The Line Book One: Carrier (2 page)

I was being retired! The room spun.

When I opened my eyes again I was on the floor. The reception nurse held something foul under my nose. I groaned as she pulled me up.

The man was sitting at his desk. When I got to my feet I noticed a stack of tablets in front of him. The one on top read “Number 4, Line 12” on the screen.

“That my file?” I dared to hope.

He raised an eyebrow, and the nurse left the room. I found my way back to the overstuffed chair and plopped down.

“Yes,” he said, looking bored. “That’s your file.”

“Does it have my real name in it? Do you know where my family is? Are you sending me home?”

“No.”

My face drained of blood. I should have known better than to hope. Did this mean my family, wherever they were, meant to resell me? My insides turned to ash.

Asshole.

He’d done that on purpose. Trapped me with my own hopefulness.

“Customarily,” he continued, “if a girl is sent home to her family and not resold, and the family wishes for their payments to continue, they send another girl to take her place.”

“The family gets paid?”

The man’s smile faded. “Yes, for a ten-year contract. By Auberge.”

Ten-year contract? This was the first I’d ever heard of it. He’d mentioned before how I had been on the Line for nine years, so why was I being retired a year early?

I was afraid to ask for fear he’d realize the error and change his mind.

As for Auberge paying the families for their daughters, this was no shock. Auberge owned everything inside their walls, even the people.

“So,” I pressed. “Since you have no record of my birth family, then the lady from the restaurant must have received my payments. Right?”

He ignored my question. “Since you have no family to trade for you, and are in no physical condition to resell to another family as a servant—”

“Physical condition?”

I could tell he was getting irritated. I reminded myself to stop asking questions, but it was hard when he clearly had answers. “Yes. Well, this is where it gets difficult,” he said. “You’re pregnant.”

I stared at the man and blinked, disbelieving.

He went on, “Which is extremely rare, given your sterilization when you arrived. However, these things can and occasionally do happen. Normally, the baby is aborted and the girl is returned to the Line, but in your case, this won’t happen.”

Maybe I’d heard wrong. “Pregnant?”

“With twins,” he added. He smiled his pearly whites ironically. “Congratulations.”

The walls moved, and I nearly lost my balance, but I managed to stay coherent enough to say, “What the hell?” Any moment now I was going to wake up back in the examination room with the blonde nurse. This was too outrageous to be real.

“Yes, well,” he said, his smile disappearing from his perfect face. “Since your ten-year contract expires during your pregnancy, we have no choice but to release you.”

I was about to blurt out
Why?
but kept my mouth shut. He was setting me free, and I didn’t want to mess that up.

“But that does leave us in an awkward position,” he finished.

I swallowed the lump in my throat.
He’s
in an awkward position? I released the death grip I held on the arms of the overstuffed chair and tried to remember to breathe. Pregnant. Twins.

This can’t be happening!

“Do you know which appointment...?” I let the question evaporate from my lips. “Never mind.”

The man frowned.

I was too busy panicking to care what he thought. I didn’t know the first thing about babies, or about mothers. I hardly remembered mine. I wasn’t even sure if I recalled how to button a shirt, much less change a diaper or feed a child—two children!

He cleared his throat. “As I said, making this exception has left Management in a terrible predicament...”

I snapped out of my haze enough to wonder how and why I was an exception. I shot him a nasty look. Did he really want to compare predicaments?

“With no family to claim you and your offspring, and no possible way for us to recoup your lost income by releasing you early, we are prepared to make you an offer.”

“Yeah?” I knew where he could put his offer and I was half tempted to shove it there myself.

“Bring us a replacement, and you and your babies are free.”

He said it so nonchalantly I wanted to slap him. “Free? Free to what?”

“Free to get a job. Free to earn a living. You will no longer be owned by the Line. Your contract will be complete.”

Freedom. With a catch. “If I bring you a replacement?”

“Correct. Female. Any age under twenty-one.”

“To finish what’s left of my contract?”

He hesitated. “No. For a new ten-year contract.”

This didn’t seem fair in the slightest, but I pressed on. “And what if I don’t?”

It was a challenge. His expression hardened. “If you don’t bring us a replacement we will take your children when they are born. Both of them, regardless of sex.”

I was on my feet, but I couldn’t remember when I’d stood. “To the Line?”

The man did not look pleased to respond, but he did. “Yes.”

My face felt hot. “Babies? On the Line?”

The man licked his lips. He pushed on his eyebrow again, twice. “When they reach puberty, of course.”

My jaw clenched. The idea made me sick. I didn’t even know the two beings in my belly, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to hand them over to the same people who had enslaved me for almost a decade. Worse yet, I would have to enslave someone else to gain my freedom, and the freedom of my babies. It didn’t feel like an option. It felt like blackmail. It made me one of them, and I wanted to scratch out the man’s smug eyes for suggesting it. “Over my dead body.”

He nodded as if expecting that answer. “Now you understand.”

Oh.

I felt faint again. I slouched back into the chair. I couldn’t speak for a few moments. Find a replacement, or they take the babies
and
I’m dead.

Fucking asshole!

The man stood and motioned to the door. “When you leave here, you have seven months to bring your replacement. If you miscarry or abort the babies, this deal is null and void. Do not run. Each girl on the Line is implanted with a tracking chip, so we’ll monitor where you are. We have your palm prints on file to approve your transactions. Should you fail to return by the time of your children’s birth, we’ll come for you and for them. The reception nurse will see to some credits and clothing to get you started on your way.”

“Seven months?” That seemed like such a short time and an eternity all at once.

“Correct.”

I stood. It was happening too fast. They were going to dump me on the curb? Right now?

The man walked past me and opened the door. As I approached I accidentally brushed his shoulder. He jumped back like I’d stung him.

I was too shocked at his reaction to comment.

“Don’t touch me!” he spat. A tiny trickle of spit popped off his lip and landed on my face.

I internally shuddered at his saliva on my cheek but didn’t flinch. I was used to strange men and their odd behaviors. Just then my memory sifted through the many faces of men who’d come in and out of my appointment room and all the questionable things they’d done in my presence. Not one was a face I ever cared to see again. Not a single, solitary one.

Ever.

“Right,” I said before I turned my attention to the reception nurse.

The man closed his office door, leaving me on the other side. I never wanted to see him again, either.

It occurred to me I didn’t have much of a choice.

Chapter Two

The first thing I noticed once I was outside the building was the stench.

Garbage.

It smelled like an overflowing trash can full of day-old food scraps, left to rot in the hot sun.

I shielded my eyes with an arm. It was blindingly bright too.

Outside the Line headquarters was the bustling world of Central sector. Cement sidewalks full of moving people. Electric taxicabs lining the streets, tall and dilapidated buildings as far as the eye could see, dirty water gushing in the gutters, and trash. Piles of it were everywhere, lumped on the curbs, stuffed in the doorways of the dirty and peeling buildings. Since plastic had been outlawed years ago, garbage was collected in burlap sacks and stacked in the streets. Inside Auberge, the landfills had long been full, and dumping over the wall surrounding the territories was forbidden. After several generations of this, heaps of garbage now sat everywhere for rodents to chew, which sent the stinking contents spilling everywhere. The overflow of garbage had reached a critical level. People were drowning in their own filth, with nowhere else to put it.

And it stank like hell.

My stomach soured. It seemed like my sense of smell was twice as strong as normal, or perhaps the stench was twice as bad. Regardless, I couldn’t stay there all day, standing in the doorway of the Line, gagging. Despite the escalating panic clouding my thoughts, I started walking.

Down the street were apartment buildings of every kind, stacked together like dishes in a sink. I glanced at the street signs and clenched my shaking hands into fists.

I hadn’t been out of doors in nine years. And here I stood on 10th Street. Just that morning I’d told Peni I would see her later.

I never had the chance to say goodbye.

I glanced at the people outside the apartments as I moved down the block: women, men, children. Some sat on stoops. Some hung out their windows and watched nothing. Some walked around, looking lost.

I tried not to stare.

People. Real people. Not appointments. Not nurses. Not guards. People.

Did they know what was happening in that building I’d just exited?

Did they care?

I wondered what they would think of a pregnant girl from the Line. I wondered what I thought of myself.

It was a warm and sunny day. Which was a good thing too, considering all the Line had given me to wear was a loose shirt, drawstring pants and an ill-fitting pair of sneakers. The clothes were wrinkled and made of a natural fabric I couldn’t identify. They smelled used and felt abrasive against my skin.

The sun burned high in the sky, casting a white-hot sheen over the filth of 10th Street. It must have been sometime around midday, but I had no idea what day of the week it was or the actual date.

I kept my head down and tried not to make eye contact with anyone. I wasn’t used to so much activity around me, and I was overwhelmed by the vastness of Central. So much space! I checked the street signs to keep track of where I was.

Central was constructed like a giant grid, with numbered streets going one way, lettered avenues the other. I knew that much about Central, but that was about it. The lady who’d sold me had worked me as a dishwasher in her restaurant, which was in Central, down on 25th and Q.

There were times when she’d sent me out on errands with the chef, a burly old man named Hugo who I’d grown to trust, but we never went very far and I knew very little about the other sectors. Including Central, there were also South, North, East and West sectors, each and every one owned by the same corporation—Auberge.

Auberge, like so many other international conglomerates, had purchased territories after the economic fall of the world governments and deemed the area an independent state. Auberge had gone one step further and built a gargantuan cement wall around their state, supposedly to keep the population “safe” from the outside world. Within, it was widely known that the wall existed to maintain control over the population, even going so far as to mandate how many children you were allowed to have, where you were allowed to work and travel and where you could live.

Inside the walls, Auberge owned everything.

Literally.

They owned the banks, the police, the schools, the hospital, the Line, every building. Everything. If you had a job, you worked for one of Auberge’s companies. If you didn’t, you were on your own, which was why crime was out of control and the black market was a bustling business.

If you got caught dabbling in either, you were never seen again. Many assumed you were killed and dumped over the wall. But if that were true, the stench from generations of rotting corpses would have overflowed the walls and overpowered the smell of garbage by now, and that wasn’t the case.

My family had been from East, that much I remembered.

I thought of going there. If only I knew which way that was.

I walked along the sidewalks on 10th and tried to picture where I had lived as a child. But all I could remember was the inside of our apartment and my parents’ faces. The images only deepened my feelings of isolation. And no matter how hard I wracked my brain, I couldn’t recall their real names. Just Mama and Daddy. Little good that did me. It would be impossible to find them without knowing who they were, which was too bad, since I could have used some motherly advice just then.

Besides...they’d probably forgotten all about me.

Probably.

I shook the thoughts from my head, pulling my hair away from my face.

I was alone. There was no point in dwelling on what I didn’t have or didn’t know. It was best to concentrate on the here and now, which was in Central. And from the looks of it, the place hadn’t changed much since last I’d seen it. It was still sticky cement, dirty buildings, smelly unemployed people and mountains of garbage.

I walked past some kids playing games on the sidewalk with dice. Women sat watching over them and sewed ragged-looking cloth, chatting among themselves on stoops.

They gave me crusty looks as I went by.

Friendly.

First things first, I had to find a place to stay; the streets were too hectic and dangerous. Then I could worry about finding a job. The Line had set me up with some credits courtesy of Auberge Bank to float me in the meantime.

After the reception nurse had given me a brief lecture about pregnancy in the first trimester (morning sickness, what was that?), she’d handed me my new clothes and escorted me to the front door. Then there was a five-minute speech while I got dressed on how
not
to spend the credits, particularly on things she considered “luxury items.”

“Like what?” I had asked.

“Clothing, shoes, jewelry, entertainment,” she’d said.

“What about baby clothes? Food? A place to stay?”

“These credits are to assist you with food and shelter for up to seven months. That’s it. Each transaction will be scrutinized. If they feel you’re abusing your credits, they’ll cut you off. Completely. You understand?”

I could tell from her face she wasn’t telling me something. Still, I nodded. “And if I get the job done before the seventh month?”

“The credits end.”

“I see.”

The reception nurse gazed at the manager’s door and lowered her voice to a whisper. “But after that, the tracking chip is deactivated and you’ll be free to go wherever you want.”

“Within Auberge, of course,” I said as I slipped on my shoes.

The nurse eyed the manager’s door again. “Perhaps.”

I shrugged. There was no perhaps about it.

* * *

Around the next corner from the women on the stoops there were some trading posts on Avenue S. Produce, grain and lumber were shipped in from West and sold in Central at a huge markup. There were electronics and such from East, textiles and the like from North. I asked a few shopkeepers if they were hiring. They took one look at me and shooed me away. I could tell from their expressions they didn’t trust me. I didn’t blame them. I didn’t trust them either.

After the fourth or fifth post, I got lost in my frustration and didn’t realize what was happening. Three men, old, ruddy, bulky, were walking behind me. It took me a few more blocks before I noticed they were following me.

Hell.

I turned a sharp corner, trying to lose them, and saw my mistake. Back alley. Dead end.

Hell!

The back wall of the alley was a crumbling brick building with no door, and windows way up out of reach. The wall was piled high with a mountain of trash and a rusted fire escape dangling precariously upside down. On either side of the alley were doorways to other buildings, squeezed in between wooden barrels collecting run-off rainwater. I turned a couple of knobs. They were all locked. I knocked on a few doors. Nobody answered.

I found it pretty hard to believe there wasn’t anyone home, but it didn’t matter. No one was going to help me. Why would they start now?

I checked behind me, and the men were still there, blocking my only exit and looking around to see if we were alone. But even if there were people around, they wouldn’t do anything. That was just how things were.

When the three men nodded to each other and turned toward me, I knew what was coming.

Hell no.

Twenty minutes out the door, and my life was already a disaster. I was in no condition for this. The asshole had told me that if I miscarried I’d be sent back to the Line, and I couldn’t have that. The whole reasoning behind my release was questionable at best, and the last thing I wanted to do was to test it.

My eyes darted about the alley, searching for some means of escape, but the only things there were the giant pile of trash and the barrels. My palms slicked with panicked sweat.

The men spread out, in case I tried to bolt.

Desperate, I kicked one of the barrels with all my strength and cracked the side open, sending a wave of dirty water spilling into the alley. The men didn’t think much of it; in fact, the one in the middle laughed.

I kicked the barrel again and splintered the wood into a million pieces. Cutting my hands on the scraps, I gripped two large shards and flung them straight at the closest man.

He ducked. The first plank missed his face but grazed his shoulder, and he swayed. The second plank smacked him right on the forehead.

The man on the left bolted straight for me, while the one in the middle laughed again.

I tried to grasp another plank from the broken water barrel, but it was taking too long, so I scrambled up the mountain of trash like a rat.

My feet slipped.

I felt a hand on my foot and kicked it off. I grabbed at the trash pile, climbing as it slid out from under me like sand.

“Come here, you bitch!” one of the men growled.

I kept climbing. My hands dug through the trash, searching for a weapon—a bottle, a scrap of metal, anything hard or sharp—but I couldn’t really stop to look and I was losing my lead. The men were right behind me, trying to scramble up the pile, cussing and yelling at me the whole time. They were too heavy and sunk like stones with every step. A heap of garbage was piling up between us.

Then I saw it, the ladder from the old fire escape. It was only a few feet above the top of the pile of trash.

If I could just get to it.

I wasn’t sure if the fire escape was still attached to the building, or if my shaking arms would even hold me, but I skittered like a cockroach to the top of the pile. With one great heave, I jumped as far as I could.

The pile of trash gave out from under the pressure of my jump. I looked down quickly and saw that the man who was closest had been buried under a pile of garbage and the other two had backed away, cursing. I had three fingers on the last rung of the ladder.

I pulled as hard as I could. My arms burned and my sliced palms throbbed with pain, but I got my thumb wrapped around. When I had a firm grasp I flung up the other hand and gripped with both. I dangled like a worm on a hook.

The men below were furious. Covered in garbage and panting like dogs, they glowered at me.

“She won’t last long like that. Just wait,” one man said. He had a cut over his eye where I’d smacked him with the plank. Blood dripped down his eyebrow and across his temple. He didn’t seem to notice.

The other man was pilfering through the trash, trying to dig the buried one out. He kept repeating “Stupid little bitch,” over and over.

It was a miracle the fire escape was holding. I swung up one leg and tried to hook it to the last rung of the ladder. It took a few tries, since I could barely catch my breath, but I managed to do it.

“You’re gonna pay for this, bitch,” the man said from inside the trash heap. He was finally free, but he was covered head to toe in muck. He shook his hands like flippers and brushed some limp, rotted lettuce from his long and matted hair.

“Get down here and take it like a good girl,” one of the others said.

Hell no!

I stood on the last rung and climbed up. My legs protested, but I pulled them along. Maybe I could make it to the roof or an open window. The three men in the alley weren’t bright enough to split up and come around the other side of the building, and I wasn’t about to suggest it.

A few rungs up, the fire escape shuddered and the men hooted and hollered in delight. Then they groaned in disappointment as I regained my balance and climbed farther up the ladder.

I heard one guy bet another five credits that I’d fall.

I reached the first landing, if you could call it that, since it hung sideways from the building. I pried open a cracked window with one hand.

I heard the men cussing at me as I slid through the open window and thumped to a coarse wooden floor on the inside.

I sat up and glanced around just quick enough to get clocked in the head with a frying pan.

Everything went dark.

* * *

When I came to, a toothless old woman stood over me with the pan in her hand. She waved it around like a club. “I got nothing for you! Get out!”

I staggered to my feet and felt the bump on my head. I was covered in trash juice, top to bottom.