AN: Here we go, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think.
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The weight was heavy on Carol's shoulders as she made her way back toward her bunk alone. She left recess early, carrying with her what Daryl had shared of his story. By now, she was well-known enough among the guards that she could come and go pretty much as she pleased as long as she was within the boundaries.
There was no enforced rule that said she had to enjoy the somewhat forced socialization of recess. She was allowed, if she chose solitude, to return to her bunk alone.
At some point in her life, though Carol couldn't exactly recall when, she'd become particularly susceptible to carrying the weight of other people. It was the only way that she could explain it. It was different than simply feeling sorry for them, or even just feeling for them. She could witness someone's hardship, or even just hearing about it was enough, and she walked away from the interaction feeling markedly heavier.
They would say, here, that there was no way that she could feel what she did. Her own story didn't weigh on her, so the stories of others couldn't. Nothing could weigh on her. To feel sorry for others—to feel at all? It was a human emotion. It was a human instinct. It didn't belong to animals.
Animals, they would say, couldn't show compassion. Animals, they told them, didn't feel. Animals knew nothing more than the law of nature—the brute law. Kill or be killed.
And Carol was nothing more than an animal. They told her that.
She didn't believe it at all, but she had to pretend that she believed it. Anything else? It would be going against the collective beliefs of the new order of society. It would be, she was certain, punishable.
So Carol pretended not to be moved by her own story. She swallowed it down, choked it back, clawed her own arms and bit the insides of her own mouth to keep from letting loose the emotions she felt. And she pretended not to be moved by the stories of others—though every one of them affected her and every one she kept somewhere within her, helping to carry the weight of each of the stories lest they crush the person to whom they belonged.
She had been there when each of her friends had arrived. She'd been there when they'd first come from taming. She'd seen the hollow look in their eyes. She'd seen the pain—a different kind of pain than even that which they brought with them. She'd heard them tell their stories in secret because they were afraid to feel what they were told that they could no longer feel and no longer understand.
If they'd ever actually been human.
She tried not to "collect," as she thought of it, new arrivals too often. She tried not to take in more than she could handle. The weight of it all would crush her, she feared, if she choked down too much of it.
She still wasn't sure why she'd chosen Daryl.
He'd looked so lost. He'd looked so alone. People were social animals, even if they were animals. They needed others. They needed help carrying the weight of their stories because they couldn't carry it all alone. They were never designed to do that. Even if they were animals.
He'd looked alone and lost and forgotten. The system that promised him that he'd be taken care of had failed him. It had broken him to the point that he would obey without question, but it had done nothing to help him. It had only helped itself. It hadn't built him up, as they faintly promised they would, to become something closer to human. It had simply made of him what it really wanted them all to be—domesticated animals. The goal was to make them all the government's lap cats or faithful retrievers that would curl at their master's feet and worship him merely for existing.
If they wouldn't submit willingly? They'd be broken. And they'd be broken again and again and again—however long it took, didn't matter. A dead animal was no heartbreak to the government, especially if the animal in question would never be domesticated.
He hadn't been alone out there. Most of them hadn't. Humans were pack animals. The government was right about one thing. In the wild? Their instincts had begun to kick in. The animal instincts that they'd buried down deep, the ones that had been dormant for so long? They'd begun to kick in. Among them was the need for a pack.
You could survive, but very few could survive alone.
Daryl hadn't been alone. He spoke, with some tenderness, of his brother. He told how the two of them had started their trip into the wilderness together. He told how they'd survived together, and how it hadn't always been easy. He'd skipped—and Carol knew it was on purpose—the details of everything that had happened during the time that he had slowly become the animal that the government would report having captured. He spoke of his capture, but he spoke of it in vague terms. They all spoke of their capture in vague terms—at least for a while.
But Carol noticed that he didn't speak of the brother anymore. This faithful brother who had started the journey into the wilderness with Daryl had, at some point in the narration, simply become a person of smoke and fog. He was there. Carol could feel him in the story, but he wasn't there. Daryl didn't speak of him. He didn't mention his capture. He didn't mention the after-hours when they would have been transferred to a facility. He didn't mention if they went to taming together. He never said when it was that they were split.
He simply, and very intentionally, forgot to mention the brother.
He forgot to say when it was, exactly, that he first became truly alone in the world.
And Carol hadn't told him that she knew what he was leaving out of the story. She hadn't told him that she understood why he felt the need to keep those details to himself for just a while longer. She didn't tell him her own story and she didn't tell him that she, too, hadn't been alone when the government had come to rescue her from herself.
She'd only told him that she had things to do and that she would see him at dinner. And then she'd taken the weight of his story with her, back to her bunk, where she could sit in private and lick her wounds—wounds she inflicted on herself by inviting in the hurt from his experiences. Wounds that came from the story of a man who was so much more than he realized he was. A man who was so much more than they told him he was and allowed him to be.
It had been a long time since Carol had licked wounds that were caused by a man. The feeling was strange.
And it brought with it other feelings. Feelings they'd tell her that she wasn't capable of having, no matter how strongly she felt them. Feelings that felt not entirely un-animalistic. She'd forgotten she could have them, yet there they were.
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"Fresh from the Pony Express," Randall Oliver said as he passed Samirah the bulky package that she'd been waiting for. She offered him the best smile she could, a reward for his attempt at humor, and tucked the package under her arm until she made it back to her office and closed herself inside with the black coffee that she'd really gone seeking.
The package, she'd thought, might not arrive for another week.
It was a large bundle wrapped first in brown paper. Then it was sealed shut with packing tape and over top of that was placed the large wrap-around seal of the government. It was confidential. The measures that they went to were to make sure that no one opened it and no one saw what was inside. Everything, these days, was top-secret, even if it would have been of little interest to anyone else.
Before she used the knife in her desk drawer to cut the package open, Samirah inspected it as she'd been instructed to do. If there had been any signs of tamper or damage—beyond that which naturally happened as the mail made its way from one location to another in a rougher manner than maybe it once had—she'd have been responsible for reporting it. If she'd reported damage? Anyone who had touched it, for any reason at all, would be likely to be punished.
For that reason alone, no one had tampered with the package.
She sighed as she freed the stack of papers from their bundle and started to look through them. They were plans and instructions. They were the steps that she was expected to follow to get the project underway.
She wasn't the first that had organized something like this, but it was the first thing she'd been in charge of and it felt daunting. It felt like it was too much to handle. She really had no choice, though. She had to go through with it. To voice any of her uncertainties about anything that they passed down to her would be to put herself in danger.
Samirah put the stack of papers on the desk and read through the first few pages. The first pages were nothing more than a reiterated greeting much like those that she'd received in email and over the phone. The voice that was her go-between spent several pages praising her for everything she'd done so far. It made it sound like the paper pushing and few decisions she'd made had really done something wonderful to shape the future of the nation.
The voice that was her go-between spent another few pages discussing that very future. The vision of the powers for where the human race was headed was stated there, in brief and somewhat idealistic terms, for Samirah to read and remind herself of what they were doing and why they were saying that they were doing it. It reminded her, in case she'd forgotten the lessons she'd learned when she was first pulled out of the wreckage that their world had become. Everything that the government did was for the good of the people and the good of the future generations.
The voice thanked her for what she would do and declared the upmost confidence that she would be able to accomplish every goal that she set for herself—and every goal that was set for her.
And then the documents started to pass into that which was newer information for Samirah. She'd had relatively little say in what would happen with the project. Her "opinions" had been asked, but she'd known even then that she was only being asked to give the correct opinions. She'd done what was expected of her.
For at least an hour or two, Samirah sat at her desk with her head resting on her hand and she read. To anyone who passed by her office and glanced inside, it might have looked like she was reading a book. The contents of the pile certainly read like a book—even if it would have been something of a cult classic more than great literature.
When she'd finally read enough that her eyes were burning with their efforts, Samirah sighed and straightened the pages. She didn't have to read them all tonight, and she didn't have to read all the details. Most of it she already understood.
She picked up the phone and dialed the number that she'd saved in speed dial weeks ago, when she'd first taken the job. It was a number she called often.
"John?" She said when the man picked up on the other end. "How are things? New arrivals?"
She listened as the man on the other end of the line, someone in a position of power that was as powerless as she was, recounted the things that might be of interest to her at Region Thirty Three. To pass the few minutes and to keep on top of her responsibilities, she jotted down on a square of paper a few points to discuss with him in detail later. When he'd finished speaking, and fell silent to give her a chance to respond, she changed the subject to the reason for her call.
"I'm making a trip down there," she said. "I can probably get out of here in three or four days? Thanks—I'd love to stay with you. See Regina. Listen—I heard from the head of corrections and the planning board. No—nothing new. Not—not really. I need you to start getting the files together? I don't know—at least two hundred to start?"
She smiled to herself. John Hokes was always pleasant. Sometimes? He could be one of the best things about this job. Samirah knew the importance of looking for the silver lining in everything.
"No...no...don't send them," she said when John had finished giving some preliminary ideas he had about everything. "I'll get them faster if I pick them up myself. Check your email. I'll send you some things before I leave today. You can start getting it ready. My love to Regina?"
Hanging up the phone, Samirah slipped the papers into her briefcase so that they wouldn't be seen by anyone else—not that anyone would have any great interest in them. They were all working for the same power. They were all working toward the same end. But protocol, not followed, could get someone in trouble.
Then she read back over her notes from the scratch paper and opened a document on her computer to start organizing things and ironing out details.
She hated heading up a project this big, but the only way to get it done was to get it started.
