Children of the Uprising Collection Read online

  Nan ran her thumb up and down her plastic device’s antenna. “There should be more.”

  “They’re probably scared, or all rounded up by now.”

  Jude gave a cough, and Lydia brought the water to his lips again with a little cluck.

  “I never saw nothing like this one before.”

  “There’s never been one like this before.”

  There had been other efforts to clear out unregs, mostly when new leaders moved into office with their tough-on-crime promises to keep, but Nan was right—this was the most wide-ranging program yet. Never had they come into homes and workplaces before.

  Bristol cleared his throat. “When will we be moving on?”

  “Not for a while, sweet,” Lydia answered. “We want to be here in case there are more coming, and anyway, there’ll be lighter border patrol if we wait.”

  “How long?”

  “Six months? A year?”

  Now Samara looked up. “Here for a year? They’ll find us.”

  “Not easily, they won’t.” Nan shifted her large body. The plastic sides of her communication device wheezed under the pressure of her hands. “We got lots of friends in Metrics who keep us up-to-date on surveillance. And out here, they ain’t too concerned about it anyway.”

  “Didn’t you say you sometimes hosted twenty people at once? Don’t they wonder where those people go? Can’t they follow them?”

  “We usually know they’re coming and disable the chips before they get to the woods. Metrics lists them as dead on their records, and no one asks questions. What’s a missing unreg here and there? The way they see it, the fewer of ’em, the better. No, we’ll go for the border when the time’s right.”

  Samara raised her head and licked her lips. “The…border?”

  “You didn’t think you’d be farming, did you?”

  Bristol and Samara looked at each other.

  Nan chuckled. “Best-kept secret of the modern age. Of course, you’re meant to think the United States of America has taken over the world. You were taught that America had conquered Canada?”

  “I was told,” Samara said, “that Canada wanted to be a part of us. Wanted to be…great.”

  “Yep. That’s what you were told, all right. And how were you to find out any different? You can’t travel. You can’t read news that hasn’t been filtered through Metrics. You can’t talk to anyone who asks questions.” She shook her head. “Canada’s been the same all along. Different country, just north of us. No system of separating her people either. So you go up there, they’ll protect you. You don’t have to farm. You can just live. But you gotta stay here awhile first, and be real careful. No electric lights, only food from the garden while you’re here. Don’t worry, the Red Sea brings us some extra food from time to time. No going outside, no matter what. No loud talking and no singing. Once you’re across the border, you can sing to your heart’s content.”

  Bristol stopped for a moment to ponder this. Living with restrictions in order to survive seemed just a different version of the same life, but living without them…living in a place where they could go outside anytime they wanted, day or night, where they could buy whatever food they could afford, where they could live not in a tiered society, but as equals in every outward sense…it was a dream, one that made their hearts beat faster and their minds race, out of habit, to halt hope in its tracks. But it was possible. And perhaps only a few months away.

  Samara objected again. “It’s different now though, isn’t it? They’re not just going to write us off as dead. The guards at the prison saw us, and I’m sure we were recorded by lots of street cams coming this way. And that John guy helped Bristol!”

  “John Armistead has been punished enough.” Lydia’s tone was soft but certain. “It might have been different if he’d helped his whole staff, like I’m sure he wanted to, but they won’t look into it too much just for helping one boy. His father is still well-respected.”

  Another wheeze came from Nan’s direction. “Besides,” she continued, “they’ll have their hands full with the ‘relocation,’ if you want to call it that. Every policeman in the country won’t stop working until they’re all dead. It’s a good time to lay low. And I don’t want to hear any more about it. We’ll get to Canada, but we need to spend some time right here first. Just don’t go outside, don't go into any other part of the house ’cept the bathroom when you absolutely need it, and don’t sing.”

  Lydia glared at them over her glasses. “We nearly had a riot break out a few years ago when a couple sang ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ in rounds. They went on for hours.”

  “What do we do, then?” Samara snapped.

  As if to answer, Jude eased up to a seated position and turned his head to look at the wall of books. In the candlelight, it was a treasure chest glistening with emerald and ruby and flecks of gold lettering. They’d never be able to read them all in their time here, not if they started now and didn’t ever stop to sleep. A feverish wave washed over Bristol. His body seemed to innately appreciate what this meant—this time, these books—he’d be a different person by the time he left here. Even if he never saw the outside world again, he’d be an adventurer of sorts, a traveler, possibly a connoisseur while he had access to this wall and the power it presented to him.

  Nan laughed again in her bass voice. “We can start now.” She swung her body to standing and walked over to the shelf. “The best place to begin is the beginning. Bet you don’t know how we got into this mess in the first place, do ya?”

  “Which mess do you mean?” Jude asked.

  “The one we’re in now. Some people registered, some not. People only allowed to have one kid. People only being allowed to make small decisions, never any big ones. There was a time before all that. And it wasn’t that long ago.

  “There was a war in this country in the mid-nineteenth century that people called the Civil War, because it was a war between two sides in the same country.”

  “What’s a—” Samara started, but Nan cut her off with an answer.

  “A war was a way to settle arguments, way back a long time ago. Leaders would force their people to go kill each other, and whichever side killed the most people was thought to have won the argument.”

  “That’s barbaric!” cried Bristol, mirroring Samara’s horrified expression.

  “Is it? Is it so different from what we’re living now? That’s the thing about knowing your history, son. The better you know it, the better you can see that we’re living in it now. Same problems, same mistakes, different time.

  “Anyway, as I was saying, in those days, people had different-colored skin. All people had a different shade, just like today, but the shades were much more…”

  “Contrasting,” finished Lydia.

  “Yeah, contrasting. Some people had dark skin, some people had very dark skin, and other people had light pink skin.”

  “Light pink?” Even after the day he’d just had, Bristol found this hard to believe.

  “Kind of a pink-yellow. Look.” Nan placed a book down on the table, and there they were, page after page of pictures of people with light pink-yellow skin and multicolored hair. Orange hair, gold hair, brown hair, black hair, all on people with this abnormally light skin. “And that’s not all. Some people were dark.” She turned a page. Bristol had never seen anyone with skin darker than his, but here was someone with bright teeth and eyes shining up at him.

  “So these pictures are from the war?”

  “No, no. Much later than that. See, that war was about slavery. One side had the dark people held captive as slaves and made them do all their work for them. They’d tend the fields, and then the lighter skins would make profits off the darker skins and not pay them anything for their troubles.”

  Bristol could tell Samara had something to say about this but was holding it in. There was so much more to hear.

  “The other side wanted all people to live free so no dark skins would ever be slaves again. Guess which side
won?”

  “By won, do you mean killed more people?” Samara asked.

  “Yes. And it was the side with the slaves.” Nan’s tone was blunt. “Dark skinned people were slaves for over a hundred years after that, but the problem at that point was that they kept comingling so that there were more slaves than owners. And how they were treated got worse and worse. They’d be the ones sent to fight other wars with other countries. They’d have government medical experiments performed on them. There was just no respect for their human lives, never had been, but it was getting more publicized, and most people had relatives—not that they could claim, they mostly kept them private—who had dark skin. And it had to be stopped.”

  “That’s why we’re all brown now.” Bristol was guessing, but it came out like he knew.

  “Yeah, that’s why. After Civil War II, the other side won. And they thought there should be no more dark and light, so they changed the laws. Thought there’d be no mistreatment of others if we were all the same color. But did it work? Not at all. Racism was never about skin tones. It was about a group of people thinking they were better and treating another group as lesser, as subhuman. We never needed to be the same color. With the New Race came the Tier system, and before we knew it, we were right back where we started. Ones thinking they were better than the Twos, Twos looking down at the Threes, and so on. It’s a nice secure feeling, see, thinking that other people aren’t as hardworking or ethical or charitable as you. You start to think you deserve it. They could give up their skin colors but they couldn’t give up that idea. Before, you were allowed to marry anyone you wanted, as long as they had the same skin as you. But after Civil War II, they reversed that—purposely matched people who were different colors so we’d all be the same.”

  “They were allowed to marry anyone they wanted?” Samara asked. “Didn’t they get upset when that was taken away?”

  Lydia looked over from the couch where Jude still lay. “No, they didn’t. Lots of things had changed by then. Advancements of technology meant that people spent most of their lives connected to people on their devices, but not in life. Most thoughts collected from that time indicated a relief at the pressure being removed from having to find a mate.”

  Nan nodded. “I think, by that time, most people were on board.”

  “They were just reverent toward numbers,” Lydia continued. “At the time of the revolution, right after Civil War II, people wanted to be able to put numbers on everything. How fast they could run, how many calories they ate, how many people liked them…”

  “The numerical generation,” Nan added. “It’s why we have Metrics today.”

  Bristol cleared his throat. “Is that when they made the one-child rule?”

  “A few years after that, yes.” Nan brought down another book, this one with plastic-sleeved pages with loose-printed pages stuffed inside. The one she took out read:

  NEW METRIC GOVERNMENT UNVEILS PLAN FOR THE SUPER-GENERATION

  Families Now Able to Focus on Raising One Ideal Child

  “The important thing to keep in mind was that this seemed like a good idea.” Nan carefully slid the paper back inside its plastic sheath. “Those were dark times. People were full of hate and competition. They couldn’t let it go. It was just part of them, but a part they hated and wanted gone. This was a way to wipe it out.”

  “It sounds like what’s happening now.”

  Nan’s eyes flashed, and she jumped to her feet, jarring Samara’s previously undisturbed teacup and sending the hot liquid onto the table, where it shimmered. “That’s exactly what’s happening now! Don’t you see? That’s what happens to a people who are ashamed of their history and hide it away. They don’t realize that the mistakes, the problems, the attempts at solutions are the same. We’re all the same people, underneath our citizenship status, our skin colors, our places in time. And every dangerous idea there’s ever been has been sold to the people as a great one.”

  “They need to know this,” Bristol said. “Metrics is made up of people. If those people knew how governments of the past thought they were solving these problems and the consequences that came up…”

  “They don’t want to hear it. To them, the past is a bore, not a lesson in how to govern.” Nan sat back down and wiped the spilled tea with her handkerchief. “Hell, I wish I thought that too. It’d make life a lot easier. But when you know better, you gotta do better. You can’t just swim with the current if you know it’s headed for a waterfall.”

  Samara raised her head. “That’s how I feel. I’m registered. As terrible as it sounds, there’s a part of me that wishes I’d never met either of you. I’d just go on living my life…” she trailed off as Bristol’s eyes lowered and Jude bowed his head. Nan nodded and helped her finish her thought.

  “If you could go back and not meet them, would you?”

  “No,” Samara said convincingly. “No, I’d still meet both of them.” She looked at Bristol, finally, and he at her. “I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t change it.”

  “That’s the thing about truth,” Nan said. “You feel the burden of learning it, but you never can unlearn something that’s true, and you never want to.”

  That thought hung in the air for a moment or two and led them into their separate thoughts and fears and dreams until someone began a yawn, which then passed back and forth between them. Nan laid out the thin mattresses and covered them with the hodgepodge quilts and their odd little cushions at the top for them to rest their heads upon. Images of multicolored people drifted behind Bristol’s eyes, accompanied by a strange presence of anger, pity, and wonder. He slept without dreaming.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Do it.

  Do it.

  Do it now.

  Now.

  No matter how many times Denver repeated these instructions, or how stern she made the voice in her head, her body refused to comply. The anger was easy to come by, because she had betrayed her lifestyle so blatantly by allowing herself to become emotional over what should have been a perfectly rational decision. She never would have considered herself an emotional person. Emotions were detrimental to all aspects of a person’s life, and here she was now as proof, physically paralyzed by bits of who-knows-what flying around madly inside her like specks in a decorative snow globe shaken by a wild, unsupervised child.

  She lay there on the pillows, bugged or unbugged, until the sun rose behind her curtain. With the dawning of a new day came the realization, blossoming fuller and still fuller in her mind, of the seriousness of what she’d done. Her husband was gone, maybe dead, and maybe not. If he was, she was his killer. If not, then he would be expected at work in an hour, and when he did not come, they would come to question her. And they would ask her why she had not done the thing she’d said she’d do.

  As she lay there, curled into a ball with her lips next to the soft fabric of the pillowcase—exactly how she’d positioned herself as she heard Stephen leave the house—she heard something. Running water. She stayed and listened. Yes, it was definitely the sound of the shower. Someone was in the house. After an entire night of paralysis, she slowly put her feet on the floor and made her way toward the bathroom. On the way, she gingerly reached out and curled her fingers around their broom. She held out the handle in front of her as she approached the bathroom, steam from the water floating into the hall from the bottom of the door. She turned the knob, went inside, and whipped open the shower curtain with one hand, thrusting out the broom handle in front of her body with the other.

  Stephen didn’t seem surprised to see her. After a small scream that seemed to begin to calm while it was still in her throat, she dropped the broom and took two steps back before her knees failed and forced her down onto their fuzzy brown bathroom rug. Stephen, inside the stall, finished rinsing his hair, turned the water off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stepped out. He crouched beside her on the floor, where, for a moment, neither of them said anything. Finally, Denver could no longer hold the ques
tion inside.

  “How did you know I wouldn’t do it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I was going to.”

  “I know.”

  Then he did something he’d never done before. He reached for her face with both hands and rested his forehead on hers. Aside from Sunday afternoons, she’d never been so near to him before. With his face so close, she could smell cool swirls, like peppermint, and warm ones, like sunshine. She’d always thought that if she was ever so close to a man, she’d feel some sort of exhilaration, an energy that would animate her beyond recognition, but here, feeling his nose grazing hers, and his breath, calm and steady, encouraging hers to match it, she felt only a sense of grounding as she’d never known it. As if she’d been floating and falling her entire life and now was safely on the earth.

  He did not move his hands, but put a bit more pressure on the sides of her head, as if he were hugging it, and kissed her forehead. “We don’t have much time,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “Well…we don’t have any time. See, it’s already rush hour, and will be until about ten. If we don’t show up for work, they’ll check on us. We won’t have gotten very far in all the traffic and eyes and cameras on full speed. If we do show up for work…”

  “You don’t think they’d pick us up there, do you?”

  “I do. My boss called this morning to tell me officers were there asking for me.”

  Denver swallowed. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I was afraid.”

  He squeezed her hand. “We all have moments.”

  “Why didn’t you leave last night?”

  Now he looked at her, and now she thought she understood. “Me?”

  “You.” He laughed softly in his throat. “Do you think I’d risk my life for unregs, most of whom I barely know, and leave my own wife here for dead?”

  “Stephen, we barely know each other.”

  “Yes, but…” he struggled. “Denver, I want to know you. I want to take care of you. I want to be honest with you about where I go and what I do. I want to be your husband.”