Chapter 5 : The Wall
The bodies were already hanging when I arrived at dawn.
Three of them. Ropes around necks, bags over heads, the kind of efficient brutality that suggested practice. They swung gently in the morning breeze, turning slow circles above placards that listed their crimes.
GENDER TREACHERY.
The words were the same on all three signs. The bodies were different—one male, two female, the shapes beneath their execution robes suggesting ages that ranged from forty to barely twenty.
I stood at my cordon position fifteen feet from the youngest one and watched her turn in the wind.
The crowd had gathered by 0700. Handmaids in red, Marthas in grey, Econowives in their striped dresses. They stood in ordered rows, faces arranged in expressions of appropriate solemnity, hands clasped in front of them like they were at church.
Which, in a way, they were.
Aunt Lydia took the platform at 0730.
I recognized her from the show—the grandmother's face that masked a torturer's heart, the soft voice that could shift from tender concern to vicious condemnation in the space of a sentence. She wore her brown Aunt's habit like armor, and when she spoke, even the Guardians stood straighter.
"We are gathered here," she said, "to witness God's justice."
The ceremony lasted two hours.
Lydia explained the crimes. Lydia quoted scripture. Lydia led the crowd in prayers and responses that I mouthed without meaning, the words turning to ash on my tongue. She spoke about the sacredness of Gilead's mission, the necessity of purity, the divine mandate that justified every cruelty this regime had ever committed.
And through it all, the bodies swung.
The third one—the young woman—had been dead for at least twelve hours. I knew because rigor mortis had locked her limbs in a specific position, because the color of her exposed skin had shifted in ways that suggested cooling blood. Someone had executed her in the night and hung her body on the Wall while I slept in my barracks bunk, dreaming about apple vendors and patrol gaps.
She died while I did nothing.
The thought arrived without permission. I pushed it down.
She was dead before I knew she existed. I couldn't have saved her.
Cold comfort. True, but cold.
When the ceremony ended, the crowd dispersed. Handmaids returned to their shopping routes. Marthas hurried back to their households. Econowives clustered in groups of three and four, talking in low voices about what they'd witnessed.
I stayed.
The cordon duty lasted until 1600. Eight hours of standing watch over corpses, keeping the public appropriately reverent, ensuring no one tried to cut the bodies down before their three-day display period ended.
The young woman's placard said her name was ELLEN. Just Ellen—no surname, no identity beyond what Gilead had stripped away before they killed her.
Ellen. I'll remember that.
It wouldn't help her. It might help me.
The barracks were quiet when I returned. Most of the other Guardians were on evening shifts, leaving the bunk room empty except for me and my thoughts.
I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the wall.
Three bodies. Gender treachery. Fabricated charges or real—doesn't matter. They're dead because Gilead decided they were inconvenient.
The show had prepared me for this. I'd watched executions on screen, watched characters I cared about suffer and die, watched the systematic brutality of this regime play out across five seasons of prestige television. But watching wasn't the same as standing fifteen feet from a swinging corpse for eight hours, smelling what death smelled like, feeling the weight of a system designed to make murder routine.
I have meta-knowledge that could save lives.
The thought was seductive. Dangerous.
I know which Commanders fall. I know which Handmaids survive. I know about the children's evacuation, the bombing at the Red Center, the eventual crumbling of Gilead's international legitimacy.
And if I used that knowledge carelessly, I would become the fourth body on the Wall.
I sat in the dark and built a framework.
Rule one: preserve cover above all else. A dead Guardian couldn't save anyone. Every action had to be filtered through the question of whether it risked exposure.
Rule two: intervene only when the cost of inaction exceeds the risk of action. I couldn't save everyone. I couldn't even save most people. But if I could identify moments where small interventions produced large results—where a piece of information, delivered to the right person at the right time, could cascade into something meaningful—then the risk might be worth it.
Rule three: treat information as ammunition. Every piece of meta-knowledge I had was a bullet that could only be fired once. Once I revealed something, the butterfly effect took over. The timeline shifted. My predictions became less reliable. I had to choose targets carefully.
The framework was rational. Necessary. The kind of cold calculation that might actually keep me alive long enough to do some good.
It would eventually break me. I knew that too.
But for now, it was what I had.
Evening patrol took me past the Waterford house at 1930. The lights were on in the upstairs windows, warm yellow against the darkening sky. June was probably in there somewhere—her room, the kitchen, maybe standing in the Commander's study while Fred explained the rules of Scrabble.
I slowed my pace and concentrated.
The sensation from the checkpoint locker—the wrongness, the pull—had faded over the past few days, but I'd felt something similar at the Wall. A whisper of information just beyond my reach, like a radio signal I couldn't quite tune in.
If I can feel hidden things...
I focused on the Waterford house. Let my attention drift toward it, soft and searching, the way you'd reach out in the dark to find a light switch.
And felt something answer.
A pull. Directional, warm, insistent. Something inside that house was hidden, something important enough to register on whatever strange sense I'd developed since waking up in this body.
I couldn't identify what it was. The sensation was too vague, too new. But it was real. Repeatable. When I concentrated, I could feel it. When I let my attention drift, it faded.
Hidden Piece Discovery. The name came from nowhere—or maybe from the part of my brain that had played too many video games in my previous life, the part that liked putting labels on things to make them manageable.
Whatever I called it, it was awake.
I walked on past the Waterford house, letting the pull fade as distance grew. Three blocks east, a different sensation brushed against my awareness—fainter, colder, sharp-edged in a way that felt like warning rather than invitation.
I looked at the building. Unmarked facade. No signs. The kind of deliberate anonymity that suggested official function.
Eyes field office.
The realization settled into my chest like ice water. My newfound ability was pinging on a building full of Gilead's secret police.
Whatever was hidden in there, I wasn't ready to know.
I turned away and kept walking. The Wall was behind me, three bodies still swinging in the evening wind. Ellen's face was somewhere under that hood, preserved until the birds came.
Tomorrow would bring another patrol. Another chance to map this world and find the cracks where resistance might take root.
For now, I had a framework for survival, a power I didn't understand, and the memory of a name I'd promised to carry.
Ellen. I'll remember.
The pull from the Waterford house faded as I walked, but the cold warning from the Eyes building lingered at the edge of my awareness, shaped like a threat I couldn't yet see.
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