When the instructor releases us from our work-study period, I clean up my station and store my supplies; then I duck into the seedling room to check on my carrots and beets. My six-foot row of plants is only a miniature version of what I’ll be responsible for once I graduate, but again, my plants stand out, even in the early stages. Olive 16’s beets look strong too, though.
Envy is a child’s emotion. Our city’s fortitude depends upon the strength of all its members working together—even those of us who just grow vegetables—and Lakeview will be better off if both Olive and I are good at our jobs.
Yet I want to be the better gardener.
I try to shake that thought, but I can’t dislodge it. I want to be better at tubers than Olive is, just like I wanted to be better than all the others at grains, vines, and legumes. And not just for the glory of Lakeview.
Whether it’s shameful or not, I feel a sense of satisfaction when my produce is obviously the best in the class, but not because I’ve provided the city with the best vegetables I can grow. I’m pleased because the best vegetables I can grow are better than the best vegetables anyone else can grow. It’s a strangely self-indulgent gratification.
Being the best feels good.
On the tail of that treacherous thought, I realize I’ve been looking at Olive’s plants for too long. Whoever is monitoring the camera feed might have seen my envy and realized that it is driven by personal pride.
Quickly, I check the pH balance of the solution in my carrot flood tray; then I return everything to order and head back into the classroom.
Poppy is waiting for me by the door so we can walk to the cafeteria together. Instead of the green gardening apron with POPPY 16 embroidered at the center, she’s now wearing the green classroom jacket with POPPY 16 embroidered over her heart, because after lunch we have a four-hour block of academics. She’s holding my jacket as well, but before I can take it from her, Sorrel 32 steps into my path.
Our instructor smiles at me. “Dahlia 16, Management would like to see you.”
My throat tries to close around my next breath.
“I’m sure you have no reason to worry,” she says. “They’ve probably just noticed those beautiful Italian plums!”
Sorrel 32 is very nice, but she doesn’t know that I studied Olive 16’s beets too long. Or that jealousy might have been clear in my expression when I looked at them.
“Now?” My voice sounds breathy and insubstantial.
She nods. “You’ll be given a late pass, so you’ll have time to finish your lunch with the next class.”
I see faces that are different from mine all the time, but I’ve never sat at a table surrounded by people who don’t look just like me. I will stand out.
Nerves trace the length of my spine, but there’s no question that I will obey the summons.
I take my jacket from Poppy and she looks almost as anxious about walking to the cafeteria by herself as I am about crossing the common lawn on my own. Students are encouraged to stay in the company of our identicals to maintain our sense of identity and reinforce our purpose and position in the city’s structure.
Lakeview is comprised of five bureaus, each with distinct responsibilities. I am a student member of the Workforce Bureau, which is further divided into the trade labor and manual labor divisions. The Arts Bureau provides Lakeview with music and art, including the murals gracing the walls of all the academies and the sculptures dotting the common lawn at neat, measured intervals. The Specialist Bureau gives us medical personnel, scientists, and engineers. The Defense Bureau trains soldiers for the protection and fortification of the city, and the Management Bureau ensures that everything runs at peak efficiency, with as little waste as possible.
I eat, bunk, work, and learn with the other trade labor division year-sixteen girls. And we’re really very fortunate that there are so many of us. I feel sorry for some of the smaller units because so few of the faces they see on a daily basis match their own. It must be hard for them to know where they belong.
Though the clink of utensils and the buzz of conversation call to me from the cafeteria down the hall, I head for the bank of elevators. As I step inside the first to open, I realize that I’ve never been in an elevator alone. I’m the only one leaving the academy in the middle of the day, and when I cross the first-floor lobby I feel strangely conspicuous and exposed.
Outside, a class of landscape gardeners is busy pulling last month’s flowers from the amorphous flower bed winding around the side of the academy, under the supervision of their instructor. The gardeners are light-skinned boys with freckles and brown eyes, crowned by short, dark brown waves. The familiar names—Aspen, Linden, Oleander, Ash—stitched onto all their uniforms end in the number 13.
Beyond the flower beds, another instructor leads a class of little girls with dark skin and poufy curls down a curving sidewalk toward a playground at one end of the common lawn. Movement to my right catches my attention, and I turn to find four large black-clad soldiers from Defense patrolling the common lawn in synchronized steps. Beyond them, a shiny black car rolls down the street, following a special thick, metallic-looking strip of paint called a cruise strip, which guides all the city’s vehicles. In the front seat, two men in suits—obviously Management—read from their tablets, tapping their way through menus and messages as the car takes them to work.
Everyone has somewhere to be and something to be doing. Including me. So I swallow my fear and head down the curving path toward the gate leading out of the training ward.
I’ve spent my entire life in the training ward, splitting my time between the Workforce Academy and my dormitory—first the nursery, then the primary, and now the secondary dorm. And though I’m less than two years from graduating, I’ve never even seen the residential ward, where my identicals and I will live as adult members of the Workforce Bureau. In fact, I’ve only been outside of the training ward twice.
At the gate, a soldier named Eckhard 24 watches while I hold my arm beneath a scanner. The red light passes over the bar code on my wrist, and an electronic voice reads the directions that appear on the screen. “Dahlia 16. Proceed to the Management Bureau.”
“Do you know which building that is?” the soldier asks me.
“Yes.”
I’ve never been to the Management Bureau, but I saw it once. It’s the smallest of the bureaus, because Management requires relatively little personnel. There are so few students training to be managers that their academy is only three stories tall.
By contrast, the Workforce Academy is the biggest building in Lakeview. It has to be. While there may only be twenty girls in all of the year-sixteen Management class, there are five thousand sixteen-year-old trade labor students who share my face.