Violet City

by Page Morgan

  “So now they’re blowing up houses?” I scream as he unbuttons the top clasps of his suit.

  “Any structure with a heat stamp inside,” he replies, still unbuttoning.

  There’s another explosion no more than a block away, but in the far distance, there is a constant rumble. The city. They’re probably taking down whole buildings.

  “Heat stamps. Does that mean…people?”

  Rowan opens his suit to the waist. “Our exo and sec-suits cancel out a heat stamp. But the seeking mechanism will still be able to view yours.”

  He gestures for me to go to him.

  “Get in your suit with you?”

  It’s not totally skin-tight, but it definitely doesn’t look like there’s enough room for me. I’m about to refuse when another explosion shatters the windows of the shed. Glass rains inside, and I practically leap into Rowan’s arms. I’ll squeeze myself in there if I have to.

  I kick off my sneakers as fast as I can, and Rowan picks me up, helping to guide my legs down into each pant leg. He presses me against his chest, keeping my feet off the floor. My thighs curl around his hips, my calves around each of his rock-solid thighs. It’s more than a tight fit. I wrap my arms around him and press my cheek against his chest, and it’s like hugging the trunk of an oak tree. The top of his suit is more spacious, and Rowan closes the flaps around my back, engulfing my head.

  One blast turns into two, then three, and then it starts to sound like a Fourth of July grand finale out there, with explosions so loud and close the shed won’t stop rattling and the ground won’t stop shaking. Rowan swivels, taking us to the floor. I land on top of him, but he immediately rolls over, bracketing me with his arms and torso. He still has his head exposed, but I’m hoping the heat stamp the transports notice inside the shed isn’t large enough to warrant a shot.

  I grit my teeth and squeeze my eyes shut as the sounds of houses being blown to smithereens, of splintering wood and erupting gas lines, comes inside the maintenance shed and through Rowan’s suit to burrow into my skull. The percussion of the blasts hurts my ears, and I swear they’re going to leave me deaf—if not dead. I brace myself and cling to him. He’s warm, his muscles rigid. This close, I can smell the laundry detergent on the Doctor Who shirt and something else cool and clean. It makes me think of starry nights and Christmas trees and air so cold your lungs ache.

  I’m forcing myself to wonder if aliens need to wear deodorant, instead of imagining what it looks like outside this shed right now, when the screams of the transports’ lasers come to an abrupt stop. It’s as if they’ve all received a ceasefire order at the same moment.

  I don’t trust the silence. I keep my eyes shut, waiting for the next earth-shaking explosion. There are a few more dull blasts and the chomping and cracking sounds of fire, but after a minute of waiting, the attack seems to have stopped. I open my eyes and disentangle my arms from around Rowan’s middle. I slide them up his stomach and chest, my damp palms pulling at the cotton shirt.

  “Is it over?” The close confines of his suit muffles my voice. He finally rolls onto his side and pulls the flaps of his suit down. Air rushes in, and I gulp a deep, cool breath. Immediately, I taste smoke on the back of my tongue. My hair is in my face, stuck in my lashes and tickling the tip of my nose. The suit pulls some more, and then I feel Rowan running a finger along my forehead to draw my hair out of my eyes.

  “It’s over,” he says.

  The tips of his fingers skim my hairline. They rake back against my scalp and then down to my cheekbone. It’s just his hand, and he’s just touching my hair and face, but it’s still somehow more. I stare at the blue police box on the shirt as our ribs expand and shrink with our post-adrenaline breathing. My legs, jammed into his sec-suit and curled around his hips, start to feel less awkward and more dangerous. My hot palms, pressed against his shirt, throb.

  He lowers his thumb to the corner of my mouth. On instinct, my lips part. I take in a surprised breath as he rubs his thumb across my bottom lip. What is he doing? What am I doing? My ears are still ringing, but his voice cuts through perfectly when he whispers, “I have seen the way humans touch lips.”

  An awful, wonderful zinging sensation happens where my calves are wrapped around his thighs.

  “Kiss,” I say, my own voice loud in my ears. “It’s called a kiss.”

  Rowan tugs the swell of my lower lip and then draws his thumb down the center of my chin. I finally look up, away from his shirt. His voice is softer and harder to hear. But I read his lips.

  “We do not kiss.”

  His mouth is closer than it had been two seconds ago. I know because I can’t stop looking at it. His lips are wide and full and perfect. And not human, my brain manages to remind me.

  I shake my head as a spark of anger tries to bring me back to reality. “Because it’s primitive?”

  So far, it seems everything we are and do is primitive to Rowan and the Volkranians. It’s insulting, and it makes me angry, even now as he hikes my chin with a gentle nudge of his hand.

  “Perhaps,” he says. My ears are still buzzing, and I’m stunned numb from the explosions. Yet, I feel everything. The shift of his leg. His arm beneath me, cradling my back and pressing me closer. “But I am curious to know why it is enjoyed so much.”

  It doesn’t surprise me at all that Rowan wants to know, logically, why kissing is so important to humans.

  “I…don’t know. I haven’t really kissed many guys.” I’m still a little breathless, but I try hard to treat his question with a kind of scientific distance. “I guess people like to kiss because it links them. You get to have a part of them close to you.” I shift my legs. “It’s getting a little cramped in here.”

  His hand leaves my chin and closes gently around the nape of my neck. “I would like to kiss you, Penelope.”

  My eyes slam into his. I stop breathing. Stop moving.

  “You…you can’t,” I whisper.

  He shouldn’t. And I sure as hell shouldn’t want him to.

  God, I’m such a traitor. My people are dying at the hands of the Volkranians and here I am, sealed inside a suit with one, plastered to his body, wanting to kiss him.

  My nose starts to sting. I don’t want to cry, but as I shift and wriggle my way up and out of his suit, I can’t stop the tears. Rowan stares at me with a furrowed brow as I free myself. My legs are too weak to stand, so I crawl on my hands and knees toward my sneakers. My fingers shake as I unlace them. In my side vision, Rowan stays seated on the floor, buttoning his suit.

  “There will be another strike like this one,” he says, finally rising to his feet.

  I tug on my shoes and tie them, blinking back the tears before I have to stand up and face him.

  “Once your people start to feel safe and emerge from their homes,” he continues. Like we saw on the way here.

  I finish with my shoes, but I don’t have the strength to stand. There’s no point. He’s telling me what’s going to happen. He’s telling me how I’m going to die. I want to hate him, but I can’t. Deep down, I know Rowan doesn’t want to kill us. I know he just has orders that he has to follow. Him and the rest of the Volkranians on that ship. This is what has been drilled into their heads for as long as they can remember.

  Unless Rowan can stop it. Unless the warden can do something about it too.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and wonder how and when everything became so complicated. “Then I need to go. I need to find my mom and get us somewhere safe.”

  Though now, I can scratch any kind of solid building structure off the list.

  Rowan crouches beside me. “I’m going to find out if what the warden said is true. If my father has abused his power, I will stop him.”

  I don’t want to look at him, but his eyes are too fascinating to resist, the way the colors slide together and apart, drifting lazily with one mood, and becoming a maelstrom with another. I won’t see them again after this, either. So, I turn my head and get my fill.

  �
�How?” I ask.

  Rowan lowers his head. “By unseating him.”

  I’m almost positive that means killing him. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

  Rowan stands up, fast. “Get underground.”

  I squint up at him. “What?”

  “The lasers cannot track heat stamps under the earth’s surface. As soon as you leave here, you must find a place underground.”

  He shouldn’t be handing me secrets like this, and yet he’s still giving me information, trying to keep me safe. It feels like a tornado has spun wildly through me, leaving wreckage and confusion behind. I shake my head.

  “I’m going to find my mom first.”

  He turns and walks away, toward the shattered window of the shed, before spinning back around. He’s angry and frustrated. I can read it in the fast twitch of a muscle along his jaw. I can feel it with the stare he’s pinning me with, fevered and all consuming. Heat lightning flashes in his irises.

  “Go,” I whisper. “Please.”

  He has to. Before he says anything else, or before I do.

  Rowan drags in a breath, opens the shed door, and leaves.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I watch him through the shattered window. He walks along a straight row of headstones decorated with potted mums, American flags stuck in the soil, and wind chimes strung on freestanding hooks. They ruffle and chink together in the ever-constant breeze from the hovering cityship.

  He stops next to an obelisk monument, the stone a dark marble, and lifts his chin. Rowan stares at the ship, forms a fist with his left hand, and brings it to his chest, thumping his breastbone twice. He holds this position for the next minute. Another minute passes, and I’m still watching him as clouds of smoke travel like a fast mist through the cemetery. It’s coming inside the shed, bringing the singed odor of wood and metal. I keep watching Rowan, his fist still pressed against the center of his chest, his eyes on the ship.

  And then I hear it. The familiar whir of a transport. Not a hoard of them, but just one. It drops into view at a hummingbird’s speed. The nautilus shaped craft hovers a foot from the grass. Its door zings open and Rowan bounds inside. And then the transport is gone; a quiet rocket into the sky. The transport gets smaller and smaller as it approaches the belly of the ship and then, faster than the sun sinking along the horizon, it disappears inside the cargo bay.

  I stand at the shattered window another moment. I’m alone. Rowan is back on his ship, and I’m here. Alive. He hadn’t killed me. He hadn’t found my mother either, but he hadn’t killed me. Would he lie to his father and say he had? Would his father know the truth and punish him? Or maybe Rowan will find out what the Sovereign’s true orders are first.

  I suppose I should figure out what I’m going to do. He’d said to get underground, but I don’t want to be a mole. I don’t want to hide, but I also don’t want to go out to the street and see the destruction. Houses blown apart, people dead and injured and dying. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want any of this to be happening.

  But like ripping off a bandage, I just have to do it.

  Across the street, a house is on fire. Half of it has been ripped away, exposing the first and second floors like an open-backed dollhouse. As I walk through the cemetery gates, the sound of my own breathing fills my ears. It drowns out the screams of the woman who’s pulling on the limp hand of another person, crushed underneath the rubble. I can only hear my heartbeat, the constant thud and thump, the swish of blood in my ears, and a distant ringing.

  I tell myself I’m not thinking about Rowan and how he’s gone and why my chest feels like it has a giant hole in it, my lungs punctured. I move through the center of the street, walking in a river of water gushing from a blown hydrant. The water has to be cold, but I don’t feel it. I just walk, listen to my breathing, cough on smoke, and walk some more. Eastham is a grid of streets, just like New York, and I guess I’ve never really thought about it before, but it seems I have them memorized. Charting out a course to the hospital isn’t difficult. There are houses and buildings still intact, but many aren’t. They all stay in my side vision though, along with people running around their yards and driveways in varying states of shock, anger, and anguish.

  No one says anything to me. No one tries to stop me as I turn down street after street, closing in on the hospital with stinging eyes and a sore throat. From the foul smoke, not tears. I think.

  There’s a house that’s been completely destroyed, but yards away, a minivan and Jeep are untouched in the driveway. Propped up against the bumper of the Jeep is a blue mountain bike. I take the handles of the bike and roll it away from the Jeep, refusing to think about the owner, who is most likely underneath the collapsed house. I plan to bring it back. I’m not a total looter, but I can’t walk any more. I swing myself up onto the seat and start to pedal.

  When the hospital comes into view, I’m not shocked to see that it’s been ripped in half. The left side is still standing, but the right is a landslide of rubble. Hospital beds and gurneys, desks, IV stands, chairs, and a vending machine, buried in cement and insulation and sheetrock. Paper is everywhere, a blizzard of it, fluttering in the breeze, blowing through the parking lot, and sticking to the windows of abandoned cars.

  Outside, survivors comb through the debris, others having pushed patients in wheelchairs out into the lot. Smoke pumps out of the upper floors, but I can’t see any flames.

  I let the bike coast toward the nurses and doctors. They’re wearing grimy scrubs and blood-spattered white coats, and they’re busy. Crazy busy, with that manic expression people have when they’re zeroed in on a task. My ears are still ringing, but the sound of paper caught in the spokes of the bike’s wheel is getting louder. I squeeze the brakes and stop just in front of an old woman in a pink bathrobe. She’s in a wheelchair, her forehead bleeding. She looks at me with rheumy eyes.

  “Did they get the rest of them?” she asks me with that warbling voice old people sometimes have. “Did they get them out?”

  “I don’t know.” She’s still staring at me, so I add, “I’ll…go check.”

  There are probably a dozen hospital employees scattered around the still intact entrance lobby doors. A lot more patients in hospital gowns, and many more in street clothes, are outside. Just what Rowan said would happen, but not because they feel safe. These people can’t be inside. The building isn’t structurally sound. It’s on fire somewhere. But there’s nowhere else for them to go.

  My mom isn’t out here. She’s short like me, and from the back, with her long, dark brown hair and slight frame, she’s often mistaken for a teenager. We used to share jeans until last year, when my hips had flared and I’d gone up a size, so now we can only share tops and shoes.

  I search the faces of the nurses as I walk through the maze of patients. There’s a guy in bright purple scrubs wrapping a length of linen around a man’s bloody forearm. I can’t remember his name, but he works with my mom in radiology.

  “Hey.” I tap him on his shoulder, and he spares me a glance. “I’m Nicole Simmons’s daughter. She works here with you.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I recognize you,” he says, huffing and puffing like he’s running a race instead of crouching beside the curb.

  “Have you seen her?” My eyes lift to the demolished wing of the hospital. I’ve been to radiology a few times, but I’m not sure where it is when I look at the building like this. However, if this guy made it out, maybe she has, too.

  He ties off the bandage. “Sorry. It’s been hectic here, but I haven’t seen Nic since all this started.”

  My heart sinks and my stomach churns. I’m glad she’s not buried inside the hospital ruins, but if she hasn’t been here...where has she been? I want to find her more than ever. Knowing what I do…what’s going to happen…I need to warn her. If anything, I just need to be with her when, and if, we die.

  The guy wipes his hands on the belly of his scrubs. “You want to stay here? We could use your help, and maybe you
r mom will come around.”

  I know they could use my help. Filling up the last few minutes or hours of my life with bandaging people and pulling bodies from the debris would be an admirable thing to do. But I’m on a mission, as selfish as it may seem.

  “I have to find my mom,” I answer. “But you can’t stay out here. You’re all sitting ducks for the—” I stop myself from saying Volkranians. I’m sure no one else knows what the aliens call themselves. “Aliens. They’re going to attack again.”

  The nurse shrugs like it’s no big deal, but his face is pale, and his eyes are scared. “Yeah, I know. We all know. But there’s no place to go, kid.”

  “Underground.”

  He pulls a face, like I’ve spoken another language. “What?”

  “Underground,” I repeat. “You need to get everyone underground.”

  He laughs. “What, like in a bunker? Kid, if we had bunkers, we’d be filling them right now.” A woman and a young boy hobble out of the lobby and capture his attention. “Stick around if you want. I’m sorry your mom’s not here.”

  I watch him go to the woman and boy, my mind racing forward and away from them. My mom never made it here. She isn’t at home, and I’ve pretty much written off the possibility that she’d have stayed at the high school, waiting for me to come back from the city. She’s not the kind of person to just sit around and wait. She’d need to get to me, no matter what. Even if she had to walk all the way to the Lincoln Tunnel and across the river, into the city.

  I brace myself against a brick column as it hits me. “The city,” I breathe.

  She’d known where my field trip was. She had to have started for the city herself. Maybe not on foot, though. We have a couple of bicycles in the garage; I hadn’t checked to see if one was missing.

  I know it without a doubt: She’s in the city trying to find me. Either that, or she’s dead. I can’t entertain that second option right now. I have to believe the first. I have to have a goal, something to keep me from thinking about the end of the world. Of Rowan and his promise of another attack if he can’t stop his father. Or doesn’t even try to stop him.