by Megan Lynch
“That was a fun night,” said Cindy as a photo of the two of them popped up on the screen. She changed her voice, made it deeper and more commanding. “Watch—show us, eight hundred percent.”
A hologram of the two of them shot out from Bristol’s wrist, and an image of the two of them appeared in her living room. A slightly opaque Bristol, in his gray tweed suit jacket and plum shirt, Cindy hanging from his shoulder, though she’d barely known him at the time. The snapshot was from an art exhibition nearly four years ago. Bristol smiled as he remembered what had happened later that same night—Jude had come and told him that Samara was missing, and the two of them looked all night for her. When they’d eventually found her, she’d told them that she’d been striking up a friendship with the first minister. The girl had always been full of surprises.
“You clean up well, I must say.” Cindy lingered near the hologram, almost touching it. “We look happy.”
Bristol chuckled. “I had to get an aid worker at Olympic Village to show me how to tie that tie. I’d never done it before.”
“Coulda fooled me.”
Why did she always insist on saying things in that tone?
“Tell me what I owe you for this,” he said. He tapped the face of the watch to cut off the hologram and privately congratulated himself on being a fast learner.
“It’s a gift.”
“Really, what?”
“A gift! Ever heard of them? They’re free of charge.”
Bristol hoped she’d put it on her expense report.
On the walk home, the watch felt substantial on his wrist. Heavy. Expensive.
The program had ranked him in the second-lowest rung of fame. Definitely more famous than the average person, but there were very ordinary looking people in his rung. Real estate agents and business owners and the like. He felt he should be more famous than them—all for the cause, of course. The real reason behind any of this was to gain citizenship for their faction. As long as he was well-known enough to keep his countrymen here long enough for the rest of the world’s armies to liberate the United States, that was all he cared about. Then maybe he could see his mom again. If that wasn’t a good enough reason to wish for fame, he didn’t know what was.
The last time he’d seen his mother, Bristol had been more focused on what he did best back then: sneaking away from her. He’d been out all night, checking Samara’s window for signs of life inside, dabbling with a stencil on the familiar brick wall below. He needed to be back before the sun rose for two reasons. One, to not get caught as an unlicensed artist, and two, to make sure his mom saw him before she left for work. He didn’t think she was suspicious—she was too tired to be—but he knew she’d be heartbroken and sick with worry if she ever did suspect he was doing anything other than sleeping in his own bed every night. He slipped in through the bars of his window, put on his pajamas, and went to the bathroom to scrub the paint from his fingernails.
That morning, that last morning, she’d been awake at the table when he’d come out of his room. He hid his hands inside the sleeves of his sweatshirt.
“Morning, my love,” she’d said and kissed his forehead.
Bristol remembered very little else. Denver had moved into marriage housing with Stephen by then, so it had just been the two of them. Did they have coffee together that last day? Did they talk about anything? Had Bristol’s last conversation with her been lies about how well he’d slept? They both had gone to work. Bristol had never come back.
Over the years, he’d tried hard not to imagine the day. Even now, the more he tried to block it, the more his imagination bullied its way to the forefront of his mind. He saw her at her desk, listening to coworkers whisper about the relocation. He imagined her at her window at work, watching police take the Unregistered janitorial staff away from the office park in armored vans. He saw her, panicked, rushing home to find an empty apartment, diving into his rumbled sheets, clutching his discarded sweatshirt to her heart, crying and moaning and screaming for it to be yesterday, for him to come back. He could see it vividly, because it’s what she’d done when the policeman had come to their house years earlier and told her that her husband had been hit by a train.
Bristol rubbed his eyes. He would become famous and bring her to Edinburgh. She could live with her two children again in his flat. They’d all sit at the dinner table and laugh about these pale people and their funny accents and colorful money and hefty food.
Just stay the course, he told himself. Just keep going.
Chapter Seven
It was a nice day for a walk through the cemetery. Denver had taken plenty of walks through gloomy drizzle and biting wind, which were both satisfying in their own ways, reflecting her own heartbrokenness at having to visit her son’s gravesite in the first place. But when the sun was shining, she felt more inclined to recall the happy memories of carrying him.
Some do-gooders in the city, of which there seemed to be many despite the loudness of the opposite faction (the do-badders?), had offered to bury him here with the other babies, though he wasn’t fully developed. She hadn’t even been halfway through her pregnancy when she miscarried him, but she did get to hold him in her hands, she did get to name him. His name on his little gravestone gave her a morbid kind of pride every time she came here to read it: Zion Steiner. She smiled as she approached it. Though the sun was shining, the grass was still wet from the night before. She sat anyway and placed her hand lovingly on the earth.
“Hello,” she whispered.
It seemed to her to be a timeless place, a still place. Life went on outside these stone walls, but the bodies inside rested, hopefully, in peace. It was impossible not to catch some of that peace, Denver thought. She suggested to Stephen that he come and spend some time here whenever he felt stressed, but he always seemed to be too busy. Sometimes it was difficult to be still, like her little boy in the ground. Stephen didn’t like to think about losing him.
After Zion’s death, Denver went to the doctor for a birth control implant. Neither Stephen nor Denver had brought up the subject of children again until Stephen asked if he could go on the mission with the first round of spies.
“If you go,” Denver had said, “could it be the only time?”
“Yes,” he said. “They assured me it would be just this one time.”
“And then—do you think you’d have built up enough goodwill for us to stay here in the city? Even if it’s just us?”
“I think so.”
“And then—” She wondered if she should finish.
“Yes,” he’d answered.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, then we could try for another child.”
She’d never told anyone else about this conversation—especially not Bristol, whom she knew already saw her as too self-interested—but she needed all of this to be true, everything from Stephen coming back after one trip and never returning to staying here in Edinburgh forever. Though none of it seemed likely, her experience over the last few years had taught her to see hope not as a sappy daydream, but as a tool for survival.
She cleared her throat again and pressed on the ground. “Your daddy is going on a business trip next week. He promised he’d come see you before he leaves. But he’ll be back, and then we’ll all be here in the city. Someday we’ll buy an apartment ourselves, right next door to here. And then mama can come see you every day. And I’ll bring your brother or sister. Only a few more years to go now.”
A buzzing sound cut through the stillness and Denver bristled. Of course they’d choose the first nice day of spring to do maintenance work here, mourners be damned. The buzzing got closer and closer until she could see the gardener out of the corner of her eye, watching her.
She smiled back at her son’s little piece of earth. “I’ll have to come back here tomorrow,” she told him. “Your stone is going to get all messy with the grass. But you’ll probably like the way it smells.”
She looked at the date under his name. Ther
e was just one: the day she’d miscarried. She did a quick calculation based on when he would have been born and figured he would have been three and a half by now.
The gardener kept staring at her. She appreciated that he was waiting for her to leave before he came into the infant yard with his weed-eater, but she wished he’d turn it off while he waited. She was never ready to leave Zion.
“Bye,” she said, allowing the guilt, familiar and weighty, to wash over her as she walked away.
She couldn’t go home yet. Stephen would be back soon, but she needed some time to gather herself before she saw him. The weeks before they both went off to London for training were always notorious for arguments. This week, they’d both been treading lightly around each other to avoid them. She went to Olympic Village, hoping to find Samara.
Samara’s door was unlocked. She sat hunched over a stack of papers the height of Denver’s forearm. Denver looked at the stack, and then at Samara’s hollow face.
“Want a break?” Denver asked.
“I’m just trying to get a rhythm going. I should be able to understand this.”
“Isn’t that stuff written for the sole purpose of people like us not being able to understand it?”
“That’s exactly why it’s important that we do.”
“You need a drink.”
Samara stood and rolled her shoulders until they popped. “I think you need a drink. But I’m happy to enable you.”
Denver knew Samara didn’t like to be seen out at pubs, so she’d bought a little bottle of Rosé on the way over. She pulled it from her bag, along with two paper cups.
“How are you with all this?”
“Oh, I’m happy to play homemaker while my brother expresses himself and my husband goes to war.” Denver was aware that she always seemed hostile around Samara, though she was her only female friend here. She hadn’t yet been able to shake the habit.
Samara cut her sip short. “Okay, none of that is true.”
“No? I’m home all day, cleaning—”
“—You work sixteen-hour days on the weeks you spend training the infiltration recruits.”
“And Bristol paints and talks about his paintings with every weird art person in the city—”
“—He’s in the public eye to educate them about our situation.”
“And Stephen is leaving next week for a country that tried to kill us all.”
“Just to plant a couple of surveillance devices.” Samara reached for the bottle to pour more wine into Denver’s cup. “This isn’t the end.”
“You know how dangerous it is.” Denver stared at her own reflection in the pink liquid. “The commander said to prepare myself for the fact that he may not come back.”
Samara opened her mouth to say something but took a drink instead. She was a terrible actor, but at least she wouldn’t lie to her.
“So, tell me there’s good news in that,” Denver said, pointing to the papers on Samara’s desk.
“Well,” said Samara, “there’s news, anyway. There’s a bill being introduced now to stop immigration to Scotland except in cases where ‘the skills of the migrant would be beneficial to the country’s economy.’”
“What’s the problem with that? Most of us are educated, at least mostly so. I’d love to finish my training and work as an architect here.”
“But they’d have to make an initial investment in you to finish your training, and they see that as a waste of money.”
Denver frowned. “But I see these kids on the street all the time, watching football and wasting their time in bars. The government is making investments in their education, aren’t they?”
“They were born here. They can waste their opportunity if they want to.”
Denver looked out Samara’s little window to stare at the rooftop. “It’s just like home, isn’t it? People putting themselves up on a peak just to look down at the valley.”
Samara closed her eyes. “I’ve been trying to see it from their right point of view. They pay their taxes to educate their own children, ensure that they themselves can drive on the roads, and protect themselves with their own police force. They didn’t account for taking care of anyone other than themselves.”
“It won’t be long before their own ‘relocation’ if that’s their viewpoint. That money is more valuable than people.”
“I don’t think most of them truly understand that sending us back would be killing us. I’ve talked to these people, and I don’t think they really want to kill us.”
“They just don’t care what happens to us.”
“Well, yes. I think they’d rather see us go to another host country first, but mostly they just want us out.”
Denver downed the rest of her wine. “I guess it’s best that we go through with it then. All of it. Stephen and Jude planting the devices, the armies toppling the USA’s regime. Though I do miss it.”
“I miss home, too. I just want it to be safer. A little more like here.”
“There are bad people everywhere. I don’t want it to be perfect, I just want to live somewhere where I can live my life.”
Samara shuffled the papers slowly. “Did you visit Zion today?”
Defensiveness abruptly rose in Denver’s chest. “Why do you ask?”
“That’s always what you want after the cemetery. Just a place to live your life.”
Denver felt blood rushing to her cheeks. “It teaches me what’s important.”
“I know. At least I think I know. It’s good to be reminded of that too. I don’t much care whether we ever go home or not. I want everyone in America to be safe, and I know they’re not right now. But I’m keeping my expectations low. As long as we have a place to live, safely, I’ll be satisfied.”
Denver thought of the cemetery, of her little boy’s body in the ground. Of just the two of them in the country when Stephen left, even if only for a few weeks. She was afraid Stephen would soon be in the ground in another country, the two of them separated forever. She was afraid her mother was already and she’d never find out for sure. She was afraid she’d never be satisfied.
Chapter Eight
Samara huffed as she took the steps to the capitol building two at a time. She could not be late for her meeting with Clovinger.
Initially, the intelligence agencies of the UK had assured Samara and the others that it was a very simple plan: take just two refugees—they’d chosen Jude and Stephen—with one escort from the agency. They’d plant a few devices so that the agencies could listen in and gather intel for a few weeks. Then, when they were certain it was safe to do so, they’d go over as a team, in larger and larger numbers until there were enough of them there to bring down Metrics and slowly reintroduce democracy to the United States.
Samara, at first, had thought the logistics for phase II were a little too vague, but she reconsidered; after all, as long as phase I was executed perfectly, there was time to think it all through.
But plans were unraveling quickly.
Jude had come to Samara and asked if his friend could come. She bristled and told him this wasn’t a sleepover.
“It’s a dangerous mission,” she said, keeping her voice firm even though she knew from looking at Jude’s face that his argument was far from over.
“He can use his watch better than I can. But I’ll be more adept at talking like a Two. If I can do the talking, I can get us access to our targets and he can gather intel once we’re there.”
“You’re not there to gather intel. You’re literally just there to gain access and plant devices. If you’re concerned about not being able to talk and work at the same time, I can practice with you again.”
“It’s no use. I’m seriously dysfunctional when it comes to that skill, and it’s necessary for communicating there. But I’m also the only Two, and I’ll need someone with me who can—”
“Stephen will be with you. And you’ll have an escort from the agency.”
“Someone who is the same age so he can
come with me to the Young Transportation Officials meeting. Cork can do it.”
“Cork doesn’t have the training. And even if he did, none of the infrastructure is in place for him. They’ve been working on constructing three fake metrics identities for months, and there’s not time to make another one.”
Jude crossed his arms and furrowed his brow. “I’m at least going to bring it up to the agency. He could be a great resource. I could be dead without him.”
“You could be dead anyway. But if it’s so important to you, bring it up with them.”
She was sure their answer would be no, and it wasn’t long before her suspicions were confirmed. The person who brought it up to her was none other than her old friend the first minister.
Although Samara had a bi-monthly meeting with Cara Clovinger, she was careful not to take her time with the most powerful woman in the country for granted. She never came to the twenty-minute meeting without an agenda and notes that she could quickly glance at no matter which way the conversation veered. When Samara arrived at the State building, she was surprised to find that it was Clovinger who had the agenda.
“Miss Shepherd.”
Samara clutched the handle of her second-hand briefcase, taken aback by the formality and the tone. She instinctively took on the posture of her teenage years: shoulders hung forward, hands together at her waist, eyes wide. “Ma’am?”
“I hope I have been misinformed about this. Did you tell your young friend Jude Reeder to pester my intelligence agencies to bring one of his mates on the mission?”
Samara swayed on her feet. “I…”
“Because if you did, I consider it to be very poor judgement on your part. In fact, I’d consider asking you to recommend another refugee to be my liaison to your community.”
Struck dumb by a crushing shame, Samara grasped for words. “I’m so sorry…”
Clovinger, usually a reserved woman, slammed her fist into her gleaming desk. “You and this child must think this is a game! We are attempting to liberate your country with our own people. Lives are at stake, Miss Shepherd! How dare you encourage teenage idiocrasy like this?"
