by Adam Holt
So she noticed it, too? Of course she did. I faced the windows of a shop and tried not to look at the Ascendant girl behind the counter. She was older than me and really cute. Who knows how old she was? 3? 30? 300?
The Ascendant behind me tapped me on the shoulder. He said something in Greek and waved his hand at me. He frowned at me for a moment and then said something to everyone in the rest of the line. Immediately the entire line moved out of the way and ushered us to the front!
We’re so dead—or something, I thought, keeping a grip on Janice’s hand, but she looked relaxed somehow, like this was all supposed to be happening. We arrived at the front of the line and a heavily-tattooed female with ratty grey hair shoved towels toward us. Her wooden jewelry clattered with each movement. We grabbed the towels and started to leave when she yelled something toward us.
“Keep walking,” I said.
But Janice turned around. The old Ascendant woman hobbled toward Janice and threw off the hood to reveal Janice’s untattooed face.
Oh, stars.
I tugged Janice’s hand and prepared to leap over the building behind us. We were about to be attacked, but Janice held me in place. The old alien, with a clatter of bracelets, slapped my hand away. The Ascendant in line laughed.
“Calm down, Spaceboy,” she told me.
Then the old woman took the towel and patted the water off of Janice’s face. Then she approached me and, with her wrinkled hands, did the same.
Janice walked back toward the towel stand and dropped some shells in a bowl beside the woman’s stand. Where did she get those? She kissed the hand of Janice, who grabbed mine and started walking away with me like some sort of queen.
“Janice, what in the seven planets!” I whisper-yelled.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They treated us like royalty. We have to act the part.”
“Yeah, so wrap that towel tight around you. We’re going to stick out like celebrities until we get tattoos.”
We walked back to the beach, found a clearing, and kept our hoods down low, kind of like a movie star would put on shades and a hoodie to avoid screaming hordes of fans. We scanned the crowd for Sunjay. An orange lamp above us warmed the sand, but it was also a UV lamp. The light would give us a tan if we sat there long enough.
“I didn’t plan on working on my tan in space,” Janice said.
“Oh, haha. So shells are money?” I asked.
“I stole some from the guy in front of us,” she explained. “No sign of Sunjay, huh?”
We scanned the boardwalk for him. Minutes passed. Tension. Fear. Breathe, Tully. Just observe them and be ready. Maybe they will treat him like royalty, too. I tried to calm myself, but it was hard to get used to sitting on our enemy’s beach. They won’t look so friendly when they enslave the Earth.
A couple walked toward us holding hands. They were probably a foot from where we sat—and didn’t look like they planned to stop—so Janice and I moved apart. The man frowned at me as they both leaped lightly into the air and landed on the other side of us. Janice looked at me.
“Don’t flinch next time,” she said. “He noticed.”
“Uh, sure,” I said. Okay, notes to self: cover your calves, shells are money, and in low gravity, you can go over, not around, people. Moments later we saw my dad and Buckshot. They walked past us.
“Zaxon?” my dad asked, hardly slowing down.
“Not yet,” I said.
“We’ll be back in five minutes. You should hold hands,” he said.
Janice and I tried to play the happy teenage couple at the beach, sitting on the gray sand together, waiting for a friend. Holding her hand made me feel comfortable until she rubbed the lightning scar on the back of my hand.
Finally, he appeared. Sunjay, with his brand-new six-pack abs, muscular arms, and floppy black hair cascading from under the hood of his robe. He looked, well, dire cool for the first time in his life. Wrapped around his robe was a towel with gold trim. Also around his waist, the arm of an Ascendant girl.
Sunjay saw us. He pointed toward our lamp and he sat near us in the gray sand, he and this really pretty alien with wet black hair, a gold necklace and earrings, and dark smiling eyes. Probably two years older than us. Or two hundred. Janice nearly cut off the circulation in my hand.
“Pretty boy, your English sends me beyond the Pleiades,” she said.
“Oh, thanks.”
“Where is your promised one?” she asked with an Ascendant accent. Almost an Italian accent. “Why to the Gray Sand are you coming without her?”
“Uh, I like to eat those things,” he said. He pointed toward an alien-octopus-on-a-stick vendor.
“Really? My mother makes the best fire okto-poos,” she said in heavily accented English. “Oh, grilled. That is the word. Grilled okto-poos.” She motioned for the vendor. She gave the vendor a few shells and handed Sunjay the octopus. It was actually deep fried and covered in a white sauce like mayonnaise. He looked toward me. I shrugged. Hey, it couldn’t be as bad as the death smoothie. He bit into one of the tentacles while another tentacle slapped him in the face. He heaved for a second but swallowed the rubbery food.
“To your liking?” she asked.
“Uh, dire good.”
“Dire! You have beautiful words. You speak like a real Earther. Maybe I can still steal you before you marry.”
“Marry, me?” he said.
“You are matching your tattoos with your new wife,” she said. “Why isn’t she here? She could still you be losing.”
“Uh, yeah,” he said. An octopus tentacle clung to his face, but he forced it into his mouth.
Janice poked me in the rib. “Do you get it? Aliens that are about to get married do not have tattoos. Everyone else does. It’s some kind of ritual.”
“Oh, that’s why they cut us to the front of the line,” I said. “The old lady alien thought we were cute together.”
“Well, pretty boy with beautiful words, you must see my beauty as well.” She pointed to her leg – a “IV” was tattooed there. “Is your girl from such a high step as me?”
“My girl,” said Sunjay, slurping okto-poos. “Oh, she’s, uh, great. She is the best.”
“But she is not here. I come because I like a crowd. My beach is-how is it to say?-so few people. My friends there are boring. They worry about leaving. They say, ‘What if Earthers are bad servants?’ and ‘What if I do not get the best house near the ocean beautiful?’ Silly stuff. You do not have these worries. The Lord Ascendant will reward you for your service, yes? You are pretty small for a black staff though, yes?”
“Uh, yeah, but I’m growing,” he said.
“Yes, you are. We will have to fight the Earthers, but we will have victory in the new world, dream living.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Oh, there is no guess. Even the Firsters will have the good life living. Earthers will envy them for their beauty and power. Here, Firsters want to be like us. Their Firsters will be like gods. Still, they will never ascend to me.”
“Where do you want to ascend to?” he asked her.
She dipped her head and looked at him as if to say, You know, don’t you? Then she nodded toward the city.
For the first time I took a good look up the beach toward Rathmore. It took my breath away. The wide steps swirled upward in grey, yellow, blue, jade, crimson, and the last step, a radiant purple and gold. Rathmore, the “City of Seven Steps,” spiraled toward the clear ice dome that held in this perfect atmosphere.
Oh, the steps! I thought. She’s a Fourther. She lives on the jade-colored step. She must want to be on the Fifth or Seventh. It’s where the rich and powerful must live. Tabitha will be there. But why wasn’t there a Sixth? I didn’t care what happened to it. I just knew that we needed it if we were going to reach Tabitha. The Seventh was purple and gold, and though I could not see the top, I imagined the purple tower from my dreams in the middle of it.
The Ascendant beauty was talking to Sunjay agai
n, and he was starting to enjoy his octopus—and maybe all the attention from the alien girl.
“The Fifth Step,” said the beautiful girl to Sunjay. “Do you think my dreams are too big? Not many cross from Fourth to Fifth, but I will. Do I not have the beauty and the mind?”
She smiled at Sunjay, who flipped his hair out of his eyes nervously. Janice almost broke my hand. My lightning scars throbbed.
“Uh, yeah, definitely,” he said. “The beauty. And mind. You got it. The whole enchilada.”
“Enchilada plates 1/2 off this week only at Green Turtle Beach House of Tex-Mex!”
A voice emerged from my pocket. You know who. The girl frowned and looked across Sunjay toward me. I scrambled to silence Little Bacon’s latest advertisement. The girl looked curious. Before I could silence Bacon, I felt a slap across my face. Janice looked at me in disgust. Why did she do that? It became clear to me immediately as she glared at the Ascendant girl.
The Ascendant beauty sat back and whispered to Sunjay, “Look at the Firster dirt. Her boy looked at me too long. Like animals they are. So, the whole enchilada, a strange phrase,” she continued. “You have the gift of language, pretty prince of a boy. I can see why the Lord Ascendant picked you. Are you sure you do not want me for a wife?”
Sunjay’s jaw dropped.
“Pretty prince, maybe we will see each other again, but until then...” She kissed him on the cheek and sauntered down the beach.
IN AN ALLEY OFF THE BEACH
We regrouped in an alley behind the stores on the beach. Above us stood an enormous statue.
“Stars, it’s not like I was looking for a date with the hottest alien on the beach! I got out of the water and she wrapped that towel around me.”
“You needed a towel, not a wife!” Janice said. “She thought you were about to get married.”
“I know, I know. She did think I was hot though, right?”
“Oh, sure. Nobody is hotter. Oh, but it might help that she thought you were one of the Lord Ascendant’s warriors, too.”
“A pretty prince,” Sunjay corrected her.
“She was flattering you because she wanted power,” Janice said.
“It was the muscles…wait, are you jealous?”
“No!” Janice said. “I was terrified! If we were found out because you couldn’t stop from flirting with the first alien that bought you an octopus on a stick—”
“That thing did taste pretty good, even with the white sauce,” he said.
“Okay, enough,” my dad said.
That was too bad. I was enjoying the conversation, and so was Sunjay. Somehow, I think that Janice was, too.
We disrobed and my dad handed us each a blue tunic and sandals—clothing of the Third Step, he explained. We tucked our towels into the back of our tunics to cover our untattooed calves. It looked stupid but did the job.
“We have to make some inferences here,” he said. “First, all five of us are engaged to be married. That will draw suspicion. We need tattoos. Second, we are at the foot of Step One. Everything there is gray, including clothing. Look farther. Step Two is yellow.”
We looked up the spiral staircase. We could see the next two steps but the fourth and fifth step wound around the other side of the newel. Each step had a slightly larger gap. A mile over our head was the bottom of the Seventh, and final, Step.
“Based on your conversation with the girl, this is a hierarchy,” my dad explained. “Each step is a different rank in society, from lowest to highest, from gray to the very top—purple. The Third Step clothing will buy us respect. The Firsters and Seconders won’t ask many questions, even if we don’t have tattoos.”
“The Ascendant babe showed us her IV tattoo,” I said. “So we must need the Roman numeral III to be Thirders.”
“Don’t call her a babe,” said Janice. “That’s insulting to women.”
“She’s an alien, Janice! Maybe she likes the word ‘babe,’” said Sunjay. “Who cares?”
“I do!” she said.
My dad shook his head. “Janice, Sunjay, listen up. I will not repeat this, and I will not have to. The both of you need to learn to cut each other some slack. You’re both trying to score points in an argument. And do you know who loses in that game?”
“Both of us,” said Janice.
“No. Tabitha loses,” my dad said. Just the mention of her name and I could envision her in the tower. He never had to ask them to knock if off again. “Now it’s getting darker. That’s good. If we stay away from those lamps, we can make our way to the Third Step without drawing too much attention to ourselves.”
I looked toward the ice dome miles above our heads. Jupiter took up less of the sky. It was getting darker. And colder.
We followed my dad out of the alley and onto a street full of Firsters. Their gray tunics and sandals were worn down to nothing. So were they! Firsters had hollow eyes and gray faces to match their clothing. They looked underfed, but they walked with confidence and purpose. I remembered what the girl at the beach had said. They would soon have slaves of their own, so they must be slaves themselves.
Many of the young men, women, and children carried long poles full of giant fish—way too heavy if we were on Earth—up the street toward their destinations.
“Must be the day’s catch,” Buckshot said. “Somebody’s got to feed those folks on the higher steps.”
On the beach people jumped over each other to avoid colliding, but the Firsters stepped off the street and bowed as we walked past. They also avoided eye contact, so the blue tunics were the only things they noticed, not our untattooed faces.
The street ran on a serious incline, with steps on the steepest parts, paved with ground-up shells and lined with decrepit gray warehouses. One warehouse smelled like the death smoothie. Sunjay craned his head to peek inside. Another reverberated with construction noises. Above the entrance was the Ascendant symbol, the crown with three red stones. Inside, welders worked with handheld lasers to fuse giant chunks of black metal together. Above the door a 3D image of the Earth rotated slowly, and a slogan was written below it in English: “WORK LIKE IT’S YOUR PLANET—NOT THEIRS!”
It was the first of many warehouses with similar slogans.
“Those look like Mini-Mane parts,” I said. My dad nodded.
“It reminds me of the shipyards at Annapolis,” he said. We heard a rumble and saw a completed Mini-Mane float out the back of the warehouse. It sailed over the beach to much applause, and then submerged underwater bound for destinations unknown.
We continued up the steep rough street in the gathering darkness along with other Ascendant. A few Seconders and Thirders were in the crowd, but mainly Firsters. We could just see the edge of the Second Step, made of a dull yellow stone. It looked tidier, more organized even from afar.
“Poor Firsters. It smells like dead fish and dust down here,” said Janice. “I wonder if they get to see the other steps.”
“I doubt it,” I said, “but they’ve got more motivational signs than a high school counselor’s office.”
We read them as we walked. Signs with smiling, tattooed Ascendant workers in flowing tunics, standing with their chins held high. All of them encouraging people to prepare for the Earth invasion. Most in English, and a few in Greek and Chinese.
“FIRSTERS, PRACTICE YOUR ENGLISH! PREPARE TO RULE!”
“WORK HARD TODAY! TOMORROW YOU WILL LIVE IN PARADISE!”
“CHILDREN, THE LORD ASCENDANT IS YOUR FATHER! REPORT YOUR PARENTS IF THEY SPEAK AGAINST HIM.”
I looked at the picture of an Ascendant boy. He pointed out his parents to a tall Ascendant in a black tunic, who pointed a black staff at them.
“They would betray their own parents?” Sunjay said.
“Bad alien mojo,” said Buckshot.
“Propaganda,” my dad said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Sunjay. “It’s like those videos we watched about World War II. Governments used slogans just like this.”
“Yes, bu
t lower profile,” my dad said quietly. We spread out and stopped talking so much. If they took their propaganda seriously, they would be looking for suspicious activity—like five Ascendant with no tattoos talking about propaganda.
THE SECOND STEP
We crested a hill and suddenly there was nothing but air in front of us. We had reached the gap between First and Second Steps, which was fifty feet across and fifty feet high. It wasn’t much farther than the canyon leaps. I desperately wanted to jump the gap, but this wasn’t the Ascendant way. Instead, there two options. First was a crowded trolley that ran on glowing purple rails between the steps. Second, several black staffs stood above us on the Second Step. For a few shells, they would ferry you across the gap using their weapons. Their muscles rippled as they lifted two Ascendant at a time across the gap.
Pretty easy choice. We headed for the trolley. On board, the Seconders gave up their seats for us. We sat down, folded our arms, and kept our heads down to avoid stares. The trolley buzzed lightly on electric rails as we crossed the gap. On the ride over I noticed something faintly scratched into the armrest of my seat. Not more propaganda, but graffiti, it was a pair of outstretched wings. I like graffiti so I made a mental note of it. A word was scribbled beneath it:
Ίκαρος
I reached into my tunic and pulled out Bacon’s head just enough to read the word. He translated it for me: Icarus. That name again. I had seen the wings on a wall at the beach as well.
The buzzing trolley lurched to a stop. We made it to the Second Step, leaving the poverty of the Firsters behind.
“Ooh, this looks a little better,” whispered Janice. “I like the Second Step.”
“That looks like the Alamo,” said Sunjay, pointing up the street. “Is that a taco vendor over there?”
“Say ‘Buenos Nachos!’ to Uncle Antonio’s Tacos,” said Little Bacon. I clapped a hand over his mouth and we walked toward the alien Alamo.
Propaganda was mixed with advertisements on the Second Step. Billboards lined the streets, floating images of Ascendants involved in various activities:
