12 - REMY

Spring 5, Sector Annum 106, 23h30

Gregorian Calendar: March 24

 

 

Bear and I inch down through the trees, trying not to stumble along the steep ridge in the darkness. Infrared contacts are very nice and all, but they’re nothing compared to good old sunlight when it comes to avoiding large roots that threaten to send you headlong into a thorny briar.

At the fence line, Bear shows me the slit through the mesh fence. What could have been strong enough to cut through these fibers? I don’t know much about material science, but this is the same fencing that guards the perimeters to several of the Seed Banks. Eli told me once it would take a laser or synthetic diamond to get through it. Doesn’t seem likely any Farm workers would have access to tech like that. Outsiders? I wonder. Or someone on the Farm or from the Sector interested in helping the workers?

Or both? I think, remembering Chan-Yu.

We slip through and Bear leads me through the Farm at a light jog, his movements those of someone who's been over this ground a thousand times. I quiet the stream of questions in my head, and focus on keeping my breathing quiet and my heart rate low.

When I see a run of cattails and reeds up ahead and hear the rushing water of a nearby creek, Bear pulls up short and drops to a crouch.

“Welcome to Beaver Creek. See anyone?” he asks. I shake my head in response. I check my watch. It’s fifteen minutes before midnight. Plenty of time.

We wait, as patiently as we can. I hope against hope Joral passed on the message, and we’ll be met by Bear’s old friends and not a group of Sector soldiers ready to take me back to the capital for more of Philip Orleán’s “fresh figs.”

After a few minutes, dim splashes of color appear in the distance. Heat signatures. As the figures draw closer, they crystallize into the forms of a man and a woman.

“It’s them!” Bear whispers, making to leap up, to signal to them, but I push a hand into his shoulder. Not yet.

Soon enough, they’re not even ten meters away, and I can feel Bear trembling at my side. I can make out their faces from here: the man's short, snub nose and deep-set eyes, the woman's delicate, narrow bones. I keep my eyes on the surroundings, reminding myself that this could still be a trap, that soldiers could be hidden in the surrounding brush waiting for us to give ourselves away.

“Rose!” Bear squeaks, and the two workers jerk their heads around towards us, and Bear jumps up and almost leaps at them, hugging them both, letting out hushed cries of happiness. As far as I can tell, there’s no one else with them.

“J’ai pense que tu etait mort,” Luis says, in a rich baritone.

“Est si bon de te voir, friend,” Rose says, the words tumbling out in a mix of Old French and North American, as they embrace yet again, exchanging kisses on both cheeks and with smiles to rival Eli’s at the best of times. I can’t keep up with the language—I barely know what they’re saying. I smile nervously and stand off to the side, suddenly aware of how Bear must have felt these last few months, constantly surrounded by strangers, in over his head in a new world.

“Qui est ta amie?” Rose says, coming over to me and kissing me on both cheeks. My heart seems to sigh in relief as I realize they haven’t recognized me—that Bear and I have time to frame our story, to tell it how we want, instead of facing a barrage of questions about why I’m here on the Farms and where I’ve been for the last three years.

“This is Remy,” Bear says, going on in American English, smiling at me brightly so I know the linguistic switch is for my benefit. “She’s my friend from the Re—”

“From the Wilds,” I say, cutting Bear off. I don’t want either of us to associate ourselves with the Resistance before we know where these two stand. They may be Bear’s friends, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be friends of the Resistance. “Bear and I are traveling together.”

“Why’d you come back?” Rose asks Bear.

“Why’d you leave?” Luis demands. “When we saw your initials on that drawing….”

“And where’s Sam?”

Bear bows his head. A chill runs through my bones that I know has more to do with the knife I buried in Sam’s throat than the spring cold in the air.

“Sam ... Sam is dead.”

Another pause, an extended silence where I hold my breath and wait to see if my name will come into play in Bear’s retelling of this tale.

“How? When?” Luis asks, finally.

“It was my fault,” Bear says, after a moment of hesitation. “You both know what he was like before we left. You know he didn’t do much thinking by then. But we’d been out in the Wilds for the better part of a month, and met few kind words and fewer friendly faces that might help us on our way. I saw a nice boat out on a little river one night and thought we might steal it, get ourselves a nice little place to stay while I figured out what to do next. But there were two ... two folk from the Wilds on board, didn’t seem too happy about the prospect of us taking their boat.” Bear glances at me, and I bow my head, grateful to him for pardoning me of this crime. “We attacked first. Shouldn’t have done, but did anyway. Sam got a knife to the throat, and I….”

Bear trails off, as though he can’t quite finish the story. Maybe he can’t, really, or maybe he just doesn’t want to say the end: I was taken prisoner by the people who murdered him, but I forgave them, and one of them is standing right next to me. Now I have joined with them in the Resistance, and that’s why we’re here.

I don’t blame him for ending the story there. I’m not sure Rose and Luis are ready for that second part, yet. For that matter, I’m still grappling with how Sam’s story ended, and how Bear became one of us.

Rose reaches for Bear’s hand. She pulls his fingers to her lips and kisses them, and then pulls him in for another hug. When she lets him go, I can see tears shining along her cheeks, but her voice is strong when she speaks.

“Sam was dead long before that day, Bear. You were the best friend to him he could have asked for.”

“We’ll remember him,” Luis says, but his voice lacks the empathetic ring Rose’s carries. Watching the two of them, I can almost see the effect of the Dieticians’ drugs, and how differently they’ve taken hold in these two people: Luis is blank, emptied, more like the girl with the hollow eyes I saw today. Rose, though, has spring in her step and life in her voice. I can already see her as an ally, or better yet—a friend.

“To the dead who give life,” the three of them say in unison. I remember the refrain from a long time ago, a memorial to those buried whose decomposition gives back to the soil what was taken during life.

“Why’d you come back, Bear?” Rose asks, again. Bear glances at me, hesitating, as though expecting me to answer this question for him. This is his moment—these are his friends.

“I came back,” he says, slowly, “because Remy and I have an important message to bring to you.”

“Important?” Luis asks. “More important than Sam?”

“You’re a wanted man, now, Bear. Boss’ll shoot you on sight if they ID you here.”

Ma amie Remy isn’t just any old person from the Wilds. This here’s Remy Alexander.”

Bear pauses and waits for these words to sink in. Rose and Luis turn towards me, and Luis especially seems to lean in to stare at me, scrutinizing my features. I suddenly feel as though I’m under a microscope. Thankfully it’s too dark for them to examine every freckle on my face.

“Remy Alexander? Daughter of Gabriel Alexander?” Rose asks.

“Tai’s sister? The one Sam was always on about?”

“That’s the one,” Bear says. “Remy and I are here on Sam’s account and on Tai’s. We’re here because putting people on silo duty isn’t the only thing Boss been doing to hurt people in the Sector. They killed Tai and Remy’s mom, too. We believe that you deserve to know why Sam was put on Silo duty, and why my family has been torn in half. And we want your help to change things around here.”

“But everything’s fine here,” Luis exclaims, stepping closer to Rose as if for confirmation and support. Bear motions for us all to sit, sensing the rising tension.

“Have there been any other accidents since Sam left?” Bear asks. Rose and Luis look at each other.

“Well,” Rose begins. “I don’t know if this is an accident, but Andre disappeared last month. Bosses said he went senile and escaped. He was pretty old.”

“Andre was going to turn forty-five this year,” Bear begins. “In the capital, that’s still young. Folks in Okaria get to be lots older, like eighty or ninety. I learned that when I escaped and came to the Re-”

I interrupt him again before he can say it. “My grandfather died when he was eighty seven. I bet Andre wasn’t senile at all, and that was just an excuse that the Bosses told you. Was Andre asking questions like Sam was?”

“Not about Tai or anything,” Rose says. “But he kept on talking about how it wasn’t right that Sam was sent to the silos.”

Luis nods, taking everything in.

Bear takes a breath. “The Bosses just as good as killed Sam and they might have hurt Andre, too. They might also be covering up for when things go wrong and people get hurt, when people get killed. It might be indirect, but it is killing even so.”

“There’s more,” I say. “The Bosses are feeding you special food that’s completely different from the food people in the city get to eat. I grew up eating food that made me smarter, faster, healthy. The food was designed special for me. That’s why I was able to go to the Okarian Academy, because the Sector groomed me to be smart enough to attend the Academy. Bear almost got the chance to go, too. They took him from the Farm and put him in a special school, but then, just as quickly, they changed their minds sent him back here.”

“When I returned and started eating Farm food again,” Bear says, “everything I learned at school started fading away. At first I was upset and angry that I couldn’t live at the nice school and that I couldn’t do maths so quick any more, and that I started forgetting all the big words I’d learned in class. My mind felt all muddled, and then, after a while, it didn’t even bother me anymore. It was all sort of like a dream—someone else’s dream, not even my own. And when I left the Farms with Sam, it kinda cleared up. I wasn’t so muddled up, could think better somehow.”

“All that’s because of the food?” Rose asks.

“Exactly. Food designed by the Dieticians to turn you into the kind of Farm worker the Sector wants,” I say.

“But I'm proud to work on the Farms. Not everyone needs to live in the city, and go to the Academy.” Luis says.

Yes, Luis,” I continue. “But shouldn't everyone have the opportunity to choose? Your food is specifically designed to make you not care about having your own choices. It is designed to increase your endurance and your strength, which is good for laboring on the farm, but your body isn’t meant to grow so fast, to be worked so hard. Like Bear said, people in the capital, and even in the factory towns, live much longer. If your friend Andre lived in the city, he might live for forty more years.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being strong,” Luis looks at Rose, and I can sense the hesitance, the hint of fear, in his frown. “But I don’t want to die sooner than everyone else. Me and Rose … I don’t want to leave her. That’s not fair.” Rose nods her assent and looks at us to continue.

“No, it’s not fair,” I say. “But now, Bear and I are eating the same food, and it hasn’t been modified by the Sector Dieticians. It’s natural, healthy, comes straight from the earth, and doesn’t come in a MealPak. We cook it ourselves.”

Bear pulls out some of our provisions from his pack and spreads it in front of Luis and Rose. “Please, try it. It’s very tasty.”

Rose reaches for a slim strip of jerky but Luis hesitates.

“We have more, if you like it,” I say. “We have enough that you can give some to your friends, as well.”

We hope that even a little bit of natural food, a little push from us, will open their minds just enough to start questioning things on their own. Why they’re not allowed into the Dietician’s lab. Why they’re not allowed to talk about Tai Alexander’s death. Why the folks who visit the Farms look and act so different from them. Why the Bosses live longer than the workers. Why they can’t make their own decisions on when to have children and with whom, and why their families are broken apart.

“I don’t feel different.” Rose says, after they’ve finished the plate Bear set out.

“But it tastes good,” Luis pats his belly in a gesture of satisfaction.

Bear chuckles. “It doesn’t work straightaway. In fact, if you stop eating the Farm food altogether, you will get sick before you get better. It’s called withdrawal.”

“Like fixing a broken bone. It hurts while it heals, but then it’s all better,” I add.

Bear gazes off toward the Farm campus in the distance. Luis and Rose sit in companionable silence while I fidget and play with the hem of my shirt. I glance at Bear, in a what now? gesture. Not that I expected some dramatic change of heart, but this lack of any response at all is unsettling.

“Would you like to meet again tomorrow night?” Bear asks, finally. “I can tell you more about what’s happened to me since I left, and I’d like to hear about what’s been happening here.”

Rose glances up at Luis and says, “We would like that very much.”

“If you can help it,” Bear adds, “try not to eat your MealPaks tomorrow. You may feel a little nausea, but that will pass. We’ll send the rest of this food with you. But don’t let the Bosses see you.” He hands over the bag of food we prepared for them, and Luis takes it, even as a frown of confusion and hesitance shadows his face. “We’ll have more for you tomorrow evening,” Bear continues. “We’ll make sure you get plenty to eat.”

“Bear, are you sure…?”

“I promise. You’ve both known me since I was just a kid, and you know I would never lie to you. The MealPaks are not good for you. This food is much better. It’s good for all of you—your body and your mind. And I wouldn’t know about it if not for Sam. If you listen to me, if you trust me, it’s only because Sam was brave enough to ask the questions that finally led me to the truth.”

“We’ll try your food tomorrow, Bear,” the big man says. “And we’ll meet you again tomorrow night. After that, we’ll have to see.”

“That’s all we can ask,” I say.

‘Thank you,” Bear says as we all stand to leave. “Your trust means everything to me.”

“Until tomorrow.” Rose gives Bear one last hug before the two workers disappear back into the night.