Recompense

FIVE

Opal and Will sit with me at Opal's kitchen table. The kids have gone to bed, and the room has softened to the hazy indistinctness of twilight. The oil lamp in the center of the table gives our faces a stark white contrast, and I can see on both of theirs the thoughtful concern that must also shadow mine. I have told them a bleached-out version of Willoughby's offer—that I have been offered a benign government position with a generous salary. I do not mention the name Axis or the work they do or the risk my participation may involve. I say only that I would be relocated.

"I don't see why you shouldn't take the job, Jack," Opal says. "It sounds to me like you've been given an incredible opportunity."

"It's more than I could have hoped for this morning." I can't disguise the sorrow that has been my companion since the moments following my race.

"If you stay, you have only the cannery to look forward to."

She's right. The settlement offers me only decades of drudgery. I know I really don't have a choice, that this meeting I have called is not so much a decision-making council but the delay of an inevitable outcome. They know it too.

"Where will you be moving?" Will asks.

"Willoughby didn't say. A city, most likely." There's comfort in knowing someone's location when you're apart, but neither Will nor I will have that luxury. While he will start his training at the Macron City Military Campus, the official headquarters and training base known unilaterally as Macron, even family aren't always told where missions will take their sons and daughters. And my assignment? Who knows?

"It's settled then," Opal says, pushing upward from the table. "You'll go down to the Sweenys' and call this man in the morning." Her words sound confident, but there is a glint of something in her eyes. Something I can't quite identify.

She smiles and it is gone, but the lift of her cheeks costs her something. She will feel this separation every bit as keenly as I will. She pats my hand. "Don't stay up too late."

Will and I remain seated at the table, listening to the groans of protest from the floor of Opal's room as she readies herself for bed. It is a sound that has become so familiar that I hardly even hear it anymore. But I know I'll miss the creaks, the broken step, the little things that have made this cabin home for the past eight years. It's a home I nearly missed.

I remember back to my very first evening at Opal's, the night I almost ran away. I did run away. I just didn't get very far. It was shortly after my trial. I had just made a long journey from the mountains to completely foreign terrain, and my distrust of people was at its all-time high. As soon as Opal showed me to my room, I went straight out the window and hid in the Ransoms' cowshed.

That evening, Will went out to milk their single heifer, and there I was in the corner of the shed, scrawny, dirty, shaking like a newborn colt. He seemed to understand instinctively that I'd bolt if he came near, so he just fed the cow her dinner, settled on his stool, and started milking. After a few minutes, his voice came drifting out from the cow's flank. "You must be Opal's new girl. Heard she was getting another. You got a name?" He glanced over at me.

I cringed deeper into my corner.

"Reckon I'd be scared too, alone in a new place."

He didn't say anything more till he was finished, but those few words served to lower my guard. I just watched him, noting his efficient movements and the gentleness with which he treated that cow. She didn't mind his presence in the least. I guess I finally figured if she could trust him, maybe I could too.

He set the bucket of milk down by the door. I thought he was going to leave me there like some stray animal and let me find my way home—or wherever else I took it in my head to run—but he found a tin cup, dipped it in the bucket, and carried it over to my corner. Then he sat down next to me, about three feet away, and held that cup out across the distance. That's when I got my first good look at him.