The Initiation

by Chris Babu

  Zone was everything here.

  The Bureau drilled the zone system into kids’ heads as soon as they could talk. Their first words might’ve been “mama” and “dada” but their third word was probably “zone.” New America was divided by job type into four residential zones, Zones A through D. Because of the Bureau’s stunning lack of naming creativity, nobody called the zones by their letters. Zone D, where Drayden’s family and the rest of the working stiffs lived, was known as the Dorms. Nobody could leave the Dorms since everyone had to remain in their zone, with a few exceptions for work. In case someone blacked out drunk, or suffered a prolonged brain fart and forgot, physical walls separated the zones. They were the same twenty-five-foot-high concrete blockades encircling the entire city.

  Drayden dragged himself out of bed. With the heat broken again, the frigid air attacked his skin within seconds. The Bureau outlawed lights after 10:00 p.m. to conserve power, but the moonlight glistened on the floor just enough to see. He pulled out a wooden box from beneath his bed and rifled through some dusty toys and clothes. He found his green New York Yankees baseball cap. It was a gift from Mom for his ninth birthday, and he hadn’t worn it in years. Drayden longed to have her near him, a piece of her with him at all times.

  Shivering, he adjusted the band in the back, punched the inside a few times, rounded the brim, and pulled it on. Though barely visible in the darkness, he viewed himself in the full-length mirror beside his bed. He straightened the cap. Drayden never wished more that he looked like his mother, that he could recognize her when he saw himself. He’d only inherited her olive skin. Otherwise he was all Dad—tall, skinny, dark brown hair, and hazel eyes. Wesley, on the other hand, looked Korean and was the spitting image of their mother.

  Drayden jumped back into his warm bed and pulled up the covers. Without Mom around, their rock, what would happen to them? They couldn’t just carry on as if nothing had happened. Wesley might start hitting the ack again. Drayden couldn’t imagine Dad withdrawing from life any further, though he supposed it was possible. How in the world would he take care of the family like Mom asked?

  Maybe Dad would have some idea about the truth behind her exile. Nobody loved the Bureau, but Drayden had always respected it. They did save humanity, after all. The occasional exile was part of life in New America. Still, he’d never considered this moment, never imagined what it would be like, because you had to break the law to be exiled. Major or minor, some crime needed to be committed. He never would, and he was positive his mother wouldn’t either.

  Drayden fancied himself a budding scientist. Science was about order, and expected results. Cause and effect. This exile didn’t make any sense in a scientific way. If people were exiled for committing crimes, but his mother would never commit one, how could she have been exiled? It was unusual and illogical. Something was different and frightening about it. Either the Bureau made a mistake, or some other factor entirely was at play. There was only one way to figure it out. Research.

  He had to get to the bottom of this. He might never get Mom back, but he could uncover what happened. Somebody screwed up. Drayden was going to find out who.

  CHAPTER 2

  The scent of frying butter wafted into the room.

  Drayden woke up, his stomach growling. He rubbed his eyes and then it hit him. Mom was the one who cooked breakfast every day.

  He flew out of bed and sprinted to the kitchen, forgetting about his baseball cap, now cocked unevenly to one side of his head.

  It wasn’t her. His father towered over the stove in his pajamas. He turned, brushing his graying hair away from his eyes. “Good morning, Drayden.”

  Drayden hesitated. “Hi.”

  Dad adjusted his glasses. “I thought today might be a good day to have these eggs.”

  Ah yes, the eggs.

  Twice a year, each family received two eggs in their weekly food allocation. Not everyone at the same time, obviously. The 250 chickens could only lay so many eggs each day, so the Bureau distributed them on a rigid schedule.

  It was total shkat, receiving two eggs for a family of four every six months. Why even bother? Yet nobody turned down those eggs. It was such a treat, in fact, no occasion seemed special enough to eat them. Drayden believed they should just sit around the eggs, watch them, admire them, caress them. Though illegal, some people sold their eggs on the black market.

  Heated debates erupted in their family about how to cook and divide them. One time Mom tried to make something called a frittata, which was supposed to be all fancy and special. She ruined both eggs, but they ate it anyway. Some of his and Wesley’s biggest fights involved those eggs. Needless to say, egg day was kind of a big deal.

  Drayden plopped down at the rickety table. He must have slept right through the wake-up siren.

  His father had no clue how to cook eggs. He was a genius though, so perhaps he would employ some scientific technique to engineer the perfectly fried egg. He’d been a doctor PreCon, but now he worked as a lab tech in one of the Dorm hospitals.

  Right after the Confluence, the fragmented city huddled in survival mode. The early Bureau divided the population by skills to deal with the crisis. They immediately directed the scientists to work on food and power production, doctors to care for the sick, bus drivers to transport people, utilizing everyone’s abilities. For convenience and efficiency, the Bureau housed like-skilled people together. That initiative was the genesis of the zone system.

  Way back at the beginning, the Bureau granted people one opportunity to declare their skills. Ultimately, in whichever zone you started, you remained. Too bad Dad never mentioned to anyone he was a doctor. Doctors, scientists, teachers, and anyone else with intellectual expertise lived in Zone C, known as the Lab. He claimed he’d been in shock or something, so the brilliant Dr. Adam Coulson was relegated to lab tech, and they were stuck in the Dorms.

  The rest of the usual sad breakfast appeared smaller than normal. Drayden poured a tiny glass of milk, careful not to spill a drop. Wasn’t Dad going to say anything about Mom?

  “Not too much,” his father cautioned. “Leave some for Wesley.”

  Drayden downed the miniscule glass in one gulp and slammed it onto the table. “Suddenly you care about how much milk I have?”

  His dad eyed him for a moment and returned to the eggs. As with eggs, milk ran in short supply. Every family received one liter per month. In reality, it was solid work from the measly thirty cows of New America.

  Drayden snagged an orange and a puny chunk of bread. After twenty consecutive days of oranges, the smell alone made him gag. Luckily next month they’d score strawberries and cherries. Although they occasionally received fish, their diet was vegetarian with limited dairy. Butter was an elective, not included in the weekly food allocation, but available for sale if desired. Eating eggs cooked in butter was akin to being the Premier of New America for a day.

  His father scraped a paltry pile of burnt scrambled eggs onto his plate. “Uh, I’m sorry. They didn’t turn out so great.”

  It looked like…well, a turd. “This looks delicious, Dad. Nice job.”

  “I was just trying to make this day a little better, Drayden.” He grabbed an orange. “Is that a new hat?”

  Drayden shook his head. So this was what they were going to do: Pretend everything was fine.

  Wesley strolled into the kitchen and sat at the table. The right side of his forehead bulged, the bruise purple, the cut crusted with dark blood. “Nice hat, bro,” he said without looking up. He poured himself a miniature glass of milk. “You want me to try and teach you how to play baseball again? If you’re gonna wear a cap like that, you gotta be able to play ball. I promise this time you won’t accidentally bash yourself in the head with the bat.”

  Drayden flung an orange peel at him. “Shut up.” His brother was always a comedian, a nerf. Drayden knew his way of dealing with the exile w
ould be to make light of it.

  “What…who voted for scrambled eggs?” Wesley asked. “And why are they black?”

  “Dad’s continuing his multi-year losing streak,” Drayden grumbled under his breath.

  “That’s enough, Drayden,” Dad snapped.

  Drayden threw his hands in the air. “So, what, we’re just going to pretend like nothing happened last night?”

  Dad sat between them, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I’m not sure what there is to say. We just need to, you know, continue on with our lives the best we can.”

  Drayden dropped his half-eaten orange on the table. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

  Wesley set his fork down. “Dray.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?” Dad’s voice shook, his eyes darting back and forth between them. “What do you want to do? Storm the Palace? Shoot the Premier?”

  “Yeah!” Wesley yelled, smirking. “Let’s go in there guns blazin’!”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” Dad rubbed his eyes again, the bags under them darker than usual, making him appear older than his fifty-five years.

  “People are exiled for murder and drug dealing,” Drayden said. “Because they committed a crime. There’s no way Mom did.”

  Of course Mom wasn’t plotting against the Bureau. That accusation was ludicrous. Still, it wasn’t like anyone trusted the Bureau. Plenty believed the Bureau over-exiled as a means of population control. Even with a high death rate because of crappy medical care, the population grew since they lacked birth control. Jailing people was too much of a hassle, so the Bureau exiled for every crime except the most minor ones. It made Drayden physically ill. The Bureau usually tried to appear thoughtful about it. Like, if a child robbed someone at the direction of their parents, the parents would be exiled, not the kid. The kid would be pardoned. There was nothing considerate about this one, though. They’d exiled a mother, a pillar of the community, who everyone knew would never do anything wrong.

  Drayden shoved his plate away. “Even if it’s just skipping work or school, people who are exiled always broke some law.”

  Dad picked up his glasses and fumbled with the red electrical wire holding them together. “I don’t have any idea what happened,” he said quietly. “But the Bureau doesn’t exile people without a reason.”

  Drayden gawked at him in stunned silence. “I can’t believe this. You think it’s true? Mom conspired against the Bureau? Is that why you didn’t do anything?”

  “What could any of us do?” Dad asked.

  Drayden pushed back from the table and stood up so fast his chair tipped over backward. He narrowed his eyes, burning with disdain, and stormed out.

  “Drayden!”

  Drayden slammed his bedroom door behind him, his father’s words slipping through.

  “There were some things you didn’t know about your mother…”

  When Drayden stomped out of their brownstone on East Thirtieth Street, the smell hit him like a sledgehammer. This ugly city smelled just like he felt. You got used to it, most times not noticing it at all. But every so often, particularly after being inside for a while, it assaulted your senses.

  Sewage. The complex sewage system of the old Manhattan required constant maintenance and fed into a sewage treatment plant outside the city. Surprising no one, that broke down, or rather backed up, immediately after the Confluence. Now the entire population lived on the far east side of New America. The Bureau congregated people in specific apartment buildings. It outfitted those with new sewage lines that simply employed gravity and a pipe to dump into the East River, turning it into a giant cesspool.

  Drayden hustled west toward school, at Park Avenue and Thirty-Third Street. The foul smell dissipated further away from the river, and disappeared by Lexington Avenue.

  Not only was breakfast unusually meager, a power outage had followed it, meaning no hot water. The power had been going out more often these days. He couldn’t shower, and he felt sticky and gross. His legs kept sticking to his green imitation jeans, and his gray t-shirt smelled. Hopefully his wool sweater would mute his stench.

  It was a sunny but chilly April morning. He prayed the serenity of the city would calm him down. It was deserted and silent. The Bureau had cleared the streets of cars decades ago, pushing them to their final resting place at the bottom of the East River. The rising sun illuminated the windows of the abandoned buildings, which glowed brilliant blues, oranges, and yellows, many of them missing or broken. The structures featured gaping cracks across their facades, showing the effects of time.

  He crossed Third Avenue and still hadn’t seen anyone else. The external peacefulness did little to quell the fire in his soul or the ice in his heart. Instead, the isolation made it more acute. Mom. How dare his father suggest they do their best to carry on? Like Drayden could go to school and pretend everything was normal. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t face all the other kids laughing and messing around, as if everything in the world was grand. They wouldn’t know or care about his pain.

  Drayden turned up Lexington Avenue and ran straight up the middle of the street. Huge cracks streaked through the pavement like bolts of lightning. He didn’t even know where he was going, just not school. He passed Thirty-Third Street, where he should have gone left, and kept running. He turned left on Thirty-Fourth Street. His eyes were drawn to the Empire State Building glistening in the distance. On this block, a skinny brick tower soared above the other buildings. The old Dumont Hotel.

  Hotels, like most buildings, were long abandoned. The Dumont Hotel was special, known to teenagers by another name: the hookup house. It was thirty-seven stories of decrepit bedrooms, but still. Teenagers didn’t really “date” in the Dorms since there wasn’t anywhere to go or much to do. Teens “hung out” sometimes, in a park, or in empty buildings like the hookup house, which afforded some privacy. There wouldn’t be anyone inside right now.

  Drayden pulled open the shattered front door, darted through the lobby to the staircase, and began climbing. Each landing contained a door with a small window, revealing a rundown hallway lined with rooms. He’d only been here once, and it was with his mom, not a girl. To be used according to its namesake, the hookup house required someone to hook up with, so he’d never had a reason to use it. He and Mom had come to check out the view from the roof deck. That’s where he was headed now.

  By the fifteenth floor Drayden was out of breath and walking slow. By the twentieth, he had to rest. After a few minutes, he resumed his ascent and reached the top, stepping onto the roof. Besides empty bottles of ack strewn about, and cigarette butts littering the tiled roof, it was empty. A black wrought iron fence enclosed the small space.

  Cold wind blasted his face as he walked to the west side of the deck, beholding the majestic Empire State Building again, thinking of his mother. He gripped the bars of the fence and shook with all his strength. He peered down at the precipitous drop, and for a hot second considered jumping. No. He pushed the thought away. That wasn’t the answer.

  Drayden pulled his baseball hat down tighter to ensure it didn’t blow off. He walked to the south side of the building. You could see all the zones from up here. The World Trade Center, way down in the Palace, dominated the skyline. The stupid Bureau, the governing body, resided there, at the very southern tip of New America in the former Financial District. Technically it was Zone A. Only the Bureau and its workers were allowed inside. Even the Guardians couldn’t enter the Palace. The Bureau supposedly had its own military police force, cleaning crews, doctors, and everything else needed to be self-sufficient. Bureau members could travel anywhere in the city unchallenged. Clearly, since they could do whatever they wanted.

  Just north of there, in the former TriBeCa, SoHo, and Lower East Side, was Zone B, called the Precinct. The Guardians, New America’s police force, lived there. It was now Drayden’s second most-hated zon
e after the Palace. The Guardians could basically go everywhere except the Palace. His favorite zone, the one in which his family should live, was just north of there. He gazed longingly at the Lab, which comprised the former Greenwich Village and East Village, wishing he was a scientist there. Instead he was stuck here in the shkatty Dorms where most people lived. The Dorms were bigger than the other three residential zones combined, stretching from Fourteenth Street all the way up to Fifty-Ninth Street.

  Drayden headed to the north side of the building to get a view of the windmills, but too many skyscrapers blocked the view. Besides the four residential zones, the one non-residential zone was Zone E, called the Meadow. It went from Fifty-Ninth Street at the bottom of Central Park to the top of the city. It housed the solar and windmill farms, the food production, the farm animals, the water purification, the technology development, the recycling plants, and other activities that sustained society. The Meadow was strictly off limits to most, except the few members of each zone who worked there, certain Guardians, and of course, the Bureau.

  What the hell was he doing up here anyway? Maybe he needed to physically be alone, to match how he felt. He needed to dig into Mom’s exile, but didn’t know where to start. He wanted to fulfill Mom’s request to take care of Dad and Wes, but wasn’t sure how to do that either. Job placements were a few days away, yet he had no clue what job to take. He hated all the Dorm jobs. Drayden was lost.

  He stared at the empty streets below, absorbing the loneliness and coldness of the city. He felt like the only person in the world. Time might as well have stopped, and Drayden had no idea how long he languished there.

  He couldn’t go back to school. The life he’d known was over. He could head to the FDC to talk to Wesley, return home, or simply wander the streets. Whatever he did, he needed to be careful. He was cutting school, a crime for which the Bureau could exile him. With only two days of school left this year, the teachers wouldn’t care, but the Bureau might.