21 years ago
“Hurry, Ester! We have to get outside the gates!”
“I can’t run any faster!” All around her, bodies crashed into each other, like atoms after a lightning strike, and her spindly legs didn’t hold much sway against the more substantial figures. From overhead, the emergency alert system blared its continuous warning. Return to your homes immediately. The outbreak has not been contained. Isolation required. We are in full lockdown. Ester knew that she and Garridan were crazy to move against the crowd, but she had to pick between two terrors, and there was really no contest. With what he had done, the alarm would go off for at least another ten kronias, and they wouldn’t close the gate immediately after. Still, the crowd…
She and Garridan had to just hope that either the MONIFORs would not see them, or that there would be no way to stop the couple in the chaos without harming them. The machines couldn’t harm a human, at least that was what Ester had been told. From the chaos, a hand clasped hers and began tugging her through the rushing crowd. A moment of panic gripped her at the idea that they had seen her, that one had stood amid the bedlam, coincidentally right where she needed it not to be. She sighed in relief when she recognized the face attached to the hand. “Thank you,” she finally panted when he pressed himself against the wall and clutched her to him, away from the flight of the rest of the town. “There were too many people.”
He peered into her gaze. “Once we’re out of here, if we find a way to survive, you have to put on some weight.”
“I’ll be fine,” Ester flashed him a smile. “You underestimate the determination of a mother.”
With an unexpected rush of emotion, Garridan’s eyes melted. “And a father,” he agreed, a fire peeking through his sentimental expression.
“The first father in decades.” She smiled, pecking him on the cheek before turning to lead the way along the wall toward the gate. “Come on.”
A lunge took them past the final bottleneck and out into the less compressed streams of individuals who scurried for the entrance to the city. Unlike most of them, Ester relished the open air, the breath of freedom that promised her the autonomy to carry her child. Even the butterflies that danced inside her didn’t dampen her enthusiasm.
When the huge arm swung across her path, she flinched backwards, fully aware that she could not avoid it. It was one of them – an Advocate. Since the machines couldn’t hurt humans, it would have proven too easy to defy them without the Advocates. Inside, the medicines kept most people docile, but those who managed to escape? They could have created huge problems if not for the very human Advocates, the humans who – unlike the machines – could use whatever force necessary short of causing death to keep the humans in line. They used the threat of divestiture, an evolution of the machines’ mode of control for the dome, to render the populace obedient. What sane person would risk an elevation of the Mechs’ control?
When Garridan had read her the histories, she had almost changed her mind about escaping. What if they set off another Divestiture, like the literature claimed would happen? What if millions of humans died? Or just the ones in the immediate vicinity outside their dome? But, no. Her child. Garridan had used the child to convince her, the threat that they would harvest the child from her very body and separate them from each other, alter Ester’s mind so that she didn’t remember. How could she not remember?
When they had surrendered the dome to the Intelligence and all of the procedures had been set in place, the bereft mothers had been the ones who relented the fastest, some barely into majority. Even now that they hand picked the woman, harvested the eggs before she could have even born them, she wondered if those were the earliest Relenters. Now that she knew the holiness of the experience, she realized how damaging it must be – even if the girl didn’t know it. Her body was sacred, and its ability to hold life was sacred. Stealing that seemed the highest evil that could exist. Ester didn’t want that for herself. She definitely didn’t want it for her child – or children. Unfortunately, though, believing Garridan about the horror she faced had led her here, and now she and her child were both going to suffer for it. Now an Advocate would knock her down and carry her away, and she would lose the child anyway. If she even survived the impact.
Except the fist never landed.
Instead, the face she loved like none other slipped between her and peril, and for his gift to her, it received a massive blow. In an instant, Garridan lay on the ground, almost immobile among the trampling feet of panic. Ester tried to fall on him, to cover him, but her delicate frame couldn’t fight the pressing bodies. Later, she would thank the hands of Providence that had protected her child, but the price seemed awfully high.
Hands somehow materialized by Garridan’s face, and a moment later, they had gripped his arms and lifted him from the reach of the battering shoes. She couldn’t discern anything in the bedlam except the hands that held him, and so she followed the body of her love that seemed to float through the air before her. By the time she discerned the giant form that held him, they had moved only a dozen feet away from her, even someone the size of that man facing a struggle against the huge masses. Ester wouldn’t stop to wonder why they were taking him. Instead, she blindly fought the crowd to keep the form of her husband in her sights.
After at least a dozen meters, the milling masses began to thin, and the two men who held her husband sidled off the path into a small alcove of the burgeoning forest. One of the men stood several inches taller than Ester, but the other seemed almost as short as a child. Still, the smaller man bore labor-hardened muscles, and she imagined he struggled little with his burden. If not for their age difference, they could have been brothers, with their bronzed skin and ebony curls. Perhaps a father and son? Was that how it worked, with humans creating a replica of themselves in their children? Would her child prove a replica of Garridan – or of herself? The idea brought chills to her skin.
She didn’t know whether to approach, uncertain whether she could risk the damage to her own body with its precious cargo. With a quick hop, she slipped behind a tree, grateful that her lithe build allowed her easy camouflage. The larger man, who held Garridan under the arms, glimpsed up at the motion, but though he seemed to notice her, he made no move toward her, Instead, he turned his attention to Garridan.
After about ten minutes, the shorter man glanced back at his companion, and the larger one nodded toward Ester’s hidden position. The shorter one transferred Garridan’s legs to the arms of his friend and then approached Ester with a somber expression. Though he didn’t seem overly aggressive, she cowered from his crinkled brow. When the larger man hefted Garridan into a more stable position and started to walk, though, she stepped from behind the trunk without a thought. When the shorter man finally spoke, she lost all reserve.
“I’m Travers,” he offered, his tone placid and controlled. “Your man isn’t well, and he needs care. They could possibly save him inside if he makes it in there, but I think there would be incarceration after your escape. Come with me, and we’ll discuss your options back in the Dregs.”
Of course, they had intended to go to the Dregs, hadn’t they? Even so, the word scared her. The Dregs. The lawless land of fetid corruption, the home of deformity and disease. She had heard rumors, conspiracies of a concealed Utopia – hidden from the eyes of the populace for fear that they would all flee the walls. Now that she faced the reality of the unknown, the familiar seemed much less dramatic.
What could she do, though? Garridan lolled unconscious in the arms of a very large man, and even with her height, she couldn’t have budged him. In fact, she probably couldn’t even have shoved the smaller man to the ground.
“You wanna tell me your name?” Travers prompted, pulling her back to her surroundings. She started to shake her head, instinctively unwilling to offer any concession from a position of weakness, but in truth, she needed to make friends with these men if possible – if she were going to get her love back. “Ester,” she mumbled.
“Well, Ester,” he continued, gesturing with his head for her to follow. “We have about half a mile to wander here on the path through the forest. Are you up to it?”
“There’s a path?”
“Ha. I guess not by city standards, but if you focus on the horizon, you can notice a thinner swath of trees.”
In fact, she could recognize a path once she followed his directions, though she did not need to see it. All she needed was the vision of Garridan to lead her through the trees. When she hesitated, the man called Travers pressed his lips together beneath furrowed brows.
“I don’t want to pressure you, Mrs. Ester, but I don’t like to leave you here alone. I’ll see you back if you want, but between the men from the other villages and the wild animals and the cold, I’m concerned that a night out here would prove more fatal than the fist of an Unspoken.
Peering around her at the late afternoon shadows, she realized that whether he meant the words as warning or trap, she agreed that she couldn’t risk the wilderness – not with her baby in danger. They had fled the gates after the afternoon stretch, and under the dusky shade from the trees, she spied a cluster of dwellings, with a scattering of lights sprung to life inside. For several seconds, her mind wandered as the color of the lamps distracted her. Yellow. Was it fire? Did these people actually live like Stone Age savages?
Once she realized how far away the giant had carried Garridan, she easily relented, and a quarter krona later, he disappeared through the tall narrow doorway of a log-built dwelling. Inside, she recognized a piece of history. Light bulbs. Not fire – yellow glowing orbs that she had read about, the purveyor of burns and fires and ambient heat. Now that she had left the perpetual comfort of the dome, she thought the heat might prove a benefit.
“You can sit over here,” Travers pulled a seat out from a little table, and she seated herself as the larger man laid Garridan down onto a crude wooden bed with what seemed an uneven pad in the shape of a mattress. “Rafi, go get Evangeline.” The larger man nodded at Ester before making his way out into the dusk.
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Once he had left, Ester couldn’t stay so far away from the man she loved. She went to her knees beside the wooden frame. “Garridan,” she murmured, “I’m here.”
He had not opened his eyes once that she could see on the trek to the little cabin, and she had feared the worst, so tears filled her eyes when his lids popped open, and he gazed at her. “Ester,” he smiled, and she reached for his hand. When he moved it to meet hers, he groaned, even the subtle motion causing him pain.
Ester crumbled onto the coverlet. “We should never have tried to leave,” she sobbed as he clinched his fingers against hers.
“You can’t say that!” he grunted, and she tried to rein in her tears.
“But it’s bad, and they don’t have the technology to heal you out here.”
Though he obviously tried to console her, his breath shuddered in his chest. “A few bruises. It was my job, protecting you and the child. Now these people can protect you.” He tried to make light of the situation, though they both knew he was in dire trouble.
“Why was it your job?” she complained, but Garridan just fixed his eyes on the ceiling.
“I don’t know why; I just know it was. And I got you here where you’re safe.”
“If I’m even safe here. You won’t even know if they take you back…”
“I know; and if they take me back, I will be locked down for potential contamination, and with the escape attempt, there will be little chance they will let me out before the child is ten. ANGELs can’t hurt us, but they can lock us up if we cause trouble. It’s a small price to pay, and I don’t know why, but I have a feeling about these people.”
Ester couldn’t think of anything to say, just raised his hand to her lips and held it there. She didn’t have as much experience dealing with people as Garridan did, and she was inclined to trust his instincts, but the unknown still gnawed at her confidence.
When a shadow darkened the doorway, Ester glanced up at the form of a diminutive woman with a soft age rarely seen in the dome. Maybe a decade older than most of the oldest women. She hobbled to the other side of the bed from Ester and began a gentle examination of the patient.
“His skin is cold,” she offered, her lips pressed in a line of displeasure. “Pulse thready.” She lifted his shirt and examined his abdomen. “Bruising apparent on several areas of concern.” When her glance brushed past Ester with a cool evenness, Ester’s heart clutched. The woman believed him in serious trouble, if the look she landed on Travers meant anything.
“Do we take him?” he wondered.
“Take him?” Ester challenged – it sounded like a death sentence.
“Back to the city. We hardly ever do it, but when the choice is life or death, even we tend to choose the walls, regardless of the fact that we will likely spend our lives locked up for fear that we are carriers.”
“Then we go back!” Ester commanded with more insistence than she usually mustered.
“No! Ester!” Garridan grunted. “You have to stay here. The baby,,,”
“Baby?” Travers wondered, and Rafi – still without a word – bared his teeth in an eager grin.
“Oh, my,” the woman Ester assumed to be Evangeline muttered as her eyes assessed her visitors anew. “I guess we can’t send you back, at least.”
Did they want her baby? Ester clutched her hands over her stomach – maybe these people really were the monsters they had been portrayed to be.
“Did the Bruiser see you?” the old woman directed to the taller man.
“Bruiser?” Ester wondered.
“The man who hit – what’s your husband’s name?”
“Garridan,” Garridan answered for himself, though the tone barely escaped.
“The man who hit Garridan. Did they see which way you went?”
The woman must mean the Advocate. “I followed several paces behind your men out of fear for the baby, and I didn’t see anyone doing the same.”
“That’s good at least.” The man named Travers picked up the conversation. “Well, Mr. Garridan…I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but you are not doing well. Mrs. Ester, I don’t think Evangeline will be able to pull this one through.”
Ester glanced back and forth between “Mr. Travers and Evangeline.” “Then we go back!”
“No!” grunted Garridan, trying to sit up. “You can’t go back. They’ll take the baby!”
Blowing out a breath, Ester forced a lump from her throat. Surely, the piercing ache in her gut would hurt the child. Her love or her child…no woman should be forced to choose. “Maybe this is why the ANGELs don’t let us bear children,” she gasped. “They wanted to spare us this pain…”
“They wanted to erase any reason you would hold to resist them,” Evangeline countered, and the thought gripped Ester as tightly as her fear for Garridan.
Not that she could care about the abstract at the moment, but the feeling – that sensation she could not ignore for the ache – certainly had driven her to act in a way she had never considered before. Even with her deep love for Garridan, she did not think that she could sacrifice the child, and he seemed to feel the same.
“Ester, dear…” he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes, obviously struggling. “You must stay here. You must protect and care for our child.”
He was asking her to let him go. “How do I even know that these people will let me do that?” she challenged. “What if they merely want the child for themselves?”
From behind her, Travers scoffed.
“Silence, Travers,” Evangeline adjured. “Instead of disrespecting these people going through the worst moments of their lives, go and grab a couple of the families – make sure you get some that I trust – and let them come talk to the couple here.”
“I hardly think that your special pick of examples are going to convince me,” Ester challenged.
Garridan murmured something, and Ester leaned down to hear. “Don’t talk to the parents,” he repeated into her ear. “Speak to the children. They will not know to tell a story, and it will be obvious if they try.”
Though she wasn’t at all sure how he knew what he claimed, it made more sense than trusting the adults, who might have rehearsed and solidified their narrative. Kids would have more trouble staying consistent in the lies. She just nodded at her husband, and when the two families came in, Ester examined them.
The vision seemed surreal. She had read that children resembled the parents – she had even hypothesized with the men who had carried Garridan – but the reality was uncanny. Not something she had ever seen in the town, and even more pronounced than with the two carriers. Not only their coloration, with one of the children an obvious intermediate skin between her fair skinned father and her mother’s ebony tones, but the children’s very expressions mimicked the adults’ as if in apery. If the children had not been born from the adults, they had lived with them for a very long time. Was that how her child would be?
“What is your name?” Ester asked the first child.
The girl’s mother answered. “Her name is Barly.”
“I would like to speak to the child, if I might.”
The woman exchanged a look with Evangeline, who nodded her encouragement.
“Very well…”
“How many sun-cycles have you seen?” Ester wondered.
When the child looked to her mother, Ester worried that she would find out nothing.
“She means years, dearie,” the mother prompted. “How many years old are you?”
“I am nine.”
“But you are so tall!” Ester gasped.
“The ANGELs alter the babies in the nursery so that they don’t grow too tall. You must all appear about the same height, or someone might start to venerate the person of superior height.”
“Surely, we are not so simple..”
“Not entirely,” Evangeline acceded, “but they determined several traits that might prompt a following, and they bred them out.”
“Bred them? Like livestock, or vegetables?” Ester scoffed, incensed.
“Very much like livestock or vegetables, if I’m right about how they did it.”
“So, if I were to return?”
“They would take your child from you as early as safely possible – likely in the next week or so, since you are not yet showing. The earlier, the better they can ensure that the changes will take full effect without causing harm.”
“So, I cannot go back…” Ester murmured to herself. “But, Barly,” she turned back to the child. “How long have you lived here in this village.”
“All my life – at least that I can remember. I have heard that other villages exist, but I have not seen anything beyond some scattered lights in the distance, once when father took me for a walk at night.”
A walk, at night, in the forest. Even the thought stirred envy in Ester, and an eagerness to be able to do the same. To walk in freedom with her daughter.
“You must stay here…” Garridan insisted, his eyes still closed. “You must walk with our child.”
Peering at the other family, Ester thought she really didn’t need to examine the children anymore. It seemed so obvious that the two groups stood together as units – family units, she remembered. Was that what they were, with their baby? A family?
Evangeline seemed to read something in Ester’s eyes, because the elderly lady leaned against her cane and stood to her feet. “Let’s give them some time,” she mumbled to the others who naturally deferred to her.
A moment later, Ester sat alone with the man she loved, and he squeezed her hand, finally opening his eyes again. Truly, he looked awful, his color drained and wan. Still, he smiled.
“You are mine, dear Ester, and so is our Mandalay.”
With a broken laugh, she stared at him. “What an odd name!”
He peered at something beyond the rafters, and Ester found herself leaning her elbow down onto his bed so she could read the emotion behind the grey gaze. “It was a cluster of words I read once, and when I said them, they came out in a strange regularity – like they held some connection besides just the meaning. It was so…striking. ‘O the road to Mandalay where the flyin’ fishes play, an’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!’”
“Where did you read that? I’ve certainly never seen anything like that!”
“Remember the notebook I told you about? The one that belonged to the old man on my street?”
“The man old enough that grey had begun to show at his temples? How strange that he had not yet Relented at such an advanced age!”
“I think it was the book that kept him from the task. He seemed so unnaturally attached to the thing, like he worried that if something happened to him, it would die.”
“Kind of like a child.”
His lips curved up. “Yes, actually. He –“ A sudden spasm seemed to wrack him, and Ester stood to her feet when his back arched.
What could she do? She could not let him die, and she could not let her child die. “Evangeline!” she shouted after dashing to the door. “Please, Evangeline! He has to go back!”
Travers and his taller companion rushed to the door, peering back at Evangeline – who had seated herself on an overturned tree stump – for some kind of approval. When the elderly woman nodded, the men rushed to the tent. Ester stood back so they could enter, and within a minute, they cradled Garridan between them, as if they had done the same thing many times before.
“You may accompany us to the tree line,” the taller man stated, already leading his companion to the edge of the village. “The deposit lies half a mile from here, and you can watch from among the pines. The ANGELs don’t really look past the immediate border of the wall.”
Trying to suppress the stabbing pain inside her, Ester followed closely behind the pair and their burden. She couldn’t let her child face the agony she felt at the moment, so she breathed deeply until it calmed. In less than ten minutes, she could make out the little portal at the bottom of the wall, a bustling exchange between the Dregs and the ANGELs, where dozens of the outsiders begged for their chance to go in. It was only the ill, Ester saw, despite what they were taught inside the wall. There did not seem to be any desperate Deplorables, forlorn and penitent, who had decided to risk rejection to seek entry.
Only the sick and those who cared for them. Some kind of odd and wrenching care that sent them into contortions of passion directed at the supposedly compassionate ANGELs as they pled to stay with their loved ones. For the first time in her life, she thought she understood the Deplorables.
Without warning, the two men stopped with their burden just inside the line of trees.
“What is it?” she wondered.
“This is where you say goodbye,” Travers explained, his tone surprisingly gentle, and Ester lost all of her other thoughts and her observations of the exchange at the wall. “Once he is born, Dearest,” she murmured, stepping up to a spot where she could sense the waning heat of his body beside her. She gripped his hand. “Once Mandalay is born, whenever I am able, I will seek you.”
If he had heard her, Garridan would have protested, but he could hear nothing, and after she placed a kiss on his cheek, the men carried him away. She pressed her hand to her lips as if to prevent the loss of the kiss, and her shoulders shook with the tears as he disappeared through the gate.
The gate to her home.
To the place she would never see again.