by Zoe Cannon
She began her circuit around the track, watching for him as she walked the familiar path. Every day at lunch she drove the five minutes from 117 to the park to get her exercise along with everyone else—and to check for messages from Jameson. If Jameson wanted to meet, he would tack a flyer for a nonexistent group called the Patriotic Unity League to the bulletin board. If she needed to get in touch with him—which he had made clear was only acceptable in an emergency—she would put up a recruitment flyer for the high school Monitor program. The presence of either flyer meant Jameson would join Becca for her walk the next day.
She didn’t know where Jameson lived. Didn’t know where he worked, or if he had a family. She didn’t even know his first name. All she knew about him was his last name and how to get in touch with him if they needed to meet.
It was more than she knew about anyone else in their resistance group.
They weren’t the massive shadowy dissident organization she had grown up hearing about, the bogeyman Internal claimed to protect the country from. That resistance didn’t exist. The real resistance was nothing more than a few—maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred—scattered groups across the country, acting in isolation, doing what little they could against the might of the regime. She knew Jameson worked for one of those groups. She knew she worked for one of those groups. But aside from her brief conversations with Jameson, her little corner of the resistance was as invisible to her as it was to Internal.
Jameson arranged a meeting every couple of weeks for her to pass on any information she had collected. Sometimes she didn’t have anything for him—often the videos she transcribed were weeks old, and anyone named in the interrogations had long since been arrested. But today she had names. People who could still be saved.
Or could have been saved, if she had reached the park in time.
She scanned the area again, wanting to scream, wanting to break down the doors of those dissidents herself and drag them to safety. Jameson wasn’t here.
“Becca.”
The voice next to her ear made her jerk just enough to lose her footing. Her foot landed sideways; before she could think about catching herself, she tumbled into the fallen leaves that littered the grass beside the track. She stood and brushed herself off, cheeks flaming.
Jameson stepped off the path and into view. A man in his mid-forties, dressed like any businessman, he stood barely taller than Becca herself. The sun filtered through the trees’ remaining leaves to glint off his balding head. “Calm down,” he snapped, pitching his voice low enough that no one but the two of them would hear. “Reactions like that are going to get us both caught.” He flicked his eyes toward a nearby bench, where a woman surveyed the area in front of her, sunlight glinting off the metallic eye-shaped pin that marked her as a Monitor.
The sight of the pin made Becca flinch inwardly, just like it always did—not out of fear, but out of guilt. She hadn’t done any real damage during her time as a Monitor in high school—at least, she hoped she hadn’t—but her memories of informing on her fellow students for the very people she was supposed to be fighting still made her feel like she needed a shower. She pushed the thoughts away.
No doubt the Monitor wasn’t the only one here checking the park for suspicious activity. For every Monitor wearing a conspicuous pin, there was a Surveillance agent who didn’t advertise. The Monitors existed to remind people they could never escape the regime’s watchful eye; Surveillance was there to record what happened when they did forget.
The park wasn’t safe for this kind of meeting.
But neither was anywhere else.
“You could try not sneaking up on me like that.” She meant the words to sound lighthearted, but as always with Jameson, the teasing fell flat.
“You shouldn’t have been startled. You knew I was coming. You’re late, by the way. Another two minutes and I would have left.” A reproachful frown creased his forehead as they started walking.
“I got held up at work.” Her fall had left a streak of dirt along her pants. She rubbed at it, but only succeeded in driving the dirt deeper. She straightened, trying to regain her previous composure. “Someone from work stopped by my desk wanting to talk. I need to know what to do about him—I don’t think he suspects anything yet, but he keeps trying to get close. Today he invited me out to dinner with his friends.”
“Did you say yes?”
“Of course not. I know better than that.”
Jameson’s look of reproach grew stronger. “You should have.”
Talking to Jameson was like taking a multiple-choice test where every choice was wrong. “You told me I needed to stay invisible.”
“Keeping to yourself all the time doesn’t make you invisible. It makes you conspicuous.” He quieted as a woman tugged her toddler, who was protesting as fervently and futilely as any dissident, past them down the path. “Do you have anything?” he asked in his colorless voice once she had passed.
Becca had repeated the names in her head over and over on her way here, making sure she wouldn’t forget. After the lecture she had gotten from Jameson the first time, she knew better than to risk writing them down. Now she murmured them to him one by one, as carefully as if they were cut crystal. “The dissident said they helped him hide from Internal after his parents were arrested, but they’re just as likely to be innocent. You know how it is.” She gave him a slight smile, an acknowledgment that they both knew how it worked in Processing, that they both knew how little the confessions meant.
He didn’t return the smile. “I’ll pass those names on to the others.” He turned and began to walk away.
No. He couldn’t leave yet. He did this every time, but he wasn’t going to do it today. Becca reached out and grabbed his arm. “Wait.”
Jameson yanked his arm away with more strength than she would have expected from him. But he stopped.
When he turned his thin-lipped gaze on her, she wanted to slink away like a naughty puppy. But she asked the question anyway. “What are you going to do with the names?”
“That’s not your concern.” He started to turn away again.
“The people I told you about last time… one of them was arrested. I typed up her interrogation.” She remembered to start walking again only when a woman with a stroller nearly plowed into her. “So I looked up the others. All the names I’ve given you.”
“You shouldn’t have taken that risk. Your file access could be monitored.”
Becca ignored the reprimand. “They’ve all been arrested. All of them. You haven’t saved a single one.”
Jameson let out a sigh—of regret? Irritation? She couldn’t tell. “We have to manage our priorities.”
He sounded like he was talking about some corporate strategy, or numbers on an accounting sheet at work. Not people’s lives. “What’s that supposed to mean?” She kept her voice low, kept her tone conversational, used all Jameson’s tricks of tone and body language to keep from attracting attention as they walked past the Monitor’s bench.
“We looked into the names you gave us,” said Jameson. “Those people were almost certainly unaffiliated with any resistance group. Or if not, then insignificant. Of no use to the cause. Attempting to forestall their arrest wouldn’t have been worth the considerable risk.” Jameson paused. “We have to choose our battles. You know that.”
So they had done nothing.
Becca had risked her life to get those names, and the resistance had done nothing. Because those people hadn’t been important enough for them.
And somewhere underneath 117, while Becca had sat typing up another transcript, those unimportant lives had quietly ended.
“I understand choosing my battles.” She did it every time she typed up another interrogation, every time she sat mutely at her desk instead of marching down to the underground levels to rescue the dissident whose screams filled her headset. “But I thought I was doing it to save people’s lives.” Her voice vibrated with the anger she wasn’t supposed to show.
She knew the odds. A dissident couldn’t remain undetected inside Internal forever. Jameson hadn’t given her a straight answer when she had asked him about the infiltrators who had come before her, but she could read between the lines.
She wouldn’t be dragged down to the underground levels knowing all her sacrifices had been for nothing. She wouldn’t.
“You aren’t kept apprised of all our operations,” Jameson reminded her. “We save more lives than you think.”
But Becca hadn’t saved anyone.
She swallowed her anger the way Jameson had taught her. “Tell me how I can help, then. Right now all I’m doing is giving you names you’re not using. I might as well not be there at all. I want to do more.” I want to make a difference before Internal kills me. “Do you want me to get more information from my mom’s files? Help someone escape from the underground levels? Just tell me what to do.”
“Listen to me.” Jameson didn’t raise his voice or break his stride, but Becca could hear the warning in his words. “You are not to endanger yourself or the resistance by taking unnecessary risks, do you understand? This—and only this—is what you need to do for us. Keep passing on names. Blend in better—go out to dinner with that person from work. Don’t risk looking through files anymore. Don’t get caught.”
In other words, keep doing the same useless things she was already doing. Keep watching people die because the resistance wouldn’t help them. Because Becca couldn’t help them. “But I—”
“I have to get back to work,” Jameson interrupted. “I’ve been gone too long already. Don’t be late next time.”
He veered off the path and disappeared before she could stop him, leaving her alone with her protests.
* * *
The first thing Becca saw when she sat down at her desk was the dissident from her last transcript, the dissident she couldn’t save. He sat slumped in his chair, body and mind broken, frozen in the moment of his greatest weakness, his greatest betrayal. Normally she tried not to look at the videos, but sometimes, like now, she couldn’t make herself look away. One more dissident—or maybe not even a dissident, maybe an innocent man falsely accused—who would die while she sat here and carefully recorded his last words.
I could save him.
Becca kept one of her mom’s spare keycards tucked away inside her wallet. She had snuck it from the bedroom the day before she had moved out; her mom had never realized it was missing. Every day she thought about using it. Every day she reminded herself that she wasn’t here to throw her life away to save one prisoner. That some people had to be sacrificed.
But sacrificed for what? So she could keep giving the resistance information they wouldn’t use?
She shoved the voice to the back of her mind. Started the video again to type up the final formalities: the dissident’s apologies to the air, to the ones he had betrayed; the interrogator’s false reassurances. Then she loaded up the dissident bin, as it was known around 117. If someone named known dissidents in a confession, those dissidents’ files had to be included with the final transcript, and this was where they were stored. The dissident bin’s background was a friendly blue, with a question in the center of the screen: Whose file are you looking for? A cursor blinked inside a white search box.
She hadn’t had time to run the names through before she left to meet Jameson. She did it now, and waited while the computer sifted through countless files of past and potential prisoners. Each time the bin came up with only the message, Sorry, no such file exists. None of them were in there. Not yet. How long would it take before they had files of their own, complete with transcripts of their interrogations?
She sent the transcript off to be filed, and she was done. He was done.
I could save him. I could save him right now.
She could use the keycard to get into the dissident’s cell. He might not have been executed yet. She could get him out of here, and then…
And then I would die. She knew better than to think she could pull something like that off. They wouldn’t even make it out of the building.
Probably.
But maybe he would make it. Maybe they would both make it. Maybe she could save someone for once, do what she had come here to do instead of risking her life to collect useless names.
She should have dismissed the thought as soon as it came to her, but it lodged inside her like a chicken bone caught in her throat, making her struggle to breathe.
She closed the video. Opened the next one in the queue. It was over. There was nothing she could do for him anymore.
Was he down in one of those cells right now, somewhere under her feet? Praying in vain for some last-minute reprieve while she dismissed him?
She stood up in a twitchy motion, and for a second had the disorienting sensation that her legs would carry her down to the underground levels without her permission. She forced herself back into her seat.
She started the next video. Another dissident full of defiance that would evaporate all too quickly. She typed for five minutes before realizing her screen was filled with nonsense. She had stopped hearing the voices in the video; her head was too full of I could save him.
He was probably already dead. Processing had no reason to keep a dissident around after they had drained him dry. With no information left in him, he was nothing but an empty husk taking up valuable cell space. They wouldn’t have wasted any time. She hoped she was right, hoped he was dead so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty for not rescuing him, and then hated herself for hoping it.
She wasn’t going to be able to concentrate until she found out.
And if she found out he was alive…
She wouldn’t let herself think about that yet. One step at a time.
She closed the video and went back to the dissident bin. Don’t risk looking through files anymore, Jameson lectured in her mind as she typed the man’s name. But she had to know.
One file found! the bin cheerily announced above the search results. She opened the file. Scrolled past the picture of a man she almost couldn’t recognize as the man at the end of the video. Scrolled past everything she didn’t need—name, date of birth, date of arrest, a field outlined in red that said transcript pending—until she reached Status.
Status: Public Relations, transferred, execution pending.
The man had been sent to Public Relations for televised execution. He was already beyond her reach.
She let out her breath in what she told herself was resignation and not relief.
She closed the file. Time to let it go now. Time to get back to work, back to playing her part in the regime’s crimes. But she stared at the nearly-empty page of search results for a moment, imagining how many files hid there in the bin, invisible until someone remembered them and called them up. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? All that remained of anyone who had dared to question the regime.
How many of them had other infiltrators like her tried to save? How many of them had been forgotten the way she was going to forget this man, until the only evidence of what had happened to them was written in a file no one opened?
On an impulse, she typed in another name.
The file came up in less than a second. She stared at the name for a moment, cursor hovering over each letter in turn.
Her first and only boyfriend. The boy who had wormed his way into her life in order to kill her mother. The boy she had betrayed to Internal before he could go through with his plan.
The boy she had killed.
Jake.
His photo made her breath catch in her throat, and for a second she closed her eyes as the visceral memory of his kiss swept over her. She started reading. This time she took in every bit of information, calling his memory back to life. Delaying the moment when she would reach Status, when she would see the final confirmation of his death.
Almost at Status, she stopped. Now, after a year and a half, she would know how he had died. Had he been taken into a tiny bloodstained room on the underground levels and shot in the head? Had he been shipped off to Public Relations and executed in front of the entire country?
Did she really want to know?
Maybe not. But however it had happened, she had put him there. She owed it to him to find out what she had done.
She scrolled down a little more.
Status: R100.
She blinked, trying to resolve the word into something that made sense. It remained stubbornly R100.
Cold prickles traveled up her arms.
She closed the file. After staring at the screen for another few seconds, she started calling up files at random. All the names she could remember from her transcripts. All the dissidents whose confessions she had faithfully recorded. Jameson’s warning faded into nothing as she opened file after file.
Status: Executed.
Status: Public Relations, transferred, executed.
Status: Evaluated for release, released.
Status: Executed.
Status: Executed.
She must have searched through fifty files before she finally gave up. All of them were variations on the same theme. All of them except Jake. All of them except Status: R100.
The prickles crawled up her arms to the back of her neck. It felt like the hush in the air before a storm, waiting for the lightning to hit.
She had found something.
Chapter Two
Even on a weeknight, Lucky’s Pizza overflowed with noise. The sounds engulfed Becca, threatening to drown her—tables full of high-school students whooping their enthusiasm over nothing, girls Becca’s age drinking beer and laughing too loudly, couples at corner tables murmuring to one another. A dozen different conversations all at once.
