Page 70 of Exit Party

I said nothing. Could this conversation be a trap? It seemed possible. Nico could be recording me, I thought, waiting for an incriminating response. The next thing I said could be the difference between continuing to live my life and spending the rest of my days in the desert prison or elsewhere, in some hellish black site in a basement under the city.

Nico was studying a cluster of snapdragons near where she sat.

“The State orphanages are terrible,” Nico said, still looking at the snapdragons. “That’s where they start training soldiers.”

I didn’t respond. But all my life I’ve known when people are lying and when they’re telling the truth, and I felt Nico’s sincerity. Whatever this was, I didn’t think it was a trap.

“Everyone knows that,” I said finally, because some response seemed to be expected.

“What else does everyone know?” Nico lay on her back, and gazed up at the sky. Her hair was in the dirt now, but she didn’t seem to care.

After a moment, I lay on my back too. Popcorn clouds passed rapidly over blue.

“Everyone knows that we pursue harmony at any cost,” I said. Speaking carefully, with an eye toward an eventual transcript. “That’s why we do what we do. That’s why we’re Service.”

“You still believe that, Detective?”

“If we didn’t have doubts,” I whispered, “we’d be inhuman.”

“Probably,” Nico said. “Promise that if anything happens to me, you’ll do everything you can to keep my kids out of the State orphanage?”

I was trying to imagine myself raising Nico’s children, who were very small and utterly mysterious to me. “Nico,” I said, stalling, “is this something you absolutely have to do? This . . . experiment?”

“I don’t want my children to grow up in a surveillance state,” Nico whispered. “Not just my children. Anyone’s children. This has to end.”

“If the experiment works,” I whispered back, “what will you be able to do? How does it work?”

“If it works,” she whispered, “we’ll have a way to spirit dissidents away to safety.”

I tried to imagine this. The borders of the State had been closed for a long time now. Years. I lay still, not speaking, until Nico turned her head to look at me, so I looked at her too. There were a few wildflowers between us. “Do you know if something will happen to me?” Nico asked. “Is that unfair to ask?”

She was talking about the premonitions. I studied her face through the stalks of flowers, and I found that I did know. I was absolutely certain. This was the last time I was going to see my friend. There were tears in my eyes. She read my expression, and sighed.

“Okay,” Nico said softly. “Okay.” She returned her gaze to the clouds.

“If something does happen,” I said, and I was horrified to realize that I was crying now, actually crying, for the first time in possibly years, “I promise that I’ll do everything I can for your children.”

“Thank you.” She sat up. We were almost out of time.

“Nico,” I said, “why do you trust me?”

“You’re in a high position now. There’s a lot you can do.”

“But why do you trust me?”

Nico smiled. “Because,” she said, “I remember the glasses.” She rose, brushing soil off her clothes. “Goodbye, Ibari.” I didn’t rise. I wanted to lie on this concrete forever. I wanted to stop time and not see what came next. “I hope you’re wrong,” she said, “just this once.” The last I saw of Nico was my friend disappearing behind the flowers, until she had vanished completely, and I heard her car glide quietly away.

3

On Tuesday morning I was once more in my tiny office, shaken, reading case files, waiting for the console on my desk to light up. I had barely slept since I’d seen Nico. What had I promised? What did I owe my friend? I had never actually wanted children and wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do to help Nico’s, if something did happen to her, which something was about to. I want to dive off a cliff into freezing water. I want to swim away into the dark. The desolate platform at the desert station flitted through my thoughts. I want to jump off a train at a desert station and run until I reach the horizon line. That platform was decrepit in a way I knew to be intentional. It was meant to demoralize. Sometimes after all these years in Service I felt the logic of the State bureaucracy like a second consciousness, a second string of thoughts running alongside my own. I understood it in a way I’ve never understood another living person.

Late in the day, the console on my desk finally did light up, and I was summoned to my boss’s considerably nicer office a few blocks south.

Alberto Vasquez had been with Service for his entire career. He was a large, slow-moving person, in his seventies now. His office would have been entirely impersonal if not for the aquarium, glowing blue on a table beside his desk. It was stocked with tropical fish, and was his only concession to a personality, interests, or a private life. The rest of the office was undecorated. Nothing on the walls, all spotless surfaces and closed cabinet doors. Alberto rose and smiled when I came in, then settled back into his chair and pulled something up on his computer.

“Congratulations on your promotion,” he said, without looking away from the screen.

“Thank you. I’m very happy about it.”