by J B Cantwell
Her gaze followed mine.
“They’re fine. Everyone is fed. Let them be.”
“Alright, then. Lead the way.”
Jay turned and made his way silently down the hallway to the stairwell. He led us to the highest floor, the sixth. Then, he pulled out a keyring and unlocked a door. When he opened it, the dust of decades played in the sunlight that was peeking through the sides of a blackout curtain.
“I keep it covered,” he explained. “It’s worked so far.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “If you’re a doctor, how did you end up here? Shouldn’t you be living the high life in the city somewhere?”
He laughed.
“No, that life wasn’t meant for me.”
“So, what then?” Melanie asked. “How did you get here?”
He shrugged.
“I got hooked on the meds. Let’s just say it’s somewhat frowned upon, and theft is theft. After that, it was at the Burn for three years. I could’ve gone on, tried to get back to Green designation, but I was just done. As it was, I barely made it out of that place alive.”
“But how are you here?” I asked. “Don’t the guards keep track of you? Isn’t all this illegal?”
He lifted up a lock of his long, gray hair and showed me, just visible beneath it, the long-healed scar of a chip inexpertly removed.
Immediately, I softened. This man wasn’t the bad guy. He was just like us. The group had been right to trust him.
“When?” I asked.
“Thirty years ago now.”
“Thirty years? You’ve been living in this place for thirty years?”
“Oh, no. I tried to make it as an Orange for a while. Even got a job in a restaurant for a time. Back in the kitchens, of course, where no one could see my designation. It wasn’t enough, though. And honestly, it wasn’t worth it, constantly staring down strangers, everyone afraid of me. Finally, one day, I ended it.”
“You did it yourself?”
He smiled. “I didn’t have any friends to do it for me. Though, mind you, I’ve seen Melanie’s handiwork, and I’m not sure I would’ve been any better off with someone to do the job for me.”
His eyes twinkled in her direction. She scowled, but only for a moment.
“So how did you wind up here?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“I was on the run. I took out my chip and chucked it out onto a busy street. I suppose it transmitted for a time, but it was late, and I got out of there fast.”
“So you found this place?”
“Oh, no. Back then, there were still tenants here. The water hadn’t risen so much. It’s just in the past two decades that it started to rise far enough to cover the lower part of this building. I went farther out at first, made a place for myself not too far from here. Then, when the water got too deep, and people started abandoning this building, I moved in. Nobody seemed to mind. Actually, most of them were gone by that point.”
“What about the owner? Didn’t they know you were here?”
“Don’t know. Nobody ever came back. I found some leftover things in the abandoned flats. Old clothing. Some food. Electricity cut out about a month later, so I mainly light with candles if I need to. I try to stay in the dark, though, especially at night.”
“Do they patrol back here?” I asked. “The Guard?”
“Not anymore. You’ve seen it. This place is right on the edge of the river, and it totally floods whenever there’s a storm. Nobody wants to be trudging through the water just to see if there’s any squatters. It’s not worth it to them.”
I found this interesting. The guards in the city, stationed all the way around the Manhattan Wall, were hyper alert at all times, keeping an eye on any possible threats.
But not back here. We were as good as dead back here.
“Where do you get your food?” I asked.
“The grocery stations. Have you seen the lines late at night? Around the back?”
“Yes,” Melanie said. “We hid back there for a day or so. But we never joined the line.”
“That was probably wise of you. It’s not too uncommon for people here and there to walk around without their chips hooked into the system. Folks like us have gotten good at hiding. Still, it’s a risk for the grocers. Those people who come at the beginning of the night just get scraps. But late … if you have credits … then he’s willing to deal. He charges a fair price, just a bit higher than what you might get at the front of the store, in exchange for the risk he’s taking by selling to us.”
This reminded me of Jonathan. I would need to pick Melanie’s brain on our way back down to the studio. For some reason, thinking of Jonathan tied my stomach into knots.
“So, why are you all here? I’ve never seen a group so large all sticking together. You told me you escaped from the Burn. That’s no easy thing.”
“Yeah, well, not too many of us got out in the end.”
I fell silent.
“There were lots of casualties,” Melanie said, taking over. “We barely made it. We stole a truck and picked up as many as we could cram into it.”
“But there are only a few of you now. What happened?”
“Lost them,” I said. “Some went north toward Canada. Some disappeared, captured, we assume.”
His eyes widened. “Did they know where to meet you? They could be on their way here.”
“No, no,” I said, trying to reassure him. “I only told them what they needed to know to get to the next meeting spot. I was the only one who knew where we were going.”
“Well, now that you’re all here, we’re all in danger. Better set up a fake story for them to tell if they’re ever caught. I know of a building a few streets over that’s empty. You could set it up, make it look like there are folks living there. Something like that could be your story.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Melanie said.
“I know.”
But I was wary of Jay. He’d gone from hostile to helpful awfully quickly. I wondered what was in it for him.
It was paranoid, I knew. He’d been so nice to the others.
“I think we should get back down there,” I said, moving toward the door.
“Wait,” he said. “Just one more thing.” He went to a makeshift cupboard on the other side of the room and pulled out a sleeve of nutrition squares, the kind with the sugary frosting on top. “A peace offering,” he said. “Take them.” He held them out for me.
I stared at him, unsure. They weren’t poisoned; they were still in the original packaging.
“Why are you being so nice to us all of a sudden?” I asked, not ready to accept the sleeve. “You were ready to knock me out yesterday. What’s changed?”
His eyes fell to the ground, and an expression of sadness broke through his gray, bearded face.
“It was the girl,” he finally said. “It’s been so long since I could help someone.” Tears welled up in his sagging eyes. “I’m just sorry I couldn’t do more. If I’d had the medications, I could’ve saved her. But all we could really do was keep her warm and comfortable. It wasn’t enough. Infection had set in long before she got to me.”
Jay. Our new medic.
I asked the question that had been nagging at me since we’d followed him up here.
“How do we know you’re not going to rat us out?”
He looked up, smiling a little. “It’s just like you said before. I would lose my home, too, if I did that. And there’s nothing to be gained by walking up to a guard with no chip in my head to report on you. I’d be arrested, too.”
There. The truth.
And I believed him.
Five minutes later, we were back in the fourth floor hallway.
“Wait,” I said as Melanie reached for the door handle.
“What?”
“Something about this whole thing is fishy.”
She signed heavily, clearly frustrated.
“You’re just going to have to
—”
“No. Not about Jay,” I said. “About Jonathan.”
“Oh, him. Well, he certainly was helpful with those unmarked credit cards.”
“It bothers me, not knowing where he got them.”
She shrugged and shook her head.
“I don’t know. So, he was one of the Volunteers?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I wonder how he survived. You know, the flood in Manhattan.”
I remembered it, the water gushing from the huge breach in the wall. Our bus had barely made it out in time while Manhattan filled like a great bathtub. It occurred to me that there must have been many who’d survived. And I wondered why the event had never been broadcasted into our lenses. To the rest of the world, it was as if nothing had ever happened.
This wasn’t the first time I’d wondered about how the Volunteers procured their food. They’d been living outside the law. It wasn’t like they could just walk out any old time and head to a grocery station.
But was that really true? Some of them had designations. I’d see them when I had been in the Stilts.
Still, survival wasn’t cheap. Where had they gotten the money to pay for food for all those mouths? At least thirty men, women, and children in the single building I’d been taken to.
“I don’t know,” Melanie said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “We never heard about it at the Burn. You were the first one who ever told me about what happened. So, not everybody died then?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Nobody of any importance lives on the first floor.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “That’s not true. There are all those people who work all day long. Not all of them come from Brooklyn.”
“Yeah, I guess. But it must cost a ton to live in the city, even if it’s on one of the lower floors.”
“Of course it does,” Jay said. “Everything in the city is out of reach for the rest of us. Isn’t that how it’s always been?”
Yes. That was how it had always been. At least in my lifetime.
I’d seen the woods, the plains, Paul’s house in Canada. But it wasn’t those places I wanted to save. It was the people I cared about. True, it was a little frightening to be without my lens these past several days, to not be able to tell who was who at the blink of an eye. But it had been freeing, too, to know that I was that much harder to track. I didn’t know if anyone was following me now, but if they were, they were surely having a much harder time of it than usual.
“It’s true,” I said. “It’s always been out of reach. All of it.”
I wondered what my life might’ve been like if my father had never died in battle. Would my mom have stayed sober? Could I have run to him for help when I needed it? Even now?
It was the Service he’d chosen, not to get rid of us, but to try to save us from a life of poverty.
It was all most of us had ever wanted. To be safe and secure, warm and fed. The things we had never been. It was our deepest desire. But more than anything, it was our right.
“I’ll go to the station tonight and wait for him,” I said. “He’ll have some answers.”
He’d better.
Chapter Six
It was late the following night when I set out to look for Jonathan. Everyone had been lounging all day, and with good reason. They needed all the rest they could get.
I wasn’t tired.
I had been waiting all day for night to fall again so I could move out.
In that time, Mila’s body had been moved to the lowest floor that wasn’t flooded. It was the best we could do. There was nowhere to bury her, no way to start a funeral pyre, and we could hardly walk through the streets with her dead body draped over our shoulders.
It was disgusting that we had to leave her like that, with nothing but a thin sheet draped across her. We had chosen the far end of the building to place her body, the farthest room away from us that we could find.
Death was something I’d always taken for granted; in the Service there were no funerals, no dead bodies. Not back at the base camps. People were simply left for dead out on the battlefields, their bodies littering the ground.
In the Stilts it couldn’t have been much better. The buildings had been all but razed to their foundations by the bombers the day of the breach in the wall. The bodies of the Volunteers must have floated out to sea. I wondered, with a grim satisfaction, if any of those dead bodies had come through the crack in the wall and into Manhattan. How terrifying that would’ve been to the elite who called that place home, to see death floating along on their white city streets.
I was less nervous about walking around without a designation now. If Jay did it all the time, and if the people in line behind the grocery stations did it, then I figured so could I. That didn’t mean that I was careless, though. Far from it. But the fear of being captured wasn’t quite as intense now.
I rounded the corner to the alley behind the grocery station to wait for Jonathan, wedging myself into the corner where I’d met Melanie the night before. But it wasn’t Jonathan who appeared.
“Kiyah?” I said, both surprised and delighted as her form emerged through the darkness. “You made it out!”
Seeing Kiyah was a gift to my soul. Maybe there were others, too. I opened my arms to hug her, but she pushed back on me.
“Jonathan has been captured. This place has been compromised. We have to get out, now.”
“What? But it’s the middle of the night, and he told Melanie—”
She didn’t wait for me to answer, just turned and ran back down the alleyway, away from the grocery station.
I followed reluctantly at first, but soon her speed forced me into all-out run behind her. She was a “runner” after all, someone who could make it through the city so quickly, who knew every hiding spot, every shortcut, that she was almost uncatchable.
She rounded corner after corner as if she’d been living in Brooklyn her whole life. Who knew? Maybe she had. Or maybe she’d taken an opportunity to study the place on one of her missions.
She slowed down after five minutes of running flat-out, and I nearly collapsed beside her. I had once received a single round of phasing that had left my body whole and well, curing old injuries and giving me strength and speed not unlike that of the Service’s Prime soldiers. Still, I bent over beside her, trying hard to catch my breath.
She leaned over and pounded on a metal door with her fist three times. Someone on the other side opened the door, gun out and trained on us.
“Geez,” I said, backing away. “You didn’t tell me anything about this. I don’t want to have any part in—”
“Trust me,” she said. “You do.”
She pushed past the man with the gun, but I paused, unsure.
“Are you coming?” she asked from somewhere in the darkness.
I poked my head through the door. The man had backed up to let us in, but was careful to shut the door tight once we were both inside.
“I guess I am,” I said. “Where are we going?”
“We’re here. Just a few stairs.”
I was relieved when it was only three flights she took me up. Down a long, deserted hotel hallway and into a room at the end; a “suite” as it said on the door.
She stuck a keycard into a reader, then leaned over to give proof of her identity on the retinal scanner. The door clicked open, and she pushed her way inside.
The room was old and out of use, basic in its appointments. But there was a person who was anything but basic waiting for me in the chair by the window.
Chambers.
I didn’t know whether to yelp with victory or start throwing punches.
Chambers?
The last time I’d seen him was during the first and only phasing I had received. He had argued with another doctor over medication for me to dull the pain. In the end, I wasn’t sure he had won, exactly, but I got the pain meds pushed into my IV.
“How can this be?” I asked no one in particular.
“Kiyah, can you leave
us, please?” he asked, his voice kind and full of respect. Not so much like the doctor I had met of my first day joining the Service. That man had been all business, as stoic as marble, unfazed by neither my strengths nor my weaknesses. It had been all numbers, all charts and scribbles. And now he wanted to see me again. After all this time, when I’d been dying to see him, when I’d wanted answers I couldn’t find.
Without a question, or even a nod, Kiyah turned and made her way past me, letting the door click quietly shut on her way out.
I turned around and faced him.
“What is it?” I asked. “What do you want?”
I was flabbergasted, so surprised and caught off guard that I could barely think of what to say at all, much less be polite.
“I’m sure that Kiyah told you about Jonathan’s capture, though it’s possible that you have not heard the whole story. Please, come sit.” He motioned to an empty chair across from him.
I approached, unsure.
“I don’t bite,” he said, but he didn’t wear a smile.
I didn’t sit. Instead I stood behind the chair, unwilling to submit to this simple request.
“Alright then,” he said. “I would imagine that you must have questions for me, but I think it will be best if you let me speak first.”
I waited, nodding, still amazed by his presence across from me. It had taken what felt like a lifetime to have an audience with him again. I was both excited and angry.
“Jonathan … well, Jonathan was not, is not, who he has claimed to be all this time.”
I immediately grew alarmed, and it must’ve shown on my face, because he raised up his hands to quiet me.
“It was not the enemy who captured him. Instead it was, in fact, our side. He’s been under surveillance for some time.”
“Jonathan? But he was the one who first made contact with me. He was my handler. So that was all a game?”
“No, it wasn’t a game. We’d thought, at first, that he was simply a young man from the Stilts. He was eager to prove himself, and he did so. We aren’t sure at which point he turned, but we knew for sure when he handed your friend that stack of ration cards. He told her they were untracked. He was lying.”
