Sentient Baumfree comes for Catherine Bayer first. It's not ten minutes before the Monitor is back and pointing at Darnell. Catherine is nowhere to be seen. The quickness of it throws us. We don't know if it's a good or a bad sign.
"Come on, Mr. Jones," the Monitor urges him impatiently.
But Darnell can't seem to move. Our classmate stumbles getting out of his seat. He's shaken like the rest of us. Wants to know what's happened to Catherine and what's about to happen to him. He's taking too much time to get to Sentient Baumfree, so she comes to him. The Monitor takes Darnell by the arm and the two of them are gone. The rest of us turn and make note of the time on the wall clock: 3:40 p.m.
I feel something strike my back and turn to find Servina's ponytail holder on the floor next to me. I look back. Servina's got her eyes on Miss Chalk, who's not returning her attention.
My classmate points up at the clock, flashes me ten fingers, and shrugs.
Why was Catherine's test only ten minutes?
Servina has panic scrawled all over her. It's caused her naturally dour colors to bloom into a cloud that envelops the back half of the room. It's moving of its own accord up the holding room aisles, soaking a good third of the others in a pasty pink drizzle.
I don't answer and look away.
Miss Chalk puts down her electronic notepad and sets her big blue eyes on Servina. "And no signing or using gestures, either. Last warning. There won't be another."
6:55 p.m. Sentient Baumfree walks through the door and takes a seat in one of the chairs. She looks from Servina to me then back again, focusing the second time round on our arms and our faces, which are covered in a nervous sweat.
It's been three hours of pure hell. The holding room is nearly bare. Aside from Miss Chalk, Servina and I are the only ones left. We've watched all of our colleagues be called up and disappear. There have been distant shouts and, once, a scream. But no idea of who's made it and who hasn't.
I sneak a look over at Servina, who's gone pale and has a hand full of fingers set against her teeth, then back at Sentient Baumfree. The Monitor seems as desperate for this to be over as Servina. Her eyes go back and forth a few times, as if she's deciding which one of us to deal with first.
"Miss Chalk?" Sentient Baumfree calls.
The girl perks up from her slouch. "Yes, ma'am?"
"I'll be taking Miss Adams back now. You can process Miss Dobbs from here."
The news falls hard on Miss Chalk's face. She opens her mouth to say something and the Monitor holds up a finger.
"Now, please."
Servina tries to stand but can't and falls right back into her seat. "What's happening?" she asks quietly.
Sentient Baumfree motions for me to follow her and begins to leave the room.
"What's happening!" Servina's crying now. She's found her legs. Has made it halfway to the door before stumbling over a chair and landing, facedown, on the floor.
Miss Chalk presses a button affixed to the hallway wall and speaks low into its mesh face: "Removal, please. Holding room B."
"Let's go." Sentient Baumfree takes my arm and pulls me away.
I roll my shoulder and slide out of her grasp. "What's going to happen to Servina?"
Behind us, Servina is making a slight moaning sound. Maybe she's been hurt, cracked a tooth on the floor. Or maybe she finally realizes high school is over and a whole new set of rules now apply.
"Let's go, Miss Adams." Sentient Baumfree is using an
ominous tone. She's giving me a warning not to ask again. So I don't.
Before we can get very far, a group of Blue Coats comes into the holding room. Sentient Baumfree rushes me through a door that leads to a brand-new hall. She gets the door shut just as my schoolmate's screams catch up. The testing room is small. It's just large enough for a desk with one chair on either side. On the left wall is a large television screen, and on the right, a mirrored window nearly as long and wide as the plaster expanse. I'm claustrophobic, don't like any space like this where I can't easily move around, or get out.
"You okay?" Sentient Baumfree looks down at her electronic notepad and makes some notes about my moist face.
"Fine." I wipe myself dry with a sleeve.
The woman makes a signal with one hand and a blinking cursor appears on the large monitor over her head. "Please state your name," she says. On the screen the same words appear almost as fast as she speaks them.
"Harper Adams."
Harper Adams
. I barely get them out before the words appear, already transcribed.
The cursor blinks impatiently over Sentient Baumfree's red hair. It's hard not to watch.
"Miss Adams, at what age did you first notice your abilities?"
I shrug. The cursor continues its pulsing.
"A verbal answer, please."
"I don't remember a time when I didn't see colors."
"So the colors were the first thing you experienced?"
I'm confused. "It's hard to say."
Sentient Baumfree puts two fingers on either side of her temples and rubs. "Try, please. And we're on a clock here, Miss Adams." She looks at the silvered window and the man I feel behind it. He's fatigued, like the Sentient. Wants to hurry it up, add one or two good finds to their roster and get going. The feeling I get from both of them is that they've been at this all day and it's not been a very promising return on their efforts.
"I was always able to see people's colors, though it sometimes comes and goes."
"Why?"
I shrug. "Stress, I guess. Sometimes if I'm too close to a person, I get confused. What I want to see gets in the way of what's there, if you know what I mean."
Sentient Baumfree nearly smiles, then remembers herself. Covers her mouth with a hand. "Auras," she says. "The colors you see are called auras. Moving on, are you able to read people's minds?"
"No."
Sentient Baumfree leans forward and looks at me hard. "Sure?"
"I can sometimes tell what a person is feeling, but I don't know what they're thinking."
"Never?"
I think of Lucille and of our "incident" in Mr. Mitchell's class. "Sometimes I can see things written in their energy. But this seems to happen only with other Sentients."
"How about astral travel--"
"Excuse me," the man's voice erupts over some hidden intercom. "Sentient Baumfree, this Potential wouldn't know that term. A term that's about to be Red Listed, I might add."
Sentient Baumfree leans back and rubs at her eyes. When she leans forward again, her mascara is smeared. "Have you ever felt like you've been out of your body when you were sleeping? Or maybe even when you weren't sleeping? When you were awake."
I think about the one time it did happen. I was out on my grandparents' farm, swinging on the front porch. One minute I was playing with a cattail retrieved from the pond, and the next I was flying over our pastureland. One of our cows had died. I could see her stillborn calf sticking out, half born. When I came back to myself, I ran and got my father. He found the cow with her stillborn calf exactly where I'd said.
"Once," I answer. It never happened again.
The Monitor makes a notation on her notebook and continues. "Have you foretold events before they've happened?"
"Not really."
"Not really? What's that mean?"
I shrug. "I've had nightmares."
"And they come true?"
I look away from the Monitor's makeup-smeared eyes and study the door. "I dreamt that the Pandemic took away my family."
And then it happened
. But I don't need to tell her that. The redactor in the basement, and anyone else with enough clearance, already know.
"Okay, Harper, just a few more questions before we proceed to the tests. Are you able to see traces of a person once they've left?"
"Yes." This isn't uncommon. Sometimes, I'll walk into a room so thick with the residue of someone's colors, I'll forget they're not physically there any longer and ask them some question that never gets answered.
"What about objects? Are you able to see objects as clearly as people?"
"It depends. If they've been used enough. If they're important."
The Monitor thinks about this and nods. "Are you able to hear other people's thoughts? I don't mean reading their minds, now, I mean actually hearing their thoughts. It's called telepathy."
"No. Can others do this?"
To my surprise, the Monitor answers easily, "No. Not a one. But we don't know how these abilities might be shifting over time. So, with an advanced candidate, we add a few lines of inquiry to the mix."
Advanced candidate
. My heart sinks.
"May I ask you a question, Sentient Baumfree?"
The woman nods yes.
"Why am I like this? Why are you like this?"
She looks thoughtfully over my face, as if searching for an
answer somewhere on my features. "I don't know, Harper. People like us have been around for a long time. Even the Confederation Bible speaks of people who were given the gift of sentience. In the beforetime, they called us psychics or intuitives . . ."
"Isabella . . ." the man from behind the mirror barks, and the Monitor closes up.
She sets coupled hands on the table between us and proceeds in a more formal tone. "Now, we're going to do a few tests . . ."
They're simple. First Sentient Baumfree asks me the identity of the man behind the clouded mirror. I tell her he's a Manager, is in his midthirties, and has a sore right foot. He's sprained it, or maybe even broken it. I can tell by the pulsing explosions of violet-red that cup the area every time his heart beats. The core of his wound is so tender, the colors there extend right through the wall.
I explain to Sentient Baumfree that this is what I get mostly--a person's position, their age, their physical health. Sometimes feelings, too. The Monitor then asks me if I can tell her what three objects are sitting on the desk in front of the man in the other room. They're easy--a gun, a knife, and a stuffed bunny. Each of the three has been either well used or well loved, and the energy that envelops them creates for me a form made out of color.
Next, people are brought in the room and I'm asked to read their colors, presumably to make sure I'm able to identify them in a standardized way. Then there are card readings and Monitor readings and a set of challenges having to do with audio files and how I'm able to apply my abilities to a nonvisual format.
Having passed those tests, I'm asked to review a real, bona fide Monitoring file. Up on the screen, the dialogue appears as a set of vertical lines. It's a conversation between a man
and a woman. The husband is telling the wife that he wants to get out of the city. He's good and goddamned tired of the Confederation of the Willing and believes what he's heard, that
The Book of Noah
is real . . .
I jump out of my seat and back into the wall behind me, my ears covered with both hands. "I'm not supposed to hear this!"
Sentient Baumfree comes after me with softly waving arms. "It's okay, Harper! You've been approved for this part of the test . . ."
Recent events are too fresh in my mind. I shut my eyes and repeat, "I'm not supposed to hear this!"
Tenderly, the Monitor takes hold of my hands.
"I know what you saw," she whispers. "It was an unfortunate event, Harper. But you've been cleared now to have access to such terms as
The Book of Noah
. You will not be punished for witnessing it."
Just six months ago, a few hundred people were lined up against a wide gray building and killed for one of two offenses. The first crime,
Falsely Bearing His Name,
refers to speaking the term
The Book of Noah
. And the second,
Bearing Silent Witness,
to the crime of having heard someone else speak
The Book of Noah
and not turning that person in to the authorities. Those in the second category were largely family members of those who'd actually uttered the Red Listed term. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives. They struggled to hold hands as they were pushed into place. Blew kisses to one another. Stared at one another's faces, no matter how many times they were instructed to watch Press Secretary Johnson. One man broke free from his ordained position and ran full-force toward a woman a few people away. Warnings were called out but the man didn't stop. He was shot in the head and fell into the woman's arms. She was shot just as she caught him.
While these sinners were being ushered into place against the wall, twelve hundred students at my school, aged fifteen to eighteen, were ushered into a gymnasium. Up on the screen, the criminals' confused faces shone pale. We watched them from the bleachers and the gym floors. When Press Secretary read their codes, impossible numbers such as 550 and 917, we turned to one another with question-mark faces.
Murder by being shot? And what about the ones who didn't die from their wounds? Would it really be death by beheading?
We looked around at our teachers, who would not return our stares.
On the screen, Press Secretary Johnson explained that the government had allowed enough loose talk of our founding father. We'd been warned for months, hadn't we? The end of discussion on this topic had been mandated and that date had been tacked up to every free board and wall. Commercials ran morning and night indicating the final day on which loose talk of our founder would result in anything other than a 550. Notes had gone out to each and every mailbox. Schools were asked to hold seminars to educate the youth.
That date had been yesterday.
And today,
Press Secretary Johnson said with a smile,
today is the beginning of a new era. One with no more loose talk
.
That loose talk was fully represented by the term
The Book of Noah. The Book of Noah
referenced a text supposedly written by our founding father but meant to collapse the very government he'd built. I'd heard stories about this book from as long ago as my childhood. Over the years, talk of it came and went but the whispers were always the same.
The Book of Noah
would reveal every lie and every truth. Having read it, we'd be too filled with knowledge to ever again be content with the easier path of ignorance.