Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) (10 page)

He gives me another pained look before very gently, very intentionally swiping my forehead. I am equally deliberate as I return it. I stand outside the keeping and watch him walk away. He looks back at me several times. Before he can decide to turn back, I find the disk Ritter gave me for the meld.

Ritter maintains the chastised puppy look once I make it inside. I don’t know how he knows I’ve arrived, but he practically meets me in the meldway.  I’ve had plenty of time on the three slides home to think about things, but now I’ve lost track of everything I wanted to ask.

He sees the look on my face and assumes, however, that it’s aimed at him. With a determined yet fearful look, he sighs and says,

“A promise is a promise. Fire away. I can see you’re full of questions.”

My mind eagerly latches on to the distraction. Rather than discuss the woman, I turn back toward the flood of things I’ve been wondering about and the new things my visit with Mina created.

“How many people usually assimilate at one time?”

Mina has given me the impression that it is done in groups. If five people disappeared from a larger group, how many are there in a typical group?

“I don’t know,” he admits.  “I think it varies. Why?”

“Mina was telling me that she had a friend who assimilated the year before she did.  And she said her fiancé told her that several people vanished from the last class.”

Ritter looks at me evenly. “Vanished?”

“That’s what she said,” I reply. He doesn’t look…anything.  Nothing sparks in him to suggest that he knows what it means, but it also doesn’t appear to surprise him. I try another question.  “Is Assimilation something that everyone who isn’t born here has to do? You know, if someone decides to come here from an open world and wants to stay forever?”

“Yeah.  It’s really just…immigration?” He speaks the last word as if he isn’t sure he’s got the right one.

“That’s what we call it when someone from one country moves to another country,” I explain.

“Well, Assimilation is the same thing,” Ritter answers, “but for changing parallels.”

“So, people from open worlds can decide they want to live on Concordia and move here permanently?”

He nods. “Yes. They can appeal to the local Tribunal and if the Tribunal grants their request, they have to go through Assimilation. If they complete it successfully, they get to stay.  If not, they have to go back to their own parallel.” 

“Does anyone keep records of the Assimilation classes?”

He frowns. “The pastkeepers might.  I’m not sure.”  He leads the way into the office. The wall in front of us lights up. After a few minutes of searching the scape, Concordia’s internet, Ritter comes up empty.  “I’d research it more at the pastkeepers function hall if I were functioning before the Tribunal, but I’m not.”

“Are there other heralds you function with that you could ask? Or do you have any pastkeeper friends?”

He’s grabbed his logger and is swiping through screens. “Already on it,” he says.  “I’m going to start with a couple of people at the local function hall, and if that doesn’t return anything I’ll go outside.”

No sooner than Ritter finishes logging, it beeps in his hand. Swiping at the screen, he frowns.

“Turn on your viewer to VC2,” he reads.

We move into the living room, neither of us sitting. Ritter touches the wall panel and the screen fills with a dark screen and an intermittent pinging sound. It reminds me of the Emergency Broadcast System and the familiar monotone refrain that it is only a test. Except this isn’t a test.  The screen fills with just three sentences:

All slivvers are being called back to Concordia. Be prepared for long waits for slides nearest the launch sites. Await further information, news, and instructions.

Ritter flips to several other channels on the viewer. They all have the same black screen and same message.

Ritter voice logs Scuva. “Guardian,” he explains. “Scuva? It’s Ritter. What’s going on? Have you seen the viewer?”

I’m prepared to watch helplessly and listen to one side of the conversation, but with a few quick motions Scuva’s voice bursts through the logger as if he were in the room.

“I’m not sure yet.  Only that Concordia is pulling everyone back and closing the launches until further notice. No one goes out, no one comes in. Except the Disposal.”

Ritter’s face, which had taken on a hopeful expression, falls.  Of course they wouldn’t close the Disposal.

“I’ll let you know if I hear anything else about it, but I have to go.” Scuva doesn’t wait for a goodbye. His end goes dead.

We leave the viewer on to see if the screen changes, but it doesn’t. Ritter logs everyone he knows, and it is the same everywhere.  No one knows anything more than we do.

Two days later, with the launch closure mystery and our impending Tribunal, Ritter’s about to jump out of his skin when Strega barges in after he clears function for the day.  Instead of his usual calm greeting, however, he’s agitated. Strega’s eyes volley between us, and when he finally settles on Ritter, something in them darkens.

Ever the gentleman, Strega’s eyes flick my way again.  “Could I have a moment with Ritter?”

“Sure,” I reply, logging back and forth with Mina and Melayne, who are both home alone while their guardian mates are functioning. Both Scuva and Ollie have been asked to stay late. The strange message on the viewer has both of them nervous, wondering if their men are in danger.  The only difference between them is that Ollie is military and Scuva is more like police.

Strega and Ritter go into his unit, presumably for privacy, but Strega is so loud I wonder why he thinks he’ll find any anywhere in the keeping. I can’t quite make out the words at first, but Strega’s angry, something I haven’t encountered yet.

“Bullshit!” Strega cries. His voice becomes muffled again. I catch only parts of what he’s saying. “She’s —ey’s scrier.”  There’s a long part I don’t catch before his voice rises and every word is clear. “Why in God’s name would you take her to Mom and Dad’s? It’s not like she died and they forgot what she looked like! Did you think none of us would recognize her? What if the Tribunal knows it, too?  Did you even consider that before…parallels…for her scriers?”

I wish I could have made out the entire conversation. The pieces are all there, I think, but I can’t fit them together. I can tell by the movement of shadows in front of the meld that Strega is pacing. I can hear him clearly as he passes close to the meld.

“You couldn’t just let it go,” Strega accuses. “No. And now look what you’ve done, you mucker!”

Mucker is usually an affectionate Concordia term for someone who goofs up, but there is no affection in Strega’s voice. His voice is like a shaft of steel, and from the sound of his reply, his words have cut Ritter deeply.

“Don’t you get it?” Ritter yells back. “There’s something wrong, Strega. Really wrong.  People aren’t killing themselves. They’re being murdered.  She was murdered!”

“Oh, stop! Not this again!”

It is Strega’s turn to plead. And either because he’s a caretaker or merely because he’s Strega, he also soothes.  I don’t catch it all, since his voice becomes low and calm again. Something about love and pain and letting things go that can’t be controlled or made sense of. And then I find myself just outside the meld, drawn closer by the mystery of what a scrier is.  Strega’s voice catches. “If you get disposed of, Ritter…”  His shadow approaches the meld.

I flee to the rear of the keeping, to the platform with the view of the canals, ashamed of my eavesdropping. With a sigh, I slip off my shoes and sit on the edge of the platform with my feet in the cool water, waiting for one of them to come find me. Usually the ringing laughter of children playing along the canals can be heard in the distance, but today, with the unchanging message on the viewer, the world seems to be hiding and holding its breath.  The only sound is the wind through the trees.

When it becomes clear no one is going to collect me, I go back inside in search of Ritter. My feelings are hurt, if I’m being honest. I feel abandoned. Forgotten. And then I roll my eyes at myself. Being stranded here has made me self-centered.
The world doesn’t revolve around you,
I remind myself harshly, hearing my father’s voice in my head that last day home. We continued our argument after he got home from work, before I yelled that I was going to Rae’s to study for finals and went to a college party, instead. I force down tears, wishing my biggest problem was moving for the thirteenth time.

Ritter is in the cleanse, in front of the sink. I hear tubes clink together, so it is sleepbringer and moodleveler.  But it is also ridiculously early, which means Strega no doubt put in an override for the sleepbringer. In any case it means Ritter will not be company tonight.

I wander the keeping, remembering the argument we had two days ago when I realized it lacked pictures and mementos of any kind.

“Put them back, Ritter.  Hiding the fact that you have friends and a family and a life isn’t going to make me feel any better about losing mine!”  I’d all but screamed at him. But he hasn’t. His walls and shelves have glaringly obvious bare spots where the people he loves had hung or sat in framed photos.

Though I know better, I peek into his unit to see if by some chance he’s still awake.  He’s splayed face down on his rift, shirtless.  I can see the line of his back move with each breath, deep and even.

Restless, I grab the meld chip and set out into the fading of the day. It’s chilly but not cold, so I forego returning for Melayne’s jacket.  Although I didn’t set out with any particular intention, it doesn’t surprise me when I end up pulling Strega’s codes to find which slides I need to take to his keeping.

When I arrive, I can tell by the darkness and the color of the glass that he’s probably not there.  Many people frost the glass when they are away. I’m not sure if it’s to keep people from looking inside or to keep the temperature steady. I try Ritter’s spare meld chip, since Ritter explained all meld chips will open any meld that is “willing”, or unlocked.

I have to remind myself as the meld gives way that, here, it isn’t insane to leave your doors unlocked. If someone unwanted should enter, the meld’s receiver will have a record for the guardians. If someone tries to tamper with the records, the backup logs will show proof of that, too.

It is impossible for anyone with an Idix to enter any structure in the zone undetected, so most people have no real fear of intruders. If anything should go missing or someone ends up dead, all the guardians have to do is petition the Tribunal for the meld’s pattern of movement. One by one each person who’d passed though the meld would be called in for questioning and breath chemistry. And with the Idix, there’s nowhere you can hide. You can even be tracked in the wilderness, by satellite.

Even knowing that Strega has said I can always come to him, I am filled with a rush of guilt. His keeping is quiet and calming, as if by occupying the space something of Strega himself is imprinted there.  I feel comforted just standing in the meld hall, my guilt evaporating like a puddle in the sun.

In for a penny, in for a pound, they say.  I step further inside.  Strega is everywhere.  He’s in the dual calendars on the wall…Concordia’s old 36 month version and the 12 “new month” version, as the people here call them. He’s in the BAU that rests beside his spare meld chip and allotment device.

Unlike Ritter’s place, pictures clutter the surfaces here, and I’m only in the living room. His mother and father, he and Ritter together, Ritter alone, and the various relatives I met…all smiling. A number of people I don’t know who must be friends. There’s even one of the three of us outside one of the slide stations, already framed and everything.

I’m about to venture further into the unit when my logger alerts with messages from Mina and Melayne. Viewer programming has returned to normal, with only a ticker at the bottom of the screens saying slivvers are expected to continue their exodus from other parallels while all persons currently on Concordia from open worlds must exit within 72 hours or risk Disposal.

I wake on the sofa. My logger says that it is now after midnight, one day closer to Tribunal. I’m just getting up to pace the keeping again when a shadow shifts in the meldway. My palms dampen even as Strega slurs,

“Davinney?”

9

BY THE LOOK of him, Strega went straight from Ritter’s to an unwind.  He’s not completely bombed. Breath chemistry doesn’t allow for that. But he’s definitely unsteady on his feet.  If he’s surprised to see me in his keeping, he doesn’t show it. He’s all smiles until I ask him what he fought with Ritter about.

Though I try and try, he won’t tell me the details of last night’s conversation with Ritter.

“It isn’t my story to tell,” he says. “He made me promise to hold it.  Telling you would violate the theft standard. Theft of words.”

“He wouldn’t turn you in,” I protest.

“I
would know.” He shakes his head. Whether that was to punctuate his words or to clear the effects of the alcohol, I don’t know.

“Tribunal’s tomorrow,” I say unnecessarily, knowing full well it’s written on both of his calendars in angry looking block letters.

“I know,” he replies, his voice thick.

I sit down on the sofa again because I know he’ll follow suit and don’t want to keep watching him sway unsteadily. Ritter is the one who lets everything show. I imagine that Strega will be embarrassed that I’ve seen him like this…in any condition other than in total control of himself.

“I was there when his parents ended,” Strega says out of the blue. “I’ve always felt guilty about it, like I could somehow control the slide. Like I caused it, or, I don’t know, like I should have been able to see the malfunction before it happened.” He snorts at himself. “It’s ridiculous, I know. I was twelve years old, standing outside the Challenge hall, and I watched it happen like everyone else. But I still feel like that…like there’s something I should have done.  And I feel like that now.”

His eyes, when he glances my way, are bright. His jaw clenches hard against the threat of tears. He won’t let them spill. Maybe because we aren’t as close as he and Ritter. Or maybe he doesn’t let go for anyone.  The latter feels more accurate, and I feel sad for Strega. 

“Something shifted that day,” he continues, his eyes clear once again.  “Watching them end, everything in me moved. Everything in me realigned with preserving and protecting life, with being a surgeon.  Maybe if I’d been one then, I could have put them back together.”

“A surgeon?”  I look at him in surprise.  I’d known he was a caretaker, but not a surgeon.

Strega seems to realize his error. His eyes flick to mine and then flit away the way eyes do when you’re caught…something primal in us that fears the abandonment of our naked selves laid bare.

“You were loosening,” he offers dully. “Bleeding out,” he adds, gesturing at my head.  “Loosening,” he repeats. 
Dying?
I wondered.  “I was able to stop it,” he adds needlessly. Guilelessly.

Silence rests comfortably between us for a few moments before Strega speaks again.

“It’s important to me that you know Ritter never wanted this to happen. He would never have initiated the H.IT if he’d known you’d be dragged with him."  He takes my left hand in his right. I think he’s going to unwind the bandage to check on my burn, but instead his thumb strokes gently over the back of my hand. My skin tingles where he touches it directly. I’m glad the bandage covers most of my skin. I don’t know what to make of the way I feel when he touches me with anything other than the clinical concern of a caretaker.

“I hope you’ll stand for Ritter at Tribunal.”

“Stand?”

“Stand up for him,” Strega replies, looking into my eyes as if he will find my answer there. “If the Tribunal sees you don’t resent him for stranding you here, there’s a chance they won’t dispose of him.”  He shifts his body so that he faces me more fully, and somehow my hand ends up under his, resting on his knee.  “A small chance,” he adds glumly. “I’ve been researching Tribunal outcomes in situations like these. About 75 percent of the time, the violator is disposed of.  What I’m not entirely clear on is how much the outcome depends on the violated.”

I feel a little let down by his words.  Let down because of Ritter’s chances, and let down because suddenly I feel like Strega might be taking such an interest in me only because of Ritter.  Like maybe his concern for me isn’t about me at all but about Ritter. 
Save her life,
I think,
or Ritter gets the Disposal. Treat her with extra special attention and maybe she won’t ask the Tribunal to shuttle my brother to a planet that might as well be called Serial Killer Playground.

But I can’t ignore the way Strega lifts his free hand and runs his index finger along the smooth, unmarked skin inside my left forearm. It doesn’t feel calculated. I wonder, too, if it is ugly to him without the familiar silvery tattoo or whether he sees it as a thing of beauty.  As he absently traces along my skin where lines and circles should be, I think about how we’re all vulnerable there, men and women alike. And then I get a brief flash of Melayne and Scuva and heat rises in my cheeks.

He pulls his hand away quickly, as if burned.  Or as if he’d somehow heard my thoughts.  A weird silence fills the room, then dissipates back into a comfortable one.

I’m about to fall asleep listening to the rhythm of Strega’s breathing when he slurs sleepily, “I told him not to go looking for Linney. She’s ended. There’s nothing to be gained from his obsession with her end.”

My heart stops, then begins a frantic pounding. A wave of dizziness hits me, and I feel a tingling in my fingertips that suggests I’m about to start on a whopper panic attack.

Linney.

Was that the name he’d spat out at Ritter earlier?

That’s my grandmother’s name. Another piece. Closer, but they still won’t fall into place. I need to be alone. I need to sit with these pieces, concentrate on them.

“I’d better go,” I whisper, not wanting to shatter the stillness of these early hours. Not when it has kept at bay most of the things that threaten at the edges of my consciousness. He struggles to rise, but I stop him, my palm on his chest.  “Don’t. I’ll be fine.”

I feel his eyes on me in the semi-darkness, watching me go.

Back at Ritter’s, it’s just after two in the morning as I breathe into the MedQuick. As seems to be the norm for me, I get sleepbringer and moodleveler along with my tube of toothwash.  I dutifully swish the toothwash around but carry the other tubes to my unit.

I lie in the dark on my rift, the tubes clenched in my hand and wonder who they were talking about, what a scrier is. Dread. That’s the reaction I had when I overheard Strega’s accusations.  I still feel it now.  Linney isn’t just close to my name…it’s
part
of my name.  I don’t think it’s my ego that causes a persistent niggling.

Oh.

My.

God.

I was so caught up in disbelief about where I was, in the fact that someone was telling me I was in another dimension, I never thought about the essential nature of a parallel world.  Parallel. It’s right there in the word. The answer to everything. And it has been, all along.  Right there in front of my stupid, stupid face.

I see Ritter’s mother’s face crumple and hear her anguished cry:
Ritter, what have you done?

My sleeves were down. My lack of Idix was not what alarmed her. It was
me
.

Strega’s spewed words, too, hit a nerve in me.
It’s not like she died and they forgot what she looked like! Did you think none of us would recognize her?

I put the sleepbringer and moodleveler tubes on the shelf next to the rift and pace the unit for a few minutes.

Linney.

Me.

Ritter’s words.
People aren’t killing themselves. Linney was murdered!

Murdered.

I’m an idiot. Why hadn’t I connected it sooner? The whole concept of parallel universes is that each of us exists in every parallel, but our lives might be drastically different.
We
might be drastically different.

I feel like I’m going to throw up. He didn’t stumble on someone who looked like someone he knew. It wasn’t a coincidence that drew him to me. He came looking for me on purpose. He was watching me for a reason, because I looked like someone he knew, he cared about. And she killed herself. Or she was murdered, as Ritter tells it.

I’m caught between sympathy and fury. Between hauling him off his rift so I can beat him senseless and bursting into tears.  He only told me part of the truth. Sure, I’m just this person that reminds Ritter of someone he knew.  But it wasn’t an accident. He searched me out. His fascination with me, with watching me, landed me here.
Stranded
me here.

I make my way to the living room and begin tearing apart his shelves, tossing aside books and various clutter, not caring if I’m noisy. It’s nearly dawn. I don’t care if I wake him.

When the shelves turn up nothing, I move on to a set of low cabinets behind the sofa. Like a burglar, I leave things on the floor, though I’m not as careless. I resist the urge to hurl and smash. Finally, in a drawer in his office, I find a photo face down in a drawer.

Me.

Or her, anyway. Linney. Same dark hair, though hers is cut very short, hugging her scalp in little feathery wisps. She’s dressed differently, of course, and she’s had that small gap between our front teeth fixed. Her body is more toned…though with the diet mandated by the ScanX and the walking to slide stations that are sometimes a mile or two apart, mine is getting there, just as Mina predicted. But she is me, without a doubt.

“The Concordia edition,” I say aloud, snidely, and turn to find Ritter in the meldway, ghost white.  I wait for sympathy to kick in, compassion for the utterly lost look on his face.  Instead, I hurl the photo at him, surprising even myself. He doesn’t protest when it smashes at his feet, but he backs away when I advance toward him.  “You came for me.”

“Yes,” he admits. I think he knows that to do otherwise might make me violate the abuse standard.

“You watched me, followed me,
scared
me because I look like her.”

He says nothing to deny it.

“You —” my voice wavers, and I want to punch my own vocal cords for it. “This whole thing, this whole time you’ve just been manipulating me, trying to save your own ass.  All of your apologies, all of your introducing me to your friends, your family…all of it was designed to make me feel sorry for you, to make me forget that you were following me. Because none of this would have happened if you had just left well enough alone.”

He flinches but still says nothing, so I pound the final nail into his coffin.

“It wasn’t an accident at all. You’re not blameless, not a hero. You brought me here on purpose because I’m Linney. Attero’s Linney. Why, Ritter?”

“Scrier,” he says softly. “We call a double in another parallel a scrier.”

“Yeah,” I say snidely, “I figured that out already. Don’t change the subject.”

He just stares helplessly at the back of the broken frame on the floor.

“Why?” I scream at him.

He bends down and retrieves the broken frame, letting the glass left at the edges tinkle to the floor before gingerly fishing the photo out. He leaves the rest of the glass there and says dully,

“I have something I need to show you.”

He retrieves a messenger bag from the closet in the office and leads the way into the living room.  He pulls out a device that looks something like an iPad. His voice is flat as he offers it to me after turning it on and making a few swipes.

“The pastkeepers maintain a storehouse of function records. They’re all electronic. This is a table I made from some of the data.”

It is all gibberish to me. “So? What is this?” I ask coldly. Nothing here could possibly have anything to do with me.

“I started noticing a trend with the suicides.  Those are the most recent function standings for each of the 4,337 people that have committed suicide so far. And that’s just this quadrant.”  He leans over my shoulder and points to various sets of meaningless numbers.  “This is the Idix number, a unique identifier for each person, in lieu of using names. It’s the number that each of us has in here,” he says, pointing to his own Idix.  Somewhere in the mirrored lines and circles, he’s saying, there’s a Ritter number coded. And a Strega number in Strega’s and so on.

I don’t want it to, but my anger begins to ebb as he continues with greater and greater urgency. “This number,” he says, pointing to another, “is the most recent function standing for the person with the Idix number I just showed you.  It’s very low. A number like this would mean a level one function. Basically, this person was failing miserably at every part of their function.”  He points to another number. “This is the function number…which means this person was in cookery. Doing a bad job in there could be anything from continual improper handling of food, failing to control outbreaks of illness from foodborne bacteria, or even intentionally tainting the food supply in some way.  After these results posted to the Tribunal hall, the person with this Idix number died. It was ruled a suicide.”

He moves on. Screen after screen, file after file, he points out the numbers, until I have memorized that the first set is the Idix, the second the function standing, and the third, date of death.  Every single Idix tracks to a person who was functioning poorly, at a level three or less. Every one of them died after their latest function review was sent electronically to the Tribunal hall.