Adam Crain's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Adam found the tablet on his bunk the next morning. It was propped against his pillow like a note from a friend. The screen was already lit. A message thread waited at the top, his name at the head of it. The last line read: We need to talk. Below that, an address tag for the security office and a time, twenty minutes out. Adam read the older messages above it. One said they knew where he lived. One said do not tell anyone. He sat down on the edge of the bunk and made his face do nothing, in case a camera was watching him read. He walked the corridor slow enough to think and fast enough not to be late. He had spent his life reading what people wanted before they said it. He tried to read this one. A bribe. A trade. A warning dressed up as a meeting. He could not pick which. Guessing wrong in that room meant naming a crime nobody had charged him with yet. He decided to say nothing first and let her speak. The security office sat behind a heavy sealed door. Inside, monitors stacked the far wall in a cold white grid. Chief Meredith Hanover stood at the console, short and broad, red braids over a jumpsuit weighed down with patches she had not earned. She did not look up when he came in. She tapped a key. One monitor filled with library footage. Adam watched himself set a paper on the reading table. He watched his own hand slide across the wood and stop against Willem's. "That's you," she said. "That's him. That's a paper from the farm office you had no business carrying." She paused the frame on their knuckles. "I'm onto you." Adam kept his hands at his sides. He said, "What do you want." He did not make it a question. He had decided on the walk over that he would not guess. He would make her name the price out loud, or he would walk out owing nothing he had agreed to. She turned then and met his eye. "Nothing yet," she said. "You haven't been assigned a mate. Neither has he. That doesn't mean you get to choose one. From today, you have eyes on you. Every corridor. Every room with a camera. When I want something from you, I will tell you. Until then you behave like a man who knows he's being watched." She tapped the screen black. "Go back to work." Adam walked out into the corridor and understood he had not bought silence. He had been put on a leash, and the hand on the other end had not pulled yet.