Laurel walked back to camp, as quietly as she could manage with just her small ray illuminating the ground in front of her. Ella was making supper from the very last bits of some furry four-legged animal they shot yesterday, one Riley called a rabbit. It looked too sweet and soft for her to want to see it killed and skinned and then roasted on the fire, but she was always hungry, they all were, and short of eating bugs, there was nothing else for them to eat safely. She didn't remember thinking that way about the squirrel for some reason.
The rabbit's smell reached her, making her stomach growl and she walked over to where Ams and Riley were sitting by the fire, talking. They did that a lot lately. She didn't know what to make of it, all their talking, but Ams seemed almost happy, happier than she was before the talking started when she was still angry at the boy. And Riley, too, seemed different, lighter somehow, not quite so adult-like.
She sat down next to Ams. "I think that city is dead, guys. It just doesn't make any kind of sense for it to be so quiet in there, and so dark. There would have been something. A flier light, a stream of smoke, something making some kind of noise. I waited for almost an hour, and there was nothing. I don't think we'll find anything there." Riley was watching her intently now. He was the only one here who would know what it meant for this city to be like that, and she wished he'd just tell them, so she and Ams didn't feel so scared about what they'd find there. But Ams didn't look scared, just a little sad.
"Where do you think everyone who lived there went? What happened to them? Why would anyone pack up and leave the place they're from, all at the same time like that? It doesn't make sense, Laurel, it just doesn't. Maybe they are all asleep and nobody wants to waste resources on keeping the lights on at night. Or maybe they turn the lights off to keep the bugs away. I don't know, but there is no way this whole city is just sitting there empty." She was looking at her in her old Ams way.
"There is. There is a way this city could be dead. One way, but I didn't think they still did that sort of thing," Riley said very quietly. He sounded sad now, his adult-sad, the sort of sad where he was usually blaming himself for one thing or another. He stood up. "Let's eat. We can talk about the other things after dinner. I need some time to think, figure out how to explain it."
The rabbit was great, just not enough of it to not still be hungry for any of them. Laurel went to rinse their knives and bowls in a tiny stream, the only one they found here. She knew she needed to go back, but the way Riley spoke, she didn't want to know what that thing was that could make everyone leave the place they were from. She didn't care. If it was dangerous and they couldn't go to this place, they would just have to stick it out through the woods until they find another city. She was okay with living on squirrels and even rabbits for another week if that's what it took. The sadness that the thing that happened sounded full of from Riley's voice—she didn't think she was okay with knowing that, with making that a part of her memory.
"You’re hiding. I'm not sure from what yet, but you are." Ams collected the dishes from the bank, watching her. "Remember how you'd always make me do all those crazy things we weren't allowed to do, and you didn't seem to care if we got caught? I want that Laurel back. I miss her. I'm serious. You don't seem to be happy you're here and not at the compound somehow. It's like you changed your mind about this whole running away thing halfway through, but didn't bother to tell anybody."
That hurt, that last bit. But Ams was right. She didn’t feel so carefree and brave lately. She didn't like this Laurel any more than Ams did, but that's just how it was. Maybe she'd be as brave as Ams seemed to have gotten if she always had someone like Riley at her side to talk her out of her fears, to shoot her snakes for her, to make sure she was all right. Maybe that's what it was. She didn't have a Riley and she barely had Ams anymore, and Ella didn't really talk to anybody much, even though she always had that pad of hers around her neck, so she could if she wanted to.
Ams was still standing there waiting for her to either get up or say something. So she got up and walked silently back to the camp, back to where Riley was going to put something sad and ugly into her memory, and she would have to let him.
Riley was pacing by the fire, even strides, hands behind his back like he used to have them all the time at the compound. He pointed to a log he pushed by the fire for them all to fit comfortably on. Ella was already sitting there, looking through the flames, hands worrying a loose thread in her shirt. Laurel walked over and sat next to her. She didn't feel like sitting next to Ams after what she said to her at the stream.
"Ella knows most of this or at least knows what I know. We don't know how much of it is true, we just know that that's what we were told in Waller, and then I heard similar stories in other cities while looking for El. I can't tell you how any of it started or why, and I don't know if it matters, but basically, the only way a whole city can disappear like that, die like that, is if the Alliance wanted it to...." He took a deep breath and started pacing again in front of the log.
"When we were still fighting and trying to break into their metros, these huge networks of cities with the tunnels in between and impenetrable walls for miles and miles on the outsides, that's where your kind end up living after the compounds…. Anyway, we were still fighting then, some of us, rebelling against them casting us out like that and essentially cutting our people off from everything to where we had to start things from the beginning, and we had no resources to do any of it. Even basic stuff like food, and schools, medicines even, and that was the hardest thing of all. It took a very long time to make enough of the meds just to keep our kids from dying in horrible ways from things that nobody had died from in centuries. I think that's why Zoriners didn’t give up for so long…. They were angry that their kids were dying like that.
“Anyway, at some point the Alliance decided that the best way to stop all the fighting was to make us too afraid to do it anymore, and they knew that anyone who wanted to fight wouldn't be afraid to get caught or to die themselves, so they figured out that if they took enough of us from our cities, our communities, for every attempt at a break-in, eventually we'd stop." He stopped with the pacing then and just stood there in front of them, looking somewhere past their heads, somewhere they weren't.
"That's what happened in Waller. That's why they took Ella and my parents. My mom and dad, the reason they had those journals was that they were in the fighting once. And they took a lot of other people too, and that's just from Waller. Their scientists had it all worked out to a number of people, a percentage in each community that needed to disappear for the rest of the people in it to give up. And it worked. It always worked. This city, being dead–it means that it didn't work there–so they just killed everybody."
Nobody said anything, because there didn't seem to be any of the right things to say to this, and nobody wanted to say any of the wrong things. They just sat there, watching the fire die. Ams made Riley sit next to her and hugged him to her, but he didn't seem to want to be hugged now. He just looked at the fire, blankly, as if it was going to tell him what they were all supposed to do.
He stared at it for an awfully long time, but it didn't seem to be telling him anything much. It didn't seem to be telling any of them much.
Laurel took a deep breath and said what needed to be said: "It won't do us any good to go into this city if nobody's been there for a while, and it looks like whatever happened wasn't yesterday or a week ago. There should at least still be animals or something there, dogs, but there is nobody. We won't find any food there or anything else we might need. We'll just find the bodies, and I can't do that. I wouldn't know how to do that."
Riley looked at her as if she had two heads. "We have to go! We have to know what happened there. Maybe we'll find somebody who made it. We’re traveling blind, so if nothing else, maybe we'll learn something that can keep us safe. If you’re afraid of the dead bodies, we'll cover your eyes, but you should probably get used to the idea of seeing a few. I know it's hard to
get past, but the rest of the world isn’t a compound, where the worst thing that can happen to you is a badly cooked breakfast or a strange caterpillar. We’re going, all of us, first thing in the morning. I suggest we all get some sleep," he said, before walking away angrily to a patch of grass far enough away from the fire to where his blanket was. And that was that.
She looked over at Ams for comfort, if not to take her side, but Ams got up and ran to where Riley was. Laurel wanted to cry, but Ella was still sitting unmoving on the log, and she didn't want her to see it and take it to Riley; didn't want him to know that his words hurt her. She walked back to the stream and sat by this trickle of water crying for all the wrongness that she felt, for this city with no life in it, and Riley's parents, and Ella, but mostly, for Ams no longer being Ams.
And when the crying was over, she stayed there still, long enough for someone to have come looking for her, and then longer than that, but nobody came, and when she knew for sure that nobody would come, she went to the little patch of grass with her blanket on it and curled up, making herself as small as she could manage, and went to sleep, hoping that she could coax the old Laurel out of this new one, Laurel who wouldn't be so afraid of all the things she didn't even know existed for her to be afraid of. Laurel who could maybe get her Ams back.
17
Smoke
Drake, April 25, 2236, The Woods
Drake expected them to just shoot him, maybe in front of everybody but the girls, not keep him here for days, asking questions. He didn't have anything left to tell them. They came up to the tower, the boy and the mute did and held some rag over his face, and he remembered that it smelled funny, sweet, but not sage sweet. He didn't know that smell, and then he woke up and his head hurt and kept hurting, and he looked for his gate key and his gun, but couldn't find them. That's all he remembered. He wrote it down for them on the pad so many times, not changing a word. He didn't know anything about the two girls. He had no idea who they were, them looking so alike. No, he never spoke to anybody. Why would they even ask that of a mute? So he sat there in the same cell he watched Hassinger torture Riley in and waited for them to finally shoot him.
"Drake, you bloody idiot. Do you have any idea who these girls are? Why we take so much care to protect them, keep them safe until they mature? Each one of them is worth more than some countries, you ignorant, dumb mute. Their lives are worth a thousand times more than all of ours combined, and that includes mine. So I can't very well tell the Alliance that we let them disappear. That we lost the replenishers...." She paced in front of him again. "We have to get them back, Drake, before the Selection. And I can't go looking for them or tell anybody. You have to find them. You have to find them and bring them back here. You can go and live your life wherever you want to after that. I won't hold you anymore. You have my word. I'm sending Keller with you. You'll leave in the morning. Go and pack all the supplies you'll need."
She was speaking to him as if he were a child, small words, so he didn't get lost in them. It amused him that she thought of him as a dumb mute, that they all did.
"Of course, if you are not back with the girls before the Selection, I will have Keller cut you up into tiny pieces while you are still breathing. He likes doing that sort of thing... And don't forget that until I release you, I can track you, in case you decide to do something stupid, like run. I'll send every unit to hunt you down if I have to with one call." She smiled at him, in that way she smiled at Riley that night. He believed her, about Keller and about that last thing. It was lucky that they hadn't tagged Ella yet. They would have that morning, of course, that's why they had to run when they did. Lucky, too, that he stole one of the comms from the guardhouse when they dragged him in there to berate him for forgetting to charge his screens, and for what they called his stinking breath.
"I can smell you coming from across the whole bloody lawn, that stench on you. Stop eating that shit, mute. It makes me wanna puke," the ugly mustached one screamed into his face, spitting on him. He could use some sage or peppermint or a toothbrush, his teeth the yellow of the underside of termite-eaten bark; sticky sour smell that he knew would stay on him for a long time afterward. It always did.
He needed the comm to know where it would be safe for them to cut through to the next city, without running into soldiers. Drake hoped the mustache one wasn't the one Hassinger called Keller, but he had a feeling he was. The name seemed to fit him. He'd know for sure soon enough.
He packed in a hurry, enough broth powder and bars, and tea to last a month or so. He'd find other things to eat in the woods if that ran out. He wondered if Keller had ever been in the woods, if he ever had to kill an animal to eat, or if he came from one of those places where they didn't do that, where the only food you ever saw was cut up into chunks on your plate. It would give Drake an advantage when the time came. He'd know that soon enough, too.
By midnight, he was all packed up and ready to go. Keller would collect him in five hours. Drake slept then, knowing he would never see the inside of this cabin again, or the Riley tree, or the sad, ugly walls of the compound with its dark, empty rooms and its pretty inhabitants who were too brainwashed to know that they were prisoners there as much as the slaves were. All but the two of them now, he smiled. He wished he could talk to them somehow. He missed these kids … and Ella. He missed her so much it hurt. Maybe this time, if he ever did find her again, he would finally tell her that.
He drifted to sleep with Ella's adult face blurring into Ella's kid face, Ella's voice soothing the kitten, silky soft, Ella's angry voice yelling at Brent and his buddies to lay off him, to leave him alone, and when they didn't, her soft silky voice walking him home, telling him that it would be all right, that they’d get tired of it, the picking on him, and find someone else, and he would be safe from them then. Telling him, too, that maybe he should hit one of them, Brent maybe, right in his ugly nose, just once, hard enough to make him bleed from it, hard enough to break it, and then they would stop picking on him.
He was always ashamed in front of her after that, because he just couldn't do that one thing he needed to do, so she didn't have to feel bad for him anymore, the breaking of Brent's face. He thought about doing it every day, but every time they stopped him after school and called him all those names, shoved him until he dropped his bag and shook all his stuff onto the ground, breaking everything in it that was breakable, he just shook his head and let them. He could still hear the sound of his screens crunching, shattering, grinding into the coal dust and gravel….
He woke up with a start to the sound emanating from his screen. So he was indeed Keller. He would have no problem breaking his face; for Riley, for spitting on him and kicking his ribs in, and for every time he looked at him like he was an ant he could squish if only he wasn't Hassinger's ant. He'd know soon enough just what kind of a dumb, dickless mute he was dealing with.
"Come on, mute. Hurry your lazy ass up. Let's go." Keller pointed his stun gun at his head, looking him up and down. His free hand went to Drake’s bag and searched through it. He patted him down, digging into his pockets, checking the insides of his boots, and then he put his hand right on his crotch and laughed. "So you do have a dick after all. We'll see if you still have it in a week or two."
They set out in the same direction he sent the group in. Keller said they were heading for Reston, but Drake didn't know anything about that place. There wasn't supposed to be a city in between them and where the kids were going, but they were definitely following in their tracks. Keller calculated that they'd reach them in about eight days if they didn't need to stop for more than a few hours of sleep each night and a few quick meals during the day. Keller seemed in a hurry as well. That should put them in this city that wasn't on a map a day or two before Ella and the kids.
By the second night, he knew he was right about Keller never having been in the woods before. The man jumped at every sound of a snapping branch and cursed every mosquito that had the misfortune of drinking his bl
ood. Drake wondered if anything that bit him wouldn't just die on its own, from all the poison in him. Another few days of this trek should have him unraveled enough to trust him to make all their meals and tea.
Keller couldn't seem to get enough sleep out in the open, probably for all the noises scaring him, the owls hooting something nightmarish into his ugly head, the trees creaking in the way concrete walls never did. He walked slower now, head mostly down, red eyes trained on the ground in front of him. At least he shut up, almost completely. The only time he opened his mouth was to give Hassinger an update every evening, and yell at Drake to make the fire faster. Maybe he wouldn't need to kill him. He could just leave him in the bloody woods and he'd be deader than dead in less than a week.
On the seventh day, they saw smoke. It streamed grayly into the inky sky some twenty meters in front of them. Keller dropped to the ground, stun gun at the ready, buzzing on lethal. The idiot couldn't tell that the fire had been dead for a while from the way it smoked. This didn't bode well for them. They must have covered less ground than he thought and he wasn't sure Keller could speed it up any, tired as he always seemed. He'd have to carry his bag for him at least if he wanted him to move any faster.
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