Children of the Uprising Collection Page 12

  The doors opened and a guard stepped through. “Kopecky, Albin.”

  He stood. The guard turned her head to see him.

  “Come.”

  He reached his long legs over the bench and left with a wink, taking his flimsy notebook with him. The rest of the lesson progressed without any further disruption. When the blessed bell rang, the boys took their usual places in line as four guards filed in to escort them back. Jude waited until his teacher was close.

  “Miss Shepherd? I saw that some words have a coupla consonants at the beginning. How would you know which one to say?”

  The guard closest to him let out a snicker.

  After a moment of hesitation, she turned to the guard. “I’ll take him and explain before my next lesson. I’ll walk him to his work area myself. Is that all right?”

  The guard shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Sit down, Reeder.” Samara nodded to the bench closet to the front, and he obediently sat with his hands folded.

  “So there are two types of words with double consonants at the beginning. The first type is a blend, and that’s where you say both the sounds very quickly together to make one sound, like flit.” The last of the boys walked out of the room, and a hushing puff of air signaled the close of the door. “There’s an F and an L and you say them together and—” They were all gone. “Okay, what is it?”

  “Thank you. For before.”

  Samara smiled and breathed in more deeply. “Of course. Any more insight into who did it or why?”

  “I don’t know anything. I thought maybe Warden Paul had something to do with it, but she doesn’t.”

  Samara shifted in her seat. “How do you know?”

  “Kopecky trusts her. And I trust him. And I’ve been thinking, maybe this isn’t so bad. I’ve been scared for a long time that something wasn’t really right here, but I’m thinking now everything’s gonna be okay. I’m going to get out when I’m supposed to, just like Kopecky.”

  “Just keep your head low and try to get through your sentence, Jude. They’re worried their genetic matching didn’t work with you. You’ve got to go out of your way to show them you’re…” Jude could see she was searching for a word. Smarter? Stronger? Better? “You’ve just got to try harder.”

  Jude lowered his head. This speech sounded familiar. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I should probably get you back to your work area. There’s another class coming in ten minutes.” She followed his gaze toward the kitchen, where leftover English muffins formed a stack on the counter. “Are you hungry?”

  He nodded. “They’ve taken my meals. Until I confess.”

  Miss Shepherd gave him a strange look; was it pity? Most adults fresh from the you’re-not-living-up-to-your-potential lecture were angry at him by the end of it, but she didn’t seem to be. “They’re going to throw those out anyway. Let’s go get just one.”

  They walked to the kitchen. Just as they’d crossed the wide threshold, the automatic door made its familiar pffffffst. Someone was coming into the cafeteria on the other side. The two hit the floor, and Samara opened the door to a large cupboard, which was mercifully empty and spacious.

  “In here,” she mouthed.

  From inside the cupboard, a small crack between the doors allowed them to see the rest of the room. A guard marched in first, followed by two other older boys. Why were they still here? Kopecky was taken from class a half an hour ago, at least. Sure enough, as the line proceeded and came to a halt, Kopecky himself stopped in the middle of the room. He was carrying something in his hands—a piece of black folded fabric. All the boys carried the same item. A parting present, maybe?

  “Turn!” The voice of the warden, unseen but unmistakable, boomed from somewhere in the cafeteria. “Thank you. Shortly, you will all be taken to our family receiving center, where your families are waiting for you. I myself have just come from there, and I can say that they are truly anxious to see you. The room is filled with balloons, signs, cake”—Kopecky’s eyes shined—“and other welcome-home goodies. We have just one more step to complete, and you will be on your way.

  “As you may or may not know, there have been some diseases in the past few years on the outside that you have been protected from, living here in safety. The flu has been especially rampant. For your own protection, we’ll first give you a vaccine, a Band-Aid in the color of your choice, and then we’ll get back on the bus and send you on your way. This is a high dose of the vaccine, so you may feel dizzy or nauseous, but only for a few minutes. Don’t be alarmed. Please pull up your right shirtsleeve.”

  The boys obeyed. From their hiding place, Jude and Samara saw Kopecky push up his sleeve, stick out his arm, and wait for his injection as eagerly as if he were anticipating a kiss. The guards—three of them, one for each boy—injected the skin above their forearms. Some gasped. Kopecky coughed and murmured, “She wasn’t kidding ’bout the nausea thing! Feels like I could…”

  He drifted off, and coughed again through his teeth, trying his best to laugh it off. Next to him, a boy dropped to the ground. His guard took the black fabric from his lifeless hand, shook it out so it became a bag, and swiftly stuffed his body inside. Kopecky was still coughing, so forcefully now that it was taking all his concentration. Jude had the intense desire to do something crazy and brave, like run into the room, punch the guard in her perfectly shaped nose, and carry Kopecky away, but he stayed hidden, immobile and horrified.

  Jude and Samara saw him drop. They saw his guard take the black bag. And they saw his face disappear behind it, the corners of his mouth—perhaps still expecting to soon be stained with icing—still upturned.

  The warden exhaled loudly. “Not a pretty sight, ladies, but necessary. We’ve got another one scheduled for tomorrow, then that should be all for quite a while after that. Metrics is finally taking steps to remove all the unregistered, so we’ll have less incoming inmates.”

  “Remove, Warden?” asked one of the guards.

  “I’ve been told that for the unregistered removal, the police will use these same injections.” She held an empty syringe up to the light. “It’s a very humane method. Quick and painless.”

  “Who is scheduled for tomorrow, Warden?”

  Jude’s breath stopped in his throat.

  “Number 17201, of course. The Reeder child. I don’t think he’ll confess before tomorrow, but we’ll give him a last meal anyway.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Faces were always hard for Bristol. Closing his eyes for the thousandth time, he tried to visualize the ratio between her cheekbone and the bottom corner of her eye. He’d just seen her the night before, unbelievably lovely and disarming in her own room.

  Thoughts of Samara dominated Bristol’s mind. Over and over, he recalled how the moon had come out from behind the clouds when he’d beckoned him up her fire escape, which felt like good luck. Bristol was incessantly superstitious. It drove his family crazy, but he’d never made an effort to change. The forgotten wisdom of looking for guiding signs was too alluring to ignore. Besides, even if Samara knew the innocent boy personally, there was no way she could know who was behind the graffiti. And he’d never tell her—just in case.

  This morning, he had easily drawn those arms, that body, but still had trouble with her face. It was maddening, being able to see her in his mind’s eye but not being able to capture it. He’d already drawn her rocking horse ten different times.

  He wouldn’t be able to finish it today. He was already going to risk being late for work. Another ten or so hours of chopping onions and cleaning pans and generally being one of those underlings who higher tiers so depended on to keep up their lifestyle. Bristol had spent years with bitter, scathing thoughts toward the proprietor of the restaurant—and ultimately Metrics. Stealing his time on earth for their own gain. As he grew older, he saw the wisdom in Denver’s advice: “There’s nothing you can do to change it, so don’t think about it too much. Just show up, and rely on something else to make you happy
.” For Denver, that had been games on her watch. Watching her eyes glaze over on the couch when she played, Bristol was mostly secretly glad he wasn’t allowed one.

  But circumstances change. It was ridiculous to even think about. Now he found himself wishing he did have one—and a number. Then he could apply for a spouse. He knew it was crazy, that you had no control over who you married. The odds that you knew the right person for you were surely so slim that of course most people met their spouses on their wedding day. He turned his hopes to the next best thing—that Samara would not decide to apply for a spouse and they could continue to see each other every now and then. It was the best he could hope for.

  And he didn’t mind doing that little favor for her. In fact, he hoped he’d have another opportunity tonight.

  The prep kitchen was loud today, though no louder than usual. It always took a minute or two to adjust and hear one’s own thoughts again. A radio played rock music, which mostly sounded like crashing cars, and over that a projected news anchor’s head blared. Through the noise, Bristol calmed his own movements, gently taking his apron down from the nail it hung on and tying it tenderly around his body.

  “But why are these people so dissatisfied? Have we not given them a job? Have we not allowed them to live in this society?”

  Another prep cook, the same who’d received a warning about talking, glanced at Bristol and lowered his chin. “They talkin’ about us.”

  Bristol turned off the radio. The prep cook’s face took on an expression of surprise and then gratitude. An aggravated voice from the news was all that could be heard now.

  “These people—these unregistered—they are a burden on society. I’m sick of all this ‘they’re the strength of the nation’ crap. The fact is that in a country where we now have to make up jobs for the Ones and the Twos, we could do better. Give those unregistered jobs to the Fives, let the Fours do the jobs of the Fives, and so on. We’d all have more if these unregs didn’t drain our resources!”

  “If you’re just joining us now, we’re talking about the implementation of a new effort to reorganize society, many calling for the removal of so-called ‘unregs’—that’s unregistered citizens—and relocating them so there are more resources for the documented citizens. Of course, this idea has been around for years—decades, even—but today, Metrics took a bold step in removing the first 100,000 unregs, relocating them to the western desert states.

  “We just heard from a top policy maker saying, essentially, fewer people means society doesn’t have to spread its resources so thin, meaning the quality of life rises for all documented people, especially if they’re in the top tiers.”

  “That is what I’m saying, Shara,” the man in the suit continued. “We’ve got too many people. We tried to fix this three decades ago with the single-responsibility policy—”

  “In which families were allowed only one child.”

  “Yes”—he balked at being interrupted—“but as I argued at that time as well, the policy didn’t go far enough. Women need sterilization after their one child. They cannot be trusted to have one baby and report for their injections with perfect timing after that.”

  “Sometimes—rarely, but it has happened—the injections don’t work.”

  “Yes! Exactly!” The man was nearly choking with enthusiasm. “Technology fails us, people fail us, and if we’re going to have a correct society, one in which everyone has enough and no one wants for anything, we need to protect ourselves against failure. Fewer people to drain us. Get the unregs out and make sure we don’t get any more.”

  Bristol and the prep cook exchanged glances. They both went back to their vegetables. With his eyes firmly on the carrots, Bristol spoke first, each word carefully measured.

  “Where is everyone else?”

  “We the only ones here today. They didn’t have enough room for me on the bus. Boss is listening to the news in the office.”

  He wanted to reach out and touch him somehow—a hug, a pat on the back, anything—but was aware, as ever, of the cameras pointed down at their movements, ready to betray them if they stopped chopping. The anchors were still talking, but the sound was a nasal train passing by now. They were saying nothing, just continuing to complain about the wants in their lives and blaming people they didn’t know because of it.

  Bristol pressed the garbage down into the bag and tied it. He walked out the back door and swung the sack over his head and into the dumpster, trying his best not to breathe in the sickly sweet air that never left this courtyard.

  “Psst.”

  His first thought was that it was a mouse—the soft sound had to be an animal. He looked down and around and heard it again.

  “Psst. Bristol.”

  A shadow darkened Samara's copper face. She stood beside the building, behind a ladder with vines wrapped around the rungs. Though the situation didn’t look good, he couldn’t stop a small smile.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Keep working. Pull some leaves off the ladder to make it look like you’re busy.”

  Bristol obeyed, taking leaves down to the right of Samara and tossing them in the dumpster. “Listen—we have to get out of here. Have you heard what they’re trying to do to the unregs?”

  “They say that every couple of years. It’s fine.”

  “This is different,” she whispered. “They’re taking the unregs now. And they won’t relocate you. They’ll kill you.”

  Bristol’s heart thumped. “What? No.”

  “You know it’s true. And I definitely know it’s true. I saw the warden kill three boys today. I saw it with my own eyes. Have you seen the news today?”

  Bristol had never seen this kind of fever in a person’s eyes. He wished he had a pencil and paper and the courage to tell her to stand still. “Yes…”

  “Then you know they’re rounding up the unregistered. It’s time to move, but we’re going to make a pit stop at Fox. We’ll break out a boy living there. They’re all in danger really, but he’s in the deepest. And then we’ll go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “North.” Her eyes widened as she leaned away from the shadow. “We can live there. There are farms with safe houses for unregs.”

  Bristol couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Live there? What are you talking about? I’ve got family here. Metrics isn’t going to just kill us.”

  “Oh, then what? They’ll relocate you? You still won’t be with your family. And sorry for the spoiler, but you won’t be living in Arizona or wherever. You’ll be dead. I wish I didn’t know that, but I do. Now are you coming with me, or do I have to break this little boy out of prison myself and take him to up north alone?”

  The whole thing sounded so crazy that Bristol didn’t know where to start. Even if they knew where they were going, how would they get there? He had no idea how far it was, but he knew it was at least a couple hours in a car, which none of them knew how to drive. Then there was his chip, and Samara’s watch—surely they would have implanted a chip in the boy as well by now. It was in the vein in Bristol’s wrist, meant to leave him to bleed to death if he ever tried to cut it out. He didn’t think it worked anymore, but what if it did? He couldn’t keep ice on it for that long.

  “Samara, it sounds like you haven’t quite worked out the details. And I promised my sister I’d stop with the sneaking around. This seems like the time to make good on that.”

  “It’s already in motion. I put my watch in a bag of rocks and dropped it in the river on the way here. Do you hear those sirens? They’re for me. They’re looking for my body in the water.”

  As if by magic, he did hear them wailing in the air. He shivered.

  “The battery has already been damaged, so they won’t find my watch. They’ll have moved on to looking for my body. If they find the watch though, we’re in bigger trouble, so we have to move. I’m sorry to have to do this, but the time has come for me to help you. Are you coming?”

  The s
irens continued singing their song of panic. He looked at Samara for the first time since he heard her calling to him and saw tiny orbs of sweat shining on her forehead. His own shirt grew damp.

  “No. I can’t.”

  “It was nice knowing you, Bristol.”

  “Samara—” What could he say? He was sorry? He didn’t want to believe she was right. He wanted to trust in the system that had always kept him down but safe. At least he always knew where he stood. But he thought of her little student, how he had been caught for Bristol’s crime, how the child was still behind bars, how he’d never told her the truth.

  It was too late to think through any of this with her, of course. She was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  In an ideal world, Samara would have taken her time formulating a plan to get Jude out. She may have even asked Jude himself for his opinion. He seemed bright, and although she didn’t consider herself stupid, she wasn’t as good in these think-on-your-feet situations. She’d hoped at least Bristol would help, although that hope had fizzled fast. Bitter thoughts of good riddance clouded her mind, and she worked to clear them. She needed all her brainpower. No distractions tonight.

  Just one obstacle would have provided enough difficulty, but there were three. The cameras, ever present in every room in almost every angle; the chip, tracking his every movement; and herself. She was supposed to be dead right now, and she didn’t know whether the night guards would have that information. There was only one way into Fox Juvenile Detention Center, and that was the way she intended to go. She could only hope that in all the hubbub, no one would have thought to inform her employer.

  She pressed the Call button on the front door and waited. It was seconds, or minutes, but sometimes time is different, unmeasured in such terms. She only knew she waited long enough to hear her heartbeat in her ears.

  “Hello?” said a cool and clear female voice at the other end of the line.

  “Hello! Sorry to bother you, but my watch isn’t letting me in today. I think I need to get something checked, but could you let me in for now? I forgot something in the cafeteria.”