AQUA (The Elements Series Book 1)

by Korn, Tracy

  We walk to the line so I can get a tray.

  "The security screen in the rooms," I say. "Long story."

  I look over my shoulder at Vox, who grins under her braids. Jax sees her reaction and nudges my arm.

  "She did this to you? Have you even seen the cut across your nose?"

  "No. I mean, yes, but it's not what you think. I have a cut?" I say, bringing my hand to my face to feel for it.

  "What security screen? Like, for privacy?" he asks, and I shake my head.

  "Invisible ones like a forcefield so you don't kill each other I guess. I don't know, maybe you can make it opaque or soundproof," I say, making a mental note to check. I begin to slide my tray along the rails and notice a panel of buttons, brown, green, red, and white. I look at Vox just off my shoulder who raises an eyebrow at me, then after another second, I push all three. The serving bar ahead of me starts to hum while a metallic cover rounds over the opening on our side, closing off the geometric food. Everyone in line stops and begins protesting.

  "Nice work, Jazwyn," Sarin says, and thanks to her, everyone else in line turns around to stare at me. "And what happened to your face?" She sneers. Heat shoots up my neck and spreads over my cheeks, and I give Vox a sideways glare, knowing now that she set me up.

  "Stow it, Sarin," Jax says. She begins what will no doubt be a typical biting reply, but is cut off by the metal shield completing its rotation and reopening the window to the food. Instead of geometrical food colored shapes, there are trays of fish, scallops, what look like sausages and even…hamburgers?

  "Is that beef?" someone at the front of the line says, and the rest of the comments are lost in a deluge of celebration.

  "That's ice cream!" Jax says.

  "Bread!" someone up the line says.

  I turn my head back to Vox, who smirks. "See what happens when you push buttons?" I smile back at her, and notice my face doesn't hurt quite as much. In seconds, robotic arms begin placing food on plates in response to the requests, and I let Jax slip in line in front of me.

  "Ice cream," he says, but a red light begins to blink on his bracelet cuff. His face falls.

  "What?" I ask.

  "The neural voice thing said my tray was at capacity," he says, and I stifle a giggle at his crushed dream expression.

  "Ice cream," I say, and a robotic arm places a big scoop in a small, clear dish in the corner of my tray. I nod for Jax to take it, and he beams, then shoots me a wink.

  "We're over here," he says, pointing his chin in the direction of Fraya, Joss, Ellis, Avis, and Arco, then narrows his eyes at Vox as if to ward her off.

  "She's OK," I say, and he raises an eyebrow at me. "Who's your roommate?"

  "This giant, mute cloudy named Pitt," he replies. As we walk toward the table, I see Liddick sitting with Myra, Quinn, and several other Skyboard North cloudies I don't know. Sarin takes a seat at that table as we walk past and immediately begins her mouselike chittering to everyone at the table. They all look up at me, so I know it must be about the state of my face, which, despite feeling better, must not look better.

  Liddick meets my eyes and starts to stand, but I shake my head to let him know everything is fine. He stops, and his eyes dart to Vox. I can see him putting pieces together, but I can't deal with that now, not with Arco and his impending overreaction 10 feet away and closing. As we approach our table, I prepare for the onslaught of questions that will inevitably begin the instant we sit down. Talk about the technology in the room, the food, the arrow voice…I remind myself.

  "Jazz! What happened?" Fraya says, as if on cue.

  "A little mishap with the security screen in our room," I say, sliding into a seat, but that doesn't seem to be a sufficient answer. "I ran into it before I knew it was there."

  "Why was it there?" Arco says, immediately looking at Vox. I feel another tingling at the nape of my neck again along with the need to defend her even though Arco is completely right to suspect her, but then soon figure out that she's just trying to push me again. I shoot her a look, and she widens her eyes. "What did you do, Vox?" Arco says with heat in his voice, and I realize that my reaction to her pushing has made it look like I was outing her to the table.

  "No," I say to Arco and everyone else, then look at Vox again and remember that I do have her to thank for eating actual food-shaped food right now instead of the bars on everyone else's tray. "It was just an accident." I don't know how much of this is actually how I feel and how much is the result of Vox's pushing, but we need to let this go before someone makes a scene. "So, was anyone else aware that those nano-technics they injected us with can also fix broken noses overnight?" I say, and spoon up a bite of broccoli.

  "Your nose is broken?" Fraya says, then covers her mouth with her hand.

  "Well, it was. Apparently, they're in there working on it right now. It already feels better, and I can breathe now." I say, forcing a wide smile until the pain kicks in again, but at least my lip is completely healed from yesterday morning's monkey-boy shuttle wrestling episode. I hadn't even noticed that until now.

  "You'll probably breathe better than you ever have by the time they're finished," Ellis says between forkfuls of brown rectangle. "They'll restore everything to its original state, so if you've ever had any other injury to the area, even tissue inflammation that has accumulated over the years because of the topside atmosphere—it'll be gone now." He chews while everyone looks at each other, and the fleeting thought that maybe Vox did me another favor enters my mind, along with the tingling sensation in the back of my head. I reach up and rub it out, cutting her a sideways look as a warning. She pops a strawberry into her mouth and chews through a smile.

  "Maybe I can break my leg and get a new knee from the little doctors," Joss laughs, pushing back his blonde hair as he takes a bite from the white circle on his plate.

  "What's wrong with your knee?" Avis says from under a wing of blue bangs.

  "When I was fourteen I was pulling in the nets. One of them got stuck on something, so I had to get out and pull it loose. Cut my ankle on a rock, and before I knew it a bay shark had come up and taken hold." He spoons up another bite of white circle.

  "A shark bit your leg?" Vox pipes up in a clear, ringing voice.

  "Almost lost it—bit down right there," he says, moving back in his seat and hiking up his pant leg to show us several dark, shiny scars along his shin, over his kneecap, and trailing off along his outer thigh. "My parents sent for a medi-droid, but the selkie said I'd lose it if she didn't treat it then and there."

  "What's a selkie? A witch?" Vox asks, taking another bite of strawberry. Everyone at the table looks at her, and my stomach drops at the prospect of another situation.

  "Not a witch," Joss says without any detectable chastisement, "just a healer. My gran says selkies used to be seals who took off their skins and hid them so they could walk around like people, but couldn't find them again, so they got stuck here."

  "Seals," Avis says. "Like, the animal? How could a seal be a healer?"

  "Suppose if they can take off their skin and put on a person suit, they might know a thing or two about fixing up boys who scrap with sharks," his dimples flash with a grin that ignites his hazel eyes, and his laugh is infectious. Soon, a warm feeling seems to spread over the table.

  "So, does it still hurt?" Vox asks, lifting her glass to her lips, and I raise an eyebrow at her interest.

  "Now and then, if a storm is coming, but I don't suppose I'll have to worry about that anymore down here." He gives her an easy smile, then looks around the table in the same way before returning his eyes to his plate.

  "Well, if you hadn't harpooned the parson fish, I'm sure it could have been of use," Vox says through a smirk that gives way to a smile, despite her efforts to look smug. I stare at her, feeling the heat spread over my own cheeks and the flutter starting in my chest. I take a breath when I realize these are her feelings—so that's how it works? There's nothing but the emotion when she's just radiating them, and t
he tingle at the nape of my neck when she's trying to push me one way or another.

  Feeling like I finally have the upper hand, I smile a secret victory to myself and open my mouth to ask Joss what he thinks of Vox turning him into Queequeg, but she shoves a strawberry into my mouth before I can say a word. "See, you should thank me," she says, glaring at me sideways with her glowing reptile eyes. I smile as I bite down on the strawberry, content that I have harassment fodder for later.

  Arco laughs under his breath, but not in amusement, and when I look over at him, I see him sending Vox a narrowed glare before he looks back at his plate, which he's only managed to rearrange in all this time he's been sitting here so quietly.

  "Hey, what's wrong?" I ask, nudging his forearm on the table and swallowing the strawberry. He clips me a look and grabs up his tray to leave. "Hey?"

  "What's his problem?" Jax asks me once he's gone. I shrug, then look over at Vox who is finishing off her drink. "Oh," he says, following my gaze and coming to terms with the fact that there are no more bites of food for him to scrape onto his silverware. "I'll talk to him." With a wink at Fraya, he gathers up his tray and goes after Arco.

  "He's a bloated dead horse, isn't he?" Vox says around the last of the berries she has popped into her mouth as she watches Arco shove his tray through the receptacle slot at the front of the cafeteria before heading out the door.

  "Eww," I say, taken off guard by the imagery before reloading my sentence. "So why are you trying to start all this trouble here?" I ask, lowering my voice.

  "Buttons," she says with a shrug. "I like pushing buttons."

  CHAPTER 18

  Tattoo Story

  After lunch, I go back to my room to lie down, and amazingly, don't actually wake up again until the next morning, but when I do, my face is fixed, and there are navy blue jumpsuits that shimmer with small, scale-like texturing hanging at the foot of our beds.

  The jumpsuit material is stretchy, but silky, even softer than the colored tunics and pants we were given at our interviews. It looks too small, like it would better fit Nann than me, and at that I feel a stab of pain in my chest. How have I not even thought of her and my mother before now? I remember Ms. Rheen saying we can't make any port-calls until our matriculation period is over in three months, but make a note to ask someone today about at least being able to send a message to let people at home know that we've arrived and that we're all right. In the back of my mind, though, I know they won't let us. My bracelet cuff blinks, and I press the light. Breakfast in the cafeteria in 30 minutes, orientation to follow, the arrow voice says in my head. I don't know if I'll ever get used to that.

  I pull the jumpsuit over my base layer, and Vox is already up with her back to me stepping into her own. Her bold, charcoaled tattoo lines like the ones on her throat run up the back of her calves, but they stop at her knees, leaving the backs of her thighs and everything else unmarked until her shoulder blades, where they then fan out toward her arms, each side a different pattern of fine, meandering lines. I have two main thoughts as I watch her—that those lines must have taken forever to ink, and that she might just be the whitest person in the world.

  "Yes, they hurt," she says abruptly without turning around as she pulls her jumpsuit over her shoulders, which breaks the spell I'm under. She turns to face me, and with the front of her suit still unfastened down the middle, I can see that her tattoos run the length of her sternum, where it turns into a twisting maze system over her heart. She smirks at me before flopping down on her bed again.

  "Who did them?" I ask, and watch her begin to unbraid her hair.

  "My mother did the clan ones. I did the rest."

  "You did?" I ask.

  "My mother was a mapper. It didn't take long to learn."

  "Was?" I ask, then immediately wish I hadn't because a vice closes around my chest.

  "Yeah, was," she answers, and I don't press her for more.

  "So she was a Tinkerer, then. What's your father?"

  "My father wasn't one," she uses the past tense again. I let it go, feeling ice in my chest now in addition to the compression as I watch her nimble fingers undo each braid before letting it fall in a series of wavy kinks around her right shoulder.

  "So, all those lines are maps?" I ask. Vox pulls the suit down over her shoulder and collarbone, half her hair still in braids.

  "These are the roads that lead up the mountain to Skyboard," she says.

  "You've been to Skyboard?" I ask, feeling my eyes widen.

  "Are you going to question everything I say?" she asks, and I feel my face get hot. "When I was 13. We all have to go at 13. The clan elders take you to the edge of the village and tell you to come back with cloud thistle, which only grows at the top of the mountain, or don't come back at all," she finishes, and after a second, it seems safe to ask her another question.

  "But how did you get up there? It's all sealed off unless you have a bio-chip," I press, but she just stares at me with her standard smirk.

  "You don't need a bio-chip if you can find the roads."

  "There are no roads that go up there."

  "There are always roads. If you can't find them, you just make them," she says, returning to her hair.

  "How did you get past all the carnivorous plants they have around the perimeter, especially if you were just 13, and weren't you afraid of the cannib—" the word breaks off as I'm saying it as I look up at her, the reality of Vox's father's people, who have to be The Badlanders if her mother was a Tinkerer, dawning on me.

  "The cannibals?" she asks, her fingers stopping in mid braid. She raises an eyebrow at me like she doesn't have all day for me to stop being so painfully stupid. I feel the ball of ice spreading in my chest again, and swallow hard to regain my composure.

  "Yeah," I say, my voice barely a whisper. She laughs out loud and resumes unbraiding her hair.

  "They don't eat family," she finally says, then looks at my expression and laughs even harder. So hard that her hands fall away from her hair and drape over her stomach.

  "That's not funny. Are you one?" I ask, the combination of anxiety and anger at her constant games, at not being able to tell the difference, welling up inside me.

  "Nn—no…" she finally sputters. "Do you even know how stupid you all are? Oooh, look, she's from the tribe in the trees…she's from the clan in the caves… Crite, cred-feds are so paranoid."

  I narrow my eyes at her, unsure what she means, but it's evident she's not complimenting me.

  "You're all sown and grown for Gaia. There's more to life," she answers through a handful of tapering chuckles, then starts shaking her fingers through her now completely unbraided hair. I feel my blood simmering just below the surface, but there's no way she's getting me to lunge at her again, only to discover she's a hologram or something after I bash my face into the wall behind her. I opt for the verbal throttle this time.

  "More to living like what? Like drawing all over yourself and living under a rock? Or wait, you're saying there are no subterranean or forester cannibals in The Badlands, I forgot. It's all just made up, right?" I say. She laughs.

  "I didn't say that. I just said I wasn't one of them. Who knows where they really are," she says, pulling her jumpsuit down over her right shoulder now, which is symmetrical to the left until the end of her collarbone where it breaks off into a different scraggle of fine lines. "These are roads through Seaboard North, back down again, and into The Badlands quadrant," she says, tracing over the lines she references.

  "That's a map of The Badlands?" I ask getting up and walking over to her. "Can I see?" I ask, looking into her glowing animal eyes that never seem to blink. She pulls her arm out of the jumpsuit, and the lines stop just below the bend of her elbow.

  "Why does it stop there?" I ask, pointing to the place about eight inches up from her wrist.

  "Because that's as far as I got before I was caught."

  My eyes snap back to hers. "Caught by what?"

  She smirks at me again,
and I feel a tickle in my throat like laughter bubbling up. She thinks my shock is funny?

  "The 'V.' The Fringe," she says, letting the empty sleeve flap to her side as she pulls her arm the rest of the way out, stretching the neck of the jumpsuit under it.

  "Fringe live out that far?"

  "They're not your Fringe—not my people. They're something else," she says, and I stare at her. The tickle in my throat is gone now and replaced with a lump from the pressure of my heartbeat, which feels like it's trying to claw its way out of me and run out the door. I try to swallow it down and take a deep breath. "These lines run past the old buildings where my people are, even past the tunnels underneath. Out past all that; that's where the 'V' live."

  "But it's just all briar and sand dunes out there," I say. "There's nowhere for anyone to live."

  "They're underground. At least you cred-feds got that part right," she says, pulling her arm back into her suit.

  "How did they catch you?" I ask, knowing I should let it go with how hard my heart is pounding in my ears now, but I have to know.

  "I was scouting and fell in a sinkhole because I was stupid. I should have seen it coming," she says, and a chill runs up my spine. "It dropped into a room that fortunately wasn't too far under the surface, though," she says, pulling her arm back into her suit and zipping it. I blink a few times when I see the zipper disappear into the fabric once it's all the way up, then look down at my own, moving it up and down to make it…absorb.

  "So you weren't really caught, it was just an accident?"

  "Oh, no, it was a trap," she laughs. "They resealed the hole about 20 minutes after I fell into it. Then they lit some torch that I could only see through a reflection in the wall, but couldn't see out past it. Fifty pairs of eyes must have started staring through the slats of the walls then, and stayed there for the rest of the day. I didn't understand their mumbling language at first, but I figured out enough to know they didn't really want to hurt me, at least not just then."