Children of the Uprising Collection Page 4

  Chapter Six

  Denver let the letter fall to the bathroom floor.

  It had come a day early, just as she’d hoped it would. Though Mom and Bristol weren’t home yet, she’d still retreated to the most private room in the house before opening it. She stared at it, the ramifications of the blue printed words only now washing over her.

  His name was Stephen Steiner. His skin and hair were very light, which she expected, being darker-skinned herself—Metrics liked to mix skin colors so eventually all people would be exactly the same color. They’d done a remarkably good job at it so far, though Denver and Bristol somehow turned out darker than their parents. He was also in Mid-Tier Four, a full Tier beneath her. She’d expected that too. A dead father and a live brother made her a poor match for a Three. Mr. Steiner was studying to work as a dispatcher for the Department of Transport, which meant they spent every day in the same building. Had she seen him before? All those days rushing through the door for her daily seven a.m. meeting, all those glassy-eyed elevator rides, the trips home where she simply shut off the part of her brain that cared about being shoved and smashed by the current of commuters. Was he there among them?

  Maybe. There was a link to his profile on the paper, of course, and scanning it would make his face appear right here in the bathroom with her. Then she would recognize him, or not. No, she’d let it go. It was enough for one evening to understand the irritating reality that she would go live with a stranger. Seeing a strange face would only make reality itch more.

  A knock at the bathroom door made her jump. “Yes?”

  “It’s me, honey,” Mom said. “Everything okay?”

  Denver opened the door and looked into her mother’s face. Mom looked down at the letter. Both watches flashed with light. Of course. Just when she wanted to really talk…

  “My letter came! He’s a dream! Isn’t it wonderful?” said Denver.

  “Let’s celebrate tonight!”

  “Perfect!”

  The flash only signaled the start of the recording, so she couldn’t be sure how long they’d listen. The average recording was seven minutes, though at work, she’d listened to recordings of others that had lasted several hours.

  Bristol rounded the corner, looking like a storm in his all-black uniform. “What are we celebrating?” His gaze landed on the blue lights at their wrists, and then the letter. “Oh. Congratulations, Den.”

  “Thank you!”

  She rolled her wet eyes and looked again at her watch with a small smile. Can you believe our luck? Then she leaned down and took the letter from the floor back into her bedroom. Now that Bristol knew, she was sure he’d give her some privacy.

  She leaned her forehead on the cool window. You’re doing everything right. She’d studied hard and had a solid job waiting for her at Metrics. There was absolutely nothing in the letter she didn’t expect. Still, now that she had her letter, she wished it hadn’t come today, but tomorrow. The anticipation had tricked her into thinking this enormous life change would be nothing but positive, but now the anticipation was over, she longed for one more day to be just Denver, herself unchanged and her life unremarkable.

  The doorknob turned, too slowly to be Bristol. Mom poked her head in the room.

  “How long has it been, then?” asked Denver.

  “Thirty minutes,” said Mom. “If they’re still recording, let them listen.”

  She sat down on the bed and held out her arms. Denver curled into them like a child.

  “When I was assigned, everything was different,” Mom said. “The whole system was just being built. It wasn’t sophisticated like it is now, how they take personality and abilities and past choices into account. They couldn’t, really, because the war had drained us and there was no money to relocate people to be near a perfect assignment. They matched us locally, and the only thing they looked at was our skin color. Light with dark. Now it’s all different. You two will get along. They’ll have made sure. You might even come to love each other.”

  Denver pulled away and leaned against the wall. “Did you love your assignment?”

  Mom licked her lips. “I loved your father.”

  “You must have. To have two kids with him…” Denver looked at her mother, who was now looking down and twirling a bit of the blanket in her fingers. Denver’s mind began to simultaneously speed and slow, as if it were running in the sand. “With Dad. With Don Ray.”

  Mom buried her left wrist in the blanket and said, “It was different, baby. I thought I’d tell you when you were older, but you might as well know. It was different then. Don—Dad—was a homosexual.” She took a breath. “And it wasn’t like it is today, where they can just choose to live without a spouse. Back then, everyone of a certain age had to be married. The most important thing was creating the New Race.”

  Denver stared at the bit of blanket in her mother’s hand for a full minute. “He wasn’t my real dad.” She’d meant to ask it as a question, but it came out like she already knew.

  “He was a good man. He was kind and clever and…”

  Denver curled her knees into her body. “But I don’t have his DNA.”

  “No. No, baby, you don’t. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him in another way. We worked well together, and you’ll work well with your assignment too.”

  “You had two children outside of marriage and Dad killed himself. That’s why neither of us have the right New Race skin tone. You call that working well together?”

  “Don had a lot of problems, honey. He was depressed anyway—he would have been even if we weren’t married—and Metrics never made things easy for him.”

  “You didn't make things easy for him either.”

  “Don encouraged my affair, if you’d call it that. He loved spending time with both you and Bristol. He wanted kids. He just didn’t want to make them with me.”

  Mom tried to touch Denver’s shoulder, but Denver dodged her. “Do you want to know who your father is?”

  “No!”

  And with that, she got up, put on her shoes, and walked out the front door. She briefly registered Bristol standing to stop her, but she charged past him.

  She walked into the first cold snap of spring. She hadn’t brought her jacket, but the thought of going back to get it filled her with disgust. It didn’t matter how hard she fought for a better life, she couldn’t escape the fate already laid down for her. She didn’t know how Metrics even let her slip through—she should be as unregistered as Bristol, fighting toward nothing, sleeping and eating and going to work without any thoughts of rising or falling. What had Mom been thinking? To have a child with another man, get away with it, and then to have another… Of course, Mom’s citizenship score was low as tree roots, but did she really believe the punishment would stop with her? How crazy was she to believe she could hide such a thing from Metrics? They kept samples of everyone’s blood since birth, so they must have known and decided within an hour of Denver’s entrance into the world that she wouldn’t live long as a Three. They probably only allowed it to save some face and convince themselves that their matching system was working.

  She approached Craft Street, where assigned artisans made specialty coffee and bread and jewelry and other things she soon wouldn’t be able to entertain the possibility of buying as a Four. Did Mom realize that? That her daughter’s entire way of life was about to change drastically because she didn’t do the right thing and abort when she had the chance? And then there was the other question of who this man had been. Mom had lived in that apartment since she was twenty. Could it be someone local? Denver scanned the area for men with skin like night. People shopped along the street happily—just another day for them, burning the hours until curfew—but all of these people had about the same paper-bag–brown tone to their skin. She couldn’t go on like this. She was suffocating.

  Denver sat on a bench with spikes between individual seats. Her gaze found a store window. In it, a bright pink mannequin with splayed arms and l
egs wore a short green dress, ridiculous for this weather. The fabric looked light and three or so shades of green were layered on top of each other. She didn’t particularly like it, but she liked the sight of the store window.

  “Watch—current dress size,” she said.

  A woman’s voice answered her from her wrist. “Your current dress size is two.”

  She held her watch to her eyes, pointing the face toward the window. “Show an image of me in this.”

  A hologram of herself wrapped in green appeared floating before her eyes. Not bad.

  “Buy it.”

  “Bought.”

  She tapped the face so she wouldn’t have to hear the part where the store owner comes on and thanks you and tries to get you to buy more. She walked up to the clerk, who smiled and handed her the bag. A moment of desire satisfied. It wouldn’t last, but with any luck, she’d think of something else when the suffocation came back.

  Chapter Seven

  Bristol wasn’t allowed to talk at the restaurant, his manager was very clear about that. The kitchen was full of unregs, and by this time in their lives, they’d grown accustomed to always being asked to listen, but never talk. When they found communication absolutely imperative, they were to be on the lookout for extraneous words that might waste time, such as please. It was important to know exactly what you were going to say before any noises came out of you because you could get in trouble for uhh and oh and even hmm. If someone needed to clean a counter, they’d say, “Pass the squeegee,” loud and clear, like a line in a play, but nothing more. At their various stations, Bristol and the other line cooks would dance around each other in a wordless ballet, and even in the silence, Bristol could tell which ones liked him and which ones were too bitter to like anyone. Bristol still didn’t know any of his coworkers’ names, not even the manager’s. He supposed they were introduced once, but that had been years ago, and Bristol hadn’t been paying attention, and to ask again would surely be considered a waste.

  They were allowed to act as humans again just as soon as their shift was over and their cleaning was done and they were on their way home. But by that time, knowing his manager’s name didn’t seem important enough to ask. He hardly talked to anyone on the street or at the bus stop anyway. Bristol didn’t have many friends apart from his sister. It seemed to him that his fellow unregs always had an excess of something within them—fear or anger or self-loathing. Mostly they were unhopeful creatures wrapped tightly up in themselves, which made sense to Bristol because society got along by pretending they didn’t exist. Not that he was a saint. We all have our ways of coping.

  What he preferred was to fade into the scenery and listen to the conversations of others, like a half-finished face in the background of some tableau, just witnessing the action. He liked to be inside his own head, to think of images to match the words he heard. Today, he took his seat on the bus behind two middle-aged women. He liked women's conversations the best. The one talking usually tried to be detailed, not leaving out important things like emotions, and the other one usually made those extra listening noises that peppered the talking nicely. He sat, looked out the window, and waited a moment for his ears to tune in.

  “Relocate to where?” one of them said.

  “They’re saying out west, to the desert. There’s lots of land out there.”

  “Then who would do—you know, the cooking and the cleaning and everything? We can’t just get rid of them.”

  “There’s an excess of Fives right now. Lots of people in higher tiers had their citizenship scores brought down, and that’s the lowest they can drop.”

  “Hm!”

  “But I’ve heard they’re giving higher jobs to the Fives right now because the unregs have the menial labor market cornered and there are just so many Five jobs to go around.”

  “What?”

  “Yes! My niece knows a Five who just got assigned as a bank teller!”

  “No!”

  “Yes! Just think—that poor girl has probably been taught to do customer service or repairs or whatever it is they teach the Fives, and just like that! Her future changes. They expect her to work with the interface bankbots, balance the amounts… It’s a lot of responsibility! Surely she’d be more suited to a Five job.”

  “Surely!”

  “But all the Five jobs are taken.”

  They must be Threes. Threes were always so afraid of anyone beneath them.

  The second woman thought a moment. “What about the higher tiers? Won’t this mean there’ll be more work for us?”

  “Oh, people will pitch in. I’d think this would give the robotics workers more incentive to improve their work to help us out. There’s a rumor they’re holding back now, trying not to take jobs away. Wouldn’t be a problem if this goes through. It’ll help us all financially too. Do you even know how much we’re spending on the unregs?”

  “Money that could be going back into the economy!” said the second.

  “That’s right.”

  The bus stopped and the ladies scuffled off, both stopping to thank the driver. How much of what they said was true? Probably the bit about robotics slowing to accommodate jobs. A human driving this bus was proof of that. Don’t worry about it too much. Talk like this came up every now and then, saving resources and such. But less than fifty years ago, people deemed unfit to procreate were sterilized, and everyone else was forced to have only one child. Wasn’t it enough? The unregs weren’t hurting anyone, and if it helped the Fives to let them drive instead of upgrading the busses, why couldn’t they just do that?

  A picture began in his mind’s eye, as if it had always existed and someone were just blowing dust off the surface. The face of a watch lying on the ground. The screen showed the middle of some transaction. A hand cupped it from underneath, with the palm up and the fingers curling in, attached to a crushed body below. He took out his notebook and sketched it.

  “Oi!”

  Bristol looked up. He was the only one still on the bus.

  The driver looked at him through the rearview. “Missir stop?”

  Bristol threw his notebook and pencil into his backpack. “Oh…yeah.”

  “Where were you supposed to get off?”

  “Larkin Station.”

  The driver shook his head. “You’ll never make it back there before curfew.” The bus gave a sudden exhale. “I’ve got my scooter. I’ll take you. I’m going that way anyway.”

  Moments later, Bristol hung on to a bar behind his seat as the scooter flew through the quickly emptying streets. He’d never been on a scooter before but couldn’t imagine never going on one again. He should try to convince Denver to buy one. The two of them could ride like this every night…

  Except they couldn’t, he remembered. In a few days she’d be married, and he’d be the only one sleeping in the little bedroom with the one loose bar at the window. And then there was the problem of this graffiti arrest… Suppose it wasn't over? Just stop. Just enjoy this ride.

  “Y’smell like onions!” shouted the driver over his shoulder.

  “It’s garlic. I’m a cook.”

  Usually this admission about his profession inspired some sort of credence. Bristol liked his day job well enough and there was usually some confidence in his voice on the rare occasions he told other people. But this driver, casually in control of this soaring metal beast, only nodded. Bristol got the impression he knew who he was too, and he was proud of it.

  All too soon, they halted in front of Bristol’s building.

  Bristol stuck out his hand. “Thanks very much.”

  The driver took it and shook. “No problem, man. By the way, those bushes in front of your building…they ever burn?”

  “What?”

  “Ever see any burning bushes?” He looked at Bristol like he knew something, expected something.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The driver frowned. “Stupid joke. Anyway, you’re welcome.”

 
He sped off, leaving Bristol standing there, unable to decide if he was more curious to know more or relieved he didn’t.

  Chapter Eight

  On Monday morning, Samara met her new boss. Warden Paul was a tall woman made even taller with the help of her shiny black stilettos. Her uniform, pressed to perfection, looked as if it had grown on her, and she seemed the type to keep an identical one in her drawer for sleeping. Though Samara had diligently practiced good posture the entire bus ride over, she shrank in the presence of this glistening giant. Warden Paul had barely laid eyes on Samara when she gestured for her to follow and clacked down the hall and into the cafeteria past the boys eating their lunches. Silence grew in waves as she made her way to the front. She snapped her heels together, drew her hands behind her back, and surveyed the room. Yes, they were all listening. She smiled with her square teeth but not her eyes.

  “Inmates!”

  A droning chorus answered, “Yes, Warden Paul.”

  She smiled wider to a frightening effect. “Answer crispier! Inmates!”

  “Yes, Warden Paul!”

  “That’s better. We will now practice our new meal routine. From now on, you will have one minute to eat your food as quickly as you can. Then you will have twenty seconds of rest. During the rest, you are not to touch any food or drink. Your hands will be in your lap. You will have three rounds of this, and then you will clean up and be dismissed for work. We will do this because it is fun. Now, how long will you have to eat your food?” She paused. “Nelson!”

  “One minute, three times.”

  “Yes. How long will you have to rest? Jordan!”

  “Twenty seconds, three times.”

  “And why are we doing this? Kopecky!”

  Kopecky mumbled, shoulders hunched into his ears.

  “Loud and proud, Kopecky.”