Текст книги "The Earth Dwellers"

Автор книги: David Estes

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Adele

I’m tired. Which isn’t a surprise. Sleeping in a cold, metal drawer meant for dead people doesn’t lend itself to the most restful kind of sleep.

At the same time, however, I’m energized. Even as my eyes are trying to close and my feet are screaming at me to “Sit down!” my blood is running hot and fast through my veins. Because things are going so right at the moment. I’ve got my chip, my new name, a friend named Avery cleaning a street somewhere, and, most of all, a chance. A mission that was originally meant to be bordering on suicidal is suddenly full of possibilities.

And I can’t fail. I can’t. I don’t know how.

The first step is to get my bearings. And who better to help with that than my new friend. My stomach growls as I make my way back the way I came, down twenty-sixth street, left on J. I’m hungry, but not desperately so. I clench my abs and try to swallow the dry, thick spit in my mouth. Another seven blocks and I’m back where I started, where I first met Avery and got the directions. I head in the direction he went with his cleaning machine, stopping at each intersection to look both ways, see if I can spot him.

I reach the army medical building, past which the city ends at the main gate, the one with the double doors and airlock system. The edge of the dome rises up from the desert floor. Thick glass separating me from Tristan.

I turn around, retrace my steps, and pick a random road to turn onto. People move down the streets: some wear white like me, which I’m starting to realize means they’re from the Lower Realms, moon dwellers and star dwellers; some wear camo uniforms, the army obviously; and others wear gray and black. What is their role, I wonder? Most of the people enter glass-walled buildings, and I watch as they scan their wrists on a transparent plate before pushing through metal turnstiles, almost like scanning your ticket at the underground train stations in the Tri-Realms.

I come to a long line of people, waiting patiently to enter a door. The hearty aroma of cooked food wafts out. My stomach grumbles again. I stop to watch.

Every so often someone exits, and another person is allowed to enter, scanning their wrist on the glass plate at the door. A red light flashes and then turns green. The man at the door gestures them inside. Red light flashes. Turns green. One out, one in.

I’m about to move on—my main goal is still to find Avery—when I see something different happen. Red light flashes. Stays red. “You’ve already received your ration for today,” the burly man at the door says.

“C’mon, I’m still hungry,” says the kid trying to get in. He’s younger than me, maybe fourteen.

The big guy looks at a screen in the side of the scanning machine. “You’ve tried this before. Twice.”

“No,” the kid says.

The man points to the machine, taps the screen. “Two warnings in the system. And you’re supposed to be in school.”

“No,” the kids says again.

“There are no third warnings,” the man says.

“Stay away from me,” the kid says, backing away. “I’m just hungry. I just want more food.”

“Everyone shares equally,” the man says.

And then I hear them. Heavy footsteps from behind, running. I glance back. Two soldiers, dressed differently than the others I’ve seen so far, still in camo uniforms but in shades of blue. Carrying guns, but even their weapons look different. And yet so familiar…

My father slumping to the floor, the Taser having sent a shock of electricity through him.

The Enforcers turning on me, on my mother. Taking her. Taking them. Taking us.

The beginning of everything.

“No!” the boy screams behind me, and when I turn to look, he’s already halfway down the block, charging away. He’s got a good lead on the…I don’t have any other word for the soldiers than the one I know from before…Enforcers, about to turn the corner. Maybe he’ll be able to find a place to hide, to escape…

He looks back as he cuts sharply to the right…

Slam!

Another Enforcer comes out of nowhere, cracking something long and thin over his head—some kind of a stick. The boy flops to the ground, still. So still.

The other two Enforcers catch up, lift his rubbery body, and carry him away.

No one in the food line even turns to watch. None of them say a damn thing.

Where are they taking him? To a place like the Pen in subchapter 14, a kid prison for troubled youths? All for what? Asking for more food when he’s hungry, skipping school? If those offenses warranted imprisonment, every kid I grew up with would’ve been hauled away.

What kind of city is this? Rations, food lines, bland colors representing your standing…

“Hey,” a voice says from the side, jerking me around.

Avery. Thank God. “Hi,” I say.

“Did you get your chip malfunction sorted out?” He leans on his cleaning machine.

“Yeah, yes, thank you,” I say, still too shocked at what I just witnessed to think of anything more.

“That happens sometimes,” he says, motioning to where the boy had just been beaten. “Your first time seeing it?”

I nod. “How often?” I ask.

“Once, twice a week,” he says. He lowers his voice. “Usually to moon and star dwellers, since our rations are less than the others. Every so often the hunger makes someone snap, but most of us just learn to tighten our belts and ignore it.”

“Less?” I say.

He doesn’t answer, just looks at the food line. “Haven’t you eaten since you’ve arrived?”

I’m getting into dangerous territory. “Uh, yeah, but I guess I, uh, just never noticed.”

He looks back at me and I do my best to meet his gaze. Try to look honest. “My daughter’s over there, in line,” he says. “She’s on her break. Do you want to meet her?” He motions to a girl wearing white like me and Avery. I only now realize she’s watching us closely.

“Sure,” I say.

We walk over together and Avery makes the introductions. Her name’s Malindra. Lin, for short. I shake her hand, meet her eyes, which are a mesmerizing mixture of blue and green. With each movement, her reddish-brown hair bounces in curls on her shoulders. She’s got a nice, warm smile, like her father, although she doesn’t really carry any of his other features.

“I’ve got to get back,” Avery says, as two blue-clad Enforcers eye his unattended machine as they pass by. He rushes off, leaving us alone…with all the other people standing in line.

“No line jumping,” someone yells from the back.

“Oh, I’m not—” I go to say.

“Shut your mouth, we’re just talking!” Lin yells back sharply. I gawk at her, her smile temporarily falling, but coming back just as quickly. “Have you had your afternoon ration yet?” she asks.

Uh, what? “No,” I say.

“C’mon,” she says, pulling me away from the line. “The food here sucks anyway.”

I let her drag me down the street. A guide is exactly what I was looking for.

When we cross the road that leads back to the main gates, I hear a commotion to our left, somewhere behind the army medical building. “What’s going on?” I say aloud, my thoughts spilling from my lips.

“Who knows, who cares?” Lin says, still pulling at my arm. “The army’s always up to something. Supposedly protecting us from the big, bad savages, or some such nonsense.”

I stop, pull back, listening. It sounds like something big is happening, or has already happened. The mission, I remember, the one Meaty-Bun and Skinny-Bun were talking about when they entered the morgue. Just beginning or just ending?

“Can we check it out?” I ask Lin.

She looks at her watch. “I’ve only got twenty minutes before I have to get back to work…” she says. “Ah, screw it, let’s go.” She releases my hand and we stride quickly toward the building and then past it. “Why the interest?” she asks. “You got a boyfriend in the army or something?”

“Not exactly,” I say, smashing my face to a fence that’s blocking our progress. She does the same, grabbing the metal links with her fingers. We crane our heads far to the right, trying to see what’s happening at the gate.

Vehicles are pulling in, one at a time, soldiers spilling out. Blood on their uniforms, on their faces, on their hands. Backboards being carried to the trucks, loaded up with bodies, hauled away. “What the hell?” I say.

“Looks like the natives might’ve got the best of them this time,” Lin says beside me. “There aren’t usually this many casualties, but it’s happened before. Once. Maybe twice.”

“What?” I say, even though I completely understand what she’s saying. She thinks they’ve been fighting the natives, but does she mean the Tri-Tribes? “Who?”

She shrugs. “I dunno, they don’t tell us much. Only that we’re safe and that the army is doing everything they can to protect us from the savages. But it’s not like the natives are just going to roll over and let us take their land. Nor should they. It’s all a load of rubbish if you ask me. We should just leave them alone and maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

My mind is whirling. If there are this many Glassies…I mean, earth dwellers…dead, then how many “savages” died? Skye and Siena and Wilde and…oh, God, Tristan. Could he have been in the battle? Here I thought I was the one taking the risks, going inside the dragon’s lair, when really the dragon was outside hunting. A pit widens in my stomach.

“Can we climb this fence?” I say, looking up, already sticking a foot between the links. I have to see if they’ve got any prisoners, if any of the dead bodies are the enemy. (Or Tristan.)

“Only if you want to get shot,” she says, grabbing my arm. “It’s a restricted area; they won’t hesitate.” Her eyes are serious enough that I step down.

But I can’t just do nothing, can I? I try to swallow, but my throat’s too dry.

“What’s this really about?” Lin asks, ducking slightly to catch my gaze.

Tristan. It’s about Tristan.

“Nothing,” I say.

~~~

She has to go back to work, so we agree to meet later on. I promise to answer all her questions. But I can’t, can I? She doesn’t seem to have any love for the army, or the way the city is run, and she is a star dweller, or at least used to be…but what if she turns me in? I barely know the girl, and as feisty as she seems to be, if she gets her mind to do something, there’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll do it. It’s a risk but…

I could really use an ally.

Before Lin left, she took me back to the food line. I’m halfway to the front but my appetite is long gone, replaced with the dark hole in my gut. Who did the soldiers fight? Did they discover the spy cave used by Hawk and Lara? I cling to the hope that whoever killed so many soldiers didn’t suffer any deaths. Or maybe it was those wild beasts, the Killers. Yeah, maybe the soldiers ran into a huge pack of them. I’ll take anything other than Tristan fighting.

I’m at the front of the line, having forgotten to watch the person in front of me to see what they did. Scan your wrist, do it quick, like you know what the hell you’re doing. I lower my arm to the glass. Will this work?

A red flash. Please turn green, please, please, please…

Green!

The burly man, who somehow contacted the Enforcers to arrest the hungry boy, motions me inside. I resist the urge to spit in his face.

Inside, it’s way too quiet to be a place where people eat. Food involves conversation, and conversation involves stories and laughs and some level of fun. Even in the Pen it was like that, although the fun sometimes included fistfights and insults about mothers.

I see them. Burly men wearing black, standing in the corners. Watching everything, scanning the room, eyes roving back and forth. Back and forth. Fun-killers. People are sitting, eating, most of them in silence, some talking in voices so low I don’t know how anyone can hear them. It’s eerie, like I’m in a cave full of sleeping bats.

The line moves forward and I look for a plate, a tray, something. Everyone moves forward empty handed. I watch as a woman wearing dark pants and a black shirt at the front of the line scans her wrist on another plate, and is handed a dish with a glass of water and four rectangles on it: one green, one red, one yellow, one brown. What are those? Surely not food. She takes her plate and sits down at the first seat she comes to.

The next person, an old white-clothed man with a cane, scans his wrist and is given a similar plate, only with just three rectangles. The same as the lady’s, but without the brown one. “No meat ration for the Lowers today, I guess,” he mutters as he sits near where I’m standing, looping the curved part of his walking stick on the corner of the table. Despite his complaint, he dives right in, using the side of his fork to smash the rectangles into something that looks—at least slightly—more like food. He shovels the resulting paste in his mouth with a large spoon, pausing only to take long gulps of water.

It’s almost my turn, but my mind is on anything but food. No meat ration for the Lowers today. The man’s muttered complaint. By “Lowers” did he mean…those from the Lower Realms? The star and moon dwellers? The ones wearing white, doing all the jobs the former sun dwellers don’t want to do? I pay attention to the three people in front of me. Two of the three are wearing dark clothes and get the brown rectangle. The last one, wearing white, doesn’t. A Lower. So what does that make the others? Uppers?

Feeling disgusted, I scan my wrist. A chubby woman wearing a white cap over her hair hands me a plate. No brown rectangle for me, the Lower.

I take the first seat I come to, fighting back the rising urge to scream.

~~~

I meet Lin later on where she told me to. The corner of W and 2^nd. The streets are full of white-clad people, presumably returning home from whatever crap jobs they’ve been assigned. I’m surprised—the sun is still streaming through the glass, an hour or two from the horizon. Are their jobs really that bad if they get to go home this early? Maybe they start really early too.

Despite having made sure I’d be at the designated meeting spot well before six, the time we’d agreed on, Lin’s already waiting, smiling broadly.

Without any kind of greeting, she grabs my hand and pulls me through the press of the crowd. It’s the loudest I’ve heard the earth dwellers. They’re talking and gossiping like normal human beings. Like they’re alive and not the zombies I’ve seen walking around all day.

“Lin?” I say, still being dragged.

“Yeah?” she says, not looking back.

“What’s going on?”

“They let all the workers out early, for an—”

A three-toned sound rings out from somewhere above, cutting her off. Instead of continuing whatever she was going to say, Lin sticks a finger in the air and keeps on leading me.

A loud voice blares, immediately silencing the people. “Please return to your sleeping quarters and power up your vids for an important announcement from President Borg Lecter. I repeat…” The command loops three times, until I can’t help but to mimic it, mouthing each word. What sort of announcement? Is this about the injured soldiers we saw today?

After eating lunch, I’d gone back to the army medical building, looked through the fence. The soldiers were gone, all of them, the injured likely receiving medical attention, the dead taken to Meaty-Bun and Skinny-Bun in the morgue, one of them probably stuffed in the very drawer I slept in last night. Hopefully they didn’t need to use the drawer I stashed the weapons in. The uninjured would be back wherever they live, resting and preparing for the next mission. If there’ll be a next mission. But if they won the war already…

Lin practically yanks my arm off as she cuts to the side, out of the human flow, leading me through a door that clicks and opens automatically when she scans her wrist on a plate at the front.

We stop in front of a row of shiny, metal doors. Lin presses a button in the middle of them, which lights up bright yellow.

Only then does she turn to me. “Everyone’s speculating what the message will be about,” she says, “but I can tell you from experience that Lecter”—I like the way she says his name, irreverently, just his last name with no “President” attached—“only makes city-wide announcements if he’s trying to gloat or influence us.”

“So propaganda basically,” I say.

“About right,” she says as one of the doors opens. I follow her into a small closet, barely wide enough to fit both of us. Buttons with numbers from two to thirty-two are poking from one of the walls. Lin scans her wrist again and presses eighteen. The button lights up.

The doors close and the closet hums under our feet. There’s a lurch and we start to rise. Even as I put a hand on the wall to steady myself I can’t help but think of the long ride up to the surface with Tristan. Up to check things out and back down to the real world. That was the plan. I shake my head, wondering how the hell I ended up as a spy in the New City.

“What?” Lin says, eyeing me curiously.

“Life is funny,” I say, meaning something else.

“No. Life is crappy,” she says, meaning exactly that. Her word choice is closer to what I was thinking anyway.

When we stop and the doors open, we step out into a long hallway with many doors on each side. Like a lot of doors. There have to be at least a hundred. Weird.

Lin turns left and goes to one with the number 1808 on it. Scans her wrist, waits for a click, and then pushes through. “Avery?” she says. Funny she doesn’t called him “Dad” or “Father.” A lot of things about Lin are kind of funny.

“Here,” the familiar voice answers. She holds the door for me and I step into a long narrow room that ends in glass. Through it I can see the sun reflecting off the side of another building. Avery’s inside, fiddling with some kind of plastic wrapper.

“I brought Tawni,” Lin announces, and I almost look around for my old friend. But no, that’s my name now.

“Hi there,” he says, to the both of us.

“Hi Mr…Avery,” I say.

“Just Avery,” he says, ripping the plastic off a green rectangle. “Want to have dinner with us?”

My stomach clenches at the thought of more rectangle-food, but I know I need the energy. I can’t just not eat because the food is tasteless and shaped like bricks. “Sure,” I say.

I close the door behind me and take in my surroundings…or rather, lack of surroundings. There’s nothing to the place. A small counter runs down one side, with small metal squares, like cabinets, set into the wall—no handles, no knobs, no way of opening them. Just in front of the glass window at the end is a small table with two chairs. Running back down the other side is a bare wall, gray, with strange lines cut into it. This is where they…live?

Avery peels off another couple packages and adds a brown and a yellow rectangle to his plate, holds his wrist up to one of the metal rectangles and it opens. He shoves the plate inside and shuts the door. Yellow light glows from the edges as it hums. Maybe ten seconds later, the machine goes dark and the door pops open. Steam rises from the rectangle-food.

“You can have this one,” Avery says, handing me the plate. Rations, I think. I can’t possibly take their rations, can I?

“That’s okay, you have it,” I say.

“Here, I’ll trade you,” Avery says, setting the plate on the counter and grabbing my wrist. Why do he and Lin love to do that? He lifts my wrist to a different metal plate and then pulls it back. The door slides open and inside are three clear, plastic pouches, each with a colored rectangle inside—green, brown and yellow.

Down the counter, Lin has scanned her own wrist and is already unwrapping her food. So it’s like…unlimited food at night but rations during the day? Why would that kid have been complaining about being hungry?

I lift my wrist to try scanning it on another metal square, but nothing happens. Did I do it correctly? Is there some special technique to scanning I haven’t quite mastered, that I would have learned had I been through the proper welcome-to-Earth orientation?

Avery laughs. “I try that sometimes, too, just for kicks, hoping there will be an error with the system and I’ll get a double ration. But it never works.”

I laugh like that’s exactly what I was trying to do. Trick the system. Like I’m not the clueless idiot who doesn’t know how anything works.

But Lin’s not buying it. “You’re different,” she says, grabbing her steaming plate out of the weird-super-fast-cooker-thingy. Avery sticks the next plate in.

“I could say the same about you,” I say. “Both of you.”

“How so?” Lin asks, sitting at the table.

“Have a seat,” Avery says with a wave. I take the only other seat and Lin passes me a fork, the question still in her eyes.

“Well…” I start, choosing my words carefully so as not to offend the only two friends I have at the moment. “Lin, you’re…not a zombie, and Avery, you actually talked to me on the street.”

“Score! Not a zombie,” Lin says. “That’s what I was hoping for. Compliment of the year.”

“So I am a zombie?” Avery says, standing and eating.

Smiling, I shake my head. “No, I just meant that I walked around all day and no one seemed the least bit interested that I existed. Except for you two.”

Oh, and the two Enforcers that had stopped me on the street and scanned my wrist. “Why didn’t you just tell us it was your Anything Day?” one of them had said before they moved on, leaving my heart to return to normal speed, my knuckles to unclench.

“See, there you go again,” Lin says. “People don’t talk like that up here.”

I look out the window, but it’s not a window anymore, it’s a black screen, spotted with static.

“The announcement’s starting,” Avery says. “Let’s see what our esteemed and fearless leader has to say.” I like the way he says it. He sounds startlingly like Lin did when she spoke of the president.

The window-that’s-now-a-screen suddenly blazes to life, filled with a man set against a blue background. He’s wearing a dark coat with a dark shirt underneath. The only splash of color is a red flower in his breast pocket. His face is lined and weathered, like he’s been through a lot in his life but come out on top. He’s not that old, but has silvery hair, parted just to the side of center, accented by blue-gray eyes. He wears an easy smile, but it doesn’t look natural, like it’s been pasted on.

This is President Lecter? He could be someone’s grandfather. He probably is somebody’s grandfather.

“Citizens of the New City, earth dwellers, pioneers,” he says slowly, like each word is of the greatest value and deserves perfect pronunciation and attention.

“Why does he always start that way?” Avery asks, almost to himself.

“Because he’s a tool,” Lin mutters.

Staring right at me, Lecter continues. “We’ve won a great victory today in the fight for our children, for our liberty. The savages that call themselves the Icers have been destroyed!” My heart blinks, once, twice, thrice, stuttering before returning to normal speed. Not the Heaters. Not Tristan. I hate myself for the excitement that flutters through me because other people have died.

“We couldn’t let any of them live, because even with their last dying breaths, the bloodthirsty natives were trying to kill our soldiers. They even brought their children to fight, arming them with guns stolen off the bodies of our loyal protectors.”

They killed them all. Wilde had talked about the Icers like they were their only ally. So where does that leave them? A bubble of pressure forms in my throat. My mission has just become even more important. I cannot fail or they’ll all die. What’s left of them anyway.

“But we suffered losses too,” Lecter says, his face softening. “Twenty-two of our brave men and women were killed in the battle, and many more were injured. Let us have a moment of silence for them and their families.” The president bows his head, clasps his hands. We just stare at him.

I speak over the silence. “Do people here really believe the natives are savages?” I blurt out.

Lin stares at me and I know I’ve been too obvious. “Who are you?” she says.

~~~

I wait until Lecter concludes the announcement—raising a fist and promising to eradicate the rest of the savages that threaten the good people of the New City, or some such nonsense—before answering.

“I—I’m a moon dweller,” I say, desperately trying to decide where to go from here. Can I really tell them? Can I really trust them? I said it myself: Avery and Lin are different. But are they allies? If I just leave, walk out the door, will they forget about me, that I ever existed? They know my name—my fake name, yeah, but the one that the damn chip in my arm is linked to. They could tell someone about me.

“Yeahhh…” Lin says, urging me on. “But you’re not just a moon dweller, are you?”

At some point, I’m going to have to trust someone, or I’ll never learn the ropes. And if I don’t know the ropes, I’ll stick out more than a star dweller in the Sun Realm.

I stare at Lin, mulling over my decision.

She rushes on. “Look, we have NO love for Lecter, for the way things are run around here. Whatever your game is, I want in. I can’t take another second of this creepy, God-forsaken city. I know Avery thinks things are worse down below, in the Star Realm, but they’re not. Not really. At least down there we can live life the way we choose. Whatever you’re hiding, tell us. You won’t regret it.”

The conviction behind her words is as hard as steel. Either Lin’s a really good actress, or she’s being honest.

I take a deep breath. This is it. My best or worst decision. My gut says I can trust these people, and I’ve learned to trust my instincts. The truth.

“I snuck into the New City because I’m helping the natives,” I say, holding my breath.