Unequal

by B. E. Sanderson

  Nodding to Captain Riley, she stepped from the room they’d ensconced her uncle in. “Have I proven myself?”

  “In more ways than one. I wish we had someone with your skills when we went up against the border faction last year. We lost more men than we should have.”

  “Border faction?”

  “The outlying districts…” He shook his head. “Not something the DOE broadcast on the newsnet.”

  Rue opened her mouth but decided against her inquiry. There were a lot of things she was in the dark about. Not the least of which was why someone who seemed as sane as the captain would work for the DOE. But this wasn’t the time to delve into it. She had things to attend to first. And the next on her list was making sure Justin would never hurt anyone again.

  Crammed in with Riley and a half dozen soldiers, Rue rode the elevator back to the fifth floor where Justin would be waiting. He was going to answer some tough questions whether he wanted to or not. She never imagined she’d be in favor of torture, but seeing her uncle stretched out on a hospital bed put all kinds of ideas in her head. Whether she would act on any of them remained to be seen.

  The doors slid open, and Rue was astonished to find a serene scene. No surprises, no tragedies. Merely a group of people lounging around, waiting. And Justin exuded a calm she wouldn’t have expected.

  The captain whistled and his men snapped to attention. He nodded once and then tilted his head toward Justin. His men surrounded the bemused figure.

  “I’m guessing your surgery went well.” Justin pushed himself up to a full sitting position. “I knew when I found you I’d chosen correctly.” His gaze picked its way through the new arrivals. “I’m also guessing Charisse wasn’t on her best behavior down there. Don’t be too hard on her. She’s had a rough life.”

  “Shiraz is fine,” Rue said, unable to wrap her brain around the new name. “She’s spending some quality time with one of the nice men you introduced me to.” She thought about approaching Justin but if she got within striking distance, her actions wouldn’t be conducive to achieving her goals. As much as she wanted to hit the man, she needed information more.

  “What did you think you were doing?” she asked him. “I mean, I assume you have some kind of grand plan and you aren’t merely a psychotic freak.”

  “You assume too much,” Bruno said, walking up behind her. “I can’t pinpoint a single reason why anyone would do what he’s done.”

  To their surprise, Justin laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound. In fact, the longer it went on the more Rue wondered if assuming he wasn’t deranged was a good idea.

  All at once, the sound ceased. The silence was more shocking than the maniacal laughter had been. “You were always so short-sighted. Look at the world around you, Bruno. There are a million and one reasons why.” He sat back against the sofa he occupied like some kind of emperor. “Oh, I admit all of my choices didn’t turn out exactly as planned, but they had reasoning behind them. I’m not insane.”

  “I wouldn’t lay money on it.”

  “And you’re a gambling man?” Justin snorted. “I don’t think so. You want things in a nice orderly way. You need everything in black and white. So much like our little doctor here. The two of you should hook up. I mean, if you don’t get killed.”

  Bruno opened his mouth, but Rue stopped him. “Enough of this,” she said. “Nothing could justify what you’ve done. But if you have reasons, I’m sure everyone here wants to hear them.”

  A few soldiers shook their heads. Captain Riley growled something to the negative. If Justin didn’t start talking soon, Rue would have a tough time keeping a handle on this. Hell, if he did start talking, she might not be able to maintain control.

  Looking each person in the eye, she said. “Before this gets nasty, remember I’m the one who has to patch up your wounds. The person who starts something is the last person who gets treated. Something to consider before you start pulling triggers.”

  “You’re assuming the person who starts this will be injured at all.” Justin smiled.

  “And it won’t be you, right?” she countered. “So you might want to turn down the snide.”

  “Sure. You wanted my reasons for all this?” He paused. Rue was sure it was for dramatic effect, but she wasn’t willing to give in to his teleplay. “Okay, so that’s a given. Do you want the specifics or the general, overall reason?”

  “Go ahead and get it over with.”

  Justin laughed. “You’re ruining it for me, you know. I hoped it would never come to this. Alone in the dark, I played the whole scenario out in my head so many times. Except you’re not reacting the way I imagined you would.”

  Bruno shrugged off Rue’s hand and stood over Justin. “Cut the crap.”

  “You want the reason? Really.”

  “Quit stalling.”

  “It’s not stalling. It’s drama. If this world hadn’t been the way it is, I probably would’ve been an actor instead of a leader. Although if you consider the two occupations, there really isn’t much diff—”

  The large man wrapped one hand around the front of Justin’s shirt and pulled him upward.

  “Fine. Fine. Whatever. I did this for Rue.”

  Silence fell over the room. A few, hushed whispers eventually broke through it, but the volume didn’t rise above the rush of air conditioning.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she asked.

  “You, Rue. I did this for you.” His grin widened to Cheshire proportions. “Well, and for people like you. Do you have any idea how many Citizens of this fine state want to be something other than what the Department of Equalization says they should be? Your precious uncle dreamed of being an architect. Poor Crispin wanted to be a sculptor for petesakes. He was really the one who did the sculpture of Max you loved so much.” All traces of his relaxed posture disappeared. “I wanted to be an actor, damn it. I’m quite good at it, don’t you agree? But instead the great minds at the DOE thought I’d be best as a Citizen Enforcer, so I could work my way up to Citizen Executioner. Instead of training to make people happy, I spent my youth training to make them miserable.”

  He leaned forward with such menace the soldiers pushed him back with their gun barrels. Justin ignored them. “And I had a lot of experience at miserable. We all do, don’t we? Well, they wanted it, so I gave them as much miserable as I could manufacture. I took your addlebrained uncle and turned him into the perfect vessel for misery.

  “All those Unequals striving so damn hard to be happy. They didn’t realize all they needed to be happy was to accept how unhappy they were. I gave them that.” He settled himself on the sofa once more. “Think about it, Rue. I gave you more happiness in the past few weeks than you had your whole damn life. You’ve been up to your armpits in blood and guts, and you loved every second of it.”

  Crossing his arms over his chest, he winked at her. “You’re welcome.”

  “You’re sick.” The tiny hairs along her arms quivered as her skin crawled. “I never wanted this.”

  “You can tell yourself whatever you want but seriously, Rue, consider what I’ve done. Every bit of exertion would be moot if there wasn’t some problem somewhere. The plumber doesn’t find happiness in well running pipes. If the sludge is moving perfectly, no one has any need for him. He gets bored. Boredom makes him unhappy. One person flushes a sock down the drain and his life perks up. The way I look at it, I simply flushed a thousand socks down a thousand drains. This city is seeing more productivity than it has since the damn Equality Laws were enacted.”

  In some twisted way, Justin’s logic made sense. But logical or not, his reasoning was perverted. “There are things to be done in the world without causing destruction.”

  “My way is simpler. Consider it a shortcut to happiness.”

  “That’s fucked up,” one of the soldiers said. A dagger-glance from Riley snapped him back to attention.

  “To the closed mind, perhaps.” The sick bastard shrugged. “As I said, I got tire
d of waiting. If someone else wasn’t going to fix this place, I would. And I did. All better. Isn’t that what the doctors say?”

  “What about the people you killed?”

  “Sometimes a few mice have to be sacrificed before the experiment succeeds.”

  Rue slapped him. She couldn’t help herself. She was beyond words. How anyone could sink so low was beyond her. Captain Riley stepped forward with his weapon raised, but she stopped him with a glare. All the anger she’d held within must’ve poured from her eyes because the battle hardened warrior accepted her look as a command.

  One of his soldiers didn’t. He struck out with the butt of his gun before anyone could stop him. Once his fellows had wrestled him away, the room grew quiet once more.

  Justin rubbed his split lip. To his credit, the soldier’s action had stunned him enough to keep him silent.

  “One more statement about mice and experiments and these guys will beat you to death. I might let them. Lord knows you deserve it.” She eased away until there was plenty of room between them. She wasn’t sure she could stop herself from carrying out a beating instead of the soldiers. Never before had she wanted to end someone’s life. Justin could be her first but though he had earned every ounce of pain her training could provide, she wouldn’t do it to herself. Some things were more important than giving in to impulses—no matter how satisfying they might seem at the time.

  Once she composed herself, she began again. “You admit to the hospital bombing.”

  “If you really need an admission, fine. I admit I ordered the bombing. But if you want guilt, you won’t find it here. Maybe if you look at the people who created this society, you’ll find the guilt you’re looking for.”

  “The people you killed didn’t create this.”

  “Maybe not, but they kept it alive.” He wiped the blood from his chin with the back of one hand and held it out toward her. “This isn’t merely a rush of liquid. It’s individual cells all moving in the same direction. Cancer doesn’t start out as tumor. But if enough cancerous cells band together, you have a life-threatening growth. If you think about it, Rue, we really aren’t so different. You remove disease from the individual body. I was trying to remove a disease from the body of our society.”

  Rue shook her head sadly. “Mankind isn’t a group of cells working as a unit. You want to pretend you’re different? That you’re somehow changing things from the way the old DOE was operating to your new vision of how society ought to work? Funny thing is, you were working so hard to be the opposite of the DOE, you became exactly like them. You aren’t a doctor, and you sure as hell aren’t mankind’s savior. You’re just a sad, strange, little man with a god complex.”

  Lowering herself into a nearby chair, she allowed her fury to drain away. She couldn’t sustain her anger anymore. As warped as his ideas were, his plans had been to fix something awful. His problem was he couldn’t see he’d been fixing the awful by creating something truly horrendous. She could talk until she was hoarse, but one look into Justin’s eyes told her he would never get it. You can’t change a group by destroying it. You can’t even change one by infiltrating it and throwing out a new set of ideas. The best way to create change was to change each individual.

  Except, they didn’t want individuals. “Manipulating the whole is so much easier than the individual pieces.”

  “What are you talking about?” Riley asked.

  “The DOE… Justin… Everything.”

  “You’re still not making any sense.”

  “Turn a multitude of individuals into exactly what you want them to be and anyone from the outside would have a tough time changing them back. The group. The pod. The herd. Whatever the DOE was, and whoever was responsible for it, they knew what they were doing. They made everyone equal, homogenous. One big lump of humanity where no one person stood out from the rest. Sheep are so much easier to control in a herd. The stragglers and the strays are the problem, so they eliminated them.

  “Then along comes Justin with his ideas, and he sees what the DOE is doing. He might understand it’s wrong but on some basic level, he saw that their method worked. So he stopped the disappearances. He turned the Unequals into soldiers instead of corpses. The individuals they were trying to become were wiped out either way.”

  She pointed toward the man she’d first encountered in the basement. “What did you want to be when you grew up?”

  “I am what I want to be.”

  “That’s no answer. What did you dream about before the DOE made you a soldier?” She stood and once she was toe to toe with the man, she poked a finger into his chest. A low growl rumbled his ribcage. “What secret hope did you hold? The one you hid so no one would ever find out you weren’t as Equal as you pretended.”

  His eyes hardened. For a second, Rue was sure he wouldn’t answer. Once he did, the words came out as little more than a whisper.

  “What?”

  “A veterinarian.” This time he spoke loud enough for Rue to hear but too low for his comrades.

  “Do you still want it for yourself? Because if we really fix what is broken, you could have what you want.”

  His gaze swung from her face to Justin’s to Captain Riley. The captain nodded for him to answer.

  “Yes.” Staring at a point behind Rue’s head, he continued, “It’s not a real job anymore, but I read these books… Herriot was the author’s name. He was an animal doctor. After I read the stories he wrote, it was all I could dream about.”

  “We have animals in the world, even if they’re not kept as pets anymore. You could become a doctor to them if you really wanted to. All we have to do is fix this.” Turning toward the crowd, a lump rose in her chest. “Is it really so broken we can’t fix it?”

  Bruno’s heavy hand dropped onto her shoulder. His quick squeeze eased her pain a little. One person—one individual—understood. Maybe it was all she could ask for.

  “It seems to me your little theory isn’t going over as well as you hoped.” Justin pushed himself away from the sofa. “And if you don’t mind, I have work to do. Feel free to keep using the hospital. I’ll let you know when I need it again.”

  He managed two steps before the crush of uniformed men stopped him.

  “Please. You can’t really believe by wanting to be a doggie doctor, you can be one. There’s too much work left to do for anyone to get what they want. There are too many Equal loving Citizens left for anyone to be an individual.” He pushed against the muscled chest in front of him. “Let me through.”

  No one moved away. Rue was just happy none of them moved toward him either. Justin was held tight without being harmed.

  “You can’t seriously believe anything will change. The Citizenry will hunt you down and, DOE or no DOE, they’ll make sure you disappear.”

  A little laugh bubbled into the room. After a moment, Rue realized it came from her own chest. “The Citizenry? The ones you bullied and bombed and threatened into capitulation? They don’t care anymore. They simply want hot food, a roof over their heads where they can live without fear, and medical attention if they need it. They’ve been without so many things for so long as soon as anyone offers them a chance for more, they’ll be happy with it.”

  “For now. For now, they’ll be happy. What happens once one of them feels they aren’t quite as good as one of you? The resentment will rise up and choke them. They’ll hate you all over again.”

  “We’ll simply have to handle it on an individual basis. One by one. And someday, maybe we won’t have too much hate to deal with. We start here. We start rebuilding all the broken things. We get things working the way they’re supposed to. But first, we eliminate the fear.”

  Heads were nodding all around her, but several people seemed unconvinced. Their opinions wouldn’t change overnight anymore than the ideals of a whole society. Still, enough of those gathered agreed with her. Enough of them saw hope in the future where despair had reigned for so long.

  It wasn’t much, but it
was a start.

  “Maybe you can’t be a veterinarian tomorrow, or Bruno here can’t teach yet, or the Captain won’t start the little farm he might be dreaming of as soon as he’d wish. It might be years before we all get our dreams.” Rue thought back over the years she worked to attain her dream and hoped none of them had as rough a road. “But know this. No one has to dream in the dark anymore.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The machines monitoring Howard Winston’s life hummed softly in the background. Rue wasn’t sure if he’d survive. She’d given him the best chance but, ultimately, his survival was up to him. Hopefully, the traumatic events leading up to his gunshot weren’t enough to sap him of his will to live. His mental state was reduced to no better than a child. Children were resilient. Maybe some of the resilience would rub off on him.

  Shifting next to his bed, Rue uncrossed her legs and hefted her feet onto a nearby chair. Ever since the surgery, her bottom had been glued to some piece of furniture in his room. If she had to be uncomfortable, she might as well make the best of it.

  Her movement upset the pile of papers on her lap. She caught it before it fell to the floor and totally ruined her concentration. The topmost piece was a list of the remaining officers within the DOE. She didn’t recognize any of the names, but she could bet those three inquisitors she encountered during her first time in their jail were on there somewhere. They would be the first to be given a choice, change their ways or leave.

  The list was longer than she had feared. Shuffling through the stack, she located a similar list from a decade before. It was a third the size of the current list. The more she read, the more she broke the DOE into pre-Justin and post-Justin.

  Pre-Justin, the DOE had been less of a behemoth than she had assumed. Some computer somewhere at headquarters contained a file with all the names of everyone who had been disappeared. Thousands of people had simply vanished over the years. When the DOE took its first unholy steps, thousands disappeared every week. And then, disappeared had truly meant dead.