Page 9 of Trade
How stupid am I? Until today, I’d actually felt safe. I knew it was all luck, of course. I had the right looks—pretty in the way men prefer—and I was born on an upper floor to a head of department. And I was grateful for it, but I never once considered that the thing about luck is you didn’t earn it, there’s no way to hold onto it, and it can turn on a dime.
“The most dangerous threats in a bunker are fire, airborne disease, and panic,” I murmur.
Cecily nods. “And panic is the worst.”
“Wouldn’t they cut me a break, then, if they’re rigging the lottery and women are panicking?”
“Oh, the lottery is definitely rigged. Why would Command give up a lever of power? I won the lottery because I reported that the impellers on the pumps were wearing out, and pretty soon, we’d have breakdowns we wouldn’t be able to fix.”
“You won the lottery, like, three years ago.” I’ve never heard anything about the impellers.
“Oh, I remember.” Cecily gives me a pointed look, and my cheeks heat. That was insensitive of me.
“They wanted you to keep quiet,” I say.
Cecily smiles grimly and mimes locking her lips with a key. “Getting thrown out is the easy part compared to getting let back in. They are going to make damn sure, one way or another, that when you come back, you aren’t going to say anything that causes trouble.”
I thought no one talked because they wanted to put the experience behind them, or because they were ashamed, even though they had no reason to be.
Because I believed their bullshit. “The lottery isn’t a sacrifice we’re called to make for the good of the bunker.”
“Nope.” Cecily pops thep. “It’s what you get if you make trouble. And you, Gloria Smith, are trouble. You’ve got hundreds of married ladies up on Level C worried what happens if their cheating husbands get their side pieces knocked up. You’ve got them thinking that if this can happen to good, upstanding Gloria Smith—Don Walker’s daughter—then it could happen to them. Maybe the system is broken. Maybe it needs to change.”
“I still don’t get it.” I know I should, but my brain feels like someone punched it.
“Command has to show you falling in line and doing your duty like a good girl, affirming the rightness and virtue of the lottery, and they need to remind all those married ladies making noise who’s really in charge.”
I honestly didn’t see it before, but now, like I’ve got the decoder ring, everything clicks into place. Wasn’t Gina and Amy’s mother the sole holdout against the ten-year extension of the Head Administrator’s term? And who won the last lottery? Carla Duncan. She never came back.
I search my memory. Carla was my age, an inspector in Safety and Compliance. She worked in water filtration.
“Oh my God.” Ice surges through my veins.
Cecily grabs my hand, and leaning closer, she whispers, “Don’t fight. Keep your mouth shut. When they open the door, do what they say.Don’t fight them.” She holds my gaze like a magnet, her brown eyes haunted and fierce. “And whatever you do, never, ever tell anyone what you see out there.”
ChapterThree
For the next few weeks, I have nightmares about bombed-out buildings and bones half-buried in gray dust. I wake up hyperventilating, my sheet tangled in my legs, my skin sweaty against the plastic mattress.
I cry silently in my bunk until someone turns the overhead light on, then dress and shuffle with the other women to the elevators to go to work. My entire life has changed, but I still have to report to the atrium at nine o’clock and prune and mulch and act like people’s problems are real.
A rake is missing. Alan the intern claims it must’ve been stolen. Reginald accuses Alan of misplacing it and then lying to cover his ass.
Someone has been stowing fertilizer under the arbor vitae, presumably because they’re too lazy to return it to storage. Judith feels this is an affront to AP’s solemn duty as stewards of the future.
It’s all so stupid and petty. It always was, but I thought I was very important, didn’t I? Like I was some protector of the peace and common good and not a referee of squabbling children.
If I think about the lottery, I panic, so to soothe itself, my brain returns compulsively to Bennett, building a timeline in my head, searching for clues to exactly when it started.
Everything was fine at Christmas, wasn’t it? There’s a woman in Facilities who makes flowers out of paper, and he had her make me a hibiscus out of a page from Michael Pollen’sThe Botany of Desire.
I was mad that he did that to one of Dad’s books, but the thought was sweet, so I didn’t let on that I was upset. I’m sure he knew I was mad about it anyway. He always complains that I expect too much from people, and no one could possibly live up to my standards. Was the hibiscus the straw that broke the camel’s back?
Did he have a flower made for Meghan, too? Was she just happy to get it?
Or was it so much more basic than that? Was it how, even though I weigh the same as I did when we married, my ass is still somehow wider, and everything that used to bounce now sags?
Am I boring?
