The Earth Dwellers

by David Estes

  What choice do I have? If I try to run, I’ll be abandoning my family, and I might be killed anyway. And if I try to escape with them, they might be killed, too. But if I go along with this plan, at least I can protect Mother and Jolie, Buff and his family, Yo and Abe and Hightower. And the Tri-Tribes might win the war anyway. Then things will just go back to normal, won’t they? I could explain things to Skye and Wilde, make them understand the impossible situation we were in.

  The only thing worse than lying to your friends is lying to yourself.

  I glare at the Glassy soldier walking by and contemplate whether he’d shoot me if I chucked a snowball at his head.

  Make that an iceball.

  I head inside to give my family the bad news.

  ~~~

  Jolie doesn’t understand and I don’t blame her. “Why do we have to leave?” she asks.

  We’re sitting inside the house, trying to keep warm and considering what to pack for the long journey ahead of us.

  “The leaders decided it was best,” I say, trying to keep from grinding my teeth.

  “And they’re really smart, right?”

  “Wellll,” I say. “Some of them are.” All the ones who voted against the decision.

  Mother’s gazing absently into the fireplace, saying nothing.

  “How long will we be gone?” Jolie asks.

  I shrug. “Probably not long. Maybe a week, maybe two. But it could be more than that, too, no one really knows.”

  “Will Wilde and Skye be there?”

  The question hits me so hard it’s as if the iceball I wanted to launch at the soldier rebounded and came back twice as hard, smashing me in the gut. “Wellll…” Why do I keep starting my sentences with that word, drawing it out like that? As my father would say, “Sounds like a deep thought.” Ha ha. I’m annoying even myself. I start over, ready to face the truth head on with my family by my side. They deserve the truth. “Skye’s not coming, Joles. Nor is Wilde. Not any of our friends from fire country.”

  “Why not? Don’t they want to be protected by the Glassies, too?”

  Deep breath. Take a sip of hot tea to open my throat. “The thing is, the Glassies are supposedly ‘protecting us’ from the Tri-Tribes.”

  Jolie starts cracking up. She doesn’t believe me and I don’t blame her. “Why would we need protecting from our friends?” Sometimes she’s too smart.

  I sigh. “We don’t, but the leaders think we do.”

  “We should ignore the leaders and go live with Skye,” Jolie says, her face lighting up, like she’s just come up with the best idea in the world. Which she has. The best, impossible idea.

  “They won’t let us,” I say. “Trust me, Joles, we have no choice. Now let’s get packed up.”

  “This sucks iceballs,” Jolie mutters, and finally Mother snaps her gaze away from the fireplace, her mouth half-open as if to rebuke her daughter’s vulgarity. But then her mouth slowly closes and she gives me the saddest look I’ve ever seen.

  ~~~

  We’re all packed up and ready to go. Mother, Jolie, and I decided to bring just what we can carry on our backs, which isn’t much.

  As we walk through the snow, leaving final footprints like markers so we don’t get lost, I glance back at our house, half expecting it to crumble into ash behind us. But it doesn’t, just stands resolute and waiting, the final wisps of smoke from the snuffed out fire snaking from the chimney toward the sky.

  A large snowflake lands on my nose, and I watch with crossed eyes as it melts into a tiny droplet that drips to the ground.

  I hold Jolie’s hand on one side and Mother’s on the other, and it’s not weird at all like I’d expect it to be. If we must go, we’ll go together, as one. We are the Unity Alliance, and we’ll see it through, somehow, someway, if only in our minds and hearts.

  We pass the rigid form of a soldier, red-faced and standing at attention, staring past us as if we’re not even there. Are we ghosts? Have we been reduced to wraiths, shadows of ourselves who give in to tyrants? My eyes never leave the soldier’s, as if challenging him, but he doesn’t so much as change the path of his stare; until, just as we’re about past him, his eyes flick to Jolie’s and he winks.

  The sudden rage that fills me splits me like a logger’s axe on a fallen tree. I’m taking deep breaths and clenching and unclenching my fists and thinking happy thoughts—doing all the things I’ve practiced to control my temper—when Jolie sticks out her tongue. Well—yeah, get ready for another deep thought—let me tell you, the soldier’s face goes even redder, and it’s not from the cold. It’s humiliation and embarrassment and for a second I think he might shoot us all dead right here and now. But his hand only twitches on his weapon and then he flashes a smile and goes right on back to staring at nothing and nobody.

  I look down at Jolie, and she’s grinning up at me. Mother’s smiling, too, because sometimes it’s the stuck-out-tongue of a twelve-year-old that’s the best antidote for arrogance and evil; and my temper, too, I guess.

  Down the path we go, making our way to Buff’s house. At least we’ll be able to travel with him and his family.

  I chuckle softly to myself as we approach. It’s like all the chaos and insanity that’s usually hidden behind the thin wooden walls has spilled out into the snow. They’ve got a wooden-wheeled cart, full of all sorts of odds and ends, like pots and kindling and water skins and—is that a feathered hat?—and bundles of clothes that appear to be dark with wetness and maybe mud, as if they were dropped a dozen times before making it into the cart-bed. All around the cart are munchkins: two of them are rolling over and over, a boy and a girl, grappling, shoving snow in each other’s faces; another one’s climbing the cart wheel, screaming “Ayayayayayaya!” with streaks of mud on her face; a fourth kid, who I like to call Baby-Buff, because of his striking resemblance to my friend, has his boots on the wrong feet and is tossing handfuls of what appears to be flour into the air. “It’s snowing!” he yells at the top of his lungs. The fifth is being wrestled to the cart by the second-oldest, Darcy, who looks to be about at the end of her rope with impatience and frustration, her dark, curly hair tumbling out of a knit-hat and across her face.

  Buff’s right behind her, his father’s arm looped around his neck. As they hobble over to the cart, Buff sees us and says, “Want to go kid-wrangling? Whoever gets the most in the cart—you might have to tie them up, mind you—gets a rare and wonderful prize.”

  “Ooh, I want a prize,” Jolie says. “What is it?”

  “Don’t encourage him,” Darcy says, shoving one of her brothers into the back of the cart. Within seconds, he’s climbed over the food and clothes and leapt off the side, managing to dislodge the wheel-climbing kid at the same time. They tumble through the snow in a fit of giggles and shrieks of delight.

  “You get to eat yellow snow!” Buff exclaims, as if that’s the most original joke he’s ever made.

  “Eww,” Jolie says, but she’s giggling.

  I swoop down and grab the two kids wrestling, one under each arm. “I’ll help with the wrangling, but I’ll skip the prize if I win.”

  “Your loss,” Buff says with a tight grin. To anyone who doesn’t know him as well as I do, he would almost look happy, like his good old jovial joke-cracking self. But I can see something behind his façade of wisecracks and wide smiles: fear. For his family; for my family; for this entire freezin’ world that’s become a huge Heart-icin’ mess.

  I toss the kids onto a soft pile of unfolded clothes in the back of the cart, and then help Buff lift his injured father. My mother takes his crutch. “What do you make of all this?” she says to him in a low voice.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. It feels so wrong, but so do so many things nowadays.”

  My mother nods, takes his hand. “We’re in this together. All of us.” I give her a boost to sit beside him. “We’ve got two of the best boys in the whole of this world,” she says once she’s settled.

  I turn away to grab another ki
d so she can’t see the ice water in my eyes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Adele

  Finally, it’s just Tristan and I again.

  The curving glass dome stands before us, dispersing the last rays of the dying red sun into fragments of light. It’s beautiful. Almost doesn’t seem real. I still can’t get over how big everything is up here. I’d thought some of the Sun Realm subchapters were more enormous than anything in the world, but this land, fire country, makes everything below seem like dwarfs, stunted.

  And an entire city contained within a glass dome? Sounds impossible, and yet I’m staring at the buildings rising up like giants made of stone and metal and glass.

  The heat of the sand warms my belly, even through the camo shirt, which is tucked into my camo pants.

  “Adele…” Tristan says, and I can feel his heat, too, as he looks at me, as his hip brushes up against mine.

  I stare straight ahead, as if hoping to cut an opening in the glass with the intensity of my gaze. I can’t look at him, can’t break down, can’t be attached to anything but my objectives. Infiltrate, gather intel, sabotage, assassinate.

  “Adele, look at me,” he says.

  “No.”

  “Adele, I—”

  “No.” Seriously, no.

  Tristan grabs my chin and pulls it toward him and then we’re ripping off our masks and kissing, his lips so soft and yet moving fiercely against mine. I wrap a hand around the back of his head, lace my fingers through his hair, breathe him in, kiss him back. My heart blossoms.

  It can’t. I can’t feel this, not now.

  I pull away, but can’t bring myself to unlock my hand from his head. “Adele, I—I love you,” he says.

  It’s too much—more than I can handle. A raft of emotions fills my chest: a burst of happiness, a swallow of guilt, an icy stab of pain and sorrow.

  “You can’t say that,” I say.

  “I just did.”

  “I mean, you can’t say that now.”

  “Then when?”

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly.

  “Too late,” he says.

  “I love you, too,” I blurt out, and when his lips form a huge smile I almost feel giddy, which isn’t right because of what I’m about to do, and what might happen and because…

  “This won’t be the last time you say that to me,” Tristan says, serious again. “It won’t. Don’t think it for one second.”

  I nod. Swallow. Replace my mask. Go back to gazing at the New City. Where I have to go.

  We lay in silence for a while, watching the city from our hiding spot behind the large boulders. The sky grows darker and darker.

  When only a sliver of sunlight glows over the horizon, Tristan says, “My father once referred to Borg Lecter as a snake.”

  I glance at him and our eyes meet. “Takes one to know one.” He can’t see my smile beneath my mask, but I think it reaches my eyes, because I see his cheeks lift.

  “I just mean to be careful. That’s high praise coming from my father. He hated and respected Lecter. He must be impressively evil to have wrested power from a Nailin.” The way Tristan speaks of his father is so clinical it’s like he’s discussing the molecular composition of granite. What his father did to him…

  “Tristan, I wish things could’ve been different with your family…” That I didn’t have to kill your father, that you didn’t have to kill your brother, that your father didn’t kill your mother, my father, Cole. So much death—it’s almost unbelievable.

  “You’re my family,” Tristan says, still sounding remote, detached. He’s got a wall up around his heart now. “Roc’s my family. Your father was like a father to me, even if only for a short time. A real father.” His voice breaks on the last word, as if the wall around his heart has a crack in it.

  I feel my own heart start to crack, too, so I say, “You know, it’s funny, people in my town, in subchapter 14, always hated your father, hated the Nailins, but they sort of envied you, too. They wanted to be you. The girls wanted to be with you.” I’m trying to lighten things up, but it doesn’t work.

  “They shouldn’t have,” Tristan says.

  “You were the goodness amongst the evil,” I say. “You and your mother. Flowers amongst weeds. That’s why she brought us together. Remember? She believed you could change things, and you have. We both have. Only we’re not done yet, okay? There’s still a fight to be fought.”

  “But I’ll be fighting out here, and you in there.” Tristan gestures angrily at the glass dome, glowing now with city lights.

  “Perhaps you should be fighting from somewhere else,” I say.

  “What?” Tristan says, glancing at me sharply.

  I point at the ground. “Maybe Wilde was right. Maybe one of us should go back, try to unite the dwellers, gain support for the cause above.”

  Tristan shakes his head. “I’m not leaving you up here alone,” he says.

  I take his hand. “Once I’m behind that glass, I’ll already be alone. There will be nothing more you can do for me.”

  “I can fight with the Tri-Tribes. Fight my way inside, back to you.” The intensity in his eyes and tone tells me he would. Or at least try. But no.

  “They need you down below. You’re the one to unite the Tri-Realms.”

  His head won’t stop shaking. “I’m a Nailin who went against the Nailins. The sun dwellers will call me a traitor, and the moon and star dwellers will call me the enemy. I’m an outcast from my own people.” It’s like an endless chasm has opened in his chest, sucking his soul into a pit of despair. I need to pull him out of it.

  I grab his shirt by the collar, pull him toward me, hug him fiercely. Whisper in his ear. “Your mother believed you could make a difference. My father too. And so do I. Just think about it, that’s all I ask.”

  When I release my grip to look at him, one of his eyebrows is raised, and even beneath the mask I can see the cockeyed look of amusement I fell in love with the first time I saw it. He’s back. Maybe not all the way, but at least partially. I only hope that’s enough.

  ~~~

  Eventually even the city lights begin to wink out, one by one, casting the buildings under a blanket of shadow. The edge of the glass dome shines slightly under the lights of the moon and stars.

  It’s time to make my move.

  Will I ever see my mother again? Elsey? Can’t think about that now. Need to focus.

  First I need to check out the security situation. I tried to explain it to Wilde, but the idea was foreign to her. “What does ‘security’ mean?” she asked.

  “Like protection,” I said.

  “Guards?”

  “Definitely. Probably electricity and guns and other things, too. Security. I’m just warning you not to be alarmed if you see and hear some crazy things tonight,” I told her.

  “Okay,” she said, but I’m not totally sure she understood.

  In any case, it’s time to find out what I’m up against. With Tristan watching, I pick up a medium-sized rock and run my thumb and forefinger along its sides, trying to get a feel for it. Tense my muscles in preparation. I pop up, widen my stance, and chuck the rock with everything I’ve got. Crouching, I watch as it arcs, reaches its peak, and then starts its descent downward, skittering off the hard ground and bouncing short of the dome. I swear under my breath. I’ve never had that good of an arm. Give me something to shoot—a gun, a slingshot, a bow—and I’ll do just fine, but make me throw something and it usually doesn’t go that well.

  “Sure you don’t want me to come along for situations like this?” Tristan says. His comment pisses me off a little, but at least he’s joking again, smirking. Himself again.

  He picks up another rock, one a little bigger than mine, and crouches beside me. Leans back, his long arm whipping behind his head, and then launches it. We huddle together, watching its flight as it careens farther, farther, farther, and then connects!

  Sparks fly as the angry snarl of electricity rips thro
ugh our ears. The rock is flung back and away from the dome, and a huge spotlight bursts through the glass, illuminating the desert just outside the city.

  We duck behind the rocky outcropping, jammed together. My heart’s racing, my breath sucked heavily into my lungs. I don’t dare to breathe. The light passes over us, cutting a bright arc around the shadow cast by the boulder.

  And then it winks off, returning the night to its natural state of moonlit darkness. My breath comes out in a whoosh, but Tristan’s is even heavier. Maybe now Wilde understands what I meant by security.

  “Guess you’ll have to use the door,” he jokes.

  “Damn. That’s so not my style.”

  We wait in silence for what feels like an hour before risking another peek at the city. Inside the dome, nothing moves, nothing breathes. Silence.

  Then we hear it.

  A cough.

  We look at each other with wide eyes. The cough becomes a hum, then a snarl. A vehicle. Approaching fast. A fire chariot, as Siena would say.

  It comes into view when it bursts over a mound, its headlights cutting through the night. It roars down the hill, not fifty feet from us. As it passes, I see them in the truck bed. Earth dwellers, wearing uniforms and masks, not unlike my own, toting black guns. A loud hum fills the air and the black, metal gate swings open, either automatically or because someone is watching for them. The truck enters through the gate and then stops in a glass tube just inside. We can see it through the transparent dome. The metal door closes behind them. There’s a rubbery suction-like sound that lasts for a few minutes, and then a door at the opposite end of the glass corridor opens. The truck drives through.

  “An airlock,” Tristan says.

  I nod. “They filter out the potentially harmful air before letting them through.” Makes sense. Seems they’ve got everything figured out to protect their citizens. And yet they refuse to leave the Tri-Tribes alone to live in peace, as harmless neighbors. Why?