by R. A. Rock
What the hell had my big mouth got me into now?
7 Playing Nice
Chad
That evening I stood at the edge of the ball room in New Winnipeg, waiting for the rest of my team to show up. Everything was beautiful in an old fashioned way.
The party-goers were dressed in Victorian styles. The men paraded around in black tuxes with tails and the women wore fancy dresses in a variety of generally pale colours, of the kind that I would call a princess dress. It all looked stiff and formal and uncomfortable.
And I wondered what these people were thinking that they would want to live this way. Then I remembered the conditions on the outside, and figured that a little Victorian discomfort was probably worth the safety and conveniences they had here in New Winnipeg.
Of course, Victorian discomfort was one thing, arranged marriages were something else entirely. I glanced around at the couples chatting quietly and wondered how many of them had had marriages arranged for them.
Natasha had told me that because of the problems that sex outside of marriage causes, it was not allowed in New Winnipeg. You have to be married to have sex. And there’s not that many people to choose from, nor were you necessarily allowed to choose.
She had said that you could apply to get married but if your personality tests came back saying that you weren’t compatible, you would be matched with someone more suitable.
Apparently, they hadn’t had any new influx of population for years and she hadn’t seemed to want to talk about it when I asked but I got the feeling that there weren’t that many babies being born either — some sort to fertility issues to do with whatever had caused The Wastelands.
I snorted, thinking that Yumi and I would probably never pass a compatibility test. That reminded me of what she had said about trying out other people. I tensed up at the thought. And no matter how put together I looked on the outside wearing these fancy clothes, I was nothing but a mess on the inside.
Mostly because I kind of did want to try out Natasha.
I didn’t want to want to. But if I was being honest with myself, I did. I think most of the appeal was satisfying my sexual appetite with no emotional pain. I had never been one for casual sex but at this point in my life, I had changed my mind about it completely.
At one time, I had thought that Yumi was the only person I would ever make love to. But obviously that was over. I guess maybe I just wanted a break from the whole drama that Yumi and I were living — and empty sex with a gorgeous woman like Natasha seemed like the perfect solution.
Except that Yumi would also be trying out other people.
Such as Jeff, the nice guy that reminded me of an over-friendly Labrador Retriever crossed with a street thug.
I tried not to think about Yumi.
My wife.
With the guard.
The handsome, muscular, dark haired guard. Who likely was well endowed, in addition to his swarthy good looks. I clenched my jaw at the thought of them together, trying to push the vision of him on top of her out of my mind.
Why had I agreed to this idea? It was the stupidest ever.
Then Natasha walked in and my body responded.
She was wearing a Victorian gown that covered her from shoulders to toes and right down to her wrists. But somehow it was fit in a way that suggested… more… underneath. And the gown had been cut a little lower on the chest than had probably been proper in Victorian times, showing her ample cleavage.
Those breasts were like soft pillows and for a second I imagined laying my head on them. Shit. I gave myself a mental shake. I wasn’t really going to… was I?
I was a married man.
A married man with permission from his wife to try out Natasha.
Yumi said she was okay with it.
Right. And I believed that?
Natasha walked up to me where I was standing near the wall, not drinking the whiskey in my hand.
“Chad,” she said. “You clean up well.”
“Thank you,” I said, clearing my throat.
God, why did this woman throw me so off my game?
This reminded me of that time at summer camp. I had been fourteen and I had tried to talk to a girl I liked. I got all embarrassed, turned beet red and said something stupid. The girl had laughed at me and walked away.
Yumi didn’t say anything but she made me skip the afternoon session. Instead, we spent the time in the woods behind the camp. She drew a picture of the girl and stuck it to a tree. Then we made a bow and arrows. She always had pockets full of stuff and she happened to have her jackknife and a piece of string.
The bow and arrows weren’t that great, but it sure felt good to shoot them at the drawing of the mean girl. Okay, so it wasn’t very mature. But neither were we.
Shit. How had I gone from turned on by Natasha to reminiscing about how supportive my wife has always been, in spite of her somewhat gruff attitude? I was so pathetic.
“You look beautiful,” I said, searching for the poise that usually was so easy for me to find.
“Thank you,” she said, a smile gracing her lovely, perfect face. “Where are your friends?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Still dressing probably.”
“The dark one is pretty, in a low class sort of way.”
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to get into a conversation about my wife with Natasha, who I guessed was trying to provoke me into admitting something about my relationship with Yumi.
Then I really looked at Natasha, and she was so attractive it distracted me completely for a moment.
Her honey blonde hair was in precise ringlets that hung in clusters over her shoulders and I imagined tangling my fingers in it. I couldn’t help checking out all those curves. Her hips and breasts made me hunger to put my hands on them. As Yumi had said, it had been a very long year. And for most of the time I hadn’t been interested in sex because my life had been too insane.
But now…
Kissing Yumi had brought up all that desire that had been below the surface. But I didn’t want Yumi, I reminded myself. Yumi and I had too much past. Natasha would be a fuck without strings. And that was what I wanted.
Suddenly I realized that the pause in the conversation had gone on too long as I was fantasizing about Natasha. I remembered I was supposed to be finding out information about New Winnipeg and I made a clumsy attempt at getting back on track. From the look on Natasha’s face, she knew how she was affecting me and wasn’t that upset about the lag in the conversation.
“So, tell me about your beautiful city. The engineering is amazing. When was it built?”
And I truly meant that.
The place was incredible.
“Well, it was constructed immediately preceding the solar flare,” she said, looking around at the architecture and not meeting my eyes as she said this. “Did you know that they were able to predict the event nearly six months beforehand? Governments were warned. But they didn’t listen. Didn’t prepare.”
“There was warning?” I said, pretending to be horrified as if I was a person from this time who didn’t know. Meanwhile, I tried to remember my history. Had there been warning? I remembered that there had been a solar flare. Then I remembered there had been the Dark Times for a hundred years. And after that they had reestablished the Canadian government and things had got better from there.
But I had no details.
Where was Shiv when you needed him? He was a serious history buff and he knew all the dates and interesting events. His memory was phenomenal and he knew tons of useless facts about the past.
“Oh yes. But they didn’t tell the common folk. The scientists knew but they thought or maybe hoped it would go past like the one in 2012 that just missed the earth.”
I frowned, trying to do the math.
“How big is the city?”
“Our population is about five thousand people.”
“No, I meant the surface area.”
“It’s about ten kilomet
res by fifteen kilometres.”
“And the founders started building it six months before the solar flare hit?”
“That’s right.” She smiled around at the room with affection.
“That’s pretty fast to have built a place underground of this size.”
“Oh,” she laughed and there was an edge to it. “They didn’t finish it all before the solar flare. They worked on it for about two years after, to get it done. It was a mess in the meantime.”
“Ah, that makes more sense,” I said, trying to shake the feeling that something didn’t add up about her story.
“So, the solar flare hit in 2017?”
“Yes.”
“And the city would have been completed in 2019? Just over a year ago?”
“Correct.” But I noticed her eyes were flitting around.
She was lying.
I’m not only a Telepath, I’m an Empath, too, which means I can sense people’s emotions. And the deceit coming off of her was like the funky smell of a house that’s been closed up for a long time without any fresh air.
“It looks well lived in for something so new.”
“Yes, well it’s all the old furnishings, I suppose. They were sourced from collectors around the world, before civilization ended. There were warehouses full of all of this stuff just waiting to be installed. There’s even one of those founding bricks that show the year the city was built down in the basement. Rather fanciful for engineers but it’s sort of a cool addition to the city.”
“Yeah. That’s cool. Could I see it?”
“See what?”
“The brick.”
“Oh, no. It’s in the sub basement. It’s almost a crawl space. Very dusty. Spiders. You know. No one actually looks at it. We have a photo of it in a more accessible location. In fact, I’ve never seen it myself. So, it might even be one of those, what do they call them? Urban myths? It’s a fun story to tell, though.” She laughed falsely and I got an even deeper sense of lying from her.
“Of course,” I said, deciding it was time to change the subject. “And where do you get your water from?”
At that moment, I sensed Yumi come in to the room through the soul bond but I didn’t look up. I didn’t want to see her. I wanted to talk to Natasha.
“Well, some of it comes from the river,” she said, and I remembered the intake pipe that Yumi had pointed out to me when we had first arrived. Apparently she had been right. It had been sucking water. “But that water needs to be intensely treated before it’s safe so we have other sources, as well.”
She seemed much more comfortable discussing aquifers and surface water dangers than she had been when we were discussing the timeline of the city’s construction.
Hm. Weird.
I filed the information away.
Something wasn’t right about this city.
But I wasn’t sure what.
Maybe some quality time with Natasha would reveal all of its secrets, though. I imagined her spilling her guts as we snuggled together after sex.
The thought didn’t sit well with me.
But who knew what I would do?
The woman was hotter than hell.
And at this point, I hardly recognized myself anymore at all. I really couldn’t predict the choice I would make when it came down to those breasts.
8 The Party
Yumi
When Grace and Shiv and I came into the ballroom a few minutes late for the party, Chad was in deep conversation with Natasha. His eyes never even looked up when we came in, though he was no doubt aware that I was here because of the soul bond.
Not that I cared.
The three of us stood in a slightly uncomfortable half circle, talking quietly amongst ourselves.
“Okay, I swear to God, I just saw Steve Jobs walk by,” Shiv said, his eyes excited.
“He’s living here in New Winnipeg?” Grace said, clearly knowing who Shiv was referring too but seeming puzzled at the thought.
“Who’s Steve Jobs?”
“Are you kidding?” Shiv said, as if I had said… Who’s Albert Einstein? … or something equally uneducated.
“He’s only the most important person who ever lived in the early 21st century. He revolutionized the computer industry when it was still in its infancy. We wouldn’t have any of the tech that we now have, if it wasn’t for him.”
Grace gave him a look.
“Okay, maybe someone else would have invented the smartphone but they didn’t. His company did. And I’m sure that’s him that I just saw walk by.”
He was so excited that he was bobbing on his toes a little.
I thought for a minute.
“Is that who the Jobs galaxy is named after?”
Shiv nodded, still vibrating with excitement.
“How did all the knowledge survive…” I trailed off, not sure how to describe what was happening right now.
“The Dark Age? Oh, that only lasted maybe a hundred years before people started to rebuild. This must have been one of the secret cities.”
“Now you’ve got him started,” Grace grumbled.
“Shh, this is interesting,” I said as Shiv went on as if neither of us had spoken.
“There were secret cities built underground all over the world and nobody knew about them.”
I frowned.
“When were they built? Not after the solar flare?”
“No, most of them were built at the beginning of the 21st century.”
“Why?”
He stopped short.
“I don’t know. Actually, I never noticed that before. But it is odd.”
“It’s not odd if you knew the solar flare was coming,” I pointed out. “That’s what I would do if I had warning.”
His eyebrows drew together.
“But the furthest out they could predict solar flares in this time was about six months. The scientists did warn people, governments, that sort of thing. But no one believed them. They all thought they’d get lucky like with the event in 2012. It just missed the Earth. This one didn’t.”
“So why did they start building so long before? Just in case?” I said.
Chad came up to us then but I ignored him in favour of continuing my conversation with Shiv. I could smell the mouthwatering aroma of the appetizers that were set out along one wall and I made a mental note to go get a plate. I hadn’t had supper and I was starving.
“Maybe?” Shiv said with a shrug. “It doesn’t make sense.
“What doesn’t make sense?” Chad asked.
“That they would have started building cities like this years before the solar flare,” Grace said.
“Oh, this one wasn’t built that early,” he said. “Natasha told me that they started building New Winnipeg when they got the warning…”
“Six months before,” Grace said and he nodded.
“Right. And then it took them two years to finish the place.”
Grace scrunched her forehead up.
“This was all only finished a year ago? It doesn’t look that new. These people must be hard on their stuff.”
We were all thinking now. Something wasn’t right with the math.
Continuing on with a boring conversation about the amenities in the city, we carried on a mental conversation in our heads. This was a basic skill that we had learned in our training.
“Something doesn’t add up,” I sent telepathically.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Chad sent back.
“The dates don’t really work,” Shiv pointed out. “But that would mean she was lying to you, Chad.”
“Of course she was lying to me,” he sent. “She doesn’t trust me further than she can throw me.”
“If there were only a way to find out when New Winnipeg was actually built,” I sent, wishing for the Grid — called the (non-existent) Internet in this time.
“Wait,” Chad sent, his thoughts sounding excited. “She told me there’s a brick that has the date the city was built o
n it. Like a founding stone or something in the sub basement. We should go check it out.”
“Actually that works out perfectly,” Shiv’s mental voice was animated, too. “I need you and Yumi to get me the adamantium that I’ll need from the basement.”
“You already found out where they’re keeping it?” Grace was surprised.
“Remember Natasha told us about the stores they keep down there. I asked one of the staff, pretending to be interested in the planning of the layout of the city and she told me all about where they keep everything. I even know where the rooms and rooms of toilet paper are. Maybe we should take some with us when we leave.”
Grace snorted mentally.
“Then you could swing by the brick and find out what the deal with this place really is. Or at least it’ll clear up the matter of when the city was built,” Shiv said. “This might be important information that we could get for Matt and Nessa. I’m sure they’d want to know about something like this.”
“Of course they would!” exclaimed Gracie. “This could be crucial knowledge for them.”
“So, Yumi, you up for a stealth mission tonight?” Chad asked, a challenge in his eyes.
Was I up for a stealth mission tonight in some grimy basement when I could be sleeping in my very fluffy, comfortable bed? Probably not. But I wasn’t about to back down if he was challenging me.
“Sure,” I sent. “I haven’t got anything else to be doing in the middle of the night.”
He gave me a dark look as if he was imagining what I would otherwise be getting up to with Jeff in the middle of the night. And then it occurred to me that if I wasn’t able to have a sleepover because we were sneaking out tonight, then Chad wouldn’t be able to either.
“Sounds like a plan,” Shiv looked pleased and mentally relayed us the info he had about the adamantium store rooms.
“Great.” Chad sent. “See you around midnight.”
I gave one sharp nod and changed the subject.
Grace gave us a look as if she sensed that something was wrong, but I didn’t bother explaining. What would I say anyway?
***
Chad
It was ten o’clock and the party was winding down. And though the string quartet continued to play sweetly, nobody was dancing anymore. I was looking for the others to say goodnight, when I pulled aside an alcove curtain. There was a couple making out and I went to step out again before they noticed me.
