Teachers are not supposed to curse, either.
Zinhle decides to test these new open waters between herself and Ms. Threnody. “Why are you telling me this?”
Threnody looks at her for so long a moment that Zinhle grows uneasy. “I know why you try so hard,” she says at last. “I’ve heard what people say about you, about, about…people like you. It’s so stupid. There’s nothing of us left, nothing. We’re lying to ourselves every day just to keep it together, and some people want to keep playing the same games that destroyed us in the first place.…” She falls silent, and Zinhle is amazed to see that Threnody is shaking. The woman’s fists are even clenched. She is furious, and it is glorious. For a moment, Zinhle wants to smile and feel warm at the knowledge that she is not alone.
Then she remembers. The teachers never seem to notice her bruises. They encourage her because her success protects their favorites, and she is no one’s favorite. If Ms. Threnody has felt this way all along, why is she only now saying it to Zinhle? Why has she not done anything, taken some public stand to try and change the situation?
It is so easy to have principles. Far, far harder to live by them.
So Zinhle nods, and does not allow herself to be seduced. “Thanks for telling me.”
Threnody frowns a little at her nonreaction. “What will you do?” she asks.
Zinhle shrugs. As if she would tell, even if she knew.
“I’ll talk to this representative, I guess,” she says, because it’s not as if she can refuse anyway. They are all slaves these days. The only difference is that Zinhle refuses to pretend otherwise.
The people beyond the Firewall are not people. Zinhle isn’t really sure what they are. The government knows, because it was founded by those who fought and ultimately lost the war, and their descendants still run it. Some of the adults close to her must know—but none of them will tell the children. “High school is scary enough,” said Zinhle’s father, a few years before, when Zinhle asked. He smiled as if this should have been funny, but it wasn’t.
The Firewall has been around for centuries—since the start of the war, when it was built to keep the enemy at bay. But as the enemy encroached and the defenders’ numbers dwindled, they fell back, unwilling to linger too close to the front lines of a war whose weapons were so very strange. And invisible. And insidious. To conserve resources, the Firewall was also pulled back so as to protect only essential territory. The few safe territories merged, some of the survivors traveling long distances in order to join larger enclaves, the larger enclaves eventually merging too. The tales of those times are harrowing, heroic. The morals are always clear: safety in numbers, people have to stick together, stupid to fight a war on multiple fronts, et cetera. At the time, Zinhle supposes, they didn’t feel like they were being herded together.
Nowadays, the Firewall is merely symbolic. The enemy has grown steadily stronger over the years, while tech within the Firewall has hardly developed at all—but this is something they’re not supposed to discuss. (Zinhle wrote a paper about it once and got her only F ever, which forced her to do another paper for extra credit. Her teacher’s anger was worth the work.) These days the enemy can penetrate the Firewall at will. But they usually don’t need to, because what they want comes out to them.
Each year, a tribute of children is sent beyond the Wall, never to be seen or heard from again. The enemy is very specific about their requirements. They take ten percent, plus one. The ten percent are all the weakest performers in any graduating high school class. This part is easy to understand, and even the enemy refers to it in animal husbandry terms: these children are the cull. The enemy does not wish to commit genocide, after all. The area within the Firewall is small, the gene pool limited. They do not take very young children. They do not take healthy adults, or gravid females, or elders who impart useful socialization. Just adolescents who have had a chance to prove their mettle. The population of an endangered species must be carefully managed to keep it healthy.
The “plus one,” though—no one understands this. Why does the enemy want their best and brightest? Is it another means of assuring control? They have total control already.
It doesn’t matter why they want Zinhle. All that matters is that they do.
Zinhle goes to meet Mitra after school so they can walk home. (Samantha and her friends are busy decorating the gym for the school prom. There will be no trouble today.) When Mitra is not waiting at their usual site near the school sign, Zinhle calls her. This leads her to the school’s smallest restroom, which has only one stall. Most girls think there will be a wait to use it, so they use the bigger restroom down the hall. This is convenient, as Mitra is with Lauren, who is sitting on the toilet and crying in harsh, gasping sobs.
“The calculus final,” Mitra mouths, before trying again—fruitlessly—to blot Lauren’s tears with a wad of toilet paper. Zinhle understands then. The final counts for fifty percent of the grade.
“I, I didn’t,” Lauren manages between sobs. She is hyperventilating. Mitra has given her a bag to breathe into, which she uses infrequently. Her face, sallow-pale at the best of times, is alarmingly blotchy and red now. It takes her several tries to finish the sentence. “Think I would. The test. I studied.” Gasp. “But when I was. Sitting there. The first problem. I knew how to answer it! I did ten others. Just like it.” Gasp. “Practice problems. But I couldn’t think. Couldn’t. I.”
Zinhle closes the door, shoving the garbage can in front of it, as Mitra had done before Zinhle’s knock. “You choked,” she says. “It happens.”
The look that Lauren throws at her is equal parts fury and contempt. “What the hell.” Gasp. “Would you know about it?”
“I failed the geometry final in eighth grade,” Zinhle says. Mitra throws Zinhle a surprised look. Zinhle scowls back, and Mitra looks away. “I knew all the stuff that was on it, but I just…drew a blank.” She shrugs. “Like I said, it happens.”
Lauren looks surprised too, but only because she did not know. “You failed that? But that test was easy.” Her breathing has begun to slow. She sets her jaw, distracted from her own fear. “That one didn’t matter, though.” She’s right. The cull only happens at the end of high school.
Zinhle shakes her head. “All tests matter. But I told them I’d been sick that day, so the test wasn’t a good measure of my abilities. They let me take it again, and I passed that time.” She had scored perfectly, but Lauren does not need to know this.
“You took it again?” As Zinhle had intended, Lauren considers this. School officials are less lenient in high school. The process has to be fair. Everybody gets one chance to prove themselves. But Lauren isn’t stupid. She will get her parents involved, and they will no doubt bribe a doctor to assert that Lauren was on powerful medication at the time, or recovering from a recent family member’s death, or something like that. The process has to be fair.
Later, after the blotty toilet paper has been flushed and Lauren has gone home, Mitra walks quietly beside Zinhle for most of the way. Zinhle expects something, so she is not surprised when Mitra says, “I didn’t think you’d ever talk about that. The geo test.”
Zinhle shrugs. It cost her nothing to do so.
“I’d almost forgotten about that whole thing,” Mitra continues. She speaks slowly, as she does when she is thinking. “Wow. You used to tell me everything then, remember? We were like this—” She holds up two fingers. “Everybody used to talk about us. The African princess and her Arab sidekick. They fight crime!” She grins, then sobers abruptly, looking at Zinhle. “You were always a good student, but after that—”