Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (14 page)

“No problem, Tom,” Jeffrey said. “We were just admiring the herd here. Wonderful work you've been doing.” As he spoke, Jeffrey's hand closed forcefully over Natasha's arm and he began leading her past the group. “Anyway, we were about to head back to dinner.”

In the Garden, the white chairs had been dispersed around the circular tables, and the tables themselves glittered with silver utensils and white china; sparkling candles scattered across sky-blue tablecloths. The Alphas had left, though that was expected. Even the more socially inclined among them never remained outside the Department of Government for more than a few hours. In their absence, the formal feeling of the Ceremony had given way to the thrill of a festive reception. Groups sat talking around plates of roast lamb and glasses of wine, while others gathered around the musicians, dancing in slow circles or laughing conspiratorially at some private joke. Still others wandered in groups of two or three under the canopy of branches, admiring the recent bloom of the magnolias or orchids or stargazing lilies. Jeffrey led Natasha firmly through the Department doors and into the Dome.

Raj and his friends were still standing near the elephant with their signs, and an argument was brewing between Raj's group and a handful of Epsilons. No one noticed as Jeffrey tapped his finger at the Department of Research doors and hurried Natasha inside. The circular lobby was empty.

“Since when do you have access to Research?” Natasha asked.

“There are certain perks to being a Gamma.”

“Where are we going?”

He tapped his finger again, this time at the door labeled
OFFICE OF BIOPRODUCTION
.

“Somewhere private,” he said.

They passed through the doorway and it closed behind them. There were no overhead lights in this room; instead, row upon row of bluish, glowing vats lit their way, each vat containing a pale, growing organ. The sight did not help Natasha's already weak stomach, and she told Jeffrey as much. But not until they had come halfway down the aisle of replacement hearts, each one thumping mutedly in its liquid home, did Jeffrey stop and look at her.

“All right, this is it,” he said. “I want to know the truth. The whole truth. Your behavior has gone far beyond a normal response to a traumatic event. You need to tell me why you're acting like this.”

“I want to come on the mission,” she said, almost wildly. She was desperately thinking of some way she could warn the Tribe before the team got to them. Once she got Outside, she could break off from the others and run ahead, or else make so much noise that the Pines would hear them coming and flee. “Please, Jeffrey, get me on this team.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“You got me on the last one. And it wasn't my fault they took me. Why should I be punished for it? I should've been Arthur's first pick. I understand the Pines better than anyone.”

“There, like that.” Jeffrey's face was livid. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing,” Natasha said. Her mind was reeling; she was making things worse. “Just that I'm the only one who saw their cave and actually talked to them. You might not know they spoke English if it wasn't for me.”

“How many times do we have to tell you, it doesn't matter what they speak?”

Natasha shrugged with feigned nonchalance, but her heart was beating fast, twice as fast as the replacement hearts around them. A kind of violent awareness was coming into Jeffrey's eyes.

“Was there anything you left out of your report to Arthur?” He regarded her closely. “You've been a terrible liar ever since you were a kid. Remember how they'd catch you sneaking chocolate squares out of the Dining Hall?”

“I'd never lie about this,” Natasha shot back, furious.

“I hope not, considering that you're a member of
my
team in the Office of Mercy, who was given the extraordinarily misguided privilege of leaving this settlement.”

In a sudden, violent gesture, Jeffrey yanked the sleeve up his right arm. The bright burn raged over his flesh, pink even in the blue dim. For the first time in her life, it made Natasha flinch.

“There is no one in this settlement who understands the capabilities of the Tribes better than I do. I know their tricks. I feel the consequence of their trickery in a way that—Alpha willing—no other citizen ever will. Now I want you to look me in the eye and swear that you will never speak of leaving this settlement again.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

His eyes seemed filled with an answer he could not express. His hand remained on his sleeve and his whole being insisted on her response more vehemently than if he'd been shouting.

“I swear,” she gave in. “I swear not to go on a mission again.”

“Good. That's good.”

He rolled down his sleeve in a gesture that seemed almost embarrassed, and with a sudden calm that made Natasha regret her acquiescence almost immediately. He reached out to touch her shoulder, but withdrew just as soon. The blue light from the vats reflected off his glasses.

“Let me walk you back to the party,” he said, acting as if nothing unusual had happened between them.

“I'm not really in the mood to mingle.”

“To your sleeproom, then.”

“I think I can find it.”

“Okay,” he said, showing his empty hands in defeat. “I'll give you some space to calm down. See you at the afternoonshift tomorrow.”

Natasha remained rooted in place as Jeffrey's footsteps echoed down the long aisle and the door fell closed behind him. In the quiet, the low, deep thuds of the replacement hearts seemed louder, and the glow of the vats dreamlike and menacing. The array of floating organs cast strange, odd-shaped shadows on the ceiling, within the rippling patterns of light.

She knew what she had to do, though she could hardly think it. But she knew, as absolutely as if it were the single possibility, a future laid out before her like a walled Garden path. While she waited for the minutes to pass, for Jeffrey to be absorbed back into the crowds at the party, she took measured steps farther down the aisle, gliding one hand along the counter and absentmindedly reading a label here or there.

Most of the hearts in this row were full-grown and ready for transplant; and a plate at the base of each vat gave the name and generation of the intended host. She paused at one vat that held a bit of pulsing biomatter much smaller than the rest, about the size of a grape, floating above a mesh of thin, stringy veins.
KENNETH MARIO, GENERATION BETA,
the plate read. That made sense. Kenneth had just received a new heart early last month; the bioengineers must have only recently started his next one.

Several minutes had passed; it would be safe now. Natasha reached the far wall, turned the corner, and began walking back through the purplish kidneys. She shuddered, knowing that one of them belonged to her and that, elsewhere in the room, dispersed among the different rows, were the replacements for every vital system in her body, waiting to find their home in her flesh. But she shouldn't have to worry about transplants yet; she still had time. The rounds never began before the half-century mark. Unless, of course, Natasha thought cringingly, as she entered into the deserted lobby, unless a citizen was brash or crazy enough to risk the body premature damage.

10

T
he party had spilled out into the Dome, creating a scene of unusual havoc. The din of human voices echoed off the circular wall, mingling with the music and joyous singing emanating from the open Department of Agriculture doors. The flora and animal-themed dresses and wraps had begun to slip from women's shoulders; and most of the men had their jackets off, the top fastenings undone on their shirts. Near the Department of Research, a group of Epsilons and Deltas, the most gregarious from their respective generations, were laughing loudly and throwing extra rolls of streamers toward the hub, so that the colors unfurled gracefully in the air before the spools clunked to the floor. It took Natasha a moment to realize they were not just horsing around, but very deliberately antagonizing Raj and his group, who remained near the elephant doors with their signs, looking just as menacing as ever.

“Hey, Maria,” Mercedes called, breaking the protesters' silence, “throw another one of those and I'll stuff it down your throat. Give everyone's ears a break.”

Maria, known for her distinctly shrill voice, flushed pink from her neck to her forehead. But her outraged response was overpowered by one of her friends.

“That's some mouth you've got,” Jared Sullivan shouted to Mercedes, “for a traitor. No one wants you here. You're ungrateful for what the Alphas give you and you disrespect the suffering of the Crane Tribe.”

Mercedes rejoined with her own ideas about respect and suffering, but Raj, calm and aloof as ever, stopped her with a small gesture of his arm. The damage was already done, though. The wall of silence had disappeared and the two groups were shouting and taking steps toward each other. The crowd in the Dome was noticing, straining to see who had finally done the inevitable and told the protesters exactly what they all thought of them.

Natasha spotted Eric standing with a few other Epsilons, holding a bottle of wine by its neck and looking ready to launch himself into the center of the action. Natasha went to him quickly and grabbed his arm.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Hold on, I want to see how this turns out.” But one look at her face must have changed his mind. “What is it?” He allowed her to guide him toward the Dome wall, away from the others.

“Did you know that the Office of Mercy is sending a team out in the morning?” she said.

“Who told you that?”

For a moment she considered lying, and keeping her promise to Jeffrey, but given what she wanted from Eric, she figured she owed him the truth.

“Jeffrey told me,” she said. “Just now. He said they're planning a manual sweep.”

“They can't,” Eric said simply. “We don't even understand how the Pines have been hiding from us, or how they're destroying the sensors. And it was awful last time. It wasn't even close to ethical.”

“That's why we have to stop it.”

“How?” He was looking over her head, through the open doors to the Garden.

“We can't convince them. I tried already, with Jeffrey. They have Alpha approval and nothing we do will change their minds. You heard the Mother. No one is listening to us.” She took a breath. She had just caught sight of Jeffrey, well inside the Department of Agriculture, picking at the tables of food. “We have to warn the Tribe,” she said. “Suit up and find them, and tell them to leave the perimeter if they want to live.”

“You're promoting irrationalities,” Eric said. But Natasha could see that she had roused his interest. This is what she had counted on: Eric's history of breaking the rules. Back when they were kids, he had held the record for sneaking out of bed at night; and in school, he had always been the one goofing off during lessons, the one whom the teachers had to move to the front. Now he was thinking fast, running through the logistics as Natasha had done just minutes ago.

“The sensors are off on the green,” Natasha said, “for construction. That means no one will see us leave. As long as we keep near the riverbank, we won't set off any alarms. Once we hit the ridge, we're in the deadzone that the Pines created.”

“How do you expect to find them?”

“Jeffrey thinks they stayed near their old camp, hiding in the caves. I bet you he's right. Where else can they go? Anyway, if they're not there—”

“If they're not there, then they've already left the area and the team won't find them either.”

Eric set the wine bottle carefully against the wall. With the argument continuing near the hub, no one was paying any attention to them.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's do it.”

Until this moment, the idea of leaving the settlement had felt wild, locked within an aura of impossibility. But now, she and Eric were walking through the groups of people toward the Department of the Exterior doors. They were going to do it; they were going to walk right out of America-Five.

Just as they were entering the hall, a shout sounded from behind them and Natasha looked back. She could not see through the crowd to the center of the activity, but what she did see, Natasha found startling: Raj Radhakrishnan, standing slightly apart from the others, his placard dropped to his side, watching Natasha and Eric with steady and curious eyes.

But then he was gone. The doors closed, and Natasha hurried to catch up with Eric, who was already a little way down the hall. They were lucky; with only a scattering of people working tonight, the hall remained deserted as they slipped into the Office of Exit. A row of biosuits hung on a rack near the wall, ready for tomorrow's team. Wordlessly, they stripped down and each found the best fit—Natasha took Claudia's biosuit and Eric took the one made for Douglas.

“We're really going out there,” said Eric.

“Yeah, we are.”

“I don't think the Alphas even have a reeducation plan for something like this.”

“Hopefully,” said Natasha, “they won't need to write one.”

They put on their helmets and entered the airlock. Then, as they had done on their mission, they passed through the two white cube-shaped rooms and into the supplyhouse. Natasha kept thinking that someone would stop them, that, at any moment, the door behind them would open and a clamor of furious and incredulous citizens would arrive to drag them back Inside. But no one came. The supplyhouse was pitch black and silent until, with a click, Eric flipped the lever for light. The dust kicked up from under their feet and hung lazily in the glow.

“What should we take?” he asked, eyeing the guns.

Natasha had thought about this already. “Nothing,” she answered firmly. “They've seen what our weapons can do. If we walk into their camp with a couple of LUV-3s, there's no chance they'll stick around long enough to hear us out.”

The light from the Dome cast a warm glow across the green and the inner circle of trees. They found that their helmets had lights, and they switched them on. Even in the dark, they knew the way. They had practiced navigating this area hundreds of times in the Pretends. What a strange way for their vigilance to pay off, Natasha thought.
They
made it possible for us to do this;
they
taught us everything we know.

Neither Eric nor Natasha had brought a tracking device, which served a secondary purpose of showing the time, but they guessed they had reached the plateau in just under three hours. The beams of light from their helmets swept across the empty camp as they examined the scattered, ash remains of the old fire and the bits of sensor parts abandoned near the birch trees. All was still. An owl hooted from one of the branches behind them. The lights reached into the large, curving dark of the cave, hitting the far stone in two circles made jagged by the uneven surface.

“They're not here,” Eric said.

“They're probably still underground.” Natasha started for the cave's mouth. “One of those rocks has a tunnel behind it, that's how I escaped.”

Something moved, cutting the beam of light in half. Then a shout. People running from the trees.

Within seconds, Natasha and Eric were stumbling backward, standing on the charcoal remains of the fire, with five people coming at them, the shiny points of their spearheads thrust menacingly out.

Natasha saw Hesma and Mattias. The violent ones whom she had feared in the cave. Hesma wore the same red beads. Mattias's chest was bare and his skin was painted with thick white lines over each rib.

“Hesma,” Mattias said, “take away their weapons. London, go tell Axel.”

The smallest Tribesperson, a skinny boy years from being full-grown, sprinted into the cave, while Hesma, the only woman in this group, came forward and began pulling at Eric's airfilter.

“Hey, come on!” Eric protested. “We didn't bring any weapons. No guns.”

“We came to warn you,” Natasha said, as the woman's tugs now threatened to dislodge her own airfilter. “The people—the same people who swept, I mean, attacked you before—they're coming back.”

“Quiet!” Mattias said. While Natasha had been talking, she had turned to him, and the beam of light from her helmet glowed in his face. He put his hand up, squinting against it. Natasha turned off the light and told Eric to do the same, but he shook his head. Natasha could hear a quiet stream of curses from behind his visor.

The boy emerged from underground.

“Axel says to bring her down,” he said, pointing to Natasha. “But not the other one. He doesn't want him to see where we live.”

The boy beckoned to her, maybe even smiled a little. Resigned to do anything to make their warning known, Natasha started to follow—until Eric stopped her.

“You're not going down there,” he said.

“Yes, I am. I have to. Listen, I know that name. Axel. He's their chief. If we want to save these people, we need to tell him directly.”

“No way. They're going to kill you, and kill me too. This was stupid. Really, really stupid. No one knows we're here. No one's coming to help us.”

“We won't need help.”

Though even as she said it, she had doubts. Since the mission, Natasha had convinced herself that the Pines had never intended to harm her, not when they abducted her and not even when they had her bound in the cave. And yet, even if she was right about that, it was no guarantee that they wouldn't hurt her now. She remembered one of their units in school on primitive ethics: Revenge. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. The most rudimentary idea in all justice-based social systems. If the Pines trusted their human instincts, which they almost certainly did, then murdering Natasha would be a perfectly fair, if not lenient, response to the death of three of their own. She paused a moment, looking at the boy, who was scratching a red welt on his calf while he waited. Then she squeezed Eric's arm and spoke some hushed instructions about not scaring the Tribespeople and, before Eric could stop her, she walked between two spear-holding men and into the cave.

The boy—London, they had called him—led her through the same opening in the rock from which she had escaped weeks before. He carried a bit of fire (a candle, Natasha thought, remembering the name), though even with that light and the calm motions of the boy's bare shoulders to guide her movement, Natasha still had trouble on the tilting, bumpy ground. They took two turns where the tunnel split, both turns to the left, and then the path began to level and smooth. London put the candle forward to reveal a strange sight: the cave wall did not seem to be of rough, mountain stone, but of smooth concrete. In the concrete was a large square of glass, like the windowpanes in the settlement but smaller and, as Natasha saw in a moment, movable too. London raised the glass and pushed aside a hanging piece of blue-and-green checkered fabric. He stepped through the opening and Natasha, because she had come this far already, followed boldly behind.

She did not know how many she had expected, but it certainly was not the number that greeted her on the other side of the glass. They rose to their feet as she entered—forty or fifty of them in all. Their eyes fixed on her and did not look away. They wore dark, earth-soiled fabrics, and the space smelled foul. A bright energy showed in their movements, which gave Natasha a chill.

“You don't have to wear that, you know.” It was Axel. Natasha recognized his round, open face and dimpled cheeks. He indicated her helmet.

“We don't wear them,” a second man added, “and we're all perfectly healthy.”

As the man emerged from the shadows, Natasha was surprised to find herself face-to-face with the beautiful man she had spotted on the sensors. She stared at him a moment, transfixed by his perfect arrangement of features. In return, his expression showed a mixture of hopefulness and welcome that made her inexplicably glad.

Natasha had a feeling the Tribe's standards of health did not quite match the cell-by-cell perfectionism of the settlement doctors. But figuring that she had already breathed the Outside air once before, and had come out all right, she unclasped the helmet from the biosuit collar and lifted it over her head.

As she looked around, the Tribespeople showed no signs of aggression; in fact, they seemed positively happy to see her. She could observe the room better now too: a small fire crackled at its center, the smoke rising up through a hole in the ceiling and drifting through a rectangular opening in the far wall, too perfect to be natural, and with the unmistakable dimensions of a manmade door. The floor was littered with a patchwork of trampled furs, clay jugs, and baskets. It seemed that the Pines had set up a semipermanent home here, though why they would resort to such measures, why they would stay close to America-Five when they had the whole forest at their disposal, Natasha could not imagine. The cave itself was strange, the walls not rough but square and smooth, with sharp corners that formed near-perfect rectangles. But Natasha had no time to reflect on this strangeness because they were all staring at her, waiting for her to speak.