Made Men by Bradley Ernst Page A

He looked side to side , face in the shadows. Gitte imagined that he
smiled. The police on his side of the wall—no, that was wrong—on
the oppressed side of the wall were
cracking down on waving. One could stand to be seen, but one could not wave to
augment or validate the interaction. People were arrested for less. A tiny
cherry-colored glow flared as he lit a cigarette. Her uncle hadn’t smoked a
month ago. Were cigarettes calming?
    She wouldn’t take it up. It seemed dirty .
    Just
seeing him calmed her enough. She had never smoked, but much of her family used
to. Before the war. So many of them were gone. He was
the last and lucky, she guessed, to be able to take up the habit at all.

 
    R yker and Rickard
pulled books into the tunnel and emerged from their burrow. After heating
themselves for a few minutes by a radiator, they made for the side door, easing
shut the latch on the folded card. Padding, now warm, down the alleyway in
their new-testament shoes.
    They
followed her scent.
    She
had paused at a place along the wall. Calves bunched, toe-tipped for elevation,
the librarian waved at a man in a hat over, what they knew from the newspapers,
the controversial structure. Their not-mother tilted
her head, blew a kiss, and craned her long, warm neck to see over the gathering
crowd. Workmen on the east side of the wall smeared mortar, placing blocks in
rows. Their not-mother wiped at her face. In two days,
if the men continued to place blocks at that rate, she’d no longer be able to
see him.
    How would she know where to look?
    The
newspapers were full of stories of families divided by the wall. Homes were
lost. Manmade landscapes changed each day. The man of interest to their not-mother , Gitte, held up binoculars. A scarf to her nose,
the librarian’s emotional composure had changed yet again. Though upset, she
seemed determined to hide her expressions from the man’s augmented eyes. Waving
in a more final way, she dashed to where the wall married a building, out of
the hatted man’s sight, then leaned against a newspaper machine, tin bearer of
consistent bad news, to collect herself —wiping
at her dripping face. She appeared isolated despite the ever-increasing throng
of bipeds and the odd quadruped.
    “Closer.”
Rickard clicked.
    OK.
    Now
just feet away, Ryker hissed at a stray canid that paused to sniff one of their
librarian not-mother’s gingerbread-scented legs. Rickard stooped to read the
front page inside her unlikely perch. Ryker joined him to peep through the
glass. On the newspaper, an image showcased a less comely woman as she jumped
from a second floor window. He deduced that gravity had promptly pulled her
toward a large, circular bit of canvas held by a dozen men, but the outcome was
not provided; the picture served as human bait—coins—pushed into
the tin can were needed in order to turn the page.
    The
building before them was the structure from whence the woman had jumped. Ryker
scanned the pavement below the window for blood. Blood contained iron, which
stained things.
    No blood. She’d made it. He liked to
save money.
    Workmen
inside the building set bricks into window frames to avoid more people leaking
to freedom. Oppression required people to oppress; these men had been tasked to
plug the holes.
    A
crew with expensive-looking equipment pushed through to photograph the workers
from the street, though the images they collected seemed unworthy of paper and
ink, let alone coins. The lower floors were barricaded already; the windows
being sealed were higher—six stories up. Ryker wondered why building
levels were stories, in American English, which he and his brother practiced
when they could.
    Were the Americans that unimaginative?
    It
seemed a lazy overlap of word meanings. Stories belonged in books. The British
knew that and called different floors storeys, instead.
    Uniformed
men pushed people in a pattern. The photographers appeared divided: some
clicked wildly at the workers