I have exceeded all expectation. Then let me do the thing myself.”
“Hiram,” she said. And her voice was now low and filled with worry. I think she knew that she could lose me right there. That if she did not prove to me that this was not all some trick, I would be gone, and any hope of Conduction would go with it.
“Very well,” she said. “You want me to show you. I will show you.”
“No games?” I asked. “This is for real?”
“More real than you think,” she said.
14
BUT FOR CORRINE TO admit me into the deepest sanctums of the Underground, she had to ensure that I would never leave. For this reason, she demanded something of me to bind me for good to the cause. And what she demanded was the destruction of Georgie Parks.
I had dreamt of such a deed, in jail, in the pit, and then here, had long contemplated all that I might vent upon Georgie. But now I saw that faced with the thing, the sword in my hand, all my wrath faded in the face of the full shape of what must necessarily follow.
“You were not the first he betrayed,” said Corrine. “And you were not the last. He is back there at Starfall, right now, plying his devious trade.” It was late night. I was down in the library with Hawkins and Corrine. I had just finished my studies for the evening. And I knew, hearing them, that I had not yet come to terms with all that Georgie had done. Some part of me still saw him as he had been mythologized—Georgie the tasking man who’d seized his own liberty. To fully accept his betrayal was to accept the fullness of what had been done to us, how thoroughly they had taken us in, so that even our own heroes, our own myths, were but tools to further maintain the Task.
The plan, they explained to me, was to use our gifts of mimicry and fraud to implicate Georgie in a betrayal. Not a betrayal of the Tasked, but of Georgie’s own Taskmasters.
“You know what they’ll do to him,” I said.
“If he lucky, they’ll hang him,” said Hawkins.
“And if he ain’t,” I said, “they’ll clap him in chains. Break his family. Send him Natchez-way. And work him worse than anything he know. And God forbid the tasking folk find out why he down there.”
“Likely they’ll tell ’em,” said Hawkins.
“We crossing into something here,” I said. “Or y’all done already crossed, and asking me to follow.”
“I say we just kill him outright,” said Hawkins, marching past my concern.
“You know we can’t do that,” said Corrine.
She was right—but not out of any moral principle. It was too obvious, and if reprisals did not find us, they would certainly find every tasking soul in the region. No, Georgie Parks must be dealt with and it must be his masters who did the deed. We would simply offer mild encouragement.
“These people, I know them well,” Corrine said, shaking her head. “Whatever agreement they have with Georgie, I promise you that they trust a freeman less than the slave. And Georgie is a known liar, even in their service, a man who bends under power. Is it so hard to imagine him bending under another power, still?”
“The Underground,” I said.
“Or what they believe the Underground to be,” Corrine replied. “And what if some notice might be found in a distinguished home marking the breadth of his sins, his efforts to work both sides, his feckless enslavement to this Underground? And what if then a package of effects—forged passes, free papers, the literature of abolition, and missives indicating a northward journey—were to be located in Georgie’s home or on his person?”
“We killing him,” I said.
“We are,” said Hawkins.
“By the rope or by the chain,” I said. “We are setting to kill that man.”
“That man meant to kill you,” Corrine said, her gray eyes filling with a low anger. “He meant to kill you, Hiram. He’s killed many before you and if we do nothing he will keep killing. This is a man who takes the last hope of freedom and burns it for fuel. Little girls, old men, whole families, he burns them all. Have you ever been deep into the South? I have. It is hell, worse than the stories say. Endless toil. Endless degradation. No man deserves this, but if any did, it would be the masters themselves first, and men like Georgie Parks second.”