Page 9 of A Better World

“So long as we’re a good fit. It’s a little ominous, isn’t it?”

“They seem to like us.”

“Do we like them?”

“Does it matter?” he asked. “It’s like those old game shows: a prize behind a door. Do we take the cash that won’t last us six months, or do we trade it for whatever’s behind door number two?”

She shrugged, knowing the answer but still uncertain.

“I wanted this my whole life,” Russell continued. “A company town. Can you imagine if my dad was still alive? This is probably the one thing that might have made him like me. But now that we’ve got this brass ring, I can see that we’ll lose something, too. In a way, everyone here will be our boss. They’ll have experience and connections.We won’t. That’ll be tense… My whole life is tense. I’ve always felt uncomfortable around other people. It’s probably why I got fired even though they needed me to run that department—”

“No—” Linda started to interrupt, but Russell stopped her.

“—I’m not good with people. I know that. You don’t have to protect me from it. I know I wasn’t popular over at the EPA… Around here, they don’t seem to care about whether I go out for drinks or crack the right kinds of jokes. They care about the work. It’ll be fine for me. Better than home. You’re the one who’ll need to adjust. You like your friends. You like mouthing off.”

She felt no need to defend herself. She knew it wasn’t an insult. Shedidlike her friends. Shedidlike mouthing off.

“…But in the end, I don’t think any of that will be a problem. We’ll get used to it. I know Jack’s a cold fish, and from what I saw of Zach, he wasn’t great, either. But the guys in my department were okay. I think the people who live and work in this town aren’t so different from us. You’ll find your friends. I’ll… I’ll work. We’ll feel good, physically. We’ll eat well. It’s unfortunate that this place is so cut off that we’ll never be able to have visitors. But very quickly, I think you’ll forget what’s left behind. We all will. That’s the trade-off. For you more than me. We’ll become the kinds of people who live behind walls.”

She said what she’d known she’d say all along. “Let’s bet the college fund on door number two.”

There was hardly time for good-byes. She reassigned her patients and sent out a brief email—not enough, but all she could do. Her mentor, Dr. Fielding, called the day they left.

“You can’t move to a company town,” Fielding said. She’d just turned seventy-eight and was still practicing despite a hacking cough, which she’d x-rayed in the office, and self-diagnosed:Stage four. Guess I should have gotten more X-rays!

“Pretty sure I can,” Linda told her.

“I’ll up your hours. Overtime for three months,” she said, her voice all rasp and exhale. Linda pictured her, vaping in the supply closet. Itwas illegal to do indoors, but no one in the position to enforce such things was paying attention.

“Not enough,” Linda answered.

“Honey, you can’t even vote there. Stay in New York. It’s a broken democracy, but it’s a democracy. You think if a bomb drops, you’ll want to survive it? You won’t.”

“I have to do this,” Linda said.

“You’ve got a career here. What do you have there? They can dress it up as the prettiest pig at the prom, but it’s still a pig. Those people can’t handle real life. They’re not living, they’re avoiding death. It’s a tomb.”

Linda was trying hard not to cry. She’d been thinking about her young patients all day, imagining their parents reading the prosaic note she’d sent:Dear families—I’ve loved serving you for the last fourteen years but now it’s time to move on. I wish you the best!Some of those children were very sick and needed her to testify in housing court about the effects of mold in their bedrooms. They needed regular paperwork filed to get their medicine. They needed Dr. Linda Farmer.

“If we don’t get out of here, it might be my kids who are patients.”

“The mom card.” Fielding sighed. “Okay, you win.” Then she told Linda to take care and keep in touch, to punch Russell in the nuts for her, which she often said, about everybody. And then the Farmer-Bowens were gone. Their belongings packed and shipped by BetterWorld, they boarded the private plane without encumbrance. She watched the outside world get small beneath her feet. A speck of nothing beneath the great blue sky.

ABOUT THE CALADRIUS

• The caladrius was engineered by top BetterWorld scientists for use as an alternative food source.

• They require little sustenance and no hormones to rapidly gain weight.

• Like lobsters, they never stop growing. They haven’t been around for long enough to test the theory, but it’s estimated they can live for up to one hundred years!

• They’re a perfect creature for husbandry, leaving 10 percent the footprint of chickens.

• The original rugged individuals, caladrius avoid their own kind, only grouping to hunt when food is scarce or during spring mating season.

• They’re highly sensitive to pollution. Once outside Plymouth Valley’s walls, they fail to thrive.

• Their DNA comes from preserved fossils in Pompeii, which BW scientists revitalized.

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