The Capture (16 page)

“And what is that?” His Honor asks.

“A map of our territory,” Goodman Nellitch responds, with a glint of satisfaction in his eye. “Property of the Republic, with this location circled in red.” He pauses dramatically before adding, “Found on the body of this very Less Than.”

His stubby finger points in Book's direction, the spectators erupt in a chorus of angry murmurs, and Hope and Book share an urgent look.
This isn't good. This is definitely, one hundred percent, not good.

W
HEN THE CROWD FINALLY
settled down, the Chief Justice turned back to me. “And how do you respond to these charges?”

“I've never seen that map in my life,” I answered.

“Even though the leader of the hunting party says he found it on you?”

“He didn't find it on me; that's a lie.”

More murmurs, topped only by Goodman Nellitch, who spoke with a condescending smirk. “Trust me, Your Honor. That's where the map came from. The leader of the party told me himself.”

“But that's not true!” My eyes searched the crowd for the man who'd captured us. I couldn't find him anywhere.

“So you deny any contact with the soldiers of the Republic?”

“I didn't say that. We've been surrounded by soldiers all our lives.”

“And where was that?”

“The girls are from Camp Freedom, and we're from Camp Liberty.”

The silence that descended on the chamber was immediate.

“Camp Liberty?” the Chief Justice asked. “You're from Camp Liberty?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, just us five.” I motioned to the four other guys.

“So they're Less Thans,” Goodman Nellitch chimed in. He said it the way one said
plague
or
evil.

“We are,” I said proudly. “And we have the markings to prove it.”

All of us pulled up our sleeves to reveal the tattoos on our forearms. Some members of the crowd actually gasped.

“And may I ask how you got here?” the Chief Justice inquired.

I gave him a shortened version of our escape and journey, making it clear we not only weren't spying for the Brown Shirts, we were fleeing from them. When I finished, he stared at us a long time before conferring with the other members of the Council.

I was in a state of shock. Where had that map come
from? And why had the hunting party leader said he'd found it on me?

The Chief Justice stepped forward, tugging at his sheepskin pelt.

“While we have no evidence to deny your statement of the nature of your origins,” he began, his voice echoing across the chamber, “neither do you have evidence to support it.”

“But our tattoos—”

“Could have come at your own hands. And the evidence we do have is a map, found on you, indicating you are in collaboration with . . . the
Republic
.”

That was all that was needed to incite another angry buzz.

Hope took a step forward. “That's not true,” she said, straining to be heard above the crowd. “There was no map.”

The Chief Justice glared down at her. “I will ask the defendants to refrain from speaking until judgment has been passed.”

“You're not listening!” she cried out. “They're our enemies. They're the ones we're running from.”

The crowd grew louder. The Chief Justice banged the rock. “Order!”

“They tortured us. And they're the ones killing us!”

Two guards rushed forward and grabbed Hope's arms. One of them stifled her mouth with his hand.

“Given the fragile nature of our post-Omega circumstances,” the Chief Justice said, “there is no greater
threat than spying. Therefore, the punishment we prescribe is . . . thirty years' hard labor.”

He banged the rock a final time, the crowd burst into applause, and the Council members rose and began shuffling out. I turned to the others. We were in a daze.

“Thirty years?” Flush was asking, his voice barely audible above the drone of the crowd. “Is that what he said? Thirty years?”

I nodded dumbly.

“But that means”—he did the math in his head—“I'll be nearly forty-five.”

We looked at each other. We were no spies. But how could we convince the Skull People of that? A glance at the prosecutor revealed his satisfied expression.

“You lied!” I yelled.

His leering smile split his face in two.

Even as the guards blindfolded us and led us back to our cells, I kept thinking over and over,
This isn't happening
.
This cannot be happening.

Stuck as we were at the end of a windowless cave, it was impossible to have any true notion of day or night. All I knew for sure was that I was sleeping soundly—dreaming of Hope and the touch of her outstretched fingers—when eight guards appeared.

“Rise and shine,” one of them called out. He had bright-red hair and a lean, pointy face. He ran his knife
across the rebar to make a loud, clattering sound.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and realized this was Day One of Thirty Years. Only 10,949 days to go.

“Where's your friend?” I asked one of the guards as we shuffled through the cell doors. “The one who captured us.” I wanted to know why he'd lied to Goodman Nellitch.

“Not here. I get the honor today.” He said it like it was anything but.

We were led to a small chamber, where we were given new clothes. Faded gray pants, T-shirts, long-sleeved shirts over those. Not all that different from what we'd had before except actually clean, like they'd been washed a million times.

Once more we were blindfolded and led down a series of tunnels. This time, I could hear us being split up, each prisoner forking off into a different passageway. Soon, it was just me and the red-haired guard.

Farther and farther we descended into the bowels of the cave, the explosions getting louder with each step. The guard abruptly yanked me to a stop, then ripped off my bandanna. We stood on the edge of a precipice, looking down into an enormous cavern. Branching off from it, like spokes from a wheel, were at least twenty tunnels. Hundreds of workers scurried in and out like ants.

The guard turned to me. “Hope you're not afraid of hard work.” He snickered and led me down the rest of the way.

My boss was a big, burly man with a thick, bushy beard. His cheek bulged with a plug of tobacco.

“So you're the spy, huh?” he said matter-of-factly.

“I'm
not
a spy,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed, then turned to the side and spat. “Makes no difference to me. Labor is labor.” He and the guard met eyes. “I got him from here.”

The guard gave me a threatening look. “I'll be back for you at the end of the day,” he said, then retreated back up the slope.

“Welcome to the Wheel, boy,” my boss said, then turned to get a better look at me. “What happened to your leg?”

“Born this way. Radiation.”

“Those damn politicians. Had no right firing off nuclear weapons. Had no right building them in the first place.”

His candor surprised me. I'd heard only one other person speak so openly about Omega or against the government, and that was Frank.

“What's your name?” I dared to ask.

“Why do you want to know?”

“If you're my boss, I should know what to call you.”

He thought a moment, then answered gruffly, “Goodman Dougherty.”

“So your name is Goodman, too? Just like Goodman Nellitch?”

“All the men here are Goodman, and all the women
are Goodwoman. It's our way of creating equality.”

“But there was a judge. . . .”

“Sure. That's his task. Chief Justice. Just as I have a task and the woman who keeps the torches going has a task and the men who plow the fields have a task. We all have our jobs; no one is greater than anyone else.”

A very different structure from what we'd experienced back at Camp Liberty, where we were just Less Thans. Where we had no more identity than a number . . . and even less value.

“Enough talk. It's time we got you to work.” He hawked up what sounded like a hairball and told me the basics: the Skull People were expanding the Compound, digging deeper into the earth, carving out more caves.

“Where do they lead?” I asked.

Goodman Dougherty smiled, revealing a mouth that was missing teeth. “Wouldn't you like to know?” The clanging bell sounded twice, followed by an explosion and then the final bell. “Well, don't just stand there,” Dougherty said. “Go get those rocks.”

He thrust two large white plastic pails into my hands—pickle buckets, he called them—and led me into a cave where the dust was just now settling. My job was to fill the buckets with rocks and dump the rocks into a cart. Simple.

But backbreaking. Within fifteen minutes I had sweat through my shirt. There was also the limestone dust coating my arms, my nostrils, the back of my
throat. Even when they let us take a break and fed us lunch, I mainly tasted rock and grit and sand. Yum.

Goodman Dougherty slapped a meaty hand on my shoulder. “How's that limestone tasting?” He threw back his head and laughed.

“Is it always this way?”

“Always. Why do you think I keep a mouthful of chaw?”

He hawked up another enormous glob of black phlegm and shot it to the side. Explosions rocked the ground, my lower back ached, I was choking on dust and exhausted to the point of collapse, and even as his laughter filled the air, one looming question rattled around in my brain: how was I ever going to endure thirty years of this?

Four Fingers dug irrigation ditches, Flush tended solar panels, Hope and Scylla were assigned to the kitchen, Diana to the laundry; and Twitch was placed in a mechanic's shop, where he sorted nuts and bolts. Someone even went to the trouble to carve Cat a wooden arm so he could be placed on a painting crew. Cat did the painting, but he refused the arm.

“Don't need it,” he grumbled.

“But it'd make your life easier,” I said.

He just grunted and left the artificial arm lying on the cell floor.

As for Argos, he was taken away from us. They wouldn't tell us where to.

When we returned to the cells each night, we shared what we'd seen. The one thing we agreed on was that the Skull People had created a highly functioning society.

“And the thing is,” Flush was saying, “these people are smart. They get all their energy from the sun and wind—and they've created a grid to store the excess. It's amazing.”

All the Sisters lined up at the front of their cell, just as we were lined up at ours. All except Cat. He sat off to one side, picking at his stump.

“There's still something I don't get,” I said, trying to rub the limestone off my arms. “How can these tunnels support all these people? Where do they get the oxygen?”

“That's the most incredible part. They've built these air shafts with enormous fans, so there's constant circulation.”

Okay, so they were intelligent. Then why were they wearing those animal skulls the day we first encountered them?

People began drifting off to bed until it was finally just Hope and me at the front of our cells.

“Did you recognize him, too?” she asked.

“Who?”

“The prosecutor. Goodman Nellitch. He was the mayor of the Crazies back in Bedford. The one who talked to the Man in Orange.”

That was it! Although he was all cleaned up and his
white toga was a far cry from the cowboy hat and boots, she was absolutely right.

“But why would a Crazy be here with Skull People?” I asked.

“Or a Skull Person with the Crazies?”

Yet more questions we had no answers to.

When we were sure no one was looking, we stretched our hands forward through the bars until our fingers touched. We let them linger there as long as possible, holding on for comfort, for reassurance, for the desperate hope of not just a future, but a future together.

By day we worked; by night we shared notes. Not only were our lives passing before our eyes, so too was any chance of rescuing those Less Thans back in Liberty. Each day meant they were one day closer to the Rite, to imprisonment in the bunker, to being sold off to Hunters and shot down like prey.

I began taking on more responsibilities at the Wheel, even assisting with the explosives. Soon I came to understand the basics of dynamite and C-4, how to use fuses and blasting caps, how to mold the explosion based on needs.

But I knew I wasn't put on this earth to help dig tunnels for the Skull People. I had to get back to Camp Liberty.

“So how're you going to stop the Brown Shirts?” I
asked my boss one day at lunch. We were seated on the ground, backs against a wall.

Goodman Dougherty gave me a funny look. “What do you mean, stop 'em?”

“I mean, what happens when you're discovered? You can't very well just pick up and move somewhere else.”

He leaned to one side and spat. Bits of brown chew got stuck in his thick beard. “Don't you worry. Those soldiers ain't interested in us, and even if they were, they'll never find us, not with our camouflaged entrances.”

He had a good point about the door; it had been nearly impossible to see.

“So you're fine with the Brown Shirts?” I asked.

“I didn't say that. It's just . . .” He searched for the right words. “They're like a bunch of wasps. You don't go bothering them, and they won't be bothering you.”

Was it really that simple? I wondered.

“But if they did find you—”

“Which they won't.”

“—how would you fight back?”

His beard pendulumed from side to side as he shook his head. “We don't fight back.”

“You mean you haven't yet?”

“I mean we won't need to. That's why we got escape tunnels.” He swiveled his head to me and explained, “Besides, we'd rather put our efforts into educating and feeding folks than building weapons. Just makes
a lot more sense to us.”

He was right, it did make sense . . . unless you had firsthand experience with the Brown Shirts.

“And you're fine with their policy?” I asked. “The Final Solution?”

He poked a couple of stubby fingers into his bushy beard and pulled out some tobacco and crumbs—from what meal I had no idea. “The final
what
?”

“The Final Solution. You know, how the Republic intends to eliminate all the Less Thans and Sisters from the face of the earth.”