After the Red Rain (14 page)

S
he tended to her cuts—they were minor, not worthy of the guilt he’d felt and expressed—and managed to sleep. When she awoke, he was still gone. In those first muzzy moments of waking, she thought maybe he might have returned, entering through the window. But she was alone in a bed that, for the first time, seemed too big. She could have been disappointed or agitated.

But, instead, she found herself thrilled. She’d kissed him.

That kiss… it had been too short, and afterward they’d both been flustered and in shock, but it had been perfect nonetheless. The memory of it made her woozy, a pleasant and unpleasant feeling at the same time. She could replay the kiss too easily. She could feel his lips lingering on hers, long after the kiss had been broken. She wanted another. But who knew if Rose would even come back?

Optimism was hard to come by in Ludo Territory.

Until recently
, he’d said.
Until recently, I’d never seen anything beautiful in the world.

Did he mean…

He couldn’t mean.

No, he didn’t mean.

She touched her scar, wishing—as she often did—that she could sink her fingers into it, prize up an edge, then peel it all off. But she knew what lay beneath—blood and bone, not fresh, new skin.

If only it were that easy. If only you could tear away the old and the ugly and reveal something new and beautiful and perfect.

Like the City itself, maybe, and its broken, crumbling facade.

What lay beneath the buildings and roads of the City? If she could peel them back the way she wished she could husk her own skin, would the building equivalent of arteries and bones be revealed to her? Or was there something else under there? Something horrifying and deadly?

Something mysterious and grand?

Something beautiful?

It could be anything, she realized.

She’d spent her life in these buildings, on these roads, so certain that the Territory and the wider City and the Cities beyond were the same in every direction.

Never thinking to look
down
.

S
he threw on her poncho, as always, and grabbed a sleeve of fruit discs to eat on the way. They were old, but fruit discs were genetically modified to last just short of forever. They’d be stiff but edible.

Air quality was mixed. She slipped on her mask, just to be safe.

She stood stock-still in the doorway. With reflexes born of thousands of repetitive days, she’d prepared for work.…

But she wasn’t
really
going to work today, was she?

It would be crazy to go to L-Twelve. She couldn’t imagine what Jaron had in store for her, but it couldn’t be good. He couldn’t let her mingle with everyone else. Not now. She wasn’t entirely certain he would kill her to eliminate one of the witnesses from the rooftop… but what else might he do? He could have the Bang Boys throw her out of the Territory, sure. He could trump up some kind of charge and have her arrested, even.

But she kept coming back to the easiest, most obvious solution. He and the Bang Boys had chased Rose down, and she didn’t think they were just going to drag him out of Ludo if they’d caught him. It was wholly possible that Jaron had decided that the best, safest course of action was to kill Rose and her, after all. And Jaron, she knew, would do whatever was best for Jaron.

Meaning she should stay home, where it was—

Where it was no safer than L-Twelve. He could send the Bang Boys there just as easily as he could send them to the factory floor.

She was shaking. She took deep breaths and leaned against the doorjamb. What was the best move? She couldn’t stay home. She couldn’t go to L-Twelve.

Hide. She had to hide. But where? The Territory was empty and crowded at the same time. The empty places were just as dangerous as the full ones, maybe more so. She could stumble into a nest of tooth-weed and a death that would make her long for the Bang Boys and their pipes.

I have to leave
, she realized.
I have to leave the Territory.

It was a thought so huge and impossible that there seemed not to be room in her head for it. She couldn’t just leave. It didn’t work that way. She would have to cross the river into Sendar. No way she would go to Dalcord. And what would the people in Sendar think when she showed up with her Ludo brand? How would they treat her?

And what about Rose? She couldn’t just disappear on him.… But hadn’t he done precisely that to her? Was she supposed to stay in Ludo and hope he would come back? Or should she vanish into safety?

You have to figure this out, Dee. It’s up to you. What are you going to do?

Maybe Jaron
wasn’t
going to kill her. He could have done so yesterday, easily. Just as easily as taking her pendant. Maybe he would let her live.

For now. But once he became Magistrate, his power in the Territory would be complete. What then?

She would spend the rest of her life in Ludo wondering.

Self-exile? A life on the run in some other Territory? Or life here in Ludo, terrified and wondering? Both solutions sucked. There was no other way to put it. No matter what she did, she would be in danger.

But the danger in another Territory was hypothetical. The danger here was real.

She took off at a run toward L-Twelve. If nothing else, she had to intercept Lissa before she got there. So she could tell her best friend she was leaving, and why. She owed Lissa much, much more than a quick good-bye, but it was all she had to offer.

Deedra was halfway to L-Twelve when Rose appeared from nowhere, hustling up to her, grabbing her by the arm. It took her a moment to process him, to realize that it really was him, out on the street as though nothing had happened, as though nothing had changed.

“Act normal,” he told her, and she laughed because she had no idea what the word meant anymore.

She slowed down, but only to about half speed, not a normal walking pace. “Normal? Are you kidding me?”

“No need to draw attention or act suspicious.” As he said it, though, he darted his gaze around. It made him look completely suspicious.

“
You
act normal,” she chided him. She dug out a fruit disc and handed it to him. Distracted, he stopped peering around like a fugitive and took it with one hand. At the same moment, he brought up his other hand, opening it.

On his palm lay her pendant.

Deedra gasped. Where the chain had broken when Jaron yanked it from around her neck, a little bead of resin—probably from a discarded ration pack—healed the breach. “Where did you—”

“Don’t ask.” He shook his head. “You don’t want to know. Like I said, act normal.”

“But—”

“I have something else for you, too.” He looked around. “Not here, though. At work.”

“Work? I’m not going to L-Twelve.”

“Why not?”

She gaped. “We can’t go there. Neither of us, but especially you. You humiliated him. He’ll kill you.”

“I’m not worried about Jaron,” Rose said with brute confidence.

“He’s the boss. And he’s the Magistrate’s son. He can do anything.”

He cocked his head, a small smile playing at his lips. “Do you really think he can hurt me?”

“If you can do the… things you do, why didn’t you stop Jaron and the Bang Boys yesterday? Why did you just let them chase you and hit you?” A bruise had formed overnight along his jaw, flaring tender and purple against his fair skin. “Was it worth it?” she asked.

He shrugged, scrutinizing the fruit disc, then gingerly tapped at the bruise. “It didn’t really hurt me. And I guess it made them happy.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Who cares about making them happy? They’re
wrong
.”

“True. And they need to realize they’re wrong. But if I overpower them and force them to stop, all they learn is to hate and be afraid of something stronger than them.”

“If I were stronger than them, I would
love
for them to be afraid of me.”

“And they would just exorcise that fear by bullying the people under them even more. And you would be no better than them.”

As she considered that, they kept walking. It wasn’t raining, but the humidity was high, sweltering. “It doesn’t matter anymore. We can’t go to L-Twelve. And you might not be in the system, but I am—I have to run. I don’t have a choice.”

“You don’t need to run anywhere,” he told her. “I’ll protect you.”

“I don’t need your protection.”

“You might be right. But you’re getting it anyway.” He raised the fruit disc to his nose and sniffed. His expression said it all.

Deedra chewed her way through a plum-melon disc. “They taste better than they smell,” she confided.

“They would have to.”

“Try it.”

He sniffed it again, this time even more gingerly. The downturn of his lips was sad and hilarious at the same time. How could he have gone all this time without eating a
fruit disc
? They were one of the few food items the government had figured out how to mass-produce at the necessary scale. One of Deedra’s first memories was tasting a fruit disc at the orphanage. (One of her
other
first memories was of spitting it out, but still.)

“I really can’t,” he said at last.

“It won’t hurt you. Everyone eats them.”

“No, I mean I can’t. I’m sure it’s… good.” The disbelief written blatantly on his face made his lie funny, and they both laughed at it. The laughter was a relief and a danger at the same time, given the circumstances. “No, really! I’m sure it is! But I don’t need this.” He handed it back to her. “I take nutrients from the soil.”

“You do
what
? From that little patch? You, what, absorb it through your feet or something?” She looked down, but Rose’s feet were unremarkable.

He smiled. “There are some other spots, too. Not many.” His expression, so mournful, made her think someone had died. Or, worse, had been hauled away by the DeeCees. “Everywhere I go, I find more and more of the world is dead.”

“There are still people—”

“I’m not talking about people. I’m talking about the
world
. The earth. Things are bad.”

“They used to be worse,” she countered. “It’s actually better since the Red Rain. There aren’t as many people, so there’s more room. More food. I read somewhere that it used to be so crowded that you couldn’t even go outside without getting crushed or having someone try to steal from you.”

“Where did you hear that?”

She shrugged. “Everyone knows.”

“It used to be like that, true. Before the Red Rain. There were so many people on the planet that they had to cover the entire planet in buildings.”

Deedra frowned. The entire planet
was
covered in buildings. That was just the way it was. There were once a hundred billion people living on earth, and the world was barely able to sustain that many. After the Red Rain, the population was cut in half, and there was more room. So much room that some days—like today—you could walk the street without being jostled or molested by a hundred other people along the way. On days when the Magistrate called for Territory-wide searches of apartments, though, the Territory overflowed with citizens camped out on sidewalks and streets, waiting for the DeeCees to finish conducting their investigations.

“Well,” she said diplomatically, “it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Things are the way they are. The Magistrate runs the Territory, Jaron and the Bang Boys do whatever they want.…” She realized she’d clenched her fists in anger; her palms hurt and her fingers had gone numb. “And that’s why we have to go away.” It had been a pleasant distraction, talking to Rose, but it didn’t change the concrete facts of her situation. She would run. She would forever surrender her rations.

“I’ll end up scavenging all the time,” she said. “It probably won’t be so bad, I guess. Maybe it’ll be better than the junk the government gives us.” Even as she said it, the pasty aftertaste of the fruit disc seemed to linger overlong in her mouth.

“Once upon a time,” Rose said slowly, “that’s how it was. People didn’t eat… this.” He gestured to the fruit disc in her hand. “Genetically modified synthetics grown in a lab.”

“What do you expect us to eat? Where else are we supposed to get food?”

“From the ground.”

Deedra laughed. “You want us to eat concrete and pavement? Or that little bit of dirt?”

“That’s not what…” He sighed. “Once, you didn’t have to filter the water to drink it. People decided where they wanted to live and what they wanted to eat. And when.”

“When was that?”

“Before the Red Rain. A long, long time ago.”

Despite herself, she chuckled. “That’s totally not true, Rose. It’s always been like this, except for when it was worse. There’s no point in fighting it.”

“We’re here,” Rose said.

She gazed past him. Yes, they’d arrived. Lissa was nowhere in sight. Was she inside already?

If so, that was too bad. Because Deedra was
not
going in there.

“We have to go,” she told Rose, backing away from the building. “I’m going. I’m leaving the Territory. I’ve decided. Are you coming with me?”
Please say yes. Please, please, please. I can do this alone if I have to, but I don’t want to.

Rose said nothing. He was staring up, not moving, a slip of green against the grayed white and beige backdrop of the Territory’s buildings. The sun struggled through the clouds, and bands of dust-filled light strobed around him.

“Rose. Come on. Let’s go.”

He pointed above them. What seemed like an entire fleet of drones soared over L-Twelve. Deedra barely had time to take in their presence when they all screamed through their speakers with one voice:

“Lockdown!”

L
ockdown!” the programmed voice commanded again, also blaring from speakers mounted high on poles along the street. The sound was so huge and thick that it pressed against Deedra and nearly knocked her over. She stumbled against Rose, who steadied her.

“Lockdown!” it blared again. “This is a lockdown!”

Lockdowns happened all the time, especially more and more lately, as war with Dalcord seemed inevitable. There were lockdowns when a group of scavengers from another Territory dared to cross the border. When a lunatic with a homemade bomb threatened to blow up the factory. When a derecho blasted through the Territory, or when the rain was too toxic to risk going out into it.

“This is a Territory-wide lockdown! All citizens remain in place until released by the Department of Citizen Services or representatives of the Office of the Magistrate!”

A Territory-wide lockdown was the most serious of all. Maybe the Dalcord people had finally gone over the line, as everyone in Ludo feared they would. Or maybe it was just the weather. At least once a month, everything shut down because of drastic weather or dangerous air quality.

“Get inside!” a voice shouted above the alert. “Now!”

It was Dr. Dimbali, standing in the door of L-Twelve, waving people in as they rushed past the scanner without pausing. He looked up to the sky, then back to the crowd gathered outside, hustling them inside.

“We have to go inside,” Rose said. “It’s safer there.”

“No way. Not a chance.”

“Deedra, don’t be ridiculous. We have to get inside.”

“But Jaron—”

“It’ll be fine,” he promised, and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her toward the factory.

Deedra wanted them anywhere
but
inside L-Twelve. Trapped in there for who knew how long, they’d be penned in with Jaron and the Bang Boys. Her stomach tightened as they got closer, and, without even trying, she began dragging her feet on the ground, resisting. Rose was right: Whatever was happening, they needed shelter and L-Twelve was the closest, but she still couldn’t bring herself to go inside.

Ultimately, she had no choice. Between Rose’s pulling and a press of bodies, she was unwillingly thrust through the door, tripping past Dr. Dimbali, who waited until everyone was inside before going in himself. He slammed the door shut and locked it.

“This is bad,” she muttered to Rose. “This is not good at all.” They were locked down with Jaron, with the man who had proved he would beat Rose with pipes, would chase him down in the streets. She wanted to shrink into invisibility, crushing herself down to vanish between the bodies around her.

Dr. Dimbali cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Everyone please remain calm!” The buzz and burble of frightened voices did not abate. He shouted some more, but the overlapping echoes of frightened voices in the relatively confined space overwhelmed him.

As Deedra watched, he strode over to Lio and grabbed his pipe.
Then he slammed it against the floor twice, three times:
Clong! Clong! Clong!

Now everyone paid attention. Breathing heavily from his exertions, Dr. Dimbali called out, “Please remain calm! We are well fortified here! Stay calm!”

Deedra wasn’t sure of that. A lockdown was different from the shelter-in-place order that day by the river.

“Are you all right?” Rose asked.

“It’ll be okay,” she said with a confidence she did not entirely feel. “This happens sometimes. We just have to sit tight for a while. They’ll update us. If it’s weather, we’re stuck here until the weather’s over. If it’s something else…” She drifted off. Was she trying to calm him or herself? If Dalcord had attacked, they could be stuck there for days.

Or they might not get out alive.

Or Jaron might…

She clutched her pendant, twice as glad that she had it back. One day of reaching for its ghost was more than enough. She raced it back and forth along its chain and stared up at Jaron’s office.

As the alarms tapered off, L-Twelve grew quiet and still. Tension hung in the air like tattered cloth. Everyone was listening for whatever would happen next.

Nonchalantly, Deedra sidled into place at her favorite workstation and focused her attention on Jaron’s office: He wasn’t in it.

Relief flooded her. Jaron wasn’t here. Good. And maybe that meant the lockdown was a drill. If Jaron had known about it in advance, he might have stayed home, rather than be stuck all day at the factory. Jaron’s air scrubbers had to be top-notch; he would be much more comfortable at home than at L-Twelve.

She murmured, “Jaron’s not here,” to Rose, then sought out Lissa in
the crowd, finally spotting her in the back of the building, pressed into a corner. They signaled to each other that they were each all right. Lissa shrugged as if to say,
Sorry I’m all the way back here
.

Rose nudged Deedra and pointed out Kent Massgrove, who was glaring in their direction. “I think we should get out of his line of sight.”

She agreed. The Bang Boys would be distracted by the lockdown for a little while, but then who knew if they would take advantage of it to mete out what they perceived as justice for the previous day’s humiliation. Without Jaron, it could go either way.

Taking Rose’s hand, she dragged him back toward the relief room, where people took their ten-minute break each shift. Together, they huddled in a corner.

“Look, there’s something I need you to have,” Rose told her, speaking very quietly, making certain no one else could hear.

“What?”

“It’s a long story,” he told her. He reached under his coat and—after glancing around to make certain no one was watching—pulled out a flat, somewhat thick rectangle. He handed it to her, sure to keep it between them so that no one else could see it. “I want you to know everything I know, Deedra. I want you to learn what I’ve learned.”

The object felt old and fragile but still substantial. It had the surface area of a tab but was much thicker and heavier.

“It opens,” he said, and she realized it did. It was somehow hinged on one edge, then open on the other three. She peeled back the stiff outer covering to discover words:
This Side of Paradise
. Reflexively, she tapped the words, but nothing happened.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Rose said, chuckling kindly. “It’s not electronic. It’s a book.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Keep it hidden.”

“Why? Is it illegal?”

“I don’t think so. But it’s different. I don’t want someone to take it from you.”

“Would that be bad?”

“Well, it’s for you. Not for someone else.”

A book. She’d heard of books, of course—the wikinets were full of them, diatribes about politics and the war and DNA recombination and the Red Rain. This didn’t look anything like a book, but she took Rose’s word for it.

The lockdown siren blasted again. She winced into its intensity.

“The Territory-wide lockdown is over,” said a different voice. She recognized this one as the voice of L-Twelve’s systems. “Lockdown is now isolated to this building. Please turn your attention to the nearest screen.”

“Something’s happening here,” she told him. “Probably a bomb threat. That happens sometimes.”

Out on the factory floor there was a large screen mounted up near the catwalk, for instruction and directions. The relief room had a smaller one, and they turned to it as it flickered on.

Deedra was shocked to see Max Ludo’s face appear. It was cracked and offset from the broken display, but it couldn’t have been anyone but Max. Father and son shared the same gray eyes and the same cruel twist of a mouth. Max was Jaron in fast-forward, with the dew of success and power clinging to every wrinkle and the hollows of his cheeks.

“I am speaking to you personally,” the Magistrate said, his measured voice rebounding and echoing from the display and the speakers on the factory floor, “because of a great personal tragedy.…” He paused and growled at someone off-camera. “No. Not like this. Go to hell.”

He leaned forward, his lips trembling and his eyes flaring with rage. When he spoke this time, his voice was laden with grief and injustice. “Listen to me, you little puke-ants, you ungrateful dung-dwellers.
One of you murdered Jaron. We believe it’s someone in this building. Troops will interrogate everyone within, and believe me, whoever is responsible
will
be found.” Max ground his teeth together with an animal ferocity. “If I have to haul each and every one of you into SecFac and cut your fingers off one at a time, I will! I will!” He was ranting now, pounding a fist on the desk before him. “My advisers tell me I should offer you little rat-chasers a
reward
for information about the killer. A
reward
!” His voice—usually deep and commanding—pitched high and quivering with uncontrollable rage. “I’ll give you a reward! If you didn’t kill him, you
get to live another day
! And if you killed him, I will personally rip your heart out and shove it right! Up! Your! Ass! Your family will eat
cement
for a month!” Spittle flew from his lips and spattered on the camera as he ranted.

“Show them!” he bellowed. “Put the picture up! Show these animals what one of them did to
my
boy!”

Heaving his breath, he waited a moment, then screamed to someone off-camera, “Don’t give me that crap! Put it up! Now!”

The screen shifted to a static image. A bed. A body lay on it. Deedra recognized Jaron immediately. He was naked from the waist up, and she couldn’t not recognize that tattoo—the starburst. Until she saw the picture, she hadn’t believed he was actually dead. Even Max Ludo’s outburst hadn’t convinced her. But the picture left no doubt. What would be the point of faking this?

Jaron’s body was twisted out of proportion, limbs turned in ways limbs had never been designed to turn. He looked
squeezed
, as though a giant had picked him up in its massive hand and crushed him to death as he struggled.

Lacerations raced up and down his flesh, strips of skin hanging, a map of blood chiseled into him. Somehow, the worst part was that Jaron’s eyes (well, the one eye visible in the picture at least) were still open, staring emptily.

It was bloody. It was terrible. Yes. But her tormentor was dead. She felt guilt and relief at the same time.

Next to her, Rose drew in a startled breath, and his grip tightened.

And she really
looked
at the image. Looked beyond the body, which had so commanded her attention.

Something green and sinuous and studded with wicked projections lay entwined around Jaron’s lower leg, as though it had slipped down. In the upper left corner of the image, another, similar length of
something
lurked there.

Something?
Who was she kidding? It wasn’t
something
.

It was a tendril.

The feed cut away to a black screen with the logo of the DCS and the words:

“Put that away,” Rose murmured. The book. He was talking about the book. She slipped it under her poncho, into her waistband, not even feeling it go. Her muscles had gone slack, her fingers numb. “No one can change what’s in there,” he whispered. “It’s permanent. It’s not like online, where people just say whatever they want and it gets all mashed up. This is the truth. This is real history.”

What was he
talking
about? Who cared about his stupid
book
right now? Jaron was dead, and it was obvious who had killed him. “I can’t believe you did it,” Deedra said, her voice pitched low. “You killed him!” The idea thrilled and terrified her. Jaron’s death was a gift and a horror at the same time.

“I didn’t.”

She didn’t believe him. It was almost impossible that he hadn’t.
He had the pendant.
Where else would it have come from, if not from Jaron?

Oh, God
, she thought. And she remembered what he’d said to her the other night.

Have you killed?

Many, many times.

And then he’d talked about bacteria and insects, but when she’d asked if he’d killed a person, he hadn’t said
no
, she realized.

I don’t make that distinction
, he’d said.

“Did. You. Do. It?” she asked. Along her leg and side, the places where he’d cut her the night before itched and throbbed. Moments earlier she hadn’t felt them at all. Now it was as though the rest of her body had gone numb and she could feel only those cuts.

“I swear, no.”

“You saw the picture. Those tendril things looked like, like… like
you
. He was cut. That’s like—”

Voice urgent and huskier than normal, Rose grabbed her by the shoulders and locked eyes with her. “I
swear
, I didn’t do it. I could have, but I didn’t. I don’t want to
hurt
people, Deedra. I want to
learn
about them. Learn
from
them. And maybe fix things for them, if I can.”

“You can’t fix the world. I told you—it’s always been this way.” She shook him off. “And stop trying to change the subject!”