Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (15 page)

“My name is Natasha Wiley,” she said. “The man who I'm with is Eric Johansson. We came back Outside by our own choice. No one else from our settlement knows that we're here. We came to warn you. The people—the people where we're from—they plan to nova these caves in the morning. I guess you don't know what that means. But it's bad. Like fire, but worse. You have to know, you'll die if you stay here.”

Axel, far from being startled by her words, remained impassive. And seeing his reaction, the others took on a similar countenance.

“The weapons we used to attack you last time,” Natasha pressed on, “those were guns and thermo-grenades. Those are
nothing
compared with a nova. You can't outrun a nova, and you can't hide from it. This whole underground place will collapse. Most of the time, we don't find a single body. You have to run away. Go over the mountains like the rest of your Tribe. Go as far south as you can and never come back here.”

But at this, there was an unhappy murmur, and a shaking of heads.

“Sit with me, Natasha Wiley,” Axel said.

He knelt on a clean-looking pelt of fur and indicated the place between the beautiful man and himself. Natasha knelt. The other men and women squatted down where they stood—all except for London, who, at a motion of the chief, handed over a small wooden box of what looked like rolled papers. Axel took one of these papers, lit it in the fire, and somehow sucked the smoke into his mouth from the opposite end. He then handed it to the beautiful man, whom he called “Tezo.”

“We do not plan on going anywhere,” Axel said. “We made the decision to stay and that will not change.” Natasha began to protest, but he went on. “We know about your fire weapons, and the power they have. It is an old story, all the people know it. How the god-people who live underground brought night and death to the earth. Many generations considered the god-people the stuff of legends only, but not us. We knew that the god-people who made the skies black still dwelled here.”

Natasha was disturbed by what he was saying, and a moment later she realized why: this group had memory of the Storm, however hazy it was. That wasn't accounted for in the ethical practices of the Office of Mercy; the Tribes weren't supposed to have any notion of past annihilations.

“We know that you still use these fire weapons,” Axel continued. “And that you send them from your glasshouse. We know about your eyes in the trees. How do you think we survived these last two seasons without knowing?”

“But how?” Natasha asked, curiosity fully overtaking the last remnants of fear. “You never entered our field before April, but you came knowing exactly how to evade us. You must have seen other settlements before, haven't you? America-Six or America-Seven? They made some mistake and you figured out the Alpha system of observation. . . .”

Axel seemed, if anything, amused by Natasha's assumptions. He also seemed ready to satisfy her curiosity, and would have done so had it not been for the low growl of another person sitting near him: Raul, the man who had lost his children and their mother in the manual sweep.

“Tell her nothing.”

“But my friend, didn't we all agree? We could tell by the look of her, by the way she came to us in the woods. She was the god-person sent to help us, just as fate intended. And look! She understood by the grace of the divine that we only meant to keep her safe when we restrained her in our home. Isn't that right? Didn't you understand?” Axel was suddenly prompting Natasha, who nodded despite her confusion. “And now,” Axel continued to Raul, “look how much she has risked in coming back to us. Why would she lie?”

“How can we know what she risked?” Raul asked. “By what she told us? She could be lying about that too. Who knows if there will be an attack if they can't drive us into the open first? Like Ollea, like my children.”

“
She
didn't kill your family,” Tezo interjected. “That was the others.” He looked appraisingly at Natasha. “She is the one who will help us. I'm sure of it, and I trust her.”

Axel seemed to weigh both men's words, and said, at last, “How about this, Natasha Wiley? If you are telling the truth about the attack tomorrow, then we will meet you again in the place of your last murder, at the next full moon, and I will give you the answers you want. If you are lying . . . well, your people will suffer for it. We know our way around this land.”

“I know you do,” said Natasha. “That's partly what made me see things differently—your intelligence. No other Tribe is like you, except maybe the Palms.”

“The Palms?”

“I don't know what they called themselves,” Natasha said, “but they were a Tribe that entered this area a couple of decades ago. The settlement swept, I mean, killed them. But only just barely. They got within a quarter-mile of our home before we even saw them. No one's threatened us like that before.”

“Twenty-two years ago,” said Axel.

“What?”

“The attack on your settlement, the murder of those people, it happened twenty-two years ago.”

“How did you know that? Were you here, underground? Did you see it happen somehow?”

“I know because we are them.”

“Axel!” Raul said, horrified. And even Tezo looked shocked.

But this time, Axel ignored them.

“We were children then,” Axel said, indicating the faces around him. “All the people here. I was very small. Tezo and Raul were a few years older, but not the age of a fighter.” The mood among the Pines had changed, a tense stillness descending over them. “We lost our parents, our siblings. Tezo here watched as his dearest friend was crushed by a burning tree.”

“That can't be the same attack, though,” Natasha said. “The Tribe I'm talking about all died.”

“Don't you remember the deaths, the fire weapons?” Axel asked Natasha, intently.

“No, no,” Natasha said, “I was too young. But it can't be you,” she repeated, her head still reeling from his claim. “We swept the Palms. It was clean. The Office would never have left survivors. . . .”

No one was listening to her. Axel, Tezo, and Raul were rising to their feet, and the others too. Then Natasha heard what they heard: a voice calling her name from a near distance. Eric was somewhere inside the cave, he must have broken free of the others. Before she had fully processed this fact, there came the sound of a small metal object clanking onto stone and rolling down the passage outside. A fine white mist began leaking through the checkered fabric that covered the window. Everyone began to cough, deep hacking coughs. Natasha's eyes streamed with tears; her throat was closing up. It was dispersion gas, it had to be; a gas designed to drive Tribespeople out of closed areas before a sweep. Eric must have taken a canister from the supplyhouse when she wasn't looking. The men and women scattered, pushing through the doorlike opening on the other side of the room. Natasha managed to put on her helmet. She could still hear Eric calling for her and, furious, she went to find him. The dispersion gas would not harm the Pines, though Natasha guessed it would damage her cause. She should not have asked Eric to come. She would have been better off alone. But there was nothing more she could do now: the Pines would have to decide their fate for themselves.

•   •   •

Was it possible they had gotten away with such a blatant act of treason? Natasha could only wonder, awestruck by what she and Eric had done. Of course they had left the settlement at a time when the sensors were off on the green, and Natasha's and Eric's knowledge of the field had allowed them to keep securely within the deadzone. And yet, it still seemed as if they had done what should have existed only outside the realm of the actual; as if they had acted out in real life an experience that belonged to a fantasy world in the Pretends. When they returned to the Office of Exit, they found the room as empty as they had left it. The chemical bath and UV lamps had cleaned and dried their borrowed biosuits, and so they were able to restore them to the rack seemingly as good as new. They slipped into the Department hall unseen and, first Eric and then Natasha, joined the late-night stragglers in the Dome. The clock on the maincomputer read 0326 as Natasha boarded the elephant in the company of a male Delta and a female Gamma, both looking ready to collapse with exhaustion. (The Department of Health, Natasha thought, will have their hands full tomorrow.) She found Min-he sprawled over the covers, still dressed with only her shoes kicked off, her snake necklace coiled at the foot of her bed.

Natasha changed into her nightclothes, threw back the covers and got into bed, her thoughts screaming with the fact that the people Outside had talked to her, and that they had wanted to meet her again. The leader of the Pines knew her name; and the beautiful man whom she'd watched on the sensors was a real person who actually seemed to like her. As she lay on her mattress, staring up at the ceiling, the secrets burned in her core. Happy secrets and disturbing ones too: the Tribe's claim about the Palms, their understanding of the sweeps, and their apparent belief that her helpfulness fit some supernatural prediction about a “god-person” doing them good. At least we warned them, Natasha thought as her tiredness took over, we gave them a chance. As for the rest, she and Eric had no choice but to keep what they'd learned about the Tribe to themselves.

Now it was morning, and Natasha sat at her desk in the Office of Mercy, her mind still raging with the memory of the Outside. She was not exactly sure how Eric was feeling today. Their trip back to the settlement had left little time to discuss more than the basics: that the Tribe would not leave the area, and that they claimed to be the same group as the Palms. He had told Natasha that he was furious with her for going into the caves, and that he did not share her trust in the Tribe. Apparently, when he broke away from the group with spears, they had poked him several times in the sides. The spear points did not penetrate the fabric of the biosuit, or even damage it in any way, but the affront was enough to dispel much of Eric's sympathy.

Meanwhile, the news of Jeffrey's team and the intended manual sweep became public, and, in the hour after lunch, the updated news that the mission had failed. According to Arthur, the Pines had deserted the cave area and left no trace of their presence and no trail to a new camp. Eric, as soon as he had an opportunity, caught Natasha's eye from around the side of the cubicle wall and glared at her with such alarm that (though she had no regrets) Natasha's stomach tightened with fear. The full consequence of their actions must have sunk in for him at this moment, as it had for Natasha. The Pines had listened to them after all. They had moved before the team could get them and now they were somewhere out in the forest, and it was all Natasha and Eric's fault.

As the days passed, Natasha's fear only grew. She was afraid that someone (particularly Raj) would come forward, claiming to have seen her and Eric leaving the settlement; she was afraid that the Pines would try to attack; she was afraid that they would stay in the area as they had promised and get themselves killed. Plus Natasha had Jeffrey to deal with. It seemed that their talk on the night of the Crane Celebration had made him nervous about leaving his team alone all day. He did not return to the morning or afternoonshifts, but he began checking on them in the Office of Mercy at random hours—on Natasha especially. She could not really blame him, given all the blatantly unethical things she had said. But his attention, his calm, stony way of standing over her desk or listening in on her conversations with Yasmine made her jumpy and distracted. She could not believe how desperately she had craved his notice just days ago, when all she wanted now was to slip through the tasks of her shifts ignored.

During the long, idle moments—watching the cumulus clouds drift by on her screen while Jeffrey watched her—Natasha could not help but wonder how Jeffrey would react if he found out that she had left the settlement. Would he keep her secret? Or would he turn her over to Arthur? To the Alphas? After the way he'd treated her since the mission, Natasha could only fear the worst, that one more tug would snap the already tenuous bond between them. Despite how angry she was with Jeffrey right now, it still hurt Natasha to think that her actions within a mere cluster of hours could destroy what remained of his affection for her, for herself as a whole person. Could his regard for her—could the years of history between two people—crumble as easily as that?

Unfortunately, Natasha could not dismiss these as idle worries because she was constantly and increasingly aware of the possibility that Eric might give them away. In the last minutes of one otherwise uneventful afternoonshift, Arthur sent Natasha and Eric to wheel two faulty memory cubes (which together backed up three hundred years of sensor data) to the Office of Dry Engineering, and Eric seized upon this chance to once again make his opinions clear.

“You know I don't like this,” he said, as soon as they were out of hearing range of the Office. “I mean I really, really don't like this.”

“They haven't caught us yet.”

“I'm not worried about getting caught, Natasha. I'm afraid we made the wrong decision. Going out and telling some random Tribe to disappear is one thing. But they're not leaving the perimeter. Apparently they have no intention of leaving. And according to you, they're not random at all.” They pulled the cart to a screeching halt while they waited for the Department doors to open. “According to you, they're the
Palms
.”

“That's what they said. But maybe they're lying. Or misrepresenting themselves, you know? Like how we would call ourselves citizens like the citizens of other Americas, even though we're not really the same group.”

“Then how do they know about the sweep?” Eric challenged. “There was no one left to tell them.”

The doors opened and they passed into the Dome. The other citizens hopped out of the way of the cart and veered sharply along different paths. The din from the construction site was deafening; Natasha had heard that the workers were pulling double shifts this week.