Once

by Anna Carey

Page 28

  As I walked I replayed that moment: his eyes looking up at me, the whispered words only I could hear. I carried it inside me now, nestled somewhere inside my heart, a small, silent thing that we alone shared.

  Finally the land opened up before us. Rusted, abandoned planes sat on the pavement. Metal carts were strewn everywhere, some empty and bent, others piled with suitcases and crumpled, sun-scorched clothing. A metal sign above the building read McCARRAN AIRPORT.

  Caleb hooked a right. I followed him across the sandy parking lot, turning back every now and then to check for soldiers. The airport was empty. A few faded playing cards blew past, somersaulting in the wind. He disappeared into a long stone building and I followed behind, waiting a few minutes before going in.

  Inside, the shadowy planes towered above me, AMERICAN AIRLINES printed on their sides in red and blue letters. I’d only seen planes in children’s books before, had heard the Teachers reference the flights that went from one coast to the other. “Pssst,” Caleb’s voice called out from the darkness. He was hiding behind a short metal staircase on wheels. I went to him. Keeping close to the wall, we started toward the back of the hangar, his arm around my shoulder.

  “So this is where you come every day …,” I said, looking up at the massive planes, over a hundred and fifty feet long. Their metal wings were lined with rust, the white paint bubbling up in places.

  “Some days. The construction is on hold now, but a week ago there were nearly fifty people here each morning. ” We walked toward a door on the back wall. “Citizens come from all across the Outlands to take shifts, on top of the work they’re expected to do in the City center. The regime has been running demolition a half mile east of here. During the day it’s so loud you can barely hear yourself think, but it covers up the drilling or hammering sounds. ”

  Caleb knocked five times on the door. A man with a full beard stuck his head out, a red bandana tied around his head. Sweat soaked the front of his T-shirt. “Aren’t you supposed to have a hot date tonight?” he asked. Then he noticed me standing behind Caleb and a smile curled on his lips. “Ahhhhh … you must be the lovely Eve!” He made a big spectacle of bowing, dropping one hand to the floor.

  “What a welcome,” I said, bowing back. He hadn’t called me Genevieve, and I immediately loved him for it.

  “This is Harper,” Caleb said. “He’s been overseeing the dig while I’ve been at other sites. ”

  Harper opened the door just enough for us to squeeze in. Lanterns lit the small room. Two others, a man and a woman in their thirties, stood at a table, hovering over a large sheet of paper. They looked up when I came in, their eyes cold.

  “I haven’t been outside since one o’clock,” Harper went on. He was a shorter man with a gut that hung over his belt, his gray T-shirt two sizes too small. “Can you see the stars tonight? The moon?” His light gray eyes darted from Caleb to me.

  “I didn’t look up,” I said, a little apologetically. I’d been too focused on keeping my eyes hidden, the cap pulled down over my forehead.

  Harper wiped the sweat from his brow. “She didn’t look up!” he teased. “The one thing that’s hard about this City is the lights. Makes it difficult to see the constellations. You can get a good view from the Outlands though. ”

  “Harper can tell direction by the stars. That’s how he got to the City originally,” Caleb put in. He rested his hand on my back as he spoke, his thumb grazing my spine. “What’s that thing you always say, old man?”

  Harper threw his head back and laughed. “Old man yourself,” he grumbled, landing his fist into Caleb’s arm. Then he looked at me, pointing at the ceiling for emphasis. “There are millions of stars, each one shining and burning out at the same time. They die like everything else—you have to appreciate them before they’re gone. ”

  “I won’t forget,” I said.

  The wide office was empty except for the table and a stack of boxes. A hole nearly three feet across gaped open in the floor. I stood there, waiting for the other two to speak, but they were still perched over the paper, their faces half-lit by the lanterns. “No progress with the collapse?” Caleb asked them.

  The man was tall and thin with cracked glasses. He wore the same uniform shirt as I did, except the sleeves had been ripped off. He shook his head. “I told you, I’m not discussing this in front of her. ”

  Caleb opened his mouth to say something but I interrupted. “I have a name,” I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice. The man kept his eyes on the paper, studying sketches of different buildings throughout the City, notes scribbled next to them in blue ink.

  “We are all well aware,” the woman said, glaring at me. Her blond hair was rolled into thin dreadlocks, her pants spotted with mud. “You’re Princess Genevieve. ”

  “That’s not fair,” Caleb jumped in. “I told you, you can trust her. She’s no more the King’s family than I am. ” My stomach tensed as I remembered this afternoon. I hadn’t pulled away when he’d hugged me, had felt close to him when we’d spoken of my mother. A sinking part of me wondered if maybe I was guilty of something.

  The couple returned to the sketches. “Give ’em time,” Harper whispered, patting Caleb on the back. Then he looked at me. “If Caleb says I can trust you, then I trust you. I don’t need any more proof. ”

  “I appreciate that,” Caleb said, grasping Harper’s arm. “Harper was the one who started building the tunnels out of the City. He realized we could use the flood channels as a starting point. Parts of them have collapsed or are too unstable, mostly from all the King’s demolitions. We’re constantly digging through rubble, or finding parts of them blocked off. We’ve nearly gotten under the wall on this one, but then we hit a whole section that had collapsed. ”

  Harper hiked up his belt. “It’s too dense to dig through. We need to figure out an alternate route through the flood channels. Without maps of the drainage system we’re just feeling our way in the dark. ”

  “This is the entrance to the first tunnel,” Caleb said, gesturing to the hole. Behind us, the couple hovered over their work. “We try to keep the hangar the way it was when we found it, just in case any troops come through. The rubble is taken out at the end of the night, a little at a time, and then the construction starts again the next evening—or at least it used to. ”

  “Where are the other two tunnels being built?” I asked. “Who’s working on those?” The man and woman raised their heads at the sound of my voice.

  “Please don’t answer that,” the man said, his voice flat. He smoothed down the paper with both hands.

  Every muscle in my body tensed. “You know I was an orphan,” I said. “Up until a few days ago, I believed both my parents were dead. I’m not some spy. I have friends who are still locked up in those Schools—”

  “You sat in that parade, didn’t you?” the man with the cracked glasses interrupted. I could see my shadow in his lenses, a black figure against orange lantern light. “Were you not on that stage, in front of all the City’s residents, that stupid grin on your face? Tell me that wasn’t you. ”