by T. S. Welti
“Does it hurt?” I asked the angel who gripped my arm without regard to whether he was hurting me.
He looked down at me and I realized he was quite handsome, or maybe it was just his uniform and the rations distorting my perception of him. His slightly sloped nose and full lips made his blue uniform appear even more crisp and authoritative.
“I wouldn’t know,” he replied, and I could smell the rations on his breath, a faint metallic scent that washed away the handsome image like the dirty cloth my mother used to wipe the glass clean last night.
Where was my mother? She had stayed behind to have a chat with Headmaster Tate and she still hadn’t caught up with us. Did she even care that this might be the last day she ever saw me?
We finally arrived at a set of glass double doors at the end of the hallway. Etched across the surface of the glass were the words Suffering is optional. And I opted to suffer, so now I was going to suffer the consequences.
The huskier angel on my right slipped his sec-band into the scanner. A flash of green then the locking mechanism clacked and the glass doors exhaled a great whoosh of air as they slid open.
The blue carpet in here was thicker, rendering our footsteps completely silent as we approached a glass semicircular desk in the center of the lobby. The girl seated behind the desk wore a variation on the same gray tunic I wore to school. She even had her brown hair pulled back into a long braid that ran down her spine like mine. She could be me in ten years if the committee chose to take mercy on me.
The air in the lobby was stagnant and warm as if no one had entered this room for weeks. I wondered how the girl at the desk got in without disturbing the stale plastic air. Maybe she never left. Maybe she lived here, she and the committee, shacked up in some back office or stockroom, grinning as they waited patiently for the next sacrifice.
“Sera Fisk?” the girl asks in a bright voice, as if I was here for a party. “The committee is ready for you.”
They’re ready?
But I was early. Would it look bad on the evaluation that they had to wait for me to arrive?
The husky angel pulled me by the arm toward a steel door in the center of the wall behind the girl. The textured linen wallpaper made me a little dizzy as he jerked me forward and around the desk. He held his wrist inside the scanner and the door slid open.
There was no hallway or lobby. The sliding door deposited us directly into the evaluation room. A wall of mirrors at the opposite end of the room reflected the glossy vinyl examination chair in the center of the room; a health specialist dressed in gray surgical scrubs stood in the corner next to a tray of surgical instruments; everything bathed in the unholy glow of fluorescent lights.
“Please have a seat,” a pleasant female voice spoke.
I glanced at the health specialist’s reflection, but he was obviously a man. The angel who smelled of rations escorted me toward the reclining chair bolted to the floor in the center of the room. I scooted back to take a seat as the angel flipped a switch to activate the footrest, knocking me off balance so I tumbled onto the chair.
“Tie her down,” the voice said and the angels secured each of my wrists to the arms of the chair with leather straps. My legs were secured with a single belt that fastened between my ankles.
My leg jerked involuntarily and I wondered if the rations were already wearing off. Maybe the liquid they pumped into my vein wasn’t even rations. Maybe it was something meant to wear off once I got here so the committee could see me in my “dark” state of mind.
“Sera Fisk,” the female voice said. “You are being evaluated today for health purposes only.”
“What?” I couldn’t help but utter this question aloud.
“You are being let off with a warning today,” the voice echoed throughout the evaluation chamber. “But you must submit to a physical evaluation and a marking.”
I had a sudden fear that the marking would be a great slash across my face to widen my smile. Then the black-haired boy’s half-smile flashed in my mind. He obviously worked for the Department of Felicity—he was wearing the signature uniform, gray coveralls with a blue star on the breast pocket—but did he know what was going to happen to me today? Is that why he mocked me with that bizarre smile?
A nervous tremble grew inside my chest as the health specialist approached me. The wheels on the surgical cart squealed and my muscles ceased up.
This was going to hurt.
The specialist began organizing his tools on the tray and the despair that gripped me less than one hour ago returned. The sharp edge of the scalpel in his hand gleamed and taunted me.
This was going to hurt badly.
“Please,” I begged the specialist though he wasn’t looking at me. He was focused on the glimmering steel instruments before him. “Please don’t do that.”
“Sera,” the female voice came again. “You will need to answer a few questions before Specialist Dodd examines you. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Sera, do you remember drinking your noon ration yesterday, Sunday, at approximately ten in the morning?”
I nodded again. Of course, I remembered. I drank my ration early then skipped out of the apartment to make the four-mile trek across town to the darkroom on Broadway. I made that journey daily, usually at noon or after school, but Sunday’s session inside Darklandia was different. I didn’t spend the requisite hour in the pod. After Saturday’s rapture celebration, I needed more than an hour and six hours was the limit any single person could spend inside Darklandia per day. I spent six hours inside Darklandia on Sunday; six hours in a world where my father still smiled and cried.
My father cried the day before they dragged him away from that park bench in Central Park. And though I didn’t recognize the signs on Saturday, my grandmother cried beneath that sack at her rapture celebration.
“Are you aware that not drinking your rations at the prescribed hour is a punishable offense?”
My head felt disconnected from my body as I nodded. This was happening to someone else, not me. I did nothing. I would never do something so foolish as not drink my rations. I was still inside Darklandia. That was it. I was still trapped inside that world where people went to do their dirty deeds. That was it! Six hours was too long. The pod must have overheated, or something, and now I was trapped.
I had heard of people getting stuck inside malfunctioning pods until they wasted away to dried sinew and bones. No wonder I was so hungry and thirsty last night. I was trapped inside a pod. Oh, sweet felicity! How long before they found me?
The darkroom on Broadway had very few regular users. As long as one of the three pods remained available, no one would realize I was trapped. They would come and go, never the wiser. I would be raptured in this pod and no one would find me for weeks, possibly months.
The panic returned just as the lights in the evaluation room went out. Yes! They found me! The pod was going to open and release me from this virtual nightmare. Someone stirred next to me and I held my breath, my ears trained on the clink of metal against metal.
The lights stuttered and flickered back to life. Specialist Dodd stood next to the door of the evaluation room looking confused. The brief respite from the darkness was cut short as the lights went out again. A brief flash of blue light sparked near Specialist Dodd revealing a shadow behind him.
“Dodd, you’ve been relieved,” said a young male voice from somewhere near the door.
“Relieved by whom?” Dodd asked.
“Minister Locke.”
Jane Locke?
The blue light flashed again, lighting up the darkness for a fraction of a second. Footsteps. Someone undoing the belt over my ankles. Hands on my wrists as the restraint on my right arm was released followed quickly by the restraint on my left arm. Soft fingers closing around my hand tugging me forward.
“What’s going on? Who are you?” I asked, as I slid off the chair onto the tile floor.
“Sh!” the young man hushed me as
he pulled me toward the door. “We only have four minutes.”
“Four minutes for what?”
“Before the lights come on and they turn you into a walking billboard… or worse. Don’t let go of my hand.”
He clutched my hand in his and the blue light flashed again. From here I could see it was his sec-band flashing from inside the scanner on the wall. The door slid open and I could glimpse just enough of the lobby through the darkness to see that the girl at the semicircular desk was gone. I stepped forward toward the glass doors that led to the corridor and the elevator, but the young man jerked me sideways and I finally saw him. It was Mr. Half-smile.
I jerked my hand back. “Where are you taking me?”
Through the shadows, I could see a crease form between his eyebrows. “If you want to keep asking questions, that’s fine. It’s your purification, not mine.”
“Okay. I’ll go.”
He led me to the corner of the lobby where he knelt and yanked up a corner of the carpet. Underneath the plush braids of blue wool lay a steel door twice as wide as my shoulders. I glanced at the security camera in the corner of the ceiling.
“It’s not on,” he whispered as he slipped his fingers into a groove in the door and pulled up. “The generators only supply power to the doors, so people aren’t trapped in the event of an outage. Go ahead.”
He pointed at the opening in the floor and, though everything inside me told me this was a bad idea, I lowered myself down a steel ladder into an even darker room below. He followed quickly behind me, making sure to pull the carpet into place over the door before it closed, plunging us into complete darkness.
“Sera Fisk?”
“How do you know me?”
“Listen,” he whispered, and I could feel the heat of his body next to my arm. I had never been this close to a boy before. “I’m going to leave and you’re going to make your way through the corridor to the elevator. The power, and the lights and cameras, will come back on soon. They’re going to find you on this floor and you’re going to tell them that Specialist Dodd brought you down here. Do you understand me?”
“Why am I going to tell them that? That’s not true.”
He exhaled a sharp puff of air. “Because that’s the only way they’ll let you go with a warning and without a mark. If they think Dodd screwed up and can’t complete the procedure, they’ll let you go. Okay?”
Screwed up? This boy used filter words so easily.
“Why are you doing this? Am I still in Darklandia? How do I get out of here?”
My heart thrummed inside my chest. I was losing sight of what was real. Or maybe I didn’t want to accept this new reality. Either way, I couldn’t tell the difference anymore and this uncertainty, this fear was more unpleasant than anything I’d ever felt.
“This isn’t Darklandia, it’s worse,” he whispered in my ear. “I’m going to lead you into the corridor and you’re going to walk in a straight line until the lights come on. Understood?”
Though I could only see a vague outline of his slender face and spiky hair, I knew he was looking me in the eye, and he knew what I was thinking. He hadn’t answered the question of why he was doing this, but there was no time to press him for an answer. He led me out of the room by the arm. His sec-band flashed blue again, another mystery, and he deposited me in what I could only assume was the center of a similar corridor as the one on the floor above us. He grasped both my arms and turned me around so I was facing away from him.
“You want to know why I’m doing this?” he whispered, his lips so close to my ear I could feel his breath tickling the hairs on my neck. “Because you know something they don’t know… the same thing your father knew.”
“What’s that?”
“Suffering is not optional.”
5
By the time I reached Cedar Street, I was convinced that my encounter with the committee and Mr. Half-smile was all an illusion of my time spent in Darklandia. It wasn’t real. The evaluation wasn’t real. Mr. Half-smile wasn’t real. His vile words spoken in the darkness of the corridor weren’t real. My release by the Department of Felicity wasn’t real.
The familiar acidic smell of the VITALIS factory on Cedar was real. The security of the bracelet on my wrist and the vial dangling around my neck was real. The comfort of the rations in my blood was real.
I paused in the middle of the sidewalk as I approached the metal service door. If I couldn’t remember exiting the Darklandia pod, but I was certain I had spent far too much time in there, did I still have to go to the darkroom on Broadway to serve my hour today? Did my hours in Darklandia only count as served if I could remember them?
“Sera!” I whipped my head around to find Darla bounding toward me through the cool shadows of the buildings on Cedar Street; her pale face transformed a marvelous pink by the afternoon sun. “I’m so glad they let you go.”
“Let me go?”
“Yeah, the committee.”
Anything. I would do anything to erase her words. Then the committee’s words came to me: Go home. Drink your ration. Get some rest.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Aren’t you happy they let you go?”
I shook my head instantly. “No. Why would I be happy? Do you know what I did?” Darla’s smile tapered. “I stopped drinking my rations. I should have been purified right then and there.”
A crease formed between her ginger eyebrows. “But I thought it was a mistake? You didn’t do it on purpose.”
“Yes, I did.”
Darla glanced over her shoulder to where a hulking angel stood on the corner of Broadway and Cedar. Then her eyes flitted above us at the camera mounted on the wall beneath an apartment window. “You’re frightening me. I don’t want to talk about this.”
We stood in silence for a moment before I spoke. “You’re right. Let’s go inside. It’s almost time for our rations.”
“Did you serve your hour today?” she asked warily. I could see it in her face. My best friend thought I was becoming a darkling. She was probably right.
I had seen the change in others before. The transformations quick and terrifying, and inescapable, like a leap from a hundred-story building. The gravity of the descent too powerful to reverse. It was only a matter of time now before I was detained, my identity washed away like the grime in our apartment.
I could go upstairs and drown my growing fears in a glass of greenish-blue liquid, or I could go to the darkroom with Darla and pretend there was nothing to fear. I could pretend I didn’t know there was someone else out there who knew my secret; someone who knew my father’s secret; someone who believed suffering was not optional.
“Let’s go to the darkroom on Broadway,” I replied.
“But it’s so far,” Darla complained as we made our way toward Broadway. “We’ll miss our next ration.”
“A couple of hours won’t make a difference.” Not to me, not since Grandmother contaminated me with her diseased words. “You can always drink your lifesaver, if you need to.”
“But the waiting list for lifesavers is up to forty days now.”
Of course. The longer the waiting list, the more accustomed people would become to not using them.
The thing with lifesavers was that you couldn’t take any refillable container and deposit a ration inside to take with you anywhere. Lifesavers were a concentrated version of your ration packaged in a hermetically sealed vial to prevent contamination. That’s what they were making in the VITALIS factory across the street. Production of the glass vials and the metallic rations produced a sharp odor that seeped into my window on humid days and cut through my dulled senses.
“There’s a dispenser at the darkroom on Fifth,” I replied, trying to ignore the glare of the angel on the corner. “We can get your ration first then go to the darkroom on Broadway.”
“I hate that dispenser,” Darla complained, absentmindedly twisting her lifesaver between her slender fingers the way she always did when she was concentrating on a
difficult problem. “Even after I drink my ration, it still smells like a toilet in there.”
I wanted to make a disparaging comment on how the rations dulled our sense of smell and how this meant we had been shielded from both the bad and the good smells. Grandmother once told me the most wonderful thing she had ever smelled was her mother’s spring garden in full bloom with rows of English lavender.
What in the world was English lavender and what did it smell like? Did it still exist? Grandmother tried to answer my questions, but I didn’t know what she meant when she said lavender smelled sweet and soapy. I had never smelled anything sweet and the soap we used to wash our bodies and clothing didn’t smell like anything. Maybe everything smelled different to a darkling.
I had a different question today; a question no one, except perhaps the Department of Felicity, could answer. If I continued assaulting my senses with the rations, would I eventually lose my sense of smell, and the rest of my senses, altogether? The numbing agents in the rations were powerful, but they still weren’t strong enough to damper the most ferocious smells, like the toxic lifesaver factory and the sewage-encrusted toilets at the darkroom on Fifth.
“Just cover your nose with your shirt and you won’t smell a thing,” I said, as we crossed Fulton toward the abandoned chapel.
“I wish that were true.”
I tried not to look at St. Pauls’ Chapel as we passed, but the crumbling columns kept drawing my attention. I imagined the darklings that used this building during the war as a sanctuary from the Department of Felicity—until not even the churches were safe. Men, women, and children wearing white bandannas with red stars huddled in the pews as bullets fired in all directions, terror flooding their hearts as everything they once believed in crumbled and splintered around them.
We did this, not the darklings.
We stole the fractured light shining through the stained glass into the cathedrals of yesterday. We pillaged the history and strength in the pillars that once welcomed the weak. We killed the hope in those pews and gave birth to a false hope, a false idol: Felicity.