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As I draw closer to the City and look up at the apartment buildings, I realize that something else is wrong, not just the lake.

It is the middle of the night. But the City has not gone to sleep.

The color of the lights seems strange—blue instead of gold—and it takes me a moment to realize why. The ports in all the apartments are on. I’ve seen Society-wide broadcasts like this on winter evenings before, when the sun goes down early and we are awake for part of the dark.

But I’ve never seen people watching ports this late.

At least, not that I remember.

What could be so important that the Society would wake everyone up?

I pass through greenspaces, now colored cool blue and gray, and I find my apartment complex and slip through the heavy metal door after entering the keycode. The Society will note my lateness; and someone will speak to me about it. An hour unaccounted for here or there is one thing; this is half a night, the kind of time that could be spent in a myriad of nonapproved ways.

The elevator slides as noiselessly as an air train up to my floor, the seventeenth, and the hallway is empty. The doors are well made, so none of the port light seeps through, but when I open the door to my apartment, the port waits in the foyer, as usual.

My hands fly to my mouth, my body anticipating my need to scream before my mind has taken in what’s before me.

Even after my time in the Carvi

ng, I could never have conceived of this.

The portscreen is showing me bodies.

It’s worse even than those burned, flung-aside, blue-marked corpses on top of the Carving. Worse than the stone rows of graves in the settlement where Hunter put his daughter down with care and farewell. The sheer numbers make this terrible, make it nearly impossible for my mind to take in. The camera goes up and down the rows so that we can see how many bodies there are. Up and down and up and down.

Why are we watching?

Because they’re showing the faces. The camera lingers on each person, long enough for us to register either recognition or relief and then it moves on, and we are afraid again.

And then another memory comes to mind—the tubes inside the Cavern in the Carving, where Hunter took us.

Is that what they’re doing? Have they found a new way to store us?

But I see now that the people on the screen are alive, though far too quiet and far too still. Their eyes are open and unseeing, but their chests move up and down. Their skin seems strangely dusky and blue.

This isn’t death but it is almost as bad. They are here and not here. With us and gone. Close enough to see but out of reach.

Each person is tethered to a clear bag with a transparent tube running into their arm. Do the tubes run all the way through the patients’ veins? Are their real veins gone and now they’re threaded with plastic? Is this a new plan of the Society’s? First they take our memories, then they drain our blood, until we are only fragile skin and haunted eyes, shells of who we used to be?

I remember Indie’s wasp nest, the one she carried all through the Carving, the papery circles that used to contain humming, stinging creatures and their busy, brief lives.

In spite of myself, my eyes are drawn to the blank, unseeing gazes on the patients’ faces. The people don’t look like they are in pain. But they don’t look like they are in anything.

The point of view shifts, and now I think we’re watching from the ports mounted on the walls of whatever building houses these people. We’re looking from another angle, but we’re still looking at all of the sick.

Man, woman, child, child, woman, man, man, child.

On and on and on.

How long have the ports been showing this? All night? When did it begin?

They show the face of a man with brown hair.

I know him, I think in shock. I used to sort with him, here in Central. Are these people in Central?

The images keep coming, merciless, pictures of people who cannot close their eyes. But I can close mine. I do. I don’t want to see anymore. I think about running and I turn blindly toward the door.

And then I hear a man’s voice, rich and melodic and clear.

“The Society is sick,” he says, “and we have the cure. ”

I turn slowly back around. But there is no face to put to the voice; just the sound. The ports show only the people lying still.

“This is the Rising,” he says. “I am the Pilot. ”

In the tiny foyer the words echo from the walls, coming back to me from each corner, every surface in the room.

Pilot.

Pilot.

Pilot.

For months I have wondered what it would be like to hear the Pilot’s voice.

I thought I might feel fear, surprise, exhilaration, excitement, apprehension.

I didn’t think it would be this.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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