AQUA (The Elements Series Book 1)

by Korn, Tracy

"What did they want with you?" I ask, sitting straight up on the edge of her bed.

  "Don't know. I didn't stick around to find out. All the eyes disappeared once the sun went down, and I started digging stairs into the dirt wall with a few of my tools; just before dawn I broke through the surface and ran."

  "And you were just 13?"

  "No, I didn't map The Badlands until after that. I was 15," she says, turning away from me and then flipping onto her stomach.

  I have so many questions, but my chest is already tight and it's hard to get a breath. She evidently doesn't want to talk about The Badlands anymore.

  "What about your neck and face," I ask, and can breathe a little easier. She puts her fingers through her unbraided hair to fluff it again over the foot of the bed, and it falls in an arc over the back of her neck when she flips it back up. Sitting this close to her, I can see that her tangle of tattoos runs up into the hair on the left side and over her left ear. She points to those.

  "These are from the top of Skyboard North. The ones on my face and throat are the same as everyone else in my clan, like these," she flips onto her back and unzips her jumpsuit to the center of her chest again to show me the maze system, then raises her pant leg to reveal the markings of her shins and calves. "They're tradition. These are my lands, and these," she gestures to the divot in her collarbone, then to her neck and face, and finally, her legs, "this is a map to Vishan; it's in the stars," she says, rolling her eyes.

  I feel the little tingle in the nape of my neck a second too late. "You've been…to the stars?" I say, feeling stupid the second I hear the words in my own voice.

  "No, don't be stupid," she says, and I close my eyes in a long blink. Why do I talk? I have to get better at knowing which feelings are actually mine, and which ones she's just magnifying. "My father's people believe we're descended from the people of the stars. This is supposed to be our map back to where we came from. It's just stories they tell you so you don't lose your nerve and die when they set you out in the wild to mark your paths. They want you to feel like it's in your blood to travel long distances or something."

  "Then why are the markings on your legs too? They make sense, as much as they can, I guess, at the top of your body. Closest to the stars…" I trail off, realizing it all just sounds even more ridiculous when I say it.

  "They believe there are ways to get there by going down too," she says, closing her eyes and flicking up her brows as she shakes her head. "I don't know, they're just stupid old tales. I didn't ink these, so that's all I can really say about them," she finishes with a few more quick shakes of her head.

  "How did you give yourself these others?" I ask, looking again at the intricate patterns that run down over her ear, and again along her collarbones before they disappear into her jumpsuit. They're different from the straight, bold, clean lines over her chin, throat, and nose. She nods.

  "Mirror."

  "In Skyboard North? Why not just use an imager?"

  "I couldn't exactly be found with a program on me when I was supposed to be relying on my own abilities to get myself up there and home again, now could I?" she says, sitting up and leaning her back against the wall as she zips her jumpsuit and pulls her knees into her chest.

  "I don't know, could you?" I feel a stab of embarrassment as soon as I ask and realize with the cold tingle that it's her pushing again. I have to learn to outrun the impulse to act on it "All right, stop, it's a real question. I don't know your wild mapper girl rules," I say, and her eyebrows shoot up as a wide smile spreads over her face.

  "Wild mapper girl rules?" she says, then starts slow motion nodding, her eyebrows climbing higher on her forehead like they're trying to beat each other to her hairline.

  "Whatever. You just admitted that you're a mapper, and I think this morning more than proved you're wild. I refuse to verify if you're a girl, so I'm just giving you that one," I say, trying to maintain a serious expression, but in seconds, we're both laughing.

  "All right, here are the rules then," she says after regaining her composure. "So if you're going to be a boundary scout, you turn 13, and at whatever time you were born that day, the elders set you at the outskirts of the village with no food, no water, no tools, nothing except your pick knife, and that's so you can mark your path," she holds up her arms at right angles and cocks her wrists out, presumably to show me her paths, which consist of the several intricately drawn lines and etchings I've seen from afar."When you come back, you have an inked path and the knowledge that you can carve out another one without anything to help you. After that first trip, you can bring supplies."

  "What did you use for ink that first time if you couldn't bring supplies? Is this that trip?" I ask, pointing to the short line running from the edge of her collarbone to the top of her shoulder, which gives way to a blue line that looks like water, then starts again in a deeper black as it winds around and back up her shoulder.

  "That's the Skyboard trip, yeah. I used char from a fire I made to start it out, that's why it's lighter than the rest, and some crushed plants for the water line right here,"she says, pointing to the bottom of her deltoid muscle. "I used squid ink that I…borrowed from one of the Fisher clan's docks for the rest of way up the mountain. That's what the elders used for these too," she says, waving her hand toward her throat and face like she's fanning herself. "Only they traded for their ink. Or, at least I think they did." She smiles, angling her head toward me, and I can't help looking at all her lines and imagining a 13-year-old girl using a pick knife, a knife that's more of a short skewer than it is a knife, to record all these roads on herself.

  "So do you make maps for a job now? I mean, when you're not at school?"

  "That was the plan, and scouting," she says, getting up and taking a pair of navy socks from the drawer, then pulling them on over her bone white feet, her ankle bracelets now in a pile on her nightstand. "My father took a group out to The Badlands Fringe after I came back and told them I'd fallen in a trap, and when they never returned, another group went out. We never saw any of them again, and the elders forbade anymore mapping of the West," she says, readjusting her jumpsuit and falling back on the bed. "I could have found him, though. I could have found them all," she says.

  "But instead you wound up here," I say, finishing her thought and not even realizing it until her eyes light on mine. She cocks one dark eyebrow at me and huffs a short laugh.

  "Heh. I actually forgot you're a sponge," she says, lying back again on her bed and propping her feet against the wall behind me, making the legs of her jumpsuit fall up. I study her face as she looks at the ceiling, then at the door with her arms folded in support under her head, and suddenly I understand. She never wanted to come here.

  "You're trying to get sent back, aren't you? You want them to kick you out?" I say in one breath. "It all makes sense now."

  She meets my eyes long enough for me to be sure that I'm right, and our bracelet cuffs begin to blink. A 10-minute warning to report to the cafeteria plays in my head as a smile trickles over her face.

  CHAPTER 19

  Campus Tour

  Everyone's trays are filled with food-shaped food this morning, brightly colored oranges, grapes, bananas, pastries, strips of smoked fish, and all of this in just the first bay of options. The next two bays are another wash of color before a sea of faces, some of them even smiling at Vox and me as we walk into the cafeteria. I scan the room for Jax and see him sitting against the far wall again with the same people from lunch yesterday, so after choosing our breakfast, Vox and I make our way over to them.

  "So what happened to you last night? And wow, I thought you'd have a few black eyes this morning," Jax says, studying my face, and I'm surprised he commits his mouth to two full sentences when there is still food on his plate.

  "Yeah, nanobots, or technics, something like that. I decided to take a nap, and before I knew it, it was morning," I smile, and brace for pain that never comes.

  "Nanites," Ellis says, intrigued now a
nd leaning over the table a little too closely to my face to study it, lifting a finger like he's going to poke my nose. I flinch backward. "They're amazing. It's like nothing ever happened. Did you know that this cartilage here…" he gestures to the tip of my nose as I flinch again, "…and the channel of blood vessels that connect it to the skeletal bridge are all brand new now? New, like the day you were born." He shakes his head, marveling, then sits down again. I exhale, relieved that he's no longer just three inches away.

  "It's not right," Arco says without looking up. "They rewire us like we're their machines, like we're droids they can program." Almost everyone at the table looks at him, startled by his sudden vehemence.

  "But she's all fixed—look," Avis says, then splits an orange, accidentally squirting Ellis in the face with juice.

  "Ugh, really?" Ellis says, squinting and padding around the table for his napkin.

  "That's what they want you to see, what they want you to believe," Arco says to Avis while throwing Ellis a napkin. "In the meantime, they can program whatever they want to tell us in our heads, rearrange anything they want." He looks up and around the table, flexing his wrist outwardly and gesturing with his empty fork. "No one else sees the potential problem with any of this?"

  "Zone, Arc… it's just to keep the flow," Avis says, chewing. "Rheen said there are what, 3,000 students here? Not to mention all the homestead and industrial communities out there," he lifts his chin to the windows behind us. "It's hard enough to get medi-droids topside, but can you imagine down here?" He shakes his head and spears a piece of melon, then snaps it off the fork like some kind of blue-plumed tortoise.

  "Sure, that's the reason." Arco shakes his head and looks back at his plate, stabbing at his eggs. I look over at Vox to see if she's behind his mood, but she just raises her brows at me like she's offended.

  As if reading my mind like he tends to do, Jax throws the biggest green grape I've ever seen at Arco, which hits him in the chin and bounces off his hand onto his lap, then rolls onto the floor. Arco freezes in a long blink.

  "What's your malfunction?" Jax asks, and Fraya nudges him for it. He turns to her, confused."What?" he says, his shoulders jerking up as he looks at her.

  "Nothing," Arco answers, hacking into his eggs again.

  "So what's this about an orientation?" Fraya asks, breaking the tension in the air. "Did everyone get that feed this morning?"

  "There aren't many of us, so it probably won't take long," Ellis says after finishing the last of his juice, then, looks around the room.

  He's right. I look around and see only three other tables with people in blue jumpsuits like ours…Liddick's table, and two others with about ten students seated at each. No one else has tattoos like Vox, but one table in particular seats people who look like cinestars. Six boys and four girls, all of them athletic, long limbed, and oblivious to anyone else in the room.

  "They're from the mountain," Vox whispers at my side, evidently following my stare.

  "Skyboard really is here? I thought they were just automatically assigned an apprenticeship somewhere," I say.

  "Well, maybe there's equality in the world after all," Avis says, grinning, then polishes off the last of his melon. Arco huffs out a cynical laugh as he chews.

  "Ok, seriously, what?" Jax presses him, and he finally looks up. Now I notice that his eyes are bloodshot, the shadows below suggesting he didn't sleep much last night.

  "See that one on the end? Dark blond hair?" We all look at once, and he sighs, lowering his forehead and pinching the bridge of his nose.

  "Sorry," I say to Arco, "stop staring," I say to the table and shove my shoulder into Vox, who is vibrating with laughter. "So, what about him?"

  "That's Tieg Spaulding. My roommate."

  "Room—?" Jax coughs, then tries to enunciate the word. "Roommate?"

  "They bunked you with a cloudy?"Avis blurts. "Did he even talk to you?"

  "That's all he did—all night spouting about his father who's some kind of liaison to the pollies at the State, his mother, who's a language whatever-something, and about his six brothers who came through here already and are stationed all over the four seas doing diplomat-nano-surgeon-god-of-the-universe jobs. He's a droid. No one can talk that much in one sitting without programming."

  I feel my eyebrows raise and my eyes widen at him as he makes another stab at his eggs, then fires them into his mouth. The table explodes in laughter, and he looks up, shocked. "What?" He rolls his eyes, then goes back to mutilating his food. Jax gets up and slaps him on the back while chuckling and shaking his head on his way over to the Skyboard table. Fraya follows him.

  "What is he doing?" Vox asks me in a lowered voice.

  "Clipping off Arco," I say through a sigh. In a few minutes, Jax and Fraya head back to our table with Arco's roommate, Tieg, and a girl with straight blonde hair, which swishes over her shoulders as she walks. Coming along a few steps after them is a boy who looks like he could be related to Tieg, but his hair is black and his eyes are as intensely green as Tieg's are blue. He's also a little taller and thicker than Tieg, but otherwise similar. Ellis, who sits next to Arco, nudges his forearm, which causes Arco to spill eggs onto his lap. He sucks in a quick breath, ready to react, but has to swallow it as the cloudies walk up.

  "Everybody, this is Dez Spaulding, Fraya's roommate," Jax says to our table, and as she smiles, I notice there are no spaces between her teeth. No individual teeth at all, just a solid white bar. "And this is Pitt Spaulding, my roommate." They all smile now, all of them flashing the same thinly sculpted wedge of spaceless teeth. I wonder if Arco wasn't kidding after all when he said Tieg was a droid, and I try not to stare.

  "Spaulding?" Arco asks.

  "We're triplets," Tieg answers, smiling to one side.

  "Triplets? But you're all…different," I say before I realize the tingling at the base of my skull, and immediately kick Vox under the table. Dez smiles and nods knowingly, then bites her bottom lip.

  "Where we live, parents can…tailor the appearance of their kids, so, that's why Pitt and I look like opposite ends of the spectrum, and Tieg is somewhere in the middle. Lots of genes, three kids, variety, right?" she says with a nervous laugh, her eyes darting around the table as she chews her lip again. Is she actually worried about what we'll think? A cloudy? I look at them all more closely now as they stand side by side, and to my surprise, I really can see the dark to light spectrum she's talking about. Pitt's darker Mediterranean features and bright green eyes give way to Tieg's lighter skin tone and more sharply angled lines, whereas Dez is very fair with a heart shaped face, a long, graceful neck, and wide, innocent eyes that interchange the coloring of Tieg's: an icy blue with sapphire flecks where his are the reverse. The more I look at them, the more I can even see the similarities as well…how Pitt and Tieg have the same weighted gaze, the same deep pitch of their eyebrows, broad build, and imposing stature. "That's amazing," I say, and Dez's worried expression relaxes.

  "Fraya tells me you've all grown up together shoreside?" she says, her smile widening now when she looks at me, and I can't help but stare into it like the solar eclipse the teachers specifically tell you to avoid. Just as that thought crosses my mind, I feel a stab in the side of my thigh closest to Vox and yelp at the same time I see her putting a fork back on her tray.

  "Ow! I mean, yes, sorry…pinched myself on something," I recover in front of everyone, and promise myself I will throttle my psychopath roommate the second these statues leave. She could have just nudged me to get me to stop gawking.

  "These smooth, moulded benches can be tricky like that," Tieg says, and drops a wink. Arco rolls his eyes, and I feel the delayed flush of embarrassment climbing up my cheeks. I try to cover it with my hand, letting it slip behind the back of my neck in a few uncoordinated gestures.

  "They can," I say, trying to pull it together after my outburst. "So, Arco said you're from Skyboard?" I manage, and they all smile their strange wedge smiles again. I will myself not to
stare this time. She nods, then looks around the cafeteria again, particularly toward the enormous window that travels the length of the room.

  "Everything is all so unbelievable," she says, shaking her head.

  "It's definitely not as predictable as we were expecting after watching all those years of advertisements," Pitt says, raising his dark, heavy eyebrows, his voice deeper and quieter than Tieg's, but just as articulate. As if waiting its turn in the conversation, I hear the arrow voice in my head:

  Cadets, please prepare for orientation, which begins in five minutes. Your respective guides will arrive shortly.

  ***

  All of our eyes dart to one another's as soon as the transmission ends, and I feel myself relax a little. No one, not even the perfect cloudies, has adjusted to these neural links yet.

  Within minutes of the announcement, a tall, tanned girl wearing a green jumpsuit approaches our table. Her dark hair is woven in an intricate braid that starts behind one ear and spirals up and back until it winds around to a clip over her shoulder, then falls loose from there. She's fit and tall like the Skyboard students, and reminds me of a hummingbird the way her feet move so quickly over the ground, almost as if she's floating to us.

  "And this must be our tour guide," Avis says, turning to see her beaming smile. When she's close enough, I notice that her teeth are normal rather than the flat, seamless bar of the Skyboard students, and for some reason, I'm relieved.

  "You're all from Seaboard North?" she says in a voice that is much more assertive than I was expecting given her graceful build.

  "And thereabouts," Vox says after a beat. The girl smiles in her direction.

  "I'm Etta, and I'll be taking you to get set up with schedules," she says to the group. "I'm from Seaboard South on the Orlando coastline. This is my final year at Gaia before my apprenticeship begins at the State, and part of my job is to show you around, answer questions, that kind of thing…so, everyone ready to go?" she says as her eyebrows raise in an arc over her hazel eyes.