by K. Makansi
“Never,” he says. “You’re the first.”
I reach for the magnum of wine just as he grabs it. “Whoa, whoa, Vale. I am the arbiter of all things fun today. I would be nice to me if I were you.”
“Arbiter of fun, huh?”
“Indeed, my friend. Which is why I am taking it upon myself to ensure that you have no shortage of beautiful girls for the evening.”
“I’m not that hard up. I could get a date if I wanted.”
“A date? You could get any date in the entire Sector if you wanted.”
“Vale has a date?” Moriana comes up behind me and gives me a big hug. I embrace her and she kisses me on the cheek. Moriana and Jeremiah are always mocking me for my lack of interest in dating. It’s not that I’m uninterested; I’m just not always as outgoing and talkative as they are. And it doesn’t help that even three years later, I can’t get Remy Alexander out of my head.
“No, that’s the problem,” Miah says, handing Moriana a glass. She grabs his bearded chin and pulls him down to her height for a quick kiss. “He doesn’t have a date. Which is why I’m taking it upon myself to ensure he doesn’t sit in a corner all night.”
Moriana turns to me and pokes her finger in my chest. “Miah’s right. You should find a lady, Vale. My cousin will be there tonight—”
“See?” Miah laughs, interrupting Moriana. “We’ll be surrounded by brilliance and beauty all night long.”
“—And she’s been looking forward to seeing you again,” Moriana finishes, glaring at Jeremiah.
“Stop playing matchmaker and pour me another glass of wine,” I say.
Suddenly I feel the slightest pressure on my arm. The hair stands up on the back of my neck, and I know who it is before I even turn. When I do, I find a wave of silken blond hair and the bluest eyes in the Sector. Linnea Heilmann, who is almost as tall as me, stands at my shoulder, an inviting smile playing around her mouth. She wears a sleek, shimmering pearl-colored dress that trails down to her feet, with a very noticeable slit that trails right back up to her thigh. She is as sharp and beautiful as a blade. My mother has been not-so-subtly encouraging me to start going out with her. “She’s so talented, Vale. You’d make such a great pair! And you have so much in common.” What I have in common with Linnea could fit in a buckyball.
“Congratulations, Vale,” Linnea says with a gentle smile. “You did a great job out there. I’m sure all the citizens of the Okarian Sector were impressed. I know I was.”
“Oh, hey, Linnea,” Miah says with a barely concealed sneer. “I thought only students were allowed back here.” Jeremiah hates Linnea. He thinks she’s just about the worst thing that ever happened to the Sector. He’s always going on about how she treats the workers on the Farms like second-class citizens, even though the Farm workers are among the most important citizens of the Sector. Working on the Farms is considered a great honor, and almost everyone who begins a term on the Farms decides to stay. I flash Miah a glare that says very clearly: Cut it out. We don’t need to get on Linnea’s bad side.
“Thanks, Linnea,” I say hesitantly, not sure how to walk the line here. “As always, you look nice.” That’s the best compliment I can muster. She seems satisfied, though, because she smiles at me, flashing perfect teeth and full lips painted in luscious plum.
I ignore the look Miah gives me and turn away as Moriana scowls and mouths my cousin like it’s a command. I let my eyes linger on Linnea’s and then drag them down over every curve and shadow, all the way down to her high heels and painted plum toenails and back up again. I start to speak, but my throat is dry, and I find that even if I really wanted to, I couldn’t put the words together to invite her along. Despite her best efforts—and my mother’s—Linnea isn’t my type.
Her eyes cloud as if she realizes what just went through my mind. She leans in and whispers, “Come find me later, Vale. I’ll wait for you.” She lets her fingertips trail off my shoulder as she turns elegantly and walks off.
Miah hits me in the arm so hard I almost drop my glass. “Vale, if you so much as consider going out with her, I’ll—”
“That girl is climbing the power ladder,” Moriana says, interrupting what would surely have been a diatribe, “and you are just a few rungs from the top.” She tilts back her glass and downs it in an uncharacteristic display of enthusiasm. She’s usually so calm and modest that even Jeremiah looks surprised. “Come on, you guys, forget about Linnea. Tonight’s our last night of freedom before we start work. Let’s go have fun!” She grabs each of us by the hand and hauls us off towards the door.
Outside, six or seven girls are waiting at the airship deck, smiling eagerly at me as we approach.
“A gift from me to you,” Jeremiah says to me, smirking. I recognize a few of them as acquaintances of Jeremiah’s from the SRI’s engineering division and assume he brought them along in the hopes of getting me to go out with at least one of them.
It turns out Jeremiah has worked even more of his magic for the evening. My father’s personal airship waits for us, gleaming and sleek.
“It’s pre-programmed to take us to the club and then home afterwards,” Jeremiah says with a wink, “but your father was all too happy to donate it to my cause this evening.”
I’m speechless. My father never lets me take his airship. My dad’s been fond of Jeremiah since they discovered a shared interest in flight engineering, which drives my mother crazy—she thinks Jeremiah lacks motivation.
Once we’re all in, Jeremiah pulls out another bottle of wine and we toast to our futures as we blast the music and sing all the way across town to the club.
At the club, we smoke our Dietician-approved cannabis doses and relax into the swing of the evening, talking about the ceremony and what’s to come. Jeremiah has to ask the club managers to keep the photographers and reporters out of the party so we can relax away from the scrutiny of the rest of the Sector. The aromatic haze of incense and smoke blends with sweat and perfume, and I sink deep into the pleasure of my last night as a student. We take off our shoes to dance on the mossy rooftop veranda, and Moriana makes sure I have a steady supply of dance partners, especially her cousin. The cannabis and alcohol help me forget that 07h00 and General Aulion loom closer with every passing minute. I keep my friends close, even doing a turn around the dance floor with Miah until Moriana mercifully cuts in and rescues us from ourselves. I want to hold onto every moment, every song, every laugh, because I know that tomorrow, everything changes. Once or twice, Moriana catches my eye, and I know that even though she’s clinging to Jeremiah’s arm, she misses them, too. The ones who left.
Several hours later, the party is winding down, and most everyone else has already gone home or on to other parties. I plop down at our now-empty table, my head reeling from the fullness of the evening. It was almost perfect. I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. In the background, the performers play a final ballad and the lights dim slightly. In the alcohol-and fatigue-induced haze, Remy Alexander’s face swims up before my eyes. I see her copper skin, her round hazel eyes, her flush lips and brown curls—fifteen-year-old Remy Alexander, the last time I saw her. The last time any of us saw her. She’s eighteen now, of course … I wonder what she looks like, if she still has that silly giggle, the glint in her eyes like when she was teasing me. Or did her sister’s death tear that happiness from her?
I start as Moriana appears out of nowhere. She looks lovely with her long dark reddish brown hair framing her freckled cheekbones and tired green eyes. Her silky black dress rustles and dances around her as she pulls up a chair and sits at my side.
“I miss them, too, Vale,” she says, somehow reading my thoughts.
“I know,” I say after a minute. “I just don’t know why they left. They had everything. Why throw that away? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s time to move on. Tomorrow you start your new job and a whole new set of opportunities will open up for you, for both of us. It’s what we always dreamed of.”
“I know it’s stupid, but sometimes I can’t stop thinking about her. Remy, I mean. She just left. Everything seemed perfect and then, well … then Tai. One day she stopped talking to me, and then she was just gone. Everything we shared, thrown away with no explanation.”
“Vale, you were seventeen. She was fifteen. You were kids. Now you’re twenty, you’re a citizen of the Sector, you’re an officer in the Defense Forces. We live in a different world.”
“Where’s Miah?” I ask, closing my eyes. I can’t believe how exhausted I am. How the hell am I going to face Aulion in just a few hours?
“He’s waiting outside. I told him I needed a minute.”
“Look, just—”
“I won’t say a word. But Vale, seriously. It’s time to leave them behind. Just like they left us behind. I miss Jahnu, but he and his parents made their choice.”
“Do you ever wonder why he left?”
“I used to, but not anymore. I have no idea what my aunt and uncle thought they would find out in the Wilds. Some sort of agrarian paradise? Did they go to live with the Outsiders? Who knows—but I suppose every society has its rebels. We can’t change that.”
“Yeah, I know,” I mutter. I want to agree, but I don’t. I can’t. There are too many unanswered questions, too many ghostly memories that cling to me like a second skin, and I can’t seem to shed them. There’s something wrong here, something I’m missing. And tomorrow, at 07h00 hours, I intend to start looking for the answers.
3 - REMY
Fall 47, Sector Annum 105, 18h02
Gregorian Calendar: November 6
Jahnu and I walk through the dimly lit main corridor of our underground compound, through to the cramped cafeteria, looking for Eli. We head down the stairs toward the director’s office and our communications center. Our meager excuse for a kitchen smells like fresh baked bread and sautéed onions, and I remember how lucky I am to have escaped the Okarian Sector. If I never see a Dietician-issued Mealpak again, it’ll be a day too soon. Here we may not have a lot, but what we have is real. I breathe in deeply, hoping to get another whiff of the caramelizing onions and fragrant garlic, only to be brought back to reality by the scent of recycled air and rubbing alcohol wafting from the open door of what passes for our infirmary.
We’re in the bowels of what was, at one time, a large university, on par with our own Sector Research Institute, the SRI, today. We live like moles, hiding underground, digging tunnels and burrowing to avoid being seen by Sector drones when they venture out this far. Except that no one in the Okarian sector has seen a mole in a hundred years, or so says old man Rhinehouse. They were all killed by poisoned groundwater, habitat destruction, or radioactive waste seeping into the earth. Gifts bequeathed to us from the civilizations of the past. Some areas are still uninhabitable; others, nature has mended in her own way; still others were relatively untouched to begin with.
Jahnu pushes through the heavy double doors to the comm center, where Eli is sitting in a swivel chair with headphones on. He wears a thoughtful expression, like he’s trying to figure out how some piece of circuitry works. But there’s no circuit box in front of him—just the headphones and the array of dials and switches that make up our old-fashioned comm center. I walk over and poke him in the shoulder.
“Eli!”
He starts and looks up at me. When he sees who it is, he swivels in his chair and removes his headphones.
“Well, look who’s here. I was just about to send a messenger to find you, Remy. Your folks are calling in. You want me to put you through?”
“Jahnu and I want to go topside for our own graduation celebration,” I say, trying to dodge the question. “There’s nothing crazy on the weather forecast, is there?” The weather is so erratic these days that you can go to bed on a warm evening and wake up to a meter of snow on the ground. Then there are the thunderstorms with hailstones that can kill a man, the downpours that deposit an ocean’s worth of water in a few hours, and the occasional tornado clusters. Needless to say, we monitor the weather closely.
“Do you want to talk to them or not?” Eli asks, holding the headphones out, his finger on the incoming call switch. He can always tell when I’m being evasive. Not that I’m ever particularly subtle.
“We want to have a picnic, so we need to get everything organized. I’ll have you put a call through to them later.”
Eli cocks his head and raises one eyebrow as if to say, You’re not fooling anyone.
“Remy, you have no idea if they’re even going to be available later,” Jahnu points out. It’s true. Posing as Outsiders, nomads who live in the Wilds, my parents are constantly moving, traveling between factory towns and Farms, trying ever so subtly to spread word of the Resistance to Sector citizens willing to listen. The Resistance is so small, and most of us are defects from the elite of the OAC and the Sector government. So my parents try to spread the word, and in the meantime they work to deliver real food, information, and medicine to people in the Farms. As a doctor and an artist, they make a powerful combination. But their access to reliable communications is spotty at best, especially since they’re operating right under the nose of Sector Defense Forces, and whatever public communications equipment they might use is liable to be monitored. If Sector soldiers ever caught them, well….
“Listen, I don’t want to talk to them right now, okay? Besides, I don’t need mommy and daddy to make everything all better.”
“The world would be a better place if we all had mommies and daddies to make everything all better,” Eli says, with an edge to his voice. I wince, remembering that Eli has no idea where his parents are, or if they’re still alive. I have to be careful about what I say around him—I never know when something will send him spiraling into one of his dark moods. The kind where he’ll barely say a word for days. The kind where he forgets to eat or sleep—where I wonder if he wishes the gunman had gotten to him, too. “Your parents are waiting.”
“Fine.” I sit down at the call station and put my finger on the switch. I hear Jahnu ask Eli, “So, is it safe to go topside now? We need something to cheer us up after the ceremony. And my birthday is next week.”
“Last one to hit the big one-eight, huh? What’s it like to be a child prodigy?”
“You should know….”
I tune them out and flip the call switch. There’s a hollowness on the other end and then, “Remy? Is that you?”
“Yeah, Mom. It’s me.” My voice catches in my throat.
“Dad’s on the line, too. We saw the ceremony.”
“I’m sure everyone in the Sector saw the ceremony.”
“You okay, little bird?”
At the sound of Dad’s voice, my eyes well up and my nose tingles. I pinch the bridge of my nose to keep the tears at bay. Mom’s always been my sounding board. She keeps me grounded, but I’m more like my dad. He’s the writer, the poet, the dreamer who brought art and music and literature into the house. He’s the one who encouraged me to be an artist, who somehow found books, real books, on artists that had dared to be different. When Tai was off being brilliant and perfect, finishing her science and math classes with flying colors, I always had a pen in hand, perpetually drawing, painting, or sketching. Dad was the one who encouraged me to enter the Academy’s prestigious Art and Design program—even though that turned out to be nothing but an extensive study of propaganda. And while Mom was planning our escape route, he’s the one who sat with me the night before we left when, one by one, we went through my portfolio of drawings and paintings and decided which ones to keep and which to burn. We went through every piece and picked our favorites, and then I took the others and held them over the flames in the fireplace until they were nothing more than ashes and my fingers were hot and smudged with soot.
I shouldn’t have taken the call.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
Talking to them on the commlink is torturous—it always makes me remember how much I miss them and Tai. I haven’t seen my parents
in over a year. We talk here and there, whenever they can get their equipment connected to one of the old service towers that the Resistance has rehabbed. But sometimes we’ll go weeks without talking. I have trouble sleeping then, thinking of all the terrible things that could go wrong.
“I hope you’re going to do something fun today, maybe get outside for some fresh air,” Dad says.
“Yeah, we’re going to have a picnic later to celebrate our lack of a graduation.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. But I realize I’m being a baby, so I change the subject quickly. “Where are you right now?”
“You know we can’t tell you that, sweetie,” Mom says.
“We’re going somewhere new in a few days, though,” my dad pipes up. “That’s why we wanted to talk to you now, before we have to pack up the comm equipment.”
“Is it somewhere dangerous?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer. But not knowing would be worse. My parents volunteered to serve as missionaries to the laborers on the Farms, but I wasn’t allowed to go. “Too risky,” the Director said. “You’re too young. Besides, we need you here.” My parents agreed. They wanted me to stay at the main base, which we call Thermopylae, with Eli and the other kids from the Academy. That’s how I got assigned to Eli’s raid team with Jahnu, Kenzie, and Soren.
“It’s no more dangerous than where we are now,” Mom says gently.
“That’s not very reassuring. Don’t get caught, okay?”
“We’ll try, little bird,” my dad says. “You be safe too, okay? I heard about the last seed bank raid you guys did. It sounded much more dangerous than what we do.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I say, with a glimmer of a laugh, “but I’m sure it was way more fun than what you guys do, too.”
The last mission our team went on was a thrill. We broke into one of the OAC’s seed banks, trying to steal the backup database that had all the genetic codes for the seeds manufactured there. Security was lax, presumably because the OAC didn’t realize we knew that particular bank existed. We had the run of the place, and we each picked out something to take home with us. Eli brought back a handheld retinal scanner. Soren found a digital harp, and none of us had any idea why that was hanging around the seed bank. I brought home a touch-screen drawing pad—one of the plasma tablets we used in my art classes at the Academy. I hadn’t seen one of those since we left the Sector. It was the most successful mission in the Resistance’s history, and we were greeted like war heroes when we came back.