Dawn was holding Jed’s hand now, and she gave it a squeeze. He took it as a recognition of their shared adventure since that day, and how much they’d been through together.
She lifted his hand a little and looked at it closely before giving it another light squeeze. “Part of my job has been infiltrating Transport protocols and accessing TRACE backdoors to use the system against them. Right now they think we’re both unconscious and recovering from the surgery and the drugs they gave us. They know that you’re slowly adopting the BICE data into your cognitive stream. I have the data mirrored so they’re seeing what I want them to see. Basically, I’ve hacked your brain, Jed. And I’ve also communicated to TRACE command everything that’s happened.”
Jed just stared, unsure what he should accept and what was still too fantastic to be believed.
“There’s a war going on, Jed. And right now, one of the battlefields is your mind.”
“I just want to be out of it all. I just want to be home.”
“There is no out. There is no home. Unless we win.”
Jed shook his head. “It’s too much.”
“Listen,” Dawn said, “I don’t expect you to get all of this at once. It’s a lot to take in, and I understand that. We’re just lucky they didn’t shoot us back when they captured us just to be done with you.”
“Blessed,” Jed said.
“What?”
“Not lucky—blessed.”
Dawn shrugged. “All right. Blessed, then.”
“So what do we do next?”
Dawn stood up and turned to face him. She reached out with her hands and pulled him up out of his chair. When he stood, he was uncomfortably close to her, and she didn’t step back to increase the space between them. She looked up at him as she spoke. “Next? You’re going to go through all of their training and protocols.” She reached up and fixed a wisp of hair that had escaped from her kapp. “The system does that automatically as you sleep, so you won’t really notice it that much. Only fragments of notable instances here and there will occur to you. Without your even knowing about it, they’ll train you to use the system, to access information unconsciously, and they’ll program your BICE to send back information to Transport Intelligence. You’re going to pretend to go along with everything they do.”
She gave him a sideways smile, as if to say sorry about this part. “Actually, you won’t have to pretend. My guess is that they’re going to try to zap your memory of the last few days—going all the way back to when you first arrived at Transport Customs in Columbia, before you met me. I don’t know exactly how they’ll do it, but we’ll soon see. Then they’re going to deliver you to the Amish Zone—exactly as you’d originally intended before all hell broke loose. They’ll expect that you won’t know what’s happening, and their plan is for you to serve as an unwitting spy, gathering data and transmitting it back to Transport.”
Jed noticed that even though he was now standing, Dawn was still holding both of his hands. He wondered if that was part of the fantasy that his brain was concocting, or if she was really in control of what he saw in front of him.
“Why go to all of this trouble just to spy on the Amish? What harm can the plain people be to Transport?”
Dawn pushed the troublesome strand of hair back into her head covering and shrugged. “The plain people are never harmless.”
“But they are harmless,” Jed said. “They’re pacifist. They don’t take sides. They can’t help or hurt anyone.”
Dawn shook her head again. “Free people who produce everything they need to survive are never harmless, Jed. Because they’re not dependent on government—and that makes them dangerous when governments are wicked. Add to that the fact that people on both sides of this conflict depend on Amish production for food… which means the plain people are strategically important. And don’t forget that the resistance is led by a former Amish man.”
“My brother.”
“Yes.”
Jed took a deep breath. “When am I going to find out about Amos?”
“Soon.”
Jed reached over and touched Dawn’s sleeve. The green fabric felt cool and very real to him. When he touched her, she turned to him and smiled.
“Your brother wanted you to see everything, to experience what’s going on in the Amish Zone and in this world. He figured that maybe then you would understand his decisions.”
“I don’t understand them.”
“This whole thing,” Dawn said, “everything going on here… this is not some grand plan to torture you or keep you in the dark. You don’t think every single one of us in the resistance isn’t tired of saying ‘Not yet, we can’t tell you yet’? Of course we’d love to have just told you everything when you first arrived at customs. But then you’d never understand. You’d be like the elders here in New Pennsylvania—unable and unwilling to see what’s really happening.”
“The Amish will never change. They will never fight.”
Dawn smiled. “Your brother knows that. He doesn’t want them to change or fight. They’re too valuable to this world and the old world. He wants you to know the truth, so that at least you can communicate with them and let them know why he’s made the decisions he’s had to make. Why he’s chosen to fight.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“I know,” Dawn said. “Hopefully someday you will.”
Jed didn’t reply. His hand moved up her sleeve, and then before he could stop himself he was touching her face. He couldn’t help it. He wanted to know what she felt like, to get an understanding of what was real and what was not. Her skin was soft to the touch, and she leaned in to the contact and closed her eyes.
“If they zap my memory,” Jed said, “then won’t what they’re trying to do to me… or with me… well, won’t it work? Won’t I forget everything and just go on without knowing what they’ve done to me?”
Dawn smiled again, and now she was the one to reach out and touch his face, as if she was checking to see if he was real. “They aren’t going to zap all of your memory, because I’m going to keep them from doing it. They might accomplish it for a bit, but in the end you’ll remember. I’m just going to teach you how to trick them so that they’ll think they succeeded.”
Jed didn’t respond. He just looked into her eyes.
After a moment, her hand traveled upward until she was pointing at the center of his forehead. “But never you worry, Jed.” She smiled and his heart leapt. “All the while, I’ll be right here.”
His hand found hers and he pulled her finger down from his forehead until it was pointing at his heart. He held it that way for a moment, and then he released her hand.
“You’re a very handsome man, Jed.”
Her eyes closed and he could see that she was going to kiss him, or that she wanted him to kiss her. She hesitated, only centimeters away from his lips, expecting that he would meet her there.
He did not.
“I can’t,” he said. Her eyes opened and he blushed. “I don’t know what’s real.”