by H. A. Swain
“What am I going to do?” I slide down to the floor and wrap my arms around my knees.
“Child, you have a way to make that money.” Tati looks down at me, hands on hips, shaking her head.
“No way,” I say, peering up at her. “Putting on a concert is the reason Nonda went missing in the first place.”
“No, it’s not,” says Tati. “That was bound to happen sooner or later. Maybe while you were at work or out with Brie. What Nonda needs now is to be in a doctor’s care and putting on a concert will get her that.”
“But Medgers has her eye on me and with those private investigators snooping around—”
“First off, Medgers is an idiot.” Tati reaches down and pulls me to my feet. “And those investigators aren’t interested in you. They’re off trying to find Calliope Bontempi. Buncha dumb-asses.”
My stomach churns. “But if I get caught…”
“You won’t get caught. I got your back.” She gives me a reassuring pat. “I’ll make sure there’s a distraction in the PODPlex to keep security busy during the show.”
As I think it over, a swirl of excitement eddies through my body at the thought of being on stage again. Plus, Tati’s right—making music didn’t get me into this mess, but it can get me out of it.
“Okay,” I say. “So, you’ll get the word out, then? 7:45. Half-hour show. That gives me plenty of time to get to the MediPlex and pay.”
“Got it,” says Tati. She goes back to digging through the bin. “Aha!” she says and holds up a strange floppy glove with an unblinking eyeball in the center. “My latest invention: a camera glove. I see people wearing something like this in the City. I took apart that old video cam orb you brought me and attached it to the palm, then wired it up through the fingers and back of the hand so you can wear it instead of holding it.”
“And it’ll connect to the laptop?” I ask as I examine her clever invention.
“Only one way to find out,” Tati says with a wink. “I hear there’s a LiveStream tomorrow night.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t…” I say.
“Shoulds are for sissies,” Tati tells me. “And besides, when has that ever stopped you before?”
I grin because I know she’s right. There’s a rebellious streak in me, surely inherited from my mother. Seeing Nobody from Nowhere scrawled on the bathroom stall door in the warehouse, then yesterday on the wall by the Y.A.R.D. fuels it. Hearing Veronica, Rhiannon, and Jolene describe the hijacking at the Strip or lying to Smythe and Beauregarde while Medgers stood by makes it burn brighter. Listening to Dr. Garcia try to find my melody makes me want to sing out loud and sing out strong for everyone else to hear.
I pull on the glove. “It’s perfect,” I say.
“And it’s all right there,” says Tati, touching the eye. “In the palm of your hand.”
* * *
Back on my bike, with the camera glove safely inside my bag, I ride along the river path toward the PODPlex to meet Brie. Finally our schedules have collided. A day off for her, a free evening for me. Which is a mighty good thing because I have so much to tell her I’m about to burst.
As I come to the curve in the path where Nowhere hides, I see the silhouette of a person illuminated from behind by the sun cresting over the treetops. I squeeze the brakes to slow down but I’m going too fast and the curve is too sharp. “Watch out!” I yell and skid.
The person spins around. Goes right then left, but can’t seem to decide. I lean hard to swerve but the wheels go out from under me. I fall with the bike, sliding through the gravel and dirt. My back tire swipes the person’s leg. Pebbles grind into my calf. My elbow hits a rock. A cloud of dust kicks up all around us as our bodies tangle with the bike.
“Sorry! Sorry! Are you okay?” I yell.
“I’m fine,” the guy says as he gets to his feet and brushes himself off.
His voice is familiar. I squint up and get a twinge in my belly when I see Aimery.
“Zimri?” he says, clearly confused, but then he smiles big and broad.
“A little help here?” I struggle to get my pant leg free from the bike chain. He squats and spins the pedals but only makes it worse. “Other way!” I swat at his hand and notice that he’s wearing a strange glove. The fingers are a soft flesh-colored mesh with black tips at the ends but the back has a beautiful glowing dark purple shell. I reach out to touch it. “What the…?”
He quickly hides his hand behind his back and uses his other hand to turn the pedals. “There!” he says when my pant leg comes loose. “You’re free. But you’re bleeding.” He points to my elbow as he helps me to my feet.
I turn my arm this way and that, trying to get a good look at the scrape.
“Here.” He slips off the weird glove, shoves it in his pocket, and pulls out a small packet of thick soft cloths, each imprinted with a painting. I’ve seen them in the warehouse, packed them many times, but they’ve never been on sale at Black Friday. I wonder if he stole them. “Try this.” He hands me one that looks like mushrooms on a decaying tree.
“You’ve got a rip,” I tell him as I dab at the blood.
“Crap.” He pokes a finger through the hole at his knee.
“No offense,” I say. “But don’t you have any other clothes? You’ve been wearing the same thing all week.”
Aimery shakes his legs and tries to brush more dirt away from his pants but there’s not much good he can do. “I’d be fine if a certain person wasn’t trying to kill me with her bike. Why were you going so fast?”
“Why were you standing in the middle of the path?” I ask. “Hardly anybody but me comes out here anymore.” Dorian flashes in my mind. We weren’t far from here when we kissed. Everything seems so different in the light.
“You know, just looking at the river.” Aimery gestures awkwardly toward the water. “It’s very pretty.”
I draw in a deep breath, pulling river air into my lungs to calm myself down after the bicycle wreck. “It’s the one nice thing Corp X couldn’t buy and destroy when they came.”
Aimery’s eyebrows shoot up.
“It’s true,” I tell him. “They bought up most of the land and businesses and houses, then plowed them down to build the Community of the Future!” I say in a booming voice. “Now everyone’s a corporate drone unless you live in Old Town.”
“Old Town?” he asks.
I point back over my shoulder.
“Is that where you were coming from in such a hurry?”
“Sorta,” I say. “First I visited my grandmother. She’s in a MediPlex.”
“She … what…?” he says. “In a MediPlex?” His face contorts as if he’s trying to do a math problem. “Is that why you needed to leave work today?”
“Yes and thank you,” I say, embarrassed by the fracas in the warehouse. “I tried to find you afterward but you were surrounded by all your adoring admirers,” I tease him.
“Oh, please!” He waves away my gratitude. “I owed you one. Or twelve. You’ve stood up for me plenty with Rude Jude when he crawls up my butt about my lousy times. He’s a real piece of work, isn’t he?”
I lift the cloth to check my elbow. The bleeding has nearly stopped. “Yeah, well, he’s the piece of work we all work for, so…”
“Actually,” says Aimery, “you all work for Corporation Xian Jai, and they might be very interested to know how a guy like that is running the place.”
“Are you a mole?” I blurt out.
“A mole?” he asks, confused. “Is that like a squimonk?” He tucks his bottom lip under top teeth and pretends to nibble on a nut.
“No!” I laugh. “I mean a corporate spy. Sent here by Corp X to check up on the warehouse.”
This time, Aimery laughs long and hard. His voice echoes across the riverbank and back. “What would make you think that?”
“That’s what Jude thinks,” I tell him and kick at rocks on the path.
“That makes sense,” he says sarcastically. “Because he’s an idiot and that�
�s idiotic.”
“Are you a rabble-rouser?”
“A what-the-whatter?”
“You know, one of those people who infiltrates and tries to get warehouse workers to band together? What did they used to call it? Unionizing or something?”
“I didn’t know that was a thing.”
I fold up the soft cloth he gave me. “Do you want this back?” I ask. “I’m not sure I can get the bloodstains out.”
“Gross, no,” he says. “It’s disposable. Throw it away.”
“Something this nice?” I say. “I’ll wash it.” I put it in my pocket. “So, if you’re not a mole or a rabble-rouser, what are you doing here?”
“Working,” he says. “Like everybody else.”
I scoff. “You’re hardly like everybody else.”
“Neither are you,” he says and I start to protest but he cuts me off. “I mean that as a compliment.”
Butterflies stir in my stomach.
“So your grandmother,” he asks suddenly. “Is she okay? The other day the security officer came and you seemed worried and then today you were hurrying off and…”
“It’s not a great situation,” I admit.
“I’m sorry,” he says and steps closer. The sun is beginning to wane and shadow-trees creep across the path toward us. “I know what it’s like to worry about someone you love when they’re not well.”
“You do?”
“My sister’s been in a MediPlex since I was really young.”
“At the MediPlex here?” I reach out to comfort him but then I stop because that might seem weird. Like nearly everyone in the warehouse, I feel drawn to Aimery. I’ve seen what happens when he goes down the aisles. People stop and stare because he’s somehow inexplicably fabulous. He doesn’t look like us or talk like us or even walk like us. There’s something about him that makes everyone want to watch him. But the weird thing is, sometimes I find him watching me.
“No, not here,” he says. “MediPlex has facilities all over the place. She’s in one where I grew up.”
Before I can ask where that is, he says, “So your grandmother, is she going to be okay?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know,” I tell him, surprised by how easy it is to be honest just then.
He moves in closer. The temperature seems to drop and I get goose bumps on my arms. “How not okay is she?”
I hesitate, unsure whether it’s okay to confide in him, but there’s a part of me that’s ready to burst from keeping all the worry inside. For three days I’ve gotten up, gone to work, done my job, rushed to see her, and gotten home in time to shove down some food and fall in bed. And the only good part of those days has been Aimery. Every morning when I see him in the warehouse, I find myself smiling, glad to work near him again, even if he is horrible at his job. And he seems equally happy to see me. For the first time since Brie was switched to nights, my tenners have been fun again because I go outside with Aimery. We joke around and talk about all kinds of silly things like which snacks are better (Krispy Krab and Bakon Crickers or SalsaGhetti Squidoos) and what songs on the Buzz make us want to barf. I can make him belly laugh by imitating Ios’s butt-shaking “(Quark) Charmed, I’m Sure” song. The truth is, I feel a strange and intense comfort with Aimery that I don’t feel with anyone else but Brie, and before I know it, the words are spilling out as I pace back and forth, kicking up dust around my feet.
“I don’t know. It’s bad. She’s old and her memory is slipping and she wandered away and then someone found her and to make a long story short, they’re going to kick her out of the MediPlex tomorrow unless I come up with a boatload of cash that I don’t have.”
His mouth falls open. He looks horrified. “Where was she? Who found her?” His voice is urgent, like a little kid who needs to know the end of a story.
“We don’t know,” I tell him. “That’s the weird part. As best anyone can figure, some Plute was driving by the river and found her wandering in the road a few miles from here. She’s incredibly lucky. She could have been hit, or picked up by a maniac, or attacked by a coyolf, or fallen into the river.” I visibly shudder at the thousands of ways the story could have ended badly. I look out over the water to the other side of the river, then back at Aimery. “It’s probably the first time in history a Plute has ever done anything nice for a Plebe out here.”
He laughs, weird and nervous. “There are plenty of nice Plutes in the world!” he says loudly. “Maybe it wasn’t even a Plute that found her!”
I scoff. “He was definitely a Plute. The MediPlex people saw his car.”
“They did?” he asks, eyes wide.
“Yeah, but it was dark so they couldn’t say what kind it was.”
A little dragonfly zooms up between us and Aimery jumps. “Oh, no!” he yells and hides his face behind his arm.
“Take it easy!” I shoo the bug away. “It won’t hurt you. Dragonflies don’t sting like wasps and bees.”
“Oh wow, that was … it was…” He watches it fly off. “Real, wasn’t it?” He looks at me, amazed.
“As opposed to a fake dragonfly?” I raise an eyebrow at him.
“Ha, right, yeah. Forget it. I’m a little weirded out by bugs.”
“There are no bugs where you’re from?” I tease him.
“Not like that,” he says. Then he points to my bike. “Hey look, your handlebars are crooked.”
“Dang it!” I pick it up and work to straighten them. “Dorian just gave me this bike.”
“Is that the big tall dude with the arms?” He pretends to flex. “If I’d known it was your birthday—”
“My birthday?”
“I just figured since your boyfriend got you a present—”
“My boyfriend?” I squint at him. “Dorian is just a friend, an old friend,” I say, but a flush crawls up my chest and into my face. Friend doesn’t feel like the right word, but I can’t call him a boyfriend after just one quick kiss. “And what’s my birthday got to do with it?” I snarl, embarrassed by the conversation. “Are we five years old?”
Aimery blinks at me. “You mean, you haven’t gotten a birthday present since you were five?”
“Nobody does,” I tell him.
“Nobody?” he says and laughs. “From Nowhere?” Then he starts to hum.
A thrill hits me in the belly and I nearly drop the bike again. “Why are you singing that song? How do you know it?”
“There’s this thing.” He leans close and touches me on the shoulder, sending a ripple down my back. “Called radio. If you have a receiver, which is like a special box you buy on the black market, you can hear it. And sometimes people set up pirate stations.”
“I know what pirate radio is! But when did you hear that song?”
“I’ve heard it a few times,” he tells me. “A couple of days ago late at night. Then last night DJ HiJax played it.”
“DJ HiJax!” I blink at him, disbelieving.
“He’s been playing it a lot. If you want, I’ll show you my receiver.” He wiggles his eyebrows, but I just stare at him, speechless. “You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I tell him slowly, trying to puzzle through what’s going on, but it makes no sense. “It’s been a weird day, that’s all. I should get going. I have somewhere I need to be. See you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” he asks, confused.
“Work,” I say. “Remember? That job you have in the warehouse, just like everybody else?”
“Oh, that,” he says, but looks uncertain.
“You’re not thinking of ditching, are you? Because Ajax will put you on nights if you miss a shift. And if you think working days sucks…”
He looks everywhere but at me. “I … um … yeah … we’ll see,” he mutters.
I figure that’s the best answer I’ll get out of him and I shouldn’t be surprised. People come and go all the time around here. But I’m glad the light is waning because my face burns bright at the thought of not seeing him. I sling my leg over the seat and sa
y, “See you around.”
“Good-bye,” he calls after me as I head off toward the PODPlex in search of Brie, wondering what Aimery’s not telling me.
ORPHEUS
After Zimri slams into me with her bike, then zooms around the curve in the river, disappearing beneath the trees, I stay in the middle of the path. Stuck. I was all set to get the hell out of here. This afternoon in the warehouse when Rude Jude was harassing Zimri, I knew my experiment in Plebeland needed to be over. It was all fun and games when I first got here, but I can go home if I want an asshole to yell at me and tell me what to do. Plus, my father pays better.
Then she knocked me over, literally, and I’m all confused. Part of my brain thinks, Might not be so bad to stay. Which is insane! I can’t stay at a Complex for a girl. Especially not a Plebe girl. What am I going to do? Settle down in a POD with Zimri and work on the warehouse floor until I die? As if!
But then she came around the curve and made my heart rev. There’s something about her that draws me in and makes it impossible to look away. She has all the raw material every PromoTeam hopes for when a kid wakes up from an ASA: charisma, charm, an interesting kind of beauty, natural confidence, and compassion. Only no one in the City would ever expect that kind of thing from a Plebe like Zim.
And so, there’s a dumb little part of my brain that keeps saying, If things were different … if she wasn’t a Plebe and I wasn’t a Plute. But no, it’s stupid. She’s the wrong girl. The wrong kind. A Plebe girl. A beautiful, interesting, funny, fascinating Plebe girl who I can’t stop thinking about when the workday’s done.
I shake myself to snap out of it. I can’t go back to that god-forsaken warehouse again. Especially when I have a life back home. “This is just a hiatus,” I say aloud. “A chance to make my parents fret.”
I force myself to picture Arabella, lovely Arabella. I was so mad at her a few nights ago when she wouldn’t leave a dumb party to talk to me when I needed her, but that was silly. She was just doing her job. I can’t be mad at her for that. It’s what her brain is wired to do now and everything else is secondary. I try to conjure up her face, but her image is cloudy. It’s hard to remember who she used to be beneath the bigger eyes and complicated braids and body paint. Then Zimri crowds my mind again. I try to imagine her dressed up like a Plute girl and I laugh. She’d never go for it. Zim’s the kind of person who’d tell a PromoTeam to shove it and then do her own thing. Like my mom.
