First to Dance
Page 24
“Good. Then you will pick up where Etana left off. I am putting it all into your hands, Ayita. Everything. The only thing I am not giving you is control over the spaceships that I use personally. Everything else is yours. Do with it what you will. I shake my hands free of this and put it behind me. I know that whatever you choose to do, it would make Etana proud.”
“Thank you,” she said. She smiled and looked down at the carefully held tablet in her arms. She was trying to embrace the magnitude of what was taking place. “Where should I start?” she asked herself.
Timothy knew he wasn’t the one being asked, but he answered her question anyway. “I think the best place to start would be to read what your two friends Aira and Acton have been up to since you left. Your actions made quite an impact, and they’ve opened the door for much more change on Zozeis.”
She looked up at him, full of curiosity and an excitement to learn. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
He winked at her again. “Read it and find out. As for me, I’ll be on my way. I’ve left it all in your hands, Ayita, and I take no responsibility for anything you do or anything you don’t do.”
He started walking back toward the spaceship.
“Wait!” she said. “You mentioned a goal that you never reached. What goal was that?”
He glanced away and smiled slightly. “I failed to win Etana’s heart,” he said. “Over time, she gave me everything of herself, except for her heart. I’ve come to realize over the years that having her heart was more important to me than any of my other pursuits.” He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, then entered the spaceship and took off.
19
Acton paced about his house angrily. How could Ayita do this to him? For once in his life he’d found a glimmer of hope, only to have it snatched away. He sunk down into the couch and put his head in his hands. “How selfish of me,” he whispered. “Here Ayita’s the one who will lose everything; all I’m losing is a girl I never even had, and I’m upset with her for it.” He closed his eyes and thought. His parents had already gone to bed and he could hear his father snoring. Acton quietly slipped outside and sat on the porch.
“Earth, Ayita. Earth, really? You really believe those lies?” His grandmother had once mentioned Earth to him, and he laughed at her for it. She never mentioned it to him again. He looked up at the stars twinkling in the sky. “But what if you’re right?” He thought about the pile of books they’d burned in front of her house. Where could all those books have come from? What if they weren’t lies?
He breathed deeply and stared up at the clear night sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight this evening. Acton studied the stars and wondered: what if they really are surrounded by other worlds? Then he felt angry again, so he closed his eyes and looked away. He wasn’t going to let Ayita’s problem become his problem, too.
After much contemplation he looked back up to the stars. He wanted to yell, but he didn’t want anyone to hear him, so instead he spoke softly toward the sky. “I’m mad at you, Ayita. I’m mad at you, whether you deserve it or not. Maybe I wasn’t content with life before, but I’m definitely not content now, and all because you showed me so briefly that I might not be as alone as I thought.” He looked down at the ground for a moment. “And now you’re gone.”
He closed his eyes and held his head for a few minutes, but when he looked up again, he saw something. Far off in the sky, a blue light was rising up from the horizon. Acton stood and started walking toward it. It went up and up until it disappeared from sight. Acton walked faster in that direction, moving between houses and through yards so he wouldn’t lose sight of where in the sky it had originated. Finally, he came to the edge of the forest surrounding their town, and he trudged on through the trees. It was dark and he couldn’t see well, but this didn’t stop him for even a second. He had to find out where that light came from. Too many questions had been asked today, and this was one that maybe, just maybe, he could actually find the answer to.
Acton was beginning to wonder exactly how long he would be walking, or if he was even going in the right direction anymore, when finally he emerged out of the forest and onto the side of a large hill. In front of him was a long stretch of flat, empty land, and when he walked around toward the front of the hill he could see a building not far off.
Upon hearing a sound, Acton froze in place and listened intently. There was someone else walking around here, too. He cautiously turned his head up toward the top of the hill, and there he saw a young woman: Aira.
As soon as she saw him, she stopped moving also, and it looked for a moment like she was going to dart back into the forest and hide among the trees.
“Wait!” Acton called. He stepped closer to her, until he was sure of who she was. “You’re Ayita’s friend, aren’t you?”
The girl nodded back at him. She looked scared to be here.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell anyone you were here.”
“I won’t tell either,” she whispered. “I came because I saw something strange in the sky.”
“The blue light. Yeah, I saw it too.”
Aira took a deep breath. “Well,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Acton smiled. “My thought exactly.”
They walked together to the building and cautiously entered. They explored the building together, taking in every detail of the place, and eventually the two of them sat down at the computer in the control room. Acton quickly discovered the history log and looked up Ayita’s most recent actions. His jaw dropped.
“She left for Earth. She actually left for Earth!”
“Wait, what?” Aira looked at the screen to read it. “Wow….” She paused for a moment. “Should we go, too?”
Acton looked at her briefly and considered it. There was one spaceship left. They certainly could, if they wanted to.
“No,” he said. “I think we should stay. We need to prepare this planet for when she comes back. Now that we know what we know, we can do what Ayita thought was too big a job.” He scrolled down a few pages and started reading more about Ayita’s life. The more he read, the more he thought he loved her.
Aira nodded, but she was scared to stay. She didn’t think she could keep a secret this big, and she didn’t want to be the one to let it out. Now that she knew this was here, the choice Ayita made felt like the safer one.
Acton saw the reluctance on her face. “Aira, it looks like Ayita spent weeks, maybe even months, reading about and gaining excitement for this planet called Earth. That’s why she left—she’s dreamed of visiting Earth for a really long time. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t dreamed about leaving this planet at all; my dreams were more along the line that the people on this planet would change. If I left for Earth, I would have nothing to do there and no dream to fulfill, but if I stay here, maybe I can have an impact.” In his head he thought, maybe I can accomplish something that would be meaningful to Ayita.
Aira looked at him and considered what he was saying. “So, what are you planning to do?”
Acton stared at the computer screen for a long time while he thought about it. “I’m going to tear down the secondary school,” he said.
“You’re going to what?” Aira almost shouted.
He smiled wide. “I’m going to tear it down. It’s the only way.”
Aira looked unconvinced.
Acton rolled his eyes and sighed. “You can go home and pretend you never saw any of this, Aira. Or you can join me. I’ll try not to pressure you either way, but if you’re going to head home you should probably do that now before they notice you’re missing. As for me, I’m not going back.”
Aira looked even more alarmed now. “So…what? You’re just going to live here, then?”
Acton kept his eyes on the screen and nodded his head. His smile grew larger and larger on his face until he could no longer contain himself, and he started laughing. “Don’t you see what this is, Aira? We can see everything that
everyone has done. We can know what they’re planning. We’ll always be ten steps ahead of them.”
Now it was Aira’s turn to roll her eyes. “Yeah,” she said, “Until they all go searching for the three kids who suddenly went missing without a trace. You know they’ll find us here.”
Acton considered it briefly. “No,” he said. “The leaders won’t bother to look for us. They have bigger issues to deal with. And our parents won’t look for us, because they’ll quickly realize that by our disappearing when Ayita did, we’d be taken away as soon as we’re found.”
Aira scoffed. “My parents will look for me,” she said.
“We’ll see.”
“What if they already know about this place?” Aira asked. “The leaders, I mean.”
“No,” Acton said, shaking his head. “If they knew about this place they would have discovered and destroyed Ayita’s book collection a long time ago. And they’d have people here, guarding this computer. Ayita wouldn’t have ever had the chance to leave.”
“I wonder why it wasn’t found earlier,” she said in contemplation.
“Have you ever gone through the forest? I mean all the way through? It probably took me two and a half hours to get here, weaving through all those trees. Who’s going to bother with that, when we have everything we need in town? Probably a few people have walked halfway through the forest, found nothing, and turned around to go home, but nobody’s walked the whole distance. The only reason I came this far was because I was up late, thinking about Ayita, and I saw that light in the sky. I knew it had to come from somewhere, so I came to find out where. Now I know, and I’m not going back.”
Aira had a blank look on her face.
“So,” Acton said, “Are you with me?”
She looked at him. He looked so confident, the same way Ayita looked when she spoke of things that were important to her. Aira didn’t have that confidence in herself or anything she believed, but she thought that perhaps she could follow someone who did.
She slowly nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
They stayed up until dawn, reading the history logs and memorizing as much of it as they could. Aira went to sleep first, taking claim of the bedroom, and Acton eventually lay down on the floor in front of the computer. When they woke up, they ate a little food from the kitchen and went back to reading.
“I wish Ayita was here,” Acton said a few times. “She’d remember it all after reading it only once. I have to read it two or three times to get it right.” Then he laughed uncomfortably; he wanted Ayita to be here for more reasons than that. Aira didn’t respond to these comments from him; she just wanted her friend back. She kept thinking that taking the other spaceship to Earth made a lot of sense, but the computer said it wasn’t fully charged yet.
As much as Acton desired to learn everything there was to know about Ayita, he instead spent his time learning about what took place inside the secondary school. The more he read, the more convinced he was that it needed to be torn down. The people there were like Ayita: they’d found a book about Earth and chose to believe it instead of destroy it. They dared to dream, and they dared to stand up for their dreams. The people in the secondary school were shunned by society, but Acton admired them now. He also wondered what the people running the school thought about all this. If the books were truly lies, where were they all coming from? Where did this idea of Earth originate so that so many people could discover it? He read back, further and further into the history of the planet, until he came to the people who started it all. Then he found out about Etana, and he read her story through to where it ended. “I wish Ayita could know all this,” he said. “She would want to know. She left too soon.”
They continued reading, continued learning, and continued eating. There wasn’t very much food left in the kitchen; Ayita took most of it with her to Earth, and that meant Aira and Acton needed a way to sustain themselves.
“We can just take food from the fields when we need it,” Acton said.
“You mean steal,” said Aira.
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
Aira shrugged her shoulders.
“We’ll ask her dad to help,” said Acton. Then he nodded confidently. “Yeah, we’ll do that.”
Aira laughed at the idea, and then it made her nervous. She didn’t feel comfortable with asking Ayita’s father for help. She felt a lot of guilt over bringing them to cover up Ayita’s painting, and felt it was somewhat her fault that Ayita skipped class so hastily the next day. How could she ask him for help now, knowing that she was partly to blame for the books’ destruction and Ayita’s push to flee the planet?
“You can ask,” she whispered.
He looked at her strangely. “You’re her best friend, Aira. Her dad knows you. If I ask, he’ll just be wondering ‘who is this guy and what does he have to do with my daughter?’ At the very least, we’ll ask together. I won’t be asking him without you.”
Aira just looked at him.
Acton let out a frustrated sigh. “Fine; I will ask without you, but only because it has to be done.” He turned back to the computer and continued reading. After a while he switched over to the video monitors and had them show him the secondary school, inside and out.
“So, what are you going to do?” Aira asked him.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Study the school until I know how to destroy it, I suppose.”
“They’ll just build another one.”
Acton glared at her. “Must you doubt everything? No matter what I come up with, you think it will fail.”
Her shoulders fell and she looked away. “I’ll keep my comments to myself, then,” she said.
“Good.”
Aira walked to the bedroom and lay down. She didn’t feel very useful and she didn’t feel very optimistic either. What could two kids do to change the world? Not that they were kids, but a lot of times, she still felt like a kid compared to everyone else. She closed her eyes, and she saw Ayita’s painting. She studied it and considered it for a long time, and then she knew. She didn’t have to tear down a building to make an impact. She would do exactly what Ayita did: paint. Ayita wasn’t here to do it anymore, and someone had to. She smiled and got up from the bed, then walked back to where Acton sat at the computer.
“I have my plan,” he said. He looked at her and smiled.
Don’t discourage him, Aira told herself. She returned the smile. “Will you tell me about it?”
He looked skeptical at first, but for once the girl was smiling at him. “Okay,” he said. “So I’ve rewound the video and fast-forwarded through their nighttime routines. It’s pretty much the same thing every night. Everyone is locked in their bedrooms and the guards rotate shifts between sleep and work. The guard at the north door goes in about fifteen minutes after the guard at the east door goes out. They only keep one guard out at night, I suppose because no one’s ever tried to break in before. The guard walks the perimeter of the building twice before waiting at the north door, and then the guard there goes in. They always go in at the north door and out at the east door.”
Aira nodded, but she couldn’t figure out why this was significant. Rather than make any comment, she just listened.
“So here’s my plan. If I can set a fire on the west side of the building, then when the guard comes out of the east door and starts walking the perimeter, he will see the fire and call for help. The guard at the north door will come running, and I can be waiting there to slip inside. I’ll run quickly and unlock the bedroom doors. I’ll let the people out and we’ll all run for it.”
She wanted to tell him that someone would see him and stop it from happening, and that he would end up locked in one of the rooms there for the rest of his life too, but she bit her lip.
He saw the look on her face. “You don’t think it’s a good plan,” he said.
She smiled, laughing at herself for being so obvious. “There’s just so much that can go wrong,” she said.
“Someone will see you.”
“Maybe, but they’ll be thinking about the fire first, and me later.”
“Someone might get hurt in the fire.”
“I won’t set it to the building, but close enough and large enough that they’ll want to put it out.”
“What if you set it outside the east door instead? Then all the guards inside would run to that door and it would be easier to go in through the north door unnoticed.”
He smiled at her. “Thanks,” he said. “I knew you’d prove helpful for something. That’s a great idea.”
Aira blushed a little.
“Aira, I already know you don’t want to go with me, but whenever I go, would you be here as my eyes and ears? Then when I return you can update me on anything important that I need to know. It would save a lot of time.”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
The next day, Acton set out toward Ayita’s house. He waited in the trees across from her house and watched for her parents to come home. Ayita’s father had taken to sitting outside and watching the sky at night ever since Ayita left. Acton watched them go in together, and waited silently for him to come back out. It seemed to take much longer sitting here in person than it did when watching from the computer, but finally the door opened and out stepped Ayita’s dad. He sat down on the steps and looked up to the sky.
It was getting dark and there weren’t many people out at this time of evening. Seeing that they were alone, Acton stepped out of his hiding place and approached the house. The man got up to go inside once he saw him, but Acton called for him to wait.
“Sir,” he said. “Please stay out and talk with me for a moment.”
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“No. We haven’t met. But I was friends with your daughter.”
He studied Acton for a moment. “Tell me your name,” he said. “And why you are here.”