Free After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling [Editors] Page A

flinches. It has never occurred to her, before, that their prison offers parole.
    “What will happen then?” she whispers. “Will you, will you join with all of them?”
     She falters. When has the rest of humankind become them to her? Shakes her head. “ We won’t want that.”
    He smiles faintly, noticing her choice of pronoun. She thinks he notices a lot of
     things. “ They can join us if they want. Or not. We don’t care. But that’s how we’ll know that your
     kind is able to live with us, and us with them, without more segregation or killing.
     If they can accept you, they can accept us.”
    And finally, Zinhle understands.
    But she thinks on all he has said, all she has experienced. As she does so, it is
     very hard not to become bitter. “They’ll never fight for me,” she says at last, softly.
    He shrugs. “They’ve surprised us before. They may surprise you.”
    “They won’t.”
    She feels Lemuel’s gaze on the side of her face because she is looking at the floor.
     She cannot meet his eyes. When he speaks, there’s remarkable compassion in his voice.
     Something of him is definitely still human, even if something of him is definitely
     not.
    “The choice is yours,” he says, gently now. “If you want to stay with them, be like
     them, just do as they expect you to do. Prove that you belong among them.”
    Get pregnant. Flunk a class. Punch a teacher. Betray herself.
    She hates him. Less than she should, because he is not as much of an enemy as she
     thought. But she still hates him for making her choice so explicit.
    “Or stay yourself,” he says. “If they can’t adapt to you, and you won’t adapt to them,
     then you’d be welcome among us. Flexibility is part of what we are.”
    There’s nothing more to be said. Lemuel waits a moment, to see if she has any questions.
     She does, actually, plenty of them. But she doesn’t ask those questions, because,
     really, she already knows the answers.
    Lemuel leaves. Zinhle sits there, silent, in the little office. When the principal
     and office staff crack open the door to see what she’s doing, she gets up, shoulders
     past them, and walks out.

    Zinhle has a test the next day. Since she can’t sleep anyway—too many thoughts in
     her head and swirling through the air around her; or maybe those are people trying to get in—she stays up all night to study. This is habit. But it’s hard, so
     very hard, to look at the words. To concentrate, and memorize, and analyze. She’s
     tired. Graduation is three months off, and it feels like an age of the world.
    She understands why people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness.
     By being different, she forces them to redefine “enemy.” By doing her best for herself,
     she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential.
    There’s no decision, really. Lemuel knew full well that his direct intervention was
     likely to work. Even if he hadn’t come to her, Rule 3—staying herself—would’ve brought
     her to this point anyway.
    So in the morning, when Zinhle takes the test, she nails it, as usual.

    And then she waits to see what happens next.

T HE F LEET RIVER STARTS SOMEWHERE UP ON THE H EATH . I ’VE never bin there, but Morris has. It’s where the North London drug barons live in
     big houses—palaces, like—all ringed with steel security fences and guard dogs and
     armed patrols. Morris goes there on business, to get supplies. “You’d never get in
     unless they wants you in,” he says, and then he grins a bit, showing his gums, and
     says, “nor you’d never get out again neither.”
    Well, the Fleet starts there, up in the woods, and then it dives underground and runs
     along in drains and sewers for a while, but all the time it’s chewing away at the
     bricks and burrowing under old roadways till they sag and collapse, till by the time
     it gets to Kings Cross it’s opened itself a nice deep channel, not that you’d wanta
     swim in it.