by J B Cantwell
“It’s very different from here. Everything is rich or poor, and technology is everywhere. Inside our lenses we can see what designation other people are given so we can stay away from them if they’re considered dangerous.”
“Designation?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “There’s Black, but we never see them, except on the news stories that sometimes pop into our lenses. Black means you’re a terrorist. Red means you’re in jail and about to start a tour in the Service to pay your debt. If you succeed in that, you move up to Orange. Trouble with Orange is that no one will hire you with that designation, so in order to make it up to Green, you have to do a second tour in the Service. Then, once you’ve paid it all off, you can be a Green again, get a job, a place to live.
“And you are … ?”
“Green,” I said. “At least I was until yesterday. I’m not sure what my designation will be now.”
“If you’re charged with this crime, how long before you’re able to pay it off?”
“Most offenses serve for three years,” I said. “But if you’ve been violent, killed someone or really hurt someone, the sentences can go longer.”
“Have you met any of those people?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably. Our ability to read designation of other soldiers through our lens is disabled as soon as we start training. I don’t know what any of my teammates have done. All of that information is hidden.”
“But why?” he asked. “Why join at all if you were already a Green? War is dangerous. You could die.”
“You’re at war. What about you?” I asked.
He broke eye contact and stared at his feet. “I don’t really have anywhere else to go. My folks were in the army, so I followed them in. They died in the first few weeks before we started really changing our tactics. I was the one who got us up into the trees. I was younger then, and I weighed less than anyone else. I worked out a system to get the smallest of us up there. It’s the safest way we have to fight.”
He went quiet for several long moments, then took up the knife again.
“Back home there are a lot of ways that I could die, too,” I said. “The bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan always takes a beating when we get hit with hurricanes. If we were to get cut off from the city, all our food and water would be rationed. People would die.” I shrugged. “But overall, hurricanes are actually a good thing; it’s how we get most of our water. Going too close to the wall from inside Manhattan and being arrested is a risk, too.”
“What’s the ‘wall?’” he asked.
“You don’t see it around here, but on the coast the water has risen thirty feet. We have a giant wall holding the water back from the interior buildings of Manhattan.”
Sam’s eyes grew wide.
“What about the other buildings?” he asked. “The … exterior ones.”
“Those are called the Stilts,” I said. “They say people live in them, but it’s illegal and I’ve never seen them. Those people don’t have lenses. I don’t really know how they survive out there without food or water. The government at least keeps us fed. The tide comes in every day, of course, and in Brooklyn we have no wall. We’ve all retreated into the inner buildings to live.”
And watch the water inch closer every day.
“The technology is cool, though, I guess,” I said.
“What’s it like?” he asked pausing his knife again.
“I guess it’s kind of like walking around with an encyclopedia in your head. It’s the internet available with the blink of your eye. It keeps us safe. Warned.”
Tracked.
My breath caught.
I tried to recover.
“In the city you can walk by a store and instantly be shown what it’s like to wear a certain gown, a pair of jeans, anything you can imagine. The technology knows us by name, remembers what we like. Life is like a big glowing advertisement. I guess it’s kind of cool. And annoying. I’d probably like it better if I had any money to spend on stuff like that.”
“Do you think you’ll get another lens? I mean, if you go back?”
“I guess I would have to,” I said.
The fear that came with my walking back into our camp washed over my whole body. They might do anything to me. Reject me. Shoot me. Make some sort of example with my killing.
“Being out here is beautiful, though,” I said. “It’s nice to see the world without a lens constantly feeding me information.”
“Yeah, I can’t really imagine that.”
“What’s your home like?” I asked. “Do you live in a city?”
“There are cities left, yeah,” he said. “Toronto and Montreal and some others. They tell me not much has changed there. Now Canada has more food growing than it ever had before. We get clean rains to water the crops, and even though the days are shorter for half the year, we don’t see as much cloud cover as we used to.
“City life is not for me, though,” he went on. “It’s too dirty and dangerous. My village got together with several others and signed up to help in the fight. Our water might be safe for now, but if we keep letting the land go, eventually the States will suck us dry.”
“Why not just sell it to them?” I asked.
“We’ve tried. But they don’t have anything to trade,” he said. “The industry in most of the country has been destroyed. Only the areas near the Great Lakes have survived, and what can they make for us that we aren’t able to make for ourselves? And American currency has collapsed compared to the rest of the world. There’s no way for them to pay us back.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
We really did have nothing.
But then something popped into my head I hadn’t thought of before.
“Do you have power?” I asked.
“Power? What do you mean?
“Like electricity.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t really know. I guess they need it in the cities, but we don’t use much out in the country. We’re outside all day, working farms and livestock. By the time the sun goes down, we’re too tired to need lights on.”
My shoulders dropped. I guess there really wasn’t anything we could offer the Canadians.
“What about immigrants?” I asked. “Does Canada let them in from the States?”
“Sometimes. I don’t know any, but I think there’s a program. You need to have letters, I think, telling the government why they should let you in. Why? Do you want to stay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I know I don’t want to fight. I think if I’d have known that I could flee, I probably would have done that instead of joining the Service.”
“Well, why don’t you do it now then?” he asked. “Your chip has already been yanked. You’re clearly not much of a threat. Stay with us and fight until this is over and you’ll have more than the two people you need to vouch for you.
I looked up at him, and saw a look there that I hadn’t seen before.
He was hopeful.
And I knew why.
“I have to go back,” I said, firmly making a decision for the first time. “Alex is in there. I have to try to convince him to come with me. Do you think that, if we showed up in your group, weapons down, that you might let us back in?”
“I really don’t know.” Disappointment was clear in his eyes. “Maybe if you find some way to help us, then yes.”
“But how can I help you without giving myself away?” I asked. “The minute they get a hint of betrayal from me I’ll be executed.”
“Just think about it,” he said. “There has to be something you know that you can share.
I felt full of things I couldn’t share, not with either side.
And so, just as I had felt before, at home, at boot camp, as a soldier, and now a captive, I was on my own.
Chapter Eleven
We walked back to camp, the cleaned deer draped around Sam’s shoulders, more cuts of meat in our packs. Most of the blood f
rom the animal had drained away, but Sam still had drips of it sliding down his back.
“How far out do the people go?” I asked looking over the vast empty field behind us. “I mean, is it all Fighters for miles? How do you tell them apart from us?”
He looked at me and laughed.
“Well, now, I can’t tell you all of our secrets,” he said, mimicking Margaret.
We walked for a time.
“Do you really think Margaret would let me in if I asked?” I said. “Wouldn’t she worry that I was a spy for the other side? If you guys let me go then what’s stopping me from telling the Service whatever they want to know?”
“Well, you pretty much already told us everything you know,” he said. “So you’ve acted as a spy for our side already.”
I hadn’t thought about that. What would the Service do to me if I tried to get back in? Would they know that I had given away so much information? I got the uneasy feeling that re-joining wouldn’t be limited to inserting a new chip.
Though maybe if they did, it would be blank. Records of my lack of discretion would be lost. They would have no clue that anything I said to them might be the truth or a lie. They would be forced to use regular questioning to try to break the truth from me.
“But if I go back … they’re definitely going to make sure I tell them everything I know.”
I thought about Alex and the other men. And then there were those going into the Burn. They had been pumped up, too. If I told the military that I had shared our secrets, all would be lost for me. They would send me to the Burn.
Or worse.
With that thought, I made a decision that I didn’t expect.
“When will we be back?” I asked.
The forest had been eerily quiet today, and I wondered what the soldiers were planning.
“Soon,” Sam said. “Why?
“I need to talk to Margaret again.”
He sighed. “Well, you can try.”
We entered the camp about a half hour later, and I realized it was mostly deserted.
“The Fighters go out early in the morning to pick off your soldiers,” he said. “It’ll be a while until they get back.”
My head was still pounding from the blow and the chip removal.
“Mind if I lie down for a bit?” I asked.
Sam looked at the bleeding pit on the side of my head and nodded. I stumbled over to the cot I had slept on the night before and gingerly lowered my body down onto the lumpy mattress.
But I couldn’t sleep. I kept imagining, remembering, all that I had done in the past few days. Madness. Attack. Murder.
But there were other things, new experiences, on my mind as well. Friendship offered freely by the enemy. The taste of meat on my tongue. That weird beast of a dog. Thoughts swirled within my damaged brain as I tried to make sense of it all. The look in Alex’s eyes. He had recognized me, I knew it. The hard lines of Margaret’s face. Hannah’s vine-like tattoos crawling up her arms. Sam’s green, green eyes.
I must have slept. Fighters were trickling in, silent as they removed their weapons and sat. I pushed myself upright, looking for Sam. I found him standing over the pot of dinner, no doubt full of the deer I had shot that morning.
I pushed myself up and walked over to where he was mixing the meal over the fire.
“Hi,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“Hey,” Sam said. “She awakens.”
“Yeah. I feel like somebody’s stuck their fingers deep in my brain.”
He laughed.
I looked around. “Is Margaret back yet?”
“No,” he said. “But she will be soon. Pull up a log.”
Around the fire, several logs were placed as makeshift seats. I did as he said and took one. My head was throbbing worse than ever.
“You ok?” he asked, suddenly concerned.
“My head,” I said.
“Here,” he said, handing me a long, wooden ladle. “Watch over the stew. I’ll be right back.”
I stood up and slowly stirred the pot. I had almost no experience cooking anything, ever, but I followed what he had been doing, stirring the contents around and around. The aroma was foreign and wonderful, and my stomach growled loudly. It was amazing to me that these people seemed so savage and backward, and yet it was almost easy for them to create a meal that would make any soldier’s mouth water.
Sam returned with a small vial and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“More of the silverberry,” he said. “It seemed to help you last time.”
I looked carefully at the vial, and a vague memory of the word silverberry registered. It was the stuff they had given to me to kill the pain a couple of nights back. I uncorked it and drank every last drop, the handed the vial back to Sam.
Margaret and a group of Fighters quietly made their way into the camp. Sam’s face fell when he saw her.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“There were eight on our team this morning,” one man said.
I turned to look. I counted six.
Suddenly the urge to speak to her, to tell her everything, came over me. I got up and walked over.
“We need to talk,” I said.
She dropped her gun to the ground, sweat covering her face.
Sam brought her a cup of water and then proceeded to do the same for each of the other Fighters. Margaret downed hers, gulping it as though she hadn’t had a drink all day. Maybe she hadn’t.
“What do you want?” she asked me.
She took a cloth from her pocket and wiped some of the dirt and sweat off her face.
“I want to tell you everything I can to help you,” I said.
My stomach swirled and bucked beneath my skin, and for a moment I thought I might be sick.
Margaret looked at me like I was crazy.
“I want to join you,” I went on. “But I can’t. I have to go back. My best friend is stuck in there, and I have to get him out.”
“And how do you propose to do that?” she asked. She sat down on one of the logs, and I followed suit.
“I think you can win back the base if you can take out the Primes.”
“The Primes?” she asked. “You mean the big ones?”
“Yes,” I said. “The rest of the infantry doesn’t really matter. They, we, all go first to try to flush you out of hiding. Then, after you kill us, or most of us, the Primes come through. They’re like super-fighters, and they’re covered head to foot in armor.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “Isn’t your friend a Prime? What, are we supposed to just leave him alone if we see him? We wouldn’t even know how, or which one he was.”
My heart thudded. I didn’t know the answer.
“You don’t know, do you,” she said. “You don’t know how to get him out. And if they take you back, you’ll be rewired in a day, maybe two.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I need you to leave me that tool. I need to be able to unplug him. That’s why I’m telling you this. The only way to take out a Prime is to shoot him right in the face. Literally every inch of his body is covered with impenetrable armor. The bullets won’t do any lasting damage unless you hit them in the face.”
She nodded her head.
“That explains some things,” she said. “Assuming you’re telling the truth, where do you want us to hide our chip removers?”
“You have more than one?” I asked.
“Three, actually,” she said.
“Well, I only need one. Find a tree, something easy for me to remember. Then let me know how to find it.”
“But how are we supposed to not shoot at you?” she asked.
“That’s a risk I have to take,” I said. “I’ll smear blood over my head, and I’ll do the same to Alex. Hopefully that will be enough.”
“Alright then, girl … Pink … you’ve got yourself a deal.”
Sam walked over to us with two piping hot bowls of stew. I
took it gratefully, trying not to burn my mouth and throat as I dug into the meal.
Margaret looked over at me. “You eat like you’ve never seen food before.”
I laughed, nearly spitting out the spoonful of meat I had just put into my mouth.
“No,” I said. “We don’t eat like this.”
“You don’t?” she asked. She stared down at her bowl, and it reminded me of the way my fellow soldiers would look at their portions of mash.
“No,” I said. “We eat nutrition squares and water. Mash, too, if you’re in the Service.”
I quickly finished my bowl and handed it back to Sam.
“So,” I said to Margaret. “Please try not to kill us.”
“I’ll leave the tool right under that tree there. It’s the biggest in this clearing. Will you be able to find your way back?”
“I’ll try to make some sort of map of it on my way back to base,” I said. “If you can leave something, some sort of marker, that would really help.”
She nodded.
“I’ll think of something.”
My eyes were starting to droop again. The silverberry made me sleepy as it went to work on my broken parts.
“I’m going to go back to sleep again if that’s ok,” I said.
I stood up, and both Sam and Bear stood up to follow me.
“No,” I said. “That’s okay.”
Sam looked after me with concern, but the dog followed, regardless of my wishes to be left alone.
When I got to the cot I flopped onto it. Bear walked up to my head and gave me a big, wet kiss on the cheek. Sam was there in a flash, pulling Bear away.
“It’s ok,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
He released the dog again and Bear came right back up to my head. He gave just one more lick, then settled down next to me to sleep. It was odd sleeping next to another being, human or otherwise. But I found his warmth comforting.
I had a plan now. I could get reinstated, I was sure of it. The Service didn’t have any record of what had happened to me after they removed the chip, so they couldn’t prove anything. I would play the victim, tell them that the enemy had tried to get information from me, but that I was still so freaked out by all the shooting I’d done that I was incomprehensible. They would believe it.
