Veracity (8 page)

I'm almost off the hundredth floor when Mr. Weigland puts a hand between the silver closing doors. "Hold the elevator, please!"

I press the Open button. It wouldn't have been like me not to.

Mr. Weigland's arms are full. He's carrying one overstuffed satchel and two briefcases, their handles wedged into the
palm of one hand. I tuck the travel brochure Evans brought me under an arm and relieve him of one of the briefcases.

"Thanks." He looks down at the brochure jutting out from my side and a fleeting smile crosses his lips. "So. You know yet?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm choosing Henley."

Oh
. I feel myself visibly relax. He's talking about our vacations.

Mr. Weigland leans against the back wall, trying as best he can to affect casual. "A week in a high-altitude complex. Outdoor hot tub. Warm log fire. Pretty nice, huh?"

I shake my head no. "I'm afraid of heights."

"It's nice up there. Quiet."

"Actually, I was thinking of Chesney. It's down south somewhere. A complex on the coast."

Mr. Weigland considers this news with his tongue pressed firmly in his cheek. "I could use a little sun, come to think of it." The elevator stops and two people get in. Mr. Weigland scoots closer to give them room. "What do you do with Sarah while you're gone? She go to our day care? Or to family somewhere?"

Sarah
. I flinch. I never use that name. Ever. "Devon's sister takes her."

Devon was once my husband. A district judge who preferred the company of prostitutes to that of his wife and daughter. His apathy made the divorce easy. I won full custody and a small stipend for expenses. Veracity has no memories of the man who was once her father. She wouldn't recognize him if they were introduced.

Mr. Weigland leans closer to whisper, "Sarah doing okay with the change and all?"

I look at the buttons lighting up as we descend. We're stopping again, at the fifty-second floor. "She's fine," I answer. Get out of the way for the new riders.

Mr. Weigland wants me to use Veracity's new name but
I won't. Over the last twenty-one days, I've managed to go without using it once. Instead, I stick with sweetheart and baby and ignore her pleading eyes. She uses the name herself sometimes, like she's trying to warm me up. Like she's introducing herself. Unlike her mother, she's moved on.

"It's a good name, Harper," Mr. Weigland says.

The trip brochure slides forward, yawns open against my side. Beneath the elevator's overhead lights, the tape is shining, outlining the shape of a locker key. I've thoughtlessly forgotten to tear it off.

I turn toward Mr. Weigland rather than away. "It was my mother's middle name," I offer.

"Sarah?"
He smiles enthusiastically. "Sarah was your
mother's
name?"

"Yes. Middle."

"Well, that's great. Adds some significance, then."

The elevator doors open and we pour out. I hand Mr. Weigland his bag and wave good night, the brochure curled in my hand. My heart beating hard enough to drown out his farewell.

Oh, Mr. Weigland
. I find myself taking a step toward his retreating form. He smiles at me. Squints at the ungainly way my feet are moving toward him of their own accord. It takes him two tries before his shoulders will correct themselves and point forward, toward the exit. Then I am alone with the blue and green swirls of color he's left in his wake. They resemble contrails. Or the long banners flown over the National House when something bad has happened and President wants us to know everything will be all right.

I watch him walk past the windows. There's no one to talk to anymore, now that Candace is gone.

He doesn't look over.

I am dreaming of my daughter. Of soft brown hair springing wildly around her face and huge brown eyes focused on my own. She's beautiful, even happy, but this will change soon enough when she's down on the floor, flailing. I've been having this dream ever since Chalmers, since the night I was put on Red Watch. As much as I want it to be, this isn't a nightmare. It's a glimpse of the future.

Veracity's sitting in someone else's house. Behind her is a floor lamp, the kind with a neck that extends. To her left, a small table with curved, old-fashioned legs. Soft light is flooding in through the window to her right. It turns the room butter yellow, Veracity's favorite color. Through the panes I see the pickled brown bark of trees and, beyond them, green earth and blue sky. There are no buildings to disrupt the view. No white sidewalk or gray road. My daughter has been placed in the countryside, as promised. Somewhere far away from Wernthal.

"Mom," she calls me. Not so long ago, I was Mommy. "I understand now."

I call to her, but she can't hear me. She's staring straight at me but can't see me. It's all for naught, finding her like this, happily living in someone else's house, unable to warn her. In the first few seconds of this dream, when her image pops up on the screen of my night, I'm overwhelmed with joy. Then I remember what happens in the rest of it and would die first if I could.

"I'm sorry I didn't visit you in Chalmers. And I'm sorry I didn't take your call," she says, eyes brimming. "I know you were just trying to keep what happened to Hannah from happening to me."

I'm screaming impotently. Pounding my fists against something hard, though when I look down there's nothing there but my lap and my trousered legs wedged against the arms of a chair.

Veracity sits back to pull a tissue from a pants pocket, and static draws one of her long locks toward the light's metal stand. Inside my transparently walled cell, I begin to flail.

"I understand what you're doing." Her head is resting against the metal pole--hair, scalp, bone, brains. "I don't have to go by Sarah anymore."

I scream,
Don't say it!
Get up out of my seat and hurl it against the transparent wall separating us, but nothing shatters. The chair disappears right through.

Veracity looks at me, head to pole. "You were trying to give me back my name . . . Vera--"

My daughter's voice is stillborn. Only the first two syllables come, then an ending I won't allow. She thought her slate had been turned off and was speaking a Red Listed word.

I can feel my legs flexing, working to wake me up before the rest of it comes. I open my eyes and the present rushes in like a sickness.

I almost cry out but then feel the bed beneath me. I'm alive. In one piece. May or may not be alone. I turn my head and look down at the floor. There is no Blue Coat at the side of my bed. For whatever reason, he's left me alive, and not so long ago. I can see shining traces of him on the dusty floor, though the colors suggest something the opposite of rage. Iridescent
green and robin's egg blue. They must have been left by someone else. Most likely me.

I'm on the bed, not under it. Wedged under covers that smell of mold and feel like burlap. When I try to kick them off, they don't budge. Someone has squared the corners so tight, my toes are bent at right angles to my feet.

I lift up the sheet and look down at myself. I'm in my bra and panties. My nicest pair of trousers, my most comfortable eggshell chemise, the white silk blouse Mr. Weigland issued me as a bonus for the last three months of overtime. All are gone. My slurring mind doesn't comprehend it.
What's happened to me?
Maybe I've had a stroke.

The ceiling is moving above me and every muscle in my body aches. I put my arms over my head and bring together the thumb and forefinger of each hand. They all work. No stroke. No pain between my legs. No rape.

I try to get up and stumble, throw out my arm to rebalance, and it connects with something soft and warm. It's a woman's hand come forward from the shadows, small but thickly muscled.

"Congratulations, Adams. You're officially offline."

Offline
. It's a recently Red Listed word meaning no longer connected to the Fatherboard.

"I laid your clothes out to dry on the porch. You sweat them through. Now lie down." I'm thrust back onto the bed and the hand withdraws.

The woman's only given me three short sentences and a silhouette as she moves past the window, but it's enough. She's in her midthirties. Either a Confederation prostitute or someone who bounces from one Food Service position to another. The other thing I know about this woman is that she's a lifetime smoker. We get this breed in Monitoring on a daily basis. They're people who wind up committing suicide
or being executed. People who can't find the middle ground required by the government.

Her face appears over my own. "No, you didn't have a stroke and, no, you're not dead. Yet." She manages to sound annoyed and bored at the same time. I wish I could see her features but the moon is over her shoulder. All I can see is coarse yellow hair.

"Who are you?" My postbreak voice sounds cracked and torn. Just exactly how it feels. It will be a couple of days before it's back to normal.

A small orb of orange light travels up to the woman's mouth. She inhales deeply and spits the smoke down at my face. "Ezra."

Ezra.
The one the Blue Coat named Skinner was going to call.

I cough and start to fall sideways off the bed. Ezra catches me. "Jesus." She rolls me back into my original position and battens me down with the blunt ends of her fingers. "I said keep your ass in bed! Are you deaf or just stupid?"

She lets out a sigh and returns to a chair that's been pulled up next to me. I can finally see her face. Makeup has been applied liberally. A mask of black and brown shadow highlights the white orbs of her eyes, drawing attention to their green centers. Her lips are painted a metallic yellow and her medium-length blonde hair is twisted into multiple braids that have been banded away from her white face by a wide ribbon. She's pretty. Very. And she's small. Small body, small waist, small hands. I'm surprised about the small breasts. Most prostitutes opt to augment, whether or not they need to.

The recommended appearance for a prostitute is white base applied to the whole face, red lipstick, and razor-thin brows drawn higher than the natural line and always in black. Ezra's makeup is garish and feral. Her perfume is something like lavender, a floral. Most prostitutes smell like musk. Instead of wearing the signifying red sash over one
shoulder, this woman has it tied around her neck, a box of menthols hanging from its end.

"You can't smoke yet." She sees me looking.

"I don't want to."

There are a dozen cigarette butts jackknifed into the surface of a side table. Ezra adds another while looking me up and down. "So, you're the bigwig." She frowns.

"Harper Adams." It comes out sounding like a croak.

She rolls her eyes at the introduction. "And here I might have been in the wrong house."

"There were two men here before." My eyes wander up to the ceiling and over to the closet.
Where's my picture?
One of them must have taken it. "There were Blue Coats . . ."

"Don't worry about them."

"I was almost raped."

"You call that rape?"

"By the man who murdered my best friend!"

"Get over yourself, Adams. You got saved is what you got."

"Her name was Candace!"

Ezra steps forward, allowing me a look at the ease of her features and how little she cares. "I have about two minutes to waste here and that's about a two-
hour
conversation. I said you don't need to worry about them and that's as much as you'll be getting out of me. Got it?"

I push myself up, just to my elbows. Want to move on with my mission and away from her. "I'm meeting my trainer."

Ezra pushes me back down, this time with enough force to hurt. "Oh, really? Right now you're not doing anything but keeping your ass in that bed." She's bitter. Doesn't like me.

"What are you doing here?"

"If I could be somewhere else, believe me, I would be."

I'm too tired for this repartee.

"Should move." I'm parched. The words get stuck on my tongue.

Ezra gets up and walks to the door. "There are some
vitamin packets over there." She motions toward a small box on the floor. "Take one when you wake up tomorrow and then another one before you go back to sleep. There's food in the room above the kitchen."

My mind is taking its time to formulate thoughts. When they come out, it's all at once: "My trainer? When . . . where do I . . ."

"You do nothing! You wait, is what you do!" Ezra shakes her head, but she's smiling like the cat that just caught the canary. "Seems you're not all that bright, Adams. Can't seem to catch up to things. There are going to be some pretty disappointed people where you're headed." She taps short, lacquer-free fingers against her mouth and adds in a whisper, "Jesus Christ, he better not have made a mistake with you."

I can see Ezra's slate, shining on her neck just above her prostitute's sash, and feel for my own. It doesn't feel any different than before. Won't look any different either.

"When did you break?" I ask.

"A long time ago. Now listen up, bigwig, were you lucid when I explained your instructions? Or do I need to repeat them?"

Her escalating voice is making the air vibrate. I shut my eyes and focus on not throwing up. "Where's my car?"

"Towed."