Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (16 page)

“The thing is,” Eric continued, “if they really are
the Palms, then we're not dealing with just any Tribe. The Palms were the smartest, most aggressive Tribe that this America has ever seen. Even more dangerous than we thought, if they managed to hide the existence of a dirty sweep.”

They arrived at the Department of Research, and Natasha tapped her finger; Arthur had temporarily granted her genetic code access to the wing. They maneuvered the cart in a clumsy arc across the circular lobby, toward the door marked
OFFICE OF DRY ENGINEERING
.

“We shouldn't keep this secret, Natasha.”

“If you tell Arthur or Jeffrey what we did,” Natasha said, “we're both getting eternal bans from the Department of the Exterior. And I can't even imagine what the Alphas would say.” Eric only shrugged but, sensing a weakness, Natasha pressed on. “Look, I'm not crazy, okay? I don't want to put the settlement in danger any more than you do. But we have to be smart about this. Jeffrey has always told us that the Tribes are tricky, so before we throw away our careers, let's figure out if they're telling the truth.”

“How do you expect to do that?”

Natasha tapped her finger once again, and they wheeled the memory cube into the Office of Dry Engineering. The room contained a series of long, high metal tables with men and women in white lab coats and goggles tinkering with small instruments. A contained wreckage of computer and electrical boards lay scattered before them. At the back of the room, a few stooped and very still bodies peered into the eyeholes of compact u-quark microscopes, which, according to a recent bulletin, the scientists were using to investigate new subatomic energy sources.

Upon seeing Eric and Natasha, two of the engineers stepped stiffly down from their stools.

“Just leave it to me,” Natasha said. “My free day is coming up soon. I'll go to the Archives and have Min-he dig up everything there is about the Palm attack. If the sweep looks as clean as we've always been told, then we'll assume they were lying. If not, then I agree with you. We have to tell someone.”

Eric was already nodding hello to the engineers.

“Fine,” he said, under his breath. “Do what you have to do. But I don't want it to be ‘we' anymore. I shouldn't have let you convince me to leave the settlement in the first place. They could've killed us, easily. I mean, Alpha, we're lucky the Office didn't sweep us by accident. I'm out, okay? I'm wiping my hands clean of this mess.”

11

T
he Archives were one of the great feats of America-Five. In the time before the Storm, when other Alphas had put all their energy into transforming the Yangs' underground bunkers into suitable homes, shoring up their Domes, and gathering enough seed, animals, scientific equipment, and raw DNA supplies to last them until the Day of Expansion, the America-Five Alphas had also had the foresight to gather information. For the first two hundred years after the Storm, the piles of books, digital files, and paper records had lain fallow in one dehumidified room on level eight. Later, though, sometime just before the Gamma birth, the Alphas and Betas had decided to siphon off the top story of the Department of Living and make this area into a reading room and library. At first no one saw much use in it, since they already had the Pretends for entertainment and schooling, and the Ethical Code for moral grounding. But as the years went on, interest in Pre-Storm documents grew and, eventually, added to that interest, there arose a desire to keep detailed histories of the happenings within the settlement itself, records beyond what individual memory could retain. Now, as had been the case since the first professional assignments of the Gamma generation, the Archives maintained a healthy staff of twelve to fifteen citizens. Their work consisted of recoding the old, Pre-Storm documents and books, maintaining the living record and the yearly biosnapshots of each America-Five citizen, and—though Natasha would never say as much to Min-he—endlessly shifting information from one organizational system to another.

After breakfast, Natasha climbed the spiral staircase to the top floor of the wing. Today was her first free day in weeks, and she was all too happy to spend it away from the Office of Mercy and the dull, streaming data from the satellite feeds. She cleaned her hands in the decontamination sink at the landing and pushed through the handsome, Pre-Storm–style glass doors that led to the Archives. The air in this room was cool from the dehumidifying vents and smelled of old paper. Towering shelves cut narrow rows along each side of the aisle leading to the archivists' stations, and each shelf boasted a tightly stacked row of faded book spines. Except for the printings of the Ethical Code, these were all Pre-Storm books—really, the only sentimental relics that the Alphas had preserved from that previous world.

Tucked off to one side of the room was the reading area: a comfortable nook of plush armchairs with ottomans and little tables that one could draw up and over the armrests. Along the opposite wall were seven windowed conference rooms that citizens could sign out for private meetings. Arthur met here sometimes with the heads of the Department of the Exterior offices; and often, a handful of citizens would organize discussion clubs that gathered in the evenings. Natasha herself had attended a few meetings of the Moral Principles Discussion Group in her first year out of school, and Min-he had once dragged her to a culinary club responsible for providing the kitchens with innovative menu ideas. Just now, there were five Betas talking animatedly (though silently, to Natasha's ears, since the rooms were soundproof) around one of the tables. They were not volunteering, though. A sign on the door identified them as the Reeducation Committee, a subgroup from the Department of Government. These men and women helped the Alphas organize specific behavioral and psychological goals for citizens who had acted against the common good, against the Ethical Code. Natasha looked away; she could not worry about them right now.

Natasha found Min-he at a large desk in the back corner of the room. A giant book was propped open on a wooden stand, and loose papers were scattered across the desk and floor. Min-he sat hunched over a small computer, typing rapidly. Wisps of black hair had escaped from her usually neat ponytail, and her eyes exhibited a wide, slightly crazed look.

“Hey,” Natasha whispered, “can I bother you for a second?”

Min-he's head shot up from the screen, but she smiled when she saw Natasha.

“I forgot it was your free day! Sure, I was about to take a break anyway.” She closed the massive book gingerly, so all the pages lined up straight, then laid it down on its side.

“What are you working on?”

“A new index of the Bible. My Director gave me the assignment this morning.”

“Didn't someone just finish a new index last year?”

“Yes.” Min-he sighed. “But this one will cross-reference thematically parallel passages in the Ethical Code. Anyway, were you looking for something? Leisure reading?”

“No, something for work, actually.” It was harder to lie to Min-he than Natasha had anticipated. “Well, you know we're still having trouble with the Pines. Our tracking methods haven't been working, and we need some new ideas.” Natasha faltered a moment, looking up as one of the archivists coughed. “A few of us have been talking about the Palm attack,” she continued. “Just to see—behaviorally, I mean—what we might be up against.”

“Does Jeffrey know you're here?” Min-he asked, with some suspicion.

“Of course,” Natasha said, “it was practically his idea.”

Min-he frowned, and Natasha was pretty sure that her roommate guessed there was more to the story. And yet, without further questioning, Min-he set Natasha up at one of the viewing consoles in a dimly lit corner of the room, with a list of video codes from Year 283, on the day of the Palm attack. With a last glance at the archivists, Natasha typed in the first code and tapped her finger on
Play
.

The recording came from one of the sensors on the green, and began seconds before the alarm sounded. Natasha watched, captivated, as teams of suited citizens jogged up from the stone steps and fanned out into different positions, their weapons snug under their arms. Some climbed ladders to the roofs of the wings, while others knelt on the green, with still others standing behind them. One team of four vanished around the side of the settlement and into the trees, perhaps hooking through the forest to keep the Palms from retreating.

When the manual sweep happened, it happened fast. The Tribe burst onto the green; they emerged running from the trees amid a flurry of arrows and spears aimed for the hearts of the citizens on the ground. But the Tribe's weapons could not stop the quicker and sharper spray of bullets from the citizens' guns, and the Palms fell, if not all at once, then in very quick succession. Natasha leaned in toward the screen, searching for any clue that the Palms and the Pines were connected, as Axel had claimed, or else searching for some great discrepancy that would make a connection unlikely. But it was too hard to say. Many Tribes had overlaps in appearance and dress, and any difference Natasha noticed could easily be attributed to the elapse of twenty-two years. Now on the recording, medworkers were rushing up the stone stairs, and Natasha saw with horror that at least five citizens had arrows sticking straight up from the tough fabric of their biosuits. Then, while the others were stowing their weapons, a group of three citizens went from body to body, guaranteeing with precise, single shots to the back of the head, which made the bodies jump as if shocked by live wire, that no human being of the Palm Tribe would continue to suffer.

The video was in its last minute when Natasha noticed, in the sliver of sky above the tree line, a column of dark smoke dividing the screen in two. That must have been the fire that the Palms had set in their wake, the fire that had caused Jeffrey's burns and, if Axel was telling the truth, that had killed many Tribespeople too. Jeffrey must have been among the four who had left the green before the attack. Natasha watched anxiously for his return, but before anything more could happen—and to Natasha's frustration—the recording ended.

Natasha hurriedly selected the next code. She wondered if there was footage of the Palms actually starting the fire, or a record of whatever tricks they'd performed to trap Jeffrey in the flames. But this next video showed a similar location as the first, only from a different angle on the green; and it cut off even earlier. The third recording was from Inside, when the archivists used to keep a camera in the Dome, attached to the maincomputer. (They had since dismantled it, after too many complaints from the citizens about being treated like Tribes in the field.) By the time Natasha entered the code for the fourth and final recording, she had remembered something important. There probably would be no documentation of the Palms in the forest because the Office of Mercy didn't have as many sensors back then—hence the Palms' success in reaching America-Five undetected.

Indeed, the last video again showed the attack on the green, though at least this one was a little more interesting. Here, Natasha could better make out the faces of the team of four who had gone into the forest before the Palms arrived.

As she had suspected, one in the party was Jeffrey. A second was definitely Claudia. As for the identities of the other two, though, Natasha could not tell. She wondered if the team had inadvertently startled the Palms with a covert approach—and in that way had instigated the Tribe's violent and sudden retaliation—or if the Palms had seen the team coming from a long way off and had set the fire deliberately in their path. She wished that Jeffrey wasn't already watching her for signs of unethical thinking, or that she didn't have so much to hide; otherwise she would have tried again to get him to talk about that day. For now, though, she decided she could not risk it.

This last recording, once again, ended abruptly, and Natasha turned off the console and went to find her roommate.

“Hey,” she said, squatting down beside Min-he's desk. “Do you have any more information from that day? Audios or logbooks or anything?”

“Nope, that's it,” Min-he replied. “Why? Didn't find what you were looking for?”

“No, it was helpful,” Natasha said evasively. “It's just that all the records stop right after the sweep is over.”

“Well, we can't keep
everything
. If the records stop, then probably not much happened afterward. You saw the whole sweep, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

Min-he tore her attention away from her computer to gaze at Natasha. “I promise I gave you everything we have. The Archives are open to everyone. I'm not allowed to keep things back. I'd lose my position here if I did.”

Not wanting to raise Min-he's suspicions any further, or attract the attention of the archivists seated nearby, Natasha hastily thanked Min-he and went back to the console.

She watched the recordings again and again. The lunch hour came and went, and the dark of the room and the glow of the screen tired her eyes and made them dry.

The Tribespeople were falling to the ground again, hit by a field of invisible bullets, when a light touch on Natasha's shoulder made her jump.

“You won't find anything useful there,” came a smooth, confident voice. “You're not the first to try.”

Raj was leaning over her, one hand on the back of her chair, his delicate features and clear skin illuminated by the glow of the screen.

“What really makes me curious, though,” he continued, “is what prompted you to dig up these records in the first place. If, of course, you're willing to tell.”

“It's no secret,” Natasha said, willfully returning her eyes to the screen. “We're having trouble with the Pines. I thought that looking at the Palms might give me some new ideas.”

“
You
thought? Didn't you tell Min-he this was Jeffrey's idea?”

“It's not polite to eavesdrop.”

“I agree. But I wasn't eavesdropping. I asked Min-he what you were up to and she told me. We go way back,” he said, sensing Natasha's surprise. “I used to be her Director.”

“Until the Alphas transferred you to sewage,” Natasha said. She wasn't trying to be mean, but Raj was making her nervous.

“Electricity and Piping,” he said, “but close enough.” He shrugged. “It was a punishment for lesser offenses than the ones you've committed.”

She would not allow him to see her fear. He had spoken the words casually, but the meaning was not lost on Natasha. She vividly remembered how he had watched her and Eric leave the Dome on the night of the Crane Celebration. Well, whatever he suspected, he would receive neither denials nor confirmations from her.

He drew up a chair from another console.

“I've gone through all these recordings,” he said, “and many others that Min-he didn't give you because they're so peripheral to the attack. I'm guessing you've noticed by now that there are gaps in the record. Well, I was Director of the Archives for five years and I can tell you that those gaps are real, and were created by someone in this settlement. I don't know who did it, or why, but they're definitely covering up something. And I'm sure that it goes all the way to the top. The Alphas know. When I was Director, I filed several appeals for more information.”

“Did they tell you anything?”

“Only a little. And nothing on purpose. Eventually, they got tired of my curiosity. Hence my abrupt career change.”

The reference to his transfer stirred Natasha to recall that, officially, she stood in harsh disapproval of Raj. Only a month ago, he had harassed her and her team outside the training Pods and had addressed them with loathing and total disrespect. Apparently, though, Raj felt no antagonism for her now. And Natasha wondered if he was even more perceptive than she'd thought, if he'd noticed a change in her since the mission.

“Why don't you come to our meeting on Sunday?” he asked.

“What meeting?”

“Me and some other Deltas. Mercedes, Eduardo, Sarah, and Ben. We meet at twenty hundred hours on Sundays in conference room A, just around the corner. We discuss the murder of the Tribe populations.”

“You're allowed to do that?”

“Of course,” he said. “It's still a free America.”

He stood and looked quickly over the codes that Min-he had given Natasha. “Like I said, you won't find anything useful in these, or anywhere else in the Archives for that matter. But if you are truly curious about the Palms, you might look someplace else.”