I take my jacket from Poppy and she looks almost as anxious about walking to the cafeteria by herself as I am about crossing the common lawn on my own. Students are encouraged to stay in the company of our identicals to maintain our sense of identity and reinforce our purpose and position in the city's structure.
Lakeview is comprised of five bureaus, each with distinct responsibilities. I am a student member of the Workforce Bureau, which is further divided into the trade labor and manual labor divisions. The Arts Bureau provides Lakeview with music and art, including the murals gracing the walls of all the academies and the sculptures dotting the common lawn at neat, measured intervals. The Specialist Bureau gives us medical personnel, scientists, and engineers. The Defense Bureau trains soldiers for the protection and fortification of the city, and the Management Bureau ensures that everything runs at peak efficiency, with as little waste as possible.
I eat, bunk, work, and learn with the other trade labor division year-sixteen girls. And we're really very fortunate that there are so many of us. I feel sorry for some of the smaller units because so few of the faces they see on a daily basis match their own. It must be hard for them to know where they belong.
Though the clink of utensils and the buzz of conversation call to me from the cafeteria down the hall, I head for the bank of elevators. As I step inside the first to open, I realize that I've never been in an elevator alone. I'm the only one leaving the academy in the middle of the day, and when I cross the first-floor lobby I feel strangely conspicuous and exposed.
Outside, a class of landscape gardeners is busy pulling last month's flowers from the amorphous flower bed winding around the side of the academy, under the supervision of their instructor. The gardeners are light-skinned boys with freckles and brown eyes, crowned by short, dark brown waves. The familiar names-Aspen, Linden, Oleander, Ash-stitched onto all their uniforms end in the number 13.
Beyond the flower beds, another instructor leads a class of little girls with dark skin and poufy curls down a curving sidewalk toward a playground at one end of the common lawn. Movement to my right catches my attention, and I turn to find four large black-clad soldiers from Defense patrolling the common lawn in synchronized steps. Beyond them, a shiny black car rolls down the street, following a special thick, metallic-looking strip of paint called a cruise strip, which guides all the city's vehicles. In the front seat, two men in suits-obviously Management-read from their tablets, tapping their way through menus and messages as the car takes them to work.
Everyone has somewhere to be and something to be doing. Including me. So I swallow my fear and head down the curving path toward the gate leading out of the training ward.
I've spent my entire life in the training ward, splitting my time between the Workforce Academy and my dormitory-first the nursery, then the primary, and now the secondary dorm. And though I'm less than two years from graduating, I've never even seen the residential ward, where my identicals and I will live as adult members of the Workforce Bureau. In fact, I've only been outside of the training ward twice.
At the gate, a soldier named Eckhard 24 watches while I hold my arm beneath a scanner. The red light passes over the bar code on my wrist, and an electronic voice reads the directions that appear on the screen. "Dahlia 16. Proceed to the Management Bureau."
"Do you know which building that is?" the soldier asks me.
"Yes."
I've never been to the Management Bureau, but I saw it once. It's the smallest of the bureaus, because Management requires relatively little personnel. There are so few students training to be managers that their academy is only three stories tall.
By contrast, the Workforce Academy is the biggest building in Lakeview. It has to be. While there may only be twenty girls in all of the year-sixteen Management class, there are five thousand sixteen-year-old trade labor students who share my face.
Which is why it feels so odd to be leaving the training ward without a crowd of them around me.
The soldier presses a button, and the gate slides open with a heavy scraping sound. "Thank you for your service," I say as I step out of the training ward.
"Your work honors us all," he replies.
The gate slides shut behind me and I relax a little as I pass the Hydroponic Gardening Center, where my identicals and I will work when we graduate. Poppy hopes we'll be assigned to the grains and grasses unit, because it's the most spacious, but I hope we get vines and climbers. Or anything other than tubers, really.