Darklandia (17 page)

When I changed into my own tunic and leggings, pulled from our dresser at home, the musty scent of unwashed clothing felt like shackles confining me to this dull world.

Mother cocked her eyebrow as I entered the kitchen. “Don’t you want me to braid your hair?” she asked, as I reached for a dingy glass in the cupboard.

“No, thank you.” I held the glass under the dispenser and tried not to look at her. I didn’t want her to notice the slightly bloated appearance in my face, which had emerged with the bleeding.

“There’s something different about you.”

Fear burrowed into my belly and I thought of lesson number one. I took a deep breath then gulped my ration. “Really?”

“Yes, there’s something definitely different.” Her eyes roved over every inch of me, taking in my clean skin and nails and the lack of grease plastering my hair to my scalp.

I took another deep breath and forced my lips into a tiny smile. “I feel fine; just the same as yesterday.”

“I didn’t see you yesterday.”

Deep breath.

“Are you sure you feel fine?” she asked, her voice sweet, though I detected an unmistakable tension in her words as she watched the deep rise and fall of my chest.

“Yes, of course. I’m fine, Mother. I was just spending some extra time inside Darklandia. After what happened to Darla, I needed it.”

“What happened to Darla?”

She didn’t know? Or was she pretending? Was I even supposed to know what happened to Darla?

I swallowed hard and took another deep breath. “She wasn’t at school yesterday. I don’t know what happened to her, but it can’t be good, can it?”

Her eyebrow went up again. She didn’t believe me. “Have a good day at school, dear.”

I had no way to get in contact with Nyx. I needed to tell him I was going to skip school. But where would I go if I couldn’t go to the village?

Darklandia.

I had to try to get in contact with my father. I had to let him know that I knew the truth. But how could I do that. My father and I didn’t have a secret code word like “sweet felicity”. I passed the door to the darkroom in our apartment and my gaze skidded over the star etched into the surface. That was it.

I walked confidently down the hall to the service door and stepped out into the brilliant morning light. I didn’t see the army of angels surrounding the GAT in front of the VITALIS factory until it was too late.

I froze as I watched Jane Locke emerge from the driver’s seat of the GAT. The look of triumph on Locke’s broad, lumpy face as she spotted me sent a surge of adrenaline coursing through me and I did the one thing that would probably doom me to a life inside Darklandia: I ran.

I darted down Cedar and made a right on Greenwich toward the Department of Felicity—
wrong direction!
—not bothering to look over my shoulder to see if the angels were pursuing me. My heartbeat was a roaring drum in my skull, drowning the sound of my boots pounding the pavement and the vague shouting coming from somewhere behind me. The South Pool came into view and I nearly stopped at the site of the angel standing at the corner of the fountain. But something snapped inside me and I kept running—straight at him.

His helmet was pointed elsewhere and I collided with him, ramming my shoulder into his chest with the force of a bomb hitting a city street. He flew backward and I snatched his baton out of its holster before he tumbled over the metal rail and dropped forty feet to the concrete bottom of the parched fountain.

The roar in my skull crescendoed into a symphony of shame. What had I done?

Darkling. You’re a violent, despicable darkling now.

The thought vanished as someone grasped my arm.

“Come with me!” Nyx shouted, as he clutched my hand and dragged me toward Greenwich and Cortland.

We sprinted across the square, past dozens of smiling faces, faces so locked in
ration limbo
they were unable to react to this chaotic scene.

“How did you know I was here?” I yelled, as we hurtled across Greenwich.

The irony of Nyx clutching my hand in public as we escaped the clutches of the angels was not lost on me. How my world had changed in a matter of minutes.

“I was going to work!” he shouted back.

Of course, that would be over now. This time his cover was truly blown.

I glanced behind us as we turned left onto Church Street and my heart nearly stopped when I spotted the stiff formation of no less than twenty Guardian Angels zooming toward us.

“Drop the baton!” Nyx shouted, as he pulled me toward the steps of the Cortland subway station.

I flung the heavy steel rod into the street before I plunged down the steps with him. He scanned his sec-band and I panicked for a moment before the scanner flashed green and the iron gate swung open. We rushed into the station and down another set of steps as a train pulled in. I banged the window in frustration as we waited for the doors to open. The doors slid open and we tumbled into the cabin.

My body tingled with fear as a single-file line of angels marched down the steps toward the subway car. Nyx squeezed my hand as the first angel in line rushed the train as the doors began to slide shut. With a few inches to go, the angel jammed his arm through the gap. Nyx beat the man’s arm down as if it were an unfortunate insect. The angel cursed and swiftly yanked his arm back. The train doors closed and carried us away as the angels attempted to bust the windows open with their batons.

“I raptured him.” I muttered the words to myself as I collapsed into a seat. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life in Darklandia.”

“You didn’t rapture him. Don’t use that word. And you didn’t kill him. You don’t even know if he’s seriously hurt. You didn’t do it on purpose.” He took a seat next to me and reached for my hand.

I stuffed my hands between my legs. “I could have stopped, but I didn’t want to.”

“You were being chased.”

“Stop making excuses for me.”

Nyx leaned forward in his seat as he fiddled with his lumen, probably deactivating our sec-bands again. “This isn’t going to work.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. Someone must have reported you,” he replied, as he tucked the lumen into his back pocket.

“I ruined everything.”

“Stop that.”

“I need to get inside Darklandia, Nyx. I need to see my father. Please take me to a pod.”

“You’re not going in there. They can discharge 200,000 volts of electricity through the neuro-gel pads and they won’t hesitate to do that if they get a read on your signature. It’s over, Sera. We have to let the masters go.” He leaned forward again and buried his face in his hands. “We have to get these sec-bands off before they reactivate them and turn us into toast.”

As the train charged forward toward the village, I realized with humble clarity that this was the descent. The leap from the hundred-story building. No escape. No stopping the momentum plunging me toward the end. All I could do now was watch as the city and all its filth and lies passed before my eyes on the way down. A blur of ashen concrete, grimy reflections of broken skyscrapers and stifled souls, the mesmerizing desolation. All of it mashed together in an illusion of stability. All of it falling away into a shattered nightmare I would never wake from.

The truth was a lie. That was what my father would have told me if he hadn’t been shot in Central Park.

18

Our arrival in the village was met with many somber faces. I assumed Nyx must have sent a message from his lumen, until I realized Nyx was as surprised as me by their gloomy expressions.

“Where’s Jock? I need him to remove our sec-bands,” Nyx barked at Lux as she and Gray followed us into the conference room. “What’s with the faces? What’s going on?”

Lux and Gray glanced at me before they made their way to the far side of the conference room, near the map of Times Square.

“What is it?” I asked.

Gray stared at her boots as Lux swallowed hard, working up the courage to speak. “Darla was killed.”

“You weren’t testing me?” I whispered.

“I didn’t know.” Lux’s cool façade melted into a puddle of shame, as she turned to Nyx, unable to face me. “I swear I didn’t know, Nyx. Hispa just called to tell us. I didn’t know they were going to… I didn’t think they’d really do that.”

“That’s how you tested her?” Nyx hissed at her. “Are you crazy!”

They continued to argue, but I couldn’t hear any of it. The room became hazy as I crumpled onto the bench. My shoulders and legs sagged as the emotions, the shock, the pain weighed heavy on my deadened limbs. This new truth curled like smoke inside my chest, suffocating me, burying me, burning me. If this was reality, I wanted no part of it.

I wanted the rations. I wanted the grip. I wanted Felicity. I wanted the lie. I wanted to climb to the top of that twisted heap of lies, raise the Atraxian flag, and declare my allegiance—and I would never look down. I would never take another step toward the edge. I would guzzle the lies and drown in Darklandia.

“Sera.” Nyx and Jock knelt before me calling my name in unison. Jock reached for my hand, but I slipped it behind my back.

“Please don’t.”

“Come on, Sera,” Jock said softly. “You have to get it off now. We don’t have time. Look: Nyx’s sec-band is gone.”

Nyx placed his hand on my knee and I glared at his wrist. Where his sec-band used to be, the skin was red and inflamed, but beneath that I glimpsed a band of nearly white skin. Marked by the lie, like Darla’s mark, only this mark would fade with time.

“Sera, you’re going to live here with us,” Nyx whispered. “This bunker is safe. You won’t ever have to go back. I’ll protect you. I promise.”

“You didn’t protect Darla.” The implication in Gray’s words was not gray. The accusation was grim and boldly clear and, as much as I hated to admit it, unfair. Just as what happened to Darla was unfair.

“Why?” I whispered, as I laid my hand, palm up, on my knee.

Jock swiftly scooped up my wrist in his huge hand. “This is going to be really cold.” Lux stepped forward with a yellow bucket and Jock plunged my hand into the bucket of ice water. I gasped and he gripped my arm tighter as my instincts kicked in and I struggled against his grasp. “Don’t move!”

“It’s cold!”

My skin burned as my bones ached. Just as my body began to shiver, the pain disappeared, as if I had drunk my ration.

“That’s five minutes,” Lux called out, and she pulled the bucket away and placed it beneath the bench as she handed Jock a tube of ointment.

He piped the ointment around my wrist, just beneath the sec-band, and spread the greasy balm evenly over my numb skin. Then he pulled and yanked and squeezed and rocked until the sec-band finally slipped off, but not without removing a chunk of skin the size of my thumbnail from over my wrist bone. My skin was so frozen; the gash didn’t even bleed or hurt.

“I want to go into Darklandia,” I proclaimed. Nyx didn’t look at me as he stood and took my sec-band from Jock. “I want to at least try to get my father out. You have to at least let me try to save my father.”

“Let her go in,” Hispa’s voice rang in my ears as she entered the room. “We need her to go in. We’re missing one more piece of information to access server eighty-seven.”

“She’s not going back in there,” Nyx replied. “She’ll be fried.”

Hispa scowled at him. “We have no choice. They’re closing in on us. You want to kill the virus, don’t you? Don’t you want Sera to wake up? Don’t you want everyone to wake up?”

“I’m going in,” I insisted.

“This is ridiculously reckless,” Nyx said, glaring at me as he headed for the door. “Wait here. You’re not going in without me.”

“Department of Reality is handing out virtual beat-downs tonight,” Jock said, his face twisted in an obscene expression of delight.

Nyx shook his head as he stormed out of the conference room leaving a profound silence in his wake that begged to be filled with Hispa’s technical knowledge, and she quickly obliged.

“There’s one more level of encryption on server eighty-seven: Jane Locke’s password. The message from your father was incomplete. I’m going to have Nyx work on getting back onto the server while you’re inside the pod and I need you to work on retrieving the rest of that message.”

“What pod am I going to use? I can’t just stroll into any darkroom and expect not to be detained.”

“You can’t use the pod in Jock’s apartment. His cover hasn’t been blown and we need to keep it that way.” Hispa marched toward the map of Times Square and pointed at the image of the abandoned apartment building on Broadway where I served my hours. “You’ll have to go to Nyx’s apartment and hope the angels aren’t waiting for him.”