“Was it difficult for you to believe?” Ronja asked, finally swiveling to view her companion.
Roark smiled, but it did not reach his eyes.
“Not at all, but my situation was rather different.”
“How?”
He shook his head forcefully. A stray strand of hair flopped into his eyes. He flicked it back with an aggravated twitch of his fingers. “Another time,” he said. “Right now, I want to hear about you.”
Ronja leaned back in her chair, blew out a puff of air through her nose. “Yes,” she replied, and was startled to realize that it was true. “I do. I have no real reason to doubt it and . . . it feels like the truth. Maybe it helps that my head is so much clearer now that . . . ” Ronja reached up and brushed the mangled remains of her ear. Pain prickled beneath her fingertips, but it was nothing compared to the brutal notes of The Music.
“You look like you need some of your pain meds,” Roark noted.
“Yeah,” Ronja replied, relieved he had changed the subject.
“I’ll take you back to your room,” he offered.
Roark got to his feet and stretched his arms above his head with a groan. He let them plummet with a crunch of leather. “You should take your antibiotics too, or Iris will start mashing them up in your food.”
As soon as they exited the suffocating room, Ronja felt a good deal of her anxiety leak away. The Belly was full of exotic aromas and bizarre spectacles, but, more importantly, abundant space.
Word of her induction had spread like wildfire in the few minutes since the meeting ended. The people of the Belly kept their distance, but offered quick words of welcome as they passed. Ronja’s stomach fluttered each time someone said “welcome” or “congratulations.” She tried to respond each time by thanking them, but usually stumbled over her words.
“How can they be so sure of me?” she asked Roark after an elderly woman with a hunched back and hair like steel wool attempted to kiss her cheeks.
Roark had shooed her away gently, claiming Ronja’s injuries were still bothering her. “They aren’t,” Roark said, waving at the woman over his shoulder. “They’re just hopeful. It’s not every day we get new blood down here.”
“They don’t know me.”
“Good thing, too, or you’d have been topside days ago.”
Ronja rammed the boy with her shoulder, nearly causing him to careen into a man balancing a ludicrously tall stack of books.
“You’re stronger than you look, Ronja,” he laughed, massaging his shoulder tenderly.
Ronja shrugged. “Had to be, I guess,” she replied offhandedly, sidestepping a barrel-chested man toting a toddler. “Did you just call me by my name?”
It was Roark’s turn to shrug. “You’re the only one who calls me by my real name. I figured I could return the favor once and awhile.”
“Why don’t you use your first name?” Ronja asked, stepping around a couple entwined in a rather compromising embrace.
“I hate it.”
Ronja eyed the boy sidelong. His jaw was abruptly stiff, and he stared ahead blankly. “Why?” she prodded carefully.
Roark blinked. He snapped his gaze back to Ronja, and the fog clouding his pupils dispersed. He forced a laugh through his stiff mouth. “It’s about a century old and a syllable longer, you’d hate it.”
It was a weak excuse, but Ronja let it be. She was not being completely honest about her own past, so why should Roark feel obligated to be? They had known each other for less than a week, and she had been comatose for most of it.
The thought nearly made her stumble. She felt as though she had known Roark as long as her own reflection. Perhaps it had something to do with her newly-uninhibited emotions.
That’s right, she realized dimly. I can feel whatever I want.
A streak of color fractured her thoughts. Ronja came to a grinding halt as two children, a boy and a girl barely hip high, tore across their path. She watched them as they darted down the walkway. The girl was faster than the boy, her coarse braids always an inch out of his reach. Both the children and their shrieks of delight were swallowed by the crowd as quickly as they had emerged.
“What?” Roark asked.
Ronja blinked rapidly. “I don’t remember the last time I saw kids playing like that.”
Ronja had played games as a child—or rather, she had been used in games. A class favorite was mutt and catcher. That usually ended badly.
“Here you are,” Roark said, nodding at the curtained doorway to her room.
Ronja looked up in surprise. She had not noticed they had arrived.
“You should get some sleep; you look like you could use it.”
“You expect me to sleep?” she inquired doubtfully. “I just joined a highly illegal revolution in an abandoned subtrain station and you expect me to take a nap?”
“You’re still recovering,” Roark said seriously. “Trust me, when you lie down, you’ll be able to fall asleep.”
Ronja nodded, but remained skeptical. The boy gave her a lazy salute and started to back away.
“Where are you going?” she called after him.
“I have an errand to run. I’ll be back later tonight,” he reassured her.
“What happens tonight?”
Roark grinned, and the laden air of the Belly was suddenly thin.
“You’ll see. Get some sleep.”
Ronja ducked into the bedroom. For a time she stood still, gazing at the cot with dull eyes. As inviting as it looked, she could not bring herself to succumb to sleep.
Instead, she rinsed her face in the basin of clean water that had been placed beside her bed. She washed down one of the antibiotic tablets and two pain pills with water and a hunk of sourdough, which someone (presumably Iris) had left at the foot of the bed. She reminded herself to thank the surgeon for the bread, which was some of the best she had ever tasted.
Her stomach full and her pain preparing to subside, Ronja began the arduous task of untangling her matted locks with the comb she discovered in the drawer. Ten minutes later her hair was still winning the battle, so she surrendered and twisted it into a knot. The bun perched atop her crown in victory.
Feeling somewhat revived, Ronja ventured out into the Belly.
There was something invigorating about the handmade city. It reminded her of the moving pictures of old Revinia that Ito had shown her, but it was even better.
It was real.
The mammoth platform appeared to be the heart of the miniature metropolis, though the tunnels also throbbed with activity. Narrow paths threaded between the squat homes. The platform was flanked by two rows of proud brick columns like shading trees. Some bore stunning murals: tranquil faces as tall as Ronja, rural and urban landscapes, swaths of roiling color that served no purpose but made her shiver with strange delight. The dual flights of steps that once led to the surface now served as bleachers on which Anthemites relaxed in clusters. From afar they reminded Ronja of birds on telephone wires.
Members of the Anthem roamed freely, channeled by the winding walkways. The vast majority bore faint scars on their ears and temples, but some of the children and teenagers did not. They had never worn Singers. Never heard The Music. Their freedom was absolute, unquestionable. It was almost dizzying.
Iris was not lying when she told Ronja there were others who had suffered unconventional amputations. As she walked, Ronja came across a one-eared woman with cropped blond hair. She seemed to wear her puckered scar as a badge of honor, going so far as to shave the area around the old wound.
Ronja was watching the girl disappear into the crowd when she slammed into an elderly man lugging a potted plant. With a cry of shock he lost his grip on the foliage and its hollow home. The clay shattered on the floor, and a cloud of silence settled over the area.
Ronja closed her eyes, bracing her body and mind for the slough of insults.
“Are you all right?”
Ronja cracked an eyelid.
The man was peeri
ng at her with wide, concerned eyes, ignoring the clay shards and black soil at his feet.
“I . . . ” Ronja looked about anxiously.
The onlookers had returned to their tasks after the brief hiccup. They appeared entirely unconcerned with the incident.
“Are you hurt?” the man prompted.
“N . . . no . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
The man waved her off and crouched before the mess, knees popping. A hiss of pain escaped through his teeth. Ronja knelt quickly and began to scoop the chunks of dirt into a more manageable pile.
“Don’t worry about it,” the man said, waving a wrinkled hand dismissively. “You young people are always moving so fast. Old men like me don’t mind a slow task.”
“It’s no problem,” Ronja replied hastily. She reached out and scooped the homeless plant from the flagstones. “The roots are all intact. If we get it back into soil, it should be fine,” she assured him.
The man glanced up. He smiled at her as one might smile at an old photograph. “Are you a gardener, my dear?”
“My sister is,” Ronja replied absently, brushing earth from the fragile leaves. “Do you have another pot?”
“Yes, right over there,” the man pointed at a nearby tent with a sagging roof. “There’s a crate by the entrance, could you get it for me?”
Ronja rose, swiftly brushing the dirt from her knees. She retrieved the wooden crate and set it before the man, then crouched alongside him again to help scrape the damp soil into the box.
“Where is your sister now?” the man asked, dumping a handful of black earth into the crate.
“Up there,” Ronja gestured to the ceiling that cloaked the sky. “Hopefully at school.”
“I find that hard to believe,” he admitted with a glance at his watch. “Considering it’s nearly seven-thirty in the evening.”
“Really?” Ronja craned her neck to view his timepiece. It was of surprisingly fine make. The numbers were inlaid with gold, and the hands laced with silver.
The man chuckled, a sound peppered with nostalgia. “I nicked it when I was a boy,” he said, admiring his watch. “Singer and all.”
Surprise knocked a grin onto Ronja’s face. “No skitz?”
The man mirrored her smile. His teeth were corroded and yellow, but his eyes were flush with youth. “I was a fantastic pickpocket, I’ll tell you what. I could snag a wallet from a man’s jacket and put it back without him feeling a thing. I would do that once in a while, get the wallet, snag the cash, then put it back empty just to see if I could.” The man itched his balding head. “Of course, that’s how the Offs got me in the end.”
Ronja laughed. She rubbed her hands together to clean them. Most of the soil they had managed to scrape into the fresh container. The rest had tucked itself into the cracks between the flagstones.
“Thank you for the help, Ms . . . ”
“Ronja,” she said, shooting to her feet and extending her earth-stained hand for the old man to grasp.
“Very nice to meet you, Ms. Ronja.”
He took her hand with his age-rumpled digits and allowed her to help him up. He smiled softly. “May I?” He gestured to her forehead with two fingers.
“Oh, umm . . . ”
“It is a gesture of good fortune,” the man explained, his fingers outstretched.
“Oh, okay. Sure.”
Ronja dipped her head awkwardly. The elderly man touched the center of her brow with two fingertips.
“May your song guide you home,” he said gently.
Ronja opened her eyes, a niche forming between her eyebrows. The man was already hefting the newly potted plant from the floor.
“See you tonight,” he said cheerily.
Ronja nodded mutely, baffled.
When she saw that the old man had safely completed the fifteen-yard marathon to his home, Ronja continued to wander the Belly. Though it was tiny compared to the sprawling metropolis she had grown up in, it was infinitely more intricate. If Revinia was a bare-bones sketch, the Belly was an elaborate tapestry.
Cook fires, which dotted the landscape and radiated intoxicating aromas, seemed to be constant and communal. Each fire was ringed with Anthemites of every age and race. They passed dishes heaped with steaming food, read aloud from fat books, told stories animatedly. The vents that had once powered the station had been retrofitted to inhale smoke; she could hear their steady drone above the babel.
Ronja discerned that each family was allotted a plot of land on which they built their home from whatever materials they could scavenge. Many slept in large, drooping tents. Others had crafted huts from construction scrap. Underground, they did not need to be protected from the elements, so Ronja assumed the barriers were mostly to preserve privacy.
Though that seems rather pointless, she thought.
Life bled into life in the subterranean community. Ronja had already seen dozens of children in the Belly, something she found rather curious. Barefoot and lithe as cats, they darted from house to house, family to family, in packs of three or four. It was impossible to discern who was blood and who was not, and even harder to tell which children belonged to which parents, or if they had parents at all.
As Ronja watched, a group of three scrawny boys a bit younger than Georgie pounced on a woman stoking a fire, their sticky fingers grabbing at the bowl she had set on the brick hearth. The woman spun expertly and swatted them away with a rag. The boys bolted, cackling. The woman shook her head, but even from across the road Ronja could see she was smothering a chuckle.
An explosion of riotous laughter erupted to her left. Sudden panic knifed through her, and Ronja tripped backward over her feet.
When her spine struck the floor, she was no longer in the Belly.
She was six. She wore a jumper and nearly-matching stockings. It was lunchtime at school, but she did not have a meal. Layla had passed out on the couch in a virtual coma the night before, a bottle of vodka hollowed out on the floor next to her. Ronja had managed to find a hunk of bread in the cabinet, but had given it to Cosmin. She sat at the long table, drinking the milk provided by the school with fervor, sucking each calorie out of the soggy carton. Two girls with clean platinum braids snickered at her over the tops of their crisp sandwiches.
She was seven. Lying awake in bed, The Night Song roaring in her ear. She had been naughty that day, stolen an apple from a stall, eaten it in the alley next to her house.
Ronja crashed back into her body, gasping for air and steeped in sweat. A ring of faces orbited her tilting vision.
“Hel—” she gasped.
Her memories buried their hooks in her again.
Six months after the apple. Her first true migraine happened in the middle of history class. She had spoken out against something her teacher had said, something about The Conductor. White lights swarmed in her vision, and she had cried out. The other children laughed. The teacher averted his eyes.
She was ten. She had locked the bathroom door, crawled to the top of the sink. She sat cross-legged in the shallow basin, staring into the foggy mirror. The skin on her face was taut and pale as parchment. She was crying, tugging at her scalp. Chunks of her dark curls were coming out in her hands. She thought she was turning into a mutt. She had watched her mother’s hair thin rapidly, her nails flake from their beds. She did not realize that these were also the symptoms of starvation.
She was twelve. Her right eye was swollen shut. Blood poured from her nose. Sharp pain ruptured in her ribs each time she inhaled. The boys had jumped her out of nowhere, pinned her to the brick wall. People trudged past, looked into her face, then away. The smallest boy stood guard at the mouth of the alley.
She was fourteen. She had turned in her textbooks and applied for a job as a driver. Scrawny though she was, she was tall for her age, and easily passed for the minimum age of sixteen. She cried as she exited the school, despite being relieved to escape the torment she had endured. She had seen far too many people abandon their education
, and it never turned out well.
She was fifteen. She was dreaming of running through a field somewhere far away when The Night Song woke her with a series of stabbing notes. She choked down a scream by stuffing her face into her pillow. She did not know what she had done wrong.
She was sixteen, driving a steamer through endless branches of tunnels. A messenger tapped on the window of her car when she came to a stop in a station, telling her to go home immediately. She ran all the way across the city, abandoning her post and her paycheck, imagining the worst. When she arrived home, she found that Layla had discovered a library book under her pillow, wanted to know why she was wasting her time on such ridiculous things.
“Come back to us, mate.”
Ronja blinked.
The world fell back into place. Each brick settled into the mortar, each tent flapped and stilled. The halo of faces above her stopped spinning. Half a dozen sets of eyes gazed down at her.
“I’m—” Ronja heaved, trying to force her apology through her tight chest.
“The memories will settle out with time,” a voice to her left said.
Ronja shifted to view the speaker.
It was a girl about her age with thick black hair chopped at her cheekbones. Her features were plain, but her eyes were the color of dark honey and her skin was tan and smooth. She wore a green jumpsuit smudged with grease. The top was knotted at her waist, revealing a tank top and lean, muscular arms. The emblem of the Anthem was tattooed over her heart, and fine, intricate designs decorated her long fingers.
“A lot of us have been through it,” the girl continued, kneeling next to Ronja and holding her stare as it attempted to reel back into the past. “Nothing to be ashamed of. You’re seeing things as they were for the first time, bit of a skitzing shock if you ask me. You want to talk about it?”
Ronja rocked her head back and forth against the hard floor. She did not think she had the words.
“All right, but it does help. You ought to go get some sleep. Big night tonight.”
Ronja nodded mutely.
The dark-haired girl gave a crooked smile.
“I’m Evie. You’re Ronja, right?”
Vinyl: Book One of the Vinyl Trilogy Page 12
