Donor 23 (42 page)

Reck stared at her. He couldn’t believe what she had told him.

“You’re leaving? Going to him?” he spit out incredulously.

“I don’t expect you to understand. I’m sorry. But I have to talk to him, openly and with honesty.”

“What about me? You don’t care about me? Did you ever?”

“Oh, Reck, yes—”

“I’m a fool. Is that it?” He raised his voice, “I’m a fool?!”

Some of the others turned to look at them.

“No, Reck, it wasn’t that way. No. There were days with you when I thought it would be all OK. It was love, or it was going to be. Everything seemed to fit, at times, you and me.”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry. But you deserve to be with someone who loves you truly. I…just don’t feel it that way. The way it should be, that is, or what I think it should be. I can’t be true to myself and be the person you think I am—the person you want me to be.”

“What do you mean? You are the person I want.”

“I’m not.” She paused.
No more lies. It was time for truth.
“I didn’t kill Nox.”

“What?” The revelation startled him.

“I let him go.”

His frustration and hurt emerged as anger. “How could you do that? How could you let him go? He killed your parents. He brought Kaleb out here and killed him. Oh, wait, Nox was your partner, wasn’t he? You worked with him, informing, didn’t you?” The words stung her—sliced her. “What is it with you? You inform on your own mother, but you won’t kill Nox? Why didn’t you let me do it?”

“I can explain—”

“No! There’s no explanation. You should’ve done it. Or you should have at least let me.”

Colonel Spiller and a few soldiers approached them.

“What’s going on?” Spiller asked.

“She’s leaving,” Reck blurted.

“Leaving?” the Colonel questioned, surprised.

Joan spoke with determination, “Yes, right now—”

Spiller shook his head, indicating no, and motioned to the soldiers. They rapidly stepped around her, surrounding her. One of them was the soldier whom Joan had cut with her knife. The scar glistened across his chin, as he pulled his handgun out of its holster. Instinctively, her hand flew to the knife at her belt.

“Don’t move,” the scarred soldier said, relishing this opportunity for revenge. This time, she didn’t move. He reached over and took the knife from the sheath on her belt.

Reck reacted with anger. “What are you doing? Leave her alone. Don’t
you
threaten her.”

He moved toward the soldier and grabbed his arm, forcing the two of them to the ground. Another soldier drew his gun.

“Reck, don’t!” Joan pleaded.

The Colonel stepped in and broke up the minor fight. Joan made a move to get her knife back, and Spiller grabbed her arm, shoving her slightly.

“You can’t keep me here,” Joan complained, in disbelief.

Spiller said, with an incredulous laugh, “Of course we can. You can’t just leave. What do you think? You signed up.”

“Actually I didn’t.”

“Technicalities.”

Spiller took Joan’s knife from the soldier’s hand, as the others tightened the circle around her.

Spiller ordered, “I think the General would—”

“Want to see me. Fine. I want to see him,” Joan countered.

44

L
ucas sat in the shade under a tree, while his men packed up the campsite. He read a book and sipped from a china teacup he perched on an end table. As usual he was immaculately dressed, wearing a tan uniform, which contrasted brilliantly with his dark skin. Conrad walked away from him, carrying a silver coffee pot and an empty plate. It was an incongruous sight, there in the desert.

Still surrounded by soldiers, Joan and Spiller approached him. Spiller held his arm against Joan, making sure she stopped a few feet away. Then he walked up to Lucas, bent over, and whispered in his ear. Lucas’s eyes darted to Joan. He closed his book slowly and waved Joan to him.

Joan did not move.
Look at him,
she thought,
sitting there like that. How arrogant!
Lucas was a citizen. Her anger at him, at the Alliance, and at the System welled inside her. Then she
recalled what Duncan had said. She was no better than the citizens because she held her own preconceived notions about others.

She took a deep breath and said in a robust voice, “I need to see Duncan Starr. But I’ll be back. I intend to fight with the Resistance. I will. I promise, sir.” Her voice began to crack, and she stopped speaking to swallow. She didn’t want to falter. She wanted to be strong.

Lucas took Joan’s knife from Spiller and examined it, pondering what she said. He wanted the Lionheart in his Resistance. Yet he could understand people. Joan was a fighter, but he couldn’t force her to fight. As a natural leader, he wanted her to
want
to follow him. He stood up.

“Lionheart,” he said, sympathetically but firmly, “walk with me.”

The two of them strolled along a creek, neither speaking for a couple minutes. Spiller and the soldiers followed them at a close distance.

Lucas calmly counseled her, “Look around you. Most of the soldiers here left the Alliance for a better life. They chose to leave it.

“You and I, we have something in common. We were forced to leave our homes. We had to escape. Make our way alone. Leave people we loved. My parents were killed, like yours. Life isn’t just full of challenges. Life
is
a challenge.”

He was remembering, recalling twenty years earlier, when he fled from the Alliance. He was thirty years old at the time. Many of his family members had been killed. His wife was killed.

Joan cleared her throat, “General…”

She wasn’t sure what to say. Back in the Alliance she never had to reason with anyone. She never had to analyze or rationalize. The System didn’t allow it; it offered no ambiguities. The System was clear-cut.
Life had to be different out here
, she thought.
Lucas had to be different
.

“I’ll come back. I have to do this, sir. If I don’t…then I don’t think I’d be any good for you or the Resistance. I can’t explain it.”

Lucas pursed his lips, as he fingered her knife. He learned more about her each time they talked.

“Try,” he said kindly, but it was an order.

They continued the conversation for a while longer. Finally, he put his hand on her shoulder, in a comforting manner, and handed her the knife. Joan glanced behind them—at Spiller and the soldiers. Then she briskly walked away.

Lucas watched her go. He was glad he had the foresight to take those photos of her. He hoped his people in Seaton had made them into posters and transmitted them to their contacts in the Alliance, as he instructed. He would get her to do what he wanted eventually. He was certain of that. Even so, part of him hoped she found what she searched for. And he knew, in order to do that, she would have to return to him.

Nox staggered along the forest. Every few feet he stumbled. His chest pained him. His legs buckled under him. He couldn’t reconcile the image he now had of Joan with the one he had throughout the last year—the donor, the informant, the evader, and someone guilty of assaulting a TEO officer.
Could she be a good person? Could any donor be a good person? Equal to a citizen?
If so, the laws he lived by all his life—the System—were wrong.
No, it was not possible.
The law declared Joan a donor, so she must have the immoral qualities that go along with that status. But her actions in letting him free contradicted the law. Her actions contradicted what he knew of donors.
His father, for one
. Memories of his father swinging his belt—the pain when it reached its target—flooded into his mind. Nox squeezed his eyes against the recollection.

A pounding sound invaded his thoughts and eardrums. He lurched into a clearing and fell to the ground at the crest of a waterfall. The river raced by him to the ridge of the falls, cascading over the sheer drop of eighty feet.

Water. His fear.
Water brings death
. She gave him water—the donor did. Number 23. Joan Lion. But she gave it to help him—to bring him life.

He stared at the cataract, at the torrent of water. In any person’s life, there may be another who enters it and destroys it. He was one of those people, a destoyer—
a thief of sorts
. He thought of the kidnappings. He took those five people from the Outside, never knowing what happened to them afterward. He’d heard stories of a special underground prison—of constant interrogations, threats, and years of confinement. Before he stole them, they had lives and families. He never felt comfortable with the kidnappings. He couldn’t rationalize them with his fervent belief in the rules. So he had requested transfer to the TEO.

The TEO and its reliance on the System fulfilled him. There were no questions, no gray areas. The System spelled out everything with clarity. The System was perfection.

But what did it all mean?
What’s left for a man who’s lost the basis of his devotion?

Tentatively he stepped into the river near the edge of the falls. He waded until the water reached his knees. The surge grabbed his legs. The cold seeped into his bones, but strangely enough he felt calm. He steadied himself in the flow. In a moment the current would grasp him, drag him over the edge. Free him.

Suddenly, over the din of the raging water, a voice called out, “Nox!”

Nox looked around with uncertainty.
Did the voice come from the heavens?

“Captain! Over here!” Henworth yelled from the other side of the river, waving his arms. Two soldiers stood by his side.

“Don’t cross there, Nox. Come upstream a ways, and we’ll string a rope across,” he shouted.

Nox stared at him, not comprehending. He looked back at the water—at the torrent. Henworth called to him, but the water called to him as well.

The Governor’s aide, Biggs, held the poster for the Governor to view. Gates wiped his mouth with a napkin, as Violet took a plate away from his desk.

“This was hanging in ghetto 4 this morning. All over the place. We had a few disturbances,” Biggs informed him. “I just heard they also found some in two of the other ghettos.”

Staring at the poster, Gates held out the napkin but said nothing. When Violet didn’t immediately take it from him, he dropped it on the floor.

Violet returned to pick it up, saying “I’m sorry, sir.”

He ignored her. “Let me see that, Biggs,” anger seeped into his voice.

As Violet stood up with the napkin, he grabbed her arm, squeezing it tightly, but he didn’t take his eyes off the poster. Violet grimaced. Just as quickly, he let go of her—never saying a word to her.

With a hint of uneasiness, Biggs approached him, holding the poster. It showed a young girl with brown hair, her light blue eyes piercing the viewer, as sun streaked across her face.

“That’s 23?” the Governor remarked.

The sun had burned Joan’s face slightly, giving her a healthy, pink-brown glow. Her eyes flickered with certainty and conviction. Gates recalled her eyes the time they met at
the Fitness Center; something had flashed in them then, too. The way she wore her hat on her head, pushed back with the brim buttoned up the left side, gave her an air of confidence. Her hand grasped a rifle, and—he couldn’t believe it—she proudly displayed her tattoo. Over her heart hung a carved figure of a mountain lion. And to top it off, behind the girl’s head, the photographer managed to catch a sunburst on the film, giving an aura of magic to the poster. The caption read, “The Lionheart Lives. The Lionheart Fights.”