The Earth Dwellers (21 page)

“Ow!” he hollers, lying in a heap, rubbing furiously at his skull.

“Serves you right,” I say. “What were you saying to me? Something about being lazy and wooloo and—what was that other one?”

“A baggard,” Roc says, popping his mask off, grin-grimacing, one eye closed. “Siena’s been teaching me all kinds of new words while we waited for your no-good tug-lovin’ butt to wake up.”

“Well, this butt is awake,” I say. “The rest of me too.”

Roc replaces his mask. “Yeah, I found that out the hard way. I risk my life to come find you, and you throw me into a tent pole. Some friend you are.”

“We ain’t searin’ friends,” I say, doing the Siena-impersonation now. “We’re brothers, and I’ll be burned if I won’t chuck you into tent poles and pricklers if I have a mind to.”

Roc laughs. “Not bad,” he says, “but you’ve had time to practice. Now let’s go, the day’s a-wastin’.” He crawls out of the tent.

Sighing, I roll away from my blanket and follow after him, squinting when the blinding light hits me. It could be years before I get used to how bright everything is up here. On Earth. Where I am. Not in it, but on it. It still doesn’t feel quite real.

Brown-skinned people are milling about, carrying stones, logs of wood, bags of what appear to be cut up pricklers, babies, and all sorts of other things. Men are building tents, stacking stones. Women are tending fires and stirring pots. Kids are playing, stopping to stare at me as I pass them.

Roc’s already sitting beside Tawni on a stone bench, next to a crackling fire. Circ and Siena are side by side, smashed together so close they almost look like a two-headed person. Hawk and Lara are there, too, but they’re on opposite sides of different benches, like they see plenty of each other on a daily basis to want to get too close.

I sit next to Roc, jabbing him lightly in the ribs.

“Morning,” says Tawni brightly.

“Good morning,” I say. “Sleep well?”

“Like a rock,” she says. “No pun intended.” Roc grins.

“Yeah, he does seem to fit in up here,” I say, motioning to the stone seat our butts are on. “Maybe we should leave him.”

“Do your worst,” Roc says. “But I’m growing to like the food up here already.” Balancing a bowl in one hand, he shovels a spoonful of soup under his mask and into his mouth. “This ’zard stew isn’t half bad.”

“Ain’t half bad,” Siena corrects. “Remember what I taught you?”

“You might not be saying that if you knew what a ’zard was,” I say.

Roc gives me a look, but I don’t elaborate. I’ll show him a live one on our trip back to the cave.

“So you don’t want the soup?” Circ says, offering me a bowl.

I shake my head. “If you’ve got any prickler salad, I’ll take that.” He hands me a wooden plate with green chunks and some sort of dressing on it. “Mmm,” I say, taking a bite, “at least this wasn’t creeping in the dirt before it ended up in my mouth.”

Roc, having just taken another bite of his soup, looks down at his bowl curiously, as if it might be looking back at him.

I finish off the salad and stand up just as Skye, Feve and Wilde approach. “We met with the rest of the Tri-Tribe council,” Wilde says. “They’ve agreed to the plan. We’ll march north shortly after you leave for the East.”

“Good,” I say, my eyes meeting Skye’s. I can’t read her expression, except I know I’m gladder than ever that I’m not a Glassy. “I hope we meet again soon.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Adele

T
hey don’t call the Enforcers, don’t turn me in to Lecter. At least not yet. Although I’m not denying the possibility that the moment I fall asleep they could very well turn me in. I wouldn’t necessarily fault them if they did, considering I’m trying to, in a fashion, bring down their perfect little city.

Instead, they ask me questions and I give them answers and they shake their heads in bewilderment.

“I know this is an impossible request,” I say, when there’s a break in the questions, “but I need your help. Not directly.”

“Anything,” Lin says.

“Lin,” Avery says.

“No, Uncle. We can’t do nothing. You know as well as I do that Lecter’s gone too far.”
Uncle?
But I thought…Avery called Lin his daughter, so I assumed he meant from a biological standpoint.

Avery sighs. “He went too far a long time ago,” he says. Something clicks inside me. Why these two are different than the others, maybe.

“Lin, where are your parents?” I ask.

She scowls at the table, drums her fingers on it lightly. Her half-eaten plate of mushed brown, green and yellow insta-food has long been pushed away from her.

“My sister, Lin’s mother, died in the Star Realm a long time ago,” Avery says.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” I say, following Lin’s gaze to her hands.

“She was supposed to come with us,” Lin says, her voice tight. “We’d been ‘hand-selected to start a new life as sun dwellers.’” I can tell she’s quoting something. A message, a person. She looks up at me. “We were so excited, my mother more than anyone. She’d been sick for a long time, but she was always worrying over me, concerned I wasn’t eating enough, wasn’t hanging out with the right sorts of kids, wasn’t smiling enough. But when we were picked, she couldn’t stop smiling. Not because she was going to what she thought was a better place, but because
I
was going to a better place, going to have a better life…” Lin’s voice trails off and she looks away, out the window that’s just a window again.

“She died a few days before we were scheduled to leave,” Avery says, looking at Lin with concern.

“Because of me,” Lin says, and her words are cracking so much I get the feeling she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. “She only held on as long as she did because she was worried about me. Now that I was taken care of—or so she thought—she gave up. It was my fault.”

“Lin, no,” Avery says, putting a hand on her back. “It was just life.”

Lin turns to look back at her uncle, her lips quivering but her eyes like steel. “Well this ‘just life’ has been awfully rotten to us. You can’t deny that.” She looks back at me. “We went to the Sun Realm, all right, but then they said we’d been further selected to go above. ‘Above?’ we said. There was nothing above the Sun Realm, or so we’d all been told. Only toxic air and a dead world. Not that different than the Star Realm really. But they were so excited when they told us. We even got another letter, this one from President Nailin himself, wishing us luck on our great adventure.”

She slams her fist on the table so suddenly I flinch back.

“They lied every step of the way. The moment we got up here they shoved a chip in our flesh and put us to work, told us where we could go, what we could eat and how much, where we could sleep and how long.

“My father…was a stubborn man—guess there’s no surprise where I get it from.” Finally a tear falls and she wipes it away quickly, as if frustrated by it. Blows a few stray hairs out of her eyes. “He asked a lot of questions and they don’t like questions up here. He questioned the rules and the honor of the president, and then one day he didn’t come back from his craphole job cleaning toilets around the city.”

Reflexively, my hand goes to my face, covers my mouth. Does my heart have room for one more tragedy?

She continues numbly. “We got a letter three days later saying there’d been an accident, that he was dead, that his body was…
unviewable
—whatever the hell that means. But there was no accident—they killed him. The bastards killed him.” She laughs, shakes her head.

“You know, the funny thing is that it was just a day earlier that my dad and I were joking about how he’d better watch his mouth or Lecter might come down off his throne and shoot him. This ‘just life’ that we have isn’t life at all. It’s as good as death. So yeah, Uncle, when I say I’ll help Tawni in any way I can, I mean it.”

“My real name’s Adele,” I say, finally trusting Lin and Avery with every bit of my being. “Under the orders of President Nailin, my father was shot and killed and my sister, Elsey, maimed. I’d be honored to have any help you can give me.”

Lin looks at me, manages a smile, and then sticks out her hand. I shake it firmly. “Avery, you with us?” I say.

He scrunches up his face like he wishes he’d never spoken to me in the first place, but then says, “Yes, but please don’t let anything happen to Lin. She’s all I’ve got left.”
And he thinks of her like a daughter
, he doesn’t have to say.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll do all the dangerous stuff. Now tell me what ‘Presidential Cleaner’ means.”

~~~

Turns out you can find out a lot about a person if you’re able to scan their wrist onto your vid screen.

The first thing that pops up is a way big photo of my face, complete with the Tristan-inflicted black eye. It’s the photo the chip guy took earlier today and it’s completely blocking our view of the building next to ours. TAWNI SANDERS it reads in black block letters.

Avery’s shaking his head. “I don’t know how you did it, Adele.”

“Luck, mostly,” I say, grinning. “And a little help with directions from you.”

He shakes his head again and the screen changes. Lin is using a small pad which is showing her whatever’s on the screen. There are some stats about me. Height- 5’7”. Weight- 130 lbs. Eye color- green. Hair color- dark brown. Boring stuff.

Lin uses her pad-thingy to flip to the next screen: Occupation and Schedule. A photo of a large building appears, fully glass and rising higher than any of the buildings around it, coming to a sharp point, like a spike. Near the base, there’s a large iron door with a couple of armed guards standing in front of it. A sign above the door reads: Presidential Offices.

Below the picture it says “Presidential Cleaner.”

“Seriously,” Lin says. “How did you land this gig?”

Now even I’m shaking my head. “I just saw it on the forms and checked it off as my job. Evidently because all my information was supposedly ‘lost’ on my malfunctioning chip, they just believed me.”

“Well it’s perfect for our mission,” Lin says, sounding almost eager.

“I think you mean
my
mission,” I say.

“That’s exactly what she means,” Avery says.

“I just want to help,” Lin says. “That freak president killed my father.”

“You already
are
helping,” I say, motioning her back to the screen. “What does all this mean?”

“Well, you’re to report for duty tomorrow at seven in the morning. Whoever implanted your chip made your Anything Day today, so you’ll have to work nine days straight before you get another break.”

“I heard an Enforcer say that—
Anything Day
—what does that mean exactly?” I ask.

“It’s just a normal day off. One in ten days we get one, and we can do practically anything we want, within the laws and restrictions of the city, of course.”

I’m not planning on sticking around long enough to experience my next Anything Day, but at least I know it’s there if I need it. “Okay, what else?”

“You have a consistent schedule. You’ll start at the same time every day and finish at six in the evening. Today we all got out at five because of the presidential message, but most people work seven to six.”

They’re long hours, but not to the point where people will rebel, I think to myself. It seems everything in this city pushes people to the edges of frustration, but not quite over the brink. Definitely part of Lecter’s strategy. It’s like he’s obsessed with efficiency, organization, cleanliness. And he pretends to believe in equality, with the rationing of food, of resources, etc, but it’s an act, because those originally from the Sun Realm get slightly greater rations than the “Lowers.”

“Hey,” I say, “what do they call the people who used to be sun dwellers?”

“The Uppers,” Lin says. “Why?”

I grit my teeth. “No reason, just curious.” It’s the Tri-Realms all over again, just packaged, shined up real nice, and hidden amongst a bunch of other shiny things on a shelf. Where Tristan’s father liked to flaunt the huge gaps between the haves and the havenots, Lecter is more subtle. Tristan was right.

President Lecter is the one man who managed to control my father.

He’s dangerous, that’s for sure. I can’t just charge in there, guns blazing. I’ll have to be every bit as subtle.

“Where is this place?” I ask.

Lin swipes her finger and a map appears on the window, a red dot pulsating in the direct middle.

Avery says, “The city center, 20
^th
and M. It’s the tallest building, rising to just below the apex of the Dome. It comes to a point at the top. ”

The screen flashes back to a close-up of the main doors. “It says you won’t be entering via the main entrance. There’s a side entrance down an alleyway in the back somewhere.”