Blood Zero Sky (18 page)

~~~

Kali has a hammock. We sit in it and play truth-or-dare. This is what fifteen-year-old girls do. This is what everyone expects. They don’t know what we dare each other to do when no one else is around, how those secret dares make every minute of every day an excruciating journey through fear, anticipation, and rapture, in an ever-repeating, ever-divine cycle. They don’t know how I love her, how my love for her permeates every moment of my life, how since I met her every fiber of my body aches, burns, screams with agonizing, electric longing.

They don’t know I would die for her.

It’s a few days after I planted the bug in Kali’s apartment, and I’ve almost made myself forget about it. Almost. Now, in the hammock, we drink N-O orange soda. Her bare foot rests on top of my bare foot.

Both her parents are at work. Still, she looks over her shoulder before kissing me. In the tension of her body I can feel her fear. Now, that fear no longer offends me. In fact, I share it. After Blackwell showed me his movie of us, it seems only a matter of time before everyone discovers our love, and forces us—God forbid—to live our lives apart.

If this ever happens, I have decided, I will go to the top of my dad’s office building, over two hundred stories high, and jump off. I will proclaim my love for Kali as I fall, so the whole world can hear.

I love Kali. I vow I will never stop.

As years pass, I will eventually become ashamed of almost everything about myself: the privilege I was born into, my bony shoulders, my masculine-looking jawline, and especially my perverse and sinful desires. But my love for Kali—of that I will never be ashamed. Today, I’m just glad her sister is at the shopping plaza and we’re alone.

I creep a finger up the bottom of Kali’s tank top, along her belly. She takes a sip of her soda and stares at the ceiling of the patio. I slide my hand up the skin of her stomach. My fingers are trembling; I can’t help it.

“May,” she says, “don’t you ever get tired of making out all the time?”

Of course I don’t.

“Sure,” I say. “Sometimes.”

This is a first. Normally, Kali will submit to me without a word. She might start by acting uninterested—she might keep reading her magazine or pretend to be watching a show on the imager (though not today; the imager is still broken), but soon she will turn her lips, shiny with sweet-tasting lip gloss, to my own. Never before has she protested my advances, and my mind is spinning with rage, fear, and nameless jealousy.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer.

“I know you’re pissed off about something,” I say.

She doesn’t answer.

“Seriously, Kali, what’s wrong? I love you. You can tell me anything. Tell me to jump off a cliff for you and I’d do it.”

She looks at me and smiles sadly. I’ve never seen a fifteen-year-old smile like that. Her smile speaks of long-submerged sorrow, of
knowing
things that neither children nor adults should ever know. I don’t know what to make of it, so I smile back, but inside I’m terrified.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I say. “Please.”

She looks at me for a moment before finally beginning. “I’m sad,” she says, “because . . . you remember what I told you the other day? About my dad? Well . . . May, I believe in God. I believe God makes things the way they are for a reason. And . . . he made me love you and he made you love me . . . even though it’s wrong. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. About what Jimmy Shaw says, how things are the way they are because that’s how God wants them. Then that means God wants a lot of terrible things. He wants you and me to be horrible sinners. He wants my father to die so young—”

“Your father isn’t dying,” I say.

She shakes her head. “You should see him. He’s always working or hiding in his room when you’re here, so you don’t know. May, his hair falls out in big clumps, more and more every day. Sometimes he wakes up and his pillow is covered. And it’s getting gray.”

“There are drugs against aging,” I say. “My dad is over sixty and he doesn’t even have gray hair.”

“It’s not his age,” she says, looking at me with those big, mournful hazel eyes.

“What’s wrong with him, then?” I ask.

“It’s his work,” she says. “He has nightmares. He can’t sleep. Sometimes he never comes home from the office. ”

“He’s a distribution manager for retail stores, right?”

She shakes her head. “He does other things. He won’t talk about them, but I know something is going on, and it’s killing him—there’s something horrible they make him do at work. Last night, he woke up screaming and all I heard was ‘black brands.’ He screamed it, May. But that’s the way God wants it. And I’m a queer sinner because I love you, and I’m afraid that when Dad finds out, it will kill him. You know, like the straw that breaks the camel’s back? And it’ll all be my fault. And I’m afraid that’s how God wants it. And I’m afraid . . . you and me will stop loving each other.” She’s crying now. “I couldn’t take that. Because then I’ll be alone. I mean, I have no parents—they’re always gone—and my sister is such a bitch . . . I’d be alone. And I know I’d die alone. I’m afraid I’ll lose you. I’m afraid that’s how God wants it.”

Of course, I have no idea what to say. I touch her arm, feeling the heat of emotion under her skin, coursing through her blood.

“You won’t lose me. And your dad will be okay. That’s not what God wants; he doesn’t want everything to end up all tragic. He wants . . .” My mind scans through every Jimmy Shaw sermon I’ve ever heard, looking for the answer. “He wants everybody to be rich,” I finish.

“But you and I will never really get to be together,” Kali says, “and if we can’t be together, I’ll die. I know I will. And if my father goes crazy and my mother is gone working all those triple shifts . . . and we’re always in debt, deeper and deeper—”

“Just work hard,” I say, “and you’ll be a Blackie some day, too.” This is the mantra of our Company—although I’ve already begun to recognize it’s a lie.

Kali smiles the sad smile again. She kisses me. She lets me take off her shirt. And at that moment, the unthinkable happens; her tragic prophecy fulfills itself: her father walks in.

My memory of what happened after that moment is flawed, like scar tissue. Here’s her dad’s face, livid and red as he screams at her. There’s Kali, just sitting on the hammock, crying and crying. And here’s me, afraid to stand up for her.

That is a wound that will never heal, that will forever bleed: knowing that I did not stand up for her and for our love that day. I just wait until her father stops screaming, then walk out the front door, my head hung low, lips quivering as I hold back tears. Kali and I don’t even say goodbye. How could I know that I’d never see her again?

And Kali’s prediction about her father comes true, too: A few months after he walks in on us, the rest of his hair falls out. Soon, he gets reclassified as an unprofitable. One day, he goes for a walk and disappears forever. Repossessed.

Me, I get an HR watcher credit for leaving that bug in their place. Fifty thousand, with a letter from Blackwell:
The Company thanks you for your service.

My father, when he finds out about me and Kali, sends me away to an expensive, prestigious, N-Corp boarding school. When I come back to visit, I almost feel like a different person. I’m more considerate, more God-fearing, more self-loathing, more intelligent. Back home on Christmas break, I stop by her apartment and learn that Kali has run away. No one knows where she’s gone. Except for her family, hardly anyone even remembers her.

I don’t throw myself off the building when I get the news, but some piece of me does fall into oblivion that day. Part of me is still falling.

~~~

A yellow field with a rattlesnake coiled at its center. Beneath it, the words:
Don’t Tread on Me.
The flag hangs on the far wall.

“As you can see, she has undergone the baptism of the knife . . . ”

There are nods, but nobody speaks.

“That alone should make her one of us.”

A strange trick of my imagination: Ethan seems taller now, standing before the eleven assembled members of the governing council. They watch him, taking in his words in measured silence. The twelfth council member—Clair—is still in Company custody.

A woman speaks up, “If her daddy weren’t one of the founders of the Company, and if she hadn’t come to us as an admitted spy, then, yes, the fact that she cut out her cross would make her one of us.” Five of those seated before me are women and six are men. The woman speaking now has short, curly gray hair, glasses, strong arms, and a low but cutting voice. She is perhaps fifty years old.

“What kind of a spy comes announcing that they’ve been sent to spy on you?” says an older man.

“A stupid one,” a stocky, bearded young man says with a laugh.

“Or a very clever one,” says the first woman, eyeing me with unconcealed disdain.

“So what do
you
say we do with her, Grace?” asks Ethan.

“She’s admitted to being a spy. We have to try her as one and punish her as one.”

Those words elicit many furrowed brows among her companions. I can only imagine what the penalty for spying is around here, but I doubt it’s good.

The small assembly takes a collective breath, everyone watching me. Despite the overwhelming urge to run, to go back and hide in my own apartment with the shades drawn, or to spit at them all for judging me, to curse them out in embarrassment and frustration, I swallow my fear and stand tall, shoulders squared, making eye contact with every one of them just as Ethan advised me to before leading me into what he called “the hearing.” It’s hard to do when I know they’re probably thinking about condemning me to death.

“McCann,” Ethan says, “you’re never this quiet. What do you think?”

McCann! In the stress of the moment, I hadn’t noticed him there at the end of the council table. Now, seeing his familiar face is a much-needed relief. He chews on a plastic straw, leaning back a bit in his chair, arms crossed at his chest and seething with muscle, like two intertwined snakes. His eyes are narrow as he looks at me. He sucks on the straw for a second, then takes it from his mouth.

“It’s a right and good rule that a person only gets one chance to join us—at least now, while our safety is so fragile,” he says in his exotic accent. “But . . . it is also a right and good rule that if somebody takes the baptism of the knife and leaves the Company—especially her, who is almost a Blackie—it’s right and good that they should be let in. She’s given up much to get back here. ”

“Might gain much, too, by betraying us,” mutters the woman—Grace—under her breath.

“In my mind, it’s a tied game for her,” continues McCann in his thick accent. “And to break the tie, I’m interested mostly in why you think we should accept her, Ethan.”

There are some assenting murmurs.

Ethan clears his throat. He’s been pacing back and forth during his exchange, and now he stops next to me.

“The Reapers and I have watched May for a long time,” he says. “She’s strong, she’s in the inner circle, and she knows how the Company works as well as anyone. But most importantly, she has the seeds of hatred for what the Company stands for. She’s different. She loves women. She’s wearing pants, you can see, and we didn’t give them to her. She came wearing them.”

Even the curly-haired woman raises her eyebrows at this news.

“She cut the cross out of her face herself, with no help,” Ethan continues. “And as McCann can attest, she saved Clair’s life by helping her escape after the Headquarters bombing. Jimmy Shaw didn’t tell her to do that. Nobody did. I want her here because I think she’s one of us. Because she has the potential, I believe, to be one of the greatest among us.”

His words hang before me like a curtain, one that might rise to reveal a death sentence, or perhaps a new life.

“I have a proposal,” Ethan continues, with new energy now as he senses the tide turning in his—and my—favor. “We’ve received intelligence that Clair is being held in the prison at Work Camp 5, along with some other Protectorate sympathizers. I will take a small force and rescue them. May will fight with us, as a test.”

The council reacts, mostly, with stares. A few people shake their heads.

The curly-haired woman, Grace, speaks up: “First, how do you know where Clair’s being held?”

“I have my ways, Grace,” Ethan says.

Grace snorts. “Fine. Again, being mysterious. That aside, does Miss Fields know how to fight? Does she even know how to fire a gun?”

“I’ll teach her,” Ethan says. “I taught you, didn’t I?”

Grace, rebuffed, loses her resolve, but still manages to say, “I don’t like it. It’s too great of a risk for you to take, General. We can’t lose you.”

“You won’t,” Ethan says. “May will keep me safe. Isn’t that right, May?”

He looks at me, eyebrows raised in playful expectation. I feel my mouth gaping. My voice cracks as I try to speak, then I clear my throat. The burn of my blushing cheeks makes my wound throb, and the pain hardens my resolve. All eyes are on me.

“I . . . I want to help you,” I say. “If the Company has wronged people, I am partly responsible and I want make it right. Besides . . . ”

My mind whirrs, searching for the right words to express the doubt, the loneliness, the ever-present, ever-growing sense of unease that has haunted me year after year. But how can I express to them what was wrong with my life inside the Company? In what must seem to them the rose garden of my life, how to point out the thousand stinging thorns? I have had all the luxury in the world, all the opportunity. I have never trembled in cold or sweated in heat, never lived in fear or moaned in hunger. Still, I was bound. Bound to work I did not love, to morals that were not my own, and most horribly to the sovereign will of the Company, which forced me to place myself and all I loved on the altar of their insatiable God of Money. And all I can think of is: I want to write poetry. I want to kiss women, and tell the world about it. I want to lie in grass unwilted by the Company’s pollution. I want to go to a place where my name and my debt and my work history and my million plastic possessions cannot follow. The revelation hits me like an exploding grenade: I don’t want to go back. I truly do want to join the Protectorate.