by T. S. Welti
He kept his arm wrapped around my waist as we ambled through the rows of plants, some of them blossoming with red berries and delicate flowers I’d only seen in photos. I tried not to collapse under the crushing pain as I marveled at the beauty of so much life thriving in one place. It wasn’t just the hunger and withdrawals that had my stomach in knots.
My father knew this place existed and he wanted to share it with me. This was clear from our weekly visits to the patch of grass on the border. Just beyond the fence where we sat, a world of green existed. He wanted me to see the beauty hidden beneath the withered flesh of Manhattan, but I was too focused on the silver helmets of the Guardian Angels to pay any attention.
The tears came for the third time in three days. Silent tears for silent pains. So many kinds of pain. No amount of food or drugs or virtual reality could anesthetize this ache. I didn’t need to know much to know that.
“Are there angels up there?” I asked, gazing up at the tiny skylight in the ceiling, which seemed to be the source of all the sunlight. “Is this area protected?”
“Protected from what?” he replied, as we passed a row of plants I recognized as red roses. “The sleepwalkers don’t come out here. It’s forbidden, remember? And we don’t need protection from ourselves.”
He led me to another door with another photo of a building affixed to it. All the windows of the building in this photograph were boarded up, like the buildings I saw in the videos taken during the Civil War. Nyx raised his hand, but I didn’t see a scanner. He banged on the door and the clang of his knuckles on the steel reverberated in my aching chest.
“We outnumber the sleepwalkers three to one, you know.” He stared at the door as if he were waiting for it to open on its own. “Not here in Manhattan, but all across the country.”
“If we outnumber them, why didn’t the rebels win the Civil War?” I asked, gritting my teeth as a sharp pain lanced through my left side.
He pulled me closer so I wouldn’t collapse. “It depends on how you define defeat. Most of the world is on our side, but it’s difficult to defeat a nation holding a stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons. Plus, it’s difficult to argue with their reasoning.”
“Their reasoning?”
“The drought. This is all because of the drought, which is very real. The only reason you see so much greenery here is because it’s been a few months since our supply of water was cut off. They’ll find our source soon and we’ll have to find another way to tap into the supply again.”
“You’re not supposed to use the water like that,” I said, as another sharp pain ripped through me and the door swung open.
Nyx scooped me into his arms again and carried me past a tiny, dark-haired girl whose gaping mouth was full of rotten teeth.
“You got her?” the girl squealed. “You did it! You got her!”
“Set up the purification room, Gray,” he replied, and my heart nearly stopped as she scurried ahead. “And go wake up Jock. Hispa’s bringing a new formula tonight.”
“Purification room?” I muttered. “What’s going on here? What are you doing to me?”
“We’re going to flush the bad stuff out of your system so you can eat.”
He carried me into a room with a single bed where Gray was busy turning down the bed covers. He placed me on the bed and stepped back. The grin splashed across Gray’s gaunt face widened as she pulled the covers up to my chin.
“Is that okay?” she asked.
I opened my mouth to answer, but the only sound that came out was a guttural scream as another pocket of pain ruptured inside me. I stuffed the blanket into my mouth to muffle the screams.
“Get Yola!” Nyx ordered and Gray skittered out into the corridor.
The pain crashed down on me in waves. I tried to ride them out, curling into a ball then stretching across the bed, but nothing worked. Nyx knelt next to me, his face mirroring my pain as I squeezed his hand with every new surge.
“Please… make it go away,” I begged. “Please give me my lifesaver. Just for now…. Please.”
Nyx shook his head as the sound of hurried footsteps slapped the floor somewhere in the corridor. A woman with dark-brown skin flew into the room and Nyx immediately let go of my hand and backed away from the bed.
“She’s stage five,” he said to the woman. “I think they had her on the grip.”
“Bastards!” the woman shouted, as she knelt next to me and pulled open the drawer of the bedside table. She extracted a syringe and an amber bottle. “I knew they would do this.”
I didn’t understand anything that was going on, but I watched the woman stab the needle into the top of the bottle and fill the syringe with a glistening orange liquid. She tossed the bottle back into the drawer and slammed it shut before she turned to me.
“Please,” I pleaded, my legs writhing and twisting the sheets into a tangled mess. “Make it stop.”
She grabbed my wrist and Nyx held my shoulders to hold me still. She stretched my arm straight out over the edge of the bed and tapped the crook of my arm a few times before she jabbed the needle into my flesh. The needle burned as it pricked my skin, but this was nothing compared to the burning sensation that tore through my vein like a bullet through a church pillar.
I ripped my arm back and stuffed it beneath the blanket.
“Don’t worry, honey. It only hurts for a few seconds,” the woman said. “Pretty soon, you won’t feel a thing.”
Her words were soothing, but the burn in my arm made me hate her. I pulled the blanket over my head and curled into myself, squeezing my eyes tightly to block the roaring pain and hunger. I jumped as someone placed their hand on my back.
“Go to sleep,” Nyx’s voice was softened by a tinge of worry.
How did he expect me to sleep with this fire inside me?
Then the final wave hit. The bed swayed beneath me, a sinking ship on which my consciousness ebbed. The pain was the first to dip below the surface and within seconds I went completely under.
11
The room was dark. My chest hollow. I wasn’t alone. Darla sat in a chair next to the bed, her face buried in her hands.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. She raised her head and I couldn’t catch the gasp before it escaped my mouth. “What happened?”
She had been marked. Through the darkness, I glimpsed the raw, red star freshly cut into her fair skin.
She buried her face again. “I skipped my rations today. I wanted to know what it felt like. Darren reported me as soon as I got home from your house.”
Innocent, ten-year-old Darren? I wanted to believe Darren didn’t understand what he had done, but he’d had the same four years of Felicity school as the rest of us. He knew exactly what happened to people who were reported for skipping rations.
“I’m sorry, Darla,” I whispered. “I started all of this. I didn’t mean for this to happen to you.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, as she grabbed a glass off the bedside table. Against the dim glow of the sodium lamp on the bedside table, the liquid in the glass appeared thick and white. “Nyx said it’s best if you don’t eat solid food for a few days. He said they gave you the grip.”
It took a moment to push myself up into a seated position before I took the glass. “What’s the grip?”
“They said it’s a drug they give to people like you and your dad. People they know are going to wake up.”
“How did you get here?” I asked, before I took the first sip. The thick liquid coated my tongue in frothy deliciousness. Maybe this was what sweet tasted and smelled like. “What is this?”
“I think they called it a coconut milk shake. Nyx got me out of the Felicity building. He told them he was taking me on some sort of tour, but he didn’t.”
Was there anything Nyx couldn’t do? Apparently, he couldn’t figure out the algorithm my father had cracked.
I took a few more sips of the coconut milk shake before I set the half-full glass on the bedside ta
ble. The lamplight twinkled on the rim of the glass and reminded me of so many nights lying with my mother in our twin bed and wishing I had a better view of the stars through the window across the bedroom.
“When did they start giving me the grip?”
“Judging by your level of withdrawal, at least a month ago,” Nyx’s voice warmed the darkness. The yellow glow of the lamp caressed the tip of his nose and forehead as he stood in the doorway.
“Level five?” I asked, remembering what he had said before Yola injected me with the fiery orange liquid.
“Level six junkie, if we had one,” he replied, as he entered the room and stood behind Darla. “How are you feeling?”
“Junkie?”
He flashed me a half-smile. “It’s a term of endearment, I promise. You ready to go home? It’s almost curfew. Your chat with Hispa will have to wait for another day.”
“Why does everyone here have weird names?” Darla asked, as she rubbed the skin around her mark.
“Because we choose our names. Our DNA may have been crafted in a government lab, but we were reborn here. Changing our names is a small mutiny, but it means a lot to us.”
“Can I change my name, too?” she replied.
“Well, judging by the number of people you’ve murdered inside Darklandia, I think Killer would suit you well,” he said, flashing her a half-smile as he took a seat on the edge of the bed.
My stomach fluttered at this small gesture, as if I wanted him to save all his half-smiles for me. How silly. Smiles belonged to no one, especially his.
“And you,” he said, turning to me. “What will your name be?”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak as a muted version of the gnawing pain in my belly returned.
“I’ll get you some pain relievers before we leave,” he said then he pulled the blanket down and I stared with confusion at the boots still laced up over my feet. “We didn’t want to wake you.”
My boots, and the handful of pain relievers swirling through my bloodstream and clicking inside my pocket, carried me to the subway car.
“I’ll forge your hours in the system tonight, but I can only do that in emergencies like this. Both of you will have to serve your hours tomorrow,” he said, as soon as we took our seats in the train. “I’ve adjusted both your rations, and, now that I know it’s there, I’ll block the grip. So you’re both fine to keep drinking your rations. Just smile and act like everybody else. I’ll be in touch soon.”
Minutes later, the train deposited us into the station on the corner of Broadway and Chambers.
“This is where I leave you,” Nyx said, his body half-turned away from Darla and I as if he couldn’t get away from us fast enough.
I had a strange urge to touch him as he walked down Broadway in the opposite direction of my apartment. All these feelings inside me were so unfamiliar and new. I wondered if Nyx had experienced similar feelings when he was awakened. I wondered where he was off to at this hour. Where did he live? I wanted to know. I wanted to see.
“He’s handsome,” Darla said, as we crossed Chambers.
My eyes flashed toward the security cameras then to the smile on her face. “You can’t talk like that out here.”
“Oh, right.” She glanced at me before she tempered her smile to look more like the sleepwalkers and I nodded at the false grin.
How long had I looked like that? Like a mannequin with a painted smile, not a care in the world while the world, my world, crumbled around me.
In the morning, Darla and I walked to class as if nothing had happened. We crossed our hands over our face and chest to form the Atraxian star as we walked under the stone arch into Fillmore Prep. Darla appeared more depressed today than she had yesterday right after the marking. Maybe it was the effect of removing the drugs from her rations, or maybe she had finally gotten a chance to look in a mirror. Either way, I couldn’t allow her to dig her grave even deeper.
I nudged her arm as we walked to Professor Gage’s class. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” I said, plastering my face with the same mild grin I saw plastered on the faces of all the sleepwalkers roaming the halls. “Did you finish your Darkling History assignment?”
Her mouth crooked into a tiny smile, but her shoulders still drooped. “Yes.”
I glanced around the corridors for signs that anyone recognized the melancholy in her face and stature. If anyone did notice, they didn’t seem to care. Maybe they assumed she was allowed a free pass today since she had only been marked yesterday. How long could she sulk like this before someone reported her?
I saw it happen to Harry Tibbett last year in gym class. He came to school after skipping his morning ration because he was in a hurry to get to class. He didn’t even do it on purpose; at least, I didn’t think he did. Someone saw him skulking about campus and reported him to the headmaster. He was marked the same day.
There were no warnings in Atraxia. The marking was the only warning. A reminder that lasted a lifetime. A woman in my mother’s sewing circle was marked a few years before my father’s detainment. She tried to cover the mark with a hat and long bangs during one of their meetings, but my mother insisted she remove the hat. The woman was purified.
Well, not purified. She was turned into a lab rat. Or maybe she was on Level 16 with my father, forced to haunt the virtual lives of those who once loved her.
Never forget. Suffering is optional.
“Are you going to kill anyone today?” I asked Darla, my attempt to lighten her mood as we walked down Broadway to the darkroom in the abandoned apartment building.
She heaved a deep, wistful sigh, but she didn’t respond.
“Come on, Darla. How about Professor Gage? Don’t you want to just… strangle him for giving us that pop quiz today?” Discarding my language filter would take some getting used to.
“I just want to get my hour over with and go to bed,” she replied, hanging her head as she stared at her boots.
A woman pushing a baby carriage glared at Darla and me. I wanted to ask her what her problem was, but I didn’t want to draw further attention to Darla’s, or my, strange behavior. The woman cast one more incredulous look in our direction before she disappeared behind us.
A poster on the side of an old bank depicted Jane Locke facing right, as always, but this poster differed from the others. Someone had painted Jane’s sleepwalker smile a brilliant red.
A small mutiny.
I had to temper my smile as I thought of the face of Felicity being defaced.
I had an overpowering urge to clear my throat to get Darla to look up as we approached an angel on the corner with his helmet pointed straight at us. Clearing my throat would be too obvious, but I had to get her attention.
“Look! It’s Aaron,” I said, and Darla’s face lit up as she scanned the sidewalk ahead of us. Her gaze flitted across the street then back to the pavement in front of us, a slightly bewildered smile played across her freckled face as she searched for Nyx.
“I don’t see him.”
The silver helmet followed us as we stepped down from the curb and I watched the angel’s reflection in the shop window across the street. His helmet never turned away from us until we passed the window and I no longer had a view of him. I sped up just a tad to urge Darla on and soon we were inside the abandoned apartment building staring at Nyx.
“Do you ever work?” I asked him, as Darla and I approached the scanner.
“I’m working right now,” he replied, as he turned to Darla and whispered, “Hey, Killer, you go ahead. I need a word with your pal.”
Darla looked disappointed that handsome Nyx didn’t want a word with her and I truly felt awful. She was already having a miserable day.
“I’ll be right in,” I assured her, though I had no idea if that were true.
She scanned her sec-band and disappeared into the darkroom without a word.
I wanted to ask Nyx if she would feel better once the drugs wore off, but I was highly conscious of the security camera i
n the corner of the ceiling. He nodded toward the corridor and I followed him out of the camera’s line of sight.
“Are the pain relievers working?” he asked, his voice dripping with concern.
“I’m fine,” I replied, conveniently leaving out any mention of the sharp ache snaking its way through my abdomen and lower back. The truth was I had only taken one pain reliever this morning. I left my afternoon dose underneath my grandmother’s pillow; too afraid the soft click of the pills in my pocket would draw attention to me at school.
“Good, because today is your first test.” He fixed me with a gaze that drove spikes through my nerves. “Once you’re inside, you’re going to realize, for the first time, that you’re not actually in control and it’s going to be… alarming. You’re going to hear a voice urging you to wake up. Try to hold onto that voice.” He grabbed both my arms to get my attention and I couldn’t help but flinch at his touch. He let go of my arms, but he held my gaze. “Sorry, but this is important. I need you to keep a cool head in there or you won’t remember what I’m about to tell you.” I nodded and he continued. “Your dad was trained with a code word that will trigger a response from him inside Darklandia. I need you to try to work this word into the conversation.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s not as easy as it sounds. You’re going to have a very hard time controlling your thoughts in there. That’s the nature of Darklandia. You’re not yourself. You have to fight off this digital persona the system imposes on you. It’s going to be difficult.” His gaze softened. “The system is designed to slowly make you forget who you are, who your father was, what he gave up. The darklings had a saying, ‘Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.’ Don’t let them make you forget.”
The way he looked at me made me uncomfortable. “Okay, so what’s the word?”
“It’s not a filter word so it shouldn’t be difficult for you to say, but it’s not part of the standard projection the system created for you so the bots will take notice.”