Brave New Love (38 page)

“Yes, yes. How did you
know
how to operate it?”

Akil hunted through his sparking brain for an answer that would satisfy. He hadn’t
known
, exactly. It was just that . . . what else could you do?

“Just . . . just did.”

The gray man’s flat silver eyes flashed as he lowered his chin, tallying these unexpected equations.

“Why?” he said when he finally looked up. “Why did you come down here? Weren’t you afraid?”

“Yes. Afraid.”

“So? Why?”

“For . . . the girl.”

“Girl? What girl?”

Through the electricity, a surge of anger burst through Akil. Was the gray man going to deny that she even existed? Deny the most important thing Akil had ever felt?

“Persephone,” Akil tried to shout back, but the buzzing in his head made the word sluggish and heavy. “Persephone.”

The gray man took a step back, as if Akil had suddenly become dangerous. He was struck into silence for a time.

“Persephone,” the gray man said at length, “isn’t a girl. It’s a machine.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Akil pushed, suddenly feeling, through his lethargy, that he was in charge of this conversation. “I heard them . . . talking about her. Saw them . . .
carry her away in the box. I saw . . . where she lived. And the same . . . truth that she saw.” His body was laboring under the effort of getting all these words out. Sweat slicked his
forehead, his chest. “We’re connected by it . . . forever.”

The gray man was shaking his head in slow disbelief.

“Persephone is PERcentage Surviving Electron PHaser ONE,” he said, delivering a deathblow with cool detachment. “It’s an engine component crucial to a machine that . . .
that essentially cleans the air, decontaminates it. Do you understand? We’ve been looking for it for a long, long time. It was hidden by the people who built it long ago, when their enemies
were trying to destroy them.”

“The men who . . . came up before . . . called it . . . ‘she.’”

“We sometimes refer to machinery as though it were female,” the gray man said. “A superstition of sorts, I suppose, a way to make the machines more like us.”

Akil struggled to force his drooping eyes onto the gray man’s glowing planes of light. The intensity singed his retina, and tears began to flood his eyes.

“I know Persephone is alive. I can . .
. feel her.
Where is she? Tell me . . . where she is.”

“It”
the gray man said.
“It
is below us, deep in the foundations. They’re fitting her—” he caught himself. “They’re fitting it into
place now. It’s one of the last components of the machine. If it works—” something like awe passed into the gray man’s voice, “if it works, we might actually have a
chance of surviving beyond another generation or two.”

Below
, Akil thought.
There was still more below
this? And Persephone was trapped down there.

“Please,” Akil said, the last ergs of his energy ebbing out of him. “Please just let me . . . see her once. Let me speak to her.”

The gray man shook his head again, slowly.

“I’m sorry, boy. I really am.” He let the glow of his eyes reflect on to Akil a moment longer, then turned away and went to a section of the wall that slid open for him and
closed behind him as he left, turning the room back into a prison once more.

The instant he was alone, Akil tried to pull himself forward. His leaden torso rose fractionally, the electric needles buzzing through him, and he slumped back. He couldn’t even shift his
weight so that he could topple off the chair and possibly out of the light. He fought his eyes, to keep them from closing. Every part of him felt so heavy.

He moved his fingers, stretched them out, trying to get them to lead the hand, the arm toward the small table with the head of the hammer on it. The arm slid forward an inch, two, then the
needles became too much, felt like they were eating into his bones.

But what must they be doing to Persephone now, down below? Connecting her to a machine, was that what the gray man said?

Akil flung his foot up, managed to hit the edge of the table holding his belongings. It rattled and teetered, the things atop it sliding to the edges, and then it found its balance again and
stilled.

He threw his leg up again, needles firing up his whole body. He would have screamed if he’d had the strength for it. His foot caught the table again, rattled it. The pliers fell to the
floor. The head of metal jumped slightly, skittered to the nearest edge.

He had nothing left. His body was alive and burning up with hot needles.

Just to have Persephone’s cool hand touch his hot cheek.

He kicked up again, but lost his strength in the midst of it. His foot glanced off one of the table legs. The hammerhead vibrated, tipped, fell.

A heavy crunch sounded from the floor where it had landed and the light from below flickered. Akil struggled. The electricity buzzed through him still, but not quite so deeply now. He could feel
the muscles in his arms and legs popping with new strength. Strength enough to grip the edges of the seat, hoist himself out so that he tumbled forward and fell on to the cold metal floor, away
from the glow of the light.

He gasped for air as prickles intensified and then slowly retreated from his limbs, his fingers, his toes. Inches away from his face, the misshapen chunk of metal rested on the floor, a crack
splaying from beneath it, covering nearly the entire surface of the single plate that cast the light. The plate itself was glass or plastic and it flickered now, brighter and dimmer, much like the
bulbs in the halls of 357.

Akil got on his knees and breathed in deeply many times to let the stale air clear the sluggishness from his body. He reached his hand back into the light and quickly pulled out the
hammerhead.

He scooped up his pliers, his cord and wires, and stood up. He walked over to the part of the wall that had opened for the gray man, but which remained closed for him.

He pressed himself against the wall adjacent so that if the door opened and someone entered they wouldn’t immediately see him. He looked around the room, but it offered nothing he
hadn’t noticed before. They would come back for him eventually and maybe they would send him down, hook him into a machine. Maybe they would even put him near Persephone. If they did, and if
she were the last thing he saw as they bled his life out into a machine then he would take the sight of her into death with him. He could accept that. But maybe they would just take him back to 357
and fix it so that he couldn’t get back into the “elevator.” He’d be up there, alone forever. And, worse, Persephone would have become a part of the foundation of this
place, giving her precious life to—

The door hissed open and Akil swung the hammerhead overhand at the gray man. Akil felt the impact up his arm and through his whole body and the gray man stumbled crazily to the side and fell to
the floor, heavy and senseless.

Akil turned to run out of the room, but standing in the doorway now was another gray man, bringing his weapon to bear. Akil shut his eyes tight, so tight that he clenched his jaw in the effort.
He slapped his free hand over his eyes and then tried to whip his body away.

He heard the flash of the strobe, felt a brief heat on his body, then opened his eyes and spun backward, hurling the chunk of metal as soon as he had sight of his target.

It struck the gray man in the chest, slamming him against the back wall and causing him to cough sharply. Akil fought his instinct to run, heard his mother whispering in his ears for calm, for a
plan that would
work
.

He leapt on the gray man, snatched up the metal and was poised to bring it down on the gray man’s skull. But the man remained still beneath him. Akil looked quickly up and down the
corridor then wrestled the gray man’s body into the room. The door whispered shut behind him and there was an instant of panic. What if he were trapped once again?

But the sound of his mother’s voice calmed him and he searched the fallen men. Their belts were packed with things so unrecognizable that Akil could only wildly guess what they were, or
what they were used for. He removed one of their belts and, because he was too small to wear it at his waist, he strapped it across his chest as if it were one of the tool bandoliers used by
357’s machinists.

At this point the door opened for him, and he ran from corridor to corridor—careening past branches where gray men went by, either oblivious to him or too slow-moving to impede his
immediate progress—until he found a place that he knew, near the giant room with the vast screens. He let his instincts find the route again, back to the elevators.

As he turned a corner, two gray men walked ahead, their backs to him. He shot up against the wall behind them, ricocheted and landed in front of them and sped away before they could utter a
single sound.

Then he was before the elevators again. There was the one he had come down in and there was the other as well, and if the one he had used led back up . . .

Mounted on the wall by each door was a plate. Akil prodded it and heard a chirp from something on the gray man’s belt. The plate lit up and the door slid open.

Footsteps, many of them, were rising hurriedly from around a near corner. He threw himself into the compartment, looked at the buttons and the screen. This was 00000 and above were standard
numerals: 1, 2, 3 . . . all the way through 357 and up.

So what is below us, Mother?

Footsteps crashed down the hallway outside. He pressed the buttons: 00001.

The doors closed and the elevator moved.

Down.

It went for a long time, longer than the distance Akil would have judged between any two floors, any ten floors even. But below were the foundations, the gray man had said, whatever that meant.
Maybe there was as much below as there was above. Maybe the foundations went down forever.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Light from the elevator poured out on to a metal grating with a rail to prevent a fall into the space beyond, which sprawled into a deep, endless
black.

He stepped out, on to the grating and felt a hot wind pouring up as if from a raging furnace deep below. The door shut behind him, cutting off the light. Now he could see, over the rail and
down, pinpricks of light through the black: red, white, flickering, flashing, glinting from long corners and pointed tips. The lights extended as far as Akil could see, and even farther still. They
were giant machines, the size of the unimaginably massive structures Akil had seen on the screen earlier, machines that kept all the floors above working, perhaps all the towers in that impossible
landscape working, and did other things that only the machines themselves knew or understood anymore.

Somewhere below, in this world of machines, was Persephone. Her quiet greeting, her welcoming gaze, the relief of her cool hand on his fevered cheek.

So Akil chose a direction and ran, looking for his love, in darkness.

W
ILLIAM
S
LEATOR

All the teachers are cops.

I’ve seen on TV that kids our age used to do things in class like pass notes and spit little balls of paper at each other. Incredible. Pass a note these days and you get
tazed—painfully.

The kids even got into fights, talked back to teachers, and “cut” class in those old shows. Their punishment? Detentions and suspensions. No way now. Break a major rule and you get
sent straight to the work camps for a while. Screw up enough and you’re there permanently. Or worse. My mom says it’s all necessary, that schools have to be “safe
environments.” That’s why teachers became cops, so they could enforce the rules and “protect” the students.

So I can’t communicate with Supan—or Pan, his nickname, which he prefers—at all in the two classes a day we have together. The truth is, even if I
could pass
notes or
talk to him, I still wouldn’t be able to communicate during the boring hours of our classes. My grades are much better than his, and we are assigned seating by grade-point average. That puts
me in the front of the first row on the left and he’s near the back of the last row, on the right. He’s way smarter than me, but the teachers don’t know it because he’s from
Thailand. He has a slight accent, but his English speech is nearly perfect. He just has problems reading English. So he doesn’t do well in school. If school weren’t so rigid, he’d
shine. But these teachers/cops don’t care how smart he is. Everything is based on tests and grades—including their jobs and the whole school’s budget.

There’s only one teacher who’s nice to Pan. He tells me about her, when we meet secretly after school. The nice teacher is Ms. Van Houten, who teaches ELL—English Language
Learning. She’s familiar with foreign kids, so she knows how smart Pan is. She’s also nice to me when I go to meet Pan after her class—it’s his last one of the day. She
doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with two boys being together. All the other teachers would turn us in if they knew. Since the Breakdown and the New Constitution—which happened before
I was born—it’s against the law here.

The place where we go to be together is the Truth or Consequences Motel. It has no cop cameras in the rooms, and that’s why it’s expensive and takes all my spending money. But
there’s nothing else I want to spend money on than having a place to be close to Pan. I just worry all the time that our parents might find out. They’d set the real cops on us in a
flash. The laws are very strict. Family members are always turning in their relatives and spouses and children.

I’ve already rented a room at Truth or Consequences for this afternoon because I know that wrestling practice after school has been cancelled today. The coach is out sick. I just made the
reservation on my phone. It’s lunch break. I went outside to hide behind a big dead tree—dead like all the trees in the city—so the security cops constantly patrolling the school
building wouldn’t see me. Of course, even that was risky. Phones are not allowed on the school grounds. Pan and I have different lunch periods so he doesn’t know about this yet. I can
hardly wait till school’s over so I can tell him.