Darklandia (18 page)

“Why didn’t you ever tell me you lived there? Have you been watching me all this time?”

I could barely see through the haze of the dark glasses Lux made me wear. Nyx and I were both disguised as employees of the Department of Felicity, complete with the blue coveralls and fake names. Nyx’s disguise only changed his hair and eye color. The golden-brown coif he wore was so different from his usual spiky black hair; he looked ridiculous—like the son of a Commissioner. My disguise wasn’t any better. When Lux pulled a luxurious ginger wig out of her closet I nearly collapsed.

“Don’t you have something a little less touchy?” Nyx muttered.

She handed me a long, black wig, which she insisted I couldn’t pull back into a braid or ponytail. She wanted it to hang forward to conceal my face. The dark sunglasses were the riskiest part of the costume. No one in Manhattan wore sunglasses unless they were blind.

I bumbled along Broadway Avenue toward Times Square, my white cane stretched ahead of me, tapping the floor and the light poles aimlessly as if I couldn’t see them. But I could see everything. All the people setting up the stage in front of One Times Square and the booths in the street. Dozens of law-abiding citizen scurrying about, hanging signs advertising youth programs and contests to win extra washdays, all smiling as they prepared for the Felicity Festival. Through the darkness of the sunglasses, I could almost imagine that they weren’t real.

Not even a week had passed since my grandmother’s and the mayor’s murders and everyone was ready to celebrate the very system that killed them. It made me think of St. Paul’s Chapel. I imagined the sleepwalkers of Manhattan rejoicing as the darklings were cornered in that church and the rebel movement heaved its final dying breath. It was all the same as the pompous warmongering of the early twenty-first century that we had been taught to despise in Felicity school. The same monster in a different costume.

Nyx, or
Darren
(as the name sewn into the pocket of his coveralls read), kept his head down as we passed two angels standing at the corner of the half-built stage. He grasped the crook of my arm and gently guided me toward the not-so-abandoned apartment building, the building where he had lived for the past eleven months since he was inserted into the Department of Felicity as one of the rebel’s most gainful assets.

“I never told you I lived here because I didn’t want you to be tempted to visit me,” Nyx replied as we entered the building and he guided me across the lobby, past the darkroom, and toward the corridor.

As he led me into a dimly lit stairwell, I understood why he had never raised any suspicion when he followed me to the darkroom on Broadway. He never followed me. He was always there.

“You can take the sunglasses off now,” he said, when we reached the top of the first staircase.

I slid the glasses off and tucked them into the pocket of my coveralls. As my eyes adjusted, I realized the lighting wasn’t as dim as I thought it was. We climbed five more flights before we reached the fourth floor. We hung a left and he stopped at apartment 406. The circular hole in the wall where we normally buried our hands to scan our sec-bands taunted us.

“You don’t have a sec-band anymore,” I said.

“Don’t need one.”

He raised his foot and swiftly kicked the wall around scanner. The drywall buckled, but only slightly. He kicked the wall four more times before he finally broke through. He brushed away the broken drywall, stuffed his hand inside the wall, and yanked out a thick bundle of brightly colored wires. He pulled a small pair of scissors from his pocket and cut the plastic band that tied the wires together. The sorting through the different colors took longer than I thought and I began to feel highly exposed in this well-lit corridor. I glanced up and down the hallway as he sifted through each wire, looking it over carefully before he set it aside.

“You don’t have to be nervous. There aren’t any cameras here.”

“Why isn’t anyone here? You’d think they’d have a team of angels out here sifting through the traitor’s apartment.”

He pulled aside a thin orange wire and his fingers trembled slightly. “Please let this be it,” he whispered, before he cut the wire.

The apartment door slid open and we entered quickly, though the door did not automatically slide closed behind us.

“They’re not here because they saw the bogus video feed of me getting off the subway uptown. They’re probably searching the buildings up there, which means they may or may not be getting close to the village. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t decide to come at any moment. That means we have to hurry.”

Nyx’s apartment was furnished exactly like Jock’s apartment; the same white sofa and chairs, the same glossy white pod, even the same fruit bowl on the counter. The only difference was that Nyx’s apartment was about half the size of Jock’s.

“Do you remember the code word?” he asked, as I dropped my white cane and moved toward the pod.

I wondered what it would feel like to be hit with 200,000 volts of electricity. Would it feel the same as the shock I was delivered in class on Monday?

“Sweet felicity,” I replied.

“Wait.” He grabbed my hand to stop me from sitting in the pod.

He tore off my wig and tossed it onto the floor. I removed his and chucked it aside, as well. I clutched the front of his coveralls as his hands cupped my face.

He held my gaze as he ran his finger lightly over my eyebrow then kissed my forehead. “You’re going to get out of that pod. You know how I know that?”

“How?”

“Because that’s what your father wanted. He wants to you to wake up and be free. And so do I.”

His lips fell softly over mine and I had never felt anything so amazing. I tugged the front of his coveralls toward me until our bodies were pressed against each other. Just when I began to forget where I ended and Nyx began, he pulled away.

His breath was hot on the tip of my nose as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders. My stomach plummeted as I slid my arms around his waist. This might be the last time I ever saw Nyx and everything he opened my eyes to. All the good and the bad, the gray and the red, the detachment and the pain. All the love.

He planted one more kiss on my cheek before he released me. “Wait until I’m logged in to server eighty-seven before you sit down.”

I nodded as I turned sideways so my back was to the pod, ready to insert myself as soon as he was logged in. He worked quickly, punching commands into his lumen, and I found myself wishing he would slow down, give me a minute to collect myself before I went in to face my father. I opened my mouth to voice my trepidation, but he finished before I could speak.

“I’m in,” he declared, casting me a grim look. “But I just found something on the server.”

“What?”

“The reports.”

“What reports?”

“They just moved the reports from the Security Petition server onto server eighty-seven an hour ago. The report that brought the angels to your doorstep this morning and the report that got your father shot.” Nyx’s face screwed up in a combination of anger and confusion. “It was your mother. Your mother reported both of you.”

“No, she wouldn’t do that.”

“She did do that. Look.” He raised the lumen toward me and I knocked it out of his hand. “You don’t have to do this. You can back out now and we’ll leave. You and me, we’ll go somewhere else. We’ll leave Manhattan behind.”

“And go where? Chicago? We can’t just ignore what’s going on here. And I can’t leave my father on Level 16.”

“Sera, they’ll keep you on Level 16 with your father for the rest of your life. You’ll never wake up!”

Before Nyx could stop me, I leaped.

I let myself fall backward into the pod, a slow motion descent. My father’s face flashed before me, quickly replaced by the gray despair of a dying Manhattan.

After the leap came the drop.

The neuro-gel immediately tightened around my limbs. “Goodnight, Aaron.”

The pod had not fully closed before the jolt of 200,000 volts slammed into me.

19

“You’ve done well, Sera.” The health specialist gently slid the needle out of my arm. She grasped my arm and heaved me out of the pod and out of the cell.

The corridor on Level 16 was bathed in a beautiful blue glow. It reminded me of something I’d seen inside Darklandia. The sky. That was it. The sky inside Darklandia was gorgeous, especially today.

“What day is it?” I asked, as I dragged my feet across the shiny tile.

“Excuse me?” Specialist Young asked, as she leaned toward me.

The corridor appeared fuzzy as if I were viewing it through a clouded window. My heavy head bobbed with each step I took.

“What day is it?”

“It’s day twenty-six for you, Sera.”

“Twenty-six,” I muttered, as I slowly lifted my hand and attempted to count the numbers off on my fingers, but my hand was nothing more than a hazy blob. “How many more… days?”

Specialist Young led me into the laboratory where rows of cushioned chairs stretched and blurred into the distance.

“Many,” she replied, as she helped me into my reclining chair and strapped down my arm to receive the next needle. “Many more days.”

20

Manhattan, 2015

“The VR therapy doesn’t work for everyone, Mr. Fisk, especially the cases with the most severe degeneration in the brain tissue,” the technician said as they watched the female technician in the adjacent room slide Sera’s body out of the virtual reality pod, a giant medicine capsule which had thus far proved to be filled with placebo.

Darren Fisk tried to hold back the tears stinging behind his eyes as he laid his hand flat against the pane of glass separating the VR control room from VR-406, the virtual reality therapy room.  The female technician, dressed in her yellow HAZMAT suit, wheeled Sera’s body across the room and punched the call button for the elevator that would deliver his daughter back to room 1621; the sealed hospital room she had lived in for more than two years since contracting the virus named after Felicity Locke, its first victim.

In 2013, the Felicity virus infected 71 million Americans and 2.3 billion people worldwide. Nearly one billion people died within the first six months, before Vitalis Pharmaceuticals developed and released a successful vaccine. The virus attacked the brain and nervous system, rendering its victims incommunicative and completely dependent on others.

Sleepwalkers. That’s what they called the victims of the Felicity virus. Once the virus took over, millions of people were found wandering the streets of cities all over the globe completely unaware of their surroundings.

For those who contracted the virus in the first six months, the vaccine had a low success rate. Many of them never woke up. Sera contracted the virus two months before the vaccine was released.

Though there was no detectable trace of the Felicity virus left in Sera’s bloodstream, the doctors still suited up every time they came near her. Darren was also required to wear the HAZMAT suit during the one hour he was allowed inside Sera’s room each day. The fact that she had yet to wake from her 26-month catatonic state was evidence that the virus may still be squatting inside her brain. The hospital couldn’t risk another outbreak, or a lawsuit, just so Darren could hold his daughter.

“But the therapy has an eighty-seven percent success rate. And Dr. Ming said Sera had an excellent chance of waking up.”

“Mr. Fisk, forgive me, but you are well aware of the downfalls of the procedure. You are aware it works better on those who contracted the virus within the last eighteen months; those with less evidence of degenerative tissue in the right hemisphere.”

The technician delivered this statement with care, but it didn’t prevent Darren from imagining an air of condescension in his tone. Darren didn’t want to think that the hospital staff had given up on Sera. He also didn’t want to think about the day his wife’s attorney delivered her living will specifying her refusal of the treatment. And just because the VR Therapy failed to wake Darren’s grandmother, it didn’t mean he should give up hope it would work for Sera.

The virus was under control now. The population of New York was rebounding. Every day, people were waking up with the help of the vaccine and the VR therapy. There was no reason not to hope it would work for his only daughter.

“With all due respect, Mr. Fisk, we can’t be certain that Sera is even aware of her surroundings or that she isn’t in pain. She needn’t suffer.”

“It isn’t that easy. I didn’t have an option with her mother. She made her own choice,” Darren replied. “I want to try again.”

The technician gave a pitiful nod before he exited the control room.

Darklandia may have failed, but there were other VR narratives they had yet to try. Three more. One of them had to work.

Eighty-seven percent. Those were damned good odds.

Acknowledgements

One of these days I’ll get my own pod to live out the narratives in my mind all by myself, but until then I’ll have to settle for working with totally awesome people.

Special thanks and so much love go to my old and new beta readers: Kristin Shaw, Jordana Welti, Michael Finn, Stacy Davis, and Renee Chavez. Writers are sometimes led astray by ego, stress, unruly plots, and too many ellipses. Your feedback helped me keep those in check.

Extra special thanks go to photographer Marianna Orlova at
DeviantArt
for allowing me to use the image of Sera for this cover. Your generosity and talent made this cover powerful.

So much gratitude and awe go to my magnificent cover artist,
Scarlett Rugers
, for making my first experience with a cover artist absolutely amazing and capturing such a breathtaking image of a young girl trapped in a society gone wrong. Thank you for putting so much thought and hard work into this project.

There are no words to express my gratitude to the many friends and family members who offered their support in so many ways during the writing of this book; especially my parents, my sister Penelope, my Aunt Bernice and Uncle Adam, and Martha and Dennis. I was already convinced that no one has a more generous family than I do. I am now certain.