The Harvest (9 page)

The boy acts like he's going to run and then, in a flurry of motion, he pivots, plows one foot into the officer's groin, bends and rips the Bolt from the man's hand. As the officer keels over into a fetal position, the boy
thwacks
him on the side of the neck with the butt of the weapon. The man goes still.

“Follow me,” the boy says with an unnerving calm. We run down the same alley where the Watchman was about to drag him. Together we make it about a kilometer, before he stops.

“Thanks,” he says. “I need to get home now.” He turns away, heading down a side street.

“Wait!” I reach out to keep him from darting off. “How did you learn to do that?”

“To fight like that?”

“Yeah.”

“One of my moms taught me, before I came to the Sector. Groin shot. Pressure point. Disarm. Incapacitate. If necessary
dim mak
. Death touch.”

“Your moms?”

“When my mom died, all of the Outsiders became my parents. The mom who taught me to fight is Soo-Sun.” He stares at me. “You know her.”

Yes,
I think.
I do.
I don't know how
he
knows this, but like everything with the Outsiders, I don't ask too many questions.

“How did he catch you, if you're such a good fighter?” I ask.

The boy just shrugs. “He was bigger and stronger, and he surprised me.”

I admire his honesty.
True strength comes from knowing your weaknesses
. Something my grandfather used to say.

“Thank you for helping me.” He turns to leave.

“One more thing.” He stops and turns back to me. “What's your name?”

“Heron,” he says, and something clicks in my mind. I realize why he looks so familiar.

“You're related to Osprey, aren't you?”

He smiles faintly, looking almost ghostlike in the ephemeral Okarian night. He turns and slips away.
Did I just meet Osprey's brother?

As I head home to meet Meera, I think:
I need to find Shia.

The next morning, after I wake from a long, deep sleep, I sip a mug of tea and press my fingers into the leaf for the millionth time.

Persephone has returned, and with her, Spring.

It's code, of course. In the old mythology, Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, ancient goddess of the harvest, was fated to spend six months of each year in the realm of Hades, Lord of Death, as his queen. During this time, her mother Demeter was so sad that she caused all the plants and food crops to wither and die. But for the other six months, Persephone returned to the land of the living, and her mother celebrated, giving life back to the earth, and food back to the mortals who survived only by the grace of the harvest.
The message from Bunqu tells me that Demeter and Vale have been successfully reunited.

I feel my way across the letters on the second leaf, the transcription of the words Vale wrote in response to my message in the book.

You have renewed my hope. Stay safe. Love always.

I read it again and again, a wide smile on my face. You have renewed my hope.

There
is
hope. I can feel it. I throw on my clothes for the day, paint my disguise on as best I can, and set out to find Shia.

First I go to the apartment complex Fen pointed to last night when indicating where the three of them lived. I buy a flower from a street vendor and put on my best shy, sweet expression as I approach the doorman.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I met a man named Shia the other day in Reunion Park and he asked for my courriel. I was so nervous I wrote it down wrong. He told me he lives here, but,” I blush and look away, “do you know where he works? I'd like to take him this flower. With my real courriel this time.”

“
Désolé
, mademoiselle,” the older man says, with a touch of charm, “I can't
tell you where he works. I can give you his flat number, though, if you want to leave your flower for him. Take it inside to the desk, and they will see that it is put in his box. He will get it when he returns.”

I nod demurely. “Would you mind?”

He writes it on a little v-scroll for me, and I thank him with a seedcoin and head inside. At the desk, I unroll the scroll, erase the 7W, and write:
If you want to know more about LH and ET, meet me at the Pont du Rue Panet at 20h00. Watchmen aren't the only ones telling lies
. I tie the scroll to the flower and leave it with the woman at the desk who assures me, with an engaging smile, that she will make sure Shia gets it as soon as he walks in the door.

The Pont du Rue Panet is the same little bridge where we stumbled on the Watchman assaulting Heron last night. I hope Shia will make the connection.

I leave the flower and head out the back way, out to one of the city's suburban parks, away from downtown. Today, after hearing from Vale and Bunqu, and with an engagement to keep later tonight, I have no desire to risk discovery.

Will Shia be brave enough to meet me?

The streets are empty, traces of light lingering in the sky as darkness falls lat
er and later each evening. I draw in a deep breath as I watch a leaf swirl on the water's surface, drifting lazily under the bridge. The air smells like spring time, like moist earth and promise. It's well past eight and Shia still hasn't shown, but I can't bring myself to leave.

Instead of tapping my feet or anxiously watching the streets, as I might have once done, I try to channel my inner Chan-Yu. I focus my eyes on a point in the distance—a rocky swell where the water gathers and foams before running under the bridge at my feet. I immerse myself in the motion of the stream. The swirls and eddies. The rocks, rough in some places, smooth in others. The way the last light in the sky falls on the stones, giving them an otherworldly glow. I lose myself in the delicate sound, the endless energy, the rush and flow of the water carried forever downstream.

“Are you the one who left the flower?”

The voice catches me by surprise, but I don't startle. I turn and see the tall man with tight curls and a nervous, piercing gaze. Shia.

“Yes.”

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Someone who can answer your questions.”

“What questions?

“I was here last night. I heard you talking to your friends, and I saw what happened with the Watchman.”

He looks me up and down. In his canvas jacket, polished loafers, and neatly trimmed beard, he looks the part of the Okarian elite.
He is
, I remind myself.
He took classes with Eli
. He's not the kind of person who would normally associate with someone who looks like me—with my dirty brown hoodie, baggy pants, and scuffed boots. He raises a challenging eyebrow.

“You might not like how I look, but you're here.”

“What of it?” He doesn't look excited to hear what I have to say. I scan the area. There's hardly anyone nearby. I chose this spot because it's a quiet place in a busy city, but still, I don't relish the idea of casually chatting about my treasonous friends and Resistance members on the streets of the capital city.

“Maybe we can continue this conversation somewhere a bit more secluded?”

“You're crazy if you think I'm going to follow you anywhere. You look like a slum rat. Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Because,” I say quietly, pushing the hood away from my face, “I'm Remy Alexander.” I remember Corine's bloody promise to publicly execute me if I am ever caught, and I wonder why I'm not more afraid.

He blinks. Leans in. Studies my face like he's trying to memorize it. I did my makeup so it would only give me the barest of camouflage tonight, counting instead on the shadows and the protection of my hood to keep anyone—human or drone—from recognizing me. I was prepared to tell Shia who I am, to finally reveal myself. I thought I might have to, in order to convince him to listen to me. I've disappeared in this city before and I can do it again. I wait for the recoil, the hands out in self-defense, the moment I've dreaded and anticipated for almost two months now.

The moment of recognition.

“By the harvest,” he says, his mouth slightly open, “you are.” But the recoil never comes. He makes no move to leave. He's looking at me like I'm a revelation, a magic trick come to life.

“Are you going to run away, Shia, and report me to the Watchmen?” It comes out sounding half like a threat, and half like a child's dare.
Bet you can't jump off that swing!
“Or are you going to believe what you already know in your gut—that there's something rotten in Okaria, and that I can lead you to the truth?”

He stares at me and I hold his gaze. I can see the gears turning frenetically
i
n Shia's mind, the questions, the doubt, the thirst for answers. I am calm. My mind is clear, like the stream below us.

“Lead the way,” he says at last.

8 - REMY

Spring 74,
Sector Annum
106, 19h07

Gregorian Calendar:
June 1

The lights around me flicker and go out. The hot smell of summer rain and sweaty bodies permeates the air, and I breathe it in, savor it. For a moment the stadium is quiet. From my vantage point behind the upper bleachers, the moonlight casts an eerie glow on the center ring. The announcer's voice rings out more vibrantly in the dark.

“Citizens of Okaria, let the games begin! The final night of the 25th Okarian Gymnasia Championship starts
now
as two of our favorite athletes take the wrestling floor! Throw your hands in the air for
The Grizzly
!”

Thousands of voices roar together as a single spotlight illuminates a hulking man who looks like he'd been carved out of a cliffside. The giant vidscreens around the stadium light up, giving us a close-up of the contestant. His hands alone look to be the size of my head. The Grizzly clenches his fists and takes a moment to throw his head back and roar. His fans go wild, echoing his cry around the gymnasia hall.

“The Grizzly, hailing from Sakari in northwestern Okaria, tore down Oak-Man's branches and snatched The Falcon out of the air to qualify for the first round of the championship. With nineteen points out of possible twenty-four The Grizzly has a great shot at the victor's sunflower crest!” The Grizzly gets down on all fours and paws at the ground, playacting his invented character. “With limbs like tree trunks and fists the size of boulders, The Grizzly has outwitted and outwrestled each and every one of his opponents this Gymnasia season. Will he do the same tonight? Will he be able to defeat his challenger and childhood friend:
The Wolf
?”

Another half of the crowd goes wild as a second spotlight throws an entirely different figure into relief: a tall and slender woman with strong and unnaturally long limbs. When she crouches, she looks like a coiled spring, ready to leap with a canine's ferocity. Everyone around me is on their feet, clapping, shouting, and stomping.

I alone am quiet. Watching.

“Also from Sakari,” the announcer continues, “The Wolf and The Grizzly grew up together, fought together, and entered their first gymnasia competition the very same year. Now, their rivalry is famous throughout Okaria. The Wolf brought down the undefeated Avalanche last season and won the right to challenge The Grizzly for today's competition.” The crowd roars, and the woman howls in response, dancing gleefully around her opponent. “Will she continue her ten-match undefeated streak? Or will her old friend and rival send her whimpering like a pup back to Sakari?”

In the arena, Faisal Bergsland and Susannah Malik morph into new characters. They play on primal aspects of their personalities and bring those characteristics into the spotlight. With their costumes and makeup, they assume personas they're unable to embody in real life. The Wolf is no longer Susannah Malik, hydroponics coordinator at Sakari. The Grizzly has nothing to do with plasma technologist Faisal Bergsland, who lives in Okaria's Cacti neighborhood, just married and with his first baby on the way. Here in the gymnasia, their day-to-day personalities fade and a new truth is revealed—a truth normally obscured by the banalities of daily life. Here in the gymnasia, a darker, more violent side of them is revealed.

Of course, there is no fight to the death, and both will emerge from the contest mostly unharmed. The gymnasia competition, hosted every year in Okaria by the OAC and featuring contestants from all over the Sector, is nothing but fun and games.

But tonight will be different. Tonight it won't be all fun and games. A deeper, darker truth will be revealed, not about The Grizzly or The Wolf, but about the streets we walk, the food we eat, the banalities of life that make us all complacent. Tonight I'll show the citizens of the Sector that Okaria, too, has a violent side.

“How could you have known I wasn't going to turn you in?” Shia had asked, many hours after I pulled down my hood and showed him who I really am. We sat by the bank of the little stream, partially hidden from the main street by a thicket of cattails, talking in hushed voices for hours. Shia had been a friend of Eli's, it turned out, when they were younger. When Eli came to the Academy on his TREE scholarship, Shia was one of his first friends. They parted ways quickly, though, and were only passing friends later at the Academy. When Shia failed to make it into the SRI, he went on to work in digital communications, and the two fell out of touch. But he could never bring himself to believe the OAC's cover story—that Eli had gone crazy after the trauma of the massacre.

I shrugged. “I didn't know,” I said. “But you asked the right questions. You already had doubts about the OAC's story. I knew you would at least hear me out.”

“You should tell your story,” Shia said. “Far and wide. There are people like me who would listen. I work in communications, you know. I could help. I don't work for the Sector. I work for Olympia.”

Olympia
, I thought, trying to remember. It had been so long since I watched regular Okarian programming.
What was Olympia?
And it came to me: the company that hosts and broadcasts the athletic games. Wrestling, running, jumping, boxing. And the annual OAC-sponsored gymnasia competition, one of the most exciting events of the year.

“You do broadcasting for the games?” I asked, racking my memories. “The gymnasia? Isn't there a big one coming up?”

“Pan-Okaria,” Shia nodded. “The biggest of the year. I'm not directly involved this year, but last year I was the broadcast controller. I know the whole stadium, in and out.” He leaned forward, staring at me. “It's five days from now. You said earlier you had video footage from the fight at Round Barn. We could play that all across Okaria.”

I sat looking at him, dumbfounded. The sheer power of it. It was almost blinding, the ferocity of his idea.

“If the people didn't believe Linnea before, they will when they learn about Round Barn.” His mouth was set in a grim line.

The crowd roars as The Wolf and The Grizzly circle each other in the pit. I pull my scarf tighter around my face, watching the crowd. This is the last night of the 25th annual Okarian Gymnasia Competition. More people attend this event than any other in the city, with the single exception of the chancellor's annual Okarian Address. The crowd is comprised of more than thirty thousand Sector citizens from all ranks and walks of life. Those of us in the cheap seats—no more than a few hundred seeds—watch the opening match on a series of huge holographic displays in the center of the stadium. Tonight's event, the wrestling matches, will decide who takes home the OAC's sunflower crest. The winner will also take home money, glory, and—best of all—a scholarship for themselves or a family member for a single year at the Okarian Academy. The Gymnasia is open to all citizens and is sponsored by the Okarian Agricultural Consortium as a way to publicize and advance the athletic-enhancing abilities
of the MealPaks and drug cocktails.

I take a moment to admire the arena, one of Okaria's most magnificent buildings. The stadium ceiling is built upon a complex exostructure designed with a combination of glass and swooping, curvaceous steel, with indoor hanging gardens to provide cooling during the summer and insulation during the winter. The gardens are rooted in a geodesic frame, arcing up and around the whole of the stadium in an elegant egg-shaped dome. In addition to insulation, the gardens provide electricity and produce a small amount of biolight, bathing the whole stadium in a delicate golden glow. With six giant vidscreens dotted around the arena, it would be impossible to miss the excitement of the contests.

“The Wolf has her opponent in what appears to be an illegal throathold—but no, citizens, the referee has called it a pressure point attack and therefore non-deadly by gymnasia rules, her attack stands, and in
five, four, three, two
—” the whole stadium begins to count down along with the announcer as The Grizzly thrashes helplessly—“
one
—and, The Wolf has clinched the match!” The crowd erupts in a deafening roar as The Wolf leaps up and throws her hands triumphantly into the air. “Even with The Grizzly's point lead, The Wolf will advance and face the victor of the next match …”

The announcer's voice fades. The sounds collapse and condense into a single dull hum of energy around me. The stadium swirls and melts into greyscale. I practice patience. I lose myself. I become a machine. Now, I am just waiting on Meera's signal. I am waiting for someone to flip my switch and turn me on.

Spearhead and Windrush compete: Windrush, a broad-shouldered man with long hair, the fastest wrestler I've seen thus far, knocks Spearhead out in under a minute. Jason of the Argonauts takes two rounds to pin the Squid, and a character who just calls herself Siberia, with blonde hair and a physique reminiscent of the now-extinct polar bears, takes out her opponent Mastodon in the longest and most torturous round I've ever watched. When it comes down to Siberia and Windrush and the crowd breaks for a moment, I tense. My eyes wander away from the vidscreen, focusing instead across the stadium where Meera is supposed to be waiting. Around me, spectators get up to refresh their cocktails. Some open their plasmas to adjust their final bets. In section A4, I see it. The flash. Meera's bioflare, glancing briefly across the stadium. Once. Twice. Three times it passes me.

I move.

I follow my memory of the map Shia drew for me and Meera, heading directly for the unused staircase that was locked off when the stadium was expanded ten years ago.

“Only the workers know where the old staircases are,” Shia said. “Servers will use it as a shortcut, sometimes. There's one that leads directly up to the broadcast studio. It's locked, but you can unlock it with employee biomarkers.” So Meera began the painstaking process of replicating Shia's fingerprints and superimposing them onto microfibers designed to replicate human flesh.

“Normally these are used for medical purposes,” Meera said, as she copied Shia's fingerprints over and over again at a hundred different angles on a tiny handheld scanner. “For burn victims, for instance. Or people with scar tissue that won't heal properly. But years ago Soo-Sun figured out how to use them to make fake fingerprints. She was able to help Outsiders forge identities in the Personhood database.”

Meera meets me at the staircase. With her characteristic raised eyebrows and cheeky expression, she palms the scanner at the door jamb. It slides open without a hitch. She cocks an eyebrow at me and I smile. So far, so good. The stadium is settling into a comfortable hush before the final round. We race up the stairs together, taking them two at a time as we follow the staircase up to the center of it all, where the filmography for the gymnasia is coordinated and the event is broadcast to the ten million citizens of the Okarian Sector.

At the top floor, we pause before opening the door, both of us panting lightly. She swings her backpack around to the front of her body and opens it. She pulls out a small bottle of champagne and two glass flutes, carefully wrapped in waxed leaves, and hands one to me.

“Cheers, darling,” she says, holding her glass out in a fake toast. I wonder if there's an alternate universe somewhere where Vale never came to the Resistance and Meera and I are lovers. I can't deny my attraction to her as she puts on her best impression of a sloppy drunk, falling against the door and giggling as she presses her fingertips to the heat sensor and almost collapses when the door opens. We link arms and lean into each other as the door closes silently behind us.

“By the harvest,” Meera says loudly, as bubbly as the champagne in our glasses, as we walk down the hall. “Did you see the clothes Windrush was wearing?”

“Or lack thereof,” I respond, slurring my words, even as my body tenses, ready for a fight. Meera looks at me and winks. Then she opens her hand and drops her glass. It shatters, the noise ringing out through the halls. Around the corner, I can hear voices, too low to make out. Will they both come? Or just one? Will this be easy, or hard?

“Oh, no,” I say as two Watchmen round the corner, approaching us cautiously. A man and a woman. I sigh, resigning myself to the challenge. At least neither of them has pulled a weapon. “I'm so sorry,” I say, to no one in particular. I fall into the wall.

“What are you two doing here?” the male Watchman asks.

“There used to be a bathroom here, I swear,” Meera says, sounding mildly disappointed. She stares around for a moment, as if looking for a door. Then she bends, teetering and unsteady, to try to pick up the shards of glass. I see what the two Watchmen don't—as she stoops, she drops a small flower, still wrapped in leaves, not yet bloomed. As soon as the flower hits the ground, its petals start to unfold, and within seconds a foul-smelling, noxious gas will start seeping from its anthers. Meera and I both took a heavy dose of the antidote right before we walked into the stadium, but the two Watchmen will be very much incapacitated after just a few seconds of inhaling the toxin.

The female Watchman darts toward Meera, unaware of the flower, trying to stop her before she falls on the glass and slices open her hands. I tense in preparation. Meera lets the woman catch her. For a frozen moment the two look almost like dancers, Meera dipping down in an elegant twist, the Watchman counterbalancing her before they pull back up for a dramatic spin.