Sometimes, if the gentle white noise machine lulled into silence during her treatments, Thea could hear the prayer bells announcing the holy times and she’d repeat to herself the wisdom of the churches: One God, one world, one peace.
Thea adjusted her face to talk and lifted her chin, she could only see Arjana’s feet and legs, but soon the woman took her hands and began to pull and twist the muscles on Thea’s back. The manicurist had her hands, but Arjana was staying close.
“Amazing,” Thea responded. “As always.”
“Good, good.” A brief pause, hesitant and pregnant. Thea heard Arjana lean her body closer and lower her voice. “It was time for a touch-up, so I’ve scheduled an appointment for your mother.”
Thea nodded briefly and closed her eyes, eclipsing the feet and the floor. She concentrated on the push and pull of her body, the smooth hands working the tendons in her shoulders.
“I’ll tell her when,” Thea responded, as was her custom.
“One week from today. Noon,” Arjana said casually. She patted Thea’s back and took a step away from the table. “Easy to remember.”
“That might work. They spotted a cruiser again,” Thea added softly, even though she knew to pass on that information was verboten. Except the only other person in there was Lesedi and Thea’d already divulged her mother’s whereabouts to her. “She went out to see if anyone was…you know…but it’s been a long time. I’m sure the stress will ruin her.” Arjana hummed a reply but they were both putting on a show for the aesthetician who tucked Thea’s hands back under the gravity blanket for rest and bowed out of the room in a hurry.
“I heard,” Arjana replied once the door was shut. The absence of a listener didn’t mean no one could hear them though—Thea was too deep into Kymberlin’s controls to be naïve about the extent of the monitoring. She’d have to be careful.
She placed her hand on the heavy blanket and shifted her body, turning underneath. Once facing upward, she sat and gathered the fabric around her nakedness, only her shoulders exposed. Lesedi, her brown shoulders exposed, her hair moved to the side, didn’t move on the massage table beside her. Her friend’s breathing was steady, quiet and meditative.
“One week from today at noon,” Thea repeated. She knew she looked sweaty and relaxed, dewy with the joy of an afternoon in treatment.
“I’ve booked her a serum,” Arjana added. She leaned against the long counter that ran parallel to the massage table and crossed her arms over her white dress, her breath even and clean, assessing.
“She’ll love it,” Thea responded, her throat dry. Serum. Serum. She played through the various codes that particular word could mean. “I’ll tell her when I return. Or when she returns. The cruiser…she’ll be gone for a few more days.”
“Ahhh,” Arjana hummed, understanding. “See you next month, Ms. Truman.” Without taking any more risk, the spa owner retreated and left Thea with Lesedi on the table, naked and relieved.
They’d said no red words, avoided suspicion for nearly two years. Using the spa as a roving mailbox, Thea loved the whole power of it all—her mother needing her help, Arjana treating her as an ally, the massages. All of her friends completely and totally in the dark. It was fun.
“I feel blissful,” Lesedi said and shifted on her own table, sitting up, keeping herself covered. “Maybe I can get an invite for a treatment next month?” she asked with a wink on her voice.
“Depends on if I need to do any major mea culpas or truth-seeking missions. I brought that Danish daughter from Paulina on two different facials and she still doesn’t trust me. And there is that teacher from Apollo…”
“People know the spa trips are political,” Lesedi offered with a laugh. “You know that right? ”
“What about you? You think I’m playing you when you’re here?” Thea asked. She kept her voice light and lilting, but she watched her friend’s face for signs of betrayal. Lesedi’s face glistened post-facial and her body shimmered from the massage oil—she was stunning and smart, and she knew her place.
Lesedi sat up, extended her legs, and let her eyes drift to the ceiling. “Hey, I know it’s exhausting to be you. I figure when I get an invite it’s because you truly need to relax.” Her friend winked.
Thea nodded and smiled. “I’m heading to the tea room. Wanna join?”
She dropped off the table and dressed into the white robes of the spa, donning her slippers and tugging the belt tight.
“You scheduled me for a wax, I thought,” Lesedi said.
“Right, right.” Thea tugged the belt tighter. “See you in there after?”
Lesedi nodded and Thea slipped out into the hallway. An attendant escorted her from one area to the other, not daring to make small talk.
Thea loved the tea room; she loved the excitement of watching the women notice she was there. Every time she visited, she meandered to the recovery room where she sipped tea with the others enjoying their whole health vacations. She’d sit back and watch as the group spotted her in phases. Someone would recognize her and smile and when that person thought she wasn’t looking, she’d motion for someone else to notice.
“It’s Thea Truman,” they would mouth and she would laugh and introduce herself.
Thea opened the door to the tea room and scanned the open massage chairs for an available seat. She found one open near the center and settled down into the synthetic leather. She waited for her cup of tea: peppermint. After the attendant left, she watched the faces of the others and smiled as they made eye contact.
There it was, the ripple.
“Hello,” she whispered as one woman put her hand over her mouth in surprise.
This was her favorite part. While sipping her tea, she observed their expressions as the room’s energy changed with noticing. People whispered and others couldn’t help but nod, so Thea looked at everyone around the room, smiled her wide smile, and said hello with the practiced air of her status as Island royalty.
But as she gazed at the people in the room, she noticed a hostile expression on a young woman in the corner who’d slunk backward with her teacup to her nose, eyes leveled and trained on Thea, unmoving.
The young woman had striking black hair cut into an unfriendly shape.
Thea shivered and settled into her seat, closing her eyes. She planted a neutral smile on her lips and put the tea in her lap, but after a few moments, she opened her eyes and looked at young woman again: the woman hadn’t moved.
She sat there, face covered with porcelain, glaring at Thea.
Snapping her eyes shut once more, Thea took deep breaths and ignored the dissident in the corner, hiding behind her tea and her bitterness. Hostility on some of the Islands had increased in the past few years—but it wasn’t her problem. She was four death certificates away from leadership, and she vacillated between thinking that was too many or too few.
She’d rule the Islands someday.
Her mother was intent on claiming power and Thea was along for the ride knowing she might be called upon to lead—and the idea seemed insatiable, like a dollop of sweetness on her palate.
However, it wasn’t her own Island rule that mattered in the current age—Blair was born to carry out Huck’s vision and she was closer to running Elektos than ever before. Someday her mother would reveal her plan and open the eyes of the Islands to the full nature of the threat looming just beyond the shore. She’d smash all questions of intent.
Thea relaxed. She tried to settle her prattling brain.
She lifted the tea to her lips but it was still too hot and she lowered it down, not bothering to open her eyes. The room settled back down into a lull of meditation and ease, and she knew she’d soon fall asleep in the oversized chair. A few people left, a few entered, and someone from the far corner asked for a refreshed tea, as theirs had cooled, everyone spoke in careful whispers as the meditation chimes and chants flooded the
Thea opened her eyes and scanned the room once again, breathing deeply. The young woman
in the corner was still there, but now her hands were in her lap, her jaw tight. Her eyes still remained locked on Thea’s in pure disgust. It was obvious now that the woman wanted to be noticed—she wasn’t trying to disguise her obvious disdain for the Truman name, and Thea smiled back at the young woman, flashing her teeth.
She was sure her eyes betrayed the smile but she wasn’t sure the young woman cared. Without the teacup to block her face, the room cameras would be able to identify her in seconds, and Thea could get a whole history of the Islander’s background by the time she landed back on Kymberlin. Keep glaring, bitch, Thea thought and made a big show of setting her cup down, crossing her arms over her chest, and resting back. She put the eyeshades over her lids and smiled. If the girl across the room kept her ugly face trained on Thea’s that was her choice, but she couldn’t ruin Thea’s recovery room time and she wanted her to know.
Look how I’m still enjoying myself not thinking about you, Thea played through her mind, hoping she embodied the picture of apathy.
The door coverings rustled again and a few people whispered to leave, and Thea meditated on the trickling river sound piped into the speakers, the artificial chirp of Robins and sparrows, flooding their senses with an aura of nature.
Then: burning.
In an instant, Thea was on her feet grabbing at her mask and at the exposed skin on her neck and chest. She tore at the robe and fell to her knees, aware of the chaos immediately falling all around them. People screamed and someone ran and there was a thud and a yawp and the sound of a million people joining them in the recovery room.
Thea noticed Arjana among the fray, her hands wrapped around the shoulders of the Glaring Girl, who was now on the ground, her arms pinned to the spa floor, a bowl of sudsy water from nearby turned over drenching her face and body in oils. Tossed idly to the ground was the girl’s teacup, empty.
It took Thea too long to understand what had happened—where her pain came from and why she was sobbing, clutching at herself, reeling over. Arjana left Thea on the ground in the care of others and tended to Thea’s wound, covering it in a balm and wrapping the peeling skin with bandages.
“What happened? What happened?” Thea sobbed while the room cleared and the guards emerged. “She burned me!”
“She’ll be going to Copia for a long, long time,” Arjana cooed, coaxing a white tablet into Thea’s mouth and forcing her to swallow it whole and dry. “Dearest Thea, she will be punished for her actions. Don’t worry about her. Don’t give energy there.”
“Yes, yes,” was all Thea could say, the burning sensation increasing and throbbing. Tears stung her eyes as a deep-throated laughter emerged from the other spot on the floor where the Glaring Girl still kicked and pushed against the guards.
“Copia?” she spat with a wicked laugh. “They mean…” she raised her voice, “… the drowning chambers.”
Drowning chambers, Thea wanted to laugh. Oh, the rumors were all so involved. The Island people were such idiots. She rolled her head over and curled her lips into a sneer preparing to tell the girl how ridiculous she was. Arjana ran her hand over her face, her braids and ribbons falling, “Hush, no use, child.”
Thea, despite her pain, disagreed. “She’s a sheep,” she hissed and turned while her skin cooled under the gel. All pretenses of a kind and smiling princess vanished with her writhing and growling, not that anyone would blame her. In many ways though, she wanted to give the young woman credit. In a world filled with shiny veneers where each member was taught to sacrifice for the whole, that girl didn’t buy the lies. It would kill her, of course, but Thea admired the rage and the bravery and wondered if given different circumstances she’d have balked at the status quo. Only, she was born with power—the status quo never belonged to her.
It was fleeting empathy because as soon as a flicker of burn started again and Thea felt the tightness of her reddened skin, she wondered if she’d be able to dictate exactly to her mother the best way to kill the asshole.
Chapter Four
The Colony,
formerly Jackson Lake, Wyoming
The Grand Tetons
LARKSPUR
On a small hill within the border of the Colony sat an ancient tool shed since converted into a fort. Hidden behind overgrown dogwood, the hideaway remained isolated and abandoned. Locked with a rusty combination lock, she stuffed the shed with her important earthly things; personal items she wanted to hide; things she wanted to take with her when she escaped.
Escape was always an idea she toyed with because Lark was eager and desperate to experience life beyond the perimeter. But she’d been raised to fear life beyond the mountains; a life her parents dismissed as deadly but not worth discussing. Details about the outside world were scarce on purpose—their survival plan was based on insulation.
And until she listened to Elijah speak, Lark didn’t know about the nomads. She didn’t know about raids, or Islands, or a man named Ethan who had an amputation. Soon, she’d have to face her parents with all her questions under scrutiny, and it was possible they could refuse to answer. What then?
Lark wanted to process because she faced the truth. She was afraid she might not be able to handle it.
Inside the cabin, Lark settled down on to a pile of blankets and discarded mattresses. She wished she’d had the gadget from the Old World that recorded people and played it back to listen to later because the details of the conversation from earlier were already slipping into mush.
Lark pulled out a notebook and wrote down everything she could remember. She drew a sketch of where she was in relation to the voices, she attempted accuracy with her quotes, and she created a box on the page to ask her own questions: where are the Islands? Who is Ethan? What is the Bayou? Where was I born?
She knew that others survived beyond their small corner of the mountain. Of course, she did. But there was no way to have an accurate census since global communications and technology careened back to the dark ages.
Power plants crashed.
After a short amount of time, fail-safe mechanisms stopped. Bombs destroyed some of the cities in an attempt to hurry along the process of death. Bombs left unattended exploded, too, and the world was simply unsafe. Outside their fence, the dangers were unknown and unpredictably awful.
Sometimes she thought about the Old World her parents described. She used to ask a lot of questions before they turned her on to the books—pages and pages of a world so unbelievable it gave her an ache in her chest if she thought too hard about all that was lost in that giant genocide. Not only progress and technology but generations of grit and spirit, wiped away by someone’s singular selfishness.
Lark reached over from her spot on the floor of her cabin and spun the combination lock to a small safe. She deposited the knife into her collection of other weapons and supplies. She added the notebook with her recollections, too, and shut the safe again.
Then she got up, stepped back, and stared at her map.
She knew her land better than they could ever imagine; she knew each location and walked the entirety of the Colony in her mind never missing a rock or a divot or a section of plants. And as she stared at the grid, she knew Elijah was right—her parents couldn’t hide a stranger inside their own border. The cabins were easy to search and it would be idiotic to hide someone at the Lodge. Even their maze of secret rooms would confuse people for so long.
Either there was no runaway or she wasn’t kept close. What other name had she heard? Orin, she wrote. She couldn’t remember the last name. It was quite possible then the runaway, if she existed, was hidden with the Children of the Lake. That added a fine layer of complications.
Brilliant, thought Lark, shutting her eyes and turning away from the grid. By now her parents had no doubt been alerted to her presence in the Lodge earlier and she knew she’d be heading home into a minefield. She was ready. Emboldened even. Vindicated. All those years creeping around corners and learning to walk with a light touch, and there’d been nothi
ng to hear.
Until there was.
And she’d been there.
It was time to ask some questions.
Her father looked tired.
She sat in her rustic living room, the furniture the same as her whole life, the art the same, too—paintings of bears and people on the lake, a life immortalized in ink of when life roamed free, when there were cities and the possibility of escape.
When Grant noticed Lark enter the room, he couldn’t muster enough energy to move or acknowledge her presence with exuberance. Instead, his eyes flickered and he shook his head once: We’ve talked about this. Haven’t we talked about this? And what have you done? What have you done now?
And they had talked to her before, of course they had; talked about spying and discovering things before she could understand what she might discover, but this felt different. This was bigger than the other things.
Bigger than anything they’d told her before. This involved active lying. Which was so different than never mentioning the truth.
And even though she hadn’t figured out the details yet, her parents already reacted to her potential questions with despair and shock. That alone signaled the tectonic shifts, and as she stood there, contemplating what she could say, Lark understood the difference between now and all those other times.
Before, when she’d discovered things she shouldn’t—they met her questions with anger and defense, and their anger seeped into the wells of her imagination and festered. Now, she saw, they approached her questions with fear.
Lucy and Grant were scared.
It was fear that kept them inside the nucleus of the Colony, fear that kept secrets from their children and kept the Children of the Lake shackled to the earth as their bodyguards.
Grant stared at his daughter, his face drawn into concern. His curly hair was flattened with sweat against his forehead, and he said with a sigh, “That man drew his gun today, Lark, and there was a moment—which you couldn’t see, but maybe you felt—where I didn’t know what was going to happen. And had I known…” he swallowed and stared at her, Lark didn’t blink, “my daughter was a few feet away in the possible line of fire, I don’t know. I don’t know what I would’ve done. So, it’s good I didn’t know until later…it was irresponsible and dangerous…”
The Bedrock Page 6