Lotus and Thorn

by Sara Wilson Etienne

  But not this one. Despite the fact it looked healed and faded, this one was new. And I had no idea how I’d gotten it.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE NEXT MORNING, I was up and dressed before Marisol came for me. I chose a dress that was long enough to cover the hilt of the knife stuck in my boot. There were layers of secrets inside this Dome, and everyone seemed to be keeping some.

  Still, as long as I was constantly escorted—by the Kisaengs, by Edison, by Grimm—I had little hope of uncovering the one I was really looking for. Was Jenner playing with Red Death like he was playing with the Curadores’ genetics? Had Tasch been just another of his victims? How many more lives did he plan on taking?

  And now, I had a new question . . . a more personal one. What had been done to me while I’d been sedated in isolation? I thought about Jenner’s checkup yesterday, the fly taking my blood, the files flashing up on the screen. There were answers inside this Dome and I was going to find them, before anything else was taken from me. I touched my hidden knife for reassurance as Marisol came through the front door without knocking.

  “This morning we’re going hunting!” Marisol announced cheerfully.

  “Hunting?” We walked outside and the sisters were there, waiting for us.

  Marisol said, “Sure. We want a go at yesterday’s Finds before they break them all down.”

  The Salvage Hall was on the opposite side of the Gardens, so we risked taking a magfly. The whole line had been slowed down—in case of any future malfunctions—so I got a good view of the Dome this time. And, because the magfly tracks ran in concentric circles around the Dome with spokes connecting the different rings, I got to see a lot of it. We passed the old church where Edison and I had gone that first night—it looked even more impressive in the daylight.

  Statues perched high on the stone spires and I wished I was flying with Grimm again so I could get a closer look at them. The rush of last night’s flight was still buzzing inside me. And like the betrayer my mind was, it flickered back to the feel of Nik’s hand across my body. I reminded myself, Focus. Eyes open. Knife ready.

  The magfly passed a double line of women walking through the streets near the church. They all wore the same long cream tunic dress and every single one of them was pregnant. A line of children walked single file between the rows of women.

  “The Mothers,” I said. Edison had talked about this . . . children being raised by the group, not the individual. Now I remembered the huge compound we’d passed the day before, filled with shouting, playing children. And I remembered the tall wall enclosing the whole place. I’d barely noticed it at the time because all the apartment buildings in Pleiades were surrounded by walls. But those were to isolate the populations, keep them separate so outbreaks wouldn’t spread.

  So in a city with no disease, what were the walls protecting?

  “Yeah. They’re always out parading around. Noses up, looking down at us.” Marisol said it with a shrug, but her voice was bitter. “I try my best to avoid them and their little brats.”

  But her eyes followed them as our magfly glided away.

  Soon we entered a totally different section of the Dome. Old magflys and machinery littered the ground alongside the track. There was a long windowless building, labeled the Meat Brewery, where, according to the Ellas, the chiken and beeph was grown in huge vats.

  Then, finally, we arrived at the Salvage Hall. We got out and descended down a steep moving staircase into a huge underground room. It was like being in a vast reclamation pit. Only louder.

  Flys buzzed in massive swarms, descending on stacks of old appliances and corroded metal scraps, assessing their worth. Giant machines sorted the scrap into more stacks and more piles while simultaneously Kisaengs picked over them—snagging tendrils of bright, plastic-coated wire or bits of pretty glass, checking them against the colors of their dresses. As we descended into the room, I looked for Olivia again, hoping she’d recovered from the magfly accident. I wished I’d gotten more than a glimpse at her file yesterday in the Lab.

  Marisol swept into the room like she owned it. As we walked, Kisaengs stepped out of the way for her. Curadores bowed and smiled. Actually, they did the same for me too. It was a strange feeling—the world making way for me—but one I could get used to.

  “Exquisite!” Marisol gushed over a trinket another girl had found.

  “Thank you.” The girl looked unsure whether to be flattered or cautious.

  “Just look at how it catches the light, will you, Aaliyah?” Marisol said.

  Aaliyah knew her part well. She raised a painted eyebrow, which swirled up to join the rest of the spirals on her head, perfect in its enigmatic amusement. “Marisol! It would look spectacular against your hair.”

  No one spoke for a moment, and there was an awkward silence before the girl realized she’d missed her cue. The Kisaeng scrambled to catch up with the scene unfolding around her. “Oh! I’d be honored to give it to you.”

  Marisol took the item, scrutinized it for a moment and then said, “On second thought, maybe it’s not quite as special as I thought.” And Marisol threw it back on the pile. Her aim was perfect, so the treasure spun around for a moment before falling down into a crack—lost among the salvage again.

  I hung back, watching Marisol and the sisters repeat the performance again and again. Sometimes Marisol took the gift. Sometimes she handed it over to June or the Ellas or one the others in her circle. I didn’t know what her system was, but it wasn’t random. It was clear to me that everything Marisol did was deliberate.

  I cringed as Marisol zeroed in on Riya. The Kisaeng had been absorbed in the salvage piles, collecting a basket full of bright toys—tiny cars, dolls’ legs, plastic bracelets. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I watched the sisters cluster around Riya like circling vultures. Marisol began admiring Riya’s Finds, carefully picking up and examining every object, before plucking the whole basket from her grip.

  In a final insult, Marisol reached up and snagged a beautiful ornament from Riya’s hair—an intricate creation made of plastic gears and brass screws. Riya started to take it back, half reaching out a hand before dropping it again. With a smug smile, Marisol put the decoration in her own hair, punishment for Riya’s boldness the day before.

  Riya’s face was thunderous and I was afraid, after our lesson yesterday, that she might punch Marisol. But instead, Riya calmly unfastened the necklace of bright plastic knitting needles from around her own throat. Then her bracelet. She surprised both Marisol and myself by dropping them in the basket as well—castoffs for Marisol.

  And I was reminded of what Oksun had said. That the others see something unique in Riya. You’d think they’d want to understand it, but no. They either want to own it or crush it. Clearly Marisol wanted to do both. I smiled at Riya’s perfect revenge—no one can steal something if you’re willing to simply give it away.

  Then a loaded magfly pulled into the Hall, blocking my view. Flys descended on the fresh scrap, till it was completely covered with twitching black bodies.

  “The trick is to get to it before they do.”

  I practically jumped at the sudden voice in my ear. June hovered next to me up on her silver seat.

  “Sorry, sometimes I forget to make noise. Let me try again.” And straight-faced she said, “Clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp. Ahem!”

  “Much better,” I said, matching her faux seriousness, and I was surprised to find I was glad to see her. But it was impossible to imagine her doing anything as gauche as clomping. June commanded a certain grace, her torso balanced on her board, her skirts flowing as she moved. “What happens to all these Finds?”

  “Reprocessing.”

  And I remembered Edison talking about the reprocessors making new flys when the old ones broke.

  June elaborated. “Most stuff gets shredded or melted down into raw materials and reformed into thi
ngs we need. There’s a whole complex of machinery farther underground that deals with that.”

  “Machines underground?”

  “Sure. Or perhaps you think this place runs off pure love?” June made ridiculous kissing noises.

  It was amazing to think there was a whole level to the Dome I wasn’t even seeing. As it was, the piles of scrap and machines and noise went on and on. Clusters of flys were everywhere. They carried items off the magflys, over the Kisaengs’ heads, and to the conveyor belts along the walls. Or to one of the many piles. And sometimes they seemed to be doing the whole maneuver in reverse—loading things back onto the magflys.

  The smash of breaking glass cut across the din. One of the clusters of flys had literally dropped out of the air along with a pane of solar glass they’d been carrying. There was shrill scream and I saw the three Ellas standing, terrified but unharmed, in a puddle of blue shards.

  I had flashbacks of the magfly accident the day before, wondering if we were all about to get “fixed” by the flys. But there was another clatter as more flys dropped—sending spools of copper wire rolling in every direction. Then another crash. And another.

  Kisaengs were screaming and running for cover as flys went dead, midair and midjob. June was on the floor now too, her board having inexplicably dropped to the ground like dead weight. She tried to maneuver herself out of the way, heavy skirts dragging behind her. But between falling debris and trampling feet there was nowhere to go.

  I reached down to help just as her board mysteriously came back to life. June pulled herself onto it and shot out of the room. I was right behind her when I caught a flash of white out of the corner of my eye.

  One of the Mothers was crouched behind a pile of old computers, her hand reaching for a fallen circuit board. The Curadores often had unusual looks, but this Mother was a study in contrasts. Her freckle-dusted brown skin was set off by white-blond hair that was twisted into a bun. Her face was long and elegant, but her nose had a slight bump to the bridge. And in the middle of it was a pair of immense, wide-set eyes. The whole combination should’ve looked odd, but instead, it was breathtaking.

  While the other Kisaengs ran back up the stairs to safety, I dodged behind a pile of styrofoam insulation, watching her. What was even more unusual than the Mother’s appearance was that she was perfectly calm—we were the only two people not running away from the chaos. She moved low and stealthy, despite her very pregnant belly, and I moved with her, slipping from scrap heap to scrap heap. Watching.

  She picked up a shiny data storage drive and fiddled with her tunic—tucking the drive into her dress in such a way that it completely disappeared behind the bulge of her stomach. Then just as a conveyor belt on the other side of the room went haywire, speeding up, flinging metal scraps in every direction, she darted out of her hiding place and grabbed a spool of copper.

  I darted too, trying to get closer, and my foot sideswiped a pile of aluminum cans. They went clanging in her direction and the woman’s head snapped up. I was surprised to see that she was just a few years older than me, and we stared at each other across the deserted Salvage Hall, still going mad around us. What was the protocol was for this situation?

  I settled on “Hello?”

  She looked startled by my voice. Maybe she was stunned that I would dare to talk to her. Maybe there were rules against that sort of thing. She glared at me, freckles popping dark against her tawny skin. Vivid against her white-blond hair.

  The Mother did not scurry away. She stood tall . . . almost defiant. Slipping the spool into the pocket of her white dress. Then I noticed a small device, half hidden in her other hand. She pressed a blinking button and a cluster of nearby flys jettisoned their haul. A collection of plastic bottles rained down on me. I ducked, shielding my head.

  When I looked up again, she was gone.

  CHAPTER 24

  “I DIDN’T SEE anything strange in Jenner’s files, nothing about Red Death or the Citizens, but I’ll try again tonight. Did you find anything on your mission?” Edison’s voice was light—like this was some kind of game—and it irritated me.

  We were working on the radio again, without much success. Since my visit with Nik, I wasn’t sure how to act around Edison. There’d always been question marks surrounding Edison, but before they’d been an intriguing mystery waiting to be solved. Now I realized I’d let my attraction to him blot out my uneasiness. I’d justified his secrets with my own.

  But the omission of Grimm—that he and Nik had been watching me for most of my life— felt like a much bigger transgression. Even more than his collection of Kisaengs. Because in asking me to tell him about my sisters, about my family, Edison convinced me to hand over pieces of myself that he’d already taken.

  No. I’d told myself that I didn’t need to trust Edison, that we were using each other for our own agendas—but that had been a fantasy of my own making. I’d trusted him, because I’d believed his original lie. We were the same.

  We might both be exceptions, but Edison had been crafted and created, while I was merely a Corruption. Edison’s differences made him a prince among his people. Mine made me an exile. It would be like saying an eagle and a moth were the same because they both had wings.

  Now I glanced at Edison. He was splicing a damaged wire as he waited for me to answer to his question. If I stopped telling him things, he’d know something was wrong. And just because I couldn’t trust someone didn’t mean I couldn’t still get information from them. Wasn’t that the whole point of coming to the Dome? Of being a Kisaeng?

  So, for the moment, I stopped thinking of the bigness and the noise, stopped thinking of the huge question I was after, and started shuffling through the pieces of information I already had. The Mother in the Salvage Hall. Olivia still missing. The scar on my belly. And this radio, tucked away in a locked room in the Lab. Suddenly I could see the gaps—all the pieces I was still missing—and I start digging for them.

  “How come no one else is here, helping with this?” I kept my eyes fixed on the radio’s main board, inspecting each chip and card—carefully prodding a pin here or double-checking a connector there. “Is the radio a secret?”

  “No. People know about it . . . they just don’t care.”

  That surprised me, but then I guessed why. “No one believes I really heard a voice, do they?”

  “I believe you.” Edison put down his soldering iron and met my eyes. But they didn’t have their absolute pull on me anymore. He was still handsome and dazzling. But after meeting Nik, there was something a little too perfect about Edison—all smooth edges and confidence, until the moment when he was soulful confessions and apologies. And suddenly I wondered, what did Edison look like when there was no one else around? When he had no Kisaengs or Curadores to perform for? And I couldn’t imagine it.

  “And it’s not that they don’t believe you,” he continued. “It’s that the whole thing seems unbelievable to them. Coded messages bouncing across satellites from worlds away? No. They want to stick with what they know.”

  “Even if what they know is falling apart?” It was like the Indignos—they were too busy making a garden out of a desert to imagine something as revolutionary as Earth.

  Then I thought about something Edison had said. “Why is the message coded anyway? I mean, you said you’ve been picking up garbled transmissions on this channel since forever . . . so if Earth was trying to contact Gabriel all these years, why code the message?”

  Edison nodded, reconnecting the wiring inside the speakers. “I’ve been thinking about that too. And all I can come up with is that whoever you spoke to on the radio, whoever’s been broadcasting that message, knows something we don’t about the plague . . . about what happened here five hundred years ago. And they want to make sure their message only gets to the right people.”

  “And who are the right people?”

  Edison looked sidewa
ys at me, a hint of a smile on his face. “Now you’re asking the right question.”

  He reached over me, attaching the speaker cable to the main board. Then he plugged in the radio and switched it on. One of us must have done something useful, because this time the power light glowed orange, though nothing came through the speakers. He messed with the buttons, trying to get sound.

  That was the trick wasn’t it? Asking the right question. But it wasn’t as simple as that. You also had to know what answer you were looking for. And answers didn’t have to be true to be telling.

  Reaching into my pocket and pulling out an orange I’d saved from lunch, I thought about Marisol’s lesson the first night in the Dome. And I thought about Suji’s rule and the importance of details. Then I pushed my fingernail into the peel. A scent of giddy brightness welled up out of it, the smell perfuming the air with memories of Edison’s and my picnic.

  It worked. Edison’s body changed as the scent of the peeled orange hit his nose. He was still busily tweaking buttons and knobs, but his shoulders dropped. And his hands relaxed. His eyes met mine as I placed a slice into my mouth. And I knew he was thinking about that night.

  “The girls took me down to the Salvage Hall today.”

  “Oh? Nikola and I used to escape down there when we were kids.” Then suddenly, Edison’s face split into a grin and he actually started laughing to himself. “One day, when we were about thirteen or fourteen, one of Jenner’s assistants—a horrible, tedious man—was escorting us to the Lab for testing and stopped to flirt with his favorite Kisaeng. The moment he turned his back, we ran off. I’m sure the Kisaeng saw us, but she must have liked us more than him because she didn’t say anything.”