Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) (6 page)

The walls gradually stop closing in on me.  I feel foolish now, the way I usually do after a panic attack.  I don’t like admitting to myself that that’s what they are, that they are the real reason my father taught me combat breathing.  Not just because he’s a military man who wants to prep his family for potential crises, but because his daughter, for reasons unknown, sometimes just freaks out for no reason.

I tell Ritter these things, babbling senselessly, and when I come up for air he holds my gaze and says,

“But this isn’t one of those times.  This time, the reason is real.  It makes sense.”

I nod. I guess it does.

“Do you want something to eat?” He asks after a few minutes of just the two of us facing each other, his hands back in his lap.  I shake my head.  “Will you keep me company?”

I don’t know how to say no to that, so I follow him into the servette, glaring accusingly at the ScanX. He breathes, he chooses, and he cocks an eyebrow at me.

“Sure you don’t want anything?”

I shake my head again.

I sit beside Ritter at the table this time instead of across from him. He gives me a grim look. Several times when he opens his mouth, I think he’s going to speak.  Instead, he just takes another forkful.  I wait. Eventually, he will say it.  Ritter isn’t one to hold things in for long.

The knockout tournament method of determining friendships has, I think, given me a lot of insight into people.  Really, it isn’t that hard to read them, anyway, if you pay attention.  Ritter is easier than most, in my opinion, because as I’ve mentioned, he’s very animated, the sort of person you’d describe as wearing their heart on their sleeve.

He continues to try and to fail until he’s exhausted his supply of food.  I feel a little like a lost puppy as I follow him into the servette and watch him wash his plate and fork. Now he’s stalling for sure, scrubbing the sink and wiping down the counter. Finally, though, he moves to a screen mounted on wood paneling just this side of the archway from the servette to the entry hall.  He touches the screen, waking it, and takes a few swipes.

“Shit,” he says.

Good to know cursing jumped the parallel.

“What?” I ask as he turns to face me.  Healthy just a moment ago, his complexion is now devoid of color. “The Tribunal notice just came in,” he announces flatly.

His hand trembles as he swipes the screen a few more times, then rests his forehead on the panel next to it. It wouldn’t have seemed possible, but he’s grown paler still.

“We need to talk,” he says, grabbing a small device that looks like a cell phone. He swipes the screen of the device, then powers down the one on the wall.

“Okay,” I say, following him as he strides purposefully into the living room.

By the look on his face, he’s waiting for me to fall apart or panic.  Truthfully, I’m expecting it, too.  I wonder why it hasn’t happened yet, why I am so ridiculously unpredictable.  Lately, I seldom seem to feel the appropriate thing at the appropriate time.  This is very serious. Ritter is very serious. But apart from seeing his expression and knowing it means I should be afraid, the panic has hidden itself away again, waiting to pop out when there’s no logical reason that it should.

“The Tribunal is set for Monday, June ninth,” he begins, gesturing to the handheld device, silently asking if I want to read it.  I don’t.  We sit like this for a few moments until Ritter decides I’m not going to take the device.  “I wish this hadn’t happened, Davinney.   I wish it with everything in me.”

His apology is sincere.  Everything about him is earnest, from the sag of his shoulders to the way his mouth turns down.

“I need you to understand that,” he says, shifting so that he faces me more fully.

“I do,” I assure him.

My words aren’t enough. I remember everything Ritter told me last night about open worlds, about closed worlds.  Something dawns on me.

“Ritter, when I asked you when I could go home, Strega said ‘maybe never’,” I sit up straighter in my chair.  “Maybe means there’s still a chance I can go home, right?”

Ritter sighs. “In certain circumstances,” he says slowly, “the Tribunal has chosen to allow it.”

“But what about the Agreement?”  I ask, remembering what he said about my world’s closed stance.  Disavowing all knowledge of parallel travel to the point where I’d be a threat to them if I returned.

“Certain high profile cases have caused Attero to bend where they’re normally inflexible,” he admits.

I smile as a spark of hope blinks to life. “My dad is an officer in the Air Force.  Would that help?”

Ritter doesn’t smile back, though.  He holds his hands up. “It might,” he shrugs. “But I don’t want you to get your hopes up. They’ve seldom allowed it, and it’s unlikely they will now.”

“But you must think there’s at least some small chance.”

“It’s probably wishful thinking.”

I feel deflated, my stomach sinking. I know he didn’t mean to plant a little seed of hope inside me, but he has, and I’m afraid for the seven days that loom ahead.  That little seed will surely sprout.  The pain will be worse if that seed takes root.  I try to rip it out again. 

“Isn’t there any kind of leniency, considering I’m still just a kid?”

Ritter frowns. “Not here, you aren’t.” A strange expression floods his face. He turns red and stammers, “I-I mean, you’re at least sixteen, right?”

I wonder about this look, why he looks like I’ve caught him stealing a sucker from a toddler.

“Yes,” I admit. “I’ll be seventeen next month.”

“You’re an adult here,” he says. “The Agreement would only consider you a minor if yours was an open world.”

My heart falls. His next words, also very earnest, help to tear away the last of that stupid root of hope.

“Just in case things don’t work out, I want you to understand the other way things might go.”

“Okay,” I agree, sitting up straighter, meeting his eyes with what I hope looks like bravery.

“If the Tribunal decides you’re stuck here, you’ll be forced to assimilate.  You’ll be expected to become a productive member of our society.  A lot of it will be automatic and at least relatively painless…choosing your foods from the acceptable list, complying with whatever information and instruction the MedQuick provides.  You’ll pass through Challenge, which is a series of tests to determine a range of functions you can perform.  You—”

“Functions?”

“Jobs,” Ritter counters. “You’ll have to commit to our version of English. Assimilation is about full immersion, about letting go of where you came from and pledging complete loyalty to Concordia.”

It seems hideously unfair to me that Ritter’s Earth wants to keep me from my home and won’t even let me have the things that make me who I am.  When I tell Ritter as much, he reaches over and takes my hand, his eyes clouded with regret.

“You have no idea how many times I’ve gone over what happened in my mind, trying to figure out how I dragged you back with me.  I shoved you out of the path of the car, but that should have been the end of it.  I should have come back alone.”  He shakes his head.  “I wish I could take it back, I really do. I don’t regret getting you out of harm’s way, of course, but that I somehow brought you with me.”

“You can’t take it back,” I mumble down at my hands, clenching my jaw so I don’t cry. I force myself to see things from his perspective.  He was only trying to help, and now he’s got to live with the fact that he might have single-handedly ruined my life. And I do, too.

It’s just so impossible.  The logical part of me fully accepts that he did the only thing he thought he could to help me, but something dark and violent in me twists and curls around inside and fights for dominance. I want to leap on him and pound him with my fists until I don’t feel so homesick I might die.

I’ve only seen this part of me a few times before, like when I punched Jake Armadice. Or once when I was in a self-defense class my dad forced me to take.  I figured if there was ever an acceptable time to get violent with someone that was it. The instructor appreciated that side of me. The other times, I am not proud of, even if they weren’t altogether unwarranted.

Ritter squeezes my hand.  “Look, let’s try not to focus on the outcome right now.” He frowns. “That sounds stupid when the next thing I was going to say was that it would be best if you try to spend this time before the Tribunal learning as much as possible about Concordia.”

I don’t bother to agree. It would only rub everything he’s feeling back in his face.  “Don’t you have to…function?”

He brightens. “I have a function,” he agrees, one corner of his mouth lifting. “After I wrap up a few things, I’ll be excused from functioning until the Tribunal.”

“What do you do?” I ask.

“I’m a herald,” he says, rising from the sofa. Cocking his head, he thinks about something for a moment. “That’s a journalist to you.  I write the news bits you’ll find on the scape.” Scrunching up his face, he adds, “Internet. You might find me very useful in the near future.”

I don’t ask him why.  I know what he means.  He means if the Tribunal confirms that I will not be allowed to go home.

6

I AM STILL wearing the caretaker’s uniform Strega dredged up, careful to keep my left arm and wrist covered because Ritter doesn’t want to have to explain things to anyone.  He insists it’s not shame or embarrassment, but I don’t believe him.

“It’s more for you than anyone else,” he insists. 

Ritter tries to teach me everything as we go, starting with the meld hall. “Doors are called melds, for the way they blend into the wall around them.  So we’re standing in the meldway.”

He picks up two disks a little larger and thicker than dollar coins and says, “You’re going to need these.”  He holds up his forearm, the one with the silvery tattoo, pointing to it with a game show flourish.  “All I need to open melds, ride the slides, buy things…right here. But since you don’t have one, this chip is for the melds,” he says, handing me the silver colored one, “and this one is for anything you need to purchase. It’s a spare copy of my luxury allotment.  A portion of my yearly allotment gets loaded to this each week.  We need to get you something to wear besides a caretaker’s uniform.”

I look down at myself.  The shirt and pants are perfectly comfortable, but I know I can’t wear them every day all day long.

As we step outside, Ritter begins to explain about the address system on Concordia.  Everything is addressed using one’s own keeping as the point of reference.

“Which means if I ever move, I have to reconfigure my entire address log…not the other way around.  It’s a real pain.”

All addresses relate to slide numbers and station numbers. After Ritter breaks down a few addresses for me, I ask him to stop.

“I’ll get it,” I tell him, stepping onto slide ten, the closest to his keeping, “but it’s a little too much right now.”

He’s quiet until we’ve changed slides three times and are on the first street that doesn’t look like every other street we’ve walked along.

“This looks like Bricktown,” I tell him as we reach a store and the meld automatically opens.  “It’s a shopping district in Oklahoma City.”

“That’s a neat coincidence,” he replies in a hushed voice.  Too late, I remember that I’m not supposed to do anything that will make it obvious I’m not from around here.

“It’s not, actually,” a woman with deep burgundy spikes calls out from behind a display table.  With hoops in her ears and studs in her nose and below her lip, she looks like she could be one of the Goths from Touchstone.  She finishes folding a blouse and drops it on the display, looking me up and down with storm cloud grey eyes.

Ritter’s face colors as he looks away. It dawns on me then why he doesn’t want me advertising that I’m an outsider.  People might correctly guess that he’s violated the standard.  The thing I don’t understand, though, is why he assumes people would jump to that conclusion.  I could just as easily be a tourist from any open world, couldn’t I?

At any rate, the clerk doesn’t notice his discomfort.  She finishes looking me up and down and her blackish-red lips curve upward. “So…size eight, are you?”

I nod.  Without asking if I need help, she moves quickly through the store, plucking this or that off a shelf or rack, zig-zagging through the place until she  reaches a bank of dressing rooms and begins stocking one with the armfuls of clothing she’s collected.

Finished hanging the clothing, she beckons at me to come inside.  She slips easily around me, hesitating in the doorway. Meldway.

“Attero?” she asks, seeing my empty wrist as I reach up for the first shirt.

Now my face goes red, too. I pull the sleeve down over my bare wrist.  She steps quickly back inside and closes the door.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you or your friend.”  She lifts her arm, gesturing at the familiar silvery mirror tattoo, and her face brightens.  “I got my Idix last week. I forget that not everyone from Attero sees this rite of passage as a good thing.”

I look up at her, at her heavily lined eyes and her dark lipstick and the hardware twinkling from various parts of her face, and I want to cry.  It would be so much easier if the thought of living here forever made me as obviously thrilled as it makes her.

“What happened?” I ask.  “I mean, why are you here?”

“A happy accident,” she says, pulling a logger out of her pocket, which is the actual name for the handheld device Ritter had been using earlier.  He showed his to me on the slide. It’s like a cell phone on steroids, capable of keeping in touch with friends and family who move to other open worlds.  The touchscreen is similar to the one on my now abandoned iPhone.  She swipes through some screens before turning it toward me.

“My fiancé,” she says, and I glance down at the smiling face of a guy dressed in what I’ve learned is the guardian uniform.  Concordia does not differentiate between its police and its military, so he could be either.

I frown. “But isn’t he in trouble for breaking the Agreement?”

Her head shakes. “I met him in a bar.  He got drunk, started talking all kinds of crazy about how he wished he’d met me on Concordia, and the next thing you know he’s looking all sorts of horrified.  Way, way too much to drink.” She winks and nudges me with her elbow. “He went a little overboard, you know, being set free from the constraints of breath chemistry for a few days. I didn’t know what the cuckoo monster was going on about, but I was worried he’d try to drive, so I followed him outside. He went for something in his pocket, and I thought it was car keys, so I grabbed his arm.  I was just about to tell him I’d call him a taxi when he launched.  I was still holding his elbow, so…”  She throws up her hands and shrugs.

“But what about your family?” I ask, wondering how she could be so matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

She lifts a shoulder.  “Don’t have one,” she answers. “I’ve been on my own since I was fifteen.”  Plucking a piece of lint off another of the shirts in my try-on pile, she mutters, “Could have used the abuse standard right about then.”

I look through the stack of clothes.  She watches me flip through them before glancing at me.

“You probably shouldn’t buy too much today,” she says.  “I came here wearing a six.  I’m in a four now.” She twists and turns, showing off her slender body.

I roll my eyes.  “You have a point,” I reply, thinking of the dictator-ish ScanX.  But my mind is still stuck on her arrival on Concordia. “So, you took his elbow and you automatically transported with him?”

“Yep.  If so much as a strand of your hair is touching a slivver when they transport—” She makes a popping sound with her mouth. “Automatic hitchhiker.”

“And what about the Tribunal?” I asked. “Didn’t he violate the theft standard?”

“Yeah.  The guardians reamed him out and dropped him two levels for getting silted. Drunk. They said it ruined his judgment, but he’s a guardian, so he’s sort of got a certain amount of immunity.  It all comes down to intent.  If he’d intended to bring me here, you know, like if we were completely in love and he’d proposed and I’d said yes, that would be a big no-no.  But breath chemistry doesn’t lie.  He was bombed out of his tree and didn’t realize I had his elbow.”

I can’t help firing questions at her, hoping I’ll find some loophole in her answers. “You weren’t freaked out at all, ending up here and being told you couldn’t go home?” 

She shrugs again. “This place takes a little getting used to, sure, but since I had nothing keeping me on Attero, I didn’t really mind.  And once I was here, we
did
fall in love, so it all worked out for the best.”

“But just the fact that Concordia exists didn’t freak you out?”

She laughs. “Of course it did! I was on moodleveler for about a week, but I guess since I’ve always been crazy about science fiction, it wasn’t too much of a leap. I’ve always believed there was more life in the universe besides ours.  I just didn’t necessarily think it was human. Or that there was more than one version of our universe.”

In the end, all her talk serves only to remind me that the outlook isn’t favorable.  I guess it shows on my face because hers falls. She puts her hand on my arm, no longer smiling.

“If you need help assimilating, let me know.  It’s…a strange process,” she admits.  “Some of it was sort of hard for me.”  Glancing up at me, her face freezes. “But everybody’s different,” she adds quickly.

I nod. “Thanks,” I say hollowly.

Silence stretches between us until it becomes sharp and awkward, like pins left in the clothes I am about to try on.

“Well,” she backs toward the door, “I’ll let you try these.”

I feel bad. She looks sort of disappointed, and I wonder if, despite all her talk, she’s glad to run into someone from the world she left behind. 

“Thank you,” I say, this time with more feeling. “I’m Davinney.”

Her mouth turns up again.  “Mina,” she replies. “Call me if you need other sizes.”

Ritter is staring out the front window when I finish in the dressing room. Taking Mina’s words to heart, I’ve only chosen three pairs of pants, four shirts, and a pair of pajamas.  And even then I’ve only chosen ones that were just a little snug so I’ll still be able to wear them for a while even if I lose weight. And, thinking of Ritter, all of the shirts I’ve chosen have long sleeves that cling.

He turns at the sound of the dressing room door closing. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be needing lingerie?” Mina asks as she carries my choices to the back of the store.

Ritter goes back to staring out the window while I choose some underwear and a couple bras.  I’m quick about it and a little anxious as I realize I don’t know what any of it costs or how money actually works here.  I make a mental note to ask Ritter later.

Mina gathers the last of my purchases and leads me back to the payment desk.  Ritter, having joined us, places his arm on a swing out panel, resting it there until a pinging noise issues from the panel.

“Wait just a second,” she says, swiping the screen of her logger.  “I just want to give Davinney my codes.” She looks up at me.  “Your logger?”

Ritter holds up his own.  “Use mine for now,” he says.  Mina nods and each waves their logger in front of the other’s. Ritter glances at his screen.  “Got them,” he says.

“Good to meet you, Davinney.”

I take the bag she holds out to me. It says
Flash
on it in large, slash-like letters.

Once we’re on the street, Ritter offers me his first smile since we arrived at the store.

“You made a friend,” he says, glancing at his logger again.  “Want to meet some of mine?”

“Sure.” 

How can I refuse? He’s putting a roof over my head, feeding me, and buying me clothes.  I’ve got little to offer him in return, but I can offer him my willingness to assimilate…even if it is the last thing I want to do.

The service unwind (bar and grill) is a few blocks down in the same district. Ritter must have given this outing some real thought.

The place is called Lennin’s Unholy Unwind. Just inside the meld, we have to provide our breath chemistry. When I give Ritter an exasperated look, he says,

“If you have a propensity for addiction, you won’t be able to order anything with alcohol in it.”  He clamps his mouth shut as someone approaches.

I wonder why he’s bothering to introduce me to anyone when I’m bound to mess something up and embarrass him. Even so, Ritter introduces me to his friends, Melayne Serda and her husband, Scuva, referring to me as a friend from out of town.

Melayne and Scuva go still and glance at Ritter. Melayne’s hand curls around Scuva’s tightly and the four of us stare awkwardly across the table at one another before Scuva breaks the spell, offering me a stiff smile that makes the back of my neck prickle.

Melayne follows his lead. Looking at my outfit, she asks, “You’re a caretaker?  Are you a friend of Strega’s?” I blink at her accent, which sounds vaguely British but is mixed with something else I can’t identify.

Ritter looks caught but recovers smoothly. “We met Strega this morning for breakfast and there was a little accident with our drinks.”

She laughs sympathetically.  “Your doing, I assume?”

Ritter dips his head and lifts his hands.  “You know me,” he chuckles.

Melayne’s blue eyes twinkle as she peers over the edge of the table.  “I see you’ve used Ritter’s clumsiness as an excuse to visit one of my favorite shops. Well done.” This, too, strikes me as British. I wonder whether she’s also from Attero. Then I inwardly roll my eyes at myself. There are probably an infinite number of open worlds full of people with accents of all kinds.

I smile and set the bag on the floor. I don’t tell her any differently.

Ritter and Scuva get into a conversation about an upcoming festival.  I try to follow, but some of what they say is obviously Concordian jargon and I quickly lose the meaning. The strange, loaded looks continue, though, reminding me of the ones passed between Ritter and Strega in holding. I want to ask Ritter why they’re looking at me this way, but I can’t.

I’m relieved when Ritter shows me his logger and asks,

“Anything look interesting?”

It is my ScanX profile, adjusted for the menu in this service unwind.  My stomach feels so jumpy, I’m not sure I’ll be able to eat, but I choose a steak with seasonal vegetables.  Although I’m only sixteen years old, I’m given both alcoholic and non-alcoholic choices for beverages.  When I start to ask Ritter what the drinking age is on Concordia, I bite off the question just in time.  A local would know that. And anyway, I’ve just remembered that he told me you are legally an adult at sixteen. I pretend my choked off words are because I’ve changed my mind and say, “No, wait, I’ll have the lemonade.”