The Testaments(54)

“What can we do?” I asked. “It sounds like there’s nothing.”

“I’m coming to that,” said Elijah. “As it turns out, there may be a chance. A faint hope, you could say.”

“Faint hopes are better than none,” said Ada.

The source had been promising to deliver a very big document cache to Mayday, said Elijah. Whatever this cache contained would blow Gilead sky-high, or so the source claimed. But he or she hadn’t finished assembling it before The Clothes Hound was robbed and the link was broken.

The source had contrived a fallback plan, however, which he or she had shared with Mayday several microdots ago. A young woman claiming to have been converted to the faith of Gilead by the Pearl Girls missionaries could enter Gilead easily—many had done so. And the best young woman to transfer the cache—indeed, the only young woman acceptable to the source—would be Baby Nicole. The source did not doubt that Mayday knew where she was.

The source had made it clear: no Baby Nicole, no document cache; and if no document cache, then Gilead would continue as it was. Mayday’s time would run out, and Melanie’s and Neil’s deaths would have been for nothing. Not to mention my mother’s life. But if Gilead were to crumble, it would all be different.

“Why only me?”

“The source was firm on that point. Said you’re the best chance. For one thing, if you get caught they won’t dare kill you. They’ve made too much of an icon out of Baby Nicole.”

“I can’t destroy Gilead,” I said. “I’m just a person.”

“Not alone, of course not,” said Elijah. “But you’d be transporting the ammunition.”

“I don’t think I can,” I said. “I couldn’t be a convert. They’d never believe me.”

“We’ll train you,” said Elijah. “Praying and self-defence.” It sounded like some sort of TV skit.

“Self-defence?” I said. “Against who?”

“Remember the Pearl Girl found dead in the condo?” said Ada. “She was working for our source.”

“Mayday didn’t kill her,” said Elijah. “It was the other Pearl Girl, her partner. Adrianna must’ve been trying to block the partner’s suspicions about the whereabouts of Baby Nicole. There must’ve been a fight. Which Adrianna lost.”

“There’s a lot of people dying,” I said. “The Quakers, and Neil and Melanie, and that Pearl Girl.”

“Gilead’s not shy about killing,” said Ada. “They’re fanatics.” She said they were supposed to be dedicated to virtuous godly living, but you could believe you were living virtuously and also murder people if you were a fanatic. Fanatics thought that murdering people was virtuous, or murdering certain people. I knew that because we’d done fanatics in school.





33


I somehow agreed to go to Gilead without ever definitely agreeing. I’d said I’d think about it, and then the next morning everyone acted as if I’d said yes, and Elijah said how brave I was and what a difference I would make, and that I would bring hope to a lot of trapped people; so then I more or less couldn’t go back on it. Anyway, I felt that I owed Neil and Melanie, and the other dead people. If I was the only person the so-called source would accept, then I would have to try.

Ada and Elijah said they wanted to prepare me as much as they could in the short time they had. They set up a little gym in one of the cubicles, with a punching bag, a skipping rope, and a leather medicine ball. Garth did that part of the training. At first he didn’t talk to me much except about what we were doing: the skipping, the punching, tossing the ball back and forth. But after a while he did thaw a little. He told me he was from the Republic of Texas. They’d declared independence at the beginning of Gilead, and Gilead resented that; there had been a war, which had ended in a draw and a new border.

So right now Texas was officially neutral, and any actions against Gilead by its citizens were illegal. Not that Canada wasn’t neutral too, he said, but it was neutral in a sloppier way. Sloppier was his word, not mine, and I found it insulting until he said that Canada was sloppy in a good way. So he and some of his friends had come to Canada to join the Mayday Lincoln Brigade, for foreign freedom fighters. He’d been too young to be in the actual Gilead War with Texas, he’d only been seven. But his two older brothers had been killed in it, and a cousin of his had been grabbed and taken into Gilead, and they hadn’t heard from her since.

I was adding in my head to figure out exactly how old he was. Older than me, but not too much older. Did he think of me as more than an assignment? Why was I even spending time on that? I needed to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing.



* * *



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At first I worked out twice a day for two hours, to build stamina. Garth said I wasn’t in bad shape, which was true—I’d been good at sports in school, a time that seemed long ago. Then he showed me some blocks and kicks, and how to knee someone in the groin, and how to throw a heartstopper punch—by making a fist, wrapping your thumb across the second knuckles of your middle and index fingers, then punching while keeping your arm straight. We practised that one a lot: you should strike first if you had the chance, he said, because you’d benefit from the surprise.