The Sowing (36 page)

“You killed him.” The little man’s voice is quiet, despairing and exhausted. He doesn’t look at me. He takes his friend’s dead hand in his own and holds it tightly.

“You would have done the same to us,” I say, my voice shaking, though my hand, holding the knife ready to throw, is still. The man doesn’t seem to be a threat anymore. He makes no attempt to move.

Soren steps over the two men and comes to me, enveloping me in his arms. “Give me the knife,” he says, as he pries it from my hand, which is gripping the hilt so hard he has to unwrap my clenched fingers. My hands, my whole body, won’t obey the signals my brain is sending. I feel like I’ve been turned into a stony statue, frozen in time, forever immortalizing the moment when I first took a human life. Soren’s voice is the only anchor I have to the idea that I’m still alive, that things might someday be okay even though a man is dead at my feet. At my hands.

“Who are you?” Soren asks calmly, as the man huddles over his friend’s body.

“No one,” he responds, and his voice is muffled, lost. Is he crying?

Soren releases me from his arms and walks slowly over to the pathetic, shivering form. He turns his head to Soren’s advancing figure. Soren crouches down in front of him and points the knife at his throat very deliberately. He speaks, calmly and quietly.

“This weapon is proof that you were going to kill us. You boarded our boat and were going to murder us in our sleep. Your friend is dead, and you are lucky to be alive. But if you don’t answer our questions, you won’t be for very much longer.”

The man then turns and gently lays his companion’s head on the deck. The gesture is tender, soft. The full force of what I’ve done hits me, and salty tears and rainwater course down my cheeks. I close my eyes and lean my head back, wishing the rain would just dissolve me and carry me with it, with the blood and sweat and bones down into the river to be diluted and purified. When that doesn’t happen, I open my eyes again and fall back into my chair, watching as the man kneels over his companion and pulls his lids down, erasing the surprised, wide-eyed expression forever. He smoothes back the dead man’s hair and whispers something. A prayer, maybe. Or a pledge.

Then he grabs hold of the railing and starts to pull himself to his feet.

“Not so fast,” Soren says, standing up abruptly and waving the knife in front of him. “Keep your hands visible.”

He holds his hands up in the air and looks at Soren wearily.

“Can I stand now?” he asks bitterly. Soren glances back at me, and then beckons him to stand up. He grabs a piece of rope from the deck of the ship and uses it to lash the boy’s hands behind his back. His wrist is still bleeding where I bit deep into his skin. That’s what he is, I realize. A boy. I knew he was small, but standing in front of us now, it’s clear he’s even smaller than I thought. He’s closer to my size than Soren’s. He can’t be any older than fifteen or sixteen, but the expression in his eyes makes him look like he’s closer to a hundred.

Soren drags the boy inside to the tiny kitchen area and sits him down at a little table just behind the helm. I follow reluctantly, not eager to face the child whose friend I have murdered. But it’s warm inside, and I’m cold, wet, and maybe in shock. I need to warm up. I sit down at the controls, a little apart from them. Soren starts heating up some water, and I watch blankly.

“I know who you are,” the boy says. “You’re Soren Skaarsgard.”

Shit. I turn my head to the boy and stare at him.
He’s recognized us.
Soren and I lock eyes briefly, and the flicker of understanding that passes between us means we don’t tell him anything. Not until we know more about him. Soren goes back to preparing tea.

“Who?” he asks nonchalantly.

“I saw you years ago. You were visiting our Farm with your mother when she was chancellor. You played the piano for us. Some piece called Chopping,” he says, and I almost laugh out loud. I choke it back and turn it into a cough, but he looks at me somewhat indignantly.

“What?”

“Chopin,” Soren corrects gently, more tactfully.

“So you are Soren!” he exclaims, his eyes lighting up.

“Just because I know what Chopin is doesn’t mean I’m this Skaarsgard person. You’re from a Farm?” he asks, handing me a mug of tea as he sits down across the table from the boy.

“I know you’re him, so stop pretending you’re not. And
you’re
Remy Alexander,” he says, nodding purposefully at me. Soren and I look at each other again as we realize the charade is up.

“How do you know her?” Soren asks, speaking for me, since my throat still doesn’t seem to be working.

“You’re famous,” he says simply. “You were all over the official Sector broadcasts. But I know
you
,” he says, nodding at me with a glint of anger in his eyes, “because of Sam. When the massacre at the SRI was on the télé, we all heard about it. Sam couldn’t get enough of it. It hit him hard, the deaths of all those students, and especially ... your sister.”

I think back to those months after the killings. The endless broadcasts, the analysis of the killer’s psychology, the speculation about why he did it, the photos of all the students’ faces shown over and over again on the Sector programs. They made the students into martyrs and the Outsiders into murderers.

“
‘Elle était si belle,’
he always said.”

She was so beautiful,
I translate, remembering how strong the old French influence is on the dialects outside of the capital.

“He adored her. He just couldn’t get over it. And so we watched the broadcasts, and they always showed photos of you. You’ve grown up, but not so much that I wouldn’t savvy you anywhere.” He takes a deep breath. “Sam hated the Outsiders after that, and was always talking about how if he ever met any, he would kill them. That’s what we thought you were, when we saw the boat on the river. Outsiders.”

I look away.
Sam, the one you killed … your sister … he adored her.
So this is what I am. The killer. The girl who killed a man who adored my sister, who grieved for her, who wanted to avenge her. Just like I do.
They would have killed us first,
I remind myself. They would have stabbed us to death in our sleep. But that argument rings hollow in my head. I didn’t have to kill him. I could have stopped them some other way.
I didn’t have to kill him to keep myself safe.

I don’t know who I am right now.

“So you know us,” Soren says, returning to the questions, “but we still don’t know who you are or why you and your friend saw fit to board our boat and try to kill us.”

“Like I said, we thought you were Outsiders. We saw your boat and thought there might be food and a fast way out. We were just trying to stay alive.” He talks like he wasn’t doing anything wrong by sneaking onto a boat and plotting to murder the people on it.

“By killing other people?” Soren demands.

“We didn’t have a choice. There’s a bounty on our heads, and we needed an escape.”

Soren glances at me, his eyes raised, nervous. Why were they being hunted?

“What’s your name?”

“Bear.”

“Bear?”

“I’m registered as Antoine Baier. But apparently I was a difficult child. My wet nurse complained that when I was hungry, I cried so loud and thrashed so wildly, I sounded like a bear charging through the woods. So, Antoine Baier became just Bear.”

“Okay, Bear. Tell us why there’s a bounty on your heads.”

“Because of Sam. His real name was Samuel, but everyone in the camp called him Samson on account of how big he was. He is—was my best friend.” His head bows momentarily and he stops talking. When he resumes speaking, his voice is thick and gritty. “He … was a few years older but for some reason got it in his head that I was smart and funny. He liked me. One of the few who ever did.” His eyes are downcast, and he swallows like he’s fighting back tears. My stomach churns and I look away.

“Anyway, he’d always been a bit of a troublemaker, but he was so strong—he could do the work of three men easily—so Boss put up with it. Until after the Alexanders disappeared.” I look up at the mention of my name. The boy is shivering, and Soren takes pity on him and pours him a mug of tea as well and puts it on the table in front of him. Bear clutches it between his palms and lets it warm him. He takes an awkward, slow sip with his bound hands and then sets it back down.

 “What does my family have to do with you and Sam?” I ask.

“Sam got the idea in his head that not everything was the way we’d been told. He started asking questions. Like, ‘Where did Tai’s family go?’ and ‘How come they never held any hearings about the killings?’ and ‘How come nobody ever hears about the Skaarsgards anymore?’ He started telling the rest of us workers that the government hired the Outsiders to kill them. Then he stopped eating the food, saying he wouldn’t eat anything given to him by murderers. Finally, last summer, they put him on silo duty.”

“Wait,” Soren interrupts. “Who’s
they
?”

“They’re called the Enforcers, but we all just call them Boss. They’re the guards and the administrators at the Farms. They’re in charge of assigning tasks and passing out the Dieticians’ food and stuff like that.”

“So what’s a silo, and what do you do in one?” I ask.

Bear leans back. “There’s these tall structures, silos, where the grain is stored. When the grain is moist, it’ll start decomposing, and it starts to clump up and gets pretty nasty. We go in and break up the clumps.”

“Why are clumps bad?” I ask.

“Makes it hard to get out of the silo and into trucks for transport, I suppose. Maybe causes problems for processing, I don’t know. We just grow the crops. After it’s trucked away, I have no idea what happens to it.”

“Okay, so what happened in the silo?” Soren asks.

“I don’t know in his case. Sometimes a sinkhole forms and the grain turns into a giant funnel, sucking everything down. If you don’t have your harness on, you go down too and drown in the grain. Or if you’re walking on the top level, scraping clumps off the sides of the bin, the whole pile can collapse on you and one minute you’re breathing air and the next minute you’re ten feet under, breathing corn. Probably Sam’s weight collapsed a load of grain around him—everyone knew he was too big for the silos. That’s why it was so crazy when Boss put him up for silo duty. Anyway, if the harness don’t hold or your partner don’t pull you up,
tu seras mort
.”

“But obviously Sam didn’t die,” Soren says.

“No, the harness held. Me and a couple of friends managed to pull him up. But he was so heavy, it took us longer than it should’ve. He was under too long. Never was quite right after it. Brain damage, the doctors said. They wanted to euthanize him. But then the chief Boss figured it didn’t take too much brains to do what Sam did. Since he was dumber than a box of rocks now, at least he wouldn’t cause more trouble. So they fixed him up and put him back to work.

“Problem was, after that they worked him like an animal. Well, after that, he was an animal. Just a big dumb ox, a work horse that toiled from sunup to sundown without ever saying a word.” Bear stops, his eyes cloudy with memories. He sniffs and wipes his face on his sleeve.

“So you left,” Soren prods, gently.

“Yeah. About month ago. They were gonna work him to death. And he’d looked after me, so I decided to look after him. We snuck out one night when some of the uppity-ups from Okaria were doing a visit. There was a big fête and all the Bosses was so busy kissing ass that they didn’t savvy when we just walked out through the unlocked front gate. It was unreal. We’ve been habitating out here since, trying to make our way west. There are others out here, too. Some of ’em will give you a helping hand. We met up with a healer who tried to help Sam, but there wasn’t nothin’ she could do for him. Damage was already done. But she was nice. And her husband … he was a poet, sang songs and such.”

He stops and studies my face as I hold my breath.
Is he talking about my parents?
They travel in disguise, but could he have recognized them? But then he shakes his head and goes on. “But some....” He stops and is quiet for a while. Neither Soren nor I press him.

“Did you … like living at the Farm?” I ask, my voice quiet, trembling.

“Like it?” he asks, looking up with a perplexed expression, as though he’s never quite thought about this question. “I didn’t know anything different, ’till I got out to the Wilds. I guess I liked it well enough. It sure was a lot easier than being out here. But I liked that out here we could do what we wanted.” He thinks about this for a minute. “So much for my brains Sam thought so much of, huh?” he jokes weakly, with a pathetic, weepy smile. He takes a deep breath and shudders visibly. “’Stead of saving Sam, I got him killed.

“So, Remy Alexander and Soren Skaarsgard, you going to kill me now? I really wouldn’t mind. Just do it quick.” He looks at Soren, and then his eyes flick back and settle on me. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me. Cold, unflinching. “You do it. A flick of the wrist. That’s the way I want to go. Just like Sam.”

26 - VALE

Winter 2, Sector Annum 106 07h31

Gregorian Calendar: December 22

I’m listening to Jeremiah snore quietly as I load up the map again. I didn’t sleep well, so I’ve found myself in need of a distraction. My stomach growls, but I resist the temptation to open another Mealpak. The food will only last so long—I can’t go stuffing my face at every opportunity. I start tracing a path from our current location to the nearest sighted Outsider camp, due west about a hundred kilometers. If we go there, will we find anyone? Will Chan-Yu be with them?
Will Remy?
I realize that the odds of finding the Outsiders with just a rumor and a few photos to go off of are pretty slim. We’d have to do a lot of flying, checking back and forth, crosshatching over the land. And even then, there’s no guarantee. Our drones haven’t had much luck photographing them, so we know they’re evasive. What’s to say we’ll succeed where the drones haven’t?