Read Online The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) by Amanda Witt - Free Book Online Page A

reminded him we were
visible, because he turned back and braced his arms on either side of me again,
and this time I stood still.
    “The Watchers aren’t just going to sit there and watch us
starve,” I said. “They must have some sort of plan.”
    “We’ll see.” He sounded as if he meant it.
    “How? How will we see?”
    He hesitated.
    “It’s Rafe ,” I said, and as I
spoke I grew certain. “He’s up to something.”
    Farrell Dean didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. I knew I
was right.
      “I was there
when they arrested him,” I said, trying to ignore the cold finger of fear
sliding down my spine. “What’s going on?”
    Farrell Dean shifted, but he didn’t look away. “There’s not
much to tell. Not yet. We’re still gathering information.”
    “ We as in who? You
and Rafe ? And Meritt ?” What
he was saying finally hit me. “You’re spying on the Watchers.”
    “ Shhh .” He threw me a
warning look, glanced over his shoulder, then leaned in close. “Have you ever
thought about how many products we have that we can’t account for?” He spoke
very quietly, his mouth against my ear. “Cigarettes, eyeglasses, pencils .
How’d we get those? We don’t mine graphite.”
    I had asked a nanny mother about this years ago, and the
answer had seemed plausible enough at the time. The Watchers knew how to
manufacture each of those things, she’d said, but they had the city do so only
in spurts, stockpiling enough for years and years, mothballing the tools until
they were needed again. Fleetingly, I wondered why they hadn’t kick-started the
manufacture of cough medicine, given we were running short, but I was
distracted by a sudden wave of guilt.
    “Agriculture,” I said. “We should have been working harder.”
It was my fault. We couldn’t help the wet spring, but maybe we could have done
more to make up the difference this summer.
    “Yeah, you’re a real slacker, Red.” Farrell Dean pulled back
a bit and looked at me. Though his tone was teasing, his eyes were grave. “The problem runs deeper than a bad season and your lazy
workers.”
    “The time of the ashes?”
    My supervising farmer liked to complain about how much worse
the crops had been since the months of drifting ash. He thought it had messed
up the soil pH, made it hard for the plants to take in nutrients.
    Farrell Dean shrugged. “The time of the ashes put them out
of their depth. That’s how Rafe put it. They were
fine as long as we could follow Plan A. Plan B—well, the Watchers don’t
seem to have one of those.”
    He was suggesting the unthinkable.
    The city commissioners had always guided us—we knew no
other way—and even if we did, how could we go against them? They had
wardens, and stunners, and guns.
    And—
    “What about the Guardians?” I said.
    Despite what the scarred warden had told me, I half-hoped Farrell
Dean would tell me not to be silly, not to mistake bedtime bogeymen stories for
reality. If he said it, I’d believe him. I’d trust him over the creepy warden
any day.
    But Farrell Dean nodded. “They’re a problem,” he said.
“Still, we don’t have a choice.”
    “This is crazy,” I said, and sheltered there behind the
tractor shed, blocked from view by Farrell Dean, I felt suddenly conspicuous.
The Guardians—what if they could see and hear me, like the wardens but
exponentially increased? I didn’t want to go against the Watchers; I really
didn’t want to go against the Guardians.
    “Surely we can hang on until spring.” My voice
sounded thin to my own ears.
    Farrell Dean looked me straight in the eye.
“We’re starving,” he said, and his voice was steady, which frightened me more
than if he’d been dramatic. “If we don’t take control away from the Watchers,
some of us won’t make it to spring.”
      Some of us . The wind rose and stirred my
hair; the workers from B gathered gourds. The sky above was bright and blue,
oblivious to the hungry winter that was