“Of course it is.” There was a pile of discarded clothing settled on a large desk. The stranger who’d let them into the building sat perched beside it. “That’s what I started the fire for. To warm this place up.”
11 nodded. His eyes went wide with the realization of the heat radiating from the fire. It was trapped in the large metal container in the front corner of the room. He cleared his throat to cover his embarrassment. “I’ll get the others.”
A moment later, ten other bare-faced students crowded the trapped flame. They reached their hands out toward it tentatively, or leaned their face close to feel the warmth on their skin. There was a low chatter of a dozen voices flowing at once, each commenting on the novelty of a device that could contain the violent flame and force it to provide the service of heating the room.
When he’d had quite enough of the cooing from the group, the person who’d started the fire raised his voice over the din of the crowd. “All right, that’s enough. To your seats, please.” Bodies pulled reluctantly away while a couple of the adults raced toward the seats closest to the crackling fire. Glares at the pair who had settled in first were returned by victorious smiles. Once everyone had found a seat, the fire tamer spoke again.
“My name is Parker. I’m one of the groundskeepers here at Hanford.” He looked into the distracted faces of his students and pointed to the caged fire. “This is a wood stove. We load it up with combustible materials, then light them on fire and close the door. As you can see, it contains the flames and emits heat. Don’t touch it. It’ll burn you. It’s hot enough to cook eggs on.”
62’s arm shot up in the air almost before the question fully formed in his mind. Parker pointed a finger at him with a nod. “What’s an egg?”
Parker’s left cheek rose in a sideways grin. “It’s the device that contains organic goo before it mutates into a chicken, of course.” 62’s eyebrows squeezed together. He lowered his hand slowly, befuddled at the answer. Parker’s grin spread wider.
“As I’m sure you’re already aware, there’s a lot for you to learn about this world above ground. I’m sure that you’ve each seen dozens of things that you don’t understand in the short time you’ve been here. I’m going to do my best to help you understand what things are, and how to survive above ground. We’ll get you accustomed to the outdoors and I’ll try to knock some common sense into you.” Parker chuckled, “Maybe then you’ll realize that you need to wear coats when it’s cold outside so you don’t freeze to death like a bunch of dummies.”
Parker eased up from the corner of the desk he’d been resting on and reached behind himself to a stack of papers and some sticks. “We don’t use tablets or projectors here, but we’ll get through school fine with these. Please take a paper and pencil. Use the sharp black end to write your number on the top of the page. Then, I want you to write three questions you’d like answered. No question is too dumb to ask, but please only ask three. When you’re done, raise your hand and I’ll collect the paper from you. Then, we’ll spend the rest of the morning answering your questions.”
He dropped a sheet of paper and pencil on 62’s desk. He recognized them from his dreams with 71 long ago. He picked up the pencil and felt the weight of the thin slice of wood carefully in his hand. At one end was a sharp black tip for writing. He pressed the tip down on the paper and it snapped, sending a black nub skittering across his desk. A deep black mark was left on the page. He looked up, embarrassed that he’d broken his pencil on his very first use. It was clunkier than it had been in his dreams, and the tip was far more brittle than he’d expected. When he tried to write again, only a faint gray line dug into the paper.
“Don’t know your own strength?” Parker arrived at the side of 62’s desk with another pencil. He pulled the broken one from 62’s hand and examined the tip. “Wow. You broke the graphite all the way up into the shaft. Let’s try to ease up a little bit on this next one.”
62 accepted the new pencil and applied it to the paper with light, even strokes. He wrote:
Boy 1124562.
Why is it sometimes hot and sometimes cold?
What is a chicken?
Why do we have two cafeterias?
CHAPTER 11
THE MORNING HAD OVERFLOWED with so many answers that 62 felt his brain might burst. He sat alone under the cover of a small greenhouse outside the school. This one was a lot smaller than the massive structures on the outskirts of town where most of the food was grown. Parker said that this smaller building was put here long ago for conducting experiments, and they’d converted it into an indoor garden to teach the students about plants. He looked across the garden at the small plants reaching up toward the sun filtering through the opaque ceiling, waving their leaves in the breeze of a fan. Parker had assured him that plants were some kind of food. People and animals ate them. He reached down to the dry patch of grass under him and pulled up a blade. He eyed it warily. It looked similar to the grass that Blue had brought down into Adaline. But instead of green and flexible, this grass was brown and stiff, breaking if he bent it too far. But other than the color and texture it looked just like the blades of grass Blue had snuck into his cube.
62 pulled his mask away from his face. He popped the grass into his mouth and let his mask snap back into place. He chewed the rough blade. It was stringy, sticking in his teeth. The texture was horrible, and he lifted his mask a second time to spit the offensive plant back out. How did these people survive on plants? He wiped his tongue on his sleeve and instantly realized his mistake. Gritty dirt clung to his tongue. He spat again on the ground beside him and pushed his mask back over his face again.
He leaned back against the greenhouse wall and folded his hands behind his head. This was why there were two cafeterias. The one he was assigned to, cramped and small, only dispensed meal tabs. The other one was for long-time Hanford residents to eat food made from plants and animals. Animals! To think that the people here were happy to eat other living things. It seemed brutal. Violent. Unthinkable.
“It’s survival.” Parker’s words echoed in his mind. The teacher had explained to the horrified group that in the above-ground world, there was a need to work at surviving. To take any advantage available in an effort to make it to the next day. Parker had been adamant that animals themselves often ate other beings that were smaller or weaker than them in this same effort to survive. Perhaps a bird didn’t have the capacity for wondering about the life of the insect it ate, but 62 did. He couldn’t imagine putting a bird in his mouth. The idea made his stomach churn.
The wind picked up again, a reminder of the uncontrolled weather, which they’d discussed in class. The world’s ambience was too large to control, apparently. It was up to the sun, and the wind, and some new measure of time called seasons, to manage what temperature the air would be. Time itself seemed unruly. In Adaline, life was counted by seconds and cycles. Eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds in a cycle. And the cycles accrued long as you lived. Here, above ground, they counted time in days. Nights. Weeks. Seasons. Years. How was anyone supposed to keep track of it all?
62’s head swam. The wind began to howl and a funnel of dust shot up into the air and began to dance around just beyond the greenhouse. Time to get inside. Despite his previous upturned stomach while thinking about people gnawing on animals, now his belly groaned that it was hungry. He’d been in such a rush to get to his new school that he’d skipped going to the cafeteria for his morning meal tab. He put his hand on his stomach and could feel the muscles wobble as it grumbled for attention.
The dusty funnel weaved closer to the edge of the glass, and he knew it was time to move. He shoved himself up from the patch of grass and trotted through the greenhouse door, letting it slam shut behind him under its own weight. He made his way to the cafeteria and heaved the door open. It slammed closed with a crash, pushed by the wind at his back. He took his mask off as he walked up to the counter. He dropped his mask into a bin at the end of the counter and washed hi
s hands, then pulled a cup from the stack and moved down the line toward the pitchers of drinks.
In Adaline there had only been one kind of drink; a thick, clear liquid that was full of nutrition and void of flavor. Here, there were four types of drinks to choose from. Each had their own chemical makeup, according to the cafeteria worker he’d gotten instructions from on his first day. One was purple. It was dark in color and left a sticky, thick feeling on his tongue after he drank it. Another was amber-colored and cloudy. It was lighter feeling in his mouth, and it seemed that it never mattered how much he drank, he always wanted more. The third was orange and dense in a way that made it so you couldn’t see through it no matter how little lay in the glass. The last was as clear as the container it sat in. They each had labels; grape, apple, orange, and water. He wondered why the orange one was labelled with just its color, but hadn’t thought to ask in school. A question for another day, he supposed.
He filled his cup with the grape drink and then moved down the counter to the tray of meal tabs. He grabbed two and turned to find a place to sit. The cafeteria was never really crowded, and wouldn’t be until more refugees were saved from Adaline and released from quarantine. He chose a table away from the door. A worker was nearby, mopping up a spill on the floor.
“We used to have bots that did that, back in Adaline,” 62 stated.
The worker looked up. His face was fresh and clean, unmarred by the wrinkles of age. He was older than 62, but not by much. “Yeah, musta been nice to not have to do anything.”
62 couldn’t help but voice his offense. “We did things. We went to school, and I was in physical training. That was a lot of hard work. And then I was recruited for Defense. I worked there, too.”
“Oh?” The young male stood up and dunked his mop in a bucket. He was a bit taller than 62. “You worked for Defense? Doubt it. A young kid running through the halls with guns a’blazing. How dumb do you think I am to tell me a story like that?”
“I did work for them. They strapped me up to these Machines and I —”
The worker shook his head. “Don’t lie to me, kid.”
62 shut his mouth, but not because he was lying. He clamped his lips closed to keep from yelling at the worker that he’d been part of a secret team of dreamers. He’d been important to Defense, even if 62 thought what they were doing was wrong. He’d been what Defense was looking for; someone who could track other dreamers down, identify them, and then alert the bots so that Men with the dreaming anomaly could be rounded up and disposed of. 62 shrank down in his seat. It didn’t matter that he’d worked for them because in the end, he had been the reason that his best friend had been caught. It wasn’t something he should be proud of.
The kid with the mop moved in closer to 62 and patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t look so down. You’ll get an above-ground job before you know it. There’s lots of things that need to be done up here. Loads of ways to be useful.”
62 stared into his cup and traced its rim with his finger.
“Hey, I bet you never had anything like that down there in the hole.” The kid pointed at the purple liquid in the cup. “Grape juice is my favorite, too. Tastes as good as off the vine, but when it’s a drink you don’t have to chomp through the skins. I hate the skin.”
“Off the vine?” 62 looked into his cup and back up at the kid with the mop. “This juice comes from a plant?”
“Sure does. They pick them in the fall and then squish the juice out. Bottle it up and then we get to drink it all year. The grapes are pretty good on their own, aside from the skins you know, but you missed the harvest. They’re all gone now.”
62 stared back down into his cup. “It’s a lot better than the grass I chewed earlier.”
The worker let go of his mop and took a step toward 62. The mop listed slowly to one side, trying to escape from the bucket. “You did what?”
“I was in one of those greenhouses and tried eating a bit of grass. Parker said plants are food and I wanted to see what it was like.” 62 glanced up from his cup and noticed the worker’s worried gaze. “I spat it out. It was gross. I wanted to get it out and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. Bad idea. That was even worse.”
“Holy Mother of Hanford. You didn’t!” The kid flailed his arms, knocking the mop the rest of the way out of the bucket. “We’ve got to get you to medical. Of all the stupid, idiotic things to do. Come on.”
62 sat stunned as the kid stomped his way across the cafeteria. He jumped when the door swung open and the worker spun around, a mask halfway on his face.
“I said, come on! We’ve got to make sure you don’t have any radiation in you.” He pointed out the door and set his jaw in an expression of determination that made 62 get up from his seat and retrieve his mask from the bin. The worker finished putting on his own mask and swore.
“What did I do?” 62’s voice wafted through the wind when they stepped outside.
“You picked up grass fresh from the dirt and ate it. Didn’t even wash it first! And then —” the kid’s hands flew wild in the air again, “you had the bright idea to lick the dirt off your sleeve. I’ve met some dumb refugees, believe me. But this takes the cake. I mean, hasn’t anyone told you not to put dirt in your mouth? Unless you’re walking around with a counter, you’ve got no idea what you’re sticking in your face.”
“A counter?” 62 was struggling to keep up with the larger male’s stride, which made understanding what he was saying that much harder. “A counter of what?”
The big kid spun around and grabbed 62 by the shirt. “A radioactive counter. The world up here. It’s poisoned. The wind spreads it around. Moves it from here to there and back again. Even if this spot of dirt was counted yesterday and was fine,” he pointed his other hand to the ground beneath them, “it might be covered in radioactive dust today.”
“But I was in the greenhouse. It’s all walled in, and the door was shut. I thought since I was inside, it was safe.” 62 didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t even really know what the cafeteria worker was talking about. “I — I didn’t know.”
“Well, we’re going to take you to medical right now and make sure you aren’t going to die. Then maybe tomorrow you should ask somebody to explain it to you.”
Not another word was passed between them as they made their way to the hospital. The two Boys checked in at the same doors that the refugees had entered when they’d first come from Adaline.
“What seems to be the problem?” a bored-looking female in a lab coat asked as she leaned against the admittance counter.
The cafeteria worker threw a thumb over his shoulder in 62’s direction. “This idiot licked the dirt outside.”
The Woman’s bored eyes narrowed and she looked the worker straight in the eye. “He did not.” Her gaze shifted and she looked down at 62. “You did not!”
“I wasn’t outside, I was in a greenhouse,” 62 blurted. He gave a long sigh. “But yeah, I did.”
“Thank you for bringing him here,” she said. “You may go back to work. I’ll take it from here.” She went behind the desk and opened a few drawers, looking for something.
“Thanks, Ma’am.” The cafeteria worker turned to 62. “I gotta go. I hope you don’t die. If they let you back out, don’t go licking anything, or spreading any more tall tales about Adaline.” The kid gave a quick wave, then walked off toward the exit, leaving 62 behind.
62’s shoulders sagged. He wondered how much worse this whole experience would have been if the kid had believed him about being a defense worker. Would he think 62 was bad for helping Defense hurt other people? Would he have decided he was so bad that he shouldn’t be brought to medical for help? Maybe his past in Adaline was something he should keep to himself from now on. He mumbled toward the door as it swung shut, “Okay, I won’t.”
The Woman came back around the counter holding a device with a box carried in one hand, and a long wand in the other. 62 recognized it. It was nearly identical to the Machine Geiger had used w
hen 28 had taken his mask off during their escape.
“Take your mask off. Stand with your legs wide, arms out to your sides.” She waited for him to follow her instructions, then waved the wand around different parts of his body. The Machine ticked. She moved it around his hands and face and then sighed, “Open your mouth.”
62 obeyed and she pushed the wand gently against his lips. She didn’t push it into his mouth the whole way, like Geiger had done to 28. For that, he was grateful.
“Background radiation only. Everything looks normal.” The hospital worker set the device down on the counter and shut it off. “Well, normal enough for here, anyway. You’re lucky.” She turned back to 62, hands on hips and a look of concern in her eye. “I don’t know how they do things in Adaline. But here in Hanford, we don’t lick anything that’s come into contact with the ground. It’s undignified, unsanitary, and likely to get a radioactive particle stuck in your gut. Then not only will you be a rude little refugee, but your bones will dissolve and you’ll die a gruesome death.”
“But the greenhouse –”
The doctor tilted her head. “Look, the greenhouses keep the dust from blowing around in the air, but they still have dirt in them. And where there’s dirt, there’s potential for a problem. Not to mention whatever particles you and every other greenhouse visitor walked through and got stuck to your clothes before you went inside. Understand?”
“I’m starting to,” 62 sighed.
“Go home. Take a shower and put on some clean clothes. And for the love of Hanford, please stay inside until someone can knock some sense into you.”
“Yes Ma’am.”
CHAPTER 12
“HANFORD IS TRYING TO kill you.” Parker pointed at a large map hung on the wall. It outlined the town where everyone lived. Farmland was arranged in neat rows beyond the first set of fences, and there was a vast empty mass of unknown space beyond. “Practically everything here will kill you if you ignore it long enough.”
The Adaline Series Bundle 1 Page 41
