The Enclave

by Karen Hancock

  Stuck out there, in fact, and apparently no worse for it. But then, Xavier said Zowan had hallucinated the Enforcers coming out to warn him, as well.

  Zowan turned his gaze back to the performance below as Gaias came round and found a spot against the railing not far from Helios. When Zowan realized he meant to stay there for the duration, he was filled with a powerful dismay. How could Neos ever meet him with Gaias standing right there? He had to make him go away!

  But even as he thought it, Zowan knew it would be impossible. Even if there hadn’t been a concert, it wouldn’t have worked, for how would Neos walk through the commons and mall and into the Star Garden without being caught? It made no sense. It had never made any sense. He’ d simply desired so strongly to believe it, sense didn’t enter into the matter.

  Neos was undoubtedly dead. Zowan probably overheard someone say that Andros was dead when he was in one of his hallucinatory states in the infirmary, and from that had conjured not only Gaias’s visit, but Andros’s pleading voice. And the voice of I Am, as well. Who most likely hadn’t spoken in parallel to words from the Key Study because

  He was real, but because Zowan had assigned those remembered words to Him in the hallucination. Besides, what kind of name was “I Am,” anyway? He must’ve made it up.

  There would be no meeting with Neos, there was no Light, and there would be no freedom for Zowan. He’ d best just accept it and get on with his life in the Enclave before he made so many mistakes they would put him into the Cube.

  Though this was the reasonable conclusion, for a moment his disappointment was so bitter he wanted to weep. Then, in the next moment, he wanted to stride around to his brother and smash a fist into his face, maybe grab him by the throat and strangle him right there in front of everyone.

  Why can’t they just leave me alone? Let me leave if I want? Let me wander off across the poison-filled surface of the Earth and die?

  The urge to weep was back, and he swallowed hard against the lump in his throat—mortified, blinking, lest the tears welling in his eyes break free and trail down his cheeks. He would have left right then could he have done so without drawing an inordinate amount of attention.

  The quartet had just finished their third selection when the lights went out—stars and wall lamps together—steeping all in sudden and absolute blackness. Since power disruptions occurred frequently in the Enclave’s electrical circuits, blackouts were a common occurrence, and all Edenites were trained from early childhood to freeze wherever they were and wait for the lights to return or instructions to be given. Block leaders all carried portable hand lamps in case the power outage lasted longer than a few minutes.

  Thus, when this one occurred, everyone obediently stood or sat where they were and waited patiently for the lights to come back on and the concert to resume.

  Instead, the alarm Klaxons went off, and a rough male voice bellowed, “Breach!”

  At which point, pandemonium erupted. Zowan immediately reached for Terra, pulling her snug against him as he stepped back from the railing toward the wall and the two benches, lest in the chaos they might be pushed over and fall five levels. His grasp on Terra was broken as they tumbled onto one of the benches. Screams and shouts and a thunder of running footfalls filled the air, and the wood floor trembled underfoot. Where were the hand lamps? Where were the leaders? Why didn’t they act?

  If the sealed integrity of the Enclave had truly been breached, precious oxygen and water were not only leaving New Eden, but deadly poisons were entering. Shouldn’t the garden be locking itself down, guarding the precious air it had? Everyone knew the Enclave was equipped with a system of self-closing emergency steel doors that would be automatically activated should the Enclave’s outer walls be breached. Could they still function if there was no power?

  A sudden gust of air washed around him, heavy with the odor of unwashed flesh. Probably someone had just raced along the walkway searching for the stairwell. The thought had no sooner flashed through his mind than it was proved wrong as he was seized from behind and pulled off his feet. Another whoosh of air, like a heavy door closing on him, preceded a sudden close thump, and immediately the noise in the Star Garden was reduced to muffled cries and indistinct thumping.

  After the absolute darkness of the garden, his pupils had dilated enough to detect the faint light that illumined what was a narrow passage paralleling the curved wall of the Star Garden. He heard someone breathing behind him. Neos? He turned, excited. But his hope gave way to panic when he saw a man robed in Enforcer’s black filling the space there. Gaias! But why would Gaias snatch him like this? And why was he suddenly wearing his cowl over his head like that?

  Then the stench of old sweat and stale clothing, made worse by a tang of vomit, became so overpowering Zowan could hardly breathe, and he knew it couldn’t be Gaias. No one would be allowed to live in the Enclave with that kind of body odor.

  Motioning for Zowan to follow, the other man sidled away through the narrow passage. Zowan gave him a couple of steps headstart to clear the air, then followed, thinking he was nuts to follow a stranger in Enforcer black, especially one who smelled so bad. But hope and curiosity had overruled his common sense, for it seemed Neos’s words were coming true, impossible as it was. Or maybe it was all hallucination again. Dr. Xavier had said he might suffer isolated episodes of delusion for another few weeks.

  They crept past the wooden frames and studs that supported the backside of the Star Garden’s finished interior walls, the passage lit by oblong stones aglow with blue-green phosphorescence, sparsely placed along the stone wall near the floor. Though Zowan had never seen the likes of them before, he guessed now was not the time to remark on them, even if pandemonium still raged on the other side of the wall.

  As they rounded the curve, Zowan noted several places where makeshift stepladders sat beneath what appeared to be peepholes bored through the facing material. Seeing as the Star Garden was a place where Edenites came for solitude and privacy, Zowan found this both understandable and outrageous. Had someone spied on him and Andros here last week? Heard their heretical conversation? Or worse, the one that had preceded it six months ago?

  But his whispered “What is this place?” only provoked a hissed order for quiet from his guide.

  Before long they came to a closetlike opening in the rock wall to their left. As Zowan’s guide turned his back to the opening, then reached up and pulled himself out of sight, Zowan realized the “closet” lacked both floor and ceiling and was actually a vertical ventilation shaft cut through the stone.

  Cautiously, Zowan backed into the place the other man had just vacated and reached up as he had done. His fingers closed about the metal rung of a ladder ascending the side of the shaft. Bracing his feet on the sides of the opening until he’ d ascended far enough to get them on the ladder’s bottom rung, he remained unnervingly aware of the space at his back and the indeterminate drop below him.

  After what seemed like forever, his hands reached the end of the ladder. Groping about, he found a flat landing, and was considering how to execute the transition from ladder to floor without anything to hold on to when a hand seized his arm and pulled him off the ladder onto the flat as if he were a child.

  The hand was hot as fire as it drew him away from the shaft and through a doorway—though only the snick of a door shutting behind them told him so. He was released then, and a palm-sized lamp was pressed into his right hand as a rough but familiar voice grated, “Turn it on. Keep your voice down.”

  “Neos?!” Zowan flicked on the hand lamp, its weak light illuminating his dark-robed guide once more. It was Neos, all right, but his brother had changed considerably since Zowan had last seen him six months ago. His face had grown more angular, his brow heavier, his cheeks gaunter. It was just now sweat-sheened and streaked with some sort of dark pigment, and the angry red boil in the midst of his forehead looked ready to burst.

  Zowan had no more than a glimpse of it, though, for the moment t
he light hit him, Neos gasped and turned away, shielding his eyes with a huge, knobby, long-nailed hand, also streaked with pigment, dirt . . . and blood.

  “What is that on your forehead?” Zowan angled the lamp away from the other man, all his excitement now turned to horror. It couldn’t be an oculus. Why would they do that? Neos was never selected to be an Enforcer. Enforcers were supposed to have affinity for the position, to be reliable and obedient and stable. . . .

  “I don’t know,” Neos said, so softly Zowan had to lean toward him, trying not to gag on his pungent body odor. “I don’t want to know.” He said it so vehemently, Zowan veered off from questioning him further. He was obviously unwashed. Perhaps it was just a big pimple.

  “Is there really a breach?” Zowan whispered, trolling about for something else to say, and realizing now that it must have been Neos who’d yelled that panic-igniting word in the blacked-out Star Garden.

  Neos made a huffing sound that might have been a snort. “There’s always a breach. New Eden’s air comes unfiltered from the surface and always has.” He shook his head. “There are no air scrubbers, no seals, no poisons. The surface is fine. Everything they’ve told us is a lie. Everything.”

  “Are you all right?” Zowan leaned closer, lifting the lamp a bit, to see that Neos really was shivering under the heavy cloak. “You seem ill.”

  “I am ill. They’ve infected me with something. I don’t know what. I don’t even know if I’ll survive it. Probably not.”

  “We should get you to the infirmary,” said Zowan. But the moment he uttered the words he knew it was a ridiculous suggestion.

  Which Neos confirmed with another snort. “Why? So they can finish the job?” He fell into a coughing fit—deep, wracking, mucus-filled coughs that made Zowan draw back in alarm. His thoughts went back to the heat of his grip, the boil on his forehead, and the clumps of fair hair on his red tunic. All symptoms of the development of an oculus . . .

  Suddenly his brother’s hand shot up from the dark folds of his cloak to grip Zowan’s forearm again, the burning on his bare skin now carrying profound significance. “The world is not what they said it was. You have to go and see it. They’re holding us here like prisoners. Doing things to us that shouldn’t be done to—”

  He broke into another bout of vicious coughing. When he had recovered, they sat silently for a moment, and then he said again, “You have to go and see it.”

  “How?” He waited and, when Neos said nothing, added, “Is there a way out of the goat ravine?”

  Neos grunted. “It would never be that obvious.” He heaved a shuddering sigh and shoved to his feet. “Come. I’ll show you.”

  Between the continued darkness, and the exit from the Star Garden through various ducts and shafts, Zowan had lost all sense of direction. He followed Neos through a maze of passages—some wide and high and recognizable as corridors in the Enclave proper, others dusty, cramped, and unfinished. Once they walked around the edge of a huge shaft, toes balanced on a narrow walkway as they held on to the pipes and cables that snaked down the stone wall.

  Zowan had no idea how long they walked, or where they were, and sometimes he wondered again if he was just hallucinating all of it.

  Finally they entered a low-ceilinged chamber full of the whir of machinery and the odor of damp earth, metal, and concrete. Zowan’s hand lamp reflected off huge pipes sprouting out of the floor, running parallel to it and then turning away, or dipping down again. Some were marked with red painted lines, others with blue. They followed one such pipe, marked with red, all the way to the back of the chamber, where it dove into the floor so close to the back wall they practically touched. About five feet away from it, Neos rolled aside the large metal drum that was holding a four-foot square of steel plating in place against the wall. Pulling the plating aside, he revealed a small tube that had been drilled through the stone, slightly over two feet in diameter.

  “It’s through there,” he said, gesturing for Zowan to enter. “Crawl on to the other side and wait for me there.”

  “Wait for you?” Zowan looked at him aghast.

  “There are some things I need to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Set up some diversions. I can feel Gaias getting closer. And they’ll probably have some of the power lines up soon.”

  “What difference does that make? Can’t we just leave?”

  “If they know where we’ve left the Enclave, they’ll know where to look for us on the surface. Besides, I want to keep things confused enough they won’t know for sure you’re even gone yet. It’ll give you a bit of a head start. And believe me, you’ll need it. If they think you’ve gotten out, they’ll hunt you down. And when they catch you, they’ll add you to their collection of experimental subjects.”

  “But how will I know which way to go?”

  “You won’t have any options. Just crawl to the end of the tube and wait for me there. Now hurry up. I want to close this back up before I leave.”

  And so Zowan shoved hard into the narrow tube, which was barely wide enough for his shoulders. Wriggling forward on his elbows and hips, the beam of the hand lamp spearing about erratically, he tried not to think of where he was or where he might be going. But when he heard the sound of the metal drum being rolled back into place against the steel plate, intense anxiety accelerated his pace until he was crawling as fast as he could, desperate to get to the end of the tube and wondering how he was going to be able to stand waiting in a space not much bigger than his sleepcell bunk for who knew how long.

  Especially since he was growing more and more convinced this was all a trick and Neos had only brought him here to bury him alive in this bizarre way. His breathing rasped loudly around him as blisters formed at the pressure points where he sought to push himself forward.

  Then abruptly his outstretched elbows came down on nothing and he pitched headfirst out of the tube.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  New Eden

  Zowan fell only about two feet to a dirt floor below the crawl tube’s ending. At first he lay panting, disoriented in the total darkness that had descended on him when he’ d dropped his hand lamp. Profoundly relieved that things hadn’t turned out as badly as he’d feared, he still regretted ever having gone to the Star Garden. Neos had sounded like a madman, not just during their recent flight through the Enclave, but earlier when he’ d visited Zowan in the infirmary. Zowan had not wanted to admit it then, invested as he was in the hope of getting away. Now he could not escape the horrifying realization that he’d been tricked.

  After a time he sat up and groped around until he found his hand lamp, then switched it on to look around, the beam noticeably weaker than it had been. He sat in yet another narrow, rock-walled tunnel, though this one was at least high enough he could stand up in it. Mindful of the hand lamp’s failing battery, he switched it off and settled down against the wall to wait. Silence pressed about him so profound the rasp of his own breathing sounded loud. The rankness of Neos’s unwashed flesh lingered in his nose, and he could almost feel the trembling, too-hot hand upon his arm. He was getting thirsty, too, and had no idea where he might find water. . . .

  Led here by a madman. What an idiot you are, he told himself. But then, maybe he was also mad. . . .

  Eventually he drifted into sleep, where Andros called to him again. “They’ve got me locked up in a dark cell down here. Please, Zowan, come and get me out. I don’t know what they’re going to do to me!”

  “Why would you think they’re going to do something to you?” Zowan asked him.

  “Because I can hear them talking about it. It’s your fault I’m here, you know. You have to come and get me out!”

  Guilt seared Zowan’s heart. “I don’t know where you are, Andros!I don’t even know where I am right now.”

  Andros did not reply.

  “Besides, I have to wait for Neos to come back. . . .”

  Again, only silence. Andros spoke to him no more, and somehow Zow
an knew his friend was annoyed with him.

  He awoke to the same dark, dusty corridor he’ d fallen asleep in with no idea how long he’d slept. Neos had not returned and Zowan’s thirst was stronger than ever. He was getting hungry, too.

  How long should he wait? What if, in creating his diversions, Neos had been caught? What if they’d made him tell where Zowan was and were coming for him now? Or worse, what if Neos had been caught and taken to that place where the experimental subjects were kept? What if he wasn’t coming back?

  He wrapped his arms around bent knees as horror consumed him. For a time he sat nursing bitter self-recrimination. Then a sound made him look up, and he glimpsed a gleam of light on the rock walls of the corridor ahead of him, just where it took a turn. He sat forward in sudden hope. “Neos?” he called.

  There! Another gleam. He leapt to his feet, switched on his hand lamp, and soon reached the place where the corridor turned and angled upward, arriving just as the person ahead of him disappeared around the next corner. “Neos!” he called, louder this time. “I’m down here!” Neos must have come back, after all, and not seen Zowan sleeping in the darkness beside the hole.

  Now Zowan hurried up the sloping corridor, expecting his brother to reappear around the corner at any moment. But he did not. When Zowan reached the corner himself, he saw the light shining down a rugged rocky wall from above. Hurriedly he climbed after it, speculating that Neos wasn’t speaking for fear of drawing the attention of Enforcers. But as the mysterious man with the lantern continued to lead upward, never letting him draw close enough to see more than a robed figure with a light, he began to think it wasn’t Neos at all.

  Instead his thoughts returned to the voice of I Am, who had told him during his time in the infirmary to leave the Enclave, to come out of the darkness. . . . Was that who was leading him now? A new eagerness seized him, a sense of something greater than he could imagine. He hurried along narrow passages that had turned from solid rock to earth and rock together, his shoulders brushing the walls, the top of his head sometimes brushing the wooden supports that held up the tunnel. Intersecting passages offered alternative paths, but he ignored them, his eyes fixed on the light ahead. The passages gradually grew wider. At one point he passed a small room and found a dusty striped mattress on a metal frame, a blanket folded at its foot, a not-so-dusty bucket sitting beside it—as if someone might have lived here for a time.