Breeder

by Honni van Rijswijk

  “Dismissed,” one of them says finally, and we walk quickly toward the door, everyone looking daggers at me.

  “What the fuck, Will?” Lewis says, as we walk back into the building.

  I don’t answer.

  “Will?” he says. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” He’s pissed.

  I shrug him off and jog into the building.

  •

  A few mornings after the Responder protest, my heart racing, I go down the street in the Old Town to the Book Shadow’s shop and hold my wrist to the security scanner, frightened about what I will find, but unable to stay away. The scanner beeps red and won’t let me in. I knock on the door and there’s no answer. I walk around the building looking for open windows and everything is shut up and the blinds are all closed. I knock again and the door of a neighboring shop—“Tailor”—opens and a small, older man peers out. I want to say something, to ask about the Book Shadow, but then I turn and leave without saying anything.

  The following week, I walk down the same street and stop: the whole building has been fire-bombed. There are barriers up and down the street and I can’t get within one hundred feet of the door.

  •

  Alex and I meet every Wednesday morning after our Gray Corps work at the revolting diner that’s just outside the Gray Zone security checkpoint. It’s a twenty-four-hour diner, so Gray Corps affiliates and CSOs and runners and all the other night people are here, and it’s generally acknowledged to be neutral ground, unless someone does something particularly stupid. I always get there first and have to wait for Alex. Rob drops me off at the diner around 4:30 a.m., and Alex comes in an hour later. I don’t know what Alex does all night with her Gray Corps affiliate—she still won’t say.

  I’m happy with the steady supply of Crystal 10 and with the bonus units. Every Tuesday night, I meet Rob at the Wall. Every Tuesday night, I spend two hours at the Gate, on the edge of the badlands, trading gold for Breeders. Every Wednesday morning, I mentally review the following facts: I take Breeders from their families, sometimes by force, and give their parents a little bit of gold in return; I carry sometimes-screaming Breeders back across the Gate; I help drug the Breeders; I help put Breeders in the back of a gold SUV and hope they don’t suffocate before they get to the Incubator; once at the Incubator, they’re unloaded by someone else. I don’t know exactly what happens to them, but I have a pretty good idea. I take all those facts and I put them in a black box inside my mind, and I don’t open that box until the following Tuesday evening, when I say goodbye to Ma and head down to the Wall again.

  Alex and I have a coffee before I go home to shower, and then go work at the desal plant, and before Alex goes home to do whatever it is she does during the day—she won’t tell me about that either, except that she has to stay inside and out of sight. Alex and I always sit in a booth at the back. The diner predates the End Times—it’s one of those buildings that for arbitrary reasons remained standing while the others on the block were razed to the ground in the burning and bombing and terror. The seats are covered in faded red vinyl and the tables in light-blue laminate. Alex takes out a tissue from her pocket and slowly runs it along the table. The diner isn’t a nice place or anything. The owners must make a pile of units off us and the Gray Corps, but you can tell they hate serving all of us. Things that get broken stay broken, and several of the seats’ vinyl backs have been torn or ripped; there are cracks along the surface of most of the tables. Ours is an exception, which is one reason we like it. They don’t even bother cleaning the place properly, so there’s a film of grease on the floor, and blotches of mustard and cream on the surface of our table that Alex is painstakingly wiping off.

  Alex’s mother is a serious Mood who’s on buckets of medication and can’t work, so Alex’s income from the Wall is all they’ve got. Alex told me that her mother was kidnapped by some Corp explorers from a Western city a few years before Alex was born. When I say that’s impossible, that the land was burned out a long time ago, that there are no Western cities, Alex raises an eyebrow and says, “Do you honestly believe everything the Corp tells you?” But when I ask her to explain, she won’t. And she won’t tell me about how she ended up in the Incubator, or, more importantly, how she got out. I still don’t get how Alex can go around as a Breeder without getting caught—there are seriously so many people everywhere, even in the Gray Zone, who would rat you out for a few units. The diner is full of Wall Kids like her, and she’s grown up with some of them but the kids her age are guys—sooner or later, all the Breeders are sent to the Incubator, even here in the Gray Zone. Alex must be protected by someone. She seems to have a source for scan patches whenever she wants to leave the Gray Zone—it’s the only way she can move between zones. You inject them into your wrist to fool the scanners into thinking you have access, and then they dissolve within twenty-four hours.

  We like spending time together . . . I think. Well, I like spending time with her, but she also makes me nervous. I get scared I might accidentally touch her. And if I think about her too much, about her being a Breeder—it still makes me feel strange. I handle Breeders all night at the Wall, but that’s a truth for the black box. Although Alex is a Breeder, she’s also like nobody I’ve ever met before. She knows things—she knows much more than I do. She knows things beyond what the Corp tells us.

  Alex has never been to school and she says she’ll never do proper work for units within the Corp, ever. She’ll live her life in the Gray Zone. She’s fascinated by how I go about my days—the desal plant, school, the monthly tallying of units. She’s fascinated by my recounting of the End Times, which she says are all lies. Her eyes sparkle when she says this, and I can’t tell whether she’s joking or not.

  “Go on, recite me some history!” Alex says now, smiling. She roared with laughter when I first told her that our history lessons were taught through The Horrors of the End Times. She thinks it’s hilarious that I’ve seen it six hundred times and can recite the whole two hours verbatim.

  I shrug. “After the End Times, over a billion people starved to death. The survivors decided that kind of violence and poverty and starvation was never going to happen again, and that the only way forward was to make every decision based on creating economic prosperity. The Corporation drew a line around the settlement, and then they built the Wall on that boundary. They put barbed wire outside the wall, and cameras and guards. They sent the machines out to monitor the perimeter . . .”

  “More! I want more history!” Alex shouts, laughing, and I continue.

  “There are over five million people in the Corporation, and it’s big enough to sustain its own economy. Nobody goes in or out. Neither do any goods or trading. We don’t want foreign materials disturbing the balance of our delicate economy. The Corporation decided long ago to remove the tyranny of government to avoid repeating the End Times, which was caused by government interference. The best decision our original settlers made was to allow the market to take care of itself. Our Corporation leaders are a conglomeration of CEOs from the biggest companies. They’re the ones who know how policy is going to influence business, and the quality of our daily lives. Efficiency is of the utmost importance.”

  By now Alex has stopped laughing and is shaking her head at me. I don’t say anything more, even though I know the next part by heart too: The Corporation writes the Laws, which include strict rules about who is allowed to reproduce, and how. The Laws manage every life, and determine who is allowed to Breed, and how. Breeders are a special category . . .” I don’t want to say Breeder in front of Alex.

  I can tell that Alex thinks I’m an idiot. I can see the acid sea from where I work at the plant, but other than that, I have to admit that I have no proof that what the Corp tells us is true. I asked Ma about it, after the Shadow protest at the desal plant, and she asked me who I’d been talking to.

  “Nobody!” I told her. “Who do you think? The Response?”
Ma went white and looked around. She made a sign at me—a knife across her throat. Cut it out. She wasn’t being paranoid. Our house could be bugged by the Corp.

  “What’s it like, living there?” Alex asks. Even though she lives in the Gray Zone, it’s an off-the-grid economy that’s in many ways outside the Corporation.

  I shrug. It’s hard to explain the only thing you’ve ever known. I don’t tell Alex that everyone in Zone F feels almost as sorry for the Wall Kids as for the Westies beyond the Wall. And I can’t tell her the truth of everything I’ve done, and everything I am. So I start by telling Alex some stories about when I was a kid.

  Once, I tell her, my class went on a school excursion to a film set located in Zone C, called Horrors of the End Times World, where parts of the documentary were actually made. The whole set has been preserved, so that our history can be told for generations to come.

  They’ve hired all the nonfamous actors from the documentary, and they reenact key scenes of misery and desperation from the film, showing how people really lived and died during the End Times. On one set, there’s a housewife with boils all over her face, crying that she has no food to give her baby, who has the plague anyway. On another set, a farmer sets fire to his crop because it’s covered in maggots. There’s the scene of the Traitor on the Gibbet, who has a spear shoved through the bottom of his feet and through his body, as an example to others. Best of all, I tell Alex, is the set of the Cannibalism of the Innocents, where an intake of Westies was sacrificed for Corp food after a bad harvest.

  Alex grins at me. “And you totally believe that’s the truth? Like, that it’s history?”

  I sigh, annoyed. “Look. I know my Zone F education is shit. Okay?”

  Alex shakes her head. “Don’t get pissed at me.”

  “I’m not,” I lie. “It’s just . . . How about you tell me about what it was like growing up here, in the Gray Zone?”

  She smiles.

  “Well?”

  “Well . . . a lot of parents try to preserve Westie culture, which is nice.”

  “Like what?”

  “In the winter we always have Bonfire Night.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah. It’s from old Westie history. Once, the Westie common people murdered a corrupt king by burning him alive.”

  I laugh. That sounds really “nice.”

  “So every kid makes a king . . .”

  “You make a king?”

  “Out of some old pants and a shirt and stuff. You fill him up with paper. And you stick a crown on him. And then you put him on your shoulders and take him door-to-door, saying ‘a dollar for the king?’ ”

  “You’re collecting money for—the elderly and the sick?”

  She snorts. “No, for ourselves!”

  “Okay. Very nice. Then what?”

  “Well, then we build a big fire at the reservoir. We put all the kings on top of the fire and burn them. You know, just blow them all up. Then there are fireworks . . .”

  “Sounds . . . interesting.” Alex and her childhood sure are a trip.

  “It’s great! The same night, all the little kids leave their pillowcases outside with a box of matches on top. If our pillowcases aren’t filled up with stuff, the legend is that we’ll light a match and burn the zone down. So in the morning, we find presents, gold pieces, new clothes and shoes.”

  “It’s filled up by, like, a magic fairy, or something?”

  “Nope. By the Gray Corps affiliates. Who are usually our fathers . . . Obviously.”

  “I see.”

  Alex is embarrassed. She gulps her last bit of coffee and then says, “Hey! Do you wanna go on a trip to Zone C with me?”

  I almost spit out my coffee. “Come on!” Alex says. “I have injectables,” she whispers. “They cost me a packet.”

  “There’s no way,” I tell her. “Have you heard about the latest Breeder rapes?”

  She sighs. “No need to tell me. Nothing surprises me about humans. Nothing.”

  I still tell her about the latest murder of a Breeder, in the canal down past one of the tech schools. “Raped and murdered by a bunch of thirteen-year-old Wasters,” I say. “Never mind the CSOs taking you to the Rator, Alex, there are kids out there who will kill you on sight.”

  “The depths of human depravity, Will. Distract me. Tell me more about your dream job.”

  “Shut up!” I say, smiling. She’s been teasing me about it relentlessly.

  “No, I mean it. I’m sorry I made fun of you before. I want to hear more.”

  I tell her again about how the desal plant has a supervision position opening up, and because I’ve painstakingly gained extra units from my electronics work, I’m allowed to take a promotion test for a potential level up. It would put me on track for an early transfer to Zone E.

  “That’s exciting!” Alex says.

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “If I get it, they might even let me put down a deposit for a car.”

  Her eyes are glittering. She’s totally making fun of me.

  “Shut up!” I tell her. I punch her lightly on her shoulder. She hits me back.

  “So, what, they just suddenly opened up this supervisor job?” she says, pretending she’s interested.

  “Well, they did an audit day at the plant,” I say.

  “And?”

  “They have spots open because they got rid of ten percent of the staff.” I don’t tell her that we call these Rator Days. We never know when they’re coming. You just walk into the plant one morning and a bunch of windowless vans are lined up in the parking lot. At the end of the workday, those vans will be taking the bottom 10 percent to the Rator. Sometimes, you can tell it’s actually more than 10 percent—that’s if the Corp is freaking out about excess Westies not contributing enough units. They just don’t need that many male bodies.

  “Don’t you worry that one day that will be you?” Alex asks.

  I shrug. “Not really. I’m always at least average in my tests and stuff.”

  “And ten percent of your friends disappear and that doesn’t, like, worry you?” she asks, alarmed.

  “They’re not my friends. I just work with them. And it means less competition for units.” I grin at her. I’m kidding. Kind of.

  We look at each other. And because I feel embarrassed, a little put on the spot, I blurt out, “How did you get out of the Incubator anyway? Did someone buy you out?”

  She looks down, her face growing red. I regret asking her instantly.

  “I’m sorry . . .” I say. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “It was the Response,” she says.

  I look around, panicked. You just don’t say that word aloud in a public space. At all. Ever. According to the Corps, the Response doesn’t exist. But if you say it does, and they hear you . . .

  “Hey . . . It’s my birthday today,” I say quietly to distract her. “Though not officially.”

  “Officially, nobody here has a birthday. Don’t worry.”

  She reaches for my hand and our fingers touch and I flinch. I try to hide it but it’s hopeless. I can tell she’s confused by my reaction and I feel a ball of shame and anger in my stomach. I wish everything weren’t so hard. I wish I weren’t such a coward.

  “I don’t get it,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Well, you want to grow up and be a profesh and get a house and a wife, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you can’t even touch my finger.” She cracks a smile.

  I shudder, and she laughs.

  “Finger!” She laughs again.

  “Shut up!”

  “You should see your face right now!”

  I look away. She’s still laughing. “But why, Will . . . ?”

  “I dunno,” I tell her, honestly. I feel such big, conflicting things
when I’m around Alex. “For a start, Breeders literally belong to the Corp,” I blurt out.

  I see her face.

  “I don’t mean you,” I say quickly.

  “Yes, you do,” she says. “But it’s okay. Just tell me: How does that change, exactly, when Breeders become Shadows?”

  “Well, according to Corp law . . .”

  She rolls her eyes at me. “Again, you don’t have to believe every single thing the Corp tells you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for a start, there’s no such thing as Breeders and Shadows,” she says. “They’re just words the Corp made up. We’re women and girls or just, you know, people.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “For another thing, the Response is real,” she says, too loudly. She sees the panic in my face and she laughs. Then she takes my hand again, and this time I let her. I hold her hand back. “Happy birthday, Will.”

  “Thanks.”

  She looks at me carefully. Too carefully. Like she can see who I really am.

  •

  When I get home, Cranky is loose in the front yard and I can hear Ma inside the house, shouting and swearing in Westie.

  Ma only drinks once a year, on my birthday, which is of course also the anniversary of my mother’s suicide.

  The front door swings open and Ma is standing there, throwing handfuls of gold pieces down our front stairs. The gold I got from Breeder running.

  “Blood money!” Ma shouts, as I run around collecting the pieces as they bounce off the ground in the dawn light, hoping nobody can see us. I put them carefully in my pocket because Ma will want them later, when she’s calmed down and practical again. Ma watches me. Then she pushes past me and goes to Cranky and feeds him some herbs from her pockets.

  “The Corporation are fucking shits!” Ma shouts.

  “Ma, shhhh,” I say, looking around. “Come on inside.”

  Ma begins to cry. She never cries. I put my arms around her and take her upstairs. I help her onto her bed and take her shoes off and tuck her in. She’s still crying. I put the blankets around her chin.