by Makansi, K.
We come to the gap in the fence and Bear slips through first. We pass the stuffed sacks through to him. One by one, we slip through. I’m on high alert—this is the first time I’ve been back on actual Sector-controlled territory since I fled almost three months ago. I’m thankful that the moon is almost new, that it will be harder for soldiers or drones to detect our motion in the dark. So I still my nerves with a squaring of my shoulders and follow Bear as he leads us silently through the fields.
After about twenty minutes of walking, Bear pulls up short.
“We’re here,” he breathes. He drops his pack and squints around. “They must be running late.”
“It’s okay. We’ll wait.” Remy sets down her sack and drops to the ground. I follow suit. The early spring grass is cool, and the dandelions and daisies have sprouted. Eli stands, looking almost as anxious as I feel.
“You ready?” I ask Remy. She’s sitting cross-legged, looking meditative, with her eyes closed and her breathing deep and even. Her small hands clasped in her lap, the only thing that betrays anxiety is a slight catch in her breath when I ask.
“Yes,” she responds without opening her eyes. Eli finally sits next to her, and she reaches out to take his hand, sensing it was him without looking. “Are you?” she asks me in return, now opening her eyes. “They’ll want to know why you’re here with us.” Her voice is expectant. She’s not asking me if I’m ready to tell my story, but if I’m ready to support hers.
“I’m ready.” The confidence in my response belies my hesitation. Am I?
I hear a shuffling behind me, and Eli and I step back into the shadows so as not to alarm anyone. They won’t be expecting you, Remy had said. We’ll want to introduce you when the time is right.
A line of men and women approach, and as they draw nearer I count them and smile. There must be at least twenty. Remy scrambles to her feet, smiling warmly and shaking the hand of the big man who leads the group.
“Luis,” she says. “Thank you for coming, and bringing everyone.”
Remy and Bear have obviously already won over the woman at Luis’s side. Her smile is bright even in the evening darkness. Remy turns and hugs her.
“Rose,” she says. “Good to see you, thank you for being here.”
“Of course,” Rose says in return. “We brought as many as we could, safely, and as many as would come.”
“How’s everyone?” Bear asks, his question directed to the group at large. A few voices murmur back at him in greeting.
“What are you doin’ back here, Bear?” someone asks. It’s a low, masculine voice, and in the darkness I can’t make out the speaker.
“Luis and Rose asked the same thing when we talked two nights ago. I came back because I’ve got somethin’ to tell you all, somethin’ important. It’s about Sam and Andre, and everyone else who’s ever gone missing, and what we’re all doin’ here on the Farms. But first, we brought some food to share.”
“Food?” someone says, skeptically. “You off your MealPaks? You know you gotta eat what the Dieticians give us or you’ll get sick.”
“That’s one of the things I want to talk about,” Bear says, his tone provocative. “I am off my MealPaks. I’ve been living in the Wilds for nigh on four months. No Dieticians out there to feed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I’m as healthy as I ever was. Healthier, even.”
“Their food is good,” Rose says, piping up helpfully from Remy’s side. “Luis and I tried it the other night. Our Paks are good, I’ll grant you that, but what they’ve got tastes different, somehow. And the bread is, well …” she turns to Remy. “I really just came for the bread,” she laughs.
A joke. Remy and Bear have made an impression on one farm worker, at least. There’s laughter in the group at this comment.
“Fills you up,” Bear says. “And tonight we brought more than just bread. Dried fruit and smoked meat, the likes of which I’d never tasted before I left the Farm. And these honey-oat bars that taste so sweet you’d swear you were robbing a beehive.”
“Here,” Remy says, taking a loaf and breaking it into chunks. She passes a few pieces on to Rose, who hands them out to the other workers. “Why don’t you pass the bread around, sit down, get comfortable and then taste it for yourself.”
The men and women settle in and a few moments of silence pass, as the bread and oat bars are passed around from hand to hand. It’s a good thing we brought a lot of food, I think, even as I realize that what we have here won’t go far among twenty people. If we’re going to keep this up, we’ll need to fly in supplies.
“This is good,” someone says, sounding a little surprised.
“I told you, Cal,” Rose says kindly. “I said you’d like it.”
“Now, while you eat, my friend Remy’s got something to tell you,” Bear says. “It has to do with what she found out when she was living in Okaria.”
“Remy?” someone asks, leaning forward to peer through the darkness, looking Remy up and down like Bear just conjured her out of the evening mist.
“Haven’t heard that name in a long time,” someone else says. “Since that … you remember that attack way back … when was that … five, six years or so?”
“It was a little over three years ago,” Bear says. “And this is that Remy, Remy Alexander.”
Remy stands a little taller and rolls up on the balls of her feet. “You all know who I am,” she says. “You know me as the daughter of the Poet Laureate. You know me as Tai Alexander’s sister. And as the girl whose family disappeared after the massacre at the Sector Research Institute.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “But tonight I’d like you to get to know the real Remy Alexander. The Remy whose sister was murdered not by Outsiders, but by the Sector. The Remy whose mother—a doctor who helped people on Farms like Round Barn—was murdered just a few weeks ago by Sector forces.” Little gasps go up around the crowd as Remy continues. “I want you to get to know the Remy who fights for the Resistance.”
“You mean the—”
“With Jeremiah Sayyid, who kidnapped—”
“Worse than Outsiders, they are, that’s what I heard—”
“Terrorists!”
Rose looks around nervously, and Luis stares at the ground, as though unwilling or unable to take a side. But Remy looks unmoved, obviously prepared for this reaction.
“That’s what you’ve been told, and in truth, if I was in your position, I’d believe all that, too. But the problem is that none of what you’re being told is true....” She holds her hand up as some in the group start to grumble. “And there are two other people here who I hope can help me convince you to listen and consider what I have to say.” She motions for me to stay in the shadows, and continues.
“First, I want you to meet Elijah Tawfiq.” Eli steps into the circle and nods at Luis and the others. “You probably remember that Eli was there the day my sister was murdered. He was nearly killed, too, and he told his story to the investigators. But they didn’t listen. They claimed he was disturbed and wasn’t telling the truth about who really killed all those students, who really killed Professor Hawthorne, and who tried to kill him. Instead of listening to him, they took away his job and tried to keep him drugged to keep silent. Then his parents disappeared. And that’s when he left Okaria with my family. That’s when Eli joined the Resistance. Eli.”
Remy steps aside and motions for Eli to speak up.
“What I have to say can be summarized in one word,” he begins. “Please. Please try to open yourselves up to the possibility that Remy is telling the truth. Please try to listen when she says the Outsiders didn’t kill her sister. Please try to believe me when I say the investigation was a sham. Please try to consider that the Sector is lying to you, controlling you, that the OAC under the leadership of Corine Orleán does not have your best interests at heart.”
More voices interrupt and Rose hushes them with a louder than expected Shhh.
“And if you won’t consider what Remy says or what I say,”
Eli continues, “there’s one more person who’d like to speak to you. Someone else here tonight who has a stake in this story.” Silence settles around the group, and Eli turns to Remy. “You do the honors.”
Remy steps forward again and says to the group. “I’d like you all to meet Valerian Orleán.” She turns and motions me forward. “Vale?”
I feel a flush run up my neck and into my cheeks. None of the Farm workers are looking at me, not yet—it’s too dark for anyone to have put my face to my name. But I can feel Eli, Remy, and Bear, all watching me expectantly, and Eli’s words from earlier come back to my ears. Okaria loves him. He’s our ace in the hole.
I step forward and clear my throat, but words don’t come. What do I say? Why am I nervous? I’ve spoken before thousands of people before, in front of some of the most important people in the Sector. Why can’t I find my voice?
I meet Remy’s eyes, the whites of them glimmering in what little starlight we’ve got. She tilts her head in an almost imperceptible nod. All I can do is tell the truth.
“My name is Valerian Orleán.” I pause to let this sink in, but no one speaks. No one moves. “If you’ve heard of the Resistance, you’ve surely heard that I’ve been kidnapped by this band of renegades, terrorists. You probably saw the broadcast my parents put out through the Okarian News Network, the one in which they claimed I’d been betrayed by my best friend, Jeremiah Sayyid. But I’m here to tell you that none of that is true. I stand before you tonight side by side with Remy Alexander, Elijah Tawfiq, and your old comrade Bear, as a member of the Resistance.”
I stand a little straighter, draw in a deep breath. The last time I gave a speech was at my SRI graduation and it was broadcast throughout the Sector. I was nervous, but I was playing a part, eager to do my political duty and get on to the party where Jeremiah and Moriana and our other friends were waiting. I’m still playing a part, and Jeremiah is still waiting for me, but this time, there is no party. No chauffeured airship stocked with champagne. This time, lives are at stake and I have to take care to get it right.
“I wasn’t betrayed by Jeremiah. In fact, Jeremiah is with us, too, waiting just a few kilometers away for our return. The truth is Jeremiah is still my best friend. No matter what my father or Linnea Heilmann tells you, Jeremiah did not betray me. My parents betrayed me. The Okarian Sector betrayed me. The leaders of our country betrayed me, and they’re betraying you, too.” I wait for that to sink in. The air is so still, the workers so silent, it’s almost as if I’ve bored them to death. Finally someone speaks up.
“Don’t make no sense. Why would your parents tell the whole Sector you’d been kidnapped if it isn’t so?”
“Because they’re angry I found out about the crimes they’ve committed and the people they’ve hurt. Because they’re afraid I will tell the truth to honest people like you. Anger and fear. That is what is driving them.”
“Crimes?” Someone says. “I don’t believe it! What crimes could they have possibly done? Why they saved our lives what with that last outbreak on the Farms. Corine Orleán is a miracle worker. She can’t be no criminal.”
“As hard as it is for you to believe, it was even harder for me to believe. In fact, at first I couldn’t accept it. It’s impossible, I told myself. My parents can’t be killers. And yet … and yet….”
“Sam was killed because he asked too many questions about Remy’s sister,” Bear says, stepping in to save me. I thought I’d steeled myself to the facts, that by now I could say it all out loud, but I’m thankful for the interruption.
“He was surely dead to us, dead to who he’d been before, the moment he came out of that silo,” Luis says, nodding as if to reassure himself that speaking up is the right choice.
“And Remy’s sister and everyone else in that classroom were killed by Corine. Remember I was there,” Eli says. “The man who killed those students was no Outsider. He put a Bolt to my head,” Eli places two fingers at his temple as if to pull the trigger, “He looked me in the eye and said ‘Don’t get on Corine Orleán’s bad side,’ and then he turned the Bolt around and shot himself. Tai was murdered, directly or indirectly, by Corine Orleán.”
A shiver slithers up my spine as murmurs pass through the group of workers. I’ve seen those words, but only on a computer screen, when I read Elijah’s testimony about the massacre when I broke into my mother’s office and hacked into her computer. Hearing them spoken out loud gives them new meaning. I can disassociate myself from my parents, but they will always be a part of me.
“And my mother was killed when the Sector attacked us and bombed our home in the Wilds,” Remy says. I can hear the quaver in her voice, but she doesn’t break.
“There’s more,” Bear says, reclaiming control of the conversation. “You’ve heard from Vale, Remy, and Eli what the Sector’s lied about, who they’ve killed, but it goes deeper than that. The food we eat here at Round Barn does more than just make us strong and healthy to work. It also makes it harder for us to think, to ask questions, like Sam did. Like Rose does now.”
“What does that mean?” Luis asks, now skeptical again.
“Were any of you sent to schools in other quadrants when you were little?”
“I was,” a woman pipes up. “One of the teachers here thought I was good at math, so they sent me to a school in quadrant four.”
“How long did you last?”
“I was there about three years thereabouts before I asked to be transferred back. I liked it better here. More time to play and have fun. And I like being outadoors.”
“Did you notice anything different when you got back?”
“No, back to the same fun and games,” she says, and there’s a few laughs around the room.
“Well, I went, too, but I did notice something when I got back.” Bear says. “When I was five, I was sent to a nice school in one of the factory towns. They thought I was good at language and spatial imaging, that I might be good at art, like Remy. When I got there, I suddenly started seeing things in colors—”
“We all see things in colors, Bear,” Luis says, and this time there’s quite a few laughs around the group. Bear smiles sheepishly.
“But do you smell in colors?” he asks, and that question sends a hush around the group. “Do you feel things in colors? When I was at their school, one of my teachers spoke in a voice that sounded the same way storm clouds look. A friend in school gave me a feeling as deep amber as good whiskey—”
“Now, what’s a boy like you know about good whiskey?” a man at the back says, and there’s another round of laughter.
“I didn’t know it then, ya see, but I know about whiskey, now. Point is, I could feel and smell and taste things I’d only previously been able to see.”
“It’s called synaesthesia,” Remy says. “I experienced it, too, when I was eating Sector MealPaks. The Dieticians put special chemicals in the MealPaks of people who are artists to enhance their ability to paint or describe the world around them.”
“But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Luis says. “You make it sound like what the Dieticians do is bad.”
“Wait a minute,” the woman who’d also been to a quadrant school speaks up again. “Seems like there was a difference when I got back home. I couldn’t read as fast, or do math in my head like I had been able to before, when I was at the other school. But I didn’t care back then. I didn’t like it in town. I wanted to go home and they let me. Didn’t give it another thought after that.”
I note that Rose was right about this group: they have more of a sense of self, an ability to question, to think critically, than I’d expected based on what Bear told us of the Farms.
“That’s just it,” Bear says. “I did care. Experiencing the world the way I did at school was fantastic. I loved it. But when they decided I wasn’t good enough to go to that school anymore and sent me back here, they took me off those drugs and I didn’t get to taste or smell those colors anmore. It wasn’t my choice—it was theirs. I didn�
��t know why that happened until I was much older, and I met Remy here.”
“So what are you saying?” the same voice asks.
“Speak up, Ren,” Rose says, turning to the speaker, her voice challenging. “What do you think Bear’s saying?”
“I don’t know …” the woman says, her voice soft, unsure.
“Don’t matter if you know for certain or not. Take a guess. What do you guess he’s saying?”
“That the MealPaks have stuff in them that can change us?” Ren says.
“I haven’t eaten a MealPak in three years,” Remy says. “Sometimes I miss those colors I used to experience. Sometimes I miss not being able to draw as quickly or precisely or remember images as clearly as I could before. But when I stopped eating the MealPaks, I realized I wasn’t the same person the Dieticians had been making me, all those years. It was like all my life I’d been standing in front of a mirror in the darkness. Then one day, I reached over and switched on the light and there I was. Me. The real me.”
It occurs to me again, as it has more and more often in the last months, that I never experienced this change. Everyone in the Resistance talks about this process of withdrawal from the Sector’s drugs, both physically and mentally—and we all saw the effects in Miah, when he had an especially hard time coming off the MealPaks. I feel as though I’ve missed a rite of passage. And more than that, I keep asking myself, over and over, why? Why has everyone else seen this change and gone through this process of self-discovery, when I alone feel exactly the same, mentally and physically, as I did in Okaria?
“Drugs?” Luis says. “They aren’t drugs. Drugs are dreamweed, or cannabis. What the Sector puts in our MealPaks—”
“Is biochemically identical to the effect of dreamweed or cannabis, just in smaller doses,” Eli says, cutting him off. “Did you know that at least one out of every five Farm workers has benzodiazepine, a calming drug, in their MealPaks? When criminals go to the Asylum, they get put on the exact same drug. It’s designed to calm you, to keep you from worrying about things, to accept what the Bosses tell you without question.”
