Chapter 10 : The Testimony Behind the Wall
The bedroom smelled like lavender and desperation.
I moved through Commander Harlan's residence with my utility knife in one hand and my Discovery sense stretched wide, checking walls and floorboards and furniture for anything that shouldn't be there. Standard post-reassignment sweep—when a household's Handmaid was transferred, protocol required security to verify nothing compromising had been left behind.
The other Guardians on the sweep team worked mechanically, running hands along obvious hiding spots and calling rooms clear with the practiced boredom of men who'd done this a hundred times. They checked drawers. Cabinet backs. The space under mattresses.
None of them could feel what I could feel.
The pull started in the back bedroom—the Handmaid's quarters, small and spare, decorated with exactly three permitted items: a Bible, a single lamp, and a picture of flowers torn from some pre-approved magazine. The bed had already been stripped. The closet held only empty hangers.
But the wall panel behind the closet radiated wrongness so intense it felt like someone had pressed their thumbs into my temples.
I waited until the team leader called for lunch break. The others filed out toward the kitchen, where the house Martha had laid out sandwiches. I stayed behind, claiming I needed to finish documenting the room.
The panel was old. Original construction, probably, from before Gilead repurposed this neighborhood for Commanders. I worked the blade of my utility knife into the seam, careful to leave marks that could pass for old damage.
The wood gave way with a soft crack.
Behind the panel: a hollow space about six inches deep. Inside the hollow: a journal bound in what might have been a pillowcase, its pages swollen with years of tight, furious script.
I pulled it out and opened it to the first page.
They gave me a new name today. I refuse to write it. My name is Margaret. It will always be Margaret.
The entries ran backward from there—not chronological, I realized after a few pages, but emotional. She'd written wherever she found space, filling the journal from both ends and working toward the middle, her handwriting growing smaller as she ran out of room.
The Commander says I should be grateful. He says God chose me for this purpose. I think about the knife block in the kitchen and whether any of them are sharp enough.
A Martha slipped me chocolate today. I don't know her name. She didn't ask for mine. We are all nameless here, and that namelessness is the only privacy we have left.
I met someone in the market. She said there are people who help. I don't believe her, but I wrote down what she told me anyway: third pillar from the fountain, fifteen minutes after the hour change. If I'm still here in a year, maybe I'll try it.
I flipped through faster, cataloguing what I found. Names—most of them probably dead now, given the journal's age. Meeting locations—some I recognized from my own mapping, some that must have been changed or compromised. Survival strategies that ranged from grimly practical (never cry where they can see you) to heartbreakingly hopeful (I saved a seed from an apple. I'm going to plant it in the garden. Even if I'm not here to see it grow, something I touched will outlast this place).
And then, in the final third of the journal, the tone shifted.
Something is wrong with the water.
The entry was dated—or rather, marked with a system of tally marks I couldn't fully decode—from what appeared to be several years into Margaret's captivity.
I don't know how to describe it. The taste hasn't changed. The color is fine. But something is different. The Martha mentioned it first—said the supply trucks come from a new place now, somewhere northeast. And two weeks after the change, three Handmaids at the district Prayvaganza were transferred to the Red Center for "behavioral correction." All three from households in our section.
The next entry was more urgent.
Eight Handmaids now. All from households that draw from the same supply line. I asked the Martha what she knew, and she stopped talking to me. I asked at market, carefully, obliquely, and the woman I asked was transferred the next day.
The water. Something in the water. But I can't prove it, and no one will listen, and—
The entry cut off mid-sentence. The next three pages were torn out, ragged edges showing where someone had ripped them from the binding.
I closed the journal and sat on the bare mattress, turning the evidence over in my mind.
Water supply. Behavioral changes. Handmaid transfers.
It sounded like Margaret had stumbled onto something—a contamination issue, maybe, or something more sinister. But the journal was old. Whatever she'd discovered had happened years ago. The water supply had probably been changed, investigated, or normalized since then.
And the final pages were missing. The conclusion of her investigation, torn out by someone—Margaret herself? A later reader?—for reasons I couldn't guess.
I had bigger priorities. Alma was waiting. The network I was building needed nodes, and nodes needed intelligence I could actually use. An incomplete warning about water from years ago didn't fit the current operational timeline.
File it. Move on.
The lunch break was ending. I tucked the journal into the lining of my coat—a hidden pocket I'd sewn there two weeks ago, using skills I'd pulled from a Martha who did alterations—and rejoined the sweep team.
"Find anything?" the team leader asked.
"Clear," I said. "Ready for the next room."
We finished the sweep by 1400. I walked back to the barracks with Margaret's testimony pressed against my ribs and a water supply warning dissolving into the background noise of everything else I had to worry about.
That night, I read the journal more carefully. Page forty-seven held a small drawing in the margin—a flower, petals curving upward, rendered with the kind of attention that suggested the artist had spent hours on something that took up less than an inch of space.
Margaret drew this. The thought arrived with unexpected weight. She was here, in that room, for years. She wrote down everything she experienced. She tried to warn someone about the water. And then she disappeared, and her journal sat behind that panel until I found it.
I didn't know what had happened to her. The Colonies, probably, or the Wall. The usual fates for Handmaids who didn't produce.
I stashed the testimony in a dead-drop I'd prepared behind a loose brick near the barracks—a location I'd mapped during my first week, tested and verified as unmonitored. The water supply warning went with it, dismissed as irrelevant to current operations.
Focus on what you can use. The patrol data. The household layouts. The contacts who are still alive.
Tomorrow, Alma would be at the bread stall. Same time, same careful way of watching everyone who watched her.
Tomorrow, I'd start building something that mattered.
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