The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (8 page)

Could that have been why we’d been going to meet him?
Because he wanted to tell
Meritt
something?

“Maybe at the school, maybe at his house,” Marta said,
because of course she didn’t know we’d been going to meet him in person.

“He wouldn’t put anything in writing,” I said. “Too
dangerous. The wardens might find it.
Rafe
was
careful. He was always careful.”

Marta nodded. “Exactly,” she said. “He was careful enough to
make contingency plans. And if he left a message, he wouldn’t have left it in
plain sight. It will take someone who knows him well to find it.”

Then, with a brisk nod, she pulled down the serving flap and
left me facing a rusting metal wall.

* * * *

By the time the city siren sounded to end the
work day, I was weak with hunger. Even so, the memory of being ostracized at
breakfast made me dread the cafeteria. Maybe I’d go by the dorm and shower
before dinner. I’d end up getting the dregs of whatever we were having, but at
least by then there’d plenty of empty spots at the tables.

On my way to the dorm I caught a movement out of
the corner of my eye. I knew what it was without looking—
Petey
and Judd horsing around—though I couldn’t
believe they were playing their usual games, not after what had happened last
night. For a second I was appalled, disgusted with them, but then I imagined
them behaving like the laundress at breakfast this morning, white-faced with
fear. This was better.

So I mustered a little energy and strolled down
the street as if I hadn’t noticed their
dash from doorway to doorway. I
pretended to be utterly absorbed in the goings-on around me: I took in the
weary-looking physician carrying two large boxes into the infirmary; the dorm
mother sweeping the front steps of her dormitory; a knot of older women moving
slowly toward the cafeteria, helping each other over uneven places and up
steps. The way they clung to each other gave me the uneasy feeling that if one
slipped, they’d all go down in a heap, shattering hips and arms and who knows
what all.

I was trying to see if any of my old people were in the
group when
Mariella
caught sight of me. Her face lit
up and, daringly, she let go of the arm she was holding for balance and waved
gently in my direction. Heads turned; they all saw me, all smiled, all lifted
their hands in greeting, all swayed unsteadily.

I smiled and waved back, the pain in my heart easing just a
little. My old people weren’t hiding from me. They never had. They’d always
made time for me back when I was a lonely little girl. They’d told me stories,
taken me for walks, watched me play in the dirt in the yard of the children’s
dormitory, listened to my secrets. Sometimes they touched my hair wonderingly,
but they never called me a freak.

They moved carefully on, and I watched them until they were
safely inside the cafeteria. Then I started down the street again.

Finally I was within range, and my stalkers pounced. They
leapt out from the shadow of the prison house, shouting something
incomprehensible, grabbing my arms and spinning me in a circle, their own arms
and legs flying in all directions. “We got you!” they yelled. “We win!”

A passerby edged around us, shaking his head disapprovingly.

 
“Did you see
us?”
Petey
asked anxiously as we stumbled to a stop.
He was a thin boy, eleven years old, with an oddly round face.

“If I’d seen you, would I have let you catch me?”

Judd saw through my evasion and snorted. “Yeah, you would.
You keep thinking we’re babies.” Judd was twelve,
stockily
built, and blond. I had been his partner at school, after
Meritt
left, so he wasn’t afraid of me and my odd hair, like most of the younger kids
were.

“Don’t cheat for us,”
Petey
said.
“If you see us, you have to tell. Otherwise how can we get better?”

I considered this. “Okay, I saw you,” I said.
Petey’s
face fell. “But just barely. You moved faster than
everyone else on the street, and that caught my attention.”

 
“Right, blend
in,” Judd said, “You’re so very good at that, Red. Thanks for the tip.”

He shot me a smile before he ran off. I hoped being seen
with me wouldn’t get him and
Petey
into trouble.

* * *
*

When I finally got back to my dormitory, the bathroom was
blessedly empty, except for
Meri
, who was never one
to chatter. In a dorm room full of girls, I liked that about her. She wouldn’t
be here much longer; she’d just turned nineteen, and soon would be moved to the
adult quarters—assuming, of course, we survived that long.

As I stripped my clothes off in the steamy shower area, I
wondered who she’d be assigned to. There was quite a crop of guys who’d
recently turned nineteen or soon would—
Ezzie
,
Cline, Joe, Harding, Errol, Farrell Dean. Though I didn’t want Farrell Dean for
myself, I couldn’t picture him with
Meri
. Or with
anyone, actually. And when
Meritt
was assigned
 . . .

I ducked under the spray, turning my face up to it, wishing
I could wash away whatever the future held—because whatever it held for
me, it wouldn’t be
Meritt
. Not if we couldn’t escape
to the woods.

Meri
might
get him. Though there was no guarantee
Meri
would be
put with a young man, because there were more girls than boys her age. She
could get put with a reassigned older man. That happened a lot. And sometimes
the genetic counselors reassigned one of the older men to a new breeder, even
if there were younger men available. I didn’t know why.

But I did know that
Meri
at least
had a chance at the boys her own age, and I didn’t. I was two years younger
than they were. They’d all be assigned long before I turned nineteen. And I’d
be turning nineteen all by myself, because after
Meri’s
age group came the big empty gap with nobody but me in it. So I’d get put with
some reassigned middle-aged man. Someone I didn’t know well, or worse, someone
I did. Felix, for instance. Or—the thought made me shudder—Garry. I
could be forced to live in the same house with blustering red-faced Garry, just
him and me, alone together, for years and years.

Or I could be assigned to the scarred warden.

That was when I remembered the camera—or, rather,
remembered who could be watching me through it.

I’d have leapt for a towel, but I was covered with soap.
Instead I turned further away, feeling my face flush red with embarrassment.
The camera had always been there, and I’d always ignored it. What else could I
do? I had to bathe. But now I’d seen that bank of monitors in the watchtower;
I’d seen actually seen a man watching us through those little mechanical eyes.
And, worse, I knew the scarred warden watched me especially.

I would ask
Meritt
to disable that
camera as soon as possible. He’d taught me how to interfere with the sound, but
visuals were harder to mess up, at least if you wanted to make it look
accidental. Surely we could find a way to sneak him into the dorm, or find a
legitimate electronic issue for him to deal with in here.

“Nice to have hot water for once,”
Meri
called, startling me. She never made small talk. “I sure needed a good shower
today. I had blood all the way up to my elbows.”

It was true that her skin was pink from scrubbing—she
worked in food preservation, which was a pretty messy job. But it dawned on me
that she wasn’t really talking about cleanliness; terse, efficient
Meri
wouldn’t bother to make chit-chat about something like
that. Maybe, in light of my
ostracization
this
morning, she was talking to me just to let me know she was a friend.

“What did you do today?” I called, testing my theory.

Meri
turned off her shower and reached for her towel. “Cut and cured beef strips.”

“So are we all set for winter?”

It was a clumsy question, and when
Meri
turned toward me she glanced up at the camera, even though she knew the sound
of my shower running would mask our voices, as long as we kept them low.

“You know the saying, ‘waste not, want not?’ With the beef
sausage, nothing went to waste. We had to use everything we possibly could, and
we’re still only at about half our usual quota.”

“That cattle illness in the spring?” I’d heard about it all
the time, but hadn’t paid much attention.

She nodded. “
Coccidiosis
. We lost
a lot of calves. Too many.”

“What about our other meat supplies?”

She shrugged and began toweling her hair. “Fishing is a
little thin; poultry  . . . well, disappointing; and pork had a
scour epidemic back in May. The wet spring.”

I thought of the rot problem we’d had with the early
potatoes, and the sorry crop of cherries thanks to a late freeze. I didn’t have
to tell
Meri
about that. Word had gotten around. And
the entire first cutting of alfalfa was pretty much worthless.

For a long moment we were silent, pondering how much
devastation a single unusually wet, cool spring could have.

“It seems like there should be some way to make up the
difference,” I said finally.

Meri
shrugged, twisting a dark strand of hair around her finger. Then, wrapping the
towel around her, she walked under the camera as if leaving the room. When she
was directly below it, she reached up and twisted the wire that
Meritt
had taught me controlled the sound.

She knew.
Meri
knew how to mess up
the sound.

I stared at her, and she met my eyes levelly. “We didn’t
have much margin to begin with,” she said. “So much of what we have goes to the
Ws
.”

To the wardens, the Watchers, and to the watcher assistants.
I had no idea how much the Watchers and their assistants ate, but I knew how
often the wardens went back through the serving line.

Meri
wasn’t looking at me anymore; she was eyeing the sign beneath the
camera—“We Watch Because We Care.” But she hadn’t left the room.

“Why do you think they do it?” I said, keeping my voice
down, averting my face so the camera wouldn’t see my moving lips.

“Do what?”

“Watch us all the time.”

She shook her head; she didn’t know.

“I just keep thinking how much easier it would be if they
weren’t watching us,” I said. “And really I can’t figure out why they are. So
many cameras, so many wardens, all the time. It just all seems so unnecessary.
Like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. Like we’re all dangerous criminals or
something.”

The wire uncurled back into its usual shape. I shut off the
shower, snatched a towel, and hurried to where
Meri
stood beneath the camera, putting a finger to my lips as soon as I was out of
its sight.

Meri
nodded and put one arm around my neck. She was damp and hot from the shower, so
hot she felt feverish.

“You shouldn’t have tried to help
Rafe
,”
she said. Her voice was a mere breath. “But I wish it had worked.”

Blinking back tears, I nodded and pulled away.

Meri
studied me. I guess she saw something that made her decide to trust me, because
she leaned in close again. At the same time she reached up and started scraping
her fingernails against the wall just beneath the camera, creating sound cover.
It was another trick of
Meritt’s
.

 
“A couple of
weeks ago, one of the mechanics accidentally cut a couple of wires when he was
patching a leak in the roof of the food preservation building,” she said, so
quietly I could hardly hear her. “He tried to fix them but just made matters
worse, and electronics hasn’t gotten around to replacing them yet. So in the
meantime I’ve been hiding food.”

It took me a moment to understand what she was telling me,
and then a startling image filled my mind: Farrell Dean, our best mechanic,
playing the bumbling incompetent.
Gathering
information
, he’d said, as if that were all he’d been doing.

 
“I can only skim
off a little,”
Meri
murmured. “But if the Watchers
don’t know we have it, maybe it’ll help. Maybe it’ll keep us alive.”

Then she turned and left the room, leaving me to get my mind
around this conspiracy I’d been totally oblivious to.

Hurriedly I toweled off, staying in the small blind spot
under the camera, and pulled on my pants and shirt. In the bedroom
Meri
was sitting cross-legged on her bunk, yanking a comb
through her hair. I couldn’t ask what I wanted to know, not with the live
camera above us, so instead I went back to the shortage problem.