The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) Read Free Page A

alone. He caught up to us and positioned himself on my other
side, and together the two men marched me through the city. They had work boots
on, so they didn’t pay much attention to where we stepped. They pulled me
straight through puddles and twice I stepped on sharp rocks, stumbled, was
jerked upright.
    The younger one was rougher than the older one, and when he
figured out that my feet were callused enough not to mind the puddles and
rocks—except the really sharp ones—his fingers dug into my arm. It
was a stupid petty punishment, but I had bruises to show for it later, angry
elongated ovals that changed from blue to purple to yellow over the course of
the next few weeks, marking the ordinary passing of time as the world fell to
pieces all around me.
    We passed the laundry house, where soap-scented steam rose
gently from the vent pipes; skirted the food preservation buildings and the
infirmary, where one light burned; and made our way around the cafeteria, dark
now and silent. Then we came to the center of the city, to the circle with its
concentric rows of steps, to the watchtower and the door at its base. To the
prison.
    Even though I’d known where we were headed, the sight of the
windowless door made my knees suddenly weak.
    The older warden swung open the heavy outer door. It was
metal and it opened with a raw echoing clang. Inside, the long hallway smelled
of antiseptic and fear, and the black-and-white tiled floor felt cold and
smooth and strangely slick.
    I had never been inside the prison before. There were rows
of doors on each side of the hall, gray steel doors with heavy bolts. The
scarred warden started to pull me down the hall toward those doors, but the
older warden stopped suddenly—so that I was yanked between the two of
them—and dragged me into a nearer room. That room, unlike the others, had
a small mesh-covered window in its door.
    “Sit,” he said, pointing at a metal folding chair. Then he
went back out into the hall, jerking his head to tell the other warden to
follow him. Hisses and mutters followed. I couldn’t hear what they were saying,
but it sounded like a disagreement.
    Their delay gave me a chance to scan my surroundings. The
room looked clean but smelled musty, like old damp paint, and was mostly
bare—a gray metal table sat straight in front of me, and two other metal
chairs were folded and leaning against the wall. One bare light bulb hung from
the ceiling, right above the table.
    After a moment both men came into the room. The older warden
grabbed a chair, opened it with a clang, and sat down a few feet away, off to
the side. I had to turn my head to see him. The scarred warden took the other
chair and sat down behind the gray metal table before pulling a small book with
a metal cover out of his shirt pocket.
    The dangling light bulb above him was glaring, but I didn’t
squint or look away. I didn’t want to look shifty or too frightened—I
didn’t want them to realize I was a systematic rule-breaker who had only now
been caught. I wanted them to see a first-time offender, a nobody, a girl who
had stupidly gotten lost and stayed out after curfew.
    “Name,” the warden said, but he was already
writing—everybody knew my name—so I thought he was talking more to
himself than to me. My feet were wet, the bottoms of my pants drenched, and as
I watched the warden write, my teeth began to chatter. It wasn’t because I was
terrified—though I was—and it irritated me. This was going to be
tricky enough without my body throwing out random unintended signals.
    “Name,” the warden said again, more sharply. He didn’t look
up.
    I guess the formalities had to be observed.
    “Red,” I said. Some of the others had been given two names,
but I only had one, and it was a darn unimaginative one at that.
    The warden dropped his pen on the table and leaned back in
his chair, making his black shirt pull taut over his chest. Ridiculous, I told
myself. He was showing off, trying to