From the moment Danielle was employed and entered the small sound engineering booth, she had not spoken. Father Silas had stopped her at the door of the unit and explained the rules without ever acknowledging her presence.
The first and the last rules were the same: “You must listen. Never speak.”
That was easy for her. She was quiet when he explained what she’d be doing, as if she hadn’t passed the tests and interviews.
“You’re lucky your husband was accepted into the Virtues Program. We need augmented soldiers now more than ever,” he told her when he left.
She was lucky. Without Elias, she never would have gotten the credits needed to take the courses. Without his connections, she never would have had the interview. Without Elias…
Danielle rubbed at her already raw eyes as she stared at her comm unit. The troops that had been sent beyond the city walls were back, but Elias had yet to answer her call. She knew what that meant, but nobody had informed her of it. She could deny the truth a little longer.
She wasn’t lucky if Elias was dead.
Instead of focusing on what her future would entail without him, she connected her comm unit to her work terminal. Once the connection was approved, she switched to a dead channel and started typing.
Her job that day was to splice a new message to be broadcast outside the city walls. After the previous broadcast was answered with an attack—one that had cost them a third of the city—the Church decided mercy was no longer an option.
“This is for all survivors. We are here for you. We are waiting for you with open arms. Come and rejoice in the city’s light.”
Danielle cut up the end of the message. Father Silas sent her new sound bites from the Cardinal of Communications along with the new message to splice.
She typed in the message, listened to the sound bites, and corrected any pitches and pauses that made the Cardinal’s voice appear too mechanical.
“This is for all survivors. We are here. We will open our arms in peace. Please approach the city through the eastern gate marked 18.” She had a hard time finding the sound bites for the number, but once she spliced together an ate and teens it sounded good enough.
The rest of the message, a much longer ending than before, was instructions on what the survivors could expect: quarantine, inspection, isolation. It even talked about mutated genes and the vertical levels of the city. Like the original message, it talked about the abundance of food and water available to every citizen, the hierarchy in the city, and what was expected of everyone. It was basically the city’s guide book, summarized to the most specific points all children should know.
Neither version ever talked about the regime that would send people like Danielle and her husband to their deaths if anyone knew the truth of their marriage.
Danielle found the message too long. Any survivors would be bored to death before they ever reached the city gates. Maybe, it was because she had heard it thousands of times.
Once she had spliced together the final version, she sent it to Father Silas for approval. Danielle never spoke, but that didn’t mean she made no sound. As she waited for a confirmation, she disconnected her terminal and went into a testing stage. She then disconnected her comm unit from the terminal and used its built-in keyboard to type out a new message.
“It’s all a lie. Don’t come here. Especially if you’re a woman. Especially if you’re different.” The Cardinal’s voice came out of her comm unit quietly. There were awkward pauses in his speech and different tones, but it felt nice to hear someone so powerful agree with her.
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