The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (13 page)

When he let go of my hand I stopped in my
tracks, afraid he had run away and left me alone and lost in some distant part
of the city. He was two years older, after all, and a boy. Sometimes he thought
things were funny that I didn’t. So I stood there in the darkness, seeing only
a strip of gray concrete beneath the edge of the blindfold, picturing myself
searching for him down unfamiliar streets, lost and terrified.

It felt like forever to me, but it was probably
only a few seconds before
Meritt
untied my blindfold,
pulled it free, and revealed his big joke: the blood-filled slaughterhouse
yard. He was hoping to make me shriek, but I was so relieved he hadn’t
abandoned me that a bunch of cow blood didn’t seem like a big deal. I think I
managed to impress
Meritt
a little, that day. He
never knew how frightened I’d been. Only
Rafe
knew
that.

He knew, because when the other kids left school
that day, I stayed behind to talk to him. I didn’t have anything to say, not
really, but I was always looking for some reason to prolong my time with him.
That day, what I said was, “Will we have another Lost Child day, or was today
the only one?”

Rafe
had been taken aback—I think he’d forgotten I was so much
younger than the other kids, more liable to be frightened by being turned loose
in the city.

“Lost child,” he said, putting an arm around my
shoulders and pulling me close. “Is that how you felt?”

And that was it.

That was it!

I took a deep breath, wanting to shout, wanting
to tell someone. That was what
Rafe
had said just
before he died:
Lost child.

It was a message only I would understand. Nobody
knew about that but the two of us,
Rafe
and me. What
did he want me to remember about the Lost Child day?

I thought back to that incident, five years
before. After I’d been unimpressed by the bloody slaughterhouse yard, I’d
managed, with a good bit of winding and doubling back and sheer blind luck, to
get us back to school. Then
Meritt
and I had switched
places. I had blindfolded him, and wandered randomly around until we ended up
at the blackberry fields.

Was there anything significant about either of
those places? The slaughterhouse lay on the eastern wall, near the safer woods.
It smelled metallic and salty, like blood. The camera was unreliable. I
couldn’t see what any of that had to do with
Rafe
.

But the fields didn’t, either. As a farm worker
I knew there was nothing there—just rows of aggressive blackberries with
their sharp thorns that left stinging cuts on our faces and arms, their fruit
that stained the bottoms of our feet purple. They grew so fast you could
practically see it happening; they were a blessing and a blight. They had
nothing to do with
Rafe
.

Shutting my eyes, I imagined myself back into
the Lost Child day. I was small, looking up at
Rafe
.
His face was troubled because he’d intended it as a fun outing for us, but he
could see that something in the experience had shaken me.

He had started to say something, then stopped,
shaking his head. Then he took hold of my shoulders and pulled me into his
arms. That didn’t happen very often, and I felt startled and pleased.
Rafe’s
shirt was rough under my cheek, like my own was
rough on my back. He smelled like chalk dust and musty books and himself. He
seemed very large and warm, and for once I felt completely wanted, completely
safe from jeers and
jostlings
and accidental injuries
that had been carefully planned.

When he spoke I heard his voice rumble in his
chest, where my ear was. He said, “Red, remember this: You’re never a lost
child if you have a map in your hands or in your head.”

And now I opened my eyes.

There on the wall of the empty home was the map
Rafe
had used to teach us geography. It was a large square
of paper, carefully framed in wood. At the top it said, “A watched city is an
orderly city.”

The motto struck me as odd, now, and I wondered
whether
Rafe
had put it there as his own private
joke, or maybe to make it look like he believed in everything that was
Optica
. Because he hadn’t. Even years ago, before the city
began failing and
Rafe
began spying on the Watchers,
years before when I was just a kid in school,
Rafe
had said things that made us ask questions.

Holding the candle up, I studied the meticulous
portrayal of
Optica
. There was my dormitory. There were
my fields, with the Watchers’ compound above them, and the
wilderland
beyond that. I found the watchtower in the middle, saw the circle beneath it,
even the tiered steps carefully rendered in impossibly thin lines. Every street
was drawn, every building, right down to every little house.
Rafe
—or whoever had made this map—had included
every detail.

He had even, I saw now, marked the cameras.
Surely that was what the tiny x marks meant. Yes, there were the two in the
school, and the wide-lens in the schoolyard marked with a double x; and there
was the one at the slaughterhouse.

What was I looking for? What had
Rafe
wanted me to see?

I studied top to bottom and left to right. I
began finding the places where things had happened to
Meritt
and me. I traced the lines of the streets where I'd run with him that memorable
night, noted the exact spot where I'd been caught. There was the gap where the
blonde warden had stopped
Meritt
; there was the
wasteland where
Rafe
had been arrested.

Something caught my eye.

Rafe
—or whoever the mapmaker had been—had drawn a tiny,
almost invisible circle on the outer side of the city wall. I looked at the
rest of the wall; tiny circles appeared regularly. There was one outside the
eastern wall, near the slaughterhouse. But I knew that area well, had spent
hours out there with
Meritt
, and
I couldn’t remember anything there worth marking with a circle.

Lifting the candle, I examined the map again, this time
turning my attention to the inside of the city. After a little while I spotted
another tiny, faint circle under the watchtower. I went on searching for the
tiny circles until I thought I was going cross-eyed, and counted nine more
before my stinging eyes made me stop.

What were they? I had no idea.

I rested my eyes for a few minutes, and then tried again. I
was just on the cusp of giving up when I noticed something else, a mistake that
until just recently I would have considered completely unremarkable: On
Rafe’s
map the wall was open between the Watcher compound
and the
wilderland
. But I knew the wall there was
unbroken—I had seen it through the telescope in the watchtower. The
Watchers were walled off from the Guardians.

My heartbeat sounded suddenly loud in my ears. I didn’t know
whether it was from hope or fear.

Rafe
was
careful.
Rafe
had drawn this map—and I was
sure, now, that he had drawn it with his own hand—with incredible
accuracy and care. So if the discrepancy meant what I thought it meant, at one
time the wall beyond the compound had opened to the
wilderland
.
And that made sense. The Guardians protected the Watchers, enforced their
commands.

But then something had changed, a falling out perhaps, and
the openings in the walls had been filled in. And if the Guardians were no
longer allies with the Watchers, there was at least a small chance that they
would help us.

There was another possibility, of course. Maybe the wall was
sealed because something mad or evil out there had killed the Guardians, or the
Guardians themselves had gone mad, and nothing was safe from them.

Who would be brave enough—or foolish enough—to
go into the woods to find out?

I shivered, remembering the guttural voice from the night
before, the voice from the
wilderland
, calling my
name.

Anxious
to find
Meritt
and tell him what I’d discovered at
Rafe’s
house, I went to breakfast early. It was a misty
morning, touched with pale pink light—one of those strangely delicate
mornings that sometimes come just before a hard frost.

Though I was out far earlier than usual, the streets weren’t
empty. Small groups of people clustered here and there, huddling into
themselves against the morning chill. A boy on the edge of the circle nearest
to me surreptitiously snickered. I approached one group—cautiously, given
my pariah status—in time to hear a woman say, “It’s not just this one.
It’s most of them.”

She was standing beneath a camera. I followed her gaze and
saw that someone else had been slipping through the shadows on the streets of
Optica
the night before. Someone with access to black
paint.

The sign under the camera now read, “We Watch Because We
SCare
.”

* * *
*

The cafeteria was full of gray-faced, frightened people. If
they’d seen the altered signs, they were afraid to laugh at them.

After waiting by the door for ages I went through the line
and got my food, and then settled at a table with old Louie and Cline, where I
could see the entrance. Two people at the table promptly got up and left, but
the rest stayed put. I guess they figured they were already eating with Louie,
who’d actually been put in a city meeting, so what did I matter.

Louie patted my hand when I sat down. “I don’t want to talk
about it,” he said, and I nodded.

“Neither do I.”

“Then let’s discuss a more pleasant topic. You, for
instance, are getting prettier every day.” He winked. “Though that’s only to be
expected, given you’re a fairy child.”

Cline’s face took on a look of such pained incredulity that
I almost smiled.

Louie chatted on in the same manner, saying nothing
important, but somehow steadying me just the same. And all the while, I was
watching and waiting. How was I going to stand it if I had to go all
day—and possibly all night—without being able to tell
Meritt
what I’d found?

Eventually Louie wandered off to cheer up someone else and
left me to Cline’s silence. I was finishing my toast—still keeping one
eye on the door—when Farrell Dean slid into the seat between us and
rolled a hardboiled egg from his tray to my own. His face was flushed and his
eyes sparkling, unlike pretty much everyone else in the room.

Maybe it was the contrast between him and all those
gray-faced and cowed people, or maybe I was annoyed with
Meritt
for not being there when I needed him; in any case, I smiled at Farrell Dean
with more warmth than I intended, and he went abruptly still and quiet.

Cline glowered at me—he seemed to think I was an
embarrassing habit Farrell Dean should have the willpower to break. I smiled
sweetly at him, knowing it would irritate, and turned my attention back to
Farrell Dean. If I could have told him about the map I would have—I was
itching to tell someone—but there were too many people around for that
sort of conversation. I settled for teasing him a little.

“You’re looking fit this
morning,” I said. “Sleep well?”

He cast a sideways glance at me, his eyes wary. “As always,”
he said.

“Have sweet dreams?”

“Not really, no.” He turned sideways in his chair and looked
at me directly. “I dreamed about you.”

I stuck out my tongue at him and he laughed.

The textile worker directly across the table was smiling
benevolently at us. At least we’d managed to distract one person from the
stress of the day.

“So what happened in this dream about me?” I said, rolling
the egg on the table to crack its shell.

“Actually, it was a nightmare.”

“A nightmare? No way. Not with me in it—I’m a fairy.”

“Since when?”

“Since Louie said so. Ask Cline.”

Cline made a disgusted noise.

“Can you tell just by looking?” Farrell Dean said. He began
considering me narrowly, leaning back and forth to see me from different
angles, presumably looking for signs of fairy-dom. “Do fairies have wings?
Fancy hair? Are they pretty?”

Cline dropped his fork in exasperation; the textile worker
flinched, startled, then recovered and smiled at us again.

“Fairies are smart,” I informed Farrell Dean. “That’s their
key characteristic—they’re smarter and braver than other people give them
credit for being.”

Farrell Dean nodded, miming deep thought. “The Red
in my dream was smart,” he said slowly. “Too smart for her
own good, in fact. And too brave. And too stubborn. Plus she had
terrible
taste in men. Does that sound like a fairy to you?”

I frowned; Cline smirked. The textile worker looked back and
forth between the three of us.

“And in my dream this fairy—or whoever she
was—kept dancing on the edge of a cliff.” Farrell Dean pointedly met my
eyes.
 
His tone was still light but
his face was grave. “That’s where the nightmare came in. I knew I was too far
away to catch her if she fell.”

For a long moment the table was silent.

“Maybe the fairy didn’t need to be caught,” I said. “Maybe
she could fly.”

Farrell Dean smiled, but his eyes were serious. “Maybe she
thought so,” he said softly. “But it was only a dream.”

The textile worker waited to see if I’d reply. When I
didn’t, she stood up and collected her tray. “Young people are so resilient,”
she remarked as she turned to go.

I got up as well, and pushed my metal chair back up to the
table.

 
“I’ll be at your
field sometime today,” Farrell Dean said in a low voice, every trace of joking
gone. “We need to talk.”

“About what?”

He glanced over at Cline, who nodded, his face set and grim.

“About
Meritt
.”

“
Warden
,” Cline
muttered.

I turned, and found myself face to face with the scarred
warden.

“Time to go,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I tried to back away from him, but
Farrell Dean had stood up and was right behind me. He put a protective hand on
my shoulder.

The warden looked at him over my head. “This has nothing to
do with you,” he said. “She’s field supervisor, and she’s late.”

I wasn’t. I knew exactly how much time I still had. But
arguing would do no good, and I wasn’t going to drag anyone else into trouble
as well.

“He’s right,” I said hurriedly, glancing back at Farrell
Dean. “I’m going.”

“Red—” Farrell Dean began.

“Take her tray,” the warden told him. “That’s your only role
here. Clean up her mess.”

Then he took me by the arm and started pulling me after him.

“Hey—” Farrell Dean said. “Wait a minute—”

I glanced back over my shoulder, casting a beseeching look
at Cline. He nodded and, without a word, stepped in front of
Farrell Dean, blocking the narrow aisle with his bulk.

When I glanced back again, from the end of the
aisle, Cline was gripping Farrell Dean’s shoulder and whispering something in
his ear. Farrell Dean’s gaze was fixed on me, his face white.

As for the scarred warden, I hoped
he was
only trying to scare me—surely he wouldn’t make me go with him now, when
I really was supposed to be at work, when I’d be missed and reported.

But I grew less hopeful as he pulled me toward the door,
staying so close that I could feel his breath on my hair. I wanted to believe
he was only toying with me, but with each step I felt less and less certain. If
I was late to work, after all, I’d be the one in trouble; and if I blamed him,
if I complained, no one would pay any attention. He only had to say that he’d
taken me in for some infraction.

What would happen if I ran for it as soon as I got outside?
I was fast, though maybe not faster than he was—and anyway where could I
go? Even if I escaped this time, he’d catch up to me sooner or later, and it
would be worse then. Or he might pay me back by going after my
friends—and
Meritt
and Farrell Dean certainly
couldn’t stand up to malicious scrutiny, not if they’d been pulling stunts like
the one that got
Rafe
killed.

But if I went with him  . . .

As I reached the door, still trying to find a way out of my
quandary, two figures appeared at the entrance to the kitchen. I saw them out
of the corner of my eye, but didn’t pay any attention. They’d be kitchen
workers, finishing up their first shift; they always came out about now, ready
to take a break before starting lunch. They couldn’t help me. Nobody could help
me, except maybe another warden, and why would one of them take my side against
one of their own?

I had started to push the exit turnstile, leaning into
it—I had to run, I couldn’t meekly hand myself over to this
man—when someone spoke.

“Oh, Red, I’m glad I caught you,” she said. It was Marta,
the kitchen worker who drove the lunch truck. “I need to talk to you about the
number of Field A workers—there’s a miscount somewhere, and I don’t know
if it’s on our end or yours, but your field is requiring more meals than we’ve
rationed for you.”

She looked at the warden, then, as if she’d only just
noticed him.

“I’m sorry, warden, we’re blocking your way,” she said,
taking my arm and leading me around him, toward the kitchen door. That swinging
metal door with its scuffed gray paint seemed like the most beautiful thing I’d
ever seen. I didn’t look at the warden—I kept my eyes firmly on that
door. Marta pushed it open and we stepped inside. The door swung shut behind
us. Steamy heat from the big sinks where workers were washing pots enveloped
me. It made me feel faint, or maybe I was faint from relief.

The scarred warden hadn’t followed us. Apparently he wasn’t
yet prepared to make a scene, was willing to bide his time till a more
opportune moment.

The kitchen workers were folding their aprons and filing
toward the door we’d just entered. Marta eased us around the stragglers, one
hand still firmly on my arm, and pulled a clipboard from the wall.

“Here,” she said. “Look over those names, and tell me who’s
missing.”

I met her eyes. Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelash
did she indicate that she knew she’d interfered with whatever the scarred
warden had planned for me.

But I had to wonder. The list had all the proper names.

* * *
*

The day went downhill from there. Farrell Dean never came to
my field, and wasn’t at supper, and
Meritt
didn’t
come to supper either. I searched for him at the city meeting, but if he was
there I never did spot him. I ended up standing with my silent bunkmate, Kari,
who wasn’t really quite as silent as she seemed, at least not that night. She
hummed, just barely audibly. Maybe it was a holdover from her work in the
postnatal ward; maybe she hummed to the newborn babies. Or maybe she just found
it comforting. In any case, she did it all through the city meeting, so quietly
that sometimes I couldn’t hear it but could only sort of feel it. It didn’t
bother me, but it didn’t comfort me either. I wished it did.

That night, the Watchers put Judd and
Petey
in the circle.

“One of these boys stole a pair of boots,” the Voice,
echoing out of the darkness, announced. “Our surveillance team caught both of
them at the relevant place in the relevant time frame. But which boy was it?”

They looked so young, standing there in the glare of the
spotlight. Judd was shaking his head. Though the night was chilly, his face was
red and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.
Petey
looked petrified with fear.

“Each boy has two choices,” the Voice said. “He can confess
and ask for mercy; or he can stay silent and maintain his innocence. But there
are consequences. If one boy confesses and the other stays silent, then the one
who confesses will be executed for stealing. If neither boy confesses, or if
both boys confess, they’ll both be executed.”

A wave of nausea hit me. They were so young, they were best
friends, and they would both die unless one volunteered to die alone.

Rain began to fall, not heavily, but each separate drop cold
and sharp, stinging my face. I didn’t raise a hand to protect myself; no one
did. In the harsh glare of the spotlight we stood frozen, appalled, watching
Petey
and Judd sort through the dilemma. Their faces fell
into expressions of despair as they realized there was no way out, no way for them
both to survive.

 
“Time is up,”
the Voice announced. “I will count to five. At five, your decision has been
made.” Two wardens stood behind the boys, guns at the ready. Judd turned his
head and looked at his younger friend.
Petey
was
terrified, all skinny arms and legs and big frightened eyes. He was staring
fixedly straight ahead, as if he couldn’t believe this was happening to him.