Raven cringed. Technically, topside couldn’t be totally safe. It could be free of toxins in this area, but the turbine towers were far from safe. They could collapse if the wind blew too strong. She would not let her daughter go anywhere near the windmill field.
“One… two…” Raven pushed the hatch up. She cringed at the squeak of rusty hinges and a brief shower of disintegrating gasket, then stared out in awe at the sight of a dark, starry sky.
Confusion gave way to mild disappointment at the sun not being out, as she’d wanted her daughter to see it. However, seeing the night sky for the first time in her life left her too enthralled to dwell on it. She didn’t know how well her mechanical clock synced up with actual day and night, but it couldn’t be too far off if her scheduled sleep time lined up with darkness.
Tinsley pushed at her backside, trying to get her to move up off the ladder.
Chuckling to herself, Raven climbed out of the shaft and reached back to steady the girl as she, too scrambled up onto solid ground. The child froze on all fours, staring at where her hands mostly vanished in the dirt up to her wrists. After a moment of stillness, she gingerly lifted her right hand, holding a clump of earth, watching as it fell between her fingers. She picked up another handful and sprinkled it back to the ground.
“Scoot forward a bit. I don’t like you being so close to the opening.”
Tinsley crawled a few feet, then sat, gazing up. “It’s not that bright. My eyes don’t hurt.”
“It was bright when I fixed the windmill. Outside, the light comes on by itself and goes off by itself. Remember what I showed you about the planet spinning around?”
“Yeah.” Tinsley nodded, still playing by raking her fingers at the dirt between her knees.
“I don’t really know what clock times are day and which are night. When I came up here before, the sun was out.”
Tinsley leaned back, gazing at the stars. “Who poked all the holes in the sky?”
“Those are stars. They appear at night, unless it’s raining.”
“What’s a star?”
Raven pointed. “One of those light spots.”
“How did they get up there?”
“I think they’ve just always been there.”
Tinsley fidgeted at her filter mask. “They’re pretty. I hope no one steals them again.”
“People can’t steal stars. They’re far, far away and extremely large. Bigger than our planet, mostly.”
“They can, too, steal stars.” Tinsley pointed at the hatch. “The Plutions stole them from us a long time ago.”
Raven’s heart nearly broke. She brushed a hand over her daughter’s hair, which refused to be tamed. “Yeah, they sure did.”
“Why is the door so small?” asked Tinsley.
“This is a secondary exit. Like for emergencies. The Arc has a great big door on level one.” That might be dead. No one has been up there for years. “They haven’t tried to turn on the machine that opens it in a very long time. It might not even work, but that’s okay. We still have this way out.”
“Oh. But the old people can’t climb ladders. Are we all gonna go outside?”
“I dunno, Tins. This planet we once called home is like an alien world. We don’t know what’s out there.”
“It’s gotta be funner than down there.” Tinsley pulled her tread socks off and plunged her toes into the dirt, trying to laugh and giggle without making too much noise. After mushing her feet into the ground for a while, she squirmed out of the rope harness, got up, and wandered off to examine the weeds growing here and there.
Did the people who made the Arc expect us to stay in it forever or did they hope we could leave it someday?
Maybe at some point in the past, their society could have been perpetually self-sustaining, able to produce everything from simple clothing to complex components for computers and CO2 scrubbers. Somewhere during the past few centuries—or however long it had been since the doors sealed—technical knowledge faded as well as supplies and operational fabrication machines. A former administrator must have committed a fatal error in allocating resources that contributed to the complete failure of precision manufacturing of silicon chips and circuit boards. Or maybe her idea that some horrible past event killed off most of the people had some truth to it. All the best and brightest perished, leaving normal people behind.
No matter why it happened, we’re still in trouble.
The soft rush of Tinsley taking a deep breath broke the otherwise perfect quiet. A noise that started sounding like a cough ended as more of a throat clearing.
Raven looked away from the weed at her daughter, who’d pulled her filter mask down off her face. An instant of panic hit her, as though she’d accidentally exposed her child to deadly poison. She managed not to scream, clinging to the hope offered by the doc’s negative swabs. Tinsley took another deep breath then leaned to put her face right into a bush dotted with small white flowers.
“Tins? Be careful.”
“I am.” The child backed away from the foliage. “It smells nice out here.”
She’d smelled it before, the scent of thousands of plants carried by air that hadn’t gone through clogged filter panels and a chemical bath millions of times. Still, Raven pulled her mask down to enjoy it again. It might have been all in her mind, but breathing out here felt as though it took less effort and made her head spin ever so slightly for a while.
“Why’s everyone scared of goin’ outside?” Tinsley wandered around, evidently enthralled at the feeling of dirt on her toes.
Overcome by a moment of childish abandon, Raven took her tread socks off, leapt to her feet, and spent a little while running around with her daughter. She teased her fingertips at the leaf of a spiky weed as tall as the child. If this could grow on the surface, food crops could as well. Seeing the area surrounding the Arc evidently free of the contamination she’d grown up believing saturated everything topside gave her hope. Unfortunately, it also didn’t prove that no contamination existed anywhere.
Alas, it didn’t take long for the late hour to catch up with her. Tinsley let out a huge yawn, so Raven guided her back to the open hatch.
“C’mon, kiddo. We should get back inside before anyone catches us.”
Another yawn later, Tinsley nodded. “Okay.”
They sat to put their tread socks back on. Raven secured the rope around the girl for the climb down, then lowered herself onto the ladder, going first so she could catch the girl if she fell in her tired state.
“Mommy?” asked Tinsley while climbing onto the ladder in front of her.
“Hmm?”
“If a rule is stupid, people are s’posed ta break it. I don’t think we did anything bad.”
Raven gave her a quick hug, then reached up to pull the hatch closed. “All right. Time to be quiet again.”
Right before the metal plate cut off the starlight in the shaft, Tinsley raised a thumbs-up.
14
The Great Death
The Arc was a good idea. It would’ve been a whole lot better of an idea if they had the time to plan it properly. But, when your ass is on fire, you don’t care what might be in the toilet before jumping in. – Ellis Wilder.
Once back in her quarters, Raven changed into her nightgown. Tinsley hadn’t bothered, merely ditching her poncho and skirt before falling face-first onto the bed. Raven sympathized with that level of exhaustion and didn’t care if the girl wanted to sleep wearing her inside pants instead of a nightgown.
Raven crawled into bed and pulled the blankets over them.
“I wish the bugs would come back,” whispered Tinsley, snuggling close. “Why did they go away?”
“Well…” Raven didn’t bother opening her eyes. “A long time ago, there used to be lots and lots of people living topside. So many people that they made huge places called cities and needed machines like cars and airplanes to go places. Poison got into the sky and the water and the air. Insects started dying, but the people didn�
�t notice or didn’t care. They didn’t really like bugs. Even the good ones. When the bugs were gone, the plants disappeared. Then the food. One day, people realized they should have done something about the poison, but it had become too late.”
“People died,” whispered Tinsley.
“Yes. All the people except for the ones who went into the Arc long ago. We call it the Great Death. Every living thing on the planet from the smallest bug to the biggest creature died in only a few years because of all the poison and heat.”
“What was the biggest creature?” Tinsley held her arms out in front of her, sleepily pretending to be a ferocious giant monster.
Raven tried to squeeze memory out of her exhausted brain. It had been a long time ago she’d sat there listening to Ms. Reed teach. “I think elephant… or maybe whales might’ve been bigger than them.”
“Whale?”
“Go to sleep.”
Tinsley grumbled. “I can’t sleep ’til I know what a whale is. I’m gonna be wondering.”
Raven closed her eyes, chuckling softly to herself. “They looked like really big fish but they breathed air. I think the book said some of them could way several tons.”
“Wow.” Tinsley coughed into the pillow. “They must’a lived in big rivers.”
“The biggest.” Raven smiled. “They lived in the ocean.”
“Did the ocean die, too?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s sad.”
Raven rubbed the girl’s back. “Very. Please go to sleep.”
A moment passed in silence.
“Where did”—the girl yawned—“the poison come from?”
“The bad guys. Plutions.” Raven failed to resist the urge to yawn as well. “Stories say Plutions were everywhere, killing everything.”
“I don’ like Plutions.”
“Me neither.”
Tinsley stretched, then snuggled closer. “Are the Plutions still out there?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. The stories say the Plutions smelled really bad, so they can’t sneak up on us.”
The child murmured something that sounded like ‘that’s good.’
Hoping the girl had gone to sleep, Raven let herself drift.
A few minutes of silence passed.
“Mommy?”
“Hmm?”
“I won’t tell on you.”
Raven chuckled.
“Can we go outside again sometime? Like when it’s the sun?”
Raven kissed her on the head. “Maybe. Now, go to sleep.”
15
Dying Air
Your mother got mad at me the first time I went to topside. Didn’t speak a word to me for a week after. Always said goin’ out there would kill me and she didn’t want to grow old alone. Damn world’s got a sick sense of irony. – Ellis Wilder.
Alarm bells drilled into Raven’s skull, pulling her out of a strange dream.
She’d been standing in the doorway of someone’s private quarters, unable to go inside. The sense of dread keeping her out didn’t frighten her as much as it merely felt ‘wrong’ to intrude. Not until the clock jolted her awake did she realize it must have been a long-buried memory. Her mother had died after a long illness when Raven had been around five. She didn’t remember much about the woman who’d been in the infirmary for over a year, evidently too sick to allow a child that little to visit. The day she finally got the okay to visit her mother, Raven had been standing in a doorway waiting for Dad to call her into the room… but the woman had passed away hours earlier.
Anger at the world pushed aside her fatigue. She cut the alarm and got up, prodding Tinsley to get moving. They both somehow found the energy not to be too sluggish, so had plenty of time to eat breakfast at the cafeteria—more muffins. Today, she made an exception and let Tinsley have a little bit of coffee. As frivolous as it might have been to use up hydroponic tank space on coffee beans, all the admins—and at least forty percent of the adult population—demanded it, and for that, she felt grateful.
Especially that morning.
On the way to her job station, she dropped Tinsley off at the school room. The Arc had an entire hallway section devoted to school space on level five, but it hadn’t been used in several generations. Similar to schools before the Great Death, it contained eight rooms for grade levels plus four classrooms intended for high school age students. Years ago, the Arc had enough of a population to use them. Nowadays, the children used one room on level three. No reason to make them walk all the way down into a mostly empty area.
It worried her that Tinsley was currently the youngest resident of the Arc. Ariana, at nine, came in second. Cheyenne and Xan, both eleven, came next, with Josh, the eldest at twelve—not including Trenton, who no longer counted as a child at nineteen.
Did they stop asking people to have babies or have they not been able to get pregnant?
She didn’t think crummy air quality would have mattered for that, but if people got tired of having kids because Noah asked them to… that didn’t bode well. Another potential bad situation would be if they’d run out of safe genetic pairings. Granted, she and Chase could have more kids. Ariana’s parents could as well. Raven didn’t much care for the idea of having sex with him again, but if the survival of the human species depended on it…
He’s not that bad.
Tinsley hugged her and walked to her desk.
Raven waved goodbye, then smiled at Sienna before turning to leave—but stopped when Arianna burst into coughing. She had almost the same skinny build as Tinsley, her low body mass making her the next most vulnerable person in the Arc to bad air. Generations of careful pairing to avoid incest had resulted in most residents being thoroughly mixed in terms of ethnicity. Despite that, some variances occurred. For example, Ariana obviously had her father’s Chinese eyes but otherwise looked like a smaller version of her mother, Elena Vasquez.
Cheyenne didn’t cough, but seemed half awake, seconds from face-planting over her desk.
Even the normally uncontainable Josh sat still, not making noise, not fidgeting.
The air’s getting thin. Low oxygen or elevated CO2 can cause lethargy. Dammit!
She darted off down the hall to the engineering room, not entirely sure what to say, but fully intending to demand Ben do something. She had no proof of low oxygen, high CO2, or chemical toxicity from the hydroponic fluid in the air. The doc said he’d run tests on it but hadn’t said a word to her about the results. Regardless, something was clearly making the children sick and affecting the smallest ones the most.
Like the bugs. The small stuff dies first. When adults start feeling sick, it’ll be too late to do anything.
Her sprinting into the engineering area brought an abrupt stop to a highly animated conversation going on right outside the door to Ben’s office involving him, Shaw, and Trenton. What had echoed into the hallway prior to her arrival sounded like more back and forth over the air filters, Trenton mostly doing the ‘yeah, what he said’ thing whenever Shaw barked at Ben.
Raven ran past Lark, who worked at her table evidently trying to ignore the men arguing, and inserted herself into the circle of men.
“Hey. Welcome to the party,” said Shaw, nodding.
“Ben.” She came close to grabbing his shirt in both hands, but held herself back. “We have to do something now.”
“What’s on fire?” He noticed her practically up on tiptoe, and leaned back a little.
Trenton gawked. “There’s a fire?”
Shaw closed his eyes, likely asking the Saints for strength inside his mind. “No, boy. She means metaphorical fire.”
“The air. Tinsley’s been affected by it for a couple wakes. I just took her to school, and now it’s other kids, too. Ariana’s having trouble breathing and all five of them are lethargic. The CO2 is too high, or the oxygen is too low, or it’s from the chemical leak in the hydroponic farm that the filters can’t clean. Maybe it’s a high concentration of particulates.”
“Hold on a moment.” Ben rested a hand on her shoulder. “You’re saying that there’s something going on with the air but you don’t even know exactly what it is?”
She closed her eyes and bit her lip to keep from screaming. When the urge to do so passed, she exhaled hard and fixed him with an almost glare. “You know that all of those things are happening. One scrubber should be enough to keep 200 people alive, but we’re running all of them and it’s still iffy. When you shut them off the other wake, they almost didn’t come back on. Next time you power them down, they won’t turn back on. Did you see the amount of dust that fell off the filter when Shaw whacked it against his leg?”
Shaw wagged his eyebrows as if to say, ‘see, she agrees with me.’
“Okay, okay.” Ben rubbed his forehead. “I admit there are several issues going on. The best thing for us to do is address them one at a time as fast and effectively as we can.”
“Alarm’s going off on the filters,” said Trenton. “Started this wake.”
“I told you,” said Raven. “They’re gonna fail. Next time you hit that button, they stay off.”
“No not the scrubbers, the filters.” Ben looked around the group. “Why don’t you three see what you can do for them and I’ll check on the scrubbers.”
Raven lost her battle with self-control and grabbed Ben by the shirt. “The kids are showing signs of oxygen deprivation or contaminated air. We are not going to wait for one of them to drop dead before we take this seriously. You know exactly how this shit goes, and it’s the smallest one who dies first.”
“Whoa, whoa.” Ben grasped her gently by the wrists. “I completely understand where you’re coming from. But there’s only so much we can do.”
“Bullshit. We can do more. You and I both know that Noah simply won’t.”
Ben tilted his head. “Like?”
“Open the primary door and the escape hatch. Vent in outside air. The scrubbers are going to die really soon. The Arc is too old to stay sealed anymore and the air outside is fine.”
The Girl Who Found the Sun Page 14
