by Ramona Finn
Kev followed my lead, but his response to taking off his helmet appeared much less dramatic. It made me sad for him, to know he didn’t share my connection to the surface. Despite the danger we faced, I longed for the familiarity of the friendship I’d left behind, not the invisible wall that seemed to be materializing between us. I tried to push away the disappointment and focus on the task at hand.
“They’re onto us,” he said nervously. “I’m telling you, Ty, we have to hide. It’s our only chance.”
“No, it’s not,” I said firmly. “We can do this, Kev. We have to do it.” Somewhere in the forest, a critter scurried up a tree. The sound nearly sent Kev out of his own skin. I grabbed him by the shoulders to refocus him. “Focus, Kev. Stay with me, okay? It’s just us, talking. We’ve talked before, right?”
He nodded, but his eyes scanned the woods behind me. I leaned over, blocking his view repeatedly until his eyes settled on me. “Hi,” I said, trying to soften my voice. “Nice to have you back.”
“Yeah.” His gaze settled, and I could see that his sense of reason had returned. “Sorry.”
“What we’re about to do is gonna take some focus. I need you to focus.”
He nodded, and I let my body relax. “Okay. You’re right, we can’t keep wandering around like this. Do you remember which air vents lead to the hydroponics?”
“Yeah, that’s like secondary training level. But surface vents are for expelling air. Most of the growing areas are self-filtering because of the plant life.”
“Exactly. Hydro is one of the only places that vents straight to the surface. Which means there’s got to be a grate here somewhere.”
I watched Kev’s face light up as the pieces fell into place for him. “That’s our way in!”
I nodded. “Yes!”
“Only...”
“Only, air that vents out does so because it’s toxic. I already thought of that. There’s one vent in the farming wing that’s always on the fritz. It’s on the re-code list almost daily. Vent 42C.”
Kev nodded. “Yeah, that vent is always a pain, and it’s set back in the composting section. Rancid.” He wrinkled his nose.
“So, the good news is that the vent is probably not functional, meaning that we can get in without choking to death. The bad news is, once we get down there, we will be in a composting room with shit for ventilation.” I couldn’t help but laugh at my own joke, hoping it would break the tension.
It worked. Kev fought against the upturning corners of his mouth, pushing me playfully. “If you don’t stop, I may just die of bad jokes before we even have a chance to die from air toxicity.”
“Shut up. That one was good, and you know it,” I teased back. For a moment, it was just Kev and me being Kev and me like the old days. It seemed eerily appropriate that it was him sharing this adventure with me.
Now it was just a matter of finding the grates.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Everything felt better after we ditched the suits. Kev had wanted to try to haul them along, in case we needed them in the compost room, but we decided it was too risky. Hauling extra weight, especially oddly-shaped weight which we had no feasible way to carry through the air vents, would only slow us down. And as far as I was concerned, our number-one enemy was time.
We navigated based on Kev’s memories of the farming wing’s blueprints. Though they relied a lot on coding for many of the grow systems, the farming wing liked to resolve structural repairs on their own as much as possible. Blueprints and building were a huge part of their primary education. I had no doubt that Kev knew the farming wing from the inside-out.
Knowing it from the outside-in was where I came in. I’d reached the highest elevation of our entire group, maybe of anyone from the Geos other than the Farrow family. When it came to landscape and directional orientation, I was our greatest asset.
Between the two of us, we were able to find the correct gate before dawn. I pried the steel grate up pretty easily, though I needed Kev’s help to pull it all the way away from its frame. Together, we stared down into the void. As I’d suspected, the system was on the fritz, and nothing seemed to be moving through the ducts. But there was a new problem, I realized, as I stared into the darkness… there was at least a twenty-foot drop.
Jumping straight in was tempting. Getting it over with quickly might make it seem less painful. But, what if the drop was longer than we saw? We were both pretty sure the ducting system was secured well enough to take each of our weights at a crawl if we were cognizant about it and kept an appropriate distance from one another. At anything other than a slow crawl, though? I was pretty sure that would be a strain on the framework, even if it didn’t completely demolish the system.
I scanned the area, hoping to find some sort of vine, or a fibrous bark that I could use to make a rope.
Nothing.
“We’re gonna have to climb down, aren’t we?” Kev’s voice had cracked, betraying him.
I nodded. “I don’t see another way.” I pulled one arm across my chest, stretching it out. My legs were killing me, so I was going to have to trust my arms to take the brunt of my weight.
“Um, well then,” Kev stuttered, “I should go first.”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Kev, but I don’t exactly need protecting.”
“No, that’s not it.” Kev blushed so fiercely that I could make out the crimson shade even in the low light. “It’s in case I fall. I don’t want to take you out on the way down. I mean, c’mon. I’m exhausted. And you? Whatever you’ve been doing up here has made you crazy-strong, Ty.”
Now it was my turn to blush. I looked away.
“I don’t just mean physically, either,” he said. “I mean mentally, emotionally. You’ve been amazing. I just wanted you to know, you know, just in case...”
He didn’t have to finish his sentence. I knew where it ended.
“Though, you could totally whoop me in a fight. Don’t think I don’t realize that, too.”
I was relieved he’d tried to ease the tension my silence had caused, but I didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, if I was placing bets,” he continued, “I’d say that I’d be the first of us to wipe out on the way down, and if you go first, I’d take you out on my way down.”
I hated how he was starting to make sense. Not that he’d be that much better off if I were the one to fall, but from the outside looking in, Kev’s plan had the best chance of some version of success.
I sighed. Kev nodded, accepting his fate, whatever that might look like, and then he braced his arms and legs on each wall, straining as he made his descent.
I followed his lead, crouching down and swinging my legs down into the vent. Something tugged at the back of my mind and I shifted, so that my hands and feet were positioned on different ducting panels from Kev’s. Even if he hadn’t been nervous, the physical exertion was likely to produce sweat, and I didn’t want to risk hitting a wet patch and plummeting through the ductwork to injure both of us.
By some miracle, we made it to the bottom without dying. It took almost everything we had left to give in the moment, and we paused at the bottom, collapsing against the ductwork for support. The cool metal against my face was the closest I had ever come to pure joy.
One of the other ways we were fortunate, upon further inspection, was that the ductwork for the ventilation system was quite spacious. I was able to move about with minimal discomfort on my hands and knees. On the other hand, Kev, who was broader in the shoulders, had to duck down further, half-dragging his legs as he led me through the twists and turns that were taking us deeper down into the Geos.
The sound of Kev’s elbow forcing open the interior grate in front of us was a welcome sound. Between the darkness as we’d slithered through yards of the dark and dusty tunnels, and the way my thoughts had begun to weave in and out of each other, I was glad for a change of scenery. Maybe being able to stand fully upright would help unmuddle my brain.
But the
second I slid out of the ductwork, I regretted our plan. The air was thick and foul, causing my body to battle between reacting by choking or gagging. Quickly, I wrapped Skylar Two’s headscarf around my nose and mouth multiple times, holding the rosewater-infused cloth up against my nostrils to keep out the putrid invasion of chemical stench.
Kev took me by the hand, looking back over his shoulder to confirm that I was alright. I took one end of my scarf, holding it out as an offering, but he shook his head and led me through the noxious fog.
As he pulled me around industrial equipment in the low light, I saw him with new eyes. As much of a mess as he had been when we’d been on the surface, here in the place he had known his whole life, he thrived, walking with renewed confidence in himself.
I could see why he’d want to stay in a place that gave him that. I wasn’t sure whether it was our somewhat unconventional descent into the Geos, the exposure to the Composting Room, or nerves, but the world began to sway around me as we made our way out of the farming wing and into the Union Hall where people were making their way to their shifts.
We walked through the crowd undetected until we’d made it all the way to the atrium. Did no one realize who we were? Even after we’d stood on stage in front of them all? I searched the crowd for familiar faces and came up empty. Frustrated, I made my way to the nearest terminal and pulled up an old program Viv and I had worked on as kids so we could contact one another even when she was on restriction. I pulled Ben’s comm out of my pocket and placed it in my ear before getting to work. I was pretty sure that, if I altered the parameters of the program, I could use the comm to tap into the Union Hall’s speaker system.
I pressed the button on the side of the comm and the speakers squeaked, making Kev jump. I was in.
Suddenly, my mouth ran dry and I had no idea what to say. All the words that I’d planned so perfectly as we’d made our way back down into the Geos evaporated from my mind.
“Uh, Tylia, we’ve got company,” Kev warned me. I followed his gaze to the corners of the room, where the EFs were closing in.
“Now would be good, Ty,” he said nervously as EFs moved through the crowd. As they moved in, I began to worry that my confidence that they couldn’t kill us if we made it back had been an unreliable gamble.
“Hello,” I said, relieved when my voice emanated from the sound system. In the atrium, all activity paused as confused workers searched for the source of the sound.
“IT’S TYLIA!”
I sighed with relief as Viv’s voice cut through the silence. She jumped up on a table, drawing the crowd’s attention. The EFs froze, waiting to see how the crowd would respond. From her perch, Viv pointed in our direction. “The first survivors!”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The atrium broke out into wild applause. Over the comm, I heard the same voice who had directed the group to kill Acceptance survivors call out, “Fall back!” I scanned the crowd, relieved to see the EFs disappearing into the shadows. I’d called their bluff. They couldn’t touch us!
I stepped forward as the crowd roared their approval, holding my hands up to silence them. This was my chance. I took a deep breath, opened my mouth, and—
“What a wonderful day this is!”
I froze. The voice booming over the loudspeaker wasn’t mine. A hush fell over the crowd as the confusion set in. Everyone looked to their neighbors, and then to Kev and me.
I knew that voice. We all did. As R.L. Farrow made his way to the front of the crowd, everyone seemed to look on him with such awe that for a moment I almost forgot what it was I had wanted to say to the audience. It wasn’t until Farrow made his way past Viv and put his arm around my shoulder that I snapped out of it. I tapped the button on my comm, trying to reestablish the link, but it was no use. Someone had isolated my hack and shut off my link to the system.
“After years without a survivor, we now have not one, but TWO!” Farrow continued to a captive audience. “Surely, with this much success, our efforts in the search for the Cure will move forward with renewed vigor!” At this, he raised his arms up and a group of EFs took the stage, sweeping Kev and me to the sidelines as Farrow claimed the crowd for himself.
“If I were you, I’d count myself lucky, hacker.” One of the EF’s jabbed Kev in the ribs with his elbow. “Keep quiet and march!”
Kev shot me a helpless look. But Farrow had a countermeasure for everything, and he’d begun tossing extra meal vouchers to the masses, distracting them from the fact that the survivors were being swept off to who knows where.
At first, we were taken to Medical. This time, the EFs passed over the waiting room, nodding at the scheduler as they took us past everyone who was currently waiting in the queue.
They took us in the back, past the regular exam rooms and through a set of double doors that said RESTRICTED in big red letters.
“Where are we going?” I asked one of the EFs as he pulled me down the hall by my upper arm.
“Testing,” he grunted as he pushed me through a doorway on the left. I craned my neck around, trying to get a better look at the room. It was circular, with screens lining the walls that flashed data so quickly I couldn’t make sense of it. In the center was a command center full of buttons and lights I didn’t recognize.
“Relax, Tylia, we aren’t going to hurt you.” I spun back around to see Nari standing in front of us calmly. In her arms, she carried a portable terminal. She pressed a button on the screen and it lit up. Then she turned to the EF who had me by the arm.
“You can release them now, thanks,” Nari instructed. My EF looked at Kev’s, who nodded reluctantly. I rubbed my shoulder where the EF’s hand had been as if I could rub his touch from my skin if I tried hard enough.
“Have they had any scans since their return?” Nari asked Kev’s EF.
“No, they didn’t come through one of the approved avenues. Snuck down the vents instead.”
Approved avenues? More questions filled my mind.
“Who are all these people?” Kev asked, looking around at the strangers in white lab coats, each at their own terminal.
“They’re from the Labs.” Nari’s face remained neutral as she wrapped a band around Kev’s arm, preparing to take blood samples.
“I want to see my family,” I said. I hoped that having Nari here would increase the chances that someone—anyone—would listen to me.
“Your parents are fine,” she said, barely making eye contact as she went about her work, and my heart sank. Nari moved to band my arm, as well, but as she finished up, she squeezed my arm reassuringly. When I looked at her, confused, she winked as if to say, “You did it.” At least one of the faces in the room was somewhat friendly.
The others approached us to take hair and saliva samples, and to begin monitoring our hearts and lungs. Nari moved about them, seemingly at ease, but I’d developed a keen eye during my time with the Rejs, and I could see that her movements were tense. She didn’t trust these people from the Labs.
Each time one of them approached me, I tried again. “When can we see our families?”
“You’ve got more important things to worry about now,” one of them finally said. “Soon as we are finished up here, you two will be headed up to the Labs.”
“What is all of this?” Kev demanded as one of the white coats shined a light in his eyes, making him flinch.
“We’re finished here,” Nari barked over the beeping of monitors and humming of machines. “Take them to their rooms.”
And, just like that, the EFs took us each by one of our arms and led us through separate doors.
Our sleeping arrangements were not all that different from our rooms during training. It was perfect for an individual, with a living space/bed and a separate room for bathing, which I took advantage of immediately.
The room had a single bed with ample pillows and blankets—a simple luxury, but a welcome one. There was also a terminal for recreation, with all the most recent game releases uploaded, as well as
some I’d never seen before. I guessed they were exclusive to the Elites, and I couldn’t resist giving some of them a try as I tried to pass the evening hours.
Next to the bed was a miniature refrigeration device which was stocked with tons of greens and even some fresh meat. I imagined that Kev would be quite happy to find these accommodations in his room, though they left something to be desired for me after having experienced fresh food on the surface. I stuck to the greens, which were less disappointing.
It wasn’t long before the weight of living underground settled into my chest. Without the presence of natural light, I found myself struggling to keep track of time. I laid on the bed, but sleep wouldn’t find me. I was finally relieved, if not startled, to hear a soft knock on the door.
“It’s me,” Nari whispered from the other side. “And I’m not alone. Hurry.”
I punched the opening code into the keypad by the door and it whooshed open to reveal Nari along with two other cloaked figures. Nari pushed past me without so much as a greeting, ushering the other two in.
It was only once they’d removed the hoods of their burlap cloaks that I realized they weren’t cloaks at all—they were potato sacks someone had swiped from the dining hall. And it wasn’t Elites that Nari had brought with her.
It was my parents.
I was in their arms before I could blink. All of a sudden, the weight of everything I had been through came crashing down on me. It was like I was a child again, crawling into their bed after a bad dream to be comforted by their touch and the scent of their skin.
“Shhh.” My mother wrapped her arms around me as I collapsed into her embrace, kissing the top of my head. “Shhh, it’s alright,” she cooed.
“Oh, Ty.” My dad squeezed my shoulder as sobs wracked me. “You did good, honey. You did so good.”
Nari remained a silent witness to our reunion, guarding without intruding on us, from the farthest corner of my room. When all my tears had run dry, I wiped my face. My father brought me a cup of water, and this time I didn’t even care that it was recycled—I drank deeply, letting it wash over my soul, cleansing me from the inside-out.
