Pills and Starships (22 page)

“But—what happened down there? What about Mom and Dad? Are they—”

“We have to wait and see, Nat. I don’t know.”

“We have to take on faith someone’s trying to help them? We have to just hope that wasn’t them really, truly
dying?”

He stared me down.

“Are you heartless?” I burst out. “They’re our
parents!”

His face got stony and his mouth twisted like it does when he’s really upset and trying to hide it. “We’re taking care of ourselves now, Nat. This is us.
Living
. As they’d want us to—their
real
selves anyway. And we don’t have any time to waste. So just—do what I told you to!”

I stared back at him, furious.

But a couple of minutes later I
did
do what he’d told me to—though I was still angry at him, my face still prickling with heat. I stuffed this journal into the bag, and my collection and the goodbye letters, and a babyish, tiny stuffed animal I’ve had since I was a kid and still keep with me. A mouse.

I know it’s juvenile, but it was the only thing I had from my old life. I’ve had it forever and it reminds me of my earliest memories—the one house we ever lived in before our condos, before separate houses disappeared. The worn mouse has a particular smell of oldness—not a bad smell but just a really specific one. And the smell reminds me vaguely but nicely of that house. It was an olden-times house, one of the last remaining on a big complex, with two others like it right nearby; it had a porch swing and faded, flowery curtains, these creaky boards on the floor, and bushes in front that made the old porch smell like lilacs.

Then they bulldozed it under the new housing rules, and we moved into a complex.

Anyway, I stuffed my possessions into my bag and shoved it all under my shirt. I couldn’t allow it to show up on the cameras as I walked down the hall.

From the living room, I called out to Sam that I was headed to the waste room and would be back in a minute. I was amped still from the meds, I realized, as well as being really pissed at him, so I was actually glad to be able to expend some of that excess adrenalin.

Does it have to be the waste room?
was what I was thinking. I would have preferred to rappel down a wall or something.

But I took what I could get.

Once I was in there, and saw it was empty except for me, I started looking around. The waste room didn’t have windows, only these vents high up, and I knew the hall outside was covered with surveillance cameras, so I was confused about how I was supposed to get out of there undetected.

I barely had time to do anything, though, before the door opened and someone stepped in. Not Keahi—I was kind of disappointed, I admit—but his friend from the night before.

“Didn’t the hall cameras catch you?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Come over here. You’re not going to like this, I warn you. But it’s necessary. Here.”

And he walked straight past me to the far back corner of the room and clicked open a wall panel, which fell forward from the ground. There was an opening behind there—about three feet by two feet or so.

Unfortunately, it was the waste chute.

There was a smell coming out of it, not of waste exactly but of waste covered with a perfume that helped disguise it. The combination was nauseating.

“You’re kidding me,” I said.

“I’m not. Listen: I can’t come with you, I have another role to play. So do what I say. At the bottom you’ll be in a waste compost room. Put this over your nose and mouth.”

He took a white mask out of the pocket of his robe and handed it to me.

“The fumes can be overwhelming. Wear that while you’re in there. Go out the door and along the path to your right. Right, not left. The first door you see. Out that door, you’ll see a sign that says,
Employee Transport
. Follow it. You’ll see a row of big recycling bins. Hide behind there until your guide shows up. It could be minutes or hours. Just stay put. Got it?”

I repeated it back to him and he nodded at the chute door.

“It’s safe? The—the fall, I mean?” Because we were on the fifth floor.

“Safe as we could make it,” he said. “There’s a full bin beneath. You’ll drop into straw and feces.”

Nice.

“One other thing. These chutes aren’t soundproofed well. So as you fall, whatever you do—
don’t scream
.”

I couldn’t go without asking him one more question. “Listen. Um, I need to know . . .” I began.

“Yeah?”

“My—my parents. Do you know? Did they—are they really—” And I couldn’t say it. Even then.
Dead
.

He looked at me steadily and then put a hand on my shoulder. “You have to be okay on your own, Natalie.”

My stomach sank. I tried to blink back tears.

“And if you want to live, you have to go
now
.”

Every bone in my body shrieked out against it; I still felt confused, partly terrified and partly desolate. But I put on the mask and held my breath out of pure fear and then he grasped my arm to guide me. And I stumbled in.

I must have done it more awkwardly than I should have, because I didn’t fall straight, I bumped against the side of the chute a couple of times as I fell, and it was all so quick all I knew was adrenalin and the pain of bumps and scrapes as I plummeted.

But I didn’t make a sound.

I’m still proud of that.

I didn’t even notice the smell at first, I just lay there stunned and thought about the throbbing pain in my hip and the searing pain in my elbow. I felt like my whole skin was a bruise. And into the confusion of the pain was mixed confusion over my parents—my parents who, now, were confirmed gone.

But no bones seemed to be broken, and I hadn’t hit my face on anything.

I pulled myself up after a while, dizzy and sore and disoriented. I was in a kind of square bin, with walls almost as high as I am tall. The room was dim, the walls of the bin I’d fallen into seemed high, but I climbed out of it with a little effort, my feet slipping and churning in the straw and the waste, and then stood on the clay floor and lifted my arm to look at my elbow. It was bleeding hard from a big gash and the blood was dripping down my arm and all over my hand and onto the floor, even, which couldn’t be good, so I grabbed some dirty straw from the bin and tried to sop it up. Well, it was more of a scraping than a sopping. But better than nothing.

I had no cloth to wrap my elbow in except the mask, so I took that off and was hit by a terrible stench and just held it to the cut as I jogged out the door. Luckily the directions weren’t hard to follow; it was more about whether I ran into anyone, because there was no way, now, I could pass myself off as a normal obedient survivor. Covered in straw and waste.

But I made it to the building door, which was closed and said,
Emergency Exit Only Alarm Will Sound
, and that stopped me for a good minute while I pondered if that was actually true or if they’d been able to disconnect it. And finally I took my chances and pushed on the bar, and it opened silently.

Silently for me, that is. Somewhere else, on the speakers of some monitor, I knew it might be shrieking hysterically.

That pleasant thought powered me as I ran along the gravel outside, probably looking like a 20th c. Halloween monster with hay and dung hanging off me like dirty hair. I saw the row of recycling containers, which were these big metal bins, and I ducked behind them, basically into a thick hedge with waxy leaves and bright flowers. I pushed myself along between the bins and the hedge so I was further in, and then hunched there, shivering.

I was wet as well as filthy—damp all over, and the blood from my elbow had soaked through the mask, which was useless for stopping it anymore. So I threw the mask into the bin in front of me and rummaged in my bag for something else to stop it, but all I had was the bag itself and my ancient stuffed mouse. I used the cloth of the bag.

Above me the sky was dark, the stars were out, and I had nothing to do but hold the bag against my elbow, wait for the blood to stop, and think about the fact that it would be easy to find me here, if you were a service corp worker. It wasn’t the smartest hiding place.

At some point the blood stopped flowing and was more like seeping to the scraped, raw surface of the flesh, and though the pain was almost worse at that point the blood wasn’t much of a problem itself anymore so I took the pressure off. I sat down on the ground under a gap in the hedge and picked straw off my clothes to pass the time, counting my aches and pains. Elbow, hip, knee, ankle.

Then I counted the ways in which I was mad at Sam for his coldness about our parents. Then I counted the ways I’d failed as an older sister. Finally I got done with counting.

I didn’t have a handface, of course, so I don’t know how long it was but it seemed like forever before anyone arrived.

It was Keahi.

I was so relieved to see him I didn’t even have time to remember I was smelling and looking grotesque.

“Where’s Sam?” I asked.

“His plan’s on track,” he said, and I tried to read his expression but couldn’t; Sam was coming, I told myself. Sam would be there.

Keahi was rushed but focused, his actions compact and neat. He stripped off his beige robe and underneath it he had on his camo gear. “Stash this in your bag for me, okay?” he said. “I’ll need it again. Now let’s book.”

I knew I shouldn’t have been thinking like this, that it’s kind of selfish, but he was so efficient in that moment that I felt I could have been anyone, that I was nothing special to him. And I bundled the robe into my blood-wet bag and scrambled to follow him through the dark. We had no flashlight to guide us, because that would be too easy to spot, I guess, if anyone cared to look, so I just followed right behind him through all this bushy vegetation, with nothing to guide me but his narrow back and wide shoulders, which I could barely make out sometimes. He went fast and my body was starting to ache more and more from that fall, I felt like one giant bruise, but I gritted my teeth and tried not to grunt or moan.

Once or twice when the twinges were extra bad or I panicked, not being able to see him close enough, I did beg him to slow down—but either he didn’t hear me or he
did
hear me and the answer was no.

It went on and on, like the waiting had before that, but worse because it was so hard, till it seemed like hours that I’d been following him with my last vestige of energy, and then the last one after that, when I already felt tapped out. It was always uphill, it was always through trees, we were slapped by slick leaves and branches and scrambling in slippery mud. I was sweating and panting, out of breath and bone tired all through me.

Then at a certain point there was no more vegetation, and around us it was even darker but airier, and I knew we were in a lava tube.

Up ahead was a light, dim but real.

We went toward it, slogging, dragging. At least I was; Keahi was still moving fast.

There were more lights, strung up along the tunnel wall. And there were people.

There was Xing. And Keahi’s mother.

I practically fell into their arms.