“They’re right, Dahlia.” His focus on my eyes intensifies, as if he’s looking for something. Or maybe he’s found something. “You are different from the others.”
Trigger stares at me in the dim stairwell, and I can almost see him weighing his options. I’m not leaving Poppy or any of the others here to die.
Finally he nods. “Okay. Let me see what I can find out.” He pulls a small tablet from the inside pocket of his uniform jacket and begins to tap and scroll. “You know this is crazy, right?”
I’m not sure I understand. According to my year-twelve social anthropology unit, crazy means mentally disordered. The inability to draw or keep one’s thoughts in logical order.
Is that one of my defects?
I glance up at Trigger, and with one look at my face he gives me a small smile. “It’s an expression. Do they not say that in Workforce?”
I shake my head.
“It means that only someone with an inability to see the logical flaws in our plan would go through with it. But you’re not literally insane.” Trigger turns back to his tablet. “I can get into your instructor’s feed again, but since Sorrel 32 isn’t Management, she might not have access to the information we’re looking for, and we don’t have time for me to hack anyone else’s account.”
I’m not sure I understand that either, but I nod anyway.
“Okay,” he says a few taps later. “It looks like a bulletin went out to all the year-sixteen trade labor division instructors a couple of hours ago. They were asked to bring all their classes to the Defense Bureau in staggered time slots. That’s probably where the blood tests were performed. It’s probably also where the recall will take place. Rumor has it there’s an underground level only the top-ranking Defense officials have access to for that very purpose.”
I try to swallow my horror. “There’s a secret killing level in the Defense Bureau?”
“Its existence isn’t the secret. It’s the location most people don’t know.”
“Can you tell if they’re still there?”
“Not from Sorrel 32’s feed. Your instructors won’t have the security clearance to access the specifics on this. Mine won’t either. That’ll be limited to top-tier Defense and Management officials.”
“Okay. Can you get us into the building?”
Trigger shrugs as he slides his tablet back into an inner pocket. “Yes, until they discover what I’m doing and strip my access.”
Which won’t be long, if anyone has discovered him missing. “So we need to go now.”
“We need to have gone two hours ago.”
My shoes hardly hit the fourth-floor landing before we’re past it, only three flights from the ground now. I look up at the spiral of stairs above us and I can’t believe how far we’ve come already. Yet how far we still have to go.
“We can’t just march across the city,” Trigger says as I try to match each of his silent steps with one of my own. “We need a plan.”
“I have one.” I stop, panting, at the very bottom of the stairwell with nothing except a single steel door separating me from an entire city that wants me dead. “We’re going to march across the city. Or rather, you’re going to march me across the city. Your whole division’s supposed to be looking for me, right? Do you have one of those plastic restraints like they put on us in the equipment shed?”
“You want me to pretend to have caught you?” Trigger looks intrigued.
“That would let you walk us both right up to the building, wouldn’t it?”
“They’ll take custody of you the second they see you. They’ll do that before we get to the bureau, if anyone from Management or Defense sees us on the way.”
“So we avoid the common lawns and go behind the buildings instead. We can sneak most of the way and only walk boldly when there’s a chance we’ll be seen. Will that work?”
Trigger shrugs. “I doubt it. But your plan’s better than anything I’ve come up with. However, the hard part will be getting past the gate into the administration ward.”
“Oh.” Of course. “Um…”
“There’s a gate on the back side of the training ward that only has one guard. It’s mostly used for shipping. I think that’s our best bet.”
“Okay. So the plastic restraint?” I glance at his waist and notice for the first time that he’s not wearing an equipment belt like full-fledged soldiers do. “Please tell me those are standard-issue?”
“For a cadet? No. But I might know where we can get one.” Trigger eases open the interior stairwell door. Over his shoulder I see an empty first-floor hallway. He closes the door softly, then opens the exterior door on the right. Even before I see grass and sky, I hear footsteps and voices. Instinctively I back away, but Trigger doesn’t seem worried, and after a second I realize why. The voices and footsteps are heading away from us.
The last place anyone expects a girl on the run to go is back to her dormitory.
I can’t decide whether that makes me stupid or brilliant.
Trigger removes his backpack—it would be a dead giveaway in our new plan—and takes my hand again as we step out of the stairwell onto a sidewalk that hugs the side of the dormitory. It’s mostly used by the grounds crew and manual labor division, who push carts and wheelbarrows loaded with supplies from the delivery bay at the back of the…
The delivery bay.
“No!” I whisper, tugging Trigger to a stop. “We’ll be seen.”
“No, we won’t. Most shipments come in the morning.” He pulls on my hand again, and I follow him around the building, hugging the wall with the hope that the afternoon shadows will hide us. “This time of day, the bay should be deserted, except for…” Instead of finishing his sentence, he levels an openhanded, triumphant gesture at two vehicles sitting at the curb, straddling the cruise strip.
One car is blue with the Lakeview city seal painted on the side. It’s a patrol car.
The other is neither a patrol car nor a CitiCar, open to use by the general public. For adults, anyway. CitiCars are all bright yellow and numbered. This car is shiny and black, and its windows are so tinted I can’t see inside. It’s a personal vehicle, and those are only issued to very important people.
Bureau chiefs. Management officials. The Administrator.
It must belong to Ford 45.
Trigger lets go of my hand. “I’ll be right back,” he whispers, then jogs across the bay toward the patrol car, hunched over. He pulls open one of the front doors and reaches into the small compartment beneath the dashboard. A second later he is jogging toward me again with not just one but several white plastic restraint strips.
“You sure you want to do this?” he whispers, holding them up for my inspection.
“I’m sure I don’t have any other choice.” I turn and put my hands behind my back, and even though I’ve volunteered for this I am almost as scared as I was when the real soldiers restrained me in the equipment shed.
The plastic is cold against my wrists, and I can both hear and feel the zipping sensation when he pulls one end through the slot on the other. He leaves it loose enough to be comfortable. I flex my wrists and realize that if I have to, I can pull myself free.
“Just in case,” he explains.
“Does it look too loose?”
“If anyone gets close enough to notice, we’ll have bigger problems to worry about. You ready?”
I wouldn’t be ready even if I had a decade to prepare. Instead of answering, I turn and hold one bent elbow toward him.
Trigger wraps his hand around my arm and takes a deep breath. I wonder if he can possibly be as nervous about this as I am, but there’s no time to ask, because in the next moment we’re moving, not toward the common lawn but away from it. Toward the rear of the dormitory and the little-used walkway connecting it to the rear entrances of many other buildings in the training ward.
It’s a ten-minute walk from the dorm to the small gate he mentioned, but it feels like forever with my hands restrained at my
back. With the possibility of a very real arrest hanging over my head.
Every rustle of tree limbs in the fall breeze makes me flinch. Every bird chirp raises my pulse. And when I hear footsteps headed our way, my feet try to spread roots into the sidewalk beneath me.
Two instructors round the corner of the Specialist Academy, where doctors, dentists, and other highly trained and educated genomes are taught, and their conversation stops when they see us.
Trigger pulls me forward with more force than he would have used if he weren’t pretending to have apprehended me, and to my relief the instructors seem to believe our act.
“Did you see the bulletin?” one asks the other.
His friend nods. “The entire year-sixteen trade labor division. They must still be rounding them up.”
“Using cadets?”
“Yes. Didn’t you get that ping?”
We’re too far away by then to catch any more, but I’ve heard what I needed to. My plan is a good one, and Trigger is playing his part well. Yet every single step is loaded with the terrifying possibility that we will be caught.
We see several more small groups of people on the way. All of them are instructors or supervisors, and though they all stop to watch, none of them question us or seem to doubt that we’re anything other than what we appear to be. Possibly because we haven’t yet gone far enough to encounter anyone from Defense or Management.
When we reach the rear of the Arts Academy, Trigger pulls me to a stop in the shadow of the building. “There’s the gate.”
He points and I see that he’s right. The gate is open, and there’s only one guard.
But one is all it takes to sound an alarm.
I turn back to find Trigger studying the guard, a Defense graduate in his mid-twenties whose gaze constantly scans the training ward grounds.
“We just need a distraction….” Trigger eyes the trees near the gate, then a car approaching along the cruise strip. “Something big enough to get his attention but too small to require backup.”
A camera positioned over the gate catches my eye as it rotates, constantly surveying a new slice of the common lawn. Fifty feet away is another camera, around a slight bend and just out of sight of the guard.
“Remember when you said you could hack the cameras?” I whisper. “Can you give us another little malfunction?”
Trigger follows my line of sight and smiles. Then he pulls his tablet from his pocket and starts tapping. A minute later the red light on the far camera goes off.
A second after that, the guard pulls his tablet from his own pocket and frowns. He glances to his left but can’t see the camera around the curve.
“There he goes,” Trigger whispers when the guard reluctantly leaves his post to check out the malfunctioning camera. “It’ll come back on in three minutes. Let’s go.” When I hesitate, trying to calm the nerves fluttering in my stomach, Trigger leans closer to whisper, “Walk as if you belong and that’s what people will believe.”
I let him march me toward the gate as quietly and quickly as we dare without attracting even more attention. I can’t see anyone watching us, and with any luck, anyone who is will believe our charade.
It’s a short walk from the small gate to the back of the Specialist Bureau, and by the time we reach the far corner, clinging to the shadows cast by the building, we can see the Defense Bureau.
“Okay,” Trigger whispers. “We need to find a way inside without being seen.” He pulls out his tablet again. “If they’ve figured out I’m missing, then scanning my bar code at any door will raise an alarm. So we really need to…”
His voice fades into the background as a loud rumble comes from the opposite side of the Defense Bureau. “What’s that?” I whisper. Then I have to repeat my question a little louder so he can hear me.
“Sounds like…engines.” Trigger looks up from his tablet, frowning as the first vehicle rounds the far side of the Defense Bureau. It follows the cruise strip painted on the road like any normal car, but there is nothing else normal about this vehicle. It’s huge. At least fifty feet long. It looks kind of like a giant, completely enclosed delivery cart.
At the front is a passenger compartment holding a single man. A soldier.
Behind the first vehicle comes another. Then another. Then another.
“What are those?” I ask.
Trigger doesn’t answer until I elbow him and repeat the question. “Cargo trucks. They’re used to deliver goods we trade with other cities. But…”
“But supplies aren’t shipped from the Defense Bureau,” I murmur as I watch the procession of trucks. Something isn’t right. I can feel that from the goose bumps that have risen on my skin all the way to the strange ache in my bones. “They come from the central warehouse.”
“And soldiers don’t make deliveries,” he adds. “Goods are always delivered by high-ranking members of Management.”
The line of trucks stretches farther than we can see from where we’re hidden, and there seems to be no end in sight.
“Are soldiers deployed in trucks like that?” I ask, desperate for a logical explanation to calm the unease crawling over me.
“No. Troop transport trucks have removable canvas tops. And I’ve never seen more than a few of those dispatched at a time. They carry up to eighty bodies each, and this many could carry hundreds. Maybe thousands…”
We both seem to hear what he’s said at the same time.
Bodies. Thousands.
He meant living bodies, but…
“No.” I shake my head over and over. I can’t stop. Sorrel and Violet, and…Poppy.
All those nights we stayed up whispering. All those lunches spent criticizing the mushy veggies on our trays and imagining how we’d cook them. A thousand smiles and laughs, and at least a hundred field day victories, when I’d trade my icing for her cake.
She can’t be gone. I can’t even imagine the world without her.
“Hold on. Let me check.” Trigger taps on his tablet again while I watch the never-ending procession of cargo trucks with tears in my eyes. “Your instructor doesn’t have access to any useful information. I need someone else’s account….”
“How do they do it?”
“Hmm?” But he’s still tapping and scrolling. “I can’t access the camera feed. Someone has locked it down. Wait. I have one feed. It’s broadcasting from the loading bay behind the Defense Bureau. There’re still a dozen trucks back there.” He holds the tablet toward me, but I can’t look. I can’t turn away from the procession still rolling by. “They’re just waiting in line.”
“Trigger, how do they do it?” I demand softly. “The recall. Did they feel anything?”
“You don’t know that they’re in those trucks, Dahlia.” He’s tapping again.
“What else would Lakeview have to deliver by the thousands, from the Defense Bureau with its secret killing level, on the very day my genome is scheduled to be recalled?” Nothing else makes sense.
Not that the truth makes sense either. There was nothing wrong with them. They were no threat to the efficiency of the city or the citizens’ faith in Management’s ability to lead.
They didn’t need to die.
Trigger makes a strange noise deep in his throat, and I turn away from the parade of trucks to see him staring at his tablet. “A bulletin just went out to all your instructors. It’s done. There’s a crematorium a few miles outside of the—”
“No.” I heard him. I knew the truth even before I heard him. But I can’t…
I can’t…
I can’t…
Trigger pulls a small folding knife from his pocket, but I hardly feel it when he cuts the restraint from my wrists. The plastic falls to the ground, and dimly I realize that someone will find it eventually, and they might figure out that we were here. That we saw the caravan. That I was not in one of those trucks.
But they’ll never know the full story. Management won’t let that happen. They just killed almost five thousand pe
ople to prevent that very thing.
“Shh…,” Trigger whispers into my ear, his arms around my shoulders, his jaw scruff catching in my hair, and that’s when I realize I’m crying. I am bawling and gasping and choking on tears. My nose is running. The entire world looks like a watercolor painting viewed too closely through my tear-filled eyes.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The recall.
They told us that recalls were good. That they were necessary to preserve order. To keep the rest of us safe and productive.
But that’s not what this is. This is pointless death. This is thousands and thousands of lives stolen. Our violent, wasteful ancestors had a brutal, ugly name for this.
Murder.
Lakeview just murdered my best friend. All my friends. Nearly everyone I’ve ever known. Management thought that if they recalled an entire genome, there would be no one left to miss the missing. But I’m left. I miss them.
“Just hold it together long enough for me to find someplace safe,” Trigger whispers.
But there is no place safe. That’s the whole problem.
Trigger turns away from me, and I hear the scrape of metal against metal. His knife is out again. He’s forcing a lock. A second later he pulls open a heavy door and tugs me into a narrow space with a big echo. Another stairwell.
“Where are we?” I sob, wiping my eyes, but the effort is futile. The tears won’t stop.
“The Specialist Bureau. The workday is over. There won’t be anyone here but the night cleaning crew, and if we stay in the stairwell we won’t have to worry about cameras. But I need you to get it together. We can’t stay here long. The longer they go without catching you, the wider and more thorough the search will be.”
Get it together. That sounds like nonsense.
How am I supposed to get myself together when we just saw several dozen truckloads of bodies roll toward the city gate? When almost everyone I’ve ever known in my entire life is dead? Because of me.
There is no getting it together.
In the back of my mind, in spite of everything that had gone wrong, I believed there was a way to fix this. We could tell everyone that my identicals weren’t flawed. We could fight. We could escape into the wild together and Poppy, Trigger, and I could make some kind of “crazy,” primitive life on our own. Harvesting wild vegetables. Hunting wild…cows. Or whatever soldiers learn to hunt and cook.