Chapter Two
Citizen-Servants shall be punctual at all times for officially scheduled appointments and activities. Time is a valuable commodity, not to be wasted. (Rule Two, The Megari Way)
As predicted, the girls were waiting for them outside their school. Duncan unbuckled his seat belt and popped open his door to help the girls get buckled in. Beata held her breath, hoping that their teacher, Mrs. Connelly wouldn’t give her more than a disapproving look today. While her thin smile was polite as she escorted the girls to the car, her eyes were disapproving. She swept her gaze around the interior of the mini-van, looking for evidence of poor caretaking, Beata was sure. The old bat probably would like nothing better than to find Beata in violation of caretaking protocol for something more serious than chronic tardiness. Beata wished the kids would hurry and get set so she could take off before Mrs. Connelly got up the jigglies to actually say something to Beata.
Teachers were almost always jealous of the caretakers, because they had 20 – 40 hybrid kids at a time, and they all had varying levels of discovery about their powers. Plus, the teachers all lived at the school and weren’t assigned homes since they weren’t allowed family units. In another fifteen years, Beata would be sending Dominic off into the world on his own, and then her caretaking duties would be done. It was rumored that old Caretakers would be recycled as Teachers every few years. The training processes had already begun for some of the first hybrid caretakers, the ones who went through their indoctrination in the Megari Way almost immediately. The ones from cities conquered sooner than Phoenix, like New York, D.C., and Chicago. Cities that were now completely abandoned, patrolled only by Megari aircraft with orders to shoot to kill any living thing that far north.
Too late, Connelly was mincing in her teetery teacher heels around the car, her brows drawn sharply together, intent in her pinched brown eyes. Not wanting to make a bad situation worse, Beata rolled down the window with a friendly smile. Maybe she could sweeten Connelly’s sour mood with some extra kindness.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Connelly! I’m so glad to see you today! How are you?” Beata’s voice was bright and cheery, personable, but the annoyed teacher was having none of it.
“Ms. Lorio, it is currently three-thirty in the afternoon.” Mrs. Connelly began.
“Yes, Mrs. Connelly, about that. I’m so sorry! It’s just been a- .”
“You are aware that the children must be picked up by three-fifteen at the very latest, yes? I know we’ve been over this a number of times, Ms. Lorio.”
“I know that, Mrs. Connelly. Once again, I’m sorry that I had to- .”
“These are not my rules, Mrs. Connelly. The Megari Hybrid Educational Authority is very strict about these requirements, and your lack of punctuality is affecting more than just you and your wards, Ms. Lorio. If affects us all.”
Beata had had enough of this self-righteous prig getting upset over a few minutes. “Now wait just a minute, Mrs. Connelly. Other than a very minor inconvenience to your time, how is this affecting you?” Beata was just warming up, two days worth of worry, hurry, and exhaustion coming out in her voice.
“You live at the school. I can’t always get her on time because it’s tough to get the kids picked up and shuffled from their activities on time every day. Children sometimes take a little extra time. Since you don’t see them outside these hallowed halls, maybe you’ve forgotten that!” Mrs. Connelly’s face blanched at this last bit. Her teeth gritted together, and her pinched little eyes were welling up with tears as she looked away from Beata to stare off in the distance, breathing deeply to control her emotions.
Beata’s anger sank into guilt as she realized that this woman probably knew exactly what it was like to live with children. She had probably had her own children at some point. She’d probably had a whole family. The Caretakers had been specifically chosen to act as parent-figures because they’d had no children of their own. They’d be easier to train in the Megari Way than parents with previous experience. Plus, so many human children had been exterminated in the Day of Reckoning, that any Caretaker who had lost their own human child and then been assigned a hybrid child might have resented the child and harmed it. The Megari wouldn’t stand for that. As a Teacher, though, Mrs. Connelly wasn’t subject to the same rule. She may have been the only survivor from her own family. Of course now, everything was different, and Teachers weren’t allowed a family unit. She’d be going back inside the school tonight to sleep with no children of her own to cuddle.
“I- I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it came out…” Beata stammered out her apology, knowing it was too late. Her thoughtless angry words had just burned a bridge and stirred up the pain of this woman who was only trying to do her job.
Mrs. Connelly took a final deep breath, closing her eyes and Beata could almost hear her counting silently to ten in her head. Moments later, Mrs. Connelly had herself under control finally, and turned back to face Beata with a chilly smile.
“I’m sure we all have our burdens to bear and our stories to tell, Ms. Lorio. Perhaps you’ll find it in your heart to be punctual for the sake of Imogen and Hermia, who suffer the embarrassment of having to wait out here with me every day, rather than going home at the same time as our other students. If that can’t be arranged, perhaps you can arrange with the MHA to pick them up on time instead. I’m sure they’d be happy to accommodate your very important schedule.” With that, she spun on her teetery heels and marched back into the school, waving to the girls in the backseat, who both waved back with sympathetic and slightly embarrassed looks.
She turned to find Duncan giving her the “Way to go, Mom” stare. The girls, normally vibrant and bouncy from school, were quiet and subdued. Beata had blown it again. Speaking without thinking was going to get her killed someday if she wasn’t careful. Not to mention, what a great example of human compassion she’d just demonstrated to the kids.
Beata had the strange thought that in the past, this day would have gone so much better if she’d just been able to get a cup of coffee. And a greeting card to send to Mrs. Connelly to apologize for her heinous conduct. No more greeting cards either. Maybe she could write a note. Or not. Who knows what the MHA might use as evidence against her someday. A note to a teacher admitting guilt for something as simple as misspoken words or tardiness could well end your life if they brought you to the Court of Reckoning for Judgment. Well, too late to fix it now. Best just to move forward with you time on this earth.
“Everybody buckled in? Good. Mia, can you pick up Dominic’s apple juice? He dropped it a while back and he needs to keep drinking fluids today. How was school today, Imogen?” Beata heaved a sigh of relief as she pulled the van back out into the street to get to their next stop, the Food Distribution Facility. Imogen’s reddish-blonde curls fell in a tangle over her bright blue eyes, as she narrated her day in her piping voice.
“I told Miss Thompson that I wasn’t coming back tomorrow, and she said she’d miss me and we had peaches for lunch and she let me teach my good-bye song to all the other kids…” Beata knew if she let her, Imogen would continue with all the minutiae of her day if not interrupted. Duncan turned around and tickled Imogen’s knee to get her attention.
Imogen giggled and answered Duncan’s photopathic question, “Ye-essss Duncaaannnn. I showed them the dance we made up too. Jose said it was stupid, and Miss Thompson made him sit in time-out, but everybody else thought it was super-fun!” Duncan smiled at his little sister as she trailed off, looking out at the sunshine filled sandy streets. Automatically, she began to hum a jaunty little tune. They’d long ago stopped asking her not to hum. It was her very nature to do so. She didn’t even know she was doing it most of the time. She’d been known to imitate the voices she heard in her dreams during her sleep, and sometimes Beata or Duncan would stop by her door to listen, fascinated by the dream conversations peeking out of her nighttime mind.
Mia, on the other hand, ever the serious child, picked up Dominic’s apple juice cup for the third time and stated emphatically, “If you throw it down again, Dom, I’m not picking it up. You’re just going to be thirsty.” She turned back around in her seat, cracked open her current novel, and without turning around or looking, pointed her finger directly at Dom.
“Don’t do it.”
Dom, giggled and put his apple juice cup back in his mouth rather than dropping it like he had intended. Mia could read minds, so Dominic liked to play little games with her where she’d “catch him” – the telepathic equivalent of a game of peekaboo. Mia tickled Dom’s knee with her pointing finger and then settled into her book. It was another of the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Beata had loved those as a child, and was able to pass her set down to Mia, along with many of her other favorite childhood novels. Public libraries and bookstores were not really available to the human servants much, unless you filled out a metric ton of paperwork for each book you wished to read.
Their Megari overlords fully approved of learning, but found fiction confusing and dishonest. They didn’t ban it, but they did carefully oversee how much fiction you were consuming, and cut off your supply if you were “overindulging”. Mia was at the age where they were just the right food for her fertile imagination, adventurous, but not so wildly ridiculous that they were silly. Mia and Beata both had appreciated the sincerity and earnest joy of the frontier family. Mia had begun asking if they could go fishing sometime, like Laura did in the books, and Beata wasn’t quite sure what to tell her. She didn’t think it was allowed.
Luckily, they had left most people’s personal libraries alone, the same with CD’s and DVDs. You couldn’t get new movies or music, really, and fictional television programs were a thing of the past. The television airways were now filled with informational and instructional messages from the Megari about The Megari Way. Radio had gone the way of the dodo, and the internet was now severely restricted as well, or at least their ability to access the internet and the content being generated by human citizen-servants was.
Right after she’d graduated college and decided to move to Phoenix to work at the Children’s Hospital there, her parents had come to visit and bring her all the boxes of stuff she’d managed to avoid hauling to Arizona so far. Beata recalled her mother’s gentle laughter in her kitchen as they’d shared pizza while dad and her younger brother, Marc, had hauled in box after box of her childhood memorabilia and stacked them in the living room of her tiny apartment.
Later, as she and her mom were going through the boxes together, she was astounded to find her mom’s eyes tearing up over one of the several boxes of childhood books they’d brought. Beata had hugged her normally vivacious and laughing mother in concern, but her mother just waved away her emotional response, saying, “I just remember how many rainy days you spent on your bedroom floor, reading these stories so intensely. You wanted to BE that little frontier girl. That’s all you could talk about. I remember you even dressed as Laura Ingalls Wilder for Halloween that year.”
They’d giggled together over the memories that night, and it was the first time she’d ever felt like her mom was more than just her mother. She felt like a valued friend, one who knew your whole history, so you didn’t have to explain the whys about what you were doing now. She just knew.
Glancing at her brood in the rearview mirror, Beata wondered if she’d ever have the chance to form those kinds of relationships with them. Would they even be allowed to come back to see her once the MHA took over their education full-time at seventeen years old? Would they be allowed to see each other? Would they be allowed to have families of their own someday? Fall in love, have children, bring them to her so that she could meet them?
The MHA wasn’t big on letting its citizen-slaves in on information until it was too late to do anything about it. Who was she kidding? There was nothing she could do about it anyway. But for those wonderful, kind, loving faces who trusted her to do the right thing for them and keep them safe, she would surely try.
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