The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) Read online

  Someone on the other side of the wall drew a sharp breath.

  I scrambled to get my feet beneath me, to rush back the way I’d come. I took a step backward, turned, took one long leaping stride—and barreled straight into someone.

  Meritt.

  He put a hand over my mouth—not that I would have cried out—but I knew it was too late for silence, too late to hide. Someone was outside the wall, and any moment now he would step into view and pin us with his light. And unlike me, Meritt had been caught before.

  All this flashed through my mind instantly, definitively. I wrenched myself out of his arms and pointed at him, then pointed back the way we’d come.

  There was just time to register the quick series of expressions flitting across Meritt’s face—disbelief, objection, dismay—to see him reaching to grab me and missing as I stepped beyond his grasp, pulled off my cap, shook out my hair, and plunged into the light.

  Chapter 2

  One of the wardens reached for his stunner and the other took a step back. I paused just long enough to register their faces—both men, that was good, it was harder to know how to maneuver if you were dealing with mixed pairs—and then I started talking.

  “There you are!” I said. “I’ve been looking for you forever.”

  Go on the offensive, my friend Cynda always said, and she had more experience with wardens than any of us.

  The wardens stared at me, their faces impassive. One was young. His hair was short-cropped and he had an ugly puckered scar running through his upper lip. He stood in a way designed to show off his muscles, with his chest out, his hands fisted on his hips. The other warden was bigger, softer, older—about Rafe’s age, maybe—and was completely bald but had a short blond beard. I recognized him and could almost remember his name. We thought he might be Judd’s father.

  He asked the obvious question. “Why were you looking for us?”

  “I’m lost,” I said, making it up as I went. “I don’t know how to get back to my dorm.”

  For a long moment neither warden said a word; they just stood there staring at me. Then the one with the scarred lip reached out and took me firmly by one arm.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and from his tone I knew he wasn’t taking me home.

  As he began to lead me away, the other warden, the older one, turned on his heel and walked down the shadowed sidewalk, shining his light here and there. I craned my neck to watch him, stumbling as the younger warden pulled me along, my heart in my throat.

  But Meritt was safe. The older warden came back alone. He caught up to us and positioned himself on my other side, and together the two men marched me through the city. They had work boots on, so they didn’t pay much attention to where we stepped. They pulled me straight through puddles and twice I stepped on sharp rocks, stumbled, was jerked upright.

  The younger one was rougher than the older one, and when he figured out that my feet were callused enough not to mind the puddles and rocks—except the really sharp ones—his fingers dug into my arm. It was a stupid petty punishment, but I had bruises to show for it later, angry elongated ovals that changed from blue to purple to yellow over the course of the next few weeks, marking the ordinary passing of time as the world fell to pieces all around me.

  We passed the laundry house, where soap-scented steam rose gently from the vent pipes; skirted the food preservation buildings and the infirmary, where one light burned; and made our way around the cafeteria, dark now and silent. Then we came to the center of the city, to the circle with its concentric rows of steps, to the watchtower and the door at its base. To the prison.

  Even though I’d known where we were headed, the sight of the windowless door made my knees suddenly weak.

  The older warden swung open the heavy outer door. It was metal and it opened with a raw echoing clang. Inside, the long hallway smelled of antiseptic and fear, and the black-and-white tiled floor felt cold and smooth and strangely slick.

  I had never been inside the prison before. There were rows of doors on each side of the hall, gray steel doors with heavy bolts. The scarred warden started to pull me down the hall toward those doors, but the older warden stopped suddenly—so that I was yanked between the two of them—and dragged me into a nearer room. That room, unlike the others, had a small mesh-covered window in its door.

  “Sit,” he said, pointing at a metal folding chair. Then he went back out into the hall, jerking his head to tell the other warden to follow him. Hisses and mutters followed. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it sounded like a disagreement.

  Their delay gave me a chance to scan my surroundings. The room looked clean but smelled musty, like old damp paint, and was mostly bare—a gray metal table sat straight in front of me, and two other metal chairs were folded and leaning against the wall. One bare light bulb hung from the ceiling, right above the table.

  After a moment both men came into the room. The older warden grabbed a chair, opened it with a clang, and sat down a few feet away, off to the side. I had to turn my head to see him. The scarred warden took the other chair and sat down behind the gray metal table before pulling a small book with a metal cover out of his shirt pocket.

  The dangling light bulb above him was glaring, but I didn’t squint or look away. I didn’t want to look shifty or too frightened—I didn’t want them to realize I was a systematic rule-breaker who had only now been caught. I wanted them to see a first-time offender, a nobody, a girl who had stupidly gotten lost and stayed out after curfew.

  “Name,” the warden said, but he was already writing—everybody knew my name—so I thought he was talking more to himself than to me. My feet were wet, the bottoms of my pants drenched, and as I watched the warden write, my teeth began to chatter. It wasn’t because I was terrified—though I was—and it irritated me. This was going to be tricky enough without my body throwing out random unintended signals.

  “Name,” the warden said again, more sharply. He didn’t look up.

  I guess the formalities had to be observed.

  “Red,” I said. Some of the others had been given two names, but I only had one, and it was a darn unimaginative one at that.

  The warden dropped his pen on the table and leaned back in his chair, making his black shirt pull taut over his chest. Ridiculous, I told myself. He was showing off, trying to frighten and impress me.

  “I’ve seen you before,” he said, and his tone was flat and expressionless.

  Of course he’d seen me. You’d have to be blind not to see me. I was the freak, the only person with blazing red hair in the whole city, on the whole island—in the whole world, for all I knew.

  The scarred warden kept staring. Finally it dawned on me that he expected an answer.

  “Oh?” I said, lamely. “Where have you seen me?”

  “Anywhere you’ve been. Everywhere you’ve been.”

  My skin felt suddenly clammy.

  He kept staring at me, tipping back in his chair. It was obviously a pose, a technique pointing out that he could relax while I was sitting bolt upright, struggling to keep from trembling. He’d probably practiced all this in front of a mirror, that flat gaze, the relaxed muscles. Ridiculous, I told myself again. He’s ridiculous.

  The older warden cleared his throat.

  The younger one didn’t look at him. “How old are you?” he said to me.

  “Sixteen years, eleven months.”

  Then he did look over at the older man. “She’s the one who was born during the ashes.”

  The older one nodded a confirmation. It was my claim to fame—well, that and my hair. I was the only one born during a four-year stretch when a foul-smelling ash drifted across the island, darkening the sun, blighting crops, wreaking havoc with human and animal fertility. Most women couldn’t get pregnant during those years, and the ones who did miscarried. All but my mother. I’d never known her and I didn’t know if she’d done something in particular that let me survive, or if she’d just been lucky.

&nb
sp; The scarred warden was eying me speculatively. “Almost seventeen years old,” he said. “I thought she was younger than that.”

  Everyone thought I was younger than that. It added insult to injury—all my life there had been no other children my age, and I looked even younger than I was. It had made for a lonely childhood. The young kids bored me and were frightened by me. The older kids let me tag along, at least sometimes, but they had never been my friends. Only Meritt was my friend; only Meritt had been different. He liked me and because he did, some of his friends gradually became mine as well. I owed him everything.

  I would not say a word that could even possibly give him away.

  The scarred warden was still examining me, his gaze running up and down my body.

  “Up close she looks her age,” he said, in a voice that made me want to scrub with soap and water. “But now I get it. That hair—she was born during the time of the ashes, so she’s damaged. She’s a runt and she has mutant hair. Which is why we watch her.”

  That last part should have sounded like a conclusion, but he made it sound almost a question. And what did he mean? The wardens watched everyone, not just me. The cameras were everywhere. That was the way of Optica.

  The older warden shrugged. “We watch her because we’re supposed to.”

  The scarred warden studied me for another long moment, then set his chair legs down hard on the floor and looked down at his notebook. “Employment?” he said, with the tone of someone getting down to business.

  “Field A Supervisor.”

  The warden smirked without looking up. Supervisors got all the blame and none of the credit, which was why the older, more experienced workers usually found a way to avoid the position.

  “Dormitory?”

  “Girls’ Dormitory H-2.”

  The scarred warden wrote it down. Then he looked up. The light above his head cast long shadows down his face. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. Why was he the one asking all the questions? Was he in charge?

  As his gaze lingered I felt my face begin to flush. I had to fight to keep from squirming. I had to come across as a silly stupid girl who had gotten lost—I had to seem like someone who was mostly innocent and therefore only a bit frightened, not guilty and therefore utterly terrified.

  The warden tapped the end of his pen against the table a few times. “Why were you out after curfew?”

  I blinked innocently at him; I was pretty good at blinking innocently. “Because I got lost,” I said.

  He didn’t write that down. He reached in his pocket for a battered pack of cigarettes, lit one, and then settled back and stared at me again. His eyes were a pale blue, his expression flat, but that wasn’t what made my throat go suddenly dry. There weren’t many cigarettes left on the island and I happened to know, thanks once again to Cynda, that the wardens saved them for important occasions. To mark a particularly lucrative deal with some hapless person vulnerable to blackmail or other coercion. To celebrate some especially pleasurable arrest.

  But I was nobody. I was just some girl who got lost. There was no reason for him to celebrate arresting me.

  The warden smoked, staring at me with his flat eyes. Clearly he was going to sit there until I said more, but I wasn’t going to say more, not until he made me. People talked too much, Cynda said. They got tangled up and gave themselves away. It was better to be as brief as possible—that way you had fewer lies to remember.

  It was hard, though, to sit quietly with the wardens staring at me. The cigarette smoke tickled in my throat, made me need to cough. I managed to swallow instead. To keep myself from talking I began to count silently to myself. When I was somewhere past five hundred and thirty, the warden leaned forward and tapped out his cigarette on the tabletop, making a pile of gray ash. He carefully tucked the half-smoked cigarette into his shirt pocket and leaned back in his chair again.

  “Why were you out after curfew?” he said again, exactly as he’d said it before.

  This time I gave a small embarrassed shrug. “I couldn’t sleep, and so I went outside to get some fresh air, and then I got lost.”

  He made a circling gesture with one finger. Keep talking.

  “I couldn’t sleep because of the thunderstorm,” I said.

  The warden scowled, but I was mindful of Cynda’s warning—keep lies simple—and anyway I couldn’t think of anything else credible to add. Should I say I’d gotten lost while trying to pet one of the stray cats that roamed the city? No, that was too childish sounding. It might work for the older warden, but not the scarred one. He wasn’t looking at me as if he thought of me as a child.

  Then it hit me. “The thunderstorm kept me awake, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about the city meeting tomorrow.”

  That got a reaction. The scarred warden didn’t say anything, but he glanced at the older warden. Did they know what the city meeting was about? None of the rest of us knew. We just knew it was bound to be bad.

  The scarred warden wrote something on his paper. Then he looked up at me again. “Go on.”

  “I know I shouldn’t have done it,” I said, glancing apologetically at the older warden. “But I was scared. I am scared. The city meeting scares me.”

  “Look at me,” the scarred warden said. “Not him.”

  I did, squinting against the light. “I was sitting on the dorm steps and I kept thinking about going to the circle tomorrow for the city meeting and about how I didn’t want to go. I wanted to be somewhere else. So I sort of started walking in the other direction.”

  From the corner of my eye I could see that the older warden was nodding. “Toward the orchard,” he said.

  “Toward the orchard. And I went through the orchard, and then I sort of kept walking until I got to the gap in the wall. And then— ” I took a deep breath, considered what I was about to say, and decided to risk it—“I sort of went across the wasteland to the edge of the woods.”

  Neither warden moved, but the room felt suddenly different. My breathing seemed too loud.

  There was no rule against going to the woods—there didn’t need to be—so I hadn’t gotten myself deeper into trouble. With luck, I was distracting the wardens from what I’d actually done. With even more luck, I might manage to get some precious information out of them. I’d never before had a chance to talk to wardens about the woods.

  “Don’t you know what lives out there?” the scarred warden said. I couldn’t read his expression.

  “Wild animals,” I said. “Wolves and stuff.”

  “And stuff.” He smiled without humor. “You’re meant to know the stories.”

  “I do,” I said. “But sometimes I wonder if that’s all they are. You know—just stories.”

  The warden stared at me for a long moment, not blinking. “And what would be the point of just stories?” he said, his voice hard.

  I chose my words carefully. “It’s hard to get everything done,” I said. “We don’t have enough people who are strong and healthy. And if the woods were safe, we might lose good workers. Some might leave the city. They might even try to find a way off the island.”

  The warden crossed his arms over his chest, tipped his chair back. “So you think the city commissioners lie to keep people in the city. You’re calling the commissioners liars.”

  “No! Not lies—just stories, for the kids, when we’re little. I only wonder sometimes, because nobody I know has actually seen anyone out there. In the woods, I mean. No one has seen anyone in the woods.” I was babbling. I should never have broached the topic—but now that I had, I’d have to see it out. “I’m not saying the Watchers are liars.”

  “City commissioners,” the warden corrected. “It’s rude to call them Watchers.” Then he gave a humorless snort that might have been laughter, and set his chair down with a thud. “Sounds like you need a bit of review. Start with Wes. You remember what happened to Wes?”

  “He gathered firewood too far north. Too near the wilderlan
d.”

  “And?”

  Maybe it was only a story. Still, I didn’t like to say it out loud. “They sent out a search party and found him dead,” I said, as evenly as I could manage. “He’d been skinned like a rabbit.”

  Somewhere down the hall a door shut with a clang. From the corner of my eye I saw the older warden turn toward the sound, but the scarred warden kept his gaze on me. “Now do Rosella,” he said.

  Rosella wasn’t as hard to talk about. In fact, she was something of an inspiration to me.

  “Rosella didn’t like the breeding partner she was assigned,” I said. “She ran away to the woods in protest.”

  “And what became of her?”

  “She was gone for a couple of months. When she came back, she said there were things in the woods that were terrifying and beautiful, all light and shadow. Not entirely human. She went around warning people to stay in the city, away from them.”

  The warden nodded. “Exactly.”

  He seemed calm enough, so I decided to push my point. “But she came back crazy,” I said.

  “As a bedbug,” he agreed.

  “So she didn’t know what she was saying. She could have been repeating childhood stories she’d been told. She might not have seen anything at all out in the woods.”

  I desperately wanted to believe there wasn’t anything to fear out there. Sure, I’d been terrified of the woods when I was younger. I’d thought of the gaps in the walls as gaping mouths that would devour me if I wandered too close.

  But now . . . I wanted to believe there was a place we could go, Meritt and I, to escape from the eyes all around us. We’d never talked about it, but I wanted to hope that when the time came for him to be assigned a breeding partner, we’d run away, go live in the woods and become part of the legends, the victims in horror stories designed to keep everyone under control, but really we’d be safe. We’d be free. We’d be the ones who got away.