The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale 2)

“By courier,” said Ada.

“Everyone knows those courier services leak like a sieve.”

“I didn’t say courier service, I said courier.”

I thought a minute. “Oh,” I said. “You took them to her?”

“Not took, not directly. I got them to her. Your mother really liked those pictures,” she said. “Mothers always like pictures of their kids. She’d look at them and then burn them, so no matter what, Gilead wouldn’t ever see them.”

* * *

—

After maybe an hour we ended up at a wholesale carpet outlet in Etobicoke. It had a logo of a flying carpet, and it was called Carpitz.

Carpitz was a genuine carpet wholesaler out front, with a showroom and a lot of carpets on display, but in back, behind the storage area, there was a cramped room with half a dozen cubicles along the sides. Some of them had sleeping bags or duvets in them. A man in shorts was sleeping in one, sprawled on his back.

There was a central area with some desks and chairs and computers, and a battered sofa over against the wall. There were some maps on the walls: North America, New England, California. A couple of other men and three women were busy at the computers; they were dressed like the people you see outside in the summer drinking iced lattes. They glanced over at us, then went back to what they were doing.

Elijah was sitting on the sofa. He got up and came over and asked if I was all right. I said I was fine, and could I have a drink of water please, because all of a sudden I was very thirsty.

Ada said, “We haven’t eaten lately. I’ll go.”

“You should both stay here,” said Garth. He went out towards the front of the building.

“Nobody here knows who you are, except Garth,” Elijah said to me in a low voice. “They don’t know you’re Baby Nicole.”

“We’re keeping it that way,” said Ada. “Loose lips sink ships.”

Garth brought us a paper bag with some wilted croissant breakfast sandwiches in it, and four takeouts of terrible coffee. We went into one of the cubicles and sat down on some used-furniture office chairs, and Elijah turned on the small flatscreen that was in there so we could watch the news while we were eating.

The Clothes Hound was still on the news, but nobody had been arrested. One expert blamed terrorists, which was vague because there were a lot of different kinds. Another said “outside agents.” The Canadian government said they were exploring all avenues, and Ada said their favourite avenue was the waste bin. Gilead made an official statement saying they knew nothing about the bombing. There was a protest outside the Gilead Consulate in Toronto, but it wasn’t well attended: Melanie and Neil weren’t famous, and they weren’t politicians.

I didn’t know whether to be sad or angry. Melanie and Neil being murdered made me angry, and so did reme

mbering nice things they’d done when they were alive. But things that should have made me angry, such as why Gilead was being allowed to get away with it, only made me sad.

Aunt Adrianna was back in the news—the Pearl Girls missionary found hanging from a doorknob in a condo. Suicide had been ruled out, the police said, and foul play was suspected. The Gilead Embassy in Ottawa had lodged a formal complaint, stating that the Mayday terrorist organization had committed this homicide and the Canadian authorities were covering up for them, and it was time for the entire illegal Mayday operation to be rooted out and brought to justice.

There was nothing on the news about me being missing. Shouldn’t my school have reported it? I asked.

“Elijah fixed it,” Ada said. “He knows people at the school, that’s how we got you into it. Kept you out of the spotlight. It was safer.”

32

I slept in my clothes that night, on one of the mattresses. In the morning, Elijah called a meeting of the four of us.

“Things could be better,” said Elijah. “We may have to get out of this place pretty soon. The Canadian government’s under a lot of pressure from Gilead to crack down on Mayday. Gilead’s got a bigger army and they’re trigger-happy.”

“Cavemen, the Canadians,” said Ada. “Sneeze and they fall over.”

“Worse, we’ve heard Gilead could target Carpitz next.”

“We know this how?”

“Our inside source,” said Elijah, “but we got that before The Clothes Hound was burgled. We’ve lost contact with him or her, and with most of our rescue-line people inside Gilead. We don’t know what’s happened to them.”

“So where can we put her?” said Garth, nodding at me. “Out of reach?”