by T. S. Welti
Darklandia.
I had to try to get in contact with my father. I had to let him know that I knew the truth. But how could I do that. My father and I didn’t have a secret code word like “sweet felicity”. I passed the door to the darkroom in our apartment and my gaze skidded over the star etched into the surface. That was it.
I walked confidently down the hall to the service door and stepped out into the brilliant morning light. I didn’t see the army of angels surrounding the GAT in front of the VITALIS factory until it was too late.
I froze as I watched Jane Locke emerge from the driver’s seat of the GAT. The look of triumph on Locke’s broad, lumpy face as she spotted me sent a surge of adrenaline coursing through me and I did the one thing that would probably doom me to a life inside Darklandia: I ran.
I darted down Cedar and made a right on Greenwich toward the Department of Felicity—wrong direction!—not bothering to look over my shoulder to see if the angels were pursuing me. My heartbeat was a roaring drum in my skull, drowning the sound of my boots pounding the pavement and the vague shouting coming from somewhere behind me. The South Pool came into view and I nearly stopped at the site of the angel standing at the corner of the fountain. But something snapped inside me and I kept running—straight at him.
His helmet was pointed elsewhere and I collided with him, ramming my shoulder into his chest with the force of a bomb hitting a city street. He flew backward and I snatched his baton out of its holster before he tumbled over the metal rail and dropped forty feet to the concrete bottom of the parched fountain.
The roar in my skull crescendoed into a symphony of shame. What had I done?
Darkling. You’re a violent, despicable darkling now.
The thought vanished as someone grasped my arm.
“Come with me!” Nyx shouted, as he clutched my hand and dragged me toward Greenwich and Cortland.
We sprinted across the square, past dozens of smiling faces, faces so locked in ration limbo they were unable to react to this chaotic scene.
“How did you know I was here?” I yelled, as we hurtled across Greenwich.
The irony of Nyx clutching my hand in public as we escaped the clutches of the angels was not lost on me. How my world had changed in a matter of minutes.
“I was going to work!” he shouted back.
Of course, that would be over now. This time his cover was truly blown.
I glanced behind us as we turned left onto Church Street and my heart nearly stopped when I spotted the stiff formation of no less than twenty Guardian Angels zooming toward us.
“Drop the baton!” Nyx shouted, as he pulled me toward the steps of the Cortland subway station.
I flung the heavy steel rod into the street before I plunged down the steps with him. He scanned his sec-band and I panicked for a moment before the scanner flashed green and the iron gate swung open. We rushed into the station and down another set of steps as a train pulled in. I banged the window in frustration as we waited for the doors to open. The doors slid open and we tumbled into the cabin.
My body tingled with fear as a single-file line of angels marched down the steps toward the subway car. Nyx squeezed my hand as the first angel in line rushed the train as the doors began to slide shut. With a few inches to go, the angel jammed his arm through the gap. Nyx beat the man’s arm down as if it were an unfortunate insect. The angel cursed and swiftly yanked his arm back. The train doors closed and carried us away as the angels attempted to bust the windows open with their batons.
“I raptured him.” I muttered the words to myself as I collapsed into a seat. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life in Darklandia.”
“You didn’t rapture him. Don’t use that word. And you didn’t kill him. You don’t even know if he’s seriously hurt. You didn’t do it on purpose.” He took a seat next to me and reached for my hand.
I stuffed my hands between my legs. “I could have stopped, but I didn’t want to.”
“You were being chased.”
“Stop making excuses for me.”
Nyx leaned forward in his seat as he fiddled with his lumen, probably deactivating our sec-bands again. “This isn’t going to work.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. Someone must have reported you,” he replied, as he tucked the lumen into his back pocket.
“I ruined everything.”
“Stop that.”
“I need to get inside Darklandia, Nyx. I need to see my father. Please take me to a pod.”
“You’re not going in there. They can discharge 200,000 volts of electricity through the neuro-gel pads and they won’t hesitate to do that if they get a read on your signature. It’s over, Sera. We have to let the masters go.” He leaned forward again and buried his face in his hands. “We have to get these sec-bands off before they reactivate them and turn us into toast.”
As the train charged forward toward the village, I realized with humble clarity that this was the descent. The leap from the hundred-story building. No escape. No stopping the momentum plunging me toward the end. All I could do now was watch as the city and all its filth and lies passed before my eyes on the way down. A blur of ashen concrete, grimy reflections of broken skyscrapers and stifled souls, the mesmerizing desolation. All of it mashed together in an illusion of stability. All of it falling away into a shattered nightmare I would never wake from.
The truth was a lie. That was what my father would have told me if he hadn’t been shot in Central Park.
18
Our arrival in the village was met with many somber faces. I assumed Nyx must have sent a message from his lumen, until I realized Nyx was as surprised as me by their gloomy expressions.
“Where’s Jock? I need him to remove our sec-bands,” Nyx barked at Lux as she and Gray followed us into the conference room. “What’s with the faces? What’s going on?”
Lux and Gray glanced at me before they made their way to the far side of the conference room, near the map of Times Square.
“What is it?” I asked.
Gray stared at her boots as Lux swallowed hard, working up the courage to speak. “Darla was killed.”
“You weren’t testing me?” I whispered.
“I didn’t know.” Lux’s cool façade melted into a puddle of shame, as she turned to Nyx, unable to face me. “I swear I didn’t know, Nyx. Hispa just called to tell us. I didn’t know they were going to… I didn’t think they’d really do that.”
“That’s how you tested her?” Nyx hissed at her. “Are you crazy!”
They continued to argue, but I couldn’t hear any of it. The room became hazy as I crumpled onto the bench. My shoulders and legs sagged as the emotions, the shock, the pain weighed heavy on my deadened limbs. This new truth curled like smoke inside my chest, suffocating me, burying me, burning me. If this was reality, I wanted no part of it.
I wanted the rations. I wanted the grip. I wanted Felicity. I wanted the lie. I wanted to climb to the top of that twisted heap of lies, raise the Atraxian flag, and declare my allegiance—and I would never look down. I would never take another step toward the edge. I would guzzle the lies and drown in Darklandia.
“Sera.” Nyx and Jock knelt before me calling my name in unison. Jock reached for my hand, but I slipped it behind my back.
“Please don’t.”
“Come on, Sera,” Jock said softly. “You have to get it off now. We don’t have time. Look: Nyx’s sec-band is gone.”
Nyx placed his hand on my knee and I glared at his wrist. Where his sec-band used to be, the skin was red and inflamed, but beneath that I glimpsed a band of nearly white skin. Marked by the lie, like Darla’s mark, only this mark would fade with time.
“Sera, you’re going to live here with us,” Nyx whispered. “This bunker is safe. You won’t ever have to go back. I’ll protect you. I promise.”
“You didn’t protect Darla.” The implication in Gray’s words was not gray. The accusation was grim and bol
dly clear and, as much as I hated to admit it, unfair. Just as what happened to Darla was unfair.
“Why?” I whispered, as I laid my hand, palm up, on my knee.
Jock swiftly scooped up my wrist in his huge hand. “This is going to be really cold.” Lux stepped forward with a yellow bucket and Jock plunged my hand into the bucket of ice water. I gasped and he gripped my arm tighter as my instincts kicked in and I struggled against his grasp. “Don’t move!”
“It’s cold!”
My skin burned as my bones ached. Just as my body began to shiver, the pain disappeared, as if I had drunk my ration.
“That’s five minutes,” Lux called out, and she pulled the bucket away and placed it beneath the bench as she handed Jock a tube of ointment.
He piped the ointment around my wrist, just beneath the sec-band, and spread the greasy balm evenly over my numb skin. Then he pulled and yanked and squeezed and rocked until the sec-band finally slipped off, but not without removing a chunk of skin the size of my thumbnail from over my wrist bone. My skin was so frozen; the gash didn’t even bleed or hurt.
“I want to go into Darklandia,” I proclaimed. Nyx didn’t look at me as he stood and took my sec-band from Jock. “I want to at least try to get my father out. You have to at least let me try to save my father.”
“Let her go in,” Hispa’s voice rang in my ears as she entered the room. “We need her to go in. We’re missing one more piece of information to access server eighty-seven.”
“She’s not going back in there,” Nyx replied. “She’ll be fried.”
Hispa scowled at him. “We have no choice. They’re closing in on us. You want to kill the virus, don’t you? Don’t you want Sera to wake up? Don’t you want everyone to wake up?”
“I’m going in,” I insisted.
“This is ridiculously reckless,” Nyx said, glaring at me as he headed for the door. “Wait here. You’re not going in without me.”
“Department of Reality is handing out virtual beat-downs tonight,” Jock said, his face twisted in an obscene expression of delight.
Nyx shook his head as he stormed out of the conference room leaving a profound silence in his wake that begged to be filled with Hispa’s technical knowledge, and she quickly obliged.
“There’s one more level of encryption on server eighty-seven: Jane Locke’s password. The message from your father was incomplete. I’m going to have Nyx work on getting back onto the server while you’re inside the pod and I need you to work on retrieving the rest of that message.”
“What pod am I going to use? I can’t just stroll into any darkroom and expect not to be detained.”
“You can’t use the pod in Jock’s apartment. His cover hasn’t been blown and we need to keep it that way.” Hispa marched toward the map of Times Square and pointed at the image of the abandoned apartment building on Broadway where I served my hours. “You’ll have to go to Nyx’s apartment and hope the angels aren’t waiting for him.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you lived there? Have you been watching me all this time?”
I could barely see through the haze of the dark glasses Lux made me wear. Nyx and I were both disguised as employees of the Department of Felicity, complete with the blue coveralls and fake names. Nyx’s disguise only changed his hair and eye color. The golden-brown coif he wore was so different from his usual spiky black hair; he looked ridiculous—like the son of a Commissioner. My disguise wasn’t any better. When Lux pulled a luxurious ginger wig out of her closet I nearly collapsed.
“Don’t you have something a little less touchy?” Nyx muttered.
She handed me a long, black wig, which she insisted I couldn’t pull back into a braid or ponytail. She wanted it to hang forward to conceal my face. The dark sunglasses were the riskiest part of the costume. No one in Manhattan wore sunglasses unless they were blind.
I bumbled along Broadway Avenue toward Times Square, my white cane stretched ahead of me, tapping the floor and the light poles aimlessly as if I couldn’t see them. But I could see everything. All the people setting up the stage in front of One Times Square and the booths in the street. Dozens of law-abiding citizen scurrying about, hanging signs advertising youth programs and contests to win extra washdays, all smiling as they prepared for the Felicity Festival. Through the darkness of the sunglasses, I could almost imagine that they weren’t real.
Not even a week had passed since my grandmother’s and the mayor’s murders and everyone was ready to celebrate the very system that killed them. It made me think of St. Paul’s Chapel. I imagined the sleepwalkers of Manhattan rejoicing as the darklings were cornered in that church and the rebel movement heaved its final dying breath. It was all the same as the pompous warmongering of the early twenty-first century that we had been taught to despise in Felicity school. The same monster in a different costume.
Nyx, or Darren (as the name sewn into the pocket of his coveralls read), kept his head down as we passed two angels standing at the corner of the half-built stage. He grasped the crook of my arm and gently guided me toward the not-so-abandoned apartment building, the building where he had lived for the past eleven months since he was inserted into the Department of Felicity as one of the rebel’s most gainful assets.
“I never told you I lived here because I didn’t want you to be tempted to visit me,” Nyx replied as we entered the building and he guided me across the lobby, past the darkroom, and toward the corridor.
As he led me into a dimly lit stairwell, I understood why he had never raised any suspicion when he followed me to the darkroom on Broadway. He never followed me. He was always there.
“You can take the sunglasses off now,” he said, when we reached the top of the first staircase.
I slid the glasses off and tucked them into the pocket of my coveralls. As my eyes adjusted, I realized the lighting wasn’t as dim as I thought it was. We climbed five more flights before we reached the fourth floor. We hung a left and he stopped at apartment 406. The circular hole in the wall where we normally buried our hands to scan our sec-bands taunted us.
“You don’t have a sec-band anymore,” I said.
“Don’t need one.”
He raised his foot and swiftly kicked the wall around scanner. The drywall buckled, but only slightly. He kicked the wall four more times before he finally broke through. He brushed away the broken drywall, stuffed his hand inside the wall, and yanked out a thick bundle of brightly colored wires. He pulled a small pair of scissors from his pocket and cut the plastic band that tied the wires together. The sorting through the different colors took longer than I thought and I began to feel highly exposed in this well-lit corridor. I glanced up and down the hallway as he sifted through each wire, looking it over carefully before he set it aside.
“You don’t have to be nervous. There aren’t any cameras here.”
“Why isn’t anyone here? You’d think they’d have a team of angels out here sifting through the traitor’s apartment.”
He pulled aside a thin orange wire and his fingers trembled slightly. “Please let this be it,” he whispered, before he cut the wire.
The apartment door slid open and we entered quickly, though the door did not automatically slide closed behind us.
“They’re not here because they saw the bogus video feed of me getting off the subway uptown. They’re probably searching the buildings up there, which means they may or may not be getting close to the village. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t decide to come at any moment. That means we have to hurry.”
Nyx’s apartment was furnished exactly like Jock’s apartment; the same white sofa and chairs, the same glossy white pod, even the same fruit bowl on the counter. The only difference was that Nyx’s apartment was about half the size of Jock’s.
“Do you remember the code word?” he asked, as I dropped my white cane and moved toward the pod.
I wondered what it would feel like to be hit with 200,000 volts of electricity. Would it feel the same
as the shock I was delivered in class on Monday?
“Sweet felicity,” I replied.
“Wait.” He grabbed my hand to stop me from sitting in the pod.
He tore off my wig and tossed it onto the floor. I removed his and chucked it aside, as well. I clutched the front of his coveralls as his hands cupped my face.
He held my gaze as he ran his finger lightly over my eyebrow then kissed my forehead. “You’re going to get out of that pod. You know how I know that?”
“How?”
“Because that’s what your father wanted. He wants to you to wake up and be free. And so do I.”
His lips fell softly over mine and I had never felt anything so amazing. I tugged the front of his coveralls toward me until our bodies were pressed against each other. Just when I began to forget where I ended and Nyx began, he pulled away.
His breath was hot on the tip of my nose as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders. My stomach plummeted as I slid my arms around his waist. This might be the last time I ever saw Nyx and everything he opened my eyes to. All the good and the bad, the gray and the red, the detachment and the pain. All the love.
He planted one more kiss on my cheek before he released me. “Wait until I’m logged in to server eighty-seven before you sit down.”
I nodded as I turned sideways so my back was to the pod, ready to insert myself as soon as he was logged in. He worked quickly, punching commands into his lumen, and I found myself wishing he would slow down, give me a minute to collect myself before I went in to face my father. I opened my mouth to voice my trepidation, but he finished before I could speak.
“I’m in,” he declared, casting me a grim look. “But I just found something on the server.”
“What?”
“The reports.”
“What reports?”
“They just moved the reports from the Security Petition server onto server eighty-seven an hour ago. The report that brought the angels to your doorstep this morning and the report that got your father shot.” Nyx’s face screwed up in a combination of anger and confusion. “It was your mother. Your mother reported both of you.”