Chapter 19
“How?” Casey breathed, staring at Adam in a mixture of awe and shock. “You... the brain damage...”
Adam shrugged and glanced around. He knew they needed to start moving soon, or someone would notice them. He splashed around in the water for a moment more, grinning stupidly, before shuffling over to stand close beside his brother. “I’ve been faking,” he admitted.
“For twenty years?” Casey demanded, incredulous.
Adam shrugged. “After the first few months, people saw what they expected to see.”
“Adam,” Casey whispered. “Twenty years!”
“We’ve got to move, Case,” he murmured, his lips barely moving. “I’ve played in this puddle long enough. Stick to the middle of the road, though. We can keep talking, but try to keep it quiet and get your face under control. Anyone watching those cams will be able to see you looking like you just saw a ghost.”
Casey shook his head, but managed to get his feet moving again. “I did,” he muttered. “Damn, Adam... Mom and I thought...”
“I know, but that was kind of the point. Grampa told us what was coming, Case. The Purges, the executions... when They shot him, and They took you and Andrea away, I realized that the only way to keep everyone around me safe was to look dumb.”
“Adam... you were eight years old!” Casey objected softly, walking slowly beside him. “How the hell...?”
Adam shrugged and jammed his hands into his jacket pockets, hunching his shoulders. “I just knew. The time wasn’t right. He knew it. Dad knew it, though he finally tried to do something after They took you and Andrea. Grampa always said the time would come, but we had to wait for it. The time has come.”
Casey snorted. “What, you want the two of us to revolt? Seriously?”
Adam took a deep breath. “No,” he replied evenly. “I want to start the revolution. Not the two of us, Casey: everyone.”
Even knowing what Adam had been suggesting, the confirmation of it made his brother recoil slightly. He glanced over sharply at Adam, his expression dumbfounded. “You’re serious!”
Adam’s eyes flashed, but he quickly looked back down and scuffed a shoe on the asphalt. “Of course I’m serious, Case. It’s not a word you bandy about without meaning it, not in this place. Grampa told us stories of what things used to be like. Remember? He mentioned freedom. Is that what you see here, Casey? Do you see freedom? I don’t. I see slavery, Case. We’re trapped within our Zone, forced to work with no hope for advancement. Our homes can be invaded by Citizoneprotects at any moment. Families are broken apart, women are forced to...”
“Enough,” Casey growled. “No, I don’t see freedom here. I live in the same world, Adam. I heard the same stories growing up. I don’t disagree. I see the chains. I have no illusions about this world. But revolution...” his voice had dropped, and he stumbled over the word. “It’s scary, Adam. While I remember everything Grampa told us, I also remember what they do to people who try to fight the system. They took my Dad, too. I was too young to remember it, but Mom told me he had been trying to organize a resistance.”
Adam shook his head. “The people weren’t ready,” he whispered. “The Great Purge hadn’t happened, the Merges... when Uncle Chaz was still alive, people still believed things could get better.” He glanced up at Casey for a moment. “But that’s not true anymore. I’ve looked at people’s faces the last few years, Case. It’s one of the benefits of being seen as Simple Adam. No one notices me. No one hides in front of me. They hide in front of everyone else, but not me. I’m harmless. So I’ve spent some time watching people.
“Grampa said for a revolution to occur, people had to want it more than anything else. He said that people had to have lost all hope before something this big could happen.” Adam grimaced. “While it shames me to admit that I have been waiting for the day where all I could see in the faces of those around me was despair, I have been. And I’ve seen it, Case. I’ve seen the despair and the hopelessness. It’s everywhere. It’s in the way people shamble home after work, their shoulders hunched and their eyes staring blankly forward. It’s in the way people walk, how they move. It’s in the way they shrink into themselves when they see CPs walking down the street. They have abandoned all hope.”
Casey shook his head. “And you expect to be able to give it back to them?”
“I don’t see anyone else trying to,” Adam replied. “Think about it this way, Casey: do you want your children, if They allow you to have any, to grow up in this world? What kind of society do we live in where whether or not you can have children – and who you have children with – is dictated by the government? Would you be willing to risk everything at a chance, just a chance, to take back the ownership of your life?”
Casey stared at him from the corner of his eyes. “You may not be stupid, Adam, but you sure as hell are bat-shit crazy. How the hell would we even begin?”
Adam allowed a small smile to touch his lips. Casey had said ‘we’. He glanced around the street. A few hundred feet ahead, the glass and steel Sanitation Building squatted beside the road like the faceted eye of a bug poking from the ground. Their time was running out. “We begin simply,” he whispered. “This morning there was only me. Now there are two of us. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. Tell your boss you got me to Sanitation okay, but you want to check in on me this evening to make sure I got home okay. He’ll be feeling guilty about transferring me by then, so it should be an easy sell. We’ll go over names of people we know have lost a parent, a sibling, or a spouse in the Purges. Tomorrow... well, tomorrow we start recruiting. Quietly. Are you in?”
Casey looked up at the building looming in front of them. At last he nodded. “I’m in, Adam. God help us both. I think you’re nuts, but I also think you’re right. I’m with you.” He paused and studied his brother. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
The smile that was playing across Adam’s lips grew slightly bigger. “Hey,” he whispered. “This has already been the best day of my life. I got my brother back. I’ll be fine.”
Casey blinked. “I’ve missed you, Adam. So has Mom. Can I...?”
Adam shook his head. “Not yet,” he whispered. “She can’t know about me yet. It would put her at risk.” They stood in the rain just outside the door of the large building, and Adam tossed one more glance at his brother. “I need to get back in character. Come to my place tonight. I’ll be waiting.”
Without another word, Adam ran a hand across his face. He knew the routine wouldn’t be complete, but he was able to slam most of the doors in his mind shut. He felt his face slacken, felt the glazed look film over his eyes. He walled off the emotions the conversation with Casey had ignited, and he stared blankly at his own reflection in the glass doors, though he barely registered the condition he was in, drenched to the skin, covered in mud, hair plastered to his skull, a dark bruise blossoming over his right cheekbone from where Derris had hit him. It simply didn’t matter to him. He glanced over at the red-haired man beside him. “Are we there yet, Case?”
Adam admired how quickly Casey was able to hide his reaction to his sudden transformation. In a matter of seconds, Adam had gone from being vibrant and alive with zeal to being dull and dazed, the perfect image of a simple-minded, overgrown child. The transformation was dramatic, and Casey was able to stifle his exclamation of surprise at the change. “Yeah, Dummy,” he growled. “We’re here.”
They stepped within range of the sensor for the gold-rimmed doors, and the glass swished open on a spacious, marble-floored lobby.
“Why are we here, Casey?” Adam inquired as he followed him inside.
“You’ll be working here, now, Adam. Can you remember that?”
The lobby was empty except for two security guards standing at a granite-topped counter near the steel-doors of the elevators. Like all government buildings, this one was designed to impress visitors. A glass-backed waterfall stood behind the security desk, with the word “Sanitation” written into the glass in gold. The falling water gurgled merrily, and soft music echoed in the vast lobby. A couple of empty black chairs lined the glass wall near the entrance. Adam glanced around nervously. His file was clear on his terror of government buildings, so he had to maintain appearances. “I don’t wanna, Case.”
“It doesn’t matter, Adam. You pissed the boss off, so he transferred you. You come here from now on.”
“Did you see the boss, Case? His caterpillar was doing somersaults. Have you ever seen a teapot? He looked like a kettle with a fuzzy caterpillar on it.”
“Sure he did, Dummy. Come on. Let’s go speak with these nice people,” Casey murmured, pointing to the security desk.
“Say, Case, does that mean I don’t work with you anymore?” Adam whined.
“That’s right,” Casey agreed, guiding Adam forward slowly. “But I’ll walk you to work every morning. The boss told me to.”
Adam clapped his hands in childish glee. “Oh, goody!” Suddenly his expression grew fearful again. “But I don’t like this place, Casey. Can’t I come back to the Yard?”
“No dice, Adam. You work here now.”
They approached the security desk, where one of the guards took one look at him, laughed softly, and turned to the second guard. “Hey Angie,” the man chuckled. “You get this one. I’ve got to use the head.”
The second security officer was a petite, dark-eyed beauty with short brown hair. She glanced up from the desk at Casey, and then frowned at the other guard who had simply walked away. She shook her head. “Can I help you?”
Casey shoved Adam forward and glanced down at the floor, obviously nervous. “My boss told me to make sure Adam got here. He’s... well, he gets distracted easily. He’s just been transferred. His name is Adam McLeod. I’ll be accompanying him here every morning until he’s gotten accustomed to coming here instead of to the Yard, officer.”
She studied Adam, a small grin playing across her lips. “Why is he drenched?”
Casey swallowed hard and glanced toward the door. “Like I said, he’s a little... distractible. He was playing in puddles. Look, I’ve got to get back to work. My bidaily is shot as it is.”
The security guard nodded. “I hate those things. Go ahead. I’ll take him to HR. Who’s he supposed to see?”
“I don’t know. The boss didn’t take the time to tell me,” Casey admitted. Not saying another thing, Casey bolted for the door. Adam didn’t blame him. Government buildings were not the most pleasant of places. They all looked the same, and almost everyone had had one or two bad experiences in a government building in the past.
The security guard studied Adam for a moment, her eyes speculative. “You got your boss that mad, did you?” she asked, unexpectedly.
Adam blinked. She wasn’t supposed to ask questions. In his experience with being shuffled from job to job, the security guards wanted to get him out of their hands as quickly as possible. Not able to help himself, he met her eyes. They looked... playful. For just an instant, he couldn’t help but feel a flush of excitement, his eyes flaring. His eyes burned, clear and lucid for a single heartbeat before he could fight the emotion back under control, praying she hadn’t noticed.
A tingle ran up his spine as she reeled back slightly as if struck by the sheer power of that glance. Her playfulness faltered for an instant, and something else flickers across her features...
Curiosity.
“Hello, lady,” he whispered softly, stamping down the last embers of the raw emotion that had flared to life and glancing back down at his feet. “Where did Casey go?”
“Hello, Adam,” she murmured softly. “Casey had to go back to work.” She stepped around the counter and approached him. He couldn’t help but notice the confidence in her stride. “And you have to come with me. I’m going to find out where you need to be.”
The first security guard was walking back toward the desk, and the woman waved at him. “I’ve got to head to Placement, Luke. Are you okay here alone for a minute or two?”
Luke glanced at Adam, smirking. “Sure, Angie. We always seem to attract the best and brightest, don’t we?”
The security guard, Angie, frowned at him. “Ease up, Luke. Come on, Adam. Let’s see where you have to go.”
Adam glanced up at her with puppy-dog eyes. “Sanitation!” he murmured. “I’m supposed to go to Sanitation.”
Angie smiled at him. “Of course, Adam, but every floor in this building is Sanitation. We need to find your department. I’m going to take you to Human Resources, Placement Services. They’ll have your employment record.”
Adam frowned. He wasn’t prepared to deal with this woman now, not with his act so fragile. Already he had exposed himself more than he would have, normally. Still, there was little he could do. It wasn’t as though Simple Adam could find his new boss on his own. She would know that, just as she should know that with his limitations, he would be placed in Menial Labor, which would be located in the underground. Instead she was taking him to Placement, which according to the listing placed beside the Security Desk was on the top floor. He knew better than to question her, however.
She noticed his hesitation, and stepped up beside him, taking him gently by the hand. He blinked at the unexpected sensation of her soft hand in his. The scent of her hair, fresh and sweet, reached his nose. He found himself staring at her again, and immediately stared back down at the floor, struggling to regain his self-control. With shuffling steps, he followed her to the elevator. He paused as the steel door swished open and cringed a little. His record would show that he was afraid of elevators. He had confided as much to his Counsellor. He wasn’t really, but he knew that They expected him to be. Most people were, especially people who had been children when they were taken for interrogation. The silver doors were always the last thing a person remembered before the interrogations.
They had taken him in for questioning a few days after They took his father. They hadn’t been gentle. He had spent a week in Their hands before the interrogator had determined he was as harmless as he appeared. It had tested the endurance of his role. Seven days of sitting in darkness, or else being dragged into brilliant lights and riddled with questions he pretended to be unable to answer.
“Come on, Adam,” she smiled, her voice gentle. “I won’t hurt you.”
In spite of himself, he found he actually believed her. With hesitant steps, he followed her into the elevator.
The silver doors slid shut. In the enclosed space, the scent of her hair almost overwhelmed him, a clean scent of herbs and some kind of flower. She took his hand again, and he shivered slightly. “My name is Angie,” she told him softly.
He gripped her hand tightly. It was the first time that he could remember that someone had actually introduced themselves to him. A small part of him wanted nothing more than to drop the act, to bare his soul to this pretty stranger, but he clamped his teeth together and instead smiled at her dumbly. “Hello, Angie,” he whispered. Unable to stop himself, he looked up at her eyes again. “You’re awful pretty.”
He saw her blush to the roots of her dark hair before he dropped his gaze back down to stare at his toes. “Thank you, Adam,” she murmured, embarrassed.
To break the ensuing silence, he pointed to the elevator panel. “Can I push the button, Angie?”
“Of course you can, Adam. Number twelve.” Her voice was relieved... and almost a little sad.
He reached out and pushed the button, and glanced at her with wide eyes. She was watching him, and she smiled gently. He smiled back, trying desperately not to form an attachment to this beautiful stranger.
In an effort to focus, he stared at the mirrored walls of the elevator and tried to clear his mind. Every government building was the same. The floors were all made of black marble, polished so well you could see your reflection. Even the floor of the elevator gleamed bright in the harsh fluorescent light. He studied his worn, muddy boots, a stark contrast beside her polished, black ones. For some reason, the difference between them made him think of his grandfather.
Standing there, gazing at the reflection of Angie and him in the polished floor as the elevator moved slowly upward, he thought back to the time his grandfather had taken him down to the riverside, before all of the parks had been cordoned off. He’d been very young, but he remembered it vividly.
They had stood on the waters’ edge, gazing down at their vague reflections, like he was staring at the tremulous shades of Angie and his reflections in the black stone floor of the elevator. The old man had sighed deeply, and glanced across the water at the fence that was coming closer every week. Already the restrictions had begun.
“You have to look ahead, boy,” he had said, motioning Adam onto a stone that lunged over the water like a giant’s finger clawing itself from the earth. Adam had curled up on the stone as the old man picked up a handful of stones from the water’s edge. “See this pebble? It was once something big and strong: a mountain, a part of the earth itself. It was great, and now it is nothing. In enough time, even the nothing that it is now will disappear.” He hurled the stone into the water. “But this pebble…” he held up another pebble. “This pebble is one among thousands. It has travelled down from a mountain from before a time we have ever known. It has travelled around the earth, perhaps, and seen countless wonders. It was here long before us, it has watched the world become what we see now, and it will be here long after we are done. And so it is still great. These pebbles, Adam, they are all different.
“This stone,” he had continued excitedly. “This was stuck in the tread on the bottom of a boot. It was walked on, ignored.” He held the stone, a white pebble with a black line as straight as a knife blade circling the stone just a little off the central axis, up to the sunlight to look at it more closely. “But before that, before the boot, this pebble was a part of a building. An old building. A building which was once strong, but now lies in ruins. This pebble watched the great deeds of men done, watched freedom come and go. Then it, too, broke away, falling from the wall as new faces tore it down. A booted foot picked it up and bore it to the river and it knew freedom as it was washed away. It has rolled up onto the shore a day, or a hundred days, or a thousand years later to tell us its story, boy. This stone is strong, it has strong memories. Keep this stone, boy.” He had handed the pebble to Adam, and Adam had clutched it like a prize. As Adam remembered, he toyed with the pebble that still sat in his coat pocket.
“Every stone is different, boy,” the old man had continued. “Every single one. And yet, at the same time, they are all the same. This stone is big, that stone little. That stone is gray, this one is red… all different, and yet they are all stone.
“Every stone, every pebble, every little thing in this universe has a story, boy. Don’t forget that. Some of those stories you will never understand, but you can at least hear them, if you let yourself.” He held up one last stone. “This pebble has a brother, somewhere in the river.” He threw the final pebble back to find its brother and winked at Adam. “Because you never forget family,” he’d explained.
“Every stone,” Adam whispered.
Angie looked at him in bafflement. He turned his dull gaze upon her and pointed at the polished back surface of the stone beneath their feet, a blank grin on his face. “Every stone has a story,” he said softly, measuring his nuances carefully.
Angie looked at him for a moment, and then she laughed delightedly. “Every stone has a story. Yes, Adam, every stone does have a story. Every person, too.”
He had to fight to keep from asking what her story was.
She turned to look at him, one hand on her hip in a curiously feminine gesture. She cocked her head to one side and studied him, her lips pursed. She seemed about to speak when there was a change in the sound of the elevator. Adam glanced up at the digital display. Fifth floor. There was a soft chime as the elevator stopped. Someone was getting on. Angie stepped closer to him and grabbed his arm gently, facing forward... the perfect image of a Security Officer doing her job.
A tall man, reed thin, stepped into the elevator, dressed in a crisp blue pinstriped suit. It made him look like he was going to hit his head on the ceiling of the elevator. He nodded a curt greeting at Angie, one of the blank nods that Adam had seen so often in the factories and yards, a guarded look of gentle uncertainty. Fear. Fear ruled here, too, Adam realized. The newcomer turned around to push a button and Adam tapped him on the shoulder as the doors slide shut.
“Do you work for Sanitation?” Adam asked hopefully, summoning the strength to play his part. “I work there now. Casey says I have to work here now, though. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. But Angie is taking me to the people people, and they’ll tell me where I have to go, I hope.”
The reed-man craned his neck to peer around at him. His gaze held just the right amount of revulsion. For some reason this man, as different as he was, reminded Adam of the gopher-faced man, Derris, from the Yard. Maybe it was the buck teeth, Adam thought. He grinned at the thought of this whip of a man in a pin-striped suit trading blows with him in the mud and the rain of the yards. Then, for the first time, Adam really looked at himself in the mirrors around him. His grin grew wider.
There was no question that he was a mess. He was wearing his muddy, worn boots and stained, soaked pants, a t-shirt, and his faded old leather jacket… and he was completely covered in mud. His blonde hair was grimy with dirt and drenched by the rain. The rain had washed most, but not all, of the dirt and blood from his face, but thin lines of grit seemed to have taken their place, seeming to highlight the purple bruise on his cheekbone. While he was not as tall as their fellow passenger, he had a boxer’s build, and his leather jacket made him appear much bulkier in the elevator. The only things still clean about him were his crystal-blue eyes, which appeared almost too bright for the glassy stare he maintained. He was a mess. And, he realized, he was cold.
The realization made him start to shiver, and his teeth chattered in the sudden silence. Thinking about how silly he must look made him grin even more broadly, and for a moment he pitied this poor man who had walked into an elevator with this drenched, mud-caked, stupid, grinning, shivering idiot with the chattering teeth... who was being escorted by security. He saw a small smile appear on Angie’s face as the same realization dawned on her. “He’ll be working here, now,” she told the man serenely.
The reed-man’s eyes bulged for a moment, and his head swiveled to focus on her. “He can work?”
“Of course he can work!” she snapped defensively. “He’s just a little… slow.”
Perfect. She had said it. Word would spread. To everyone in the building, Adam was now a Simple. He no longer had to impress anyone with his stupidity. He would be assumed to be stupid. This entire process had been monitored. In a few short words, Angie had accomplished what would have taken him weeks to establish. Simple Adam was safely established.
This was not the first time Adam had changed jobs. Convincing people about his mental deficiencies was always the trickiest part of the process. Still, once one person was truly convinced, word spread. It always did… and Reed-man was convinced.
Adam closed his eyes, still shivering. The elevator ride seemed to take forever, even though it was only twelve floors. That was as high as buildings were built, now, though his grandfather had told him that they had been much taller, once, before the War.
The old man used to talk about the towers, the ‘sky-scrapers’. “Monstrous things, they were, boy,” he’d say with a twinkle in his blue eyes. “Tall as mountains, they seemed. Taller, in some ways, I suppose, because they were man-made things, not things that were always here. All glass, dark glass. And steel. Glass and steel monsters that girded up the world like Atlas. Or maybe they were trying to keep the sky from falling. It doesn’t really matter. The number of people who worked in them was staggering. Like anthills. People would swarm into and out of them, struggling to keep one step ahead of everyone else. Unfortunately, no one was looking where they were all running, they were too busy making sure that everyone else was behind them, too busy looking to see who, not what, lay before them. We called it the rat race, but how many people just said the words and never thought deeply upon their meaning?
“Those buildings were standing guard over us, or so we thought. Get up high enough that you can see your enemy coming. But men forgot the reason they felt an urge to reach the sky: the hawk sees both its prey and the dangers below. And it knows freedom. And so man climbed into the sky, but he couldn’t see past his neighbor’s house. And while he was high, he was not free; he was so busy watching his neighbor that he could no longer see himself. And so he stopped looking, and They crept into power.
“Who are They, boy? ‘They’ are just other ‘us’. They are men, like I am and like you will someday be. Men no better… nor truly any worse… than you or I. Just different. Men with different ambitions and different morals, but men and women like us. They are just other us. But They are the ones who have made this life that you must live. They are the ones who shaped your world without asking you if that was what you wanted. They are the ones who have chosen to dictate what we will or will not do. They are the law-makers, the wealth and power, the clerics of a monetary god.
“But once upon a time we had some say in our lives. Once we voted. Once we even had a choice: it was a choice between evils, but we had a choice. My father could even have told you about a time when there was a fair choice: if in nothing else than in who spoke for you. But then things went wrong, Adam. I don’t know where and I’m not sure when, but things went wrong.”
They got rid of sky scrapers during the war. They were just too easy a target… too many people in one place. People were terrified, because no one knew what was going to happen next.
Blinking, Adam shook his head. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. He cursed silently, wishing he hadn’t had to drop the act to approach Casey. It made playing Simple Adam so much more difficult.
The chime of the elevator rang, and the doors slid open. Reed-man bolted from the confined space like a terrified crane, flapping down the hallway, putting as much distance between himself and the filthy, grinning, dismally stupid new employee as he could. Adam could hear him muttering something about Security needing to do more to control people like him, and he couldn’t help but keep grinning. He’d heard the comments before, from the same kinds of faces with the same kinds of eyes – eyes that no longer saw a person in the shambling idiot he pretended to be, only a thing. He knew the tall man would complain, loudly, to every person he met.
His act was secure.
The hallway they entered was exactly like every other hallway: twelve white doors on either side of the polished black hallway, each door like a square in a checkerboard. Adam hesitated as he stepped out of the elevator, and he was suddenly thankful for Angie’s hand on his arm, steadying him. While he had to come to buildings like this every time he was transferred, he couldn’t help but have the memory of the first experience in one of these buildings flash up before him. Dragged in by Citizoneprotects, beaten savagely, locked in a dark room with a white door…
It wasn’t hard to act afraid. He cringed slightly as he looked up and down the hallway. “Have I done something bad, Angie?” he asked in his slurred, simple voice.
“Of course not, Adam,” she reassured him. She glanced at him, and concern leapt into her features. “Oh, you’re shivering!”
“C…ccc…ccold,” he stammered.
“I know,” she murmured. “I should have thought to grab a towel or a blanket. Still, we don’t have much further to go. I’ll ask the people at Personnel to get you one.”
She took his hand in hers, her touch gentle, her hand soft and warm. He felt that warmth spreading up his arm, and his pulse began to race. He paused and closed his eyes. Too much had happened. He forced himself to calm, felt his heartbeat and breathing slow. He passed a hand over his face and felt his mind grow blank.
Adam shrugged and glanced around. He knew they needed to start moving soon, or someone would notice them. He splashed around in the water for a moment more, grinning stupidly, before shuffling over to stand close beside his brother. “I’ve been faking,” he admitted.
“For twenty years?” Casey demanded, incredulous.
Adam shrugged. “After the first few months, people saw what they expected to see.”
“Adam,” Casey whispered. “Twenty years!”
“We’ve got to move, Case,” he murmured, his lips barely moving. “I’ve played in this puddle long enough. Stick to the middle of the road, though. We can keep talking, but try to keep it quiet and get your face under control. Anyone watching those cams will be able to see you looking like you just saw a ghost.”
Casey shook his head, but managed to get his feet moving again. “I did,” he muttered. “Damn, Adam... Mom and I thought...”
“I know, but that was kind of the point. Grampa told us what was coming, Case. The Purges, the executions... when They shot him, and They took you and Andrea away, I realized that the only way to keep everyone around me safe was to look dumb.”
“Adam... you were eight years old!” Casey objected softly, walking slowly beside him. “How the hell...?”
Adam shrugged and jammed his hands into his jacket pockets, hunching his shoulders. “I just knew. The time wasn’t right. He knew it. Dad knew it, though he finally tried to do something after They took you and Andrea. Grampa always said the time would come, but we had to wait for it. The time has come.”
Casey snorted. “What, you want the two of us to revolt? Seriously?”
Adam took a deep breath. “No,” he replied evenly. “I want to start the revolution. Not the two of us, Casey: everyone.”
Even knowing what Adam had been suggesting, the confirmation of it made his brother recoil slightly. He glanced over sharply at Adam, his expression dumbfounded. “You’re serious!”
Adam’s eyes flashed, but he quickly looked back down and scuffed a shoe on the asphalt. “Of course I’m serious, Case. It’s not a word you bandy about without meaning it, not in this place. Grampa told us stories of what things used to be like. Remember? He mentioned freedom. Is that what you see here, Casey? Do you see freedom? I don’t. I see slavery, Case. We’re trapped within our Zone, forced to work with no hope for advancement. Our homes can be invaded by Citizoneprotects at any moment. Families are broken apart, women are forced to...”
“Enough,” Casey growled. “No, I don’t see freedom here. I live in the same world, Adam. I heard the same stories growing up. I don’t disagree. I see the chains. I have no illusions about this world. But revolution...” his voice had dropped, and he stumbled over the word. “It’s scary, Adam. While I remember everything Grampa told us, I also remember what they do to people who try to fight the system. They took my Dad, too. I was too young to remember it, but Mom told me he had been trying to organize a resistance.”
Adam shook his head. “The people weren’t ready,” he whispered. “The Great Purge hadn’t happened, the Merges... when Uncle Chaz was still alive, people still believed things could get better.” He glanced up at Casey for a moment. “But that’s not true anymore. I’ve looked at people’s faces the last few years, Case. It’s one of the benefits of being seen as Simple Adam. No one notices me. No one hides in front of me. They hide in front of everyone else, but not me. I’m harmless. So I’ve spent some time watching people.
“Grampa said for a revolution to occur, people had to want it more than anything else. He said that people had to have lost all hope before something this big could happen.” Adam grimaced. “While it shames me to admit that I have been waiting for the day where all I could see in the faces of those around me was despair, I have been. And I’ve seen it, Case. I’ve seen the despair and the hopelessness. It’s everywhere. It’s in the way people shamble home after work, their shoulders hunched and their eyes staring blankly forward. It’s in the way people walk, how they move. It’s in the way they shrink into themselves when they see CPs walking down the street. They have abandoned all hope.”
Casey shook his head. “And you expect to be able to give it back to them?”
“I don’t see anyone else trying to,” Adam replied. “Think about it this way, Casey: do you want your children, if They allow you to have any, to grow up in this world? What kind of society do we live in where whether or not you can have children – and who you have children with – is dictated by the government? Would you be willing to risk everything at a chance, just a chance, to take back the ownership of your life?”
Casey stared at him from the corner of his eyes. “You may not be stupid, Adam, but you sure as hell are bat-shit crazy. How the hell would we even begin?”
Adam allowed a small smile to touch his lips. Casey had said ‘we’. He glanced around the street. A few hundred feet ahead, the glass and steel Sanitation Building squatted beside the road like the faceted eye of a bug poking from the ground. Their time was running out. “We begin simply,” he whispered. “This morning there was only me. Now there are two of us. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. Tell your boss you got me to Sanitation okay, but you want to check in on me this evening to make sure I got home okay. He’ll be feeling guilty about transferring me by then, so it should be an easy sell. We’ll go over names of people we know have lost a parent, a sibling, or a spouse in the Purges. Tomorrow... well, tomorrow we start recruiting. Quietly. Are you in?”
Casey looked up at the building looming in front of them. At last he nodded. “I’m in, Adam. God help us both. I think you’re nuts, but I also think you’re right. I’m with you.” He paused and studied his brother. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
The smile that was playing across Adam’s lips grew slightly bigger. “Hey,” he whispered. “This has already been the best day of my life. I got my brother back. I’ll be fine.”
Casey blinked. “I’ve missed you, Adam. So has Mom. Can I...?”
Adam shook his head. “Not yet,” he whispered. “She can’t know about me yet. It would put her at risk.” They stood in the rain just outside the door of the large building, and Adam tossed one more glance at his brother. “I need to get back in character. Come to my place tonight. I’ll be waiting.”
Without another word, Adam ran a hand across his face. He knew the routine wouldn’t be complete, but he was able to slam most of the doors in his mind shut. He felt his face slacken, felt the glazed look film over his eyes. He walled off the emotions the conversation with Casey had ignited, and he stared blankly at his own reflection in the glass doors, though he barely registered the condition he was in, drenched to the skin, covered in mud, hair plastered to his skull, a dark bruise blossoming over his right cheekbone from where Derris had hit him. It simply didn’t matter to him. He glanced over at the red-haired man beside him. “Are we there yet, Case?”
Adam admired how quickly Casey was able to hide his reaction to his sudden transformation. In a matter of seconds, Adam had gone from being vibrant and alive with zeal to being dull and dazed, the perfect image of a simple-minded, overgrown child. The transformation was dramatic, and Casey was able to stifle his exclamation of surprise at the change. “Yeah, Dummy,” he growled. “We’re here.”
They stepped within range of the sensor for the gold-rimmed doors, and the glass swished open on a spacious, marble-floored lobby.
“Why are we here, Casey?” Adam inquired as he followed him inside.
“You’ll be working here, now, Adam. Can you remember that?”
The lobby was empty except for two security guards standing at a granite-topped counter near the steel-doors of the elevators. Like all government buildings, this one was designed to impress visitors. A glass-backed waterfall stood behind the security desk, with the word “Sanitation” written into the glass in gold. The falling water gurgled merrily, and soft music echoed in the vast lobby. A couple of empty black chairs lined the glass wall near the entrance. Adam glanced around nervously. His file was clear on his terror of government buildings, so he had to maintain appearances. “I don’t wanna, Case.”
“It doesn’t matter, Adam. You pissed the boss off, so he transferred you. You come here from now on.”
“Did you see the boss, Case? His caterpillar was doing somersaults. Have you ever seen a teapot? He looked like a kettle with a fuzzy caterpillar on it.”
“Sure he did, Dummy. Come on. Let’s go speak with these nice people,” Casey murmured, pointing to the security desk.
“Say, Case, does that mean I don’t work with you anymore?” Adam whined.
“That’s right,” Casey agreed, guiding Adam forward slowly. “But I’ll walk you to work every morning. The boss told me to.”
Adam clapped his hands in childish glee. “Oh, goody!” Suddenly his expression grew fearful again. “But I don’t like this place, Casey. Can’t I come back to the Yard?”
“No dice, Adam. You work here now.”
They approached the security desk, where one of the guards took one look at him, laughed softly, and turned to the second guard. “Hey Angie,” the man chuckled. “You get this one. I’ve got to use the head.”
The second security officer was a petite, dark-eyed beauty with short brown hair. She glanced up from the desk at Casey, and then frowned at the other guard who had simply walked away. She shook her head. “Can I help you?”
Casey shoved Adam forward and glanced down at the floor, obviously nervous. “My boss told me to make sure Adam got here. He’s... well, he gets distracted easily. He’s just been transferred. His name is Adam McLeod. I’ll be accompanying him here every morning until he’s gotten accustomed to coming here instead of to the Yard, officer.”
She studied Adam, a small grin playing across her lips. “Why is he drenched?”
Casey swallowed hard and glanced toward the door. “Like I said, he’s a little... distractible. He was playing in puddles. Look, I’ve got to get back to work. My bidaily is shot as it is.”
The security guard nodded. “I hate those things. Go ahead. I’ll take him to HR. Who’s he supposed to see?”
“I don’t know. The boss didn’t take the time to tell me,” Casey admitted. Not saying another thing, Casey bolted for the door. Adam didn’t blame him. Government buildings were not the most pleasant of places. They all looked the same, and almost everyone had had one or two bad experiences in a government building in the past.
The security guard studied Adam for a moment, her eyes speculative. “You got your boss that mad, did you?” she asked, unexpectedly.
Adam blinked. She wasn’t supposed to ask questions. In his experience with being shuffled from job to job, the security guards wanted to get him out of their hands as quickly as possible. Not able to help himself, he met her eyes. They looked... playful. For just an instant, he couldn’t help but feel a flush of excitement, his eyes flaring. His eyes burned, clear and lucid for a single heartbeat before he could fight the emotion back under control, praying she hadn’t noticed.
A tingle ran up his spine as she reeled back slightly as if struck by the sheer power of that glance. Her playfulness faltered for an instant, and something else flickers across her features...
Curiosity.
“Hello, lady,” he whispered softly, stamping down the last embers of the raw emotion that had flared to life and glancing back down at his feet. “Where did Casey go?”
“Hello, Adam,” she murmured softly. “Casey had to go back to work.” She stepped around the counter and approached him. He couldn’t help but notice the confidence in her stride. “And you have to come with me. I’m going to find out where you need to be.”
The first security guard was walking back toward the desk, and the woman waved at him. “I’ve got to head to Placement, Luke. Are you okay here alone for a minute or two?”
Luke glanced at Adam, smirking. “Sure, Angie. We always seem to attract the best and brightest, don’t we?”
The security guard, Angie, frowned at him. “Ease up, Luke. Come on, Adam. Let’s see where you have to go.”
Adam glanced up at her with puppy-dog eyes. “Sanitation!” he murmured. “I’m supposed to go to Sanitation.”
Angie smiled at him. “Of course, Adam, but every floor in this building is Sanitation. We need to find your department. I’m going to take you to Human Resources, Placement Services. They’ll have your employment record.”
Adam frowned. He wasn’t prepared to deal with this woman now, not with his act so fragile. Already he had exposed himself more than he would have, normally. Still, there was little he could do. It wasn’t as though Simple Adam could find his new boss on his own. She would know that, just as she should know that with his limitations, he would be placed in Menial Labor, which would be located in the underground. Instead she was taking him to Placement, which according to the listing placed beside the Security Desk was on the top floor. He knew better than to question her, however.
She noticed his hesitation, and stepped up beside him, taking him gently by the hand. He blinked at the unexpected sensation of her soft hand in his. The scent of her hair, fresh and sweet, reached his nose. He found himself staring at her again, and immediately stared back down at the floor, struggling to regain his self-control. With shuffling steps, he followed her to the elevator. He paused as the steel door swished open and cringed a little. His record would show that he was afraid of elevators. He had confided as much to his Counsellor. He wasn’t really, but he knew that They expected him to be. Most people were, especially people who had been children when they were taken for interrogation. The silver doors were always the last thing a person remembered before the interrogations.
They had taken him in for questioning a few days after They took his father. They hadn’t been gentle. He had spent a week in Their hands before the interrogator had determined he was as harmless as he appeared. It had tested the endurance of his role. Seven days of sitting in darkness, or else being dragged into brilliant lights and riddled with questions he pretended to be unable to answer.
“Come on, Adam,” she smiled, her voice gentle. “I won’t hurt you.”
In spite of himself, he found he actually believed her. With hesitant steps, he followed her into the elevator.
The silver doors slid shut. In the enclosed space, the scent of her hair almost overwhelmed him, a clean scent of herbs and some kind of flower. She took his hand again, and he shivered slightly. “My name is Angie,” she told him softly.
He gripped her hand tightly. It was the first time that he could remember that someone had actually introduced themselves to him. A small part of him wanted nothing more than to drop the act, to bare his soul to this pretty stranger, but he clamped his teeth together and instead smiled at her dumbly. “Hello, Angie,” he whispered. Unable to stop himself, he looked up at her eyes again. “You’re awful pretty.”
He saw her blush to the roots of her dark hair before he dropped his gaze back down to stare at his toes. “Thank you, Adam,” she murmured, embarrassed.
To break the ensuing silence, he pointed to the elevator panel. “Can I push the button, Angie?”
“Of course you can, Adam. Number twelve.” Her voice was relieved... and almost a little sad.
He reached out and pushed the button, and glanced at her with wide eyes. She was watching him, and she smiled gently. He smiled back, trying desperately not to form an attachment to this beautiful stranger.
In an effort to focus, he stared at the mirrored walls of the elevator and tried to clear his mind. Every government building was the same. The floors were all made of black marble, polished so well you could see your reflection. Even the floor of the elevator gleamed bright in the harsh fluorescent light. He studied his worn, muddy boots, a stark contrast beside her polished, black ones. For some reason, the difference between them made him think of his grandfather.
Standing there, gazing at the reflection of Angie and him in the polished floor as the elevator moved slowly upward, he thought back to the time his grandfather had taken him down to the riverside, before all of the parks had been cordoned off. He’d been very young, but he remembered it vividly.
They had stood on the waters’ edge, gazing down at their vague reflections, like he was staring at the tremulous shades of Angie and his reflections in the black stone floor of the elevator. The old man had sighed deeply, and glanced across the water at the fence that was coming closer every week. Already the restrictions had begun.
“You have to look ahead, boy,” he had said, motioning Adam onto a stone that lunged over the water like a giant’s finger clawing itself from the earth. Adam had curled up on the stone as the old man picked up a handful of stones from the water’s edge. “See this pebble? It was once something big and strong: a mountain, a part of the earth itself. It was great, and now it is nothing. In enough time, even the nothing that it is now will disappear.” He hurled the stone into the water. “But this pebble…” he held up another pebble. “This pebble is one among thousands. It has travelled down from a mountain from before a time we have ever known. It has travelled around the earth, perhaps, and seen countless wonders. It was here long before us, it has watched the world become what we see now, and it will be here long after we are done. And so it is still great. These pebbles, Adam, they are all different.
“This stone,” he had continued excitedly. “This was stuck in the tread on the bottom of a boot. It was walked on, ignored.” He held the stone, a white pebble with a black line as straight as a knife blade circling the stone just a little off the central axis, up to the sunlight to look at it more closely. “But before that, before the boot, this pebble was a part of a building. An old building. A building which was once strong, but now lies in ruins. This pebble watched the great deeds of men done, watched freedom come and go. Then it, too, broke away, falling from the wall as new faces tore it down. A booted foot picked it up and bore it to the river and it knew freedom as it was washed away. It has rolled up onto the shore a day, or a hundred days, or a thousand years later to tell us its story, boy. This stone is strong, it has strong memories. Keep this stone, boy.” He had handed the pebble to Adam, and Adam had clutched it like a prize. As Adam remembered, he toyed with the pebble that still sat in his coat pocket.
“Every stone is different, boy,” the old man had continued. “Every single one. And yet, at the same time, they are all the same. This stone is big, that stone little. That stone is gray, this one is red… all different, and yet they are all stone.
“Every stone, every pebble, every little thing in this universe has a story, boy. Don’t forget that. Some of those stories you will never understand, but you can at least hear them, if you let yourself.” He held up one last stone. “This pebble has a brother, somewhere in the river.” He threw the final pebble back to find its brother and winked at Adam. “Because you never forget family,” he’d explained.
“Every stone,” Adam whispered.
Angie looked at him in bafflement. He turned his dull gaze upon her and pointed at the polished back surface of the stone beneath their feet, a blank grin on his face. “Every stone has a story,” he said softly, measuring his nuances carefully.
Angie looked at him for a moment, and then she laughed delightedly. “Every stone has a story. Yes, Adam, every stone does have a story. Every person, too.”
He had to fight to keep from asking what her story was.
She turned to look at him, one hand on her hip in a curiously feminine gesture. She cocked her head to one side and studied him, her lips pursed. She seemed about to speak when there was a change in the sound of the elevator. Adam glanced up at the digital display. Fifth floor. There was a soft chime as the elevator stopped. Someone was getting on. Angie stepped closer to him and grabbed his arm gently, facing forward... the perfect image of a Security Officer doing her job.
A tall man, reed thin, stepped into the elevator, dressed in a crisp blue pinstriped suit. It made him look like he was going to hit his head on the ceiling of the elevator. He nodded a curt greeting at Angie, one of the blank nods that Adam had seen so often in the factories and yards, a guarded look of gentle uncertainty. Fear. Fear ruled here, too, Adam realized. The newcomer turned around to push a button and Adam tapped him on the shoulder as the doors slide shut.
“Do you work for Sanitation?” Adam asked hopefully, summoning the strength to play his part. “I work there now. Casey says I have to work here now, though. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. But Angie is taking me to the people people, and they’ll tell me where I have to go, I hope.”
The reed-man craned his neck to peer around at him. His gaze held just the right amount of revulsion. For some reason this man, as different as he was, reminded Adam of the gopher-faced man, Derris, from the Yard. Maybe it was the buck teeth, Adam thought. He grinned at the thought of this whip of a man in a pin-striped suit trading blows with him in the mud and the rain of the yards. Then, for the first time, Adam really looked at himself in the mirrors around him. His grin grew wider.
There was no question that he was a mess. He was wearing his muddy, worn boots and stained, soaked pants, a t-shirt, and his faded old leather jacket… and he was completely covered in mud. His blonde hair was grimy with dirt and drenched by the rain. The rain had washed most, but not all, of the dirt and blood from his face, but thin lines of grit seemed to have taken their place, seeming to highlight the purple bruise on his cheekbone. While he was not as tall as their fellow passenger, he had a boxer’s build, and his leather jacket made him appear much bulkier in the elevator. The only things still clean about him were his crystal-blue eyes, which appeared almost too bright for the glassy stare he maintained. He was a mess. And, he realized, he was cold.
The realization made him start to shiver, and his teeth chattered in the sudden silence. Thinking about how silly he must look made him grin even more broadly, and for a moment he pitied this poor man who had walked into an elevator with this drenched, mud-caked, stupid, grinning, shivering idiot with the chattering teeth... who was being escorted by security. He saw a small smile appear on Angie’s face as the same realization dawned on her. “He’ll be working here, now,” she told the man serenely.
The reed-man’s eyes bulged for a moment, and his head swiveled to focus on her. “He can work?”
“Of course he can work!” she snapped defensively. “He’s just a little… slow.”
Perfect. She had said it. Word would spread. To everyone in the building, Adam was now a Simple. He no longer had to impress anyone with his stupidity. He would be assumed to be stupid. This entire process had been monitored. In a few short words, Angie had accomplished what would have taken him weeks to establish. Simple Adam was safely established.
This was not the first time Adam had changed jobs. Convincing people about his mental deficiencies was always the trickiest part of the process. Still, once one person was truly convinced, word spread. It always did… and Reed-man was convinced.
Adam closed his eyes, still shivering. The elevator ride seemed to take forever, even though it was only twelve floors. That was as high as buildings were built, now, though his grandfather had told him that they had been much taller, once, before the War.
The old man used to talk about the towers, the ‘sky-scrapers’. “Monstrous things, they were, boy,” he’d say with a twinkle in his blue eyes. “Tall as mountains, they seemed. Taller, in some ways, I suppose, because they were man-made things, not things that were always here. All glass, dark glass. And steel. Glass and steel monsters that girded up the world like Atlas. Or maybe they were trying to keep the sky from falling. It doesn’t really matter. The number of people who worked in them was staggering. Like anthills. People would swarm into and out of them, struggling to keep one step ahead of everyone else. Unfortunately, no one was looking where they were all running, they were too busy making sure that everyone else was behind them, too busy looking to see who, not what, lay before them. We called it the rat race, but how many people just said the words and never thought deeply upon their meaning?
“Those buildings were standing guard over us, or so we thought. Get up high enough that you can see your enemy coming. But men forgot the reason they felt an urge to reach the sky: the hawk sees both its prey and the dangers below. And it knows freedom. And so man climbed into the sky, but he couldn’t see past his neighbor’s house. And while he was high, he was not free; he was so busy watching his neighbor that he could no longer see himself. And so he stopped looking, and They crept into power.
“Who are They, boy? ‘They’ are just other ‘us’. They are men, like I am and like you will someday be. Men no better… nor truly any worse… than you or I. Just different. Men with different ambitions and different morals, but men and women like us. They are just other us. But They are the ones who have made this life that you must live. They are the ones who shaped your world without asking you if that was what you wanted. They are the ones who have chosen to dictate what we will or will not do. They are the law-makers, the wealth and power, the clerics of a monetary god.
“But once upon a time we had some say in our lives. Once we voted. Once we even had a choice: it was a choice between evils, but we had a choice. My father could even have told you about a time when there was a fair choice: if in nothing else than in who spoke for you. But then things went wrong, Adam. I don’t know where and I’m not sure when, but things went wrong.”
They got rid of sky scrapers during the war. They were just too easy a target… too many people in one place. People were terrified, because no one knew what was going to happen next.
Blinking, Adam shook his head. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. He cursed silently, wishing he hadn’t had to drop the act to approach Casey. It made playing Simple Adam so much more difficult.
The chime of the elevator rang, and the doors slid open. Reed-man bolted from the confined space like a terrified crane, flapping down the hallway, putting as much distance between himself and the filthy, grinning, dismally stupid new employee as he could. Adam could hear him muttering something about Security needing to do more to control people like him, and he couldn’t help but keep grinning. He’d heard the comments before, from the same kinds of faces with the same kinds of eyes – eyes that no longer saw a person in the shambling idiot he pretended to be, only a thing. He knew the tall man would complain, loudly, to every person he met.
His act was secure.
The hallway they entered was exactly like every other hallway: twelve white doors on either side of the polished black hallway, each door like a square in a checkerboard. Adam hesitated as he stepped out of the elevator, and he was suddenly thankful for Angie’s hand on his arm, steadying him. While he had to come to buildings like this every time he was transferred, he couldn’t help but have the memory of the first experience in one of these buildings flash up before him. Dragged in by Citizoneprotects, beaten savagely, locked in a dark room with a white door…
It wasn’t hard to act afraid. He cringed slightly as he looked up and down the hallway. “Have I done something bad, Angie?” he asked in his slurred, simple voice.
“Of course not, Adam,” she reassured him. She glanced at him, and concern leapt into her features. “Oh, you’re shivering!”
“C…ccc…ccold,” he stammered.
“I know,” she murmured. “I should have thought to grab a towel or a blanket. Still, we don’t have much further to go. I’ll ask the people at Personnel to get you one.”
She took his hand in hers, her touch gentle, her hand soft and warm. He felt that warmth spreading up his arm, and his pulse began to race. He paused and closed his eyes. Too much had happened. He forced himself to calm, felt his heartbeat and breathing slow. He passed a hand over his face and felt his mind grow blank.