by Kelli Kimble
Then, we went down the hall. Everything looked as it had earlier. We moved through the corridors, looking for a sign that someone had been around recently, or maybe just a clue as to where Tabby and the mountain people had gone.
There was nothing.
We went to the stairwell, then went all the way down to the lowest level and began working our way back up. We found a room that had a store of the infamous spyro packs. I made note of where it was, and we continued.
But it was slow going. In six hours, we’d only really searched two floors. We decided to camp inside the facility for the night. It seemed safe enough, and there was a supply of food, too.
We went back to the room with the spyro, and we each took a few packs. We found a nearby room with two beds that still had mattresses and some bedding, and we camped out there. The lock worked, and we locked ourselves inside — just in case there was someone in the facility whom we hadn’t yet come across. Even so, I reached out now and then to feel for others, but as far as I could tell, we were alone.
The spyro was disgusting, but we ate it again for breakfast. The tablet said the spyro was a complete meal; it contained everything a human needed for sustenance. Too bad it tasted like old socks soaked in spinach juice . . . and that was the opinion of someone who wasn’t too picky about what she ate.
After we’d eaten and cleaned up a bit – the plumbing still worked, somehow – we moved on to investigating the facility. We made our way through four more floors, stopped to eat lunch, and then went through four more. For dinner, we finished off the spyro packs we’d taken, and then we searched the last two floors of the building.
Besides the spiro and a few tablets, we found nothing that was going to be useful. There didn’t seem to be clues anywhere as to where they’d gone, and the place was empty. The strange tanks were everywhere on the upper floors, and they gave me the willies. But there weren’t any people.
We descended back to the lower level that had the spyro storage, and we gathered more, then we retired to the room we’d spent the night in.
Lying in the cot, I took out one of the tablets we’d recovered. I activated it and began searching through it. It was different than the one we already had, which was surprising. It contained a lot of biological information about humans, mostly about physical fitness. I dug through, it trying to understand why it was different than the one we already had. Why wouldn’t they all contain the same data?
I stumbled across an image of one of the tanks. The water in the tank looked murky, but there was something in the water. Something big.
I zoomed in on the picture. There was a foot. A human foot. It hung in the water, near the glass, clearly distinguishable.
“What on Earth?” I asked. The caption simply said: A tank in use. I went back a few pages, trying to find the beginning of the section.
“What are you looking at?” Gayle asked.
“Look at this,” I said, sliding forward to the image of the tank. “There’s a human in there. See? See the foot?”
Gayle squinted at the picture. “Uh, yeah? I see something there. Let me see.” She took the tablet and began going through it. She gasped. “The tanks were for growing people? Like, they were crops?”
“What?”
“This says right here, they used the tanks to control the population inside the mountain. To grow fetuses.”
“This isn’t a picture of a fetus, Gayle. This is an adult-sized foot,” I said, pointing at the outline in the image. “Don’t you remember the size of the tanks we found? They were big. Not fetus-sized.”
“That’s just not possible. They’d come out like babies — grown-up bodies with no idea how to function.”
I pursed my lips. She had a point. “No matter what size, they were somehow growing people,” I said.
Gayle shook her head. “I can see how things might have gone wrong here.”
“Like we can throw that stone,” I said.
“What happened to you wasn’t widespread, and it wasn’t normal. If people in the city knew about what had been done to you, they wouldn’t have stood for it.”
I didn’t answer. If my aunt had — for even a minute — thought what happened to me wasn’t normal she’d never let on. My closest living relative hadn’t cared, so why would anyone else think anything of it?
I picked up the other tablet and began sliding through the content again. A file caught my eye. It was titled: Silver. I opened it. It contained a series of photos of a tank. In the first, an infant floated in the murky liquid. In the next, a toddler. The toddler had his face and hands pressed to the glass, with a wide grin on his chubby face. The next seemed to be the same boy, only taller. A succession of photos showed him aging, until he was finally an adult. In each photo, his face was close to the glass, and his hair floated around him like seaweed. Everything below his shoulders was obscured by the water, and sometimes, even his face was blurred.
“Wow,” I said. “They really did have adults in those tanks. Look.” I handed her the tablet.
“That’s Silver,” she said. “The man Tabby went away with. That’s him.”
I took the tablet back and studied the current photo. It was the last one in the progression, taken at his oldest age. I touched the edge of the tank in the image with my finger. “That’s bizarre,” I said.
Before I could say anything else, though, a flash came into my brain. Water. It was an overwhelming amount of water. It filled the horizon in nearly every direction. It made me feel small and finite.
Fear grabbed me by the throat, and I gasped.
Then, it was gone.
The tablet clattered to the floor.
“Easy with that,” Gayle said. Then, she caught the look on my face. “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”
“I – I don’t know. I had another one of those visions, I think. Of someplace I didn’t recognize.” My hands were shaking, and I pushed them under my thighs to quiet the motion.
“What did you see? Maybe I can help.”
“It was a lot of water. As far as I could see. It made me feel . . .” I twirled a hand in the air, trying to grasp the right word. “Helpless and small. Like nothing I do could ever matter.”
“You saw the lake?”
“No. No, it was a different color entirely. It had waves — way bigger than any I’ve ever seen on the lake. It couldn’t have been the lake.”
She studied me for a minute. “That sounds like the ocean.”
“The what?”
“The ocean. It’s west of the city, far away. I’ve never seen it. But I’d heard some of the searchers say they’d seen it. On both coasts, I guess. There’s an ocean to the east, and another to the west.”
“The searchers are a bunch of liars,” I said. I wanted to discount the existence of something so big. But I knew it was an unfair accusation. The searchers were only doing their job, looking for people who’d survived the long winter.
Gayle tsked. “Do you even know any searchers?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I just — what I saw, it can’t be real.”
“Weren’t you holding the tablet when you had that first vision? The one of the sky?”
The tablet was still on the floor at my feet. I picked it up. “Yeah,” I said. “I was. I was trying to read a note someone hand-wrote in the margins. But it was too messy. I couldn’t read what it said.”
“Think you could find it again?” She handed me the other tablet.
I paged through the various documents and topics. What had those notes been written on? Something historic. Something . . . old. I went back to the beginning and slid forward, page by page. The margins were all blank. After a few minutes of looking, I tossed the tablet onto the cot beside me. “This is useless. I don’t remember what I was looking at. It could take me forever to find it again.”
“Well, you know what you were looking at just now.” She pointed at the other tablet, still sitting in my lap. “You were looking at
the pictures of Silver in the tank.”
The name seemed to dance up my spine in a shiver. Realization dawned over me, and I hung my head into my hands. “I’m linked to Silver, somehow,” I said. “I think I’m seeing what he can see. Or, maybe just something that made a big impression on him.”
“That’s crazy,” Gayle said. “How can you know it’s Silver? How can you know it’s anyone? Maybe it’s just a memory you forgot.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said. I tapped my fingers over the tablet, calling up the picture of Silver in the tank again. I took a deep breath, touched my finger to the picture, and closed my eyes.
Immediately, I was back at the water. Overhead, I heard a bird making an unfamiliar call. A flock of them moved together through the air, and one dove down into the water, coming up with a fish in its beak. As I watched, it tipped its head back, and, through a series of jerking motions, swallowed the fish whole down its gullet.
I turned my head. Beside me, there was a woman. She looked familiar. Her hair was shockingly red and hung to her shoulders in beautiful curls. Her eyes were green. “We should get back for the day,” she said.
A masculine voice emanated from me — though it wasn’t me. “Yeah, let’s get going.”
I grabbed her hand, and we turned from the view and trudged through the white sand, up over a ridge and between patches of tall grass, then onto a dirt path only wide enough for one person at a time. The woman went ahead of me.
This was weird. I felt like I was just along for the ride, like I was just an observer.
“Hey,” I said, trying to get her attention. “Can you hear me?”
But she kept walking — and so did the person whose body I was stuck in.
“I can hear you,” Gayle said, snapping me out of the vision.
“What?” I said. My eyes reluctantly focused on her. The images faded away — though it wasn’t difficult to remember what happened this time.
“You asked if I could hear you, and I was telling you I could. Are you all right? You seemed like you disappeared there for a few minutes.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I stood up and began pacing the room. It was a small room, and I didn’t have very far to go. I reached the wall, turned on my heel, and paced again towards the other wall. “What does Tabby look like?” I asked.
“She has red hair. I always envied her for that. Green eyes. Freckles. She’s kind of short. Why?”
“I think I might have just seen her. In my vision.”
Gayle jumped on me and clutched my shoulders. “What? You saw my sister?”
“I think?”
“What was she doing? Where is she?”
“She’s with whomever I’m connected to. Silver, I suppose? He turned his head, and I saw her. She said, ‘We should go back,’ and he said, ‘Yeah,’ and then they turned away from the ocean, and they walked up the sand and over a ridge to a path. That’s all I saw.”
She gave one gleeful shake of my shoulders, and then she began dancing around the room to a tune only she could hear. “I knew it! I knew she was still alive. She’s alive!”
“Whoa, wait just a minute,” I said.
“Don’t go trying to kill my buzz. You just proved she’s alive.”
“No. I only proved I saw something Silver saw at some time. I don’t know whether what I saw is what he’s seeing now or just a memory.”
“What? No, that’s stupid. It has to be now. Why would you see something from the past?”
“Why wouldn’t I? How long has it been since he touched either of these tablets? How long since this picture was taken?”
Gayle stopped shaking her butt, and her face collapsed into a frown. “I suppose you’re right. But, did she look old? Older than me?”
I shrugged. “She had some wrinkles, I guess?”
“But, did she look older than me? Did she have any grey hair?”
“I don’t know, Gayle. I’m a kid. Everyone over 25 looks old to me.”
Gayle huffed out a loud breath. “I wish I could just see what you’re seeing. I need to know.”
I patted the cot next to me. “Sit down and try to relax. We have contact with them, right? We’re better off than we were just 15 minutes ago.”
She slumped onto the cot next to me. “Yeah.”
“Then, let’s try to take advantage of what we know and make some progress, hmm?” I looked for a map on the tablet I was holding. It only had a rudimentary image of the United States.
“Let me look on this one.” Gayle tried on the other. A detailed map of the mountain and the surrounding areas appeared. She zoomed outwards and scanned west from our location until the map turned blue. She grinned. “The ocean.” She peered close at the map, unable to read the text without squinting. “The Pacific Ocean,” she read, pointing to the name with her finger.
“If they’re at the coast, it stands to reason they’d be at the closest point, right? The shortest distance would be here, to this area.” I traced my finger in a straight line from the mountain to the coastline. “We’re in a state called Idaho, and . . . it looks like we should head to the ocean right where the state of California butts up against Oregon.” I tapped the area on the map and zoomed in closer. “See? Yeah. This looks like a good spot. There’s a river there, so there’ll be fresh water.”
“Really? You think they’ll be there?”
“It’s as good a place to start as any,” I said. “Unless you want to go back to the city?”
“No. No way we’re doing that. I don’t ever want to go back there.”
I turned off the tablet and looked at her. Her hair was greying around her temples, and deep wrinkles surrounded her eyes and nose. The skin on her neck looked more like wrinkled linen than skin. She looked weary but also excited. She wanted to find her sister. She needed to.
“Maybe you should explain to me why you dislike the city so much,” I said.
“How much time have you got?” she asked.
It felt good to laugh — even if only for a moment.
Chapter 3
“Tabby and I were very close. I’m sure you’ve figured that out. But, we’re twins, you see. We did everything together: We wore the same clothes; we practically knew what the other was going to do or say before she did it. Our parents were career-oriented, and they spent a lot of time at work. We took care of each other, you know?”
I nodded — though I didn’t have a sister, and I’d never been that close with anyone.
“We were a little younger than you when Tabby started acting funny at times. Little things at first, but then, bigger and bigger. She’d do things totally outside her personality, like beating up a kid in the neighborhood without reason. Not that beating up someone is ever allowed, just — she wasn’t provoked. She just wanted to. She stole things. Started to drink and smoke.
“Our parents were concerned she was becoming too rebellious. They started staying home a little more, and they tasked me with keeping her out of trouble. But I was no match for her. She could slip away and be back before I even knew she was missing.
“Later, I learned through all that, she was suffering through painful headaches and double vision. She never let on — not until she picked on the wrong kid, and she took a beating herself. My parents took her to the hospital for her injuries, and they discovered she had a tumor in her brain.”
Gayle’s fingers clenched, tearing holes in the nearly-rotten blanket on the bed. I patted her hand, and she gave me an appreciative smile. Her hand relaxed.
“The tumor had become entangled with her implant, and in the hopes of killing the tumor, they created a magnetic pulse from the implant. It did change the tumor to a non-malignant form, but it shorted out the circuit that made it possible for her to speak telepathically. They couldn’t insert a new one.
“After that, they tried drugs to shrink the remaining tumor as much as possible. The doctors said she was lucky; most people wouldn’t have survived what she did. But she didn’t feel l
ucky. She’d become a verbal person, and she could never be telepathic. She felt trapped by her condition, and when it became clear she wasn’t going to be given a normal future . . . well, then the rebellion really started. I learned to speak so that I could communicate with her, but once she started acting out again, our parents cut her off. They would only talk to her through me, and then the conversation was always strained and difficult. I hated being in the middle and having to act as a parent to her. But that’s the way it was.
“When Silver and his group first came, she was being punished for trying to incite a riot in the marketplace. The implant technology was becoming scarce, and they were projecting a shortage of available chips in only a few years.” She ducked her head. “Of course, you know all about that.”
I nodded. It was ridiculous how much suffering those stupid chips had caused.
She continued, “Tabby organized a group of parents to demonstrate against the selective placement of the chips. After she was caught, Preia told my parents Tabby had two options: Leave the city forever or become Preia’s servant. Tabby wanted to leave, but I begged her not to go. I convinced her if she’d only behave properly, they’d let her return to a normal life.”
“Wow,” I said. “I had no idea she had such a rough time.”
“Then, it got worse. She fell in love with Silver. She did everything Preia asked — and then some — but Preia wouldn’t let her be. Then, when Preia tried to convince Silver he should be her successor . . . that put her over the edge. That’s why she convinced him he had to leave. He was – is – a good man, and he recognized the danger in trying to assume the kind of power Preia wanted to give him. He was easily convinced to leave — especially when he discovered Preia’s plans for the rest of his family.”
She grabbed my hand. “Preia isn’t in power anymore, but don’t let that fool you. The people who did this to you, they most likely were motivated by her or someone like her. The popularity of selective placement has waned, but the powerful people still want more. They’ll always want more, Nim. That’s why I wanted you to come with me. I know you think everyone who knew about you is gone, but I’m sure that can’t be true, and I couldn’t stand it if someone else had to endure what Tabby had to go through.”
