forward, I don't immediately notice the commotion outside the car. Motion flickers briefly in my peripherals, a flash of something unrecognizable, but before I've had the chance to realize what’s happening my peacekeeper has already yelled for the car to stop.
We screech to a halt, our seatbelts slamming us into our seats. My mind lurches, trying to catch up—trying to understand. In the blink of an eye, the peacekeeper is unbuckled and out the door, while all I can do is helplessly watch the scene unfolding.
Details click into focus slowly, one at a time, like an old movie reel. Each frame sliding together to form a moving picture.
A man is running. Not a normal run, not the kind for exercise or for chasing your dog down the street. This is a life-or-death kind of running, arms and legs pumping as fast as they can, face red.
In the near distance, someone is shouting threats.
I realize they’re coming from the clinic, and the moving picture all clicks into place: The runner is trying to escape.
My peacekeeper's hand goes straight for his holster, and in the next instant, he's lifted the paralyzer gun, shiny black metal. When it goes off, it sounds like what lightning must feel like, and my body jolts as though I'm the one suffering the impact, a scream lodging itself in my throat. I force it back with sheer force of will.
The runner doesn’t realize what's happened right away. There’s a brief and sickening delay in reaction, a breath of stillness between the shot and what comes after. Then his legs collapse onto themselves and he hits the pavement, writhing violently, a full-body convulsion with eyes rolling back into his skull.
He's landed directly in my line of vision, in front of the open car door, and that's when I recognize him. It’s Toma.
Peacekeepers rush the scene, black coats lining up like a wall. One of them has a nose that’s gushing blood, the kind you get from an elbow to the face.
I remember the way Toma had looked in the waiting room, like a man on the precipice of something dangerous. In my mind, I think, of course. This must be the price he pays for making eye contact with the cursed girl. I must be responsible somehow, a walking doomsday. I always have been.
I'm thankful no one is paying attention to me right that second, because I can feel the shock frozen on my face and the blood draining from my cheeks. Corinne's efforts would have been wasted.
In the air, there’s a smell like something burned.
In contrast to the horrifying scene, my peacekeeper seems wholly composed. He straightens to his full height and runs a hand over his hair, smoothing back the strands that have fallen out of place. The gesture reveals a scar on his forehead. It's wide, like a deep gash that should have been stitched but wasn't. Was it really there this whole time? I can't believe I ever missed it.
A cured person would never avoid medical treatment—it would be too careless, too irrational—so it must have happened before. Before the cure.
The discovery is a shocking one. A part of me thought peacekeepers must have been born cured. As if they popped right out, pure and clean, but the evidence is there on his face: He was human, once.
My stomach twists.
Two of the peacekeepers lift Toma by his arms and drag him away before the scene can attract too much attention. In the near distance, a lone figure stands in the street, watching with vacant interest. I’m not sure what's worse, seeing peacekeepers in action or seeing citizens not care what they do.
“Thank you, Alexei,” one of the peacekeepers is saying, and there’s a tinge of something in their voice—respect? admiration? “Excellent as always.”
My peacekeeper grants them a swift nod before folding his long limbs back into the car, and every molecule in my body prickles with revulsion at his close proximity.
As soon as the car door shuts, time rushes forward again.
As we drive away, I resist the urge to glance behind at Toma, most likely being dragged back to the clinic. What happens to him now? One can only guess. The same thing that will probably happen to me, if I’m not careful. I may have just witnessed my own future.
I pray I don't look as horrified as I still feel. My insides are knotted up, painful and tight, and I can sense the peacekeeper aiming his focus at me, checking for cracks and for flaws.
“What are they going to do to him?” I ask, my voice going weak in the way that it does.
He still manages to hear me. “You shouldn't ask so many questions, Sabine.”
I realize my mistake and clamp my mouth shut.
8
Returning to work is a strange sort of relief. A distraction, if nothing else, after being stuck at home, trapped and helpless in the face of my stepfather and our peacekeeper.
Even more strange is the fact that being around my stepfather has become more unbearable than being around the peacekeeper. My stepfather may still be here in body, drifting through the house quietly as always, but now a sort of fog surrounds him, muting the world all around.
Seeing him like this is a lot harder than I expected, and I’m glad we won’t be seeing too much of each other, with both of us working long hours.
The glass towers of downtown Reye greet me with their impassive faces, as though they’ve forgotten me already in the short weeks since we last saw each other. They feel like giant strangers looming from above, judging me silently.
I hadn’t noticed before how eerie they look, all identical and carefully placed in a measured line-up. An entire street of glass cathedrals and white concrete.
My company’s logo sits atop one such building. A giant black orb with tiny veins running through it, like a marble—or an eye staring at you, unblinking. Just one word—Onyx—glows from its center in bold lettering.
Not many people get jobs at Onyx. We’re responsible for all the security systems in Reye, and only the best are assigned to their entry training program.
When I got my letter of acceptance, I thought of my mother. Would she have been proud of me? It’s impossible to know. She had been mentally absent for a long time. Years. Her name was scribbled on a waiting list for the cure, tucked away in some obscure digital folder, never to be seen or heard of again.
If only she were here to see this, all of us being forced to receive the cure. I wonder what she’d think.
As I exit the car, my feet remember the way. I follow the crowd into the belly of the glass beast, as though on autopilot. At the gates, I half expect the building to reject my access card, but the light flashes green and the door swishes open. I ride the elevator up to one of the middle floors, all the while rehearsing in my head how to act cured.
This is a building with eyes everywhere, security cameras fitted into corners.
I'm dreading the attention of my return, but walking into the office, I might as well be a decoration on the wall. No one is surprised to see me, no one comments on the fact I've been gone.
No one is themselves anymore.
I fight off a sudden chill as I make my way to my desk near the back of the room. There’s a sweater still hanging off my chai
r, forgotten many weeks ago, and I quickly put it on, wrapping it tightly.
Maybe I’m unaccustomed to the air conditioning after being away, or maybe it’s something else.
The office still looks the same—grey carpeting and black steel walls, lamps of blue light and spherical work desks—but an unfamiliarity clings to it. Perhaps it’s because there are others still missing, stations sitting vacant and abandoned, and no one bothers to mention them.
Or perhaps it’s because, two places down from mine, Rory's workstation is hauntingly empty. I glance over, as though she might materialize and give me one of her mischievous smiles.
We signed up for this job after graduation, went through training together, spent our lunch breaks sitting side-by-side.
And now she’s inexplicably gone, and I have to pretend not to notice.
I look away and face my smart-desk, activating the touch screen monitor by pressing a series of taps into the corner—a personalized entry code. The system responds to my touch, the smart-glass flickering to life, and our company logo appears, the same giant black orb that’s on the outside of the building.
At least the system appears to remember who I am, which is more than I can say for my stone-faced coworkers, each of them frozen in their seats with their eyes glued to their screens.
I try to copy them and focus on the workload for the day, my muscles immediately aching from the effort of sitting so straight. My screen fills with tasks, a long spreadsheet of breaches in security that need to be investigated, random house checks that need to be implemented.
How ironic, that I’m the one overseeing these things. I’m not even sure what Corinne wrote in her report after I saw her, but whatever it was, it worked. I am being trusted, for now.
Although that doesn’t mean I’m not being watched. We all are. Not just from the peacekeepers, but from our friends and our neighbors. Anyone.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a flash of movement. The girl sitting at the desk in front of Rory's drops a stylus. It slips right out her fingers and rolls towards the edge of the smart-desk. When it clatters to the floor, she bends to reach for it, which is when she catches me watching.
She’s a tiny little thing, hasn’t been with us long. Big dark eyes and a head of shiny, tight curls. Her name’s Josie, I think.
Our eyes lock.
Has something as simple as dropping a stylus become dangerous? Neither of us seems to know. We're both caught in a moment of hesitation, debating what’s just happened. Maybe nothing.
But then again, maybe not.
Josie’s dark eyes are wide. Is she afraid? Is she like me? If she is, she tries to mask it. Her expression visibly shuts down, her jaw clenching, and suddenly I wonder if I’m the one at fault here. She snatches the stylus quickly off the floor and resumes her work.
I straighten in my seat again and pretend I saw nothing—did nothing—while another chill creeps up and down my arms. It feels like the air conditioning is blasting me intentionally, a vent positioned just right overhead, marking me as its target.
I’ve become too fragile for this new world. A world where everything is cold and hard.
I shrink deeper into my sweater, stuffing my free hand into one of the pockets to warm it up.
I freeze when my fingers crumple around a piece of paper tucked into the lining of the pocket. I don't remember leaving anything there, and as I pull the paper out and unfold it, I quickly realize why.
The handwriting isn't mine.
I have to read it a couple times, trying to make sense of what I'm seeing. There’s only six words on the page, but I don't quite believe my eyes.
“We know. Find Rory. Or else.”
At first, I almost laugh. Or else? Who says such a thing?
In fact, the longer I look at it, the more ridiculous the note seems. Like a children’s game. A joke. A prank.
Except my heart beats fast, like it doesn't think it's funny at all.
I instinctively sneak a quick glance around the room, wondering who might have left it. Someone here? The sweater has been hanging off this chair for weeks. Anyone might have left it.
But then why would they say “we know"?
My mind latches onto another possibility: Is this a test?
If it is, I decide the best course of action would be not to react, so I carefully refold the note and replace it into the pocket.
∆∆∆
“You've returned,” Ayn, our supervisor, says when we see each other in the lunchroom. She's the first person to comment on it since I arrived.
“I was out for a while, after my curing.”
“I know,” she says. “Weeks.”
I still have to fight the urge to wince, every time I hear that word. Weeks. It’s hard to believe it was that long.
On the far-right wall, the meal trays are slid out on a conveyor belt through a hole in the wall, each tray filled with the exact required food groups for optimal health. You have the option of a hot meal or a cold. We never see the cooks, except sometimes in the mornings, when we’re all showing up for work.
Ayn grabs a plate from the available meal trays and starts crossing the tile floor towards me. The rest of the lunchroom consists of long white tables with glossy surfaces, and chairs set up to sit face-to-face. There are limitless options, the place is empty, but Ayn takes the seat across from me, where Rory should be.
I try not to visibly stiffen in my chair.
She doesn’t appear to notice my discomfort. In fact, she seems remarkably unchanged compared to some of the others, like the cure barely disrupted a thing—like it agrees with her. She was always the unexpressive type, with unreflective eyes and a flat pink line for a mouth.
It’s only when she blinks that there’s the telltale mark on her eyelid. The marks go away after a time, mine was gone once I woke up from my own curing, so she couldn’t have been cured that long ago.
“Happens to some of us,” she continues our conversation. “Not everyone wakes up right away. Smith is still down. Jude only woke up yesterday.”
It doesn’t escape my notice she hasn’t mentioned the most important person of all. I contemplate not mentioning her either, but the note still weighs heavy in my pocket. Could Ayn be the one who left it? That doesn't seem likely. As a supervisor, she's never built close relationships with the staff, as a gesture of professionalism.
I decide to take a chance anyway.
“And Rory,” I add softly.
Ayn looks up, eyes narrowing on my face. They were always kind of vacant, weren't they? Like she'd always looked a bit cured, even before. “No. Rory woke up right away.”
I struggle to keep my face still. “Then where is she?”
Ayn stares, her face so blank she might be looking at a wall. “I suppose you wouldn’t know, since you’ve been out. She had to go in for a second time.”
A second curing.
My fist closes around my fork. “And?”
“No news yet.” She resumes eating, like it’s not important.
“No news at all?”
“None,” she says between bites, with such painful indifference I feel myself prickling, a mixture of bitterness and resentment.
I push the food around my plate, wondering how I’m supposed to eat now my appetite has vanished. I wait for Ayn to leave before dumping the rest into the bin. Do cured people waste food? I have no idea. I’m beginning to feel like we’re becoming two completely different species—the cured and the uncured.
And the sick. We can’t forget the sick. Even though they might be extinct soon.
I’m reminded of this very real possibility when I return to my desk. Just as I’m sitting down, two peacekeepers cut around the corner into the office, boots thundering across the carpeted floors. We all look up and watch in silent suspense. For a second, I'm convinced they're here for me and my cheeks grow hot.
They stop in front of Josie’s desk instead. I should have known, but I'm still surprised. I study the back of
her skull as she looks up at them, her hands frozen at her touchscreen. The peacekeepers bend to speak in hushed voices, so I can’t make out what's being said, but I can see her shaking her head, the ringlets bouncing. Back and forth, back and forth, desperation clinging to her shoulders.
Should I say something—do something? I feel helpless, just sitting here, watching.
Before I know it, they’ve forced her out of her chair and out the door. We only hear one word echoing clearly across the office, in the split second before she disappears for good. A loud and resounding, “No!”
The sound of it shudders through me, and my eyes snap back to my screen.
As I resume my work, only six words remain on my mind: We know. Find Rory. Or else.
Yes, the sickness may very well become extinct soon, marched out by peacekeepers just like that in the midst of an otherwise ordinary afternoon, never to be seen or heard of again.
And I might be next.
9
Over the course of the next few weeks, it's a struggle to adjust to this new life full of order and secrets. Every day exactly the same, a mind-numbing routine, with me growing more and more desperate not to draw any unwanted attention to myself.
After the day I found the note, I flushed it down the toilet, but the words still haunt me every day and I have the sensation that I'm running out of time somehow. Only I don't know how much time, or what I'm supposed to do.
At the end of each workday, our peacekeeper waits for me outside, parked among the cars idling at the curb, all of them lined up like a funeral procession. Bodies exit the buildings in near terrifying unison, a march of sorts. The end of the workday march. All of us at the same time, like clockwork. Tick, tick, tick.
As usual, I do my best to blend in, to appear as cured as the rest. It feels like I’m getting away with it most times. At least, that's what I tell myself, and I'm hoping if I believe it hard enough it’ll become true.
Other times, I feel like I’m hanging by threads, likely to snap at any moment.
On that day, a day no different from any other, something inside me inexplicably unravels, my marionette strings falling away like ribbons.