The Earth Dwellers

by David Estes

  I see them. Burly men wearing black, standing in the corners. Watching everything, scanning the room, eyes roving back and forth. Back and forth. Fun-killers. People are sitting, eating, most of them in silence, some talking in voices so low I don’t know how anyone can hear them. It’s eerie, like I’m in a cave full of sleeping bats.

  The line moves forward and I look for a plate, a tray, something. Everyone moves forward empty handed. I watch as a woman wearing dark pants and a black shirt at the front of the line scans her wrist on another plate, and is handed a dish with a glass of water and four rectangles on it: one green, one red, one yellow, one brown. What are those? Surely not food. She takes her plate and sits down at the first seat she comes to.

  The next person, an old white-clothed man with a cane, scans his wrist and is given a similar plate, only with just three rectangles. The same as the lady’s, but without the brown one. “No meat ration for the Lowers today, I guess,” he mutters as he sits near where I’m standing, looping the curved part of his walking stick on the corner of the table. Despite his complaint, he dives right in, using the side of his fork to smash the rectangles into something that looks—at least slightly—more like food. He shovels the resulting paste in his mouth with a large spoon, pausing only to take long gulps of water.

  It’s almost my turn, but my mind is on anything but food. No meat ration for the Lowers today. The man’s muttered complaint. By “Lowers” did he mean…those from the Lower Realms? The star and moon dwellers? The ones wearing white, doing all the jobs the former sun dwellers don’t want to do? I pay attention to the three people in front of me. Two of the three are wearing dark clothes and get the brown rectangle. The last one, wearing white, doesn’t. A Lower. So what does that make the others? Uppers?

  Feeling disgusted, I scan my wrist. A chubby woman wearing a white cap over her hair hands me a plate. No brown rectangle for me, the Lower.

  I take the first seat I come to, fighting back the rising urge to scream.

  ~~~

  I meet Lin later on where she told me to. The corner of W and 2nd. The streets are full of white-clad people, presumably returning home from whatever crap jobs they’ve been assigned. I’m surprised—the sun is still streaming through the glass, an hour or two from the horizon. Are their jobs really that bad if they get to go home this early? Maybe they start really early too.

  Despite having made sure I’d be at the designated meeting spot well before six, the time we’d agreed on, Lin’s already waiting, smiling broadly.

  Without any kind of greeting, she grabs my hand and pulls me through the press of the crowd. It’s the loudest I’ve heard the earth dwellers. They’re talking and gossiping like normal human beings. Like they’re alive and not the zombies I’ve seen walking around all day.

  “Lin?” I say, still being dragged.

  “Yeah?” she says, not looking back.

  “What’s going on?”

  “They let all the workers out early, for an—”

  A three-toned sound rings out from somewhere above, cutting her off. Instead of continuing whatever she was going to say, Lin sticks a finger in the air and keeps on leading me.

  A loud voice blares, immediately silencing the people. “Please return to your sleeping quarters and power up your vids for an important announcement from President Borg Lecter. I repeat…” The command loops three times, until I can’t help but to mimic it, mouthing each word. What sort of announcement? Is this about the injured soldiers we saw today?

  After eating lunch, I’d gone back to the army medical building, looked through the fence. The soldiers were gone, all of them, the injured likely receiving medical attention, the dead taken to Meaty-Bun and Skinny-Bun in the morgue, one of them probably stuffed in the very drawer I slept in last night. Hopefully they didn’t need to use the drawer I stashed the weapons in. The uninjured would be back wherever they live, resting and preparing for the next mission. If there’ll be a next mission. But if they won the war already…

  Lin practically yanks my arm off as she cuts to the side, out of the human flow, leading me through a door that clicks and opens automatically when she scans her wrist on a plate at the front.

  We stop in front of a row of shiny, metal doors. Lin presses a button in the middle of them, which lights up bright yellow.

  Only then does she turn to me. “Everyone’s speculating what the message will be about,” she says, “but I can tell you from experience that Lecter”—I like the way she says his name, irreverently, just his last name with no “President” attached—“only makes city-wide announcements if he’s trying to gloat or influence us.”

  “So propaganda basically,” I say.

  “About right,” she says as one of the doors opens. I follow her into a small closet, barely wide enough to fit both of us. Buttons with numbers from two to thirty-two are poking from one of the walls. Lin scans her wrist again and presses eighteen. The button lights up.

  The doors close and the closet hums under our feet. There’s a lurch and we start to rise. Even as I put a hand on the wall to steady myself I can’t help but think of the long ride up to the surface with Tristan. Up to check things out and back down to the real world. That was the plan. I shake my head, wondering how the hell I ended up as a spy in the New City.

  “What?” Lin says, eyeing me curiously.

  “Life is funny,” I say, meaning something else.

  “No. Life is crappy,” she says, meaning exactly that. Her word choice is closer to what I was thinking anyway.

  When we stop and the doors open, we step out into a long hallway with many doors on each side. Like a lot of doors. There have to be at least a hundred. Weird.

  Lin turns left and goes to one with the number 1808 on it. Scans her wrist, waits for a click, and then pushes through. “Avery?” she says. Funny she doesn’t called him “Dad” or “Father.” A lot of things about Lin are kind of funny.

  “Here,” the familiar voice answers. She holds the door for me and I step into a long narrow room that ends in glass. Through it I can see the sun reflecting off the side of another building. Avery’s inside, fiddling with some kind of plastic wrapper.

  “I brought Tawni,” Lin announces, and I almost look around for my old friend. But no, that’s my name now.

  “Hi there,” he says, to the both of us.

  “Hi Mr…Avery,” I say.

  “Just Avery,” he says, ripping the plastic off a green rectangle. “Want to have dinner with us?”

  My stomach clenches at the thought of more rectangle-food, but I know I need the energy. I can’t just not eat because the food is tasteless and shaped like bricks. “Sure,” I say.

  I close the door behind me and take in my surroundings…or rather, lack of surroundings. There’s nothing to the place. A small counter runs down one side, with small metal squares, like cabinets, set into the wall—no handles, no knobs, no way of opening them. Just in front of the glass window at the end is a small table with two chairs. Running back down the other side is a bare wall, gray, with strange lines cut into it. This is where they…live?

  Avery peels off another couple packages and adds a brown and a yellow rectangle to his plate, holds his wrist up to one of the metal rectangles and it opens. He shoves the plate inside and shuts the door. Yellow light glows from the edges as it hums. Maybe ten seconds later, the machine goes dark and the door pops open. Steam rises from the rectangle-food.

  “You can have this one,” Avery says, handing me the plate. Rations, I think. I can’t possibly take their rations, can I?

  “That’s okay, you have it,” I say.

  “Here, I’ll trade you,” Avery says, setting the plate on the counter and grabbing my wrist. Why do he and Lin love to do that? He lifts my wrist to a different metal plate and then pulls it back. The door slides open and inside are three clear, plastic pouches, each with a colored rectangle inside—green, brown and yellow.

  Down the counter, Lin has scanned her own wrist and is
already unwrapping her food. So it’s like…unlimited food at night but rations during the day? Why would that kid have been complaining about being hungry?

  I lift my wrist to try scanning it on another metal square, but nothing happens. Did I do it correctly? Is there some special technique to scanning I haven’t quite mastered, that I would have learned had I been through the proper welcome-to-Earth orientation?

  Avery laughs. “I try that sometimes, too, just for kicks, hoping there will be an error with the system and I’ll get a double ration. But it never works.”

  I laugh like that’s exactly what I was trying to do. Trick the system. Like I’m not the clueless idiot who doesn’t know how anything works.

  But Lin’s not buying it. “You’re different,” she says, grabbing her steaming plate out of the weird-super-fast-cooker-thingy. Avery sticks the next plate in.

  “I could say the same about you,” I say. “Both of you.”

  “How so?” Lin asks, sitting at the table.

  “Have a seat,” Avery says with a wave. I take the only other seat and Lin passes me a fork, the question still in her eyes.

  “Well…” I start, choosing my words carefully so as not to offend the only two friends I have at the moment. “Lin, you’re…not a zombie, and Avery, you actually talked to me on the street.”

  “Score! Not a zombie,” Lin says. “That’s what I was hoping for. Compliment of the year.”

  “So I am a zombie?” Avery says, standing and eating.

  Smiling, I shake my head. “No, I just meant that I walked around all day and no one seemed the least bit interested that I existed. Except for you two.”

  Oh, and the two Enforcers that had stopped me on the street and scanned my wrist. “Why didn’t you just tell us it was your Anything Day?” one of them had said before they moved on, leaving my heart to return to normal speed, my knuckles to unclench.

  “See, there you go again,” Lin says. “People don’t talk like that up here.”

  I look out the window, but it’s not a window anymore, it’s a black screen, spotted with static.

  “The announcement’s starting,” Avery says. “Let’s see what our esteemed and fearless leader has to say.” I like the way he says it. He sounds startlingly like Lin did when she spoke of the president.

  The window-that’s-now-a-screen suddenly blazes to life, filled with a man set against a blue background. He’s wearing a dark coat with a dark shirt underneath. The only splash of color is a red flower in his breast pocket. His face is lined and weathered, like he’s been through a lot in his life but come out on top. He’s not that old, but has silvery hair, parted just to the side of center, accented by blue-gray eyes. He wears an easy smile, but it doesn’t look natural, like it’s been pasted on.

  This is President Lecter? He could be someone’s grandfather. He probably is somebody’s grandfather.

  “Citizens of the New City, earth dwellers, pioneers,” he says slowly, like each word is of the greatest value and deserves perfect pronunciation and attention.

  “Why does he always start that way?” Avery asks, almost to himself.

  “Because he’s a tool,” Lin mutters.

  Staring right at me, Lecter continues. “We’ve won a great victory today in the fight for our children, for our liberty. The savages that call themselves the Icers have been destroyed!” My heart blinks, once, twice, thrice, stuttering before returning to normal speed. Not the Heaters. Not Tristan. I hate myself for the excitement that flutters through me because other people have died.

  “We couldn’t let any of them live, because even with their last dying breaths, the bloodthirsty natives were trying to kill our soldiers. They even brought their children to fight, arming them with guns stolen off the bodies of our loyal protectors.”

  They killed them all. Wilde had talked about the Icers like they were their only ally. So where does that leave them? A bubble of pressure forms in my throat. My mission has just become even more important. I cannot fail or they’ll all die. What’s left of them anyway.

  “But we suffered losses too,” Lecter says, his face softening. “Twenty-two of our brave men and women were killed in the battle, and many more were injured. Let us have a moment of silence for them and their families.” The president bows his head, clasps his hands. We just stare at him.

  I speak over the silence. “Do people here really believe the natives are savages?” I blurt out.

  Lin stares at me and I know I’ve been too obvious. “Who are you?” she says.

  ~~~

  I wait until Lecter concludes the announcement—raising a fist and promising to eradicate the rest of the savages that threaten the good people of the New City, or some such nonsense—before answering.

  “I—I’m a moon dweller,” I say, desperately trying to decide where to go from here. Can I really tell them? Can I really trust them? I said it myself: Avery and Lin are different. But are they allies? If I just leave, walk out the door, will they forget about me, that I ever existed? They know my name—my fake name, yeah, but the one that the damn chip in my arm is linked to. They could tell someone about me.

  “Yeahhh…” Lin says, urging me on. “But you’re not just a moon dweller, are you?”

  At some point, I’m going to have to trust someone, or I’ll never learn the ropes. And if I don’t know the ropes, I’ll stick out more than a star dweller in the Sun Realm.

  I stare at Lin, mulling over my decision.

  She rushes on. “Look, we have NO love for Lecter, for the way things are run around here. Whatever your game is, I want in. I can’t take another second of this creepy, God-forsaken city. I know Avery thinks things are worse down below, in the Star Realm, but they’re not. Not really. At least down there we can live life the way we choose. Whatever you’re hiding, tell us. You won’t regret it.”

  The conviction behind her words is as hard as steel. Either Lin’s a really good actress, or she’s being honest.

  I take a deep breath. This is it. My best or worst decision. My gut says I can trust these people, and I’ve learned to trust my instincts. The truth.

  “I snuck into the New City because I’m helping the natives,” I say, holding my breath.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Siena

  Tristan’s staring at the prisoners and they’re staring back up at him.

  And then Tristan jumps on the guy, right on top of him, like he might strangle him to death. Only he’s not strangling, he’s…well, I think he’s hugging him. “Roc,” he says. “You crazy son of a—”

  The prisoner—I s’pose I hafta call him Roc now—groans and says, “My gut, you’re gonna rip it open…”

  Tristan rolls off of him, shifts to the girl with the sunny hair, says, “Tawni.” She hugs him and we’re all just standing there staring at Tristan hugging the Glassies. Or, wait, if he knows ’em, then either they’re not Glassies or Tristan is, and I think we decided Tristan’s not, right? Things’re getting more wooloo than a prickler casserole made from Perry’s left arm. Sorry, Perry, but you know it’s true.

  “What’s with the mask?” Roc asks Tristan.

  “Like we always knew, the air’s not good up here,” Tristan says. “Especially for people like us who aren’t used to it. We’ll need to get both of you masks too.”

  “What the burn is goin’ on?” Skye says. At least she and I are thinking the same way.

  “These two,” Tristan says, getting up and pulling the girl, Tawni, up after him, “are my friends.” He helps Roc to his feet, too.

  “I say kill ’em anyway,” Skye mutters, but no one pays her any attention, and for once I think she’s joking.

  “And why are they here?” Wilde asks.

  An arm ’round each of ’em, Tristan says, “Now that’s a good question.”

  Roc, the one with the brown skin who almost looks like he could belong with us if not for the strange britches and shirt he’s wearing, says, “To find you. It was easy. We just spoke to the
scientist you introduced us to before you left, arranged transport to the surface. You put me in charge, so he couldn’t refuse me.”

  “We were worried,” Tawni adds.

  Tristan shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “What? We were just going to do nothing when you and Adele didn’t come back?” Roc says. “It took all of two days for everything to start falling apart again.”

  Tristan smirks, pushes Roc’s shoulder. “So you came to get me because I’m needed below?”

  Roc’s eyebrows lift and he pushes Tristan back. “Oh, wait, you didn’t think we came because we were worried about you? No, no, no, the Tri-Realms, Tristy. Personally, I was hoping you were taking an extended vacation, that maybe I could kick back, sit on the throne for a while…”

  “Bastard,” Tristan says, but there’s no anger in his voice and I finally realize they’re joking, like friends do.

  “Roc,” Tawni warns, using her eyes like weapons. Turning to Tristan, she says, “We were worried about you and Adele both, regardless of what my idiot boyfriend says. He could barely sleep when you didn’t come back.”

  “That’s the last time I share my secrets with you,” Roc mutters, but he moves over and puts an arm around Tawni. Not a “friend” embrace, like the one Tristan gave her, but something more intimate. “Speaking of Adele, where is she? Not as light a sleeper as you, I guess?”

  Tristan’s chin falls to his chest. His eyes close. “She’s…not here,” he says.

  “What do you mean, ‘not here’?” Tawni asks, her voice about as hard as it’s been since she started speaking.

  Tristan doesn’t seem as talkative all of a sudden, so I figure I can be helpful and I blurt out, “She’s in the Glass City.”

  “What?” Roc says. “You don’t mean the…” He trails off.