The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (3 page)

From the corner of my eye I
could see that the older warden was nodding. “Toward the orchard,” he said.

“Toward the orchard. And I went
through the orchard, and then I sort of kept walking until I got to the gap in
the wall. And then— ” I took a deep breath, considered what I was about
to say, and decided to risk it—“I sort of went across the wasteland to
the edge of the woods.”

Neither warden moved, but the room felt suddenly different.
My breathing seemed too loud.

There was no rule against going to the woods—there
didn’t need to be—so I hadn’t gotten myself deeper into trouble. With
luck, I was distracting the wardens from what I’d actually done. With even more
luck, I might manage to get some precious information out of them. I’d never
before had a chance to talk to wardens about the woods.

“Don’t you know what lives out there?” the scarred warden
said. I couldn’t read his expression.

“Wild animals,” I said. “Wolves and stuff.”

“And stuff.” He smiled without humor. “You’re meant to know
the stories.”

“I do,” I said. “But sometimes I wonder if that’s all they
are. You know—just stories.”

The warden stared at me for a long moment, not blinking.
“And what would be the point of
just
stories
?” he said, his voice hard.

I chose my words carefully. “It’s hard to get everything
done,” I said. “We don’t have enough people who are strong and healthy. And if
the woods were safe, we might lose good workers. Some might leave the city.
They might even try to find a way off the island.”

The warden crossed his arms over his chest, tipped his chair
back. “So you think the city commissioners lie to keep people in the city.
You’re calling the commissioners liars.”

 
“No! Not
lies—just stories, for the kids, when we’re little. I only wonder
sometimes, because nobody I know has actually seen anyone out there. In the
woods, I mean. No one has seen anyone in the woods.” I was babbling. I should
never have broached the topic—but now that I had, I’d have to see it out.
“I’m not saying the Watchers are liars.”

“
City commissioners
,”
the warden corrected. “It’s rude to call them Watchers.” Then he gave a
humorless snort that might have been laughter, and set his chair down with a
thud. “Sounds like you need a bit of review. Start with Wes. You remember what
happened to Wes?”

“He gathered firewood too far north. Too near the
wilderland
.”

“And?”

Maybe it was only a story. Still, I didn’t like to say it
out loud. “They sent out a search party and found him dead,” I said, as evenly
as I could manage. “He’d been skinned like a rabbit.”

Somewhere down the hall a door shut with a clang. From the
corner of my eye I saw the older warden turn toward the sound, but the scarred
warden kept his gaze on me. “Now do Rosella,” he said.

Rosella wasn’t as hard to talk about. In fact, she was
something of an inspiration to me.

“Rosella didn’t like the breeding partner she was assigned,”
I said. “She ran away to the woods in protest.”

“And what became of her?”

 
“She was gone
for a couple of months. When she came back, she said there were things in the
woods that were terrifying and beautiful, all light and shadow. Not entirely
human. She went around warning people to stay in the city, away from them.”

The warden nodded. “Exactly.”

He seemed calm enough, so I decided to push my point. “But
she came back crazy,” I said.

“As a bedbug,” he agreed.

“So she didn’t know what she was saying. She could have been
repeating childhood stories she’d been told. She might not have seen anything
at all out in the woods.”

I desperately wanted to believe there wasn’t anything to fear
out there. Sure, I’d been terrified of the woods when I was younger. I’d
thought of the gaps in the walls as gaping mouths that would devour me if I
wandered too close.

But now  . . . I wanted to believe there was
a place we could go,
Meritt
and I, to escape from the
eyes all around us. We’d never talked about it, but I wanted to hope that when
the time came for him to be assigned a breeding partner, we’d run away, go live
in the woods and become part of the legends, the victims in horror stories designed
to keep everyone under control, but really we’d be safe. We’d be free. We’d be
the ones who got away.

“Poor lovely Rosella,” the balding warden said sadly. “She
was a friend of mine, once upon a time.”

I turned to look at him, the metal chair creaking ominously
as I moved. “You actually knew her?” She had died a long time ago.

He nodded. “I knew her,” he said, running a hand over his
short beard. He was watching me closely, his face weary. “The Guardians haven’t
been as active lately,” he said. “There’s a reason for that. People my
age—
Rosella’s
age—learned not to cross
them. You young ones ought to learn from our mistakes. Don’t think the woods
are safe just because you don’t personally know anyone who ran into trouble out
there.”

The scarred warden snorted. “
Out there
. You don’t have to go into the woods to run into the
Guardians. Hey—turn around. Look at me.”

I did as he said.

“You’re old enough to remember Chet, aren’t you?”

I did remember Chet. I’d only been eight or nine when he
died, but I remembered him because he had bullied some of the older children
who let me tag along after them. Once he’d locked Cline in the dark food
preservation cellar for fourteen hours, and another time, he’d stolen
Meritt’s
shoes.
Meritt
got put in
isolation for two days for not keeping up with his belongings.

There were other incidents, too, and one morning the
butchers found Chet hanging from his feet in the slaughterhouse in a row of
cattle carcasses. He was fifteen.

“Anyone could have done that,” I said diffidently. “Chet
wasn’t well liked.”

“He wasn’t well-liked by the Guardians, that’s for sure.”
The scarred warden’s expression turned smug. “You want to know how I know it
was them?”

Reluctantly, I nodded.

“I saw them come in at the northwest gap just before dark
that night. Two of them.”

I leaned forward. “What did they look?” I said. “Regular
people?”

For a moment I thought he was going to refuse to tell me,
but apparently the desire to show off won out. “Could be, but I doubt it,” he
said. “They were bigger than normal. Faster, too. I lost them in the blackberry
fields, and I don’t lose
regular
people.”

Behind me the other warden shifted. “First I’ve heard of
this,” he said mildly. “Did you report it?”

“Sure. Got told to keep my head down and my mouth shut. Come
daylight, the kid was dead. Come evening, I’d been made a warden.”

His pale eyes glinted as he turned back to me. “So like I
said, you’d best be careful, wandering around at night, talking as if the
commissioners are liars. The
Watchers
.”

The shiver that ran through me wasn’t faked.

The scarred warden smiled. “Where did you get lost?”

The change in subject threw me off balance.

“I  . . . I got turned around in the
orchard,” I said after a moment. “I came out of it where I wasn’t expecting to
be. Somewhere in the adult housing section. And then I knew it was getting
close to curfew, and so I ran, and I saw some old men and tried to ask where I
was but they were drunk and threw a bottle at me. Then I found you.”

He was watching me with a funny gleam in his eye. I didn’t
know why. Everything I’d said made perfect sense, I thought. The orchard was
confusing, row upon row of ancient twisted apple trees, no landmarks to keep
things straight. Someone could easily get lost in there. Sure, it was well past
curfew, but I could easily have lost track of time when I was lost. And I’d
nicely accounted for the old men seeing me.

The scarred warden tipped back in his chair, rocked gently
on the back legs.

“Lost in the adult housing section,” he said, and smiled as
if he knew a secret joke.

Behind me, the older warden got up without a word and left
the room.

I didn’t know what was going on.

The scarred warden pulled out his cigarette and lit it
again. He didn’t say anything; he only smoked, and watched me, and rocked his
chair, and tapped ash off onto the metal table, and smoked some more.

Again the smoke scratched at my throat. The room grew full
of hazy gray curls that were thickest up by the ceiling, moving like living
things groping blindly for a way out. There was a narrow window high up on the
wall, but it was shut.

Except for that window, and the door, the gray cinderblock
walls were bare and uniform all about. There wasn’t anything for me to look at,
and I didn’t want to stare at the warden staring at me.

How would the pretend me act? Some girl who was telling the
truth but couldn’t help but be a little nervous that she was in the
prison—what would she do?

She’d fidget. Just a little.

That was easy enough. I busied myself combing my tangled
hair with my fingers, working through the knots the wind had made. I worked at
it for three minutes, four, maybe longer. It felt like a long time.

 
“We’re told to
watch you,” the scarred warden said suddenly, setting his chair down hard. “But
we didn’t need telling. That hair makes us watch.” His voice dropped to a raspy
whisper. “I bet you like that.”

Was he crazy? I didn’t want to be watched. No one did.
Nothing good ever came of attracting attention, so we all tried to make
ourselves as inconspicuous as possible.

“No,” the warden said. He got up and came around the table
to stand over me. “Stop looking at the door. Look at me.”

He was so close I had to crane my neck back to see his face.
The light behind his head cast a halo. When he shifted I was blinded by the
glare.

“That hair,” he said. “You’re a freak. You know that?”

I nodded. I knew.

He shifted and blocked the light, and the room seemed dark
because my eyes hadn’t adjusted, and just as they did he shifted again and
blinded me again. He could give me a headache, doing this.
 

This time when my eyes adjusted he was examining me like a
bug under a microscope. I didn’t know where to look and kept focusing on the
scar cutting through his upper lip, puckered and mean.

After a moment he leaned a hip against the table, smoking, gazing
down at me, getting too comfortable and still standing too close, looming over
me. I was small even for a girl—I was a runt, like he’d said—and I
was sitting and he was standing, and he reminded me of the bulls in the cattle
yard, the ridiculously muscled shoulders, the flat bull-like eyes.

I wanted the other warden to come back. I didn’t want to be
alone with this one. He scared me.

But I shouldn’t let him know that.
Rafe
said that some animals could smell fear, that it told them you were prey.
 
He said some animals waited to see if
you’d run from them, and if you ran they knew you were prey and then they’d
chase you.

I couldn’t be prey. I had to stand my ground, had to be
calm, had to push back—not hard enough to get slapped down, just hard
enough to not get eaten alive.

So I did the only calming thing I could think to do; I
started braiding my hair. I combed it with my fingers and divided it into three
bunches, and I wove them together tightly and neatly.

The warden stood there—too close—watching me,
smoking his celebratory cigarette, looming over me, but he didn’t order me to
look at him. He let me braid my hair, and the familiar motions steadied me. I
wasn’t prey. I was an unfortunate girl who had gotten lost, and who soon would
go home to her dorm.

“I checked to see who your parents were.”

Surprised, I almost dropped the braid.

The warden cocked his head, blew smoke out of pursed lips.
“I searched the records. You want me to tell you what I found?”

I knew he wouldn’t. But of course I wanted to know—we
all wanted to know. Some people could guess, could match features and coloring
and hope that they were looking at an older sibling, an aunt or an uncle, maybe
even a parent. Not me. I’d never seen anyone who looked remotely like me.

“Do you want me to tell you?” the warden said again. He was
toying with me, but all the same I had to answer.

“Yes,” I said. “I would love for you to tell me.”

The warden dropped the nub of cigarette on the floor, ground
it out, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I can’t.”

Wouldn’t, he meant. No surprise there. I fished a piece of
string out of my pocket and tied the end of my braid.

“I can’t tell you who your parents are,” he repeated. “Even
the genetic counselors can’t tell you. You know why that is?”

“Because they’re not allowed.”

“Wrong.” He smirked at me. “They can’t tell you because they
don’t know.”

He was trying to get a rise out me, trying to unsettle me,
but he failed because I knew for a fact he was lying. The genetic counselors
knew everything about our genetic backgrounds. That was their job, and it was
an important one because on a small island like this, we had to be careful.
Inbreeding could weaken us; an unfortunate convergence of genetic flaws could
destroy us.

So the genetic counselors knew lineage. They knew that and
much, much more—predisposition to hereditary diseases, presence or
absence of various genetic markers, everything. One of the genetic counselors,
Roy, had explained it all to
Meritt
once. It was
amazing, what they could know about us from their records and our blood
samples.

So I wasn’t impressed by this attempt to unnerve me. In fact
it made me feel calmer, to think that this was the best the scarred warden
could do. Pointedly I studied my fingernails, my expression bored. I was not
prey; I was a tired bored girl, waiting to be allowed to go home.

“You don’t know who my parents are,” I said. “That doesn’t
mean the genetic counselors don’t know.”

Slowly, mockingly, the Warden shook his head. “There’s no
record of anyone with your color hair—ever—and there’s
no record of your birth
.”

My mouth went suddenly dry.

The warden smiled at me. It was not a pleasant smile. “That
got your attention,” he said. “And yeah, you heard me right. There is no record
of your birth. You aren’t in the books. Officially, as far as the genetic
records go, you don’t exist.”

How could I not be in the books? They were comprehensive,
exhaustively comprehensive. This made no sense.

Maybe he was lying. Yes—that was it. He was searching
for a new way to frighten me.

“I didn’t know why you weren’t in the records,” the warden
said. He pushed away from the table and walked a few steps, turned around,
walked back.
 
“I’ve been wondering
about that. But now I get it. Something’s wrong with you, right? The time of
the ashes, all that black soot—it killed the normal ones, but not you.
You’re a mutant. A runt with freaky hair. But you were all we had, right? So
the genetic counselors couldn’t euthanize you.”

I was staring at him now, horribly fascinated. I wanted to
believe he was lying to me, but I just wasn’t sure. If he was lying, he sure
was caught up in the lie.

“For all the genetic counselors knew, you were all we were
ever going to get,” he said. “For all they knew, you could have been the last
baby ever born. For all they knew, you were the one whose mutation made you
immune to the ashes, whose blood could save the rest of us. So they had to keep
you. We were in a fertility crisis. They couldn’t risk eliminating the newest
breeder, especially a breeder who had survived the ashes.”

He stopped pacing and looked at me as if to assess my
interest. He had my complete attention, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

“So they had to keep you,” he said, and now he was looking
pleased with himself. “They had to keep you, but at the same time, they didn’t
want to be blamed for however you turned out. Because who could say what sort
of mutant you would turn into as you developed, right? So they had to keep you,
but you were also a big risk. And no one wanted to be on record as okaying your
existence. No one wanted to be on record as planning you or keeping you.”

He stood right in front of me, looking down at me, his hands
on his hips. “So they didn’t write you down. And they keep a close watch on
you, just in case. Because who knows what the mutant will do? Who knows what
the mutant will become?”

He wasn’t lying—at least he seemed to think he was
telling the truth, was congratulating himself for sorting all this out. But he
could be wrong.

I risked a question of my own. “But the wardens don’t watch
me more than they watch other people, do they?”

I made a gesture indicating that I meant all the wardens,
not just him in particular, because he obviously had been watching me
especially. He had been asking questions about me, checking the records,
thinking about me. It made my skin crawl. “There are cameras everywhere.
Everyone is watched. It’s not just me.”

He gave a short humorless bark of laughter. “Everyone’s
watched, sure. But not like you. Where you go, who you talk to, what you say,
what you do. Your birth isn’t in the books, but all your days are written in
them.”

Maybe he was making that up—psychological torture,
that sort of thing. I looked at him, trying to decide whether he was lying or
telling the truth, and I saw that he was thinking about something else, that
something new was flickering in his flat eyes.

“What is it?” I said warily.

“You’re an unrecorded mutant, but they didn’t rule you out
of the breeding program.”

“So I must be a harmless mutation.” I tried to sound casual
and unconcerned, but I managed only to sound breathless. I certainly couldn’t
look at him any longer. Trying to act nonchalant, I straightened the hem of my
shirt, fastened a button that had come undone on one wrist. From the corner of
my eye I could see that the warden was still watching me. He uncrossed his arms
and shifted closer still, standing right up against me. His black pants brushed
my arm.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, facing the empty chair across
the table from me, trying to keep my breathing slow and easy.

“You realize that you’re in over your head,” he said softly.
“Things are happening that you don’t know about. Tonight was a bad night to be
out after curfew.”

He liked scaring me, and I was scared, and I couldn’t fake
not being scared, not anymore.

“Prison’s not easy,” he said. “The wardens sometimes forget
you’re there until you die and start to stink. Other times, you wish they had
forgotten you. Does that scare you?”

I nodded.

“Good.”

He bent over and looked me straight in the eye. I could
smell the tobacco on his breath. “I can keep you safe,” he said softly. “I can
keep them from forgetting you. Or remembering you. But you’ll have to make it
worth my while.”

My throat closed up.

“I could even cut you loose tonight,” he said. “Lose the
paperwork. Make this end right here. But you’ll have to give me something in
return.”

I tried to speak, had to stop and swallow. “I don’t have
anything to give you,” I said, and I didn’t—none of us had personal
belongings. At least we weren’t supposed to.

The warden reached out and moved my braid, circling my neck
with his hand. It felt hot and damp against my skin. “You have a lunch break,”
he said, pressing his thumb into the hollow at the front of my throat. “I can
feel your pulse. I can stop your pulse, if I want to. Or, at noon
tomorrow—”

The door opened with a bang. I almost jumped out of my skin.
At the same instant the scarred warden straightened up and stepped away from
me. He drifted casually across the room as the bald warden came in and set a
white ceramic mug on the table in front of me.

“Warm milk with honey,” the bald warden said, sitting down
behind the table. Then he spoke to the scarred warden. “We can’t take her back
yet. There’s been another disturbance.”

The scarred warden didn’t answer, and the older warden
looked from him to me, then back again.

“There a problem?” he said.

The scarred warden shook his head. His expression was closed
off, remote.

“It’s going to be awhile,” the older warden said. “E’s
locked down.”

Area E.

The boys’ dormitories.
Meritt’s
section.

The older warden nudged the warm milk closer to me, nodded
that I should drink.

Though my throat felt tight with anxiety I managed to sip
the warm drink. The scarred warden leaned against a wall and watched me. The
bald warden watched him.

“One of us had better get back on patrol,” the bald warden
said.

I didn’t want to be left alone with the warden who wanted me
to go somewhere, do something, at noon tomorrow. All I wanted to do at noon
tomorrow was eat lunch.