Incineration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 2) (16 page)

Chapter Twenty

I’m at the food distributor the next day, trying to decide if I want to spend the credits required to purchase an orange, when the Defiance makes contact. The small room is crowded, a line of people waiting to give the man standing behind the counter their orders so he can send one of his minions zipping into the warehouse space to retrieve the items received from a Dome that morning. As I watch, he hands over a box to a geneborn woman and the word “oranges” goes dark on the electronic board above his head. They’re out. Disappointed, I’m disinclined to make conversation when the short man beside me says, “Damn, my wife’s going to be mad. She told me to come here earlier because she wanted oranges, but I put it off and now I’ll have to go home without them.”

I make
um-hm
noises, thinking,
I could get one lemon and four tea bags
, when his next words jab me.

“Troubles frequently come in threes, don’t they?”

I jerk and look at him. He’s got thinning, dirty blond hair, deep hollows under his cheekbones, and wears the gray jumpsuit of a Ministry of Transportation employee. “What?”

“Well, along with missing out on the oranges, I was late to the ministry this morning and my supervisor docked me twelve credits for it, and then my ACV scooter wouldn’t ignite. Troubles come in threes.”

“We’re lucky they don’t come in fours,” I respond stiltedly, the words feeling foreign on my tongue.

The man gives a barely perceptible nod before moving forward to place his order. When he turns away from the counter holding a small box of produce, he trips and lurches against me, saying in a barely audible voice, “Get your order and sit on the bench around the corner to the right. Don’t look at me.” Raising his voice, he says, “Sorry. My wife’s always saying what a klutz I am.”

“That’s okay,” I murmur, stepping up to the counter where the distributor waits impatiently, arms crossed, while I give him my order and my ration card.

Five minutes later, I’m walking out, clutching a bag whose contents I’m not even sure of since I was so knocked off balance by trading code phrases with the Defiance contact that I don’t know what I asked for. Even though it’s almost six, the day is still warm, and the adrenaline pumping through me makes me even hotter. I glance around, spot the bench, and walk toward it. It’s empty. I hesitate a moment, and then sit. The warm steel mesh imprints on my backside. The bench rocks slightly as someone sits on the other end. Obedient to my instructions, I don’t look, but I can see gray-jumpsuited legs in my peripheral vision.

“Report.” His voice is clipped and low, and he doesn’t face me when he talks.

Taking my cue from him, I look down into my produce bag and tell him about the communications satellite launch, trying not to move my lips. I’d managed to winkle a few more details out of Marizat, including the launch date. I feel silly and tense at the same time, and have to stop myself from looking over my shoulder to see if anyone is loitering within hearing range.

There’s a long silence when I finish my thirty-second recitation, and when I venture to look up, the man is gone. I sit for a moment as the bench brands itself onto the backs of my thighs, and then rise to leave, not realizing how tense I am until the bag I’m holding tears and a lemon rolls into the street.

Five days later, I’m on my way to 2241 Lithonia Court. The note has preyed on my mind since I found it, never far from my thoughts, and I’ve finally given in to my curiosity. Mindful of what happened last time I looked up a location on the computer—the IPF captured Halla and imprisoned her in a RESCO—I ask Marizat if she’s aware of any historical maps of the city, citing a completely bogus interest in Atlanta’s history.

“You could try the library,” she says. “Looters raided libraries during the Between, but a lot of the books survived because looters couldn’t sell them or eat them. Some were burned for heat, though. I’m sure there’s plenty left. The Ministry for Cultural Preservation has been doing cross-canton work for years, collecting and cataloguing materials from most of the significant regional and educational libraries at the Ministerial Biblioteque. Your MSFP ID will get you in.”

I visit the Biblioteque on my lunch break and have no trouble locating several Atlanta area maps, including a book that divides the city into segments. Using an index, I find two Lithonia Courts, but only one is in an area marked “DeKalb County.” It’s southeast of the city center. A glance at train routes when I’m back at my computer shows me I can get within a mile of it by train.

We serve six days a week, but Sundays are free, which is why I’m at the train station on Sunday, using my electricity ration card to free an ACV scooter from the rack of rentals in front of the station. There are few people about; in fact, I’m the only one who got off at this station. The remaining passengers all looked like soldiers and were headed to the end of the line, to the IPF base, I suspect. I’d had to concentrate on breathing evenly and looking innocent the whole ride, worried that one of them would recognize me, even though the young men joked and argued with each other, paying me no attention.

I’ve memorized the route to Lithonia Court and I ignite the scooter and glide forward. This area is much more run down than the city center, the houses smaller and older, pre-Between, the mix of construction materials showing they were patched together after the fighting ended. They’ve got plain glass in the windows, and most have driveways, leftover from when there were cars. Every sixth or eighth house has been reduced to rubble and people have cannibalized the ruins to repair their homes; there are dark red bricks from one crumbled house mortared in rash-like patches on three of the tan and yellow brick homes in the next block. The trees and shrubs are brown and long-dead, although no one has bothered to pull them up. Their brittle branches clack together when the wind stirs them.

Many of the street signs are missing—not unusual since the roads themselves are nothing but chunks of ruptured asphalt interspersed with holes large enough to make the ACV sputter out so I must dodge them—but I spot a couple of old metal ones, their lettering faint to the point of invisibility, and a couple of hand carved wooden ones that neighbors must have erected. By gliding along what used to be the biggest road from the train station and counting the turnoffs, I approach what I’m almost certain is Lithonia Court.

My heart thumping now that I’m close, I drift past the opening, glancing casually into the cul de sac as I do. Judging by one open door, the steam coming from a laundry vent, and another house’s sparkling windows, three of the five homes, at least, are occupied. Since I don’t know if 2241 is supposed to be lived in or not, that doesn’t help much. My palms are sweaty on the ACV’s throttle as I think about what to do. I was hoping there’d be cover of some kind, so I could approach unnoticed and scope out the situation, but aside from the dead shrubs and the shell of a house on the corner, there is no cover. I had foreseen the possibility, though, and come prepared with a datapad, vials, water testing chemicals and a story about contamination concerns due to a fertilizer facility leak upstream. The bombed out facility and river water near the
Chattahoochee Belle
had given me the idea.

I rehearse my story as I nervously approach the first house. I knock. No one comes. I tap my foot, as if impatient, for the benefit of anyone watching. Finally, I leave the door and walk around the house, peering in the windows as I go. Nothing seems out of place. Coming to an above-ground cistern in the rear, I remove the cover and scoop water into one of my vials, adding a reagent which turns the liquid orange. I enter my pretend findings on my datapad. Agitating the vial, I glance casually into the back window and spot an IPF helmet on the table. I almost drop the test tube.

I shouldn’t be surprised there are IPF soldiers living in the area; it’s less than a mile from the base and married soldiers are allowed to live in the community. Still, the realization ratchets my tension level a notch. I return to the front and ostentatiously pour out the orange water before moving to the next house. This time, a woman answers my knock, a questioning look on her doughy face. I reel off my spiel about a leak and contaminated water, hold up my testing supplies, and ask for permission to test their water.

She opens the door wider in invitation. “It looks normal to me,” she says.

I feed her blather about microbes, not visible to the naked eye, can’t be too careful, and test the water from their kitchen faucet and backyard tank. I don’t spot anyone or anything out of place or confusing. Maybe someone sent me on a wild goose chase with that note.

A little boy, maybe three, appears and leans against his mother, thumb in mouth, eyes wide with curiosity.

“We have a license for him,” she says hurriedly when I smile at the boy.

“Of course you do,” I say soothingly. It strikes me as sad that so many people spend their lives worried about having or not having children, applying for procreation licenses, being able to keep them, having them repoed by the government. Not my parents, though, nosiree . . . they dumped me on the government’s doorstep.

“What does it mean when it turns blue like that?” the mother asks, worried, when I add dye to the water.

“It means it’s safe to drink. Congratulations.”

Acting as if she’s won a prize, the woman escorts me to the door.

I cross to the next house, a bit more confident since my ruse was accepted so easily. A metal “2” hangs crookedly beside the door and a ghostly “241” shows where the other numerals used to hang. This is the place. A baby’s wails penetrate the door. I take a deep breath. I have no idea what to expect, and I’m tensed and ready to run if necessary.

Tap-tap-tap.

The screen door rattles with each knock. The door swings inward. The foyer is dark and I can’t make out the features of the person standing half-hidden by the door. The baby’s fussing almost drowns the nervous “Yes?”

The single word knocks me back a step.
It can’t be
. My head spins like I’ve been twirling around as fast as I can go. I reach out a hand to steady myself and my palm scrapes against flaking wood.
She’s dead
, my brain says, even as my senses tell me my friend Halla is very much alive. My skin flushes hot, but just as quickly the heat recedes, leaving me chilled.

The implications drop on me like shells lobbed by long-range artillery. Halla, alive. Little Loudon screaming his lungs out. The IPF neighborhood. It was Halla. Halla betrayed Bulrush to get her baby back, to marry Loudon. Halla got Cas and Milo and Gunther killed, put me in prison, sent Alexander into exile and cost Fiere her memory. Not Saben. My best friend. I shake so hard my teeth chatter and I double over, sure I’m going to vomit.

“What is it?” Halla asks. “Are you ill?” She pushes the screen door open. “Come in and I’ll get you a glass of water. Don’t mind the baby—the teething’s been hard on all of us.” She looks the same, her loam-colored skin smooth, black hair spiraling almost to her shoulders, a little longer than it used to be, plump bosom straining her tunic. Concern for me purses her mouth and pulls her brows together.

She doesn’t recognize me. Of course she doesn’t. Not as long as I don’t say anything.

She puts a hand on my shoulder—Halla was always kind, except, apparently when condemning her friends to death and torture—and I flinch away.

“Water . . . testing,” I manage in a gruff voice. “I’ll . . . later.”

I turn and flee, stumbling down the step and across the dirt patch that was a yard many locust lifetimes ago, along the cul de sac’s edge to the scooter. I hang onto it like I’ll be swept away if I let go, drowned by the memories and regrets smashing into me, emotional debris hurled downstream by a broken dam. A broken friendship. I wish she were really dead. I wish it fiercely, every muscle tensing so I shake like a malaria victim. If she were really dead, I’d still have the memories, seventeen years of friendship. This way, I have nothing.

Mounting the scooter, I almost over-balance it. I pause, trying to suck air into my tight lungs, trying to control myself. I manage to ignite the scooter and get on without keeling over. I glide away, the scooter wobbling a bit before I straighten it out and point it back toward the train station.

The ride back to downtown Atlanta seems twice as long with the weight of Halla’s treachery pushing on me. Once the initial shock wears off, I work out what happened. She’d been hysterical about leaving the RESCO without Little Loudon, and she told me she hated me for rescuing her when it meant she’d never see him again. No amount of logic, of telling her unlicensed babies belonged to the government anyway—which she well knew—made a dent in her hatred. She must have contacted Loudon, the baby’s father and an IPF soldier, and he helped her work out the deal with the Prag forces: her freedom and her baby in return for betraying Bulrush. I don’t know if they put a locator on her or if she was able to draw them a map to the brothel . . . the details don’t matter. The end results—the deaths, the disillusion, the pain—are the same.

Never once in my four months of imprisonment had I considered the possibility that Halla was the traitor. Not once. Am I stupid, or blindly loyal? Maybe they’re the same thing. I trudge from the central train station to my billet like a zombie, my boots seemingly filled with ten pounds of sand that make it almost impossible to raise a foot and step forward. I’m halfway there when the realization hits me: I’m to blame, too. If I hadn’t detoured to Dr. Malabar’s office in hopes of finding out who my parents are, if I’d gone straight to Halla’s room, I could have gotten her out before they extracted the baby. Bulrush would have smuggled her and Little Loudon to an outpost, and the raid would never have happened. I’m not foolish enough to think it’s all my fault—Halla chose to trade her comrades for her baby—but I’m culpable. The deaths and misery are partly down to me.