SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel)

by Choate, Heather

  So much for being open with me. Clearly, there were things he didn’t want to tell me yet. I’m just a dumb fly caught in a spider web, I fumed as I went back to the files. I felt completely helpless against the scarb. They were threatened by me for reasons I didn’t know, but they still wanted to keep me—again, for reasons I didn’t know. This is such crap.

  Another two endless hours passed. Still, the Origin beetle slept. I guess he’s not to interested in talking to me after all.

  Every once in a while, Jack would snap at me. “Please keep your thoughts to yourself. The colony’s intentions are none of your business.”

  I couldn’t take it any longer. I stood up to leave, just to get out of there, go anywhere besides that stifling room with the completely unhelpful scientist. I felt Saki coming down the hall toward our room before I saw her.

  “Yes,” Jack agreed to my thoughts of escape. “I think that will be enough for today.”I hated that he beat me to the punch so that even my leaving seemed like his idea.

  “How was it?” Saki chirped cheerfully, but one look on my face—or one read of my thoughts—told her enough. “Thank you, Jack,” she said hastily, leading me out of the room. We didn’t speak as we walked up the steep hallway to the upper level to the dormitory. I could sense everyone else all congregated in the great room. I was the last one.

  “Things will get better, you know,” Saki said lowly as we approached the dorm room.

  “Like when you start telling me why I’m really here?” I shot back at her.

  She didn’t answer. “Dinner will be served in the common room tonight.”

  “Fine,” I huffed, not even bothering to care, and went around her into the common room.

  Just as I had sensed, everyone else was already there. Nathan and Gray played ping-pong at a table that must have been set up while I was gone. Travis and Jorge went over the mechanical blueprints for the machines used in the shipping yard. Mrs. Weatherstone read a book on the couch. Officer Reynolds slept at her feet. Only Derrick wasn’t actually in the great room. I could sense him just off to the left, behind a closed white door.

  I needed to talk to someone, but Nathan and Gray seemed to be having so much fun, I didn’t want to bother them.

  “Dinner is in half an hour,” Mrs. Weatherstone told me as I went around the side of the common room.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled and gave Derrick’s door a gentle knock.

  “Just a second, Cat,” Derrick’s deep voice came into my mind. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he knew it was me, but I guess I was still getting used to the idea that we all had scarb senses now. Human customs, such as knocking or calling someone on the phone to talk to them, had become unnecessary. There was no privacy. Even in my own brain.

  The door opened. Derrick wore a gray uniform.

  “Did you start training today?” I asked.

  “Yes, mam.” Derrick gave a fake smile. “I’m an official Fiskar supply shipper-in-training.”He pushed the door open wider. “Come on in,” he offered. “You need to talk.”

  “Thank you,” I entered his room and let out a whoosh of air. The room was small and consisted of a tidy bed, desk, and nightstand with a lamp—just like all the others—but his room had a whiff of freshly cut grass and soap to it, just like he did.

  I sat down on the chair while he sat on the edge of his bed. I dove right in. “I’m ready for that thought control lesson you promised me. Today was awful. Jack knew every little thing that came into my mind.”I ran my fingers through my hair. “I’ve got to get a hold on this. Will you please teach me?”

  “You really don’t like being out of control, do you?” he said with a small smile at the left corner of his mouth. I didn’t think it was funny.

  “Sure, I’ll teach you,” he said more seriously, putting his hands in his lap. “Okay, well, it’s really pretty simple. You have to use a lot of focus at first, but then it’s like riding a bike and it just becomes second nature.”

  “I’ve been trying to focus,” I threw my hands up. “I try to block my thoughts from other people, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. How do you do it?”

  The smile didn’t leave his face, but he was kind and didn’t tease me like Nathan, or even Ray, would have at seeing me so vulnerable. “You know the connection you feel to all the other scarb?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s how you control who you send thoughts to and how to keep others out. Anytime I think a thought I want to keep to myself, I tap into that connection with the other scarb and think ‘mine.’ I imagine blocking everyone else out. When I want to communicate with someone else, I simply find my connection to that individual, and direct the thought at only them. If I want to talk to more than one person, I just loop them into the connection. The only thing happens here,” he tapped his temple, “my mind. And here,” he tapped his chest, “the connection.”

  That seems to make a lot of sense.

  “I’ll give being Scarb one thing. They communicate a lot better than humans do,” he continued. “There’s not much room for error. We receive the messages from the other person in the way they intended to say them, and you can learn to send more than just words, too. You can send pictures and ideas, also. I’ll show you,” He scooted closer to me, so that our kneecaps were almost touching. “I’ll send you something, and you tell me what it is.”

  His dark blue, four-irised eyes were right on me. A picture of a rainbow swirl lollypop came into my mind. I could actually taste the fruity sweetness of it on my tongue.

  “Wow.”

  “That was a memory,” Derrick explained. “Every function our minds perform can be shared with others if we want to. Now, I’ll show you how I can block you from my thoughts.”

  He paused and stared at me. Twenty seconds passed, and I felt nothing, heard nothing.

  “What was I thinking about?” Derrick asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders and threw out a wild guess. “Dancing monkeys?”

  “About my first day on the island,” he corrected.

  “Oh. Let me try.” I closed my eyes to focus on the connection to the other scarb. I felt the glow of it in my chest. There was Derrick, strong and bright before me. Nathan and Gray bounced about on the other side of the wall. More beyond the room, on all levels of the colony. Some very high, some very low. I felt them all.

  Next, I tried to do as Derrick told me, to block them out. “Mine,” I said, and then thought about the red and yellow quilt my mother used to put on the end of her bed. My eyes shot back open, and Derrick’s face filled my vision. I raised an eyebrow.

  “A blanket,” he answered. “With red and yellow patches in a white twin bed.”

  “Dang it. I really tried that time.”

  “Like I said, it takes practice,” Derrick said patiently. “Try again.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment and really focused on putting up a wall around myself while I thought of different things.

  “A gray car.”

  “A laughing clown.”

  “A hopping paperclip.”

  He guessed time after time, so I tried to make the thoughts more difficult.

  “A piece of blueberry pie with anchovies and pine needles on a yellow sun-flower plate.”

  “Cliff-diving while wearing a pink raincoat, Mickey Mouse gloves, and an orange parka.”

  After a while, Derrick picked up on what I was doing. “Making your thoughts more ridiculous doesn’t keep me from seeing them,” he laughed. “This isn’t some guessing game. Focus instead on keeping me out, not making your thoughts more unpredictable.”

  He put his hands on either side of my head, right above the temples. His touch sent a ripple of energy down my body. “Concentrate,” he said softly, but I could barely think with his face so close to mine. Again, the smell of sun-warmed hay filled my nostrils, just like it had at the dance. I wanted to breathe it in deeply and let the warmth envelope me.
I felt my skin start to tingle, and then I remembered what had happened at the dance when I went all “glow-worm.” Something unexplainable happened when I was around Derrick. I couldn’t control it, and that scared me. I dropped my gaze from his deep blue eyes to the floor. He seemed to understand my hint and put his hands back in his lap.

  I was frustrated both by the weird energy between us as well as my inability to get thought control. “Why is this so hard for me? Everyone else seemed to get the hang of it pretty quick. I’m either stupid or some kind of freak.”

  Derrick shrugged and his knees accidentally touched mine, causing more shivers of electricity to pass through my body. “I don’t know,” he said gently, twisting a thread from his bed spread around his fingers as he thought. “Maybe it has to do with how the spores mixed with your personality. You were always pretty easy to read before.”

  “Was I?” I shot back at him, a little surprised and also a little embarrassed. Nathan had always teased me before about wearing my emotions on my sleeve. I wasn’t sure I liked hearing it from Derrick now. As if I’m not vulnerable enough.

  “Yeah,” Derrick said, not moving his knee from mine. “Like how much you hated going to Mr. Blackwell’s class or how disappointed you were when the blackberry cobbler was gone,” he said with a laugh, making me smile. I was surprised he had noticed those things about me. Was it really the whole town, or just him? I had thought that Derrick’s attention to me had started when we were put into the same troop. I certainly hadn’t noticed him much before that, but now I started to wonder just how long Derrick had been noticing me. “Yeah,” he grinned, “and how the whole town knew you liked Ray before either of you ever admitted it.”

  My mouth fell open. The smile fell off his face as he realized that was the wrong thing to say. I tried to fake a smile like it was okay, but I felt a little jab inside every time someone mentioned Ray’s name. But it was even more potent now. There was a new emotion there: Guilt. Guilt that I was letting myself be overtaken by the energy I felt when I was with Derrick. Guilt that I’d let myself dance with Derrick when I still had feelings for Ray. Everything was so confusing inside, like tumblers turning inside me.

  He tried to apologize. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have…That wasn’t what I wanted…”Derrick’s embarrassment only seemed to add to mine.

  “It’s okay,” I said, even though I knew it certainly was not okay. None of this was okay. Me being here, a scarb. Dancing with Derrick. Ray being gone. All of it was so messed up.

  Mrs. Weatherstone spoke her thoughts to us from the other side of the door. “I just want to let you know that dinner is ready.”

  Her words were a welcome excuse to flee the awkward situation with Derrick.

  “Thanks for trying to teach me,” I told him, trying to bring some closure to our conversation. He looked like he was about to say something, but he didn’t. Maybe he was blocking his thoughts from me. I got up and went into the common room, looking for anything to distract me from the tumult of feelings I had turning inside me.

  Nathan gave me the relief I needed. “Hey, sis,” he called from the little round table where he was trying to pile more food onto his plate than Gray—which was quite a challenge, since Gray’s already mimicked Mt. Everest. “Come sit with us. I want to tell you all about flying.”

  Gratefully, Nathan and Gray took turns for the next hour telling me about their unsuccessful flight attempts. It soon turned into an argument about who was the better non-flier since neither of them could actually fly.

  “I can glide over five hundred feet,” Nathan boasted while shoving turnip greens into his mouth.

  “Yeah, but your landings suck, dude,” Gray shot him down and was about to stick his finger into the jar of mulberry jam when Mrs. Weatherstone saw what he was doing and snatched it out of his reach with the tendril on her elbow. “You’ve got to learn to stick it, like me.” He snatched the jar back and plopped a blob of jelly into his mouth before Mrs. Weatherstone could scold him.

  Everyone laughed. Derrick’s eyes, dark as the evening sky, caught me from across the table. I was certain he had been watching me, but whatever his thoughts were, they were carefully tucked away from me.

  I sighed and felt tiny pin-pricks in my chest. It seemed the longer I was a scarb, the more difficult everything was becoming.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bearer

  The next morning, Derrick was gone to the shipping yard before I pulled up to the round table for breakfast. I was grateful. I wasn’t sure I could face him until I figured things out. I had taken one bite of a cheddar biscuit when Jack—the grim reaper himself—appeared, looming over the table.

  “We have a lot of work to do today,” he said glumly. “We’d better get right to it.”

  My brain screamed at me to tell him to shove it, but Nathan shot me a look from across the table. I had to keep my promise to follow the plan.” I crammed the rest of the biscuit into my mouth and followed the tall scarb scientist away from the common room and all hope of happiness for the day.

  Just like the day before, the lab was dark, humid, and stuffy. The tiny red Origin beetle was still sleeping. I guess he’s still not too interested in talking to me, I thought as I settled back into the seat across the room from Jack’s microscopes. Jack had told me he wanted to talk to me again, but he hadn’t even moved in two days.

  “He’s preparing for hibernation,” Jack answered my thoughts matter-of-factly. I cringed internally, knowing that my study session with Derrick the night before had yielded me no more protection over my thoughts.

  “Thanks,” I grumbled sarcastically, knowing that he already knew how unhappy I was about not being able to hide my thoughts. He could at least do the decency of pretending not to hear me instead of answering my internal questions.

  Another mountain of files greeted me. “Saki pulled these out for you this morning,” Jack told me, like she’d given me a gift or something. I groaned but got to work sorting and organizing them into folders.

  After three hours, my lower back was sore, and there was a crick in my neck. Jack was still hunched over his microscope. This is stupid. I thought about Nathan off at his flying lesson, and even Derrick helping bring in shipments far below us. At least they get to move. I wished that I’d been given wings like Nathan so that I could be up there with him. I don’t belong down here, stuck in this prison. I need to be out in the fresh air. I need to be looking for Iva so I can find Ray, not sorting through these stupid papers.

  “Why do you study these?” I finally asked Jack, picking up a graphic of a Spur-Throated Grasshopper eating a Luna Moth. Jack didn’t look up from his slide when he answered.

  “We are part of a much bigger picture now, Cat,” he emphasized my name as if he distasted it. “There are nine hundred thousand known species of insects.”He turned the turret on the microscope’s tube. “That’s three times as many as all other animal species put together. More are discovered every day. It is important to understand where we fit into the picture of it all.”

  I crinkled my nose at the photograph of a Carolina Locust whose abdomen had been cut open and its guts strung out for study. “We don’t fit in,” I said automatically.

  Jack put the picture down, eyebrows raised. “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, we don’t fit in anywhere,” I protested, shaking the pictures. “We don’t belong with the bugs, because we’re human. We don’t belong with the humans, because we’re bugs.”

  “That’s an interesting theory.” Jack narrowed his eyes. “Come and take a look at this,” he said, motioning for me to look into his microscope. He slid his chair back, giving me room to put my eyes against the two-eyepiece lenses. The illuminator glowed yellow, revealing hundreds of tiny moving globes. Some had tiny hairs surrounding their oval bodies. Another larger one actually had four legs that it used to propel itself through the amber liquid.

  “What is it?” I asked him, amazed at all the busyness and life on
just one slide.

  “A single drop of pond water,” he answered.

  I’d never taken more than sixth grade math or science. “Seriously? But there must be hundreds of living organisms here.”

  “Exactly,” Jack said. “The universe is buzzing with life down to the smallest particle. Mutation or not, we are all connected.”

  I had to laugh a little. “That sounds very ‘Circle of Life’ to me.”

  “It’s true,” Jack said seriously, but with a smile.

  Are we actually having a moment?

  “Then why am I stuck down here?” I asked, careful not to sound too demanding. “You said that the reason I’m still alive is because I possess certain valuable assets for the colony.”I motioned to the stack of files. “I don’t think paperwork is one of them.”

  Jack slid his chair back and tapped the armrests with his fingers. He looked at me for a long moment, but it wasn’t him that answered my question.

  “You’re a recruit,” the clear, clicky voice said. I turned to the tanks behind me. Origin was crawling down from a fat green leaf, his two antennae twitching.

  “I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” Jack snorted, but I didn’t pay him any attention.

  “What do you mean, I’m a recruit?” I asked, walking to the glass and crouching down eye-level with the little beetle.

  “You were intentionally made scarb,” Jack answered for him.

  This made me frown. “Isn’t everyone?”

  “Yes, but you were specifically selected by Emerald,” Origin explained as he scuttled across the sand with his six black legs. “Somehow the spore’s mutation in humans renders the majority of them barren, particularly women. That is why the queen of this colony brought you here,” he explained as he stopped to clean his face with his front leg. “It has become apparent to her—as well as to the other queens of this world—that if they are to become stronger and increase their domain by means other than conquering, they must start to purposely Change humans.”