[Contributor 02] - Infiltrator (2013) (10 page)

The complex had made her uneasy. Evidence of human habitation stood not far off, rough lean-tos that provided only the scantest of protection from the elements. She’d had no idea if they were still in use. No one was around, and she didn’t see any trash, remnants of fires, or other signs that anyone had been there recently. Mal’s scouts conducted regular sweeps, ensuring that the cell’s territory was secure, but the knowledge didn’t comfort her much. She had lived in mortal terror of the wasteland her entire life, and a few excursions out to Free Thinker bases weren’t enough to undo the conditioning. Once she’d located the secure door she’d scrambled through it, skin crawling until the door was closed between her and the wasteland.

“This is a big place,” Dara said as she and Raj reached a set of steel double doors.

“It’s one of our training facilities. Before you ask, I don’t know how many there are in total. I doubt anyone does.”

“It’s hard to believe the Free Thinkers have so many hideouts.”

“Not really, when you think about it. For every building that conceals one of our hideouts, there are easily ten others that are vacant. Our scouts scour the area constantly, keeping an eye out for any new buildings that would be good hideouts, and our salvage teams stumble across the occasional gem while searching for scrap. We can spread out more by increasing the number of our hideouts. The idea is for there to be as few people as possible in any hideout at any given time.”

“What about living quarters for people like you? Those have to be more permanent than this.”

“They are, and they’re one of our weakest points. No one ever sees them unless they become a resident. Everyone is fanatical about concealing their locations. Families live there with small children, babies. I’m sure you can imagine what would happen if the location of one of the living quarters was compromised.”

“What about the things you leave behind? From what I can tell, you guys don’t usually keep much, but there’s always the risk of something being left behind.”

“Every hideout is rigged with explosives, even the living quarters. If necessary, detonation can be triggered remotely, any evidence in the building incinerated or buried under tons of rubble.” Raj’s face was grim, and Dara shivered.

“Has it ever come to that?”

“A few times.” His jaw grew taut and he didn’t elaborate any further. “Come on. The trainers are waiting for you.”

The trainers turned out to be a brother and sister team who looked to be in their mid thirties. Both were of average height but well muscled, both nondescript, the type of people who would have no trouble blending in with a crowd. They spent hours working with Dara, teaching her some basic self-defense moves, which they then practiced by taking turns sneaking up on her, sometimes both of them at the same time. By the time they were finished she was exhausted and bruised—both her body and her ego.

“You’ll do better next time,” Trey, the male trainer, assured her.

“I could hardly do worse,” Dara said, wincing as she rubbed her sore tailbone.

“The most important place to start is with the Great Famine and the events leading up to it,” Raj said. They had moved from the makeshift gymnasium to a small, square room with an assortment of salvaged desks and a viewscreen that had been obsolete for years but was apparently still functional, if a little worse for the wear. He had brought a couple of tablets and several memory sticks with him, and he arranged them on the desk he’d claimed as his own. Facing her, he leaned against the desk, arms crossed over his chest, legs crossed at the ankles.

Despite his casual pose, Dara found herself sitting erect, spine perfectly straight, hands folded neatly on the desktop, and realized how difficult it was to dispense with the rigid habits she’d been taught since she was old enough to walk. She had to remind herself that Raj wasn’t one of her Instructors, and that getting on his good side and performing well wouldn’t lead to a coveted position with Magnum.

“I already know about that. Five generations ago, the crops began to fail. Genetically engineered plants had produced the highest yields in human history, but they began to succumb to the harsh soil and the strangling vegetation and—” Her voice trailed off at the sight of Raj shaking his head. A blush crept over her cheeks as she realized she’d been speaking in the voice she had used whenever she’d recited something to one of her Instructors.

“That’s true, but it’s a partial truth. What we’re going to discuss is not the sanitized, Creator-approved version, but a more truthful version. Granted, separating fact from fiction is a challenge, but I have video clips to show you, fragments of private diaries kept by people prominently placed in the old organizational structures of the Creators, newsreels, and eyewitness accounts. What you’ll find in them is quite a bit different from what you’ve been taught.” His mouth compressed into a firm line, he pushed a button on the remote, and what Dara saw made her jaw drop.

The screen filled with images of widespread panic, people screaming, running, trampling one another. Angry voices blared through the speakers, and she flinched. People chanted slogans, and though they used unfamiliar words like “corporations”, she heard the names of several of the Creators and understood they were shouting anti-Magnum slogans, anti-Desai Nanotechnology slogans, and slurs against other Creators. The vile words shocked her. It was inconceivable that people would openly yell anything so harshly critical. Even a much milder version of what these people were shouting would have been grounds for banishment from the domes.

Coming to an abrupt stop on a clip of an emaciated young woman clutching a tiny, skeletal child, Raj began to speak, but it took Dara a moment to register what he was saying. She was too transfixed by the woman’s face, by the canyon-like hollows in her cheeks, by her huge, empty eyes. Never before had Dara seen such despair, such hopelessness. Something wasn’t right with the child, and bile rose in her throat when she finally realized that the girl was dead, her mother cradling her as if she could somehow protect a child who was beyond all protection.

“Dara?” Glancing at the screen, Raj swore under his breath and pressed another button on the remote. The picture disappeared, leaving the viewscreen a blank, black hole that threatened to swallow her. “It’s not easy to watch, I know.”

Pressing her fist to her lips, she bit down on it, trying to swallow back the bile, trying to hold back the tears. “They made it sound…” Her voice was a whisper, shaking violently. She racked her brain, desperate to make sense of what she had seen. Statistics floated through her head, information about the number of crops that had succumbed, ever falling figures indicating the rapid dwindling of the crop yields, but nothing about the number of people who had died. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t conjure up a number because she’d never been given one. A few lines from one of her texts came back to her, and she remembered reading it with such clarity that she could smell the scent of her old classroom.

Though many were lost, Magnum and the other Creators went to heroic lengths to rescue millions. The tireless Creators rushed construction of the domes, devoting their lives to saving humankind and ensuring the safety and security of the families they served
, the text had read.

“They made it sound like the Creators saved everyone,” she finished.

“The Creators did save many, there’s no denying that, but it was at the expense of billions of others.”

“Billions?” Her voice was sharpened by disbelief.

“Billions. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to shock you with this, but, well, there’s no real way to be gentle about it.”

“No one should be gentle about it.” Raj seemed taken aback by the anger in her voice. “The scale of the tragedy… How could they conceal this from us?”

The question was rhetorical, and he didn’t bother answering it. Closing her eyes, Dara fought the urge to weep. The image of the mother and child seemed burned into her retinas, and she wondered if she’d see it every time she closed her eyes.

When she’d managed to regain some control, they read the accounts he’d brought, and she began to develop a clearer picture of what had happened. The actions of the Creators hadn’t been intentional, but for decades they’d ignored the warning signs. It was apparent that the reasons for this were complicated, everything from greed to a fear of facing reality to the need to displace the blame, but it had ultimately led to the end of life as anyone knew it.

“This is just the beginning,” Raj said. As they read his face became increasingly drawn, his eyes so full of pain that she couldn’t bear to look at them. “This is only part of what the Creators don’t want you or anyone else to know.”

“I never doubted, I never questioned,” she murmured, shaking her head. It was hard to remember what it had been like, even though it had been such a short time ago.

“You weren’t meant to. No one was. At first it was a question of survival. There wasn’t time for dissent, and with everyone unused to living in close quarters, it was important to preserve harmony. Over time the culture evolved. The Creators became accustomed to how easy it was to keep things moving forward as long as people did as they were told without question. Life was simpler when loyalties were specific to Creators instead of nations. Before the domes, war was common, violence epidemic in some parts of the world, as you’ll see. Since the domes, life has been much more peaceful.”

“At what cost?”

“That’s the most important question for the Free Thinkers, the one we never want to lose sight of.”

Dara thought about that. Was it worth giving up everything she’d been forced to give up? She didn’t want to live in a world where people went to war over water, where mothers were forced to watch their children waste away slowly, painfully, as starvation claimed them. But if living in a world without those things meant giving up her freedom to ask questions, her loyalty to her family, her ability to do what she wanted, was it worth it? She thought about the Cores, stuck where they were with no hope of ever rising to a higher standard, the Roots trying to steal life from the merciless land, and she wondered who really benefited from the system as it now stood.

For the next several weeks Dara did her best to maintain her charade. She could see that her father was worried about her, but she couldn’t talk to him about everything she had learned from the Free Thinkers. Whether this was because it was too difficult for her to talk about it or because she was trying to protect her father from the truth, she couldn’t say.

She returned to the training facility twice more, but Raj told her it wasn’t safe for her to go to the same place every time, so they set up a rotation, meeting at other hideouts every other week. During the weeks when she wasn’t at the gym, he studied with her, delving more into the history of the world before the Great Famine. Sometimes Tasha joined them, and Letizia was there on occasion as well. Mal even dropped in once, and Dara was relieved to find he seemed to be softening to her—or at least he no longer bristled quite as much when he was in her presence. She’d had very little information to pass on to them, but her scrutiny of Andersen and her tipoff about his project seemed to have convinced Mal of her sincerity, and she was glad for one less bit of stress.

No further mention of the project was made. Andersen went about business as normal, but she suspected he’d had at least one other secret meeting with the Creators.

His new suit had tipped her off. She noticed it one day, even though it surprised her to realize she’d been watching him so closely she knew every last detail of his clothing. She had once thought of him as impeccable, but she’d noticed that each of his suits had a barely discernible flaw. A tiny chip marred the button of one. Another had a snag on the right pant cuff, where there wasn’t enough material for the cuff to be hemmed in order to conceal the flaw.

This suit was perfect, though. Clothing was issued at the beginning of each year, and all Contributors were expected to care for their clothing in the interim, mending any tears or damage. Cotton was too hard to grow in the domes, and it demanded too many resources. Most clothing was made of a blend of synthetic fibers, but even those were hard to come by and expensive to produce. Creators had a wide variety of clothing in various cuts, colors, and fabrics available to them, but the Contributors were given five suits, two sets of exercise clothing, and two sets of nightclothes each, along with undergarments, socks, and hose. The Cores were given a couple of sets of clothing to go with their two allotted jumpsuits. No one received anything new until the annual distribution.

Once she’d noticed the suit, she began to notice a few other subtle details as well, things like a small canister of sugar stowed in one of Andersen’s desk drawers, a spoonful stirred into his coffee when he was unaware she was watching. On another occasion he opened a drawer to give her something and she caught a glimpse of strawberries within. She swore his tablet was different, too, and it took her a few days to remember that his old one had a scuff mark on the back that seemed to have magically disappeared.

“He must be getting gifts from someone,” her father said when she told him what she’d noticed.

“The gifts had to have come from a Creator. He might have had the vouchers for sugar or strawberries, but a new tablet, a new suit?”

“Twice I’ve caught Jasmine combing through expense reports. Both times she told me she was working on something for the Head, but I think she’s lying.”

Dara frowned. “If she’s digging, she’d better be careful. Andersen will hear about it eventually.”

“I also overheard someone asking Javier how his sister was doing, and they mentioned surgery. He gave a noncommittal response, but he was visibly shaken.”

The next time Dara saw Raj, she asked him if he’d uncovered anything about Javier’s sister.

“Her records indicated she came in with complaints of headaches. Scans detected a mass, but further testing was necessary to determine the cause.”