The Superiors (20 page)

Cali considered for a moment, looking up at the sky with a frown of concentration. “I don’t think so, no. Actually, you’re the only one who really talks to me.”

“I am?”

“Yes. The rest just come and eat and leave.”

“I see.” Draven thought this over for a bit. He hadn’t seen many Superiors conversing with sapiens, but he assumed the ones who owned livestock did. If he bought Cali, he would want her to be happy so she would cooperate and not try to run away or become lazy. “Does it bother you that I make you talk to me?”

“You’re not making me talk to you. You just make me…want to talk to you.”

“How odd.”

Cali laughed and he jerked back a bit, still startled to hear that sound from a sap. “What?” she asked, recovering her balance on his lap.

He laughed at this, and so did she, and then they looked at each other. Her laughter always disconcerted him, and he realized how close she was, that she was on his lap and had been for a long while. His lap felt uncomfortably hot under her, and he had a sudden flash of her pulling on her shift and approaching him without collecting a pair of underpants from the communal basket. He stood abruptly, and neither of them said anything more while he carried her back and deposited her in the doorway of the eating hall. He left, still ruffled by the strange effect she had on him.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Cali woke when the Superior reached into her bunk and grabbed her feet. She liked to curl up as close to the top of her bunk as she could get, where none of the roaming Superiors would come by and grab her by chance. But the ones who already knew her and knew where to find her still came.

When he bit her without saying anything, she knew it must be the Man Who Hurries. The other one always talked to her, and ever since she’d taken him out to the garden, he seemed to have a preference for that. She lay still while the Superior sucked on the back of her leg. He’d bite her any old place, not just in her arm like the Man with Soft Hair. She didn’t mind the leg bites so much, except when he got her right behind the knee, and then the little painful bumps rubbed on everything—the chairs when she sat down, the back of her leg when she squatted or sat on the ground, everything. And the Man with Soft Hair only took the lumps out of her arms, never her legs.

Cali wondered what would happen if for once she just kicked this one right in the face. It probably wouldn’t hurt—people said Superiors had no feelings, physical or otherwise. She didn’t know if she believed it. It would be awfully sad not to ever feel anything. But then, they wouldn’t feel sadness either, so it might be okay. Still, this guy had left her so many bites, so many sore spots. Once, she’d taken her hand away from the Man with Soft Hair, and he hadn’t gotten mad. She’d been tired, just stretching, but she’d thought he’d get mad. She could kick this one in the face and just pretend she kicked out in her sleep. It would serve him right.

Cali gave a big sigh, the kind she’d give in her sleep, and turned onto her side a little. She drew her leg up and made another little sleeping sound. Then she kicked him.

He must have sensed her foot coming, because he moved away and even though she’d done it fast, she only grazed his chin. Then—smack!—he slapped her thigh so hard that the sound echoed through the whole long barrack with all the bunks. It sounded like a bone snapping, or a wall snapping in half. But he’d had his hand flat, so just his palm smacked her. And holy sap-crap, it hurt. Her skin burned so bad where he’d hit her that she thought it might peel off.

Cali bit down on the inside of her cheek and tried to make her stomach stop shaking while he bit her again and finished sucking her blood. She knew she’d done something awfully stupid—she should probably be glad that he’d just given her a little slap. Or a big slap, but still. She’d tried to kick a Superior in the face. The thought of it was so incredible she couldn’t believe she’d actually done it. If her leg didn’t sting so bad, she’d have laughed.

For a long time after he left, she couldn’t go back to sleep. Her leg throbbed. She had cramps. The whole night had turned out pretty bad. At least no other bloodsuckers came to her bed, and she finally got to sleep right before she had to get up again and start the day all over. At breakfast, Poppy asked why Cali had a limp, and when Cali told her, all her sisters looked at her like she’d grown bloodsucker teeth straight out of her head. It had been a pretty dumb thing to do. And by the middle of the day, when the cooks brought the food out and everyone sat around eating outside, it seemed like half the people at the Confinement knew why Cali had a limp and the beginning of a hand-shaped bruise on her thigh.

“You just ignore them,” Mama said when a couple snarky girls started bothering Cali about it.

“I am,” Cali said, taking a bite of her corn pudding. Inside, the eating area got so hot during the day that no one wanted to go in, especially after the cooking warmed it up even more. In the mornings it was okay, and at night after a cold shower it didn’t seem so bad. By the end of dinner, though, everyone had gotten just about as sweaty as before their showers. Cali knew she was lucky she’d made it back, and she didn’t miss trying to stay up all night at the restaurants, or the constant biting. Still, she’d forgotten how hard Confinement life was. She’d had it easy at the restaurants, only having to clean and do a little gardening in the window boxes at the nice place.

A few hours later, while she weeded, one of the boys kept looking at her leg. “Is it true that you kicked a bloodsucker in the eye?” he asked after about the tenth time she caught him looking.

“I’m Jonathan. I have a house and everything. All to myself. I built it over there, all by myself. My whole family has houses, and I’d been wanting one for a long time, and I finally got enough stuff to make a house.”

“That’s nice,” Cali said. She wanted to do her work in peace. Her woman’s days always gave her the worst stomach pains, and sweat had stuck her shift to her back and she kept having to pull it loose from where it clung to her skin, and she didn’t smell too pretty right then either. She’d rather people talked to her after she’d showered.

He just kept talking though, telling her about how he’d built his house, all the things he’d found to make it, how big it was, what the inside and outside looked like. He seemed nice and everything, even if he did keep following her to the next row of beans, and kept talking like she had answered. Bragging annoyed her a little, and he bragged a lot. But she figured he was just trying to look good so she’d pay attention to him.

“How old are you?” he asked after a while. She’d almost stopped paying attention since he hadn’t required her to say anything.

“I’m fifteen. Almost sixteen. You?” Age didn’t really matter at the Confinement, not once a girl could have babies. It was just something to talk about.

“Twenty-six. You got kids?”

“No. You?”

“Yeah. I had a girlfriend who lived with me before, and we were going to get married, and that’s why I tried so hard to get the house built. We had two kids, and we were going to get married once I had the house all ready. We even moved in before I’d finished it, because I didn’t want her to have to be in the barracks and get disturbed and wake up the babies. I took real good care of her, and the babies. I’d be a good husband.”

Men got sent away to work on farms more often, so a lot more women lived in the Confinement. If a man wanted a wife, he could be picky. Mostly the men just gave lots of women lots of babies. The Superiors liked it when humans had lots of babies.

“Uh huh. What happened to her?”

“Someone bought her and the babies both. So now I have the house to myself. I like it sometimes. It’s quiet and people come over and sleep there if they’re fighting with their family or someone. But I really miss having a girl around. That’s why I made the house, because I wanted a family, and now I’m left with the house and no family. But I figure I’ll find a girl pretty fast. Everyone wants a family, and not everyone can offer a house like I can.”

“Sounds like it’ll be easy then.” She knew what he was doing, seeing if she was interested. She wasn’t. She didn’t want to end up as that girlfriend of his, or worse, with babies. Poppy went on and on about babies, how much she loved them. The way Cali saw it, that was part of the problem. If you loved a baby and it got taken away, or you did, then what? She’d seen it happen. It was bad. The only way she’d ever want babies was if someone bought her first, and got her and a husband together, and then she could be pretty sure her family would stay together.

The boy stayed and kept talking to her all day, until she got so tired of him she had to escape to the outhouses to avoid him. She used the composting toilet inside the plastic stall. Even though the toilets flushed, the tiny stalls sat in the sun, and the heat and smell inside got pretty bad by the end of the day.

That evening after her shower, she joined her family at one of the tables in the noisy eating hall. “Hey, did you hear that Patty and Pat are going to make a run for it?” Poppy asked as soon as Cali sat down.

She rearranged herself on the bench, scooting forward so the edge wouldn’t press on the backs of her knees so bad. “Uh, no. Where to?”

“South America, of course. Where else would they go?”

“I don’t know.”

“So? Aren’t you excited or nothing? They even said they’re taking Leon with them, and they got everything ready, even. Stuff to make the big escape.” Poppy leaned forward as she talked, and whispered like someone might overhear and tell the Superiors. Which someone actually might, although Cali couldn’t understand why anyone would do something like that. After all, they should all root for each other and try to help each other get out if they could. But for some reason, some people always had to try and ruin the chances of anyone brave enough to make a run for it.

“Do you think anyone ever makes it that far?” Cali asked, scraping her corn pudding onto her corn tortilla. Corn, corn, corn. She didn’t see how she hadn’t turned yellow from all that corn. Maybe the helping of soybeans kept her from turning into a corn plant.

“Course they make it,” Zinnia said, holding her belly. “Sure they do. You know what they say, that way down there, on the other side of the wide water, people get to live free. Buy their own stuff, have their own animals and gardens, everything.”

“I even heard humans can read down there,” Poppy said. “They just give them books and teach them everything.”

“Maybe,” Cali said. “I doubt it.”

Her sisters gave her dirty looks. “Why you gotta say that?” Zinnia said. “One day I’m going to take my baby and we’re going to go down there and I’m going to have twenty books, and then I’m going to write you a letter and put it in a book and send it to you.”

Cali smiled. “That’d be great. Maybe I’ll come too.”

“And me and Sandy, too,” Poppy said. “And mama and Gwen and all of us, and all our families…” She kept on talking, but Cali stopped listening. She thought about how great everyone thought restaurants were, how working in a restaurant meant you could run errands in the city alone, and do things and have things that no one here had. But it was all just another South America, only closer. Probably no one ever made it to South America. Everyone who escaped got sent somewhere a lot closer—the blood bank. And everyone around her knew it, but they’d never say it. If anyone ever made it to South America, she thought they’d be in for a shock. Probably, they’d find a place just like here. Maybe even worse.

Cali had run a few times. Stupid, sure. She’d been a kid, though. Now she knew a little more about Superiors. Running away usually only caused more problems. Bad things had happened when she’d run away. First she’d gotten sent to a blood bank, then to a restaurant. Neither of which had been at all fun. In the Confinement, she didn’t have it so bad. She had food, and her family, and only a few Superiors bit her every night. She didn’t need anything that she didn’t have. Everything here was good enough, as good as it would probably ever get. Asking for more just seemed greedy when she was already so well cared for. As long as she didn’t do anything dumb, like kick a bloodsucker, she’d be okay.

That night they came while she slept. Not just one of them, but a ton of them. She woke when the lights went on, and everyone started sitting up and blinking and rubbing eyes. The Superiors came down the center aisle, familiar guards and others all wearing the same uniforms. They pulled people out of the bunks, shouted, marched them all outside. Cali stood with the others in a group, all of them sleepy and silent and staring. The babies all started screaming. Inside, the Superiors started pulling the thin mattresses from the bunks, now unrolled for sleeping. They dragged every mattress on the floor, flipped them over, sometimes scanned them or felt all over them and tossed them back up.

“I don’t know. Stuff we’re not s’posed to have. Anything that could be a weapon, I guess. Or something could be used to escape with.”

Cali’s heart began to hammer, first slow and hard and then faster. What if they were looking for that thing she’d stolen? What if they’d found out, if he’d missed it? She didn’t even know what it was for, but she knew she shouldn’t have it. It must be a contraband item. She’d stuck it in along the seam of her mattress and sewed it back in, but they could surely tell. They had an instrument to wave over the mattresses to see things.