The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (12 page)

I flung myself toward the wasteland
,
toward the safety of the city, stumbling over the tufted wasteland grass,
urging
myself not to fall, and the voice cried out again, louder, nearer
still, calling my name
pleadingly, so close I was
afraid to look back, afraid I’d see it reaching out to grab me, and then
I
reached the gap in the wall and hurtled inside, not pausing to check for
wardens or spotlights, not caring if they caught me. I hit the pavement of the
city and kept running, skidding around the corner of the slaughterhouse,
smelling blood and death and fear, hoping the wall would stop my pursuer,
hoping he wouldn’t follow me into the city and chase me down and kill me in the
street and paint pictures on the slaughterhouse wall with my blood.

Behind me the voice cried out once more, distantly and in
tones of despair, “Red.”

“Family of
Optica
,”
the Voice said, and Judd, standing next to me, spoke the rest with him. “There
are cancers among you.”

“
Shhhhh
.” I glanced warily around
at the rows of faces. Judd’s father might be a warden—might, if we’d
guessed right—but that wouldn’t protect Judd, not these days.

He glared at me for shushing him but stayed quiet during the
rest of the lecture, while the wardens led Stuart, a butcher who’d recently
lost an arm in an accident with the sausage grinder, into the
spotlit
center of the circle. Then wardens brought out an
elderly man and stood him a few feet away from Stuart.

It was Louie.

I must have gasped. “
Shh
,” Judd
said, and in the reflected glow of the spotlight his face was unnaturally pale
and pinched.

The wardens set a heavy bag of grain on the ground near
Louie, and a bucket of water on the ground near Butcher Stuart. The Voice
didn’t give us its introductory lecture. It didn’t ask the men any questions.
It didn’t explain to us what the men had done wrong.

Instead, a warden lit a match and touched it to the bag of
grain. Then, unbelievably, he reached out and lit the sleeve of Louie’s shirt.

A cry, hastily muted, went up from the crowd. Butcher Stuart
didn’t hesitate. With his one good arm he grabbed the bucket and flung the
water over Louie. Before our lungs could release our collective sigh of relief,
the Voice spoke.

“Butcher Stuart has failed the test,” it said. “Cities do
not survive on sentimentality.”

As the last word echoed over the stunned crowd, a shot rang
out. Stuart fell.

In the circle, Louie ran a disbelieving hand across his
eyes. Then he knelt, slowly and awkwardly, beside Stuart’s body and touched his
neck, feeling for a pulse. When his shoulders sagged, we knew he’d found none.
I thought he’d get up then—I was afraid he’d stand up and the warden
would shoot him next—but Louie stayed on his knees. Clasping his hands
together in front of his chest, he bent his head. His lips moved.

Then the spotlight cut out and all was black.

After a long paralyzed moment, when the lights didn’t come
on and the Voice didn’t speak, people began moving silently, leaving the
circle. Beside me Judd was craning around, peering into the darkness. Then he
leaned toward me and breathed noisily in my ear. He was only twelve, but
already he was taller than I was.

“Have you seen
Petey
?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Stuart was
Petey’s
dad,” Judd
whispered. “We think.”

* * *
*

Late that night, afraid but determined, I made my way
through the streets to
Rafe’s
house, avoiding the
live cameras, staying in the shadows, trying not to think of all the ways I
could get caught. I was in danger from the girls in my dorm, if any woke and
found me gone; in danger from the cameras winking at me from the walls; in
danger from patrol cars; from the scarred warden; and from Zee, the warden in
the tower, peering at me through the telescopes, following the pointing finger
of the spotlight.

Unless Zee was busy drinking hot milk and whisky, playing
Solitaire.

That thought made me angry. He sometimes watched and
sometimes didn’t, so even when I had privacy, I didn’t know that I did. I’d
never know whether there were watchers in the tower, or if they were only in my
mind.

The adult houses near
Rafe’s
were
all dark, all quiet. His house was on the end of a row, so though it was
crowded on three sides with other small dark houses, to the west were only the
bee fields and then the orchards. That would have been helpful to
Rafe
, I thought. It would have made it easier to slip out
unnoticed.

I stood against the western wall of his house a long time,
watching for wardens, but the street remained quiet. In the narrow strip of sky
between the eaves of two houses I could see only a single bright star, and a
rhyme one of the nanny mothers had taught us came back to me—“Star light,
star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the
wish I wish tonight.” It wasn’t the first star I’d seen that night, and
besides, stars were burning balls of gas that couldn’t grant wishes. Still I
said the rhyme in my mind and added, “Please, star. Please help me remember
what
Rafe
said.”

The door to
Rafe’s
house swung
open at my touch; I crept inside and stood very still, ready to run, holding
the door just barely ajar. I had to be as careful as possible, though I didn’t
think anyone else had been assigned to this house yet, and it didn’t feel like
anyone else was breathing in the darkness. The room felt hollow.

When I was as certain as I could be that I was alone, I
pulled the door quietly shut and, after a moment’s thought, swung the bar down
to lock it. If someone tried the door and found it barred they’d instantly know
that someone was inside, but if I didn’t bar it, anyone could walk right in.

I’d never been in any of the houses before, and I wasn’t
sure what to expect. In the dark, I felt my way around, avoiding the shadowy
shapes of furniture, the deeper darkness of the walls.

Exploring didn’t take long. The tiny house consisted of only
two rooms, the main one where I’d come in, and a small bathroom.

Some of the window shades were open. I pulled them down, and
found a towel to cover the gap where one shade wasn’t quite long enough to
completely block the window. I was afraid to turn on the overhead lights, and I
had no flashlight, of course—only wardens had those—but I had
managed to pocket a candle from the emergency supply in the dormitory
storeroom, and now I lit it, carefully shielding the flame with my hand,
keeping even its small light away from the windows.

The main room contained a couch, a double bed with a gray
blanket, and a small table with two chairs. A stack of books and papers sat on
the table, and I went straight over. If
Rafe
had left
a message, that seemed like a possible hiding place—tucked in a book,
buried in lesson plans.

The top book was a history of
Optica
.
It was an important book, because our history had passed out of living memory
some fifty years before, after some sort of electrical storm had caused
widespread illness and amnesia. I wasn’t surprised to see the book here.
Rafe
had been particularly interested in our missing past
and had spent a lot of time talking to the old people, asking questions, trying
to help them remember what had happened. He’d even spent time in prison for
that. The wardens said he was unsettling people.

The books beneath the history were less interesting, though
still important—we didn’t have many books, and the ones we had were
passed around among the handful of instructors. There was a book of
mathematical proofs and explanations, and a book about logic and logical
fallacies. Neither had any notes stuck between the pages.

Next I fanned through the stacks of papers, releasing the
familiar smell of the schoolroom, of chalk and paper and sweaty children. All
the papers were written in
Rafe’s
own hand, in the
decisive and efficient half-cursive, half-print that I’d seen a million times
on the blackboard. At first I thought all the papers were lesson plans; then I
realized that a few of them, without warning, turned personal.

“What is it that makes me want privacy?” he’d written on the
bottom of a grammar lesson. “How can I even imagine it? My students imagine
that we adults have privacy, but wardens knock at my door at all hours. They
come in, they run their hands under the sheets, they check the bottoms of the
chairs, and then they vanish again—until the next day, or the next hour.
And even when they aren’t here, they know things they couldn’t know unless they
were here, which means they could be watching even now, as I write this. They
snatch my thoughts out of the very air. Do they watch everyone as closely as
they watch me? They are everywhere and nowhere.”

Hastily I let the pages fall, hiding those words. Watching
now
? I hoped not.
Meritt
had never said anything about cameras in the adult houses.

But maybe
Meritt
didn’t know
everything.

And yet
Meritt
probably
did
know everything about surveillance;
he maintained it all.

But I hadn’t warned him that I was coming here. If he’d
known, maybe he would have warned me that there were cameras.

After sitting there frozen in panic for who knows how long,
I had a marginally helpful thought: There was no point in worrying now. If I’d
been seen, I’d been seen.

Again I looked down at the pages in my hands. I would take
Rafe’s
words away with me—not to read, but to
destroy. They were private, weren’t they? One of the only privacies
Rafe
had ever had. Even if wardens had already been here,
even if they’d already read these pages, destroying them would be my gift to
Rafe
. That’s what I would do.

But now I had to concentrate on why I was here. I stood in
the center of the main room and considered. If
Rafe
had left a message, maybe it wouldn’t be in a book or under the mattress. He
knew wardens searched such places. So he’d hide his message in a way that they
wouldn’t understand. He’d make it so that even if they saw it, they wouldn’t
know what they saw.

The question, of course, was whether I would.

 
Rafe
had been fond of me, enough that I had even dared to
wonder, against all the evidence of our very different appearances, if maybe I
really was his daughter. Progenitors had more information than children
did—they at least knew how old their children were, and sometimes they
knew the gender, if the mother managed to catch a glimpse in the delivery
room—so finally, in a fit of courage, I’d asked him.

He had looked at me for a long time. “
Lonna’s
pregnancies were well before your time,” he’d said finally.

“And you were never assigned to anyone else?”

“No,” he said. “But if it’s any comfort, Red, I wish you
were mine. I’d be glad to claim you.”

Yes,
Rafe
cared about me. I had no
doubt about that. But he’d never told me about what he was doing, about the
spying and the hiding of food and the mysterious stealing of painkillers. So if
there was a hidden message, it probably wasn’t intended for me. I might look
right at it, and not recognize it for what it was.

Pushing away that discouraging thought, I set to work. Not
expecting to find anything, I flipped up the mattress, felt among
Rafe’s
clothes, his towels, his bedding, looked under the
bottoms of the chairs in case
Rafe
had written
something there. I felt like a warden, but I kept looking anyway.

I found absolutely nothing. I saw nothing that seemed odd or
out of place.

Where else could I look?

There were three things on the wall: a calendar, a sketch of
Lonna
, and a map of
Optica
that
Rafe
had used to teach us geography.

The calendar was heavily marked, but nothing on it seemed
significant—notes about when and where the moon rose and set; comments
about the tide; and, of course, his plans for what he intended to teach each
day at school. One day in April was marked, simply,
Lonna
.
It was, I thought, the day she died. It had been some sort of electrical
accident at work. She’d still been training
Meritt
,
but he hadn’t been with her when it happened. He and
Rafe
had found her afterwards
. She had died alone.

I studied her picture on the wall. It was
amazingly like her. Had
Rafe
drawn this himself, or
had someone else drawn it for him? Sometimes we doodled in the sand in the
schoolyard, but there wasn't enough paper for us to practice real drawing.
Someone had, though. Someone could draw quite well.

The only thing left to examine was the map.
Gently I reached out one hand and touched it, remembering sitting in school,
listening to
Rafe
going on about the difficulties of
mapmaking.

“When you’re in the middle of a forest, all the
trees seem tall,” he’d said. “Distance is skewed by your own physicality, by
whether you’re tired, lonely, energetic. In mapmaking, feelings count for
nothing. It’s all measurements and geometry. It’s all brain, not heart. But
even brains sometimes fall prey to illusion.”

He’d had us try to make our own miniature maps
on our small chalkboards, then sent us out into the city in pairs. One partner
was blindfolded and led about until thoroughly lost, then freed and told to
find the way back to school using the little map.

Staring at
Rafe’s
map,
there in the flickering candlelight, I remembered being blindfolded, feeling
Meritt’s
hand in mine, holding tight to my map with the
other. We had walked a long time, but I hadn’t known whether we’d gone a long
way, or whether he’d led me around in circles.