Page 2

AMITY

As Zeph and I sit together on the bus, like we have so many times over the years, he stares out the window and I glance around.

This route goes downtown and it’s a mix of people heading to jobs and a few kids our age heading to the courthouse, same as we are.

The CSOs, Community Security Officers, are in the back.

Each Officer is a different height, her face unique, but all with the same strong build, dressed head to toe in identical white uniforms with their hair pulled into long braids down their backs. Each carries a Taser at her waist and stun baton on her back.

I know the uniform well. My whole life, I’ve watched my mother put on that same uniform day in and day out.

I fully intend to follow her into the Force.

There’s no greater legacy, no greater service you can give back, than keeping the peace.

“Peace is a Privilege” my mom always reminds me, and I believe her .

“Zeph,” I say carefully. There are cameras and microphones scattered over the ceiling of the bus.

“You know my grandmother died at Tel Nof.” I add the word please , forming it silently.

Whatever he is planning, I don’t want to see him under arrest, a thick monitor on his ankle, all doped up to become a person I don’t recognize anymore.

I imagine him slumped on the couch next to his father, watching government videos, and I shudder.

“My grandfather also died in the Integration,” he says, his brows drawing together.

I didn’t know that. Did his grandfather fight for or against the Peaceful Society?

“They sacrificed for us, Zeph,” I murmur. Not only the millions of lives lost. The destruction of weapons factories, the haze when the drug fields burned, the new restrictions and rules. The cost was so steep.

Even now, the world population has been shrinking steadily since the invention of the fertility chip.

Reproduction was one of the Freedoms we gave up for peace.

In our territory it’s a Privilege now, only available to Citizens, and must be earned along with the Privileges of Speech, Movement, Work, Assembly, Privacy, and Participation in Public Affairs.

“You make your choices, I make mine,” Zeph says. He likes to argue about free will with me, likes to tell me all about how men should have more control over their own lives.

My dad has plenty of control over his life.

He works for the WPA, like most men who are Citizens.

He took the Oath and as long as he wears his SafeGuard and checks in for Citizen Training once a year, he’s given equal Privileges with women.

In theory, he could undergo training to try for Clearance.

Then he could hold a better-paying job, a Position of Power, even if only a fraction of men make it through.

Clearance training is more rigorous than training for Citizens, and HighClear, the training to become a Security Officer, is the toughest of all. It requires absolute self-control and nonaggression, total nonreactivity of speech, thought, and movement. Few men even volunteer to try it.

The buildings outside the bus window grow larger and look scrubbed, the marble shining. Even the concrete appears immaculately clean in this area of the city that houses the central CSO station, the courthouse, and nearby government buildings.

At the bus stop I stand, tugging Zeph behind me until we’re out on the street. We watch the heavier traffic in this area for a minute, e-cars backing up at the stoplight in front of the bus stop.

I turn to him, fearful. Tension spreads throughout my body, my chest rising and falling rapidly despite my efforts to slow my breathing down.

“What will happen?” I ask quietly as we stand together.

I clutch his hand in my own sweaty palm, not ready to move toward the courthouse yet.

The building behind us is the Central Security Station.

Women in white walk briskly on the sidewalk and hurry up the steps to work. Zeph glances around nervously.

“I’ll leave,” he says simply, and I know what he’s talking about. It’s his crazy plan to get to Anchorage, to a rebel militia there. “Or go underground.”

I glance down at the pale concrete beneath our feet. Kids whisper in school about men’s rights groups meeting underground, in the old subway tunnels. Fighting with each other more than getting organized from the sound of it, their capacity diminished but not entirely extinguished.

“You could refuse the Oath also, Amity, you don’t have to stay here,” he says in a mournful voice. I heave a deep sigh. He knows I’ve made up my mind, the same as him.

I’ve known I was going to train for HighClear since I was a little girl, dressing up in all my white clothes and borrowing my mother’s weapons belt. Her empty weapons belt, that is. There’s no way she’d let me touch her Taser.

He sees the answer in my eyes.

“Yeah,” he mutters. Pain flashes over his face. The hug he draws me into is sad, defeated. In other words, it’s goodbye.

“You’re my best friend, Amity,” he says into my hair.

A tear slips down my cheek. If that’s true, why is he going to refuse the Oath? Or whatever he’s planning?

“Go in Peace,” I tell him as goodbye. We’ll walk together down the block to the courthouse, but I don’t want to say goodbye there, in a long line with the other kids ready to take their Oaths.

I’ll say it now, because once I’m there I’ll be Amity Bloome, my mother’s daughter, granddaughter of Selene Bloome, martyr of the Integration.

As I expected, the line into the courthouse is long, snaking down and around the block. Zeph and I walk along the row of teenagers, laughing and joking, many of them sleepy after a night of post-graduation partying.

I greet a couple of friends from the swim team, mostly serious girls like me who are going up for Clearance. You need high grades to be considered, and those don’t come without a lot of work. I never had time to date or socialize much in high school.

If the Peaceful Society accepts me into HighClear, I’ll only have tonight with my family to say goodbye and get ready and then I’ll be sent off to the Institute with the other girls.

The thought of leaving my little bedroom, my parents, and my brother Ethan, opens a crack in my heart.

I imagine the barracks: cold, white and bare. Security Officers don’t indulge. When my mom is home she does all these little things, taking a warm bath, drinking a cup of tea, even cuddling under a thick blanket on the couch, and calls them her luxuries.

I think luxury would be having the latest e-car or living in one of the huge houses up on the hill.

Zeph walks in front of me, and it’s not his usual carefree stride. Each step is deliberate, and I see his eyes scan up and down the line.

We finally get to the end and begin the wait. Luckily the line is moving at a quick shuffle. I assume they’re scanning everyone’s SafeGuard. Maybe there are even metal detectors. I remember them from when I was a kid.

During the Integration, metal detectors were literally everywhere. There would even be checkpoints on the sidewalk with CSOs monitoring the foot traffic. They were catching each and every gun for the buyback, and enforcing the new, weak peace.

I’m excited to maybe walk through one. I don’t know what weapons anyone would dare bring to the courthouse. There are Officers stationed all over the place. I guess it could detect if you had a knife. I assume Zeph has thought of all that.

Our eyes meet but I can’t tell what he’s thinking. All these years, hanging out, watching our siblings, walking to school day in and day out, and I still wonder if Zeph is trying to smuggle a knife into the courthouse.

What would be the point anyway—you’d only get in trouble.

Inside the wide marble lobby, gray plastic boxes line up like doorways with teenagers waiting to walk through. On the other side, guards with handheld scanners scan each kid’s SafeGuard.

Zeph goes first, then I walk through the metal detector. Nothing happens. There’s a girl scanning a couple of kids in the uniform of a rival school. A different guard steps around her and comes over to us to bend over Zeph’s wrist.

This guard is a man, dressed like the other guards in white against his deep brown skin, his shoulders broad and wide, a head taller than the women scanning wrists around him.

It’s so curious to see a man working as a guard. He must have Clearance to be allowed to scan SafeGuards. Is he support staff? I gaze around the room and everyone is getting their wrists scanned, then moving down the hall in clusters.

No one is staring at this guard. No one except me.

His hair is tight black curls, clipped close to his head.

He’s still bending over Zeph’s wrist, getting the scanner to work.

He must be older than me if he’s a courthouse guard but he doesn’t seem very old.

More like a bigger, stronger version of the boys I went to school with.

The guard’s gaze rises to meet mine and my stomach drops. I know those eyes, dark brown, nearly black. There’s no mistaking his starkly handsome, strong features with dark brows above a smooth, brown jawline.

He may not be in fourth grade anymore, but the tall, serious boy I used to see at my mother’s MAV meetings stares directly back, standing behind Zeph, as if he can feel my focus on him. He's the son of my mom’s friend Mikayla, but I never saw them again after the Integration.

The guard starts slightly. It’s almost imperceptible except that I’m obsessively staring at him, trying to remember his name. After a brief glance at my school uniform he bends back over Zeph’s wrist, but I think I see a shadow of a smile, and maybe confusion as well.

My eyes fall to his hands and narrow. What is taking so long? Is the scanner broken?

I catch an unexpected flicker of movement, the guard sending what looks like a SafeGuard up into the sleeve of his white uniform while Zeph flexes his wrist, wrapped in an identical SafeGuard.

Did they just switch them? I don’t know how you could do that with a scanner.

There’s a tool the doctor uses to fit a new one on me at my checkup.

My heart races as Zeph takes a few steps and Mikayla’s son looks up, meeting my eyes, waiting for me to step forward.