“And come back as the Pines.”
Jeffrey nodded. “That’s been the suspicion.”
“We were always taught that the Palms started the fire,” Natasha said with quiet fury. “You said so yourself.”
“Yes,” said Jeffrey, his eyes tearing up. “The Alphas did that for me. They thought it would help alleviate my suffering. My guilt.”
“What happened to the larger group of Palms?” Natasha asked, moving on. She refused to feel sorry for Jeffrey right now.
“We realized pretty quickly that we had inadvertently cornered them. But there was nothing we could do. Nothing. They were up against the cliffs, and there was fire all around them. Our airfilters let us breathe through the smoke, and our biosuits gave us a limited degree of protection from the heat. But what good was that? There were over a hundred people, many of them passed out or nearly dead from the smoke already. We didn’t have the means to save them. We couldn’t ask the Office of Mercy for help. The fire retardants we have today only came later, as a result. And everyone else was fending off the attack on the green.”
Jeffrey took a breath, briefly closing his eyes; clearly, this was difficult for him. But Natasha didn’t care. She needed the truth.
“I heard you crying,” he said. “You were trapped behind a wall of fire about as high as my waist. It was so hot, your face was bright red but you weren’t burned at all. I saw you and I knew I had to save you. It was hard, I missed you twice. The ground was dry and the flames kept getting bigger. But then I lunged over the fire and I grabbed you. Once I had you in my arms, it was the best thing. The best moment of my life. Claudia couldn’t stop me. She tried, but she wasn’t strong enough. I managed to knock her down and hold on to you at the same time. Claudia and I, we’ve always had a complicated relationship, but she definitely hated me after that. And then, I left them all in the field. I took off in a sprint for the settlement. They tried to pry you away from me in the Office of Exit, and again in the Dome, but I wouldn’t stop until I had you on a stretcher in the Department of Health, with a team of doctors swearing on the Mother and Father that they wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.”
“Your arm?”
“Yes, the burn. I got it reaching to get you. The biosuits were fire resistant, but they started to melt in direct flame.”
“You said it was a trick.”
“It was a trick. A good trick, a wonderful trick. You were so perfect and innocent. I would have thrown myself into the fire to save you.”
Behind the door, the muffled voice from a loudspeaker rang out through the settlement, ordering the members of certain Offices to checkpoints in the Dome.
“So all the older generations have been lying to me,” said Natasha. “They know I’m not a real Epsilon, they must.”
“The Deltas don’t know. They were only nine years old at the time. It wasn’t hard to slip one more little baby under their noses. We said you’d been sick, tucked away by yourself in the medical wing. As for the Betas and Gammas—and the Alphas, of course—well, you couldn’t really call it lying, after a while. You were still so young when you came here. Only about twenty-three months, according to the medworkers. The Epsilons had just turned two. It was perfect. You fit right in. Of course, early on, there was outrage over what I had done, but none of it was really directed at you. Then, as the years passed, people stopped thinking about it. You were here. That was what mattered.” He shrugged, at a loss for words. “They loved you. We all loved you. As much as if we had made you ourselves.” He looked her in the eyes, suddenly trying to impart to her a very important lesson. “You are just as much a citizen of this settlement as anyone else.”
Natasha was silent. While Jeffrey had been speaking, the reality of her immediate situation had been slowly setting in. The citizens had managed to get the backup generator running. The Alphas had Raj and the others locked away in their private wing. What could she do now? Natasha wished that she had not returned, not now, not ever. She should have stayed with the Pines. She could have run away with them—she should have convinced them once and for all to run away.
“Will you remember that?” asked Jeffrey.
“Okay,” said Natasha, unsure of what the question had been.
His smile was odd; he was forgiving her too easily.
“Good,” he said. “Then go down to your sleeproom and clean yourself up and meet me in the Dome in one hour. Raj and the others have refused to talk to the Alphas, but I’m sure that will change soon, once they stop worrying about themselves and resume a more universal perspective. Don’t be afraid. The Department of Government is a lovely place. Reeducation will be the best possible thing for you right now. I’ll be sorry to lose you from the Office of Mercy, but I’m sure that, before too long, you’ll come to a career that suits you even better.”
“You’re kicking me out of the Office of Mercy?”
“It’s hardly a severe reaction, given what you’ve done.”
“But I haven’t done anything!” Natasha protested, reaching frantically for a lie. “I never even talked to them. Well, once before—when they took me—but that wasn’t my fault. This time we only looked at them, from a distance. It didn’t do any harm. The Pines never knew we were there!”
“That,” Jeffrey said, undeterred, “you will need to discuss with the Alphas.”
She was desperate. If they shut her away in reeducation, if they banned her from the Office of Mercy, then the Pines would not be able to get Inside. Everything depended on her silencing the alarms on the green.
“Please,” she begged. “Give me one more day in the Office of Mercy. The chance to say goodbye. I love it there, and I love our team so much. Ever since I was a kid, it was my dream to work there. Let me say goodbye the right way.”
He did not answer her immediately, but the hardness in his face was softening.
“Fine,” he said. “One more day. The Alphas have enough to deal with at the moment. But tomorrow evening, you’re coming with me to the Department of Government. No complaints.”
“Yes, thank you, Jeffrey, thank you.”
They walked out of the Office of Exit and into the eerie blue dim of the hall. Once the door had closed, Jeffrey touched the genetic code reader and began to reprogram the lock.
“So you’re not tempted,” he said.
The lock beeped three times fast; the change was complete. Jeffrey crossed the hall to the Office of Mercy without another word—confident, apparently, that Natasha was under his supervision. With a trembling hand, Natasha touched her finger to the reader. The light glowed red. She was trapped. Unless she took a nova to the lock, she no longer had any way into or out of the settlement. She looked to the yellow door of the Strongroom, actually wishing they had stolen a second nova for good measure. If only the settlement had more than one exit, if only they did not build the wings so solid . . .
But then, all of a sudden, Natasha knew what to do. And a moment later, she was racing into the Dome, darting inconspicuously between the hordes of citizens trying to find their checkpoints, and others who simply did not know where else to go. How long had it been since she had parted from Axel and Raul at the edge of the green? Five minutes? Ten at the most?
Natasha slipped swiftly through the door of the New Wing without looking back. Eighty-three incuvats glowed at the center of the room and, inside, the Zetas bobbed in the cloudy liquid; they were all thankfully unharmed by the blackout, as Raj had previously assured. As she moved around them, one tiny Zeta leg kicked in such a muscular flash of motion that it made Natasha jump.
The building tools lay scattered around the New Wing, abruptly abandoned when the power shut off. Natasha found a pair of pliers like the ones she had used on her first day of construction; she climbed the scaffold and began to work away with all her strength at one of the panels that she had installed just last week. For some seconds she thought it woul
dn’t give. But then, with a final pull, the panel dropped to the scaffold with a thunderous clang, and a rush of cool air met Natasha’s face. There was no time to worry about the sound. No chance to check behind her. She stuck her whole body through the now-opened rectangular gap in the wall; and, holding the frame at the top, she jumped a half story to the cushiony grass below.
With her heart pounding, Natasha gathered herself to her feet and ran across the green and into the woods. Her calls found answer quickly, more quickly than she could have hoped. She reached Axel and Raul well before the river.
“They caught me,” Natasha said before they could ask. “They were waiting for me at the door. They locked me out of the Exit and by the end of tomorrow, I’m going to lose access to the computers too—to the Eyes—they’ll see you coming across the green.”
They began to interrupt her with questions, but she didn’t have time.
“Listen,” she said. “The plan has to change. You’ll have to get in through the New Wing. I’ll mark the panel. It will look secure, but I’m going to leave it propped in its frame, without the bolts screwed in. Just pound on it a few times and it will give. I’ll be waiting for you on the other side. On the scaffold. It’s this thing like a raised platform. Well, it doesn’t matter, you’ll see. It will be harder for us to get to the Strongroom. We’ll have to pass through the Dome. But I’ll show you the way. That should be fine. The important thing is that you’ll have the nova. Just show them the nova and they’ll have to let us through.”
“Not now, not tomorrow,” Raul protested in disbelief. “We’re not ready.”
“Yes. Tomorrow. At noon, when the sun’s the highest in the sky.”
“But that’s impossible,” Axel said. “We need more practice.”
“I’m sorry,” said Natasha. “But if you wait any longer, I won’t be able to turn off the alarms. They’ll see you on the green and start a manual sweep before you’ve had a chance to talk to them. They could miss noticing the nova and start shooting and detonate it by accident.”
“So let them,” growled Raul. “Let them try to kill us all.”
Axel shook his head and turned away from Natasha, toward the ocean, as if he were considering the fate of the people sleeping there on the sand. Something like anger stirred in Natasha. Didn’t they realize how much she had risked for them? How far they had come with her help?
“I have to go back,” said Natasha, “before they realize I’m gone. Will you do it, tomorrow at noon?”
“Yes,” Axel said. He signaled Raul with a wave of his hand that they should go, but he pointedly did not look at Natasha or give any word of farewell. They began stepping away, disappearing into the dark.
“Wait!” said Natasha.
They stopped and turned.
“I’m still leaving with you, right?” she said. “After we destroy the novas—the Birds. You still want me, don’t you?”
“Of course, little Nassia,” Axel said. He returned to where she stood and touched his open hand to her cheek. “You are our sister.”
When she nodded, they started away, but she called them again.
“And no one dies tomorrow,” she said.
Axel turned, squinting at her in the dark. In a slow, measured voice, he answered, “No, no one dies.”
• • •
The sun had yet to rise fully over the trees, and the Dome shimmered in the diffuse glow of the weak and early light. Why did it feel like the settlement was empty? The clock on the maincomputer read 0641 and a few early-rising citizens were spilling out from the elephant. But why did it feel so deserted, as if Natasha were alone?
No one had seen Natasha emerge from the New Wing. She took the elephant to level six and walked quickly down the hall with its familiar smell of dust and shower room water. The blue emergency lamps glowed overhead, and as Natasha entered her sleeproom, the open door threw a triangle of light across Min-he’s bed.
“Where have you been?” she groaned. “Close the door, we still have ten minutes till wake-up.”
“Sorry,” Natasha whispered.
Natasha’s hair was caked with sand and her hands were filthy. She grabbed a clean outfit from under her bed and went back down the hall to the shower room. She stripped off her clothes in the changing stall and dropped them down the damaged-clothing chute (let the Biotextile workers wonder all morning whose filthy clothes those were). She spent a long time in the shower, letting the hot water pound her face, washing the brown grime from around her nails and the flesh of her heels. She washed her hair twice through with soap. Did the Tribes have soap? It didn’t seem so, considering how strong they smelled up close. They didn’t have showers, certainly. Probably this would be the last shower of her life.
A few minutes later, as Natasha was leaving the shower room, there was a rumble and then a sudden illumination as all the lights turned on. She entered the hallway to the sound of people clapping and cheering and darting out of their sleeprooms to check that everything was, indeed, back up and running.
By the time Natasha returned to her own sleeproom, Min-he was gone and her bed was already made for the day. Panic came over Natasha in waves. It was happening too fast. She was letting things slip. Without even realizing it, she had missed her chance to say goodbye to Min-he.
Natasha had no appetite for breakfast, so she hid in her sleeproom until the 0800 alarm. She joined the line in the hallway with the other latecomers.
“Morning, Natasha.” It was Sylvia Greene, a Delta, whose sleeproom was across the hall from her own.
“Morning.”
Waiting for the elephant, the citizens chitchatted about the Electricity and Piping crews, wondering how the teams could have messed up badly enough to lose both the main power and backup generator for several hours. No one had told them. In front of her, Lee Davis and Lu Tang began discussing a game they had going in the Pretends: “. . . but I’ve been easy on you. Meet me after dinner tonight and I’ll dissolve you to the marrow, I will. . . .” Natasha was sweating; her neck felt hot. Was it true they sensed nothing? It seemed impossible that no one else would know what was coming, that they could expect to be playing some frivolous game in the Pretends tonight. Elliot Beckman smiled at her and she looked away, though immediately regretted doing so. He was only saying good morning; she needed to get a grip.
As they rode up in the elephant, Natasha tried to force herself to assume the tired, bored expression of the other citizens. But by the time they had reached the ground level, she was sweating worse than before.
She tried to drink in everything: the grind of the elephant doors closing behind her, the sun glinting off the honeycomb windows, the clean air, a perfect 74 degrees Fahrenheit, the pleasant breeze blowing in from the vents. Her legs moved fast, too fast. But this was the speed that everyone moved; this was the quickness with which she walked every morning.
Jeffrey watched her as she entered the Office of Mercy. He waited at his desk until she had settled down at her computer. Then he walked over and knelt by her chair.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d come,” he said.
“Of course I would. I said I wanted one more day.”
“I’ve been talking to Arthur about your transfer. Don’t worry, though,” he added quickly, “I told him it was your idea, for now. He doesn’t suspect you of anything. He doesn’t even know about the breach yet. I think the Alphas are planning to call him into their department this evening. Anyway, we were both thinking you’d do well in the Office of Neuroreplacement in the Department of Health. You’ve always excelled at three-dimensional conceptualization, and you have a nice blend of scientific skills and a capacity for human interest.”
“Yeah,” said Natasha. “That sounds fine.”
“I’ve mentioned the transfer to a few others too. I hope you don’t mind. I think it will make it easier for you, in the long run. You’re perfectly a
t liberty to pretend the transfer was your idea.” He dropped his voice lower. “The Alphas have decided to keep Raj’s situation private. I’m sure they will extend the same kindness to you, and to the others.”
“That’s good. That will make our lives easier.”
She tried to muster an appearance of relief. But it made no difference what the Alphas did. In a few hours, none of this would matter.
“Look, we can’t talk much here, but have dinner with me tonight, after your shift. We can put off going to the Department of Government until after we eat. There’re still things I want to tell you about—about your childhood. I’ve been agonizing over how to tell you these things for years. Twenty-two years, to be exact. Last night wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined.”
“Fine,” she said. “Dinner tonight.”
He gave her an unsure smile, confused, no doubt, by her conciliatory mood. Claudia glared at them, her hands hovering an inch over her keyboard. Natasha shivered, recognizing for the first time the true hatred in the other woman’s eyes. Well, Natasha thought, at least that was one person who wouldn’t be sorry to see her go. She tried to think of the Pines, and how exciting and different her life would be with them. And yet. Jeffrey’s presence distracted her. Something was unsettling Natasha, a feeling dangerously close to regret. Would she ever speak to Jeffrey again? Would she even see him before she fled, amid the chaos of the Pines’ arrival?
“I’m sorry,” she burst out, in a whisper, as he rose to return to his desk. “I’m really, really sorry. For everything.”
“There’s no need to apologize,” he told her, kneeling down again. “No one’s mad at you. You don’t have to be afraid of the Alphas—they only want what’s best for you.”
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