Ash (15 page)

I didn’t know who to ask. It wasn’t like I could just call in one of the ministers. Not for personal business, and not without explaining myself. And it would certainly get around if I called in one of the janitors. The whole staff would be buzzing about what was so important that I forced someone to come in on their evening off.

Then it came to me. That infuriating Ash from Spectrum. Sol. He worked in the Records Room, which meant he’d have access. He’d also be able to help if I hit another wall. He was some sort of tech geek. It’s why, despite his ring, he was employed at the UV. Officially, he was just there to sort files, but his skill set had even the highest Purples using him to fix computers, plexis, you name it. I’d even heard he helped with encryption. Not that anyone would admit it. And it wasn’t just at work. He’d managed to hack our school system to fix test scores for a few of my friends over the years (for a price, of course). He’d changed Portia’s mathematics grade from a pass to an excellent rating last year now that I thought about it.

Although I had never sunk that low. Was I really going to ask ‘the dead guy’ for help now? If people found out, they’d talk. Still, ostows had kept him quiet after Portia’s test fix. Hopefully a small donation would do the same for me.

I went back and forth with the decision. This was way bigger than a grade change. And Sol was destined to die by his eighteenth birthday. What if he wanted to go out with a bang? No, I reasoned with myself. He wouldn’t risk putting his family in jeopardy by messing with a future minister. I’d be fine. And if anyone questioned my talking to him, I could cover it up by saying my plexi was acting up, and I was afraid some non-believer was trying to get into the mainframe. It sounded reasonable. I did a quick search and found his name and information, then pinged him despite my better judgment. A Purple, especially one of my standing, shouldn’t be contacting an Ash. But I had to. The things Link had said had gotten to me, and I was determined to find out the truth. I kept my eyes glued to my tracker. Why hadn’t Sol responded?

The race had been over for two hours now, and I stopped, thinking again of Aldan Harris standing on the finish line. I shuddered, unable to stop my mind from replaying the scene of his removal. I sent a quick note to Nora and requested she send flowers. It was the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. Then I pinged Sol again. Five minutes passed and still no answer. I looked at his address. No. 15½ , Ave D, Ash Ring. It was so far out. I didn’t dare go—not alone. Then Link’s words rang through my head.
Have you even been out there, Madden? Have you walked through the Ash zone?

He made it sound downright awful, but I knew better. Link was spewing craziness. The Ash ring was fine. That’s what I told him, and it was time to put words into action—to prove that I was right. About the outer circles, about destiny… about my mother. I took a deep breath.

The Ash ring was about to get a visit from Madden Sumner.

N
othing about home felt real. It was like walking into a memory that had been perfectly preserved. There was the box of Rice Puffs, still sitting out on the kitchen counter, and my dad’s glass next to the sink. The cube screen brightened as my brothers and I entered the kitchen, one side showing Aldan’s inbox of unopened fan mail, the other flashing headlines. I didn’t read them. I wasn’t interested in hearing more. I looked at the clock with blurred vision. Could it really have been only hours earlier that I’d sat right here, Aldan on one side, Link on the other?

We walked past the kitchen into the living room. Carlen, Shay, and Strom were already home. I didn’t have the heart to ask them if they were able to get Aldan’s body for burial. Their faces answered for me. They sat in a kind of daze. Shay tabbed through something on his plexi, but I knew he wasn’t concentrating. The other two barely moved. Traces of paint were still smeared over their cheeks. I wanted to scrub it off, remove the evidence, pretend that Aldan would be walking through the door in a few hours, that he was still out celebrating. I’d always been a realist—my status saw to that. But tonight I couldn’t bare it.

I listened as Kai and Pel updated my other brothers up with the trip to the holding cells, answered their questions, and made plans to visit the next day. The talk soon turned to the race. No one understood what had happened any better than I did. When the musings became too much, I said goodnight and shuffled up the stairs leading to our bedrooms. I walked slowly, stopping to stare at our high school portraits. They were lined up in chronological age. Carlen, at the foot of the stairs, then Shay, Strom, Kai, Pel, Link, Aldan, and finally me at the top. Everyone looked so happy. Except for Link. His was the only photo that wasn’t smiling. But that was Link in a nutshell. He was the serious one. How could he just throw away his life? I studied his photo. All of my brothers were handsome, but Link was the one with the classic features. Square jaw, defined cheekbones, wide green eyes, straight nose, dark blond hair that was always combed to one side. He looked like the poster boy for the Purple ring. They wouldn’t keep him in jail forever. Would they?

The thought made my eyes move to Aldan’s photo. His status didn’t save him. My boisterous, loud-mouthed brother, whose sun-kissed hair hung in his eyes and huge grin leapt off the wall. Blond stubble covered his face and he wore his purple jersey. The top half of the number “1,” given to him by his first coach on account of his destiny, peeked into the photo. I closed my eyes, picturing the number as it disintegrated, the blood spilling from his chest, and Aldan falling to the track. He couldn’t be gone. He just couldn’t. I bolted up the remaining stairs and down the hallway, stopping when I was inside Aldan’s room. I slammed the door shut behind me, leaning against it as I looked around.

Clothes and gear were covering the floor, his desk, and sticking out from his dresser drawers. His collection of loop boards hung in a line on the wall with one noticeable gap. I wondered if we’d get the board back. I doubted it. His purple bedspread was in a heap on the floor, and he’d forgotten to turn his photo cube off. It was on projector mode, and a stream of pictures rotated over the ceiling. I climbed onto his bed and lay down, watching the photos fade in and out. His pillow smelled like him. Like wind and sweat and shampoo. I curled into a ball and cried.

I’m not sure how long I stayed that way. Grief shifts time, I think, and at some point I must have dozed off. When I woke the moon was beginning to rise, and its faint light trickled through Aldan’s window. The photos still played overhead—smiling faces swapped with other smiling faces—some were friends of Aldan’s I had known, some weren’t. I wondered what they were all doing now. I wondered if they understood the race any better than I did.

There had to be some explanation for Aldan throwing his destiny. It wasn’t like him. My brother didn’t have anti-destiny leanings. It had to be a mistake. Aldan would have told me if he was up to something. There would have been signs.

That was it. I got out of Aldan’s bed and raced to his desk. There had to be a clue somewhere in his room. Something to give me, to give everyone, an answer. I started tearing through his things, looking at papers for some sort of hidden message, scrutinizing knick-knacks and gadgets for hidden compartments, but I wasn’t coming up with anything. One after another, I’d look, throw it on the floor and move on. When the desk proved of no help, I moved to the dresser, flinging out every piece of clothing until I could remove the shelves, hoping he taped something on the back of one of them.

But he didn’t.

Not finding anything sent me into a frantic craze. I pulled his loop boards from the wall, praying that he wrote something on one of them. When all eight were piled onto the floor, I moved on to the closet, yanking everything out. I didn’t care what kind of mess I was making. I needed answers. But there weren’t any to find.

I sunk down onto a rumpled pile of clothes, shoes, and loop pads. If I just had his wrist tracker. But that was gone with Aldan. I threw my head back against his bed. Pictures were still being projected on the ceiling. I got a sharp pang in my stomach. Had the answer been above me the whole time? I grabbed the cube from the bed and put it into album mode. Everything looked normal, one marked ‘championships’ that had subfolders filled with snaps of Aldan at each of his races across the country—places I’d never been. Southsphere. The Middle Territories. Even New Vegas. I’d never left New City. Then again, most hadn’t.

There was a main folder for ‘family.’ I tapped on the album marked ‘Shay’s Destiny Day.’ It was from three years ago, at Shay’s celebration party, after he’d fulfilled his destiny of forming New City Park. He still worked there as the public parks administrator. Everyone was happy in the photos. Especially Aldan. He didn’t look like a guy who was anti-destiny. I stopped on the last photo. One of Aldan and me laughing, covered in cake. Aldan had accidentally dropped a piece on my lap. So I flung some icing at him. And he threw some back. It escalated until we were both covered. Shay snapped the photo. When my mother tried to send me home for messing up the cake, Aldan was the one who changed her mind. He had that affect on people. I pushed past the photo. I couldn’t get weepy now. I needed to keep looking—find something that might answer my questions.

The last album was marked ‘Other.’ It had subfolders marked ‘UV tour,’ ‘loop views,’ ‘tricks,’ but the one that caught my attention was marked ‘OM.’ I had no idea what that stood for, and when I tried to open it, it was password protected. None of Aldan’s albums were locked. My breathing picked up. For a split second, I considered pinging Sol and asking for help. He could hack anything. But it didn’t feel right. If anyone was going to get a glimpse of my brother’s hidden secrets, it wasn’t going to be an outsider. It was going to be family.

I studied the cube. The password was only four numbers long. I could figure it out. First I tried 1-1-1-1, hoping my brother had been lazy and went with his shirt number four times. But it didn’t work. I closed my eyes and focused.
What would Aldan pick?
His birthday, March seventeenth. I tried typing in 0-3-1-7. Still no luck. Then it hit me, the only day more important than Aldan’s birthday was the one he had been prepping for his whole life. September nineteenth—his Destiny Day. I typed in 0-9-1-9, and the album opened.

A close up of a girl’s face appeared on the screen. She was about my age, with brown curls framing her face. Pretty, but even relaxed she had a kind of fierceness to her expression. Her head was leaning back like she was taking in the sun. She looked so familiar. I’d seen her before but couldn’t place her face. There were no other photos of her. Why, I wondered, had Aldan locked this one? Was this his secret girlfriend? I stared at the image, trying to place her. And then I remembered. She’d been talking to Theron after the race. What was it she had said?

Aldan’s door opened slowly, and I flipped the cube off. My mom stood in the door. She seemed broken, stooped over, like a much older version of herself. Her eyes widened as she looked around the room.

“Oh crilas, what have you done?” she asked. Her voice was hoarse and scratched, as though she’d just found it after a period of misuse.

I didn’t know how to answer. Any normal day Aldan kept his space messy, but never this bad. This was a disaster.

My mother fell to her knees, picked up one of Aldan’s jerseys and held it to her face. “You ruined it. It’s like he was never—” her voice cracked, “never here.”

I stood up, coming out of my own fog. “I didn’t mean to mess anything up.”

“Why Dax? Why?” Her eyes were sunken and her skin looked gray. It was obvious from the tremor shaking her hands that she was flying on Xalan. This conversation was going to spiral if I didn’t stop it fast.