We hear the Whistleblowers approach. For previous searches there has been only one vehicle, but now I think I hear more. Louder engines than usual, perhaps vans instead of cars. There are usually two Whistleblowers to a car, four to a van. Do I hear three vans? Twelve possible Whistleblowers.
I start to tremor: This is a full-scale search. They’ve found me; I’m caught. I breathe in the fresh air, feeling my freedom slipping away from me. I don’t know what they will do to me, but under their care last month I received painful brands on my skin, the red letter F seared on six parts of my body. I don’t want to stick around to discover what else they’re capable of.
Dahy looks at Granddad. “The barn.”
“They’re onto that.”
They look far out to the land, as if the soil will provide an answer. The soil.
“The pit,” I say suddenly.
Dahy looks uncertain. “I don’t think that’s a—”
“It’ll do,” Granddad says with an air of finality, and charges off in the direction of the pit.
It was my idea, but the thought of it makes me want to cry. I feel dizzy at the prospect of hiding there. Dahy holds out his arm to allow me to walk ahead of him, and I see sympathy and sadness in his eyes.
I also see good-bye.
We follow Granddad to the clearing near the black forest that meets his land. He and Dahy spent this morning digging a hole in the ground, while I lay on the soil beside them, lazily twirling a dandelion clock between my fingers and watching it slowly dismantle in the breeze.
“You’re like gravediggers,” I’d said sarcastically.
Little did I know how true my words would become.
FIVE
THE COOKING PIT, according to Granddad, is the simplest and most ancient cooking structure. Also called an earth oven, it’s a hole in the ground used to trap heat to bake, smoke, or steam food.
To bake the food, the fire is allowed to burn to a smolder. The food is placed in the pit and covered. The earth is filled back over everything—potatoes, pumpkins, meat, anything you want—and the food is left for a full day to cook. Granddad carries out this tradition every year with the workers on his farm, but usually at harvest time, not in May. He’d decided to do it now for “team building,” he called it, at a time when we all needed reinforcement, to come together. All of Granddad’s farmworkers are Flawed, and after facing the relentless searches from Whistleblowers and with each of his workers under the eye of the Guild more than ever, he felt everybody needed a morale boost.
I never knew Granddad employed Flawed, not until I got here two weeks ago. I don’t remember seeing his farmworkers when we visited the farm, and Mom and Dad never mentioned them. Perhaps they’d been asked to stay out of our view; perhaps they were always there and, like most Flawed to me before I became one, seemed invisible.
I understand now that this helped drive a wedge between Granddad and Mom, her disapproving of his criticism of the Guild, the government-supported tribunal that puts people on trial for their unethical, immoral acts. We thought his rants were nothing but conspiracy theories, bitter about how his taxpayer’s money was being spent. Turns out he was right. I also see now that Granddad was like Mom’s dirty little secret. As a high-profile model, she represented perfection, on the outside at least, and while she was hugely successful around the world, she couldn’t let her reputation in Humming be damaged. Having such an outspoken father who was on the Flawed side was a threat to her image. I understand that now.
There are some employers who treat Flawed like slaves. Long hours and on the minimum wage, if they’re lucky. Many Flawed are just happy to be employed and work for accommodation and food. The majority of Flawed are educated, upstanding citizens. They aren’t criminals; they haven’t carried out any illegal acts. They made moral or ethical decisions that were frowned upon by society and they were branded for it. An organized public-shaming, I suppose. The judges of the Guild like to call themselves the “Purveyors of Perfection.”
Dahy was a teacher. He was caught on security cameras in school grabbing a child roughly.
I’ve also learned that reporting people as Flawed to the Guild is a weapon that people use against one another. They wipe out the competition, leaving a space for themselves to step into, or they use it as a form of revenge. People abuse the system. The Guild is one gaping loophole for opportunists and hunters.
I broke a fundamental rule: Do not aid the Flawed. This act actually carries a prison sentence, but I was found Flawed instead. Before my trial, Crevan was trying to find a way to help me. The plan was that I was supposed to lie and say that I didn’t help the old man. But I couldn’t lie; I admitted the truth. I told them all that the Flawed man was a human being who needed and deserved to be helped. I humiliated Crevan, made a mockery of his court, or that’s how he saw it anyway.
As a result, I was seen to have lied to the Guild. I brought them on a journey of deceit, grabbed people’s attention, and then admitted the truth publicly. They had to make an example of me. I understand now that my brandings were really for misleading the Guild, for embarrassing them and causing people to question their validity.
One of the strengths of the Guild is that they feed the media. They work alongside each other, feeding each other, and the media feeds the people. We are told that the judges are right, the branded are wrong. The story is obscured, never fully heard, the voice of reason lost through the foghorn of a Whistleblower siren.
Among the long list of anti-Flawed decrees, Flawed are not allowed to have positions of power in the workplace, such as managerial roles or any functions where they have influence over people’s thinking. In theory, nonmanagement jobs are open to the Flawed, but despite that, most Flawed are discriminated against in the workplace. Granddad isn’t one of those employers. He goes out of his way to find Flawed workers, to treat them exactly as he’d treat anyone else.
Dahy is his longest-standing employee. With Granddad for thirty years, he has an ugly scar on his temple for his bad decision to grab the child. His brand was seared before the Guild managed to finesse the branding chamber and its tools. Still, it is nothing in comparison to the sixth brand on my spine, the secret one that Judge Crevan gave me. That’s a personal message, and it was done in anger, without practice and without anesthetic. It’s a raw, shocking scar.
Dahy is making another bad decision right now, colluding with Granddad in hiding me. Granddad could get a minimum of six months’ prison time for aiding a Flawed, but as a Flawed man, helping another Flawed, I dread to think of what Dahy’s punishment could be. As a Flawed person you think life couldn’t be any worse for you until the Guild turns on your family and uses them to inflict further punishment and pain.
The three of us stare down into the rectangular pit in the ground. I hear doors slam—multiple doors—and I imagine a Whistleblower army in their red combat gear and black boots. They will be with us in a matter of minutes. I lower myself into the pit and lie down.