by Megan Lynch
Bristol would have felt sorry for her if it hadn’t been for the way she’d treated Denver—choosing to think of Denver as a slice of a pie in her charts and not as a living, breathing person. Mrs. A. A. deserved a reminder that everyone is an individual capable of emotion, even she.
“You always said you’d deny it, Allison. Maybe this was the wrong way to do this. But I won’t be back tonight. You’ll have to go back to your husband if you want your kicks.”
“I don’t know you!” Mrs. A. A. shrieked, and Bristol decided she’d had enough. Time to go.
He sprinted down the hallway toward the stairwell. Over his shoulder, he shouted, “I’ll always have fond memories of that couch!”
He imagined her seated colleagues jumping to their feet with disgusted expressions and laughed. A crowd formed in the hall, but everyone was too shocked to know what to do. Surely none of their emergency drills accounted for a janitor publicly breaking off an affair with the boss, so the employees must have felt paralyzed. Bristol took advantage and ran as fast as he could before the spell could be broken. Sure enough, he had a brief glimpse of Denver. Her incredulous smile made her stand out from the dumbstruck faces around her. Bristol looked forward to laughing with her later, but for now he just ran, down the stairs, past the security guard at the front, and out into the street, feeling like a little kid’s picture of a hero.
Chapter Twelve
There was blood on Samara’s sheets.
She’d noticed the dampness right after she put her feet on the floor and felt shocked. Had she wet the bed, like a toddler? Even with no one to see, she burned with shame until she saw the red smear on the cheap plastic white sheet. What happened? She checked her body, but the only place it could have come from seemed to be inside her. There was a puddle in her underwear, and her inner thighs were sticky.
Somehow it felt wrong to tell Dad, but she had to tell someone. She was dying! There was no other possible explanation. She didn’t know how long she’d be able to function like this, but it couldn’t last long. She wished her mother were here.
She called The Public Medline and listened to a robotic voice present the menu of options. Was she a patient? A provider? A caregiver? Did she need to know the hours of operation? Directions to the office? Did she have questions about any injections (Get all of your injections on time, every time! the voice warned). She tried to slow her breath so as not to panic.
“Please state your emergency,” the robot’s voice said.
“I’m bleeding from inside. It’s coming out of my…” She didn’t know what to call it. All she knew were slang terms, and those didn’t feel like the right words to say on The Medline.
“When was the date of your last focus injection?”
What does that have to do with it? “May 6,” Samara answered.
“Please report to your school or workplace for an immediate injection. Bleeding will cease shortly thereafter. Thank you for calling The Public Medline, a service of your Worldwide Metric Government.”
She tapped her watch to end the call and breathed a sigh of relief. Come to think of it, she was due for another injection. It had been such a busy time that she’d forgotten all about them. Fox County Detention Center must have too. So that’s what the medicine’s really for. She’d always thought it just helped her think more clearly.
She cleaned herself and packed a change of underwear in her bag in case it happened again before she got her shot.
When she arrived at work, she walked straight to the guard behind the front door and asked how soon she’d be able to get an injection. The guard, a young woman about her age, looked striking in her tight navy jumpsuit with gold trim.
“We don’t get those here,” she told Samara. “Are you bleeding? The employee locker room has pads. Just go in and look in the cabinet.” The guard’s watch began to blink with a yellow light. “Excuse me,” she said and answered a phone call.
Samara went to the locker room. Inside the cabinet were pillow-like tissues that, once unwrapped, were sticky on one side. She puzzled over them for a moment, but it didn’t take her long to realize what they were for. She noticed dampness and found that her underwear was once again soaked in blood. Her hands shook as she changed into her new pair and placed the pad on them. How long would this continue?
At work, she was distracted. She felt a little funny, but she was unquestionably still able to perform her duties. Halfway through the day, she was mortified to see that she needed another pad, as the first one had been saturated. She placed the first one in her bag with her red-stained underwear. She didn’t know what to do with either, but she’d figure it out later.
On her way home, she sat on the back row of the bus to conduct some searches on her watch in private. All of the information listed seemed to be censored. If she was a medical professional, the tiny hologram projected on her lap read, she’d be able to put in her number and bypass the security page. She turned off her watch with a huff, causing the hologram to disappear, and rested her head back on the seat. She grimaced and massaged her stomach. All this worry seemed to be making her sick.
At her stop, she stood and stepped off, eager to get home.
“Hey!” A voice came from the street. “Samara!”
Irritation rang through Samara’s whole being until she saw that the person walking toward her was Bristol. The sight of him made her think of the brick wall outside her window, which, of course, had a new image on it.
“Hi. Bristol, right?”
“Yep.” Bristol’s smile was wide and warm.
“Oh. I didn’t know if that was your real name or not. You also told me last time that you made soup,” she said, eying his janitor’s uniform.
“I did—I do. I borrowed this.”
“Quite a fashion statement.”
“No, just something stupid for my…friend.” He told her about his friend and her misery, and then recounted his adventure in the Department of Domestic Affairs. As he talked, Samara’s stomach pain seemed further away, and when he got to the part about breaking it off with Mrs. A. A., Samara laughed for the first time all day.
“I mean, it’s not really funny. You could have been caught, and then you’d be in real trouble,” she said, though her cheeks were still high on her face. “I wish I had someone to do things like that for me.”
“Well, what do you need? I’m a vigilante in a one-man justice club. At your service.”
She laughed again, shook her head, and looked down at her watch. Not flashing. “Come with me.”
She took him to the fire escape outside her building. While Bristol waited on the street below, Samara climbed to the second floor, unhinged her watch, and stashed it in her bag.
“Won’t your dad find it?” Bristol asked.
She climbed back down and readjusted her skirt. “No, he won’t. My dad’s probably drunk already. I don’t want you to think any less of him, though. He just misses my mom.”
“But he’s still got you.”
“I don’t want to talk about this. I want to show you something.”
She pointed toward the wall covered in fresh plastic. They dove under it and plunged themselves into a world of blue light. On the wall, there was a small, simple painting of a bowl of fruit. Samara was disappointed to see Bristol shrink at the sight of it.
“I thought you’d think…well, I think it’s funny.”
“What?”
“This fruit. It’s like the kind of antique Art people in high tiers have in their houses, except it’s here for us all, outside.”
Bristol immediately brightened, his chest swelling. “That’s right!”
“That’s what I thought when I first saw it this morning. I don’t know if it’s right, but that’s my idea.”
“No, I think you’ve really hit the nail on the—Samara, is that blood?”
Samara looked down to see a trail of red, darkened in the blue-tinted space, streaming down her leg. She froze. “I…yes, it is.”
&nbs
p; Bristol took out a handkerchief and handed it to her. She ran it up her leg to the hemline of her skirt.
“I didn’t know Fives bleed too. I thought it was just unregistered,” he said.
Samara looked up eagerly. “You bleed like this too? From the inside? Every day? Or does it stop and start?”
“No, I don’t. It’s just the women. I’m sorry. It happens for a few days every month. Is this…the first time?”
Samara nodded, told him about her lack of focus injections, and confessed she thought she’d be dead by this afternoon. She was glad when he did not laugh.
“You’re not dying. Unregistered women cope just fine. They complain, but they live. If your stomach hurts, I could get you some pills.”
Samara frowned. “I don’t want any.”
Bristol looked perplexed for a moment. He smiled and shook his head. “No, it’s not what you think. Just medicine to help your stomach while it’s happening. They don’t have them in pharmacies.”
“But you know where to get them?” Under her crossed arms, as if on cue, her insides contracted, and she winced.
“Let me bring them to you tonight. I’ll just set them on the fire escape outside your window. If you want to take them, great—if not, just throw them out.”
She looked at the handkerchief balled in her hand. “How will you get away? Aren’t you chipped?”
He examined the bulge on the back of his hand. “You know, I’m not sure if this thing is even still active. It used to rumble sometimes when I was a kid, but it hasn’t done that in years. It’s ancient, though, and it only reads body heat. I just put a glove on, and then an ice pack under that, then I’m free.”
“You can’t be free. There are cameras everywhere.”
“We’ve got ways around those too.”
“It’s a different life, being unregistered, isn’t it?”
“Maybe. But we’re not as different as you think.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“I told you. I’ve got a vigilante nature.” His eyes wandered over to the fruit. “And you’re helping me too. I like talking about this.”
“About art?”
“It’s generous to call this art. But I do like hearing what you’ve got to say about it.”
To her surprise, her dad wasn’t drunk when she got home. Instead, he was drinking a glass of ice water and talking to her mom, whose face was projected on the white wall.
“Mom!”
“Baby!” said her mom’s floating head. “How’s my baby?”
Her dad’s face was glowing, turning from mother to daughter.
“I’m fine,” she stammered. She had just been wishing she could talk to her mom about her little problem, but now that she was here, Samara suddenly felt ashamed by it. She could just imagine what her mother would say: What kind of a job doesn’t provide focus injections? The last thing her mom needed was more disappointment. “Fine! Things are going well. How are you?”
Her mom’s image looked around, as if ensuring her privacy. “I’m fine, for now. But I was just telling your dad: I need to get out soon.”
“I heard you were near a bad place.”
“We are. And the worst part of it is that I think some of these people are involved. They’re helping runaways.”
“Where are they even running away to?”
“That’s the craziest part. There aren’t any more large cities to the north of us, so they’re just fleeing to the country. North of us is just acres and acres of land and ruins of old cities. Unstable unregs are trying to just run up there and live off the land, I guess.”
“Why don’t you report it, Mom? Report the people around you if you think they’re involved.”
“If I do that and I’m wrong, I could be here picking berries for the rest of my life. And if someone reports me and I can’t prove otherwise…”
Samara imagined her mother in prison, shoveling food down her throat to improve efficiency. She took her dad’s hand. “We’ll get you out. We’re saving everything we can.”
“I know you are. I love you, baby.”
“I love you too.”
After they said their goodbyes and ended the call, her dad wordlessly dumped the ice water down the sink and replaced it with bourbon, filling the glass to the top.
The next morning, there was a large red coffee mug on the fire escape with several carnation-pink pills inside. She rolled them around the bottom of the mug, wishing she knew for sure what Drift looked like. In the next room, her dad belched and groaned. With her hand still on the handle of the mug, she walked to the incinerator and tossed the pills in. Though it felt like she was being physically eaten from the inside, she couldn’t afford the risk.
Chapter Thirteen
Denver married Stephen on a Friday afternoon, right after work. The whole thing had taken about four hours. Mrs. A. A.—a few weeks removed but barely recovered from her traumatic experience with the strange handyman no one seemed to know—arrived with Mr. Stephen Steiner already in tow and took them to another office to sign the necessary papers. After that, the three of them went to the cafeteria to eat a meal together. Denver had chosen a green salad with roasted peppers, almonds, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Normally she wouldn’t have eaten anything so extravagant in front of a person of a lower tier, but this was her last time eating Three food. Fours ate cheaper ingredients because if everyone ate fresh fruits and vegetables, there wouldn’t be enough to go around, obviously. They’d both received an adequate amount of information in each other’s files. Mrs. A. A. was there to make suggestions of topics they might discuss. Mostly she just read the news on her watch, and when there was an awkward silence, she’d sigh and say things like, “Mmm…favorite sports teams? Ohh…what did you do last Saturday?” Whether Denver had anything interesting to say or not, she tried to keep talking to avoid another suggestion.
Every time A. A. cut in, Denver felt like the marriage was getting off to a rocky start. She’d heard rumors that these officials could tell which marriages would last and which would end in divorce from the first meeting. The last thing she wanted to do was to imagine Mrs. A. A. going back to the water cooler, laughing about how sure she was that the mixed-tier couple would last the minimum sixteen years before splitting. Denver droned on, boring herself, until she caught Stephen’s eyes flicker and his lips part to take in breath. While he talked, she thought of nothing but what to say next.
After dinner, they parted for the first and last time, each going back to their family homes for one more night.
“Can I see him?” asked Bristol.
Denver held out her wrist and projected his head in the air.
“He’s…handsome!”
“I know.” Denver’s face was like stone, but she had a thought that brightened her. “By the way, I saw Allison today. She looks good. Might just be getting over you.”
Bristol grinned. “I hope she and Mr. Ansberry can come through this together.”
Denver laughed and shook her head. Then her face became more somber. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“You’re reaching your limit.”
“Hear me out,” she said softly. “What you did at work…it was funny, but it’s got to be the last time.”
Bristol snorted. “I doubt they’d let me in again anyway.”
“Shut up a second. I’m serious. It’s a miracle you haven’t been C-A-U-G-H-T yet.” She glanced down at her watch. It remained still. “I’m going away and it’ll just be you and Mom here. You need to stop now. Stop the painting and the practical jokes. Stop messing around with your life. If not for your own sake, then for Mom’s.”
“You’re going to try and convince me that you care about Mom now? You two haven’t spoken for weeks. Did you think I wouldn’t notice? What’s going on?”
“You’re trying to change the subject. You promised you’d stop someday, and I’m asking you—no, I’m telling you—the time has to be now. That guy who was arrested for your painting is in prison
right now. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“What are you afraid of? I’m always careful.”
“Just—no more painting. No more revenge. And I know it’s crossed your mind already—I know you, Bristol— do not turn yourself in.”
Bristol lowered his shoulders and bowed his head slightly. “For the guy in prison. The innocent one?”
“Yes, him. I don’t know what he was doing out after curfew either, but it couldn’t have been good.”
“Denver, I’m out after curfew almost every night!”
“Not anymore.” Denver leaned in. “Promise.”
Bristol looked at her and nodded. “Okay.”
Denver left him and stepped inside the bathroom. Once inside and alone with her thoughts, she reached for her watch but felt only her bare wrist. She’d taken it off at the door. She was technically married now. This had been what she was waiting on to be happy. Her last night with Bristol and Mom, and all she could do was pick fights and lock herself away. She pressed her fingertips into her temples. Get it together.
She undressed and ran water in the tub. For once, she didn’t care if she exceeded her water allowance for the month—that was a problem for another day. In the mirror, she played with different angles to guess at her best side. She looked toned from straight-on, though a little flabby from the side. She sucked in her gut and looked again. Better. Something bizarre caught her eye—was one of her breasts bigger than the other? Why hadn’t she noticed before? She felt with her hands, confirming the imbalance. This threw off the look of straight-on. She closed her eyes, blew a long breath out, and made a mental note to make sure to be seen from the left.
Denver liked her bath scalding, even in June. It made her sweat, but she didn’t care because it seemed she could finally feel all the little muscles in her legs and feet relax. She had a friend once who said she had a hard time “letting go.” A boy named Harold. She’d met him in the eighth grade and used to fantasize from time to time about being paired with him. But that had stopped suddenly one day a few years later when he told her she was trying too hard for her future.
