control

by Lydia Kang

  “Take it. I should have given it to you before.” I hand the tome to Ana, who flattens it against her chest, eyes closed. I hug her tightly, book and all, and she stifles a cry.

  Cy’s old climbing shoes lay dark and tangled in the corner. I pull off my soft boots and start to lace them on tightly. He won’t be happy once he realizes his climbing lesson helped deliver me to Aureus.

  I jump onto the bed, piling up the cushions on a chair, and lift myself through the middle window. My muscles are still sore from my climbing session. It takes a lot of maneuvering not to jostle the vials under my shirt. Ana holds Dyl’s purse with its precious cargo. Once I’m halfway out, I find a finger hold above my room where the thin metal slats run horizontally. Luckily, the agriplane shields Neia from difficult weather, so the wind is mild.

  It’s surprisingly easy to get out. The flat surface of my climbing shoes rests on the window’s bottom edge and I grip the slat with one hand, bending down to thrust the other hand through the window. Ana passes me Dyl’s purse, and I sling it over my head and shoulder. She puts her hand on my toe and squeezes it.

  “Come back to us. To Cy.” Her other hand protectively goes to her chest.

  I feel a parallel softness touch my own chest. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m leaving a real home. The realization twists at my throat. What am I doing? What have I already done? Ana blinks at my indecision, waiting. But I can’t go back. Dyl needs me.

  “Good-bye, Ana.” I blink away tears and swallow down the fear rising quickly in my throat. I can’t let myself go there, not now. Maybe not ever again.

  One thousand feet above the actual earth is not a good place to lose it.

  I have to climb about thirty feet before the agriplane and the underside of endless framework begins. I call Micah on my holo, but he doesn’t answer. I hope that doesn’t mean they’re backing out of the plan. I lick my salty hands, making them sticky enough to grip the dusty metal struts of the building. I don’t look down. I don’t look anywhere except up for my next handhold. There is no room for worry when your foothold is a few inches deep.

  Every few feet another metal strut encircles the building. I try to use my legs to push upward instead of relying on my chicken arms, like Cy had taught me. My thighs start to burn with lactic acid buildup because I’m not breathing enough, so I step up the rate and depth of my inhalations. By the time my muscles are screaming from the climb, I’m only one more strut from the agriplane.

  Focusing on the climbing alone, I feel strong and capable. I swing my leg up to a thin metal bar running under the agriplane. The nearest supporting building is about a quarter mile away. I’ll have to shimmy over, holding on to a pole above me and balancing on the one below. Once I’m out of range of the tower, I’ll call Micah and try to figure out how to get down.

  I take a mincing step on the metal bar, stretch to make it a whole twelve inches. My hands slide along the pole above me, and I ignore the blisters already forming on my fingers.

  Twelve inches, done. One foot. Several breaths. Only 1,319 more to go. And I have two hours to do it.

  Shit.

  After I’m halfway there, I’m horrified that I’ve only got one hour to go. My blisters have popped and started to bleed. Dark red smears my hands and wrists. Everything is slippery and sticky, and my arms ache so badly, they threaten to fall off in rebellion. I can’t even use Cy’s brew to fix my hands, because it takes two hands to unstopper the bottle.

  I watch one drop of blood lay a trail down my palm and sway, shimmering like a ruby in time to the pulse in my wrist. It falls off into the gentle wind. Down, down it goes, through that watery darkness and onto the building three hundred feet below me.

  One excruciating hour later, I am there, but barely. The building looms almost next to me, a deep, brown monstrosity with weird brassy metal pyramids studding the entire façade. There are no metal struts, or handholds, or tail-holds, or anything. There’s no going back, but right now it seems there’s no going down either.

  What time is it? Midnight looks the same as six in the morning or evening in Neia. I detach one sticky, painfully sore hand to turn my holo on.

  “Time,” I command. For the first time in a long time, the green screen comes on without any static. The display shows 11:57 p.m.

  So close.

  “Micah,” I call. “Are you there? I’m outside the top of a building, the one with the pyramids on it.” I wait, my biceps and triceps on fire, my hands throbbing with pain, my knees jittery with weakness.

  The green screen remains blank.

  “Oh, god,” I utter. It’s too late. After all that, my escape plan is half-assed and I’ve lost my chance. And I’m stuck up here, one last muscle cramp away from failing once and for all.

  What am I going to do? After a few minutes, I realize I don’t have an answer. I need to go back. But the idea of crossing back on the scaffolding with my torn-up hands is overwhelming.

  A scraping sound rattles the silence. It grows louder and louder, from the building only feet away. One of the decorative brass pyramids trembles as if it’s undergoing a small, self-contained earthquake. A puff of metal dust spews from the corner of the pyramid base, and the entire thing retreats into the building’s innards.

  A gaping square of darkness remains, like a metal tooth knocked out of the socket. A hand slides out of the black depths, covered in hard, green-brown bumps, followed by a face with the same lichen-over-bark surface. Tegg’s two glittering black eyes take me in. I am summarized in his glance: All this trouble for you? Not worth it.

  “It’s about time,” he says. Not meanly, but it’s so matter-of-fact. Spoken by someone who’s won a game before he even picked up the dice. “We don’t have all night. They’re waiting.”

  He offers me a rough hand, which hurts more than I want to admit. It squeezes mine painfully as I put a shaky foot inside the hole of the building. The second I’m on the solid floor, he takes his hand back and points to a transport. He’s as big as Hex, but without the kind spirit I’m suddenly homesick for.

  Glancing at my ragamuffin appearance, he almost says something—cruel, insulting, who knows—but doesn’t. Maybe I look too pathetic to insult, or maybe somewhere inside that shell is actually a conscience.

  “Let’s go.” He walks ahead of me, not fast, but too fast for me. My legs still feel like jelly. We end up downstairs in a dim corridor that ends abruptly with an iron door. Tegg shoves it open with a grunt.

  A fancy char, even nicer than the Porsche, is silently purring in wait. The silver color gleams in the gloomy night and a tiny metallic jaguar decorates the very front. We must be in the back of the building, because there’s no lobby here, only a few refuse chute openings.

  The back door to the char opens as I walk forward.

  “You’re late.” I recognize Caliga’s high-pitched voice.

  I duck my head and enter the backseat. Caliga moves over to make room, but not enough. The right side of my face and thigh tingle, and my tongue already feels heavy. My stomach roils in response. She really is like a bad pill, complete with awful side effects.

  Caliga delicately nibbles a cuticle. She’s dressed in a long, flowing blouse of deep purple and tobacco-hued cigarette pants, her white hair in a bun on her head. I’m sure I look like an orphan from a fifth-world country compared to her.

  “He said you’d come.” She studies her fingertips when she says this. Apparently her cuticle deserves more attention.

  “I don’t really care what Micah says about me,” I mumble with my half-numbed tongue.

  “You little idiot. I’m not talking about Micah.”

  I snap my head up. Who is she talking about?

  Tegg slips into the front seat and starts the char. In the rearview mirror, he checks on me, then glances at Caliga. “Lights out, dearest.”

  “Oh, right,” she says. One hand goes to cover my eyes and they go numb, doing that rubber eyeball thing again. I blink and see nothing. The char pitc
hes to the left and speeds up, making me sink deeply into the leather seats. Ugh, not good. My belly swirls faster than a gyroscope, and acid creeps up into the back of my mouth. I’m charsick.

  “You’re nauseating,” I mumble.

  “I think you take the cake, honey. Have you seen a mirror lately?”

  What an annoying rhetorical question, when clearly I can’t see a thing. I turn my face away from her, trying not to squirm. The Carus kids may look frightening, but they’re not monsters. This girl is a totally different beast.

  Caliga clucks her tongue. “I know what you’re thinking. You with your nose in the air.” The leather seat creaks as she leans closer. “I have news for you. You’re just like us.”

  “No. I’m nothing like—”

  “Me? Why, because you’re magically less illegal? Because you want to live your life your way? I’ve made a choice about how I’m going to survive. My choice.”

  “Shut up, both of you. And you . . .” Tegg pauses, and I know he means me by the disgust in his voice. “Take out your holo. Now. House rules.”

  I’m in no position to protest, so I wiggle it out of my earlobe and offer it to the darkness in front of me. Caliga takes it, making my hand prickly and heavy, and causing my stomach contents to swirl inside my belly again. I hear the window open, and the air whips my hair against my rubbery eyelids. I’m guessing my holo just became a gutter ornament.

  “Now, what’s this? You brought us a house-warming gift?” There’s a tug at Dyl’s purse, still firmly hanging across my torso, then the squirrelly feeling of a hand rummaging inside. I can tell from the slinking, metallic sound that she’s ignored the vials and has taken my necklace.

  “No!” I yell, and smack the air around me haphazardly, trying to get it back. I’m so stupid. I should have put it on, just to be safe. My non-numbed hand swings to make contact with something soft and Caliga utters a cry of surprise.

  “Uh! You little piece of—” Her hand clutches my neck, and numbness starts to seep down my chest, around my rib cage.

  Tegg curses. “Leave her be. Remember what SunAj said. He wants her intact.”

  Caliga lets go and makes a sulky noise. “Doesn’t matter,” she mutters, making clinking sounds with my necklace. “Nothing’s yours for much longer.” I’m afraid to tell her how valuable that necklace is to me. It’s one thing to be weak; another thing to be completely helpless.

  Unfortunately for me, right now I’m both.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE CHAR FINALLY JERKS TO A STOP. Caliga opens the door and clickity-clacks in her heels away from the char. I stumble as I get out, and Tegg grabs my arm before I hit the pavement.

  “Careful.”

  “Like you really mean that,” I say.

  “Look,” Tegg says blandly, “I really have nothing against you. It’s not personal.”

  “It’s always personal for the losers.”

  “We’re all on the losing end,” he says. “We’ll give you more of a life than that crap hole you lived in.”

  “Complete with getting drugged out of my brains when I don’t do what you want? Or chopped into bits?”

  “I didn’t say it was perfect,” he says quietly.

  My vision returns in increments. First it’s grainy and gray, then bits of light flicker in and out. We enter a transport and fly diagonally but definitely downward, beneath the surface of Neia.

  I can hear and feel a faint thrumming under my feet, like an enormous heartbeat. The transport doors open to a painfully bright room where the thrumming is a bit louder, and Tegg pokes a spiny finger into my shoulder, forcing me inside.

  It’s white and glossy, furnished in white designer pieces. It’s what heaven looked like in the old movies I used to watch. But it can’t be heaven, for one simple reason.

  Micah is here.

  He is the only dark thing in the brilliant room. Sitting on a snowy chaise that belongs in Louis XIV’s sitting room, Micah pushes off and comes to meet me. His clothes are expensive-looking, his frame perfectly proportioned for any girl with eyeballs to notice. For a minute, there is nothing but that insistent beat vibrating through the floor and into my legs, my chest.

  Tegg and Caliga hang way back. Do they know what’s coming?

  “I’m so glad you came,” Micah says, his voice deep and velvety. He lifts my fingers into his, gently. The warmth of his hands doesn’t hurt, but I pull them back anyway.

  “You didn’t really give me a choice, did you?”

  “It’s the best choice. You’re on a winning team now.”

  My right hand shoots out to slap him across the jaw, as hard as my exhausted body can muster. The crusted blisters of my palm open again on impact, and Micah jerks back, touching his red-smeared cheek. Before he can process his surprise, I slap him again.

  “That’s what I think of your goddamned winning team. Now let’s get this over with.”

  Micah’s face goes from beautiful to terrible in a single breath. “Then let’s go.” He grabs my wrist, and it burns as if he’s holding me over a torch.

  It’s unbearable. My knees buckle, but Micah doesn’t let go. My screams echo against the white walls, until I’m hearing myself in 3-D agony. Tegg coughs uncomfortably.

  “C’mon Kw, that’s enough.”

  Micah releases me and I crumple to the floor, cradling my wrist. The pain is white-hot, worsening instead of getting better. I open my eyes to see a bubbling mess of blisters and red skin. My brain is pounding, yelling at me to run away, undo every choice I made to get to this moment. I think of Ana and her fingertips and my sister. What have I gotten myself into?

  “I’m sorry, Zelia. I didn’t want to do that.”

  I suck in my tears and swallow the pain. Micah yanks my good arm without shocking me, pulling me to my feet. I am led toward the other end of the room. A panel opens to reveal a place so dark that I think the lights must be out.

  One thing is unchanged since I’ve arrived, though. The incessant heartbeat of Aureus doesn’t stop. It throbs right into my brain, and I wonder if the walls have blood and guts flowing within them.

  This room is four times as big as the white one. There is a man sitting in a large armchair with a gilded book in one hand, a teacup in the other. He lifts his head, turns his profile only a single degree in a glance to make sure I am who he thinks I am—the newest acquisition to Aureus—and goes back to his book. How he reads in such gloominess is beyond me.

  To my right, the thick squat boy from the club sits on the floor, picking his teeth. He doesn’t look at me, and actually turns away when I step closer, as if he’s afraid to make eye contact. On the left, a girl with espresso-colored skin and a bob of black hair lies on her stomach, reading a book. She’s clothed in more black, making her a living shadow in this dark room. A pair of wraparound sunglasses covers her eyes, the same ones you see old people wear in bright sunlight. An odd thing, given how dim the room is. I wonder if this is Blink, the one Ana said swims in the black.

  And finally, the boy who helped take Dyl at New Horizons sits on an ottoman. Even now, he’s popping the black jelly beans. His hair is oily and carroty, and he nods at me with recognition. He smiles only briefly, showing teeth smeared with black gunk. Disgusting.

  “Wot’s that? In the bag?” A woman’s voice with a decidedly English accent sounds from somewhere in the room, but I can’t find the source. Maybe it’s like Ana, someone who can talk in my head. I can’t decide if I like the voice or not. It sounds eager, like a child’s, but has the tone of an older lady.

  “Hush, Aj. In time, in time.” The man has a similar accent, but his tone is far less energetic. In the armchair, he rubs his grandfatherly silver hair and adjusts his plaid flannel shirt. In a room like this, I’d expect a crimson velvet robe and a silk cravat. Nothing quite fits together. “So, Zelia. I’ve heard so much about you.” He licks his finger and turns the page, but still won’t look me in the eye.

  “Who are you?”

  “Of course. I d
idn’t introduce myself. I am Sun.”

  “How egocentric of you.”

  “Perhaps. You may blame my dead mother for the name. Keep in mind, young Zelia, that insolence is not tolerated here, and arrogance is earned. And you haven’t earned a cent thus far, despite what your father has done for us.”

  “My father.” The words escape my lips before I can stop them.

  “Yes. We owe him a great deal, even though he kept his biggest contribution to society a secret for too long.”

  “I already know.”

  “You do? I am surprised.”

  “He helped people. The illegal kids.”

  Sun leans back in his chair. “Well. You are more enlightened than I thought, if that’s what you think he did.”

  Now I’m thoroughly confused. Holo-Dad already told me he cared for the illegal kids. What’s going on? Sun opens his mouth to continue when that English woman’s voice interrupts him.

  “She doesn’t know, darling. Her own father didn’t tell her. It’s quite a shame.”

  “Aj, not now.” Sun talks over to his right, but still I see no one. The people in the room are totally unperturbed with the comments from this bodiless voice. The voice echoes again, more insistent. Hurt.

  “Stop silencing me, Sun. You promised you would be better. Let me speak.”

  Sun blinks several times, then shuts his book. He shifts within the armchair and turns his shoulders to face me.

  “Oh!” I blurt out, covering my mouth with my hand. I should be used to this after being in Carus, but still I’m not prepared.

  On Sun’s head, protruding out of his temple and cheek are a small face, legs, and arms, as if a geriatric fetus had been pressed into his head and stuck fast, like putty. The wrinkled face is palm-sized, with a mouth larger than the other features. The eyes are garishly painted, with sparkling blue eye shadow and too much mascara, the color disturbing and unexpected. The tiny blunted limbs writhe with gentle excitement.

  “Don’t look at me like that. You’re no better than I am. We’re equals here.” She curls her mouth, and her pale blue eyes glisten as she studies me. “You don’t look like your father. You look honest.”