Lizzie came into the supply cupboard, startling me.
“My chair,” she said. “My torch.” Her voice had a rasp to it, harsh, demanding.
I stood and slipped the torch off my head. My headscarf tangled in the strap. Lizzie reached out and grabbed it roughly. The torch fell against Elsa’s forehead with a smacking sound. Elsa startled, stiffened, her back arched against my arm, and she cried, a shrill, sharp sound that pierced the shadows of the supply cupboard and echoed down the corridor. I propped her against my shoulder and patted her back with a sense of urgency, a rapid pat, pat, pat as though that would somehow take away the surprise and the pain of the injury. “It’s okay,” I murmured. “It’s okay. I’m here.” But even as I tried to soothe her, I felt a fierce rage.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. Lizzie didn’t seem to hear Elsa crying. She just sat, still as a stone, holding the tangled torch and headscarf on her lap.
She glanced up at me, then looked away. “Nothing,” she muttered. “Nothing you need to know about.” She fumbled with the headscarf, pulling it free from the torch, and handed it to me. Elsa’s crying was easing into little hiccups. I moved her to my other shoulder, felt the roundness of her head against the curve of my neck.
“Try me. I’m a good listener.” I heard Randall’s uneven footsteps outside as he made rounds. Lizzie cocked her head toward the sound, then sighed.
“It’s time to diaper and feed.” She led the way for me to take Elsa back to her crib, I put my headscarf back on, then together we went through the robotic routine of diapering babies and propping bottles. Finally, we finished and went back to the supply cupboard. She sat quietly, frowning as if thinking hard thoughts. Without looking at me, she started to talk.
“So, you’re a good listener?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes a person just needs to talk,” she said. “Know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
She rocked, her hands gripping the arms of the chair so tightly her knuckles were turning white.
“It’s Randall. I’m worried about him.”
I waited.
“You can’t say a word about this. Hear me?”
I nodded.
“Say it. Say you won’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Not Joan. Not anyone.”
“Not Joan. Not anyone.” This was eerily like repeating the pledges to the Authority.
“He heard something about the Perfection Standards.”
I’d heard that phrase before but wanted to know what Lizzie knew. I gave her my best blank stare.
“You don’t know Perfection Standards? Typical home-raised—otherwise you’d know. Makes me tired having to explain everything.”
“I’m sorry. But no one else explains as well as you do.” Her face softened into a shy smile.
“Okay, then. Here’s the history; you’ll understand. The Authority, right from the start, knew that resources could not be wasted. The old government wasted everything. Under them, the Earth got sick and the people suffered.”
The light in the corridor was changing from night darkness to a lighter shade of gray. She wouldn’t have much more time to talk.
“Then what?”
“Well, with the Authority in charge, things got better. You know. Like if someone is sick, really sick, and needs a lot of care, well, that turns out to be a waste of resources. They call it futility.”
The word illuminated a memory—George’s first wife. Mother had told me about her. Renal failure, a case of futility. And they took her away.
“And then when someone isn’t productive enough, doesn’t produce enough energy or isn’t able to do their assigned job then, well, that’s just not fair to everyone else. I mean, we all have to give and receive equally.”
My poor mother, curled on her mat, not walking her board. And they took her away.
“Babies can’t give equally,” Lizzie said. “Everybody knows that. But they’re kind of like investments. When they grow up, they can start producing energy. But . . .” She paused, as though trying to think of the best way to explain something. “The Authority soon realized that some babies would never be productive enough to warrant that investment. So they announced the Perfection Standards.”
Another memory illuminated: that young couple in Living Space 2, and the absence of their baby creating a void between them.
“Randall’s worried. He heard some rumors. I tell him rumors are like poison. Once they get into your head you can’t get them out. He shouldn’t listen. But he does. He thinks the Authority might expand the Standards. And he’s got that limp.” Her voice was low as if she was talking to herself, worrying out loud. “It’s getting worse. He thinks he needs a special shoe.”
“You really care about Randall, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. He’s my brother.”
“I thought your brother’s name was Andy,” I blurted out.
She stood up, pushing the rocking chair back. It hit a shelf and some nourishment bottles crashed to the floor.
“How do you know that? Are you some kind of a spy? I should have known better than to talk to you. I should have listened to Randall.”
I took a step back from her, and held one hand up in front of me. “I’m not a spy. I promise. I heard your mother say that. I heard your mother tell someone . . .” I paused, took a breath, and went on. “I heard her say her children were named Elizabeth and Andy.”
“When? When did you hear my mother talk?” She was leaning forward, her face red with anger, her neck muscles tight like thick ropes.
I took another step back. “It was just a coincidence,” I said, and told her what I remembered from that day. The nourishment cube, the Gatekeeper, the Enforcers. Her mother saying she needed the food for her children, her Lizzie and her Andy.
“Andy,” she said, relaxing a little, not leaning forward as much. “Randall was ten years older than me. Everyone called him Randy but I couldn’t pronounce it right. It always sounded like I was saying Andy. It turned into his nickname.” She stared at me for a minute, shaking her head. “You’re saying my mother was stealing? Stealing food for me and Randall?”
I nodded.
“Then what happened?”
“They took her away.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Dawn broke. I left Lizzie looking pale as a moth’s wing as I walked down the long dim corridor to Joan’s office. Her door was open and light from her window slit cast a narrow beam on the corridor floor. I could hear Lizzie saying a toneless good-bye to the day shift. Through the window slit I saw Randall by the gate, scuffing the dirt with the shoe of his crippled foot, sending up little puffs of dust. The day-shift Gatekeeper stood tall and smiling next to Randall, who looked sullen, like a cloud ready to rain down great drops of bad news. Above him, the flags hung limp. As I watched, Randall’s dark mood seemed to transfer onto the day-shift Gatekeeper—his head started to hang low and his shoulders slumped.
Joan was at her desk. She looked up at me and smiled. I couldn’t help but feel love for her. How much David looked like her, with the same full lips and smooth, dark eyebrows. She gazed past me into the hallway, and a spark of fear flashed in her eyes.
“I expected you to report in yesterday morning,” she said in a loud, firm voice. “You were instructed to do so, and you disobeyed that directive.” She put her finger to her lips, pointed toward her door.
I didn’t know what to say. I glanced in the direction she was pointing and there, in that narrow beam of light, I saw the shadow of a person standing outside the door, blocking the light of the main entrance. The shadow didn’t move. Lurking.
“Well, answer me,” Joan said, glancing toward the shadow, then looked at me with a stern expression. “You disobeyed. That’s against the rules.”
I flailed around in my mind, searching for the right answer. Should I be giving an answer to Joan or to the shadow? I said the only thing I could think of.<
br />
“I don’t know what to say.” The words came out in a jumble, hardly a space between any of them.
“Speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Joan shifted in her chair and turned slightly toward the doorway.
“Well, let me ask you this. Maybe you can handle a simple yes-or-no question.”
The shadow didn’t move at all. I could make out the shape of a headscarf at its top.
“Did you follow Lizzie’s instructions? Did she teach you?”
The shadow seemed to lean forward a bit, as if to hear my answer. Joan nodded her head up and down, giving me a silent instruction.
“Oh, yes. She taught me so much both nights.” I paused and could hear the footsteps of children far away at the other end of the corridor. Maybe they were going for breakfast cubes. Or maybe to class to learn to recite Praise Be’s. “She’s a very good teacher. She knows so much about how to care for the children.”
The shadow seemed to straighten up and puff out wider.
“I know how good Lizzie is,” Joan said, but she had a tightness around her mouth, the opposite of a smile. “That’s why I assigned you to work with her. It’s important that you learn as much as you can from her.”
The shadow got shorter and slipped away. And then, a few seconds later, through Joan’s window slit, I saw Lizzie and Randall walking along the fence toward their barracks. They looked like they were having the same serious conversation they had been having at the beginning of our shift. Randall walked as though his foot hurt, lifting it and putting it back down slowly, gingerly. Joan saw me looking through the slit and turned toward it.
“Quite a pair, aren’t they?” She looked at me, eyebrows raised.
I nodded. I didn’t know if there might be other shadows lurking about. Lizzie had said trust was important. And she was right, at least on that point.
“Lizzie only knows what she learned at the Village. That’s it. Randall had a fairly normal childhood but then was ripped away from his family and had to grow up in the barracks. He has no understanding of the history of the Republic, no understanding at all. And he trusts no one.” She stood up and went to the window slit, watching Lizzie and Randall disappear around the corner of the fence. “And he’s different. He has that limp. In the Republic, it’s not good to be different.”
She came back to her desk. “Why didn’t you stop in yesterday morning, Emmeline?” she said. “I was worried.”
I didn’t want to tell her the real reason so I changed the subject. “Lizzie told me about . . .” I twisted my hands in my lap. “She told me about people being shot. Back then. My aunt. My grandmother. That was the first time”—I felt my throat tighten, my voice tremble—“the very first time anyone told me.”
She started to say she was sorry, but I couldn’t hear her anymore. There was a roaring in my head, like bees swarming, drowning out her words. In a heartbeat, in the space of a breath, I had erupted into hot rage. Out-of-control rage. I thought I could hear the gunshots, the people screaming, dying. I thought I could see people herded into trains.
“What did you do, Joan? What did John do? You let it happen. If there had been more who protested, more who tried . . .” My voice rose, then I couldn’t go on. My throat was as tight as if a headscarf had been tied around it. No air could get in; no air could get out.
Joan came around her desk toward me. I held out my hands in a feeble attempt to keep her away. If she touched me, I would fracture into a million little pebbles. But she kept coming, and soon I was sobbing in her arms and she was patting my back with one hand and smoothing my hair away from my forehead with the other. My headscarf had slipped down and was hanging around my throat.
Joan adjusted it, pulling it into position and retying it. Her hands were cool and smooth on my skin.
“I’m sorry, Emmeline,” she whispered into my ear. I felt a cool wetness on my cheek. Tears. Joan was crying, too, and her tears were mixed with mine.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “We were wrong.”
I pulled away from her and looked at her face. Strands of her hair had slipped out of her headscarf and were curled wetly against her cheeks. How gray her hair was. Her eyelids were heavy and swollen. For the first time I saw her as more than just kind. She was defeated, too.
“We were wrong. We didn’t see what the others saw. We trusted too much.”
There was that word again.
Trust.
“Who did you trust? What did you trust?”
She went back to her desk and sat with her head in her hands, her long fingers that were so much like David’s making tight little circles around her temples. It was quiet in the corridor. The children must all be in their assigned spaces. I wondered about the little boy, the one who wanted to use the washing-up area in the middle of the night. How was he now? How awful it must have been for him, awake in the dark, needing something personal, private, that was not allowed by the rules. And the sad tone of his voice when he said he wanted me to come back tonight.
Finally, Joan looked at me and started to talk.
“We trusted—John and me, and a lot of others—the way things were. We couldn’t imagine anyone being able to change that.”
“And what does that mean? The way things were?”
“Our life. Our family. Working. We had our farm. If we worked hard, we would succeed. Same as your parents. A work ethic. Individuals could work and be rewarded for their effort. Not just farmers. Teachers. Factory workers. Anybody. Some were more successful than others, of course.”
She tapped her fingertips on her desktop.
“We didn’t mind the work. Really. Maybe others did, I guess. When the Authority came in to power they said we didn’t have to work so hard. Said everyone could share everything. We would all be equal. They called it the Fare Well plan. They spoke so eloquently. And they made the changes so quickly! Seemed like almost overnight.”
She fiddled with a clipboard on her desk, looked at some of the numbers written down. “The babies aren’t thriving,” she said. “My job is to find out why—or, to find some reason other than the obvious.” Her shoulders were pulled up tense and tight, almost touching her ears under her headscarf.
She was changing the subject, but I needed to know more, to understand. And I couldn’t stay too long here in her office. Others would notice. I had to get her back on the before-time, how it had all happened.
“And this work ethic. How did it change? Under the Authority, I mean.”
“Think about it,” she said. “Your energy board, for example. Say you are young, full of energy, strong. You want to walk your board past the peg. Gain credits. Maybe get an extra cube. What happens? What happens when you walk your board?”
I had never thought about it like that. When my energy board meter pegged, that was it. I didn’t have to give any more. I would get my cube once it pegged. When it pegged, I stopped.
As though she could read my mind, she said, “When it pegs, you stop. Right?”
I nodded.
“So nobody can be better than anyone else. No one can be stronger or smarter. No one can be outstanding. All Citizens are equal. All get the same rewards. There are three ways a Citizen can be different,” she said, leaning forward and staring at me so hard I felt hypnotized. “One way a Citizen can be different is by not meeting the Standards set by the Authority. Another way they can be different is by needing more than other Citizens. Giving less or needing more. Both of those ways are punishable.”
“And the third?”
She glanced through the doorway to the corridor before she spoke.
“The third way is for one Citizen to report another to the Authority. Report them for acting or talking against the Authority. The reporting Citizen is rewarded.”
“And the other Citizen? The one who is reported?”
“No one ever sees them again.” She said this in a flat voice, as though the words were heavy and hard
coming out of her mouth.
She picked up the clipboard again. “The babies aren’t thriving,” she said. “They’re not gaining weight. I’m frightened about this. I was assigned here to fix this problem.”
“They’re not being loved,” I said.
“What?”
“They’re not being loved.”
I leaned forward, waiting for her to respond.
She raised her eyebrows, adjusted her headscarf. “Some things I can’t mandate. Like love.”
Maybe not, I thought. Not when you look and sound so hopeless. “You can mandate rules. Make the workers follow the rules. You’re in charge.”
“I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried.” She shifted in her chair. “Truth is, Emmeline, there are more of them than there are of me. The workers are organized against me.”
“What happens next? If you can’t fix this? If the babies don’t thrive?”
“I’m afraid, Emmeline, the Authority will close this Children’s Village and relocate it to another Planned Community.”
Relocate Elsa? I could feel the little hairs on my arms stand up and something like a round stone rolling and shivering down my spine.
“They would do that?”
“My dear Emmeline,” she said with a shallow sigh, her face in her hands, “you know so little. So very little. And we are running out of time.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The day-shift Gatekeeper didn’t help me with my energy bicycle as he had the day before. Something had changed.
“Long meeting?” he asked. “Not much fun, those meetings.”
I shrugged. “Just some extra training.”
I fumbled with the rusty chain locks on the bicycle bar; he didn’t offer to help. His eyes never met mine, but twitched back and forth as though looking for someone or something.
“Did you miss your egg last night?”