Z 2134 (17 page)

Jayla smiled at the four boys. As she
opened her mouth to maybe say hello, a trio of giggles surfaced, followed by
three girls, who emerged from an adjoining room, maybe a bathroom.

“Hey Tommy,” one of the girls said. Adam
recognized all three girls as being friends of Jayla's, though he didn’t know
any of their names.

Adam smelled the smoke before he saw the
cigarette, curling into his nostrils and reminding him of the Dark Quarters — the
only place kids were said to smoke, not that Adam had ever been in the Dark
Quarters.

The middle girl blew a plume of smoke
from her mouth, then held the cigarette out in front of her. Tommy reached to
take it, but she quickly drew it back, shaking her head. “It’s for him,” she
said, nodding to Adam.

Adam shook his head. “No thanks,” he
said.

Adam’s friends all laughed. The three
girls joined them. While he was used to boys laughing at him, the laughter of
the girls cut even deeper and made him feel even dumber.

Jayla, to her credit, was silent.

The middle girl shrugged, then handed the
cigarette to Tommy and turned to Adam. “Pretty cool, your sister being in The
Games. Did you get to watch the opening?”

The girl’s question was innocent enough,
but a current of rage raced through Adam anyway. Before he could stop he
yelled: “You wouldn’t think it was a fucking game if it was
your sister
running from zombies!”

The middle girl shrank back, her eyes
wide and startled. Tommy laughed and Daniel said, “Whoa, did you hear Bilbo? He
said
fucking
.”

The guys laughed, though it seemed to be
a more genuine laughter, instead of one that mocked him.

Adam, who often talked of
The Hobbit
,
had never said the F Word anywhere outside of his own head. He swallowed,
shocked by how good it felt, first on his tongue, and then as it left his lips.

“Chill,” Morgan set his hand on Adam’s
still-shaking shoulder. “It’s OK. Melissa didn’t mean anything by it.”

Jayla said, “She’s just trying to make
conversation,” making Adam feel like he’d been reprimanded by the one person
whose opinion he cared about.

“I know,” Adam said, then stuttered,
knowing he couldn’t take it back, but having nothing else to say.

“It’s my fault,” Jayla said. “I asked
Morgan and the boys to bring you down here.”

Adam was stunned into silence. “What?” he
repeated, still stuck for words. “Wh...why?”

Morgan and Tommy each finished their turn
with the cigarette. Daniel drew a final drag, then passed it back to the girl
standing to Melissa’s right.

Jayla smiled. “Because it can’t be easy
to have your parents both gone, then wind up in here, only to have your sister
sent outside The Wall. We all have our stories, but yours seems worse than
most.” She shrugged. “I thought it might cheer you up.”

Adam was trying to decide what he should
say. He was surprised that Jayla had even thought about him, let alone consider
how hard everything had been on him.

The girl who had taken the cigarette from
Daniel dropped the butt on the ground, put it out with her heel like a scurrying
roach, then bent to the floor, scooped up the evidence, dropped it into her
pocket, and turned to Jayla. “Let’s show him.”

“Yeah,” Morgan agreed. “Let’s get out of
here.”

Adam swallowed, terrified, wondering what
it was they wanted to show him.

“OK,” Jayla said, swinging her feet to
the floor, then standing. She held her hand out, and the girl to Melissa’s left
filled it with one of the pillowcases in her hand.

“Let’s fly.” Morgan slapped Adam on the
back again, then stepped in front to take the lead. Tommy and Daniel both edged
their way by, following the four girls into the shadows as Adam silently
followed, trying not to appear as scared as he was.

They left the room and walked a long
hallway without a single light, so dark it may as well have been outside The
Wall on a moonless midnight, their footsteps echoing back to them. Adam found
it odd that none of the hallway seemed familiar. If it was the floor beneath
the TV hall, it
should have
been one of the teaching levels, not some
dusty living quarters.

Then he realized that the walls, unlike
the other floors he’d been on, weren’t black, but rather a faded stone-brown
color. It was as if they were in an entirely different building — kind of like
a secret wing in an ancient mansion or castle he’d read about in his books.

“What is this?” Adam whispered. “These
aren’t the classrooms.”

“It’s one of the secret floors,” Jayla
whispered back. There’s a few of them between the other floors, places the
elevators don’t get off.”

“Wow!” Adam said. “How did you know this
was here?”

“When you grow up in The Rock, you hear
things,” Jayla said, smiling.

Somewhere, behind one of the many doors
in the hallway, something made a loud groaning sound.

Adam jumped, startled, and everyone
laughed, way too loud for his comfort. He was certain someone would hear them
and they’d get in trouble, but he didn’t dare whine — not in front of Jayla.

“Relax,” Tommy said, slapping Adam’s back
playfully. “It’s just the pipes. Haven’t you ever heard the pipes before?”

Adam laughed, feeling foolish, and
smiled. Jayla caught his eyes and smiled.

They reached the end of the hall and ran
into a second set of stairs leading one direction — up. They climbed the narrow
stairwell, then opened a black wooden door with faded peeling paint that led to
a gleaming, white kitchen.

“I told you we were going to the mess
hall,” Morgan laughed.

Adam gasped as he stepped into the light.
He had never seen the world on the other side of the cafeteria line, but
everything in the kitchen seemed shockingly clean and surprisingly new.
Everything else in Chimney Rock was ancient and dingy, but the white tile and
gleaming aluminum inside the kitchen reminded Adam of the high ceilings and
wide-open rooms of his father’s office at CityWatch.

He swallowed his hesitation and stepped
into his bravest voice. “Why are we here?”

“Because,” Jayla chirped, “they’re about
to show the Top 10 Opening Games Moments, and
everyone
goes out to the
hall to watch. Starla noticed it about seven Games back.”

The girl who must’ve been Starla — the
blonde one who had said nothing so far, the one who had been standing to
Melissa’s left — smiled and gave Adam a tiny wave. Daniel, Tommy, and Morgan
were already in the kitchen’s middle, kneeling beside a giant alloy cabinet and
digging through the second-to-bottom drawer.

“Let’s load up,” Jayla said, shaking her
pillowcase.

Adam joined the huddle and stared down
into the drawer, packed high with various-sized white boxes marked “City 6
Rations” over a listing of each box’s contents: cereal, crackers, jam, cookies,
dried fruits, nuts, beans, soups, and dried meats.

“Oh my God. There’s so much food,” Adam
whispered.

Adam salivated, then fell to his knees
and started scooping rations into a pillowcase that had fallen into his hand
without his even realizing it.

“Not too many,” Jayla warned. “We have to
be careful. If they notice, we can never come back. Let’s move to that one.”
She pointed to a second alloy stall on the far side of the kitchen.

“Good idea,” Morgan said, pulling a
pillowcase from Starla’s hand and crossing the kitchen. Halfway there a loud
clang rang from behind them.

Adam’s heart froze.

“Hey!” a woman shouted into the silence.
“Who’s in here?”

Without any words, the bottom drawer
slammed shut and they ran back the way they’d come. Adam’s heart pounded in his
chest as he followed, certain that at any second they’d run into an adult.

“Hello?” the woman shouted from behind,
but she seemed to be far enough away that they’d escaped her sight.

They reached the door to the stairwell
and ran down the stairs, back down the hall, and then into the room where
they’d been smoking the cigarette.

Adam was the last through the door and
was surprised to find Jayla waiting at the door for him, a huge smile on her
face, her eyes wide and alive. Once Adam was inside, she pulled the door closed
and locked it.

“Oh my God!” Starla said, “That was soooo
close!”

Adam collapsed on the couch, his lungs on
fire, adrenaline coursing through him, mixing with fear, exhilaration, and
then, to his surprise, laughter, which erupted out of his mouth like a bark at
first.

Everyone turned, looking at him, as
shocked as he was by his laughter, and then they joined him.

Jayla joined him on the couch, and their
eyes met. She smiled and said, “You’re pretty cool, Adam.”

“Balls like grapefruits!” Morgan shouted,
ripping into a box of cookies, and chowing on them.

Adam was too excited and nervous to eat,
though.

“Shouldn’t we get back to the TV hall?”
Adam asked.

“No, we’re gonna wait until right before
the show is over and they go back to live footage,” Tommy said.

“Relax,” Jayla said, putting a hand on
Adam’s hand.

Her skin was soft, and so much darker
than his pale skin. And his hand was shaking.

“Everything’s gonna be OK,” she said,
smiling the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen.

And as Adam sat there with his new
friends, next to the prettiest girl in the world, he felt happier than he could
remember being in a long time. He wished his father could see him.

And with that thought came a flash of
guilt as he wondered what his father would think of his theft.

J
onah woke with a splitting headache
hammering between his ears hard enough to make him wonder whether he’d been out
all night or half-dead for a month. His throat was dry, and his mind filled
with a fog thick enough to cut through.

His arms and legs were bound to a chair.

He pulled at the bindings, but they
wouldn’t give, and pulling hurt his arms too much.

Jonah blinked several times, trying to
move his mind into motion as he cast his eyes across the dim room, which was
lit by a single old tube light in the ceiling. Still waiting for his blurred
vision to clear, Jonah sniffed the air, wrinkling his nose at the musty scent.

He wondered how long he’d been out, and
more so, where the hell the kids had brought him. The last thing he remembered
was them walking toward a tunnel.

He couldn’t remember anything after that.

They must’ve drugged me with a coma dart
or something.

The wavy lines in front of his eyes
finally straightened, and Jonah found himself blinking at an ancient-looking
poster, still trying to focus. The poster, announcing some sort of high-speed
train, showed a drawing of a giant train racing through a tunnel and out onto a
track high above a city. Giant bold type announced,

“
The Bullit: The Maglev Across
America! Tomorrow’s Train TODAY! Debuting in the Winter of 2030.”

He
was
underground, in the old
Maglev station, which had been turned into an underground habitat for many
banished from City 6. He’d never been to the station and had only heard of it
from Duncan, though most people didn’t know of its location. While the Cities
didn’t care much about anyone beyond The Wall, there were no doubt people
living in The Barrens that City Watch would love to get its hands on — to
question, torture, and exact some ounce of flesh for offenses, real and
perceived.

Had the people who’d taken him known that
he was Underground and that he’d helped get so many people to this very place,
he’d be a hero, not a prisoner. But neither the City nor the network had
exposed him as an Underground operative. They didn’t want to make him a martyr —
so instead, they made him a crazed wife killer.

All Jonah was to these people was a
former Watcher, someone they’d hold responsible for their treatment within The Walls
of City 6.

Jonah was an enemy without a state.

He twisted his head to the right, gasping
in a surprise when his gaze fell onto a man whose shoulders were broad enough
to be dangerous, though he was short enough to be considered a dwarf.

“Nice to see you awake,” the dwarf said.

Jonah tried to hide his shock of seeing a
dwarf, as it was so rare to see one alive. Dwarves were among those forced to
live in the Dark Quarters, lives consigned to freak show or sex trade. That was
assuming they weren’t murdered at birth as most were. The Cities allowed only
one child per couple unless you could afford a ticket for a second. Parents
rarely wanted to “waste” their child credit on anything less than a perfect
clone of themselves.

The dwarf seemed to be around 35 or so,
with long brown hair and a matching scruffy beard. His eyes were ice blue,
though weary from all that he’d likely seen and experienced.