16 - VALE

Spring 8, Sector Annum 106, 17h24

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Gregorian Calendar: March 27

 

 

We spent the rest of the day setting up camp, hearing the details of Remy and Bear’s mission up to this point and filling them in on what we’d learned while searching for them.

Late in the afternoon, Jahnu, Kenzie, and I set out to put into practice the trapping skills the wayfarer girl had taught us in the hopes we’d have something fresh to eat over the next few days. As we headed back to camp, we heard rustling in the undergrowth and my first thought was that we’d been discovered. My second thought, as per usual, was utter dread at being questioned by Aulion in front of my parents. My third thought was, shit! That’s a mean boar headed straight for Kenzie. I whipped out my Bolt, jammed the setting to KILL, and fired. But it was already dead by the time I got off my shot. Jahnu and Kenzie had both seen it and fired at the same time. The hairy thing was practically already roasted, smoke rising from its inert body. The smell of burning hair and skin filled the air.

“Bacon!” Kenzie whooped.

“I thought you were a gonner,” I said, wiping my forehead.

She looked down at the carcass, poked at it, and turned it over with her booted foot. “Nah, it’s kinda scrawny.”

“Scrawny or not, it’s fresh meat, protein we probably all need,” I said.

“Who is going to skin and dress this baby for dinner?” she asked.

“We’re bringing home the bacon,” Jahnu quipped, “so I volunteer Miah and Firestone.”

“Hah, Firestone, maybe,” I laughed. “But Miah? I don’t think so.”

“About time he learned to live off the land,” Kenzie said. “It may be scrawny, but I don’t want to carry it back.” She looked from Jahnu to me, and we both shrugged and shook our heads. “Okay, we’ve got to figure out how to move the damn thing.”

We created a makeshift sled and dragged the boar back to camp, Firestone stepped up and volunteered to do the honors and to show all of us how to skin and dress the meat. Eli and Bear dug a hole, fashioned a spit, and the boar roasted over the fire through the evening while we talked about what comes next.

After a well-earned meal and a few brews that Firestone had secretly stowed without telling anyone, we hunkered down for the night and, for the first time in a long time, I slept peacefully knowing that Remy was just on the other side of the fire pit.

Now, evening is upon us again and the sun is dipping behind the trees as we prepare to make our next move. Remy and Bear told us that Rose, one of Bear’s old friends on the Farm, had set up a clandestine meeting with a few of the more spirited workers, including some of Bear’s old friends and a few new transfers from other parts of the Sector. We decided, in the interest of secrecy, to split up and only have a few of us attend the meeting.

After much discussion and some serious dissension, Eli declared, and we all finally agreed, that Remy, Bear, Eli, and I would go to the meeting. Soren, Kenzie, and Jahnu would accompany us as far as the Farm perimeter, but wait outside in case something goes drastically wrong and we need help getting out. Miah would man the airship in case an emergency evac is necessary, and Firestone would guard the little cave Remy and Bear had found and used as a back-up hideout. Earlier in the day, Eli hiked up with them to pack their other camp and drive the car back to the cave, backing it in carefully for easy getaway.

Ducking out of the cave to refill my water supply at a nearby spring, I slow as I hear voices, low but clear, a little ways through the trees. As I get closer, I can hear Soren and Eli arguing. I stop moving, staring through a thicket of bushes, beyond which I can just see Soren pacing and Eli leaning up against a tree, striking his usual confident pose.

“I still don’t get it. Why does Vale go in while I stay on the perimeter?” Soren seethes. “How is that smarmy son of a bitch gonna convince anyone to join the Resistance?”

“Your grudge is blinding you,” Eli says. “Vale’s a known quantity. Plus, he’s got charisma. You’ve seen him on the Sector broadcasts. There’s a reason they called him the ‘golden boy’ when the Orleáns took over. Okaria loves him, and the Farm workers will be jolted into reality when they realize he hasn’t been kidnapped after all, that he’s on our side.”

“Are you so sure he’s really on our side?”

“Soren, wake up. He’s our ace in the hole.”

“More like asshole.”

Eli straightens and walks forward. Soren stops pacing. They’re standing nearly toe-to-toe.

“Look, whatever problem you have with Vale is clouding your judgment. I know you guys have a history. Both of you liking Remy complicates things, but if you don’t get your shit together and get over it, I’ll make Kenzie my second.”

“Too late for that,” Soren spits. “The Director already gave your command away, remember? Seems more like you’re Vale’s second.”

I think Eli’s about to throw a punch, but I slip away, before they can start pummeling each other. I have no desire to get in the middle of a fight between two men whose trust I’m still trying to earn. I head on down to the spring, refill my waterskin, and jog back up to the cave, trying to forget everything I just heard.

Jahnu and Kenzie are sitting together at the entrance, hand-in-hand, as the sun sets through the trees. Just inside, Remy and Bear are wrapping loaves of bread, dried fruit and meat, honey-oat bars, and chocolate in cloth and loading it all into sacks.

“Can I help?” I ask, stepping up behind Remy. She straightens and glances back at me with a trace of a smile.

“Thanks, but we’re almost done.”

I nod and glance around the cave, looking for some way to make myself useful, for something to say.

“So,” Remy asks finally, “you never did tell us how long it took before you all discovered we were gone?”

Jahnu looks over his shoulder at me. “Ask him. He was the one who set off the alarm.”

“You?” she asks, raising a curious eyebrow.

I sound a bit like a frog when I speak. “Couldn’t sleep and thought I might find you awake, too. But you were nowhere to be found.”

“Oh,” is all she says. A silence blooms to fill the cavern around us.

“We hadn’t talked since—” I manage, at the same time Remy starts.

“I thought my dad would find the note….” She stops talking and looks away, frowning.

I feel Jahnu and Kenzie looking at us, see Bear swivel slightly to glance at Remy out of the corner of his eye, and then, thankfully, Miah strides up from wherever he’d been and rubs his hands together.

“I’m hungry. Got anything good?”

“How about a boar sandwich?”

“I’m already bored of boar,” Miah pokes her as if he’d made the funniest joke ever. Remy rolls her eyes and gives him a handful of dried fruits which he starts eating with relish, eyes rolled into the back of his head.

“Ohhhh … this is good,” he moans. “Better than candy.”

I shake my head at his antics, but I’m still impressed at the variety. Strawberry, prunes, figs, apricots, even mango. Eli told me Rhinehouse’s hydroponic greenhouse produced an incredible bounty of fruits and vegetables, but it’s still hard to understand how he did it. Just thinking about it makes my stomach growl.

“Got any to spare?” I ask, and watch as Remy digs into a sack and then drops a handful of fruit into my hand, her fingertips fluttering over my palm.

 

 

Now, in the deepening twilight, Bear leads the way down a steep hill to a slit in the perimeter fence of Round Barn. I’m nervous. It’s extremely risky for us to go into the Farm, although Bear was quick to reassure us that the Enforcers don’t do much in the way of perimeter guard work. And we are all wearing heat-cloaking gear, which should hide our signals from any patrolling drones. It would be much riskier, if not impossible, for the Farm workers to leave the property, unless we were able to smuggle in new clothes for them to wear that aren’t equipped with the tracking devices woven into the fibers of their current uniforms. So we’re meeting them at the same creekside spot that Remy and Bear apparently met his old friends the first time, a secluded little niche on a hill a kilometer or so away from the worker residences.

And, apparently, we’re bringing a lot of food.

“The whole idea is to get them off their MealPak diets as quickly as possible,” Remy explained, as she handed me and Eli each two loaded sacks of food. “The more untainted food we can give them, the better. We don’t really know how long it will take for the sugar water replacements to take effect.”

“Where did you guys get all this?” Eli asked.

“Normandy,” Remy said, nonchalantly. “This was supposed to be our food for the next week. But since you guys showed up, there’s plenty to go ’round, right?”

Eli and I glanced at each other, neither of us bothering to correct her: we did not, in fact, bring plenty of food to go around. We had expected to pick her and Bear up today and take them back to Normandy, and get on with the LOTUS mission. But, with our prized roasted boar now socked away in the cave, I figure we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We come to the gap in the fence and Bear slips through first. We pass the stuffed sacks through to him. One by one, we slip through. I’m on high alert—this is the first time I’ve been back on actual Sector-controlled territory since I fled almost three months ago. I’m thankful that the moon is almost new, that it will be harder for soldiers or drones to detect our motion in the dark. So I still my nerves with a squaring of my shoulders and follow Bear as he leads us silently through the fields.

After about twenty minutes of walking, Bear pulls up short.

“We’re here,” he breathes. He drops his pack and squints around. “They must be running late.”

“It’s okay. We’ll wait.” Remy sets down her sack and drops to the ground. I follow suit. The early spring grass is cool, and the dandelions and daisies have sprouted. Eli stands, looking almost as anxious as I feel.

“You ready?” I ask Remy. She’s sitting cross-legged, looking meditative, with her eyes closed and her breathing deep and even. Her small hands clasped in her lap, the only thing that betrays anxiety is a slight catch in her breath when I ask.

“Yes,” she responds without opening her eyes. Eli finally sits next to her, and she reaches out to take his hand, sensing it was him without looking. “Are you?” she asks me in return, now opening her eyes. “They’ll want to know why you’re here with us.” Her voice is expectant. She’s not asking me if I’m ready to tell my story, but if I’m ready to support hers.

“I’m ready.” The confidence in my response belies my hesitation. Am I?

I hear a shuffling behind me, and Eli and I step back into the shadows so as not to alarm anyone. They won’t be expecting you, Remy had said. We’ll want to introduce you when the time is right.

A line of men and women approach, and as they draw nearer I count them and smile. There must be at least twenty. Remy scrambles to her feet, smiling warmly and shaking the hand of the big man who leads the group.

“Luis,” she says. “Thank you for coming, and bringing everyone.”

Remy and Bear have obviously already won over the woman at Luis’s side. Her smile is bright even in the evening darkness. Remy turns and hugs her.

“Rose,” she says. “Good to see you, thank you for being here.”

“Of course,” Rose says in return. “We brought as many as we could, safely, and as many as would come.”

“How’s everyone?” Bear asks, his question directed to the group at large. A few voices murmur back at him in greeting.

“What are you doin’ back here, Bear?” someone asks. It’s a low, masculine voice, and in the darkness I can’t make out the speaker.

“Luis and Rose asked the same thing when we talked two nights ago. I came back because I’ve got somethin’ to tell you all, somethin’ important. It’s about Sam and Andre, and everyone else who’s ever gone missing, and what we’re all doin’ here on the Farms. But first, we brought some food to share.”

“Food?” someone says, skeptically. “You off your MealPaks? You know you gotta eat what the Dieticians give us or you’ll get sick.”

“That’s one of the things I want to talk about,” Bear says, his tone provocative. “I am off my MealPaks. I’ve been living in the Wilds for nigh on four months. No Dieticians out there to feed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I’m as healthy as I ever was. Healthier, even.”

“Their food is good,” Rose says, piping up helpfully from Remy’s side. “Luis and I tried it the other night. Our Paks are good, I’ll grant you that, but what they’ve got tastes different, somehow. And the bread is, well …” she turns to Remy. “I really just came for the bread,” she laughs.

A joke. Remy and Bear have made an impression on one farm worker, at least. There’s laughter in the group at this comment.

“Fills you up,” Bear says. “And tonight we brought more than just bread. Dried fruit and smoked meat, the likes of which I’d never tasted before I left the Farm. And these honey-oat bars that taste so sweet you’d swear you were robbing a beehive.”

“Here,” Remy says, taking a loaf and breaking it into chunks. She passes a few pieces on to Rose, who hands them out to the other workers. “Why don’t you pass the bread around, sit down, get comfortable and then taste it for yourself.”

The men and women settle in and a few moments of silence pass, as the bread and oat bars are passed around from hand to hand. It’s a good thing we brought a lot of food, I think, even as I realize that what we have here won’t go far among twenty people. If we’re going to keep this up, we’ll need to fly in supplies.

“This is good,” someone says, sounding a little surprised.

“I told you, Cal,” Rose says kindly. “I said you’d like it.”

“Now, while you eat, my friend Remy’s got something to tell you,” Bear says. “It has to do with what she found out when she was living in Okaria.”

“Remy?” someone asks, leaning forward to peer through the darkness, looking Remy up and down like Bear just conjured her out of the evening mist.

“Haven’t heard that name in a long time,” someone else says. “Since that … you remember that attack way back … when was that … five, six years or so?”

“It was a little over three years ago,” Bear says. “And this is that Remy, Remy Alexander.”

Remy stands a little taller and rolls up on the balls of her feet. “You all know who I am,” she says. “You know me as the daughter of the Poet Laureate. You know me as Tai Alexander’s sister. And as the girl whose family disappeared after the massacre at the Sector Research Institute.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “But tonight I’d like you to get to know the real Remy Alexander. The Remy whose sister was murdered not by Outsiders, but by the Sector. The Remy whose mother—a doctor who helped people on Farms like Round Barn—was murdered just a few weeks ago by Sector forces.” Little gasps go up around the crowd as Remy continues. “I want you to get to know the Remy who fights for the Resistance.”

“You mean the—”

“With Jeremiah Sayyid, who kidnapped—”

“Worse than Outsiders, they are, that’s what I heard—”

“Terrorists!”

Rose looks around nervously, and Luis stares at the ground, as though unwilling or unable to take a side. But Remy looks unmoved, obviously prepared for this reaction.

“That’s what you’ve been told, and in truth, if I was in your position, I’d believe all that, too. But the problem is that none of what you’re being told is true....” She holds her hand up as some in the group start to grumble. “And there are two other people here who I hope can help me convince you to listen and consider what I have to say.” She motions for me to stay in the shadows, and continues.

“First, I want you to meet Elijah Tawfiq.” Eli steps into the circle and nods at Luis and the others. “You probably remember that Eli was there the day my sister was murdered. He was nearly killed, too, and he told his story to the investigators. But they didn’t listen. They claimed he was disturbed and wasn’t telling the truth about who really killed all those students, who really killed Professor Hawthorne, and who tried to kill him. Instead of listening to him, they took away his job and tried to keep him drugged to keep silent. Then his parents disappeared. And that’s when he left Okaria with my family. That’s when Eli joined the Resistance. Eli.”

Remy steps aside and motions for Eli to speak up.

“What I have to say can be summarized in one word,” he begins. “Please. Please try to open yourselves up to the possibility that Remy is telling the truth. Please try to listen when she says the Outsiders didn’t kill her sister. Please try to believe me when I say the investigation was a sham. Please try to consider that the Sector is lying to you, controlling you, that the OAC under the leadership of Corine Orleán does not have your best interests at heart.”

More voices interrupt and Rose hushes them with a louder than expected Shhh.

“And if you won’t consider what Remy says or what I say,” Eli continues, “there’s one more person who’d like to speak to you. Someone else here tonight who has a stake in this story.” Silence settles around the group, and Eli turns to Remy. “You do the honors.”

Remy steps forward again and says to the group. “I’d like you all to meet Valerian Orleán.” She turns and motions me forward. “Vale?”

I feel a flush run up my neck and into my cheeks. None of the Farm workers are looking at me, not yet—it’s too dark for anyone to have put my face to my name. But I can feel Eli, Remy, and Bear, all watching me expectantly, and Eli’s words from earlier come back to my ears. Okaria loves him. He’s our ace in the hole.

I step forward and clear my throat, but words don’t come. What do I say? Why am I nervous? I’ve spoken before thousands of people before, in front of some of the most important people in the Sector. Why can’t I find my voice?

I meet Remy’s eyes, the whites of them glimmering in what little starlight we’ve got. She tilts her head in an almost imperceptible nod. All I can do is tell the truth.

“My name is Valerian Orleán.” I pause to let this sink in, but no one speaks. No one moves. “If you’ve heard of the Resistance, you’ve surely heard that I’ve been kidnapped by this band of renegades, terrorists. You probably saw the broadcast my parents put out through the Okarian News Network, the one in which they claimed I’d been betrayed by my best friend, Jeremiah Sayyid. But I’m here to tell you that none of that is true. I stand before you tonight side by side with Remy Alexander, Elijah Tawfiq, and your old comrade Bear, as a member of the Resistance.”

I stand a little straighter, draw in a deep breath. The last time I gave a speech was at my SRI graduation and it was broadcast throughout the Sector. I was nervous, but I was playing a part, eager to do my political duty and get on to the party where Jeremiah and Moriana and our other friends were waiting. I’m still playing a part, and Jeremiah is still waiting for me, but this time, there is no party. No chauffeured airship stocked with champagne. This time, lives are at stake and I have to take care to get it right.

“I wasn’t betrayed by Jeremiah. In fact, Jeremiah is with us, too, waiting just a few kilometers away for our return. The truth is Jeremiah is still my best friend. No matter what my father or Linnea Heilmann tells you, Jeremiah did not betray me. My parents betrayed me. The Okarian Sector betrayed me. The leaders of our country betrayed me, and they’re betraying you, too.” I wait for that to sink in. The air is so still, the workers so silent, it’s almost as if I’ve bored them to death. Finally someone speaks up.

“Don’t make no sense. Why would your parents tell the whole Sector you’d been kidnapped if it isn’t so?”

“Because they’re angry I found out about the crimes they’ve committed and the people they’ve hurt. Because they’re afraid I will tell the truth to honest people like you. Anger and fear. That is what is driving them.”

“Crimes?” Someone says. “I don’t believe it! What crimes could they have possibly done? Why they saved our lives what with that last outbreak on the Farms. Corine Orleán is a miracle worker. She can’t be no criminal.”

“As hard as it is for you to believe, it was even harder for me to believe. In fact, at first I couldn’t accept it. It’s impossible, I told myself. My parents can’t be killers. And yet … and yet….”

“Sam was killed because he asked too many questions about Remy’s sister,” Bear says, stepping in to save me. I thought I’d steeled myself to the facts, that by now I could say it all out loud, but I’m thankful for the interruption.

“He was surely dead to us, dead to who he’d been before, the moment he came out of that silo,” Luis says, nodding as if to reassure himself that speaking up is the right choice.

“And Remy’s sister and everyone else in that classroom were killed by Corine. Remember I was there,” Eli says. “The man who killed those students was no Outsider. He put a Bolt to my head,” Eli places two fingers at his temple as if to pull the trigger, “He looked me in the eye and said ‘Don’t get on Corine Orleán’s bad side,’ and then he turned the Bolt around and shot himself. Tai was murdered, directly or indirectly, by Corine Orleán.”

A shiver slithers up my spine as murmurs pass through the group of workers. I’ve seen those words, but only on a computer screen, when I read Elijah’s testimony about the massacre when I broke into my mother’s office and hacked into her computer. Hearing them spoken out loud gives them new meaning. I can disassociate myself from my parents, but they will always be a part of me.

“And my mother was killed when the Sector attacked us and bombed our home in the Wilds,” Remy says. I can hear the quaver in her voice, but she doesn’t break.

“There’s more,” Bear says, reclaiming control of the conversation. “You’ve heard from Vale, Remy, and Eli what the Sector’s lied about, who they’ve killed, but it goes deeper than that. The food we eat here at Round Barn does more than just make us strong and healthy to work. It also makes it harder for us to think, to ask questions, like Sam did. Like Rose does now.”

“What does that mean?” Luis asks, now skeptical again.

“Were any of you sent to schools in other quadrants when you were little?”

“I was,” a woman pipes up. “One of the teachers here thought I was good at math, so they sent me to a school in quadrant four.”

“How long did you last?”

“I was there about three years thereabouts before I asked to be transferred back. I liked it better here. More time to play and have fun. And I like being outadoors.”

“Did you notice anything different when you got back?”

“No, back to the same fun and games,” she says, and there’s a few laughs around the room.

“Well, I went, too, but I did notice something when I got back.” Bear says. “When I was five, I was sent to a nice school in one of the factory towns. They thought I was good at language and spatial imaging, that I might be good at art, like Remy. When I got there, I suddenly started seeing things in colors—”

“We all see things in colors, Bear,” Luis says, and this time there’s quite a few laughs around the group. Bear smiles sheepishly.

“But do you smell in colors?” he asks, and that question sends a hush around the group. “Do you feel things in colors? When I was at their school, one of my teachers spoke in a voice that sounded the same way storm clouds look. A friend in school gave me a feeling as deep amber as good whiskey—”

“Now, what’s a boy like you know about good whiskey?” a man at the back says, and there’s another round of laughter.

“I didn’t know it then, ya see, but I know about whiskey, now. Point is, I could feel and smell and taste things I’d only previously been able to see.”

“It’s called synaesthesia,” Remy says. “I experienced it, too, when I was eating Sector MealPaks. The Dieticians put special chemicals in the MealPaks of people who are artists to enhance their ability to paint or describe the world around them.”

“But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Luis says. “You make it sound like what the Dieticians do is bad.”

“Wait a minute,” the woman who’d also been to a quadrant school speaks up again. “Seems like there was a difference when I got back home. I couldn’t read as fast, or do math in my head like I had been able to before, when I was at the other school. But I didn’t care back then. I didn’t like it in town. I wanted to go home and they let me. Didn’t give it another thought after that.”

I note that Rose was right about this group: they have more of a sense of self, an ability to question, to think critically, than I’d expected based on what Bear told us of the Farms.

“That’s just it,” Bear says. “I did care. Experiencing the world the way I did at school was fantastic. I loved it. But when they decided I wasn’t good enough to go to that school anymore and sent me back here, they took me off those drugs and I didn’t get to taste or smell those colors anmore. It wasn’t my choice—it was theirs. I didn’t know why that happened until I was much older, and I met Remy here.”

“So what are you saying?” the same voice asks.

“Speak up, Ren,” Rose says, turning to the speaker, her voice challenging. “What do you think Bear’s saying?”

“I don’t know …” the woman says, her voice soft, unsure.

“Don’t matter if you know for certain or not. Take a guess. What do you guess he’s saying?”

“That the MealPaks have stuff in them that can change us?” Ren says.

“I haven’t eaten a MealPak in three years,” Remy says. “Sometimes I miss those colors I used to experience. Sometimes I miss not being able to draw as quickly or precisely or remember images as clearly as I could before. But when I stopped eating the MealPaks, I realized I wasn’t the same person the Dieticians had been making me, all those years. It was like all my life I’d been standing in front of a mirror in the darkness. Then one day, I reached over and switched on the light and there I was. Me. The real me.”

It occurs to me again, as it has more and more often in the last months, that I never experienced this change. Everyone in the Resistance talks about this process of withdrawal from the Sector’s drugs, both physically and mentally—and we all saw the effects in Miah, when he had an especially hard time coming off the MealPaks. I feel as though I’ve missed a rite of passage. And more than that, I keep asking myself, over and over, why? Why has everyone else seen this change and gone through this process of self-discovery, when I alone feel exactly the same, mentally and physically, as I did in Okaria?

“Drugs?” Luis says. “They aren’t drugs. Drugs are dreamweed, or cannabis. What the Sector puts in our MealPaks—”

“Is biochemically identical to the effect of dreamweed or cannabis, just in smaller doses,” Eli says, cutting him off. “Did you know that at least one out of every five Farm workers has benzodiazepine, a calming drug, in their MealPaks? When criminals go to the Asylum, they get put on the exact same drug. It’s designed to calm you, to keep you from worrying about things, to accept what the Bosses tell you without question.”

There’s a long silence as we wait for further objections, and none come. Finally, Luis speaks again.

“I don’t get it,” he says, in a tone that is neither judgmental nor bitter, but simply confused. “I’m happy to be who I am now. If I don’t eat my MealPaks, do I turn into somebody else?”

“Point is, the choice to be you should be yours.” Rose reaches out and takes his large, rough hand in hers. “You’re lucky you’re happy with who you are. But I’m not. I want to be more. I want to be like Remy, like Bear. I don’t like the notion someone else decides who I am and that they can decide to hold me back from being all I can be.”

“Luis,” Remy speaks up. “Would I like to experience the same sensations I experienced while eating my MealPaks? Sure. But it should be my choice. No government should force its citizens to eat foods that have been altered in order to alter the individual. If you choose to eat food enhanced to make you smarter or stronger, that’s okay. That’s your choice. But no one should force you to ingest chemicals, to put things in your body in order to change you, control you. If the Dieticians offered you a choice, you could decide on your own. Just like we’re offering you a choice now,” Remy says, addressing everyone in the group. “You don’t have to fight with us. You don’t have to fight at all. It’s up to you. But remember what the Sector did to Sam, and Tai, and my mother. If they can do that to them, they can do it to you, too.”

I speak up again and all eyes turn to me. “Sometimes choosing is hard. It was hard for me to realize my parents were not the people I thought they were. It was hard for me to realize they had hurt people I love. And it was hard for me to leave Okaria behind. But I did. I made the choice. Now, it’s up to you to make a similar choice. But as you make that choice, also try to keep in mind that the chemicals in your MealPaks influence how you think.”

“Those of you who’ve had enough can go back home, if you want,” Rose says. “But for those of you who want to help Remy and Vale and Bear make a change, who want to choose for yourself who and what you are instead of having the Dieticians make that choice for you, you stay here. Nous avons de travail a faire,” she says, and I translate in my head: We have work to do.

No one moves. Even Luis, sitting at Rose’s side, looks unhappy, but unwilling to leave.

“I don’t know about all that stuff you said about the MealPaks,” he says, finally. “And I’m happy being who I am right now. But what the Bosses did to Sam was wrong, and if what you tell us about your sister and your mother, Remy, is true” he says, “je suis vraiment desolé, then I want to help make it right, if we can.”

“Merci beaucoup,” Remy says, graciously, though her voice has the tremor of loss in it that I hear every time she talks about Tai or Brinn. But a smile tugs at my lips, watching her, listening to her speak. She could lead them anywhere, I think. I know I’d follow her.

“So,” the voice I now know as Ren rings out, “what do we do now?”