Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (9 page)

Axel left the cave, followed by the man with arrows and the woman wearing red beads. The ponytailed man, the one called Raul, began to follow. But he stopped when the little boy began to cry.

“Papia,” the boy said.

Raul froze, then doubled back and knelt down beside the boy. He kissed the boy's forehead, and then the girl's, as she had started to cry as well. Natasha stared at the children's large, smooth faces and giant eyes. Had she and the other Epsilons really looked like that once? They were captivating and beautiful, these children.

“Stay here,” Raul said. “And listen to your mother.”

He stood, and then he kissed the woman on the lips. But instead of kissing him back, the woman grabbed onto his neck and clutched her fingers into his hair, with violence.

“We were supposed to stay together,” she said.

“I'm only going to look. You'll be safer here.”

“I want us all to be safe.”

“I'll be back soon,” Raul said. “Sit against the stone and cover your heads if the earth shakes again.”

The woman looked at Natasha.

“She won't bother you,” Raul said in a hushed voice. “She can't get free.”

Raul removed the woman's hands from his neck and disappeared through the break in the rock. The woman pressed against the wall, clutching the children at her sides.

The fire crackled and Natasha closed her eyes, the terrible pain in her head briefly overtaking her body. At least she had time; instinctively, Natasha knew that this woman would do nothing to harm her; she could rest until the others returned. The man with arrows and the woman with red beads—Mattias and Hesma—if these people did want to kill her, they would be the ones to do it.

An explosion sounded from overhead and the floor rattled in a rain of pebbles. The children shrieked and, in the quiet aftermath, began to sob. When Natasha opened her eyes, the woman was pulling the children up from the ground, dragging them toward the exit. The boy screamed and wrestled under her hold.

“But Papia said to stay,” the girl protested.

“We have to go outside. It's dangerous.”

“Wait!” said Natasha.

The woman froze.

“If you go out and they see you,” Natasha continued with deliberation, speaking over the pounding in her head, “they'll sweep you, shoot you.”

“Why should I believe you?” the woman spat. “I know what you do. Your glasshouse is the most evil thing on this planet.”

The abrupt change in the woman's manner startled Natasha.

“I don't—” Natasha fumbled. “We're not evil. We try to do the right thing.”

“You kill,” she said.

“Not killing.” Natasha felt dizzy. She couldn't remember the most simple goal of the Office of Mercy. What was it? “We end suffering. Sweep. We don't kill.”

The earth shook and a piece of rock rolled down the wall and struck Natasha's back, making her scream.

The woman stared. She had her children securely at her sides again.

“The rope is brittle,” she said. “There's a sharp edge behind you. Rub the rope and it will snap. I've seen caves fall before, and this one is going to fall.”

With the sound of gunfire echoing through the earth, the woman fled out of sight with her children. A minute passed. Another explosion burst forth and the fire toppled with a crack of splintering wood; the air filled with smoke and Natasha coughed chokingly, trying to heave the stuff from her lungs. The woman was right; she had to get out of here. Natasha struggled into a sitting position, her vision swaying as if she had just finished a round of bioreplacement. The cave wall sloped to a sharp edge about waist high. Grunting, Natasha scooted over to it and began to rub the rope binding her wrists against the stone. She could feel the rope getting hot with friction; the fibers weakened, weakened and finally snapped. She fumbled and yanked at the ties on her ankles and, seconds later, they gave. She lunged for her helmet and tried to fit it back on her collar, but the blow must have damaged the metal somehow; it wouldn't screw on; she would have to try it again in the light.

The yellow and orange flames of the fiery logs grabbed at the air, and a spray of glowing embers covered the floor. Natasha was afraid to go around the fire, but she had to. She stepped slowly with her back scraping against the curving stone, terrified of losing her balance, until at last she reached the opening where the Pines had gone. The tunnel arced low over her head; it was dark and narrow. If the Pines came back now, they would crash right into her, but she had to try; trying was better than waiting to die in that cave.

She fell several times, rubbing her palms raw on the pebbled ground. The tunnel split into two paths and she chose the way that inclined slightly upward. She saw a suffused glow of white light ahead, a light so placid and strong that it could only be sunlight. She threw her body toward it, stumbling up the incline. A large flat boulder, chiseled with pictures of birds and fish, was blocking the way. Natasha screamed in agony. But then, dropping her helmet, she dug her fingers around its edge and pulled, and the boulder slid so easily that it could only have been designed for that purpose. She grabbed her helmet and ran. When she saw the broken bow with its sinew, she knew where she was. She was in the cave of the old Pine camp that she had explored with Eric, Jeffrey, and Alejandra. She saw the decaying furs and the bed of leaves and the brown-red hand that she had touched with her own. She ran into the light, but the plateau was empty.

Near the shattered sensor, tools lay on the ground. Her team must have left them. Natasha ran, gulping the fresh sweet air until her senses kicked in and she choked on it. She ran toward the path, toward the settlement. Her vision blurred but she did not have to think of the route; her legs knew it from the Pretends. She was halfway down the mountain path when a wave of pain came over her and she fell. She tried to get up again but her arms had no strength. She lay with her bare face in the dirt while gingerly, with one hand, she reached to touch the pain at the back of her head. Her fingers met a warm, sticky clump of hair. Blood. Her skull was bleeding. She drew her hand back and saw the brilliant red of her own body. Only once in her life had her flesh split open before, when as a child she'd suffered the quick, even slice of a paper cut. She remembered how she had stared at the white line of flesh and the rising blood, mesmerized, until a Beta had scolded her and sent her to the Department of Health. Natasha tried to get up, pushing herself to her knees this time, until her muscles went slack. Her lips touched the ground, dirt sticking to her mouth. She groaned. I'm sorry, Jeffrey, she thought, the words drifting by as if they existed apart from her, apart from the mind that had thought them. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

A powerful defeat washed through her limbs, her eyes were closing but from the wrong direction, the dark creeping upward. She heard familiar voices from far away, calling her name, or maybe not, maybe only the birds. Her mind went dizzy until, all of a sudden, the voices were loud, right over her head.

“Get her helmet on!”

“I've got to stop the bleeding first.”

“Is she breathing?”

“Yes. Shallow, but yes.”

“All right. Get it on now.”

“I'm trying, I'm trying.”

“Here, let me.”

“No. It's broken. Dented.”

“Leave it then. Hurry.”

“I've got her.”

Natasha felt herself being hoisted up in sturdy arms, her hot wound touching cool fabric. Her head throbbed at every jostling step of the body holding her. She drifted in and out of consciousness like during a long bad night when sleep only comes in shallow undulations. At one point she was falling, her body instinctively tightening for impact. But then, before the impact could come, she was swinging up again and the voices were saying, “Alpha be it,” and “No, no, I have her.” At last, with the pain becoming almost unbearable, she felt the unmistakable drops of a careful descent, stair by stair. The brightness beyond the lids of her eyes dissolved and a sudden coolness chilled her flesh, and Natasha knew in a burst of clear thought that she was with her team and that they had reached the Inside.

7

I
n the Office of Mercy, all was chaos. The wallphone rang shrilly with calls from the Department of Government; the audiosets crowded with voices; the overhead screen flashed with sensor images of the deadzone perimeter; and huddles of people argued over field maps and coordinate figures at various computers throughout the floor. Claudia Kim ripped off her audioset and pushed back in her chair.

“They're here,” she said to Arthur, who had just heard the same news over the comm-link from Douglas.

They rose together, and Arthur followed Claudia around the cubicles, across the hall to the Office of Exit.

Claudia tugged at the base of her shirt and tapped her finger to enter the room. She could not wait to see what kind of shape they were in, the Office of Mercy team members: Natasha, abducted and battered around; Eric, broken by the mere sight of a flesh-and-blood Pine; and Jeffrey—well, Claudia was sure that Jeffrey would be in worse shape than any of them. This whole disaster was his fault; it was always his fault. At least it satisfied Claudia to know that
he
must understand his own culpability better than anyone.

Claudia and Arthur entered the Office of Exit, where several Department of Health workers, dressed in full biosuits, were waiting with stretchers—each bed enclosed with plastic and exhaling through its own independent air system.

“I told Douglas to disable the acid bath,” Arthur said, explaining these extra measures. “It's too dangerous with Natasha's biosuit damaged.”

“You'll risk contaminating the entire settlement,” Claudia replied. “The UV only kills the weaker bacteria.”

“It's unlikely that they're carrying anything.”

“The Alphas have been nothing but cautious for the last three hundred years. It's amazing to me that you would find
your
circumstances as Director so special as to disregard all precedent—”

“Please, Claudia,” Arthur stopped her. “I have enough to worry about. We don't even know how badly she's hurt.”

A low hum sounded from the airlock, and the medworkers began readying the stretchers. Claudia could not wait to see their faces. She had predicted this from the beginning, from when Jeffrey had first broached the subject of allowing Natasha Wiley to join the team, that the mission would end in disaster. Earlier, in the Office of Mercy, Claudia had been the first to notice that Natasha was gone. She had watched Natasha veer from the route, and she had heard her blow off her Director when he asked for an explanation. She had watched, too, as Natasha's medreaders suddenly went flat, and the tracking signal—a green dot on the map—went soaring through the coordinates at a speed that implied it was no longer attached to her body, that someone had taken it from her wrist and thrown it into the trees. At 1010, they declared Natasha missing and put the entire settlement on high alert.

Even Arthur could not prevent Jeffrey from abandoning the plateau when he heard. Jeffrey bolted down the mountain by himself, leaving Eric and Alejandra to trail behind.

“You've seen nothing, absolutely nothing, enter the deadzone since we left?” Jeffrey demanded.

“Nothing but jackrabbits,” Arthur told him.

“You're sure they were jackrabbits, not wolves or bears?”

Claudia rolled her eyes; why Arthur allowed Jeffrey to take control of every situation was beyond her. He should pull rank and tell Jeffrey to shut his mouth and follow orders for once.

“You said Natasha saw a dog,” Jeffrey continued.

“A golden retriever,” Arthur said. “A Tribe dog, it sounds like.”

“The perimeter?” Jeffrey asked. His voice had become tense and, despite herself, Claudia got a chill imagining Jeffrey out there on the mountainside, wholly exposed to the wild.

“The Tribe hasn't moved,” Arthur said. “Whatever's out there, it isn't them.”

But so much for that. Two minutes later, Eric and Alejandra came off the mountain path and ran straight into a Tribe man.

“What should we do?” Eric said.

“What should you do?” Claudia repeated, wrestling communication from Arthur. “You sweep them, Eric. What do you think we armed you for?”

But they had waited too long, and the man escaped into the trees. In her dreams, Claudia could not have envisioned a more incompetent group of people. Between the five of them—Douglas, Nolan, Jeffrey, Eric, and Alejandra—they reported seeing as many as twenty different Tribespeople. At the end of the manual sweep, they'd only managed to eliminate three.

Their efforts came to a halt when they found Natasha. Jeffrey and Nolan were chasing a male back toward the plateau when they came upon her sprawled out in the middle of the path. Over the comm-link, the voices of the team arrived in jarring spats.

“We're evacuating the area now,” Douglas shouted.

In the background, Claudia could hear the popping of rapid-fire LUV-3s. She sighed. They had panicked; they were firing blindly into the trees, trying to clear a way home. They had dropped even the vaguest semblance of ethical thinking. She rose from her chair, went to the wallphone and dialed 999 for a direct line to the Alphas.

“Yes,” Claudia said, when the Mother answered. “Natasha Wiley. We have her.”

Now, in the Office of Exit, the light beside the airlock began to flash, and the doors were parting open. Jeffrey stood at the center of the group, holding Natasha clutched to his chest. Her helmet had fallen, and there was a bright red stain on his biosuit where the gash on her head had touched. As soon as the door had opened wide enough, the team rushed forward, as if they were still fleeing the Pines. Nolan dropped his airfilter and Eric's gun swept over the crowd, eliciting screams from the approaching medworkers.

“Whoa there, Epsi,” Claudia said, catching Eric's arm and forcing it down. “You're supposed to leave the guns in the storehouse.”

No one heard her. The medworkers came forward and took Natasha's limp body from Jeffrey's grasp. Jeffrey held on to her some seconds too long, completely dazed, like he had left his mind in the field and didn't understand what they wanted. Or perhaps, Claudia thought, he believed that Natasha was already dead, that this was his final moment with her.

At last, the medworkers got Natasha onto a stretcher and wheeled her out. Meanwhile, the engineers could hardly extract Jeffrey from his biosuit and throw him a fresh pair of prote-pants before he'd gone after her. Claudia followed with Arthur and the members of the team. The citizens on Wave One Defense jumped aside to let the party through. There were cries of horror and amazement as people caught sight of Natasha's injured body through the plastic enclosure of the stretcher. One citizen, unidentifiable in the biosuit, bumped into Arthur while trying to get a better view.

“We're on high alert, people!” Claudia shouted.

Once again, the citizens resumed their positions and the guns trained back to the glass.

They passed through the doors of the medical wing, and a team of new doctors descended upon them. They took Natasha straight to Bioreplacement, while the others they herded to the high-frequency electroimaging bank for complete brain and body evaluations. Jeffrey wouldn't go. Two Delta doctors had to block him from following Natasha into the preproom.

“You have to give her blood, she's lost so much,” he shouted after them. “And check for viruses, she breathed unfiltered air for over two hours.”

Claudia felt the rage build up inside her. The others had all left now; it was only Jeffrey and the two Delta doctors in the corridor. She reached out and grabbed Jeffrey's face, squeezing his cheeks.

“How dare you,” she said. The three men looked at her, astonished. “Your fascination with that girl almost cost us our peace. You'd have us die for her, would you? You'd have us suffer? Why the Alphas support you—”

“But they do support me, Claudia.” His shock worn off, Jeffrey shook out of her grasp. “They always have.”

“Not after this.”

“We'll see.”

His blue eyes radiated disdain, but Claudia met them. He could not scare her. Ever since she and Jeffrey were children, there had been an intensity of feeling between them. They had been the two top-ranked students in the Gamma generation, and even back then they used to fight. They had once gotten into a punching match over the issue of a stolen pillow; and in classes they had vied for the teachers' attention and battled for the highest scores on tests. Later, in their adolescence, their feelings for each other had briefly flared into love. Claudia would never admit it to anyone, but those days spent studying together for the Office of Mercy entrance exam, sneaking kisses in deserted corners of the Archives, were some of the best of her life. The nights they used to crawl into each other's beds she still relived in the Pretends. But that was years ago. Before Jeffrey had become so unrecognizable, wholly different from the rule-breaking, spontaneous, confident person whom she had known in their youth. She had never been able to forgive him for changing; and working together had kept Claudia's feelings fresh. Especially given that in the last several years (adding insult to injury, as they said in Pre-Storm texts), Jeffrey had managed to pull ahead of her in the Office of Mercy, rising up through the ranks to become Arthur's right-hand man. Claudia could not comprehend how Jeffrey maintained so much prestige among their peers and elders. She certainly saw him for what he was today: a man who, despite his hard exterior, had only doubt and fear in his heart.

“Get out of my way,” Jeffrey growled.

Before the doctors could stop him, he'd thundered through the windowed doors to the Office of Bioreplacement, holding his arms high and already making demands, as if he held the status of an Alpha.

What a mess, Claudia thought, while the doctors went chasing after him, shouting about contamination. Attacked by the Tribes, outsmarted by savages. They should have swept the Pines when they'd had the chance, before the Tribe had messed with the sensors. And Mother forget the possibility of a dirty sweep. Arthur had been too careful, and all his carefulness had led them here.

Disgusted by the whole situation, Claudia started back toward the Office of Mercy.

Jeffrey must be punished for this, she thought. Surely the Alphas would see it her way now.

•   •   •

When Natasha woke, she found herself lying naked on a long, high table. Thousands of hair-thin needles covered her body like a fine, stiff fur, and from these needles rose ultrafine transparent fibers, which met in a large tangle of crystal opalescence at the ceiling. Startled, Natasha tried to raise her head. But she couldn't move; she couldn't even wiggle her fingers. A soft blue light poured down on her, ubiquitous and familiar. Slowly the realization came over her that she knew this room. It was a cell injection room in the Department of Health, part of the Office of Bioreplacement. She blinked, searching for some sign of life within her limited periphery of vision. She did not like the silence; she found it unnerving, and a heavy anxiety began to build in her chest. Finally she heard the sound of a door whooshing open and, seconds later, a masked female face appeared hoveringly over her own.

“You surfaced a little early. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Natasha said, her voice cracking. “I don't feel anything.”

“Well, that's good news, isn't it? We did a nice job on your head, if I say so myself. We transferred forty billion cells fresh from Bioproduction and two dozen bundles of neurotransmitters. You're as good as new. Better than new.”

“Where's the rest of my team?” Natasha asked. Her mind didn't feel quick at all. She was straining to remember something, something about the Tribes . . .

“Asleep, I would think,” answered the doctor. Then she added hesitantly, as if afraid of taking Natasha too much by surprise, “It's been six days since the mission.”

“Six days?” Natasha tried to sit up, forgetting her earlier attempt.

“This will help you sleep a little while longer,” the doctor said, touching a screen on a panel near Natasha's feet. “You need to give your body time to recover.”

When Natasha woke a second time, the needles were gone. She was on a stretcher, moving down the central hallway. She could shift her arms around, and she wore one of the crinkly, purple nightshirts standard in the Department of Health.

“We've been waiting for you to get up all morning,” a new face said, leaning over her own. This time Natasha recognized the speaker immediately. It was Roy Heaney, an Epsilon nurse. “Any pain?”

“No,” Natasha answered. “How many days—”

“Two days since you last woke up. Eight since the mission. We have just one more scan to run.”

They were wheeling her into the electroimaging room, the same room where all the citizens of America-Five received routine evaluations for natural cell decay. The high bank of hexagonal openings rose up the far wall, one into which her own stretcher would slide. A feeling of urgency flared in Natasha.

“Wait!” she said. They were lifting her, transferring her into the tubelike imaging machine. She grabbed the sides of the stretcher.

“Don't do that,” a man's voice said. “Your fingers.”

“I want to talk to Jeffrey. Jeffrey and Arthur. You have to tell them not to sweep. I saw the Tribe. The Tribe spoke English. I talked to them. There was a woman with children. They're scared that the cave will collapse.”

“You'll see them soon,” Roy said. “From what we hear, the Office of Mercy is proceeding with caution.”

Alone in the narrow, bright tube, Natasha's fear returned. How did she get here? How had she escaped from the cave? For a moment, she tried to remember. But when she did, when she remembered moving around the fire and seeing the sunlight at the top of the tunnel, she could not figure out how her team had found her. Had they intercepted her on the plateau? No, she thought, she had made it farther, she had seen the trees in the valley before she fell.