“It’s about the rations. I don’t mean to be rude, but they’ve just seemed a little smaller lately.”
I stop short a meter or two behind them and bite my lip with a cringe. There it is: ingratitude. The transition in Mr. Watson’s face happens so quickly, I would have missed it had I blinked. The pompous and naïve, if admittedly jolly man is immediately replaced by a puce-colored fist of fury. He turns on Henrick, spittle flying as he demands explanation.
“Do you mean to imply that you aren’t content, boy? Do you mean to say that the government isn’t providing for your every need? You’re alive, aren’t you? You have work for the day, a bed at night, and the government is more than generous with its rationing allowances. You could feed two with the food you’re receiving.”
Henrick, his favored position suddenly in peril, doesn’t skip a beat in justifying his ineloquent statements. “No, no, sir. Absolutely not. I’m sorry for any miscommunication. I wasn’t referring to our rations, but to our Plenties’.”
For as quickly as his emotions escalated, Mr. Watson requires several moments to regain his composure enough to provide a sensible answer. “What of them? Are they insufficient?” he questions, strangely confident and business-like though he’s struggling to catch his breath after his most recent outburst.
“Well, Frank is sixteen now, and he’s been hungrier than usual, so that may be all it is, but lately when I’ve tried to order a second portion for him, I haven’t been able to. I was just wondering if something is wrong, or if there might be something I could do to help.”
Mr. Watson grins widely again and pats him on the shoulder fondly, now fully recovered. “That’s very kind of you to offer, but nothing is wrong. The government never runs into problems with food. Growing boys need their sustenance, that’s all. If I can, I’ll try to put a word in to get something extra sent your way, but in the meantime, perhaps you could offer Frank a portion of your ration? That appetite will only last a few years.”
So quickly I’m not sure Mr. Watson even catches it, Henrick winces slightly at the suggestion. For whatever the Plenties get, the Optics get half. Food is one of our scarcest resources here, no matter how questionable its qualities, and to even suggest giving it away is a proposition met with horror and disbelief. Sometimes, the blatant ignorance of the Governors defies my ability to comprehend. Besides, Frank would never want to eat our delightfully repulsive slime anyway.
But Henrick smiles nonetheless, and nods in acceptance of what little response, if any, he’s been granted. I’m tempted to round on him as soon as Mr. Watson is out of earshot and rebuke him for his carelessness in asking the question in the first place. It is understood universally among the Optics that any concern or complaint against the government, however apparently harmless, marks a red flag on your name if mentioned aloud to a Governor. Suddenly, you are a threat to the stability of the community, a purveyor of ingratitude among those to whom your dreadful influence may spread. As a rule, questions are discouraged in the city, except where absolutely necessary.
But before I have a chance to alert Henrick to his error, he is already meters away, making for the monorail and completely ignoring the fact that I have been with him for the past twenty minutes.
“Henrick, where are you going in such a hurry?” I ask, jogging to come into step with him.
He doesn’t answer. I grab his arm insistently.
“Henrick!”
“What,” he growls, clearly not in the mood for conversation anymore. It seems his near-failure with Mr. Watson, relatively unprecedented, has soured his attitude.
But I’ve known him too long to take it personally, and I respond in an equally embittered voice, “Who rained on your parade?”
My strange choice of words quenches his anger before he even realizes it. After a long moment of blatantly staring at me, his eyebrows come together in confusion. “What does that even mean, Io? Where do you find these words?”
I shrug. “Probably from the Governors. They love saying things that don’t make sense.”
That cracks a full grin and a laugh, and earns me a rough, unilateral bear hug. “This is why I love you, Io. This is why we’re friends.”
I hear a preemptive gasp from a few meters away right before a rough plastic smack makes contact with the back of my skull. Eyes tearing and head spinning, I stand there, unable to react, and probably would have fallen to the floor were Henrick not still hugging me, half-frozen with shock.
Half-frozen, that is, until he receives the same treatment I have, and then we back quickly away from each other.
“ID numbers?” The man making the demands is tall, towering over half a meter over me, wearing panes of plastic over his eyes to conceal his identity and dressed in the usual all-black attire that distinguishes the guards from the typical Governors. I grimace immediately, not even bothering to hide it. This is more than an anonymous warning.
Henrick and I stare silently at the man, each waiting for the other to answer. Suddenly, we’re thirteen again, facing off with our Optic trainers after being caught in the midst of one of our midnight escapades. In my peripheral vision I see Henrick glance over at me warily, concerned, I guess, that he’s about to get on the government’s bad side for the second time in two minutes. Definitely thirteen again.
I can tell from the man’s clenched fist that we’re just a few seconds of silence away from earning ourselves a second beating, so, with a heavy sigh directed dramatically toward Henrick, I dully recite, “Io Mira. 58642.”
The guard smirks as he puts his club away and records the digits on a little screen in his hand. Even after six years, none of them have forgotten me. To many of the guards, my antics at the time were an odd, but somewhat appreciated form of entertainment. To others, they were little more than a persistent nuisance. I can only hope that this guard belongs to the former group.
But as he finishes recording Henrick’s numbers and grabs our arms forcefully, my question is answered in the strength of his grip. He would love nothing more than to beat me to a pulp right now, and in all honesty, I’m not really sure why he doesn’t.
He begins to drag us along with him through the crowd, and I field the confused glances of the passing Optics with a shrug of my eyebrows. I don’t know any better than they do what’s going on.
“Where are we going?” I try to ask as innocently as possible, with full knowledge that such a question, coming from me, will almost always come across as irreverence. But I can’t shake the feeling that something is different this time.
A tiny speck of fluttering fear, which it kills me to acknowledge, blossoms in my chest at the memory of a guard and a Governor walking me down a dark hallway, a light flashing and then everything fading to black. When the government is predictable, I can understand and sometimes even outsmart them, but whenever they diverge from the norm, all of my references are torn to shreds. At moments like this, I have no idea what’s about to happen.
“The Law Enforcement Office,” he answers curtly, and my heart just about stops. The Law Enforcement Office. We’re going to see old Leo. Leo was one of the only government offices we ever feared, even on a normal day, thereby earning it a colloquial nickname as a means of ridiculing and devaluing it. We even assigned it an age, 64, a crotchety personality and a spectacular handlebar mustache to humanize it a little, but in the end, our scheme only kind of worked.
I bring back our old joke anyway, sure that Henrick is hyperventilating by this point. “Did you hear that, Henrick? We’re going to see old Leo! I wonder if he still remembers us.”
He turns his wide eyes to mine behind the guard’s back and shakes his head forebodingly. His face has turned an awful hue of purple-green, overlain on such a pallid shade of white that I momentarily fear for his physical well-being. This may be Henrick, the ever-dramatic Henrick, but if he’s sharing my instinct for uncertainty, there might actually be something to this fear.
As an awkward trio, we reach the center of the city far m
ore quickly than suits my taste. Determined to make this as humorous as possible for Henrick’s sake, I inform the guard of my sentiments, asking that we move a little slower to delay our impending doom. He responds with a blunt, “Shut up,” and nearly breaks my thumb when he forces us to scan our prints at the door.
The heavy metal barrier slams shut behind us, blocking all noise from the passing Optics on their way to lunch. The echo of the impact seals our fate. I’m admittedly concerned, but Henrick seems convinced we’re going to die. As soon as the guard departs down a hallway off the first room, leaving us alone on uncomfortable benches made of the same rough stone as the walls, I turn to Henrick, demanding of him his reason and sanity.
“What is with you today?”
He glares at me, face turning redder by the second.
“Why are you so angry at me? You’re the one who hugged me!”
Now his face transforms to purple and his lips blue. He looks livid, but I don’t hear the ragged breathing I would have expected, given the fact that there are more colors on his face right now than there are in the entire city.
“Are you even breathing? Henrick! For goodness sake, stop holding your breath!”
He expels everything in his lungs in one violent sigh and declares, dead serious, “We need to get out of here.”
I stare at him with a smirk, waiting for a smile to break through that lovely shade of puce, but nothing changes.
“No,” I respond.
He stares me down.
“No!” At this point I’m just laughing plain in his face. “Absolutely not. What problem is that going to solve?”
“We need to get away from them.” His voice is still deadpan, betraying no hint of a charade within.
“Why? What’s going to happen to us?”
“We asked a question. We challenged them.”
“Is that what this is about? Henrick, we’ve been challenging them since the day we could talk. We’ve been breaking their rules on an hourly basis for almost two decades. There’s one thing that’s stayed the same through all that time: they don’t take us seriously. And the sentiment is mutual. Why should that change now?”
The words are something of a filtered truth. My mind immediately strays to the nature of my past few months’ subterfuge, a far cry from the relatively innocent mischief of our childhoods. But I don’t allow myself to think the thought through further, afraid that it will show on my face and destroy my resolve from the inside out.
“This is different!” His voice nearly cracks with strain and his eyes grow wide and terrified once again. He leans in to whisper, “It’s one thing to visit the Neithers and play hide and seek in the tunnels at night. It’s another thing to blatantly question the food supply. I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all.”
Henrick takes my hand in his, and at this point I’d be rolling on the floor laughing if I didn’t fear hurting his feelings. With a heavy sort of sadness in his voice, he says, “Io, if something happens to me, if they do something, will you make sure Frank and Anne and Roger are taken care of?”
I lose it.
And it’s only through tearful giggles that I manage to exclaim with exasperated affection, “Henrick, they’re not going to kill you! They’re Governors. They’re weak.”
I emphasize the point as strongly as I can, but Henrick’s eyes will no longer meet mine, fixed on those of someone in the back of the room.
“Is that what you think, Io? That we’re weak?”
My blood freezes. I don’t need to turn around, don’t really want to anyway. I know that voice.
Be Brave, Henrick
Mack’s stare bores into the back of my mind as I finally turn to face the visage I haven’t had the displeasure of viewing head-on for six years. Same unyielding gaze, same long, silver hair running back from his face.
I dismiss his alluding comment as a weak stab at invoking fear and return the stare with everything I have in me. I want him to see the color in my eyes, a permanent reminder to him that I still got my way in the end. I may have a chip in my brain, but my life has been nothing close to what they meant it to be. Ruth and James are a blessing, not a curse, and the freedom Mack meant to take from me fielded no such destructive blow. I was never freer than the day they proved to me that they could never take my sight.
I try to communicate all these victories in a wide, confident smile, just to spite him, but before the expression fully forms on my face, Mr. Watson steps out through the door from behind Mack and with a single finger points to Henrick.
“Come with me, boy. I need to talk to you about something.”
There is no emotion in his voice – no hearty joy, no blunt impatience, no raw anger. Just pure neutrality I would have thought unfeasible given the man. He is impossible to read right now.
My left hand is still twisted behind my back, enclosed in Henrick’s where it was the moment the two men entered. I give his a gentle squeeze of reassurance, unsure how else to communicate strength without voicing it openly. Mack can’t counter my encouragement if he doesn’t know I’m giving it.
Mack’s eyes follow Henrick as he crosses the room to pursue Mr. Watson out to the hallway beyond. They snap back to mine when the door shuts and a hidden lock clicks into place. He smirks knowingly, sinisterly, disturbingly. Even six years later, I’m accustomed to his blunt confidence, but something different this time. More than just pleased superiority, it’s a hint at some knowledge to which only he and a select few others are privy. I don’t deign to ask, but I can tell that he can tell that my mind is spinning out one theory after another, frantically concerned about the fate of Henrick just a few rooms away. He’s no enemy of theirs, at least not that they know of, but some part of me begins to fear that they’re going to use him to get to me.
I fell from my rebellious peak six years ago, and age has brought me the good sense to know when to shut my mouth – at least most of the time. My clandestine escapades have been few and far between, their purpose more practical than mischievous – sneaking out at night to tend to a sick friend, a subversive trade to get extra food for James when he went through a growth spurt just as Henrick’s Frank is going through now – nothing morally wrong, regardless of the government’s rules. But I also know that I’ve been among those talking, among those attending secret Optic discussions to debate the changing curfews and the shrinking rations, the longer nights and the shorter days.
Had it just been the food, we might have accepted the change without explicit notation, or passed it off as a shift of government leadership unbeknownst to any outside their circle. But the night half the Optics in the city were left scrabbling against the walls like a bunch of lost Plenties when the lights went out two hours early – and the subsequent quotidian announcement for two weeks straight reminding us of the earlier curfew – caught us off guard in such a way that we never had time to brush away those dangerous questions that came to mind. Words were exchanged, first between individuals, then in groups, until weekly meetings began to take place in a dank old tunnel near the cafeteria where no Governor dared soil their pristine white attire. Why are they doing this? What could be happening? How can we work when we’re so hungry? What do we tell our Plenties? The questions abounded, never answered but growing in number, and to this day, though several weeks have passed since those initial nights, even our best surveillance and reconnaissance efforts have brought us no closer to the truth. And now that Henrick and I are here with Leo, I can’t help but fear that there’s a spy in our midst, betraying the names of the most avid participants, that maybe Henrick’s desperate response a few minutes ago, so absurd at the time, might be closer to the proper one than my open ridicule.
“Is something bothering you, Io?” Mack asks, not unkindly. I almost buy it for a moment before I remember who he is. It’s a struggle to keep some snooty response from slipping out of my mouth, but I manage to win the battle against my own disposition.
“You know, if there’s something worrying you, you
can always come talk to me.”
At this I feel my eyebrows disappear behind my bangs, almost involuntarily. If Mack is at all displeased by my reaction, or lack thereof, he doesn’t show it. He simply shrugs and says, “No? Well, then you have no further need to stay here. You may leave. I expect your friend will be out by the end of lunch. And I wouldn’t worry yourself too much about him. He’s a good kid.”
With that strangely accusatory statement, he heads back toward the door through which Henrick disappeared moments ago, unlocking the exit to the outside by some command invisible to me. I hesitate, reluctant to abandon Henrick to these monsters, but underneath it all, I know there’s nothing I can do. He’s going to have to fend for himself.
And as I make my way across the city, past scattered Optics munching on dull, white mush, laying on the low walls that first delineate the Governors’ City, resting their backs against support beams and columns, or hanging their feet from the outer walkways of the atrium, I find that I don’t even have enough of an appetite to seek out a meal. Instead, I walk laps around the room, working my way from one level to the next with the same thought running through my head, over and over again.
Be brave, Henrick.
When Governors Meet Neithers
From my perch on the 22nd floor, I can see everything and everyone in the atrium aside from the area just opposite the Governors’ City. I see a line of Optic trainees, no more than nine or ten years old, file in a perfect row to a classroom on the fifth floor. I see a Caretaker, one of a select few Optics whose parental nature has earned them the job of caring for the younger orphans, guiding a class of toddlers on a lap around one of the upper floor walkways. I see an older Optic, maybe in his forties or fifties, reprimand a group of younger ones for tossing a plate back and forth like a disk and nearly breaking a Governor’s window in the process, until a guard comes up and gives the whole group, old and young alike, an admonishing smack on the head. He comes down hardest on the ringleader of the group, a boy I recognize from the monorail to the South Quadrant, hitting him again and again as the others back away. When the guard is finished, the poor kid takes to his feet with an embarrassed sidelong glance to check for an audience, before brushing off his smock and wandering out to one of the quadrants to nurse his fresh wounds.
Be Thou My Vision (The Population Series) Page 5
