“You think you’ve got me all figured out, don’t you?” he says. “Because I live on the fifth floor and you live down here.” His eyes are cold again. They are expressive. Except I haven’t seen anything resembling warmth in them. Maybe it is in there, behind a cloud; maybe not. “But here’s the thing: Life isn’t that simple. You think since I’m a Preme my life is gold, but you have no clue. You think I look down on you, see you as filth, but you’re the one doing it to me. You’re more preoccupied with being a Lower Mean than anyone else is. Did you ever think about that?”
I shake my head. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t exactly venture out of Lower Mean territory if I can help it.”
“That’s a lie.” The words escape him quickly, and then he pauses. Like he didn’t plan to say them.
“What are you talking about?”
He looks uncomfortable again. The anger in his eyes has faded. “I’ve seen you before, that’s all. In the library.” He stares at me. “Or at least I think it’s you. It’s hard to tell when your face is covered in blood.” His lips curl into a smirk.
“Cheap shots tend to do that.”
“You didn’t give me a choice.”
I’m about to tell him there is always a choice, but I hear something from around the corner: the shuffling of feet, low chatter. A moment later, Hunter, Maggie, and Emerald push into the small room.
They freeze when they see who sits in front of me. Or maybe it is my condition that does it.
“What’s he doing here?” Hunter demands, his gaze shifting slowly from my bloodstained face to the Preme.
Emerald stirs and makes her stance wider. “Get away from her.”
The Preme’s eyebrows lift. “Why, you think I’m going to hurt her?” His gaze flicks to mine. “Again?”
It stings; he meant for it to. My stupid pride. But he is accepting the fact that he has hurt me—relishing it, even. No longer does he feel riddled with guilt; I can see that. That is good. I don’t want his sympathy.
“You just about killed her,” Emerald continues. “You know that, don’t you? Smashing her face in like that…we have a word for that down here: dirty. Don’t think we’ll forget.”
He raises a hand. “If I wanted to kill her,” he says as he stares at me, “don’t you think I would have by now?” Strangely enough, there is no anger in his eyes, not now. Instead they look thoughtful. Maybe he is thinking about killing me. Maybe he is enjoying it.
The room is silent, and all of us are still.
Finally Hunter raises the white paper bag that he holds. “Lemon squares, Eve. Your favorite,” he mutters. His eyes linger a little longer on the Preme. Maybe he’d rather not look at me at all. I don’t blame him.
“Thanks, Hunter.” If there was any fight left in my voice, now it is gone. I just want to sleep. To lie back peacefully and shut my eyes and forget all of this. I want to dream about the Oracle. Dream about being anywhere but here, in Compound Eleven.
The scraping of the Preme’s chair wakes me from my daze. He is standing. But before he goes, he bends his face down so it is inches from mine. “Bye, Eve. Hope it doesn’t hurt too much to chew.”
I watch his back as he moves past my friends, glaring at them as he goes. His eyes flash to mine one last time, the slightest grin curling his lips, and then he is gone.
The others rush to my side and fill his place. Whatever spell made things so uncomfortable is broken. It is me and my friends, and everything is okay again. The worst of the pain is over, and from here on out, it will get better.
It can only get better.
“Are you all right?” Maggie asks. She sits next to me and places my hand in hers. There is a bruise on the top of her hand, a strange spot for one, especially for someone who doesn’t fight. I don’t have the energy to ask her about it.
“I’m fine, or at least I will be. I just need to lie down.” I sigh, and weariness wraps itself around my shoulders. “Is he gone?”
Emerald ducks her head around the corner. “All clear,” she reports a second later. “What was he doing here, anyway? Dare I ask?”
I shrug, then Maggie and Hunter grab me under the arms and slowly lower me onto the bed. That feels better. A few more minutes here, just to rest my head. And then I’ll go back to my cell, where I can heal.
“He probably wanted to rub in the fact that he won,” Emerald continues. She shakes her head. “So, how big of an asshole was he?”
I mean to say that he wasn’t that bad. Instead I say: “Huge one.”
“Figured. Big dude, though, right? You really held your own out there, Eve. Bruno says that even he’d have a tough time beating a guy like that. And he’s pro.”
“Really? He actually said that?” She nods, and I smile. Bruno is seventeen; he picked fighting as his job a year ago. And he’s good—one of the best in the League.
“He said that guy can fight. Like, legit, you know? And he’s quick.” She grins, and dimples pinch in her cheeks. Normally she looks fierce—she is fierce. But she’s got a sweet smile, something guys are starting to notice. “Not that I need to tell you that,” she adds with a wink.
Hunter sits beside me on the bed, pushes my hair from my face, and sets a neatly cut square with powdered sugar dusting the top into my hand. “Eat,” he orders. “It’ll make you feel better. And since it was no small feat getting it out of the kitchen, savor every bite.”
“Damn, that’s legit. How’d you even get it?” Emerald asks. “Because Houdini you are not. I’ve seen you run before, and you’re sure as hell not fast enough to make a dash for it.”
He shoves her. “I’m faster than you. And my girlfriend works there, that’s how.” He drums long fingers against his knee, then adjusts his glasses. “I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned her. Anita.”
Maggie leans forward. “Wait, she’s your girlfriend now? I thought you two were just hanging out!”
A shy smile flickers across Hunter’s face. He is all shy smiles. “Well, yeah.”
“Is it official? Like Kyle-and-me official?”
He rolls his eyes, and as Maggie makes kissing noises, I focus my attention on the lemon square. The last thing I want to do right now is put food in my mouth; my stomach churns with too much blood. But holding the square in my hand is no better. The bones in my knuckles scream—they must be cracked—yet I know how difficult it is to bend the rules in Compound Eleven, and so I swallow the pain and the nausea and force my hand to my mouth. Hunter is a good friend.
“How’d you know I was here?” I ask once I’m sure I won’t vomit.
“Saw the ref outside the Bowl talking to your dad. He told us. Not that it was exactly hard to piece together ourselves. I mean, they had to carry you out of the ring.”
I place the remainder of the square on my chest and do my best to ignore the heat lashing at my face. “Was he—was he angry?”
Maggie gazes at me. She has an inquisitive look to her. All eyes. Today they look puffy, like she’s been crying. “Was who angry?” she asks slowly. “Your dad?”
I nod.
“Angry that you lost?” She rolls her eyes. “It was a good fight, Eve. Tell me you know that. Emerald’s right: he was a big guy. And older than you, don’t forget.”
I am silent. He had looked older than sixteen. Definitely. It strikes me suddenly that I don’t even know his name, let alone anything else about him, other than the fact that he is a Preeminate. And a good fighter.
Maggie is still talking. “If anything, your dad was worried about you. Obviously,” she adds when she sees the look on my face.
Right. So then why hasn’t he stopped by? my brain yells. He knows I’m here, laid up in the nurse’s station.
Hunter takes the remainder of the lemon square and passes it to the others. When he turns back to me, he sighs. “At the risk of stating the obvious, that was a shocking match. Whe
n you didn’t get up at the end, the entire Bowl went quiet. I think everyone sort of thought, you know, that was it. You wouldn’t be waking up from that one.” He runs a hand through his hair a little unsteadily. He was scared for me. They all were.
“Yeah, everyone went quiet…except for Daniel, Landry, and Zaar,” adds Emerald as she rolls her eyes. “They weren’t exactly what I’d call worried.”
“They wouldn’t be,” I say. Daniel and his friends hate most people, but they have long held a particular hatred for me. The feeling is mutual.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Emerald continues, “I think they were the only ones in the entire Bowl actually cheering for the Preme. And that’s saying something, right? I mean, the stands were killer full. And man, when you sucker punched him at the start of the match, they…went…wild.”
I try to smile, but I can feel a wave of disappointment riding in instead. I lost, in a big way. I couldn’t even walk out of the Bowl with dignity. They had to carry me. People thought I was dead.
Deep breath, in and out. Time to package up my disappointment and set it aside. So I got beat—badly—by a Preme, landed in the nurse’s station. He was strong. Dangerous. And I put up a good fight before things slid sideways. I did.
And—this is the most important part—it doesn’t matter. Let Daniel laugh. Let my father be disappointed; let him think that maybe, just maybe, if Jack had been born first, he would have beaten the Preme. That he would have made him proud. It doesn’t matter, none of it. Because in six weeks—by the end of what civilization used to call summer, by the time adulthood begins in earnest with the selection of a job—I will be gone.
I don’t know how, not yet. But I know that my time in Compound Eleven is nearly over.
Chapter Five
I wake to blackness, velvety and thick.
They say that many decades ago, before we were forced underground, the rising sun would gently wake its people—not kill them. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to picture a burning ball of fire, one that lulls me awake with its glow.
It is impossible. I know only blackness.
But I have seen pictures in my textbooks and in the books that fill Compound Eleven’s library on the fifth floor. I know it looks like a bright-white light, like the end of a flashlight. I know it is hard if not impossible to stare at. I know it is a four-billion-year-old sphere, one much larger than even Earth…
Still, I can’t imagine it. How could one object so many miles away fill the world aboveground with so much light? With so much heat that it is deadly? I must see it to believe it.
Something I intend to do today.
Not that today is different from any other day. It has been months now—months of trying and failing to gain entry to the Oracle, Compound Eleven’s only viewing station. The view it offers is of the world aboveground, and it is encased in glass or some other protective material so that it is safe, so that the heat doesn’t swallow you whole. That is all I know.
They used to have field trips there for the children; they don’t anymore. I remember sitting straighter when the second-grade teacher first mentioned it. I remember thinking maybe my class would be permitted to go. I remember feeling inexplicably hopeful.
No such luck. Besides, even if a field trip had been authorized, my parents wouldn’t have allowed it.
Because in second grade, I was seven. And when I was seven, my little brother, Jack, was thrown aboveground for being in breach of the compound’s one child per family policy, a policy designed to curb population growth, a policy that uses forced abortion and even sterilization to ensure compliance. Sometimes, though—sometimes a second pregnancy can be hidden from the Preeminates in charge. From Commander Katz and his comrades. Sometimes life can be hidden, too. But Jack was not so lucky, and so my parents would never have allowed me to view a world that saw his final breaths.
My own breath hitches in my throat at the thought, and I push it down, down. Instead I comfort myself the same way I have for the past nine years. I think about the remote possibility of a miracle. I convince myself that maybe…somehow…he found a way to do what all else can’t. Survive.
Silly. And senseless. Similar to my preoccupation with the world up there. Silly. Senseless.
Sure.
But for nine years, I have thought of little else. I have read more books about it than anyone I know, even my teachers. And now, as I teeter on adulthood, I have decided to finally see in person what all those dusty old books describe. See in person, through the protective walls of the Oracle, the scorching world my little brother was cruelly turned out into.
Since school is over and I have no interest or need for the job tours, I have had plenty of opportunities to attempt entry to the Oracle. So far I haven’t been successful, but maybe today will be the day. 11000536. That is today’s code. That is what my hopes pin to for now.
It has been three days since the fight, and my bruises have started to fade—those to my body and to my ego. Skin that was punched apart has mostly mended. My muscles are still sore, and my ribs, but now I can move without groaning; I have rested enough. Too much, in fact, because now I am restless.
Restless people make mistakes; they get sloppy. And if I am caught breaking into the Oracle…
Well, I don’t know what would happen, not fully. Punishment is decided by the Head of Justice, a Preme position—of course—and from what I’ve heard, he has a particular hatred for rule breakers. Losing a finger is a definite possibility, maybe worse. Everything, besides murder, is decided on a case-by-case basis, probably to keep us guessing. To allow the Head of Justice discretion to exact his will, offer him an outlet for a bad day or a crummy mood…
For murder, on the other hand, punishment is clear: Murderers are released aboveground. There, the sun will scald them to death, and if it is cloudy, the heat will suffocate them. And if for some reason it doesn’t, the land is barren and dry—incapable of supporting life. They will eventually die.
I think of Jack, his smiling face, his delicate fingers inherited from my mother, and I shudder.
We used to play a game together in the evenings: one of us would hide a small object—usually a paperclip—on our body. Pushed behind an ear, shoved down a sock. The other person had to find it, and I still remember how deftly those little fingers of his moved, tucking into my pockets, combing through my hair. I still remember how hard he laughed, how much joy he took from our simple ritual.
Frowning deeply, I turn on the lamp beside my bed and sit upright, pull on my boots. They are heavy with steel, useful if I need to defend myself. First, I tuck in a switchblade—a gift from my father and one I take care of. Weapons are hard to come by in Compound Eleven. Next, I tuck in a small flashlight, in case of a blackout.
The blackouts are to conserve energy, they say, and are becoming more and more frequent. It is something I pay attention to because, though I am afraid of little, I am afraid of the dark.
A secret I guard with my life.
I check to make sure my hair is still braided from the night prior, then rub sleep from deep-set eyes, crescents carved into skin. I yawn. Slowly, my hand drags over the rest of my face, over features that are straight and even and wide. I’ve been told that I don’t look like a fighter, not really. I don’t look fragile, either.
Finally I stand and glance in the small mirror that hangs over the desk, one that is cracked along the top and stained around the edges. My eyes look tired, though not from lack of sleep. At least the swelling in my face has gone; I look like myself again, even with a patchwork of color stretching over the skin.
A moment later, I leave the confines of my small cell and lock the door behind me as my eyes scan the hallway for danger. There is none; it’s empty. Only the faint buzzing of the neon green sign that hangs opposite my door, letters spelling out Mean 2. As if I couldn’t tell. The very same number is tattooed on the back
s of my hands.
If for some reason I don’t escape Eleven by the time of job selections, I will be subjected to more tattoos, ones that will eventually cover my forearms. All lower-floor adults have them, meaning upper-floor managers don’t need to learn our names. So they can simply read the bits of unwanted ink to know our position, our family history, our disciplinary record. An information dump, one continually updated as time marches on, and all for the convenience of the higher-born. What else is new.
The tattoos have a far worse connotation for me than for most people, though, and as I remember the sound of skin being scratched into long, tapering pieces, I cover my ears until the memory passes…
I don’t know what time it is, but I know it is early. My father has trained me to wake early, and so I do. Maggie still sleeps soundly behind the door to my left, and Hunter too, on the door to my right. Emerald is a Mean, so she lives on the third floor, between the Lower and the Upper Means, and most days she sleeps until noon.
They know nothing about my secret trips to the fifth floor. Nobody does.
I am not quite to the main corridor when I hear it. Footsteps, heavy with speed.
I move to the side of the dimly lit hallway and wait. The concrete wall is cold, enough to make my palms ache, but I don’t have to wait long. A young boy flashes in and out of my vision: short with orange hair, something tucked under his arm. A heartbeat later, there is another flash, this time all black. A guard. He is holding something long and metal.
A baton.
I step into the corridor when they have passed and gaze after them. Just in time to see the guard raise the baton over his head and smash the boy to the ground. The boy crumples and then rolls. The guard smashes him, again and again. The thing under the boy’s arm was a loaf of bread, and now it lies still and forgotten.
Soon the boy will, too. I can’t see the tattoos on his hands from here, but he’s probably a Denominator from the first floor; they are always hungry.
Maggie and Hunter think I should try to be a guard, think that I would be able to secure such a position even though it is an Upper Mean fourth-floor job, even though Lower Means like me are never granted such authority. My fighting background helps my chances, they say, and my volunteer work feeding the Denominators—Noms for short—does, too.
Escaping Eleven (Eleven Trilogy) Page 3