Darklandia (11 page)

My mind flashed to my last memory of my father again—the false memory of my last day with him in Central Park. Something about that memory was odd. It wasn’t my father’s fervor over the places where people cried real tears. That was expected, as my father had been talking crazy for weeks before that day. It wasn’t the green grass in Central Park. Only one patch of grass clung to life in the entire park, right along the border between the forbidden North side and the safe South side of the park, where the old reservoir used to be. My father and I visited that patch of grass every week as if it were a deity to be worshipped.

It wasn’t any of those things. It was the cherry soda.

“There was no soda,” I whispered and Nyx looked up from where he knelt. “And his sec-band never flashed red. He wasn’t even wearing a sec-band…. He was shot.”

He stood and looked me in the eye. “Do you see now why I said you never would have believed me?” I nodded as he moved toward the cell door. “We can’t stay here much longer. The video camera is going to switch back to the live feed soon. I’m taking you to the village.”

I glanced up and saw a single camera in the center of the concrete ceiling. “You’re taking me to Greenwich Village?”

“Not that village,” he said, nodding to the door for me to join him. “The village is the nickname for the place where Hispa and I, and the rest of the rebels, live.”

“You refer to yourselves as
rebels
?”

“Well, we like to think of ourselves as the fourth branch of the government that’s constantly ignored by the other three branches.”

I thought of one of our Darkling History lessons from just a few weeks ago. America once had three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. After the Civil War, Atraxia kept the principle of three branches, but they renamed and reprioritized them: Felicity, Community, and Security. The three I-T-Y words all Atraxians needed to be happy. What more could a person need?

Nyx smiled as he slipped his sec-band into the scanner. “Reality.”

As I dragged my leaden feet through the halls of the detainee facility, I remembered the heavy pistol I held in my hand shortly before my sec-band flashed red yesterday. As we passed the offensive water fountain in the lobby surrounded by so many concrete columns, I thought of the pillars in front of St. Paul’s Chapel, riddled with bullet holes. As we passed through the front doors of the detainee facility and Nyx exchanged niceties with the angels, I thought of the blood my mother scrubbed from my cheeks the day the angels shot my father in the chest.

As soon as we took our seats inside the subway car, I blurted the question I had been biting back since we left Level 17. “How can my father be alive if he was shot?”

“He’s alive. I’ve seen him come online every time you’re inside Darklandia. They’ve been watching you. Every time the system gets a read on you, they put your father in as an observer. I don’t know if they’re trying to torture him or if he’s being used against you.”

“Isn’t it possible they’re just scanning his sec-band to make it look as if he’s logging in? He wasn’t wearing it when I last saw him.”

“It’s not his sec-band. What you don’t know about the pods, what most people don’t know about the pods, is that the neuro-gel inside the pods recognizes you and verifies your identity. It’s called your neuro-signature. The sec-band grants access to the darkroom, but it’s the neuro-gel that actually logs you in and verifies you’ve served your hour. That’s why you can’t scan your sec-band and just hang out inside the darkroom for an hour. They would know.”

The walls of the subway car tightened around me like the neuro-gel. “They know I was sitting inside that pod today?”

“No. I told you I’m the senior analyst on the Darklandia mainframe. I wrote a code to bypass the neuro-signatures on the pod on Level 17. The signatures on that pod are intercepted, encrypted, and sent to our servers instead of the Darklandia servers. Hispa and I have been trying to use the raw data from those intercepts to break the algorithm, but all we’ve come up with so far is that every person in Darklandia is assigned a score. We think the score represents how likely the person is to wake up.”

“I must have had a high score.”

“You were definitely on the leader board.”

“Then why am I free?”

“Well, don’t forget you were almost marked yesterday,” he replied. “I don’t know exactly how it works because I haven’t seen the research, but the Department of Felicity knows the effect the mark has on unmarked citizens. I imagine the mark serves as a constant reminder to others to stay in line. Whereas, removing you from the system may have a negative effect. Once everyone forgets about you, your effect on others is neutralized.”

“That’s why they keep feeding me the memory of my father, so I don’t forget.”

“Now you’re beginning to understand.”

I wanted to ask him why the government wanted to do any of this; it couldn’t just be to control everyone. But my throat ached from asking so many questions and my near episode. My hunger pangs had morphed into a sharp, twisting stomachache. A few hours ago, I might have thought these were the pains of changing into a darkling. Now, I knew they were the pains of longing; my body longed for the rations, the drugs.

“You’re not well,” Nyx said, as the train began to slow.

My body slumped so far in my seat I was on the verge of sliding off. He helped me stand and wrapped his hands over mine as we gripped the safety pole. His palms were calloused, though I couldn’t imagine why a computer geek would have calloused hands.

“We’ll be there soon and you’ll finally get to eat real food.”

Even through the pain, I managed a smile. “You’re very kind,” I said, and he looked away. “I’m sorry. Did I offend you?”

He shook his head as he gripped my hands tighter. “No, you didn’t offend me. You complimented me. Have you ever complimented someone?”

The train stopped and my right eye twitched as the pain in my abdomen radiated down my legs and into my back. “No, I don’t think I have.”

He slipped a lumen out of his back pocket and punched in a bunch of commands with his thumbs then tucked it away. “Humility,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist to help me out of the subway car. “We counted the I-T-Y words once. Guess how many they mention in the
Code of Felicity
?” He half-carried me and I half-stumbled across the platform toward what looked like a lavatory door in the back wall. “There are 128 different I-T-Y words in the
Code of Felicity
and none of them are filter words. Gray can recite every single one in less than two minutes.”

“Who’s Gray?” I groaned, feigning interest as I got the feeling he was only talking to distract me from the pain.

As we drew nearer, I noticed the sign on the door was not a lavatory sign. The sign was clearly marked
No Access
. Nyx held his sec-band inside the scanner next to the door and it flashed green. The door slid open revealing a dark stairwell.

He helped me down the first few steps and waited for the door to close behind us before he answered. “Gray is one of us,” he whispered into the darkness between us.

I couldn’t see him and, oddly, this relaxed me and made the pain subside a bit. Then a row of motion-activated lights flickered on along the staircase and the pain returned with full force.

“You’re one of us now, Sera,” he said, his face so close I could feel his breath on the tip of my nose. “We’re going to take care of you.”

His face faded from view and my eyes rolled back as another wave of pain rolled through me. He reached down and scooped me into his arms.

“I can walk,” I muttered. “Put me down. I can walk.”

The rocking motion as he descended the staircase made my head spin. I was grateful when he quickly reached the bottom of the staircase.

“We’re not far now,” he said, the strain in his voice was evident even with my eyes closed.

“Please put me down,” I said, and he lowered me gently.

I clutched the front of his coveralls as I opened my eyes. We were inside a concrete tunnel. If I listened hard enough, I could hear the sound of water running.

“It’s not far,” he said, as he slipped his arm around my waist again and guided me forward.

The tunnel curved to the right and ended abruptly. A ladder reached up toward a manhole approximately twenty feet above us.

“We’re not going up,” he said, as he placed his foot on the lowest rung of the ladder. The tread was so low it hit the floor as he pressed down with his boot. The rung bounced back when he removed his foot. A loud clang startled me and I spun toward the noise to find a steel door behind us sliding open.

The floor inside this corridor was slick with moisture and I couldn’t imagine why. Manhattan hadn’t seen a drop of rain since March and that was only for a few minutes. The longest bout of rain to hit New York in the past twenty years was the four days it rained in December three years ago. The Department of Felicity had ordered everyone to stay inside so we didn’t get sick, but my father snuck me outside after curfew. I licked raindrops off my lips for ten minutes before the angels hauled my father off for his first evaluation and marking.

We stepped into the new corridor and Nyx pulled a lever on the wall. The door slid shut and he guided me further into this clammy concrete underworld. We soon came upon another door; this one had a scanner. Nyx inserted his sec-band, but the band flashed orange.

The door slid open and he helped me over the threshold onto a steel walkway perched over what looked and smelled like sewer water. My stomach lurched as the walkway swayed beneath our feet. Nyx still had his arm wrapped firmly around my waist as we hobbled along.

My father once took me with him on one of his calls. My father worked as a pod technician for the Department of Felicity. Whenever a pod stopped working, it was my father’s job to fix it. I was eight when he took me with him to fix a pod in what used to be the Central Park Zoo. I wished I could remember who that pod in the zoo belonged to. This sour water beneath us reminded me of the stench that radiated from the scorched soil in the former animal park.

The walkway split off in two directions and Nyx guided me to the left. A few steps and we were back on solid ground inside another concrete corridor.

He stopped at the first door on the left. Affixed to the face of the door was a large, framed photograph of a U-shaped, one-story building surrounded by real grass and trees. Chunks of the outer walls appeared to have been gouged with bombs and bullet holes, which were patched with wooden boards and slopped on concrete.

“That’s above ground,” he said, as he reached for the doorknob—a plain doorknob—something I hadn’t seen except in photos. “I’ll take you up there another time, when you’re feeling better, so you can feel the grass.”

His chest pressed against my side and I tried not to think of Darla’s parents in that twin bed. He pushed the door open and I couldn’t believe my eyes. We were inside what appeared to be a greenhouse flooded with natural sunlight.

“Where are we?” I asked, as my heart thrummed painfully, almost drowning out the fire in my belly. “What is this place?”

“We’re underneath 97
^th
Street in Central Park.”

“Upper Manhattan? The bombed side of Manhattan?”
The darkling side of Manhattan?

Nyx gazed down at me, his jaw clenched, as if he were daring me to speak my thoughts aloud. “Upper Manhattan is the safe side. Don’t forget that.” He pulled me toward him and whispered in my ear. “And don’t ever use the word
darkling
in front of the others. There is no such thing as darklings.”

He kept his arm wrapped around my waist as we ambled through the rows of plants, some of them blossoming with red berries and delicate flowers I’d only seen in photos. I tried not to collapse under the crushing pain as I marveled at the beauty of so much life thriving in one place. It wasn’t just the hunger and withdrawals that had my stomach in knots.

My father knew this place existed and he wanted to share it with me. This was clear from our weekly visits to the patch of grass on the border. Just beyond the fence where we sat, a world of green existed. He wanted me to see the beauty hidden beneath the withered flesh of Manhattan, but I was too focused on the silver helmets of the Guardian Angels to pay any attention.

The tears came for the third time in three days. Silent tears for silent pains. So many kinds of pain. No amount of food or drugs or virtual reality could anesthetize this ache. I didn’t need to know much to know that.

“Are there angels up there?” I asked, gazing up at the tiny skylight in the ceiling, which seemed to be the source of all the sunlight. “Is this area protected?”

“Protected from what?” he replied, as we passed a row of plants I recognized as red roses. “The sleepwalkers don’t come out here. It’s forbidden, remember? And we don’t need protection from ourselves.”

He led me to another door with another photo of a building affixed to it. All the windows of the building in this photograph were boarded up, like the buildings I saw in the videos taken during the Civil War. Nyx raised his hand, but I didn’t see a scanner. He banged on the door and the clang of his knuckles on the steel reverberated in my aching chest.