The Earth Dwellers

by David Estes

  “The earth dwellers,” Tristan says, eyes still closed, head still down. “She infiltrated the New City to try to stop them.”

  “Stop them from what?” Tawni asks.

  Tristan looks up. “From killing everyone who’s standing around you right now.”

  ~~~

  We give the prisoners, who I guess ain’t really prisoners any more—except to Skye, who keeps muttering that we should at least tie their hands t’gether—water and food and a place to sleep. Wilde also manages to scrounge up a couple more masks, stolen off of dead Glassies. Tristan tells ’em ’bout all the stuff they missed, and even though he skips over the part ’bout the Icers quickly with only a few words, Skye leaves the tent and I hafta blink a few times when my vision goes all blurry. Roc and Tawni, whose eyes’ve been wide for most of the story, are suddenly interested in their hands.

  “God,” Roc breathes when Tristan finishes.

  Tears are making tracks down the tops of Tawni’s cheeks, disappearing beneath her mask. These two ain’t Glassies. Glassies’d be cheering right ’bout now, wetting their britches with delight.

  “The sun goddess only watches us, gives us hope,” I say. “But we hafta make our own choices. The Glassies made theirs today.”

  “The Glassies?” Roc says. “You all kept calling us that. You thought we were from the New City?”

  “Yes,” Wilde says. “Before Tristan and Adele, anyone that looked like you were Glassies. The enemy.”

  “That’s why that crazy girl who was here earlier wanted to kill us,” Roc says.

  “I’m pretty sure she still wants to kill you,” I say. “And watch what you say ’bout her. She’s my sister and she’s grieving something awful right now. Looking for revenge.”

  “Because of the…Ice—Icers?” Tawni says.

  I nod. “They were our friends,” I say. “But one of ’em was more’n a friend to Skye, and she doesn’t let people in very often.”

  “That’s horrible,” Tawni says. “The earth dwellers are horrible. Like ten times worse than the sun dwellers.” She looks at Tristan. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Tristan says. “I want things to change as much as anyone. That’s why I didn’t come back. I have to do what I can to help these people, the Tri-Tribes. We can’t let Lecter get away with mass murder.”

  Skye steps back in. She’s been listening the whole time and her eyes are on me, softer’n ’fore, but still twice as hard as the canyon walls. “Now yer talkin’,” she says. “If I don’t get to kill you all, then I wanna kill Lecter.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tristan

  I still can’t believe Roc and Tawni are sitting in front of me, lifting their masks to sip water out of a skin and eat prickler, and learning all about what’s happening up here. They’ve been asking questions, just like Adele and I did, for near on an hour now, and Skye and the rest of them have been answering every single one, taking them through the situation. There’s a bloodthirsty gleam in Skye’s eyes every time Lecter’s name comes up. I don’t blame her.

  “Without the…”—Skye’s voice cracks slightly, and she takes a deep breath—“…our friends to the north, even if Adele can take care of things on the inside, we still don’t have the numbers to beat ’em.”

  She’s right. Adele could assassinate Lecter and it probably wouldn’t make one bit of difference. The soldiers would get orders from some other follower of Lecter and do the killing just the same. We simply need more bodies.

  “Roc,” I say. “Tell me about below.”

  Under the torchlight, what I can see of my half-brother’s face looks orange. “The generals have been asking to meet with you since the moment you left. Their troops are angry, frustrated. They were winning the battles in the Moon Realm when you ordered them to withdraw. They want the green light to start the bombing again. The generals say the delay is giving the rebels time to regroup, to refortify.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That you decided to become a hermit and live the rest of your days in a cave, letting your hair and beard grow to your knees,” Roc says with a straight face. I give him a look. “What do you think I told them? I lied, held them off as best as I could, said you were dealing with a lot right now, in talks with the leader of the Resistance, General Rose.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Hell no. They left me alone for an hour, maybe two, and then they were back on me like a bad hair day.” Roc’s still cracking jokes, but his eyes are grim. He’s stressed. “They finally said they’d take matters into their own hands if they had to. We caught the first scary-box-rocket thing to the surface, fell outside the cave like a couple of newborn babes, and wandered the desert for almost a day before we ran into your new ‘friends,’ who immediately began discussing whether to kill us now or later.”

  “They tend to do that,” I say, trying a smile but not quite getting there. Crap. The Glass City is the rock and the Tri-Realms is the hard place. I’m stuck.

  But there’s really no choice. “We’ve got to go back,” I say.

  “Yer leavin’ us?” Skye says, her eyes eating me alive.

  “No…yes…it’s not like that.”

  “I knew you were a baggard. Yer woman’s probably burnin’ us ’round too.”

  “No. Skye, no.” She seems surprised that I said her name, like I know her; her face lights up for a second before returning to a dark frown. “Skye. Seriously, I’m with you.” Her hands are clenched at her sides and I can see the hurt on her face. There’s a person beneath the hard shell she’s built around herself. Human feelings. Pain and loss. I can almost see the goodness seeping out through her pores. “Skye,” I say again, pulling my thoughts together. “I have a plan. No one’s abandoning you.”

  She purses her lips, breathes deeply through her nose, slowly unclenches her fists. “Spill it, dweller,” she says.

  Looking right into her eyes, I say, “In three days’ time, we attack the Glass City.”

  ~~~

  Even Skye seems satisfied now. Everyone’s happy, or at least as happy as possible given there’s a good chance we’ll all be dead in less than a week.

  After some rest, Hawk and Lara will escort Roc, Tawni, and I back to the cave, where we’ll return to the Sun Realm. Our mission: to convince as many soldiers as possible from the Tri-Realms to accompany us back to the surface to fight with the Tri-Tribes. We’ll be counting on Adele to help find us a way into the New City by then, or at least create a disruption in the earth dweller chain of command.

  Skye and Wilde will lead their own forces northward, toward ice country, looping around the edge of fire country and then moving south. While the Glassies are searching to the west, they’ll be northeast.

  If all goes according to plan, we’ll converge on the New City in three days, from the two places they’ll least expect to be attacked from. There are a million variables in the plan that could go against us, but Skye’s right about one thing: we have to act first, not wait for Lecter’s army to hunt us down and massacre us like they did to the Icers.

  With Roc already snoring softly beside me, his arm draped around Tawni, I finally stop staring at the tent roof, which is turning from black to brown with the rising sun.

  ~~~

  “Git up you lazy, wooloo baggard!” a voice says, shoving me out of a dreamless sleep. The voice sounds familiar, but the words don’t make sense coming from his mouth.

  Someone shoves me for real, and I grab at the arm, blinking my eyes open. I pull Roc hard, throwing him off balance. He tumbles over me, cracking his head on one of the tent poles.

  “Ow!” he hollers, lying in a heap, rubbing furiously at his skull.

  “Serves you right,” I say. “What were you saying to me? Something about being lazy and wooloo and—what was that other one?”

  “A baggard,” Roc says, popping his mask off, grin-grimacing, one eye closed. “Siena’s been teaching me all kinds of new words while we waited for your n
o-good tug-lovin’ butt to wake up.”

  “Well, this butt is awake,” I say. “The rest of me too.”

  Roc replaces his mask. “Yeah, I found that out the hard way. I risk my life to come find you, and you throw me into a tent pole. Some friend you are.”

  “We ain’t searin’ friends,” I say, doing the Siena-impersonation now. “We’re brothers, and I’ll be burned if I won’t chuck you into tent poles and pricklers if I have a mind to.”

  Roc laughs. “Not bad,” he says, “but you’ve had time to practice. Now let’s go, the day’s a-wastin’.” He crawls out of the tent.

  Sighing, I roll away from my blanket and follow after him, squinting when the blinding light hits me. It could be years before I get used to how bright everything is up here. On Earth. Where I am. Not in it, but on it. It still doesn’t feel quite real.

  Brown-skinned people are milling about, carrying stones, logs of wood, bags of what appear to be cut up pricklers, babies, and all sorts of other things. Men are building tents, stacking stones. Women are tending fires and stirring pots. Kids are playing, stopping to stare at me as I pass them.

  Roc’s already sitting beside Tawni on a stone bench, next to a crackling fire. Circ and Siena are side by side, smashed together so close they almost look like a two-headed person. Hawk and Lara are there, too, but they’re on opposite sides of different benches, like they see plenty of each other on a daily basis to want to get too close.

  I sit next to Roc, jabbing him lightly in the ribs.

  “Morning,” says Tawni brightly.

  “Good morning,” I say. “Sleep well?”

  “Like a rock,” she says. “No pun intended.” Roc grins.

  “Yeah, he does seem to fit in up here,” I say, motioning to the stone seat our butts are on. “Maybe we should leave him.”

  “Do your worst,” Roc says. “But I’m growing to like the food up here already.” Balancing a bowl in one hand, he shovels a spoonful of soup under his mask and into his mouth. “This ’zard stew isn’t half bad.”

  “Ain’t half bad,” Siena corrects. “Remember what I taught you?”

  “You might not be saying that if you knew what a ’zard was,” I say.

  Roc gives me a look, but I don’t elaborate. I’ll show him a live one on our trip back to the cave.

  “So you don’t want the soup?” Circ says, offering me a bowl.

  I shake my head. “If you’ve got any prickler salad, I’ll take that.” He hands me a wooden plate with green chunks and some sort of dressing on it. “Mmm,” I say, taking a bite, “at least this wasn’t creeping in the dirt before it ended up in my mouth.”

  Roc, having just taken another bite of his soup, looks down at his bowl curiously, as if it might be looking back at him.

  I finish off the salad and stand up just as Skye, Feve and Wilde approach. “We met with the rest of the Tri-Tribe council,” Wilde says. “They’ve agreed to the plan. We’ll march north shortly after you leave for the East.”

  “Good,” I say, my eyes meeting Skye’s. I can’t read her expression, except I know I’m gladder than ever that I’m not a Glassy. “I hope we meet again soon.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Adele

  They don’t call the Enforcers, don’t turn me in to Lecter. At least not yet. Although I’m not denying the possibility that the moment I fall asleep they could very well turn me in. I wouldn’t necessarily fault them if they did, considering I’m trying to, in a fashion, bring down their perfect little city.

  Instead, they ask me questions and I give them answers and they shake their heads in bewilderment.

  “I know this is an impossible request,” I say, when there’s a break in the questions, “but I need your help. Not directly.”

  “Anything,” Lin says.

  “Lin,” Avery says.

  “No, Uncle. We can’t do nothing. You know as well as I do that Lecter’s gone too far.” Uncle? But I thought…Avery called Lin his daughter, so I assumed he meant from a biological standpoint.

  Avery sighs. “He went too far a long time ago,” he says. Something clicks inside me. Why these two are different than the others, maybe.

  “Lin, where are your parents?” I ask.

  She scowls at the table, drums her fingers on it lightly. Her half-eaten plate of mushed brown, green and yellow insta-food has long been pushed away from her.

  “My sister, Lin’s mother, died in the Star Realm a long time ago,” Avery says.

  “I’m—I’m sorry,” I say, following Lin’s gaze to her hands.

  “She was supposed to come with us,” Lin says, her voice tight. “We’d been ‘hand-selected to start a new life as sun dwellers.’” I can tell she’s quoting something. A message, a person. She looks up at me. “We were so excited, my mother more than anyone. She’d been sick for a long time, but she was always worrying over me, concerned I wasn’t eating enough, wasn’t hanging out with the right sorts of kids, wasn’t smiling enough. But when we were picked, she couldn’t stop smiling. Not because she was going to what she thought was a better place, but because I was going to a better place, going to have a better life…” Lin’s voice trails off and she looks away, out the window that’s just a window again.

  “She died a few days before we were scheduled to leave,” Avery says, looking at Lin with concern.

  “Because of me,” Lin says, and her words are cracking so much I get the feeling she wants to cry, but she doesn’t. “She only held on as long as she did because she was worried about me. Now that I was taken care of—or so she thought—she gave up. It was my fault.”

  “Lin, no,” Avery says, putting a hand on her back. “It was just life.”

  Lin turns to look back at her uncle, her lips quivering but her eyes like steel. “Well this ‘just life’ has been awfully rotten to us. You can’t deny that.” She looks back at me. “We went to the Sun Realm, all right, but then they said we’d been further selected to go above. ‘Above?’ we said. There was nothing above the Sun Realm, or so we’d all been told. Only toxic air and a dead world. Not that different than the Star Realm really. But they were so excited when they told us. We even got another letter, this one from President Nailin himself, wishing us luck on our great adventure.”

  She slams her fist on the table so suddenly I flinch back.

  “They lied every step of the way. The moment we got up here they shoved a chip in our flesh and put us to work, told us where we could go, what we could eat and how much, where we could sleep and how long.

  “My father…was a stubborn man—guess there’s no surprise where I get it from.” Finally a tear falls and she wipes it away quickly, as if frustrated by it. Blows a few stray hairs out of her eyes. “He asked a lot of questions and they don’t like questions up here. He questioned the rules and the honor of the president, and then one day he didn’t come back from his craphole job cleaning toilets around the city.”

  Reflexively, my hand goes to my face, covers my mouth. Does my heart have room for one more tragedy?

  She continues numbly. “We got a letter three days later saying there’d been an accident, that he was dead, that his body was…unviewable—whatever the hell that means. But there was no accident—they killed him. The bastards killed him.” She laughs, shakes her head.

  “You know, the funny thing is that it was just a day earlier that my dad and I were joking about how he’d better watch his mouth or Lecter might come down off his throne and shoot him. This ‘just life’ that we have isn’t life at all. It’s as good as death. So yeah, Uncle, when I say I’ll help Tawni in any way I can, I mean it.”

  “My real name’s Adele,” I say, finally trusting Lin and Avery with every bit of my being. “Under the orders of President Nailin, my father was shot and killed and my sister, Elsey, maimed. I’d be honored to have any help you can give me.”

  Lin looks at me, manages a smile, and then sticks out her hand. I shake it firmly. “Avery, you with us?” I say.


  He scrunches up his face like he wishes he’d never spoken to me in the first place, but then says, “Yes, but please don’t let anything happen to Lin. She’s all I’ve got left.” And he thinks of her like a daughter, he doesn’t have to say.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll do all the dangerous stuff. Now tell me what ‘Presidential Cleaner’ means.”

  ~~~

  Turns out you can find out a lot about a person if you’re able to scan their wrist onto your vid screen.

  The first thing that pops up is a way big photo of my face, complete with the Tristan-inflicted black eye. It’s the photo the chip guy took earlier today and it’s completely blocking our view of the building next to ours. TAWNI SANDERS it reads in black block letters.

  Avery’s shaking his head. “I don’t know how you did it, Adele.”

  “Luck, mostly,” I say, grinning. “And a little help with directions from you.”

  He shakes his head again and the screen changes. Lin is using a small pad which is showing her whatever’s on the screen. There are some stats about me. Height- 5’7”. Weight- 130 lbs. Eye color- green. Hair color- dark brown. Boring stuff.

  Lin uses her pad-thingy to flip to the next screen: Occupation and Schedule. A photo of a large building appears, fully glass and rising higher than any of the buildings around it, coming to a sharp point, like a spike. Near the base, there’s a large iron door with a couple of armed guards standing in front of it. A sign above the door reads: Presidential Offices.

  Below the picture it says “Presidential Cleaner.”

  “Seriously,” Lin says. “How did you land this gig?”

  Now even I’m shaking my head. “I just saw it on the forms and checked it off as my job. Evidently because all my information was supposedly ‘lost’ on my malfunctioning chip, they just believed me.”