If Then by Matthew De Abaitua Read Free Book Online Page B

to who we gain. Have you found more of these soldiers on your patrols?”
    “I have not been out since. The Institute told me to monitor Hector so I keep him with me at all times. I am afraid that if I take him back to the Downs, the Process will come on too quickly and we will lose him without learning anything.”
    “What do you hope to learn?”
    “I am only doing as the Institute requested.”
    “Their request makes sense. You are our most qualified individual when it comes to the inhuman.”
    She didn’t expect him to respond to her sarcasm and instead put her hand upon his arm by way of coercion.
    “We are due another list of evictions.” Her fingers pinched at her necklace for comfort.
    “Already?”
    “Yes. We thought we had reached a stable state but it seems not.”
    “We believe your soldier is the cause,” said the Baron. “He is the new element.”
    The market day crowd pushed between them and against them. Edith put her hand up to indicate that they would speak no more of it in public, and he agreed to visit the council soon.
    All the people of Lewes came into town for allocation day, keen to discover what the Process had in mind for their future. Would there be a box allocated to Hector too? If there was, did that mean the Process had intended all along for him to become a member of the folk? If Edith was right, and Hector was the cause of the increase in the number of evictions, then surely reason would dictate that Hector’s name would be on the next eviction list. He shivered at the prospect of receiving the list; as Edith hinted, the dictation of the list was one of those moments when he was inhuman.
    As noon approached, the people gathered down School Hill. James found Ruth among them. She shared her gains with him – a gallon of barley wine in exchange for two smocks, an agreement to unblock the waste pipe in return for running repairs to a family’s clothes – and then, anxious for the allocation, they fell in step with the quickly moving crowd. Hector walked between them and Ruth took the soldier’s hand.
    “How has he been?”
    “Something in him wants to speak,” said James. Edith’s remark, her hint that he was inhuman continued to nag at him. It was the way she did not expect him to respond; either she considered him slow-witted or perhaps she did not believe his feelings were of any concern.
    “Was I ever like Hector?”
    “When?”
    “In the months after the implant.” He remembered his room at the Institute, how Ruth had knitted a pair of gloves at his bedside throughout his convalescence. Every turn of the needle brought another part of him back into the pattern of his self.
    “You were scattered. It took a while for you to come back. I was knitting you a pair of gloves and they were ready before you were.”
    “I remember the feel of the gloves on my hands and Alex explaining to me that the gloves were not part of me. Did I give up too much to become the bailiff?”
    “Change is part of life.”
    “Edith said there will be more evictions.”
    Ruth looked at the ground. “It’s so hard to know what is right.”
    “She said that I was inhuman.” He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “You will tell me, won’t you, if I stop being me? You promised.”
    Her eyes quickly brimmed with tears, and she nodded quickly and wiped them away at the same time.
    At the bottom of School Hill, the market day crowd merged with the men and women trooping in from the outlying estates and villages, their particular district denoted by the patterns upon their baggy knitted jumpers: yellow and black for Nevill, the black and white of Cliffe, the red and black of Southover, the purple and black of Glynde, and so on, as far afield as the blue and white of Isfield. Children rode on the back of empty carts, the whites of their eyes shining in lean dirty faces. Ruth’s hand tightened around his. They found their place among the people and walked over the bridge and to the allocation