Daniel suddenly tenses beside me. “Io, there’s a person,” he murmurs on the tail of a breath, the last of the air in his lungs. I follow his gaze down the road ahead to the next intersection, but it stands as empty and lifeless as the rest of them.
“Are you sure?”
“Riding on a bike,” he whispers, and his eyes begin to drift shut as he slumps beside me.
“Daniel. Daniel,” I try, but he’s barely conscious. The paper slips out of my hand. However far we have left to go, however incapable I may be of it, I’ll have to carry him on my own. The thought makes my knees go weak, but like a reflex against failure they still hold my weight. We move slowly through the next intersection. There are no further signs of our elusive neighbor, even as we step across the wide-open square. Maybe he’s hiding now, or maybe Daniel was hallucinating. I can’t decide which is worse.
The building to the right looks just like the others, but on our left towers an intimidating array of windows and bricks, a pair of grids laid one over the other. Half-way across, the building’s style changes to match its counterparts, but a pair of doors with a loose chain hanging off of one handle, fortified by interlocking metal beams behind glass, carries the squared-off pattern a few steps farther. They look impenetrable, their appearance a deterrent in its own right, but desperation and blossoming unease drive me forward. To dismiss the entryway at first glance could be to forgo a chance at safety.
I half-drag Daniel from the broken gray floor, across a path laid in bricks and up a step onto lighter gray. When we get to the doors I don’t hesitate to try the handle. It opens at the slightest touch with a piercing creak, inviting us, beckoning us, drawing us in. With the last of the strength in my arms, I move Daniel over the threshold beside me and lower him gently to the floor. He barely stirs.
We’re in a long passageway, with cold floors that look like they might once have gleamed, lit only on either end by the daylight spilling through two identical pairs of doors: those we just came through, and another pair a hundred meters away. To the right is a closed door and to the left, a stairwell climbs reluctantly into the darkness above, wrapped around a tall metal mass formed in the likeness of a man and a woman who stand twice as high as any real person, lifeless but watchful. On the chilled surface beside me Daniel begins to shiver violently, his whole body contracting with each quake. It’s not enough just to come inside. I need to find him a blanket, a towel, a sheet, anything to replace our pile of linens we inadvertently left with the Neithers.
My heart gives a throb that stops me in my tracks. Ruth knew. I don’t know how, but Ruth knew what we were going to need when we left, and suddenly, I want her here with me more than ever.
It feels wrong to abandon Daniel in the middle of the hallway, visible from both outside and in and exposed, undefended, to whatever threat may come this way. But I can’t carry him around with me as I’m searching; there just isn’t time.
I glance over at the pair of doors on the right side of the hall. There could be anything behind them: garbage or guards or a stranger’s house. As quickly and quietly as I can, I dart over and press an ear gently against the panel. Something creaks, as though the building itself is protesting our intrusion, but there’s no sign of life otherwise. The handle rattles, loose in its fitting, and I maneuver the door open.
The room behind is empty and dusty, with strange patterns of light printed on crumbling walls. A line of columns supports the high ceiling, and each of the massive windows is almost entirely covered by stacks of bricks fixed into place, blocking all but a few rectangular patches where the pieces are missing. It’s no warmer than the hallway, but neither is it colder and it’s certainly safer.
“Where are you going?” Daniel whispers as I secure him in a corner, make him as comfortable as I can, and turn to leave.
“We need food and blankets. It’s too cold. You’re getting sicker.”
He looks like he wants to protest, even takes a deep breath as though to speak, but there isn’t enough air in his lungs for words. Instead, he closes his eyes and nods.
“I’ll be back soon. Stay safe,” I whisper as I close the door behind me, fully aware of the fact that I’m leaving him completely vulnerable. Only chance will keep him safe now, and I can’t shake my uneasiness even as I venture back out into the passage.
A click echoes to my ears, and when I glance up a figure passes, pauses, in the light streaming from the far end of the hallway.
In the Stacks
The stranger in the distance stops to stare for only a second, just long enough to recognize an unknown face before they take off back the way they came. I start up the stairs, but I can hear the creaking of their footsteps just above me. They’re gathering their forces.
And I need to keep them away from Daniel.
Through a few more twisting passages a series of empty doorways lead me. Each space is strange and different, but they pass by in an indescribable blur as strangers’ voices echo from behind. A flash of light through a window, the shimmer of a polished floor, a wall paneled in dark brown, half ripped apart. The maze of the building carries me up to a wall of interlocking metal, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. I push and pull, searching for a weak point along its length, but nothing gives. A staircase lines its side, leading up to a section offset by a few centimeters and held in place by a series of chains. It isn’t a wide gap, but it’s wide enough for me.
A door slams somewhere below as I squeeze through, and for just a moment before I take off I catch a glimpse of a face staring up at me with wide eyes.
“It’s a kid,” the man calls to someone behind him. “Tell Nicholas it’s a kid, and she’s in the Stacks. This is going to take a while.”
His words, though not the man himself, pursue me into blackened rows of shelves. Down one row after another, I catch glimpses of isolated points of light, but the rest is complete darkness. Every other step, I catch an arm, a knee, on a sharp metal corner until my feet finally meet an obstacle they can’t surmount.
I fall, and as I hit the floor, a cloud of dust billows up in my face, filling my eyes, coating my mouth and drowning me so that I choke on it in hopes of gathering even a breath more of air. I’ve seen the grime of the sub-city tunnels, the filth that surrounds the Neither’s colony on all sides, threatening to invade and coat everything that stumbles into its path with an impenetrable layer of muck. But this is different. This is like the dust that occasionally settles on tops of the tables and counters in Ruth and James’ homes, if it were left to accumulate for years. And maybe that’s exactly what has happened. Maybe no one has been here for years.
Something shudders in the distance and buzzes to life, and with a massive boom, lines and lines of light bulbs flare up. It’s like these rows go on forever, and nearly every level of every shelf is filled with rectangular boxes of every size, color and design imaginable. The lights bathe the world in yellow, but even still the color and the variety astound me. It takes a few seconds for me to clear my eyes enough to really make out anything distinctive.
Up ahead, a tiny stairwell goes both up and down, and when I reach it I realize that I’m in the middle of a pile of floors as many levels high as the shelves they house. A few steps in either direction is enough to prove to me that every level is almost entirely identical. This is a place to get lost in.
“Who are you?”
A voice comes from just over my shoulder. My heart nearly stops, but I turn reluctantly to face this stranger only to find that there is no one there.
“I just want to know your name.”
It’s an echo. I can tell from the footsteps on the floor above. Whoever he is, he isn’t far away, but he hasn’t found me yet.
I creep as quietly as I can among the shelves, but the harder I try to catch my breath, to calm my heart, the more difficult it becomes. The dust has permeated the air, clogging my every gasp with microscopic particles. I use the phantom steps to guide my escape, retreating as far from their haunting b
eats as I can, but it’s getting harder and harder.
“You’re going to have to come out eventually. I swear, we’re not going to hurt you.”
He pauses again and only then do I recognize how much fear there is in this silence. In this silence he is invisible – a footstep, a sigh, the flap of falling paper. Little noises momentarily reveal his location, but when he is perfectly precise in his motions, I feel the danger more than I’ve ever felt it before. And with my wheezing breaths, now amplified by the terror swelling in my throat, I am more than just visible to him. I’m practically calling out.
I find an old desk buried in a dark corner behind a massive shelf and pull myself under it, keeping watch by my ears alone.
“At least give me your name. I just want to know who you are.”
Now his words come from a few floors above. I can’t be sure that he hears me, but I can’t be sure that he doesn’t. I’m imagining a face, an angry face, brow furrowed in focused rage. He’s looking cautiously around corners because he doesn’t know in what stance he might find me. The unknown is as much a threat to him as it is to me. But he’s got advantages: his breaths aren’t painful, searing gasps; he isn’t curled up in a ball under an ancient desk; he isn’t blinded by a thick film of tears pouring out of his eyes; he, or so it seems to me, isn’t afraid.
I am.
With a surge of terror, my hand finds the two fabric hearts in my pocket and holds them tight.
“You’re having trouble breathing. The dust is only going to make it worse the longer you’re in here. Let me help you.”
I don’t believe him, but that no longer means anything, because all of a sudden I hear footsteps on the stairs. He’s coming down. I struggle to stifle my gasping, but it seems that any voluntary control of my breathing has been compromised by my shrinking airways. So I clamp a hand over my mouth instead, ignoring the instant vertigo that results as I listen. He steps down one flight of stairs, two, three and I hear him breathing just a few dozen meters away. Through the crack between the wall at my back and the large metal shelf that conceals me, I can just see the stairwell, open at each entrance and landing except for a thick metal railing. Standing half a flight up where only his feet are visible, he pauses to listen before continuing down to the floor below. My floor. Though I’m suffocating myself, I let only a hint of breath through as he heads toward the next story down, and I watch intently in hopes of catching a glimpse of his face.
I do catch one, a good one. A hardened face, half-dark with stubble, seems to look straight at me for just a moment. But I’m certain he can’t see me, I’m certain I’m safe. Then the smile appears and I realize my error. We’ve just made eye contact.
He must be aware of my incapacitation, because he doesn’t hurry over. Or maybe he’s just trying to avoid scaring me. If so, he has failed miserably. At this point, I know I have no reason to hide my breathing, and when I finally remove my hand from my mouth, general hyperventilation attempts to join the array of conditions plaguing my chest. The volume of noise mismatches the volume of air in my lungs so grossly it terrifies me. It’s not him I’m afraid of anymore. Either way, I know I’m going to die, but suffocation seems the more painful of the two options. Suddenly, I’m hoping he pulls out a knife, just so that I don’t meet my end by asphyxiation.
But it’s not a weapon he holds in his hand. At least, not any weapon I’ve seen. He stands above me for a few seconds, passively surveying my struggle, and then kneels beside me. In instinct, I pull away to the farthest corner before I remember that there’s no point being afraid of him anymore.
“You need help. Are you going to let me help you or are you just going to keep cowering in the corner like that?”
With the last ounce of energy I can dredge up, I nod and suddenly find myself being pulled out into the open. He puts on hand on the back of my head and with the other forces a little plastic contraption up to my lips.
“Breathe.”
I struggle to cough and choke away the chemical vapor filling my mouth. He’s poisoning me. I’m sure of it.
“I know it tastes like a chemical, but it’s going to help you. Look.” At my failure to respond, he puts the container up to his mouth and inhales deeply, holding his breath as he shakes it and puts it to my lips again. “It won’t hurt you.”
I nod again and begin to breathe in, but something has changed. I can’t inhale. I arch my back, pushing the device away from my mouth as though it is the thing blocking my lungs, but it’s not. This is entirely internal and every effort I make to draw even a single breath uses more oxygen than I can take in. The light in my vision and the floor beneath me are gone before I even have a chance to cling to them.
“No, no, no. Come on. Not like that,” the man mutters urgently, a voice floating in darkness.
Just as I feel myself slipping away, I taste the chemicals again, but it isn’t enough. I’m already lost.
Welcome to the Library
I wake to a cold hand wrapped around my wrist. Somehow I know that it was a pair of warmer arms that deposited me here and that these hands are not of the same person, but I don’t really care. The flood of rich air in my lungs has never felt so good and certainly never so abundant. I breathe deeply and greedily until my fingertips tingle and my head spins with the surplus of oxygen, but this dizziness doesn’t scare me. It’s so natural, so right, and I can hardly deny my body the luxury, having so recently withheld it. I don’t even want to expend the energy to open my eyes.
“I think she’s going to wake up soon. Her pulse is getting faster.”
“Come back here, Halli. You don’t know what she’s going to do.”
“What could she possibly do to us? She’s so tiny. What do they do to them in the Population?”
“They can’t be from the Population. She wouldn’t be that small. The government sends all the food there. I’ll bet they’re from somewhere in the outskirts.”
A third voice comes in to settle the argument. “Nope. Definitely Population. Look at her thumb. She’s an Optic. I wonder how old she is.”
The man who last spoke comes closer, lifting my arm to show the others. Still, I keep my eyes closed. It’s so safe, so comfortable to stay in this darkness.
“I don’t see it…but what’s that she’s got in her other hand?”
“A scrap of fabric, or something,” someone answers.
“Here.” The man pulls back on my thumb, still sore from the injury of my escape from the guards, and suddenly my will breaks. My eyes open wide at the force of my own gasp, and I’m not the only one who’s startled. Those close jump back, those far jump closer, and within the moment a uniform wall, half of people and half of an actual painted surface at my back, surrounds me. A couple of them point strange black objects in my direction, following my every motion exactly, tracking me like eyes.
I lean closer to look into the ends and the owners of the objects slide a few more steps back. They aren’t threatening me, as far as I can tell, but the fear in their eyes proves that I’m a threat to them.
Using the wall behind me, I take to my feet. Though they exchange perturbed glances with each other, their gazes return to me almost immediately. Their confusion confuses me, but I go along with it. It’s not like I have another choice.
“Stay where you are.” The man from the shelves appears suddenly among them. He steps farther forward than the rest, the object in his hand pointed straight at my eyes. After a few seconds of painfully stagnant tension, I finally find my voice.
“What’s wrong?”
“Put your hands up in the air.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m pointing a gun at your face.”
I shrug at him and shake my head slightly. I have no idea what these guns of theirs can do, but based on their size, my guess is not much. The people’s exaggerated reaction is beginning to entertain me, but something tells me that this situation isn’t supposed to be humorous.
His eyebrows come together and he in
clines his head slightly, waving the thing in the air. “Don’t you know what this is?”
At the very end of his question, there comes something in his voice into which I wish I could read further. Ruth would be able to, and I have a feeling that right now she’d be telling me to leave. She’d want me to run as fast as I could, because in the tone of his words I abruptly hear something I never want to hear again. In his words, I hear death.
“Hold still.”
I obey his command partly in curiosity, but it’s curiosity tainted with uncertainty and fear. He turns his aim a little to the right and takes a deep breath, staring at a point over my shoulder. Seconds later, three things happen. A loud bang sends a shockwave through my body, a whisper of hot air leaves a searing line on my arm and a crack on the wall behind me spirals out from a fresh hole.
He sighs and shakes his head. “I told you to hold still. Now, look at your arm. See how it’s bleeding? That’s called a graze. The bullet grazed you. Hurts, right? Imagine what it would do if it went through your knee, your heart, your brain.”
He points the gun at each place in turn, finally settling on my eyes again. “Now do you know what this is? Tell me.”
The breath is gone from my lungs again, but not for the same reason as before. How does something like this exist? It’s like a knife that can wound without piercing the skin, like a club that breaks bones without being swung. Now I understand the inspiration for the weight of this man’s words. As long as he’s holding the gun, I am forced to choose between freedom and life.
“Tell me.” As he steps forward, his hand twitches and I jump back in horror again. The stinging in my arm won’t let me forget what I just learned.
“It’s a gun. It’s a gun and it’s horrible. So horrible. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
He smirks. “Then either you haven’t been around very long, or you’ve lived a very sheltered life –.”
“Nicholas!” The door slams opens at the far end of the room and an old man enters, supporting Daniel with one arm. He still looks pale, weak, but circumstances and a couple hours’ rest have at least gotten him on his feet.
Be Thou My Vision (The Population Series) Page 19
