Kingdom of Cages

by Sarah Zettel

“I am sorry about your father. You must have been hoping very hard.”

  “Yeah, well…” Teal looked down at the empty cup. “Turns out it was all a bunch of stupid stories. I knew that anyway.”

  Commander Poulos said nothing.

  Teal set the cup back on the board’s edge. “I guess you’re going to send me back to Pandora?”

  Commander Poulos rubbed her thumbnail gem against her trousers leg. “Not because I want to,” she said quietly. “But the director has found out you’re wanted by the Pandorans. You didn’t tell us you broke the law to get up here.”

  Her words sank in, leaving Teal cold and leaden. It had been for nothing. Her grand scheme for escape. All the Pandorans had needed to do was tell the director who she was, and now… now there was nothing.

  “What else haven’t you told us, Teal?”

  Teal stared at the blank screen above the command pad. In the distance she heard a dull voice explaining how the hothousers had herded them all under the dome, about the Eden Project, and how Mom had died, how they’d escaped and lived with Nan Elle until Teal had thought of a way to leave Pandora for good.

  She stopped there. Commander Poulos already knew how it ended.

  “Teal…”

  The sound of her name made Teal blink and turn her head back toward Commander Poulos. But the commander wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at her own hands, at the wall past Teal’s shoulder, at the door. “You should know…” Commander Poulos stopped, and began again. “I know it’s no comfort, but I believe Director Shontio doesn’t want to send you back either.”

  “It’s okay,” said Teal in a small voice, even though she couldn’t help feeling that those words were not the ones Commander Poulos had wanted to say. “It’s okay.”

  Commander Poulos’s face tightened as if she were in pain. “You should know…” she said again. “If you can just hang on. If you ever need help, you can…” She opened her mouth, closed it again, and rubbed her thumbnail gem hard against the side of her leg. “You can call on me, Teal.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll walk you.” Commander Poulos got to her feet and Teal could still feel something unspoken hanging in the air between them.

  It didn’t matter. There was nothing Commander Poulos could say to make it better. Teal stood. She couldn’t see where she was going. Nothing. Her grand plan had all come to nothing. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything. Her feet were moving on their own, steered by Commander Poulos’s firm hand under her elbow. Each step taking her closer to the Pandorans, closer to the hothouse, and the place where Mom had died. Died like Dad in a bleeding mess on the floor, and all for nothing.

  Chena was right, she thought dully. I should’ve stayed put.

  Well, that didn’t matter either, because Teal would never be able to tell her so.

  Dionte leaned over Tam in the observation chair. His face was pale, drawn, and tired. The eyes that looked back at her were sunken in their sockets.

  She looked into his face and felt nothing, nothing at all. Her Conscience told her there should be something. She knew it was wrong that her brother should look at her like this, but she could not feel that wrong.

  “Don’t worry, Brother,” she told him. “You are almost done.” She made herself smile. That was the right thing to do. Why can’t I feel him? “Only a few more adjustments.”

  “No,” he whispered, and winced. “No more. I was promised no more.”

  “Just one more. Then you are done. Then we can talk.”

  A tear trickled down Tam’s cheek and sadness hit Dionte so hard she curled her fist around the arm of the chair to keep from reeling backward. Why had he brought them to this? This was not the way it was supposed to be. They were supposed to work together for the family. He was supposed to have been beside her as they together saved Pandora. He was not supposed to be afraid of her.

  What’s happening, what’s going on? She had to concentrate to keep from shaking her head to clear it out. She could not slip now. This was too important. She could not jeopardize the potential of the bond between herself and Tam, the first one they would truly share. This moment was too emotional, that was all. There was too much going on inside and outside at the same time, upsetting her balance. It would be all right again in a moment.

  “It is just a matter of refining some synaptic connections in the implant filaments.” She laid her hand on his and felt how cold it was. A thousand memories flickered through her mind. Games of tag in the family gardens. Quizzing each other for math and botany tests. The passionate debates about every subject under the sun. She tried to take comfort from the future shining so brightly before them. Soon she’d have Tam’s stubborn, sharp-minded honesty to help her to think more clearly.

  “You’ll be glad to know that the Trusts will soon be home safe with us as well,” she told him. “Teal is being returned as we speak, and Chena will be back soon as well.”

  “Trusts… No, they are safe where they are.”

  Dionte touched the probe’s command keys, strengthening the hormonal surge by a fraction of a percent. “You trust me, don’t you, Brother? I am your sister and you trust me.”

  “Yes,” he said, the voice full of exhausted relief. “I trust you. I must trust you.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  But his face twisted up the new struggle. “Aleph…”

  “I’m here, Tam.” Aleph’s middle-aged woman appeared on the nearest wall. “Hello, Dionte.”

  “Hello, Aleph.”

  “I have no further adjustments on the schedule. Tam needs to rest and recover so that his Conscience may be fully integrated.”

  Dionte felt a spasm of annoyance. Of all the times for Aleph to question her. “You know that the growing of a Conscience in an adult is a delicate business. Numerous small adjustments must be made in order to assure proper integration, and sometimes it is not possible to schedule them all. This is one of those times.”

  “Dionte, I know you only wish to help your brother, but he is fatigued. Look at the monitors.”

  Dionte’s patience snapped. She whirled toward the wall. “I am my brother’s Guardian! This is my judgment. This is not even any of your business!”

  Aleph’s image folded its hands and bowed its head. “It is my job to advise my family.”

  “Well, then, you have advised! I have rejected your advice. That is my right. I will help my brother. I will help my family, and you will leave me to do my work!” She faced Tam in the chair again, trying to focus on the monitor and what it was telling her.

  “Dionte…” said Aleph.

  But Dionte did not turn around. She snapped the new cartridge in place and laid her hand on the input pad, subvocalizing the necessary commands.

  “Aleph,” she heard Tam say. “You promised—”

  “Trust me, Brother,” Dionte said firmly, as if speaking directly to his freshly active implant. “You know you must trust me.”

  “Yes,” he breathed, a childlike whisper. Then, even more softly, she thought she heard him say, “Help.”

  “Hagin.” Aleph opened her visual lines to the synapses. Hagin sat at his station in the cluster of monitors and desks where the tenders did most of their work. Absently she noted he was reviewing a follow-up report of her bimonthly examination.

  “Aleph.” Hagin flicked the display to the report’s next page. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hagin, there are records I want you to see. I am concerned about some aspect of my adjustments.”

  “Of course. Show me what is wrong.”

  Aleph saved the report and closed its file. Then she showed him all that she had showed the other city-minds.

  While Hagin watched her records flow across his workstation screen, Aleph found Basante in Imaging Room Four, standing in the middle of three different fate maps, comparative readouts flashing across the walls.

  “Basante.”

  “Aleph?” He did not take his eyes off
the data. He lifted his hand to touch one minute line, adjusting its length a few centimeters.

  “Aleph, I was hoping that you might speak with Dionte. You are her friend and an adviser to her, and I fear she has become distressed. I do not want to have to alert her committee yet. She may just need a friend.”

  Basante lowered his hand and blinked. “Of course, Aleph. If you think so.”

  “I do,” Aleph said firmly.

  “I’ll go as soon as I’m done here.”

  “Thank you.”

  Aleph felt secure. This was what she should have done in the first place. She should have alerted the family, and not gone to Gem in hysterics. Dionte was troubled, that much was clear. Now her family knew. The family would take care of both her and Tam, as was right.

  All would soon be well. This time, at least, she had done the right thing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Under Cover

  Chena peered between the reeds at the great white bubbles that made up the Alpha Complex. Gnats and mosquitoes swarmed around her, seeking a crack in her camouflage suit. Despite its protection, the chill from the hip-deep water soaked in. She shivered hard for a moment, from cold, but also from mounting hope. No one had come to get her. She had been standing here in a direct line of sight of the complex for an hour, after a long trek through the marshes, and no one, human or animal, had been sent out to grab her.

  It’s working. This time I got it right, she thought toward the shadow presence of Nan Elle hovering in the back of her mind.

  “They find you by scent,” she’d said to Nan Elle. “That’s how the bugs found me. It’s got to be.” Ever since she got back from Peristeria, she’d been delving into the whys and hows of the hothousers’ monitoring systems, looking for what she’d missed. They shouldn’t have found her, but they did. So, even though she’d gotten away, she’d missed something. They still knew something she didn’t, and that was no good. She didn’t know how long it would take her to figure out what had gone wrong, but she was going to try. If nothing else, it kept her from wondering what was happening to Teal, wherever she had gone.

  Chena combed through Nan Elle’s books and all the library disks and databases in both Stem and Offshoot. She was not surprised that there was next to no information. The hothousers certainly didn’t want their secrets to get out. But there were enough hints for her to see that the cyborged insects that patrolled Pandora did not really use cameras. They used transmitters that coded the responses of the cy-bugs’ tiny brains, which meant the hothousers’ computers received information from normal insect sensory impressions. Since insects relied primarily on scent, most of the analysis would have to be of suspicious chemical traces. Mask those chemical traces, mask your human scent, and you could walk unseen.

  But Nan Elle was not ready to hear any of this. “You don’t know that. We have no direct information on the mote cameras.” Not even Administrator Tam could be induced to give away so much.

  “We know they are using real bugs,” Chena persisted. She was right about this. She knew it. She might have been wrong about everything else, she might have been completely wrong about Teal, but she was right about this. “We know they are not supposed to interfere with anything in the natural order. Who knows what it would do to the local insect populations if there were a few hundred fake bugs flying around in formation?”

  Nan Elle had straightened her neck, like she always did when she was particularly disapproving. “It’s a bad gamble, Chena. You should have learned that in Peristeria. You have your route into the hothouse. Let that be enough.” A week ago, Farin had been passed a message from a man in Stem. It had come from someone inside the hothouse who wanted access to a certain narcotic compound that Nan Elle used for surgeries. Nan Elle had wanted to just send back a sample of the stuff via the connections she and Administrator Tam had set up, but Chena had convinced her that it would be useful to have more than one reliable contact in the hothouse. It had taken Nan Elle all of three seconds to guess what Chena really wanted—a way back into the hot-house, a chance to get to the hothouser computers, where she might be able to find out what had really happened to her mother. She also knew that Chena would never give up until she had gotten what she wanted, so she had reluctantly agreed.

  “It’s not enough,” snapped Chena. It wasn’t. Nothing would ever be enough until she had wormed every single secret out of the hothouse, until she knew enough that they could never steal another person from her. They were the real reason Teal ran away. They had Teal so scared she couldn’t stand to live in Offshoot anymore. “You know why we’ve never been able to break their system? They have got us all locked in cages. We need to open the doors.”

  Nan Elle sighed and thumped her stick impatiently. “This is not about locks and cages, Chena, it never has been. This is about survival, for ourselves and our village. That is our work.”

  “You said you’d help me defy them,” she shot back.

  “Defy them, yes, but not conquer them.” Nan Elle shook her head solemnly. “The villages and hothouses have been using each other for fifteen hundred years. It is the way it is here, and it will not change for your wishing, or your daring. Leave it.”

  “But—”

  “Leave it.” Nan Elle’s eyes flashed. “You belong to me until you are an adult in your own right, and I have told you to leave it be.”

  But Chena couldn’t leave it. She was right. She knew it. Confuse the cy-bugs with a different scent, something strong, but appropriate to the location—you couldn’t go with a citrus, say, in the marsh, but there was plenty that could be done with mint and loosestrife. Use the concealing scent along with the camouflage suit to disguise both the chemical and visual signatures from her body, and Aleph would never know where she was.

  She could stipulate to her client that part of the price was that he get her in through the marsh airlock. That way she could start training Aleph to get used to the idea of her coming and going through there. Before long, she’d have free access to the hothouse.

  It could work; she could do it. She would do it.

  She pleaded with Nan Elle. She coaxed, cajoled, and, in the end, threatened—to withhold her work, to run away, even to go to the constables, until, at last, Nan Elle brought her stick crashing down on the worktable.

  “Enough. After all this time, after all your disasters, you still do not see…” Spittle flecked her lips, and Chena had cringed. Had she finally said too much?

  But Nan Elle subsided and shuffled back to the stove, sniffing at the potions brewing there. “If you are determined to commit this suicide, you had better do it before you learn anything else that might harm the village when the hothousers dump your brain into the city-mind. Oh, and when they do catch you, leave Tam’s name out of it for as long as you can. I have no other insider to turn to.”

  So Chena had passed some additional conditions to her client, assembled her formulas, packed food and water, wrapped the camouflage suit in a bundle of old clothes, calculated the shortest route, and set out. She’d take the railbike to Stem, duck the fences at the lake-side, and set out overland to the marsh and hothouse.

  Nan Elle said nothing to her as she left, and Chena had said nothing back. Everything can be said when I get home, thought Chena. When she sees that I’ve found the missing piece of the equation.

  A clear blue twilight now settled over the marsh. As the light faded, the hothouse domes dimmed from white to pearl to gray. Mustn’t have an anomalous light source around at night, thought Chena, pressing her lips tightly together. It might upset the ducks.

  Now or never. There was just enough light left to see by, and it wouldn’t last. Slowly, Chena began to wade through the swamp.

  Mud sucked at her boots, making each step a struggle, but the waterfowl, ignorant of humans, seemed to think she was just another of their kind and only ruffled their wings as she passed. The frogs and crickets set up their own chorus at her movements, but they did that every time a bird moved too. She
hoped that whatever monitors the hothousers had on them would not be alerted. The cy-bugs were most certainly the first line of defense. If they did not send out the wrong pulse, nothing else became active, and the cy-bugs thought she was a big cluster of water plants.

  So far, anyway. She wondered if she should stop and make another application of her “insect repellent.” Sweat prickled her skin. She’d be perspiring freely soon, and if the cy-bugs caught one whiff of her real scent, the interceptor teams would spring into action. This time she might not be able to run fast enough, or they might send more than two, and then she’d never get to see the look on Nan Elle’s face when she found out what happened. Not even Nan Elle could get her out of the involuntary wing.

  Wonder if Sadia’s still in there. Maybe she is. Maybe, if this works, if I can start coming and going when I need to, I can pull her out. Maybe there is a way. The idea drained some of the fear out of her blood.

  At last the muck began to slope gently upward. Fortunately the concealing reeds stayed about head-high. The water was soon thigh-deep, then knee-deep, then ankle-deep, and the reed curtain parted to make room for a jumble of waist-high plants and stiff, rough-skinned grasses.

  Chena sank to her belly and began to crawl. Every fifty or so yards she stopped and mopped her face with a sponge soaked in her heavily scented goop. Her pack pressed her down into the rich earth. Her shoulders and arms protested each movement, and there were still a hundred yards to go.

  Panting, Chena closed her mind to the overwhelming distance and concentrated on the way in front of her.

  Knee, elbow, knee, elbow, breathe, breathe, breathe, don’t worry about the stink, don’t swat at the bugs, you might hit a camera, and that would alert somebody to something. God’s garden these straps pinch, knee, elbow, knee, elbow, knee, elbow …

  Finally, almost blind in the thickening darkness, Chena found herself nose to nose with a moss-coated support pillar of the Alpha Complex. She rested her cheek on a grassy hummock for a moment, just catching her breath. It was the same outside as it was inside. She was only safe as long as Aleph wasn’t paying attention to her. If she had actually bumped into the thing, the sensory subsystem might have alerted Aleph’s central consciousness, and it might have decided to look closely at what was nosing around out here, and that would have been the end of everything.