After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (8 page)

The people beyond the Firewall are not people. Zinhle isn’t really sure what they
are. The government knows, because it was founded by those who fought and ultimately
lost the war, and their descendants still run it. Some of the adults close to her
must know—but none of them will tell the children. “High school is scary enough,”
said Zinhle’s father, a few years before, when Zinhle asked. He smiled as if this
should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

The Firewall has been around for centuries—since the start of the war, when it was
built to keep the enemy at bay. But as the enemy encroached and the defenders’ numbers
dwindled, they fell back, unwilling to linger too close to the front lines of a war
whose weapons were so very strange. And invisible. And insidious. To conserve resources,
the Firewall was also pulled back so as to protect only essential territory. The few
safe territories merged, some of the survivors traveling long distances in order to
join larger enclaves, the larger enclaves eventually merging too. The tales of those
times are harrowing, heroic. The morals are always clear: safety in numbers, people
have to stick together, stupid to fight a war on multiple fronts, et cetera. At the
time, Zinhle supposes, they didn’t
feel
like they were being herded together.

Nowadays, the Firewall is merely symbolic. The enemy has grown steadily stronger over
the years, while tech within the Firewall has hardly developed at all—but this is
something they’re not supposed to discuss. (Zinhle wrote a paper about it once and
got her only
F
ever, which forced her to do another paper for extra credit. Her teacher’s anger
was worth the work.) These days the enemy can penetrate the Firewall at will. But
they usually don’t need to, because what they want comes out to them.

Each year, a tribute of children is sent beyond the Wall, never to be seen or heard
from again. The enemy is very specific about their requirements. They take ten percent,
plus one. The ten percent are all the weakest performers in any graduating high school
class. This part is easy to understand, and even the enemy refers to it in animal
husbandry terms: these children are
the cull
. The enemy does not wish to commit genocide, after all. The area within the Firewall
is small, the gene pool limited. They do not take very young children. They do not
take healthy adults, or gravid females, or elders who impart useful socialization.
Just adolescents who have had a chance to prove their mettle. The population of an
endangered species must be carefully managed to keep it healthy.

The “plus one,” though—no one understands this. Why does the enemy want their best
and brightest? Is it another means of assuring control? They have total control already.

It doesn’t matter why they want Zinhle. All that matters is that they do.

Zinhle goes to meet Mitra after school so they can walk home. (Samantha and her friends
are busy decorating the gym for the school prom. There will be no trouble today.)
When Mitra is not waiting at their usual site near the school sign, Zinhle calls her.
This leads her to the school’s smallest restroom, which has only one stall. Most girls
think there will be a wait to use it, so they use the bigger restroom down the hall.
This is convenient, as Mitra is with Lauren, who is sitting on the toilet and crying
in harsh, gasping sobs.

“The calculus final,” Mitra mouths, before trying again—fruitlessly—to blot Lauren’s
tears with a wad of toilet paper. Zinhle understands then. The final counts for fifty
percent of the grade.

“I, I didn’t,” Lauren manages between sobs. She is hyperventilating. Mitra has given
her a bag to breathe into, which she uses infrequently. Her face, sallow-pale at the
best of times, is alarmingly blotchy and red now. It takes her several tries to finish
the sentence. “Think I would. The test. I
studied
.”
Gasp.
“But when I was. Sitting there. The first problem. I
knew
how to answer it! I did ten others. Just like it.”
Gasp.
“Practice problems. But I couldn’t think. Couldn’t. I.”

Zinhle closes the door, shoving the garbage can in front of it, as Mitra had done
before Zinhle’s knock. “You choked,” she says. “It happens.”

The look that Lauren throws at her is equal parts fury and contempt. “What the hell.”
Gasp.
“Would
you
know about it?”

“I failed the geometry final in eighth grade,” Zinhle says. Mitra throws Zinhle a
surprised look. Zinhle scowls back, and Mitra looks away. “I knew all the stuff that
was on it, but I just…drew a blank.” She shrugs. “Like I said, it happens.”

Lauren looks surprised too, but only because she did not know. “You failed that? But
that test was easy.” Her breathing has begun to slow. She sets her jaw, distracted
from her own fear. “That one didn’t matter, though.” She’s right. The cull only happens
at the end of high school.

Zinhle shakes her head. “All tests matter. But I told them I’d been sick that day,
so the test wasn’t a good measure of my abilities. They let me take it again, and
I passed that time.” She had scored perfectly, but Lauren does not need to know this.

“You took it again?” As Zinhle had intended, Lauren considers this. School officials
are less lenient in high school. The process has to be fair. Everybody gets one chance
to prove themselves. But Lauren isn’t stupid. She will get her parents involved, and
they will no doubt bribe a doctor to assert that Lauren was on powerful medication
at the time, or recovering from a recent family member’s death, or something like
that. The process has to be fair.

Later, after the blotty toilet paper has been flushed and Lauren has gone home, Mitra
walks quietly beside Zinhle for most of the way. Zinhle expects something, so she
is not surprised when Mitra says, “I didn’t think you’d ever talk about that. The
geo test.”

Zinhle shrugs. It cost her nothing to do so.

“I’d almost forgotten about that whole thing,” Mitra continues. She speaks slowly,
as she does when she is thinking. “Wow. You used to tell me everything then, remember?
We were like this—” She holds up two fingers. “Everybody used to talk about us. The
African princess and her Arab sidekick. They fight crime!” She grins, then sobers
abruptly, looking at Zinhle. “You were always a good student, but after that—”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” says Zinhle, and she speeds up, leaving Mitra behind. But
she remembers that incident, too. She remembers the principal, Mrs. Sachs, to whom
she went to plead her case.
Well, listen to you
, the woman had said, in a tone of honest amazement.
So articulate and intelligent. I suppose I can let you have another try, as long as
it doesn’t hurt anyone else.

Zinhle reaches for the doorknob that leads into her house, but her hand bounces off
at first. It’s still clenched into a fist.

She gets so tired sometimes. It’s exhausting, fighting others’ expectations, and doing
it all alone.

In the morning, Zinhle’s homeroom teacher, Ms. Carlisle, hands her a yellow pass,
which means she’s supposed to go to the office. Ms. Carlisle is not Ms. Threnody;
she shows no concern for Zinhle, real or false. In fact, she smirks when Zinhle takes
the note. Zinhle smirks back. Her mother has told Zinhle the story of her own senior
year.
Carlisle was almost in the cull
, her mother had said.
Only reason they didn’t take her was because not as many girls got pregnant that year
as they were expecting. They stopped right at her. She’s as dumb as the rest of the
meat, just lucky.

I will not be meat
, Zinhle thinks, as she walks past rows of her staring, silent classmates.
They’ll send their best for me.

This is not pride, not really. But it is all she has.

In the principal’s office, the staff is nervous. The principal is sitting in the administrative
assistants’ area, pretending to be busy with a spare laptop. The administrative assistants,
who have been feverishly stage-whispering among themselves as Zinhle walks in, fall
silent. Then one of them, Mr. Battle, swallows audibly and asks to see her pass.

“Zinhle Nkosi,” he says, mutilating her family name, acting as if he does not already
know who she is. “Please go into that office; you have a visitor.” He points toward
the principal’s private office, which has clearly been usurped. Zinhle nods and goes
into the small room. Just to spite them, she closes the door behind her.

The man who sits at the principal’s desk is not much older than her. Slim, average
in height, dressed business-casual. Boring. There is an off-pink tonal note to his
skin, and something about the thickness of his black hair, that reminds her of Mitra.
Or maybe he is Latino, or Asian, or Indian, or Italian—she cannot tell specifically,
having met so few with the look. And not that it matters, because his inhumanity is
immediately obvious in his stillness. When she walks in, he’s just sitting there gazing
straight ahead, not pretending to do anything. His palms rest flat on the principal’s
desk. He does not smile or brighten in the way that a human being would, on meeting
a new person. His eyes shift toward her, track her as she comes to stand in front
of the desk, but he does not move otherwise.

There is something predatory in such stillness, she thinks. Then she says, “Hello.”

“Hello,” he says back, immediately, automatically.

Silence falls, taut. Rule 2 is in serious jeopardy. “You have a name?” Zinhle blurts.
Small talk.

He considers for a moment. The pause should make her distrust him more; it is what
liars do. But she realizes the matter is more complex than this: he actually has to
think about it.

“Lemuel,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m Zinhle.”

“I know. It’s very nice to meet you, Ms. Nkosi.” He pronounces her name perfectly.

“So why are you here? Or why am I?”

“We’ve come to ask you to continue.”

Another silence. In this one, Zinhle is too confused for fear. “Continue
what
?” She also wonders at his use of “we,” but first things first.