by Julie Wright
I must have gasped or something because the driver’s lip curled—though whether he was sneering or growling at me, I couldn’t tell.
“Tracked?”
“He means it’s automated and on rails. We don’t need drivers in the sense you’re thinking once the cars are tracked. Sensors keep them from colliding with any other cars on the rails, and the rails themselves keep the cars from colliding into anything else. There are no traffic accidents here. If you and your boyfriend had lived in this time, you wouldn’t have died. The tracks are actually energy efficient since we’ve been able to recycle the energy from braking back into the car, like subways. Between the recycled energy and solar energy, we don’t depend on fossil fuel anymore.”
He must have sensed my raised eyebrows and my glance out the window to the layer of clouds that looked like pollution to me.
“Low storm rolled in. That’s not pollution.”
“Where do you get the energy to fly?”
“Not everyone has cars with that feature. In fact most people don’t. Most people don’t have cars at all. Povs can’t afford them.” He didn’t really answer the question, but he made it sound as though only the very wealthy could afford whatever energy made cars fly.
“Are we—” I hated to ask since it would invariably make me sound stupid, but I needed to know. “Are we on the ground?”
The driver laughed. Tag didn’t laugh but seemed irritated with my questions as they forced him to be civil to me by answering. “No. We’re on the track system. A lot of crime and povs exist at the street levels. The mids, middle class, voted the tracks to be above the street so they had the top-of-the-world view and less chance of being victimized by the povs. Since they funded the project, they won by majority.” He went back to his window with a deep breath that indicated he was done with my questions.
The rest of the ride remained quiet. We circled around buildings, and then the clouds broke up enough to allow a view down to the ocean, where rain fell and whipped the waves into frothy caps. I focused hard on the space in front of the car, and sometimes the clouds swirled away enough for me to see the tracks in front of us. I tried to see through the clouds directly beneath us but could only make out faint lights blinking as we whisked past.
The driver leaned his seat back in the reclining position so his head was almost in my lap. He shook his ring finger close to his ear and then rested his hands across his chest. A diffused light shone from his ring shone light. When the light touched the ceiling of the car, I realized he was watching what looked like a homemade movie.
His IDR had provided a movie for him.
I shot Tag an incredulous look, but Tag still refused to act like we occupied the same car—or plane or train or whatever the thing we were in was called.
The driver’s ring wasn’t on his left hand but on his right thumb. His was a fancy gold-looking thing with little stones that looked like tiny balls of granite lining the edges.
He laughed out loud at the characters moving on the ceiling, and I scowled. There wasn’t any sound. What was he laughing at?
“What—” I started to ask, but Tag interrupted me.
He kept his focus out the window while he interrupted me. “He’s hearing the movie internally. The IDR transmits to the drive and plays inside his brain through pulse power. Most people use vid glasses since transmitting in public is rude.”
I looked back at the driver who’d gone to ignoring me nearly as well as Tag had a moment before. Pulse power? “Are you saying he’s got a hard drive in his head?”
Tag didn’t respond. His blue gaze fixated on whatever lay outside the glass window.
The weirdness of his silence mingled with the laughter from the driver while we made hairpin turns on a track leading us around buildings and in some cases through buildings made me physically ill.
“I’m going to throw up.” I announced, and meant every word.
The driver sat his seat up immediately, apparently not wanting to be in my aim.
“Not in my ride!” He slammed the brakes making metal squeal against metal. The car lifted off the tracks and moved to the side. I opened my door and vomited outside the car into the layer of clouds. I hoped nobody was beneath me at the same time I felt extreme gratitude for the harnesses holding me securely inside the car. Another car flew past us on the track, and I wondered if we had stayed on the track, would we have been run over? Advertisements I hadn’t noticed so much before while we were driving scrolled across and down the impossibly tall buildings, making everything seem to be in a sickeningly constant wave of movement, as though the buildings themselves were crawling.
Sensory overload. My brain couldn’t comprehend everything my eyes scanned.
The thought of running away again left before it could fully form. Instead, I closed the door to the taxi car-plane-train and closed my eyes so my brain wouldn’t fry from too much information. The future we’d stayed in at the cabin didn’t seem half as overwhelming as the future of 2113.
The driver waited to be certain I’d finished before moving back to the tracks, where the car jolted as it connected itself to the track.
I didn’t look up again until the car had moved to the side of the tracks and stopped on a platform. Tag got out on his side and walked around the car to open my door for me. I wanted to grab him and insist he take me home to Winter immediately, except my jaw dropped at the building I found myself staring at. The car had parked by a huge glass coliseum. A steady stream of people entered and exited the glass building. With every person who went through the doors, whether coming or going, the door frame glowed green. Most of the clothing seemed normal enough—jeans, loose blousy shirts, skirts on most of the women and many of the men, but the hair colors were as varied as the colors of their clothes. Pinks, oranges, reds, blues, whites, yellows, greens, blacks, and purples bobbed along as the crowd maneuvered around one another. There were even some silvers and golds—a crayon box assortment of heads. A lot of people had swirls and shapes inked between their hairline and their eyes, messages that looked like—“Is that a Coca Cola ad on his forehead?” I asked
“Businesses pay a lot of money for personal ad statements.” Tag looked at the man in question with mild disgust. “But you have to be willing to be rented for an entire month. Foreheads and backs of hands are prime marketing spaces.”
Match your hair to your outfit and run an ad for your favorite soft drink on your forehead. Welcome to the future.
A small group of guys who looked harder and more serious than Tag surrounded us on the platform. They were all younger—late teens early twenties, but they looked old, like they’d seen too much and didn’t want to talk about it. They wore silvery black jeans and black jackets like Tag’s. None of them bore any advertisements on their foreheads or hands. Maybe the military didn’t allow it. One of the taller guys took a step forward out of the circle of the others and walked toward us. He looked older, older and meaner, than the rest. He had spiky red hair, and not red as in ginger red, but red as though he’d dipped his head in a vat of fresh blood. His eyebrows had been dyed to match and seemed to make his pale skin chalky in comparison. “Soldier Taggert.” His voice sounded as though stones had been stuffed in his throat and were grating against one another with the movement of his sharp Adam’s apple.
“General.” Tag bent his head low in respect.
“You’re late, soldier.”
The “general” didn’t even look in my direction or acknowledge me in any way. I had a thousand different snarky remarks to make about my being a queen, but I bit my tongue and watched with fascination and horror. To make things worse, the wind buffeted me, threatening to shove me off the platform and toss me into the swirling clouds below.
“We ran into some malfunctions with the Orbital, sir.” There was a slight pause before the word sir. A pause so slight, it went unchecked by the general, but not by me. Such nuances were part of me, testing the pecking order and figuring out where I stood in it. Tag sto
od below this person, but he didn’t feel below this person. Interesting. No wonder Tag noticed how I played the system, living in what he called my self-made mediocrity. He apparently did the same thing.
“Malfunctions?”
I stiffened, wondering if Tag would rat me out for causing so many problems. The way the man shifted his weight from one foot to the other felt dangerous.
Tag’s glance slid to me again, briefly, and was accompanied by another slight shake of the head. “We had a power shortage due to inclement weather. The shortage in power disrupted the electrics, sending us off course. We ended up in the Rainier explosion, which further afflicted the electrics. We had to jump to a safe place and wait until the Orbital could be charged and trusted to bring her here safely. The rest of my report will be given to the professor only, sir.”
Again the pause before the title, sir. Tag hadn’t been kidding when he said he might get executed if we waited any longer. He might get executed anyway from the looks of things. I wanted to say something that might help, to somehow take responsibility for the problems. Tag tried his best to get me here on time. It wasn’t his fault I didn’t come easily.
I opened my mouth, felt Tag’s tension, closed it again, and frowned at the standoff between Tag and this general. My own muscles had tensed as well, ready for flight or fight. Flight wouldn’t get me far, not with the circle of soldiers standing guard at the exit off the platform, and fight, well, that wouldn’t get me very far, either. These guys looked hard and capable, and there were too many of them.
And I couldn’t be sure Tag would be on my side if I tried to escape. Yes, he took the heat off me by not implicating me in the blame, but he’d changed so much in the last few moments. His eyes looked cold as they stared down at the ground, his jaw flexing as though he might be grinding his teeth. His eyes were the icy, hard blue I remembered from when I first saw him.
“The professor was concerned, as were we all, that you’d proven yourself to be an unacceptable risk. We’ll see if we weren’t right.” His eyes never left Tag’s bowed head. “Report to the professor, Taggert.”
Without lifting his eyes, Tag bowed, turned on his heel, and without another word to me or another glance in my direction, he strode off with great purpose. Off and away from me. The crowd of soldiers parted for him, and the door to the coliseum glowed green at his entrance.
My breathing shortened with the new panic. Tag was gone. He’d left me with these people I didn’t know, didn’t trust, and certainly didn’t like. The general watched Tag as he went. The general’s lips stretched in a thin, calculating line. That man was trouble from spiked red hair to steel-toed boot. He never once looked at me as he snapped his fingers and said, “Take the New Youth to her dormitory. Have her checked in.”
Another soldier stepped forward and bowed his head to the general. He took my arm, not roughly exactly, but mechanically. He started to lead me away. I shook off this new person’s hold and turned toward the general. “Wait! What’s going to happen to him?”
The general didn’t turn to me or acknowledge the question. He snapped his fingers again and this time a soldier flanked me on both sides, each of them having a firm grip on my arm as they led me away.
I started to struggle as they swept me along with them. I looked back to see the general still looking toward where Tag had gone. He said, “Unacceptable risk,” cleared his throat, and strode after Tag as my new captors pulled me to my future.
Chapter Fourteen
My new guards never spoke to me. I could have picked up my feet and they likely would’ve carried me across the platform to the sidewalk surrounding the glass coliseum. I didn’t lift my feet. Instead, my feet moved along with them. We didn’t walk far before entering an arched glass tube. The wide tube followed the curves of the building.
Inside the tube was a sidewalk framed on both sides by elaborate gardens. As we walked, I soon realized that the vegetation was all of the edible variety. They hadn’t just planted pretty flowers along their sidewalks; they’d planted tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers and all sorts of other fruits and vegetables. The wide tubes weren’t simply a means of keeping the rain off your head and the wind from pushing you over the edge to fall through the clouds, they were long and well-planned greenhouses. Along the lower sides of the tubes flashed digital advertisements, scrolling, changing, always moving like a million small movies going on all at once. The people in the digital pictures looked like they were talking, but no noise came out of any piping anywhere. I wondered if the sound would play in the hard drives in people’s heads. That thought elicited a shudder from me. Hard drives in people’s heads? Ew.
I had questions, but the men marching me to who knew where didn’t look like they’d give answers. Where had Tag gone? He had mentioned he could be executed for bringing me back late. And the spiky-haired guy called him an unacceptable risk. Would they execute him for real? Was he in trouble because of me? Would they punish me, too? Or even execute me?
With no other choice, I walked and waited to see what happened next. But my fists stayed in tight little balls at my side. If they messed with me, I fully planned on bashing their noses in. Many people passed us going the other way—teenagers hanging out together, a few people who looked like they were talking to themselves, couples, the elderly, people in a hurry, people who were just wasting time. But no matter who they were, young or old, alone or in a group, no one met the eyes of my guards. No one smiled or offered a casual, “Hey, what’s up?” They acted nervous once they realized the guards were in the tubes with them.
We wound through the path of glass and produce, passing by exits into buildings every twenty feet or so, every once in a while walking through the shadows of some of the buildings. At some point, we walked mainly in shadow due to the towering buildings over us. It was as I took note of the lack of light that the tube ended. An exit and several metal doors stood in front of us. The guards chose the central door. An elevator.
Going up, a female mechanical voice said, sounding sultry and overly accommodating.
We went up, high enough my ears popped from the pressure.
The glass tube continued to wind through the city, only now it was doing so several hundred feet above the clouds. With the layer of cloud beneath my feet, I felt more secure. Now I truly felt like I was walking through the sky. Things were incredibly bright this high up. The gardens continued alongside the sidewalks.
The guards didn’t slow down at all. They kept ahold of my arms and dragged me along. I swiveled my head, taking in the ocean off in the distance and the buildings surrounding me. “Are we still in Washington?”
“Naw. We’re in the bay,” the guard on my right said.
“San Francisco?”
“Ain’t no other bay worth talking about.”
I looked around and had to admit the pride in the soldier’s voice seemed justified. The view of the city left me astounded and breathless. The clouds rolled slowly out farther over the ocean, leaving the city. I couldn’t see all the way to the ground even with the clouds moving away because that far down everything seemed to be hidden by the shadow of the buildings. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “It’s beautiful!” And it was. Beauty that slowed my progress, making the guards drag at me a little more to make me walk. Sun glittered against the buildings wet slicked from a recent rain.
San Francisco. It certainly hadn’t felt as though we’d traveled so far in the car.
In spite of the dizzying height, it was hard to turn away from the view, hard not to look out like some alien tourist. Green dotted the rooftops of buildings below the walkway—more vegetation. Each rooftop was like a miniature ecosystem unto itself. Amazing. And the sunlight gleamed along the sidewalks in the sky. Everything above the cloud level seemed bright, shiny, and new. And even the cloud level with its shifting wisps of white added a delicate beauty to the scenery.
With all the talk about crazies, wars, and disease, Tag had frightened me, but this world didn’t look all that much
like the things he described. It had beauty and filled me with a sense of wonder I hadn’t expected.
But Aunt Theresa used to always say that there were a lot of ugly people walking around in beauty suits. She meant that sometimes crummy people hid behind their beauty. I wondered if San Francisco wore a beauty suit.
We walked through one of the side exits into a building and found another elevator. Going down, the sultry elevator said. It sounded like she was politely telling us we were heading to the fiery furnaces of what Aunt Theresa called the hot place. I suppressed a chuckle. And go down we did, fast enough I held the bar to steady myself. My ears plugged up, but didn’t pop until I deliberately yawned and forced them to.
We walked out onto another level of sidewalks in the sky. This one seemed to line a building that housed businesses and shops. People moved in and out of those shops rhythmically making the entire city appear to be breathing. Farther down the sidewalk tube, the soldiers stopped at a green building that seemed to be at the center of everything else. The sidewalks in the sky all circled around that one building then cut out into their different directions, but it appeared that the city revolved around this one central spot.
The main doors swished open as we approached, and the outer edges of the door glowed green. I noted someone else walking past and saw how his ring glowed red as he came into range of the door. He scowled at the door and ducked his powder blue head into his powder blue jacket as he made a sort of snorting noise as he sped up his pace and moved past the door.
This might be the place all roads lead to, but clearly some of the people living in the city didn’t approve of their centerpiece.
As we went inside, I looked over my shoulder to the outside. Tag, where are you?
A pinched, stern-looking woman whose wrinkles might have been stretched off her face by her insanely tight bun met us at the front desk.
