After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

I snuck back down the stairs before the call was over. Listening to someone jealous themselves into a heart attack wasn’t as fun as I’d thought.

I flew down the hall on stocking feet, and was in the nurse’s office before Miss Kemp could even call down to check on me. What took everybody else five minutes, I could do in three.

That night, Bree pulled me aside on the walk back from the dining hall to the dorms.

“Mason told me to help you run lines,” she said.

She could read.

“I can get Miss Kemp to do them with me,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I want to get a look at this part, and you need the help.”

I had no idea who she thought she was fooling, but this I had to see.

We went through the script in one of the empty schoolrooms. It wasn’t much on paper. I reminded myself that Bree had done more with less, which gave me some courage.

“I’m a pretty good shot,” I said, and then I closed one eye and mimicked taking down some scrabbly mammal at a hundred paces.

“Don’t worry if you can’t hit it,” Bree said. “They’ll probably hold on you while you shoot, and then just rig one to explode in pickups.”

The way she said it threw me, for a second.

The newsman would ask me what had happened to my family, what I thought about the government and the war, how I felt about being a soldier. I breezed through the lines, the picture of a ruined kid who’d grown up too soon.

(They could have just gone outside, where the city was overrun with Lower kids trying to stay out of the ratcatchers’ way long enough to eat, but there was no telling what would happen if someone started in on a story like that. Uppers didn’t like being reminded of a problem so hopeless, a problem so close to home.)

When Bree read her lines, her exterior thinned, and the hardened war reporter devastated by what she was seeing sprang to life in front of me.

She shouldn’t have been so bitter about what happened after the weeping bride. She was too convincing, too good; whatever role she’d gotten would have been her last.

At the very end, I was supposed to look up at the newsman (cheating my face to the camera) and say, fighting tears: “I miss my brother.”

“Wrong,” Bree snapped, the first time. “It’s not a sandwich, it’s your brother. This is the evening news—you have to fool ten million people. Now, picture something you’ve really lost, and make me feel it.”

I closed my eyes. I had a dim memory of being hot and hungry and frightened, from before the agency bought me off the ratcatcher who’d brought me here. But all I had ever really known was the classrooms and the dining hall and the winding upstairs corridors with little dorms on each side, and the overhead signs for pediatric ward, where they dormed the really little kids.

“I can’t,” I said, opening my eyes.

Bree looked disappointed. “You’ve never lost a friend?”

“You’re one to talk,” I said.

After a little silence, she said, “You have to nail this line.

There’s no point in them keeping you around if you don’t sell this, you understand me?”

I didn’t understand. I couldn’t believe she was so upset; maybe this was the hallmark of an artist.

“Okay,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

She slapped me.

The pain took a second to reach me; then it pooled where her hand had struck and sent a jolt up my nose like she’d shoved a nail in it. My eyes watered, but I was too scared to close them, in case she tried it again on the other side.

She said, “Give me the line.”

I had forgotten to breathe, and when I exhaled it stung my throat.

“I miss my brother.”

“Good,” she said. “Again.”

I got to take the white van to the audition. I pressed my face to the glass, watching as the alleys full of street kids gave way to clean sidewalks and tall buildings and stores that were open for business.

Mason came with me, but in the waiting room of the building (ten full stories up), he sat a little apart, with the rest of the school reps. The kids all sat in one long, silent line, waiting to be called.

The girl ahead of me was fourteen, tops, and she stared at her folded hands like she was about to faint.

I recognized her. Magpie—the puppeteer from the Naturewise shoot. She had manipulated the bear’s face in the close-ups, hunched under a fur drape, with her arms extended, fingers pulling blindly at a hundred tiny strings.

“Were you a black bear face a few years ago?” I asked.

She looked up, surprised. “Yeah,” she said, and a second later, “Poppy, right?”

I nodded. “What are you doing here? There’s no puppet stuff, is there?” I was crap with puppets.

Without looking at me, she held up her right hand, which now had only three fingers.

“Infringement,” she said.

I didn’t understand. I looked at her.

She shrugged, recited as if by rote, “Someone from another agency tried to poach me at my last audition. My agency adjusted my value as a puppeteer.”

She folded her hands back in her lap. “They were just protecting their investment, they said. That was all.” She took a breath. “I didn’t do anything wrong. They weren’t angry with me.”

When the manager called her name a few minutes later, she slid off her chair and waved to me and walked inside, and I still hadn’t said a word.

“I got the part,” I said.

Bree had walked downstairs from the teachers’ rooms. She was silhouetted in the window at the end of the dorm hall, the only one awake.

“When do you film?”

“Next week,” I said. “There’s not much left to do. They found some foothills near where they filmed the bear thing, and the newsman’s been cast already.”

“How did the audition go?”

“I only had to read it once,” I said. “They took my picture and booked me on the spot. Mason’s already signed.” I grinned, willing her to be proud of me, for once.

“Well,” she said, after too long, “let those who would be fooled, be fooled.”

It wasn’t even the insult it should have been; it was the saddest thing I’d heard from her since the weeping bride.

Bree made no sense.

I dreamed about a black bear.

It was real, and close enough that I could smell its wet coat, but when it looked at me it didn’t attack, so I must have been wearing my bear suit.

The bear had sharp black eyes and fur that gleamed in the sun, and this close to it, I saw how careful its expressions were: the muscles above the eyes, the flare of its nostrils, and the soft brown lips that curled back a little from its teeth as it smelled the air.

At the shoot, they told us to move deliberately, and I had operated the piston that swung its heavy head to and fro, and they had said, “Good enough.”

This bear was real, and looking at it, it seemed impossible that anyone could ever have been fooled.

(“What happened to the real bears?” I’d asked.

The director shrugged. “What does it matter why something dies out?” he said, and then pointed to the