That night, Sadie dreamt again. This time she stood in a place of darkness, surrounded by the same whispering voices she’d heard before. They rose into coherency for only a moment before subsiding into murmurs again.
hereHERE this place remember show her never forget
The darkness changed. She stood on a high metal platform (balcony, said the whispers) overlooking a vast, white-walled room of the sort she had always imagined the glass towers of the Masters to contain. This one was filled with strange machines hooked up to long rows of things like sinks. (Laboratory.) Each sink—there were hundreds in all—was filled with a viscous blue liquid, and in the liquid floated the speckled bodies of Masters.
Above the whispers she heard a voice she recognized: “This is where they came from.”
Enri.
She looked around, somehow unsurprised that she could not see him. “What?”
The scene before her changed. Now there were people moving among the sinks and machines. Their bodies were clothed from head to toe in puffy white garments, their heads covered with hoods. They scurried about like ants, tending the sinks and machines, busy busy busy.
This was how Masters were born? But Sadie had been taught that they came from the sky.
“That was never true,” Enri said. “They were created from other things. Parasites—bugs and fungi and microbes and more—that force other creatures to do what they want.”
Enri had never talked like this in his life. Sadie had heard a few people talk like this—the rare caregivers educated with special knowledge like medicine or machinery. But Enri was just a facility child, just a body. He had never been special beyond the expected perfection.
“Most parasites evolved to take over other animals,” he continued. If he noticed her consternation, he did not react to it. “Only a few were any threat to us. But some people wondered if that could be changed. They put all the worst parts of the worst parasites together, and tweaked and measured and changed them some more . . . and then they tested them on people they didn’t like. People they thought didn’t deserve to think for themselves. And eventually, they made something that worked.” His face hardened suddenly into a mask of bitterness like nothing Sadie had ever seen beyond her own mirror. “All the monsters were right here. No need to go looking for more in space.”
Sadie frowned. Then the white room disappeared.
She stood in a room more opulent than a transfer center’s receiving room, filled with elegant furnishings and plants in pots and strange decorative objects on plinths. There was a big swath of cloth, garishly decorated with red stripes and a square, patterned patch of blue, hanging from a polished pole in one corner; it seemed to have no purpose. A huge desk of beautiful dark wood stood to one side, and there were windows—windows!—all around her. She ignored the desk and all the rest, hurrying to the window for the marvel, the treasure, of looking outside. She shouldered aside the rich, heavy hangings blocking the view and beheld:
Fire. A world burnt dark and red. Above, smoke hung low in the sky, thick as clouds before a rainstorm. Below lay the smoldering ruins of what must once have been a city.
A snarl and thump behind her. She spun, her heart pounding, to find that the opulent chamber now held people. Four men and women in neat black uniforms, wrestling a struggling fifth person onto the wooden desk. This fifth man, who was portly and in his fifties, fought as if demented. He punched and kicked and shouted until they turned him facedown and pinned his arms and legs, ripping open his clothing at the back of the neck.
A woman came in. She carried a large bowl in her hands, which she set down beside the now-immobile man. Reaching into the bowl, she lifted out a Master. It flexed its limbs and then focused its head-tendrils on the man’s neck. When it grew still, the woman set the Master on him.
“No—” Against all reason, against all her training, Sadie found herself starting forward. She didn’t know why. It was just a transfer; she had witnessed hundreds. But it was wrong, wrong. (Pick, pick.) He was too old, too fat, too obviously ill-bred. Was he being punished? It did not matter. Wrong. It had always been wrong.
She reached blindly for one of the decorative objects on a nearby plinth, a heavy piece of stone carved to look like a bird in flight. With this in her hands she ran at the people in black, raising the stone to swing at the back of the nearest head. The Master plunged its stinger into the pinned man’s spine and he began to scream, but this did not stop her. Nothing would stop her. She would kill this Master as she should have killed the one that took Enri.
“No, Sadie.”
The stone bird was no longer in her hands. The strangers and the opulent room were gone. She stood in darkness again and this time Enri stood before her, his face weary with the sorrow of centuries.
“We should fight them.” Sadie clenched her fists at her sides, her throat choked with emotions she could not name. “We never fight.”
I never fight.
“We fought before, with weapons like yours and much more. We fought so hard we almost destroyed the world, and in the end all that did was make it easier for them to take control.”
“They’re monsters!” Pleasure, such shameful pleasure, to say those words.
“They’re what we made them.”
She stared at him, finally understanding. “You’re not Enri.”
He fell silent for a moment, hurt.
“I’m Enri,” he said at last. The terrible age-old bitterness seemed to fade from his eyes, though never completely. “I just know things I didn’t know before. It’s been a long time for me, here, Sadie. I feel . . . a lot older.” It had been two days. “Anyway, I wanted you to know how it happened. Since you can hear me. Since I can talk to you. I feel like . . . you should know.”
He reached out and took her hand again, and she thought of the way he had first done this, back when he had been nothing more than Five-47. She’d taken his hand to lead him somewhere, and he’d looked up at her. Syllables had come into her mind, just a random pair of sounds: Enri. Not as elegant as the names that the Masters had bestowed upon Sadie and her fellow caregivers, and she had never used his name where others could hear. But when they were alone together, she had called him that, and he had liked it.
“If you had a way to fight them,” he said, watching her intently, “would you?”
Dangerous, dangerous thoughts. But the scabs were off, all picked away, and too much of her had begun to bleed. “Yes. No. I . . . don’t know.”
She felt empty inside. The emotion that had driven her to attack the Masters was gone, replaced only by weariness. Still, she remembered the desperate struggles of the captured man in her dream. Like Enri, that man had faced his final moments alone.
Perhaps he too had been betrayed by someone close.
“We’ll talk again,” he said, and then she woke up.
Like a poison, the dangerous ideas from the dreams began leaching from her sleeping mind into her waking life.
On fifthdays, Sadie taught the class called History and Service. She usually took the children up on the roof for the weekly lesson. The roof had high walls around the edges, but was otherwise open to the world. Above, the walls framed a perfect circle of sky, painfully bright in its blueness. They could also glimpse the topmost tips of massive glass spires—the Masters’ city.
“Once,” Sadie told the children, “people lived without Masters. But we were undisciplined and foolish. We made the air dirty with poisons we couldn’t see, but which killed us anyway. We beat and killed each other. This is what people are like without Masters to guide us and share our thoughts.”