The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) Read Online Free

terrified.
    The warden tapped the end of his pen against the table a few
times. “Why were you out after curfew?”
    I blinked innocently at him; I was pretty good at blinking
innocently. “Because I got lost,” I said.
    He didn’t write that down. He reached in his pocket for a
battered pack of cigarettes, lit one, and then settled back and stared at me
again. His eyes were a pale blue, his expression flat, but that wasn’t what
made my throat go suddenly dry. There weren’t many cigarettes left on the
island and I happened to know, thanks once again to Cynda ,
that the wardens saved them for important occasions. To mark a particularly
lucrative deal with some hapless person vulnerable to blackmail or other coercion.
To celebrate some especially pleasurable arrest.
    But I was nobody. I was just some girl who got lost. There
was no reason for him to celebrate arresting me.
    The warden smoked, staring at me with his flat eyes. Clearly
he was going to sit there until I said more, but I wasn’t going to say more,
not until he made me. People talked too much, Cynda said. They got tangled up and gave themselves away. It was better to be as
brief as possible—that way you had fewer lies to remember.
    It was hard, though, to sit quietly with the wardens staring
at me. The cigarette smoke tickled in my throat, made me need to cough. I
managed to swallow instead. To keep myself from talking I began to count
silently to myself. When I was somewhere past five hundred and thirty, the
warden leaned forward and tapped out his cigarette on the tabletop, making a
pile of gray ash. He carefully tucked the half-smoked cigarette into his shirt
pocket and leaned back in his chair again.
    “Why were you out after curfew?” he said again, exactly as
he’d said it before.
    This time I gave a small embarrassed shrug. “I couldn’t
sleep, and so I went outside to get some fresh air, and then I got lost.”
    He made a circling gesture with one finger. Keep talking.
    “I couldn’t sleep because of the thunderstorm,” I said.
    The warden scowled, but I was mindful of Cynda’s warning—keep lies simple—and anyway I couldn’t think of anything
else credible to add. Should I say I’d gotten lost while trying to pet one of
the stray cats that roamed the city? No, that was too childish sounding. It
might work for the older warden, but not the scarred one. He wasn’t looking at
me as if he thought of me as a child.
    Then it hit me. “The thunderstorm kept me awake, and then I
couldn’t stop thinking about the city meeting tomorrow.”
    That got a reaction. The scarred warden didn’t say anything,
but he glanced at the older warden. Did they know what the city meeting was
about? None of the rest of us knew. We just knew it was bound to be bad.
    The scarred warden wrote something on his paper. Then he
looked up at me again. “Go on.”
    “I know I shouldn’t have done it,” I said, glancing
apologetically at the older warden. “But I was scared. I am scared. The city meeting scares me.”
      “Look at me,”
the scarred warden said. “Not him.”
    I did, squinting against the light. “I was sitting on the
dorm steps and I kept thinking about going to the circle tomorrow for the city
meeting and about how I didn’t want to go. I wanted to be somewhere else. So I
sort of started walking in the other direction.”
    From the corner of my eye I
could see that the older warden was nodding. “Toward the orchard,” he said.
    “Toward the orchard. And I went
through the orchard, and then I sort of kept walking until I got to the gap in
the wall. And then— ” I took a deep breath, considered what I was about
to say, and decided to risk it—“I sort of went across the wasteland to
the edge of the woods.”
    Neither warden moved, but the room felt suddenly different.
My breathing seemed too loud.
    There was no rule against going to the woods—there
didn’t need to be—so I hadn’t gotten myself deeper into trouble. With
luck,