Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1)

by Lydia Chelsea

  Strega doesn’t ask again. Instead, out come the silver fingertip disks, which he presses to my temples. The sharp edges of my thoughts blur and smear as if someone took an eraser to them.

  “What are those things?” I ask moments later when he drops them into the low pockets on either side of his caretaker’s shirt.

  “These?” he asks, pulling them back out.

  “Those,” I agree. He lets them slide back into his pockets.

  “They’re called alpha inducers. They help calm the mind.”

  I don’t tell him that even though they work, they don’t actually cure what ails me. They only…stave it off. He’s also proud of his devices.

  “Well,” he says, giving the meld to Ritter’s unit another glance. “I guess I’ll go. Can you tell Ritter to check his logs tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” I agree, walking Strega to the meldway. When he turns, I start to swipe his forehead, startled when he captures my hand.

  “The lady never goes first,” he says, and completes the gesture. Then he releases my hand so I can swipe back. “Not unless it is between two women. And then, if it’s known, the oldest goes first.”

  “What does it mean?” I ask.

  “It’s a blessing,” he says, “a wish for well-being. It started during the reconstruction, when the ashes in the air made people dark with grime. You would reach out to someone you cared for and wipe the ashes from their face so they’d be clean, starting with their forehead. Going down and to the right is a symbol of benign intent, that you’re friendly and you mean them no harm.”

  He seems to think I’ve heard of the reconstruction. Because it’s late and I’m tired, I don’t ask. I figure that if it is part of Concordia’s history, I’ll learn about it soon enough. Probably from Ritter, who knows quite a lot about the history of Concordia.

  “But why do men and elders go first?” I ask as he stands in the meldway.

  “Because,” is all he says.

  I stare after him as he walks to the curb and turns left. I stare until I can’t see him anymore.

  Ritter is silent beside me on the slide, but he can’t sit still. His knee bounces, his fingers stroke the case of his logger. Periodically he rubs his hands along his pants as if to dry them.

  When I woke up this morning, I told Ritter about Strega’s visit and that he should check his logs. He’d checked them but had not replied to Strega, which I only know because when Ritter helped me set up his old logger today and how to import Mina’s, Melayne’s and Strega’s codes, I sent them all a quick log so they’d have mine. Strega instantly logged back.

  “Did you tell Ritter to check his logs?”

  I don’t know how to respond. I don’t want to hurt Strega’s feelings. I don’t know why Ritter hasn’t responded. I close my logger and put it in my pocket and try to ignore the insistent weight.

  Ritter’s parents are almost three hours away to the southeast. We take three supersonics and two regulars to get there, arriving early in the afternoon. The first thing I notice is the heat. It feels more like Surprise outside. I desperately want to shove my sleeves up my arms, but I leave them down.

  Just like the Serdas’, Ritter’s family lives in a visually different neighborhood. Their property is on a large plot of land, surrounded by an adobe fence. I half expect the gate to be a meld, ridiculously out of place where wood should be, but it isn’t. It’s wood. Bright turquoise, in fact, and it creaks when Ritter reluctantly pushes it open. Beyond it lies the house, with curving, sloping natural mud walls and ordinary windows like I am used to. Except, of course, for the meld, which seems so out of place.

  There’s a party. Ritter says it is basically what we call a barbecue on Attero. Much of the rest of his family is supposed to be here. From the sound of it, most everyone showed up. The happy screams of children playing and the baritone laughter of men travel to us as we make our way to the meld.

  When it opens, a woman with Strega’s gentle eyes breaks into a huge smile, but then her eyes flick my way and her expression turns to one of absolute horror. Her hand flies to her mouth, but she’s too late to stifle the cry.

  “Ritter! What have you done?”

  I feel like I’ve been slapped but don’t know why. My sleeves are down. I haven’t said a word. But she knows something is wrong. I flash back on Ritter’s words from the night before. It’s just that you look like someone I used to know. I back up a step, but Ritter grabs my wrist in his left hand and pushes past the woman with the other. As I open my mouth to ask Ritter who it is that I look like, the woman—his mother, I think—calls out for someone.

  “Harmon!”

  I resist the urge to flee. I am the one who pushed this meeting, and now I know why Ritter tried to avoid it.

  Harmon, who resembles Strega even more strongly, ushers us all into the living room. I like him instantly because he’s like Strega. His expression makes it clear that he, too, is rattled, but he approaches the uncertainty without fanfare.

  After a quick round of introductions, what is obvious to me is confirmed. Harmon and Zula Bocek are Strega’s birth parents and Ritter’s adoptive ones.

  “Ritter,” his father says, reaching for a pitcher of liquid that was already prepared and waiting for Ritter’s arrival. Cascade, I think the drink is called…water infused with several notes of citrus and a variety of cool melons. He passes a plate of the mildly sweet lemony wafers I’ve come to enjoy over the last several days of meetings like these.

  Harmon doesn’t say anything else. Just saying Ritter’s name is enough. Ritter rubs the back of his head and explains the whole thing.

  Getting the truth out of the way is good and bad. His mother, by turns, stares at me with open accusation and at Ritter with a level of despair that makes the airy wafer turns to gummy stone in my throat.

  His mother starts to rise. “I think I’m going to go outside and send everyone home,” she says.

  “Zula—” Harmon’s hand stays her.

  “No, Mom, don’t,” Ritter says, rising quickly. His mouth opens and closes. I can’t see his face, but I imagine that something in it is saying, “I might be in big trouble, here. I might not see you for a long time.”

  I finally admit to myself that even though I don’t actually know what the consequence might be for Ritter violating the theft standard, it probably means some sort of jail time. The stony lump of wafer lands in my stomach like a bowling ball.

  “When’s the Tribunal?” his father asks quietly, rising. The rest of us follow suit.

  Ritter’s voice is hollow. “In five days.”

  “June ninth?”

  Ritter nods.

  “Ritter…” Harmon protests weakly. He reaches over for Zula’s hand as she pales noticeably, but she curls into herself. Her eyes meet mine, no longer accusing. I want to turn and run as she reaches out and takes my hands in both of hers. The tears are there somewhere, but my eyes are dry. Maybe they’re stuck in my stomach under the wafer rock.

  With a squeeze, Zula releases my hands and excuses herself, disappearing into some other room within the cool walls of the Bocek keeping.

  “I’m sorry,” Ritter’s voice breaks a little. I can’t look at him. He clears his throat. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  I hug myself as Ritter falls wearily into his father’s embrace. I look away. There’s too much there, and I’m jealous of the comfort they draw from one another.

  I wander to the opposite end of the room and see that it flows into a servette. A bank of glass at the back reveals a high desert landscape of scrub pines, prairie grasses, and wildflowers. I study it undisturbed for a long time with only the quiet murmur of male voices behind me to suggest that Ritter and his father are talking at length.

  Eventually, Zula comes into view. She must have escaped the keeping from some other meld. I watch her as she’s surrounded by a few other women. Clearly, they know her well and something in her demeanor concerns them. I can’t see the expression on their faces, but I know s
he’s telling them about Ritter. Hands lift to mouths, heads turn in the general direction of the keeping. The women filter away from Zula after hugs and shoulder touches.

  I might have laughed watching the news spread throughout the party. The obviousness of it is almost comical. It’s like watching a movie montage of the school’s biggest gossip. It reminds me of Grease, actually, when word of Rizzo’s possible pregnancy spreads through the Drive-in but without the snarky glee.

  And then I’m caught spying. Zula, wandering through the yard with her arms hugging her chest, sees me peering through the window. Her face is still drawn in sorrow, but her mouth lifts up weakly and she gestures to me and then to a door. Meld.

  Stepping out, she walks me through the yard. I am introduced to cousins and their children. I already know the adults have been briefed. I watched it happen, after all. They are outwardly friendly, but there is tension in every face. When we move off to another introduction, they turn back into their clusters and groups, some of them putting their heads together and whispering. I sit down on flagstone steps and hug my knees and think about logging Melayne to see if she’s free. Hers would be a friendly voice in this thinly veiled, hostile territory. I am just the girl who’s possibly ruined Ritter’s life, made him a criminal.

  A child comes barreling around the corner, followed by a disembodied voice calling, “Meek! Meek, stop!”

  The little boy stops abruptly, dumbfounded to find a stranger in his presence. His face crumples as he points at me and wails,

  “Ritter’s going to the disposal, and it’s all your fault!”

  A blonde woman swoops in and scoops him up, looking stricken. “I’m sorry,” she blurts before scurrying away with him in her arms.

  I flee back into the house just as Ritter is coming outside. Zula is right behind me, shaken. She holds a hand to her head and excuses herself again. Harmon chases after her. Ritter and I are left alone. We don’t look at each other. I don’t apologize. He doesn’t, either. The track has worn thin for both of us.

  “What’s the disposal?” I ask, looking up in time to see his eyes go dark and his jaw twitch. But he doesn’t answer. He just stares out at the back yard, at the kids playing. They aren’t like Attero’s windows, after all. By sliding a finger along a gauge, he’s shielded the glass. He can see out, they can’t see in. Anyone who might have noticed will think it is just to deflect the sun, which is moving into a harsh position as the day wears on. He’s drinking them in like a man lost in the desert drinks when he stumbles upon water. He’s burning them into memory. Bile creeps into my throat.

  “Ritter?” I ask again. “What’s the disposal?”

  A hand falls on my arm. Harmon. And Zula. Watching Ritter take it all in. I meet their eyes. Ambivalence is like a new eye color shared by his parents.

  “This isn’t your fault,” Zula says, though my memory of her silent accusation, so much like Scuva’s, says otherwise. “Please do come back and see us, after…” her voice trails off, her voice wobbling dangerously.

  “Yes,” Harmon’s voice booms too loudly, as if volume makes the words possible. “Promise me you’ll come to us after the Tribunal, Li—Davinney.”

  A growing sense of dread and the leaden weight of the wafer in my gut keep me silent, but I bob my head.

  Ritter breaks out of his trance. He hugs them both together and murmurs an apology for ruining the day. They both urge him not to leave, but he shakes his head.

  “I can’t stay. It’s…” he sighs. “It’s too much. For everyone.”

  They put on brave faces and promise to be there for the Tribunal. We’re all too shell-shocked to say proper goodbyes, but they walk us to the meld. As I go to step through, Harmon grabs my arm.

  “Promise you’ll come back and see us,” he says again.

  I don’t know why it’s so important to him, but I nod. “I promise,” I reply.

  Ritter and I catch the slide in silence. I try to ask him again, but he shakes his head.

  “Not now,” he says tightly.

  I pull out my logger. Strega’s message is still there. I know I only imagine it, but it seems to rest on the screen forlornly, like a child who has no one to play with. I put the logger back in my pocket and rest my aching head against the cool glass window, the underground tunnels rushing by in a blur on the other side. I haven’t eaten anything substantial in hours. The wafer isn’t stuck anymore.

  I let the silence be as we switch from slide to slide, reversing our direction of travel. Another heavy trip, heavy meeting. Sorrow laced with worry, shock, and disbelief. It is the ever present undercurrent of all interactions, even the ones with people who didn’t recognize me.

  Silence can only stretch so far before it breaks, and it breaks as we reach his keeping.

  “Ritter?” I ask as he waves his arm in front of the meld reader. “What’s the disposal?”

  When he turns to me, his eyes are glassy. “It’s the end, Davinney,” he chokes as if he, too, has a stuck wafer. “It’s the end of me.”

  8

  “WHAT DO YOU mean, the ‘end of you’?” I ask, my heart hammering. My body must know.

  Ritter’s keeping backs to a series of canals that channel water through the quadrant. It is clean, and many people dunk their feet in it or swim in it. Ritter says it gets cleaned again before it is delivered into keepings or function halls. We sit in deck chairs. He stares out at the water for a long time before answering.

  “Open worlds have no prisons the way some closed worlds do. Like Attero does. We have Impietatis. It means ‘wickedness’ in Latin, but everyone just calls it the Disposal. It’s where the Tribunal sends most violators. A one-way launch to the Disposal.”

  “So,” I say slowly, “the whole world is like a prison?”

  “Worse,” he lifts a hand through his hair. “There are no laws on the Disposal. Killers can kill, rapists can rape. It’s chaos. Pure survival. Kill or be killed, or worse, day in and day out.”

  A shudder passes through me.

  “And this is where they’ll send you for saving my life?”

  He lifts his head to meet my eyes. “They might.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” I mumble, shaking my head.

  He brushes past me, striding purposefully toward the cleanse. Realizing what he intends, I lunge into it first and block the MedQuick. I have more questions. Questions he’d rather sleep through than answer.

  “Isn’t there anything you can do? Anything I can do?” I ask.

  He opens his mouth and closes it again, looking longingly over my shoulder at the breath tube that waits. “No,” he says flatly, shoving me aside none too gently, his breath whooshing forcefully into the tube as if doing so will grant him enough sleepbringer to render the Disposal a moot point. Wisely, it dispenses only the usual lone tube, which he wastes no time emptying.

  There will be no more answers tonight. He halfway sleepwalks to his unit, to his rift. I’m grateful for the mercy of the medicine I normally want to fight. Tonight, I push aside my objections to self-medicating away every feeling, every emotion that makes us who we are. The ability to abandon them with a little shot of liquid makes sense right now, so I breathe and follow suit, grateful to feel the nearly instantaneous tug of sleep.

  Ritter is quiet the next day. He refuses to talk to me about the Disposal. Reminding him that the Tribunal is only four days away makes him angry, his lips disappearing in a line. He’s terse with me.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” he clips, disappearing into his office. If the meld were more like a door, he would have slammed it.

  I log Mina and tell her if she doesn’t mind, I could use a friend to talk to about the upcoming Tribunal. She replies with directions…the slides to take to get to her store in the quadrant that looks like Bricktown.

  She is the sole proprietor and at this hour, when most people are functioning, she is alone. I join her at a display table and help her prepare some new stock for the floor, explaining the ev
ents of the past few days.

  She makes a face when I tell her about the searer and another when I tell her about Meek, the little boy who screamed at me about the Disposal before his mother could catch up to him.

  “This is obviously scary for everyone,” Mina says. Today, her makeup is normal. The difference between Goth Mina and ordinary Mina is stunning. Either way, she’s beautiful, but she looks like an entirely different person with her face dressed in ambers and pinks. “I can understand why Ritter is freaking out. The Disposal is a big deal.” She looks at me like she’s deciding whether or not to say something.

  “What?” I ask finally, dropping the last blouse onto the pile of other blouses.

  “Do you remember that I told you that some parts of Assimilation were hard for me?”

  “Yes,” I reply, accepting another pile of blouses to tag.

  She stops folding. “I was talking to a friend last night who assimilated a year before I did. She’s also from Attero. She said her Assimilation was nothing like what I described about mine.”

  I look at her blankly.

  “Ollie, my fiancé, he lost some function levels when he brought me back. Demoted,” she explains, though I had already guessed that. “But he told me that he wasn’t just slivving on Attero. He was there to function.” Again, she gets that look like she’s trying to decide how much to say. “He can’t tell me why. He could be disposed. But he said my Assimilation was a preparation for something the Tribunal thinks is coming, whatever that means. And when I told him about you…” she bites her lip.