by Corrie Wang
“Maybe your Grand has him,” Sway says as I lob another chair.
Not if she was going to meet Chia. She would never put him in that kind of harm’s way. Although she did leave us here.
“Glori, look.”
Sway points. A door has popped open on one of the cupboards that runs along the wall.
Once, before Two Five was born, we had three months of heavy rains cut only by intermittent slushy snowstorms. It was week after week of permanent gray skies and stiff, freezing hands and feet. When it began to feel like it might be better to end our lives than wake up to one more day of such bleakness, there were still a few more weeks of it. Then one morning, the clouds cleared. Patches of blue dotted the sky and suddenly a vibrant double rainbow soared over the entire neighborhood. I never imagined I’d see anything more gorgeous.
Yet the two males who now tumble out of the cupboard are, without question, a million times more beautiful. Motor wields a butter knife. Mouse gives me a happy thumbs-up.
I fly to them and grab them both up, clutching them tightly. And it is right then, as I hug Mouse to me, that I finally, truly understand the layers to what my grand has done. She has made difficult, awful decisions. But she did it for us. Just as I would do anything for this male. I would sacrifice my very life to protect him. And woe to the being who tried to cause him harm.
“We hid when the alarm started going off,” Motor shouts into my ear.
“Motor said you wouldn’t come,” Mouse shouts into my other ear. “But I said you would. I said we had to wait.”
“Glori.” Motor whaps my shoulder so he has my full attention. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t turn you in.”
“I know, Motorhead. I wouldn’t care anymore if you did. You are both mine, do you understand? And I will never ever let you out of my sight or let anyone hurt you ever, ever again. From here on out we stay together always. Got it?” I nod to Sway. “All four of us.”
Motor’s eyes well with tears, and he wipes them with his arms, forgetting to take his glasses off first. I ruffle his shaved hair, then kiss both their foreheads.
“Gross,” Motor mutters with a goofy smile.
Mouse tugs on my arm. “You mean all five of us. Want to see what I brought?”
Before I can answer, he waves across the cafeteria at a cabinet door that’s slightly ajar. I’m about to ask what he’s playing at when the cupboard pops open and the little male with the big head tumbles out. A dozen pots and pans clatter out with him. When he gets to his feet, he throws his arms wide.
“Ta-da. It’s me!”
“Glori, this is Hercules,” Mouse shouts over the voice, then in a rush adds, “You said whatever I brought had to travel well. Hercules travels super well. Can she come?”
“Well, he certainly isn’t staying here.”
Mouse shouts, “She said you can come!”
“LOCKDOWN. LOCKDOWN. LOCKDOWN.”
“Now can we please get the bump out of here?” Sway yells.
“We can’t yet,” I holler back. “We’re not all here.”
“You mean there’s more?” Sway asks.
I nod because sometimes you can protect everyone. It just takes a little more work. I look to Motor. His brow is furrowed. He pushes up his glasses. Or at least I hoped you could protect everyone.
“Duh. There’s everybody.”
Breaker’s plan before the guards electrocuted me and then my grand drugged me into a brief comatose state was simple. Keep quiet. Rescue my brother and Sway. Then leave. My variation went something like this: Keep quiet. Rescue my brother and Sway and everyone else. Then leave. Because every time I considered what was at stake, it wasn’t a question of Mouse’s or Sway’s or Motor’s life. It was a question of our very humanity. And what it would mean about mine and any future I might make, if I saved only the ones I love and left everyone else to suffer. It was the same choice all of our elders had. Male versus fee.
For me it was easy. I chose both.
So I did dispose of Motor. I disposed of him to spread the word that we were all leaving. If we could sneak out four of us, why couldn’t we sneak out just under a hundred? By the time the guards and Doctor woke up and realized everyone was gone, we’d be miles away.
“Except,” Motor says as we tell Sway all this on the stairs up to the top floor, “Glori got fried in the neck and never came back. So, when I got to the cafeteria, Breaker and I decided to improvise. Well, first Breaker threatened to murder me if I was lying. Then we improvised.”
We stop when we can climb no higher. I briefly wonder if they at least started building the swimming pool on this floor. I take a deep breath as Motor pushes through the stairwell door. On the other side is a massive, cavernous space of concrete floors and steel beams. Since the Butler hadn’t been installed on this level, I can still hear the lockdown alarm, but it is finally—finally—quieter.
“Whoa,” Sway says softly, and laughs, awed.
I know the feeling. I take his hand. Males of every age group are sitting on the ground, hugging their knees and holding various trinkets they intend to take with them. Board games. Extra clothes. Books. A few Sixteens rush to their feet when they notice us, wielding knives the cafeteria workers used to cut meal. A murmur that is only my name goes through the crowd. As I look around at all the faces, I feel a tremendous sense of panic. What am I expecting these males to do now? Grand was right. There are far worse places than this out there. What could I offer them?
“Sway, what have I done?” I ask.
“LOCKDOWN. LOCKDOWN. LOCKDOWN.”
“You gave them the power to make their own choices.”
Breaker comes forward from off to my left. He wears the faintest of grins.
“You ain’t been murdered yet, Walk-In. That makes me…glad.”
“Likewise, Breaker. Were the guards a problem?”
“Turns out,” Breaker says with a cough, “there’s a lot more of us than there are them.”
He gestures to a corner where the guard I saw outside the Littles’ room is sitting cross-legged with his arms tied behind him. The males used old sweat suits to do it. Though, telling from the fierceness of his glare, I’m quite certain he’s a she. She must be the geneticist who teamed up with Doctor. Honor. Such a very fee name.
“You’re too late,” Honor calls out. “You think you’re saving them, but you aren’t. She has a different plan and she won’t be happy when she finds out about this.”
“Yeah, well, plans change,” I call back, then ask Breaker, “And the rest of the guards?”
“Oh,” Breaker says. “They’re all kinda, like, dead.”
The Sixteens and Fifteens each take one of the Littles. Sway takes Hercules. I pick up Mouse and hold Motor’s hand. No one objects that they are too big for this kind of treatment. Mouse sucks on his thumb. Moving like Reason’s pack of dogs, none of us more than an arm’s length apart, we take the stairs down to the first floor. Breaker tells us how Maximum found one of the guards dead in the hallway to the yard, covered in red sores.
“That must have been what they were vaccinating against,” I say.
I’m suddenly glad Mouse convinced a Sixteen to give a shot to Hercules and wonder why my grand decided not to vaccinate the other Littles. I think of Liyan’s words again, how first and foremost Grand was a scientist. Maybe that made her callous and narrow, but not cruel. She wouldn’t simply let little males die if she could prevent it. But while I’m still naive enough to think this, I’m not dumb enough to say it out loud.
What I do say—blurt, really—is: “Doctor is sick, too.”
Fast as his name’s out of my mouth, the emergency system shuts off. The halls are now pristinely, anticipatorily silent. I immediately prefer the noise.
“Thank heavens,” Sway says, tapping a beat out on Hercules’s back. “I’ll be humming that sucker for weeks. Lockdown. Lockdown. Lockdown.”
As dozens of males make a shushing sound, the wall flickers and Doctor is alongside us.
This is no prerecorded message.
“Children, what do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s only a screen,” I whisper, hoisting Mouse and pulling Motor in tight to my side. “Let’s go, everyone.”
The males don’t move. Doctor walks up and down the hall so they all can see him.
“You don’t have to listen to him,” I murmur, only to think, Bump that. Then I’m shouting. “He’s not even there. You don’t have to be quiet anymore. Come on, let me hear it.”
“Woo,” Breaker says mildly. His voice barely above a whisper.
A short male with dimples tries one next, a little louder. “Woot.”
“Woo-hoo,” Motor says, and then shouts it. “Wooo-hooo.”
And then everyone does. We’re jumping and shouting and running and woo-hooing. Doctor follows along next to us, but we don’t pay him any mind. Although I imagine he’ll be dead soon anyway, whatever power he had over the boys is now gone. We don’t quiet down until we get to the Fortress’s lobby, where, as one, we skirt the slumped-over, diseased body of the gray reception male that’s next to the dais.
“I believe he’s dead,” Breaker says.
“Excellent analysis, Sherlock,” Sway replies.
Before I can think twice about it, I hand Mouse to Motor, then hurry to the gray male and pocket his red glasses. Since old habits die hard, I also pat him down and am instantly rewarded for my scavenging when I find a portable in his inner breast pocket. I toss it to Sway. He immediately sends a series of PTTs. When I rejoin the males by the blast door, Mouse reaches for me. Kissing his hot little head, I take him back, handing off my keycard to Motor in return.
“Motor,” I say loudly. “You have saved every male in here. You are a true hero. So will you please do us the honor of letting us escape?”
He rolls his eyes and mutters under his breath, “Oversell it, why don’t you?”
But then he grins and slaps the keycard against the blast door’s scanner. “Let’s get the bump out of here.”
With a whoosh of air that makes everyone hop back, the blast doors fly up. The reinforced steel exterior door pops ajar as well. I kick it open.
Motor’s nostrils flare.
“It smells, Glori.” He pushes the door open wider and steps outside. “It smells like smells. And it’s so cold.”
The night sky is a deep black. There is the monster truck with enormous tires smashed into the front of the building along with fifty other crashed cars. A cold mist hangs in the air as a light freezing drizzle begins to fall. This. This is Motor’s first view of the world.
“It’s nothing like the yard,” he says, pushing up his glasses.
Then he holds his hands out and throws his head back and laughs. Ever so slowly he spins in the cold, wet air. Sway and I put the boys down as the other males rush out around us. And then we, too, stand there arms out, letting the rain splash our faces. Hercules and Mouse mimic us, only they flap their arms like wild, clumsy birds. My eyes find Breaker. His head is thrown back as well, but his eyes are closed and he is smiling.
Suddenly, there is the squealing of tires, bright lights, and a very loud car horn. A sleek black SUV drives at us full speed, then drifts and arcs to a perfect stop not a body’s length away.
The passenger-side window rolls down and a finely dressed figure with a Majesterial horn hanging around his neck leans out. Half his head is now dyed the palest of pinks, the other half kept naturally black.
“Don’t think because I’m happy you’re alive,” he calls out, “I’ll overlook what you have done to your hair. That is not a Comma-sanctioned haircut.”
“Is Comma always your backup plan?” I ask Sway.
“I mean, I don’t have that many friends.” He looks around at all the new males. “Though I guess the number’s growing.”
We run to the SUV. I hug Comma so hard, I nearly pull him out of the car.
“You actually did it,” he says, affectionately patting my cheek when I release him. “You marvelous boy. No, plural. All you marvelous boys did it.”
I feel a tug on my sleeve. Half the males have come over to ogle the car.
“Is this a Rinspeed SUV Aqua?” Motor asks with awe.
“How do you know what a Rinspeed is but not real food?” I ask.
“’Cause meals can’t drive underwater. Duh.”
“I have never seen nothing more beautiful,” Hercules whispers, stroking the fender.
As Sway and Comma lock in a tight embrace, the driver pulls himself out his window and sits on the car door, looking over the hood at us. He’s wearing driving goggles that he now pushes up onto his forehead. They do little to hold back his wild curls.
“When you said you’d wait for us at Rugged’s,” Sway calls out, “I didn’t think you meant in the Rinspeed, Reason.”
“It’s the end times, bruth.” Reason laughs, pausing to high-five some of the younger males. “Of course we brought the Rinspeed.”
“Comma, your old man…” Sway says.
He nods. “I know. I’m okay. I’m mean, I’m very much one hundred percent not okay. But Reason and I laid him to rest, and Rugged did say every day was a gift that might have to be returned at any minute. I just…”
As Comma chokes up, I reach out and take his hand. He squeezes it and bites his lip. There will be tears for his dad, but not here or now. Reason meets my eyes over the hood.
“How’s my puppy?” I ask.
“Happy to see you alive,” he replies, then blushes.
“It’s still my puppy,” Sway says, exasperated, as Comma looks at the three of us.
“Well, this is very Unicorn Warrior season four,” he says.
After a hefty throat clearing, Reason tells us that there’s room for all the males in the apartments above Euphoria. Except the Rinspeed only seats six. I look at all the cars that line the corpse road. It’s not like we’re short on transportation. Only drivers. But then Breaker and Maximum tentatively shuffle up to our group, like they hate to interrupt. Comma curses under his breath when he sees Maximum’s facial burns.
“Don’t worry, dolly,” he says. “Paisley goes with everything. We’ll make it work.”
“Okay,” Maximum whispers. “Thanks.”
“Walk-In,” Breaker says, “we’ve had numerous lessons on the mechanics of operating and repairing vehicles. You lead and we’ll follow. Kinda, like, to the ends of the earth.”
“Wait,” Sway says. “Who’s this guy again?”
“Good,” Reason says. “Let’s get a move on. If Chia’s mood is any indication, I have a feeling World War Four is about to go down. I’d like to be safely inside when it does.”
In the rearview mirror, a caravan of ten cars snakes behind us. Each filled with males and Littles. It only took us a few short minutes to find enough working cars for Breaker and his crew to drive. Then, after doing a three-point turn that crashed him into an equal number of stranded cars, Breaker pulled alongside us, the slight raise of his lips equivalent to a mile-wide grin. The other Sixteens only too happily followed suit.
Inside the Rinspeed, everyone gets caught up just as quick. Matricula is working with the mob. She has control of the labs. The Fortress, too. Thanks to Rage’s suggestion, the Fortress is now a farm for the mob. The mayor is about to be given an ultimatum. And that’s pretty much that.
Reason tells us that late last night Chia received a PTT telling him to meet Matricula here. That she wanted to talk. But only now do I realize I never asked my grand how she intended to get all the males to leave. Just as Chia didn’t know how to get fees to his side, what threat or offer could she possibly make to have him relinquish an entire city?
“Maybe she’ll offer him the fees in the lab,” Sway says when I bring this up.
Comma snorts. “Did they lobotomize you in there? This is Queen Bee Matricula Bumping Rhodes we’re talking about. She does not sacrifice her drones.”
“It doesn’t matter what the offer is,” Reason says. �
��Chia’s bringing full forces. Matricula doesn’t stand a chance.”
Sharply, I say, “I think it’s time you stop underestimating us. Stop underestimating her.”
The car falls silent.
Once we’re out of the golf-course grasses, Reason detours around the corpse-road cars by slowly driving on the old suburban sidewalks. As Comma and Sway quietly discuss the repairs that need to be made to the steam station thanks to Rage’s attack, Motor stares out the window, a hint of a smile gracing his sour features. Hercules is passed out on Comma’s shoulder, breathing so heavily it’s like he’s trying to blow up a balloon. Mouse is curled in my lap, his eyes burdened with sleep. He reaches up and plays with my paperclip necklace.
“I need more clips,” he murmurs. “Our family got bigger.”
“We can get them.” I kiss his forehead. “Mouser, I’m sorry no one was ever very nice to you at home. I should have done more about it. Years ago.”
“It’s okay.” He yawns. “I know they loved me. Grand told me so every night.”
“What? When?”
“Every night,” he says, like I didn’t hear him the first time. “After she finished reading to us, she would tuck us in, then kiss each of our heads, and tell us she loved us.”
I shift him so I can see him better. “When did she read to us?”
“Every night,” he says again with even more emphasis. “She didn’t if she thought we were awake. That’s why I always pretended to be sleeping. I thought you were, too. I didn’t think anyone snored that loud for real.”
I tickle him. The last few years, Grand rarely came home before Two Five went to bed. I knew it was to avoid him, but maybe it wasn’t for the reasons I thought.
Suddenly, Reason curses.
Sway says, “Kill the lights, Rea.”
Motor leans forward, peers through the front windshield, and says, “Is it too late to decide I wanna stay at the Fortress?”
Soldiers in mismatched uniforms are working to move seven huge transports into position. Except, unlike the transports at the art museum, these aren’t gangly or hodgepodged together. In fact, as the soldiers park horizontally across the road, the transports gleam as if they’re brand-new. Reason puts the Rinspeed into park.
