The Choosing (The Arcadia Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  "You saved my skin today," Livy said to Tarah.

  "You saved Dav's brother," Tarah said in a matter of fact voice. "No one else could even think what to do."

  Livy shook her head.

  "Yes, it's true, don't argue with me."

  "I have to," Livy said, laughing. "You're wrong. You're always wrong. You were born to be wrong." It was an old game. Now Tarah would follow up with a variety of facts from her mother's business of weaving and dying cloth, or her father's, which was harder, because he was a veterinarian, and Livy would guess at which facts were true and which weren't.

  But Tarah just said, "You saved him. You could have gotten hurt or in trouble, and you saved him," and walked with her own arm around Livy's waist.

  Their small house burned with summer heat and heat from the peat-fired cook stove when Livy got home in the long, yellow, summer evening light. She'd stopped at the baths on her way, a pleasure approved by the government: Cleanliness was a state of perfection and as such, approached the realm of the Plutarch. That the baths were communal, loud and joyous, the women on one side and the men on the other sometimes calling to each other through the cinder block walls and other times gossiping amongst themselves was overlooked.

  With her gift tucked close in her tunic, Livy didn't delay and didn't stay longer than to wash her face and hands. Still she spoke with half a dozen women, answering questions about her mother's pregnancy, her brother Geoffrey who, at fifteen, had just become engaged to a neighbor girl, Stella, just turned thirteen.

  Livy spoke of her own work in the fields, and asking about the health of one neighbor, the promotion of another into shopkeep in one of the stores the Plutarch allowed kept open. The stores could be raided at any moment without recompense to the 'keeps, but they did provide the few luxuries or items to extend the life of staples that community members bartered for. As she moved through the baths, trying only to get clean and get out again, still Livy found herself asking after this woman's sore feet, this one's sick husband, another's child who had a worrisome cough, and she was privy to so much information.

  For some reason, her neighbors trusted her. Pippa always said it was her trustworthy face, that anyone as plain and round-faced as Olivia had to be trustworthy. Then she'd toss her long blond hair back and laugh and their mother would say that neither girl was unattractive, though Pip's behavior rather was, and scold her to stop her wicked words. Livy was, actually, the darkest of the siblings, with her grandfather's blue eyes and her father's auburn hair. In a family of wheat-colored hair everyone else had gotten from their mother, Livy stood out.

  The baths were the source of so much of the information Livy carried home with her to share with her family over dinner and more importantly, to offer to her shut-in grandfather. Today nothing she heard even came close to the book she still smuggled with her.

  "Olivia, there you are," her mother said as she entered. "Can you go get your father for me? We're almost ready to eat. You're quite late. Is everything all right?" Familiar worry lines etched their way across her forehead.

  "Fine. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to worry you. It was hot today and I didn't move very fast and I stopped to wash up coming home." She paused and looked around. The youngest of her siblings, four-year-old Tad, sat at the table already, spreading cloth napkins around to all the places. Her sister Pippa, twelve years old and interested in everything as long as it pertained to boys, poured water for the meal. "Where's Grandfather Bane?"

  Her mother's lips tightened, a fleeting movement but Livy saw it. "He's resting," she said and caught Livy by the biceps before she could push her way past her mother and make for the curtained room at the far end of the living quarters. "He's not feeling well today, Olivia. Please, let him rest. I know you both love your time together, but it does tire him."

  Livy swallowed down her automatic protest. Her Grandfather was old and by virtue of being old, society had very little use for him anymore. Healthcare for her grandfather was inconsistent and mostly incompetent, performed by poorly trained interns who would never be allowed to practice in the capital where the Plutarch reined.

  "Livy?" her mother asked into her thoughts. "I need you to fetch your father. We're ready to eat. After your chores you can take some food back to your grandfather."

  Livy nodded and went in search of her father. Never hard to find him. Jep Bane was a blacksmith, as well as working with the technology from the Before Times. If he wasn't somewhere assigned to find the solution to a problem the community was facing, he was in his workshop, building and creating and discovering. Livy's father had the plans to dozens of time and energy saving mechanicals, machines that could do the work the community labored at and do it in half the time for half the cost the community was forced to expend. None of the inventions ever left his shop, though his work was tolerated by the Plutarch's regime because he could fix anything that failed on approved equipment.

  She found him there this evening, the sparks from his welder too incandescent to look at. Livy kept her face averted until she heard the torch stop, then she called to him before entering so he'd know she was there and put down the welder. He could be working on anything from an old porch swing he wanted to present her mother with to a machine that would clean the floors of the Centurions without being manually pushed. Today in his blacksmith role he was working with molten metal, the welding something he was working on while he waited for his metal to heat to the temperature he needed.

  It always seemed loud in the workshop and neither of them usually tried to talk. When they did, they mostly shouted, and minutes after she'd arrived, Jep shouted at Olivia. "I could use your help."

  Tired as she was, a bone deep, heat-caused dragging tired, the chance to help her father in his work made her leap to follow his instructions, finding and donning a heavy rubbery apron, a face mask with goggles and long heavy gloves. Using a tool very like her mother's kitchen tongs but three times as long, Livy lifted and steadied a mold for her father as Jep used a similar tool to lift and hold far from him the molten metal he needed to pour.

  The form was nothing she'd seen before. Because she'd grown up following her father around his shop, Livy usually tried to guess what he was making and what its use would be. This time she couldn't begin to guess. The form held thirty-six shallow oblong impressions, flattened at one end, a plug of something in the flat end, and the top of the mold fitted just inside the bottom, creating capsules with flattened ends, each about an inch long. While she waited for her father to be ready to pour, Livy looked around the shop at all the other forms cooling on heavy metal racks. If she was figuring right, there were at least seventy-two hundred of the small oblong pieces of metal cooling in various places throughout the shop. The minute he finished filling the molds and clamped on the top of the mold, he instructed her to plunge the form into a barrel of water standing between them. The molten metal steamed and cooled and Livy was able to release the tongs, letting the mold settle in the barrel.

  "What are they? Something for the railroads?"

  Her father laughed humorously. He looked, she thought, strange – like someone angry and triumphant at the same time.

  And scared. There was definitely some fear in his expression.

  "I'll show you, girl, but it's a secret. You've always been able to keep information to yourself. This time it would be best to keep it from everyone."

  "Even Grandfather?"

  Her father considered, but nodded. Maybe even Grandfather. And now he opened one of the forms and let the cylinders tumble free, then picked up one of the cold metal pieces and plugged the flat end, capping it with a thickened piece of metal. In the dancing firelight of his forge, he held one out for Livy to inspect.

  "What are they?" Livy asked. She thought she knew, but the idea of finding them here in her father's shop was so unlikely she asked.

  "What do they look like?"

  Like Mother is going to be out here calling us both to dinner, and chastising me for remaining to work
with you rather than dragging you inside. "They look like bullets," she said finally.

  Her father nodded and again Livy sensed that combination of pride and success and fear. "They're freedom, Livy," he told her. "These are freedom."

  Chapter 2

  Throughout the meal the secret of the book burned inside Livy. Between dinner and the inevitable cleanup she slipped into the back room through the curtain, carrying her Grandfather's dinner. This was their time. In an effort not to exhaust him, all the siblings took turns talking with Grandfather Bane, but Livy and her grandfather shared a special bond – the love of books, of antiquities from the times Before, and a temper that frayed daily under the Plutarch's rule.

  "How do you feel tonight?" she asked, automatically taking her place on the three-legged stool that stood beside the bed. It was a milking stool, leftover from the days when they'd had a cow. The cow had been made community property a year earlier and died at the hands of the neighborhood selectmen when an early frost wiped out some of the crops left to the villagers by the Centurions. Faced with starving, the cow became beef. Now they had a goat, struggled for and kept healthy by expensive trade with a trained veterinarian, but it was worth it for the milk.

  Milking the goat required standing on all six legs and using all six hands, though, which none of them unfortunately possessed. It did not require a stool. Sitting next to the goat would be stupid. Hitting oneself in the face was faster than pretending Sweet Girl was going to allow anyone to milk her without consequences.

  Livy had already tucked the curtain closed, sealing herself and her grandfather into his room, surrounded by his possessions and memories. As he ate she regaled him with tales of the big world, made as amusing as possible, and he even sometimes laughed, though her adventures with the Centurion today made him scowl with worry. Finally laying his tray aside, he looked her squarely in the eyes, his faded blue eyes boring into her bright blues.

  "What was blocking the plow, Olivia? I can see you fair to bursting with some news."

  She gave a quick look around. However alone they were, it would never feel alone enough. Then Livy drew the book out from under her tunic and watched her grandfather's eyes fasten on the book and glow with happiness.

  "Tonight, after the others have gone to bed," he mouthed at her, and she smiled, secretive and joyful, and took his tray, and returned to her chores.

  Dinner was never quiet. With eight of them at the table – nine when Grandfather Bane was feeling up to it – dinner was raucous and loud and joyous. The eldest of six, Olivia was rarely at a loss for a companion. Sometimes silence and solitude were welcome.

  Her father had come back with her as her mother had requested. Jep Bane was tall and rugged, with scars from his years working with ploughs, tack and cutlery, with molten metallic-laden ore gathered from trade with nearby Tundrus. His father, Livy's Grandfather Bane, had tried to teach his son everything he wanted to pass down from the Before Times, but Jep Bane had a family to raise. He'd met Madeline – Maddy, or more often, Mad – Still when they were both just past the age to leave required schooling. Neither had ever looked back. What good did reading do in a world that outlawed books? They'd learned the basics – sums and how to trade and how to farm - and the rest of it came from trial and error.

  The more important lessons in life were how to survive the Plutarch's rule, to keep one's head down when the Centurions were on the prowl, to tithe what was required and to grumble against the rule only when safely at home for the night with trusted family members.

  Today, though, he'd taken the time to show Livy something different. What he'd been doing in his shop, creating bullets and calling them freedom, that was new. And probably dangerous. For Livy it was a side of her father she'd never even suspected. Her Grandfather, yes – he'd teach any of the children how to read, how to write, and tell them stories of Before Times, though of all of them, Olivia was the only one who wanted more than the stories.

  She wanted the life her grandfather had led. She wanted to know what freedom felt like; at the same time she wanted her family safe.

  "That old man," her mother said when Livy came out from her grandfather's quarters that night. "What's he filling your head with tonight?" It was a familiar refrain.

  But tonight Livy thought her mother had sounded strained, and she'd instantly sent Livy to fetch her father in for dinner.

  So at dinner, while Tad, the youngest who required constant care because of a tendency to eat everything including nonedibles like the table itself, laughed and Geoffrey told stories from the fields, Pippa tales from school, Vicki and Kellan told tales of running with their friends before and after their mandatory shifts, and while they made up rhymes and snatches of song, Livy let her gaze soften and listened hard to her parents.

  Dinner was one of the times of day they spent together, and the noise of the siblings masked whatever conversation they needed to share. Sometimes Livy overheard them. Sometimes she listened on purpose, concerned there wouldn't be enough food for winter or that Mary the Goat might be in danger of being seized by neighbors and eaten if there was a shortage of food. Sometimes she listened because she'd found herself sitting next to her sister Pippa, whose conversation revolved solely around boys and how she could get enough coins together to purchase ribbons for her plain hardwoven tunic. "Let her be," mother said mildly when Livy complained. "There's beauty in the world and Pip just wants to be a part of it." She'd straightened, her hands on her sore back, trying to work out the pain. "Sometimes we all do, Olivia. You will too. Someday."

  Maybe she would, but she was on the verge of sixteen and so far boys were interesting but less important than caring for her family and learning everything Grandfather Bane could teach her while there was still time. Before he'd taken to his bed, his bones decaying and his hands gnarled into claws, Grandfather had ventured into the badlands, the Forbidden Zone of the Void, collecting radioactive scrap from the Before Times. She knew it had sickened him, and she knew that some of the metal her father worked likely came from the same place: the very borders of the Forbidden Zone, the entrance into the desert of the Void.

  Tonight she had to listen harder than ever to overhear her parents. Her eight-year-old brother Kellan was engaged in telling a story that on the surface sounded like a revolt staged by traitors but which in reality was some game he'd been playing with his friends. Livy didn't much like his friends. It was safe to play at revolution as long as the point of the game was that the Centurions came in to save the day, that the rebels were wrong and were summarily vanquished, but she sometimes thought his friends, who always volunteered to play the Centurions, weren't kidding about their desire to grow up and don the red jackets with the shiny brass buttons.

  "Are you all right tonight, Mads?" Livy's father asked under cover of the children's chaos.

  Livy could hear the weariness in her mother's voice. "Just tired, love." Without looking Livy knew her mother would have one hand protectively over her belly. "There's always so much to do in spring, and half of that is dreading everything that will have to be done in summer."

  "And so in fall, and so in – well, not winter. Too cold. Time to snuggle up together warm in bed under all the covers – "

  Her mother shushed her father even as Livy felt the blush climbing her cheeks. They needed to stop the lovesick talk and get on with something important. She wanted to know if her father was going to tell her mother what he'd been doing in the shop.

  He didn't. Not then, anyway. Instead he went on to something that made Livy want to shout at her siblings to shut up and listen. Not that her parents would then have gone on talking. After he finished telling her mother about the latest trade for metal and that he hadn't had time to look for the fabrics she had asked for, and after Livy's mother had asked, only half humorously if he wanted to spend the winter either naked or wearing rags, he continued more softly than ever.

  "There's talk in Tundra of tax collectors."

  Livy sensed her mother's
stillness and bristled when her Pippa demanded her attention for a minute, wanting Livy to weigh in on the subject of getting another barn cat to keep the hay free of rodents.

  When she could hear her parents again, her father was saying, "New tax year," and her mother, "They've sped it up, last year it was late as the cusp of winter," and her father, "It's all right, there are so many, you can't think that."

  "But she'll be sixteen," Maddy protested, and Livy stilled, feeling fear flush up through her. It was Livy's birthday that had just passed, and her sixteenth at that.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw her father put a hand over her mother's hand, his voice too low to be heard over the squabbling of Vicki, all of six but more than willing to tangle with Kellan for the last potato.

  "There's more in the kitchen," mother said, and rose smoothly to go fetch it, as if her back didn't ache and she wasn't bone tired.

  When her mother was at the far side of the kitchen, forking up potatoes into a scarred metal serving bowl, Livy leaned quickly to her father and said, "What happened that you're making bullets?" Because asking about the collectors would tip her hand that she was listening and she'd lose one of her best sources of information.

  Her father bit the inside of his cheek, his eyes evasive. "We'll talk about it later, Olivia. You know you mustn't tell anyone, right?"

  How stupid did he think she was? "Yes, of course, but father – "

  But her mother was back with potatoes and a little more of the meat they'd been eating whose provenance it was best not to inquire too closely about. Looking at father and daughter sharply, Maddy asked, "What are we talking about now?" and Livy's father subsided into tactics to distract her while Livy let herself be pulled into yet another conversation about boys.