The Line (10 page)

“Okay.” Vivian said nothing else, hoping he knew she had understood. The artificial tenor of Daniel’s voice finally activated some connection in her brain, and she felt tiny electrical explosions of fear going off in her head.

“You understand?”

“Yes.” She knew what he had been trying to convey, knew that it should bring her some hope, but all she felt was despair.

“It’s an odd bunch, I have to tell you,” he said. “The funny thing is, we all have so much in common, this group they’ve chosen to go. Same types of backgrounds, hell, even the same kinds of hobbies.” Daniel laughed, the most horrifying sound she had ever heard, because it was so far removed from what his real laugh sounded like. Vivian stopped breathing, frozen in place at the kitchen counter. The clock on the table flipped from 5:45 to 5:46.

“Viv? Are you there?”

Vivian said nothing. Daniel and she had joked sometimes in college, where they met, about their then-budding collaboration involvement. They called it their “hobby,” as if it were something they did for fun, just to pass the time. As if being found with a single meeting notice or having a conversation where the wrong things were said to the wrong person couldn’t get them picked up by an official transport and driven away, never to be seen on campus again. It had happened to people. People they knew.

“Viv?” Daniel’s voice drew her back to the present.

“I’m here, Daniel.” Vivian inhaled, a deep breath, and straightened her shoulders.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you. I heard you. I . . .”

Tears had been streaming silently down Vivian’s face, but the sob still caught her unawares, and she was sure Daniel heard it. She gasped, willing herself under control. She could not let him fear for her, not now. “I love you, Daniel,” she whispered, then louder, “I love you so much.”

There was silence. Then his voice again, cracking, but there, warm in her ear. “I love you too, Viv. I love you more than I can tell you. I wish . . . I wish I could see you.” He stopped for a minute, and she could hear his breathing. “Listen to me now. When I get back, we should take a vacation, just get away from it all, what do you say?” He paused and then continued, emphasizing each word he said. “Get out of the city. How does that sound, Viv? Get away from the city.”

There was noise around him, some sort of scuffle. Static, and then two more words, the last words she ever heard Daniel say. “
Now
, Viv.” The connection broke.

 

 

VIVIAN HAD TRIED so hard to forget that day. Having to tell Rachel the truth about Daniel and her being collaborators had brought it all back. And the Identification had forced her to rethink being anywhere near Bensen. Because Vivian had recognized that red coat. The coat the woman who had been Identified had been wearing. It was a coat of a slightly more stylish cut than most women in Bensen wore. She knew it had been expensive, and she knew the woman wearing it had purchased it on impulse, long ago, during a happier time.

Vivian knew that, because she had been with the woman when she bought it.

She watched the door to the guesthouse, waiting for Rachel’s return.

E
LIZABETH WAS TIDYING up for the night; rinsing her wine-glass in the sink, folding the velvet throw she had covered her legs with while she read her nightly poetry in the parlor. Tonight it had been Ashling’s collection of loss sonnets. So much beauty in her words—pain transformed into grace. Elizabeth was in a dreamy state, repeating a particularly heartrending verse in her mind, when she heard the entry chimes. Jonathan’s voice scratched over the intercom before she had time to wonder who would be at her door at this hour. She hurried to let him in, worried that his unusual visit might mean something had gone wrong at the greenhouse.

He shuffled a bit on the porch, holding his hat in his hands, obviously uncomfortable. Elizabeth looked at him quizzically for a moment. “Is there some sort of emergency, Jonathan?”

“No,” he said, “no emergency, Ms. Moore. At least not yet.”

This reply, combined with his odd behavior, made Elizabeth curious. Jonathan rarely came to the house anymore— hadn’t for years—and he never came after hours. They kept their conversations limited to greenhouse business, perhaps the occasional news from town, but nothing more than that. It was an unspoken rule between them, something Jonathan had established all those years ago, and to which Elizabeth adhered willingly. At first she thought it made their continued association less painful for him, but she had since come to believe that it was his way of drawing a line, of telling her that her family and her choices had only so much power over him. She had kept it up regardless of his reasons. It was easier for her.

Once she had determined there was no emergency, Elizabeth told him to come in off the doorstep. He followed her to the parlor, where she offered him wine, which he refused.

“Well,” Elizabeth said, “what seems to be the problem, Jonathan?” She motioned for him to sit down; her leg was aching, and she needed to sit herself.

“I was in town today to pick up that load of fertilizer,” he said, “and I happened on an Identification.”

This
was
news. It had been . . . well, a long time since the last Identification in Bensen. The government avoided the backwaters for the most part, and Bensen was as sleepy as they came. Elizabeth still didn’t understand why this would bring Jonathan to her door though.

“Did you know the person Identified, Jonathan?”

“Of course not.” Jonathan shot her a look that made it clear he objected to the idea he might have associated with someone who was Identified. “Some woman.”

It was not her he wanted to tell Elizabeth about.

“I saw Ms. Quillen and Rachel there, leaving a shop. Sneaking away.” Jonathan whispered his next words. “Like criminals would.”

“Sneaking away?” Elizabeth frowned. “Surely you’re mistaken. Perhaps they were simply in a hurry.”

“No, ma’am,” Jonathan said, adamant. “They were trying to get out of there unseen, no doubt about it. They were creeping along the walls, slipping along all scared. They scooted round the corner like they were being whipped.” Jonathan looked up at her then, and there was something eerily familiar to her about his expression. “There’s no reason for upstanding citizens to be scared of the government, and they were scared. I know the girl is probably blameless—she has to do what her mother says, but still. I think it’s trouble. I think it could be dangerous for you to keep them on.” He was silent a moment. “There’s been enough trouble on The Property. Best to avoid any more.”

His tone and his audacity angered Elizabeth. That he would even hint at the past’s troubles made her furious.

“I am quite capable of determining what is
best
, Jonathan.” Her voice was low, but he must have heard the fire in it, for he rushed to assure her that he meant no offense.

“I didn’t want to upset you, Ms. Moore. I just thought you should know what you’re dealing with.”

“I believe I know that quite clearly.” Elizabeth’s clipped words dismissed him. “Now, if you will show yourself out, Jonathan.” She didn’t get up.

Hours later she was still sitting where he left her. What Jonathan said
had
upset her, but not in the ways he thought it would. She had been thinking about the world. Thinking about people, and how they could be so certain they knew what they were “dealing with.” Thinking about what was truly dangerous.

She couldn’t get the picture of Jonathan out of her mind, how he looked when he said he thought there was trouble; that those two poor souls—a widow and a child—might be dangerous. He reminded her then of her grandfather.

She had few memories of her grandfather; she was a little girl when he died. One of the most vivid was of him puttering in the greenhouse. He had long since retired from any daily work there; her father had taken over day-to-day operations shortly after he married Elizabeth’s mother. But her grandfather would still fuss with special cross-pollinations, just to “keep up,” as he said.

Often he would stare out the greenhouse windows beyond the Line, toward Away. He watched it the way an exhausted rabbit watches wolves making their final approach, glazed past wariness into a sort of trance. When one of the green house workers or Elizabeth’s grandmother interrupted his reverie, he would shake his head almost imperceptibly and nod toward the Line. “Worth every cred that thing costs,” he would say, “every last one.” He never spoke of what it was he feared, what it was he thought the Line was keeping out.

Tonight Jonathan’s eyes had looked like her grandfather’s did then: full of fear, searching for some unknown danger he was certain lurked in the darkness, just beyond the dim light of his own understanding.

R
ACHEL HAD BEEN sitting in the greenhouse over an hour, waiting for she didn’t know what, watching the sun set, and thinking about her father. She did check her seedlings; they were a special cross she had germinated all by herself. She thought they might be beautiful if they lived. She
knew
they would be unique—something that had never existed before she made them. But she hadn’t really come to check on the seedlings. She had come to see if anyone might really be out there, somewhere near the greenhouse, waiting for help.

It was different being in the greenhouse at night. The glass between her and the Line seemed less solid; it sort of disappeared in the dark. It was quiet too; the silence in the shadows around her was deeper somehow than it was in daylight. Even the orchids seemed to radiate a strange luminescence. Rachel felt like she was sitting in some kind of alien garden.

Earlier she had played the corder message back a few times, but she couldn’t get any more out of it than she did that morning. Just that whoever it was needed help, and that they would wait near the edge of
something
at sunset. Her eyes were getting achy from staring out past the Line, and it was hard to see anything clearly. She thought she had seen something right before the sun disappeared—a flicker of light in the distance—but there hadn’t been anything more.

She hoped her mother was okay. She had seemed better by the time Rachel left for the greenhouse. At least she hadn’t been crying anymore. Rachel knew Vivian was worried about her, but she thought, considering everything, that she was fine. Now that she had had a chance to think about things, the fact that her parents were collaborators actually made her feel better. She had always wondered how her mother could be so anti-government and yet so proud of her dad for going to fight some stupid war that the U.S. probably deserved to lose.

She had read everything she could find on the war with Samarik since she was little, trying to find out if there was any way her dad might have survived. Even though most of the records she read were filled with propaganda and double-talk put out by the U.S., it still sounded to her like they were actually the bad guys. She had never known how to feel about the fact that her own father had been a part of something that seemed so obviously wrong.

Her parents’ collaboration also explained why Vivian was so scared all of the time. She tried to hide it, but it still showed; all her warnings about staying low profile in town and keeping their business private and avoiding any trouble. The way she watched what Rachel researched on the streamer. She said she wanted Rachel to think for herself, so it had always seemed strange that she was so strict about Rachel’s site visits. Vivian always cautioned her to use a fake screen name if she entered a site that required registration, and any sort of chat room was totally off-limits.

Rachel used to think Vivian was worried that she would stumble upon some porn site, but now she realized that her mother had been worried about tracking. There were government agencies where people sat all day counting up hits on unapproved sites, flagging names for follow-up if they appeared too many times. The streamer at the guesthouse was in Ms. Moore’s name, but Rachel could have easily slipped up and mentioned her own name.

Vivian must have wanted to be certain that the name Quillen didn’t show up on any lists. There was probably a file on them floating around somewhere. She wondered how long it took before something like that was marked inactive. She wondered if she was in it.

Her mom was always saying how important it was to stand up for what you believe, how injustice must be fought, but today, when injustice was right in front of her, she ran. Rachel didn’t see what good all the talk about justice was if nobody tried to help when things got risky. Maybe they couldn’t have done anything today, but she felt like they should have at least
tried
. It was hard to believe her mother had once been a collaborator. She didn’t seem . . . brave enough.

One thing Rachel knew for sure was that she would never go to college if the only way she could get in was to buy a secured admission. After hearing about her father’s friend Alex, she would never be able to live with herself if she thought she might be the cause of that happening to someone else. She wasn’t sure how she was going to tell Vivian, but she would figure it out.

Rachel didn’t know what she would do instead of a Profession. That was a problem. Because Vivian was right about one thing: It was not a good idea to be without a job. She thought about the Labor Pool crew she had seen today, and about those she had seen on other visits to Bensen. They all looked the same. Not just because they wore the gray jumpsuits. Because they all had the same look in their eyes—a blend of fear and numbness. The boy today had seemed a bit more lively than most, but he would get that look soon enough. Rachel never wanted to see that in the mirror staring back at her.

She squinted out at the Line. There was no sign of anything out there. Maybe she should just give up and go in. A part of her really wanted to; she had to admit she was a little scared. Who was it out there? What was she getting herself into? Vivian would definitely be mad if she knew about this.