Free The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) by Amanda Witt Page A

meeting
before Rafe had been arrested. How could they have
known he’d be out, that he’d do something and get caught? They must have picked
at random from the current crop of prisoners. I hoped that was it—I hoped
they weren’t angry with Rafe in particular.
    At exactly eight o’clock the spotlight flashed once. The
crowd, which had been murmuring quietly, fell silent.
      “City of Optica .” A man’s voice boomed through the tower
loudspeakers, resonant and compelling. That would be one of the seven Watchers.
He might have actually been in the tower, or with all their technological gear,
he could have been speaking to us from their compound a mile away. “Citizens of Optica ,” he said. “Friends. There are cancers among
you.”
    The voice stopped. The spotlight cut off.
    In the darkness the silence stretched and held.
    I began to shiver, more from nerves than from cold. Beside
me Farrell Dean shifted until our shoulders touched. Gratefully I leaned into
him. For a long time we stood in the dark, in silence—I don’t know how
long, but it felt like forever. Across the way a baby began to cry and was
hurriedly shushed.
    The spotlight flicked back on, shifted away from Rafe , began scanning the crowd. It lingered now on one
face, now on another. Farrell Dean stood steady beside me, but I took a small
step away from him, suddenly afraid that I’d get him in trouble somehow.
    Then I was glad I’d moved, because the light paused briefly
on Farrell Dean’s face and then came to rest on mine. There it stayed, longer
than it had stayed on anyone else. I could feel its heat, or maybe it was the
heat of the panic flooding through me. My heart began to race; I felt my cheeks
grow flushed. The wind kicked up and my hair shifted, dancing strange-colored
in the spotlight, and the scarred warden’s words echoed in my mind: I was watched—I,
the anomaly, the freak.
    Just when I grew convinced it was something more than
that—that somehow they knew I’d been near the wasteland when Rafe was arrested—the spotlight moved on, over row
upon row of gray uniforms, over terrified or carefully blank faces, moving
faster and faster around and around the circle, licking here and there as if it
were tasting us. I began to feel sick. I had a horrible feeling Meritt was there, somewhere, and it would stop on him, that
he and I would both be ordered to join Rafe in the
center of the circle.
    But when the manic spotlight finally stopped, it stopped on Rafe .
    The voice spoke again, hushed and menacing: “There are
cancers among you,” it repeated. “Those who would take what belongs to all of
you and abuse it, horde it, use it for themselves alone. Those who would by
their words and deeds promote disunity, discord, and ultimately death. Did you
think we wouldn’t know? Did you think we wouldn’t see?”
    The light gave Rafe’s gray clothes
a faint blue tint; it caught at the silver strands in his dark hair and
emphasized the lines on his face, making him look older than his forty some-odd
years. But though he looked tired and grim, he did not look afraid.
    “Instructor Rafe ,” said the voice.
“You are a thief.”
    Rafe’s dark
eyes gave no sign that he’d heard the accusation, gave no sign, for that
matter, that he was standing at the center of the entire city’s attention. He
stared straight ahead—straight, as it happened, at me.
      “You have stolen
painkillers,” the voice said. “A small crime, you might say. Small pills, so
easily slipped into a pocket. But value is not determined by size. Those
painkillers will not be there, family of Optica , when
you need them. They will not be there when you break an arm working in the
field to feed Instructor Rafe . They will not be there
when you go into labor to bear a child for the Family of Optica .
They will not be there when a cook burns her hands, or when a mechanic loses a
limb.”
    I felt warm breath in my ear. Farrell Dean murmured, “He makes
it sound like