I run, even though it makes me feel like a coward.
*
I take a staircase down and pick a corridor that should lead to an elevator. But every corridor looks the same, and I don’t know where I’m going.
I end up lost in the maze that is the main floor of Training Division. Blue lights flash everywhere, reflecting off the stark white walls. I pass doors and sections of glass wall that show me some of the training areas I saw from above: the room with the intelligence capsules; the room with the battle screen for a floor. But they’re empty now. I don’t see students, let alone instructors. Small, rectangular bots hover on the sidelines in the battle room, but they can’t help me find an exit.
I recite all the digits of pi I have memorized to keep calm: 3.1415926535897932384626 …
Around a corner, I reach the end of the pathway, the last door to the last room. I’m definitely moving in the wrong direction.
I’m about to turn back when I realize where I’ve ended up. The last doorway leads to another empty training room, but this one has fighting mats on the floor, and knives lining the far wall.
This must be one of the places where officials learn how to fight. All of the officials in the outer sectors grew up here in the Core, which means they trained here too. That patrol I met when I climbed the restricted building trained here. And so did the man who gave me the scar I had before I lost it during the surgical procedure.
Red light floods the entrance to the training area. I take a step forward. The entrance makes a sound—a soft hum that reminds me of the acid shield, and the moon.
Frowning, I stretch a hand toward the red light. The instant I touch it, a shock reels through my arm. I pull it back with a gasp.
“Sorry, officials only,” an amused voice says behind me.
I whip around. A boy smirks at me, flanked by two others.
“Ah, an Extraction,” he says. “Are you lost? You’re short, so I guess you can’t see the exit.”
His snickering friends move through the entrance and head to where the knives glint on the far wall, but he just stands there, smiling at me.
I take in his blond hair that’s sticking up a little; his tight gray suit with the Core insignia on his chest pocket; his belt with several gun holsters; his green gloves; his knee-high black boots. The sound of a gunshot rips through my memory.
His name falls into my head: Sam. This is the Core boy who shot an Unstable two nights ago, in some sort of demonstration for Commander Charlie. The killing didn’t even faze him. He stood there smiling when it was finished.
“Can you talk, Shorty?” he asks.
I press my lips together. I don’t want to talk to him, but now I’ll look stupid if I don’t. “Can you help me find an elevator?” I ask.
“Sorry,” he says, bumping my shoulder as he moves past me and through the red-lit doorway. “I’d love to help, but it’s training time. Gotta practice throwing knives.”
I narrow my eyes a little as he heads to the weapons wall. Commander Charlie likes this boy. He loved it when he killed that Unstable.
Sam trails his fingers over the options for weapons, then picks one. He turns back around and walks straight toward me, knife in hand. “You any good at throwing knives?” he asks. “Did they teach you that wherever you came from?”
“No.” As if officials would teach us how to throw knives so we could throw knives at them.
“Figured.” He stops in the doorway and gives me a smug look. The kind of look bullies used to give me in school when I was little, when they thought I was short and small and afraid. The red light glints on the sharpest edge of Sam’s blade.
An idea hits me. A bad one, maybe. But before I can stop myself, the words come spilling out: “I meant, no, they didn’t teach us. But I learn fast. I bet I’d be good at it.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” He twirls the knife’s hilt in his fingertips, then holds it out to me. “Show me.”
This isn’t smart. But I grab the knife from him anyway and take five steps back, giving myself some space between me and the wall. I’m not sure where to aim. The actual targets are around the corner in the training area.
“Hit the very edge of the door frame,” Sam says, stepping behind me, “and I’ll help you get out of here.”
The door frame? The edge is thin—a couple centimeters wide. But I’m not about to back down, so I hold the knife out in front of me and close one eye. I’ve never done this before, but I’ve seen an official throw a knife, and I think they did something like this. I line the tip of the blade up with the left edge of the door.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I pull my arm back and bring it down.
Sam’s boot kicks my ankle, knocking me off balance as the knife flies from my fingertips. The weapon sails into the training room, a good fifteen feet from where I aimed it. It clatters on the floor near one of the fighting mats.
“You messed me up!” I say.
“Oh, did I? It looked to me like you lost your footing. Might want to work on that.” Sam saunters through the doorway and disappears around the corner. I can hear his friends laughing.
I glare after him. If I could walk into the room without getting zapped, I’d grab that knife and aim it at his throwing hand. He thinks he’s stronger and smarter because he’s lived here forever, but Core kids aren’t any smarter than those who live on the Surface. We have just as much potential. We can be just as Promising, if not more.
I have to be. I have to make Commander Charlie like me.
“Clementine?”
“What?” I snap, turning around. “Oh. Sorry.” It’s only Oliver.
“You okay?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m fine,” I lie. The plunk of a knife hitting a target reaches my ears, followed by a catcall. I try to ignore it. “Where were you?”
“Looking for you,” Oliver says. His eyes are a brighter shade of blue, a clear sky behind his spectacles. I frown, unsure why he still has glasses after the operation. He stares at me.
Heat floods my cheeks. “Will you cut it out?”
“Sorry.” He blinks. “You look different, is all.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“I don’t mean it in a bad way.”
I ignore that statement. “Are you lost too?”
“I found a way out,” he says. “But I saw you down here.”
He must not have seen Sam or my knife-throwing experiment, since he doesn’t mention them. I decide not to tell him.
“Which way, then?”
He leads me back the way I came, past several training areas and around a corner I didn’t try before. I curse under my breath. If I’d seen it before, I could’ve avoided that run-in with Sam.
The path turns into a steep set of stairs and then a corridor. The corridor becomes an elevator landing. Oliver presses the call button.
I drop onto the metal bench across from the elevators and run sweaty palms over the purple leather covering my legs. Above me, a fake window is built into the ceiling. Black frames surround silver panels that could almost slide off and reveal the sky if they weren’t screwed on. If we weren’t a million miles underground with brand-new faces and suits getting tighter by the second.
I grimace, feeling trapped again.
“I don’t look weird, right?” Oliver asks, twisting his mouth. His skin is fresher and shinier, and his hair is cleaner.
“You don’t look that different,” I say. “I don’t get why they kept us overnight.”
“My nurse said they did muscle repair and gave us nutrients through injections, so we wouldn’t be so skinny.”
“Yeah, I know they did. I guess I just don’t trust them yet, that’s all.”
“I don’t blame you.”
We sit in silence for a moment. I chew on my lip and glance at my body in the tight purple suit, curious to see if the muscle growth is obvious. The leather makes my thighs more pronounced,
showing curves where I’ve never had any before. I wonder what Logan would think of them.
I shove that thought away. “How come you still have glasses? I would have imagined they’d fix your eyesight.”
Oliver blushes a light shade of red. “I wouldn’t let them. I like my glasses.”
“They let you keep them?”
“They said choice is important here, and once we’re citizens, especially, we’ll have lots of choices. They wanted me to feel comfortable.”
“I didn’t want to get rid of my scar, but they made me do it.”
He observes me, a smile teasing his lips. “I bet you wanted it.”
I scoff. “How would you know?” He’s not Logan. He barely knows me.
“We all want to look more Promising.”
The elevator dings.
The doors zip open, and Oliver moves inside. I push off the bench and follow him, trying to quell my resentment. He isn’t the one who made me undergo a beauty operation, or laughed at me because I couldn’t hit a door frame with a knife.
The elevator walls are made of glass. Without meaning to, without intending, I catch a glimpse of my face. My cheeks flush.
The door closes, and Oliver scans the map of the Core on the wall. “Where do you want to go? It’s a free day.”
“Wherever,” I say, only half listening.
The change to my complexion is subtler than it looked on that tablet when the nurses showed me beforehand. But my skin still looks smoother, and my curls do look nice without dirt in them. I don’t know whether I’m “as beautiful as I was meant to be,” but I do feel prettier. I do look more Promising. Only the missing scar makes my brow crease.
Still, I’m not a different person. Logan will recognize me when I see him again.
I wring my hands and force down the winged creatures fluttering in my stomach. I would worry about him always, but I can’t, because I need to focus.
I take a deep breath and run through the steps in my head:
I have to raise my Promise as high as possible during training.
I have to become someone who is useful here, and needed, maybe even special.
I have to pick a career that will earn me an audience with Commander Charlie.
I have to convince him to make an exception for Logan. I don’t know what exactly I’ll need to say or do to convince him. But I will do whatever it takes.
Oliver jabs a button. A whir rises in my ears as we pick up speed, moving to the left in a smooth fashion.
Yellow dots on the Core map inside the elevator light up, showing where we are. We’re on the eighth floor of Training Division. I can’t see anything but steel walls through the glass of the elevator. But there must be a hundred training rooms, at least, that I haven’t seen yet, since there are twelve floors in this division and an average of twenty rooms on each.
As we speed along the elevator track, the dots on the map show us departing from Training Division and entering Invention. The steel walls outside the elevator are replaced by a long stretch of window.
We’re passing one of the science laboratories, this one for food production. Most of the food people eat in the Core comes from the Surface fields and greenhouses, but down here they’re able to grow certain crops hydroponically, without soil. Plants grow in steel reservoirs under harsh lights that serve as the sun.
Oliver is quiet beside me, his eyes drinking in the view. There’s a short break in the window, and then we pass into another laboratory. This one has more adults than the last. They wear blue coats and tap on screens in the wall, or work with test tubes and petri dishes. A couple of medi-bots hover in the corner, where a young lab assistant slips a slide under a microscope. This lab must be related to medicine. Perhaps they’re developing a cure for an illness, or even a cure for the side effects of the moon’s acid, in case it seeps through the shield again.
But even if they discovered that cure, most of the kids in the work camps would never see it. Cures for sickness are reserved for those with high Promise.
We pass another stretch of steel wall before we come to the next window. This time, there’s not a room right in front of us, but a massive deck of steam and darkness far below: the flight port. The first room we saw here in the Core.
From above, the steam hides most of the ships, but their flashing lights are visible. I can see the biggest ships clearly, the hovercrafts like the ones they use on the Surface. Down here, Core pilots use them to fly through the Pipeline to visit the other sectors, for passenger or cargo transport. Sometimes they fly to the Surface on research missions for the Developers. I’ve seen ships careen through the sky toward the world outside the settlement—even, once or twice, to the stars.
I don’t know what they were looking for.
“Did you know they made spaceships so big?” Oliver asks, his voice filled with wonderment.
I smile a little. “Yes. Are they smaller in Crust?”
“We don’t have ships, really,” he says. “Mostly everyone just walks everywhere. Even the smaller pods aren’t that efficient to travel in underground … but I’ve always wanted to fly one.”
Beyond the elevator glass, steel walls replace the view again, and then drop away. The flashing lights of the Pipeline appear. Only for a moment; then there’s steel again, and the elevator shifts to a vertical shaft to carry us up a few decks.
“Well, I bet they’d train you to be a pilot, if you wanted,” I say.
“I hope so,” Oliver says, and smiles.
The elevator slows to a stop. Ding.
“Recreation Division,” a cool, female voice says.
The doors open, and we step into what looks like outer space.
My breath leaves my body like it’s been sucked into a vacuum. My eyes widen.
There are lights all around and above me, flashing in the dark, some the size of normal lamps, others big enough that they look like small planets and stars. Reds, yellows, greens, and purples flash in the dark of a compound so high and wide I can’t see where it ends. It might not have an end. We might be floating in the sky, somewhere far out in the universe, though the ground feels solid.
And there are people. Civilians of the Core, mostly children, but also adults. They wait in line and chatter and stomp and holler, waiting for their turn inside lit-up game stations.
There are hundreds of these stations. Blue and green lights flash across the surface of a nearby one that’s round and shaped like a pod. Three gamers inside shoot blast pistols at fighter ships on a screen that covers half of the interior glass. In another station, people swim inside a giant tank of bubbling water, lit up by purple fluorescents. On the far side of the room, there’s a giant steel dome with the word PHANTOM lit up on its side. I wonder what’s inside it.
There are floors above us too, made of glass. The people up there look like they’re flying as they run between the lights from station to station. Some of them really are flying, racing in small hov-pods through the flashes and darkness in a flight arena on what seems to be the highest floor.
Logan and I used to make up stories about what people do all day when they’re not stuck laboring in fields, when they don’t have to prove they deserve to live past twenty. I wish he were here to see it.
“Clementine?” Oliver asks. His eyes reflect fake stars. “Does the real sky look like this?”
I almost laugh, but bite it back. Of course he wouldn’t know. “No, it’s bigger,” I say. “Real stars are tiny, and the moon is giant and pink.” Dangerous, I should say. “But this might be prettier.” Safer.
“I still hope I see it someday,” he says. “From a spaceship or something.”
I smile at the hopeful look on his face. Part of me hopes I’ll see the sky again too. There’s something free and beautiful about the stars especially—even the moon, though it’s deadly.
But we’re still safer below ground.
“So, what shall we try?” Oliver asks, pushing his glasses up the rim of his nose.
I twist my mouth, staring at the deck before me. I don’t know where to begin.
His eyes flit through the crowd. “I wonder if they have…” Instead of finishing his thought, he grabs my hand and pulls me past game stations. His palm is soft and warm in mine.
We come to a compound of large, glass capsules. Four of these capsules are connected by giant tubes, so they all form a square. In the center sits a fifth attachment, the biggest, and shaped like an egg. Children float inside the compound, but unlike the swimming tank, this one has no water.
“Zero gravity.” Oliver grins.
“There you are!” a voice calls, to my right. “I was looking for you.”
Ariadne slips through the crowd to reach us, her fingers pressed against the purple leather on her thighs. Her hair was tangled and messy before, but it’s ravishing now. Oliver stares at her.
“Clementine,” she says, her voice filled with awe. “You’re beautiful.”
I shake my head, laughing. “Thanks. But you’re prettier, Ariadne.”
Oliver seems to realize what he’s doing, and blinks and clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. “We were gonna go inside. Do you want to come?”
Ariadne looks at the capsules. She frowns. “What is it?”
“It’s not scary,” Oliver says. “Trust me.”
He tugs me after him into a small glass box connected to one of the four outer capsules. Ariadne follows us, biting her lip. The door closes behind us and makes a loud suction noise, trapping the three of us inside the box. A moment later, the door before us zips open.
Oliver takes a step, and I take a step, and Ariadne takes a step.
We’ve already left the ground.
I move my feet, seeking something solid, but find nothing.
For a moment, I panic. I’m not used to this. Gravity is stable and strong and dependable, while this feeling of weightlessness is not.
But I’m okay. I’m okay. I suck air in through my nose and out through my mouth. It’s silly to be afraid of this. I’ve always wished I could fly.
My eyes close. I breathe in and out.
In and out.
I forget about things that used to matter. Things that hurt me, scarred me, and worried me. Floating here, I could be a cloud, a krail, a wanderer among the stars. Or maybe I am a star.
Extraction Page 11
