by Ari Goelman
Sasha took a few steps until he was standing immediately before my chair. “Let’s take her out of her restraints,” he said to Dr. Corbin. “I want her to feel a little free before she decides.”
“I’ve decided,” I said. “I will never work for her.”
They both ignored me. Sasha got the key from the guard. He took off the handcuffs and ankle cuffs. He squatted before me and gently massaged the skin around my ankles.
I couldn’t resist. I stood up and stretched.
Sasha stepped closer to me and looked into my eyes. “Lauren,” he said quietly. “Please. What we had—what we have—it’s great. It’s wonderful. But if you think we can go on like that without someone who can protect us from the Department…”—he took a deep breath, bit his thumbnail, and shook his head—“don’t kid yourself.”
The restraints were off me and I was just a few inches from him. I could have severely hurt him, maybe even killed him before the guards could have gotten to me.
I put my hands on his shoulders. “What if I want to kid myself?” I leaned forward and kissed him.
FROM THE PRISON JOURNAL OF LAUREN C. FIELDING
December 17, 2031
I’d like to tell you I kissed Sasha because I could tell he was really on my side. That it was part of some master plan Sasha and I had worked out before I went into custody, or even that I was trying to seduce him into helping me, or at least into feeling bad about his betrayal of me. But none of that’s true.
To the extent that I was thinking anything at all it was something like this: If I’m going to be killed in the near future, I want at least one more kiss. And Sasha is a truly gifted kisser.
Standing there in that enormous sunlit office with that horrible little woman and the two guards in the doorway, it took Sasha maybe half a second to start kissing me back. His breath tasted like soy sauce and water and … metal. He had a metal object in his mouth that he was pushing into my mouth with his tongue.
I pushed the metal object to the inside of one cheek and kept kissing him, pulling his hips closer to me as he squeezed me closer to him. Honestly, if Dr. Corbin and the guards hadn’t been in the room, I’m thinking there was a good chance that we would have shucked our clothes right there and then, surveillance cameras be damned.
But Dr. Corbin stood a few feet away, watching, her mouth slightly open, which was enough to put a damper on anyone’s sexual feelings.
After a few more seconds Sasha pulled away. “That change your mind?”
I smiled without showing my teeth. Shook my head.
“You’d rather die than work with me?” Sasha said.
I half shrugged, not wanting to open my mouth and risk revealing whatever it was Sasha had slipped to me.
Dr. Corbin motioned Sasha out of the room, a look of genuine sadness on her face. “You’re still so naïve,” she said as the guards were cuffing me. “Would it be so bad to be on the winning team for once? This place is a country club compared to the prison where the Department is going to stick you. If you’re lucky. More likely they’ll just take you to a field somewhere and kill you. Please, Lauren.”
In a movie, I’d have responded with some final words about freedom, and how if futile resistance was my only choice, I’d prefer futile resistance to doing her dirty work. But in real life, when you have a metal thing in your mouth that you don’t want someone noticing, you don’t talk back. Instead I just stared at the wall behind her and worked on getting the whatever-it-was lodged securely between my teeth and cheek. Then I waited. Waited until they got my cuffs back on and I’d shuffled back to my room. Waited until they got my cuffs off and locked the door. Waited until I could turn my head away from the video camera. Only then, pretending that I was sneezing, did I spit the object into my right hand. And found …
A key to the handcuffs. The key Sasha borrowed from the guard and forgot to give back. Pretty cocky of Sasha, if you think about it. He must have put the key in his mouth as soon as he unlocked my cuffs—that’s how confident he was that I was going to kiss him, or at least let him kiss me.
The key, by the way, is why I stopped my last journal entry where I did. I didn’t want there to be any chance that Corbin would read about the key before I’d had a chance to use it. The key was useless as long as I was locked in my room on the seventh floor.
My chance came the following morning, when Corbin—cutting her losses, I guess, or maybe under pressure from her friends at the Department—decided to turn me over. Jeff and another guard picked me up in my room after breakfast.
I was in the elevator with the guards when I asked, “How long is the ride to the Department prison?”
The guards exchanged glances. No doubt they both knew there was a fair chance I’d never make it to any prison. Jeff answered, “We don’t know. Sorry.”
“Could I use the bathroom one more time?” I asked. “You can leave the cuffs on me. I just really have to go.” I blushed a little. “There’s a women’s bathroom on the ground floor next to the elevator.”
I’d been in this particular bathroom a few times on my early visits to Paxeon. I remembered a high but wide window, streaming sunlight over the sink area.
Jeff and the other guy exchanged glances again. “Okay,” Jeff said. “No problem.”
The elevator doors opened and we walked down the hallway together. Jeff knocked on the door to the women’s bathroom. “Anyone in there?” he called. There was no answer. He did a quick sweep of the bathroom, then motioned me in.
He stood in front of the stall while the other guard stayed in the hallway, I suppose to make sure no potential rescuer tried to swoop in. Or maybe just because he felt weird about going into a women’s bathroom.
I sat on the toilet seat and peed as I quietly unlocked first my handcuffs, then my ankle cuffs. I pulled up my pants, buttoned them, and crouched down to look at Jeff’s feet. He was turned to one side, facing the door to the bathroom. I threw the handcuffs behind him against the back wall of the bathroom. Jeff immediately spun around and took a step in that direction.
Given Jeff’s size, not to mention the guy waiting in the hallway, I figured I had one chance. I slipped through the stall door and leaped onto Jeff’s back, hooking my arm around his neck in the most aggressive choke hold I knew. Benitez never let us practice choke holds, but he demonstrated them once in a while. I remembered him saying that, done correctly, this one would take ten seconds to knock someone out, and about another ten seconds to kill them.
Jeff wasted a few seconds going for his Taser. I had my legs wrapped around his waist, and my thighs were stronger than his hands. Then he tried slamming me against the wall, but the sinks got in his way. By then he was already weakening.
He punched at my face twice feebly, then sagged to the floor. I counted another three seconds before letting go.
Then, standing on the sink closest to the wall, I pulled the window as far open as it went. Not that far. It was one of those slant-open windows that don’t open more than a foot or two at their widest. I pulled myself up on the windowsill, lay flat, and wiggled toward the opening.
Six months ago I never would have fit through. Yesterday I managed it, though I did get a nasty scrape on my right hip as I squeezed out the window. I dropped softly to the concrete parking lot outside.
I found myself … screwed. Standing at the edge of a massive parking lot. Freezing cold, without even a sweater to keep me warm. The only thing visible was a secured highway in the distance. Even if I knew how to steal a car, I had no idea how to drive. A few hundred feet away, I saw a black Department van waiting for me at the main entrance of the Paxeon building. I started to creep through the parking lot, keeping down, intent on at least making it out of the Paxeon compound. If I could get to a residential neighborhood maybe I could break into someone’s house, steal some clothes and food. If nothing else, I could get my story out.
I heard a car slowly cruising around the Paxeon building. It eased to a stop under the window I’d ju
st come through. I darted between two parked cars and lay flat on the cold pavement, listening to the car come closer. I heard it turn down the nearest aisle—the same one I’d been making my way along. I wriggled beneath one of the parked cars, a green minivan.
The car stopped a few yards away from me. I heard a car door opening and I caught the strong smell of French fries.
“I was planning on throwing my life away in a brave but doomed attempt to rescue you,” Sasha said. “But this is probably a better idea.”
I rolled out from under the minivan and glanced up. Sasha was in the driver’s seat, looking at me through his open passenger door. He met my eyes, not quite smiling. “Hey. You want a ride?”
EPILOGUE
Dear Reader,
You’re probably wondering: what happened next? The short—and almost entirely true—answer is, I have no idea.
The Department has done everything it can do, and it can do a lot, to erase all evidence that Lauren ever existed. That effort probably saved my life during the bloodiest part of the second uprising (why send someone to kill the sister of a girl who never existed?), but it has made it very difficult to find out anything certain about Lauren’s whereabouts in recent years. Even Lauren’s original journal entries are getting harder to find online due to the Department’s efforts. (Which, in fact, is one of the primary reasons I decided to work on this book.)
Dr. Corbin was almost certainly executed by the Department. They arrested her two years after the events detailed in Lauren’s journal, in the very early days of the second uprising. A few days after her arrest, they announced her “suicide.” I have no idea why they killed her, nor if it had anything to do with the Innocence Treatment. I have no idea if Lauren was involved.
All this is true, but it’s not entirely satisfying, is it? You know, or at least those of you who are paying attention must strongly suspect, that I’ve had some contact with Lauren over the years. How else did I get those final five journal entries?
It is tempting to simply tell a lie here. Though the Department has been purged and transformed at least three times in the last decade, I have no doubt that many people who remain in power mean Lauren (and anyone associated with her) ill.
But in the interest of partially repaying my debt to my sister, I’ll be honest.
I genuinely have no idea what Lauren has been doing, nor where she’s been living for the last decade. However, I have seen her twice in person since we said goodbye in the aisle of that airplane. Once was on the day I graduated from university. I was walking across the stage to collect my diploma when I glanced out and saw Lauren smiling in the audience. By the time I made my way to where she’d been sitting, she was gone.
On the other occasion, I was sitting on a beach on the east coast of Spain, a few kilometers south of Barcelona. It was my first vacation in years, meant to celebrate the publication of my first book.20
I’d taken the train from the Barcelona city center to the most perfect beach I’ve ever seen, before or since. Some magic of mineral sediment made the water of the Balearic Sea look speckled with gold and the people on the beach were uniformly young, half-naked, and perfectly formed. A bit sun-drunk, I was watching a beautiful teenaged couple hit a ball back and forth with wooden rackets when a young woman in a bikini, sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed sun hat approached me.
“’Scuse me. Can I borrow your sunscreen?” she asked in American-accented English.
“Sure,” I said automatically, reaching for my sunscreen before my gaze snapped back to her.
“Hand me the sunscreen,” Lauren said calmly.
I gave her the sunscreen, and she squirted some onto her hands and began rubbing it onto her chest.
“True fact,” she said. “Even in this day and age, most surveillance footage is reviewed by men. Funny, isn’t it? A ton of studies have shown men are worse at it than women. Not to mention more easily distracted.” She slowly rubbed sunscreen on her thighs and winked at me. “Not that I think we’re being surveilled,” she said. “But you can’t be too careful, right? I’ve pissed some people off.”
I stared at her. She looked … great. Beautiful. Happy. Grown-up.
Her lips twisted into the full-wattage smile I remembered. My little sister’s grin. “Not what people expect me to look like, right? Kind of funny—as though I’d have to walk around bald and skinny and full of angst for the rest of my life.” She shook her head. “Speaking of which, did you see the girl who played me in that movie? How hard could she possibly punch someone with arms that skinny?”
“I don’t watch movies about you,” I said.
“Probably a good idea,” she said. “They made you super-prissy.”
“Where have you been, Lauren? Who have you pissed off?”
“Only people who deserved it.” Then, more seriously, “I hear you’re writing a book about me.”
“How the … How did you hear that?” I’d been going back and forth with the big aggregators for months by then, trying to sell one of them on the idea of producing the definitive version of Lauren’s journals. But there’d been no public announcement. There’d been no contract. At that point, there hadn’t even been a phone conversation. “If you don’t want me to, I won’t—”
“Of course I want you to,” she said. “That movie ending was ridiculous. As though Sasha and I would let ourselves get cornered in some ugly highway rest stop. In New Jersey of all places. What would we be doing in New Jersey?”
“What would you be doing anywhere?” I asked. “Where do you live?”
She looked over her sunglasses and met my eyes. I had a sudden memory of staring into her eyes when she was a kid. Her eyes are a hard-to-pin-down shade of hazel, and she used to periodically walk up to me and ask: “What color are my eyes today, Ev?” Today they looked greenish gray, shrewd and loving all at once.
“Better you don’t know,” she said gently. Something in the distance caught her attention and she shifted her weight toward me, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I should go.” Her hand felt calloused and hard, completely out of keeping with the flowered pink bikini she was wearing. “You’ll find some old journal entries of mine in your beach bag. Tell Mom and Dad I send my love.” She leaned toward me and kissed my cheeks—first one, then the other. Just one Spanish woman saying goodbye to another. “Love you.”
She strode off, and vanished into the crowd of half-naked, tanned young people. Half a minute later I couldn’t have found her if I’d wanted to.
Maybe ten minutes after she left, a half dozen men, sweltering in desert camouflage uniforms and carrying assault rifles, jogged past my towel. They didn’t slow as they passed me. It probably had nothing to do with Lauren, but after they had vanished in the distance, I walked back to my hotel as quickly as I could. I didn’t mention seeing Lauren when I videoed my boyfriend that evening. Didn’t even give my parents her message until I saw them in person when I was back in the UK.
And that’s been it for my in-person interactions with my sister over the last decade. I get a message from her once, maybe twice a year. Never in a way that gives a hint of her current location. A text from an anonymized IP address congratulating me when I got engaged. Flowers for our mother when she was diagnosed with liver cancer. Never any ongoing contact. Never any way to ask her questions.
I understand, of course. If I was in touch with her, people could threaten her through me. But still, I wish I knew where she was. I wish I knew if she was okay.
Honestly, there’s a part of me that wishes Lauren had just stayed the way she was. Innocent as she was, Lauren was the best person I’ve ever met.
That said, I’ve read her journal entries hundreds of times and I think Dr. Corbin was right when, in that last meeting, she told Lauren she was still naïve. Anyone who fights the system as hard as Lauren does is still, deep down, an innocent. Because we all know the system wins eventually, right?
Sometimes I think I know the answer to that. Sometimes, I’m not so sure.
<
br /> Dr. E. Sofia Fielding, Ph.D.
London, UK
June 2041
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support of my writing—in particular for the 2015 Grant for Professional Writers (Creative Writing Program).
A special thanks to all the friends and family who read and critiqued early drafts of this novel: Linda DeMeulemeester, Tamar Goelman, Sarah Eisenstein, Jessica Woolliams, and Susan Yi. Janine Cross didn’t read this one in draft, but the monthly writing group meetings that she, Linda, and I shared were like a drumbeat that kept me writing. Benjamin Rosenbaum didn’t read this one, either, but he did contribute some very useful thoughts on social hacking.
Thanks to my editor, Katherine Jacobs, and the rest of the crew at Roaring Brook Press for their inspiring and intelligent suggestions. This book is tighter, smarter, and better than it would have been without you.
Thanks to Lindsay Ribar for her faith in my writing, her feedback on this novel, and for making the connection to Kate. Thanks to Wendi Gu for her hard work in taking over when Lindsay left.
Debbie—thanks for being patient and waiting until after this was published to read it. Aitan, Marcie, and Don—you weren’t quite as patient, but thanks for your enthusiasm!
Finally I want to thank my children. Every day you inspire me to tell more and better stories. (Except for sometimes at night when I get too tired, and just want all of us to fall asleep. Thanks for being cool with that, too.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ari Goelman is the author of the middle-grade novel The Path of Names. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his family. You can sign up for email updates here.
