Word and Breath (3 page)

Jenson was the best Reader the Union had in Newtown—perhaps anywhere. The number of codes and secret messages he’d found in innocuous texts was legendary. His job was secure, if anyone’s was.

She adjusted in her chair, feeling strangely self-conscious. She was used to being independent and self-sufficient. She wasn’t entirely comfortable when people went out of their way to help her.

“What do you have there?” Jenson asked mildly, evidently sensing her discomfort.

Riana showed him the three sheets of paper she’d brought over. “I’ve noticed an anomaly and was wondering if you’d noticed it too.” She spread the pages out on his desk and studied his face as he looked down at them.

Because she was watching his expression, she noticed the slight tightening of his thin lips.

“Do you see?” she prompted, pushing one of her braids back over her shoulder.

He didn’t answer. Just raised his eyes to study her face with a disturbing kind of intensity.

“Wordless,” she said, glancing down so she wouldn’t have to hold his gaze. She noticed that the hair on his forearm was dark—distinct against his skin. “It’s used out of context in all three of these pages. Once might just be bad writing. But this…”

Jenson still didn’t respond, and his silence was starting to spook her.

Because she was nervous, she started to babble. “Have you seen it recently? The word ‘wordless’ slightly out of context? I think I’ve noticed it before but didn’t pay any attention until this week—when I saw it three times. It has to mean something, don’t you think?”

“Maybe.” The one word sounded stretched.

Her eyes jerked back up to Jenson’s face. He was staring at her again but didn’t appear to really see her.

“Jenson?”

He swallowed so hard she could see it in his throat. “Riana.”

For some reason, the sound of his saying her name made her squirm. Very few people bothered to call her by her name. Very few people spoke to her personally at all.

“Riana,” he repeated, “I’m wondering if you’ll do me a favor.”

“I guess so. What is it?”

Jenson paused a moment before he responded, and his face twisted as if he were struggling to make a decision. “Can you forget you’ve noticed this? For the moment, anyway?”

Riana’s mouth went dry. She didn’t like the sound of this at all. “Why?”

He reached out and touched her arm. His hand felt warm and heavy on her wrist. “I can’t explain right now. Perhaps you can just trust me.”

Riana didn’t trust anyone except her sister. She’d learned not to bother, since she’d only be disappointed in the end. Jenson had never given her any reason to doubt him, though, and he was such a good Reader.

Readers were different from everyone else.

“Why?” she demanded again.

His eyes never left hers, and this time she couldn’t turn away. “Riana, please. It’s just a random word. Nothing for the Union to worry about.”

They both knew this wasn’t true. Obviously there was something going on with the word that Jenson didn’t want the Union to know.

Riana had no idea what to do. She didn’t like this at all and wished she’d never bothered to talk to him. Who cared how smart and perceptive he was or how he’d helped her out before?

He was just going to get her in trouble.

Her parents had gotten in trouble, and they’d been killed.

Her grandfather had always been in trouble and had suffered for it until the last day of his life.

Biting her lower lip, she grabbed the pages and got to her feet.

Jenson stood up too, his hand tightening around her arm. “Think about it. I know you, Riana. You’re better than all of this.”

She gaped at him for a moment, having no idea what he meant by that. Then she pulled away and hurried back to her desk. Shoving the sheets to the bottom of her inbox, she pulled out another page and stared down at it blindly.

Her heart pounded in her throat, and she felt uncomfortable and jittery. Her life was usually lived on an even keel—nothing ruffling her nerves or surprising her because her world was so small and unexceptional.

Now two things today had upset and confused her.

She didn’t like the feeling at all.

***

That afternoon, she was poring over a text when she heard a rustle behind her. Nelly. Another lifer. A thirty-something woman with a maternal attitude and a mischievous wit.

Nelly rolled her chair over toward Riana, leaned forward, and whispered into her ear, “Are you and Jenson lovers?”

Riana blinked and stiffened her spine. “What? No!”

“Just asking. It looked pretty intense between the two of you this morning.”

Riana swallowed over her dry throat. She’d tried to put the incident out of her mind and didn’t want to be reminded of it again. “It was nothing.”

“Do you
have
a lover?”

The blunt impertinence of the question was startling and unexpected. For a moment, annoyance and amusement vied in Riana’s mind.

Amusement won. It just wasn’t worth getting offended over Nelly’s brazen question. With a dry chuckle, she asked, “How long have you wanted to ask me that?”

“For months. It’s no fun not knowing any interesting tidbits about you. You can’t be as boring as you act.”

“I am as boring. I don’t have a lover.”

Nelly gave her a lop-sided smile. “Do you believe in marriage? I can see you as a secret romantic.”

“I’m not a romantic,” Riana objected, as if she’d just been insulted. “I just think relationships are more trouble than they’re worth.”

Her grandfather had raised her and Jannie, and he’d been a romantic. He’d also been an idealist and had taught them to be that way too. For the last few years, though, Riana had tried to smother those impulses.

Romanticism and idealism were a threat to the Union, held only by mystics and rebels. According to Union values, normalcy trumped lofty ideals, and recreational sex and breeding programs were better for society than lifetime romantic attachments. For the last hundred years, the government had been discouraging marriage and any sort of idealistic rhetoric, since such old-fashioned vices could potentially lead to irrational, anti-establishment behavior.

“Romantics aren’t as common now, but they’re still around,” Nelly replied, ignoring Riana’s objection. “I think you could find a man still willing to tie the knot if you tried.”

“I just told you—I’m not a romantic, and I don’t want to find a man at all.”

“Connor was a romantic, you know.”

Riana knew that was true. He hadn’t even tried to hide it. When she was fifteen, she’d been desperately in love with him. He’d been six years older than her, though, and always treated her like a little sister.

On the day of her nineteenth birthday, he was just gone.

She missed him.

Nelly was silent for a moment, as if she was thinking about the mysterious disappearance of Connor too, but she soon recovered her natural inquisitiveness. “If you’re not a romantic, then you should find yourself a man. I bet you’d be a knockout if you’d dress better.”

Riana snorted, genuinely amused. She had no illusions about her appearance and wasn’t the least insulted by Nelly’s words. “Right.”

“You would,” Nelly insisted, gesturing toward Riana’s two-tone high-heeled pumps. “You always wear great shoes. Why don’t you wear better clothes?”

Shoes were Riana’s one indulgence, and she spent more on shoes than she did on all the other clothing she owned. She never bothered with the rest of her wardrobe, though. Today she wore no-nonsense dark slacks, a gray top, and a black cardigan. “Why bother?”

“And why do you always wear those braids?”

Riana tugged on one of the two long brown braids she wore every day. “My hair is long. It would get in the way otherwise.”

“But it must be so pretty when you let it down.”

“Don’t even try to fix me up,” Riana said good-humoredly, recovering from her earlier discomfiture in the familiarity of harmless chat. “It won’t work.”

Nelly rolled her chair back to her own desk. It was never wise in this office to waste too much time, even early in the morning. Smyde was always prowling about. “I’m not giving up. One day, I’ll give you a makeover. We’ll find you a man yet.”

Riana just laughed in response. There wasn’t any sense in arguing.

But Riana had no illusions. She wasn’t going to find herself a man.

In her mind, recreational sex was another empty, sordid facet of the Union’s regime—imposed on people so they became interchangeable and thus easier to control—and she wasn’t going to participate in that. Besides, to attract a man, she’d have to be noticed, and Riana spent her life trying not to be noticed.

She thought about Mikel again before she forced the visual out of her mind.

Nelly looked like she was going to say something else, but her words were cut off when Smyde came over to stand in front of Riana’s cubicle.

Riana looked up at him questioningly, hoping he hadn’t decided during the night to yell at her some more.

“Did you find anything this morning? I’m told you went back to storage to check into something.”

Nothing occurred in the office that wasn’t monitored. Riana should have known she’d be questioned.

The three sheets of paper she’d been analyzing that morning were at the bottom of her inbox. She should just pull them out and hand them to her supervisor.

She could feel Jenson’s blue eyes on her from across the room.

Without thinking it through, she dropped her hands into her lap and met Smyde’s eyes squarely. “I did. I thought I remembered something from a couple of texts I read earlier this week that might add up to an anomaly. But I remembered wrong. It was nothing.”

Smyde studied her warily.

“I just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything else, so I’m trying to cover all my bases.”

This seemed to satisfy him. With a curt nod, he said, “Good. Keep it up.” Then he just walked away.

Riana let out a breath and stared down at the text in front of her. It wasn’t until Smyde was on the far side of the office that she dared to glance over at Jenson.

He was still watching her. His expression was composed, but there was an obvious thank-you in his eyes.

She inclined her head slightly and looked away, her cheeks flushing a little.

It was a ridiculous reaction. There was no good reason for it.

But she’d done something different, noteworthy, rebellious. She felt rather pleased with herself.

***

Captain Largan studied the file that had just been laid on his desk.

He hated days like today—filled with a lot of trivial problems that managed to distract him from accomplishing anything worthwhile. He needed to organize security for the President’s visit to Newtown, and he’d barely begun to make the necessary arrangements.

This was one trivial issue too many.

“Can’t you take care of this yourself?” he demanded, staring up at the supervisor of the city’s Readers.

Smyde cleared his throat rather smugly. “Regulation requires I report to you any suspicious activity and the steps I’m taking to address it.”

The man’s manner of speaking got on Largan’s nerves—like Smyde went out of his way to sound pompous. Gritting his teeth, Largan managed not to stand up and clobber the pretentious imbecile. “So what is suspicious about this woman?” He leafed through the file, which was filled with images and symbols. Union files were only rarely put together with written texts.

“Her name is Riana Cole. She overlooked a reference to the Underground.”

Stifling a yawn, Largan managed not to toss the file away. As soon as Smyde left, he needed to call the General Counsel to the President, and he wanted to get that onerous duty over with. “Surely you have your own methods for dealing with sloppiness.”

“It may not have been sloppiness. She has also been observed associating with Jenson Talon.”

That was a name Largan recognized. Straightening up, he felt a few flickers of interest. “Are they lovers?”

“We don’t know. There’s no evidence of it, but they’ve been seen associating.”

Associating could mean anything. It was one of the words tossed around among Union officials so often it had lost any clear meaning. “So we think there are ties to the Front here?”

“To the
Underground
,” Smyde said. “Maybe. We’re pursuing it through all the normal channels. I have also requisitioned a tail on her. Policy requires me to report it to you.”

Largan wondered if Smyde had corrected him on purpose—using the preferred Union appellation for the Front—or if it had been unconscious. Probably on purpose.

Refocusing on the issue, he mentally added up columns of numbers in his head to ensure they still had enough money in the budget. “An undercover officer, I hope. Surely you don’t need a Breather for this kind of job.”