Breeder Read online

  “Enjoy,” he says.

  It’s dawn as Rob drives off and I walk away from the Gray Zone with Crystal 10, two hundred units, a bag of gold, the security guard’s watch, and a job. I’m going to meet Rob at the Wall every Tuesday night from now on. I exit the security gate just as Goldbags’s car pulls up and Alex jumps out—she looks tired. We’re happy to see each other but also awkward, staring at each other as we stand in the street in the early morning light. She points at the greasy diner on the other side of the road. “Do you want to get coffee with me?”

  My heart pounds. “Next time?” I say. “I’m just so . . . eviscerated.”

  We look at each other.

  “So I have to ask,” Alex begins. “You weren’t off Breeder running or anything, were you?” She laughs.

  I laugh too. “What? No! As if!” I lie. “Drugs.” I hold up my haul of Crystal 10. It just looks like any drug baggie—lots of Westies do drug runs for the Gray Corps.

  She smiles. “Gotcha. Cool.”

  We look at each other again.

  “What about you?” I ask. “Were you Breeder running?”

  “No, I run drugs too,” she says, and I can tell she’s also lying.

  “Cool,” I say.

  “Well . . . see ya,” she says. She turns to go.

  “Wouldn’t wanna be ya . . .” I say. I start to head off, then stop. Part of me wants to spend time with her, but . . . she’s a Breeder. It’s too dangerous. I turn to wave at her but she’s already striding across the road. I stand there and wait, watching as she opens the door to the diner. But she goes inside and doesn’t turn back.

  •

  I let myself into the house just as the pink is leaving the sky, and just as the Memo is wearing off, giving me a hangover of jitters and regret. When I open the door, Ma is sitting right in the foyer on a kitchen stool, her face pale with fear. “Alright?” she says.

  “Yeah, Ma. Alright,” I say, my jaw so tense with self-disgust and anger, I can barely speak. I tear my mask off, and Ma grabs my hand and I hold onto her, tight. But then I feel guilty and pull away. Her eyes are determined, and also full of sorrow. They’re the same eyes that I saw on so many Breeder kids during the night. I don’t have to make her feel worse. She knows.

  I hold out the vial of Crystal 10 to show her and transfer 150 units to her chip. I give her all the gold pieces and the watch.

  She nods. “Good.”

  “I’d better have a shower,” I say.

  I go upstairs to the bathroom. I tear off my clothes and shove them in the laundry basket. I’d set them on fire, except that I’ll need them next week. I take a Crystal 10 and chuck the rest into the top drawer of the vanity and step into the shower, turning on just the hot tap. I hate my body. I hate having a body. Ideally, I would just float above the world, but every day I have to fight to keep this body. I trace the scar down my side, from when I fell on a sharp piece of machinery at work. I have another scar, very faded, down my arm, from when I was a little kid. As Westies, our bodies are sick, failing machines: we’re only allowed to keep them alive if we pump more and more units into the Corp, and to do that, we have to wear them out. I have to fight even harder than other Westies to keep this body, and after just days without Crystal, I can see differences. Despite my emaciation, there’s a new softness around my hips and stomach. And around my chest. I shiver. Other people might not notice, but Ma’s right—I got the Crystal just in time. I can still see the Breeders lying in the back of the SUV, and I shut my eyes tight. I stand under the water, scrubbing and scrubbing my skin with the washcloth, watching it get red and burnt, stinging. Good.

  When I’m finished, I get into my old baggy jeans and hoodie, set my alarm, and scrunch up on my bed: just a twenty-minute nap until I need to get ready for work.

  Ma’s knocking at the door. “Can I get you anything?” she calls.

  I don’t answer.

  “Will?” I can hear her heavy breathing; I can hear the cane tapping the floor, the cane that she only uses when she’s exhausted.

  “Will? Are you okay?” she sounds worried. She never sounds worried.

  I clench my teeth. “I’m okay, Ma,” I say, as gently as I can.

  There’s silence, then I hear a sliding sound and see that she’s slipped a chocolate bar and some gold pieces under my door. I hear her walking off; the quick, uneven sound of her bad leg. I know all this isn’t her fault. I know she’s trying to protect me, and that she would do anything for me—has done—and there’s nothing else she can do. I just hate myself so, so much.

  •

  On the way to work, I visit the Book Shadow. I go down a maze of streets, into the narrow lanes of the Old Town. I walk up to the ratty wooden door that says Knife Sharpener on it and I hold my wrist up to the sign until the security scanner beeps me in. I instantly feel something inside me relax. It’s a large, light-filled room, covered with ye olde furniture and doilies, and laid out carefully on shelves and tables are real, printed books. Things from the old times, before they had the entertainment plug.

  On one wall there’s a painting with angels and devils, which people used to believe in. The devils grimace in pain, while the angels look happily upward, to a place known as Heaven. The Book Shadow has a collection of heavy books containing photos and paintings of things I’ve never, ever seen in person—forests and beaches, bridges and rivers and waterfalls. She keeps them in a private room and brings them out sometimes for me to look at. Ice caps. Fjords. Whales. Elephants, zebras, parrots—creatures the Corporation says don’t exist anymore, outside their quality simulations in Zone A. Inside the Corporation there are only the animals we can eat—chickens, cows, and pigs. A few contraband goats, like Cranky.

  I take the novel I just finished out of my backpack and touch its pages before I put it back on the shelf. You can buy books, or swap them, or pay a loan fee. I half don’t want to let go of this novel, but I never let myself keep any of them. It’s about a guy named Holden Caulfield who’s my age and lives under a super-rich Corporation. He drops out of his rich school—it isn’t clear why—and then he travels around on a train and goes to a Corporate City called New York. I love that name. He gets really sad in a big, rich park that he used to go to when he was little, and then he gets really sad in a rich museum that he used to go to when he was little, and then he thinks about his dead brother and how sad his family is. To be honest, I don’t know why he’s so sad—he’s rich, gets to go to school, doesn’t have to work, and there’s no mention of anyone monitoring his units. I mean, he lives before the End Times so he can basically do whatever he wants. If he were alive today, he’d be considered a Mood and he’d be given some pills, then the Corporation would calculate what he’s cost society through his mental issues and he’d have to pay that balance with money or time, and that would be the end of it. Unless, of course, he reached the point where his unit debt to the Corporation got too big to pay off, in which case he’d be sent to the Rator. Holden just goes on and on about how sad he is, and about all the things that make him sad. For hours. Days. Weeks. But I still like him. He’s alive in the times when there were cities called New York and Paris and London, when there were underground subways, and shopping centers that anyone could go to, and restaurants where you could eat pretty much what you wanted. And parks. You could hang out in a park for an afternoon feeling sad and not even have any units deducted because nobody was keeping track. Nobody cared whether you were adding value to your Corporation or not. Nobody was concerned if you sat there like a pudding for years, generating a massive unit debt and risking the collapse of life as we know it! In fact, nobody even knew if you were racking up your unit debt because nobody even bothered calculating it.

  For a long time, entertainment was against the Laws in the Corp—using resources for mere pleasure meant robbing others of their chance to eat. But then the Corp got wealthier and the econometrics department
did studies that showed people were more efficient if they were given entertainment. Now we all have the entertainment plug in our arms, to watch vids and stuff, and we can also use it to text. It’s very efficient, because the stimulus goes directly into your senses—sight, sound, taste, whatever you like. The newest version can predict your desires—it scans the flashes in your brain cortex to see how you’re feeling. If you’re happy, say, it knows that if that happiness continues you’ll tip over into boredom, so what you need is a bit of tension and sadness. The plug then sends you some gentle melancholy—it might upload a sad love story with an ambivalent ending, and after you watch the vid you feel grateful for your own life.

  Personally, I prefer stories from the olden days, even though you can’t control them, and you never know how they’ll make you feel. I’ve read eight books altogether since I discovered the Book Shadow—all illegal, all strange and beautiful.

  I run my finger along the book spines, trying to feel a tug from a particular book. What I always look for is a good first sentence. I take out a scruffy, slim volume. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Nope. I put it back. The next: “Edward helped me into his car, being very careful of the wisps of silk and chiffon, the flowers he’d just pinned into my elaborately styled curls, and my bulky walking cast.” God, no. I put this one back and run my hand along the next shelf. My fingers catch on a particularly beaten-up book and I take it out: “It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock.” Cool.

  Sometimes the Book Shadow comes in and her face is all lit up and she tells me what I should read next. She’ll run around and say, “You’ve got to read this! No, read this, this! You would love it!” and I get excited too. Sometimes she never appears—I just choose what I want and scan her some units and leave.

  The Book Shadow has never told me her name. I’ve been coming here for a year now, and she tells me about the people who painted the pictures and wrote the strange novels. She knows all about so-called seers and visionaries and artists who lived hundreds of years ago. To be honest, they sound like Moods—but the things they made are so beautiful. She tells me that most of these old things have been lost forever. The Book Shadow is so different from other Shadows—she has this amazing store, and she runs her own life. Westie males can buy out Shadows and then they can theoretically have their own children—that is, if it’s physically possible. Or Breeders pay off their own debt through breeding, and get a regular Corp job, but not before their forties. The Book Shadow is probably twenty years old, and it costs about five of Rob’s vintage golden SUVs to buy out a twenty-year-old Breeder from the Corp. Maybe she escaped from the Incubator? Or maybe someone did buy her out. The Book Shadow reminds me of Alex—Alex would love it here. Maybe one day I can bring her here and show her these books. She and the Book Shadow would get on so well. I feel my face get hot—what am I thinking? It would be mental to take Alex outside the Gray Zone.

  I hear a soft click and then footsteps—there are all kinds of secret doors and levers in this place. I don’t know how the Book Shadow has managed to keep her shop under the radar, but she has, and does.

  The footsteps stop close by.

  “Hello?” I whisper. “It’s just me. It’s Will.”

  Her head comes around the corner, and then she’s standing there. She’s wearing track pants and her hair is matted.

  “Hello, Will,” she says. She looks terrible, but her eyes are bright, her voice thick. The red Shadow tattoo is vivid over her Breeder scar, not dull like Ma’s.

  “Hello,” I say. “How are you?”

  She smiles and shrugs. “Oh. You know.” She sees the book in my hand. “Do you want me to choose another book for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She turns and runs her hand down the spines of the books on the top shelf. Her hand falls on something and she gives it to me—its pages are worn and soft, and I can smell the paper and my heart just kind of sighs. “Pride and Prejudice,” she tells me. “It’s very, very old, and very good.”

  “Is it set in New York?” I say, stroking the pages.

  “No,” she says. “It’s set in England, on the other side of the world from New York. It’s about a family of five daughters—five!—who live in a house with their parents and all want to get married. They live in a huge house in the countryside and go to parties and have friends over for tea. It’s totally wild.”

  “ ‘Daughters’?”

  “Like Breeders,” she said. “Except they don’t have to breed.”

  Mind. Blown.

  The Book Shadow looks happy. Before I can stop myself, I ask her something I’ve always wanted to ask. “I love this shop. How did you find it? Did somebody give it to you?” I just blurt it out. I’m not used to talking to Shadows, and she makes me nervous.

  She hesitates, then nods.

  “Was it the same person who bought you out of the Incubator?”

  She stares at me as though I’ve said something unbelievably cruel. Her face darkens and becomes very red. She turns away. “I’ll see you next time, Will,” she says quietly, and shuffles away from me.

  I’m shaking and cursing myself. I carefully wrap the book in an old T-shirt and put it in the bottom of my backpack. Then I hold up my wrist to the scanner set in a wooden box with an owl carved on the top and transfer thirty units. I stand there and close my eyes and take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of old things, of old pages. I hear the soft click of a hidden door and know she’s gone. Then I let myself out. The door shuts behind me with a wssht and I wonder whether the shop will be here when I come again. Every now and then you hear of the Corp raiding shops, and all the treasures get sent to the Corporation Recycling Center to be turned into milk cartons. The owners go to the Rator.

  It’s sunny in the street, and I still don’t want to get on the work bus, so I stop by a Corporation flower shop, and buy two bunches of proper regulation roses, which cost a bomb. But Rob tipped me a bomb, so I’m going to bring some flowers to Melissa and Belinda.

  •

  I get on the bus and activate the entertainment plug. It’s too dangerous to take out my new book—chances are there’s a CSO or just a regular, lowlife snitch on the bus. I scan the home screen and feel a flicker of pleasure when I find a new horror film in the Night Clown series—I find horror really comforting. I settle back for the hour-long bus ride to the other side of Zone F.

  Before the film loads, I have to sit through the compulsory Corp ad—well, it’s an “optional” ad, but I get five units for watching it, and if I don’t watch it, it’s noted on my permanent record.

  The ad opens by panning across the landscape of Zone C: the new Transit station, the gigantic shopping center, the glass office buildings. Everyone in Zone F talks about living in Zone C as their life’s dream, even though realistically, they will be happy if their kids one day live and work in Zone E—their sons will get there through hard work, and their Breeders through serving time in the Incubator. We’re allocated one visit a month to Zone E, to explore and dream. We only get once-yearly passes to visit Zones D and C, and a life in Zone C is the sort of goal achievable by one in ten thousand Zone F families—through random, stupid good luck. Zone B is out of reach for us, and for our progeny, and we’re not allowed to visit. When Ma and her family lived in Zone C, they were given passes to visit Zone B and they aspired to move there—it’s the apex of Westie achievement. Westies are not allowed in Zone A at all, for any reason. We hear things about it—the amazing hospitals, facilities, and universities. From the plant on the clearest days, I can see the glittering dome that covers Zone A. It filters their air and I’ve heard they don’t even need to wear masks in there, but nobody really knows for sure.

  The ad focuses on a family standing at the front door of a broken-down Zone F apartment: a Shadow, a man, and a small boy. The voiceover begins, recognizabl
e immediately as Jock Hordern:

  “The generosity of the Corporation led to Shadow Stevens being accepted within the Wall as a Breeder when she was fourteen years old. Through her hard work, Shadow Stevens produced seventeen live births at the Incubator. Then, Mr. Stevens Shadowed her with his hard-earned unit savings and they started their own family.”

  Shadow Stevens waves at the camera.

  “The minimum age to send Breeders to the Incubator has gone DOWN! Unit bonuses for Breeders are UP! What does that mean for Zone F families just like yours?”

  The camera zooms in on the man.

  “We were more than happy to put our eight-year-old Breeder into a Preincubation Program, for the good of the Corporation. We no longer carry the debt of raising a Breeder, and we’ve been given a bonus of nineteen thousand units that we can use to educate our son!”

  The small boy is smiling. There’s no sign of their Breeder, who’s presumably already in her Preincubation Center. The man speaks.

  “With these units, the dream of our descendants getting into Zone C is becoming a reality! Thanks, Corporation!”

  The small boy makes the thumbs-up sign.

  “Thanks, Stevens Family! The Corp’s new, generous plan is good for all of us, in every zone—more live births make us all more viable. And it’s especially good for Zone F families like the Stevenses, because they can earn enough to make their dreams come true even faster! Early Incubation will give them nineteen thousand units and that will benefit them for generations to come. You’re doing the right thing, Stevens family!”

  The camera pans out as the whole Stevens family—

  except the Breeder—waves and smiles and says together: “Thanks, Corporation! Our dream is a reality!”