Part 24 (1/2)

The counselor explained that it'd take two weeks for the Ministry's office to process our request. At that point, our case would be pa.s.sed to a higher court in the Orthodoxy, where a panel of clerks and lay-priests would review it. If all went well, the counselor said, they'd contact us for interviews, background checks, and then they'd give us an application.

”I thought this was the application,” Helene said.

”No,” the counselor said. ”It's a request for the application.”

I felt hollow. Outside the window, searchlights swept the edge of the slums and a siren wailed. The Ministry, hunting for someone. I imagined beastly slack-jawed men with guns patrolling the ruins.

The counselor mumbled on about the beauty of sacrifice. He talked about the strength of our nation, how scheduling deaths prevented wars, famines, natural disasters. It was all so much bulls.h.i.+t. But we crossed ourselves, mechanically, as he led us in prayer.

”Providence,” the counselor recited, ”help Kelvin and Helene to meet their fates with grace.”

”I'm pregnant,” Helene told the counselor. She'd twisted the sash of her robe around her hands and her breath came in quick, shallow gulps. ”You'll kill our baby.”

”I know,” the counselor told us. ”And for that we are truly sorry.”

”Motherf.u.c.ks,” Helene said. She swept her arm across the table and our paperwork cascaded to the floor. The counselor didn't flinch.

”I prayed,” she said, her voice shaking. ”We made t.i.thes. I anointed myself and used the rosaries. Our baby's not supposed to come with us.”

Helene had always had a stubborn sense of justice. Once, when we'd been in high school, a rainstorm had soaked the ruins for days and scads of earthworms had crawled from the dirt to drown on the sidewalks. Helene spent hours on hands and knees, rescuing the squirming things. Her jeans soaked through. Her hair plastered to her forehead.

The counselor shook his head and tapped a few notes into his palmtop. ”Mrs. Hayas.h.i.+,” he said, ”I'm a little dismayed at your progress to date.”

”p.i.s.s off,” I told him.

The counselor raised his eyebrows. ”The Ministry won't be pleased with my report,” he said.

”The Ministry can go to h.e.l.l,” I said.

The counselor glared, set his skullcap atop his damp hair, and got up to leave. He pointed at the paperwork scattered across our kitchen floor.

”Don't even bother with the forms,” he said.

In the apartment on Figueroa, the sample's come back with a readout of Pepper's fate.

”Whoa,” t.i.tus says. ”'Loss of Blood.' Definite Cla.s.s X. Ambiguity's off the charts. Possible group-risk, possibly violent circ.u.mstances.”

Pepper flails her arms and arches her back and just about pulls my arms from their sockets. t.i.tus plants his knee on Pepper's chest, pinning her to the floor. His tagger starts beeping and its lights flash red.

”Her blood's not in the system at all,” t.i.tus says.

”What's that mean?”

”An Untagged,” he says.

Holy s.h.i.+t.

I look at Pepper. An Untagged. A traitor, a terrorist, a ticking time-bomb.

The Ministry makes a big show of hunting down the Untagged, weeding them out. They haven't been tested at birth like the rest of us, so they don't have cla.s.ses, don't know how their lives end. I wonder what it's like for them, not knowing.

Well, I thought. She sure as h.e.l.l knows now.

”What's the reward up to these days? Ten mil?” t.i.tus asks. ”Hold her for a second.”

I take both Pepper's hands and she tries to twist them away from me. My gloves are wet now, sweat covering everything. Ten million credits for turning in an Untagged. Ten million credits for killing someone. t.i.tus pulls the plastic zip-ties from his belt and wraps them around Pepper's wrists.

”No police,” he says. ”They'll just want a cut of the money. We take her straight to the Ministry.”

”They'll kill me,” Pepper says. ”I haven't done anything and they'll kill me.”

They'll kill me, too. On September thirteenth, the Ministry men will take Helene and I to the airfield in their black cars, they'll pack us onto a plane with the other R-4s, and then the pilot will fly us out over the Pacific and kill us all.

”Can't run from our fates, honey,” t.i.tus says.

Last week, I'd tried a new tactic. I'd slipped my credstick into the counselor's palm as he left our apartment, told him I'd do whatever it took to get this straightened out. I told him there should be enough in that account to keep him happy, keep him quiet. He'd just snarled at me and let the credstick clatter to the floor.

”Don't think for a second that you're the first person who tried to bribe me,” he'd said. His eyes narrowed.

I shuddered. A few choice words from the counselor, and they'd toss Helene and I into a holding cell. The Ministry excelled at torture: Once they knew how someone died, they knew how to inflict pain without killing him. They knew exactly what he'd be most afraid of.

”We're in the business of reducing ambiguities,” the counselor hissed at me. ”What do you think would happen if everyone sidestepped their fate?”

After the counselor left, Helene and I had lain in our sour sheets, listening to the sirens and clatter of our neighborhood. Trash fires crackled somewhere down the block, aerosol cans exploding in the flames. Kids shouted and tossed rocks at each other.

Helene pressed her toes against my leg and stretched her arm across my chest. She slept on her side these days-on her back, she felt like the baby was crus.h.i.+ng her, and on her front she felt like she'd been draped over a bowling ball.

”We're zombies,” I told her. I cupped my palm over her cheek.

”We've always been zombies,” she said. ”Just now we've got a date for it.”

For years, I'd had the same nightmares. Sterile white plasticine and a seatbelt tight across my lap. Cold wind rus.h.i.+ng past me. In the dream, I would look out the window of the plane to see the ocean at a sickening tilt. When we hit the whitecaps there'd always be a shriek of metal and then static. Death sounded like static. And the dream kept going after that. A black canvas stretched across my mind. No eyes to see or skin to feel, and the static kept churning like an engine in the dark, on and on.

”Feel this,” Helene said, and guided my hand across the taut skin of her stomach. ”Feels like his spine.”

We wanted what every parent in the slumlands wanted. We wanted our baby to come out healthy, and we wanted the priests to tag him and smile and tell us our son was a cla.s.s A, a Cancer or a Heart Disease and not a squib like we are. We wanted the priests to hustle our precious baby away, evac him out of Angel City on black Ministry helicopters, take him across the fifty miles of desert to the Garden.

The archbishop and the rest of the orthodoxy lived in the Garden. So did the financial district, the nation's politico-corporate headquarters. Towers of gla.s.s and steel, beautiful people in clean houses. Only the upper-cla.s.ses could live there: people with slow deaths, or predictable ones, or fates with low violence ratings. Low-cla.s.ses weren't allowed to come close. Too much risk to the government, to the economy.

All of us gunshot wounds, shrapnel deaths, stabbings, poisonings, industrial accidents, we'd been pinned down here in the slums with the factories and pollutants. Better for society that way.

Helene and I stared at the ceiling. The air smelled thick with gypsum dust.

”What if we'd never been tested?” I asked her.

She laughed. ”We'd live in the desert with the Untagged. Starve to death out there.”

Helene and I both lay silent for a while, breathing across each others' lips, thinking about the sun-blasted wastes, the yucca and brush in the open countryside. If we were Untagged, I thought, we'd disappear into the arroyos and the Ministry would never find us.