Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  They picketed for silence, Tasha thought, but none of them had taken out their ear buds long enough to notice. She looked around at the other passengers in her car: all but one or two bobbed their heads almost imperceptibly, their eyes looking at but not seeing the city beyond the train window. The long wire of the first generations of mobile music devices’ headphones had been abandoned for Bugs; wireless Skittle-sized speakers that one inserted into the ear like earplugs. Tasha knew people who never took them out.

  “I know you have a thing for the Nation of California,” Gina said, refusing to let go of what she saw as her trump card. “So no offense. I’m just saying what I heard.”

  Tasha knew “No offense” actually translated as “Take that, bitch.” But she was tired of playing the game. Gina always had more staying power for the endless circle of stabbing.

  “Okay, I don’t have a thing for the Nation, Gina. I just don’t think it’s fair to say an entire country is populated by terrorists.”

  “Seems like it. They wanted to secede didn’t they? They did secede!”

  “That doesn’t make them terrorists! Nobody got hurt when they seceded, and secession wasn’t illegal when they did it.”

  “Lots of people got hurt!”

  “Okay, um, after the States tried to make them stay. They offer MINK to a bunch of college kids, and in exchange they send them out there in hovertanks to blow everything up. Including themselves.”

  Gina had been quiet for a moment, pretending to look out the window again. As much as she liked to goad Tasha about the Nation, she didn’t keep up with current events as much as she pretended to. The details of the secession and the following skirmishes weren’t her strong suit.

  “They ruined what this country used to be,” Gina said eventually, echoing some fat-ass Net show host’s rantings, most likely. “I heard they were responsible for blowing up the Mall of America. They’re terrorists. Period.”

  Tasha was tired.

  “My sister lives there.”

  “Okay, well not her.” Gina snapped. “Why’d she leave anyway? We have everything we need here.”

  Tasha bristled—enough was enough.

  “Not everybody can be a Minker like you, Gina.”

  “Oh shit,” Dinah laughs, “you called her a Minker? To her face?”

  Tasha laughs a little, but she blushes. She’d thrown the words at Gina and then stood to exit the train, not bothering to look over her shoulder to bask in the effect of her statement. It wasn’t a slur exactly, but it was a mean word used impolitely to refer to someone with a MINK policy, legacy or otherwise. It had started before Tasha was born, with protestors picketing Barton Knox when he was still alive, then later, MINK headquarters. The footage was still shown in classrooms—that’s where Tasha had seen it—the protestors muted as the YouTube anchorwoman described the scene. Tasha remembers the faces of the rioters as having been multicolored, not just racially but with face paint, painted up like skeletons and undead monsters. Their signs read “MINK STINKS,” “THE MINKIER THE STINKIER;” some just “FUCK MINKERS.” The word had stuck. It was assumed that anyone using it didn’t have a policy, so it wasn’t something one uttered in the presence of strangers—not unless you wanted them to know you couldn’t pass the Knox Exam, some aspect of your life or beliefs in conflict with the Knoxian standards of worthiness. But it had felt good, Tasha thinks, to say it loud, to someone’s face.

  “Yeah,” Tasha admits, “it was kind of harsh though.”

  “Psh, she deserved it,” Dinah scoffs. “I mean, no disrespect. I know she’s, like, out there now, but still. She had no right to talk about your sister like that. You don’t say stuff like that to your friends.”

  Tasha agrees, but doesn’t say so. It’s nice to be comforted; it’s been a long time.

  “I didn’t know all that stuff about the secession though,” Dinah adds cautiously. “I was still living in Mexico—when Mexico was Mexico—when California split off. So you know all this stuff she because of your sister? Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Tasha says, feeling tired again. “She writes a lot of letters but I haven’t gotten one in awhile. She usually writes every other week. After our parents died we didn’t talk as much. She’s out there living on a commune or something with her guy and their baby. She loves it. They saw a little fighting when they seceded—the States did some bombing and the typical stuff. But eventually I think the States just kind of stopped caring.”

  “Seems like they just like having someone to blame.”

  After Tasha had insulted Gina, she’d gotten off the train at Berwyn and stood for awhile on the platform instead of going straight down to street level. She closed her eyes and felt the train rush by her in a flurry of muffled acceleration. When she opened her eyes again it was already pulling up at the next station down the line, the large illuminated dome that made up the rear and front end of the trains staring back down the track at her like an immense glowing eye.

  It had been April 27th and she shuddered in the cool air of early evening. In Kentucky the remaining trees would already be dressing themselves for spring, but Chicago’s chill lasted a little longer, with a worse attitude. There would probably be blossoms on the trees next week, but their life cycle wasn’t guaranteed. Tasha pulled up her hood and made her way to street level—no Lifts at her stop; they saved those for downtown where rich, important people lived.

  “Downtown” had spread, of course—her block had once housed only mid-rises, but had been rapidly built up. As the years passed, Chicagoans could see less and less of the sky as they walked to the L, the moon all but blocked out at night. The newer buildings in Tasha’s neighborhood weren’t quite Willis-sized—one or two were close—but they were nothing like the monsters that roosted in the sky downtown. Not that the sky was much to look at anymore—the mammatus clouds, a marble-patterned, smoky blanket, had hunkered over the city for years, painting it with a metallic gloom. Not the result of climate change, everyone insisted. And maybe they were right. Either way, the mammatus clouds had staked out the sky above Chicago for good, giving it all the more resemblance to Gotham. Ominous, but kind of pretty, Tasha always thought. The tenants in her building who had lived in the area for a couple decades were always complaining—“it used to be so beautiful,” “you used to see the sky and take a nice morning walk,” they said, “you could stroll by the lake and it would all be blue.”

  Not that those geezers did much strolling, Tasha had thought meanly, still pissed about her conversation with Gina. Hardly anybody strolled, in fact. Everyone used the moving sidewalk—the Volamu—that stretched from the many apartment buildings all the way to the L, one of many miniature superhighways of gliding pedestrians.

  Few people drove cars either, though, and the city had usurped the roads on the North Side once reserved for automobile traffic and converted them into the Volamu, lanes of moving sidewalks rushing in each direction. The little roof curving over the top of the Volamu from end to end gave it a tubular feeling, but the sides were open for air, exits, and emergencies. At night the roof gave off a soft radiating light; in the winter, a soft radiating heat. From Tasha’s window on the twentieth floor—as low as she could negotiate when she signed her five-year lease—the lighted Volamu looked like the tunnels of a glowing cybertronic ant-farm. When she looked out, she could see the dark moving spots that were people being zipped along on the miles of treadmill. Often she would sit, chin in palm, and observe their quick progress: depending on her mood they looked either like little marbles in a pinball machine, pinging away toward a high score, or like bullets loaded into a slow-motion rifle aimed at something precious.

  Tasha never used the Volamu. Even when she was late for work—which was often, as she never set foot out the door until her eyelash extensions were in their proper place—she would click down the long and badly repaired cement sidewalk at 8:30am and be startled every time someone on the Volamu zipped past her. She would imagine what she might look li
ke to a stranger’s eyes twenty stories up: a lone figure moving slowly down a broken path. She would rather be that than one of a hundred other ants in the tube, hurtling along in insect anonymity. It was bad enough she worked at the Apiary.

  The Apiary was the enormous shopping center in downtown Chicago. It dwarfed the once-famous Mall of America, which was burned down in a mysterious act of arson when California seceded to become the Nation. President Walker—who had been assassinated a year later while drunkenly pissing on the White House lawn—had, in a fit of drama, pushed through a bill that renamed the country “The States,” laying “The United” to rest in a mournful speech that only a few people watched. President Walker was the only one who really seemed to feel the loss—people were more upset about the scorched patch of earth in Minnesota.

  Chicago acted quickly. It threw up the obscenely large Apiary in a mere two years and had been bathing in cash ever since. They even donated a huge percentage of their profits to “refining” Chicago’s infrastructure. In fact, the Volamu were paid for mostly by the Apiary, another reason Tasha refused to set foot on them. It was her way of protesting. She would have liked to burn it down like the Mall of America, but she needed a job.

  Her uniform alone was enough to make her consider explosives: electric blue and made of something between silicone and latex, the knee-length dress she wore to work was straight out of a comic book artist’s wet dream. She felt like a hooker from the old movies every time she put it on, and doubly so when she pulled on the knee-high shiny white boots. The hat was too much—a little white nurse-hat thing—and often she “forgot” to put it on, resulting in eye-rolls and write-ups from her superiors. The uniform was a citywide joke—scratch that: nation-wide. There had even been a flagrantly sexual ad in the Super Bowl about it last year, and a top-selling porno with the actresses dressed as Apiary girls. It was that bad.

  “Do you want a job or not, Natasha?” Cara, Tasha’s platinum blonde boss who insisted on using Tasha’s full name, would ask sweetly when Tasha complained about the uniform. When Tasha dreamed of Cara—and she did; the woman haunted her—she appeared as a lipsticked viper, her fangs extending out of a red and slanting mouth. In reality, Cara had a way of asking questions that was both maternal and sadistically condescending: “Can you be on time for work tomorrow? Or do I need to help you?” This voice was reserved for certain employees. Tasha knew for a fact that Cara’s snake voice was never used on employees who looked like Gina. But on Tashas? Fair game. Cara was like Nurse Ratched with a nose job. Tasha had been glad to work on level 51 rather than in one of the lower level stores, where Cara spent most of her time.

  Tasha’s job on level 51—near the top of the retail floors, the last stop before the corporate offices, which occupied 60-160—had put her in a designer pet shop called Fetch Fetchers. They carried some other species—ermine, miniature cats, rainbow-colored birds of prey—but their specialty was dogs.

  The Paris Hiltons of yesteryear—Cara’s ancestors, no doubt—had introduced the canine craze, and desperate designers had latched on to the concept and run the forty-year dash with it, resulting in a new breed every few months, offered in a multitude of colors. They hadn’t reached the point of splicing yet—it was hard to find scientists who hadn’t seen those depressing PETA commercials—so people like Tasha had spent their free time on the clock wearing elbow-length rubber gloves, dying the dogs fuchsia and violet.

  Fetch Fetchers was among the busier shops in the Apiary, with the most obnoxious clientele. Tasha had no idea why she was placed there when hired by the Apiary—she guessed that they assumed that since she had been born in Kentucky she knew something about animals. The stereotypes remained, even two decades after horseracing had been illegalized. Although in Tasha’s case they had been somewhat accurate—Tasha had never been much of a country girl (her parents, not from Kentucky, had forbidden any hint of a soft “I”) but she did know a thing or two about dogs.

  Her mother and father had run the kennel in Louisville since they moved there after Tasha’s paternal grandparents died. Her parents weren’t rich, but they made a decent living from the well-offs who brought their purebreds to be looked after while on vacation or when allergic relatives were in town for a visit. The Love Lockett—it had sounded like a seedy motel to Tasha, but her parents thought it was cute, and so did their clientele. The customers had money, for sure, but even years of afterschool hours spent grooming richies’ Rhodesians didn’t prepare Tasha for the clientele of the Apiary.

  Mostly women. Everything fur. Everything designer. They would come in and ignore Tasha when she asked how she could help them, and then tap impatiently on her desk with fake fingernails when they decided they were ready to address her. They’d always look at her uniform with amused disdain, as if they hadn’t noticed that every other Apiary employee was wearing the exact same thing and Tasha had just chosen to play dress-up of her own accord.

  Tasha’s job had been to ignore the contempt and help the customers select a pet, although the animals in her shop were less pet and more purse. In soothing tones she would explain how each breed was best-suited to what lifestyle: the Shih Tzu with a little pastel dye for the middle-aged divas looking for glamour; the Chihuahua in magenta for the twenty-somethings in search of flash; and the teacup Maltese for primadonnas-in-training. There were larger breeds too—they had a few spotted Great Danes in stock once, their markings tinted with lavender—but they didn’t sell as well. The ladies liked small and dainty, the way they imagined themselves. Tasha’s role at Fetch Fetchers had been to reinforce that vision, drawing subtle parallels between the sleekness of the animals the women were choosing and the women themselves. Add a little pink to anything and Tasha had a sale.

  Tasha had often seen the same women strolling in with their credit cards out. One woman, Mrs. Kerry, would show up every month or so. Tasha had no idea what became of the dogs—and an ermine once—that she had sold Mrs. Kerry in the preceding months, but when she asked her manager about it, she was told to focus on making the sale. What happened to the animals after they left the shop wasn’t her concern.

  Which wasn’t always too hard to accept, since the attitudes of the designer dogs were similar to their eventual owners. The Chihuahuas were the worst: snappy, snooty, bitey—annoying reminders of the girls Tasha went to high school with. Tasha’s job description included bathing the stock, and that’s when the little rats would get the boldest. Each animal in the store—with the exception of the few birds; try bathing a bird—needed daily bathing (and spritzing with designer perfume) to ensure an animal that didn’t smell like an animal. Maybe that’s what happened to Mrs. Kerry’s purchases, Tasha would theorize while up to her elbows in Chihuahua and suds: they started smelling like what they were, and needed replacing. Tasha had often imagined Mrs. Kerry’s perfumes and oils wearing off; her body beginning to smell like what she was. What would that scent be?

  When Tasha had no dogs to bathe or customers’ egos to stroke, she would sit at the sparkling white counter up front and watch the shoppers in the Apiary meander to various pedways and restaurants. Across from Fetch Fetchers was the entrance to REvolve, the mobile restaurant where the eaters sat at a counter affixed to a pedway that cruised on a circuit of the hundreds of stores. Lazy and/or multi-tasking shoppers could peg out their shopping plan while sitting on their asses eating a sandwich. Next to REvolve was Pemberley, an upscale men’s salon where the high rollers would go for shoeshines before cruising the Apiary for young things to pick up. They weren’t the only predators on patrol: there were women too, wrapped in furs with dogs on leashes, on the lookout for a pet of another kind. Then there was Prada, and Gucci, and Hermes, the patronesses of which Tasha had watched with a mixture of envy and condescension. None of them seemed to have jobs, or homes for that matter.

  Sometimes Tasha left her desk and walked out into the mall to look down through the immense spiraling atrium of retail below. From where she stood on level 51 she could almost s
ee the massive crystal sculpture of a honeybee that dominated the floor of the ground level, placed royally among the kiosks and sparkling fountains; a gift from the city to commemorate the grand opening of the Apiary. The glass bee was the Queen—a transparent tyrant that oversaw all the happenings in its honeycomb. It seemed to have an enormous radiating power, drawing the people of Chicago into the tunnels of its home where they became squirming larvae, slaves to its bidding.

  The Apiary was always swarming, and at the center of it all was the Queen. Sometimes Tasha looked down from level 51 and wanted to squash it.

  “Do you hear that?”

  Tasha does hear it. She’d been thinking so deeply about her time at the Apiary that it had taken a moment for the sound to filter through her consciousness, but now she hears it and it can’t be ignored: crying.

  “It’s upstairs…” Dinah says, so softly that Tasha almost doesn’t understand her.

  Tasha can hear it, right above them. The sound of a person crying, speaking in a language Tasha doesn’t understand. Who are they? She’s been here almost a week and hasn’t heard a single footstep upstairs. They’ve been quiet—hiding in a closet, crouched in a corner; breathing like a mouse until now.

  “Is that Spanish?” Tasha asks, too afraid to worry about sounding ignorant.

  “No,” says Dinah. “Not Spanish. But I think they’re praying.”

  The crying goes on for a moment and then they hear another sound join it, a sound that raises the hair on Tasha’s arms and neck, her skin prickling, her mouth going dry.

  Barking. She knows the tone—it’s a Minker.