Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) (9 page)

Harmon doesn’t say anything else.  Just saying Ritter’s name is enough.  Ritter rubs the back of his head and explains the whole thing.

Getting the truth out of the way is good and bad. His mother, by turns, stares at me with open accusation and at Ritter with a level of despair that makes the airy wafer turns to gummy stone in my throat.

His mother starts to rise. “I think I’m going to go outside and send everyone home,” she says.

“Zula—” Harmon’s hand stays her.

“No, Mom, don’t,” Ritter says, rising quickly. His mouth opens and closes. I can’t see his face, but I imagine that something in it is saying, “I might be in big trouble, here.  I might not see you for a long time.”

I finally admit to myself that even though I don’t actually know what the consequence might be for Ritter violating the theft standard, it probably means some sort of jail time. The stony lump of wafer lands in my stomach like a bowling ball.

“When’s the Tribunal?” his father asks quietly, rising. The rest of us follow suit.

Ritter’s voice is hollow.  “In five days.”

“June ninth?”

Ritter nods.

“Ritter…” Harmon protests weakly.  He reaches over for Zula’s hand as she pales noticeably, but she curls into herself. Her eyes meet mine, no longer accusing. I want to turn and run as she reaches out and takes my hands in both of hers. The tears are there somewhere, but my eyes are dry. Maybe they’re stuck in my stomach under the wafer rock.

With a squeeze, Zula releases my hands and excuses herself, disappearing into some other room within the cool walls of the Bocek keeping.

“I’m sorry,” Ritter’s voice breaks a little. I can’t look at him. He clears his throat. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

I hug myself as Ritter falls wearily into his father’s embrace.  I look away. There’s too much there, and I’m jealous of the comfort they draw from one another.

I wander to the opposite end of the room and see that it flows into a servette. A bank of glass at the back reveals a high desert landscape of scrub pines, prairie grasses, and wildflowers. I study it undisturbed for a long time with only the quiet murmur of male voices behind me to suggest that Ritter and his father are talking at length.

Eventually, Zula comes into view. She must have escaped the keeping from some other meld. I watch her as she’s surrounded by a few other women. Clearly, they know her well and something in her demeanor concerns them. I can’t see the expression on their faces, but I know she’s telling them about Ritter. Hands lift to mouths, heads turn in the general direction of the keeping. The women filter away from Zula after hugs and shoulder touches.

I might have laughed watching the news spread throughout the party. The obviousness of it is almost comical. It’s like watching a movie montage of the school’s biggest gossip. It reminds me of
Grease
, actually, when word of Rizzo’s possible pregnancy spreads through the Drive-in but without the snarky glee.

And then I’m caught spying. Zula, wandering through the yard with her arms hugging her chest, sees me peering through the window. Her face is still drawn in sorrow, but her mouth lifts up weakly and she gestures to me and then to a door. Meld.

Stepping out, she walks me through the yard. I am introduced to cousins and their children. I already know the adults have been briefed. I watched it happen, after all. They are outwardly friendly, but there is tension in every face.  When we move off to another introduction, they turn back into their clusters and groups, some of them putting their heads together and whispering.  I sit down on flagstone steps and hug my knees and think about logging Melayne to see if she’s free.  Hers would be a friendly voice in this thinly veiled, hostile territory. I am just the girl who’s possibly ruined Ritter’s life, made him a criminal.

A child comes barreling around the corner, followed by a disembodied voice calling, “Meek! Meek, stop!”

The little boy stops abruptly, dumbfounded to find a stranger in his presence. His face crumples as he points at me and wails,

“Ritter’s going to the disposal, and it’s all your fault!”

A blonde woman swoops in and scoops him up, looking stricken. “I’m sorry,” she blurts before scurrying away with him in her arms.

I flee back into the house just as Ritter is coming outside. Zula is right behind me, shaken. She holds a hand to her head and excuses herself again. Harmon chases after her.  Ritter and I are left alone. We don’t look at each other. I don’t apologize. He doesn’t, either. The track has worn thin for both of us.

“What’s the disposal?” I ask, looking up in time to see his eyes go dark and his jaw twitch. But he doesn’t answer. He just stares out at the back yard, at the kids playing. They aren’t like Attero’s windows, after all.  By sliding a finger along a gauge, he’s shielded the glass. He can see out, they can’t see in.  Anyone who might have noticed will think it is just to deflect the sun, which is moving into a harsh position as the day wears on. He’s drinking them in like a man lost in the desert drinks when he stumbles upon water.  He’s burning them into memory. Bile creeps into my throat.

“Ritter?” I ask again.  “What’s the disposal?”

A hand falls on my arm. Harmon. And Zula. Watching Ritter take it all in. I meet their eyes. Ambivalence is like a new eye color shared by his parents.

“This isn’t your fault,” Zula says, though my memory of her silent accusation, so much like Scuva’s, says otherwise. “Please do come back and see us, after…” her voice trails off, her voice wobbling dangerously.

“Yes,” Harmon’s voice booms too loudly, as if volume makes the words possible. “Promise me you’ll come to us after the Tribunal, Li—Davinney.”

A growing sense of dread and the leaden weight of the wafer in my gut keep me silent, but I bob my head.

Ritter breaks out of his trance. He hugs them both together and murmurs an apology for ruining the day. They both urge him not to leave, but he shakes his head.

“I can’t stay. It’s…” he sighs. “It’s too much. For everyone.”

They put on brave faces and promise to be there for the Tribunal. We’re all too shell-shocked to say proper goodbyes, but they walk us to the meld. As I go to step through, Harmon grabs my arm.

“Promise you’ll come back and see us,” he says again.

I don’t know why it’s so important to him, but I nod.  “I promise,” I reply.

Ritter and I catch the slide in silence. I try to ask him again, but he shakes his head.

“Not now,” he says tightly.

I pull out my logger. Strega’s message is still there. I know I only imagine it, but it seems to rest on the screen forlornly, like a child who has no one to play with. I put the logger back in my pocket and rest my aching head against the cool glass window, the underground tunnels rushing by in a blur on the other side. I haven’t eaten anything substantial in hours. The wafer isn’t stuck anymore.

I let the silence be as we switch from slide to slide, reversing our direction of travel. Another heavy trip, heavy meeting.  Sorrow laced with worry, shock, and disbelief.  It is the ever present undercurrent of all interactions, even the ones with people who didn’t recognize me.

Silence can only stretch so far before it breaks, and it breaks as we reach his keeping.

“Ritter?” I ask as he waves his arm in front of the meld reader.  “What’s the disposal?”

When he turns to me, his eyes are glassy. “It’s the end, Davinney,” he chokes as if he, too, has a stuck wafer.  “It’s the end of me.”

8

“WHAT DO YOU mean, the ‘end of you’?”  I ask, my heart hammering. My body must know.

Ritter’s keeping backs to a series of canals that channel water through the quadrant. It is clean, and many people dunk their feet in it or swim in it. Ritter says it gets cleaned again before it is delivered into keepings or function halls. We sit in deck chairs.  He stares out at the water for a long time before answering.

“Open worlds have no prisons the way some closed worlds do. Like Attero does. We have Impietatis. It means ‘wickedness’ in Latin, but everyone just calls it the Disposal. It’s where the Tribunal sends most violators. A one-way launch to the Disposal.”

“So,” I say slowly, “the whole world is like a prison?”

“Worse,” he lifts a hand through his hair. “There are no laws on the Disposal. Killers can kill, rapists can rape. It’s chaos. Pure survival. Kill or be killed, or worse, day in and day out.”

A shudder passes through me.

“And this is where they’ll send you for saving my life?”

He lifts his head to meet my eyes. “They might.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” I mumble, shaking my head.

He brushes past me, striding purposefully toward the cleanse.  Realizing what he intends, I lunge into it first and block the MedQuick. I have more questions. Questions he’d rather sleep through than answer.

“Isn’t there anything you can do? Anything I can do?”  I ask.

He opens his mouth and closes it again, looking longingly over my shoulder at the breath tube that waits. “No,” he says flatly, shoving me aside none too gently, his breath whooshing forcefully into the tube as if doing so will grant him enough sleepbringer to render the Disposal a moot point.  Wisely, it dispenses only the usual lone tube, which he wastes no time emptying.

There will be no more answers tonight. He halfway sleepwalks to his unit, to his rift.  I’m grateful for the mercy of the medicine I normally want to fight. Tonight, I push aside my objections to self-medicating away every feeling, every emotion that makes us who we are. The ability to abandon them with a little shot of liquid makes sense right now, so I breathe and follow suit, grateful to feel the nearly instantaneous tug of sleep.

Ritter is quiet the next day.  He refuses to talk to me about the Disposal. Reminding him that the Tribunal is only four days away makes him angry, his lips disappearing in a line.  He’s terse with me.

“We’ll talk about this later,” he clips, disappearing into his office.  If the meld were more like a door, he would have slammed it.

I log Mina and tell her if she doesn’t mind, I could use a friend to talk to about the upcoming Tribunal. She replies with directions…the slides to take to get to her store in the quadrant that looks like Bricktown.

She is the sole proprietor and at this hour, when most people are functioning, she is alone.  I join her at a display table and help her prepare some new stock for the floor, explaining the events of the past few days.

She makes a face when I tell her about the searer and another when I tell her about Meek, the little boy who screamed at me about the Disposal before his mother could catch up to him.

“This is obviously scary for everyone,” Mina says. Today, her makeup is normal. The difference between Goth Mina and ordinary Mina is stunning.  Either way, she’s beautiful, but she looks like an entirely different person with her face dressed in ambers and pinks. “I can understand why Ritter is freaking out. The Disposal is a big deal.” She looks at me like she’s deciding whether or not to say something.

“What?” I ask finally, dropping the last blouse onto the pile of other blouses.

“Do you remember that I told you that some parts of Assimilation were hard for me?”

“Yes,” I reply, accepting another pile of blouses to tag.

She stops folding. “I was talking to a friend last night who assimilated a year before I did. She’s also from Attero. She said her Assimilation was nothing like what I described about mine.”

I look at her blankly.

“Ollie, my fiancé, he lost some function levels when he brought me back. Demoted,” she explains, though I had already guessed that. “But he told me that he wasn’t just slivving on Attero.  He was there to function.” Again, she gets that look like she’s trying to decide how much to say.  “He can’t tell me why. He could be disposed. But he said my Assimilation was a preparation for something the Tribunal thinks is coming, whatever that means.  And when I told him about you…” she bites her lip.

“What?” I press, wondering what she’s hiding.

“He said to make sure you do well, whatever it takes. There have been rumors about even more changes to Assimilation since I went through.”  Now she looks worried.  I say nothing, I just wait with a thumping heart and hands that shake as I tag the last few blouses. “He says he thinks the Tribunal is training an army. In the last class there were five people that just…disappeared.”

“Disposed?” I ask, meeting her eyes.

“No one knows.” She looks at me with such concern that my blood runs to ice.

Fear blooms in my chest.  I wonder if Ritter knows more about Assimilation than he lets on. Nothing he’s described to me sounds like this. He’s told me that assimilating persons have to learn the history and customs of Concordia and that there is a large component of physical fitness, as his world values achievement of an individual’s personal best in all aspects. But he said nothing about preparing for war.

I am not unaccustomed to physical challenge or to defending myself. My father made sure that his wife and daughter had the skills he felt women in the modern world would need: basic automotive and home maintenance, the ability to shoot a gun, and the ability to defend against an attacker.  I have used what he’s taught me against bullies at numerous schools, whether they were after me or someone else. But I haven’t done much with his lessons lately. Other than putting the spare tire on the Prius for a short drive to Discount Tire, the only other recent use of his teachings was that last day at home, when I retaliated against Jake Armadice after he groped me.

Jake Armadice offended me, and I’m not going to pull some sort of revisionist history crap and say I don’t feel he actually endangered me.  He did. Of course he did. He scared the hell out of me. But I have no idea how I might react in an even worse emergency.

“Mina,” I ask suddenly, “how does everyone know I’m from Attero?  How did you?”

“Attero was a lucky guess,” she says, glancing down at the pile of folded blouses as if they’ve magically appeared there.  “The only thing I really knew is that you were from a closed world. No Idix.” Mina smiles and calls out a greeting to two women who’ve just entered. “Slivvers from open worlds get a sort of temporary Idix before they launch. Sort of like a passport that they can’t lose.”

That confirms my suspicions. Despite his insistence to the contrary, Ritter had me hide my arm so that people wouldn’t know I was from a closed world. Whether I chose to come or not, being here and in Ritter’s company marked him as a violator or, at the very least, a conspirator.

Another few customers come in, so I try on some clothes and generally make myself scarce until the store clears out again. Mina finds me staring at myself in the mirror.

“Hey,” she says. There’s really no point in asking me what I’m thinking about. I shift my focus to her reflection in the mirror instead of my own.

“Is there anything else I should know about Assimilation?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I thought I might really be of help until Ollie mentioned how different it is now. But if there’s anything you want to ask me once you start, I’ll help you in any way I can.”

I nod.  She tries to change the subject by disappearing and returning with a few more things she thinks I should try.

“I don’t have any…money,” I say. Do they call it money here?  I never did circle back around to the topic. 

Suddenly my discarded pants begin to sound as the logger in the pocket activates. I fish it out. Ritter pops up on the screen, looking worried.

“Where are you?” he asks, clearly torn between irritation and relief.

“I’m at
Flash
talking to Mina,” I tell him, careful to aim the logger at my face so he can’t see that I have no pants on.

“When are you coming back?”

I bite my tongue before I ask why he suddenly cares. “I’ll leave to catch the slide in a few minutes. Why?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. I was just—you didn’t tell me where you were going.”

This time I can’t stop myself.  “You didn’t seem to care when you locked yourself in the office earlier,” I reply flatly.

Ritter looks properly apologetic. “I’m sorry. Please come back. I’ll do my best to answer your questions.”

“Okay,” I reply.  He’s going to be in for a lot of questions. He just doesn’t know it yet.

I’m in the first seat to the front on the final slide, the one that will stop less than a quarter mile from Ritter’s keeping, when it happens. Just as we’re cresting up through the tunnel into the sunlight, there’s a flash of something colorful. An impact.

The slides are amazing. They travel at unholy speeds right up until the stations, and then they brake hard. Sixty to zero in only a few seconds, you could say. Ritter’s tried to explain the technology of the air balancing system, the thing that keeps everyone on board from smashing against the front windshield or just plain falling down, but I still don’t get it.

What that fancy system means is that in spite of how quickly the slide can stop, we were still going more than fast enough to kill the young woman who stepped in front it.

Horrified chatter fills the slide car. No one moves as the front doors whisper open. We’re all too mesmerized by the broken windshield, the blur of color we see just beyond it.

A loud buzzing sounds. People thaw out and begin to exit the car, so I follow them. I tell myself to turn right as I exit, head toward Ritter’s. Don’t go left. Don’t go to the front of the car to look.

I never listen to myself in moments like these.

It isn’t that I want to see something fantastically gruesome, it’s that I can’t fathom that someone would step in the path of a moving train. Slide.

She’s staring lifelessly upward, arms and legs flopped in rag doll fashion, in directions human limbs aren’t ordinarily capable of. Sunlight catches the mirrored surface of her Idix and shines brightly. Blood surrounds her head and shoulders like a dirty halo. Some kind of food wrapper is clutched in her right hand, its contents, like the promise of her future, unfinished.

Before I know what I’m doing, I’m logging Strega.

“Hello,” he smiles, until he sees something in my face. “Davinney?” His voice becomes uncertain.

I can’t answer him or the flood that might be a scream or a sob or I don’t know what else that’s stuck in my throat will burst forth. Instead, I angle the logger screen to the woman first and then up at the slide car, which has numbers on a display screen that will tell Strega exactly where I am.

He arrives at the same time the guardians do, a bag of some sort over his shoulder. Two guardians, dressed all in black, usher him over to the woman and wait while he confirms the obvious, that she’s dead, and then they shoo him away.

Strega finds me sagged against the bricks of someone’s keeping, watching it all. I let him apply the silver disks. In fact, for once, I’m grateful for them. They shut down the million questions whirling in my head. Why? She was beautiful and young and had her whole life ahead of her. Why would she step in front of the slide like that?

There are no answers.

Strega takes my arm, leads me away, toward Ritter’s.

“There’s nothing we can do here,” he says solemnly. “The end processor is on his way.”

Ugh. End processor?  What a horrible term. “End” is the word they use for death here. So an end processor must be like a coroner or an undertaker. I’m not sure which.

As we reach Ritter’s keeping, Strega gives me a worried look.

“Are you going to be alright?” he asks, looking like he’s ready to reach for the disks again.

I nod. Speaking would be too much.

“I’m so sorry, but I have to get back to holding,” he says, frowning. Torn.

“Go,” I manage to croak. I can’t finish the thought, which is that at least there’s something he might be able to do for the ones in holding.

Strega makes no move to leave, though. Frowning, he glances at the meld. “Listen,” he says, still staring at the closed panel of glass. “Don’t tell Ritter about this.” He looks back at me now, troubled. I want to grab those calming little disks and turn them on him.

“Why not?”

It would be nice to talk about it with someone who’s not used to a certain level of detachment from death. 

Strega’s face smooths out, but his voice doesn’t. “Just please, Davinney, trust me on this. Promise me you won’t. Log Mina or Melayne if you need someone to talk about it with. Make sure Ritter can’t hear you. I don’t have time to explain now, but I will. Another time.”

“Okay,” I agree, though something inside me pushes back. I ignore it. I gave him my word, and here, the consequences for breaking it are much higher.