I follow her pointed gaze to see that a puddle of liquid fertilizer has formed around my left sneaker.
“Go on,” Poppy says. “I’ll take care of the report.” Before I can argue, she kneels next to the screen built into the side of the automatic delivery cart and pulls up the inventory chart for the current shipment. She taps on the fertilizer count and reports one damaged jug. Then she slides her wrist beneath the scanner built into the side of the cart and says, “Lakeview central warehouse.”
The screen confirms the destination and shows the route it will take; then the cart rolls forward, carrying its damaged goods out of the delivery bay and onto the narrow road that runs behind the row of academies, following the cruise strip.
“Dahlia,” Poppy says as she stands, staring at my messy shoe. “Go change.”
With a distracted nod, I turn and report the incident to Sorrel 32, who releases me to return to the dormitory and change my shoe. “You may select a classmate to accompany you,” she says.
“That’s okay. I’ll be fine on my own.” And anyone I took with me would notice just how distracted I have become.
Sorrel 32 gives me a strange look, and as I head across the common lawn I wonder if I’ve given the wrong answer. Should a future instructor still be reluctant to leave the company of her identicals? Is learning to work independently from her sisters the most difficult part of instructor training?
Is this supposed to be harder for me than it is?
Alone in my dorm room, I take off my shoes and drop them into the exchange chute, which is used for supplies we don’t need replaced every day, like shoes, jackets, and toothbrushes. Only one of my shoes is dirty, but much like me and my identicals, one shoe doesn’t travel alone.
Usually.
A second later, a red light flashes to the right of the chute. I pull open the drawer recessed into the wall to find a fresh pair of sneakers waiting for me.
The fertilizer has also dripped onto my top, so I pull it off and drop it into the laundry chute; then I open the dresser drawer labeled with my name and pull out one of my spare shirts. It feels oddly lumpy.
I sit on the bed to unfold my shirt, but I stop, startled, when I see what has been hidden between the layers of cotton.
It’s a carrot. But it isn’t any of the varieties we grow in the hydroponic lab. This carrot is paler, thinner, and knobbier than any I’ve ever produced. The stem and blooms have been removed, but the brown smudges in the gray cotton are unmistakable.
This is a wild carrot. Dirt still clings to it.
My pulse jumps, but my excitement is quickly eclipsed by a bolt of fear. I glance up at the camera in the corner of the room and fold the shirt back over the carrot, hoping my arm has blocked it from view. And that no one is currently monitoring the feed from my room.
In the bathroom—the only place where there are no cameras—I unfold my shirt over the sink. Tiny clods of dirt fall into the basin, and I stare at them, fascinated. This dirt is much paler and slightly redder than the soil the landscape gardeners use, because this soil isn’t fertilized and tilled, nor does it come delivered in bags from the central warehouse.
This dirt is earth. It is wild, free, and fragrant. It reminds me of the time I had to miss a soccer game because of a sprained ankle when I was Dahlia 10. I sat on the sidelines and picked through the grass beneath me, looking for earthworms. My fingernails were caked with the earth, and they smelled like grass, life, and all things green.
That’s what this carrot smells like.
Trigger 17.
Only a cadet would have access to vegetables grown in the wild. No one else would have any reason to give one to me. No one else would know how to avoid the cameras well enough to sneak onto my floor of the dormitory, then plant a carrot in my drawer.
My thoughts racing, I turn on the faucet and rinse the carrot. It’s long and thin, with a cordlike fibrous length trailing from the tip. I dry the vegetable on a hand towel and lift it for a taste. My mouth waters. But I can’t bite into it.
If I eat the carrot, it will be gone; but I want to keep it. I need to keep this secret, for proof that I’m not dreaming the whole thing. I want to be able to touch this wild vegetable when no one is looking and know that Trigger risked everything to give it to me.
This contraband carrot is evidence that he’s still thinking about me, just like I’m still thinking about him.
I kneel to pick up the shirt where it has fallen on the floor, and sticking out from the material I notice the torn edge of a small piece of wrinkled paper. It looks like some kind of brown wrapping. The narrow, scrawling handwriting on it reads 18th-floor landing. 6:35 p.m.
My stomach flips. I’m not allowed to use the stairwell except in an emergency. I’m not allowed to talk to students from other bureaus unless we’re working on a joint project. And I’m certainly not allowed to lie to my instructors about where I’m going and what I’m doing.
The very idea of breaking all three of those rules to meet with a boy who should not fascinate me like he does is both terrifying and exhilarating. And completely unthinkable.
But six-thirty-five is in the middle of dinner. I could conceivably excuse myself to use the restroom, then sneak onto the landing. There are no cameras in the stairwell.
But if I get caught…
I don’t even want to imagine what will happen if Trigger 17 and I are discovered. If Management finds out about the deviant thoughts and feelings I now spend every waking moment trying to hide. If they find out about what can only be a massive flaw in my genome. Both of our genomes, evidently.
I can’t meet Trigger. I cannot put my sisters in danger of being recalled.
I shouldn’t keep the carrot. It’s a dangerous memento. Yet I can’t bring myself to part with it. If I eat it—the only safe way to dispose of it—I will lose the tangible certainty that this moment actually happened.
Instead I wrap the note around the carrot and fold them both back into my shirt. Then I rinse all the dirt from the sink and flush the toilet so that anyone listening from the camera feed will think I had a legitimate reason to be in the restroom.
In the bedroom, I tuck the shirt-wrapped carrot and note into the back of my drawer and take out a clean top. I hastily pull on both my shirt and shoes, then I head out across the lawn again on my way back to the Workforce Academy.
There is a carrot in my drawer.
It’s all I can think about.
Voices rise from all around me in the eighteenth-floor cafeteria, and no one seems to mind that the food line is moving extraordinarily slowly. The landscape gardening girls are dragging their feet on purpose. Or am I imagining that?
As I shuffle forward behind Poppy, Sorrel, and Violet, surrounded by our own identicals as well as students from the year-fifteen and year-seventeen classes, my gaze keeps wandering toward the glass wall at the end of the cafeteria. Through it I can see the offices where the eighteenth-floor conservator and her staff of supervisors work when they’re not inspecting dorm rooms, scheduling field days, inventorying supplies, sending sick residents to the Medical Center, and generally maintaining a clean and efficient dorm environment.
At the end of that same hall is the stairwell, two doors down from my room. If I were to excuse myself to go to the restroom, I’d only have to walk a few extra feet to go into the stairwell instead. There’s a good chance no one would notice.
But what if someone does?
Olive 16 pokes my shoulder, and I turn to see that the line has moved forward without me. Poppy holds her wrist beneath the scanner. There is a whisper of moving parts, then the steel door slides up, revealing her tray.
Her dinner is just like mine. It’s just like Olive’s, and Violet’s, and Sorrel’s. We are all the same, and since our physical exertion level is very similar to that of most of the other trade labor unions, our nutritional needs are all virtually identical.
Poppy moves down the line to accept her carton of skim milk and bottle of water while I s
lide my wrist beneath the scanner in front of the meal dispenser. My tray comes out just like hers did, and as I move forward in line I turn for another glimpse of the stairwell door.
Instead I see a year-seventeen cadet standing in the hallway with a red braid over his shoulder and a tablet under one arm. He’s obviously waiting to see my floor’s conservator, but he’s staring through the cafeteria window at me.
Our gazes lock, and though his expression doesn’t change—not even a flicker of a smile—his eyes seem to light up. He’s found me almost instantly, even though I am surrounded by my identicals and he’s too far away to read the names embroidered on our clothing.
How does he know that I’m me?
“Seriously, Dahlia, I’d like to eat sometime this century,” Olive says, and I tear my gaze away from Trigger’s as if he is a hot coal I’ve just touched with my bare hand.
I shuffle forward again and accept my bottle of water and carton of milk; then I’m through the line. I dare another glance at him as I make my way to the stainless steel table where my roommates are already seated, but he’s gone into the conservator’s office. Or maybe he’s already in the stairwell waiting for me.
The clock over the door reads 6:25.
I can’t meet Trigger. I’d be sealing the fate of five thousand girls—of Poppy and Sorrel and Violet—if I get caught. But I scarf down my dinner anyway, just in case I decide to go, because I’m expected to eat everything on my tray before I leave the cafeteria.
As I chew, I scan the cafeteria for Dahlia 17. She sits several tables away, facing me, and as I watch, she brushes a shoulder-length blond curl back from her freckled face.
Would her genome be so tempted to break the rules? So captivated by a boy with a pleasing aesthetic and a deep voice?
“Dahlia, you look like a horse at a trough.” Violet cuts into my thoughts and I look up to see all three of my roommates watching as I shovel one forkful after another into my mouth.
“Sorry,” I say around a mouthful of black beans. “I’m starving.”
I try to eat more slowly, pretending I’m paying attention as Sorrel complains about the quality of her vines and Iris leans in to give her some truly generic advice. But all I really see is the clock over the door. The digital numbers seem stuck at 6:31. Has time actually stopped?
Finally, the conservator’s office door opens and I freeze when Trigger 17 emerges. He glances into the cafeteria briefly, but I can’t tell whether he’s found me before he turns and marches with a cadet’s formal bearing and confidence toward the stairwell.
No one tries to stop him. Are cadets allowed to use the stairs rather than the elevators? Is that part of their physical conditioning?
My leg begins to bounce beneath the table as I watch him walk away. I can’t even taste my food anymore. I want to follow him. My body is in the cafeteria, but the rest of me is already in the stairwell, asking him about the carrot, and the wild, and whatever mission or war game took him out of the city. Asking him if he’s seen the great, winding channel of water that Riverbend was named for in the mountains that sandwich Valleybrook.
I want to hear his voice, but even more I want to watch his lips as they form the words, and I have no idea why. That seems like an odd thing to crave, yet I do.
Knowing that he’s just a hallway away, waiting for me, is more than I can stand. I don’t even realize I intend to leave the cafeteria until I’m already on my feet, my empty tray in hand.
“Dahlia?” Poppy stares up at me. “Where are you going?”
“Bathroom.” I step back from the stainless steel stool bolted to the floor. “My stomach feels…bad.”
“Maybe that’s because you inhaled your food,” Violet says, and I nod because that sounds more plausible than anything I’ve come up with.
On my way out of the cafeteria, I drop my empty tray into the recycling chute, then tell the supervisor on duty that I’m going to the restroom. She lets me pass, and I can’t believe how easy it is. The possibility that I might be sneaking out to break a rule doesn’t seem to occur to her, because we are not wired to break the rules. Because, to my knowledge, no one before me has ever tried anything this bold.
Is this what Trigger has figured out? That unless we wave our misbehavior in their faces like a flag, our supervisors and instructors will only see what they expect to see?
My heart pounds as I walk down the hall, and my steps match its rhythm until I’m just feet from my dorm room and only a few more feet from the stairwell. I look over my shoulder at the last minute to make sure I’m not being watched.
No one is looking at me. But I can’t help looking at them. Several hundred people are still seated in the cafeteria, and hundreds of them are wearing my face. Spread out over several dozen other floors are thousands more who look just like us. Right now, they are talking and eating, blissfully ignorant of the fact that I’m about to put all of their lives in danger so I can ask a boy I’m not supposed to have met about things I’m not supposed to know.
Suddenly I feel very selfish. I don’t have the right to take what I want at the expense of their lives. Just because my genome has flaws—these strange thoughts and urges are evidence of that—doesn’t mean that I have to act on them. Right?
Now what I see in the cafeteria is not hundreds of my identicals finishing up their lean chicken breasts, lightly buttered corn, and black beans but a room full of prone corpses staring up at the ceiling with empty eyes. Hundreds of dead bodies that all look just like I do.
My pulse races so fast the hallway begins to blur in front of me.
I glance at the door to the stairwell. I know Trigger is standing right behind it. My hand itches to grab the doorknob. But I slide my wrist beneath the scanner next to my dorm room door instead.
For the next ten minutes, I hold a folded shirt and feel the carrot hidden inside it while I fight the tears pooling in my eyes.
I don’t even know why I’m crying.
The next two weeks are hell.
I can’t stop myself from looking for Trigger every time I see a squad of marching cadets, even when they’re not from year seventeen, but now I’m not sure I actually want to find him. I’m worried about how he’ll look at me.
Does he understand why I didn’t meet him in the stairwell? Will he even want to talk to me anymore?
The answers don’t matter. We can’t meet again, and the very fact that I want to is evidence that something is wrong with me. I spend every moment of every day waiting for Management to call me in for a blood test so they can uncover whatever genetic flaw makes me prone to arrogance and personal pride. To curiosity about things a gardener doesn’t need to know.
My identicals seem to have no trouble keeping their thoughts on schoolwork, gardening, and winning the next field day tournament. Maybe that’s because they don’t know there is anything else to think about. If I were to tell them, would we all be so prideful and distracted? Is ignorance of our flaw the only thing keeping us all from being recalled?
If so, keeping my secret means protecting all 4,999 of my sisters.
But Poppy knows, and the only thing distracting her from her duties is concern for me.
When I’m the last one off the court after a game of indoor volleyball on a rainy afternoon, Poppy hangs back to walk with me. “Are you okay, Dahlia?” She’s asked that same question a dozen times in the past few days alone.
“Yes, of course.”
Her skeptical expression says she knows better, though. “Is this about the instructor position? Have you heard back yet?” My fixation on Trigger 17 makes no sense to her, so I’ve stopped talking to her about it. But she shares my anxiety over the thought we might be separated after graduation. “Did they select someone else?”
“I haven’t heard—”
Footsteps echo toward us from the front of the building, and the precise, even cadence captures my attention. I look up and stumble over my own feet. Trigger 17 marches past my entire class without even glancing at me
.
My insides are a tangle of disappointment and relief, yet I can’t help turning to see where he’s headed.
He gives our recreation instructor, Belay 35, a formal nod of greeting. “Your work honors us all.”
“Thank you for your service.” Belay 35 reciprocates the nod, and I drag my feet so I can hear. “What can I do for you, cadet?”
“Management would like to see one of your students. Dahlia 16.”
My legs stop working. My feet are frozen to the floor. I’ve had this dream a dozen times, but suddenly it feels like a nightmare. The last thing I want is more attention from Management.
“I didn’t get a ping,” Belay 35 says, and I hear his athletic jacket rustle as he pulls his tablet from an inner pocket.
“They’re having technical difficulties at the Management Bureau. That’s why I was dispatched to deliver the message.”
“What a quaint and inefficient method of communication.” Belay 35 clears his throat, then raises his voice. “Dahlia 16?”
I am equal parts relieved and terrified as I turn. “Yes, sir?”
“Please report to Management immediately. I’ll let Sorrel 32 know you will be delayed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Poppy stares at me, wide-eyed, when I fall in behind Trigger 17. She’s probably wondering the same thing I am: is this about the instructor’s position? Have they noticed how distracted I’ve become?
What kind of bitter irony is it that they would send Trigger 17 to fetch me when he is the very source of my distraction?
When we reach the common lawn, I follow him toward the gate leading out of the training ward while the rest of my class heads for our academy. As we walk, I stare at his back, noticing for the first time how much broader his shoulders are than mine. Broader even than the boys in the hydroponic gardening union. I’m so fascinated by this that I don’t even realize we’ve turned off of the main walkway until the shadow of the Specialist Academy falls over me.
Trigger 17 has led me to the side of the building, out of sight from the common lawn, the street, and most of the nearby buildings.