The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (2 page)

I couldn’t see the car because
it was on the other side of the wall, but I could track its progress by those
lights. Surely it would go toward the wasteland, toward the disturbance. Surely
it would go toward
Meritt
and
Rafe
,
not me.

No. The headlights turned in my
direction, slowly, deliberately, like the eyes of an animal stalking its prey.

I was already running fast but
now I ran faster. I was a good runner but fear was making my heart race, was
throwing off my breathing, and the sharp pang of a stitch bit at my ribs. A
half-fallen bicycle reared up in my path, then a stack of loose cinderblocks. I
veered away from the wall to avoid them, then back into its dark protective shadow.
The patrol car was louder, closer. I had to make it past the corner and back
into my designated area before it reached me.

Laughter rang out ahead, then a
curse. I’d forgotten—three old men sat in front of a dark house drinking.
Meritt
and I had seen them when we came past, had
swung out into the blue of the streetlights to pass them on the other side of
the wall. I couldn’t do that now, not with the patrol car out there.

Maybe the men were too drunk to
notice a girl darting past.

No such luck.

“Look at that,” one called.
“Hey, what’re you doing out so late?”

“Come keep us company,” another
yelled.

“Warden!” shouted the third.

They kept calling out, mocking,
entertained. I kept running, not even glancing toward them.

I heard the bottle spinning
through the air a moment before it smashed and sent broken glass skittering
across my path. Jerking sideways I leapt over it, and I didn’t get cut but my
cap came loose, sending a cascade of hair spilling past my shoulders. That was
bad. If those men caught sight of my hair, they’d know exactly who I was.
They’d tell the wardens. I could make no excuse.

The thought terrified me but all
I could do was go on and hope the dark was dark enough.

I was getting close. One more
block of houses and I’d reach the corner by the laundry building—the
southern boundary of my area. If I got caught in my own area, and alone, I’d be
in trouble but not nearly as much. I only had to pass one more break in the
wall where the sidewalk was exposed to the street. I was going to make it.

But just as I stretched to leap
past the opening, past the point of exposure and into the relative safety of my
own area, the yellow glare of headlights poured across the gap—a second
patrol car coming from the other direction.

Skidding to a halt I flung
myself down and against the rough cinderblock wall, sending a burning pain
across my knee, tearing the leg of my pants. I grabbed at my hair, twisted it
up and shoved it under my black cap.

A car door opened.
 
I wanted to hold my breath, but I was
too winded. All I could do was hold very still and try to gulp for air quietly.

Footsteps moved toward the gap
in the wall, then stopped. I’d been annoyed by the rain earlier, but now I was
glad for the clouds, the hidden moon. Though the street was blue with artificial
light, my side of the wall—the sidewalk side—was cloaked in shadow.
As long as no one came out of the house above me, spilling light from an open
doorway, I was close to invisible.

The footsteps started again,
moved closer. I crouched there stock-still, muscles tensed, feeling a trickle
of blood where I’d scraped my knee. And now, for a moment, I did hold my
breath. The air lay still and the silence was so complete that I imagined a
drop of blood rolling off my knee, striking the payment with an echoing splash,
giving me away. I stared at the slanted rectangle of blue light that the gap
let slip across the sidewalk, expecting any moment to see a shadow there, and
then a warden.

Instead the steps resumed,
receded. The car door slammed. The headlights shifted on the street and the
patrol car growled away.

I didn’t move. I could feel that
I wasn’t alone.

The white spotlight swept past,
at this angle catching only the other side of the wall. For a long moment the
night stretched out, sighed. A handful of leaves whispered around the corner,
tumbled toward me.

I couldn’t hold my breath any
longer, so I let it out as quietly as I could and hoped it was quiet enough.

On the other side of the wall,
someone moved, whispered. There was more than one of them, unless I’d heard
only the rising wind, the leaves.

Another whisper. Not two feet
away from me, on the other side of the wall.

My body screamed for me to leap
up, run. My brain said no, staying put was still my best hope for escape. Don’t
move. Be part of the shadows, part of the night.

Then the clouds parted and the
moon emerged, full and round, shining down clear and calm and bright, outdoing
the electric blue lights, changing the shadows. The moonlight reached down and
picked out the one part of me that wasn’t pressed tightly enough against the
wall—my left foot, heel braced on the ground, toes pointed up in the air.
The moonlight struck it and cast a perfect shadow of its form, a foot with heel
and toes, clear and unmistakable against the pavement in front of the gap.

Someone on the other side of the
wall drew a sharp breath.

I scrambled to get my feet
beneath me, to rush back the way I’d come. I took a step backward, turned, took
one long leaping stride—and barreled straight into someone.

Meritt
.

He put a hand over my
mouth—not that I would have cried out—but I knew it was too late
for silence, too late to hide. Someone was outside the wall, and any moment now
he would step into view and pin us with his light. And unlike me,
Meritt
had been caught before.

All this flashed through my mind
instantly, definitively. I wrenched myself out of his arms and pointed at him,
then pointed back the way we’d come.

There was just time to register
the quick series of expressions flitting across
Meritt’s
face—disbelief, objection, dismay—to see him reaching to grab me
and missing as I stepped beyond his grasp, pulled off my cap, shook out my
hair, and plunged into the light.

One of the wardens reached for
his stunner and the other took a step back. I paused just long enough to
register their faces—both men, that was good, it was harder to know how
to maneuver if you were dealing with mixed pairs—and then I started
talking.

“There you are!” I said. “I’ve been looking for you
forever.”

Go on the offensive, my friend
Cynda
always said, and she had more experience with wardens than any of us.

The wardens stared at me, their faces impassive. One was
young. His hair was short-cropped and he had an ugly puckered scar running
through his upper lip. He stood in a way designed to show off his muscles, with
his chest out, his hands fisted on his hips. The other warden was bigger,
softer, older—about
Rafe’s
age, maybe—and
was completely bald but had a short blond beard. I recognized him and could
almost remember his name. We thought he might be Judd’s father.

He asked the obvious question. “Why were you looking for
us?”

“I’m lost,” I said, making it up as I went. “I don’t know
how to get back to my dorm.”

For a long moment neither warden said a word; they just
stood there staring at me. Then the one with the scarred lip reached out and
took me firmly by one arm.

“Let’s go,” he said, and from his tone I knew he wasn’t
taking me home.

As he began to lead me away, the other warden, the older
one, turned on his heel and walked down the shadowed sidewalk, shining his
light here and there. I craned my neck to watch him, stumbling as the younger
warden pulled me along, my heart in my throat.

But
Meritt
was safe. The older
warden came back alone. He caught up to us and positioned himself on my other
side, and together the two men marched me through the city. They had work boots
on, so they didn’t pay much attention to where we stepped. They pulled me
straight through puddles and twice I stepped on sharp rocks, stumbled, was
jerked upright.

The younger one was rougher than the older one, and when he
figured out that my feet were callused enough not to mind the puddles and
rocks—except the really sharp ones—his fingers dug into my arm. It
was a stupid petty punishment, but I had bruises to show for it later, angry
elongated ovals that changed from blue to purple to yellow over the course of
the next few weeks, marking the ordinary passing of time as the world fell to
pieces all around me.

We passed the laundry house, where soap-scented steam rose
gently from the vent pipes; skirted the food preservation buildings and the
infirmary, where one light burned; and made our way around the cafeteria, dark
now and silent. Then we came to the center of the city, to the circle with its
concentric rows of steps, to the watchtower and the door at its base. To the
prison.

Even though I’d known where we were headed, the sight of the
windowless door made my knees suddenly weak.

The older warden swung open the heavy outer door. It was
metal and it opened with a raw echoing clang. Inside, the long hallway smelled
of antiseptic and fear, and the black-and-white tiled floor felt cold and
smooth and strangely slick.

I had never been inside the prison before. There were rows
of doors on each side of the hall, gray steel doors with heavy bolts. The
scarred warden started to pull me down the hall toward those doors, but the
older warden stopped suddenly—so that I was yanked between the two of
them—and dragged me into a nearer room. That room, unlike the others, had
a small mesh-covered window in its door.

“Sit,” he said, pointing at a metal folding chair. Then he
went back out into the hall, jerking his head to tell the other warden to
follow him. Hisses and mutters followed. I couldn’t hear what they were saying,
but it sounded like a disagreement.

Their delay gave me a chance to scan my surroundings. The
room looked clean but smelled musty, like old damp paint, and was mostly
bare—a gray metal table sat straight in front of me, and two other metal
chairs were folded and leaning against the wall. One bare light bulb hung from
the ceiling, right above the table.

After a moment both men came into the room. The older warden
grabbed a chair, opened it with a clang, and sat down a few feet away, off to
the side. I had to turn my head to see him. The scarred warden took the other
chair and sat down behind the gray metal table before pulling a small book with
a metal cover out of his shirt pocket.

The dangling light bulb above him was glaring, but I didn’t
squint or look away. I didn’t want to look shifty or too frightened—I
didn’t want them to realize I was a systematic rule-breaker who had only now
been caught. I wanted them to see a first-time offender, a nobody, a girl who
had stupidly gotten lost and stayed out after curfew.

“Name,” the warden said, but he was already
writing—everybody knew my name—so I thought he was talking more to
himself than to me. My feet were wet, the bottoms of my pants drenched, and as
I watched the warden write, my teeth began to chatter. It wasn’t because I was
terrified—though I was—and it irritated me. This was going to be
tricky enough without my body throwing out random unintended signals.

“Name,” the warden said again, more sharply. He didn’t look
up.

I guess the formalities had to be observed.

“Red,” I said. Some of the others had been given two names,
but I only had one, and it was a darn unimaginative one at that.

The warden dropped his pen on the table and leaned back in
his chair, making his black shirt pull taut over his chest. Ridiculous, I told
myself. He was showing off, trying to frighten and impress me.

“I’ve seen you before,” he said, and his tone was flat and
expressionless.

Of course he’d seen me. You’d have to be blind not to see
me. I was the freak, the only person with blazing red hair in the whole city,
on the whole island—in the whole world, for all I knew.

The scarred warden kept staring. Finally it dawned on me
that he expected an answer.

“Oh?” I said, lamely. “Where have you seen me?”

“Anywhere you’ve been. Everywhere you’ve been.”

My skin felt suddenly clammy.

He kept staring at me, tipping back in his chair. It was
obviously a pose, a technique pointing out that he could relax while I was
sitting bolt upright, struggling to keep from trembling. He’d probably
practiced all this in front of a mirror, that flat gaze, the relaxed muscles.
Ridiculous, I told myself again. He’s ridiculous.

The older warden cleared his throat.

The younger one didn’t look at him. “How old are you?” he
said to me.

“Sixteen years, eleven months.”

Then he did look over at the older man. “She’s the one who
was born during the ashes.”

The older one nodded a confirmation. It was my claim to
fame—well, that and my hair. I was the only one born during a four-year
stretch when a foul-smelling ash drifted across the island, darkening the sun,
blighting crops, wreaking havoc with human and animal fertility. Most women
couldn’t get pregnant during those years, and the ones who did miscarried. All
but my mother. I’d never known her and I didn’t know if she’d done something in
particular that let me survive, or if she’d just been lucky.

The scarred warden was eying me speculatively. “Almost
seventeen years old,” he said. “I thought she was younger than that.”

Everyone thought I was younger than that. It added insult to
injury—all my life there had been no other children my age, and I looked
even younger than I was. It had made for a lonely childhood. The young kids
bored me and were frightened by me. The older kids let me tag along, at least
sometimes, but they had never been my friends. Only
Meritt
was my friend; only
Meritt
had been different. He
liked me and because he did, some of his friends gradually became mine as well.
I owed him everything.

I would not say a word that could even possibly give him
away.

The scarred warden was still examining me, his gaze running
up and down my body.

“Up close she looks her age,” he said, in a voice that made
me want to scrub with soap and water. “But now I get it. That hair—she
was born during the time of the ashes, so she’s damaged. She’s a runt and she
has mutant hair. Which is why we watch her.”

That last part should have sounded like a conclusion, but he
made it sound almost a question. And what did he mean? The wardens watched
everyone, not just me. The cameras were everywhere. That was the way of
Optica
.

The older warden shrugged. “We watch her because we’re
supposed to.”

The scarred warden studied me for another long moment, then
set his chair legs down hard on the floor and looked down at his notebook.
“Employment?” he said, with the tone of someone getting down to business.

 
“Field A
Supervisor.”

The warden smirked without looking up. Supervisors got all
the blame and none of the credit, which was why the older, more experienced
workers usually found a way to avoid the position.

 
“Dormitory?”

 
“Girls’
Dormitory H-2.”

 
The scarred
warden wrote it down. Then he looked up. The light above his head cast long
shadows down his face. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t like the way he was
looking at me. Why was he the one asking all the questions? Was he in charge?

As his gaze lingered I felt my face begin to flush. I had to
fight to keep from squirming. I had to come across as a silly stupid girl who
had gotten lost—I had to seem like someone who was mostly innocent and
therefore only a bit frightened, not guilty and therefore utterly terrified.

The warden tapped the end of his pen against the table a few
times. “Why were you out after curfew?”

I blinked innocently at him; I was pretty good at blinking
innocently. “Because I got lost,” I said.

He didn’t write that down. He reached in his pocket for a
battered pack of cigarettes, lit one, and then settled back and stared at me
again. His eyes were a pale blue, his expression flat, but that wasn’t what
made my throat go suddenly dry. There weren’t many cigarettes left on the
island and I happened to know, thanks once again to
Cynda
,
that the wardens saved them for important occasions. To mark a particularly
lucrative deal with some hapless person vulnerable to blackmail or other coercion.
To celebrate some especially pleasurable arrest.

But I was nobody. I was just some girl who got lost. There
was no reason for him to celebrate arresting me.

The warden smoked, staring at me with his flat eyes. Clearly
he was going to sit there until I said more, but I wasn’t going to say more,
not until he made me. People talked too much,
Cynda
said. They got tangled up and gave themselves away. It was better to be as
brief as possible—that way you had fewer lies to remember.

It was hard, though, to sit quietly with the wardens staring
at me. The cigarette smoke tickled in my throat, made me need to cough. I
managed to swallow instead. To keep myself from talking I began to count
silently to myself. When I was somewhere past five hundred and thirty, the
warden leaned forward and tapped out his cigarette on the tabletop, making a
pile of gray ash. He carefully tucked the half-smoked cigarette into his shirt
pocket and leaned back in his chair again.

“Why were you out after curfew?” he said again, exactly as
he’d said it before.

This time I gave a small embarrassed shrug. “I couldn’t
sleep, and so I went outside to get some fresh air, and then I got lost.”

He made a circling gesture with one finger.
Keep talking.

“I couldn’t sleep because of the thunderstorm,” I said.

The warden scowled, but I was mindful of
Cynda’s
warning—keep lies simple—and anyway I couldn’t think of anything
else credible to add. Should I say I’d gotten lost while trying to pet one of
the stray cats that roamed the city? No, that was too childish sounding. It
might work for the older warden, but not the scarred one. He wasn’t looking at
me as if he thought of me as a child.

Then it hit me. “The thunderstorm kept me awake, and then I
couldn’t stop thinking about the city meeting tomorrow.”

That got a reaction. The scarred warden didn’t say anything,
but he glanced at the older warden. Did they know what the city meeting was
about? None of the rest of us knew. We just knew it was bound to be bad.

The scarred warden wrote something on his paper. Then he
looked up at me again. “Go on.”

“I know I shouldn’t have done it,” I said, glancing
apologetically at the older warden. “But I was scared. I
am
scared. The city meeting scares me.”

 
“Look at me,”
the scarred warden said. “Not him.”

I did, squinting against the light. “I was sitting on the
dorm steps and I kept thinking about going to the circle tomorrow for the city
meeting and about how I didn’t want to go. I wanted to be somewhere else. So I
sort of started walking in the other direction.”