The Stars are Red Tonight: The Paradisi Chronicles

by Ashley Angelly

“Good. When you pick them up, take them both to the Fall City airport near the northern wall of the city. I’ve ordered a private jet to get you to Quito, Ecuador, then a long distance hopjet that will take you right to the Solix Sky Liftport, by-passing Darwin station. Try and get the drive and find out if there are any other copies. Also find out if they have cracked the code yet.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But before you and Sarah get on the jet, get rid of this Trevor so we don’t have to worry about who he is or his influence on Sarah.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What is your ETA for the space needle?”

  “Six minutes.”

  “Excellent. Report back to me once you are on the jet with Sarah.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And with that, Caroline pressed a button and the video screen went dark.

  Chapter Five

  The front steps leading up to the Space Needle were all but empty of tourists when Saya and Trevor arrived. Although he’d lived in Seattle for over six years, he’d never been this close to the famous building that dominated the city skyline. It rose above them; white columns brightly lit up against the night sky, its top looking like a flying saucer that was hovering just above the surrounding skyscrapers.

  “What should we do?” Saya asked.

  “When are we supposed to meet the man your mom is sending?”

  “9:30.”

  Trevor looked at his mobile. The time was just after nine. “We have some time to kill, and it feels sort of exposed just hanging around out front. Do you want to go up to the top?”

  Saya raised her bright eyes to his. “I’ve never been up there. Have you?”

  “No.” Trevor smiled. “Seems lame, but I never have.”

  “Well, maybe we should go, blend in a little. Look like a normal couple sight-seeing.” She slipped her hand in his to punctuate her point.

  “Definitely.”

  This was becoming almost normal for them, holding hands. He turned his head so she wouldn’t see his grin. Didn’t seem right to be so happy when their lives were in danger. This whole day, the encrypted drive, the bomb threat, Bobby’s death, all felt unreal––like one of those expensive virtual reality games. The only thing that felt real was having Saya by his side, smiling up at him, holding his hand.

  As they approached the ticket booth, Saya reached out her wrist. He realized she had an implanted ID, which brought home the truth that she came from one of the wealthiest most powerful families on the planet. He stopped her and said, “Probably better not to use our IDs in case someone is tracking us.”

  He began hurriedly fumbling in his pockets for any cash he had, finally producing a crumpled up wad of bills. Embarrassingly, he was a few dollars short.

  But Saya said, “Smart move,” and searched her laptop bag until she found the remaining cash. Together they stuffed the money into the machine, which produced two tickets.

  The ticket booth was outside the gift shop, which was busy with people milling about, pawing through commemorative snow globes, t-shirts, and coffee mugs. Trevor and Saya looked at each other and nodded in agreement that they could skip that part of the tour.

  They followed the signs and began walking up an empty ramp that wrapped around the base of the building, quickly reaching two huge glass doors that parted slowly upon their approach. Just inside the doors was a security checkpoint. The automated system was relatively simple. Trevor assumed that somewhere there were real humans who were watching their every move on closed circuit cameras. Saya put her mobile into her bag with her laptop and put it on a conveyor belt, as instructed, and they watched as it and Trevor’s mobile disappeared into a machine that made some whirring noises and then spit the bag and his mobile back out at them. An automated voice reminded them to take their belongings and continue up the ramp, where they slid their tickets under another scanner that unlocked the next door.

  “Do you think your mother is sending Frank?” Trevor broke the silence.

  “I don’t think so. She certainly didn’t say it was him she was sending. I know it sounded to you like Frank was reporting to her. But do we know that for sure? She didn’t act like she’d talked to him when I called her, and she sounded genuinely surprised to hear from me.”

  “You didn’t hear the conversation,” Trevor responded. “It sounded like he’d been taking orders from the woman he was speaking to for a very long time. Who else could it be besides your mother?”

  Trevor saw how much those words hurt her and immediately wanted to take them back. But if it wasn’t her mother … then maybe Frank was working for the people who killed Bobby. Wouldn’t that be even harder for her to accept?

  He tried to change the subject by pointing out all the displays they were passing as they travelled further up the ramp. The displays were 3D videos with interactive touch screens, and each one told a different story about the history of the Space Needle. Trevor stopped Saya at one to watch. He found it hard to believe the Needle was constructed one hundred and thirty years ago and was still standing, when so many of the historical monuments of the nation had fallen in one disaster or another.

  When Trevor looked down at Saya, he saw that her normally happy mouth was turned down at the corners, ever so slightly. Instead of watching the display, she seemed to be staring at a spot in front of her no one else could see. He pulled her gently to get her walking again, unable to think of another way to cheer her up as the ramp slowly twisted higher and higher.

  At one point, he stopped to look over the edge of the ramp to see inside the gift shop below. Watching all the people milling about, he imagined the different conversations they must be having––about where to go next, what to have for dinner, how expensive the snow globes were––and smiled a little.

  That was one of the nice things about living in Seattle, one of the few cities that seemed mostly immune to all the problems in the rest of the world. The environment hadn’t been ruined; there hadn’t been any big natural disasters. And there were still decent jobs available since it was the remaining bio-tech capital of the nation after San Francisco was destroyed by the Big One twenty years ago. The different people who’d moved here for these jobs even got along pretty well. Not like other parts of world where every day one group seemed determined to blow up another group for one reason or the other.

  Of course it all depended on the wall that those tech companies built and maintained through a tight network of security drones. At least he was on this side of that wall, not the other.

  His smile faded as he remembered the Paradisi Project. The little they’d read in the files sure looked like there were ten ships scheduled to take the richest and most powerful people in the planet far outside the solar system. What did it mean that people like the Kuttners and Gunthers were abandoning Earth, leaving everyone else behind? Would their companies collapse when the word got out? Who would maintain the jobs, even the wall? Could a place like Seattle even survive if that happened?

  Now he was feeling as melancholy as Saya looked, so Trevor tried talking again, to cheer them both up. “You never said, Saya, where did you grow up?”

  “Except for some years at boarding school in New England, I lived in Chicago.”

  “I didn’t know you were from Chicago! My mother went to college there.”

  “So did I! Illinois Tech. Chicago is the headquarters of the Kuttner empire. My mother insisted I come back home to attend college and major in business … one of the many things we fought about … but I minored in computer science. What university did your mother go to?”

  “Oh, it was just a two-year school … Prairie State.” Trevor lowered his eyes, fully aware of the difference in their family histories.

  “Oh, cool, that’s where my cousins went,” Saya said warmly.

  Trevor looked at her, and she was smiling at him again. “Really?” he asked.

  “Yep. My mother’s family are third generation sustainable organic farmers … poor but proud. My m
other likes to pretend they don’t exist. Bad for business! Another reason we fought,” Saya said, sounding more angry than sad.

  Trevor noticed that they had now reached a second security checkpoint, with lots of roped off paths that showed how crowded things could get during the day. Again, no one else was waiting, so Saya and Trevor walked right up to the place where several metal doors blocked their path. The signs and the automated voice instructed them to once again scan their tickets in the thin slot with the blinking green arrows. Trevor did just that, and with a click the door opened and they walked through. They followed another empty roped off pathway until they came to a bank of elevator doors that opened as they approached.

  Once they were inside an elevator, the automated voice began repeating various facts about the Space Needle. The doors that had looked like black glass were now transparent, and Trevor and Saya watched as the skyscrapers around them appeared to shrink as the elevator rose at a tremendous speed.

  Finally, the elevator slowed to a stop and the voice announced they had arrived and would they please exit and have a nice day. Trevor and Saya stepped out into the interior of the saucer-shaped structure, the floor of the curved room covered in a gaudy red and orange carpet that looked as if it had been there for a hundred years. A herd of drunken women surrounded them as they moved into the room.

  Trevor tried to shield Saya from them, but one of ladies shouted, “Take my picture!”

  In seconds, the herd came to a halt, and all of them were waving their mobiles at Trevor, demanding that he take their pictures.

  “Are you two married?” a woman suddenly asked as Trevor handed her back her mobile.

  “Oh no, no, we are just friends,” Trevor stammered a quick response. Saya said nothing, but Trevor thought she was blushing.

  “Ooh that is too bad, you make a cute couple,” a second woman joined in. She was much drunker than the rest, and her words slurred together as she stood wobbling in front of them.

  “It’s true, they do!” A third got involved now, and they all began gathering closer to ooh and ah over the cute couple that wasn’t really a couple.

  “Thank you, ladies. We are going to go look at the view outside.” Trevor was loud and firm as he expertly removed Saya and himself from the swarm, saying, “I think you might want to get down to the gift shop before it closes.”

  Easily distracted, the women immediately turned their attention to the elevators, and Trevor and Saya looked at each other with relief.

  “Do you think any of them even bothered to go out and see the view?” Saya giggled behind her hand.

  Trevor laughed and said, “Well, do you want to go outside?”

  “Anywhere away from them.”

  They made their way through the first set of glass doors that led out to the balcony viewing area. Except for periodic columns connected by chest-high wire cables, the only thing separating them from the nearly 500-foot drop was an electronic invisible fence. There was a slight shimmer between the columns and green lights on the columns that announced the fence was on, but the unobstructed view was truly breathtaking. Away from the artificial lighting of the building, they could see how the city glowed beneath them.

  “Wow,” Trevor said.

  “Wow is right. Look at all those lights.” Saya pointed.

  The night was clear, and while the tall buildings in the downtown section to the south of them blocked their view, when they moved around the curve towards the north, Trevor could see miles of lights, like stars in the sky. But he also noticed the ring of brighter lights that divided the city from the darkness beyond, the no man’s land where the non-citizens scraped out a precarious existence. Trevor shook his head. Like most people who lived in Seattle, he tried to ignore the wall and what it meant.

  “Let’s walk all the way around. I want to see the whole city,” Saya said, actually sounding excited. Then she shivered violently in the cold wind that blasted them when they stepped further out on the balcony.

  “Do you want my coat?” Trevor asked. She nodded vigorously, and he smiled as her cheeks started turning red in the cold air. It was all he could do to keep from hugging her as he draped his hoodie over her shoulders. They walked around the curve of the building, pushing against the wind, passing only a few other people hearty enough to brave the cold.

  When they were looking due north, Trevor said, “Do you see that dark splotch? That must be Green Lake. And if you keep looking to the left, all those lights are Ballard, where I live.” He moved in close to Saya and stretched out his arm from behind her so she could see where he was pointing.

  They continued on around counter-clockwise, noticing how easy it was to see the wandering dark fingers of Puget Sound as the only blank patches in a sea of light. Saya asked if he could see WelCo to the south, which made Trevor think about the fact that neither of them was ever going to enter that building again. He hurried her on, asking her where in the University District she lived. Turned out she lived very close to the shop where she worked with Frank, so that was another touchy subject he dropped.

  Finally, Saya said she couldn’t take the wind anymore, and she needed to go back inside. Trevor told her he wanted to go around one more time. She gave him back his jacket and disappeared through the doors into the building.

  What he really wanted was a chance to stash the second thumb drive he’d made back at Frank’s shop in one of the benches that were placed between the glass doors of the building. He didn’t want Saya to know about the second drive yet. It wasn’t that he mistrusted her. Just that it would be safer for her if she didn’t know about it or where it was. At least, that was what he told himself as he knelt in front of one of the benches.

  The bench consisted of black iron bars, and there were a few spots where the bars overlapped that left tiny, nearly invisible cracks. Trevor took out the original drive and the copy and wedged the copy into one of those spaces. He made sure it was secure and couldn’t be seen by a passersby. Then he stood up and stuffed the original drive deep into his pants pocket. He hoped that if worse came to worse and someone took the original, he would be able to come back here and pick up the copy without anyone being the wiser.

  When Trevor got to the glass doors that led to the lobby, he turned to look out once more at Seattle in all her splendor, wondering if this was the last time he’d see the his city spread out before him. Looking up at the sky, he was troubled to see that the stars for some reason looked red tonight.

  He shivered as he realized that even if he was left behind while Saya flew off to the safety of her mother, he couldn’t come back to the city. Too dangerous. Which meant hiding the drive was probably a fool’s errand. But it was the only thing he could think to do. Maybe once he was safely away he could call someone … tell them how to find it.

  But it was time to go and find Saya and face whatever was going to come next.

  Chapter Six

  Saya had found the elevator lobby deserted when she pushed open the heavy door and left the balcony. Thank goodness the group of women had disappeared––hopefully down the elevators. So embarrassing the way they all insisted that she and Trevor were a couple. Why did everyone always assume that a male and a female had to be romantically involved?

  She looked at her mobile, saw it was nine-twenty, and realized she needed to hit the bathroom before they went down to meet the man her mother was sending. She walked quickly around the curved inside wall, avoiding the empty tables and chairs that lined the glass windows. When she finally saw the sign for the restrooms, she noticed she’d made her way almost around the entire structure. If she’d just turned right instead of left, she would have saved herself a few minutes.

  Worried Trevor would think she’d gone on down to the first floor without him, she quickly used the facilities and washed her hands, running back out to the lobby. Only one of the elevator doors was open, but the light above it was flashing red. There was a large, beefy, middle-aged man standing in front of it, fiddling with some ele
ctronic device. She wondered if he was some sort of repairman. But he wasn’t wearing a uniform.

  Out of nowhere, someone grabbed her from behind and, whipping a large arm across her neck, started choking her. She dropped her bag and instinctively tried to claw at the man’s arm, but he was too tall and powerful. He simply lifted her off the floor and then tossed her onto the ground, smashing her face into the nasty carpet and bruising her ribs against the computer bag.

  Her assailant then pulled her arms behind her back and secured them in some fashion before jerking her painfully back onto her feet.

  She started to scream, hoping the other man at the elevator would come to her rescue, but the man moved his arm back quickly around her neck, hissing, “Shut up or I will choke the life out of you.”

  Saya recognized the strong metallic odor from this morning. Her captor must be the strange man she’d seen at WelCo. Had he been there to find out where Bobby lived––to go kill him? Panicked, Saya struggled to breathe as he pressed his arm against her windpipe. He then loosened his grip and said, “Will you be quiet now?”

  Saya nodded, gasping for air.

  The beefy man she’d seen at the elevator walked over and looked down at her with a crooked grin. His eyes were as black as the night sky and held no trace of pity in them.

  Hope of rescue died as she realized these two men were working together.

  Flicking his finger painfully against her cheek, the beefy man said, “Atta girl. Won’t do you any good to scream anyways. No one is on this level but you and your boyfriend. We jammed the elevator so that no one will be coming up any time soon, and we set the surveillance cameras on a loop. By the time anyone even notices something is wrong, we will be long gone.”

  “Who are you; what do you want?” she whispered

  “Oh Miss Kuttner, I believe you know exactly what we want,” growled the WelCo man behind her, as he pulled her more tightly against his chest. “But I think it best if we have that conversation once your boyfriend is here. See what’s keeping him, Palmer.”