“There aren’t any directly outside the Home. Solomon doesn’t like to be watched,” Silas says.
“How do you know?” Juda asks.
“Parents complain about it. They want to be able to watch their kids when they’re here, but Solomon won’t allow it.”
Silas doesn’t need to explain why. Parents might like the results of children being forced to stand for hours on end wearing a bag full of rocks, but that doesn’t mean they’d like it if they saw it.
“That’s why those prehistoric cameras are in the courtyard,” Silas says. “No one can hack them.”
“So when will the Bees start to track us?” Juda asks.
“I can’t be sure,” Silas says, “but we should count on them finding us as soon as we’re a mile or two away.”
“And then what?” I ask.
“Can we shoot them down?” says Juda. “With rocks or something?”
“Have you seen them?” I ask. “They’re barely bigger than actual bees!”
“There’s too big a risk they’d report our location before we destroyed them,” Silas says.
“What else can we do?” I ask, demoralized. I lean forward as the backpack tries to pull me backward off the bench. My shoulders burn as the straps dig in.
“Each Bee is programmed to connect with a particular neural pattern,” Silas says. “It synched when it was assigned to you, and now it searches for your brain waves. If you can control your thoughts or change those patterns, theoretically, you can keep it from finding you.”
“Theoretically?” I say.
“A guy in my school did it. We watched him walk to the park and back without his Bee locating him for ten minutes!”
“We need a lot more than ten minutes,” Juda says, frowning.
“You want to get out of here, and this is what I have.” Silas opens his arms as if to show us he has nothing else of value..
“How do you clear your thoughts when you’re on the run?” I ask, thinking of running through the Fields. Being calm and thought-free was not a possibility at the time.
“Omming and loops.”
Juda rolls his eyes. “This is ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous? Solomon’s kewpie curl?” Out of nowhere, Mary is standing right behind me.
My whole body tenses as Silas and Juda go quiet.
“Whoa,” she says. “Didn’t know you were discussing mutiny. I’ll see you back at the room, Mina.”
When she’s out of earshot, Silas says in a whisper, “I use omming every night. It’s the only way I can fall asleep.”
“How did you learn to do it?” I ask.
Silas grins. “You both already know how. Kalyb teaches it during session. The old coot barely understands how a clock works, let alone a Bee. He’s teaching us to clear our brain of all thought, which is omming. You do it using a loop of words. The one he used this morning was the parts of the body. I prefer numbers.”
Wow. That relaxation technique was cool, but we only did it for five minutes. I can tell from Juda’s face, he’s thinking the same thing.
“We can practice more before we need to use it,” Silas says.
“If it’s so easy, why didn’t we do it the night we snuck out of your house?” I ask.
“I always wanted to try it,” he says, “but I guess the Smoker masks just made me lazy.”
I’m really wishing he could have found more motivation.
“Okay,” says Juda. “First, we focus on the StickFoot, and if we manage to get it, then we can focus on the next part of the plan—the olming.”
“Omming,” Silas says.
“That’s what I meant. Sound good?” He looks at the two of us.
Silas and I give him uneasy nods.
Could this be the flimsiest scheme ever?
Twenty-Four
Time slows down as I wait for my meeting with Kalyb. It’s as if I’m on my bike, I’ve decided to run a red light, and now I have to wait to see if the choice will be fatal.
If I succeed in getting the StickFoot and we escape, am I putting Juda’s and Silas’ lives in greater danger? The Forgiveness Home has been unbearable so far; how much worse will it be if we get caught?
I also dread an appearance by Solomon. As long as I wear this backpack, we have unfinished business. When will he take me to the courtyard and force me to discuss the Ashers again? My body is taut with agitation. Fearing my tension is obvious, I hole up in the empty dorm.
Unable to face the climb with my backpack into my bed, I lie in Mary’s bunk, examining the graffiti that’s been etched into the bottom of the bunk above. Names overlap names, while colorful descriptions of Solomon and where girls would like him to spend the rest of eternity take up a good amount of space.
I decide to add to the collage.
I’ve been drawing for around ten minutes when Mary enters the room. Putting the pen down immediately, I try to sit up, but the backpack keeps me horizontal. “Sorry. I couldn’t face getting into my own bunk.”
She raises an eyebrow and joins me on the bunk. Looking up, she points to my drawing. “And you thought you would add to the gallery?”
“How did you know that was mine?” I ask.
“Please. I stare at this every night. I know it better than Ram knows his Book of Glory.” She narrows her eyes. “Is it a leaf?”
Feeling embarrassed, I say, “Yeps.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story, but it makes me feel better.”
“Hmm.” She sounds curious, not judgmental.
“How can you stand it here?” I ask, scooting over awkwardly and resting my backpack against a post.
“Who says I can?” she says.
“You just seem, so together, or something,” I say.
She laughs. “Me? Together? Shows what a band of freaks live in this place I guess.” She lies back on the bunk.
“You think the people who live here are freaks?”
“If your definition of ‘freak’ is ‘an abnormal, misfit, fluke of nature,’ then yes, we are freaks,” she says.
“You’re not a freak,” I say.
“Please,” she says, snorting.
“What?” I say, wondering what I’m missing.
“Uh, look at me.”
“What?” I say. She doesn’t have any eye traps that I can name, she’s beautiful, and she has the best skin I’ve ever seen.
“I’m a whale,” she says, matter of factly. “A meatball, just like Connie said.”
“No, you’re—”
“Don’t. I hate it when people say, ‘You’re not fat,’ when I know perfectly well that I am.”
“But why are you here? Is being overweight a crime?”
“Is that what you think? That people are here for crimes?”
“They aren’t?”
“We’re here for sinnnns,” she says, elongating the word. “And mine is gluttony.”
“So if you repent, will they let you out?”
“Sweetie, they won’t let me out until I’m thin as a thermometer.”
Shocked, I ask, “How long have you been here ?”
“A year and a half.”
Ignoring the weight on my back, I throw my arms around her. “I’m so sorry. That’s so unfair.”
“Yeah,” she says, patting my arm. Then she begins to tremble, and I think she’s crying, but I don’t look at her. She doesn’t seem like the type of person who wants people to see her cry.
“Is there anything I can do?” I ask after a while.
“Can you give me your metabolism?” she says, wiping her nose with her hand.
Not sure what this means, I say, “Whatever you need.”
She laughs. “You’re sweet. I see why your hunka hunka boyfriend likes you.”
She must have seen Juda kiss me in the cafeteria. I’m about to ask her who else noticed, when Kalyb knocks on the door.
“Mina, Mary, how are you ladies this afternoon?”
“Swell,” Mary says, curlin
g up in the bed with her back toward him.
“Fine, Kalyb,” I say.
“Are you ready for our meeting?” he asks me.
This is it. “Yes, of course.”
Slowly standing, I tell Mary, “See you later.”
“Yeps,” she says.
Kalyb leads me down the hall, chatting in his even voice. “I hope breakfast was satisfactory. We have games and activities in the community room this afternoon, which I think you’ll enjoy, and music after dinner, which is very popular.”
He walks at the same pace that he did on the first day, ignoring the extra weight that I’m carrying. I’m sweating and in agony by the time we reach his office, which is dark and spare, with strangely tiled walls and a white treadmill that takes up one corner. After inviting me to enter the room, he steps on the treadmill. After he walks for a minute, the overhead lights come on. His treadmill must power the lights, just like Ram’s powered his computer.
Kalyb steps down, goes to the wall, and presses his palm against a tile. A small door opens near the floor. He pulls out two stools, places them in the middle of the floor, and motions for me to sit down.
He sinks gracefully into a cross legged position, while I balance clumsily with my backpack on.
“How are you today, Mina? How did you sleep?”
“Uh, I slept well, Kalyb,” I say, scanning the bare room.
“Good. That’s great.” He smiles. “How do you feel about being in the Forgiveness Home?”
Does anyone ever answer this question with anything besides “horrible?” I look at him. “I would rather be somewhere else.”
“Where?” he asks.
With Ayan in Macy’s. With Sekena in her apartment. With Nana. “With the Dixons.”
He nods, although I’m not sure he believes me.
“Solomon thinks that you have a problem with male authority.” He grins. “Let’s talk about it.”
Why do all the Unbound smile so much? Don’t they know it makes them look like simpletons?
“You left Manhattan, and we’re really happy about that,” he says. “We’re happy you’re here with us learning to let the light in, but your escape demonstrates a certain rebellious streak that is concerning to us. We have certain codes—certain standards for how we expect our young ladies to behave.”
“Do you have a veil for me to wear?”
“No. We don’t do that here,” he says, missing my sarcasm. “It’s just that, well . . .” He looks thoughtfully into the distance. “What do you know about the world before the Dividing?”
“Barely anything,” I say, lying. He doesn’t need to know about the Primer and what I’ve read about Time Zero. I add what people always say about the Dividing: “People were miserable and suffering and needed to overthrow the government to survive.”
“That’s true. It was a terrible time.” He smiles. “Did you know that before the Dividing the president of the country was a woman?”
“Really?” There’s nothing about this in the Primer, and if it were true, wouldn’t Nana have told me?
“Have you ever learned about the Congress?”
I give him a blank stare.
“The president didn’t have all the power. She had to negotiate with two other groups—kind of like when you have to negotiate with your mom and your dad to get what you want.”
I can tell he wants me to smile at this, but I don’t.
“Both of those groups, the House and the Senate, also had a lot of women in them.”
I can’t explain why this makes me feel good, but it does.
“So it was the worst kind of disaster.”
Wait. “Why?” I ask.
“Mina.” He leans forward, giving me a pitying smile. “Women aren’t meant to lead. They have the wrong temperament. They’re nurturing and pliant, which is what makes them so lovely. But those qualities are terrible in leaders.”
I forget about the StickFoot. “So it was the women’s fault that people were starving?”
“Yes, it was.”
“How?”
“It’s too complicated for you to understand.”
“I’d like to try.”
“Fine,” he says, standing up. He grabs his first finger. “They didn’t know where to invest time or money. They used their emotions instead of their brains. They stopped building the weapons that the country needed to protect itself and put the money into schools and health, which sounds like a nice thing to do, but is totally naive.” He grabs his second finger. “They stopped importing oil, pissing off every one of our economic partners and throwing us into the Great Gas Wars of ’22.” His voice breaks. He’s so worked up, you would think he had lived through these things. He grabs his third finger. “Then, in her second term, the president attempted to repeal the second amendment.”
Second term? I’m confused. “Why would the people choose her again if she was so bad?” I know enough about history to know that people used to elect their leaders. My mother says elective government is blasphemous.
“You’re missing the point! She tried to take away the right to bear arms!”
“‘To bear arms?’” I ask.
“To carry a gun. She wanted to take away everyone’s guns.”
I imagine every Twitcher on the island without a gun, Damon without his rifle. What a different world it would be. “It’s bad to not want guns?” I say.
“No one in the Unbound would be here today if our ancestors hadn’t had guns. When that harpy came for their weapons, they said, ‘No way in Hell,’ and they fought back.”
“I thought they rebelled because everyone was starving—because babies were dying.”
“That woman overstepped her bounds.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Women shouldn’t overstep their bounds. It never ends well. You seem smart, but if God had wanted women to lead he wouldn’t have given them monthly menses. No one can lead if they spend one week out of every four in bed. It makes no sense!” He puts a hand on his forehead, as if someone has suggested cats should wear loafers.
Ignoring the fact that I’ve never spent one day in bed due to my menses, I ask, “What about the Prophet?”
“I’m glad you asked. She’s a great example. Sarah Palmer was part of the revolution, as I’m sure you know. She was one of the most vocal opponents of disarmament and fought on the front lines. She was a great hero. But She didn’t know how to lead.”
“Yes She did—”
“I know it’s upsetting for a Propheteer to hear this, to have the wool pulled away from your eyes. But Sarah was power hungry. She lost control of herself.”
“No, She—”
“She used the greatest lie available to her sex. She manipulated our dearest scripture with Her sin and told the people She had experienced an immaculate conception.” He shakes his head, blown away by the gullibility of his forefathers. “She was evil incarnate.”
I’ve never heard blasphemy like this before. My body reacts before my mind can, and I drop to my knees to pray. The backpack immediately pulls me sideways to the floor.
“Get up!” Kalyb yells, his smile disappearing for the first time.
“You spend your days torturing children, and God sees you,” I say, tucking my head.
“You will not blaspheme in this office!” Grabbing me under the arm, he tries to yank my body from the floor.
He has a hard time getting me back on the stool with the added weight of the rocks, and he’s pulling and jerking at me, when the office door opens.
Silas sticks his head in. “There’s a fight in the cafeteria.”
“Get Solomon,” Kalyb snarls at him.
“He’s in session,” says Silas.
Kalyb hesitates, not ready to end our confrontation.
“There’s blood,” Silas says. “It’s pretty bad.”
Aggravated, Kalyb tells me, “You will return to that stool, and you will not move until I return. Do you understand?”
“Y
es, Kalyb,” I say, gritting my teeth.
He follows Silas out the door.
I can’t catch my breath, I’m so angry and enveloped by Kalyb’s words. I shake my head to clear my thoughts. Remember why you’re here.
This is my moment.
Twenty-Five
I don’t know how much time I have, and I have no idea where to begin. The room appears totally empty. Can there possibly be StickFoot here?
Okay, Mina. Pull yourself together. I picture Rayna, with her wild blue hair and what she would do in this situation. She wouldn’t panic, and she wouldn’t blow it.
Kalyb got stools out of the wall, so there could be other things in there, too.
Knowing it’ll slow me down, I slip off the backpack. I hurry to the wall and place my hand on the tile like he did. The same door opens near the floor. Thank you, God. It doesn’t have to be Kalyb’s hand.
I lift my palm, and the door closes.
I slide along the wall placing my hand on various tiles. I try about ten before another door reveals itself. I find a bin full of tan uniforms, like the one I’m wearing.
I close it and move on.
Doors open every three feet. I find books and papers, extra lightbulbs, and a whole bin of toilet paper. I see more stools, the chairs we use in session, and pillows and blankets. I even find a stash of chocolate bars and a bottle of whiskey, but no StickFoot.
How long has it been? Five minutes? Ten? How long can Juda and Silas keep Kalyb occupied?
Maybe Kalyb doesn’t even keep a toolbox in here. Maybe he has a utility closet somewhere else in the building.
I sit back down on my stool. Silas said that men kept StickFoot for cleaning gutters and things. Kalyb doesn’t have any cleaning supplies in here. Maybe someone else cleans? Surely they expect women to do it.
I remember something from one of the bins. I hop up and run to the wall, praying I can remember which one it was.
I place my hand on a tile and when the door opens, I see toilet paper. Nyek.
I try again and find the bin I want. Yanking it out, I start pulling out lightbulbs. They’re all shapes and sizes and, in Manhattan, would be worth a mint. At home, we would of course use a ladder to install them, but here . . . At the bottom of the bin, I spot it—a can of StickFoot nestled between lamp bulbs.
Time Next Page 21
