Exodia (4 page)

Her father finally spoke again.
Kassandra imagined that he had been quietly waiting for the clouds
to clear and now could catch sight of that three-quarter moon and
all the stars.

“
You’re right,” he told his
wife, “it’ll be a lot smaller, primitive, and I’ll need some extra
muscle to build it. Hmf, this is one of those times I
wish—”

Kassandra rolled over. She knew her
father wished for sons, though not instead of the seven daughters
he had, but in addition to them. Both her parents would get
suddenly silent whenever any of the girls spoke of a desire to have
a brother. It was almost as if there existed somewhere a missing
older brother. That’s what she liked to imagine. An older brother
who had lots of friends. Friends she could get to know. Boyfriends.
Fall in love.

Get married.

Move away.

Have babies.

Kassandra drifted off to sleep thinking
about a missing brother, a broken windmill, and an awful story she
had heard when she was little. Something about killing
babies.

* * *

Jamie comes around from the side of the
building and sees me, waves. I walk toward him and he jogs up,
greets me, elbow out as if to mock the Reds I met.

“
Hey,” he says, “I’ve been
circling around here for the last hour. Did you catch the thief?
Where have you been?”

I try to act irritated with him, drop a
curse or two as I slam him for being a wuss, but really I’m just
trying not to think of that wild dog … or that man’s face, my fist,
the bushes, the sticks.

“
I’m sorry,” he says, “but,
you know, my dad and all …” He’s right, I do know. His dad is the
President of Defense and maybe meaner than my grandfather, but his
dad would actually care if something happened to Jamie.

“
He’d kill me,” he says. I
flash on that dead body, wipe my forehead, and try to
laugh.

“
Did I miss dinner?” I’m
sure I did since it’s dark.

“
Yup, but I saved you this.”
He glances up at me for half a second, his eyes hooded, as if he’s
lying. He opens his belt sack to offer me a linen wrapped roll. I
tear off a chunk and pop it in my mouth, but I don’t thank him. I
need to keep up the angry facade or else I might break
down.

“
Well?” Jamie’s impatient.
We’re half-way back to the side door and I still haven’t answered
his first question. I can’t decide how much to say.

If I tell him I know the kid’s name,
that he’s a spy for Ronel’s people, that there’s a prophecy about
me, he might say something to his dad. I’d be called in,
interrogated, forced to tell, and Barrett and Lydia would be toast.
There’d be more questions. The guards would make a canvass of
everywhere I went. They’d tear down the clinic and they’d tear down
Barrett’s house, too. And Lydia’s house. They’d search the
neighborhood. They’d find the body.

Guilty remorse shreds my heart with
fear.

We stop at the door. I focus not on my
dark deed, but picture instead a lovely dark face. “To tell you the
truth,” I say, “I got lost.”

* * *

In the morning Kassandra woke to the
sound of crying. It was Katie.

“
Wake up. You’re having a
bad dream again. Wake up.”

“
What?” Katie brushed off
her sister’s hands. “Get off my bed. What are you
doing?”

Kassandra moved back. “You were crying.
Nightmare?”

“
The lambs,” Katie said. She
sat up and looked toward the window. “They were dying. Dying of
thirst.”

“
It’s all right. There’s
plenty of water in the pond. They’re not going to die of thirst.”
Kassandra went to the window and looked out. The fence to the
sheep’s enclosure ran up to the edge of the pond. But there was
something different this morning. The edge of the pond seemed
muddier. In fact the pond looked smaller. “Come here, Katie,
look.”

Both girls stared. Kassandra didn’t
have any idea how they would water the sheep if the windmill no
longer worked to fill the pond.

“
Oh, no,” Katie said, “the
lambs will get around the edge of the fence if the water recedes
any more.”

Chapter 3 The Fugitive

From the second page of the
Ledger:

He went out to where his own
people were. He saw a man beating one of his own. He killed him and
hid him
.

AFTER A PRETTY sleepless night I
resolve to stay as far away as possible from the B streets in the
Red slum. It ought to be easy except that now, with the early
spring morning light, I forget my resolution and I’m tempted to
retrace my steps to look for Lydia.

I need to darken my tattoo though I
might have an advantage with her if I let her see how reddish it is
now. Maybe that’s part of the prophecy.

I dress as quickly as possible, putting
on a long sleeve shirt even though it’s warm, and sneak through the
capitol building to my grandfather’s quarters. The capitol is a
collection of office buildings that were easiest to fortify,
convert into living and working spaces, and use as the Executive
President’s year-round command center. While it’s guarded at the
gate and randomly around the grounds, it’s pretty lax inside. My
mother called it the palace or the castle when I was little, but I
see it now as not much better than the homes in the slum, just
bigger. Half our windows are boarded up or broken. The air
conditioning is rarely effective and the lighting only works
because of the expensive generators that run on fuel my grandfather
stockpiled before the last civil uprising.

I peer down the hallway that leads to
the Defense President’s residence, a suite of three rooms where I
can usually find Jamie–if I’m sure his father is not around. Right
now I don’t know. I cross over to the hall leading to the stairs. I
don’t think Jamie would be interested in this, so I won’t include
him. I’m not sure I trust him anyway.

I reach my grandfather’s quarters and
as I expected there’s no guard. The room just down the hall is an
old conference room turned into a library. It’s the room my nanny
brought me to when she taught me to read and write, before I had
tutors, before I was allowed to socialize or be schooled with the
children of the secretaries, generals, and governors who rotate
through our political world. I haven’t been back to this room in
years.

The door doesn’t lock. I step inside
and close it softly. The light is good in here. The east facing
windows are fairly clean. Enough light pours in to make my job
easier. I start with an old SCR and set it on the table by the
window, flick the tab, and let it soak in the solar rays while I
scan the shelves for what I hope is here.

I read the labels on the stacked boxes.
Many are neatly identified with names and dates or acronyms and
numbers, printed out on stickers. Some look hastily compiled with
handwritten codes. These are the ones that should hold the key. I
bring a pile of them to the table and study the codes. I decide on
the four whose nearly illegible categories begin with
“Pr”.

I slip the first one into the SCR and
the screen loads up immediately. I expect a password prompt, but
the touch-screen glows with audio, video, and reader options. I
pick the video option but nothing happens. I pull the box out and
set it on the shelf to my left.

Box “Pr-4-13-2051-D2” gives a similar
result–no video. I’m not particularly patient, but with this one I
try the audio option. It begins to play and an odd voice, not the
usual computer-generated one, recites the code followed by
“unsubstantiated psychic forecast by trained level 6 subject,
non-aided.” The audio stops. That’s it. I pull it out.

Three’s the charm, I think, but the
door opens and a guard steps in.

I have the box I pulled out in my left
hand and the third box in my right hand. I look over my shoulder,
raise my eyebrows, but say nothing. I’m guilty of so much more than
being in the archive room.

“
Hey, Dalton. Just checking.
Everything okay?”

I nod, let my face relax.

“
The Executive is heading
back to his rooms, so just stay in here, uh …” The guard acts
embarrassed. “I mean, uh, if you want to see him I can let him know
you’re here.” His voice goes up like a question on the last word,
but I shake my head no. “Okay, then.” He closes the door and I let
my breath out. The last time I was in the Executive President’s
presence things had not gone well. Grandfather or not, he’s a
tyrant.

I put the third box in and then the
fourth. Nothing on either. This is a waste of time. I walk back to
the place I found them and slide them in. I realize I left the
first one on another shelf by the window. What the heck. I grab it,
blow the dust off the metal edges and insert it once again into the
SCR. The Reader opens it again and this time I see the audio and
video options blink weakly while the reader icon glows green. I
press it.

It opens. I begin to read:

Pr-4-13-2051-D1

Substantiated psychic
forecast by trained level 1 subject, drug-aided

Corroboration by trained
level 2 administrator, unaided

Authentication code: P-R-
1116-49-C

Content: Executive President
Assassination Attempt, 99.999% probability of success in 24 years,
3 months, 2 days. Assassin: DOB ?/?/2077, Red parents, central
states area

Audio content: Subject 1’s
vocalizations, trance, drug-induced utterances

Video content A: Subject 1,
Subject 2, recorded and validated, before, during, and after
time-stamped predictions, 100% accuracy

Video content B: Executive
Presidential order, proposed, endorsed, and voted on by Executive
Cabinet, no objections. Mandate signed.

This must be the mandate Lydia meant:
the Culling Mandate. I try reloading the box to try to get the
video to open. I’m curious to see an actual psychic forecast. Six
or seven years ago, when I got to go along on an outer state tour,
we stayed with a military governor whose kids taught me new games.
I remember how they would play-act at predicting things, going into
trances and waving their arms around.

The video doesn’t open.

I hear my grandfather’s voice outside
the door, loud and angry, and I hurry to replace the box with the
other ones. I’m torn between hiding or posing myself at a desk with
an actual book, but then a door slams and the shouting stops. I
begin to search the shelves for anything else that might give me
information about the mandate, or where I was born, or why anyone
would carve my name into a wall.

I spot a shelf with a neat pile of
ledger books. They perk my interest because of their odd placement
between the vertical lines of upright books. Their spines are
without label. I thumb through one expecting columns of numbers,
but instead I find the yellowing pages filled with poetic verse.
Priests and sheep, beasts and snakes, love and marriage. The
ledgers probably mean nothing at all, but on a whim I tear out the
first few pages of one of them and roll them ’til they fit in one
of my belt sacks. Because it’s still early I swing by the kitchen
and grab some fruit before heading to that place in the fence. I
can make it to Lydia’s house and back before our tutor
arrives.

I climb the fence and ease myself over.
I land next to some pretty impressive paw prints and I touch both
belt sacks to remind myself which one holds my pathetic
knife.

I notice the smells, the garbage, the
stink, but also the good scents; someone is roasting coffee,
something that is smuggled along with cacao beans. There is already
a line for water, but instead of a stream of women snaking along
the street there are six men with all kinds of contraptions for
hauling large quantities of water back to their homes. Another
group of six lingers a block away. I can tell the Blues from the
Reds, though they are low class Blues, by the way they look down
their noses at their just as poor counterparts.

I round a corner and head up Burnell
Street. I slow a bit when I see a group of Red kids, probably all
around fourteen, lucky to have missed the Culling Mandate, lucky to
be alive. They’re bullying a smaller kid and for some reason I
think of Lydia’s smile, her eyes, and the whole pleasure of her
beauty and how she looked at me. And I imagine her now prodding me
to intervene. So I do.