Free Veracity by Laura Bynum Page B

Bond?"

    "Three miles. Why?"

    "Which way?" The answer is north. I just want her to stop sounding so superior.

    "What do you care?"

    I don't answer.

    Ezra takes a couple of steps toward the bed. She's checking to see if my eyes are still shut. "Take a right at the end of the drive, go three miles, take another right at Route 54. Staystraight and you'll drive right through it. Oh, but you'd be walking, huh?" she sounds pleased to add.

    I'd like to spar with her, use my newly expanded freedom of speech to tell her what I think of her help, but the room has resumed spinning so I keep it brief. "You don't like me."

    Ezra doesn't respond like I thought. She leans down and whispers in my ear, "You want to know why? Because you're the worst kind of whore. You and your kind make me and mine look like Mary Fucking Poppins." Whoever that is.

    She turns to leave and I hold out a hand. "Is Veracity safe?"

    Ezra pauses at the threshold. "Yes."

    "Where is she?"

    "Not in Wernthal. That's all you need to know."

    "They haven't gone after her?"

    "No."

    "Are we watching her?"

    Ezra sighs. "What happened to Hannah is not going to happen to Veracity. Enough with the questions. Go to sleep."

    The room is going away along with Ezra and her invective. I lie back down and close my eyes. Behind them, I find an image of Candace's daughter waiting. It's the before picture when Hannah was a long, dangling girl, feet swinging beneath her mother's desk. In this image, she was exuberant. Full of questions. Never able to hold still. Then comes the after . The picture channel 4 broadcast toward the end showing a stick figure in a hospital bed, the skin of her face and arms gray and patchy. Her copper-colored eyes hollowed out. The Confederation went after her, Candace's daughter. She was used as bait to lure back the errant mother.

    CHAPTER SIX
    JUNE 18, 2045.

    Maybe I'm being vain. I don't take up a knife and puncture my carotid, flicking out my slate along with a bit of that vital artery. I don't open that juncture where arm meets hand, or bruise the most lovely part of the body, the crease where neck meets head. I work death upon my body from the inside out. I choose pills. Seventeen Occlusia. Medication the government provides to keep us happy. It was the first method in a brief list. The how, my only decision. The Confederation would have used my daughter to flush me out. They would have brought her to Wernthal Central Hospital and tortured her until I came running, like they did with Hannah.

    I have to sever ties to my child in such a way the government will classify her as Unloved By Her Mother . As Not Likely to Produce a Return, no matter what they do to her. I have to get her reassigned to new parents. The recruitment letter assured me that the resistance had enough people on the inside to make sure Veracity's new home would be far away. Beyond the easy reach of the Confederation.

    Veracity, or Sarah as called by her court-appointed name, has been sent off to spend a week with my ex-husband's sister and brother-in-law on the East Coast. Anne is the kind, quiet, motherly type with no children of her own. She was my first choice. Her husband, David, has a quick smile and a good sense of humor. He works as an engineer and provides them a Class III house. Three thousand square feet. Fivebedrooms, two and a half baths. Too much room for a couple that desperately wants kids. They were my first choice. Both of them. But they're family and, therefore, too obvious. My recruiter has promised to find Veracity new parents who will be like Anne and David. Kind, if not familiar. A different home the Confederation can't remove her from.

    Anne has flown out to get Veracity so she won't have to fly back to their house alone. I say my good-bye as dispassionately as possible, as if it's meant to last just the span of a long weekend and not a lifetime. I make it all the way through the main terminal doors and out to the taxi stand before collapsing