The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (16 page)

All the next day I watched for
Farrell Dean, and all day long I was disappointed.

It was just as well. I wanted to say “I told you so” about
Meritt
—he definitely was taking me seriously, wasn’t
treating me like a child or a pet—and that was sure to rub Farrell Dean
wrong, and the last thing I needed to be doing was making things worse between
those two.

As the day wore on, though, I began to get truly worried.
Farrell Dean had never stood me up before, had never been late even by a
minute. Now he was a full day late, and more. I supposed he could be coping
with some huge mechanical issue, but wouldn’t he at least come to meals?

When blustery Garry started chewing out Felix for taking the
best hoe, I didn’t immediately rush to break it up. Instead I took the
opportunity to edge close to
Ezzie
.

“Have you seen Farrell Dean lately?” I said.

Ezzie
shook
his head, his dark eyes worried. “His bunk was empty last night,” he said.
“Nobody knows where he is—at least, nobody’s saying. I was hoping you
knew something.”

Mutely I shook my head, and a hard cold fear began to grow
in the pit of my stomach. Farrell Dean had tried to interfere when the scarred
warden accosted me in the cafeteria. If he was in trouble because of that, if
he was in trouble because Marta had stepped in and asked me to look at the
lunch truck list, depriving the warden of his prey—

For all I knew, Marta might be missing, too. For all I knew
the scarred warden was punishing everyone who stood between him and me. It was
a terrible thought.

It was better, though, than the alternative. If the Watchers
had found out that Farrell Dean was spying on them, there was nothing I or
anyone else could do to help him.

* * *
*

That night they put a plump, elderly nanny mother in the
circle center and lined up a whole row of little girls in front of her. They
made her call out the children’s names—Nevada, Savannah, Olympia, Denver,
Helena, Dakota, Geneva, Florence, Cheyenne. I was afraid the Voice was going to
order the wardens to kill the children, but instead he asked the nanny why she
had chosen these names.

“Well, I’ve named so very many children,” the nanny mother
began, her brow furrowed with worry. She seemed quite old and fragile, and I
knew she wanted to keep the children out of trouble but couldn’t fathom from
what direction the trouble might come. Nor could the rest of us. The names
meant nothing that I could see—they were just sounds, signifiers, a way
to identify the little girls.

“Sometimes it’s hard to think of new names. These just came
to me, and I used them,” she said.

The Watcher kept asking questions. Had she ever known anyone
called by one of these names? Was she sure about that? She made them up
herself? No one helped her? Had she ever heard those names before, in another
context? Had she read them somewhere?

The city meetings were getting increasingly bizarre.

Pinned in the glare of the spotlight, the nanny mother
seemed as baffled as the rest of us. She stuck to her initial answer, but after
repeated questions of the same sort finally said, “They came into my head,
that’s all, and I thought they sounded pretty, special.” Beside me,
Meri
sighed heavily; sure enough, the Watcher pounced.

“Special? You wanted to give these children special names?
Pretty names?”

“Yes,” agreed the nanny mother, though her face turned gray
as she realized her mistake. We weren’t supposed to play favorites; we weren’t
supposed to treat anyone differently from anyone else.

The nanny tried to rectify it—or maybe she was only
trying to protect the little girls. “They were such very ordinary children,”
she said. “I didn’t think special names could hurt them.”

I thought her answer was clever, but they shot her anyway.

* * *
*

Meritt
materialized beside me as I was making my way out of the circle in the dark.

“I’m doing it tonight,” he said softly. “You want to come?”

It was too dark to see his face clearly. “To the
watchtower?” I whispered.

“Yeah. Pill’s already in the bottle of milk.”

If Warden Karl caught me again, there’d be no talking my way
out of it this time, but I couldn’t let
Meritt
go it
alone. “I’ll come,” I said. “When?”

“Midnight. Don’t forget your cap.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“As luck would have it, the camera behind this building will
be shorting out just before midnight
,” he said, and
was gone before I could ask him how he could possibly have managed that.

* * *
*

That night, I thought I’d never get away. All the girls sat
up late discussing the city meeting, except for
Cynda
and the others who were at work. Everyone else huddled together on creaking
bunk beds, trading theories, getting up to check and re-check that the green
wire had not been re-attached to the camera. They had more to say about this
city meeting than any of the others, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe they were
getting used to being terrorized, at least enough that they could think and
talk instead of weeping and getting hysterical.

“What do you think, Red?” Liza said. “Why’d they pick her?”

I was sitting cross-legged on my top bunk, alone and a
little apart from everyone else, trying not to look impatient but also doing
nothing to keep the conversation going. “Just another way to freak us out,” I
said. “No rhyme or reason.”

“But Red, why would they need to
freak
you out?” That was Wanda, of course.
“That nanny was playing favorites,”
she continued. “They had a perfectly good reason to discipline her.”

Liza snorted. “Oh yeah. A bullet to the head. That’ll teach
her a lesson.”

“Killed for picking pretty baby names,” Shawna said
musingly.

“It’s as bad as
Lavinia
, killed
for being pretty,”
Meri
said, and then other voices
went on, picking up the discussion, arguing. But I had heard something else.

“What did you say?” I leaned over the edge of my bunk to
look down at my bunkmate. Kari was sitting with her arms wrapped around her
knees, and at my question she hugged herself more tightly, looking as if she
wished she’d kept silent as usual.

 
“It’s okay,” I
whispered, swinging down to sit beside her. “Nobody else is listening. I
thought you said, ‘she wasn’t killed for being pretty.’”

Blushing, she nodded.

“Why’d you say that?”

Kari glanced around uneasily, but no one was paying us any
attention. Liza and Wanda were going at it, each gathering supporters as she
went.

Kari leaned a little toward me. “It’s only
 . . . I work in the postnatal unit.”

I nodded that I knew.

 
“And
Lavinia
was a seamstress, and one of the other seamstresses
had a baby last week, so she was in postnatal.”

She broke off, and again I nodded encouragingly.

“This other seamstress said that
Lavinia
sort of  . . ..” Hastily Kari let go of her knees and waved a
hand. “Not like the Watchers mean,” she
said, and then
once again stopped.

I had no idea what she meant. “Go on,” I said,
maybe a trifle less patiently than before. This was like pulling teeth.

 
Kari
flushed an even deeper red, but pushed on. “None of the seamstresses really
thought about it, because
Lavinia
was so quiet. But
after she died they were talking about how she’d been such a good listener. She
didn’t say much, but now and then she asked just the right questions
 . . .”

“Like
Rafe
, back when
we were in school,” I said.

Relieved, Kari nodded. “That’s it,” she said.

“You mean that she didn’t say anything negative
herself,” I went on, “but she asked questions that got people to thinking, and
talking.”

Kari nodded. “And when they talked—”

She looked at me hopefully, and so again I waded
forward. “And when they talked, they realized they didn’t trust the Watchers.
Is that what you mean?”

Kari nodded again. She pulled on a strand of
hair, then took a deep breath. “And Mechanic Dane—he was
 . . .”

“One of the men in the city meeting with her. I
know.”

“He told someone else I work with that those men
weren’t fighting over
Lavinia
. He said that he
 . . . that she and he  . . . ”

“They had an understanding?”

Kari nodded. “They had put in a request to live
together. Those other men sort of hung around, because she was so pretty. And,
well, Butcher Ross was very fond of her. He was sad she didn’t want to stay
with him. But there wasn’t any conflict. He was just sad. That’s what Dane
said, anyway.”

“You overhear a lot, don’t you?” I said, and
Kari looked like she wanted to hide under the covers.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I listen, too—though
maybe not as well as you do.”

Kari smiled faintly. “I blend into the
background better,” she said.

“Have you heard anything about the others who’ve
been in city meetings?”
 
I was thinking
about Louie. He had caused trouble in his time. And Judd definitely had a
rebellious streak. But they hadn’t died, so either the city meetings had
somehow gone wrong, or I was off track. I probably was, since I really couldn’t
fathom why naming a baby Denver would get someone killed.

Kari was considering my question. She tucked her
smooth dark hair behind her ears and then smoothed her blanket. Finally she
looked at me. “Sometimes names are forbidden,” she said.

I waited.

“I don’t know why. But certain names come up
again and again—different people suggest them—but when that
happens, we’re supposed to reject the name and write in another. Call the baby
something else.”

“But why? What’s wrong with the names?”

Kari shook her head, looking perplexed. “They
don’t mean anything,” she said. “I don’t know why people even come up with
them. Paris, that’s one. Plato. London. Jesus. Elvis.”

We stared at each other. “Are those boy names or
girl names?” I said.

“Both. Either. I don’t know. There are others,
but I can’t think of them right now.”

“Did the nanny mother who died suggest those
names?”

Kari shook her head. “Yes. No. I suppose maybe
sometimes  . . . but other people did, too. And the names she
died for aren’t on the forbidden list.”

Two bunks over, Lea had started crying again.
Most of us had long ago given up on keeping Lea calm, but
Linni
abruptly stopped echoing everything Wanda said, and bent over the girl. “Why
don’t you get in bed?” she said. “I’ll tuck you in and tell you a story, like
the nanny mothers used to do.”

Lea nodded and moved to her own bunk, which, as
bad luck would have it, was next to Kari. Wanda’s beady little eyes followed
Lea, and when she saw me sitting with Kari, she leaned over and whispered
something to her minion Joy.

“Let me know if you think of anything else,” I
told Kari, and climbed back up to my bed.

Over by the door Shawna
spoke
up. “There’s no point in driving ourselves crazy trying to figure out the
Watchers. I’m going to sleep.” I threw her a quick glance but she carefully
avoided my eyes, turning over and pulling her blanket up around her neck.

To my relief the rest of the dormitory followed her lead,
and soon the room was silent. The dorm mother never came in to turn off the
light, so eventually Liza did it.

I waited until everyone was lying still and breathing
evenly. Then I waited until
Meri
got up for her
requisite almost-asleep-and-realized-she-had-to-go bathroom visit. Then I
waited until
Linni
began snoring softly, and until
the girl in the bunk beside her poked her so she’d roll onto her side. Then I
counted to one thousand.

Finally I was confident no one in the room was awake except
for me. Cautiously I eased out of my bunk, found my coat on the floor, and
crept across the room.

From the bottom bunk nearest the door, Shawna waved at me as
I passed.

I needn’t have been in such a
rush. I waited for
Meritt
for ages, shivering in the
darkness, seeing now and then the headlights of a patrol car flashing across
the cafeteria yard.

The Watchers were systematically weeding out
rebels—that had to be the method behind their terrorizing. Louie hadn’t
died, but maybe Butcher Stuart was a troublemaker too, so the Watchers were
happy whichever died. Judd and
Petey
? That one I
couldn’t figure out, nor the nanny mother.

And if the Watchers were killing off rebels, why didn’t they
announce what they were doing? It seemed like that would make people more
likely to behave.

I stood there shivering, trying to make sense of things,
until finally
Meritt
arrived. He didn’t come all the
way to where I waited, but gestured from across the yard, and I left the
shadows and followed him to the foot of the watchtower.

At the prison door, I whispered, “You’re sure there’s only
one warden?”

“
One upstairs,” he said. “We’ll
have to avoid any others.”

Great.

Meritt
swung open the door and slipped inside. I followed
,
anxiety a tight band around my lungs. The long tiled hallway was deserted, but
lights shone from beneath two of the doors.

Swiftly we hurried down the hall to the stairway door at the
far end.
Meritt
was opening it—he was inside,
and I was just behind him—when we heard it.

The crack of a whip, and the sharp hard exhalation of
someone in pain.

I looked at
Meritt
. He gestured to
me to come on and started up the stairs, walking as softly as he could so the
metal grillwork wouldn’t creak and echo. I could be quieter; I was lighter, and
I was barefoot.

I started to follow him, but the whip cracked again and I
hesitated, peering down the empty hallway. It must be nearby—must be the lighted
doorway just a few yards away. I took one step toward it, two.

A man’s voice, calm and deliberate, spoke. “You might as
well tell me now,” he said. “While you have a little skin left.”

“Nothing to tell.” The voice was hoarse, but I knew it.
Farrell Dean.

I shut my eyes as the whip cracked again.

Behind me I heard the main door to the prison begin to open.
In two steps I was at the stairway, through the door, running softly up and up,
listening for the sound of pursuit behind me. No sounds came. Whoever it was
hadn’t entered the stairwell.

I could hardly think straight. Were they beating him because
of me—because of the warden with the scar? I couldn’t bear the thought,
but the alternative was even worse. If they were beating him because of the
spying and sabotaging, they’d call him a traitor, a cancer.

We had to get him out.

Though surely they wouldn’t kill him, not their best
mechanic.
Optica
needed him.

My thoughts were racing when I pushed open the door at the
top of the stairs, the door to the
Opticon
observatory.
Meritt
was already inside, bending over
a slumped warden, the same one from the night I’d been there before. Zee, that
was his name.
Meritt
had him under the arms and was
hauling him away from the bank of equipment, propping him in one of the
comfortable chairs.

The door didn’t have a lock, but it opened inward, so I took
hold of another chair and dragged it across the door. It wouldn’t stop anyone
for long, but it would buy us a few seconds. To do what, I didn’t know—we
were completely cornered up here. “
Meritt
—” I
began, intending to tell him about Farrell Dean, but he cut me off.

“Let me concentrate,” he said. Swiftly he pulled his small
tools from his pocket and began to work, removing a cover, changing settings by
flipping miniature switches. Then he sat down and began typing on the keyboard.
One of the screens went dark, then flared green. Lines of incomprehensible
words and numbers began to scroll down it.

“They won’t be meeting this late,” I whispered, glancing at
the warden, but
Meritt
merely waved at me to hush. He
put on the headphones and typed a command, watched the scrolling text, typed
another. His eyes lit up.

“Got it,” he said, gesturing for me to come closer. He
pulled one earphone away from his head and I heard voices. Then he touched a
key and the voices stopped.

“I recorded them from earlier,” he said, looking up at me.
“You know how the general system works, right? The Watcher compound has a bank
of screens identical to this one so they can see all over the city, and they
can also watch whoever is here.”

I glanced around uneasily.

“They aren’t watching us now,”
Meritt
said. “They’re all asleep.” He pointed to a screen showing a long table and
seven empty chairs, and, at the far end of that room, a bank of screens like
the one in front of me. As I watched, that image flipped to a different scene:
the city circle, empty in the moonlight.

 
“Besides, I’ve
spliced in a loop from yesterday. If anyone looked now, they’d see the warden
sitting there playing cards.”
Meritt
looked at me,
making sure I was paying close attention. “So here’s what we’ve done. I put
together a voice-activated application and recording camera component. It
piggybacks on their central computer. I had to loop it so I wouldn’t use too
much—never mind about that. The main thing is, just now I remote accessed
it, and now I’m going to play back whatever it caught this evening. And next
time it’ll be even easier—I’ve set up a shortcut, do you see? All I’ll
have to do next time is this.” He tapped three keys. “Great, isn’t it?”

Behind us the warden was snoring gently. I turned so I could
keep an eye on him. “
Meritt
,” I began again,
determined to tell him about Farrell Dean, but then the top left screen filled
with the same table and chairs we’d seen a moment before. Now, however, the
chairs were filled by seven people dressed in white.

Immediately—to my later shame—I forgot all about
Farrell Dean.

These were the men and women who ruled my life, the men and
women who watched every move I made, and I had never before seen them. These
were the Watchers.

I leaned forward over
Meritt’s
shoulder and studied them. There were four men and three women. They all sat on
the same side of the table. The men sat together to the left, and the women sat
together on the right.

Except for their white clothes, they looked completely
ordinary—more or less like anybody else in
Optica
.
They were all older, with white hair or gray hair, and some had backs bent
slightly with arthritis. They didn’t look terribly wise or even terribly
important. They just looked like people.

A plump woman with short gray hair was chuckling. “Did you
see their faces?” she said, leaning forward. “They were completely baffled.
They have no idea where those names came from. They think the nanny made them
up. The nanny herself thinks she made them up.”

“The past bleeds through,” another woman said, languidly
stroking a finger across the table in front of her. “Memories don’t stay
buried. That has always been a problem. It’s one more reason to euthanize the
old ones.”

“And a very good reason,” the plump woman said. “We can’t
afford memories, especially not now.”

“How many more city meetings before we do it?” This was a
short, round man.

“One or two more should be enough,” another man said. He had
a very long face and was looking at a paper on the table in front of him.
“Except for the redhead that first night, nobody has lifted so much as a
finger. They’re completely cowed. But it’s best to be sure.”

 
“That redhead is
a problem, and in more ways than one.” This was a man who looked so old I was
surprised he could sit upright. “One of the wardens has been asking rather nosy
questions about her.”

Meritt
glanced over his shoulder at me, raising an eyebrow. I grimaced, repressing a
shudder. He still didn’t know about the scarred warden, and I wanted to keep it
that way.

 
“We always knew
she raised dangerous questions,” the plump woman said. “How could she not, with
that hair?”

The old man frowned. “She was a practical joke,” he said.
“One that has never been funny. We should have disposed of her long ago. An
accident, an illness. It would have been safer that way.”

I froze, one hand on
Meritt’s
shoulder.

“Absolutely not,” said the woman on the end, her voice
sharp. To my surprise I recognized Marta, the woman from the cafeteria truck.
She was a Watcher?

Hastily I scanned the other faces again; no, I didn’t
recognize anyone else.

“No,” the languid woman agreed. “We were obligated to give
her a chance. Joke or not—and you’re no doubt correct about
that—she was, nevertheless, our best hope for subsequent subjects. There
have been so few.”

“She’s still our best hope,” Marta said. “And therefore well
worth the risk.
Meritt
certainly would agree.”

Meritt
? I
shot him a glance, but he shrugged and kept his eyes on the screen.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,
Meritt
isn’t here,” the old man said, waving a hand at the room. “And if he were, and
we explained the situation, he’d certainly understand that at this point the
girl is far more trouble than she’s worth.”

“I agree,” the plump woman said. “Enough is enough. And
we’ve kept a close eye on her. We’ll have her records, if we ever need them,
though at this point that seems highly unlikely.”

“Exactly,” said the long-faced man. “At this point the
number one priority is our survival. Not the redhead, not the records, not
anything else. And I really don’t think anyone at all could possibly disagree.
Lives are at stake.”

“All this discussion is pointless,” the languid woman said,
and yawned. “We all know that one way or another, the redhead won’t be a
problem much longer.”

“I’m going to keep saying this until the rest of you show
sense.” Marta was angry. “It is essential that we keep her.”

“But why?” the plump woman said, spreading her hands. “She’s
nothing but a waste of resources, a loose end, a loose cannon.”

 
“She’s
undisciplined,” the round Watcher agreed.

“Quite,” said the very old man. “And if
Optica
is to survive, it must recapture its original discipline, its original
efficiency.”

Marta threw up her hands in exasperation. “Efficient?
Optica
? We never had to worry about that. We certainly
never had to worry about being self-sustaining. That was never the point.
People like Estelle, Louie, all of them—including the redhead—they
were the point.”

“Yes, Marta, we know,” said the plump woman, rolling her
eyes. “Please recall that we were on this council long before you came along.”

Marta smiled a little grimly. “Which means you just might be
too close to the problem,” she said. “Or a bit too attached to your role.
Whereas I, as a relative newcomer, have retained a little healthy distance.”

“And what do you think we should do?” the round man said.
“Give up all our secrets? Announce that for whatever reason we’ve apparently
been left on our own to sink or swim, and we’re sinking?”

Marta shook her head. “Of course not. There’s no need to
cause a panic. But I do think these city meetings are worse than pointless.
You’re deliberately wasting some of our best resources.”

“We’re not wasting anyone. We’re disposing of
troublemakers,” the long-faced man said. “We must address this present crisis,
and to do so we must rid ourselves of those who would, for
for
whatever reason, stand in our way. The ones who would be sentimental and thus
destroy us.”

A murmur rose around the table; heads nodded in agreement.

“The ones who might have saved us,” Marta said. “The ones
who had the brains to help us out of this predicament, and the ability to lead
the others, and the charisma to keep them calm. You don’t have any of those
abilities. You aren’t city managers. That’s only the mask we have to wear. If
you persist in confusing your role with reality, we may all die.”

Voices rose over each other, arguing. Most of what I could
make out was directed at Marta.

“We are agreed.”

At the sound of this new voice, a shiver ran up my spine and
the rest of the Watchers fell silent. It was the Voice. He was sitting at the
center of the row of Watchers.

He was a heavyset, brutal looking man, old like the rest of
them but still powerfully built. He looked around the table. “We will have one
more city meeting,” he said. “One more to make sure there is no one left who
would dare to balk at the euthanizing of a few old friends.”