Z 2134 (11 page)

Ana was leaving the horrible scenarios
behind and turning her mind to possible solutions when the van finally slowed,
then stopped. The doors opened.

“Out!” one of two Watchers said in a
crisp warble coming from the mask. Both Watchers aimed their sticks at Ana, as
though a 98-pound girl was a serious threat.

They were in the underground parking of
the City Watch Tower, packed with trucks, cars, and a few motorcycles. Ana had
never seen so many vehicles up close, or in one place. Most people didn’t own,
or even ride them. She’d only been in a vehicle three times before, back when
her father was assigned to chauffeur some visiting official from another City
and was able to bring the vehicle home.

“Go!” The order was followed by a stick’s
jab at her back. Thankfully, they hadn’t delivered a shock with the blow.

Ana wanted to turn and yell but was
cuffed and alone. She did as she was told, stepping through a sliding door and
then into a long hall.

Ana crossed the hall, then was thrust
into a room where she was surrounded by four Watchers, all of whom held her
down and ripped the clothes from her body like the husk from an ear of corn.
She screamed, fighting with her feet, sure they were trying to rape her.

The pair of guards who had brought her in
stood behind Ana while a new pair in front shoved her face down to the ground,
pulled her underwear past her ankles, then cast them without ceremony to the
floor. Her head was shoved down, so she couldn’t see as they spread her legs
apart. Gloved fingers were suddenly invading her, inside and rooting around,
searching for God knows what.

She screamed at the violation, kicked,
and cried, but nothing would stop them.

They flipped her over, and she cried out,
staring at her reflection in their helmets as they moved their hands from her
middle to her mouth.

Ana gagged, nearly puked, until the four
Watchers were finally satisfied that she wasn’t hiding anything in her body.

“Get up!” one of them barked, then roughly
shoved her into a small chamber where she was hosed with scalding water, so hot
it made her scream, thinking she was being set on fire.

She was yanked from the shower, then
thrust into another room and ordered to put on a pair of bright orange coveralls
before being marched into a slightly nicer-looking suite where she was
photographed and scanned for processing. From there, she was led to a tiny
cell, where Ana spent the next 12 or so hours, cold, wide awake, angry, and
terrified.

Her cell was just long enough to hold a
thin bed and wide enough to squeeze a toilet beside it. Fortunately, Ana wasn’t
claustrophobic, or she would have suffered insanity within minutes. Even so,
the walls felt as if they were closing in around her, like the clenched fist of
her life squeezing her future to nothing.

Her cell didn’t lock like the van door
and wasn’t like the cells she’d seen on TV and old movies, with the rows of
thin metal bars. Her prison was made from a large, paneled alloy wall, with a
thin and rather long rectangular window resting at the top. Her cell was small,
but no smaller than the many others running along either side of a stretching
hallway. She wasn’t sure if she was alone but had yet to hear anyone else in
the block since her arrival. All the walls were an ugly muddy gray, so dull
they had likely once been white but had absorbed the millions of molecules
worth of pain from the wretched souls trapped within the walls before her.

Chimney Rock was City 7 in comparison to
the prison.

After an eternity, the alloy wall finally
parted, and Ana’s cell was opened. A man in a vaguely official-looking gray
uniform stepped inside, and the paneled wall closed behind him. Unlike The
Watchers, the man wore no helmet. He was tall, with a long, square face, and looked
close to her father’s age. His hair was cut short and severe up top, with a
splash of silver on either side highlighting his jug-like ears. His jaw jutted
from his face like a hardback book, and his nose was long and sharp like the
blade of a knife.

He was both the ugliest, and scariest,
man Ana had ever seen.

And as he stepped into her cell, and his
icy dark eyes met hers, she felt a chill run through her entire body.

“My name is City Watch Chief Keller,” he
said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me? I was once your father’s boss.”

“No,” Ana said, shaking her head.

The chief was apparently in a hurry for
answers. He cleared his throat and said, “How do you know Liam Harrow?”

Part of Ana’s silence was defiance; most
was fear. The little she had left was simply because she had no idea what she
should say.

Chief Keller continued. “What do you know
about Liam? And most importantly, Ms. Lovecraft,” he cleared his throat, “where
is he?”

Duncan had told her to tell the truth.
But Duncan could be dead for all she knew, and Keller wasn’t wearing a helmet
to help him detect her lie — though his icy eyes promised that his gaze was
probably enough.

“I’ve known Liam forever,” she said. “We
went to academy together years ago, before he went to the orphanage.”

“How
well
do you know him?”

“Not well,” she shook her head.

“But you know him well enough to attend
church together, is that correct?”

Ana couldn’t swallow, or speak. She could
barely breathe. “What do you mean?” she finally managed, choking on her saliva
and coughing, surely giving herself away as a liar.

“You know exactly what I mean, Ms.
Lovecraft. The church where you were seen together is a known sanctuary for
anarchists.” Keller said it like it was a fact, without any room for defense.

Ana shook her head, then stared into his
icy eyes. “You have me confused with someone else,” she said. “Maybe a friend
of my father’s.”

Keller held her stare, still calm. He
said, “I don’t know why you’re protecting him, Anastasia. He’s an anarchist. He
killed eight people in the church, including a child. In cold blood. You must
know your friend is a murderer?”

Ana tried to hide the anger that must’ve
been painting her face. Keller was lying — Ana had seen The Watchers open fire.
That was NOT a planted memory. Her upper lip twitched, begging her mouth to cry
foul on his lie, hating him most for using the word anarchist to define The
Underground, something her father had been a part of.

Her father wasn’t an anarchist. He
believed in the law.

But perhaps not The City’s law.

“I don’t know him well,” Ana said. “But
that definitely doesn’t sound like Liam from the little I know.” Ana held his
eyes.

“Ah, well then,” Chief Keller said, his
voice pleasant. “You must not know him that well at all. For he, and all the
rats who scurry beneath the hard-working feet of the rest of us, are precisely
what’s wrong with the world. They are the vermin who destroy The City from
within. Their corrupt thoughts, their evil deeds, and their devotion to their
anarchic cause, no matter what the cost.”

Keller pursed his lips, turned, and left
her cell for a moment.

He returned holding a thin, sleek black
pad, the kind that people with homes read, played games, and watched TV on. It
began to display photos of dead bodies from the church — starting with The
Watchers, their helmets all removed, showing the faces of young men who didn’t
look nearly as sinister as their helmets suggested. Ana wondered if the
Underground had removed the helmets to get rid of any video recorded by them, a
smart move she’d not even considered.

“Anarchists have no respect for rules, or
doctrine, or laws. Democracy, totalitarianism, socialism, capitalism — everything
is ‘evil’ to them. And order is
always
wrong. Anarchists abhor rules,
Anastasia. But no rules means no safety, and in the year 2134, no safety means
certain death.”

As he said death, the final photo showed
Iris, turned up, clothes stripped, and a huge, gaping hole in her chest. Her
eyes were open in a permanent gaze.

Ana looked away.

Keller cleared his throat.

“So, you
do
have a heart, then?
You don’t agree that any action is worth the cost then, right?”

She said nothing.

“Anarchy will never work because humans
will never
earn
their Utopia, and all ideals ultimately end in selfish
exploitation. Nine years ago, my eight-year-old boy Joshua, my only son, was
murdered by The Underground rebels — a bomb blasted shrapnel into his skull,
killing him and 16 others instantly. We had been watching the parade just a
moment before; he was squeezing my pinky like he always did when he couldn't
wait to see what was about to happen.”

The horror of Keller’s memory, frozen in
his icy eyes, made Ana wish she were anywhere else in the world, maybe even
outside The Wall.

“Joshua would be 17 now,” he continued,
the emotion gone from his voice, fading as fast as it had appeared. “That’s how
old you are, correct?”

Ana nodded.

He cleared his throat, and the inner
interrogator was suddenly back. “You were seen going into the church,” he said.
“Do you deny this truth?” He cut Ana with a second question before she could
respond to the first. “People are willing to testify that you were there, and
that you were with Liam. Do you deny this truth?” he said again.

Ana held his eyes, hating herself for
trusting monsters more than her father.

She shook her head. “That wasn’t me.”

“We’re not interested in keeping you
here, Ms. Lovecraft.” The officer sighed. “Do I have to beg you to keep you
from making this difficult? Tell us what you know, and you can return to
Chimney Rock tonight. Or don’t,” he shrugged. “But then we have a problem. A
big one.” He held both palms to the air. “So, what’s it going to be?”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” She
shook her head. “I wasn’t there. That wasn’t me.”

Keller leaned down, and his head thrust
forward like a striking snake. He was suddenly centimeters from her face, close
enough for Ana to smell the sour bubbling up from his throat. In a low growl,
Keller said, “I’m giving you one more chance to save yourself. Don’t lie
again.”

His vinegar-like breath made Ana want to
vomit.

“Were you at the church with Liam?”

Ana shook her head, holding his eyes even
though fear ran cold through her blood.

She said, in almost a whisper, “That
wasn’t me.”

Keller smacked Ana so fast across the
face, she had no idea his large hand was on its way until pain splintered her
cheek and rang through her left ear.

She shook her head, reeling, trying to
blink through the stars, as fat hammers slammed the walls inside her head.

She fell hard against the wall on her
tiny bed, where she lay curled up, staring up at Keller, determined not to cry.

He pulled her up roughly by the hair,
forcing her to stand.

“Let’s try this one more time, OK, dear?”

If Ana told the truth, she was dead.

The only thing keeping me alive is their
uncertainty.

Keller said, “I really don’t want you to
be here. I want you to have a hot meal, and I want to help. You and Adam both.”
He shook his head. “But I can’t help either of you if you are unable to tell me
the truth.”

He’s going to kill me.

His mention of Adam worked like a screw
of doubt, twisting away at her plan to keep quiet.

“Were you at the church with Liam?”

Ana paused, then shook her head again.

“That wasn’t me.”

Keller gritted his teeth, then squeezed
his fingers into Ana’s arm, pinching hard into her flesh. He stood above her,
glaring down. “You know, you and your mother have a couple of things in
common,” he hissed. “You’re every bit as pretty, and just as stupidly
stubborn.”

“How do you know my mom?” Ana cried,
suddenly twice as scared and at least three times as angry.

Keller ignored the question, then leaned
into Ana, giving her nostrils another blast of his rancid fog as her eyes
swallowed the icy heat of his burning stare. “I’d hate for you to end up just
like her, too.”

He’ll kill me, no matter what.

He said, “I’ll give you until lunchtime
to consider.”

The door opened and Keller was gone,
though the chill he left in the room only grew colder.

It was several hours past lunch before
Keller returned. Ana spent the entire time swimming in indecision, wondering
what she should do, whether there was any way out, and most importantly, what
would happen to Adam if there wasn’t.

Keller was smiling as he entered the
cell, his hair slightly damp and his face freshly shaved. “So, have you given
any thought to the truth?”

Of course she had, though Ana was certain
her definition of the word
truth
was a sun to Keller’s moon.

She shook her head. “It wasn’t me.”

Instead of growing angry like Ana had
been picturing through most of the many hours she’d been kept waiting, Keller
simply laughed.