Abolition

Chapter Twenty

A shove at my shoulder wakes me, startling me enough that I almost roll off the couch. Oliver's bruised face looks down at me, his dark eyes amused. "You know that they gave you a bed for a reason right, Kirk? Like, to sleep in?"

I ignore the jab, if only because I don't want to talk about my inconsistent sleeping patterns. "Is it meeting time?"

"Yeah," Oliver says. My stomach growls loudly, and Oliver's smile actually grows. "You slept through lunch, but there are some leftovers for you. How's your head?"

I sit up slowly and don't get dizzy when I'm upright, so that's something. "Better than it has been."

"Excellent. Let's go."

There's a movie playing on a projector in the main room of the hall when we arrive, and there are more people gathered watching it than I figured were staying in the town. Oliver tugs at my arm and leads me down a hallway at the opposite end of where the movie's playing.

"Oliver, where do they get electricity?"

"They generate their own, I think," he says. "There's a river nearby, and they've got something hooked up."

He stops us at the second door on the right and knocks two times, opening the door when a deep voice says, "Enter."

There are two empty chairs at the table Barrowman, Mitsuki, and Mama are gathered at. Oliver and I sit in them, Oliver seating himself a little more carefully than I do. Mama's hands are resting on a small stack of paper in front of her. "So," she says as soon as she has our full attention, "in this pile are the printed copies of the document on the flash chip. It's a list of employees at Weston Enterprises and Logistics suspected of being conformists."

She pauses, eyes falling to the stack of papers. I haven't seen Mama for ten years but even that distance isn't enough for me to miss the bitterness in her tone. I glance around the circle, trying to gauge who else caught it, but nobody else is looking at Mama. Hell, nobody else is making any eye contact with...anybody.

It falls on me, then. "What—what's wrong?"

Mama places her thumb on one of the corners of the stack and let's the pages flick past it. She does it again, and again, and eventually she says, "We have a list of conformists, which is important, but we're still missing one vital piece of information, Kirk. Any idea what that might be?"

She looks up at me, then, but I'm not really paying attention. My thoughts are whirring, trying to connect the dots—she clearly isn't going to tell me outright. We are in an abolitionist ghost town. We have a list of conformists that we know are at Weston—a handy start, if we need to keep an eye on some of the people who are after us, but other than that it's not like we have a plan or anything—

Oh.

"We don't have their plan."

Mama sighs. "No. No, we don't."

Weston's voice sounds, and he's halfway through a sentence before I realize that it's coming from a speaker in the middle of the table. "I did the best with what I had. I got the list—only the list, so I know it's not ideal, but it's a cumulation of months of work, Moira, you know that. I would've given you more, but Polovsky was getting too close."

"Polovsky?" I blurt out. "Like, my supervisor? Henrik Polovsky, head of the Tech Department? Tall, cold, foreboding?"

Oliver snorts, and it's enough for him to grasp his ribs and grimace in pain. Mitsuki immediately looks at him, worry written all over her face, but Oliver shakes his head before she can lay a hand on him.