by Adam Bender
Finally finding the power to raise her voice, she exclaimed, “You can’t do that! I want to speak to the president!”
The Headmaster made no answer, but Eve could sense that he was grinning through the darkness.
Eve didn’t resist as a Guard led her down the hallway to her prison cell. It was quiet, and the heavy steel doors prevented her from seeing whether any of the cells had inhabitants. The Guard, a brown-haired woman with astonishingly large biceps, stopped at a cell marked 05 and sunk a card into the door.
“In there,” said the Guard, shoving Eve forward.
When they were inside, the Guard directed Eve to stand against the wall. Eve did as she was told. The Guard pulled back Eve’s shackled wrists and unlocked the handcuffs.
“Your ring…it’s beautiful,” said the Guard. “Unfortunately, you can’t have it in here.”
Eve’s eyes widened. “What? Why not?”
“That’s the policy. We’ll keep it in a safe place, and your family can come pick it up when they see fit.”
“Please,” Eve begged. “One woman to another, you’ve got to understand. I need it! You can’t take it away from me!”
The Guard shook her head. “Don’t make me use force.”
Eve fought back the tears. “But it’s mine!”
And with that she leaped at the Guard and wrestled her to the ground. Eve grabbed the soldier’s throat and squeezed until the woman’s face turned red.
As she held the Guard tightly between her fingers, it occurred to Eve that she didn’t have much of a plan–subdue the Guard and make a run for it. Chances were good someone would see her and the whole Desert Base would come down on her.
The Guard got a hand free and used it to knock Eve’s arm out from under her. Off balance, Eve was easily pushed off onto the concrete slab. The Guard pinned her down with one hand and pulled out a club with the other.
“You can’t have it!” screamed Eve. “It’s my ring!”
The blow came like a flash of light. Eve’s vision cleared just long enough to see the Guard’s fist hurtling toward her.
Red and golden leaves sashayed through the air as Jon and Eve walked through the tall gates and into the tree-filled commons.
“I’m sorry about encouraging you to take the mission,” she told him. “I love you, and the last thing I want is for us to be apart.”
He looked her in the eyes and smiled slightly. “No, you were right. I do have to think about my career, and this is an opportunity that I’d be foolish not to take up.”
She scrunched her eyebrows questioningly. “You mean…?”
“Yeah. I told them I’d take the mission.”
For a second she couldn’t breathe.
“You approve, right?”
Her lips twisted cautiously into a smile. “Of course. This is great news. What you’re doing…well it will be historic.”
Jon’s eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?”
“Well,” she said, grabbing his hand, “I’ll miss you.”
They paused and Jon kissed her on the lips. “Yeah, I’m going to miss you, too.”
They walked on through the foliage, stopping occasionally to take wild and usually futile grasps at the falling leaves. Jon stopped suddenly and pointed off the trail down a yellow slope, where months ago they had tussled in the grass. “Do you remember?” he asked.
Eve grinned. “Up for round two?”
Jon stroked a pretend beard, as if to weigh the pros and cons of the suggestion. Then, without warning, he smacked her on the back and ran down the hill. “Tag!” he bellowed.
Her blue eyes displayed something between shock and amusement. She chased after him but he was already far away. “Jon, stop!” she called after him. “C’mon, we’re too old for all this running around. Let’s play something else. Please?”
He came out of the forest holding his hands in the form of a T. “Time out,” he explained. “Fine, we don’t have to play Tag. But what mature game do you have in my mind?”
She bit her bottom lip as she thought. “How about Hide and Go Seek?” she offered, adding quickly, “I get to hide first!”
Jon laughed. “That’s not fair; you were just ‘It.’”
“But now we’re playing a new game,” she said. “You said we could!”
Jon held up his hands in surrender. “Fine.”
Eve smiled triumphantly. “Close your eyes and count to thirty!”
And she was off. Eve looked from tree to tree to find the best place for hiding. Finally, she settled on a mammoth oak tree that must have been hundreds of years old. Seconds after settling herself, a pair of muscular arms came around her and pinned her against the bark.
“Hey!” she protested. “You were supposed to count.”
Jon smiled at her mysteriously.
“What do you want?” she asked, drawing a line with her finger from his belly up to his chest.
Finally, he let go and dropped to one knee.
“Jon, what are you–?”
“So, this is going to sound cliché,” he said, “but Eve, you make me happier than anyone I’ve ever met. And the hardest–the hardest thing about this mission is going to be not having you by my side. So I want–I want to make sure that, when it’s all over, we’ll never be apart again.”
He reached into his pocket and removed a small, cherry-wood box. He pulled the top open carefully and held the spark-ling rock to her eyes. “Eve…will you marry me?”
She smiled so hard her face went red. “Yes,” she whispered.
Eve awoke with a throbbing headache. She was lying atop gray sheets on a thin mattress. Her throat felt scratchy and she tasted blood.
The bed squeaked as she sat up. Gray walls oppressed her from four sides. She felt like she could reach out and touch each of them. There was a lone toilet in the back corner. It didn’t have a seat and there was no tissue paper. She had the cell to herself, but she could faintly hear the sound of someone sobbing.
“Hello?” she called out, but her voice was hoarse.
The whining continued unabated.
It wasn’t fair, she thought. After all the years of service she had given the Guard, they’d sent her to a prison like a common Heretic. She may have helped the Underground, but she had only done what she thought was right.
Something didn’t feel right when Eve rubbed her goose-bumped arms for warmth. She looked at her ring finger and noticed it was naked. She thought she would cry but the tears never came. Eve got down on her knees and prayed.
—PART TWO—
United
She felt most paralyzed in the morning. Every day she woke up with what she called “the knowing and the not knowing.” She knew that she was soon going to die, but she didn’t know if she’d go to Heaven with the Patriots or to Hell with the Heretics.
Never before had Eve met a problem she couldn’t overcome. Sometimes all she had to do was wait around. Things always seemed to resolve themselves. But it had already been an entire month, and still she was here in prison, waiting to be dropped.
In her first few days she had carried some hope of escaping the concrete cage. By the end of the second week Eve had given up on being rescued by the Underground. She may have helped them expose Patriot ID, but they had no reason to risk their lives for her. As far as they were concerned, Eve had served her purpose. They wouldn’t need her again. If there was any doubt, pulling that stunt on Seven had certainly sealed her fate. Heck, the Underground probably wanted her dead.
The only thing that made the mornings at all bearable was reading the news. Every morning at 8:25 a.m. a slot on the heavy steel door would flip open and deposit a tabloid. Reading the news this month had been like watching a dystopian sci-fi movie, the kind that usually resulted in the real government arresting and subsequently dropping the filmmakers.
It began with reports that men and women without uniforms were fighting alongside the Guard on the Luna Coast. They were referred to as civilian soldiers. That was the line
from President Drake, too. But then someone found a dead body of one of the civilians, and noticed something surprising. Tattooed on his arm was a black silhouette of a head with fire in his eyes–the sign of the Underground.
Drake denied that the rebels were assisting the Guard. But then a story broke that a Guard was seen in a fight with one of the “civilian soldiers,” calling him a Heretic and a traitor. Someone snapped a photograph of the Guard holding a gun to the civilian’s head against the background of the Enemy’s boats at sea. The newspaper ran it on the front page, under the headline,
WHO IS THE ENEMY?
Drake was forced to go on TV to apologize for the Guard’s actions and praise the assistance of civilian soldiers, who he acknowledged were making a key difference in the war. Eve saw no more reports of fighting between the Guard and their civilian allies after that.
Finally, the news broke that the Guard had driven the Enemy off the Luna Coast and out of the country. This Eve learned without reading a paper, when a great cheer went up among the prison guards outside. They danced about the hallways spraying champagne in every direction. One soldier directed a bottle through the small window in Eve’s door, and the popping cork almost nailed her in the head.
The Underground did not waste a day before making its next move. Eve was in the recreation room when Daniel Alexander Young, Jr. appeared on TV. He revealed that he was the leader of the Underground and confirmed that the civilian soldiers who fought the Enemy belonged to the rebel group.
“However, these men and women are not Heretics,” he said. “The Underground loves its country too much to stand idly by and watch the Enemy take control. We could not allow that to happen.”
Then he revealed Patriot ID and called out “the true Heretics.”
Dick Randall, majority leader of the Congress, called immediately for a formal investigation to find out if President Drake had violated the law. Not surprisingly, Drake balked. He denied that Patriot ID was a secret surveillance program and ordered Young’s arrest. As far as Eve could tell from the papers, the Guard never caught Young, but that was the least of Drake’s problems. Protesters, chanting for justice and holding banners with the Underground’s sign, sprang up in cities and towns across the nation. In a reversal of the evacuation, they descended en masse upon the Capital.
The outrage was what surprised her the most. The church-going, God-fearing public had always seemed to accept surveillance before. How long had they been harboring this anger? Sure there were dissenters, most of whom were linked up with the Underground. But never did she dream there could be so many others.
The newspaper didn’t come for several days after the first reports of the protests, and the television disappeared from the rec room. Eve had paced around her cell, wondering what was happening.
A new edition of the newspaper finally appeared on the floor of her cell yesterday morning. The headline read,
HEADMASTER CONDEMNS PATRIOT ID, DEMANDS DRAKE RESIGN
Below that,
President Drake To Testify Before Congress Today
Last night the prison guards refused to tell Eve anything about the congressional hearing. But she knew today’s paper would have the answer. She slid off the bed and dropped lightly onto her bare feet. The stone slab sent a shiver through her body, but she pushed through the discomfort. She snapped the tabloid from the floor and brought it back to her bed.
As with nearly every recent newspaper story, the headline made her gasp:
* * *
PRESIDENT DRAKE STEPS DOWN AFTER HEARING BLOWUP!
PRESIDENT WILLIAM DRAKE resigned from office last night amid a wave of controversy over the government’s strategy for identifying Heretics. Drake made the surprise announcement hours after admitting the secret and possibly illegal nature of the Guard’s Patriot ID program.
While Drake initially pitched it as a more convenient driver’s license, the president confirmed at a congressional hearing yesterday afternoon that the microchips could record citizens’ conversations and track their geographic coordinates. The surveillance would not have been limited to Heretics or the Watched, he said.
“It was a mistake to hide certain details about Patriot ID from the public,” Drake said at a 9 p.m. press conference. “It would be another mistake for me to stay in office. I have undermined the people’s confidence in their president. There is nothing left for me to do but step down.”
The disgraced president did not say who would replace him, but multiple government officials said Majority Leader Randall of the Congress plans to take the job, at least on a temporary basis. Randall led the interrogation of Drake at the hearing.
“President Drake’s announcement that he will resign is an unprecedented decision,” Randall said. “It’s a good decision, and that’s why it’s unprecedented. Drake is making the right choice after committing high treason against his people.”
Randall declined to say whether he would take the job of interim president, but the senior congressman promised an announcement shortly. Government officials said that could happen as soon as today.
“God acts in unexpected ways,” the Headmaster said of the president’s resignation. “While shocking, we must re-member that God has a Plan. He will certainly deliver us from this dark time into a bright and infinite future.”
In sworn testimony at the hearing, Drake for the first time validated evidence introduced by DAY Corporation Chairman Daniel Alexander Young, Jr.
Young, who recently revealed that he leads the Underground, testified at the hearing that the Guard intended to relay audio recordings of citizens to a central database, where a computer would scan for “concerning” keywords and phrases. If the computer counted a minimum number of these keywords, the citizen’s name and location would be forwarded to the Guard for immediate review, Young said.
Young provided several ex-amples of how this could lead to “false positives,” situations in which he said the Guard’s computer could flag a person who voiced certain keywords but actually had no plans to do anything heretical.
“Actors could be flagged for playing Heretics in a play,” Young said. “Your offensive uncle could be flagged for making a ‘Heretic walks into a bar’ joke. Patriot ID throws out the old standards of evidence and reasonable suspicion. You could be followed, wire-tapped, even thrown into jail, all because a machine has calculated you might be up to something.”
Drake said the intention be-hind Patriot ID was to prevent future attacks, both from inside and outside the nation.
“Patriot ID will find Heretics, period,” the president said. “The only people who need be scared are the Heretics.”
But then Drake indicated that Patriot ID was part of larger and possibly illegal government surveillance program.
“This is no worse than anything [else] we’ve been doing,” he said. “This is just the next logical step.”
Randall seized upon the statement. “Why don’t you take a step back, then, and tell our nation’s people what else their government has been up to?”
* * *
A sudden click turned Eve’s attention to the door. The heavy steel portal pulled out and rolled to one side, revealing a pair of identical looking Guard.
“Parker,” one of them said. “You’ve got a visitor.”
They brought her into a chamber about the size of an outhouse. She found a single chair facing a reinforced glass window. Eve’s heart skipped a beat when a red-robed priest stepped through the door on the other side and sat down in front of her.
“Daddy?” she whimpered.
He considered Eve with an expression so full of pity that she wondered if her father thought she was suffering from some terrible disease.
She hadn’t seen him since before the Enemy attacked. She called him once, to make sure he was still alive, but that had been the end of it. She had been too ashamed to tell him about her arrest, even though she knew he would find out eventually.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” sh
e asked anyway.
He let out a deep sigh and shook his head. “I raised you better than this you know.”
Eve swallowed hard.
The priest’s eyes widened. “This is Bill’s influence, isn’t it? I should never have let him get so close to you. I suppose we can only be grateful that he’s not alive to do any more harm.”
Eve was furious. “How can you say that? He was your friend!”
The old man sighed again and she saw unfamiliar dark bags beneath his eyes. “I’m sorry, Eve,” he said. “Attendance at the church is down. My flock shows up asking questions I can’t answer.”
“What’s the Headmaster saying?”
Her father shook his head slowly. “The Headmaster is distancing himself from the president. What else can he do?”
He stared blankly at the wall behind her. “Did you see the news last night?”
“They forgot to give me a TV,” she said dryly, “but I saw the papers. What happens now?”
“An election,” he said. “Randall said he’ll protest any member of the administration who tries to take Drake’s place. He wants everyone out.”
“Everyone?” Eve couldn’t help but laugh. “How convenient for Randall.”
He held out his hands in question. “Well, he is next in the chain of succession. Given he’s led this entire investigation, his appointment makes sense.”
He glanced at his watch. “There’s supposed to be an an-nouncement at noon. Randall could take the oath of office as soon as tonight.”
“That’s quick,” she said, “but then I guess everything has been.”
Her father shrugged. “I don’t think they want to take any chances with the Enemy breathing down our necks. They may have retreated, but we didn’t win the war. They could strike again.”
He looked at her sadly. “I suppose you won’t have to worry about that anymore.”
