inDIVISIBLE (3 page)

We’d been on a beach
in Greece. T’s identification papers had just been stolen and he’d been beaten. He’d laughed about it, claiming it would never happen in One United where the Alliance comforts its sorry Citizens.

My finger darted from the delete key and scrolled to the first message instead. Could it really be that the T at the end of sorry was actually him trying to identify himself? It had looked like a standard typo but
… I placed my fingers on the keyboard. The typo was possible but not likely.

             
My heart fluttered and for a moment I forgot that I’d just lost my father. T was trying to contact me discreetly. I responded to several other messages before I responded to T.
Comfort appreciated
, I wrote.
As always.

I deleted my sent mail the way my father had taught me, the way that
left no trace for the Alliance. Since all electronic data was immediately transmitted to Alliance processing, it might cause a small blip but they likely wouldn’t notice this small message had been sent, until they analyzed all the data when I died. What could they do about it then, me contacting a person I was never supposed to see again?

Besides, I deserved some privacy, I was sure. That’s what my father told me. It’s something he’d actually been talking more and more about
before the terrorists got him. Wanting more privacy came with the job, or so he claimed.

Not that I completely understood his job. All I knew is that h
e’d spent years working in recovery; taking PCAs from people who’d passed away to record their data and send it to an Alliance processing center. That’s how they recorded your life, by who you contacted, what you said in messages, which news articles you read, your medical files … of course, it was all done electronically, so my father never saw the data himself, simply plugged in the machine, typed in the codes necessary to hack the system and released the content. Then he sent it to one of two offices—one refurbished the older or broken machines. The other simply reprogrammed it for the next assignee.

I wondered if mine had been owned by anyone before me, but ultimately, it really didn’t matter as they were upgraded
before they were reassigned, so they were basically the same as any other in the country.

             
I remembered asking my father if he’d ever recovered a child’s PCA.
Once,
he’d said. He’d never spoken of it again, and I’d never asked.

My mother’s sobbing quieted to a steady sniff, quiet enough that I heard the clean-bot kick on. The little machine ran in the living area every night while we slept, replacing energy-sucking vacuum cleaners and time-
consuming sweeping. During the days we alternated it between bedrooms and the bathroom, saving time for us to get more done at work or concentrate on our school work.

I refreshed my message page, anxious for another word from T. If only my father
could have shown me how to track where messages came from because waiting for T was killing me. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the risk of messaging too much, but I’d been craving T for months and now with my father gone—

I pulled the pins from my bun and released my hair down my back. Long waves fell halfway to my waist and I scrubbed my fingers across my scalp to ease the tension my bun always caused.

My PCA remained quiet and I only had another five minutes of messaging before the machine went offline, along with our power.

“Come on
, T,” I whispered, my feet twitching. “Give me something more to go on.”

             
The charging light went out and a yellow bar crossed my screen stating I was now offline.
They’d stolen my power three minutes early.

I unplugged my PCA, slipped out of my school uniform and crawled into bed in my und
erwear, too tired to pull on pajamas.

CHAPTER 4

Because I could not resist my mother’s grief, nor tolerate the isolation, I spent the majority of my first two grieving days in the mountains, on the trails I’d hiked with my father. The permits were easy enough to obtain, a simple safety precaution form I accessed online so they’d know where to look for me if I didn’t return. The solitude comforted and disturbed me so much so that by noon on the second day I returned to town to sit by the fountains at the shopping center, mothers pushing babies in their carts and staring at me as they wondered why I wasn’t in school. I spoke to no one, avoided eye contact. I just stared at the gurgling water and wondered what had happened to my mother.

She told me to hike, to get out of her way so she could sort my father’s belongings. She hardly looked at me, didn’t touch me … she never even said my father’s name anymore.

The shopping center filled at seven and I left, avoiding more anxious stares to return to the isolation of my bedroom.

The third day I endured the condolences offered by strangers as we stood over a small box of ashes that
used to be my father’s body in a bland room above Section Seven’s crematorium.

I’d only been to one mourning before—my grandmother’s—but she’d died while I’d been a child and all I remembered was the navy dress
my mother had bought me to wear and the stares of the strangers when I fingered the delicate lace on the hem.

I
wore no lace to my father’s mourning. I left my hair down for the occasion and put in gentle curls, the way my father preferred it. My mother had pulled hers back into a tight bun, the gray streaks more pronounced than they’d seemed three days ago. I thought it made her look harsh and angry, feelings she’d freely emitted since learning of her husband’s death. I glanced into her tear-streaked face, hoping to see life but earned an immediate reprimand for not greeting the next mourner.

Ice clenched my heart
, and I excused myself again, squeezing past the dark clad businessmen who’d worked with my father, their wives clutching their hands in silent gratitude that they were not the ones in the little box, burned to a fine ash. Worse were the whispers about their colleagues who’d turned out to be terrorists.

“Can you imagine working right beside a terrorist and not knowing for five years?” a
spindly woman whispered to her bulging companion.

The
second smothered her reply when I passed the two, her body still but her eyes following me until she had to physically turn to watch me walk from the room. Neither of those women had any remorse for my father. They simply attended out of duty, like half the others in the room that mingled amid the scent of flowers and sweat.

My head spun as I
burst into the hallway, found the exit and darted outside. I leaned against the sun-warmed wall of the building and closed my eyes, my lids colored red from the sunlight. I had to count to twenty before the whispers faded from my mind. Summer noises—birds, insects and the occasional whirring of a city bus passing by—replaced the whispers. I pressed my fingertips to my temples and tried to stop the spinning too.

Another twenty and I took my first deep breath.

More videos had been released along with pictures of the weapons the terrorists had used to kill my father and the other men—compact black rifles that looked like those the officers carried. In the early hours before the mourning, those weapons had seemed surreal.

I reached for my PCA, remembered I’d left my backpack in the mourning room near my mother and decided it didn’t matter anyway. All I wanted was a message from T and I knew it wouldn’t be there.

The door opened and a couple walked down the steps, hands tightly clasped. The woman tilted her blonde hair and whispered something to the man that made his cheeks color. He chuckled and I balled my fists, wondering how to make them understand the pain when I was jerked from my thoughts by a boy about my age slipping through the doors behind them and sliding up next to the wall beside me.

He had
dark brown hair and eyes like chocolate. Black lashes framed his eyes and for a second I felt envy. “Hello,” he said.

He had a shadow of hair above his upper lip as though he’d forgotten to shave and it drew my gaze to those lips, to the way they moved when he spoke.

“Do you speak?” he asked.

I licked my lips, course against my tongue
and jerked my gaze away. “Of course I speak.” My face heated, and I concentrated on the couple who now swayed their hips in rhythm as they ambled down the sidewalk.

“I couldn’t take any more either,” he said, leaning against the wall beside me, elbows nearly touching.
“The long lines, the unfamiliar faces.”

“My father’s mourning is that boring, huh?” I asked, not bothering to hide the sarcasm.

He cleared his throat. “No, but my father’s is excruciating.”

My heart thudded and I flinched.
I pushed a stray curl behind my ear and apologized. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “You didn’t kill him.”

“But I—” I stammered, unsure how to apologize for assuming. “I—”

His hand touched my arm, briefly, enough to gain my attention and send a shiver through my fingertips. “Don’t even try to apologize. I know what you mean.”

I nodded.

Birds
continued to chirp like we were out for a picnic not hiding from the dead. The trees in front of the crematorium swayed with the ceaseless wind, just as it toyed with my hair. I tucked my hair back and wondered how to start over with this boy.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“Brennen Carmichal.”

I’d seen his picture in the news reports, had heard his name, but couldn’t remember what role he played at the Alliance City Center so I said simply
, “I’m sorry about your father.”

“I thought I made it clear about apologies.” His voice carried sadness, yes, but there was something more.
I turned to face him, leaning my right arm against the building so close I could feel his shirtsleeve brush my flesh when the breeze caught it.

“So no more apologies,”
I consented.

He nodded once, stern
ly, and I couldn’t decide whether I liked him or not. “He was the staff doctor at the Alliance Center.”

I caught my bottom lip between my teeth and scrunched my eyebrows together.
I remembered reading that, remembered my father saying something about the doctor just last week, but couldn’t remember what it had been. “Who are you?”

“Cray Carmichal.” He extended his hand to shake
mine, and I took it but we didn’t move our hands up and down as traditional handshakes go. We just stood there, holding one another’s hands awkwardly.

My cheeks grew warm and sweat f
ormed on my palm. I pulled my hand away and planted my back against the wall again. I cleared my throat. “How long do you think we can stay out here before someone comes looking for us?” I asked quietly.

He pulled out his PCA, swiped his right hand over the screen and chuckled
—a sound I hadn’t expected from so many today. “The longest I’ve made it is seven minutes, fourteen seconds. We’re at eight.”

“And why is that funny?” I asked.

Cray put his PCA in his back pocket and folded his arms. “It’s not.” For the first time I noticed how smooth his skin was, how bronzed and firm.

“Were you close to your father?” he asked, fingertip barely touching his bottom lip as he swiped an imaginary pest from his cheek, a signal my father had used to imply silence.

I nodded.

His voice
rose slightly as he said, “Neither was I. He was so involved in work all the time that we barely spoke. I wish I’d known him better.”

             
I closed my eyes as my head thunked back against the wall.
They were listening to us
, that’s what he was trying to tell me. My father had warned me about listening devices in government buildings, but why did they think we needed monitoring at a mourning? Our fathers had just been killed by terrorists. They couldn’t think we had something to do with that.

I decided to play along
anyway. “I mean we talked, but it was just dinner conversation, you know? He told us funny stories about things he saw on his way to work or whatever.”

“You’re lucky to have those memories,” he said, his hand touching my arm, just below the elbow,
his fingertips light, moving toward my hand before stepping away just as the doors to the crematorium opened.

A bald man in a black suit stood there, watching us both before he said gently,
“Brynn, Cray, you’re needed in your mourning rooms.”

We nodded in unison, followed the man down the narrow hallway and turned off at our appointed rooms, not saying another word or even daring
to glance at one another.

CHAPTER 5