Chapter 4 : The Red Parade
The shopping district opened at seven sharp, and by seven-fifteen, I had counted fourteen Marthas, eight Handmaid pairs, and three patrol gaps wide enough to drive a truck through.
My escort position put me at the district's south entrance, close enough to the bread stall to smell the rye baking, far enough from the main Guardian post to observe without being observed. Peters wasn't my partner today—some rotation I didn't understand had paired me with a younger man named Cho who seemed content to stand in silence and watch the crowd.
Good. Silence let me think.
The token economy was simpler than I'd expected. Each household had tokens stamped with identifying marks—Commander's seal, district code, household number. Marthas used them at stalls. Handmaids used them at specific vendors. The tokens changed hands but stayed within the system, a closed loop that eliminated the need for cash and created a perfect audit trail.
Every purchase recorded. Every transaction traceable. No way to buy anything without Gilead knowing.
I watched a Martha exchange tokens for eggs at a stall near the fountain. The vendor marked something in a ledger. The Martha tucked the eggs into her basket and moved on, but not before brushing past another Martha at the adjacent stall. The brush was too deliberate. Their baskets touched for half a second.
Dead drop.
Something small had changed hands. A note, maybe, or a token from a different household. The kind of communication that looked like an accident but wasn't.
I filed the location. Third pillar from the fountain, egg stall side. Thirty feet from my position. The patrol gap at the fifteen-minute mark would give anyone using that spot about ninety seconds of unwatched time.
Not enough for a conversation. Plenty for a message.
The Handmaids moved through the district in their paired formation, wings limiting their vision to a narrow cone in front of them. They spoke to each other in murmurs—the approved phrases, probably, the "blessed be the fruit" and "may the Lord open" that served as greeting, farewell, and everything in between.
Two of them passed my position at 0842. Red cloaks, white wings, baskets held at identical angles. One of them glanced at me as she handed over her transit pass.
Not a casual glance. Two seconds of sustained eye contact, long enough to be deliberate, short enough to be deniable. Her face was young—late twenties, maybe early thirties—with the kind of careful blankness that suggested she was hiding something beneath the surface.
A test. She was checking to see if I was sympathetic or dangerous.
I gave her nothing. Flat expression. Stamp on paper. Pass returned without comment.
"Under His eye," she said.
"Under His eye."
She walked on. I watched her join the flow of red cloaks without looking back.
Resistance exists at street level. The thought settled into my mental map alongside the patrol gaps and dead-drop locations. Someone had taught that Handmaid to test Guardians. Someone had told her what to look for.
Which meant someone was organizing. Coordinating. Building exactly the kind of network I needed to find.
The morning passed in increments. More Marthas. More tokens. More whispered exchanges disguised as haggling. I watched the bread vendor hand a loaf to an Econowife and say something that made her pause—just for a second, just long enough to notice—before she nodded and moved on.
Information flowing through the cracks of Gilead's surveillance. Amateur, probably. Fragile, definitely. But real.
At 1030, I saw June.
She came through the district's north entrance with another Handmaid—dark hair, quiet posture, walking with the automatic precision of someone who'd been drilled on proper deportment. June's wings framed a face I recognized from hundreds of scenes on my laptop screen, but seeing her in person was different.
She looked tired. Not the dramatic exhaustion of television, where characters maintained their beauty through suffering. Real tired, the kind that lived in the shadows under her eyes and the slight drag in her step. The kind that said she hadn't slept well in weeks and didn't expect that to change.
Every instinct screamed at me to move. To approach. To find some excuse to speak to her, establish contact, plant the seed of an alliance that might eventually save her daughter and burn this entire regime to the ground.
I stayed where I was.
Day nine. I had no network. No cover story. No plausible reason for a Guardian to single out a specific Handmaid from a crowd of identical red cloaks. If I approached June now, the best-case scenario was confusion. The worst case was suspicion—hers or Gilead's—and suspicion killed people in this world.
Watch. Wait. Learn.
June passed my position without looking at me. Her shopping partner murmured something about the meat stall. June nodded. They walked on, swallowed by the crowd of grey-dressed Marthas and brown-cloaked Econowives.
I watched her go and felt something twist in my chest. Helplessness, maybe. Or frustration at knowing exactly what happened to her next—the Ceremony, the Commander's hypocrisy, Nick's complicated loyalty—and being unable to touch any of it.
Not yet. Not from where I stood.
The escort shift ended at 1400. I walked back toward the barracks, taking a route that passed the apple vendor near the district's west gate.
The Martha behind the stall was elderly, grey-haired, with hands that suggested she'd worked hard labor before Gilead found a use for her in a kitchen. She glanced at me as I approached.
"Apples, Guardian?"
I pulled out Kessler's ration card. "Two."
She selected them without comment—red, firm, the kind that looked like they'd been grown in someone's private garden rather than a commercial orchard. The transaction was simple: card scanned, tokens deducted, apples placed in my hand.
I bit into one before I'd gone three steps.
The taste hit me like a memory I'd forgotten I had. Sharp and sweet, the kind of crunch that meant the apple had been picked that morning, the kind of flavor that suggested sunlight and clean soil and care. My body—Kessler's body—responded with something close to pleasure, and I realized I hadn't really tasted food since I'd arrived in this world.
Too busy surviving to notice eating.
I finished the apple walking back to the barracks, letting the small pleasure of it push against the weight of everything I'd seen. June's tired face. The Handmaid's testing eyes. The Marthas passing messages beneath Gilead's notice.
There's a network here. Fragile, scared, brave. And I'm going to find it.
The second apple went into my patrol bag for later. Small comforts, hoarded against the dark.
Tomorrow's roster would tell me where I was going next. For now, I had a map of the shopping district that no other Guardian possessed—patrol gaps, dead-drop locations, the timing of Martha rotations—and the certainty that someone in this district was fighting back.
June disappeared around the corner of Milk and Honey, her red cloak vanishing among a crowd of grey, and I stood at my post knowing exactly what happened to her next and unable to change any of it.
The assignment board would tell me my next move. Right now, it showed a reassignment—perimeter duty near the Red Center.
Where Aunt Lydia worked. Where the Handmaids were made.
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