Every Missing Piece

Chapter Seven

The blocker's department is fuller than it's ever been before. Every day, Walter or another senior blocker brings in another group of recruits until our walls are almost straining against the new capacity, but it's never enough for the Assembly. They've found us valuable since the Desperate attack in the square.

From the front of the room, Walter paces and surveys the group. I should probably listen, but I've heard everything he has to say before, and he can't even see me from my place in the back, tightly sandwiched between two new blockers. As he talks, I'm folding and unfolding the paper inside my pocket, the creases long soft from frequent motion. This paper is a constant weight, an insistent pull to think of darker things.

Even when I have it tucked out of sight, I can still feel the eye staring at me.

I threw the pill away long ago. As soon as I returned to my building after the Desperate attack, I looked around once, twice, before quickly crushing it into a powder beneath my shoe in the building's entrance. The paper I held onto, if only because there was no reason not to. On the outside, at least, it looks harmless.

Harmless. I could almost laugh at the irony.

I kept the knife too, and I'm now copying the Desperate man by concealing it in my own boot. There's no reason I should carry it with me, but reasons stopped being enough long ago. Besides, what's one more act of rebellion?

While Walter finishes up, I glance over today's assignment. Every day, there are enough tasks for each blocker and then some, but we've moved beyond erasing the dead. We are the Assembly's puppets now, good for nothing more than eradicating every dissenting opinion and covering up the disappearances of the people secretly aligned with the Desperates.

I wonder how they're explaining the blocker job to new recruits now. Do they say that we keep Gotten safe by silencing anyone with a dangerous opinion? Do we keep the peace by helping people pretend that the problems aren't there in the first place? I suppose it doesn't matter. When you're invited to join the blockers, you're not presented with a sales pitch but with a mandate.

When Walter gestures for us to depart for our assignments, there's a flurry of activity as we leave the blocker's department and go our separate ways outside. Even without their memories of the Desperates rushing into the square, there's an undercurrent of unease as soon as we're outside. A guard stands at attention at every street corner, a standard in this new way of living, but there have been no signs of Desperate activity since the first time.

Every time I pass a guard, my heart beats a little bit faster and I hope against hope that it's Jack standing there and watching out for me. Every time, I'm disappointed. I haven't seen him since he saved me, and I know the Assembly's jurisdictions are keeping him as busy as I am, but I miss him, I miss him, I miss him.

There is one other person waiting for me. As always, Mason, my unavoidable shadow, stands outside the blocker's department when I leave. I meet his eyes now, and I make the best of the inevitable. We talk on the way to each day's assignment, and it's almost a relief, having someone to discuss Gotten's changes with. That's the one advantage of him being with the Assembly: it's his job to watch over the way that Gotten is twisting, so unlike everyone else I know, he will never forget. It isn't friendship, but it's an acceptable substitute.

And yes, I suppose it's also trust.

"Where to today?" Mason asks, and I silently pass him the file. For days now, he's come with me to all corners of Gotten, taking care of disappearance after disappearance as the Assembly demanded. There are so many of them, I'm surprised there's anyone left in Gotten at all. We are a vanishing people.

If Mason has recognized any of my past subjects, he's never let me know. Still, my stomach clenches ever so slightly when he hands back the file. At what point did I stop fighting? When did I start to believe him?