The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (6 page)

 
But anything
about
Meritt
was something I needed to know. All
things
Meritt
were my concern, had been since I was
little and got partnered with him at school. He could have confined himself to
tutoring me in math, tolerating his chore, but he didn’t. He liked me and he
showed it—
Meritt
, respected by everyone, never
mocked, never left out. He was the first person anywhere remotely close to my
age who was willing to be my friend, and I was his friend too—I listened
to his musings, his arguments, his jokes. I broke the rules and crept out at night
because he asked me to, because we wanted to be together. It wasn’t one-sided.
I certainly wasn’t his
pet
.

“You’re being a hypocrite,” I said. “You don’t have any
right to criticize
Meritt
if you’re keeping secrets,
too. You’re just like him.”

Farrell Dean stopped eating and looked at me. “I am not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Here’s one big difference, Red: I don’t lure you into
dangerous situations.”

“Nobody
lures
me
anywhere,” I said. “I do as I please. I’m not a child, you know.”

Farrell Dean studied me, a faintly ironic expression
crossing his face. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

He set his sandwich down and got to his feet, glancing as he
did so at the B workers, closer now—not yet close enough to hear us, but
close enough to see we were back here alone.

Farrell Dean wasn’t as tall as
Meritt
but he was still nearly a foot taller than me, and when he took me by the
shoulders and backed me against the wall, I could see nothing but him. “Let
go,” I said, shrugging off his hands.

“If you want me to talk to you, be still and listen,” he
said. He was showing the B workers what they expected to see, what they’d
automatically ignore. We weren’t supposed to indulge our personal preferences
until we were past the breeding years and safely sterilized, but except for the
wardens, most adults were willing to overlook a little handholding and so forth
until we hit nineteen and got assigned. After that any unauthorized affection
was a serious offense.

Farrell Dean put his hands on the wall behind me, one on
either side of my head. He smelled like motor oil and sun, and was so close I
could see the flecks of gold and green in his hazel eyes. “Why are we scarcely
making it?” he said, speaking quietly and swiftly. “Why are you barefoot and
practically starving?”

One of his hands dropped to my ribs, and I knew he could
feel every one.

“I’ve been all over the city,” he said. “I’ve made repairs
in every area—agriculture, industry, medicine, food preservation,
everywhere. And everywhere we’re falling behind.”

I was underwhelmed. “So we need to route a few more people
into mechanics,” I said, moving away from his hand, tipping my head back to put
a little more distance between our faces. My hair snagged in a bolt on the
metal wall behind me and two or three hairs came loose as I jerked my head, but
enough stayed caught to imprison me.

“
Here.
” Farrell Dean nudged my
chin, turning me so he could get to the problem. “I don’t mean the mechanics
are behind. Everyone is.”

“We always manage somehow.”

“Yeah, but this year the storehouses are low,” he said, and
finished freeing me. “Lower than I’ve ever seen them.”

That pulled me up short. It was late October—our
stores should be at their peak. Of course, our fields hadn’t had a great year.
Spring had come late, and when it did come it was wet and cool.

Turning to face him, I searched his eyes, but I already knew
he wasn’t teasing; Farrell Dean wouldn’t joke about this. A shiver ran through
me as I imagined my usual hunger intensified.

“The Watchers will know what to do,” I said.

Farrell Dean shrugged and began picking with great focus at
the hairs I’d yanked out on the rusty bolt. I watched him, knowing he was
avoiding my eyes.

“They’ll know,” I insisted. “The Watchers will do
something.”

“Maybe.” He freed two or three long red hairs and wound them
around his finger, while I kept up a waiting silence.

Finally he looked at me. “We’re running out of time,” he
said. “And the Watchers aren’t making any suggestions. They’re not listening to
suggestions, either. A dozen different people have tried to get in to see them,
and not one has even gotten past the door.”

“The Watchers never let anyone in to see them,” I said
reasonably. “It’s the rules. Nobody sees the city commissioners.”

“And in normal situations, fine. If it makes them happy to
act all mysterious, whatever. But this is not a normal situation.”

A field worker gathering pumpkins shouted something to his
fellow workers, and when Farrell Dean glanced over his shoulder I noticed the
uncharacteristic tension in his jaw. He wasn’t like this. He was always calm,
always steady, always good humored, always understated.

Apparently the sight of the workers reminded him we were
visible, because he turned back and braced his arms on either side of me again,
and this time I stood still.

“The Watchers aren’t just going to sit there and watch us
starve,” I said. “They must have some sort of plan.”

“We’ll see.” He sounded as if he meant it.

“How? How will we see?”

He hesitated.

“It’s
Rafe
,” I said, and as I
spoke I grew certain. “He’s up to something.”

Farrell Dean didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. I knew I
was right.

 
“I was there
when they arrested him,” I said, trying to ignore the cold finger of fear
sliding down my spine. “What’s going on?”

Farrell Dean shifted, but he didn’t look away. “There’s not
much to tell. Not yet. We’re still gathering information.”

“
We
as in who? You
and
Rafe
? And
Meritt
?” What
he was saying finally hit me. “You’re
spying
on the
Watchers.”

“
Shhh
.” He threw me a
warning look, glanced over his shoulder, then leaned in close. “Have you ever
thought about how many products we have that we can’t account for?” He spoke
very quietly, his mouth against my ear. “Cigarettes, eyeglasses, pencils
.
How’d we get those? We don’t mine graphite.”

I had asked a nanny mother about this years ago, and the
answer had seemed plausible enough at the time. The Watchers knew how to
manufacture each of those things, she’d said, but they had the city do so only
in spurts, stockpiling enough for years and years, mothballing the tools until
they were needed again. Fleetingly, I wondered why they hadn’t kick-started the
manufacture of cough medicine, given we were running short, but I was
distracted by a sudden wave of guilt.

“Agriculture,” I said. “We should have been working harder.”
It was my fault. We couldn’t help the wet spring, but maybe we could have done
more to make up the difference this summer.

“Yeah, you’re a real slacker, Red.” Farrell Dean pulled back
a bit and looked at me. Though his tone was teasing, his eyes were grave.
“The problem runs deeper than a bad season and your lazy
workers.”

“The time of the ashes?”

My supervising farmer liked to complain about how much worse
the crops had been since the months of drifting ash. He thought it had messed
up the soil pH, made it hard for the plants to take in nutrients.

Farrell Dean shrugged. “The time of the ashes put them out
of their depth. That’s how
Rafe
put it. They were
fine as long as we could follow Plan A. Plan B—well, the Watchers don’t
seem to have one of those.”

He was suggesting the unthinkable.

The city commissioners had always guided us—we knew no
other way—and even if we did, how could we go against them? They had
wardens, and stunners, and guns.

And—

“What about the Guardians?” I said.

Despite what the scarred warden had told me, I half-hoped Farrell
Dean would tell me not to be silly, not to mistake bedtime bogeymen stories for
reality. If he said it, I’d believe him. I’d trust him over the creepy warden
any day.

But Farrell Dean nodded. “They’re a problem,” he said.
“Still, we don’t have a choice.”

“This is crazy,” I said, and sheltered there behind the
tractor shed, blocked from view by Farrell Dean, I felt suddenly conspicuous.
The Guardians—what if they could see and hear me, like the wardens but
exponentially increased? I didn’t want to go against the Watchers; I really
didn’t want to go against the Guardians.

“Surely we can hang on until spring.” My voice
sounded thin to my own ears.

Farrell Dean
looked me straight in the eye.
“We’re starving,” he said, and his voice was steady, which frightened me more
than if he’d been dramatic. “If we don’t take control away from the Watchers,
some of us won’t make it to spring.”

 
Some of us
. The wind rose and stirred my
hair; the workers from B gathered gourds. The sky above was bright and blue,
oblivious to the hungry winter that was coming.

When Farrell Dean stepped away from me, cold rushed in and
settled right down into my bones.

By suppertime the city’s
uneasiness was palpable. In the crowded cafeteria, anxiety rose around me like
smoke, filling my lungs, choking me. Several times I heard “city meeting” and,
once, “reprisals.” The word lodged painfully in my mind, sharp and hard like a
shard of glass. I looked up and down the tightly packed rows of
Optica
gray and couldn’t see a single face that was
smiling, a single person who didn’t look worried or tense.

The line for food was still quite long, so I went to stand
by the conveyor belt, watching for any trays with leftover scraps, more out of
old habit than from any real hope that the trays would be anything but scoured
clean.

After a dozen or so bare ones passed by, I returned to the
back of the line and waited and tried not to think about the fact that the
cafeteria’s dangling bare bulbs looked just like the ones in the interrogation
room, tried not to think about the warden with the scar. Instead I focused on
what Farrell Dean had told me and tried to study the cafeteria with a fresh
eye.

The water marks on the ceiling were getting worse. The roof
needed to be repaired—had needed it for awhile, judging by the layered
patterns of stains. Routine maintenance took backseat to routine emergencies
—a broken pipe spewing water, an electrical outage
threatening to compromise food storage, a fence disintegrating so that cattle
wandered the city streets. The roof would be repaired when rain dripped into
our supper, and the yellowing walls would go right on waiting for a new coat of
paint. Farrell Dean was right;
Optica
was declining.
It wasn’t hard to notice really, just hard to want to notice.

A little
boy picked his nose and then
wiped his hand on the longsuffering wall beside the children’s tables. The
square floor tiles were crumbling around their edges. The metal serving table
was dented and scratched. Unusable metal folding chairs leaned in a great
precarious stack against the back wall.

By the time
I collected my food tray
I was thoroughly depressed, and apparently it showed,
because o
ne of the cooks—Alice, a woman with a calm air about
her—caught my eye
and
nodded
deliberately, reassuringly. “Everything seems worse on an
empty stomach,” she said. I tried to smile at her, but my face didn’t want to
obey.

I
made my way up one aisle and down
another, looking for
Meritt
or at least for a place
to sit, listening for
Rafe’s
name. But the muttered
bits of conversation I caught
were all on the same
topic—the mysterious impending city meeting. All we knew was we were to
gather at the city circle at eight that night and every night thereafter, until
further notice.

A warden sitting across from
Cynda
got up and walked away, and I slid into the empty seat. Waiting for food,
jostling for a chair, that was normal. What wasn’t normal was the people
gathered in little knots all around the cafeteria, ignoring the cameras and
talking openly about why the city meeting had been called. A few men huddled
together at a nearby table, gesturing angrily. I strained to hear what they
were saying, but the hum of the room blurred everyone’s words.

Cynda
leaned across our table and clasped one of my hands in both of
hers, her long fair hair falling forward over her shoulder in delicate curls.
“Ignore them,” she said. “There’s no point in worrying. It doesn’t help.”

Another warden passed nearby, eyeing her. She
gave my hand one more squeeze and then let go. “Good evening, warden,” she
said. “Will I be seeing you tonight after the meeting?”

The warden froze, his ears turning pink, and
without answering moved away. She gave me a conspiratorial wink, and then
resumed eating in her quick neat way. I took a bite as well, but the
meal—I can’t even remember now what it was, soup probably, or a thin
stew—was tasteless in my mouth.

Across the room two girls began giggling and
couldn’t stop; when their laughter became tinged with hysteria a dorm mother
touched them on the shoulders and led them outside. The loudspeaker announced
that Physician Neil was needed at the infirmary. A group of nannies directed
children to their tables, reminding the smaller ones to hold their trays level.

Someone stumbled behind me, bumping my chair as
he passed. It was Farrell Dean, surreptitiously dropping a beautiful piece of
cheese on my plate.
Cynda
smiled knowingly at him and
fluttered her fingers in a wave. He nodded a greeting to her, and though he
smiled, I saw in his eyes his worries about the coming winter.

A few tables away
Petey
,
an eleven-year-old, tipped his chair too far back and crashed to the floor. His
best friend, Judd, howled with nervous laughter, torn between helping
Petey
and leaving him to sort himself out alone. An old man
as weathered and tough as a strap of leather got up from a nearby
table—old Louie, one of my favorite people. He bent and untangled
Petey
from the chair, stood
him on his feet, and dusted him
off. A laundress glowered at them all, then said something to Judd that made
his fists clench at his sides.
Petey
put a hand on
his arm and Judd knocked it away, then turned and stalked out of the room,
leaving his tray on the table.

The murmur of conversations rose by fits and starts until
the dull roar of
it pounded in my brain like an angry
inescapable heartbeat. A woman sitting three down from me put her head in her
arms and began to cry.

The clock on the wall said 7:30.

* * * *

A little before eight, we gathered as ordered at
the circle. Its western rim lay at the base of the watchtower, where a thin
path led from the base of the tower down to the center of the circle, cutting
through the tiered steps around it. Hundreds of people filed in and stood on
the steps, each face shadowy but recognizable in the reflected glow of the blue
streetlights. I scanned the crowd, searching for
Meritt
—he
was usually pretty easy to spot—but I didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he
was still in isolation. Since he wasn’t around I worked my way down and found a
place in the front row, on the lowest level; tiers or not, I couldn’t see over
any adults standing in front of me, and nothing made me feel more helpless and
claustrophobic than standing in a crowd seeing nothing but people’s backs.

The city circle was crowded now. It had to be
close to eight o’clock, and still there was no sign of
Meritt
.
I was looking around again, just in case, when the door at the base of the
watchtower opened and
Rafe
came out, alone. He
stopped for a moment, blinking as if his eyes were adjusting to the shadowy
blue lights. One side of his face looked swollen, though from that distance, in
that light, I couldn’t tell for sure. Otherwise, he seemed unharmed.

Relief brought a smile to my lips and I started
to go to him, but I’d only taken a step or two when he caught sight of me and
frowned. Bewildered, I stopped in my tracks.
Rafe
gave a slight shake of his head, and when he began walking I thought he was
coming to stand with me, that he’d been telling me not to come to him but to
wait. And sure enough he walked toward me, cutting straight through the center
of the circle. But before he reached me he stopped. He stopped in the center of
the circle, and he stayed there.

Someone nudged in beside me, making room where
there had been none. It was Farrell Dean. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were
fixed on
Rafe
, standing there alone.

Then the spotlight came on. Around the circle
every face was cast into darkness as the bright spotlight made the blue
streetlights seem like nothing. For a split second I could see only that bright
white light, and then my eyes adjusted, and again I saw
Rafe
.
Everyone saw him. He was pinned in the beam.

Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t escape the
logical conclusion:
Rafe
was in serious trouble.

But the Watchers had announced the city meeting
before
Rafe
had been arrested. How could they have
known he’d be out, that he’d do something and get caught? They must have picked
at random from the current crop of prisoners. I hoped that was it—I hoped
they weren’t angry with
Rafe
in particular.

At exactly eight o’clock the spotlight flashed once. The
crowd, which had been murmuring quietly, fell silent.

 
“City of
Optica
.” A man’s voice boomed through the tower
loudspeakers, resonant and compelling. That would be one of the seven Watchers.
He might have actually been in the tower, or with all their technological gear,
he could have been speaking to us from their compound a mile away. “Citizens of
Optica
,” he said. “Friends. There are cancers among
you.”

The voice stopped. The spotlight cut off.

In the darkness the silence stretched and held.

I began to shiver, more from nerves than from cold. Beside
me Farrell Dean shifted until our shoulders touched. Gratefully I leaned into
him. For a long time we stood in the dark, in silence—I don’t know how
long, but it felt like forever. Across the way a baby began to cry and was
hurriedly shushed.

The spotlight flicked back on, shifted away from
Rafe
, began scanning the crowd. It lingered now on one
face, now on another. Farrell Dean stood steady beside me, but I took a small
step away from him, suddenly afraid that I’d get him in trouble somehow.

Then I was glad I’d moved, because the light paused briefly
on Farrell Dean’s face and then came to rest on mine. There it stayed, longer
than it had stayed on anyone else. I could feel its heat, or maybe it was the
heat of the panic flooding through me. My heart began to race; I felt my cheeks
grow flushed. The wind kicked up and my hair shifted, dancing strange-colored
in the spotlight, and the scarred warden’s words echoed in my mind: I was watched—I,
the anomaly, the freak.

Just when I grew convinced it was something more than
that—that somehow they knew I’d been near the wasteland when
Rafe
was arrested—the spotlight moved on, over row
upon row of gray uniforms, over terrified or carefully blank faces, moving
faster and faster around and around the circle, licking here and there as if it
were tasting us. I began to feel sick. I had a horrible feeling
Meritt
was there, somewhere, and it would stop on him, that
he and I would both be ordered to join
Rafe
in the
center of the circle.

But when the manic spotlight finally stopped, it stopped on
Rafe
.

The voice spoke again, hushed and menacing: “There are
cancers among you,” it repeated. “Those who would take what belongs to all of
you and abuse it, horde it, use it for themselves alone. Those who would by
their words and deeds promote disunity, discord, and ultimately death. Did you
think we wouldn’t know? Did you think we wouldn’t see?”

The light gave
Rafe’s
gray clothes
a faint blue tint; it caught at the silver strands in his dark hair and
emphasized the lines on his face, making him look older than his forty some-odd
years. But though he looked tired and grim, he did not look afraid.

“Instructor
Rafe
,” said the voice.
“You are a thief.”

Rafe’s
dark
eyes gave no sign that he’d heard the accusation, gave no sign, for that
matter, that he was standing at the center of the entire city’s attention. He
stared straight ahead—straight, as it happened, at me.

 
“You have stolen
painkillers,” the voice said. “A small crime, you might say. Small pills, so
easily slipped into a pocket. But value is not determined by size. Those
painkillers will not be there, family of
Optica
, when
you need them. They will not be there when you break an arm working in the
field to feed Instructor
Rafe
. They will not be there
when you go into labor to bear a child for the Family of
Optica
.
They will not be there when a cook burns her hands, or when a mechanic loses a
limb.”

I felt warm breath in my ear. Farrell Dean murmured, “He makes
it sound like
Rafe
ate buckets of the things.”

The voice stopped and I was afraid that somehow it had heard
Farrell Dean, that the spotlight would spring up again and pin us in its glare,
but when the words resumed they continued in their former track.

“You have been tested and found wanting,” it said. “You,
Rafe
, are a cancerous cell in our body.”

They would flog him and lock him away in prison. I wouldn’t
see him for ages. When he came out he would be pale from lack of sun, thin, his
muscles shrunken from inactivity. That was what happened when someone seriously
displeased the Watchers: you were put away, and when you came back, you were
never the same.

“But perhaps—” the voice was silky now,
persuasive, offering hope. “Perhaps the blame is not entirely yours. Perhaps
someone else was involved.”