The Three Most Wanted (6 page)

“This one crept in so gradually,” I said. “Now people don’t know what to do. So it’s easier to do nothing. But consciences can’t be suppressed forever, so sooner or later... Wouldn’t like to say
when
, but I reckon it’ll be quite sudden and I just hope to God peaceful.”

“You wish.”

“It’s happened before. If every person in the bloc stands up and demands change there won’t need to be a shot fired.”

“Yeah, but in reality half of them will hide under their beds, so the other half will have to start shooting to make up for them.”

“Hope you’re wrong.”

“History’s on his side. Mostly.” Gloomily Jon knelt again to trace his fingers over the chiseled writing. “Huh, this guy was our age. I can’t read his name.”

Bane stood staring out at the sea of graves with an unquiet brow and Jon went on crouching apologetically by the headstone of the nameless soldier of our age, long dead.
May they all be with you, Lord, especially this guy here
...

“Come on,” I said quietly. “Unless we want to camp here.”

Jon got to his feet at once and took hold of Bane again—they’d barely started forward when Bane threw an impulsive arm around Jon’s shoulders.

“I wouldn’t really leave you for the wolves, mate.”

“Nice to know.”

Jon threw an arm around Bane’s shoulders in return and they went along like that for a few steps until Bane said, “Watch out, tree.”

Two more days brought us to Peronne, as we made sure to pass well below the more populous regions of Douai and Cambrai. Exiting the town on the other side of the river, we turned towards Guise, our next intended point of resupply, with luck only four days away on this flat terrain.

On the second day it rained. Heavily. Swathing ourselves in our worth-their-weight-in-gold waterproofs, we tried to ignore it, but even the most expensive waterproofs in the world couldn’t entirely stop water going up sleeves and down necks.

We spent the next morning drying off, then had to take a little detour around a wolf in a clearing that didn’t seem inclined to get up and move—a den site?—so it was afternoon on the fifth day when we finally reached Guise. The next town small enough not to have police was eight days away so we collected all the food we could carry.

We stopped while it was still light for what’d already become our normal post-resupply treat. As Bane set to work with the stove, I put the bulging food bag beside me and unwrapped the first item, scanning the page of newspaper front and back. Nothing of interest. I rewrapped the cheese and put it to one side, picking up the next.

“Labrador saves child?” I offered.

“Go on, then.” Jon’s head rested on his knees. How many articles could he stay awake for?

“Okay. ‘Jeanette Paquin from Nancy, French department, had a narrow escape on Thursday when she fell into the river at the bottom of her garden. The five-year-old, who is unable to swim, was alone except for the family pet, plucky Labrador Remy, who went in after her, towing her to safety.’ Well, that’s a nice little story for a change.” Though it was ironic how the press could lavish praise on a dog for saving a child, yet villainize us for saving seventy human lives.

I read out “More strikes in the German department”—(“Good,” grunted Bane, “give the EuroGov something to think about other than us”), “Man finds diamond in burger”—(“Hope it was worth enough to get his teeth fixed!” Bane sniggered), and ‘Fifteen Underground members executed after Madrid raid,’ at which Jon stirred enough to murmur,
“Requiescat in Pace.”

The next sheet—a
FrenchDaily
front page—sent my eyebrows heading up towards my hair. A small boxed headline at the top of the page, advertising an opinion piece inside the newspaper, read:

ARE YOU ENJOYING NEW ADULTHOOD, MARGARET V.?

Willem von Leffers on the escaped reAssignees unexpected ‘New Adulthood’… p. 22

I read it to the other two.

“Weird,” said Jon.

“People must be very interested in you,” said Bane shrewdly, “if they’re writing silly little pieces like that. I mean, it must be pushing it a bit, with the government censors.”

Turning over the page, I scanned the inside. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“Here. Why?” asked Bane.

“This thing’s totally untraceable, right?”

“Oh yeah. Or I’m going to have to get my money back from the Salperton cell. Why?” Belatedly suspicious.

Biting my lip, I typed a couple of lines. “Thought I might answer their question.”

Holding up the newspaper by my face, I took a picture. Nope, it showed my roots. Tried again. Good, just my face, no hair, no background, and just the little box, not the newspaper title.

Bane watched in alarm. “D’you
want
them to know we’re in the French department reading French newspapers?”

“They won’t.” I showed him the inside page. “The article’s written by a
DailyNewsCorp
news service journalist from Germany. It’s a wire story—it will have appeared in every Department by now.”

Bane looked slightly reassured.

“What are you going to say?” asked Jon.

“‘We are all enjoying New Adult life very much. Thank you for asking. M.V.’”

Bane’s brows drew together as he analyzed this. “S’pose it doesn’t let on we’re not with the others.”

“Short and sweet,” said Jon.

“Well, then.” I held up the phone, identity-proving photo now inserted into the text. “Send, don’t send?”

“Where does it end?” Bane threw up his hands rather dramatically.

“When there are no innocent people sitting around in Facilities waiting to die.”

He scowled, so I added, “You started it all by sending me the flyer about the postSort novel competition,” and looked at Jon.

After a moment Jon turned his ears from Bane’s frustrated breathing, back to me. Spoke almost inaudibly. “Send.”

Bane threw up his hands again. “Fine, keep stirring the pot. Doubt the EuroGov can get much angrier at this point.”

I pressed send. No way to know if
DailyNewsCorps
received it. Or dared to print it. Still. Felt like I was doing
something
.

A more cheerful article, now? I rustled through several more bits of paper...

“Oh dear... obituaries...
cheerful
, don’t expect there’s anyone we...” I broke off. For a moment I couldn’t tear my eyes from the picture... “Nope, boring.”

“Who is it?” asked Jon.

“Oh, no one important...” I tried to wrap the page back around its sausage but my hands shook so badly I failed to evade Bane’s grab. “
No
...”

I lunged after the page—he swung it out of my reach, laughing. Smoothed it out and looked. The laugh dropped from his face. He handed it back to me, avoiding my eyes. Picked up a fork-spoon and began stirring the warming water.

Jon frowned into the silence. “Who on earth is it?

I took a deep breath. “A dismantler. Um... Doctor Richard, actually.”

Jon’s brow cleared. “Oh, that’s okay. I was worried.” The frown came back. “Didn’t know he was dead.”

“Um... I s’pose I’d better read a bit of it... er, ‘Doctor Richard Werrick, forty-eight, was brutally murdered during the mass breakout from Greater Salperton EGD Facility last week. Newly appointed Com...’ Ugh! Um, sorry... ‘newly appointed Commandant of Greater Salperton Facility, Major Gladys Wallis, spoke of Doctor Werrick’s genuine dedication to saving lives through his work...’ and blah, blah, blah. Saving lives, I like that!”

“Yeah,” snorted Jon. “By carving up
other lives!
Huh. The Resistance must’ve got him after you were rescued. Well, what d’you expect from murderous dogs like them?”

Bane’s face crumpled, his teeth sinking into his lower lip. He dropped the fork-spoon and his hand clenched around something inside his jacket. His eyes found mine at last—yeah, more bothered by this than he’d been letting on...

Jon’s head turned slightly to one side, his unseeing eyes intent and not at all sleepy. “What did I say?”

“What on earth d’you mean?”

“I just said something...
wrong?
Something. What?”

“Nothing...”

“No, it’s okay,” interrupted Bane. “No secrets. I killed him, Jon.”

Jon blinked; his eyes widened. “Oh. Uh... why?”

“He was chopping up Margo.”

“Good for you, then. Um, what happened?”

“I went in there and there he was, chopping up Margo, as I said. He raises this razor-thing to stab her and... well, I don’t remember deciding to do anything, but one moment I’m by the door and the next moment my knife’s going into him and then he’s dead. Just like that. S’pose perhaps I could’ve stopped him without killing him, I don’t know. It happened very fast, and I kinda saw red.”

I saw red
... Is that what Major Everington had said after killing the abusive guard? The uncomfortable thought popped into my mind—I pushed it out again. Could
Bane
have stopped Doctor Richard without killing him? Maybe.
If
he’d been able to sit around beforehand and plan what to do. “I wouldn’t start playing ‘what if’, Bane.”

“Wasn’t planning to. Just saying.” Just being honest with Jon.

“Well, it sounds like an unpleasant job that needed doing,” said Jon firmly.

“If I had to do it again I dare say I would, but it doesn’t stop it feeling a lot like bloody murder. Brutal murder, as the paper would have it.”

“You think you should’ve let him kill Margo?”

“
No
. Never.”

“Well, then.” Jon rested his head back on his knees again. “What’s next, Margo?”

“Um...” I skimmed down the page and stopped suddenly. “Wait, there’s a bit at the bottom under all that eulogizing... Just says, ‘The previous Commandant of Greater Salperton Facility, Major Lucas Everington, remains in custody charged with Category One Sedition. It is believed he will plead Guilty. No trial date has yet been set.’ Believed he will plead Guilty, huh? Oh, really. So why no date?”

“Bet he’s pleading
Not Guilty
with everything he’s got,” said Jon. “They can’t have enough evidence to convict him; he won’t confess unless he wants to die.”

“Which he will soon enough,” said Bane, “though that appears to be taking them a little longer to achieve than they anticipated.”

I folded the sheet and put it in my pocket, feeling slightly sick. One commandant to be added to the tally after all, only far more lingeringly than any of the others. How long would it take them to break him?

Lord
... What prayer could I offer for this doomed man? This man I’d said I forgave.
Lord, he hasn’t done anything...
My hand crept to my forehead.
Okay, he’s done plenty, but he hasn’t done what he’s accused of. Let his suffering not be unnecessarily prolonged?

We stretched the fresh food to five days, then it was sachets the rest of the way to Vouziers, though Jon found mushrooms one evening, his wonderful nose!

“But are they safe?” I asked him.

“Yeah, we don’t have a stomach pump,” said Bane.

“Relax, you two,” he told us. “My parents were always serving the mushrooms I gathered to the guests at home.”

Vouziers was much like all the other towns, down in a river valley and most of the surviving buildings old and beautiful. Backpackers thronged the food stalls and we had to wait to be served. High hiking season now.

The stall displayed the usual selection of French basics, bread, cheese, meat, with nice looking sausages. One of the New Adults in the group in front was probably the blackest person I’d ever seen, his skin like ebony.

I looked away so I wouldn’t stare—a stall further on had a very large selection of pies, perhaps we should go there, the line wasn’t any longer...

My eyes crept back to the guy in front and I glanced away again. There were hardly any British B (black people) left in Salperton—or British A (Asians like Jane), for that matter. The Registration Laws had made it so hard for them to find partners of their own exact genetic category that most had moved out of the Bloc several generations ago, or at least to the big cities. The EGD still claimed it was an unintended consequence...

My heart froze. Two men in uniform, a little further up the street, just before the bridge... They stopped a group of three laughing New Adults, who laughed on as they pulled out their IDs and swiped them through the policemen’s hand scanner. The policemen joked with them and let them go by. Pistol butts protruded from their holsters... NonLees. I’d just spent four months looking at just that type.

Lethals would’ve been a hundred times less scary.

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