Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (7 page)

But Jeffrey had become disconcerted. “Why would you think that?” he asked.

“Ben saw the engineers bringing your biosuits to the Office of Exit,” said Raj. “We could only assume that you intend to leave the settlement in the morning.”

“If that's true,” Jeffrey said, “then you know more than us.”

“Why sweep the Tribes at all?” Mercedes said, stepping forward to stand beside Raj, her cheeks and eyes alight with the force of her own accusation. “Why not let them pass through our area and travel south like they're trying to do? There are inhabitable places there. We've seen them on your own satellite feeds. Why can't you let them be, let them live and grow and reproduce themselves? And then, at the time of Expansion, we could incorporate them. Welcome them as our brothers and sisters of the human race!”

“That's a conversation for another time, perhaps,” Jeffrey said with mounting impatience. “I would respectfully suggest that you're ignoring the immense suffering and loss of life that would take place within that timeframe. Not to mention that you are greatly oversimplifying the difficulties of blending ourselves and the Tribes in that way—even in some distant future.”

“You of all people should know best, shouldn't you, Jeffrey?” said Eduardo, hopping down from the mats. “You've killed more Tribespeople than anyone.”

“Enough,” Jeffrey said. “If you don't get out of my way this instant, I will file a charge with the Alphas for disrupting Department business. If what you say about the mission leaving tomorrow is true, then your interference is all the more serious.”

“Murderers,” Ben spat. But it was an insult made in desperation, Jeffrey was moving past them already.

With a word from Raj, the group pulled away, and the team crossed the playing fields without further harassment, moving quickly toward the Office of Mercy.

“Useless people,” Alejandra huffed. “All talk and no solutions.”

Douglas, Nolan, and Eric quickly agreed, adding their own remonstrations.

“I can't believe that Eduardo guy would speak to you like that,” said Natasha, catching up to Jeffrey. “We
should
file a charge.”

Jeffrey shook his head, waving it off, but his mouth and cheeks remained tight, his blue eyes cold.

“No,” he said, “it wouldn't make any difference. If they're that elementary in their ethical thinking, then only a solid course of reeducation would correct their minds. I'm more worried about what's going on in the Office of Mercy right now.” But a second later he muttered, speaking to himself, “Unethical, instinct-driven people. As if the Alphas hadn't thought through everything. As if I hadn't.”

Natasha could not think how to respond, but she respected him so much in this moment. More than he could know.

They reached the Office of Mercy minutes later, and Arthur met them at the door.

“I was just coming to get you,” he said. “There's something you have to see.”

“Are the Pines attacking?” Alejandra cried.

“No, they've left the perimeter. They just picked up and left a couple of hours ago. But—”

“But what?” Jeffrey cut in.

“Well, here, we're playing the sensor recordings back on the big screen.”

On the overhead screen appeared the image of the Pine camp. Around the room, the current shift workers rolled back from their computers to look. At first, the image of the camp appeared unexceptional, if somewhat more active than usual. The men, women, and children milled around the plateau, near the gaping mouth of the cave that had served as their shelter for the last ninety-four days. Many warmed their hands at the leaping fire outside the cave entrance.

“Watch the group on the far right,” Arthur said.

Three men off to the side—one of whom Natasha recognized as the curly-haired chief—suddenly looked at them,
directly
at them, their gazes piercing and aware. Eric cursed; Alejandra gasped. An iciness shot through Natasha's core, her body perceiving the threat almost before she understood it herself. The men's eyes moved away quickly, but the sensation remained.

“What was that?” Natasha asked.

“You saw it,” said Arthur.

“Hard to miss,” Douglas muttered under his breath.

“Well,” Arthur said, “it gets worse.”

Beside Natasha, Jeffrey seemed stuck in place; his face was absolutely still and his fingers bent awkwardly together. Natasha wished that he would say something, but apparently he was as shocked as the rest of them. The image jumped and now the chief was saying something to the other men. In seconds, his words seemed to spread across the crowd, awakening the bodies into agitation. Natasha noticed that many of the Tribe, even the children, carried woven sacks or other small objects, blankets or tools. The chief looked at the sensor again, only this time the others followed his lead. The screen filled with their hard eyes, and their stares seemed to burn through the cable that connected the sensor receivers to the Office of Mercy, and burn through the screen itself. The curly-haired chief jerked away from the group, approaching the sensor, and others took cautious steps forward. Natasha could see the pockets and wrinkles in their skin, the stubble on their cheeks.

“Great Alpha,” Eric said from behind her.

The chief lingered directly under the tree that held the sensor. Then he disappeared from view. An instant later, the image began to shake; the faces hopped and blurred, until the final blow came and the screen went to static.

“Why didn't you sweep?” Jeffrey said. He had not spoken till now; everyone turned to look at him. “Right then, before they had the chance to move.”

“We didn't have a count,” Arthur said. “I didn't know how fast they'd start moving. We couldn't see anything.”

“Why not later, then, once you caught them on a different sensor?”

Natasha glanced between Jeffrey and Arthur; she hoped that Arthur would miss the obvious tone of accusation in Jeffrey's voice.

“There were no other sensors,” Arthur said. “They disabled two more, two on the north mountain ridge, smashed them apart just like the first. Here, we can play it for you.”

They all looked again at the overhead screen and watched as the Pines overwhelmed the images and went behind the sensors, and screens RN22 and RN28 went to static.

“It's wild,” Douglas said, “a Tribe that knows about our sensors.”

“It's more than wild,” Alejandra whispered. “It's terrifying.”

“As long as we're blind in those areas,” Arthur said, speaking over them, “I consider the settlement in imminent danger of attack. We're going to have to change our plans. The Recovery team is now strictly a Repair team. Forget about checking the Crane sweep site. The work there will have to wait. Our priority is to repair the three sensors that the Pines destroyed. They're closer to the settlement.” He tore his attention from the overhead screen and looked at the team. “Unless anyone has questions, you're all dismissed. We'll move you out in the morning.”

A cry of surprise rose from the group, Natasha included, and Douglas, Nolan, and Alejandra left the Office of Mercy almost immediately, talking excitedly among themselves. But Eric and Natasha lingered, determined to stay as long as Jeffrey showed no signs of abandoning the Office. Eric kept trying to catch Natasha's eye, but Natasha would not let him, afraid of responding inappropriately to the news. It was clear that Jeffrey did not share their exhilaration. And indeed, as soon as the others had gone, he turned toward Arthur.

“You can't be serious about this,” Jeffrey said.

“Of course I'm serious,” Arthur answered.

“But you said you never got an accurate count. What if part of the group stayed behind? Besides, the Tribe's hardly over the perimeter. They might be planning to double back any minute!”

“If so, then we'd see them coming. Your team would have more than enough time to return to the settlement.”

“Natasha and Eric should stay behind,” Jeffrey said, with an air of decisiveness. “They're too young for a mission like this. I never would have recommended them for anything but a basic Recovery job. They don't have the same maturity of judgment. It's too dangerous.”

The two Epsilons had only just opened their mouths to protest when Arthur spoke for them.

“Natasha and Eric are a part of this mission.”

“The mission has changed.”

“We need everyone, Jeffrey,” Arthur said. “The Alphas agree.”

Arthur dismissed Natasha and Eric again, in more certain terms than before, and this time they cleared out right away, terrified of giving their Director the chance to change his mind.

“We're going Outside,” Eric said, as soon as they had gotten halfway down the Department hall.

“I know,” said Natasha. “I can't believe that Jeffrey tried to kick us off the team, though.”

“Who cares? We're going
Outside
.”

“Yeah,” said Natasha. “Outside.”

They stared at each other in wonder, and Natasha almost felt like they were kids again, the way they reveled in the confusion and danger of what lay before them. Anything was possible, it seemed, and the expectation of tomorrow swelled and shined like new.

That night Natasha could not sleep, however hard she tried. While Min-he slumbered with her head buried in her pillow, Natasha read two chapters in the Ethical Code, curled up under her blanket and seeing by the soft glow of the pages after the underground nightfall. Entering the field would be a shock, and she wanted to keep her thoughts in the right state to receive it—to maintain within herself a calm and ethical steadfastness. She had performed well in the Pretends and that was good, but the real thing would be another story. As far as upholding the Wall, well, it had occurred to her that this sudden change in the mission's objective had eased the demands on her behavior. She had prepared herself to confront the Crane sweep site, the place of so much death, but now they would not see it. Instead they would be repairing sensors in the forest and investigating the abandoned, not decimated, Pine camp. Natasha skimmed the text, opening herself to the teachings of the Ethical Code. Perhaps it was the effect of her nerves, but reading the book filled her with a sadness and pride and hopefulness that she had not felt in years: the beauty of human intelligence poured into these words, the enlightenment of the Alphas, and the transcendence of nature's false laws that the settlements had at last achieved.

5

“A
rms out at your sides, please.”

Two long, thin gloves slipped over Natasha's hands and over her elbows.

“Now lift your right foot. These might feel tight at first, but you'll get used to it. We wouldn't want your socks falling down fifteen miles from home.”

White socks of the same synthetic fabric reached halfway up Natasha's calves.

“We only have the medreaders left. Veronica, if you will?”

Natasha stood very still while a petite Beta woman from the Department of Research began fixing cold, plastic circles, the size of thumbnails, across her bare abdomen, over her heart, and down the length of her spine.

The team was in the Office of Exit, suiting up under the direction of the settlement's top engineers. They were all naked—the biosuits had to be worn directly against the flesh—and Natasha's skin was shivery and goose-bumped despite the warm air coming through the vents. Eric and Alejandra were laughing nervously together, while Douglas and Nolan were asking one of the engineers about the particulars of the biosuits' self-replicating material. Arthur stood in the far corner, his arms folded over his chest, wordlessly evaluating every preparation, ready to jump if he suspected an error.

Across the room, a male engineer was attaching medreaders to Jeffrey's back. From this angle, Natasha could see the burn that covered Jeffrey's whole right side, creeping rashlike over his back and stomach and up to his ear. She could not help but stare. Both because she had never seen Jeffrey without clothing before, and because she could hardly imagine the pain of a fire that would leave such a mark. Jeffrey rarely spoke about it, even when Natasha asked directly. “When the Palms attacked, they torched half the forest,” he would say with a shake of his head. “They tricked me into getting too close. But I was making the choices that day, and I have only myself to blame.”

Jeffrey took his glasses off and handed them to one of the engineers. His vision problems, Natasha knew, were a result of the fire too: a slight melting of the cornea, pupil, and retina. One day the doctors would need to bring him into the medical wing and give him new eyes and new optic nerves; though, in the meantime, Jeffrey seemed to be doing okay with the special lenses constructed for him in the Office of Dry Engineering.

A woman from Research slipped a pair of lensed goggles over Jeffrey's head and Jeffrey looked around the room, testing them. Natasha noticed how the muscles in his shoulders and back stood out in the bright overhead light. Judging from his body alone, one would never guess that Jeffrey was a Gamma; in fact, he appeared in better physical shape than most of the Delta men in the settlement.

Jeffrey's gaze caught Natasha's and he smiled. She blushed but did not look away. It was not supposed to be such a big deal to see someone naked; bodies were bodies, cells were cells. Plenty of medworkers had seen Natasha without her clothes and she had never cared. But then again, the rules were different where Jeffrey was concerned.

An engineer approached Jeffrey with a biosuit, and the private moment between Natasha and Jeffrey ended. At least, Natasha thought—while the engineers tested her own medreaders—at least Jeffrey's mood had changed since last night. He had not said anything more about leaving Natasha and Eric behind. Probably he felt reassured (as they all did, if by varying degrees) by the elapse of so many hours with no further sign of danger. Last night, the Office of Mercy had drafted twenty people for the nightshift. The teams had watched every sensor, searching for any sign of human movement. But the night had passed as an unbroken calm, and the Tribe had remained tucked behind the mountains, beyond the perimeter and out of sight. They could not say for sure, of course, but it was possible that the Tribe had continued traveling at the same speed with which they had fled their camp. If so, then the Pines were far away by now, twenty miles north of the perimeter's end.

“Ready for your biosuit?” asked Lewis Matsuki, who was supervising the outfitting of the team.

“All set,” Natasha answered.

Two engineers brought Natasha's biosuit over from the rack. It looked identical to the others, except for the modifications in size and her two initials
NW
stamped onto the upper arm. Just as in the training sessions, the suit was gray with red stitching and made of a stretchy but very impenetrable-seeming material.

“It's perfect,” said Natasha, reaching out to touch one of the arms.

The engineers were pleased, and they helped Natasha step carefully into the legs, then pushed her hands through the armholes. The biosuit enclosed her entire body up to the neck. She bent her arms, testing its movement, and was glad to discover that the fabric flexed easily.

“I doubt you'll experience any damage to the suit,” Lewis said. “But if a rip does occur, just pinch the fabric together and hold for sixty seconds. The fibers will regenerate.”

“I know,” Natasha assured him. “We practiced it lots of times in the Pretends.”

Veronica strapped an airfilter to Natasha's back and a small tracking device to her wrist.

“Ready for the helmet?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Natasha tried her best to breathe evenly as the engineers screwed the helmet into the thin metal ring of the biosuit collar. For a moment she experienced a suffocating feeling, but then the air began to blow in from the filter tube. The air had a sharp, cool taste, with just a tinge of plastic.

“Okay?” Lewis asked, his voice muffled in Natasha's ears.

Natasha gave a thumbs-up.

They were all ready now, the members of the team; and they converged at the doors of the airlock. The engineers made a flurry of final adjustments to the six biosuits. They were nervous too, Natasha realized. If the biosuits did not perform as expected, it would be their years of work on the line.

“We'll be watching every sensor we've got,” Arthur said. “If the Pines double back over the perimeter, we'll give an emergency call for return. If that happens, you drop everything and come home as quickly as possible. Leave any tools if you have to. The most important thing is your safety.”

“We'll be fine,” Douglas said. “You worry too much.”

Eric smiled in nervous agreement, but Jeffrey was nodding.

“Good luck,” Arthur said. “I'll see you in seventeen hours.”

They stepped into the airlock. Natasha took one last, long look at the room: Arthur's heavy countenance, Lewis's anxious expression, and the exhilarated faces of the engineers lined up in front of the metal racks of extra airfilters, clothing, radios, and imaging devices. Then, as Veronica raised one hand in farewell, the doors closed on the Inside.

It was very quiet. The team was alone.

“We'll just walk through the airlock on this end,” Jeffrey said. “The acid bath and UV lamps are only necessary coming the other way.”

They passed into a second, white cube-shaped room, and then Jeffrey hit the control for the last set of doors.

“Here we go,” Jeffrey said. “Take your last breath of settlement air.”

They exited the airlock into a large but low-ceilinged storehouse lined with overstuffed shelves. On the walls hung at least fifty guns, all LUV-3s, and four electron saws that appeared untouched for decades. Boxes on the floor held everything from ammunition to plastic tubing, screwdrivers and metal parts for sensors. The space most closely resembled one of the storagerooms on level eight, except for one important fact: everything here was filthy. A fine coat of dust gave the entire room, even the floor, a monochromatic brown color. Natasha took a deep breath. The air tasted different, its plasticky coolness now seeming to mask a musky, thicker air beneath, and a scent like what one might experience in a fallow pasture room in the Farms.

Eric went to the nearest shelf and ran one gloved hand over the surface. He held up the circle of dirt on his finger for show.

“This is gross,” he said.

“We're technically in the Outside now, Eric,” Jeffrey said. “The environment rules here. Dirt, leaf, microbes, mammals. Our control ended at the airlock.”

Jeffrey took a gun off the rack, loaded it, and handed it to Natasha; the dust had settled in the grooves along the barrel and in the curve of the trigger.

“Don't worry,” Douglas said. “We tested them pretty recently, they're clean where it matters.”

“I'll take your word for it,” Natasha said.

She holstered the gun at her waist and waited while the others did the same. They had gone through this process in the Pretends, but the reality of it was different. Her body felt clumsier, and her fingers thicker, in a way she could not blame on the biosuit.

They were ready now. They gathered at the far end of the storehouse. Sunlight leaked in from beyond the door, interrupted by two rusty hinges. A spider with white markings scuttled above the knob and disappeared into the shadows. There was no genetic code reader here, only a series of deadbolts. Douglas opened the door.

Four sun-drenched steps led up to a verdant shock of grass. The trees towered in a ring beyond, ancient, intricate, and majestic, their sharp tops pointing to the bright blue infinity of the sky, the white puffs of cloud and the too-powerful, blinding sun: the universe. They climbed the steps. Natasha ran her hand along the sunken, moss-covered stone wall at her side. She felt slightly dizzy, as if the first strong gust of air might scoop her up and carry her off the curve of the planet. Was gravity really enough to secure one's feet to the earth? No walls, she thought. No walls to hold them in. She climbed the last step, following Jeffrey, Douglas, and Alejandra onto the circle of short grass that surrounded the settlement. She squinted against the light; it was too bright, it hurt her head. Colors exploded before her eyes: not only the blue but the deep green of the pine needles and the rippling green-yellow-white of the leaves, the textured browns of bark and the outlines of the dark, inscrutable shadows pocketing the woods before them.

“Team out,” said Douglas, over the comm-link.

“What do you think?” Jeffrey asked.

Instead of looking around at the forest and sky like the rest of the team, his squinting, smiling eyes were on her, as if he cared more about Natasha's reaction to the Outside than about the whole Outside itself. Though of course, Natasha thought, this wasn't his first mission.

“It's—” she started to say.

Before she could finish, she caught sight of them: black and soaring from above. Novas, she thought, adrenaline rushing through her body. But then she heard them caw.

Jeffrey was laughing. “Crows,” he said. “It's only crows. Eric?”

Eric removed his arms slowly from over his head, looking abashed.

The birds swooped up, changing direction, but gracefully, as if without effort. Their black wings shone in the sun. They cawed.

“It's amazing,” Natasha said, laughing with Jeffrey, watching the birds disappear to specks.

Truly, the Pretends did not do the Outside justice. Now that Natasha was seeing it with her own eyes, the simulations became in retrospect like block-color outlines of the real objects they aimed to represent. In the Pretends, the grass was green, yes, but it had no definition, the blades did not distinguish themselves as they did in real life; the simulations had not captured the variation, the scattered patches of yellow, or the matted spots where, as Alejandra said, either deer or wild pigs had rested. Natasha leaned down and ran her gloved hand over the grass, feeling its soft resistance; she picked up a leaf and looked at it closely. The pale skeleton on its underside was blemished by disease, and yet it was beautiful in its imperfection. She looked again at the random growth of the woods. She thought it was wonderful. She could have stared at the same spot for hours and not comprehended the whole of it—so detailed and intricate and unique was every square inch of the Outside.

But their time for enjoying the green was soon over; they had to get moving. One by one, the team passed into the trees.

“Abandon all hope,” Jeffrey said, as he stooped below a pine branch, “ye who enter here.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Eric asked, hesitating at the edge of the lawn.

“It's just an old quote from the Archives,” Alejandra assured him, nudging Eric's shoulder. “He's joking.”

Natasha looked back at the settlement. The sunken metal, joined boxes of the wings were such dull, lifeless objects. It felt impossible to believe they contained well-stocked, cheerful rooms full of busy citizens. Above the wings peaked the Dome, as still and faceless as its adjacent structures. The Dome was the bud of the flower and the wings were its petals, Natasha thought. Though the analogy did not seem so apt from this perspective—except for how it cast America-Five as a tiny thing glued to the Earth. Three stories the honeycomb windows rose over the grass, and yet, compared with the sky, it was nothing. In fact, even taking into account the column of nine underground levels, it seemed suddenly absurd to Natasha that they kept all that life squeezed into so small a space, when the rest of the land was so empty.

The way through the forest was rough and slow, and they were forced to move single file: first, Douglas, who held the title of navigator, though they all knew the way, then Alejandra, Eric, Natasha, Nolan, and finally Jeffrey. Natasha's energy was largely spent keeping her footing, pushing the small springy twigs out of her way and releasing them gently, so they did not snap back against Nolan's visor. They saw animals, creatures so alert and perfect it seemed bizarre that they had come into existence without any help: a brown tuft-tailed rabbit, pretty little birds with iridescent wings, a squirrel, spread-limbed, climbing a tree, and little flying specks called gnats that would have nibbled their flesh, if not for the biosuits.

Of course, not all of it was pleasant. A few hours into their hike, Eric stuck his foot into what turned out to be the open and maggot-infested carcass of a raccoon. The rancid pink and white inside was enough to make Natasha gag. And she could hardly pay attention while Eric wiped his boot against a tree and Jeffrey explained that the death was probably the work of another male of that species.