anyone, slipped away.
Becca stared at the TV, only half-seeing it. She didn’t even know what she was watching. She should go to bed, she knew; it was probably after midnight by now. But last night she’d had another nightmare about Anna, and she could still feel the dream lurking in her subconscious, ready to torment her again tonight. If she managed to sleep. She knew the restlessness would return as soon as she got into bed, and she’d toss and turn and end up pacing her room at three in the morning.
The apartment door opened.
Becca should have gone to bed when she’d had the chance. That would have made eight straight days of not having to look at or talk to her mom.
“I’m glad to see you,” her mom mumbled as she sank down onto the couch. “It’s been, what, a week?”
“Something like that.” Becca tried to focus on the TV. An Enforcer raced down a city street in pursuit of… Becca didn’t know. Something important.
“It’s good to see a friendly face. It feels like it’s been a hundred years since I’ve seen someone who doesn’t want to kill me.”
Becca kept her face blank. She didn’t think she could manage friendly. “I was just going to bed.”
“If it’s because of me, you don’t need to worry about it. I don’t care how late you stay up. If it were a problem, your grades wouldn’t be so high.” She sank deeper into the couch. “Sleep does sound tempting, though.”
“Maybe we should both go to bed.” Now the Enforcer was handing a struggling dissident over to a woman who looked kind of like Heather. Becca flicked off the TV.
Her mom let out a groan and closed her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe what this week has been like. I swear every impossible dissident was arrested on the same day, and they all got assigned to me.”
“It’s late,” Becca said, standing up. “And I have a test tomorrow.”
Her mom used to rant about work to her all the time. How had she never thought before about what it meant? How had she never imagined who the dissidents her mom complained about were, and what her mom was doing to them?
Back then, they had just been dissidents. That was the difference. Only dissidents; barely even human.
Back then, Becca hadn’t been one of them.
“Just when I was finally getting somewhere with one of them—which took the better part of four days while I fell behind on everything else—Public Relations swooped in and snatched him up for execution.” She let out her breath in frustration. “He had connections we’ve been waiting a year to find, but did that matter to them? No, all that mattered was that they needed someone young to balance out the age range in their latest batch of executions.”
Becca wondered how suspicious it would look if she ran to her room and locked the door.
“I would gladly have given them the man who came in with him. That one would say he was innocent if he had been arrested with dissident pamphlets in one hand and a bomb in the other. But no, he’s too old, and now the directors want me to get enough useful information out of him to make up for losing the other one.”
What if she threw the remote at the TV and smashed it? How suspicious would that look?
“Then there’s the whole teacher thing.” She massaged her temples as she spoke. “One good thing about you going through my files—at least I can talk to you about these things now.”
What if she threw the remote at her mom’s head?
“Every teacher who says something suspicious in class—and the sheer number of dissident teachers we’ve found is enough to make me want to pull you out of school—now has to be used for this project. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were something local, but we have to coordinate with processing centers across the country. We got a great confession from one of the teachers—all he needed was a little prompting and he came up with the entire thing himself—but it contradicted something Processing 103 had used, so we couldn’t use any of it.”
Becca’s breathing grew louder in her ears. Her hands twitched with the effort of keeping them still. She had to move. She had to do something.
“And Public Relations keeps changing what they want. First they wanted to emphasize the heroism of the students who reported the dissident teachers. Then they decided it would be better to place more emphasis on the students who had already been corrupted, and show the damage that had been done, so Enforcement focused their attention on high-school-age dissidents. Now Public Relations isn’t sure whether they want to go in that direction after all, so we’re left with these extra dissidents and nothing to use them for—but we can’t execute them, in case the geniuses in Public Relations change their minds again.”
“Stop it! I don’t want to hear about this!” Becca hadn’t meant to start yelling. She hadn’t even meant to open her mouth.
Her mom, about to say something else, stopped with her mouth half-open.
“I don’t want to know what you’re doing in that place. I don’t want to think about it.”
“Becca—” her mom started.
The image of Jake clutching the chains of the swing, bruises around his neck, flashed in front of her eyes. Her mom had done that to him, by doing much worse to the rest of his family. “I don’t care what those people said!” she screamed, while the rational part of her brain looked on in horror. “I don’t care what they did! If they’re working against the government, let them! Maybe if they took over, people wouldn’t disappear for no reason!”
In the silence, Becca’s heartbeat echoed so loudly that she couldn’t imagine how her mom didn’t hear it.
Her mom stared at her with wide wounded eyes, betrayed eyes, as though Becca had stabbed her in the gut.
There would be no talking her way out of it this time. It was too late for that.
Maybe too late for anything.
How long now before she ended up in 117?
Between protecting Becca from Internal and protecting society from another dissident, which would her mom choose?
She didn’t know the answer.
“Becca.” Her mom spoke her name in a strangled whisper.
Becca didn’t wait to hear what she would say next.
She ran.
Chapter Twelve
A month and a half ago, Becca’s phone had woken her in the middle of the night. She answered before she was fully awake. Heather didn’t say anything at first. When she did speak, her voice was choked with sobs; she stopped every few words to take another strangled whimpering breath.
Becca could only understand a few words here and there. Disconnected fragments, half-intelligible. Nothing that made any sense. Nothing that told Becca what had happened. She offered what little comfort she could, and gripped the phone tighter every time Heather said something else she couldn’t decipher.
“Please come,” Heather managed through her hysteria. “Please.”
Still murmuring reassurances, Becca left the apartment. She padded down the hall and rang Heather’s doorbell, not caring if she woke Heather’s parents. Nobody answered.
“I’m right outside,” said Becca. “Answer your door.” Maybe it wasn’t locked. Becca reached for the doorknob.
The door was hanging slightly open.
Through the phone, a series of louder sobs, interspersed with breaths so fast Becca thought Heather might pass out.
