The Testaments

30

I was telling you about the moment when Elijah said that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I don’t like remembering that feeling. It was like having a sinkhole open up and swallow you—not only you but your house, your room, your past, everything you’d ever known about yourself, even the way you looked—it was falling and smothering and darkness, all at once.

I must have sat there for at least a minute, not saying anything. I felt I was gasping for breath. I felt chilled through.

Baby Nicole, with her round face and her unknowing eyes. Every time I’d seen that famous photo, I’d been looking at myself. That baby had caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people just by being born. How could I be that person? Inside my head I was denying it, I was screaming no. But nothing came out.

“I don’t like this,” I said at last in a small voice.

“None of us likes it,” said Elijah kindly. “We would all like reality to be otherwise.”

“I wish there was no Gilead,” I said.

“That’s our goal,” said Ada. “No Gilead.” She said it in that practical way she had, as if no Gilead was as easy as fixing a dripping tap. “You want some coffee?”

I shook my head. I was still trying to take it in. So I was a refugee, like the frightened women I’d seen in SanctuCare; like the other refugees everyone was always arguing about. My health card, my only proof of identity, was a fake. I’d never legally been in Canada at all. I could be deported at any time. My mother was a Handmaid? And my father…“So my father’s one of those?” I said. “A Commander?” The idea of part of him being part of me—being inside my actual body—made me shiver.

“Luckily not,” said Elijah. “Or not according to your mother, though she doesn’t wish to endanger your real father by saying so, as he may still be in Gilead. But Gilead is staking its claim to you via your official father. It’s on those grounds they’ve always demanded your return. The return of Baby Nicole,” he clarified.

Gilead had never given up on the idea of finding me, Elijah told me. They’d never stopped looking; they were very tenacious. To their way of thinking I belonged to them, and they had a right to track me down and haul me across the border by whatever means, legal or illegal. I was underage, and although that particular Commander had disappeared from view—most likely in a purge—I was his, according to their legal system. He had living relatives, so if it came to a court case they might well be granted custody. Mayday couldn’t protect me because it was classed internationally as a terrorist organization. It existed underground.

“We’ve planted a few false leads over the years,” said Ada. “You were reported in Montreal, and also in Winnipeg. Then you were said to be in California, and after that in Mexico. We moved you around.”

“Was that why Melanie and Neil didn’t want me going to the march?”

“In a way,” said Ada.

“So I did it. It was my fault,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

“How do you mean?” said Ada.

“They didn’t want me seen,” I said. “They got killed because they were hiding me.”

“Not exactly,” said Elijah. “They didn’t want pictures of you circulating, they didn’t want you on TV. Gilead might conceivably search the images of the march, try to match them. They had your baby picture; they must have an approximate idea of what you might look like now. But as it turned out, they’d suspected independently that Melanie and Neil were Mayday.”

“They might have been following me,” said Ada. “They might have connected me with SanctuCare, and then with Melanie. They’ve placed informants inside Mayday before—at least one fake escaped Handmaid, maybe more.”

“Maybe even inside SanctuCare,” said Elijah. I thought of the people who used to go to those meetings at our house. It was sickening to think one of them might have been planning to kill Melanie and Neil, even while they were eating the grapes and the pieces of cheese.

“So that part had nothing to do with you,” said Ada. I wondered if she was just trying to make me feel better.

“I hate being Baby Nicole,” I said. “I didn’t ask to be.”

“Life sucks, end of story,” said Ada. “Now we have to work out where to go from here.”

Elijah left, saying he’d be back in a couple of hours. “Don’t go out, don’t look out the window,” he said. “Don’t use a phone. I’ll arrange for a different car.”

Ada opened a tin of chicken soup; she said I needed to get something inside me, so I tried. “What if they come?” I asked. “What do they even look like?”

“They look like anybody,” Ada said.

In the afternoon, Elijah came back. With him was George, the old street guy I’d once thought was stalking Melanie. “It’s worse than we thought,” said Elijah. “George saw it.”

“Saw what?” said Ada.

“There was a CLOSED sign on the shop. It’s never closed in the day, so I wondered,” said George. “Then three guys came out and put Melanie and Neil into the car. They were kind of walking them as if they were drunk. They were talking, making it look social, like they’d been having a chat and were just saying goodbye. Melanie and Neil just sat in the car. Looking back—they were slumping, as if they were asleep.”

“Or dead,” said Ada.

“Yeah, could be,” said George. “The three guys went off. About one minute later the car blew up.”

“That’s way worse than what we thought,” said Ada. “Like, what did they tell before, inside the store?”

“They wouldn’t have said anything,” said Elijah.

“We don’t know that,” said Ada. “Depends on the tactics. Eyes are harsh.”

“We need to move out of here fast,” George said. “I don’t know if they saw me. I didn’t want to come here, but I didn’t know what to do so I called SanctuCare and Elijah came and got me. But what if they were tapping my phone?”

“Let’s trash it,” said Ada.

“What kind of guys?” Elijah asked.

“Suits. Businessmen. Respectable-looking,” said George. “They had briefcases.”

“I bet they did,” said Ada. “And they stuck one of them in the car.”

“I’m sorry about this,” George said to me. “Neil and Melanie were good people.”

“I need to go,” I said because I was going to start crying; so I went into my bedroom and shut the door.

That didn’t last long. Ten minutes later there was a knock, then Ada opened my door. “We’re moving,” she said. “Toot sweet.”

I was in bed with the duvet pulled up to my nose. “Where?” I said.

“Curiosity got the cat in trouble. Let’s go.”

We went down the big staircase, but instead of going outside we went into one of the downstairs apartments. Ada had a key.

The apartment was like the one upstairs: furnished with new things, nothing personal. It looked lived in, but just barely. There was a duvet on the bed, identical to the one upstairs. In the bedroom was a black backpack. There was a toothbrush in the bathroom, but nothing in the cabinet. I know because I looked. Melanie used to say that 90 percent of people looked in other people’s bathroom cabinets, so you should never keep your secrets in there. Now I was wondering where she actually did keep her secrets, because she must have had a lot of them.

“Who lives here?” I asked Ada.

“Garth,” she said. “He’ll be our transport. Now, quiet as mice.”

“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “When’s something going to happen?”

“Wait long enough and you won’t be disappointed,” said Ada. “Something will happen. Only you might not like what it is.”

31

When I woke up, it was dark and a man was there. He was maybe twenty-five, tall and thin. He was wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, no logo. “Garth, this is Daisy,” Ada said. I said hi.

He looked at me with interest and said, “Baby Nicole?”

I said, “Please don’t call me that.”

He said, “Right. I’m not supposed to say the name.”

“We good to go?” Ada said.

“Far as I know,” said Garth. “She should cover up. So should you.”

“With what?” said Ada. “Didn’t bring my Gilead veil. We’ll get in the back. Best we can do.”

The van we’d come in was gone, and there was a different one—a delivery van that said SPEEDY DRAIN SNAKING, with a picture of a cute snake coming out of a drain. Ada and I climbed into the back. It held some plumbing tools but also a mattress, which was where we sat. It was dark and stuffy in there, but we were moving along quite fast as far as I could tell.

“How did I get smuggled out of Gilead?” I asked Ada after a while. “When I was Baby Nicole?”

“No harm in telling you that,” she said. “That network was blown years ago, Gilead shut down the route; it’s wall-to-wall sniffer dogs now.”

“Because of me?” I said.

“Not everything is because of you. Anyway this is what happened. Your mother gave you to some trusted friends; they took you north up the highway, then through the woods into Vermont.”

“Were you one of the trusted friends?”

“We said we were deer-hunting. I used to be a guide around there, I knew people. We had you in a backpack; we gave you a pill so you wouldn’t scream.”

“You drugged a baby. You could’ve killed me,” I said indignantly.

“But we didn’t,” said Ada. “We took you over the mountains, then down into Canada at Three Rivers. Trois-Rivières. That was a prime people-smuggling route back in the day.”

“Back in what day?”

“Oh, around 1740,” she said. “They used to catch girls from New England, hold them hostage, trade them for money or else marry them off. Once the girls had kids, they wouldn’t want to go back. That’s how I got my mixed heritage.”

“Mixed like what?”

“Part stealer, part stolen,” she said. “I’m ambidextrous.”

I thought about that, sitting in the dark among the plumbing supplies. “So where is she now? My mother?”

“Sealed document,” said Ada. “The less people who know that, the better.”

“She just walked off and left me?”

“She was up to her neck in it,” said Ada. “You’re lucky you’re alive. She’s lucky too, they’ve tried to kill her twice that we know of. They’ve never forgotten how she outsmarted them about Baby Nicole.”

“What about my father?”

“Same story. He’s so deep underground he needs a breathing tube.”

“I guess she doesn’t remember me,” I said dolefully. “She doesn’t give a fuck.”

“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,” said Ada. “She stayed away from you for your own good. She didn’t want to put you at risk. But she’s kept up with you as much as she could, under the circumstances.”

I was pleased by this, though I didn’t want to give up my anger. “How? Did she come to our house?”

“No,” said Ada. “She wouldn’t risk making you a target. But Melanie and Neil sent her pictures of you.”

“They never took any pictures of me,” I said. “It was a thing they had—no pictures.”

“They took lots of pictures,” said Ada. “At night. When you were asleep.” That was creepy, and I said so.

“Creepy is as creepy does,” said Ada.

“So they sent these pictures to her? How? If it was so secret, weren’t they afraid—”

“By courier,” said Ada.

“Everyone knows those courier services leak like a sieve.”

“I didn’t say courier service, I said courier.”

I thought a minute. “Oh,” I said. “You took them to her?”

“Not took, not directly. I got them to her. Your mother really liked those pictures,” she said. “Mothers always like pictures of their kids. She’d look at them and then burn them, so no matter what, Gilead wouldn’t ever see them.”

After maybe an hour we ended up at a wholesale carpet outlet in Etobicoke. It had a logo of a flying carpet, and it was called Carpitz.

Carpitz was a genuine carpet wholesaler out front, with a showroom and a lot of carpets on display, but in back, behind the storage area, there was a cramped room with half a dozen cubicles along the sides. Some of them had sleeping bags or duvets in them. A man in shorts was sleeping in one, sprawled on his back.

There was a central area with some desks and chairs and computers, and a battered sofa over against the wall. There were some maps on the walls: North America, New England, California. A couple of other men and three women were busy at the computers; they were dressed like the people you see outside in the summer drinking iced lattes. They glanced over at us, then went back to what they were doing.

Elijah was sitting on the sofa. He got up and came over and asked if I was all right. I said I was fine, and could I have a drink of water please, because all of a sudden I was very thirsty.

Ada said, “We haven’t eaten lately. I’ll go.”

“You should both stay here,” said Garth. He went out towards the front of the building.

“Nobody here knows who you are, except Garth,” Elijah said to me in a low voice. “They don’t know you’re Baby Nicole.”

“We’re keeping it that way,” said Ada. “Loose lips sink ships.”

Garth brought us a paper bag with some wilted croissant breakfast sandwiches in it, and four takeouts of terrible coffee. We went into one of the cubicles and sat down on some used-furniture office chairs, and Elijah turned on the small flatscreen that was in there so we could watch the news while we were eating.

The Clothes Hound was still on the news, but nobody had been arrested. One expert blamed terrorists, which was vague because there were a lot of different kinds. Another said “outside agents.” The Canadian government said they were exploring all avenues, and Ada said their favourite avenue was the waste bin. Gilead made an official statement saying they knew nothing about the bombing. There was a protest outside the Gilead Consulate in Toronto, but it wasn’t well attended: Melanie and Neil weren’t famous, and they weren’t politicians.

I didn’t know whether to be sad or angry. Melanie and Neil being murdered made me angry, and so did remembering nice things they’d done when they were alive. But things that should have made me angry, such as why Gilead was being allowed to get away with it, only made me sad.

Aunt Adrianna was back in the news—the Pearl Girls missionary found hanging from a doorknob in a condo. Suicide had been ruled out, the police said, and foul play was suspected. The Gilead Embassy in Ottawa had lodged a formal complaint, stating that the Mayday terrorist organization had committed this homicide and the Canadian authorities were covering up for them, and it was time for the entire illegal Mayday operation to be rooted out and brought to justice.

There was nothing on the news about me being missing. Shouldn’t my school have reported it? I asked.

“Elijah fixed it,” Ada said. “He knows people at the school, that’s how we got you into it. Kept you out of the spotlight. It was safer.”

32

I slept in my clothes that night, on one of the mattresses. In the morning, Elijah called a meeting of the four of us.

“Things could be better,” said Elijah. “We may have to get out of this place pretty soon. The Canadian government’s under a lot of pressure from Gilead to crack down on Mayday. Gilead’s got a bigger army and they’re trigger-happy.”

“Cavemen, the Canadians,” said Ada. “Sneeze and they fall over.”

“Worse, we’ve heard Gilead could target Carpitz next.”

“We know this how?”

“Our inside source,” said Elijah, “but we got that before The Clothes Hound was burgled. We’ve lost contact with him or her, and with most of our rescue-line people inside Gilead. We don’t know what’s happened to them.”

“So where can we put her?” said Garth, nodding at me. “Out of reach?”

“What about where my mother is?” I asked. “You said they tried to kill her and failed, so she must be safe, or safer than here. I could go there.”

“Safer is a matter of time, for her,” said Elijah.

“Then how about another country?”

“A couple of years ago we could have got you out through Saint-Pierre,” said Elijah, “but the French have closed that down. And after the refugee riots England’s a no-go, Italy’s the same, Germany—the smaller European ones. None of them want trouble with Gilead. Not to mention outrage from their own people, the mood being what it is. Even New Zealand’s shut the door.”

“Some of them say they welcome woman fugitives from Gilead, but you wouldn’t last a day in most of them, you’d be sex-trafficked,” said Ada. “And forget South America, too many dictators. California’s hard to get into because of the war, and the Republic of Texas is nervous. They fought Gilead to a standstill, but they don’t want to be invaded. They’re avoiding provocations.”

“So I might as well give up because they’ll kill me sooner or later?” I didn’t really think that, but it’s how I felt right then.

“Oh no,” said Ada. “They don’t want to kill you.”

“Killing Baby Nicole would be a very bad look for them. They’ll want you in Gilead, alive and smiling,” said Elijah. “Though we no longer have any real way of knowing what they want.”

I thought about this. “You used to have a way?”

“Our source in Gilead,” said Ada.

“Someone in Gilead was helping you?” I asked.

“We don’t know who. They’d warn us of raids, tell us when a route was blocked, send us maps. The information’s always been accurate.”

“But they didn’t warn Melanie and Neil,” I said.

“They didn’t appear to have total access to the inner workings of the Eyes,” said Elijah. “So whoever they are, they aren’t top of the food chain. A lesser functionary, we are guessing. But risking their life.”

“Why would they?” I asked.

“No idea, but it’s not for money,” said Elijah.

According to Elijah, the source used microdots, which were an old technology—so old that Gilead hadn’t thought of looking for them. You made them with a special camera, and they were so small they were almost invisible: Neil had read them with a viewer fitted inside a fountain pen. Gilead was very thorough in its searches of anything crossing the border, but Mayday had used the Pearl Girls brochures as their courier system. “It was foolproof for a time,” Elijah said. “Our source would photograph the documents for Mayday and stick them on the Baby Nicole brochures. The Pearl Girls could be counted on to visit The Clothes Hound: Melanie was on their list of possible converts to the cause, since she always accepted the brochures. Neil had a microdot camera, so he’d glue the return messages onto the same brochures, and then Melanie would return them to the Pearl Girls. They had orders to take any extra brochures back to Gilead for use in other countries.”

“But the dots can’t work anymore,” said Ada. “Neil and Melanie are dead, Gilead found their camera. Now they’ve arrested everyone on the Upstate New York escape route. Bunch of Quakers, a few smugglers, two hunting guides. Stand by for a mass hanging.”

I was feeling more and more hopeless. Gilead had all the power. They’d killed Melanie and Neil, they would track down my unknown mother and kill her too, they would wipe out Mayday. They would get hold of me somehow and drag me into Gilead, where the women might as well be house cats and everyone was a religious maniac.

“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.

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.

“Hit me,” he’d say. Then he would brush me aside and punch me in the stomach—not too hard, but hard enough so I could feel it. “Tighten your muscles,” he’d say. “You want a ruptured spleen?” If I cried—either in pain or in frustration—he would not be sympathetic, he would be disgusted. “You want to do this or not?” he’d say.

Ada brought in a dummy head made of moulded plastic, with gel eyes, and Garth tried to teach me how to poke somebody’s eyes out; but the idea of squishing eyeballs with my thumbs gave me the shudders. It would be like stepping on worms in your bare feet.

“Shit. That would really hurt them,” I said. “Thumbs in their eyes.”

“You need to hurt them,” said Garth. “You need to want to hurt them. They’ll be wanting to hurt you, bet on that.”

“Gross,” I said to Garth when he wanted me to practise the eye-poke. I could picture them too clearly, those eyes. Like peeled grapes.

“You want a panel discussion on whether you should be dead?” said Ada, who was sitting in on the session. “It’s not a real head. Now, stab!”

“Yuck.”

“Yuck won’t change the world. You need to get your hands dirty. Add some guts and grit. Now, try again. Like this.” She herself had no scruples.

“Don’t give up. You have potential,” said Garth.

“Thanks a bundle,” I said. I was using my sarcastic voice, but I meant it: I did want him to think I had potential. I had a crush on him, in a hopeless, puppyish way. But no matter how much I might fantasize, in the realistic part of my head I didn’t see any future in it. Once I’d gone into Gilead, I would most likely never see him again.

“How’s it going?” Ada would ask Garth every day after our workout.

“Better.”

“Can she kill with her thumbs yet?”

“She’s getting there.”

The other part of their training plan was the praying. Ada tried to teach me that. She was quite good at it, I thought. But I was hopeless.

“How do you know this?” I asked her.

“Where I grew up, everyone knew this,” she said.

“Where?”

“In Gilead. Before it was Gilead,” she said. “I saw it coming and got out in time. A lot of people I knew didn’t.”

“So that’s why you work with Mayday?” I said. “It’s personal?”

“Everything’s personal, when you come right down to it,” she said.

“How about Elijah?” I asked. “Was it personal for him too?”

“He taught in a law school,” she said. “He was on a list. Someone tipped him off. He made it over the border with nothing but his clothes. Now let’s try this again. Heavenly Father, forgive my sins, and bless…please stop giggling.”

“Sorry. Neil always said God was an imaginary friend, and you might as well believe in the fucking Tooth Fairy. Except he didn’t say fucking.”

“You need to take this seriously,” said Ada, “because Gilead sure does. And another thing: drop the swearing.”

“I don’t swear hardly at all,” I said.

The next stage, they told me, was that I should dress up like a street person and panhandle somewhere where the Pearl Girls would see me. When they started to talk with me, I should let them persuade me to go with them.

“How do you know the Pearl Girls will want to take me?” I asked.

“It’s likely,” Garth said. “That’s what they do.”

“I can’t be a street person, I won’t know how to act,” I said.

“Just act natural,” said Ada.

“The other street people will see I’m a fraud—what if they ask me how I got there, where are my parents—what am I supposed to say?”

“Garth will be there with you. He’ll say you don’t talk much because you’ve been traumatized,” said Ada. “Say there was violence at home. Everyone will get that.” I thought about Melanie and Neil being violent: it was ridiculous.

“What if they don’t like me? The other street people?”

“What if?” said Ada. “Tough bananas. Not everybody in your life is going to like you.”

Tough bananas. Where did she get these expressions? “But aren’t some of them…aren’t they criminals?”

“Dealing drugs, shooting up, drinking,” said Ada. “All of that. But Garth will keep an eye on you. He’ll say he’s your boyfriend, and he’ll run interference if anyone tries to mess with you. He’ll stay right with you until the Pearl Girls pick you up.”

“How long will that be?” I asked.

“My guess is not long,” said Ada. “After the Pearl Girls scoop you, Garth can’t go along. But they’ll coddle you like an egg. You’ll be one more precious Pearl on their string.”

“But once you get to Gilead, it might be different,” said Elijah. “You’ll have to wear what they tell you to wear, watch what you say, and be alert to their customs.”

“If you know too much to begin with, though,” Ada said, “they’ll suspect us of training you. So it’ll need to be a fine balance.”

I thought about this: was I clever enough?

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“If in doubt, play dumb,” said Ada.

“Have you sent any pretend converts in there before?”

“A couple,” said Elijah. “With mixed results. But they didn’t have the protection you’ll have.”

“You mean from the source?” The source—all I could picture was a person with a bag over their head. Who were they really? The more I heard about the source, the weirder they sounded.

“Guesswork, but we think it’s one of the Aunts,” said Ada. Mayday didn’t know much about the Aunts: they weren’t in the news, not even the Gilead news; it was the Commanders who gave the orders, made the laws, and did the talking. The Aunts worked behind the scenes. That’s all we were told at school.

“They’re said to be very powerful,” said Elijah. “But that’s hearsay. We don’t have a lot of details.”

Ada had a few pictures of them, but only a few. Aunt Lydia, Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Vidala, Aunt Helena: these were their so-called Founders. “Pack of evil harpies,” she said.

“Great,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”

Garth said that once we were on the street I needed to follow orders, because he was the one with the street smarts. I wouldn’t want to provoke other people into fighting with him, so saying things like “Who was your slave last year” and “You’re not the boss of me” would not be good.

“I haven’t said stuff like that since I was eight,” I said.

“You said both of them yesterday,” said Garth. I should choose another name, he said. People might be looking for a Daisy, and I certainly couldn’t be Nicole. So I said I’d be Jade. I wanted something harder than a flower.

“The source said she needs to get a tattoo on her left forearm,” Ada said. “It’s always been a non-negotiable demand.”

I’d tried for a tattoo when I was thirteen, but Melanie and Neil had been strongly against it. “Cool, but why?” I asked now. “There’s no bare arms in Gilead, so who’s going to see it?”

“We think it’s for the Pearl Girls,” said Ada. “When they pick you up. They’ll be directed to look specially for it.”

“Will they know who I am, like, the Nicole thing?” I asked.

“They just follow instructions,” said Ada. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“What tattoo should I get, a butterfly?” That was a joke, but nobody laughed.

“The source said it should look like this,” said Ada. She sketched it:

“I can’t have that on my arm,” I said. “It’s wrong for me to have it.” It was so hypocritical: Neil would have been shocked.

“Maybe it’s wrong for you,” said Ada. “But it’s right for the situation.”

Ada brought in a woman she knew to do the tattoo and the rest of my street makeover. She had pastel green hair, and the first thing she did was tint my hair the same shade. I was pleased: I thought I looked like some dangerous avatar from a video game.

“It’s a start,” said Ada, evaluating the results.

The tattoo wasn’t just a tattoo, it was a scarification: raised lettering. It hurt like shit. But I tried to act as if it didn’t because I wanted to show Garth that I was up to it.

In the middle of the night I had a bad thought. What if the source was only a decoy, meant to deceive Mayday? What if there was no important document cache? Or what if the source was evil? What if the whole story was a trap—a clever way of luring me into Gilead? I’d go in, and I wouldn’t be able to get out. Then there would be a lot of marching, with flags and choir singing and praying, and giant rallies like the ones we’d seen on TV, and I would be the centrepiece. Baby Nicole, back where she belonged, hallelujah. Smile for Gilead TV.

In the morning, while I was eating my greasy breakfast with Ada, Elijah, and Garth, I told them about this fear.

“We’ve considered the possibility,” said Elijah. “It’s a gamble.”

“It’s a gamble every time you get up in the morning,” said Ada.

“This is a more serious gamble,” Elijah said.

“I’m betting on you,” Garth said. “It’ll be so amazing if you win.”