logic of it all was clear. But I felt myself now slipping into something darker, something far beyond the romance I imagined for myself when I set off that night with Sophia. The Task was a trap. Even Georgie was trapped. And so who was Corrine Quinn to judge such a man? Who was I, who’d run with no higher purpose save my own passions and my own skin? Now I understood the Underground war. It was not the ancient and honorable kind. No armies amassed at the edges of the field. For every one agent, there were a hundred Quality, and for every Quality, there were a thousand low whites sworn to them. The gazelle does not match claws with the lion—he runs. But we did more than run. We plotted. We instigated. We sabotaged. We poisoned. We destroyed.
“It’s on us,” said Hawkins. “Do you get that it’s on us? He is out there breaking families, sending folk to the jails, to the auction, and he is doing it in our name.”
“We did not ask for this, Hiram,” said Corrine. “You are right, it is not our normal work. But what would you have us do? What is the option we have not yet conceived?”
There was none.
Now Corrine produced another file, and put it before me on the table, and I knew what was within—the usual assortment of stolen documents that might help put me in the mind of the Quality. Then Corrine looked at me and the look was not of pity or sorrow, it was fire.
* * *
—
A month later I walked out of my quarters in my flannels to begin the evening routine. It was full summer now. The nights had shortened and the days had begun their July sprawl. On the path from my quarters, I saw Hawkins approaching with Mr. Fields, both in their day clothes. Hawkins made small talk while Mr. Fields’s eyes darted to and fro. I felt that something was coming. Hawkins looked me up and down and said, “No work tonight. Tomorrow neither. Get some rest.”
I looked at him a little longer to see if I correctly caught his meaning.
“We got one,” he said.
But I did not rest—neither that evening, that night, nor the next morning. I had only the vaguest notions of the Underground’s methods in the field, and my mind ran circuits trying to imagine. They met me outside the following evening. I wore a pair of comfortable trousers, a shirt, hat, and the same pair of brogans I had thought to run in. I tried my best to conceal my excitement, but then I met eyes with Hawkins and he laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Hawkins. “It’s just you can’t go back. You can’t get out. You know that, right?”
“Long past the getting-out point,” I said.
“Indeed,” said Hawkins. “But it is a load we putting on you. And I’m feeling all that you about to feel, right now, looking at you. And I’m remembering myself when they first brought me into all this. You about to see.”
“He can’t know,” Mr. Fields said. “And besides, what else is there now?”
We walked up from the quarters toward the main house of Bryceton and convened in one of the side-buildings.
There was a table with three cups and a jar, and from the jar Hawkins poured three servings of hard cider. He took a sip, sucked in a stream of air, then said, “In a sense it’s an easy one. About a day’s journey south of here. And then a day’s journey back. Just one man.”
“And in another sense?” I asked.
“It’s one man, a real man,” he said. “This ain’t hopping or running or some spell down in the library. This is real patrol, real hounds out there who’d like nothing better than to carry you off.”
Hawkins ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. I had the sense that he was more scared for me than I was for myself.
“All right, listen,” he said. “Man’s name is Parnel Johns. He done did something to get him in bad with the local tasking folks. Had a grift he was running. Stealing from his master and selling it to some of the low whites. His master knew something was off but could not figure on what.”
“So he took it out on all of ’em,” I said.
“Surely did,” said Mr. Fields. “And he did so with interest, working the whole plantation double-time to get it back, beatings if they come