The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (10 page)

I thought about this. “What did she mean, ‘someone like
you’?”

He shrugged. “You know, reckless, taking risks, that sort of
thing.”

I started to press him for her exact words, but I didn’t
have the heart. I’d felt sick when I saw the blonde warden waiting for him,
reaching for him, and nothing he had said made me feel any better. If the
wardens, the Watchers, took the best of everything, why not this, too?

Meritt
apparently guessed my thoughts. “W
hen exactly did you
take off?”

“Just after the kissing
started.”

He didn’t look away. “Then you saw that it stopped as soon
as it started. I ended it.”

“Maybe she doesn’t think it’s ended.”

“What are you implying?” he said sharply. “I told you: I
ended it.”

I got up, and this time he didn’t stop me. The tufts of
grass felt rough under my bare feet. “I’m not implying anything. I’m saying,
straight out, that wardens have done this exact sort of thing before.”

“What sort of thing?”

It was a trick he had, a way of avoiding unpleasant
conversations. Lots of times it worked, when the other
person—me—felt uncomfortable saying out loud something awkward or
frightening. Well, I was uncomfortable, and I was frightened, and I wasn’t
going to spell out what wardens too often did. But I wasn’t going to let the
matter drop, either. Not this time.

So I gave him a pointed look. “You know exactly what I
mean,” I said. “Do you really want me to get explicit?”

It backfired.
Meritt
was nobody’s
fool, and he knew me well.

He got to his feet, his eyes like ice, the way they got when
he was very angry. “Has a warden been messing with you?”

This was not the way the conversation needed to go.
Meritt
wasn’t exactly what I’d call the chivalrous sort,
but if he knew the scarred warden had threatened me, there was a good chance
he’d decide to do something about it—if for no other reason than that
messing with me was, indirectly, messing with him. And I didn’t want him
getting hurt because of me.

So I rolled my eyes. “Please,” I said. “You’re the one who
was kissing a warden.”

Meritt’s
expression turned neutral.

I pressed my advantage. “Over-age wardens have done it
before,” I said, making myself think only about the blonde, and not about the
scarred warden. “You know that. It happens all the time. They do a favor for
someone under nineteen and then cash it in.”

Involvement with someone under nineteen was less risky for
the wardens. If the warden tried it on someone over nineteen, someone who had
already been assigned, then the warden got two years in prison. But if the
target was under nineteen and unassigned, the warden got a slap on the wrist, a
“documented reprimand.”

I drove the point home. “You’re not nineteen yet,” I said.
“You’ve got, what, almost five months left? That’s plenty of time for an
over-age warden to get whatever she wants.”

 
“I’m not a
relief worker,”
Meritt
said irritably. “And
‘over-age’ makes it sound like she’s got one foot in the grave. She’s, what,
twenty-eight, thirty?”

“That’s past the female breeding age,” I said. “She’s been
sterilized. And don’t say ‘relief worker’ like it’s a dirty word. They didn’t
choose the job. They got assigned, just like you did.”

He didn’t answer. Now he was doing that thing I hated,
staring over the top of my head, making me feel two feet tall and invisible. At
least he wasn’t quizzing me about the scarred warden—though perversely,
part of me wished he hadn’t been so easily distracted. It made me feel frighteningly
alone with that problem.

It also made me sure that I was right about the blonde.

“You might as well face facts,” I said, giving up any effort
at sounding calm. “Wardens take the best of everything. And that’s you,
Meritt
.”

 
He waved that
off impatiently, threw me one scalding look, and then, jamming his hands in his
pockets, turned away. He moved fast. In a heartbeat he was out of reach,
stalking away from me, down the wasteland.

All the anger drained out of me. I stood there alone,
shivering and tired, watching him stride away, and told myself I deserved it
for being an idiot. I’d been so happy
Meritt
wasn’t
still locked up, and now he was angry, and it was almost time for the city
meeting, and there was no telling when we’d find time to meet again. Why had I
picked a fight?
Meritt
could have been killed, like
Rafe
. So what did it matter if a pretty warden kissed him?
What would it even matter if he’d enjoyed it? It was quite possible she had
saved his life.

Kisses didn’t matter. This was
Optica
.
Nothing important could be allowed to matter.

Far down the wasteland,
Meritt
stopped, his back to me. After a long moment he turned and came back, angry
stride easing into an amble, his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, his
hands still in his pockets. I stood quietly, leaning against the wall and
watching him, tall and angular and loose-limbed. After the long gray day the
sun had decided to peek out just in time to set, and now it filtered through
the trees and brushed him with warmth, his hair, his skin. For a heartbeat I
let myself imagine a world where I could have the colors I wanted, where
practicality and consistency didn’t mean everything had to be neutral tones,
where red hair wasn’t freakish, where we were allowed to choose where we worked,
who we loved, whose children we bore.

Meritt
lifted his eyes and looked straight into mine, and his expression changed.

“Don’t, Red,” he said softly, stepping close. He cupped my
face with one hand and ran his thumb across my cheek. “Don’t cry.”

I hadn’t realized I was.

Eight o’clock.

We stood in the concentric circles of the city circle,
a field of gray dotted here and there with black-clothed
wardens. Five people stood in the middle of the circle, their backs to one
another, facing out. We couldn’t tell who they were; the angle of the
floodlights reduced them to silhouettes. The rest of us were fully
exposed,
our faces washed pale in the glare of the artificial light.

“Family of
Optica
,” said the
voice, the same one as before. “There are cancers among you.”

The voice paused. The lights stayed on, but the silence went
on too, and despite the crowded square, that silence felt empty. It made me
want to yell out.

Cline was standing beside me tonight, his nose swollen and
discolored from the fight at the boys’ dormitory. He was big and solid, built
like a brick wall, a match for the bulls he worked with at the cattle yard. But
though he was there beside me I felt exposed and alone.

The voice spoke again, now hushed and menacing: “There are
cancers among you,” it repeated. “Those who would take what belongs to all of
you and abuse it, horde it, use it for themselves alone. Those who would by
their words and deeds promote disunity, discord, and ultimately death.”

A tense ripple spread through the crowd as the spotlight
shifted. We were now in darkness, and the five in the center blinked in the
sudden glare as the spotlights turned on them. One woman—a very beautiful
woman—and four men.

“Seamstress
Lavinia
,” said the
voice. “Step forward.”

The woman took one step forward, two. Her jaw was clenched,
but she held her head high. Her hair, long and dark, flowed over her shoulders
like a cape.

“Mechanic Dane, Engineer Win, Butcher Ross, Shoemaker
Larry.”

The men stood still as their names were called.

“Seamstress
Lavinia
has been
released from the breeding program and is free now to choose her companions. If
you’d like to compete for her affections, step forward.”

Despite myself I turned toward Cline. “But—” Sharply
he shook his head, his eyes fixed on the tableau in front of us. He was right.
Of course I shouldn’t speak. But what did the Voice expect the men to do? If
they stepped forward, they’d be confessing to quarreling, to disrupting the
Family.

The men clearly knew this. They stayed put, their feet firmly
planted, their hands clasped behind their backs. Or were their hands tied?

“What? Not one of you wishes to compete for
Lavinia
?” The voice laughed without humor.

The men stood still. The butcher, a heavy-
jowled
man, was facing me, and in the light of the
spotlight something glistened on his cheek.

“Seamstress
Lavinia
,” said the
voice. “You have been tested and found lacking.”

This time five wardens in black uniforms came out. One stood
in front of each man, and one went to
Lavinia
. He
didn’t do anything; he simply stood behind her.

“Your beauty has been the cause of dissention and strife,”
said the voice. “It has betrayed the City of
Optica
.
Your sentence is death.”

Lavinia
turned and walked straight at the warden. He took a step back and she brushed
past him, striding toward the edge of the circle with her head held high. For a
heartbeat it felt, amazingly, as if they might let her go.

A shot rang out from somewhere outside of the circle, and
Lavinia
fell, her long hair pouring across the gray
pavement like oil.

For a moment, no one moved. The echo of the shot hung in the
silence. Then three of the four men yelled and leapt forward toward
Lavinia
, the butcher vomited all over a warden, and the
crowd shouted, swayed, and began to break rank. “So ends the second city
meeting,” said the Voice over the chaos, and the spotlight went dark.

* * *
*

Afterwards the dormitory was in a state—girls crying,
girls staring blankly at the gray walls, girls trying to be practical or
comforting. The dorm mother had not put in an appearance, which wasn’t
surprising. We’d seen less and less of her lately.

“
Lavinia
had three babies,” my
bunkmate Kari said, so quietly that most of the room didn’t hear her. “That’s a
record. You’d think it would buy her some mercy.” Kari worked in the postnatal
ward. She meant that three babies was a record since the time of the ashes.
Optica
still hadn’t fully recovered from it, apparently,
because pregnancies were few and far between, and many of the babies didn’t
survive to term.

I saw her point. Why
Lavinia
? As
far as I knew she was just a pretty woman, pretty and quiet.

“Who was her breeding partner?”
Meri
asked.

“Butcher Ross,”
Cynda
said. “But
what does that matter? They’d both been released from the program.”

“It matters because the Watchers killed her,” I said, my
voice rising. “Everything about
Lavinia
matters
because they killed her.”

Apparently I sounded like I was about to lose it, because
all eyes in the room turned in my direction, and
Cynda
wrapped her arms around me, making little shushing noises. I didn’t want to be
confined—I was angry, not weepy—and I elbowed out of her grasp as
Liza climbed up onto a top bunk from an angle, so the camera couldn’t see her,
and with a pencil gouged behind it at the wires. She didn’t just twist them;
she ripped them right out, her frizzy hair bouncing in time with her efforts.

“You are going to be in so much trouble,” Wanda said
gleefully.

“Try it, Wanda,” Shawna said. “Tattle on Liza, and ten of us
will testify that you’re the one who sabotaged the camera.” Around the room, a
dozen or so heads nodded. Shawna was a live-and-let live sort of person, and
often ended up acting as the peacekeeper of the dorm.

Wanda said nothing, but the look in her eye told me Shawna
had moved to the top of her hate list. Just under me, that is.

“Go ahead,” Liza said to me, settling down cross-legged on
the top bunk. “What were you saying about
Lavinia
?”

I collected my thoughts. “The Watchers were trying to make
those men turn on
Lavinia
,” I said. “And they tried
to make
Rafe
turn in whoever was helping him.”

Cynda
shrugged, as if to say she didn’t follow my point, so I went on. “They say the
city meetings are to punish us for disunity, but it’s almost like they’re
designed to create disunity
, to turn us against each
other.”

Bizarrely, Lea, the youngest girl in my dorm,
began to laugh. “
Lavinia
was going to get shot no
matter what the men did,” she said, and tears began streaming down her cheeks.
“They couldn’t make matters worse. They couldn’t make matters better. They
couldn’t make matters worse.” She might have gone right on seesawing between
better and worse, but she was sobbing and laughing at the same time now,
gasping out her words.

With no warning
Cynda
hauled back
and slapped her. “Get a grip on yourself, Lea,” she said. “Take a deep breath
and hold it.”

Lea looked stunned, but managed to do as
Cynda
said.

“One deep breath. Now another. I have to go to work soon,
and I can’t leave you hysterical.”

A circle of girls formed around Lea, all attempting to
comfort her, patting her shoulder, offering her water, saying soothing things.
It soon became clear, though, that the attention wasn’t helping. Maybe
Cynda
ought to slap her again. Or I could. I couldn’t think
of any comforting words, that was for sure, and anyway I had no interest in
playing nursemaid.

Liza didn’t either. She threw Lea an exasperated look and
then, bizarrely, began to clap—not like she was applauding, but slowly
and loudly until everyone was staring at her. Everyone—even
Lea—turned toward her. Liza wasn’t particularly pretty, with too-large
hands and feet, a beaky nose, and that sandy-colored frizzy hair; but she was
smart and decisive, and when she had something to say, she made sure people
listened.

 
“Red hit the
nail on the head,” she said, when she saw that she had our full attention. “The
Watchers want the people in the city meeting to turn on each other. They want
us to sell each other, sacrifice each other, do whatever it takes to stay
alive.”

Shawna was nodding, and
Meri
looked thoughtful. Before they could say anything, though, Wanda jumped in.

“That’s not true,” she said. “The Watchers are showing us
where we’re weak. That way we can become stronger.”

Liza snorted. “Look at how people have been acting since
Rafe
got killed. Avoiding each other, whispering about each
other. Afraid of each other. And now, with
Lavinia
,
it’ll be ten times worse.” She nodded decisively. “Something’s definitely
hinky
.”

“
Hinky
?”
Meri
said sarcastically, stretching out on her bunk. “Where do you get that idea? We
had a terrible spring, something’s killing our chickens, we’re running out
food, and the Watchers’ solution is to kill a woman for being beautiful. All
very logical.”

“We’re running out of
food
?”
Lea moaned.

“No, we are not,”
Cynda
murmured
soothingly. “She’s just giving an example. A
what if
.”

“
What if
the
Watchers are completely illogical,” I said. “
What if
there’s no rhyme or reason behind the things they do.”

 
“Wanda,” Shawna
put in. “If anyone gets in trouble for anything that’s said tonight, we’ll know
who to blame.”

Wanda glowered at her. “Red can get in plenty of trouble
without any help from me,” she said.

“Unfortunately, that’s true,”
Cynda
said, throwing an apologetic look my way. “You really ought to be more
careful.”

Wanda perked up at this unexpected ally. “Exactly. Red
disrupted the first city meeting, and that definitely breaks the rules about
orderly assembly.”

“We aren’t supposed to have anything to do with people who
break rules,” Lea said, looking at me uneasily.

“Then go away,” I told her. “Remove yourself from my bad
influence.”

“But it’s after curfew. I’d be breaking
that
rule.”

“Red puts us in an impossible position,” Wanda agreed,
looking around at the other girls. “She was a lightning rod even before the
city meetings, and now she’s downright unsafe to have around. That hair is like
a target, painted right on her head.”

“Now you’re just being mean,” Shawna said.

“It’s mean to state the obvious? To say that Red stands
out?” Wanda looked at me with a dark glint in her eye. “If you ask me,
that’s
the reason for the city meetings.
The Watchers are tired of people who call attention to themselves. I mean,
Rafe
was everybody’s favorite instructor. And
Lavinia
was gorgeous. They stood out and they knew it. They
thought they were better than everyone else.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Liza said.

Wanda ignored her. “And neither one of them was anywhere
near as bad as you, Red, with that hair—”

“It’s not like she chose that color on purpose,” Shawna put
in.

“—And we all know they watch you more than anybody.”

“They do not!” By this point it was more wishful thinking
than anything else, but I protested anyway.

Cynda
shifted. “Well, actually, they do watch you more,” she said. “Warden Rick told
me. They keep special records on you.”

Baffled, I stared at her. Why hadn’t she told me that
before? She was my best friend, next to
Meritt
, of
course.

“Of course they keep special records.” Wanda ran a smug hand
over her own unremarkable dark brown hair. “They’re afraid she’s got some
mutant disease from the time of the ashes. She has that hair, and something
obviously stunted her growth. She’s a runt mutant.”

I didn’t dignify that with a reply, but Liza did. “If Red is
what you get from the time of the ashes, then ashes are medicine you could have
used, Wanda.”

Wanda looked baffled, then offended. “If you think a runt
mutant—”

Liza talked over her. “She’s prettier than I am, too, Wanda.
I’m just saying Red may be small and redheaded, but she does have some things
in her favor.”

“
Meritt
certainly thinks so,”
someone muttered.

“Farrell Dean, too,” Wanda announced. “She’ll probably get
both of them pulled into a city meeting. She’s probably the next
Lavinia
.”