Unequal

by B. E. Sanderson

  As she stepped past him, he gave her a long appraising look. “I’m certain we can find something in here for you.”

  “For me?” She looked down at her clothes, complete with borrowed shoes. “Oh. Right.” An hour or so before, she had been worried about her appearance. Too much had happened in too short a time.

  Without another word, Justin pulled a thick pair of blue pants off one shelf. From another, he grabbed a sweater in a shade of green reminiscent of pine needles in summer. Stacking them on her outstretched arms, he moved on to the next shelf. Shoes meant more for walking than working were added to the pile, followed by sturdy socks and soft undergarments.

  “You can change in back while I speak to the owner.”

  She wasn’t sure any of it would fit, but she kept her mouth closed. If everything sagged on her, or was so tight it strangled, Justin would have to admit he didn’t know her as well as he might want to. As soon as she had the thought, she regretted it. Being petty wasn’t productive. Especially since having the clothes fit the first time would mean they’d be on their way sooner.

  And she’d be closer to finding out exactly what this man wanted.

  At the back of the store, Rue found a small room she hoped was meant for trying on clothes. Once she closed and locked the door, she realized she had a few minutes to just be alone. If Crispin was right, they’d left the DOE the day before, but it felt as though she’d been wrapped up in this mess for weeks. The last time she spent any time by herself was an age away.

  Collapsing onto the room’s single chair, she put her face into her hands and let herself cry.

  Her carefully built life was shattered. She’d never see the hospital or her little basement home again. The patients she spent so much of her energies on would live or die without her. Her few acquaintances probably wondered what happened to her, if the rumor about her capture hadn’t already made the rounds. She gasped softly as an image came to her.

  My books. All the medical texts. All the reference materials. All the novels she managed to squirrel away. They were all lost to her. Replacing those irreplaceable belongings was inconceivable.

  A knock came to the door before she realized she was sobbing in earnest.

  “Everything alright in there?” Justin’s wasn’t the voice she wanted to hear. She wanted someone who understood. She wanted her Uncle Howard, but he was lost to her, too. More so than he’d been for the majority of her adult life.

  As she cried harder, a thumping sounded above her sobs. Angry words were exchanged beyond the door. Seconds of silence passed before the lock clicked and the door swung open.

  Justin stood in the doorway, a look of consternation on his face. Behind him, an old woman stared at the spectacle of her sadness. He stepped into the shopkeeper’s line of sight and then into the tiny room.

  He closed the door, leaving them alone together in the changing room. “What’s wrong?”

  Rue couldn’t look at him. “What isn’t wrong?”

  “I didn’t get the right sizes?”

  She shoved the clothing off her lap and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course, it matters. You need to appear to be any average and equal citizen. Flopping around in ill-fitting clothes is neither average nor equal.”

  For a brief instant, she stared at him like he was stupid. Then as quickly as her tears had come, they disappeared—to be replaced by laughter. Far from the hysterical, sick-seal barking she experienced before, true amusement burst from her lips. “You’re kidding me,” she said between giggles.

  “Yes,” he said with a perfectly emotionless face. “I am.”

  Then a smile pulled his lips upwards and the change was miraculous. Justin appeared to be the kind of man any woman would be thrilled to be assigned with. The giggling girls she schooled with would’ve spent hours dreaming of being his spouse. Rue finally understood what the whispers and the giggling was about. He was truly beautiful.

  His dark hair fell in soft waves over his forehead, making the green of his eyes stand out in contrast. His must’ve been what the authors had referred to when they wrote about an aristocratic nose. The mouth beneath was full without being pouty and, for a brief moment, she wanted to see if those lips were as soft as they looked.

  Her laughter dried up in her throat. She remembered how attracted she’d been to him at first. After his betrayal, those repulsive impulses had nearly undone her.

  The smile remained on his face, but she could tell he was no longer amused. A half-formed question blossomed in his eyes but died on his lips. “Try those on. We’re running out of daylight.”

  With those words, he left her to her job and whatever feelings were rocketing around her head. In the space of a few minutes, she’d gone from mourning the loss of everything she loved to panting after a man she wasn’t sure she could trust.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  The one answer she could come up with was the stress of the past few days had her turned in so many directions she couldn’t tell which way was up. She couldn’t actually be attracted to Justin—no more than she could’ve been attracted to Crispin. Rue had to admit both of them were handsome, but the unusual feelings had to be based more on something inside her psyche than in her heart. Or maybe she was simply discounting the effect of hormones. A woman her age would, of course, feel the need to mate. Every book she’d ever read told her so.

  Without more information about either of these men, it had to be her natural urge to mate.

  A tiny bell dinged out in the store, jerking Rue from her musings. Picking up the stack of clothes, she rapidly changed. No other customers had been around when they arrived. She didn’t need Justin to tell her they couldn’t afford to spend time in the company of Citizens.

  Everything Justin picked was a perfect fit. The pants—which she recalled were referred to as blue jeans—and the sweater molded to her in a way she’d never experienced with her uniforms. And one glance at the dingy mirror told her they matched her coloring. For the first time since she was a child, she felt pretty.

  Tucking her old clothes into a ball, she left the fitting room. The shopkeeper was nowhere to be seen. Unsurprising in a store crammed with items. Once she couldn’t easily locate Justin either, uneasiness crept through her.

  “Hello?” she called. No answer came back. “Justin?”

  Silence.

  Maybe the bell over the door hadn’t signaled someone’s arrival after all. Maybe it was the world’s way of telling her she was alone.

  TWELVE

  Stepping out into the store with everyone suddenly gone was a little like turning into Alice and dropping into the rabbit hole. Rue didn’t have anything to go on but that one little bell. She hadn’t heard any voices. Justin didn’t say a damn thing. But Rue had seen the shopkeeper’s face as her own raw emotions had become glaringly apparent.

  Intense emotion marked her as Unequal.

  But if the old woman had called the DOE on her, why was she the sole person left? If they came for her, Justin wouldn’t have run. He would’ve slipped back into his role as Citizen Executioner. It would’ve been the smart thing to do. Her belief he was working for the enemy had dissipated. And, if he was working against them, he had better things to do than get disappeared.

  But shouldn’t the shopkeeper have remained inside her own store? The DOE wouldn’t want her. Hell, they’d be lining up to thank her.

  The memory of Hubert’s death slapped her. They let Rue assume she was home free then, and she walked right into a horror show. If she stepped outside right then, would she see Justin bleeding all over the sidewalk? Would another person be gushing life from the back of her head because of Rue? What kind of sick games did the DOE play? The whole damn thing seemed seriously unproductive.

  And seriously demented. Maybe that’s what happened to Uncle Howard. It was the single logical answer. He’d lost his mind. An insane man running the DOE wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination.

&nbs
p; It would be a huge rationalization, though.

  Standing in the middle of an empty store contemplating things wasn’t getting her any closer to the truth. For some reason, Justin had deserted her. The old lady had deserted her livelihood to a stranger. A shiver went down Rue’s back. Whatever had happened was probably bad. Worse than the transport crash perhaps.

  As she screwed her courage to the sticking post, she pushed past the racks of clothes. The front door was closed, but not locked. Outside, people were standing and staring up into the sky. She hesitated to leave the relative safety of the store, but she couldn’t see enough through the plate glass windows.

  The bell dinged again as she pushed through. The first thing to hit her was the smell. The eggy, sulfurous odor threatened to bring back a day’s worth of non-existent food. She reached out and grabbed the first sleeve she could reach.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Dunno. Stinks, though, don’t it?” The man didn’t look at her. She followed his line of sight, but all she could see was a haze in the air.

  Something in her head was trying not to acknowledge the scent. As if connecting the smell with its cause would make her lose more than her lunch. One more breath in through her nose removed the last traces of her tenuous control and panic began to rise.

  Hydrogen sulfide… “Run!”

  A handful of people turned toward her. None of them seemed to be affected by the deadly gas. Several of others stepped away from her apparent panic. No one stumbled. No one choked. The sidewalk wasn’t littered with the dead and dying. Rue paused and tried to calm herself.

  Think, Rue, think.

  Maybe her estimation was wrong. Maybe some other, less lethal compound was causing the smell. Perhaps some idiot had overturned a transport-load of rotten eggs nearby.

  But nothing innocuous would explain Justin’s disappearance—

  “Rue!”

  She turned toward the sound of her name. Across the street, Crispin was running toward her, holding a mask of some sort over his mouth. Once he reached her, he placed a towel over her face and tied it in place with a bit of string.

  “What’s going on?” She managed to ask before the air got too rancid to allow for speech.

  “We don’t know yet.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her after him. “Justin sent me to get you. What are you doing outside? You were safer in the store.”

  “Then why are we running away from it?”

  “No time to explain, other than we weren’t going to stay there for long. This whole place could go up like a cheap cherry bomb.”

  She repeated the chemical name, but he didn’t answer. Whatever this is, it can’t be hydrogen sulfide anyway, or all these people would be dead. A few of them aren’t even coughing yet.

  As she let Crispin lead her down the street, she watched the people. Most of them were standing and staring. Several weren’t showing much interest at all. Bombs could rain from the sky and they’d all be killed before they could take cover. Rue hadn’t heard anything about any forthcoming war, but she’d read enough about the wars of the last century to comprehend thousands of people could die in an instant.

  A tiny, beeping sound echoed in the strange tranquility. Her companion halted suddenly and pulled a small device out of his pocket. Flipping it open, he spoke his name into the base of it.

  After listening for a moment, he held it aside and spoke to her. “It’s a false alarm. The DOE testing something for use as crowd control. Justin says it’s called methyl mercaptan. They used to use it to scent the natural gas they used as fuel. It’s annoying in small doses but not lethal.”

  He put the device back to his mouth, spoke in hushed tones, and then snapped it closed. Removing the cloth from his face, he acted as if nothing had happened. “We’re supposed to meet at the alternate location. Justin apologizes for running out on you, but it couldn’t be helped.”

  Once he started walking again, she held him back. “How small a dose is supposed to be safe?” She looked back at the crowd continuing to stand around near the store. “They’ve been breathing it for… I’d guess about twenty minutes?” A young girl teetered to one side and slumped against a lamppost. Farther down the block, an elderly man fell over sideways. No one paid any attention to either one.

  “How do you feel?” Crispin asked.

  “Lightheaded, but I’m not sure if it’s because of the gas.”

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  Rue’s mind went back to the diner and how Crispin had eaten her sandwich. “In the tunnels?”

  “Then it’s probably not the gas. If Justin says it’s okay, it’s okay.” He smiled, as though trusting this person was most natural thing in the world.

  She had started to trust Justin, to the point of forgetting he had also been Jenner. Suddenly, she wasn’t so sure giving the man any kind of trust was a good idea.

  “If you say so,” she said, unwilling to voice her concerns. Crispin was obviously oblivious to any potential faults his leader might have. Who was she to point out the man’s flaws?

  “I do.” Crispin chucked her gently under the chin. “You trust me, don’t you?”

  She looked into his dark eyes and saw nothing she could faintly consider false. If Justin was the worm in the apple, Crispin was in the dark about it. “Yes. I trust you.”

  Whether that trust kills me or not remains to be seen.

  The smell was becoming less noticeable as her nose acclimated to it. She wasn’t certain whether euphoria was one of the effects of the gas, but something strange was coming over her. Crispin smiled again, and it was as if the sun rose suddenly. His eyes had a happy twinkle. His lips were thin, but the joy gracing them made them irresistible.

  Less than an hour before, she had gazed at Justin the same way. Gas or not, something strange was happening. Whether it was hormonal or these people had given her some kind of drug remained to be determined. Either way, she needed to get a grip on herself. She needed to figure this sudden attraction out before she did something truly stupid.

  Throwing myself at one or both of these men, for instance.

  “Can we get out of this before I vomit?” she asked, pressing her own cloth tighter against her face. The nausea wasn’t coming from the noxious air. The idea she would become a simpering, love-struck child made her stomach curl.

  Following Crispin through the rapidly emptying streets, she tried to reason her reactions out. Stress could be a major factor in sudden emotion. At least, her medical books had indicated as much. Her own experience had shown stress could bring on both frantic laughter and uncontrollable tears. She had never read anything about it bringing on hysterical attraction. From the novels she read a lot of factors brought on attraction, but at the base of all those reactions lay something solid.

  Love, respect, admiration, lust, gratitude… She did respect Crispin. She was certainly grateful he saved her. Whether she actually admired him as a man remained to be seen. Lust wasn’t a factor at this point.

  With Justin, on the other hand, the one rational aspect she could fathom was animal lust. He hadn’t done a damn thing to inspire any higher emotion, but he was the source of all things lustful. It was definitely the stress talking.

  “Penny for your thoughts.”

  She shook herself and realized he’d tucked her hand into the crook of his arm again. They were back to strolling along as they had earlier in the day. “Pardon me, what?”

  “It’s an old saying. It refers to coins they used to use to buy things. Pennies were the smallest unit.”

  “The smallest unit?” Rue remembered reading about such things. Cash, currency. Dollars, pounds, pennies. “Probably about as much as my thoughts were worth.”

  Lucky for her, he let his question drop. She did not want to tell him what had been on her mind, and she was too contented to lie.

  They walked the rest of the way in companionable silence. Once they reached a tall apartment building, stuck in amongst its twins, she regretted the
need to stop. Not since she was small did she have time to let everything go. In spite of all the things currently on her mind, she took their walk as the opportunity to simply exist. Within the first few steps, she relaxed and let it all go. Uncle Howard, the gas, the uncertainty about Justin, the DOE—it all floated at the back of her mind.

  “Ready?” He released her arm. The loss of contact left her bereft.

  “I’ve been ready since the day Just… err… just after they caught me at the hospital.”

  “Just after you were captured, huh? Or were you going to say the day Justin came for you in the basement?”

  Her jaw dropped, but Crispin’s attitude hadn’t changed. He was as calm and jovial as he had been. “You knew?”

  “If it weren’t for Justin, I wouldn’t have gotten you out of the cells at the DOE. You would’ve been yet another Unequal we couldn’t save.” His smile faltered. “We can’t save them all. Not yet at any rate.”

  Beneath his pain, she saw the certainty he had in his leader. She opened her mouth to tell him about the friend Justin had let die to get to her, but she couldn’t crush the naïve part of him. Time enough for his hero-worship to die later. When Justin showed himself to be what he truly was.

  What is he exactly?

  Rue didn’t have an answer. One way or another, she’d find it, though. Whether to trust Justin or prove he really was Jenner. Whatever else she was there for, she would make unmasking him a priority.

  “If you can’t save them all, why me?” she asked the question haunting the back of her mind before she realized it had moved to the front.

  “You’re special.” He made the statement as if those words told everything.

  “But why?”

  He took one of her hands. “Because you already possess skills none of the rest of us do. Skills none of us have time to acquire.”

  “You sound as if you’re quoting Justin.”

  The tips of Crispin’s ears turned pink. “I’m simply telling you what he told me when he made you a priority.” He touched her hair. “We don’t have many doctors, and none of them have the hands-on experience you do. We need someone who can triage? Am I using the right word?” She gave a little nod. “Justin says we need someone who can evaluate injuries and have the skills to treat them.”