Goodhouse (10 page)

“Not for this,” I said. “I need your help.”

He backed out of the room. “I'll find someone for you to talk to,” he said.

But no one ever came.

*   *   *

Later that night, I logged my time on the wallscreen and then opened my personal page, typing in my name and password. Each student had one of these pages. A photo of me, taken on my first day here, was in the top right corner. Beneath the photo was my location and my heartbeat, ticking along, broadcasting from my chip to the screen. Sometimes proctors stopped boys whose heartbeats were elevated, presuming they were up to something—and often they were. More than once I'd seen boys sitting with their personal pages open, breathing deeply, getting coached by a roommate or a friend on how to calm themselves. You were supposed to turn people in if you saw them doing this. They were planning on deception, which was wrong-thinking itself. Owen would have turned them in, but I never did. Seeing roommates together, planning something, reminded me of how lonely I was.

I clicked on my infraction page. I scrolled through the days until I hit Saturday. Immediately I saw my demerits from the bus accident, followed by the charge of theft, and then—a charge of predatory violence without provocation. Creighton was listed as the injured student. This was one of the worst violent infractions you could get. I clicked on the incident, but there were no further notes, only a Disciplinary Committee hearing, scheduled for Friday, June 7, ten days from now. I stared at the screen. In the space of a few hours I had dropped from a high Level 1 to a mid Level 2.

I went back to my page and clicked through the list of medical studies and Maintenance Intensives. These were the best way to work off demerits, but every study was full, with hopelessly long waitlists. I closed the page and looked down at my hands. I had red welts between my knuckles, broken blood vessels from the punches I'd thrown. At La Pine, where fighting was banned, we'd developed a way to fight that didn't leave a mark. It was the sort of thing that happens to an isolated group. It was like the palming here at Ione, just another adaptive language. At La Pine our fights were fought with our legs. We were like kangaroos, or cartoon kangaroos, anyway, and every part of the body that was covered by clothing was a target. We developed special kicks, and they circulated like a fad through the school, the smaller boys imitating the older ones. Some had talent for it, a natural way of hiding their intentions until their foot was planted in your diaphragm. Just the way some were good at math or reading, some boys could really kick.

But hitting with the hands felt more personal. It felt taboo and strangely animal, almost as if I'd been digging in the dirt. I'd had no choice, I told myself. But I'd done real damage to another person, and perhaps this wouldn't have bothered me if he had been a competitor or a Zero. But it sickened me to think of my hands tearing into Tuck. He'd been motionless when the lights came on. His face had been slack.

No, that wasn't right. I was forcing myself to hold on to the remorse, the revulsion. These were my true feelings, but they flared and dimmed in a strange way. It was as if this memory were a distortion—something I didn't quite believe in, more like a dream than a concrete event. Perhaps I'd reached the limit of my emotional capacity. The school taught us to look for this, for this moment of deadening. But my memories of the Exclusion Zone just felt wrong. They were all duty and detachment. They didn't agitate the busy, anxious part of myself, didn't mix with the me that I knew. The memory of that night felt impersonal. And yet, who else had been there? There was no one else but me.

 

SEVEN

I was discharged after breakfast and given orders to return for a cortisone shot the following morning, and every morning for the next week. I wanted to stop by the dormitory and talk to Owen, but my clearances instructed me to report immediately to the factory. I ran most of the way there. Everybody had an AJT, or an Allotted Journey Time, after which the computer automatically generated demerits for tardiness. The lower your status, the shorter your AJT, and I was so worried about it, so stressed by the invisible clock, that I arrived at the factory shaking and out of breath, my arm out of its sling.

The smell of baking bread was intense. Several large tractor-trailers were just pulling out from subterranean loading bays, their engines downshifting as the big trucks crept up a steep ramp, carrying our products off campus. The front of the factory was bare. Dust caked the brick surface; lightning bolts of rust threaded through the metal handrails and staircases. All the improvements that the school was doing for the celebration, all the new paint, the resurfacing of the sidewalks—none of that was necessary here.

I took my usual route to the mixing rooms, following the south staircase to the second floor. The first wallscreen I passed stopped me. “James Goodhouse,” it said, “please report to your supervisor's office.”

That wasn't good. I tried to log on to my personal page, but the screen locked as I typed in my password. “Please report to your supervisor's office,” it said. “Allotted Journey Time is still in effect.”

“Shit,” I said. I ran up the stairs to the offices on the third floor. Another wallscreen told me to wait, but there was no bench, no obvious place to sit, so I just stood there.

Even though the machinery was in a different part of the building, the drone of thousands of moving metal parts made the atmosphere buzz. A series of doors punctuated the wall to my right. All had a red light above them to indicate that I would not be admitted. To my left was a long bank of glass observation windows. They framed the shipping department one floor below. Men in orange jumpsuits and hairnets wheeled big stacks of trays into different areas. It was a shift of convicts, a common occurrence at the factory, where Mule Creek inmates often worked as a step toward their eventual rehabilitation. Now I looked at these men with renewed curiosity and a sense of unreality. A few nights ago, I'd had been among them.

At the end of the hallway, a line of exhibit cases displayed historic packaging for a variety of Goodhouse products. I walked over to examine them. I knew a little of the history. In the beginning, the Ione factory baked a lot of different breads, but only the cupcakes had sold. The public was uncomfortable buying staples from us, but they liked the idea of charity in the form of something harmless and sweet, almost like a Girl Scout cookie. Over time, the cupcakes became Swann Cakes—each wrapper emblazoned with a drawing of a happy swan carrying a picnic basket. The slogan read “Everything is better with chocolate.” The Goodhouse logo was shrunk and moved to the back.

“James?” a voice behind me said. A man in the green uniform of a Goodhouse alum walked out of an office. He had large, unnaturally bright teeth. His name was Tim. He scowled at me now. We'd met only a few times before, but I knew that the other students disliked him—almost, it seemed, as much as he disliked us. “I see you're on light duty,” he said. He stared pointedly at my arm, the one that was still out of its sling. I tucked it back in. “I'm sure you'll be recovering quickly,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You make any trouble here and I won't hesitate to confine you,” he said. “Got it?”

I nodded. The words
Predatory Violence
appeared at the top of my record now. Staff would be watching more closely.

Tim said he'd forgotten something in his office, and I turned toward the observation windows. An inmate stood in the middle of the room, staring up at me. His stillness caught my attention. Dozens of wheeled carts were on the move; boxes of bread were being prepped for shipment. But this man was like a ghost—arrested and staring. Just as I wondered if the glass was mirrored, if perhaps this was a coincidence, the man raised his arm to point at me. His mouth moved, but the words were lost.

“You ready?” Tim asked. I started at the sound of his voice. He marched me to the suiting-up room and then to the Quality Control area, a narrow, isolated space with two grain storage silos standing in the back. There was a small station where a boy perched on a metal stool in front of a conveyor belt. I'd heard that most of the production equipment had been scavenged from defunct bakeries, and here the machines had mottled exteriors, with numerous patches and replacement parts. A metal box with the words
HOT ICING
stenciled on the side looked like a long coffin on legs. The whole room was saturated with an earthy confectionery smell.

“You'll do the rest of your shift here,” Tim said. He was shouting to be heard over the machinery. “You see an ugly cupcake, you put it on the tray. And don't reach past this point.” He gestured to the place where the conveyor belt dove into the cooling tunnel, taking the cupcakes toward packaging. “In this section the machines are over a hundred and eighty years old,” he said. “They eat hands, arms, whatever you feed them.” He held up his own hand and showed me where he was missing the top of his right index finger. “You're replaceable,” he said. “They're not.” He asked me if I had any questions.

“Did that happen here?” I pointed to his finger.

“Not everything is better with chocolate,” he said. He patted the hulking side of a cooling tube. Then he turned and left.

I watched him go. There were rumors that Tim had given his finger to the Zeros, that they'd captured him and performed some ritual—condensing the demons inside him into a single digit, then removing and burning it. Tim was also famously surly. But I thought I'd be bitter, too, if I'd ended up working here after graduation, treated as less than a proctor, forced to wear a chip and eat with the students. I'd rather go to a recycling platform or one of the shale mines in the Aleutian Islands.

I sat on the stool and inspected cupcakes as they emerged from the hot-icer. I felt increasingly sleepy, and soon all the cupcakes blurred together. Occasionally, I saw one that looked lopsided and I put it on the tray. Chocolate frosting left damp curls on my fingers, and it took all my willpower to clean up with the towel, to refrain from sampling anything. There was a camera aimed at my station. It would flag any suspicious movements; it would notice if I brought a hand to my mouth.

Hours passed and I felt dull and empty. I kept thinking about Tuck, examining and reexamining the memory of beating him, probing it for some feeling, some remorse. I was waiting to recognize myself. The blast of a horn announced a problem down the line and the machinery quieted. The hot-icer hissed and fumed.

“Turn around slowly,” a voice said. In a second I was on my feet and pivoting toward the sound. Standing between two metal storage silos was a solitary figure in an orange jumpsuit. He stood with his feet slightly apart, as if he were ready to fight. The words
MULE CREEK CORRECTIONS
were written across his chest.

“Just stay where you are,” the man said. Underneath the white cloud of the hairnet, I saw thick, wavy black hair. There were little pockmarks on his cheeks, something that gave him a mottled, scarred appearance.

“Don't do anything stupid,” he said. “Don't try and call anyone.”

He studied the camera and I followed his gaze. He couldn't get close to me without being filmed.

“What do you want?” I asked. I slipped my arm out of the sling.

“You're the one who got Tuck,” he said. “Isn't that right?”

“How is he?” I asked.

But the man just nodded as if I'd confirmed something. “Showing your face today was incredibly stupid,” he said. “Tuck's people are looking for you.”

“Can you get him a message?” I asked.

“Are you listening to me?” the man said. “They're going to find you.”

“It was an accident,” I said. “It was dark.”

The man seemed like he was about to say something, but he hesitated, as if reconsidering. “My name is Montero,” he said, “and right now, I'm your only friend in Mule Creek. You want protection?”

I looked around. “Do I need it?”

“I'll keep his people off you, but it's got to be in exchange for something.”

I frowned. “If Tuck's people knew how to find me,” I said, “they'd have done it already.”

“They'll figure it out,” Montero said. “I did. And now they're motivated.” Sweat prickled in my hairline. My jumpsuit felt like a humid plastic bag. “They know where you work,” he added.

The hot-icing machine hissed, and the smell of molten sugar and chocolate was thick in the air. I didn't like this man's civilian confidence, the way he stood with his chin jutting forward. I stared at the little metal rungs welded onto the sides of the grain silos. The rungs formed a ladder. There was a catwalk overhead, running between them and extending out of sight. I realized that this was how he must have gotten in. “What do you want?” I asked.

“Here,” Montero said. He slid something across the floor. It collided with the toe of my shoe. It appeared to be a shallow white box, no more than an inch and a half in width and a quarter-inch in depth.

“What is it?” I said. “What's inside?”

“It's not a present,” Montero said. “It's a print reader.”

I recognized it now. Proctors opened doors with their fingerprints. In the newer buildings these devices were built into the handles and push plates, but in the older, retrofitted buildings, print readers like these were surface-mounted.

“Go on,” he said, “pick it up.”

I lifted my heel and stepped on the box, not hard enough to break it, but enough to threaten. “What is the Exclusion Zone?” I asked.

“Do not fuck with me,” Montero said.

“I'm not sure I need your protection,” I said. “But if you want me to listen”—I shifted my weight onto the box—“answer my question.”

He glanced at the door. The machinery made some sort of groaning noise, followed by a hydraulic sigh. “That device is worth more than you are,” Montero said. “You break it and I'll slit your throat.”