Chapter 20

Mist had a weary look in her eyes as she slowly got up off of her bed and walked across the room. Rain was fairly certain the expression had nothing to do with the possibility that their roommates might walk back in at any moment. Locking the door wouldn’t do any good since their roommates had codes to punch into the door the same way that Mist and Rain did.
From where she sat on her own bed, it was hard to see what Mist was doing. Rain didn’t want to alarm her by walking over and interfering, so she waited patiently. Her roommate was kneeling on the floor near one of the windows, next to a desk any of them could use when they needed it, and it sounded like maybe she was pulling up one of the baseboards. A few seconds later, Mist came back, sitting next to Rain on her bed with a familiar-shaped item, wrapped in a white towel.
Rain held her breath as she watched Mist carefully unwrap whatever it was she’d found in the cellar at the house in the woods. Once the towel was removed, Rain realized she was looking at a book, one made of paper, something she’d never seen before, though she knew they existed. It was certainly old, the pages crinkled from weather. Looking at the edge, it appeared as if some of the pages were missing large chunks.
Mist scooted toward her but didn’t let go of the item. “Look,” she said, tilting the front cover of the book toward Rain.
Parts of the front cover were missing as well, but Rain could clearly make out what it was her friend wanted her to see. In the picture, a woman in a long, elegant gown, with flowing blonde hair, had her arms around a man in a gray uniform. His arms were wrapped around her waist as he smiled down at her, and the woman looked just as happy as she tilted her face toward his approaching lips. They were about to kiss. On the mouth. And the woman seemed to welcome it.
Shaking her head, Rain tried to reason through what the picture might mean. “Maybe… a man wrote it,” she said, attempting to fit this new artifact into her picture of the past. Mist flipped the book over and showed a picture of the author on the back, an older woman with glasses and short curly hair. “So? That doesn’t mean anything. It’s possible a man wrote it and pretended to be a woman, just to spread propaganda.”
“Rain, you can explain it away however you’d like, but Sunny has a friend in Communication who has a Translator Device. She borrowed it, and though we didn’t get a chance to read the entire book, we were able to get the gist. This man and woman in the book had intercourse. Both of them enjoyed it. It sounded a lot like the way the Marrieds do it--on a bed. When he touched her, when he kissed her, the woman enjoyed it immensely. The man was allowed to show his pleasure, too.”
Still unable to process what she was hearing, Rain continued to shake her head. “Again, it could be something invented by men to make women think what the men were doing to them was all right, that they were meant to enjoy it.”
Undeterred, Mist said, “It talks about how life was like back then, and while it’s true men were the leaders, women were important, too. They had roles they played. This was written about a time called the Civil War, though Sunny figured out it was actually written a couple of hundred years after the war ended. During the Civil War, women helped the men that were fighting. Some of them ran their plantations and farms. Others even fought in the war, disguised as men. And, during the time that this book was written, the author says she’s a business owner and the mayor of her town. Rain, this is enough proof for me to believe we’ve been lied to. I do think there were times when men acted as superiors to women, but I think it was a really long time ago, even before this war, and I don’t think women were ever treated as badly as we treat men today.”
Having heard enough, Rain got up and walked across the room, tempted to put her hands over her ears to block out Mist’s arguments. None of it made sense. How could it be that women weren’t actually treated worse than animals? That they weren’t bound and used for men’s pleasure, forced to cook, clean, and keep the home? To take care of the children but only speak when spoken to? It seemed as if the entire world the Mothers had convinced generation after generation of women was once a reality may never have existed at all.
She turned around to see Mist putting the book back in a hollow space in the wall behind a baseboard. The wood slid back into place, then Mist walked toward her, her hands in front of her as she nervously intertwined her fingers and then pulled them apart. “You can’t tell anyone about this, Rain. Even if you don’t believe it, you can’t tell.”
“I won’t,” Rain assured her, looking Mist in the eye.
“If you do, I’ll be in more trouble than you can fathom. They’ll likely take me to the Bridge.”
Drawing in a deep breath, Rain repeated herself. “I said I won’t, Mist. I know. I won’t say anything.”
Mist nodded once, still looking unconvinced. “Just remember, you have secrets, too.”
“Mist, there’s no reason for you to threaten me. I have no reason to tell anyone about it, okay? Besides, apparently you trust Sunny more than you do me.”
“I do trust Sunny more than I trust you,” Mist admitted. Rain felt heat rise in her cheeks at the admission. “Sunny and I have similar viewpoints on the Motherhood, Rain. You don’t share them. At least, you haven’t. I hoped that talking to that man today would help you, but I’m still not sure.”
“Well… it didn’t change my mind about anything,” Rain insisted, stomping away from her so-called friend, back toward her bed. She threw herself down on the edge of it. “He didn’t have anything to say that would make me feel sorry for any of them.”
A brow arched over one of Mist’s eyes. “Really? You still don’t feel like the way we’ve been treating them, using them solely for breeding and nothing more, is wrong?”
Throbbing began in her temples and pulsated out across her forehead, wrapping around to the back of her head as Rain tried to process everything she’d heard in the last few minutes. “I don’t know,” she said, tossing herself backward onto the pillow. “I don’t know, Mist.”
“Well, you need to think about it. I already told you my plans, Rain, and we could use you.”
Rain looked her friend in the eye for a second before she began to shake her head. “Forget it. There’s no way in hell I’m going with you.”
“Not even if we take 24C with us?” Mist asked, prodding a nerve.
Inhaling through her nose, Rain shook her head, but the idea of fleeing in the night with Mist, Adam, and a dozen or so others didn’t sound as scary if Adam was there. Thinking of him experiencing weather for the first time, standing in the rain, or how he would look with the sunlight glinting off his hair, made her question her own convictions for a moment.
Mist saw it, too. “I’m going to go get something to eat,” she said, taking a few steps toward the door. “Just think about it, Rain. If you care about him at all, you’ll do what you can to help 24C.”
Her hand was on the doorknob when Rain’s mouth fell open, and his name slipped out. “Adam.”
“What’s that?” Mist asked, turning back to face her.
Focusing up at the ceiling, Rain said, “He wants to be called Adam.”
She heard Mist make the small sound she did when she smiled. “That’s a nice name, Rain.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t say more, and Mist left the room, leaving Rain to ponder a million questions that had no answers.