The Line Book One: Carrier (10 page)

She dropped a black duffle bag on the floor. “Bad dreams?”

“I never dream.” I sat up, and the towel fell off my head.

I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she grinned. “I’m Sonya. I like your hair.”

I ran my hands through it, tousling it a little bit. “Thanks.”

“These are for you.” She opened the duffle and pulled out a stack of underwear, a couple of tank bras, some pants, a pair of jeans and a few clean shirts. She also yanked out an old army jacket and a few pairs of leather-laced boots. “I have some slippers if you don’t like the boots.”

I slid over the bed and pulled the bag up next to me. “Thank you.”

Sonya shrugged. “Try the boots last. I snatched a couple of different sizes. I see you’ve been wearing those old sneakers, so maybe shoes won’t wig you out as much as they do me.”

She was talking so fast I found it hard to keep up. I still felt groggy from the dream. Had it been a dream? Or a memory? It had been so vivid, I couldn’t be sure. I glanced at Sonya’s bunny slippers. “Shoes wig you out?”

“I was on the Line for six years,” she said. “Shoes feel funny. I guess it was from all those years naked. Doesn’t everything feel itchy to you?”

One of the boots I held in my hand dropped to the floor with a thud.

Maybe it was because I was still groggy. Perhaps it was shock. I stared at her with my mouth open for I didn’t know how long before I was able to swallow the spit that had accumulated in my mouth. “They let you out after only six years?”

I could have sworn Doc had said the other girls had died. And here was one, alive, and giving me boots.

Sonya tightened her lips together. “No, I just sort of slipped out when no one was looking.”

“You escaped?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged as if it was no big deal, as if she’d just taken out the garbage, and I was treating her as if she’d given away a kidney.

“How? When?”

Sonya’s expression darkened a little. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather eat first? It’s a long story.”

“What’s the short version?”

She sighed. I was worried I’d pushed her too hard. It wasn’t like I was anxious to talk about my time on the Line either. I thought maybe she wouldn’t say anything more, given her pained expression, but she sat on the end of the bed, kicked off her slippers and curled her feet up under her. “A few years ago, I crawled up and out through an airshaft. I used my thumbnail to unscrew the vent cover.”

“Where? What line were you?”

“Line six. Number ten.”

I’d walked past the door many times but had never seen any of the other girls. They kept the lines separated. “That’s amazing.”

“Meh.” To my surprise, she giggled, revealing a crooked but sincere smile. She looked so young, yet so old for her age. Then again, so did I.

“What do you do now?”

“I steal.”

I dropped the other boot to the floor.

Sonya smiled and reached across me to snatch a black tank bra from the bag. She handed it to me and stood, turning her back. “Go ahead and get dressed. I’ll tell you over dinner.”

I rummaged in the duffle. “What do you steal?”

“Whatever they pay me to.”

“Seriously?” I pulled the tank bra over my head and slipped on some cotton panties. She was right. They felt itchy.

“Yeah, well, I hate to sound all doom and gloom,” Sonya said, her back to me. “But finding jobs after the Line is a little tricky. No one wants to help you, no one wants to hire you. They all just want to fuck you. They think we’re all trained geishas or something. It’s a real drag. You don’t know how lucky you are that you found Doc right away. Took me years to find someone to help me out.”

The shirt I pulled from the duffle was a cotton long-sleeved white tee, soft and smooth. It was big around the middle, but clean. I smelled it before putting it on.

I had no idea what size pants I wore, but I grabbed the jeans and pulled them on. They swam on me. There was a huge cotton panel in the front and elastic around the waist. I took off the jeans and tried the pants. They hung around my hips, but at least they didn’t fall off.

“When Doc said you were pregnant, I wasn’t sure how far along you were, so forgive me. I don’t think the pants will fit.”

“They work.”

Sonya turned around and stifled a laugh. “Oh. My. God.”

Her laugh was so light, it made me smile. “Is it that bad?”

She pulled one of the belts from around her waist and handed it to me. I took it and looped it around. “Not very far along, I guess?”

“Couple of months, I think.”

Her smiled faded. She shook her head and turned to the door. “That’s totally twisted.”

She opened the bedroom door and left before I could comment.

Two turkey sandwiches on plates sat on the stone bar, off the kitchen counter. I hopped onto one of the barstools and devoured one. The tomato was ripe and dribbled juice down my chin. Sonya went to the refrigerator and poured me a glass of water from a pitcher. She sliced some lemon and plopped one into my glass.

I drained it almost instantly.

Doc appeared from the bedroom door on the other side and grunted. “Better slow down. Nice hair.”

I detected a hint of sarcasm. “Thanks.”

“Seriously, though, it’s not good for you to eat that fast,” he persisted. “After having been starved for so long, your body will reject the food.”

“I’m not starving to death.”

“It’s not normal for a woman—how tall are you, five-six?—to be a hundred pounds.”

“You trying to get me fat?” I asked.

Sonya laughed.

Doc rolled his eyes and dropped the subject.

Sonya put some bread into a toaster. “I gained about twenty pounds right after I got out, but it’s not conducive to slipping through small places. So I took it off again.”

“You’re also about three inches shorter than Naya,” he said.

Sonya shrugged and fished in the refrigerator for some butter.

Doc shook his head and sat on the barstool next to me. “Think you can get her some clothes that fit?”

“You said she was knocked up!” she protested.

“I said she was pregnant. I’d never say that. Honestly...”

“Right, I forgot his royal majesty would never use the common vernacular.” Sonya spread butter across her bread with a knife and crunched down.

I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, with them bickering back and forth. But the sandwich tasted so good, I just focused on chewing.

Doc eyed Sonya’s crumbs on the floor. He frowned and turned his attention back to me. “All right, here’s the plan. Lie low for a day or two while we wait for Tym to get the worm configuration right. Then Sonya slips into Auberge’s HQ server room and infects the palm logs, erasing any trace of your existence.”

That seemed awfully risky.

I eyed Sonya as she chewed her toast. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

Doc continued. “While we wait for Tym, you’ll have to pick a new name, first and last. And you can’t go back and visit your family for a few months. Just to be on the safe side.”

“That’s okay. I don’t know where they are anyway.”

Sonya and Doc exchanged looks.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten you’d said that.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“Then we take you to someplace safe,” he said. “We’ll set you up with a new life, a new job. Someplace that will help with the babies after they’re born. That is, if you’ve decided to continue the pregnancy.”

“Oh. I...” I stopped midsentence. The asshole manager had told me that if I miscarried, or terminated the pregnancy, they’d come for me and bring me back to the Line. But now that I wasn’t being tracked, and on my way to a whole new identity, it dawned on me that I didn’t have to continue with my original plan.

Did I really want to have these babies?

That didn’t take long to figure out.

Yes.

I thought of Evie and my personal vow against abandonment and the two little girls on the tablet monitor and their thumping hearts. I swallowed the bite of sandwich in my throat.

“I’m keeping them.”

Sonya shot Doc a hard stare and refilled my water glass. “I like a woman who knows what she wants.”

I was certain there was more being said in their looks to one another, but I didn’t know them well enough to figure it out just then.

I drained my water glass instead.

Sonya cleared her throat and brushed her hands against each other, sending more crumbs to the floor. “All right, I’m off. I’ll be back with more clothes. Nice meeting you, Naya.”

“Yeah, nice meeting you.”

Doc pointed to the crumbs on the floor. “You going to clean that up?”

She smirked. “Why would I, when you obviously enjoy cleaning so much?” She slid out the front door without a sound. Her bunny slippers probably helped with that.

Doc groaned and took a hand broom from under the sink and swept the crumbs into a corner of the kitchen floor.

I ate the other sandwich. Turkey on wheat. It could have used a little mustard.

Doc put the broom away then settled back down on the barstool next to mine.

I was slightly horrified when I burped aloud. “Sorry.”

He smiled broadly and laughed. “Don’t worry. That’s the least offensive noise your body will make in the next few months.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, since you’re keeping the babies, in the third trimester you’ll have little control over passing gas.”

Just what I needed. “You’re kidding.”

He grinned from ear to ear. “Nope.” His dimple made an appearance again, and I looked away.

“Great,” I grumbled. “Instead of just being a washed-up whore, I’ll be a fat and gassy washed-up whore.”

“Don’t talk like that!”

“It’s true.”

Doc’s face had fallen. He slammed his fast against the countertop, causing the sandwich plates to rattle loudly. “I fucking mean it!”

I jumped. “Okay. Jeez!”

“Did you choose to be a prostitute?” His face was practically purple.

“No.”

“Did you go there voluntarily?”

“No!”

“Then you weren’t a whore, you were a slave.
Were.
Past tense.”

“All right, I get it,” I lied.

He didn’t let it go. “And no matter what you were before, you aren’t one now. You have to think
forward.
You can’t move ahead if you’re always looking back. Do you understand?”

He seemed to settle down a little bit. For as often as he got angry, it sure disappeared awfully fast.

“Yeah. Okay.” I hoped that would end the conversation. “Just relax.”

“It’s important, Naya. The first step to recovery is shedding the old you, the one without control over her own life, and taking responsibility for yourself and your children.”

“I got it. Can we drop it now?” I was finding it hard to swallow. I suddenly had the urge to leave the room and take another shower, but I wanted Doc’s help and was afraid he’d change his mind if I told him to shut up, which was exactly what I wanted to do.

“That’s why I’m so glad you cut your hair,” he said. “It shows you’re ready to move on.”

“I didn’t have a choice. It was full of knots,” I explained.

His anger caught on his face like a fish on a hook. He grinned. Then he laughed. “Exactly,” he said. He got up and shuffled into his room, chuckling to himself. “I’ll be in here if you need me. I’m pulling together some new identities for you to pick from.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want whatever I said to send him on another tirade.

After he’d gone, I got up and checked his refrigerator. I found a package of Chinese mustard stashed in a tray on the door and added it to both sides of the turkey sandwich. Then I finished it in four bites. I shamelessly drank two more glasses of lemon water.

But as good as the food was, I was still confused and concerned.

What had I said that was so damn funny?

Chapter Ten

One day at Vira’s restaurant
,
I
bleed between my legs.
I’m so surprised to see it run down the inside of my thighs
,
I
drop and break a dish.

She grabs my arm and we walk a long way away.

We go to a building
,
where she signs some tablets and stomps out the door.

A
woman in a white dress takes me to a long green hallway with silver double doors
,
hoses me off with cold water and then makes me take a pill.

I
sleep a long time and wake up strapped to a bed on wheels.

There’s a little hole in my belly button
,
held together with a shiny clear strip.

The nurse comes back and tells me I won’t be able to have babies
,
and that they used lasers to remove all the hair in my arm pits
,
legs and private parts.

They sit me up on the table
,
and I’m supposed to watch all sorts of screens
,
showing me how I’m to perform my new job.

It involves men.

There’s a picture of a naked man and how his private parts work.

It shows me what to do with it and how to hold it and where to put it.
The screen shows me how to make it grow and what to do with the stuff that comes out of it.

It tells me if I don’t do my job well
,
they’ll sell me someplace else and I’ll never be free again.
That sounds terrible
,
but the idea of touching men all day and night makes me cry.
I
scream and shout that I won’t do it.

I want to go home!

Where’s Vira?

You can’t make me do this!

The nurse comes in with a needle and gives me a shot.

The room spins
,
and I pass out.

When I wake up I’m drowsy.

The room is foggy
,
and I can’t see well.

There’s a man in the corner.

I’m in a small room on a bed with scratchy sheets and a lamp hangs from the ceiling.

I’m naked.

The man is tall with light brown skin.
He has a beak nose and black circles under his eyes.

He takes off his pants.

I
want to scream and run away
,
but my body won’t move.

I
want to tell him no
,
but my mouth won’t work.

The room is so blurry.

I’m half awake
,
but mostly asleep.

The man comes to me on the cot and opens my legs.

He shoves his fingers inside me.

It burns.

The man tastes his fingers
,
then shoves himself inside me.
I
open my mouth to scream.

Nothing comes out.

He rams and rams.

It burns and hurts.

Make him stop!

Stop!

No words come.

He shakes a little
,
grunts
,
then backs away.

There is blood.

“
Now
,
that’s what I’m talking about!
”
he says.

My body won’t move
,
but I can still cry.

A
nurse comes in and gives me a shot.

I
pass out again.

The next few days it happens over and over.

The shot.
Different men.

I
can barely move.

Eventually
,
the shots don’t make me so numb
,
and I’m able to move a little.

They strap my arms down.

I
learn from the nurse that if I cooperate
,
I
won’t get the shots at all.

I
cooperate.

At least then
,
I
can think.

And move.

I
stop fighting.

They take the straps off.

They give me my own compartment to sleep at night.
There are other girls just like me.
Some of them are nice and smile at me
,
but I can’t look at them yet.
I’m ashamed.
They count us with a laser scanner every morning
,
and then assign us appointment rooms.

I
don’t think my parents are coming for me.

How could they?
They don’t know where I am.

Did they ever know?

I
think they abandoned me.

They gave me away
,
and look where I am.

This is their fault.

I
never want to see them again.

Ever.

Why would they want me now anyway?

I’m worthless.

I
perform my job ten times a day.

Seven days a week.

For nine years.

You do the math.

* * *

In the morning, I dressed in my baggy clothes and headed to the kitchen. Doc sat at the bar, scanning a tablet screen, flicking it with his finger. He wore a worn but clean pair of jeans and a different button-down shirt that was slightly rumpled. His hair was damp and in his face. He smelled like soap.

“Morning,” he said, glancing up to grin and then back down to his tablet. He had a mug of coffee backward in his hand. “How’d you sleep?”

“Fine.”

He knew I’d lied. I could tell from his face.

I wondered if I had called out in my sleep.

“Have some eggs,” he said, indicating the range. Yellowish fluffy globs filled a pan.

“They real?” I hadn’t had anything but artificial eggs since I’d been at the restaurant.

“Went to the market this morning.”

I eyed the food. It was overcooked and burnt on one side. “What’d you do to them?”

Doc turned from his tablet. “What do you mean?”

“Do you have any more?”

He seemed perplexed but nodded. “In the fridge.”

I searched inside the refrigerator and pulled out the carton of eggs.

“What’s wrong with the ones I cooked?” he asked.

I found a bowl in the cupboard and used one hand to crack some eggs into it. Then I added a pinch of salt, pepper, some diced vegetables I found in the crisper and a little cheese.

“Nothing’s wrong with them. If you like eating charcoal.”

I whisked the ingredients together with a fork, dumped the burnt eggs into the trash, scraped out the char from the bottom of the pan, added a dash of butter, heated the burner and then poured the mixture into the pan.

It sizzled and instantly filled the apartment air with flavor.

Doc stared at me, dumbfounded.

I let the egg cook on one side, flipped half of it over and waited for it to cook through. Then I cut it in half with a wooden spatula, flipped each half onto a plate and handed one to him.

He reached out, took the plate, his mouth slightly ajar. “Where did you learn to do that?”

I shrugged, too hungry to give a long story. “Before the Line, I was a dishwasher in a restaurant. I picked up a thing or two.” I took a large bite of egg and chewed. It warmed my tongue and melted into my cheeks.

“A thing or two?”

My mouth was too full to verbally respond, but I managed a garbled, “It’s just an omelet.”

Doc put the plate down and took a bite, using the fork from his first plate of burnt eggs. He groaned when the bite hit his tongue. “Oh, that’s good.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’re easy.”

He chewed vigorously, finishing his half of the omelet in seconds. It made me laugh to see him licking the egg remnants from his fork.

“You want another one?”

“Yes, please.”

I finished my half of the omelet and made another one. This time I skipped the vegetables, since he was out of those, and added some leftover ground meat I found in the refrigerator.

He groaned over that one even more than the first.

“Wow,” I marveled. “The way you act, it’s like you never tasted food before.”

“No, I have,” he said, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “When I was growing up we had...” He let the sentence die. “Anyway, it’s been a while. Thanks. That was great.”

The notion that he was so moved by something as simple as a well-cooked egg gave me a sense of satisfaction I’d never felt before. That was new.

Pride.

“Well, I’m glad I could help you out. It’s the least I can do.”

Doc took my empty plate from me, stacked the dirty dishes in the sink, ran a little water in them and then went back to his barstool. He picked up the tablet he had been reading. “Okay, now, down to business. You need a new name. Do you want it to start with the same letter? That way, it won’t be too far of a stretch.”

“Sure. Okay.”

He read from a list on his tablet screen. “Naavah, Nabila, Nadette, Nadia, Nadine, Naida, Nan, Nancy, Nanette, Naomi, Narcissa, Narda, Nastasia, Nasya, Natalia—”

From the dream. “That one.”

“Okay.” Doc pressed a few times on his tablet. “Do you care what your last name starts with?”

“Not really.”

“All right, you’re Natalia Snodgrass.”

“Wait. Maybe I
do
care.”

He peered up from his tablet with a devilish grin. Damn, he was cute.

I found myself smiling. It felt good.

He seemed to brighten. “Hmm. How about Cain, Ehrman, Safford, Slevin, White—”

“What about Grey?”

“Natalia Grey?”

Not pure white. Not pitch black. Exactly in the middle. “Yes.”

Perfect.

“Okay.” He pressed the board some more. “And how about what you’d like to do after you have your new identity. Have you given that any thought?”

“Like where I’d like to live?”

He nodded.

I shrugged, shifting on my barstool. “I heard that in West there are working communes where women take turns caring for the children, as the others pick crops in the fields.”

“You want to pick crops for a living?”

He sounded so astonished I second-guessed myself. “Sure, I guess. I’m willing to try something new. I’m not trained for anything else, other than washing dishes and having sex.”

He blushed and frowned. “That’s not true.”

“I’m afraid to admit it, but it is. Unless you can think of some other inherent skill I’ve neglected to mention?”

He narrowed his eyes at me and cocked his head slightly to the side like the answer was obvious. “What about cooking? You just made me the best omelet I’ve had in years. Seriously.”

He was being gracious. But I could tell from the sincerity in his eyes, he meant it.

I laughed, but he didn’t waver.

“It was only an omelet,” I said.

Wasn’t it?

Doc shook his head, disagreeing.

Shirel had mentioned working for a rich family in South as a cook, but the idea hadn’t seemed like a real option. I figured at the time I’d make an adequate kitchen maid, but no more. Chefs were trained, had apprenticeships and years of preparation before they had their own kitchens. All I had were a few years of cooking lessons from an old man, a slave himself.

“I mean, after a little bit of training, of course,” Doc added.

“Training?”

“Yes. If that’s what you want, we could set you up with an apprenticeship. Look, I don’t want to influence you. Just think on it. What do you really want? Anything. Just say the word.”

Anything.

The concept was absurd to me.

Anything?

How could I chose just
anything
, and then suddenly become that?

Besides, whatever occupation I chose, I’d still be working for Auberge. Or for some family highly invested in Auberge.

Every option within the walls held a risk of my being discovered. Whatever I chose, I’d have to think long and hard about it. But since this was the first real opportunity I’d had to consider it, I found the idea too large to comprehend.

“Anything,” I said aloud. It was more of a comment than a question. I tried to picture myself in a few years. What would I be doing? I had the “me and my kids” part figured out, but the rest was unclear.

What would I
want
to be doing?

Doc waited while I thought. “This is your shot at a new life. We set you up with a work history, a family history. We’ll even pay for schooling, if that’s what you want.”

“Who pays?”

He shifted on the barstool and took a drink from his mug, as if the question made him uncomfortable. “Tym, Sonya and me. That’s why we do this.”

It seemed like an incredible danger for them to take on account of me, and an expensive one at that. “Why?”

He set the mug back on the countertop and clasped his fingers together. His gaze was steady. At first I couldn’t place why his eye contact made me uneasy, but then I realized most of the men from the Line didn’t look you in the face. They were either too embarrassed or had their eyes focused elsewhere. “We just want to help.” His eyes never left mine. “We don’t want anything from you. Honest. We each have our reasons.”

I got the sense there was more he wasn’t telling me. But he believed what he said.

He was telling the truth.

“If you could do anything, anything at all,” he said, looking at me so intently I almost looked away, “what would it be?”