The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (11 page)

“Don’t be stupid,” Liza said sharply.

“She misbehaves and she’s a mutant.”

“Anyway I wouldn’t say that Red is stunted,” Shawna said.
“She’s on the low end of normal, that’s all.”

Wanda shrugged that off. “Whatever you call it, they aren’t
going to want her in the breeding pool,” she said.

An uneasy silence filled the room as
Cynda’s
pretty face went blank. Several girls shook their heads reprovingly; even Lea
pulled herself together long enough to throw a chiding look Wanda’s way.

We didn’t know why
Cynda
had been
sterilized—the genetic counselors wouldn’t tell her what the problem was,
not even whether it was something that might have hurt her children but
wouldn’t affect her, or whether it was a disease she’d develop as she aged.
They told her it wasn’t productive for her to know things she couldn’t do
anything about. Not many things bothered
Cynda
, but
that did. She wanted to know.

“The genetic counselors are very careful,” Wanda said,
relentless, with the self-righteous air of a person who sees herself as brave
enough to state an unpleasant truth. “They don’t want us to be weakened by
compromised
genes.”

“Save it for the cameras, Wanda,” I said, going
to
Cynda
and putting a hand on her shoulder. “There’s
nobody but us watching you now.”

Wanda turned on me
. “I’m surprised they haven’t
already put you in a city meeting,” she said. “You’re a freak and a public
nuisance. If
you cared at all about fitting in you’d
at least cut your hair short. I mean, look
at you, flaunting it like
that. It’s almost down to your waist.”

Cynda
came
to my defense. “Red does try to keep it tucked away in her cap when she’s out
in public, but I don’t think she realized how sensitive you are about how dull
your hair looks by comparison. Red, to spare Wanda’s delicate feelings, could
you be sure to start wearing your cap round the clock?”

Wanda looked livid, but Lea was the next to speak.

 
“Cutting her hair
wouldn’t help,”
she said. She was still splotchy from
her hysterical crying jag and had a terrible case of the hiccups, but she was
determined to make her point. “It’d still be that color. Unless she shaved her
head bald.”
Fixing her gaze on me, she started crying again. “Please,”
she said. “Please, Red, you have to do it.”

I waved Lea off, trying to sound nonchalant despite the note
of terror in her voice. “Don’t be silly—I’m not going to shave my head.”

“But they’ll
kill
you!”

“A bald girl. It’s not like she’d be less noticeable that
way,” Liza said practically, and Lea began to wail.

“Lea, hyperventilating will not help matters.”
Cynda
looked stern. “If you can’t control yourself, I’ll
have to slap you again.” Lea gave a little jump, but she stopped crying and,
after a moment, sagged back against
Cynda’s
comforting bulk.

Wanda’s two best friends, Joy and
Linni
,
had been oddly quiet through all this, but now one of them spoke up.

“She could dye her hair,” Joy
said.

Linni
nodded in agreement. “Good idea. She should dye it.”

“With what?”
Meri
said, sitting up and looking interested.

Joy made a thinking face. “Oh, I don’t know.
Boiled tree bark? Or—listen, don’t orange and purple make brown? So she
could use blackberries.”

Linni
tittered.

“She’d attract flies,” Joy went on, “but it
would be worth it, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Wanda said, giving a satisfied smirk.
“That would be worth it.”

“It would be worth it,”
Linni
echoed.

I decided to ignore them.

“I vote that she sticks with the cap,” Shawna
said, as usual trying to de-escalate. “That’s probably a safer bet than trying
to dye her hair. If it ended up purple, she’d really be in trouble.”

By now, every girl in the room was staring at
me.

“Forget my hair!” I said. “Who cares about my
hair? Two people are dead, and there’s another city meeting tomorrow.”

Lea let out a wail.
Cynda
glared at me.

Wanda nodded smugly.

There I went again, causing trouble.

My lungs burned. I was desperately trying to keep up with
Meritt
, but he was too fast, hurtling toward the wasteland
as if he didn’t know death waited there. I tried to call out, to warn him, but
the habit of silence and secrecy was too strong. He was lost.

When I stepped in something wet I knew it wasn’t rain. It was
thick and dark and smelled metallic, and when I stopped, the puddle widened,
darkened
, held
me fast. Then wardens came out of nowhere, pointing their guns at me, and in
the split second before I felt the bullets I tried to shout that
Meritt
was lost so that maybe someone would find him, but no
one who cared was around to hear.

Then
Rafe
picked me up and I was limp and heavy and he carried
my body to the sea. He wanted to wash away the blood, and only the sea could do
it. And then I was alone, lying on cold sand, and
Rafe
was wading out deeper and deeper, trying to wash off the blood, and the waves
crashed against, separated us. They carried him away, though he struggled to
stay with me, and I was alone.

*
* * *

With a start I sat up, heart pounding. The room was pitch
black; someone was snoring gently. The cameras I couldn’t see seemed pointed
straight at me.

I lay back down, not expecting to sleep, but exhaustion
claimed me almost instantly. And as soon as I slept I dreamed again. I was
standing in the circle at a city meeting but it was
Meritt
,
not Farrell Dean, who was dragging me away from
Rafe
.
In real life Farrell Dean had held my face against his chest, trying to calm
me, trying to keep me from seeing
Rafe
die, but in my
dream
Meritt
didn’t do that. Instead he put his hands
over my ears to stop me from hearing
Rafe’s
dying
words.
It’s better you not know
, he
said.
I like having you for a pet.

This time when I sat up, I knew I wouldn’t sleep again.

How much of the night was left? I wasn’t sure. I might have
been able to guess if I could have seen the moon, but heavy blinds blocked out
the night. Not that I would have had it any other way. If it weren’t for the
blinds that darkened our room and blinded the cameras, I’d never be able to
sneak out to meet
Meritt
.

I pushed back against the wall and pulled my knees up to my
chest, moving carefully so I wouldn’t jostle the bunk and disturb Kari.

It felt like the middle of the night. It felt like it would
be a long time until dawn. Well, I knew one thing I could do to pass some time.
I would make myself remember what
Rafe
had said,
whether
Meritt
wanted me to remember or not.

No,
Meritt
wasn’t trying to keep
me from remembering; that was only my dream.

Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes. Carefully, knowing
it was going to hurt, I put myself back in the city meeting circle. I saw
Rafe
come out of the watchtower door. I squinted against
the spotlight. I heard the impossible death sentence. I felt the warden grab
me—he was choking me, but
Rafe
stopped him with
a strike to his throat. I was struggling against Farrell Dean as he wrapped me
in a bear hug and turned me away from
Rafe
, from the
gunshots. I strained my ears to catch
Rafe’s
words,
but they echoed and doubled back on themselves and were nothing but the
inarticulate sounds of my own grief.

I opened my eyes. This was no good. The harder I thought,
the more garbled
Rafe’s
words became.

Suddenly restless, I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting
there quietly tormenting myself and waiting for morning. How could everyone
sleep so peacefully, when all around us the world was more full of weeping than
we could understand?

That was what old Louie sometimes said, and he was right,
though I hadn’t truly understood it until now. He started saying it back when I
was little, when no one would play with me, and he’d take me on his lap and
tell me I was different because I was a fairy child—which even then I
knew was silly, but it was better than thinking about the many ways I was a
freak. I’d sit there with Louie and maybe a couple of the old women, and he’d
make up some story about adventures I supposedly had had. The stories were all
different, but Louie always started them to same way: Come away, oh fairy
child, to the waters and the wild. Come and let me hold your hand, for the
world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Louie was a sweet old man.

And I couldn’t stand to sit there, alone and awake in the
dark crowded room, any longer.

Gently I swung down from my bunk and felt around on the
floor for my clothes. In the darkness I pulled them on, paying careful
attention to my cap, making sure it covered every single hair. Then slowly,
scarcely breathing, I eased across the room, telling myself I was silence. I
was night.

Lea sighed and turned over, but no one else moved. The
cadence of a sleeper’s breathing went steadily on; the snorer never paused.
Even Shawna, who was an irritatingly light sleeper, was still and quiet.

The metal door was cold and heavy. I opened it just far
enough to slip through, then held it so it would close slowly, without its usual
telltale thud.

At the bottom of the stairs I did the same thing with the
outside door, flinching as the cold air hit me in the face. It smelled like
frost and made all my senses feel fully alert, honed sharp.

The moon was high in the sky and more than three-quarters
full, bathing the city in light that was almost as bright as day and yet
cooler, more remote. The bright moonlight made it a little harder for me to
travel the streets unobserved, but I could manage. I’d done it before. There
was a cinderblock pillar on either side of the door, braces that held up the
narrow roof that protected the entry area. I stepped behind one of the pillars,
the same way I always did, and scanned the streets.

No one was in sight. The spotlight swept across the city,
probing the shadows cast by the moon, but it revealed no movement anywhere.

Still I hesitated, leaning against the rough pillar,
studying the moon-washed buildings and empty streets. I’d never gone out alone
with no one to meet. I’d always gone out to meet
Meritt
.

But now
Rafe
was dead. I’d always
pretended he was my father, and if my father was gone, then I had to grow up.

So I slid from shadow to shadow, keeping track of the
cameras
Meritt
had taught me to avoid, ignoring the
ones he said were dummies or defective. I behaved exactly as I always did,
telling myself with every step that this was no different from any other night.
I knew the routine. I knew the safe path through the dark.

By the time I passed the slaughterhouse with its metallic
scent of blood, and crept out the western gap into the wasteland, I
half-expected to see
Meritt
waiting for me right
where he usually stood. He wasn’t, of course. The wasteland lay bare, its ugly
tufts of grass twisted flat against the sand.
Meritt
had been here just a few hours ago, though. He’d been here with me. I could
practically see us, quarreling, reconciling. I saw him touching my face, wiping
away my tears, stroking my hair.

The memory of us, of him, made me feel less alone. I leaned
against the outside of the city wall, where
Meritt
and I always leaned, and felt the emptiness, the silence, gently opening places
in my mind that had been tightly shut. I could smell the pine trees and taste a
distant salty hint of the sea. I could hear the wind rustling high in the evergreens,
stirring now and then the dying leaves that drifted, one by one, to the ground.

It was because there were too many people, I decided. The
city was fraught with thoughts and emotions, with fear and anger that were
almost palpable, choking me when I breathed, squeezing out any space for
thought or memory. In the dormitory someone was always crying, being comforted
or ignored. Out here it was just me, alone. Out here I could think.

But thinking too hard seemed to scare the memory of
Rafe’s
words away, so I let my mind drift, out into the
woods, into the water beyond.

Beyond
Optica
. What was out there?
Were there other islands, other people? Once when I mentioned the idea to
Cynda
, she said, “And maybe there are talking animals, too.
And maybe a giant duck will carry us to a happy place where the sun shines
every day.” She’d put her arm around my shoulders. “This is where we are, Red.
This is what is.
Optica
.”

Still I couldn’t help thinking about it, and a breeze passed
over and the shadows of the trees gesticulated, seemed to beckon me.

I was afraid of the woods, but now that there
were predators inside the city, the wild things of the forest seemed less
terrifying. It wouldn’t be hard to let myself creep slowly
toward the trees, to let their shadows
cloak me as I
moved across the open expanse of wasteland.

Before I knew it, I was fifty feet beyond the
wall; I had never been so far from
Optica
. What was a
few feet more? Quietly, slowly, I edged closer and closer to the woods.

And then I was in them, only a few steps beyond
their border, but already it felt a world apart. The city smelled
all of
pavement, people, chemical cleansers. These trees smelled fresh and somehow
hopeful. Despite everything I knew and had heard about the
wilderland
,
that scent made me feel safer. Then, too, the trees were so tall; that meant
they must be quite old, and it seemed to me that if they could endure that
long, if the earth had kept feeding them all those years and the sky had kept
bringing them sunshine and rain, then maybe there was something in the world
that might help us endure as well.

I knew I was too far from the beach to hear the sea, at
least at ordinary times, but that night felt extraordinary, so I stood very
still and listened for the distant sound of waves along the shore until the
night insects among the trees grew accustomed to my presence and began to sing
again. Then I emptied my mind and listened still longer, focusing my gaze on
the night sky above the city, clear for once and spangled with a million stars.
And the longer I looked, the more stars there seemed to be, as if some were
timid and were peeking out only after careful consideration, after they got
used to me and saw I was no threat. I gazed upward for so long that I began to
feel untethered from the earth, as if I were rising up toward the tiny lights
far and away. If I moved my hand away from the rough bark of the tree, I could
fly.

That was when I heard the voice.

With a start I came back to myself, my feet firmly on the
ground. Wardens didn’t usually patrol behind the slaughterhouse, near the gap
where I’d slipped out—it smelled bad, and it wasn’t in a heavily
populated area—but once or twice
Meritt
and I
had narrowly missed being spotted by an unusually thorough warden. One of those
must be out tonight, checking each and every sector.

At least I hoped it was a thorough warden, and not a lazy
one. What if I got trapped out here indefinitely while some slacker lounged by
the gap smoking and dozing?

The voice muttered again, unintelligible, and my blood
froze. It wasn’t inside the city; it was behind me, in the woods.

Pressing my back against the rough bark of the tree I looked
wildly around, peering into the dark woods, across the wasteland at the gray
city wall. I saw no one, no unnatural movement, nothing but the swaying shadows
of the trees in the night wind.

 
I wanted to make
a dash for the city but was afraid to move. If I stepped out into the wasteland
he—it?—would see me. I remembered the stories of people returning
from the woods without hands, or skinned alive, driven insane.

A cloud rolled out from behind the tops of the trees, and I
stood there, helpless, and watched it cover the moon, leaving me stranded and
blind. I could still hear, of course. I could hear twigs snapping, leaves
rustling. Some animals could see in the dark. Could Guardians, or whatever this
thing was?

The moon drifted back out and I frantically scanned my
surroundings. I saw trees; I saw the pale wasteland; I saw the city wall; but I
saw no one, no person, no animal. I peered into the darkness for so long that
my shoulders began to ache with tension and my eyes stung dry and prickly from
not blinking. But I hadn’t imagined the voice—I’d heard it. I was sure.

Then I heard it again. It was still quiet, but this time
perfectly distinct.

“Red!”

Who would be outside the city in the middle of the night,
calling my name? There was only one possibility.

“
Meritt
?” I called, very quietly.

“Red!”

My blood froze. The voice was louder this time, and much
closer, and it sure wasn’t
Meritt
. It wasn’t any
voice I knew. It was guttural, half-choking on my name.