“Wait,” Jake called.
Against her better judgment, she stopped.
He jogged up to her. “Maybe we can start over.”
She should have kept walking. She didn’t want to hear anything else he had to say. She didn’t want to try to figure out whether or not he was telling the truth.
“Come out to dinner with me on Friday,” he said. “We can get to know each other. Maybe I can convince you I’m not a spy.” He gave her a tentative smile.
Her refusal was on her lips—but then she thought about what refusing could mean. Maybe Jake was completely innocent, and all he wanted was a date. But if he really was a spy, she had done too much damage already.
The best thing to do—the only thing to do—would be to go out with him, play nice, and make sure he knew she was a model citizen… while trying to figure out whether he was telling the truth.
Although the idea made her stomach tighten, she nodded. “Okay.”
The pulsing behind her eyes got worse as she tried to return Jake’s smile.
Just one date. She could get through one date.
She hoped.
Becca assumed her mom would be working late again. Instead, when she got home from the playground, her mom was sitting on the couch, idly flipping through channels. As the door closed behind Becca, she looked up and set the remote down on the coffee table.
She smiled. “I got out of work early for once, so I thought I’d cook dinner for the two of us. I’m making my macaroni soup. It’s already on the stove.”
Becca studied her mom and tried to imagine her feeding scripted confessions to dissidents, creating, confession by confession, a country-wide conspiracy that didn’t exist.
Her mom frowned. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Becca mumbled. She forced herself to smile. “Tough day at school, that’s all.”
Her mom eyed her more carefully. Becca imagined, for a second, that her mom could see everything in her mind. She squirmed.
Abruptly, her mom stood up from the couch, betraying her exhaustion with only a slight wince. She started toward the kitchen. “Come help me with the soup.”
Normally Becca would have welcomed the rare chance to talk to her mom the way she used to. Now all she wanted to do was get away from her and her probing eyes.
But Becca had heard her mom use that tone before. She knew what it meant. She knew she didn’t have a choice.
She followed her mom to the kitchen.
Her mom gave the soup a few cursory stirs. Becca tried to find someplace to stand where she could see the pot but wouldn’t get hit with her mom’s elbow. Whoever had designed the kitchen in this apartment had obviously never cooked a meal in his life. Becca’s mom used to complain about the lack of space all the time, until she stopped having time to cook.
Becca examined the soup to avoid her mom’s eyes. “It looks good,” she said, just to give herself something to say. “It should pretty much take care of itself until dinner, shouldn’t it? You don’t need me for anything.”
Her mom turned away from the pot to face her. “I need you to tell me what’s wrong.”
Becca had known this was coming. Reluctantly, she raised her head. “It’s just… Heather’s parents. I know you had to do it. They were dissidents.” The note had proved it. Her mom hadn’t done anything wrong. But the thought of what had happened to them still hit Becca like a fist to the face, the way it always did these past few days when she let herself think about it too much. “But I knew them, and now suddenly they were dissidents all along, and they’re gone, and… and you were the one to kill them. And Heather will hate me if she ever finds out.” She hoped her mom was too tired to see that she wasn’t telling the whole truth.
But her mom was already shaking her head. “I’ve seen you upset about that. This is different. What’s really bothering you?”
Maybe she should go ahead and tell her mom what she had seen, ask her what it meant. Maybe her mom would have some explanation for it. But how could she ask something like that without looking like a dissident? Obviously her mom knew her better than that, but still. That wasn’t the kind of thing you just asked.
Her mom sighed. “You never used to keep things from me. We used to talk every night, remember?” She swirled the spoon through the soup. “I miss that.”
Becca missed it too. Heather had stopped talking to her parents about anything pretty much as soon as she turned twelve; Becca never had. Instead, their closeness had eroded little by little, not by their choice but by the steady growth of Processing 117.
Without their conversations, Becca felt unanchored. She could always count on Heather to offer sympathy— unless Heather was caught up in some drama of her own—but her mom had a solution for everything.
Becca took a deep breath. “Do you ever… try to get dissidents to admit to things they haven’t done? Like being part of a network of dissidents that doesn’t exist?”
Her mom drew back sharply. “Where did you get an idea like that?”
She shouldn’t have added that last part. She shouldn’t have gotten so specific.
Too late to take it back now.
“I can’t imagine you doing that,” Becca assured her. “I just… I heard something about…” She floundered, unsure how to explain her question.
“What has Heather been filling your mind with?” her mom demanded. She slammed her hand down on the counter; Becca jumped. “
An image came to Becca, of her mom calling Enforcement and demanding Heather’s arrest. “It wasn’t Heather! Heather would never say something like that.” Now she definitely couldn’t tell her mom where she had found the information, or her mom would know Heather had been with her.
Her mom didn’t look convinced.
Had Becca condemned Heather with her question, after trying so hard to keep her safe? “I heard it from… Anna.” But she didn’t want to paint Anna as a dissident, either. “It’s not like she believes it. It’s just one of those things she heard. You know how she is.” She had told her mom lots of stories about Anna over the years, like how for one whole summer Anna had refused to go swimming because she had heard somewhere that three-quarters of all swimming pools were infested with parasites that could crawl into your brain and kill you. Better for her mom to think the question had come from gullible Anna than from possibly-dangerous Heather.
Becca held her breath while her mom thought about what she had said. She had never been any good at lying to her mom.
But apparently it was enough that she was telling the truth about Heather. Her mom relaxed a little. “I still think your friendship with Heather is a bad idea. But I’m glad to know she hasn’t said anything like that.” She met Becca’s eyes. “If she does, though, I assume you’ll do the right thing and report her.”
“She won’t.” Becca hoped her mom wouldn’t press her for more of an answer than that, because she didn’t know whether she would be lying if she said she would turn Heather in.
Speaking of answers… had her mom ever answered her?
A cold prickle traveled up her arms.
Her mom placed her hands on Becca’s shoulders. She stared into Becca’s eyes until Becca couldn’t look away. “What you heard was a dissident lie. It’s a common lie, but it is absolutely untrue. Our job is to find dissidents and keep them from endangering the rest of society. False confessions would be useless to us.”
Becca couldn’t find any trace of insincerity in her mom’s eyes, or in her voice.
She had no reason not to trust her.
So why, underneath her relief, did she still hear the words of the note in her mind, and wonder whether her mom was as good at telling lies as she was at spotting them?
Heather looked terrible.
She almost fell as she staggered off the school bus. She hadn’t done her makeup, and the dark circles under
