Brave New Love (29 page)

And he was right. Everything else was the same as the first time: the big store, the chubby clerk, the cage of yellow birds to pick from. He transferred to the 93 train at station 47, standing
in line for the ticket machine. But this time an old man in a knit hat stood behind him. “What’s in the cage?” the old man asked.

Owen was angry at the man for not being the girl. But he kept his voice steady. “A canary,” he said. “It’s for my sister.”

His heart felt gray. He bought his ticket and headed home.

•  •  •

A little after five on a March evening, Miranda’s phone buzzed. She was eating dinner at the time. The baby was crawling around her ankles, and her brothers were dueling
with plastic swords. Miranda answered her phone and heard an unfamiliar woman’s voice, low and slightly husky.

“Is this Miranda?”

“Yes.” A flicker of unease. Was the city government after her again?

The woman spoke in a soft, confiding way, very fast. “It’s Nan from the pet store, sweetheart, you might recall me, I was there when you asked about the boy buying the canary, you
spoke to Patty. She was holding a hamster. Remember? I’m short and round?”

“Oh!” Miranda pressed the phone closer to her ear. She jumped from the table and went to the hall, where it was quieter. “Yes!” she said.

“I remembered that boy, dear,” Nan’s voice said. “The canary for his sister. I remembered him because of that and because he was a nice boy, and good-looking as well. And
I liked you, too, so sweet and determined. And the way you stood up to Patty about that sick dog, which we did take to the vet, by the way. So I kept your phone number just in case.”

She said this so fast, with the words all run together, that Miranda could hardly take it in. “Oh!” she said again. “You mean—”

“I know it’s a little bit outside the rules, but this is a story of hopeless romance, isn’t it? I can’t resist romance. So I wanted you to know.”

Miranda’s heart thumped. “To know what?”

“But I have to ask a question first, dear.” The voice on the phone got even quicker and quieter. “Does he want you to find him?”

An image of the boy’s face sprang into Miranda’s mind. She remembered the look he’d given her. She saw his desperate eagerness as he scrawled letters on the train window. Her
heart flipped. “He
does
” Miranda said. “I’m
sure
he does. So you mean—have you seen him?”

“Yes, I have,” said Nan, and Miranda could hear a chuckling satisfaction in her voice. “I have indeed, sweetheart. He was just here, buying another bird. He said it was for his
sister. Maybe the first one died, I hope not, because—”

Miranda interrupted. “Is he still there?”

“No, no. He left.”

“How long ago?”

“Just now. A minute ago. I said to him, ‘It’s cold out, do you have a long ride home?’ And he said yes he did, all the way to Clay Street in Area 19, so I said I’d
give him a heavier cover for the cage, and that’s all I could find out.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Miranda. “You’re so kind, I’m so grateful. I have to go now, but really, thank you, thank you.”

“You’re so welcome, sweetheart,” said the soft quick voice on the phone. “Good luck.”

To her mother, Miranda said she had to meet a friend, and her mother, wiping congealed milk from the baby’s highchair, asked no questions.

Miranda snatched her coat from the hook by the front door, dashed down the hall, hopped from foot to foot while the elevator took its time making its way up to the 38th floor, then making its
way down. She ran full speed to the stairs to the subway. She bought her ticket and ran for the right platform and waited again, hot in her heavy coat, boiling with impatience. When the train came
at last, she rode standing up, right next to the door, so she could jump out at the Clay Street stop.

She was the first one off the train when they arrived. She dodged the ingoing and outgoing passengers, stretching up as tall as she could, looking for the dark hair and slender shape of the boy
named O. The crowds were thick. She couldn’t see in any direction, blocked by backs in thick coats, bent heads in caps or hoods. Why couldn’t they all
move
? She squeezed between
them, she peered past them, and looked for the boy who had probably forgotten all about her.

But she saw no sign of him. Trains came and went, the streams of people gushed out and swirled around her. More people were sucked in and swept away. She saw no one she had ever seen before,
much less the one she wanted to see. He was too far ahead—he must be gone already, out into the streets. She knew that if she couldn’t find him here, she had no hope of finding him out
there, in the midst of the millions.

She stopped fighting the crowd. Her excitement drained away. It was time to go home and forget this quest, once and for all. She sat down on a bench, feeling hollow inside. The quest was over.
It had been a waste of time. At least no one had known about it—that was one good thing. There was no one to laugh at her and tell her how stupid she’d been.

The train came. People surged toward it, and that was when Miranda heard a flight of warbling notes, a trill that could come only from a yellow canary.

She spun toward the sound. The crowds were dense; the faces of a thousand strangers pressed toward her. She forgot her shyness—some new person inside her took command. She jumped up on the
bench she’d been sitting on, and in a voice louder than any voice she’d known she had, she sang out: “Omar!” She tried all his possible names. “Omar! Omark! O Marks
with the bird! Where are you? Where
are
you?”

People stared at her, but she heard the bird again, and she hopped down and ran toward the sound. Hands reached out but she knocked them away, and seeing that it must be some kind of emergency,
people made a path for her. Ahead, the boy stood facing her, the birdcage in his right hand half uncovered, a look of astonishment on his face. “Here!” he cried. “I’m here,
right here!”

You would think the spell would be broken then, as these two people who had barely ever spoken to each other came together in such a rush. But no. They were strangers who didn’t feel like
strangers, having been alive in each other’s minds for so long. They stood facing each other with the crowds parting around them. He smiled a smile of wonder with his mouth half open.
“It’s Owen,” he said when she was standing in front of him. “My name is Owen Marks. I didn’t have time to write all of it on the window.”

Miranda was breathing too hard to speak, but she smiled, too. Tears rose into her eyes, but she brushed them away. “Miranda,” she said. She took a breath. “That’s my
name. I heard the bird.”

“I was checking to see if it was all right,” he said. “When it saw the light, it sang.”

“It’s so beautiful,” she said.

“Shall we go out of here?” he said, and she nodded. He covered the cage again, and they walked up the stairway and into the street, where the afternoon light glinted on the cars.
They stopped beneath the awning of a store.

“This bird is a mate for the other one,” Owen said.

Miranda just nodded and smiled. For the moment, she had no words.

“It’s sad that they have to live in a cage,” said Owen. “But at least now they’ll have each other.”

•  •  •

A week before Miranda had found Owen, Clement had left his job at the pretzel stand. He’d saved enough money to move to an apartment, and he got a new and better job at a
bakery. He kept in touch with Miranda’s family, though—he was grateful to them—and one evening when he was visiting Miranda came in with a new friend.

“Owen!” Clement cried.

“Clement!” cried Owen.

Over the course of the evening, with many questions and exclamations from the family, Owen and Miranda told the complicated story of their quests. “If only I knew who you looked
for!” said Clement. “I could have saved so much trouble!” He wrinkled his pale forehead and waved his hands around in great distress. “If only I knew! You could be meeting
much sooner, much, much easier! It would have been greatly better!”

Owen and Miranda thought back over all that had happened—the obstacles, the longing, the brief moments of hope, the chance good deeds, their stubborn perseverance.

“Don’t worry,” Owen said to Clement. “A quest is supposed to be hard.”

“Yes,” Miranda agreed. “It was fine, just the way it was.”

N
INA
K
IRIKI
H
OFFMAN

I was hiding behind a flowstone curtain near Plantlands, peeking between fingers of stone fringe at Piller, the man I was supposed to mate with on my fifteenth birthday, not
far enough in the future for me. Two of the other girls my age in Na Below thought he was handsome. He was tall and strong and had all the right parts to make a good father, and he still had lots
of thick dark hair, even though he was over thirty. I might have liked him better if he smiled.

Piller leaned on his walking stick, overseeing a team of four middlers ladling recycled waste into the fertilizer channels along the rows of crops. Light banks hung from the ceiling of the
Plantlands cavern, the bright, broad-spectrum light falling hard and white on everything below. Shadows had sharp edges under the lights. Not like the fuzzy shadows thrown by the soft orange glows
we used in the home cavern.

The field near the flowstone curtain was planted with rows of corn this season. Raggedy green stalks thrust up from the pale dirt. The waste stained the cool air with the smell of shit.

Fingal, my best friend, tripped, and some of his waste spilled onto the path between rows. Before Fingal could even straighten, Piller grabbed the bucket and ladle out of Fingal’s hands,
set them aside, and struck Fingal on the back with his walking stick. Three thunks of plast against pulpcloth and flesh, and Fingal sprawled on the ground, his face in the dust, his belly on the
fallen waste mixture, his extra-long fingers twitching.

I gripped one hand in the other, wanting to run to my friend and help, afraid to be discovered so far from my own job, in a place where I didn’t belong. I pressed my cheek against the
cool, waxy curtain of stone.

Arn, Fin’s good friend and silent partner, wavered, his waste bucket swaying. Piller turned to glare at him, and Arn put his head down and went back to ladling, shoulders hunched.

The lights flickered.

“Sky take it,” Piller cursed, glaring up at the light banks.

Maybe the lights listened. They didn’t flicker again.

Piller looked at his other two crewmembers, girls I didn’t much like, both of them also scheduled to mate with him when they turned fifteen. Piller’s hand tightened and loosened on
the shaft of his walking stick. The corners of his mouth curved down. His thick, dark brows lowered, leaving his eyes in caves of shadow. Both the girls stayed bent over, faces toward the ground,
working in rhythm along the rows, their backs to Piller, their feet carrying them farther away.

Piller frowned, then turned and poked Fingal with his stick. “Get up. Get back to work.”

Fingal pushed up, uncurling from the ground. He was a freak, with extra bones in his spine, extra joints in his fingers and toes, extra long, skinny arms and legs. When he stood up straight, he
was taller than Piller, so he never stood up straight when he worked in Plantlands. He faced away from Piller as he picked up bucket and ladle and returned to where he had left off. The front of
his green bodysuit was smeared with waste.

I couldn’t bear to watch any more. I rose and padded on sock feet along the flowstone to the gap I could fit through. I peeked out to make sure Piller was looking the other way then
slipped out on to the path back to the living cavern and my own job.

•  •  •

I spent most of my time with Noel, at fifty-three the oldest person alive in Na Below. He was in charge of the puters we had left after more than two hundred years of
underground living, and I was his best apprentice. I spent some time training with Revi, our doctor, too. All the middlers did, and all the middlers worked with Noel, and tried to teach what we
learned to the littlers. We were afraid of another accident like the one that had killed Noel’s puter trainer before she had taught him everything she knew about puters. We lost a lot of
knowledge when the falling rock killed her. After that, Bufo, Na Below’s leader, decreed that all of us should study with any elders who had useful knowledge, then choose specializations that
would best take Na into the future.

There were only forty-two of us left in Na Below, seven men, seven women, thirteen middlers, and fifteen littlers. More than five hundred used to live here, when folk first fled from
Weatherdeath to the underground. Our prophet, Silas Smith, had used his earthly aboveground fortune to outfit the caverns for his chosen people while there were still cities and industries and
supplies in the Up. The first couple of generations in Na Below built and expanded and scavenged after the big disasters that had killed most everybody in the Up. When the plagues swept through the
remaining folk alive in the Up, Silas’s grandson, prophet Jacob Smith, shut the cavern entrances, and we hadn’t opened the doors since.

We had started out with plenty in Na Below to live on—stockpiles of goods and food and medicine, and machines that could recycle what we shed. Pulp-forming machines took most of our
worn-outs and made new: dishes, clothes, blocks of ply we could carve into furniture and other things we couldn’t make from the soft limestone of our cave walls. Echo River flowed through our
cavern, pushing power into our generators, watering the Plantlands, filling our cisterns. Prophet Silas had left us rules to live by that kept us alive.

Some of us, anyway. For a while.

I pulled my bodysuit collar tighter to warm my neck. In the open living cavern, the temperature stayed a constant fifty-four degrees. The puter room would be warmer.

There weren’t any other people on the path, but I kept watching anyway. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be; I didn’t want anyone spotting and reporting me. I’d had
enough shame standing this week.