by Makansi, K.
“I’m not the man I used to be,” he says, patting his belly, dusting himself off and smiling.
“Better question is, what the hell are you doing here?”
“What’s it look like?” Miah asks. “I’m coming with you.”
“It’s too dangerous,” I protest.
“When I heard you all were going to the capital on a top-secret mission—Firestone’s not very good at keeping top-secret missions top-secret, by the way—I just had to come along.”
Even Soren and Vale look none too happy to have him along.
“Why?” Vale asks.
He stares at him.
“You know why.”
“We’re not going to see her. Not unless everything goes sideways. If you wanted a rescue mission, this wasn’t the one to come on.”
He shrugs.
Soren clasps Miah by the arm. “So this is about Moriana?” Since his initial tryst with Osprey has blossomed into something so much more than what he and I had together, Soren’s been way happier, but at the same time, more thoughtful. Not so quick to anger—a strange trait for Mr. Soren Skaarsgard.
“It may be my only chance,” Miah explains.
Finally Chan-Yu speaks up behind us, whose quietude throughout this trip has been even more pronounced than usual. He’s clipping his weapons to his belt and strapping his bag across his shoulders.
“Miah is an engineer, correct?” It seems strange heading back into Okaria with Chan-Yu at my side as a comrade in arms. We all nod in response to his question. “It would seem beneficial to have another engineer while we’re setting up the equipment necessary to transmit information back to Okaria.”
“He’s too recognizable,” Vale says.
“With him and Linnea, we’ll be too recognizable,” I say.
“What the fuck is going on back there?” comes Firestone’s angry, loud voice over the intercom. It occurs to me that we’re supposed to be jumping from the airship into a rugged, mountainous area in about thirty seconds.
“Look, I brought my own gear and my own food,” Miah says. “I’ll keep my head down and stay out of the way.”
“We need to disembark,” Chan-Yu, calm as ever, pressing a button with his gloved hands. He slaps on the magnetism and grabs a line as the bay doors on both sides of the airship slide open. “The man’s made his decision,” he says, now shouting over the sound of the rushing air and wind. “I’m jumping. If he chooses to jump as well, I’ll meet him on the ground.”
I nod at Chan-Yu, whose fatalistic approach to change actually calms and encourages me. Chan-Yu hops up and out over the side of the airship, and I watch as his line unravels, letting him descend slowly. Linnea, cursing under her breath, follows suit.
Vale and Soren stare at Miah as if they don’t know what to do with him, but then they shove their gloves on, slap on the charges, and grab a line. Miah grins like a child with a face full of birthday cake and grabs his pack from the line where all of ours were arrayed, moments before. Right in plain sight. He unclips a pair of gloves and jams his hands in them.
“You dumb shits never thought to count them, did you?” He laughs.
Vale shakes his head in astonishment.
“Jump before I flip this goddamn airship upside down and toss you all out!” Firestone bellows.
We each grab a line and drop, weightless for a moment, through the air.
It’s so hot that steam rises around us as we push through the ferns and bushes of an old road. We’re hiking down through the Adirondack Mountains and Chan-Yu says there’s hard asphalt buried beneath the pine needles and centuries of forest decay. Because the terrain is so rugged, there’s no agriculture. The Outsiders have been using the Adirondacks to slip through Sector territory for decades. We’ll come down out of the foothills not twenty-five kilometers from the furthest exurbs of Okaria, a distance that can easily be covered in a day—or a night, if necessary, but we’ll be coming from a direction no one will be watching.
The downside is it’s a three-day hike from the drop point to the exurbs. And we weren’t counting on rain. The volatility of the weather is always something we have to prepare for, but hiking down steep mountainsides in slippery terrain is not the most auspicious start to our mission.
“Storm coming,” Chan-Yu observes.
“No, did the dark, ominous clouds clue you in?” Linnea mutters.
“Need to get to shelter before that hits.” Chan-Yu shows no sign of registering her sarcasm. “We have about an hour.”
“I’d be happy to have the rain cool me off,” Vale offers, walking ahead of me.
“Maybe we should strip naked and get a shower while we hike,” Miah suggests. He raises his arm and sticks his nose in his armpit. “Some eau de rainwater could enhance my pure animal magnetism.” He leans over Linnea with his arm still up. “What do you think?”
“Get away from me!” She pushes him away with a violent shudder. “You are such a child.”
“Yeah, so are we there yet? When’s lunch? I’m tired.” Miah shoots back with his typical smile. He may be a dangerous liability, but he’s also entertaining.
“Do you ever think about anything but your stomach?” Linnea spits back. “If you mention your stupid tomato sandwiches one more time I’m gonna scream.”
“You know, I brought these really awesome tomato sandwiches with cheese and spicy mustard covered with—”
Even Soren can’t hold back a laugh as Linnea clamps her hands over her ears. The first time she bit into a real tomato she threw up. Seems she’s allergic. And she can’t stand the smell of spicy mustard. To top it off, it turns out she’s lactose intolerant and spent the better part of a day in the bathroom after her first cheese binge. Watching—or rather hearing about—her going through withdrawal from her MealPaks has been an adventure in itself. Vale said she was always sharp-tongued, but without her MealPak meds, her tongue is more like a double-edged sword wrapped in razor wire.
As we walk through the hills, following Chan-Yu’s lead, the slate-colored clouds roll in over us, dropping dense bullets of rain. We pull on our slickers and continue, but the storm wets the path to the point where it’s so muddy we’re sliding up and down the hills rather than walking them.
“There’s an old house not far from here we can shelter until the storm passes!” Chan-Yu shouts back to us in between the rolling thunder, pounding the air with its heavy fists. My teeth chatter at the sudden drop in temperature, and I now wish for the earlier heat. Vale, next to me, doesn’t shiver, but just clenches his jaw, puts his head down, and plows ahead.
Chan-Yu leads us off the path a little ways, all of us stumbling through underbrush and the slick mud to follow his lead. On the top of a modest hill, I can see a ramshackle building, less of a house than a hut, tiny, decrepit with age. We shuffle up, pelted with raindrops the size of bumblebees dripping off the trees above us. I can’t think of a time in recent memory when I’ve been hotter, sweatier, wetter, or colder all within the same hour. Chan-Yu shoulders the rickety door open to get in, but as it swings open I realize the inside is absolutely nothing like the outside.
It’s spare but neat, clean, and surprisingly well-insulated against the roaring winds and rain outside. A little drip in one corner of the house pit-pit-pits onto the wooden floor, but who cares? It’s well-equipped with eight bunk-bed style cots, (small, granted—Miah and Soren would hardly fit), a small solar-powered refrigerator, a tiny kitchen, a bathtub behind a silk screen, and a little adjacent room with a toilet dug into the ground.
“There aren’t many of these outposts,” Chan-Yu says, rubbing his hands to warm them up. “They’re hard to keep secret, and hard to keep up. But there’s one here, one on the southern side of these mountains, and a few others scattered in various hard-to-reach places that the Sector considers to be their own territory, but in reality, we Outsiders move through with impunity.”
“This is wonderful, Chan-Yu,” I say, imitating him and rubbing my hands together.
“So, how abou
t we dry off and get a meal, then?” Miah says, pulling off his rain gear and seating himself neatly on one of the cots, which bends and creaks under his weight. He pulls out what I presume is one of his sandwiches, neatly wrapped in waxed, preserved leaves.
Linnea, too, drops her pack and sits on the cot nearest me.
“I’ve been hearing about food for so long, I might as well eat something.”
“Eat quickly,” Chan-Yu says. “We move out as soon as the storm has passed.”
“What?” Linnea turns to Chan-Yu, surprised. “I thought we were going to stay here overnight.”
He shakes his head.
“We’ll still have at least four hours of daylight, Linnea,” Soren says. “We can’t stop just because there’s been some rain.”
“But it’s so slippery. We can’t even stay on the trail.”
“When the rain stops, I’ll see how bad the trail is. If we have to stay, we will. But I’d rather move.”
Linnea casts a longing glance over at Miah’s sandwich, which is by now more than half-gone. She bites, regretfully, into an apple, and speaks so quietly only I can hear her.
“I knew I shouldn’t have left Okaria.”
29 - VALE
Spring 28, Sector Annum 106, 15h30
Gregorian Calendar: April 16
We soon come to the most dangerous part of our journey into Okaria. Down in the flats, in the river valley as we approach the city from the east, drones everywhere and hovercar highways crisscross into the exurbs. We attempt to stay off the roads, but the land is swampy and open, with the exception of a few patches of trees that don’t actually provide much cover. I try to stay alert and focused, but my mind is preoccupied.
The storm had taken longer to pass than Chan-Yu anticipated, and by the time he was ready to check the trails, Soren, Miah, and Linnea had all fallen asleep. Remy, who before had been practicing a similar sort of meditation as Chan-Yu, opened her eyes when the door closed behind him and looked at me.
“Your mother,” she whispered, so soft that I had to cross the room and ask her to repeat as I sat next to her on the cot, “do you still love her?”
The question took me by surprise. I examined Remy’s face, trying to gauge if she had an ulterior motive by asking me, but she just inhaled and exhaled soft, even breaths as she waited.
“It’s okay,” she said, “I won’t judge you.”
I nodded. “I’m … not sure. If she stopped all of this, this—” I gestured with my hands to indicate something like madness “—but I don’t believe she will stop.”
“She needs to be stopped,” Remy said, placing a hand on my knee, sending my heart into an all-out sprint. I didn’t want to think about my mother, about the ways evil can creep into even the most steadfast hearts, about … “And so does Evander Sun-Zi, and Aulion Faulke, and—”
“I know,” I whispered, leaning in, inhaling the scent of crushed peppermint, the earthiness of rain still clinging in beads to her course hair, and the alluring, overpowering temptation of her skin. I wanted to will her blacklist from our minds, push the inevitable into the distance, and kiss her. Remy lowered her eyes, licked her lips, tilted her head up—that is an invitation, right?—and just as I almost touched her lips with mine, Chan-Yu swung the door and slammed it behind him.
“Everybody up! Trail is fine.” Remy and I had sprung apart, awkwardly, and now I must will the almost-kiss from my mind. Later I can dwell on it, can imagine what could have been, but now, I need to focus.
The Okarian skyline is barely visible ahead but its presence feels like a weight. Okaria was once home for all of us and the decision to leave wasn’t easy for any one of us. Even Chan-Yu. The memories and the nostalgia creep up on me as we get closer—the long days of studying, practicing piano, the brisk autumn days of a new semester, the warm, dry bed in my city flat—it all feels so close, almost achievable again, but just out of reach. I know Miah is thinking of Moriana, Remy of Tai, Soren of his parents … I have no idea what Linnea is thinking, but as we approach, she gets jumpy. Any whistle of wind through the swamp grass draws her attention, every crunch or burble from the small animals that live out here startles her. I know she’s not a soldier and I begin to doubt my judgment in bringing her here.
The first sign of the city is one of the larger compost farms. Hectares of biological waste from the city are processed on the outskirts, to be returned to the city for various uses including bioluminescent lighting and plant-based electricity generation. Robotic operating systems manage the compost, turning it into fertile soil ready to be recycled into the electrical grid of the city. To support a city of almost two million people, these farms are enormous. When I was in school, studying Environmental History, we were taught that cities in the Old World could grow up to twenty-five times the size of Okaria. They were sprawling metropolises, my professor said, with too much waste to process themselves. Large quantities of it went into the land, into the oceans, and, shortly before the Blackout, into the sky. The Sector, at least, learned how to process all its own waste so that the byproducts of life might not affect the rest of the planet. We’re not all bad, no matter what Chariya and the Outsiders may think.
And yet, I think of that polluted river and dead-brown valley, poisoned water and destroyed earth that proves that even the Sector, for all its intended good done to the world, has its own excesses. Nothing that works on a small scale translates well to large scale: one of Rhinehouse’s favorite phrases. There are always unintended consequences and no system works for everyone or works forever.
At this farm, the waste is arranged in aerated static piles sectioned off from each other by ten-foot walls. We’re walking alongside the piles, as close as we can get so we’re not so out in the open, and they reek of waste, rotten food, and grime, when Remy hisses, grabs at my pack, and pulls me down into the muck.
“Drone!” she whispers, the light on her wrist detector flashing light blue. Linnea, Soren, and Chan-Yu all drop instinctively. We all have wristbands, but Miah, who obviously wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place, doesn’t. And since he was walking just a few strides ahead of us, he is still picking his way through the compost debris as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. We’re wearing camouflage and heat-reflective gear, so as long as we’re not too obviously stalking across the field, the drones shouldn’t be able to see us. I look up, scanning the skies, but the thing is either too small for me to see or still too far away.
“Miah!” My voice is low and hoarse. “Get down, stupid,” I growl, mostly to myself, as I know he can’t hear me. I crawl a few meters toward him, praying I won’t vomit at close proximity to wastes of all kinds. I tackle him around the legs as best I can from a crouch, knocking him over. His eyes are wide and uncertain. I turn my face skyward again, checking my wrist for my own detector, but it’s not flashing. I glance backwards at Remy. She holds her hand up and shakes her head. The blue light has died.
“Clear,” she breathes.
Chan-Yu is the first one to his feet, naturally. As we all stand up and brush ourselves off, he says, “Be on guard. We’ll see many more of those as we approach the city.” He narrows his eyes at Miah. “Back of the line,” he says and passes Miah by.
We walk in silence, ready to drop at a moment’s notice. Out in the Wilds, encountering a drone isn’t a death sentence. You can shoot them down, use your Bolt’s ray setting to jam their electronics, or clear out of the area before another one is called in. But here in the city, if a single drone is alerted to our presence, a whole fleet of the damned things will be swarming over us in moments and the entire mission jeopardized. Once we’re into the population centers, we’ll be in better shape, but out here on the composters, we’re sitting—walking—ducks.
After the compost farm, we hit the Lawrence River. Someone told me that once, the river fed into a huge watershed, a lake of the same name that ultimately fed into the much larger Lake Okaria. There were even a few islands in the center of the lake, or so th
e rumor goes. But most of that has turned to swamp, now, and the river is a quarter of the size it used to be. Okaria sits just on the other side, though. There are only two ways across unless you float or swim, and the river’s current is too strong for us to attempt to swim.
The first way across is the Bridge of Knowledge, named by the country’s founders for the first and foremost pursuit of the Okarian elite. It’s a pedestrian bridge, and it crosses to an arboretum on the northeast side called the City of Oaks that’s a popular day-trip spot for Okarian citizens. I spent countless days there with my parents, climbing trees and hunting squirrels and birds, pretending I was an intrepid adventurer like my grandparents. But the Bridge of Knowledge is too obvious a crossing spot—we’d be spotted and identified immediately, either by a citizen who recognized us or by one of the dozens of drones that patrol that area.
So instead we’re crossing at the Bridge of Learning. It’s a commerce bridge where hovercars and trucks cross easily, and it’s the main thoroughfare in and out of the east side of Okaria. Before we left, Chan-Yu sent a hurried message to one of his correspondents inside the city via Osprey. But we have no idea whether the intended recipient actually got the message. So we wait anxiously on a back road that leads to one of the compost farms, hoping against hope that the hovertruck scheduled to meet us will arrive.
“I wonder if it’ll be the same person,” Remy says to Soren, on her other side, and despite everything, jealousy strikes me like a fist to the gut. There’s nothing there, I remind myself and try to quell it.
“Sela?” Soren asks. I wish they didn’t share a camaraderie caused by my own ignorance and stupidity; if I had never taken them hostage and brought them against their will to this very city last year, they wouldn’t have memories to recollect together.
“Yes,” Remy says. “That was her name. I didn’t remember.”
“I remember everything about those few days,” Soren says, so softly I have to prick my ears to hear his words. I grit my teeth and look away.