Granddad nudges me and points to the far side of the room. I follow his gaze and see what he’s looking at. Leaning against the wall is a Whistleblower, a man, dressed in his black gear and red vest, keeping an eye on everything.
The old familiar feeling of doubt creeps in. What if the Guild is in on all this? What if it’s Judge Crevan’s way of catching Carrick so that he can take him away and silence him as he has silenced the guards? What if this is an elaborate setup? I look around, nervously checking the room for more Whistleblowers, waiting for them to all surround me like I’m in a trap. Though if they’re here, they’re not in their uniforms.
A woman stands at the lectern, addressing the audience. Alpha sits beside three others on the panel on the stage. She sees me and sits up straighter. She nods at me, her eyes sparkling with delight. She looks to see who is beside me, sees Granddad, notes that it’s not Carrick, and gives me a small smile, not doing anything to hide her disappointment. Her acknowledgment of me garners more stares, nudges, and whispers in my direction. I can hear the hiss of my name on strangers’ lips. I try to block them out and, instead, concentrate on the woman speaking.
She is talking about her baby, who was taken from her at the hospital, all because she and her husband are Flawed. She had refused termination. Her daughter, two years old, is still in one of the five institutions in the country that house and rear Flawed babies. She doesn’t know which institution, she doesn’t know how she is, and she receives no communication from them whatsoever. She has lost all rights to her child. The speaker can no longer continue at this point and breaks down. There is an uncomfortable silence as she cries alone onstage, her visible pain making my heart ache. I feel Alpha leaves it a little too long before coming to her aid, as though she wants to rub it in all our faces.
“Loves the drama, this one,” Granddad says in my ear, and I nod in agreement.
Alpha joins the woman at the lectern, wraps her arm around her, and looks right down to the back of the room when she speaks. At me.
“We appreciate how difficult it was for Elizabeth to come here today and share her story with us. But Elizabeth’s reliving her story, sharing how shattering it has been for her and her husband, is not in vain. We can learn from this. It hurts us and it moves us, but we can take this with us and use it to spur us on to make change. Change doesn’t just happen. We all know that. We have to force it. Let us use Elizabeth’s story to help us to force change.”
There are nods of approval all around us, and applause breaks out.
Elizabeth, still crying, shows her appreciation as best she can. Alpha faces the audience as she embraces her, and we see her eyes closed intensely as though this is the biggest hug she has ever given in her life. It’s a little too orchestrated for me.
Alpha’s back at the mike stand. “Of course, Elizabeth’s not alone in her pain. All of us here today have our own stories, our own heartache. Our next speaker is Tom Hancock, and he is here to share his story with us. Please welcome him.”
For the next twenty minutes, we listen to Flawed Tom explain how, after his Flawed wife died, he spent ten years trying to find their son, a journey we hear in all its tortuous detail, only to find that on discovering him, and his grandchildren that he didn’t know anything about, that his son didn’t want to know him. His son had been so brainwashed by the institution that Flawed Tom had to beg his own son not to report him to the Whistleblowers.
After we hear Tom, we listen to a woman who used to work in the F.A.B. institutions and doesn’t believe in, or agree with, them. She gives us a rundown of their daily schedules, the lives the children lead. As she does this, I think of Carrick and what he has lived with for the past eighteen years of his life. These institutions are pumped up with government money, the facilities second to none. The government and the Guild pride themselves on creating such successes and say it is because the Flawed can be successfully cleansed at birth. For people like me, it’s too late, we cannot be healed.
“I suggested to a colleague,” the woman says, “that perhaps the reason these children are so well-rounded, so fully functional and successful, is because of the very fact that they have both genes of the Flawed and that in itself is a strength and breeds perfection.”
Everybody looks at one another in shock that this woman, an employee of the Guild, would have suggested such a thing. I watch the Whistleblower in the corner of the room, surprised that she is able to say this in his presence, but he doesn’t react. He looks bored, as though he’s heard it all before.
“Of course, that’s how I lost my job,” she says. “But I enjoyed the looks on their faces when the board called me in to explain what I’d said.”