Birthmarked (3 page)

Ziqi Amarata Zephryn Brand

Bethany Appling Gina Cagliano

Kirby Arcado Chloe Cantara

Sali Arnold Brooke Connor

Francesco Amarus Tomy Czera

Jack Bartlett Yustyn Dadd

Bintou Bascanti Isabelle Deggan It went on alphabetically for several pages, and on a quick glance, none of the names were familiar. The pages were pocked with tiny pinholes in no pattern that she could see. She shook her head.

“You never saw your mother with it? Your father?” he asked.

“No. I’ve never seen it. Where’d you get it? It looks like an Enclave thing.”

“It was at the bottom of your father’s sewing box.”

She shrugged, tossing it back on the table. “That makes sense. He picks up all kinds of odd papers to stick his pins in.”

“Like what other papers?” Sgt. Grey asked. “Anything else you can think of?”

She frowned at him. “Didn’t you ask him this yourself?”

He picked up the pamphlet and slid it slowly into the pocket of his jacket.

“I need to know if your mother gave you anything recently-- a list or a record book or a calendar of some sort.”

Confused, Gaia glanced automatically at the calendar that hung in the kitchen by the back window. They kept track of when her dad’s clothing orders were promised, and when they planned to meet friends at the Tvaltar, and when one of the pullets laid its first egg. It listed her family’s birthdays, including her brothers’. Only then did she remember what Old Meg had given her. Gaia’s heart fluttered as she thought of what was tied against her leg at that very moment. She didn’t know what it was, but if he searched her and found it, would he believe her? She tried to guess, watching the visible lines of his smooth, angular cheeks, and his precise, colorless lips.

“There’s the calendar there,” she said, pointing to the one on the wall.

“No. Something else. A list perhaps.”

“All she gave me is in my satchel,” she said. “There’s no list.”

“May I?” he asked, reaching toward the table.

She made a gesture of permission, as if she had a choice.

Sgt. Grey opened her bag and carefully examined each item as he took it out: the squat, metal, dark-blue teakettle and its two matching cups; the herb kit, a pouched towel with vials and bottles of pills, herbs, and serums that her father had sewn for her and her mother had filled from her own stores of medicines; forceps; a metal bowl; scissors; a kit of scalpels; a knife; needles and thread; a syringe; a suction bulb; the bottle of dye that she had not had time to return to the herb kit; and a ball of red twine.

He then turned the satchel inside out and examined the cloth, every seam and ripple of the brown, gray, and white fabric. Gaia’s father had lovingly sewn each stitch, making a thing of beauty as well as a strong, practical bag that fit comfortably over Gaia’s shoulder. She felt like the satchel was part of her, and watching Sgt. Grey’s examination of the cloth and its contents felt like a keen violation of her privacy, all the more because his fingers were meticulous and careful in their movements.

His hands stilled on the cloth, and he looked over at her finally, his expression neutral. She couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

“You’re young,” he said.

His comment surprised her, and she saw no reason to answer. Besides, she could say the same thing to him. He straightened, then exhaled with a sigh and started putting her things back in the satchel.

“It’s okay,” she said, stepping forward to the table. “I’ll do it. I need to clean my things anyway.”

She extended her hand as he picked up the bottle of dye, and when he didn’t instantly give it to her, she looked up into his face. A gleam of candlelight finally illuminated his eyes. The bleakness she’d sensed in him was as real as a flat, gray stone, but it was also tinged by a hint of curiosity. For a moment his measuring gaze held hers, and then he released the heavy little bottle into her palm and stepped back, away from the candle flame.

“I want to know about my parents,” she said, forcing herself to remain calm. “When will they be home?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Not soon? Can I see them?” she asked. Why had he relinquished the charade that everything was all right?

“No.”

Each of his answers increased her panic, but also her anger, as if a dose of sand was rising up her windpipe. “Why not?”

He adjusted his hat brim over his eyes. “You d best remember your place,” he said softly.

It took her a moment to realise he was reprimanding her for her impertinence. He might have been polite and considerate as long as that was efficacious, but he was a soldier of the Enclave and as such he had power over her that she could only barely imagine.

She lowered her face, her cheeks burning, and summoned up the deferential words. “Forgive me, Mabrother,” she said.

He reached for his gun, and she heard the shuffling noise of his black coat as he readjusted the strap over his head to the opposite shoulder so it ran diagonally across his torso.

“Should you find a list, record, or calendar anywhere among your mothers things, you will bring it directly and with no delay to the gate, and request an audience with Mabrother Iris, none other. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mabrother,” she said.

“You will take up your mothers duties as a midwife and serve the Enclave in the birthing of babies in Western Sector Three of Wharfton. You will advance the first three babies of each month to the Enclave, each being delivered to the south gate within ninety minutes of the child’s birth.”

Gaia took a step back. The prospect of going on with her mothers work without her mother to guide her was horrible.

“You agree?” he insisted, his voice sharper.

Startled, she glanced up at him. “Yes, Mabrother,” she said.

“You will be compensated. You will receive a double quota of weekly mycoprotein, water, cloth, candles, and fuel. You will be granted weekly fourteen hours at the Tvaltar, which you may accumulate or give to others as you wish.”

She bowed her head, knowing this last compensation would allow her to trade for anything else she might need. It was an incredible pay, essentially double what her mother had been earning, and far more than Gaia had ever expected.

“I am grateful to the Enclave,” she said quietly.

“The Enclave knows that you advanced your first baby, unassisted,” he said, his voice dropping slightly. “This is a baby that might have been easily concealed, or sold, or given to the mother. The Enclave knows you have demonstrated the highest loyalty, and loyalty does not go unrewarded.”

Gaia knotted her fingers together. It was almost like the Enclave knew what indecision had gripped her before she advanced the baby. Though she had done the right thing and was being rewarded for it, she was frightened, too. Did they know also that she had stopped to talk to Old Meg? Did they know that even now she had her mothers parcel tied to her leg? What the Enclave knew or did not know had never mattered before, when she had no secrets.

Now it did. She wished Old Meg had never given her the parcel.

She had a startling realization, and suddenly looked up at Sgt. Grey. She could turn it in right now. Her heart leaped into overdrive. She could ask him to wait, and turn to lift her skirt, and take off the parcel right now and hand it over. That would be the safest thing. She could say she’d never even looked at it carefully and had no idea what it was. The guards could catch Old Meg before she got very far.

She bit inward on her lips.

“Yes?” Sgt. Grey asked. “You’ve thought of something?”

She turned her left cheek toward him, the scarred side, which she showed instinctively when she wished to hide her thoughts. For an instant, she remembered the keening wail of Agnes Lewis as she begged Gaia for her baby Priscilla. Agnes Lewis! Gaia had hardly thought of the mother as a real person until now. Such mother greed was unnatural and disloyal to the Enclave, and yet there had been something so powerful, so desperate in it. Gaia could not fully close herself to Agnes’s pain, and it was inextricably tangled up with the parcel Old Meg had given her, as if her mother had sent her the mysterious gift as an antidote.

“Gaia?”

She shook her head, startled that he was using her first name. It was a complete breach of etiquette. She looked at him curiously. The rigid line of his jaw had relaxed, or maybe it was that his shoulders weren’t as stiff.

“Excuse me, Masister,” he said. “I thought you recalled something.”

A log in the fire adjusted in the heat with a crackling, falling noise, and a flare of light emanated from the fireplace, touching along his stern profile. She needed to confabulate something that would reassure him she had nothing to hide.

She gave a smile that she hoped looked like embarrassed vanity. “I was just thinking I might be able to get some of those boots like they show on the Tvaltar. The cowboy-style ones for girls.” The soldier gave a dry, brief laugh. “You’ll certainly be able to afford them. It’s your privilege.”

She stepped nearer to the table again with a more determined air and began carefully rearranging things into her satchel, setting aside what need to be cleaned. She breathed deeply, forcing her hands to be steady.

The soldier moved toward the door, and Gaia thought he would open it to say good-bye. When he paused there, she looked up again.

“What happened to your face?” he asked.

She felt a familiar kick in her gut, and then a stab of disappointment. Twice in one night. She had assumed he would be too polite to ask, or that he, with any background knowledge of her family, would already know the story.

“When I was little, my grandmother was making candles and she had a big vat of hot beeswax in the backyard,” she said. “I walked into the vat.” Usually that ended the conversation. “I don’t remember it,” she added.

“How old were you?” he asked.

She tilted her face slightly, watching him. “Ten months.”

“You were walking at ten months?” he asked.

“Not very well, apparently,” she said dryly.

He was silent a moment, and she waited again for him to put his hand on the doorknob. She knew what he was thinking. Because she was scarred, she had had no chance of being advanced to the Enclave. In some ways, her case was the supreme example of why it was better to give the babies over within hours. Years ago, they used to leave babies with their mothers for the first year of life, but the mothers were growing increasingly careless, and the children were getting injured or sick before their twelve-month ceremonies. With the current baby quota system, the Enclave received healthy, whole babies the day they were born, and the mothers could get on with becoming pregnant again, if that’s what they wanted to do.

No deformed babies were ever advanced, for any reason. For Gaia, one accident had guaranteed a life of poverty outside the wall, with no education, no chance for good food or leisure or easy friendships, while the girls her age who’d been advanced were now in the Enclave, with boundless electricity, food, and education. They were wearing beautiful clothes, dreaming of wealthy husbands, laughing, and dancing. Gaia had seen them once, when she was a child. The Protectorat’s sister had had her wedding and for one day, the people of Wharfton had been permitted into a barricaded street of the Enclave to witness the wedding parade. It seemed like a dream to Gaia now, the colors and music, the beauty and wealth. The specials at the Tvaltar paled by comparison. That one glimpse, she later realized, was proof of a life that might have been hers had she not been so clumsy, or if they had instituted the safer policy before she’d been born.

She would make sure that the babies in her care had the opportunities she’d never had, those lucky three every month. If the rest, the other half dozen or more babies were unadvanced, then that was their destiny. They would take their chances with life in Wharfton as she had.

She had no idea if her visage betrayed the shades of her thoughts, but Sgt. Grey was regarding her still with an attentive, expectant expression.

‘I’m glad to serve the Enclave,” she said finally.

“As am I,” he replied.

He turned then, and she watched his fingers close on the knob. A moment later the door closed softly, and she was left alone in her home, with a drafty flare from the fireplace high’ lighting the silent strings of her father’s banjo and the fact that both her parents were gone.

Chapter 3

Rapunzel

WHEN GAIA HAD FINISHED cleaning out her teapot and cups and replenished the herbs she had used for Agnes’s labor, she carefully repacked her satchel, keeping it ready as her mother had taught her. Next she straightened up everything that had been disturbed in the guards’ search, trying to make the little house feel like home again. Even the two yellow can’ dies on the mantel that they lit every evening in honor of her brothers had been shifted a few millimeters from their familiar spots. Despite the return of order, her sense of unease remained, and when she slumped down in her father’s chair before the dying embers on the hearth, she could not relax enough to sleep, even when weariness seeped into her muscles with the gentle heat.

A soft tapping came on the back door. She rose. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. Theo. Amy sent me over to see if you’re all right.”

She pulled open the door and Theo Rupp entered, opening his arms wide. “Scared you, didn’t they?” he said.

Gaia gratefully flew into his hug, closing her eyes as the man’s strong arms enfolded her. The potter smelled of clay and dust as he always did, and he patted her back with a heavy hand. She sneered. “There, now,” he said, releasing her. “Why don’t you come on over and spend the night with me and Amy? You don’ t want to be alone over here.”

Gaia stepped back to the fireplace and threw another log on. “No,” she said, taking a seat and motioning him toward her father’s more comfortable chair. “I want to stay here. They might be back anytime.”

“I didn’t actually see you come home or I would have been over sooner,” Theo said apologetically. “Amy saw a guard leave ten minutes back and said you had to be here. Was there just the one, then?”