Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (20 page)

“But I remember,” Natasha said, the words bursting forth. “I did see them. I was nine. I had a bloody nose. They were taking me to the Department of Health, and I saw three faces looking into the Dome.”

“Well,” Raj replied slowly, with some concern, “maybe you did. Maybe they did find our settlement. But that doesn't prove the rest of their story. That only shows how adept they are at manipulating a set of circumstances for their advantage. They're not unthinking, these people. You told them before that you can't remember the Palm sweep, and apparently they've seized on that fact as a way to draw you in.”

The roar of the water rose from the ravine below, the river itself perceptible only as glints of moonlight.

“But Natasha,” said Raj, his voice rising with a faint note of curiosity, “you don't actually believe them, do you?”

“You don't?”

“At first I did—or at least I wasn't sure. But as soon as I had a second to think about it, I realized that it wasn't likely. I know the Archives and I've searched the Pretends, and I've never come across anything that would corroborate a story like that. A dirty sweep is one thing. I believe they're telling the truth about that. But the idea of a Tribe child getting Inside rings of wish fulfillment on their part. As I said, I've put countless hours into studying our settlement's past. And I can assure you that for three hundred years the Alphas have been, if nothing else, consistent in their ethical practices. If Tribe children ever did survive a sweep, then saving those children would have meant killing them, not bringing them Inside. Probably the Tribes can't wrap their minds around an idea like that. But I'm afraid that's the society we come from.”

“I don't know,” Natasha protested. “People break the rules. We're breaking the rules right now.”

“Not like that, though. Our leaving the settlement wasn't condoned by the other citizens, as an open interaction with a Tribesperson would need to be.”

“They hid the footage,” Natasha pressed. “The footage of the Palm attack.”

“And now we've uncovered the reason,” Raj answered soberly. “Our people started the fire that burned hundreds of Tribespeople alive and injured our own people too. The Alphas are probably protecting someone, someone who made a mistake. Likely they're protecting their own pride too, though they'd never admit it.”

They were quiet again, then Raj smiled a small smile. “It honestly never occurred to me that you'd accept their word as truth, considering your background in the Office of Mercy. Actually, I've only been worried—I'm
still
worried—that you might be so angry with the Pines for making up such wild lies that you've lost your desire to help them. It was foolish, what they did. They're very desperate to secure you as a friend.”

“What about you?” Natasha asked. “Are you angry?”

They were sitting side by side now on a narrow, moss-covered stone. Their biosuits were filthy; they would have to run the acid bath twice just to wash the dirt away. The moon had dropped out of sight, all but for a shimmering glow at the tops of the trees. Natasha could barely make out Raj's profile beside her.

“I don't like it,” he said. “I wish they could have just trusted us. But even with the mistakes they made, that doesn't change my commitment to saving their lives. They're victims, not angels. We can't expect them to always do the right thing. And really, it's hard to blame them for attempting everything within their power to get what they need.”

“I guess our people would do the same in their situation,” Natasha said.

“That's right. Look how far we go to create the world that the Ethical Code tells us is best. You know,” Raj said, after a pause, “it's also possible that they truly believe their own story. Maybe they did lose a little girl in that fire. Maybe that old woman really has convinced herself you're her kin. They don't have the same education that we do. They may not be able to separate emotional desire from empirical fact. They have no psychotronomy. They have no Ethical Code. The concept of projection probably doesn't even exist for them.”

“So this doesn't change how you feel about the Tribes?”

“No, I don't think so. It was an unfortunate choice to put on that charade. But I'm still committed to stopping the sweeps. It's interesting, isn't it? Their idea for destroying the novas. Ingenious, really.”

“Are you actually thinking of helping them?” Natasha asked. “Giving them a nova?”

Raj rubbed his cheeks, contemplative.

“We've had the novas for the last three hundred years and we've killed more than one hundred and forty thousand people, and that's not even counting the Storm. They say they'll destroy the weapons in an effort toward peace, maybe they deserve a try.”

Natasha shivered again, though this time it was not the river air that chilled her. She was still angry with the Tribe for what they had done, how they had scared her, twice now. But there was truth to what Raj was saying. After all, what terrors had America-Five heaped on the Pines, on all the Tribes? In the night, outside the settlement and its protection, the memories of the ones who had died rose to vivid life in Natasha's mind: the woman and her two children, the Palms on the green, and the Cranes, all of the Cranes. She remembered them, starving but resolved, about to feast with their families when their future was sliced from existence with the sharp, exacting blade of a nova. Could she really say that nonexistence was better for them? Could she possibly make herself believe that those on the Inside had sufficient information to judge the ideal moment for those Outside to die?

“You're right,” Natasha said at length. “Anyway, I don't know how else to stop the sweeps. We'll bring them a nova, and we'll end it together.”

Raj did not answer right away, but he put one arm around Natasha, tilting her against his side; it was a friendly, warm gesture that took Natasha by surprise.

“You're pretty amazing, Natasha.”

“You don't have to say that,” she quickly assured him. “I'm fine now. It was just scary in the moment, having them surround me like that.”

“I'm serious. I never imagined that I'd find a person in the settlement who cared about the Tribes as much as I do.”

“What about Mercedes and Sarah, and Ben and Eduardo?”

“They're great. I love my friends. They're all really smart people. But it's not the same thing. You came to your conclusions about the settlement's ethical practices independently. Without my influence, without my prodding. It gives me hope that we're onto something here.”

“Maybe we're both out of our minds.”

“Maybe we're both right.”

The moon had set and the dark took over except for the dizzying array of stars. Natasha breathed more evenly now, though her mind was grappling to make sense of all that she had seen and heard. Certain moments kept flashing before her eyes: the jumble of angry faces, Sonlow's embrace, Axel's fiery demands, and Tezo's planting a kiss on her cheek. Raj rubbed her neck above the collar of her biosuit, under her hair. They stayed like that, determined to use up the precious moments outside the settlement before the approach of the morning alarms. There was a deep closeness growing between them, and both of them felt it. Together they had made a decision that no Alpha had imagined possible and that, until now, they could not have imagined themselves. But Natasha, peering into the morphing shapes of the dark forest, was thinking other, private thoughts too, ones that even Raj would find shocking. Because now that the danger had passed, Natasha could sense again those unsettling feelings that defied all reason, and that had, on this night, disrupted even her own understanding of herself: first, a bursting sense of joy when Axel told her she belonged to them, and second, the crushing loneliness when Raj had said (as Jeffrey had said so many times before) that the Tribespeople were tricksters, and that their claim on her could not possibly be true.

13

I
f Mercedes experienced any of the fears that Natasha and Raj had felt when Axel first demanded a nova, she did not show it.

“It's brilliant,” she said, as she yanked the helmet from Raj's biosuit in the Office of Exit. “We talked about ways to destroy the novas but we never came up with much, did we? Nothing that didn't involve blowing up the whole settlement. We didn't have the courage to think of smuggling the novas Outside.”

“You never had the means either,” Natasha pointed out, dropping her airfilter and shimmying out of her biosuit with Mercedes's help. “We'll have fifty Pines carrying the novas to the ocean, and we'll have their boat. Plus I'm the only one with access to the Exit.”

That evening, Natasha learned that Ben, Eduardo, and Sarah were equally committed to helping the Tribe. The six of them met in Mercedes's sleeproom, a single on level five. Now that Natasha was part of their group, and actively conspiring against the Office of Mercy, they all had thought it too risky to continue meeting in the conference rooms. They needed to prevent a transfer—something along the lines of what had happened to Raj—from happening to Natasha. Besides, as Ben had informed them, for he was the one responsible for planning their meetings, the conference rooms were too crowded these days. A new volunteer committee had begun planning a two-year education program for the Zetas. The Governing Club was drafting a new set of addenda to the Ethical Code for submission to the Alphas. And, on top of all that, the Philosophers were working double-time, believing themselves tantalizingly close to a new
p
's and
q
's logic proof that would ensure once and for all the rationality of the Post-Storm sweeps. (“I'd like to see that one,” said Sarah.)

Mercedes's sleeproom was barely large enough to hold them. Mercedes and Eduardo sat on the floor, Raj stood leaning against the door, and Sarah, Ben, and Natasha sat squeezed together on the bed, their heads resting against the wall. They were exhausted, none of them had slept in the last twenty hours, but still, the talk was lively. Natasha explained to the group how the Tribe had attempted to trick her. She was glad she did; none of them made her feel embarrassed, not even when she confessed the degree to which they had convinced her.

“Isn't the rumor that Jeffrey Montague got tricked by the Palms?” Eduardo asked, once Natasha had finished her story.

“Yes,” she answered. “But he's never told me more than that. It's not even clear anymore who started that fire.”

Natasha rubbed her hands over her knees. The mention of Jeffrey's name made her anxious, though no one seemed to notice but Raj, who regarded her with curiosity.

“But still,” Eduardo said, “the point is, it just goes to show you how good they are, if they managed to trick the best in your Office.”

“That's true,” Natasha said slowly. She had not made that connection till now. Jeffrey was a hero in the Office of Mercy, and
he
was not above the trickery of the Tribes. Plus he never acted ashamed about what had happened—secretive, yes, but not embarrassed.

The talk moved to their more immediate problems: whether the Tribe could be trusted, and, if so, how to go about sneaking a nova out of the settlement. On this first point, Raj once again managed to make the whole situation cogent and clear. The Pines claimed they did not believe in murder, and to date they had killed zero people. They had not killed when they had come as the “Palms,” and they had not harmed Natasha even when they had her bound and weaponless, deep in the caves. The citizens, on the other hand, both openly professed themselves to be “mercy killers” and, true to their word, had murdered 146,990 people, on top of the millions they took responsibility for during the Storm.

“The Alphas teach us to see from a depersonalized perspective,” Raj said. “Well, from that vantage point, if
our
goal is to preserve human life, I think it's clear who we should trust.”

The second point, however, how to physically deliver a nova to the Tribe, had no easy answer. The Tribe wanted to meet them again, but exterior work on the New Wing would be finished soon, and the sensors would be back on in the green. Presumably Natasha, though she could not disable the alarms entirely, could at least silence them from the Office of Mercy. But this plan itself had two problems: first, it would mean Natasha would have to stay back, and no one liked that, considering she was their main liaison to the Pines; and, second, Natasha worked only the morning- and afternoonshifts, and there was no way for the others to go strolling down the Department of the Exterior hall in the middle of the day with a nova in their arms. Finally, there was the issue of getting into the Strongroom—a thick-walled room at the very tip of the Department of the Exterior, geographically the farthest point from the Dome—where the novas were locked away. Natasha did not have access, and she knew of only four people who did: Arthur, Jeffrey, Claudia, and one man from the Maintenance Office who handled the upkeep of the launchpad. Probably a whole host of engineers had access, but that group was constantly changing as people moved from project to project.

“So much secrecy,” Mercedes said with a sigh, once they had talked themselves into circles. “But secrecy can only last so long. As soon as the Pines come into the settlement with a nova, that's it. We'll have to let them through the Office of Exit, and show them the way down the hall—”

“You're saying we might be conspicuous?” Ben asked.

“Think about it,” Mercedes said. “Even if we pull it off perfectly, even if we manage to get the novas out of the Strongroom and all the way to the ocean without anything going wrong—”

“No one blowing up, you mean,” said Eduardo.

“Well, then what?” Mercedes continued. “What's going to happen to us? The other citizens will despise us. They'll turn on us for good. And the Alphas—”

“The Alphas don't believe in punishment,” said Sarah. “Only reeducation.”

“For willing members of the social group,” added Natasha, finishing the full quotation from the Ethical Code.

“Exactly,” said Mercedes. “Look, I'm still in. I believe in putting an end to murder and I'm willing to risk everything for it. But this could be it for us. They could throw us out of the settlement.”

After a long quiet, Raj looked at Natasha and then at the others, a gleam in his eye.

“The Pines already consider Natasha a member of the Tribe,” he said. “Maybe they'll extend the invitation to the rest of us.”

They all had to laugh at this, covering their mouths and ducking their heads to muffle the noise. The absurdity was almost too much to bear: not only the absurdity of an America-Five citizen joining a Tribe, but more, the absurdity that such a future actually existed within the realm of the possible.

•   •   •

In contrast to the complete upheaval of Natasha's life during her leisure hours, her shifts in the Office of Mercy could not have been going more smoothly. Ever since Jeffrey had found out about her continued sessions with Neil Gershman, his behavior toward her had totally changed. Their team had returned to searching for Pines, and satellite duty had shifted back to one of the lesser-ranked teams near the front of the room. Once again, just like before the mission, Jeffrey arranged the schedule so that he and Natasha had most of their shifts together. He would often find excuses to roll around to Natasha's side of the cubicle, and together they would compare notes about a fuzzy image the sensor had caught, or discuss (as everyone did in the Office these days) the impossibility of the Pines' remaining hidden much longer. But it was different between them too. The events of the last three months seemed to have broken some invisible barrier that had always existed between them. As if all the recent chaos—Natasha's abduction, their confrontation on the night of the Crane Celebration, the threat from the Pines—had jiggled loose the stays on a Wall that Natasha had hardly known was there. Jeffrey seemed more comfortable around her, and more comfortable publicly sharing her company. Instead of lurking around the Office of Mercy after his shifts, he now would openly invite Natasha to spend the lunchhour or dinnerhour with him; and a few times, they even took an evening walk side-by-side in the Garden, something they had never done before.

The attention warmed Natasha's heart and overtook her thoughts to an almost unhealthy degree. She could forget the rest of her life when she was with Jeffrey. Her distress over what the Pines had done, how they had tricked her, how they had lied, drifted away in his presence. Her worry over how to get the Tribe a nova felt less urgent when he was there. At the same time, though, Natasha comprehended the danger of what she was doing. Here she was conspiring against the Office of Mercy, making deals with a Tribe, and breaking the most fundamental, Alpha-laid laws of the settlement, and who was she cozying up to? Who was she bringing closer and closer into her life? Jeffrey Montague. The Alpha favorite. The driving force in the Office of Mercy. The man who had singlehandedly swept more Tribespeople than any person in America-Five. Natasha could not waver in her duty to the Pines, and she could not stop seeing Jeffrey, and so she would walk with forced calm beside him in the Garden, listening while he talked about the abstract nature of the Ethical Code, her stomach clenched against the looming danger of her own deceptions.

“Old societies,” Jeffrey was telling her one quiet evening, arriving at one of their usual subjects, “would talk for centuries and centuries—millennia even—about the possibility of eternity. They would write about it in stories and debate its availability for one type of person or another. Meanwhile, they were dying off in generational masses. For all their careful thoughts and complex considerations, for all their energy and imagination, they never seized wholeheartedly on the idea that the best place in which to herald in eternal life was within the realm of the living.”

“Why didn't they?” Natasha asked, anxious to keep their conversation on these general, highly theoretical concepts. “Wasn't it obvious that the goals of society should be world peace and eternal life?”

“They didn't have their ethical priorities straight,” Jeffrey said. “For instance, if you look more closely at Pre-Storm systems, it becomes clear that their most cherished ethical decrees served one of two purposes. The first was to maintain social order, and the second was to create a false sense of control over the natural world. Some ethical values served both purposes at once.”

“Like what?” asked Natasha.

They had turned onto one of the narrow footpaths that dipped behind the row of trees, the high, latticed, and vine-covered wall rising on their right. Three little birds skipped away and took flight at their approach, and a large, bright green beetle flickered into the grass.

“Well, like sexual rules, for example,” Jeffrey said. “It used to be that sexual relationships were sanctioned by whatever government or authority had power at the time.”

“But that's private!” Natasha said. “That's only between the people involved.”

Natasha glanced furtively at Jeffrey, expecting him to look as embarrassed as she felt; to her surprise, though, his expression was calm and his face retained its usual pallor.

“Now it is,” he said, “because our government doesn't require any method of control beyond its own, self-evident logic. And we as citizens don't have to believe any illusions about our bodies. We control them. We control our own fate.”

Jeffrey and Natasha reached the back wall of the Garden, and the floral sun that had been built for the Crane Celebration. They walked in silence until they reached the long, eastside wall and could slip behind a row of trees again. Casually, as though it were nothing, Jeffrey reached over and took Natasha's hand, lacing his fingers through hers.

In general, it was not such a meaningful gesture to take the hand of another person. Natasha and Raj had held hands in the woods, and Natasha had affectionately clasped hands with plenty of Epsilons over the years. But between her and Jeffrey, it was different. Natasha's heart beat hard, and she felt like time itself had become thick and slow. Even after they had reconciled, Natasha had not anticipated that Jeffrey would touch her like this, not after the disaster in his sleeproom. But here he was, squeezing her palm, gazing at her like there was nothing in America-Five that he cared about more.

As they continued down the path, Natasha's senses took in everything, startled by the surge of life in her veins. The call of birds through the branches, the delicate fall of two brown-fringed leaves, the measure of her steps next to Jeffrey's, the calm of the widening shadows as the diffuse light of evening died away—all of it touched with a fresh, vibrant aspect. She was acutely aware, too, of the tones and colors of her own feeling; how her happiness spread calm and bright like rippling waves over every surface, and also how, though she wished to deny it, a heavy sadness lay at the center of it all.

Sadness, yes, it was there, drawing in her joy with its pull. It had to be. Because Natasha had realized in this moment that Jeffrey might actually love her, and also that she might love him; and yet, in this near-perfect culmination of years of close friendship, their minds had never been so far apart.

She had lied to him, and she was lying to him now. And, worst of all, he did not in the very least suspect her. Her meetings with Neil Gershman were an act, and he believed it. Her regret for her actions during the mission and her acquiescence to his ethical views were manufactured, and he did not suspect a thing. How was it possible? Hadn't he always said that she was a terrible liar? He used to sense the most subtle upsets in her mood, her fears and her quiet desires. He had known when she was having a bad day in school or when her nightmares had kept her awake, however she might have denied it. Once she had grown up and taken the job in the Office of Mercy, he would notice—he and no one else—the certain times when she struggled to keep up the Wall.