Veracity (36 page)

My daughter leans back and puts her head against the metal bar of the light. "You were just trying to give me back my name . . ."

"No! Please!" I must say it out loud. I can feel my lips move. Am aware of a subtle shift in my waking world. Of someone over me.

"Vera . . ."

I hear the electricity before I see it behind her, blackening her long hair. Binding her to the ugly lamp with the swing-arm head. She can't move. Can't stop the metallic buzz issuing from her mouth that's traveled up from her slate. All the while, she's looking at me, not able to change her expression. Then her eyes roll up into her head so all I see are the whites and the thin veins there becoming wide. Then all the rest of it that's too horrible even to contemplate. It ends only when Veracity's new mother rushes in with a pillow at the end of her hands and knocks her free from the pole. But it's too late.

"Harper."

"Harper!"

"Harper!" It's Lilly above me. She's using both arms to shake me awake.

"Lilly?"

"
Ssshhhhh.
You're yelling!" She points at the sleeping forms who're stirring around us. "Only one more hour to dawn. Let them rest."

She starts to leave and I put out a staying hand. "When are we going to war?"

"What?"

"Tomorrow morning. What time are we going to war?"

"Six o'clock we set out. We rendezvous with the rest of our troops at seven. We'll find out then if we've successfully taken the hub. If so, we'll broadcast our mission to the rest of the country and invite them to join us."

Thirty hours from now, if I don't have the identity of the main redactor, my baby will die. Lazarus will broadcast his plea, and in their zeal to join us, she and hundreds of thousands of others will try to speak a Red Listed word. If the redactor isn't taken down . . . I can't imagine. I have almost no time left to find it. The thought sucks all the moisture from my mouth.

Overnight, we've grown from a bunker of forty-eight to a small town of over two hundred. We have enough food to feed our original group for a few weeks but won't be down here that long. So the council decides to plunder the next month's reserves. Most of us have known nothing but the frugality of poor supplies and spotty contacts. The bucketfuls of food going by have drawn everyone out.

"Excuse me," says our cook, pushing by with a plastic tub full of vegetables between her pink arms. Inside the tub are white bulbs of onions, gray-brown heads of garlic, orange-red tomatoes, and tan, unshelled ears of corn with their tassels hanging out. Someone's brought fresh produce. Behind the cook, two men follow with meat. Brown paper packages closed with twine. What's inside we can only imagine. Everyone parts for the procession and sticks their head into the resulting wake to watch tonight's dinner as it's laid out on the kitchen's round table. Some people will stay here for the rest of the day. Eyes glazed over. Lips moist.

I retrieve a mug of hot water and a packet of green tea.
When I turn to leave, Rita Ramirez is watching me. The seventeen-year-old girl who was beat up by her boyfriend and brought to the bunker against her will.

"Hungry?" she asks, a carrot dangling from her mouth like a cigarette. "They've opened the vegetable pantry."

Rita is luminous today. Perhaps nerves about tomorrow have colored her skin. Or maybe it's excitement. War or no, the last time this girl saw the up top, she was only eleven years old, and it's obvious how much she's missed it.

"No." I hold up my mug. "Just wanted something to drink."

Rita follows me out of the kitchen and through the main hall. "You have something to wear for tonight?"

"No. Do you?"

We have to step delicately around people who're sitting on the floor, staked out on their bedrolls.

"No." Rita jumps over a woman still snoring beneath her covers. "I don't give a shit about that party."

"So you're not going." I try not to turn it into a question.

"Just long enough to find a date. I hear a whole busload of boys are coming from Springfield."

Rita moves ahead of me. She walks backward, stepping on unoccupied blankets and vagrant limbs as we move toward the hall. "Too bad you can't shake off that problem you're having with your
sight,
or whatever you call it."

People around us stop milling about and plummet into silence.

"It will come in time," I lie, ignoring my concern about how she knows.

Rita stops under the hall's threshold and asks loudly, "Without that main redactor, we're screwed, right?"

I step closer. Lift my hand and she reflexively pulls away. "What are you so worried about?" I laugh easily, as if I'm anything but worried. Remove a cobweb from her hair and hold it up to the overhead light. "You might want to clean up before the party."

Rita grits her teeth and marches away. Everyone else lies back down again, eager to be soothed.

It's my last session with Noam. We're in the only room not crowded with dozens of sitting or sleeping bodies.

"We're going to do some exercises today that might help us narrow down the field," Noam says. "You already know our ultimate goal. The number, letter, or name of the master. Whatever will provide us its exact location. We know it's in the Geddard Building, sitting in a room with a few thousand other redactors just like it." He nods at Amy, who's holding a large rolled-up piece of paper in her hands. She comes over and tosses it on the floor. We watch together as it unfurls. "This is an accurate schematic of the basement. We'd like you to simply try and choose a quadrant. See if you can't get a feel for direction."

I nod.
I know
the drill.

Noam pulls me away from the wall and centers me in front of the map. "Now close your eyes and try to relax. This is just the first try. Nothing life or death hinges on today's efforts. Okay?"

Life and death do hang on today's efforts, but I agree anyway and close my eyes. "Okay."

"Now, try to imagine a room full of boxes. And, in it, the main redactor, the master that will turn off all the others. The master that will turn off all the others . . . the master . . . that will turn off all the others . . . the master . . . the master . . . the master . . ."

I'm fatigued, and today it's a help, fading out and listening to Noam's undulating voice. As he talks me into a trance-like state, I float away into that basement room. Come back quickly with a solid direction.

"It's in the northeast quadrant."

"You sure?" Noam smiles.

"Yeah."

He takes Amy's clipboard. Stabs at the page with the tip of his finger. "As you know, they have the redactors set up in a master-slave configuration. If we accidentally take down a redactor that's
not
the master, the room, the building, the whole city gets locked down."

I knew about the alarm that would be sounded, but not this. John will get trapped. Any headway made by the first exercise has just been lost. I begin to sweat.

Noam puts a hand on my head, like my father used to do when he had something bad to tell me. "Lazarus didn't want you to know because he didn't want you to feel pressured."

"Well, I do, Noam. I feel pressured."

He shrugs. "This is our last shot. I'd like to try blindfolding you and giving you directions down into the basement as they've been provided to us."

"It doesn't work like that . . ."

"Please."

I nod. "Okay." I'll try anything at this point.

Amy wraps a black piece of cloth around my head as Noam begins to talk.

"West central Wernthal," he begins slowly. "A hundred feet below the Geddard Building. Encased in layers of lead and concrete. Try and travel in through the piping. Through a vent off the corner of State and Wellesley. Follow the heat backward home to the fields of turbines and air conditioners as big as cars . . ."

This isn't how it works. I travel only as I'm pulled. The journey begins at its end. Not the other way around.

"Noam, this isn't working." It's hard to explain to him why.

Poor Noam looks as if I've just popped his last balloon, although he already understands these basic truths. It's a trick of the mind, thinking we're all separate. Walking around disconnected from one another, without the same access to all there is to know. All one needs to do is shift focus. Sounds easy enough.

"Okay," Noam says, impatient. "We'll do it the old way."

He begins the chant to which I've become so familiar. I close my eyes and let his soft voice become a picture of the master. I imagine it as tall and wide, big as a room with a million flickering lights. I envision what it does, feel the heat coming off it like an oven.

Harper, do you think you can do this?
Noam's worry has reached out and caught me. I'm pulled away from the redactors too fast, before I can mark my way back to them, or get a glimpse of the right one.

When I open my eyes, Amy sees I've come up short and starts to cry. Noam walks over and pats me on the shoulder.

"We'll try again later," he says, adding in a broken voice, "No worrying. It's counterproductive."

By midafternoon, there's an hour-long line for the shower. Bars of soap have been set out next to a gallon jug of shampoo. Someone's put out a mirror.

It's been weeks since I've seen my reflection. Even so, I have to look.
"Jesus."

There's a trail of raised skin just under my hairline from some old wound I don't remember. The cut on my chin has been sewn shut, but Lilly's needle could only do so much. The deepest parts are still raw and look like day-old meat.

I walk back to my room and find Ezra putting on her makeup at my table.

"Come here," she says.

I sit down and she drops some folded fabric into my lap. They're clothes for tonight's party. A short black skirt and a sheer yellow blouse.

"These are on loan for tonight only," she says, straight-faced. It takes me a few seconds to understand she's joking.

I pull off my trousers. Work the skirt slowly up each thigh. It's snug. I don't want it to tear. "Thank you."

Ezra waves at me with the wand from her mascara. "Shut
your eyes." She applies my new face tenderly, taking care around the wounds that are still healing.

I pucker my lips like she instructs. Pout so she can draw me a fuller set.

"Just so you know. Everyone is on lockdown tonight. That means no getting drunk and no going up top. You see anyone stumbling around or starting toward the back exit, you let someone know." Ezra drops the pink tube back in her makeup bag. "You're welcome, by the way. You look halfway decent."

Lazarus is wearing a long orange tunic and, on his head, a brown and orange cap. He leads me past couples lined up in the hall, giggling around pockets of spilled beer, and to the front hall, which has become nearly impassable. New people are standing around in clusters speaking loudly and in animated voices about what they saw last night on their way over. Lightning. Rain. A few frightened deer on the country roads caught in the flame of their headlights. Women are wearing too much makeup. Men are close-shaven. Everyone is smoking and drinking, filling up the air with clouds and cologne.

Most of the people near the stage have been born underground. I know by their age and their slate-free necks. They are largely teenagers, some in their early twenties. Their paper-white skin shows no moles or freckles, holdovers of sunburns or windburns, exposure to the topside elements. Without slates, their undisrupted necks look romantically long.

Some of these bunker-born people appear underdeveloped. Even with the required supplements they receive from birth, there are a handful of young men and women markedly shorter than the others. This lost height is in their legs. There beneath the hemline of the women's dresses and pressed
against the outer line of the men's trousers, their legs have an unnatural, outward bow to them, leaving a large space where their knees should be.

Lazarus leads me toward the makeshift stage beyond them. It's a series of cardboard boxes that have been pushed together to form a ten- or twelve-foot-long rectangle. An old man is already standing in its center, his arms waving to calm down the crowd.

"Who is that?" I ask.

"He's a storyteller." Lazarus answers with his head turning from one end of the room to the other.

"Looking for someone?"

"Yes." Lazarus turns back to me. "John. He'll only be here for a few hours before he has to get back to Antioch. They're flying him out to Wernthal tonight."

My face must lose all its color. Lazarus smiles and turns to the crowd, a finger held to his mouth. Immediately, they're quieted.

I lean in quickly and whisper into his ear. "You're sure John's coming?"

He nods yes. "Quiet now. You'll want to hear this."

"Why is he coming?"

Lazarus leans down, amusement and frustration compressing his lips. "To see you. Now,
sssshhhh.
" He pushes on my shoulders until they're parallel to the stage. "Listen."

"Anna! Anna!" the storyteller yells. "Come on now, daughter." He beckons one of these pale young women with a puckered finger. "Move along! We have an audience to entertain!" His words are coming out strange, like they're getting caught on his tongue and tripping out of his mouth. I wonder if this is what I've heard Lazarus call an
accent.
"These fine people haven't risked life and limb to watch your old father tell tales."

Arms go up in protest. "Tell us about the beforetime," the audience begs. Their hunger is all over them. They long for stories about lives lived anywhere and anytime other than here and now.

The old man nods and holds up a hand. "Sovereignty!" he shouts.