Free Veracity by Laura Bynum

the arms of a chair.

    Veracity sits back to pull a tissue from a pants pocket, and static draws one of her long locks toward the light's metal stand. Inside my transparently walled cell, I begin to flail.

    "I understand what you're doing." Her head is resting against the metal pole--hair, scalp, bone, brains. "I don't have to go by Sarah anymore."

    I scream, Don't say it! Get up out of my seat and hurl it against the transparent wall separating us, but nothing shatters. The chair disappears right through.

    Veracity looks at me, head to pole. "You were trying to give me back my name . . . Vera--"

    My daughter's voice is stillborn. Only the first two syllables come, then an ending I won't allow. She thought her slate had been turned off and was speaking a Red Listed word.

    God help me.

    I can feel my legs flexing, working to wake me up before the rest of it comes. I open my eyes and the present rushes in like a sickness.

    Have I been killed?

    I almost cry out but then feel the bed beneath me. I'm alive. In one piece. May or may not be alone. I turn my head and look down at the floor. There is no Blue Coat at the side of my bed. For whatever reason, he's left me alive, and not so long ago. I can see shining traces of him on the dusty floor, though the colors suggest something the opposite of rage. Iridescentgreen and robin's egg blue. They must have been left by someone else. Most likely me.

    Have I been raped?

    I'm on the bed, not under it. Wedged under covers that smell of mold and feel like burlap. When I try to kick them off, they don't budge. Someone has squared the corners so tight, my toes are bent at right angles to my feet.

    Bare legs. Someone's taken off my clothes.

    I lift up the sheet and look down at myself. I'm in my bra and panties. My nicest pair of trousers, my most comfortable eggshell chemise, the white silk blouse Mr. Weigland issued me as a bonus for the last three months of overtime. All are gone. My slurring mind doesn't comprehend it. What's happened to me? Maybe I've had a stroke.

    The ceiling is moving above me and every muscle in my body aches. I put my arms over my head and bring together the thumb and forefinger of each hand. They all work. No stroke. No pain between my legs. No rape.

    I try to get up and stumble, throw out my arm to rebalance, and it connects with something soft and warm. It's a woman's hand come forward from the shadows, small but thickly muscled.

    "Congratulations, Adams. You're officially offline."

    Offline . It's a recently Red Listed word meaning no longer connected to the Fatherboard.

    "I laid your clothes out to dry on the porch. You sweat them through. Now lie down." I'm thrust back onto the bed and the hand withdraws.

    The woman's only given me three short sentences and a silhouette as she moves past the window, but it's enough. She's in her midthirties. Either a Confederation prostitute or someone who bounces from one Food Service position to another. The other thing I know about this woman is that she's a lifetime smoker. We get this breed in Monitoring on a daily basis. They're people who wind up committing suicideor being executed. People who can't find the middle ground required by the government.

    Her face appears over my own. "No, you didn't have a stroke and, no, you're not dead. Yet." She manages to sound annoyed and bored at the same time. I wish I could see her features but the moon is over her shoulder. All I can see is coarse yellow hair.

    "Who are you?" My postbreak voice sounds cracked and torn. Just exactly how it feels. It will be a couple of days before it's back to normal.

    A small orb of orange light travels up to the woman's mouth. She inhales deeply and spits the smoke down at my face. "Ezra."

    Ezra. The one the Blue Coat named Skinner was going to call.

    I cough and start to fall sideways off the bed. Ezra catches me. "Jesus." She rolls me back into my original position and battens me down with the blunt ends of her fingers. "I