The Harvest (8 page)

7 - REMY

Spring 69,
Sector Annum
106, 2h03

Gregorian Calendar:
May 27

The sounds of the city shift as I walk. It's almost two in the morning. Unlike in the daylight, when the city buzzes with a productive vitality, the night feels edgier, borne of the knowledge that there are things we cannot see, cannot understand, things we choose to turn away from. Dark truths reveal themselves. Some people become fearful and hide from these truths, retreating to the safety of their homes. Others revel in it. They do things they would never do in the daylight. It is the time of secrets, whispers, things usually left unspoken suddenly bursting forth from our mouths and our hearts.

In part, this is because if you stay up late enough, the placating influence of your MealPak can wear off. The euphoria and sense of fulfilment injected into your veal rounds, engineered into your rice, lightly dusted onto your soy
glacé
, fades as the hours bleed into morning. The contentment and happiness you feel during the day starts to wane. You start to ask questions. You wonder why you've been working the same job for ten years with no promotion and no raise. You wonder why your daughter didn't get into the Academy. You think about the massacre at the SRI and wonder why an Outsider would want to shoot up a bunch of students. You wonder why so many famous scientists and politicians have disappeared over the last ten years.

This is why the Watchmen enforce curfews most nights starting at 02h00. This is why the Dieticians encourage recreational drug use among all citizens, and why they put time-release sleeping drugs into the Mealpaks of the most prominent researchers, politicians, and students. In Okaria, the smarter you are, the better you sleep. I never knew a night of insomnia until I left the Sector.

I haven't had a MealPak in years, but somehow, now that I'm back in Okaria, I feel the difference between day and night more acutely. During the day I feel myself reaching for the old Remy Alexander, aspiring artist, proud of my beautiful city and my place in it. At night, old Remy is but a spectre, clinging to memories that grow hazier with each passing moment. I am grounded in the shadows, renewed in the darkness. I reinhabit my true self. In the night, old Remy loses her way and new Remy finds hers.

It's edging close to curfew when I see them. I turn a corner and see three figures walking abreast on the sidewalk ahead of me, two men and a woman. Yesterday, Meera sent a message saying she could meet me at the apartment at midnight. She has something important for me. But what? A message from Vale? Something from Bunqu? News from the Resistance? I couldn't stay in watching the clock tick the minutes away, so I headed out for a walk. Now, I feel the ragged edges of Okaria's multiple personalities all around me.

“Eli wasn't crazy,” a tall, slender man with close-cropped hair says, a hint of defiance in his voice. Their conversation becomes more distinct as I fall in behind them, pacing my steps to theirs. “I knew him. I mean, he was crazy, but not like that.”

“By the harvest, Shia, let it go,” the woman responds.

“You don't get it, though—”

“No,
you
don't get it,” she interrupts. “The massacre is old news. They got the guys who organized it, those crazy Outsider bastards. They're dead, and the Outsiders have been disappearing into the Wilds ever since.”

I suppress a laugh. O
h, if only you knew how wrong you are!

“I had classes with him, Fen,” the voice I know as Shia says stubbornly. “He might have been a firestarter, but he wasn't insane.”

“Crazy enough to go off the grid.” This voice is new. It comes from the man on the left, wearing a stiff green jacket that looks like one of the OAC's uniforms. I can't get close enough to see if it has the golden wheat stalk, the OAC's symbol, emblazoned on his shoulder. I decide to keep my distance, just in case.

“Just like your old celebrity crush, Linnea Heilmann?” Shia asks. “You think she's crazy, too? You heard what she said the other night on that broadcast.”

They round a corner onto one of the wide-open boulevards of the city. They're headed in the opposite direction I need to go to meet Meera, but I can't leave them. Not when this Shia sounds like he's asking the right questions. I fall back a little, trying to stay just within earshot without them catching on to the fact that I'm tailing them.

“Come on, Shia, you think that was really Linnea?” Fen, the skeptic. “She was so poorly lit they could have been filming that thing from underwater. I bet they just found someone who looked like her and—”

“Part of it was true, though,” the third man says. “Linnea definitely didn't take a communications job with the OAC. I never once saw her at headquarters.”

“See!” Shia says, turning around excitedly to walk backwards, and now I get a glimpse of his face. He sports a close-trimmed beard and tightly-wound curls. A stubby nose, narrow chin, and wide eyes, even wider now as he watches his friends. “Thank you, Jeong! What if she really did leave, and go into the Wilds trying to kill Remy—”

“And what if she did?” Jeong says, suddenly hostile. “Remy Alexander's a traitor to Okaria. The Orleáns have every authority to send somebody to take her out.”

“Then why did Linnea back out of the job?” Shia asks, leaning in and talking more quietly, as if this was his trump card, the point he'd been waiting to make all night.
Never mind the better question, I think: who the hell thought Linnea Heilmann would make a good assassin?

After a few seconds, when neither of his friends respond, he continues, in an urgent murmur: “Look, all I'm saying is, the whole thing is suspicious. Think about it—”

“That's your problem, Shia, you're always
thinking
,” Fen interrupts. “You need to lighten up.”

They turn onto a smaller street, off the boulevard, and start to cross a bridge over one of the Sector's many waterways. I lag behind for a moment, hoping they won't notice me, but the three seem oblivious to my presence.

“Maybe if you thought for a half-second instead of drinking all goddamn day, Fen, you'd be worried too. All these people leaving—think about them all! From Dr. Rhinehouse to the Alexander family after Tai was killed, to Elijah Tawfiq, to Soren Skaarsgard—what the hell ever happened to him, did you ever think of that? And now Linnea appears
on the Sector broadcast
to tell us all not to believe—”

“You three are out past curfew,” a voice rings out, loud and clear. I snap to attention. The voice is coming from ahead, at the base of a bridge over one of the city's canals. I step back, duck down, and press myself flat into a shadowed wall, hoping the silhouettes of the three ahead of me will give me cover.

“No, we're not,” Fen says, nonplussed. “We've got a full ten minutes before curfew starts, and our flat is just down the street.” She waves her arm at an apartment building in the distance.

“Besides,” Jeong says, “I'm OAC-exempt. Curfew doesn't apply to me. What the hell is going on here?”

I stick my head out, risking my cover, trying to find out what sparked Jeong's question. Looking between Jeong and Fen I take in the scene: a man in a Watchman's uniform has a young boy—
too young
—pressed against the wall, his wrists pinned above his head, their two bodies pressed together in a way that brings bile to my tongue and has me leaning forward on the balls of my feet, my knife suddenly resting in the palm of my hand.

“None of your business,” the Watchman says. The boy's eyes are wide, staring at the three friends in front of me, and I don't need any microexpression technology to tell me what is plainly written on his face: terror, disgust, fear. And then something else as his eyes slide past Shia, Fen, and Jeong and meet mine.
Recognition. He knows who I am
. And then I recognize him, too: the boy who replaced Meera for my food drop last week. My stomach plummets into my boots.
He's an Outsider! The Watchman's caught an Outsider!

“Looks like it
is
our business,” Shia says, pulling out his plasma and scribbling in a few symbols. “I don't know what's going on here, but I'd back away from that boy, unless you want a patrol drone ready to report you in about ten seconds.”

“Any patrol drone would take my side in this encounter,” the Watchman spits. “This is an Outsider disguised as a Sector courtesan.” In the dark, it's hard to tell, but he's right: the child is wearing the deep purple robes of the courtesan class, a select cadre of citizens trained to entertain. “A thief, I'm sure, or a part of a smuggling ring. It's my job to arrest and deport these criminals.”

“It's your job, is it?” Shia begins, but Jeong claps a hand on his friend's shoulder and whispers something in his ear, now trying to pull him away. I guess the fact that the kid is an Outsider convinced Jeong not to bother. Fen, too, is backing off. I crouch, staying hidden, ready to defend the boy alone if I have to. But Shia isn't ready to give up.

“No, I'm not leaving. I'm taking down your badge number. I don't care who this kid is. Whatever you were doing with him a moment ago was both improper for an on-duty Officer of the Watch and illegal without the boy's consent and—”

Shia stops mid-sentence, throwing his hands up, and Fen lets out a startled yelp. The Watchman has pulled his Bolt from its holster and is waving it dangerously in the air.

“If you knew what was good for you, you'd have listened to me the first time. Go home. This is none of your business.”

“Okay, okay,” Jeong says, grabbing Shia's arm and pulling him away, down the street, giving the Watchman and his prey a wide berth. I duck back into the shadows, wishing I had my heat-cloaking gear, hoping this Watchman isn't actually on duty and doesn't have his mission contacts in. “We're leaving. Happy?”

“I work in Personhood,” Fen says smartly over her shoulder as they walk away. “You can bet I'll be looking you up in the database and reporting you for misconduct first thing tomorrow morning.”

Good for you
, I think,
but tomorrow morning isn't going to help this kid tonight.

I wait until the sounds of their footsteps have faded, and check to see that the coast is clear. The Watchman, his Bolt pointed at the boy's head, grabs his wrists and twists them behind his back, pushing him into the pillar at the base of the bridge. The boy lets out a little mew of pain.

“Shut up,” the Watchman mutters. “Filthy Outsider.” He starts to pull him away from the bridge, toward a darkened alley. His movements are jerky, though, and I know he's rattled.

I step from the shadows.

“Let him go,” I say evenly, announcing my presence. My feet are spread in a fighting stance; my knife hangs lightly from my fingertips. The knife is for show, though. I don't think I can get in a good throw before the officer fires, if he decides to fire.

The Watchman jumps and spins around, turns toward me, his Bolt pointed my direction. But his hand is shaking. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

I make eye contact with the boy.

“You're hurting him,” I say.

“What's it to you?”

“I don't like bullies.”

“I don't care what you like. You best be on your way like those other three.”

“Those other three weren't armed. Let him go.”

“Since Sector citizens aren't allowed to own weapons, you must be an Outsider, too.” He waves the Bolt at me. “So why don't you come along? Only problem is you're not as pretty as he is.”

I'll take that as a compliment,
I think.

I take a step forward, betting heavily on scaring the shit out of him before he panics and pulls the trigger. If he fires his Bolt, his weapon will immediately call for backup drones and signal other nearby Watchmen.

“Ah, but I
am
a Sector citizen, and I
am
armed. And I
will
report you for attempting to violate an underage courtesan, Outsider or not, and for pointing your Bolt and threatening other citizens. You'll be looking at suspension and a pay cut at the very least.”

He looks me up and down. “
You're
going to report
me
? Who do you think you are?”

“Rank and file Watchmen like you”—I say it with a haughty sneer—“are not privy to all the SDF operations happening around the Sector.”

“What are you talking about?” Doubt creeps into his voice.

I give him the most disgusted look I can manage. It's not hard. “Your disregard for the law compromised my operations and put citizens at risk. Leave the boy to me.”

He tightens his grip on his Bolt. “What organization are you with?”

Thinking fast, I reply, “Sector Guardians.”

“Prove it,” he pulls a retinal scanner from his belt and holds it in front of me, dropping the boy's arm.