Summer Ruins

by Trisha Leigh

  Lucas, Pax, and I sit on the rider’s bench facing forward, and Carrej gets in the front, helping the nameless Warden navigate. There’s no way to keep track of time, and the relentless shades of twilight outside the windows do little to help. It’s not a short distance but eventually another terraformed bubble appears on the horizon.

  The rider pulls to a stop outside the hatch that leads inside and Carrej twists in his seat. “You, Air. Pax. Come with me.”

  He gets out of the rider without another word, though for some reason his use of Pax’s real name makes me feel a little better. I do not like the idea of them splitting us up, but Zakej did tell us we were here to work. We should be thankful they’re letting us stay together at night, even if it is some kind of trick to lull us into complacency.

  Pax looks as reluctant as I feel, but Carrej’s impatience vibrates through the cracks around the rider doors and I can tell we don’t have much time before he forces the issue.

  I squeeze Pax’s hand and give him a nudge toward the door. “It’ll be okay. We’ll see you back at the tent before dinner.”

  “I guess it’s time to earn our keep.” He gives me a weak version of his outrageous smile, then nods. “Remember what we talked about.”

  He doesn’t elaborate, but I know he’s referring to the conversation about not doing anything we don’t want to do. We have the power, even if it’s just the power to end our lives so that the Others can’t use us to hurt anyone else.

  Lucas nods beside me, the chill brushing my cheeks the only evidence that he understands. “Last resort, Pax. And only if it helps everyone, not just us. See you tonight.”

  Pax hesitates another moment, almost jumping into my lap when Carrej bangs on the door from the outside. We share a shaky laugh as he crawls out into the brutal wind and slams the door shut behind him.

  Carrej walks him inside, and they’re gone for about ten minutes before the Warden returns alone.

  The rider takes off for a second time, and Lucas and I sit quietly in the back holding hands. There’s nothing to talk about that we’d want them to hear. My stomach churns at the thought of spending the day by myself. Whatever goes on here, I’m pretty sure it’s going to hurt to watch it happen—not physically, but somewhere deeper, in a place that can’t be healed by a good night’s sleep or a mysterious salve.

  The next bubble appears, and I’d guess the three are about equidistant from one another. Carrej beckons me this time, and I don’t dawdle, figuring getting it over with quickly is the best way to go. I brush a light kiss on Lucas’s cheek, and he squeezes my hand.

  “You can handle it.” His eyes are serious, and even though he’s usually overly protective of me, I can see that he believes his words.

  I can also see that he doesn’t want to let me go.

  “I know. See you tonight,” I respond, sliding out into the freezing cold.

  Chapter 13.

  Carrej doesn’t speak until the entrance is air locked behind us. I drop the barrier of warmth, making it easier for me to concentrate when he starts explaining.

  “You’ll be supervising the mine while you’re here. It’s not hard work, except for being on your feet for sixteen hours a day, but I think you can handle it.” His eyes roam from my hair to my toes, but it doesn’t feel icky the way some of the Wardens manage. More like he’s genuinely assessing my ability to keep up. Whatever he sees makes him give me an approving nod, and he hands me a whip. “Here. In case anyone gives you trouble.”

  “I’m not taking that.”

  He stares at me, exasperated. “Give me a break, little girl. You’re not fooling me with the I’m-too-sweet-and-innocent-to-step-on-a-few-bugs-if-they-muck-up-my-day face.”

  I cross my arms, trying to contain the anger licking at my belly. “Well, if you’ve heard so much about me, then surely you realize I don’t need some stupid weapon to keep people in line.” He flinches away from me when I jerk my hands up, palms out, and I laugh. It comes as a surprise that I can laugh at someone who’s genuinely scared of me, and for a moment it takes me aback. I shake it off. Pax is right. We have precious little leverage here and it’s not going to benefit anyone to not use it.

  I poke him in the chest for good measure. “I’m going down there because I don’t have a choice. But people are not bugs, Carrej. Don’t ever talk about them like that in front of me again.”

  “The Prime said to punish you for any behavior or speech that disparages your Deasupran roots in favor of your human ones.”

  The bravado on his face doesn’t fool me, and even though it pains me to stare, I do it anyway. “So punish me, Carrej. I dare you.”

  He doesn’t move. We square off for a full minute until his shoulders sag and he turns away. I almost feel bad for making him feel like less of a tough-guy Warden, but not enough to apologize. Instead we’re quiet as we trek from the front of the terraform to the back.

  “What are these things called? The bubbles.” I just want him to talk again.

  He doesn’t turn or look at me, as though he’s considering giving me the silent treatment instead of an answer. “We didn’t make them.”

  “So they don’t have names? Were they here before you came?” The questions kind of tumble out unintentionally, but a Warden has never been in my presence without trying to kill me before—except for Nat—so this is a rare opportunity.

  “The Haidans built them and call them igloos. It’s an English word, though. Their language doesn’t translate very well.”

  “Let me guess, more half-breeds left over from twisted experimentation?”

  This time he does ignore me, but at least I have a better word than bubble or terraform, which I don’t like. My own question makes me wonder. These half-Haidans choose to travel with the Others and follow orders, preferring their task to the alternative of not existing. Maybe we’re making the wrong call.

  Nothing has ever scared me as much as the thought of winking out of existence.

  Carrej yanks open a flimsy wooden door on the front of an even flimsier-looking shack. It’s shabbier than the one I lived in during my time in the Iowa Wilds, and that’s saying something. There’s nothing inside except a giant square hole in the ground and a bunch of cables and pulleys leading down into the darkness.

  There’s a black button in the floor that reminds me of the ones that open the boundary fences outside the Sanctioned Cities, and Carrej steps on it, a sour look on his face as though he tastes something horrible. Like the chickpeas the Clarks forced down my throat at least three days a week.

  “You know I wouldn’t have hurt you back there,” I confess.

  “Oh, yeah? Why not?” Carrej shoots me a look out of the corner of his eye, the black emptiness of his gaze sliding over me. It leaves behind a feeling as uncomfortable as the acid residue from their creepy slugs.

  His response seems to acknowledge that I have every reason to hurt him, and he’s surely heard the stories of the things we’ve done to other Wardens. The things I’ve done. Melted their skin, lit them on fire. But they never die.

  Which I can see is going to become more and more of a problem.

  “Because you’ve never done anything to me. And here we are, alone, and you’re not trying to kill me. So why would I try to kill you?”

  Any emotion that might have been threatening washes out of him with an incredulous snort and he leans forward, invading my space and sending fear tingling down my spine. “That attitude is exactly why you and your little friends can’t win.”

  A box creaks upward from the depths of the hole before I can formulate a response. My mouth remains dry no matter how many times I swallow. It was a mistake to let him see I was bluffing earlier, I can see that now. It’s not my instinct to hurt or scare people. No matter how badly I wish I could change that fact, there’s no way to alter the way I’m put together.

  I need to find a way to accept the inevitability of what’s ahead. The fact that winning means killing a few Others—or even that some people
I care about might die in the process—is common sense.

  My brain goes blank when the box grinds to a halt, its roof even with the hole in the floor. Carrej kneels and slides a door open in the top, leaving an opening just big enough for a person to drop through one at a time. He motions for me to go first, and my claustrophobia starts to whimper.

  A ball of fire flickers to life in my palm, backing Carrej up a few steps. Maybe he’s not totally convinced of my goodness, after all. Not enough to trust me.

  I drop to my knees on the slippery ground, feeling a slight chill from the ice underneath the igloo. The hand that drops into the container shakes a little, but the light reveals that it’s exactly what it looks like from above. A simple wooden box, big enough for about five human beings, if they squish. At least there are only two of us.

  “Well, get in.” Carrej barks the command, but he sounds tired.

  Maybe he’s claustrophobic, too.

  Because there’s nothing to be gained from arguing, I let the fireball extinguish and fall to my butt, dangling my feet into the darkness, then slide down until my hands grasp the edges of the hatch in the ceiling before dropping the rest of the way. It jars my knees and teeth a little, nothing too painful, but it makes me wonder why they couldn’t design a more sophisticated system for getting underground.

  The Others have sleek riders, weapons that shoot acidic slugs, and machines that wipe human minds and replace their memories with clean, fresh ones. They drain bad emotions every summer at the Summer Celebration and no one suspects a thing.

  But to extract whatever element they need to survive, they build a wooden box that creaks and shudders into the darkness as though it’s going to splinter into pieces any second.

  At the bottom, we step out into a murky gloom. Single light bulbs swing from the roof on cords, the same way they do in the tenements in the igloos. They cast eerie shadows on the walls, which are carved from dirt and dark rock threaded with varying shades of silver and yellow. The tunnel reaches only a few feet above my head and nearly scrapes the top of Carrej’s hair.

  The rock smells wet and glistens as though water or snow runs down its surface, but when I reach out to touch it, it’s only cold. Each step is a battle with my claustrophobia. It never afflicted me before the first time I hopped in a rider, but ever since that night it’s been an occasional annoyance.

  At the end of a short passage, we turn right.

  “This is the main arm of this mine.” Carrej doesn’t turn to look at me, and his voice is muffled; the rocks absorb it as though it’s essential to their survival.

  “What’s a mine?”

  “This. A place where you take metals, precious stones, or whatever out of the ground.” This time he does shoot a look at me over his shoulder. “Are you always this annoying with the questions?”

  “Probably.” I try a smile. “So are you and I in charge of this mine or what?”

  “There are approximately ten thousand dusters—I’m sorry, humans—in this mine alone, so no. You and I are not in charge of all of them. There’s one supervisor for every thousand people. You patrol all day. No breaks. Up and down, make sure everyone’s working and no one’s talking. Count them three times a day—morning, midday, night—to make sure everyone’s here and no one drops out of sight.” He stops talking when we round a corner.

  People clad in their tattered brown rags line both sides of a corridor that’s slightly wider and taller than the one we just left. They’re working with hand tools, sharp silver instruments, and shovels, plus more stuff I’ve never seen before, and the sound of metal hitting rock clinks over and over until it fills the air with a cacophony of strange music.

  They peck and slash at the rock walls. When chunks of rock tumble loose and clatter to the floor, the people kick them away and continue working. A few minutes later a group of children, all Primer Cell age, push a giant metal bin down the line, gathering the rock pieces. The rocky chunks hit the bottom of the bin with loud clangs at first, but as they move farther and gather more, the rocks hit with quiet thuds instead.

  It’s not cold or hot, but alternating blasts of both, and the stench of body odor and sweat wrinkles my nose. It’s freezing underground, but the people packed together expel enough heat that some of them sport a sheen of sweat.

  “They’ll gather the samples all day, and the children empty the bins into elevators like the one we took down. Select groups are assigned to pull the rocks up to the surface, then they’re transferred to a fifth igloo, smaller than these, where the necessary particles are extracted.”

  “What particles?” It’s a long shot; they can’t tell me the name of their sustaining force.

  I give Carrej a mocking smile when he swallows and glares.

  “You know I can’t tell you. Not that I would, anyway.”

  “I know. I just wanted to remind you that you’re not better than any of these people. You’re as trapped as they are.”

  He ignores me, but the way his jaw clenches tells me I’m at least bugging him. “It’s the way we are built. It’s not anything the Prime does to us on purpose—we’re born with the inherent ability to protect our species. Perhaps if humans were as highly evolved, this wouldn’t have happened on Earth.”

  “Whatever. So, is this hallway my area or what?” I’m tired of sparring with him. Being alone with the humans seems like a pretty good thing right now, although being stuffed in this awful hole with a thousand bodies sweating in silence for the next fourteen hours won’t be fun.

  “Yes. This is the Southeast Main in Station Three.”

  “You guys really busted your brains coming up with names, huh?”

  “This was actually a base station used by the humans for scientific research at one time, and the lab where we do the extraction was also part of that—there are several more on this continent, actually, but they weren’t geographically compatible with our needs. We developed the other three stations after we arrived.” He gives me all the information without my prying, and it’s like a handful of gifts.

  It may not mean anything, but it’s knowledge. I tuck it away for later. “What did this igloo used to be called?”

  “Vostok.”

  “What’s a continent?”

  He rolls his eyes. “A big landmass. Earth has seven.”

  Carrej walks away before I can ask any follow-up questions, even though about a hundred push their way to the front of my mind. No further instruction is necessary, I suppose. Instead of focusing on the fact that I’m walking who knows how far underground with only one tiny way out, I start patrolling the line, doing my first count along the way.

  At first I’m not going to count them, but it occurs to me that it’s as much for their safety as the Warden’s control. If one of them were hurt or if one of the children wandered away, we wouldn’t want to return to the top and leave them here overnight.

  So I count.

  I get to six hundred before I recognize Reese. The memory of how her hand bled from the frozen beaker in chemistry, red blood pooling on the desk, burns my stomach. Her hair, which I remember as sunny blond, is dirty and covered with gray dust. She swings a sharp axelike object at the wall, not making any discernible progress.

  As she pauses to wipe her brow she catches sight of me and turns, her mouth open. “Althea?”

  It’s louder than she probably intended, evidenced in the way her eyes dart up and down the row. A few people on either side of her take notice and frown, their eyes cutting toward me, but they go back to work when I ignore them. “Hi, Reese.”

  “What are you doing here? Why are you supervising?” The questions are accusing, and the harsh whisper hurts my ears.

  “It’s kind of a long story. I saw Emmy last night.”

  “You did? She’s still alive?” Her brown eyes, so dark they’re almost as black as the Others’, fill with tears.

  It’s still so strange to me to witness such natural emotion in the stoic kids I grew up with. It’s unsettling, even
though it should make me happy. It means they can’t protect themselves from getting hurt, or from being irreparably damaged from this experience. “She’s good. Her hair’s really short.”

  “We heard they had some kind of infestation in Station One a few months ago and they shaved everyone’s head.” She shudders. “Not that it matters. I guess we won’t be Partnering at the end of the last year, huh?”

  I give her a weak smile. “I guess not.”

  We’re attracting attention, and there’s no way to know how many of these people would sell us out if they thought getting on the Others’ good side would earn them an extra meal or a day not spent underground. They know nothing of our fight—or that if we lose, they’ll forfeit what’s left of their lives—and there are simply too many people down here to make telling them all at once a feasible tactic.

  Not to mention there’s nowhere to go, according to Lucas.

  Reese seems to realize people are watching, too. Color drains out of her face, and the dirt streaking it seems darker by comparison. She turns to get back to work, and as much as I want to tell her what’s going on, I continue walking. The safest thing to do would be wait a few days to determine if they’re always going to leave me alone with the same group, then maybe try to find a way to sneak a note into her pocket or something.

  But that’s no good, either. What if she gets caught with it?

  It’s something Lucas would think, and the fact makes me smile and punches me with fear at the same time. I know they won’t hurt us, especially not him since they need him to stabilize the ice, but it doesn’t stop me from worrying.

  The rest of the day creeps past slower than any Cell day I ever experienced. The children have carted countless bins of mined rock to the elevators, and the smell of sweating bodies has gotten worse. I walked up and down the path for hours and hours, making up stories about different people to pass the time. The desire to pick up a tool and work beside them for a while, just to loose some energy from my jittery limbs, pushes forward, but it might not be allowed. It’s only my first day. No sense in rocking the boat before I survey the sea.