The Sister on duty peers over the counter, her bald head reflecting the golden light filtering down from the lamps hung above the waist-high wall between me and her desk. It takes me a moment to get control of myself and find a calm sort of a smile for her. The nuns are supposed to be even more honored than Firsts, giving up everything to serve those who can’t help themselves. The ultimate example of society before self.
I don’t see a flicker of charity in this Sister’s expression. Not surprising. It’s Sister Lei, who seems to think her life’s purpose is to bring up good members of the City with a switch in one hand and a book with every word Yuan Zhiwei ever said in the other. She actually slapped me once for pretending to compulse. I was chasing some of the younger kids, telling them I was hungry for ears to make them laugh, when I felt a sharp sting on my cheek. “SS is not something to joke about!” she fluted, pointed finger level with my nose. “Especially not for you, Ms. Jiang. I suppose I should expect nothing better, considering where you came from.” Then she ordered me to report my gross disrespect during the next morning’s self-criticism.
I did, complete with sound effects.
“You’re late,” she says, standing up. “And you didn’t eat dinner.”
“Class went a little late. I’m sorry, Sister.” The smile isn’t so hard now that I’m talking. “I haven’t managed to wrench out any of my own teeth, though, so I think we’re okay.”
“You can joke about SS even now? After what happened to Peishan?” She pulls at her long brown robe, flashing a tattoo of a City seal on her hand. However many slashes were cut into her skin to mark her place in the City, they’ve been obscured since the day she took the oath to serve. I could probably see if I looked close enough, but for some reason, I think she’d be offended. “Come flouncing in here long after you’re due for Mantis? You are putting us all in danger.”
Sliding a small paper cup across the counter, she jerks her head toward a water jug pushed up against the metal grate that bars entrance to my home. Not all of us in the orphanage are infected, but separating the sick from the well has never seemed to be something the nuns or anyone else cared about. Not down here, anyway.
Back during the Great Wars, no one really knew what SS was, just people catching sick and falling asleep for too long. Days, weeks, sometimes even months. In those days, people were so terrified of being buried alive because of SS that they went down with a bell at their side just in case they woke up. And not everyone does. It is still almost impossible to tell the difference between the dead Sleep of encephalitis lethargica and the plain dead.
If only that were all SS did to people. Put them to Sleep.
I take the cup, rattling the two green pills against the sides as I get a cupful of water to wash them down. But Sister Lei doesn’t buzz the door open.
“There’s been a change of schedule. The Watch had to take Peishan to the Sanatorium for observation, and the cannery needs someone to cover her shift.”
The deep pool of anger bubbling inside my chest begins to froth again. Peishan. The newest in a line of unforgivable sins to lay at my mother’s feet.
I glance down at the pills now cupped in my hand, suddenly not wanting to swallow them. Yuan Zhiwei invented Mantis himself. It’s the only way to combat the second half of what SS does to us—the half that happens after the victim wakes up. One moment, you could be sitting and chatting about the weather; the next, singing the City anthem with full vibrato, or trying to pull out your own hair. Or attacking your Remedial Reform teacher. Compulsions aren’t exactly random. They just destroy inhibitions and agitate the victim. A bad toothache might have you in the bathroom, trying to extract it with a wrench. An annoying sibling you wish you could smack might end up with strangling bruises. Mantis cured all of that and allowed those of us Sephs who woke up to go about their lives as normal, needing only two doses a day. Yet, about a year ago, Mantis suddenly stopped working for certain people. People like Peishan. The First Circle hasn’t even issued a statement about the problem. The victims are just carted away to the Sanatorium one by one, and they don’t come back.
“Are they sure Peishan isn’t responding to Mantis? She didn’t miss a dose or—”
“Her shift starts in eleven minutes.”
I look at the floor. What was Peishan’s infected brain telling her to do when I landed on top of her? It distracts me from wondering how anyone could manage to survive in the Sanatorium. Uncontrollable compulsions, floors and floors of untreatable inmates confined. I don’t know why the City doesn’t just let them go. Send them Outside.
I close my eyes, ashamed of myself for even thinking it. The Sanatorium is a blessing from the Firsts. Nothing could be worse than being forced Outside.
Taking a deep breath, I force myself to think instead of a problem I can actually address, like my empty stomach. Only Firsts can help Peishan now.
“Food? Before I go?” The orphanage cafeteria usually stays open for those of us with odd shifts over in the factories, and I don’t think I can face another four hours of a sweaty rubber jumpsuit and gloves without something to go on.
Sister Lei doesn’t even blink. “Comrade Hong informed me of your trespassing in her home this evening, Sev.” Her eyes go back to the paperwork on her desk. “You have leave to enter the Second Quarter only for specified reeducation sessions. All of your lessons were canceled for this week, yet you still crossed the wall. If you can’t keep your Fourth tendencies in check, the Hongs aren’t going to continue trying to reeducate you back into the City’s good graces. If I were making the decisions, you’d be doing hard labor like a Fourth deserves.”
I quickly swallow the pills, the feeling of Mantis lodged in my throat remaining long after they go down.
It’s a hungry walk to the cannery, and a long night of sweating in the rubber getup that keeps me safe from the chemical-laced fruit they cart in from farms Outside. But I can’t complain. Not when I know Peishan—or any of the other kids locked away inside the Sanatorium—would die to trade places with me.
? ? ?
Tai-ge appears at the orphanage doors right as the sky falls dark a few days later, bearing an official invitation to sit across the table from General Hong to have my brain reorganized to better fit the City’s aims. Something must be brewing up in the Second Quarter for the General to summon me this late. He would have had to ask for special permission to have a Fourth out after dark.
Everything about Tai-ge is still and controlled as he waits for the Sister on duty to buzz the door open. After a Watchman gave me a bloody nose for being out in the Second Quarter alone, Tai-ge always comes to walk me to and from tutoring sessions with his father.
“Let’s go around the long way.” He edges me toward a side street that meanders between Third housing installations.
“It’s faster to go straight across the marketplace . . . ,” I start.
“There’s a new batch of soldiers all the way around the marketplace walls. They strung them up this afternoon.”