Children of the Uprising Collection

by Megan Lynch

  Taken aback at the we, Jude gaped at him. But there was no time for processing; the second bell was about to ring. “I don’t know. I feel like I should ask for help, but who’d help me?”

  Kopecky seemed to also sense the urgency and spoke faster. “Someone who likes you. Someone who can get outside. Someone who has power, but not too much of it.”

  “Boys, I think you’re done there.” Miss Shepherd’s feet had appeared beside him. “Join the line, please.”

  Kopecky whipped his head around and grinned widely at Jude. “Yes, ma’am. By the way, my friend needs to talk to you.”

  “Of course,” said Miss Shepherd. The inmates left the room, several glancing back to see if Jude would join them. Jude made some parting motions as though he was about to leave, but hung back right at the door. Miss Shepherd took his shoulder and led him into the hall.

  “Whatever it is,” said Miss Shepherd in a low tone, hardly moving her lips, “you’ll have to give it to me out in the yard.”

  “The yard?”

  “You’ll understand in…” She looked down at her watch. “Twenty seconds. Let’s move, join your classmates.”

  Jude hadn’t gone three steps before the fire alarm went off.

  Minutes later, all the inmates were in the yard. As Jude was the last person in line, Miss Shepherd had tasked him with carrying her books. The warden and the guards patrolled the lines of boys who stood obediently with their palms pressed into the sides of their hips.

  “How did you do that?” whispered Jude.

  “Do what?” Miss Shepherd asked.

  Jude remembered what Kopecky had said about avoiding trouble by keeping quiet and decided didn’t need to know, anyway. He kept his eyes forward and lowered his right hand into his pocket, produced the bag and swiftly hid it on the inside cover of the top book. One of the guards must have seen the cover move, because she came over and said, “All boys must stand at attention during fire drills, Miss Shepherd.”

  “Sorry,” said Miss Shepherd and took the books from Jude, pressing them to her chest.

  “No problem,” the guard said. “I heard this was your idea, Miss Shepherd.”

  “They do surprise fire drills at the higher-tier schools nowadays. I simply suggested it to the warden. I’m glad she approved it.”

  Jude pressed his hand on his trousers, took in the outside of his empty pocket with his fingertips, and felt delirious with a strange sensation—for the first time, someone had risked something for him for no reason; he hadn’t had to earn this kindness or prove he was worthy of it, it was just given. For the first time in eleven years, Jude had been shown love.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bristol washed and dried his hands again and then looked up at the little white screen for the next order. He reached into the oven for the potato, opened it, and stacked the ingredients. Reciting the little list in his head helped his hands to work fast: cheesesourcreambutterchives. The abundance of dairy on this order made him certain this was for a Three. His sister was forever gobbling yogurt, especially in the weeks leading up to her marriage and demotion, when she’d no longer be able to buy it.

  The kitchen manager, who looked perpetually on the edge of breaking the silence with fanatical screaming, marched over to his station, pointed at the potato, and said, “Now!”

  Bristol threw it on a plate and tossed it to him, savoring the momentum of his movements.

  The kitchen staff wore all black, so it was striking when the owner walked by in his blue button-down shirt and yellow-striped tie. Whatever his name was, he usually only stayed a few minutes to tell the kitchen manager that table eleven was in a hurry or someone had messed up and put beans on a plate when they should have given it bread. But this time, he walked right past the kitchen manager, and Bristol had only a moment to brace himself as he realized the owner was headed in his direction.

  He got closer to Bristol and looked at him in the eye. “You make the soup?” he asked.

  Bristol nodded, and the man smiled and said, “You have an admirer. Says it’s so good that she wants to thank you.”

  Bristol froze. Was this a trick? He’d never heard anything of the kind in his six years of working here.

  The owner squeezed his shoulder. “I’m saying I want you to come with me. Hang your apron there and walk out into the dining room so she can say thanks. I can show you where she’s sitting.”

  He took off his apron and followed him. They rounded the corner, and his eyes and ears worked to adjust from the bright, stark light and clanging in the kitchen to the soft, dim dining room, where the same quiet jazz song played all day, so low you wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t listening. After a few steps, he saw a familiar face in the distance, framed by cinnamon curls. He quickly looked down and tried to brush some flour from his sleeve. They stopped at her table, where she was eating alone.

  “Miss, here’s the cook that prepared your soup tonight,” said the man in the yellow tie.

  Samara looked up at Bristol with a strange look. Was it relief? She looked at him like he’d just rescued her kitten from a tree. “Oh, thank you! Yes, the soup was excellent.”

  “We don’t get many requests like this,” the owner told her. “But then again, we don’t get many Fives in here, either! Mostly we’re a low Three, high Four establishment. They’re all used to this caliber of cuisine, I think, so they don’t make a fuss. It’s nice to hear some gratitude!”

  Bristol felt his face redden. What was she doing here, and what was this meal costing her? “Thank you,” he said. “It’s really a simple recipe.”

  “Quality ingredients make the difference!”

  The owner wasn’t unkind, and never passed on an opportunity to have his ego stroked, so it didn’t surprise Bristol that he’d obliged and brought him into the dining room. But the lights in here were too low and Samara was a little too beautiful in them, and he felt the intense desire to walk out the door, preferably with her.

  “Yes,” said Samara, holding out a small white plate, and on it, a butter knife and with something wrapped in a napkin. “The only thing is…well, the bread that came with it…I hate to say…had a piece of mold on it.”

  The owner looked thunderstruck. Bristol locked eyes with Samara and, as if rehearsed, grabbed the plate from her.

  “Don’t unwrap it. I wouldn’t want to cause a scene. Would you just throw it in the incinerator, there?” She pointed directly behind Bristol, and before the owner could object, Bristol took the napkin from the plate and threw it into the incinerator. He’d been putting those dinner rolls on plates and scraping them off again for years. Whatever was wrapped inside was no dinner roll. In his right hand, he nervously twirled the butter knife. Samara gave him a strange look, but he was sure he’d imagined it a second later because she just smiled and thanked the owner again.

  Bristol and his boss walked back into the kitchen, where Bristol expected to be berated in front of his coworkers. Tossing napkins in the incinerator was strictly against the rules, and he’d never broken a rule at work before, nor had anyone else. But if he’d had any objections to Bristol’s behavior or thought that encounter was strange, he made no indication. He squeezed Bristol’s shoulder again, congratulated him, and left.

  At the end of his shift, Bristol pulled on his orange vest, indicating he was allowed to be out past curfew, and walked home, thinking of the paint combinations he could play with to recreate her eye color. Sort of a brown-red, but he’d like to see them again in the light. And then in the darkness too. He walked a block and a half past his front door. He realized it and laughed quietly. Now he knew why Denver and all the other registered kids received those focus injections every week from the time they were twelve—the opposite sex could be distracting. How would he see her if he was registered? She’d be just another person, as surely he was to her, no different from her bus driver or Yellow-tie Man or even her future spouse. The thought made his fists ball up and his stomach rise.

  He opened t
he door to another surprise: Denver shrieked at the sight of him and pulled him into a back-breaking hug.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked as loudly as his compressed lungs would allow.

  “Stephen’s working late, so I got special permission to spend the night here! How have you been?”

  Unable to hold it in, he told her all about Samara at the restaurant. As he was talking, he realized how much he’d missed his sister in the few weeks she’d been away. No one listened like she did, quietly engaged until he was really finished.

  “Are you going to turn her in?” she asked.

  “What? No! She’s my…”

  “Friend?”

  “Well, kind of. I think she wants to be my friend anyway. Or I want to be hers.”

  “Friendship is built on trust. What reason has she given you to trust her?”

  Bristol quietly considered.

  “She’s very pretty.”

  Denver scoffed and rolled her eyes. She started to say something, but Bristol wasn’t listening. Something was dawning on him. The look Samara had given him when he spun her knife. Did she know? Were they friends?

  Denver sighed and continued. “Trust but verify. It’s an ancient piece of advice, but it’s good. At Domestic Affairs, we watch, we listen, we follow… Pretty much every aspect of a person’s life is trackable nowadays. A lot of the time, they give much more information than what we ask for. All you have to do is get her ID number and her life will be so open you’ll feel like she’s your other sister.”

  They had never had this conversation before. Bristol had never felt entitled to ask. “What kind of information do you get at DA?”

  “Oh, lots of stuff. We can use the GPS to see everywhere she goes. Use the meal tracker to know what she eats and how much. We can see the other IDs around her to know who she’s talking with. We can even see what time she goes to sleep and wakes up based on her blood pressure and breathing patterns. It’s all in the watch, and then it’s all on our wall.” Denver tapped her watch to project a bright white rectangle on the wall in front of the sofa. “ID search,” she said clearly into the face. The white rectangle displayed her words and added, Please type the ID number.

  Denver looked to Bristol. “Well? Do you know it?”

  He did. He had seen the number on her watchband the first day he met her, which had been emblazoned into his mind ever since. The temptation to know what she was doing at this moment was too great. He heard himself saying them.

  “Five-two-four-nine-two-seven.”

  Immediately, her picture appeared.

  “Now this is what everyone can see—”

  Bristol snickered. “Everyone with a watch.”

  “Yes, everyone with a watch, if they know her number. So here you can see her favorite foods, her family tree, her games and her high scores…not much of a game player…”

  Bristol searched the screen, greedily trying to pick up as much of Samara as possible. She liked baked carrots and blackberries. She had a mother and a father who looked kind. She hadn’t played any games in the past year.

  “Interesting,” said Denver suddenly.

  “What is?”

  “She’s a Five, but she’s an education manager!”

  “Yeah, at a juvenile detention center.”

  “Yes, but still, that’s impressive.” She smiled. “She must be smart.”

  “I think she is. What’s she doing right now?”

  “I need to enter my access code to see…” Bristol mouthed the numbers with her. “Three-three-seven-two-two-two. Here we go. She’s home. That’s good. It’s saying that both the soup and the bread registered for her dinner.”

  “Will she get in trouble?”

  “Did your boss seem to think she was up to no good?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then, no, if you don’t report it.” Denver’s hand hovered over her watch. “But I think you should. Do you want to report it?”

  “No! I mean, she must have had a reason. Denver, you can’t tell anyone about this, okay?”

  “I won’t. But you should probably cut ties with this girl. I don’t know what she did to land that education job, but people in her tier would do almost anything for a position like that. She might have something up her sleeve that you don’t want to get pulled into.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some people can manipulate the system—for a little while. But they always get caught eventually. They’ll break into official records and screw things up. Sometimes we get Fives who write different diet logs to make it look like they’re eating all their food, for example, but they’re not. Then they lose weight and tell us they need more food vouchers, more calories. When actually they’re trying to feed…someone.”

  “Someone like me?”

  “Yes, frankly.”

  “I thought you and mom got extra vouchers for me.”

  Denver fell silent.

  “Denver, how do my vouchers get here?”

  “You can also get extra vouchers…if you work for them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mom and I work a few extra hours a week each to get an extra booklet for you. I thought you knew.”

  Bristol’s stomach was heavy. “I didn’t.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  There was a long silence, and then Bristol looked up. “How many?”

  “Not many.”

  “How many?”

  Denver sighed. “Bristol, it’s a small sacrifice for a big reward.” Her voice broke. “I love having a brother.”

  “They don’t feed us. What do they expect us to do?” He looked at his sister. “Tell me the truth. Do they want us to die?”

  Denver licked her lips and drew a breath in. “No.” She lowered her shoulders and lifted her head. “No, of course not. They know the wanted unregs are well cared for. That’s what family is for.”

  “And the unwanted?”

  “No one is unwanted. Everyone comes from a family.”

  Now their mother’s voice could be heard from the thin wall behind the still-glowing projected screen. “Some people in the family gotta work early in the morning!”

  Denver was in her old bed and asleep in minutes, a skill that had always made Bristol jealous. He closed his eyes, vaguely aware of the scent of rosemary seeped deep into his skin. When he couldn’t resist anymore, he sat up, threw the blanket at his feet, and rummaged under the bed for his sketchpad. The light given by the window was all he needed for a couple of simple sketches. He moved quickly for a few minutes, then had a realization that slowed the drag of his pencil until it came to a complete stop. She was the instructor at Fox County Detention Center. That’s where he was—the kid. They knew each other, they had to. He got up and paced around the house. It’s true that it wasn’t fair. The kid hadn’t painted that nun. Maybe he deserved to be in prison, hidden away from paints and bricks and his family and…

  He swallowed. No. No, he couldn’t do it. He’d made his promise to Denver, and it was true that he was all Mom had. He’d try to stay away from Samara—right after he made sure she was okay.

  He tossed his notebook on the floor, where it caught a ray of light from the window. There were two sketches—a carrot, a blackberry.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After the restaurant, Samara came home and unlocked her window. She had a feeling she hadn’t seen the last of Bristol tonight. Not that she knew anything about him, not personally, but if his murals were any indication of his character, he wasn’t the type to do something without questioning it. She was almost sure he’d turn up to ask her what was in the napkin, and possibly ask a favor in return. Favors, her father was fond of saying, were a valuable currency. You could give them to anyone, but you had to be careful who you accepted them from, because they’d always come back around. She already owed him for the pills to calm her stomach, even though she hadn’t taken them, but asking him to dispose of drugs in front of his boss had been much costli
er. She was exhausted from helping Jude, but she wouldn’t forget this kindness of Bristol’s.

  Just before midnight, she heard the little chime of a pebble hitting the side of the iron fire escape. She grinned, stuck her hand out, and gestured for him to come up.

  The fire escape was too small for Bristol’s stocky build, and he looked awkward squeezed between the iron bars and her window. She sat on the ledge anyway and didn’t back away from the window, though it was almost necessary. He contorted his limbs until he found a shape that suited him.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what I was doing at your restaurant today?”

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  Samara pursed her lips. Metrics catching an unreg in her window was one thing. Her father catching him was another.

  “Please,” he said with strain in his voice, “this thing is pinching my legs.”

  Her father snored in the next room. She stood back and let Bristol untangle onto her floor. He cracked the joints in his neck.

  “Better?”

  “Somewhat.” He looked around her room, and Samara began to see her own room through his eyes. When she did, she noticed her shoes carelessly thrown on the floor, the damp clothes drying on the rack. But Bristol didn’t seem interested in her messes—he crossed her room and hummed lowly, kneeling beside her old wooden rocking horse.

  “What’s this?” he asked and reached out his hands to touch it. He put two gentle hands on the horse’s head and tail, studying it.

  “My great-grandfather made that. It’s a toy.”

  “Toys are illegal. Physical toys, anyway. Adults are still allowed their toys.” Bristol gestured toward Samara’s watch.

  “No, physical toys are illegal unless they’re educational. My parents made the argument that this one is. See, you sit on it, and told on to these handles, and rock yourself. Wanna try?”

  “If I wanted another cramp in my legs, I’d go back out on the fire escape.”