Exodia

by Debra Chapoton

  Her father finally spoke again. Kassandra imagined that he had been quietly waiting for the clouds to clear and now could catch sight of that three-quarter moon and all the stars.

  “You’re right,” he told his wife, “it’ll be a lot smaller, primitive, and I’ll need some extra muscle to build it. Hmf, this is one of those times I wish—”

  Kassandra rolled over. She knew her father wished for sons, though not instead of the seven daughters he had, but in addition to them. Both her parents would get suddenly silent whenever any of the girls spoke of a desire to have a brother. It was almost as if there existed somewhere a missing older brother. That’s what she liked to imagine. An older brother who had lots of friends. Friends she could get to know. Boyfriends. Fall in love.

  Get married.

  Move away.

  Have babies.

  Kassandra drifted off to sleep thinking about a missing brother, a broken windmill, and an awful story she had heard when she was little. Something about killing babies.

  * * *

  Jamie comes around from the side of the building and sees me, waves. I walk toward him and he jogs up, greets me, elbow out as if to mock the Reds I met.

  “Hey,” he says, “I’ve been circling around here for the last hour. Did you catch the thief? Where have you been?”

  I try to act irritated with him, drop a curse or two as I slam him for being a wuss, but really I’m just trying not to think of that wild dog … or that man’s face, my fist, the bushes, the sticks.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “but, you know, my dad and all …” He’s right, I do know. His dad is the President of Defense and maybe meaner than my grandfather, but his dad would actually care if something happened to Jamie.

  “He’d kill me,” he says. I flash on that dead body, wipe my forehead, and try to laugh.

  “Did I miss dinner?” I’m sure I did since it’s dark.

  “Yup, but I saved you this.” He glances up at me for half a second, his eyes hooded, as if he’s lying. He opens his belt sack to offer me a linen wrapped roll. I tear off a chunk and pop it in my mouth, but I don’t thank him. I need to keep up the angry facade or else I might break down.

  “Well?” Jamie’s impatient. We’re half-way back to the side door and I still haven’t answered his first question. I can’t decide how much to say.

  If I tell him I know the kid’s name, that he’s a spy for Ronel’s people, that there’s a prophecy about me, he might say something to his dad. I’d be called in, interrogated, forced to tell, and Barrett and Lydia would be toast. There’d be more questions. The guards would make a canvass of everywhere I went. They’d tear down the clinic and they’d tear down Barrett’s house, too. And Lydia’s house. They’d search the neighborhood. They’d find the body.

  Guilty remorse shreds my heart with fear.

  We stop at the door. I focus not on my dark deed, but picture instead a lovely dark face. “To tell you the truth,” I say, “I got lost.”

  * * *

  In the morning Kassandra woke to the sound of crying. It was Katie.

  “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream again. Wake up.”

  “What?” Katie brushed off her sister’s hands. “Get off my bed. What are you doing?”

  Kassandra moved back. “You were crying. Nightmare?”

  “The lambs,” Katie said. She sat up and looked toward the window. “They were dying. Dying of thirst.”

  “It’s all right. There’s plenty of water in the pond. They’re not going to die of thirst.” Kassandra went to the window and looked out. The fence to the sheep’s enclosure ran up to the edge of the pond. But there was something different this morning. The edge of the pond seemed muddier. In fact the pond looked smaller. “Come here, Katie, look.”

  Both girls stared. Kassandra didn’t have any idea how they would water the sheep if the windmill no longer worked to fill the pond.

  “Oh, no,” Katie said, “the lambs will get around the edge of the fence if the water recedes any more.”

  Chapter 3 The Fugitive

  From the second page of the Ledger:

  He went out to where his own people were. He saw a man beating one of his own. He killed him and hid him.

  AFTER A PRETTY sleepless night I resolve to stay as far away as possible from the B streets in the Red slum. It ought to be easy except that now, with the early spring morning light, I forget my resolution and I’m tempted to retrace my steps to look for Lydia.

  I need to darken my tattoo though I might have an advantage with her if I let her see how reddish it is now. Maybe that’s part of the prophecy.

  I dress as quickly as possible, putting on a long sleeve shirt even though it’s warm, and sneak through the capitol building to my grandfather’s quarters. The capitol is a collection of office buildings that were easiest to fortify, convert into living and working spaces, and use as the Executive President’s year-round command center. While it’s guarded at the gate and randomly around the grounds, it’s pretty lax inside. My mother called it the palace or the castle when I was little, but I see it now as not much better than the homes in the slum, just bigger. Half our windows are boarded up or broken. The air conditioning is rarely effective and the lighting only works because of the expensive generators that run on fuel my grandfather stockpiled before the last civil uprising.

  I peer down the hallway that leads to the Defense President’s residence, a suite of three rooms where I can usually find Jamie–if I’m sure his father is not around. Right now I don’t know. I cross over to the hall leading to the stairs. I don’t think Jamie would be interested in this, so I won’t include him. I’m not sure I trust him anyway.

  I reach my grandfather’s quarters and as I expected there’s no guard. The room just down the hall is an old conference room turned into a library. It’s the room my nanny brought me to when she taught me to read and write, before I had tutors, before I was allowed to socialize or be schooled with the children of the secretaries, generals, and governors who rotate through our political world. I haven’t been back to this room in years.

  The door doesn’t lock. I step inside and close it softly. The light is good in here. The east facing windows are fairly clean. Enough light pours in to make my job easier. I start with an old SCR and set it on the table by the window, flick the tab, and let it soak in the solar rays while I scan the shelves for what I hope is here.

  I read the labels on the stacked boxes. Many are neatly identified with names and dates or acronyms and numbers, printed out on stickers. Some look hastily compiled with handwritten codes. These are the ones that should hold the key. I bring a pile of them to the table and study the codes. I decide on the four whose nearly illegible categories begin with “Pr”.

  I slip the first one into the SCR and the screen loads up immediately. I expect a password prompt, but the touch-screen glows with audio, video, and reader options. I pick the video option but nothing happens. I pull the box out and set it on the shelf to my left.

  Box “Pr-4-13-2051-D2” gives a similar result–no video. I’m not particularly patient, but with this one I try the audio option. It begins to play and an odd voice, not the usual computer-generated one, recites the code followed by “unsubstantiated psychic forecast by trained level 6 subject, non-aided.” The audio stops. That’s it. I pull it out.

  Three’s the charm, I think, but the door opens and a guard steps in.

  I have the box I pulled out in my left hand and the third box in my right hand. I look over my shoulder, raise my eyebrows, but say nothing. I’m guilty of so much more than being in the archive room.

  “Hey, Dalton. Just checking. Everything okay?”

  I nod, let my face relax.

  “The Executive is heading back to his rooms, so just stay in here, uh …” The guard acts embarrassed. “I mean, uh, if you want to see him I can let him know you’re here.” His voice goes up like a question on the last word, but I shake my head no. “Okay, then.” He closes the door
and I let my breath out. The last time I was in the Executive President’s presence things had not gone well. Grandfather or not, he’s a tyrant.

  I put the third box in and then the fourth. Nothing on either. This is a waste of time. I walk back to the place I found them and slide them in. I realize I left the first one on another shelf by the window. What the heck. I grab it, blow the dust off the metal edges and insert it once again into the SCR. The Reader opens it again and this time I see the audio and video options blink weakly while the reader icon glows green. I press it.

  It opens. I begin to read:

  Pr-4-13-2051-D1

  Substantiated psychic forecast by trained level 1 subject, drug-aided

  Corroboration by trained level 2 administrator, unaided

  Authentication code: P-R- 1116-49-C

  Content: Executive President Assassination Attempt, 99.999% probability of success in 24 years, 3 months, 2 days. Assassin: DOB ?/?/2077, Red parents, central states area

  Audio content: Subject 1’s vocalizations, trance, drug-induced utterances

  Video content A: Subject 1, Subject 2, recorded and validated, before, during, and after time-stamped predictions, 100% accuracy

  Video content B: Executive Presidential order, proposed, endorsed, and voted on by Executive Cabinet, no objections. Mandate signed.

  This must be the mandate Lydia meant: the Culling Mandate. I try reloading the box to try to get the video to open. I’m curious to see an actual psychic forecast. Six or seven years ago, when I got to go along on an outer state tour, we stayed with a military governor whose kids taught me new games. I remember how they would play-act at predicting things, going into trances and waving their arms around.

  The video doesn’t open.

  I hear my grandfather’s voice outside the door, loud and angry, and I hurry to replace the box with the other ones. I’m torn between hiding or posing myself at a desk with an actual book, but then a door slams and the shouting stops. I begin to search the shelves for anything else that might give me information about the mandate, or where I was born, or why anyone would carve my name into a wall.

  I spot a shelf with a neat pile of ledger books. They perk my interest because of their odd placement between the vertical lines of upright books. Their spines are without label. I thumb through one expecting columns of numbers, but instead I find the yellowing pages filled with poetic verse. Priests and sheep, beasts and snakes, love and marriage. The ledgers probably mean nothing at all, but on a whim I tear out the first few pages of one of them and roll them ’til they fit in one of my belt sacks. Because it’s still early I swing by the kitchen and grab some fruit before heading to that place in the fence. I can make it to Lydia’s house and back before our tutor arrives.

  I climb the fence and ease myself over. I land next to some pretty impressive paw prints and I touch both belt sacks to remind myself which one holds my pathetic knife.

  I notice the smells, the garbage, the stink, but also the good scents; someone is roasting coffee, something that is smuggled along with cacao beans. There is already a line for water, but instead of a stream of women snaking along the street there are six men with all kinds of contraptions for hauling large quantities of water back to their homes. Another group of six lingers a block away. I can tell the Blues from the Reds, though they are low class Blues, by the way they look down their noses at their just as poor counterparts.

  I round a corner and head up Burnell Street. I slow a bit when I see a group of Red kids, probably all around fourteen, lucky to have missed the Culling Mandate, lucky to be alive. They’re bullying a smaller kid and for some reason I think of Lydia’s smile, her eyes, and the whole pleasure of her beauty and how she looked at me. And I imagine her now prodding me to intervene. So I do.

  “What are you doing to him? Leave him alone,” I say this with all the confidence of my height and weight advantage, not to mention my combat training.

  “Who are you to boss us around?” the ringleader says. He waves a stick in my face. “Are you going to kill us, too, like you killed Sarkis Tait last night?” He shocks me with these words. My heart skips a beat, restarts with a hollow thump.

  I forget about Lydia. I forget about the pages of notes in my sack. My tongue is stuck and I can’t swallow. If my awful deed is known here, and among children yet, how is it that I have not been seized by my grandfather’s men or shuttled off by my mother’s servants?

  I look at these children’s bold faces and panic. I run. I reach the fence, the capitol grounds, the side door. I make it through unseen. I search for my mother. She’ll know what to do. Maybe she’ll send me to my nanny.

  Punishable by death … punishable by death. But maybe not. Maybe being the Executive President’s grandson will have its privilege.

  Maybe.

  I come to my room. My hand is on the knob, but I hear voices behind the door. And scuffing, and banging. Guards are searching through my things. It won’t take long. My heart’s in my throat now; my mind’s racing through a million things. I step away as quietly as I can, turn down the back hall and take the farthest stairwell.

  And run.

  * * *

  I’ve been north before. It doesn’t even occur to me to head south, too many settlements that way. And north will take me up the B streets toward Lydia. If she hasn’t heard of my crime she might give me supplies, maybe a map, even come along for a ways.

  I shake the stupid thoughts out of my head. Desperate. Not thinking clearly. I have to run away. With nothing. Alone.

  The streets are crowded this time of day. Heads swivel to follow me as I streak through the slum. Faces frown, eyes dart away. They know.

  I am tempted to go back and face my grandfather. I have a defense.

  But … the Culling Mandate. A man who could direct such an atrocity because of some bit of clairvoyance would not hesitate to inflict his more recent law that demands capital punishment. My grandfather is an evil man. I’ve always known it. He wouldn’t accept my defense.

  I see her street ahead and I need to make a decision. Do I slow down, stop, knock? My feet decide for me. The path to her door seems clear until my tunnel vision widens. People in the streets are whispering, pointing. I look behind and others are moving away from me, hiding their feelings towards me with nervous smiles, speaking into phones they are angling toward the morning sun.

  “Dalton!” A girl’s voice. I swing my head back around to see Lydia bounding down the steps, Barrett shadowing after her, hurrying. She yells to me, “Follow us.” She motions with her hand, turns, and speeds away. I catch up to Barrett whose shorter legs can’t match my long strides. He doesn’t look at me, just stretches his legs as well as he can. A backpack bounces to his rhythm.

  I focus on an identical bag on Lydia’s back and keep the space between us to five or six feet. I can catch her, but I’d rather not. Barrett trails behind. I doubt he’ll be able to keep up. I glance back, but he’s right at my heels.

  We reach the outer streets, pass the poorest dwellings, and leave the slum behind. The change from gray to green is striking as the landscape ahead of us is open, lush, and only marred by the occasional cannibalized vehicle. Lydia slows her pace and at last looks back at me. She smiles and I catch up to her side. We jog along in harmony for what must be five miles, our legs in sync, our breathing matched. A sheen of sweat glints off her face. She glows.

  The road dips and I stumble.

  “Easy,” she says and grabs at my arm. She pulls me to a stop and scans around us. Barrett is right there; he never lagged behind and I’m amazed to see that his breathing is not labored and he hasn’t broken a sweat. I wipe my forehead and follow them both off the road. They swing their backpacks off in unison and drop them in a clump of weeds that are speckled with tiny purple flowers.

  “We can rest here a while. Right, Barrett? Do you hear anything?” Lydia raises her eyebrows.

  Barrett stands with his head cocked bird-like and waits a beat. “Nothing,” he
says. “No trucks are following. No one on foot either.” He directs his gaze northward. “Pretty quiet ahead, too. Just birds.”

  I stare at him and wonder if he could be a GMFRE, a gemfry. Most likely a second generation gemfry, born of one of the first gemfries who immigrated here. The people with Genetic Mutations From Radiation Exposure were concentrated along the west coast. I’ve heard stories. Jamie told me he’d seen several where they used to live. Special powers sometimes. But mostly horrible deformities.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Barrett says as he eyes me. For a second I fear he has some psychic ability, then he says, “You’re worried we’re gonna lead you into a trap.”

  I let my breath out in a half-chuckle and shake my head. “No,” I say, “what I think … is that you’re a gemfry.”

  He juts his chin out, looks ready to fight, then he sits easily down among the flowers. “Yup, and it’s lucky for you that I am.”

  I remember what I heard about him being a spy for Ronel’s people. It makes sense that they’d use a kid, a special kid with exceptional hearing, and the ability to run for miles without getting winded, but why lucky for me?

  Lydia drops to the earth and I find my own soft spot. We make a loose triangle, with two of us still breathing deeply.

  I voice my question and Lydia answers, “Lucky for you because Barrett will help you get away with no chance of falling into one of Battista’s traps.” She speaks my grandfather’s name with a snarl. It makes me wish it wasn’t my name, too.

  “Traps?” I’m not so eloquent out loud. My head is stringing together full sentences, but my mouth defaults to single words.

  She sighs. “He may be glad you left so he doesn’t have to kill you, but he’s not going to be happy that you took such vital information with you. He’ll do all he can to get you back. Safely or not.” She pulls a small purple bloom and holds it above her lip, sniffs. Sitting here my heart rate should be slowing down, but it’s not. I fix my gaze on her mouth for a bit too long, drop my eyes, then raise them to try to focus on a distant hill.