“That’s very nice,” Tris says. She’s hardly touched her food.
“I am glad you appreciate my efforts! It is my job to assess mission parameter achievables. Would you mind if I asked you questions?”
I frown at him and quickly look away. Tris, unfortunately, has decided she’d rather play with fire than her food.
“Of course,” she says.
We spend the next few hours subjected to a tireless onslaught of questions. Things like, “How would you rate our society-building efforts in the Tidewater Region?” and “What issue would you most like to see addressed in the upcoming Societal Health Meeting?” and “Are you mostly satisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with the cleanliness of the estuary?”
“The fish are toxic,” I say to this last question. My first honest answer. It seems to startle him. At least, that’s how I interpret the way he clicks his front two legs together.
Tris pinches my arm, but I ignore her.
“Well,” says the glassman. “That is potentially true. We have been monitoring the unusually high levels of radiation and heavy metal toxicity. But you can rest assured that we are addressing the problem and its potential harmful side-effects on Beneficial Societal Development.”
“Like dying of mercury poisoning?” Tris pinches me again, but she smiles for the first time in days.
“I do not recommend it for the pregnant one! I have been serving you both nutritious foods well within the regulatory limits.”
I have no idea what those regulatory limits might be, but I don’t ask.
“In any case,” he says. “Aside from that issue, the estuary is very clean.”
“Thank you,” Tris says, before I can respond.
“You’re very welcome. We are here to help you.”
“How far away is the hospital?” she asks.
I feel like a giant broom has swept the air from the convoy, like our glassman has tossed me back into the bay to drown. I knew Tris was desperate; I didn’t realize how much.
“Oh,” he says, and his pupils go very wide. I could kiss the prisoner for telling us what that means: no one’s at home.
The man now leans toward us, noticing the same thing. “You pregnant?” he asks Tris.
She nods.
He whistles through a gap between his front teeth. “Some rotten luck,” he says. “I never seen a baby leave one of their clinics. Fuck knows what they do to them.”
“And the mothers?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer, just lowers his eyes and looks sidelong at our dormant glassman. “Depends,” he whispers, “on who they think you are.”
That’s all we have time for; the glassman’s eyes contract again and his head tilts like a bird’s. “There is a rehabilitative facility in the military installation to which we are bound. Twenty-three hours ETA.”
“A prison?” Tris asks.
“A hospital,” the glassman says firmly.
When we reach the pipeline, I know we’re close. The truck bounces over fewer potholes and cracks; we even meet a convoy heading in the other direction. The pipeline is a perfect clear tube about sixteen feet high. It looks empty to me, a giant hollow tube that distorts the landscape on the other side like warped glass. It doesn’t run near the bay, and no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map. Maybe this is the reason the glassmen are here. I wonder what could be so valuable in that hollow tube that Tris has to give birth in a cage, that little Georgia has to die, that a cluster bomb has to destroy half our wheat crop. What’s so valuable that looks like nothing at all?
The man spends long hours staring out the railing of the truck, as though he’s never seen anything more beautiful or more terrifying. Sometimes he talks to us, small nothings, pointing out a crane overhead or a derelict road with a speed limit sign—55 miles per hour, it says, radar enforced.
At first our glassman noses around these conversations, but he decides they’re innocuous enough. He tells the man to “refrain from exerting a corrupting influence,” and resumes his perch on the other side of the truck bed. The prisoner’s name is Simon, he tells us, and he’s on watch. For what, I wonder, but know well enough not to ask.
“What’s in it?” I say instead, pointing to the towering pipeline.
“I heard it’s a wormhole.” He rests his chin on his hands, a gesture that draws careful, casual attention to the fact that his left hand has loosened the knots. He catches my eye for a blink and then looks away. My breath catches—Is he trying to escape? Do we dare?
“A wormhole? Like, in space?” Tris says, oblivious. Or maybe not. Looking at her, I realize she might just be a better actor.
I don’t know what Tris means, but Simon nods. “A passage through space, that’s what I heard.”
“That is incorrect!”
The three of us snap our heads around, startled to see the glassman so close. His eyes whirr with excitement. “The Designated Area Project is not what you refer to as a wormhole, which are in fact impractical as transportation devices.”
Simon shivers and looks down at his feet. My lips feel swollen with regret—what if he thinks we’re corrupted? What if he notices Simon’s left hand? But Tris raises her chin, stubborn and defiant at the worst possible time—I guess the threat of that glassman hospital is making her too crazy to feel anything as reasonable as fear.
“Then what is it?” she asks, so plainly that Simon’s mouth opens, just a little.
Our glassman stutters forward on his delicate metallic legs. “I am not authorized to tell you,” he says, clipped.
“Why not? It’s the whole goddamned reason all your glassman reapers and drones and robots are swarming all over the place, isn’t it? We don’t even get to know what the hell it’s all for?”
“Societal redevelopment is one of our highest mission priorities,” he says, a little desperately.
I lean forward and grab Tris’s hand as she takes a sharp, angry breath. “Honey,” I say, “Tris, please.”
She pulls away from me, hard as a slap, but she stops talking. The glassman says nothing; just quietly urges us a few yards away from Simon. No more corruption on his watch.
Night falls, revealing artificial lights gleaming on the horizon. Our glassman doesn’t sleep. Not even in his own place, I suppose, because whenever I check with a question his eyes stay the same and he answers without hesitation. Maybe they have drugs to keep themselves awake for a week at a time. Maybe he’s not human. I don’t ask—I’m still a little afraid he might shoot me for saying the wrong thing, and more afraid that he’ll start talking about Ideal Societal Redevelopment.
At the first hint of dawn, Simon coughs and leans back against the railing, catching my eye. Tris is dozing on my shoulder, drool slowly soaking my shirt. Simon flexes his hands, now free. He can’t speak, but our glassman isn’t looking at him. He points to the floor of the truckbed, then lays himself out with his hands over his head. There’s something urgent in his face. Something knowledgable. To the glassmen he’s a terrorist, but what does that make him to us? I shake Tris awake.
“Libs?”
“Glassman,” I say, “I have a question about societal redevelopment deliverables.”
Tris sits straight up.
“I would be pleased to hear it!” the glassman says.
“I would like to know what you plan to do with my sister’s baby.”
“Oh,” the glassman says. The movement of his pupils is hardly discernible in this low light, but I’ve been looking. I grab Tris by her shoulder and we scramble over to Simon.
“Duck!” he says. Tris goes down before I do, so only I can see the explosion light up the front of the convoy. Sparks and embers fly through the air like a starfall. The pipeline glows pink and purple and orange. Even the strafe of bullets seems beautiful until it blows out the tires of our truck. We crash and tumble. Tris holds onto me, because I’ve forgotten how to hold onto myself.