“It doesn’t matter?” I ask.
“No. You were going up no matter what.”
“I was?”
“Yes,” she says, “you were.”
“But why then? Why me?”
“Because you aren’t who you think you are either.”
“I’m not?”
“No.”
“I suppose now you’re going to tell me I’m thirty too.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says.
“Then how am I not who I think I am?”
“You’re just not.”
I look around the room at the six pairs of eyes staring back at me. They seem strange and aloof and oddly at home here in this hidden room, tucked away in the walls of some stupid shaft, kilometers underground. Well, all except Jimmy.
“I know who I am,” I say. “You’re all crazy.”
“We’re not crazy,” Mrs. Hightower says. “You’ll eventually understand yourself.”
“I know who I am,” I repeat. “Bill, tell them. You watched me grow up. Go ahead. Tell them.”
“It’s not how you think,” Bill says. “Not really.”
“Yes, it is. I know exactly who I am.”
“I told you that you weren’t ready yet for the whole truth,” Mrs. Hightower says. “Maybe you will be by the time you get there. Assuming you make it, that is.”
“By the time I get where?”
“To see the Chief.”
“And where’s that?” I ask.
She smiles. “China.”
CHAPTER 10
The Other Side
“China? As in all the way to East Asia?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Mrs. Hightower says. “I remember that you always were interested in pre-War geography. The Chief is waiting for you there, and you’ve got to leave right now.”
The bearded man stands from the table and steps over to the map on the wall. He points to a series of tunnels stretching south from Holocene II and speaks to us over his shoulder.
“You can hitch a ride with friendly rats here in the south tunnels. They’ll take you as far as the Yucatan mines. It’s risky, but I think they can breach you to the surface there. We had hoped to get closer to the landing site, but we haven’t had time, so you’ll have to hike it.”
“I don’t understand something,” I say. “If we want to get to the surface, why don’t we just follow these shafts up? I mean, the cool air has to come from somewhere, right?”
Roger stops twiddling his thumbs long enough to laugh at me. Mrs. Hightower reaches over and slaps his hand.
Bill says, “Give him a break, Roger. He doesn’t know.”
The man with the beard answers my question: “The shafts don’t’ actually go to the surface, son. They only go as far as deep aquifers, where exchangers dissipate the heat into bedrock and liquid, pumping down cool air. You have to remember that this whole place was designed to be autonomous from the exterior atmosphere, even producing its own oxygen.”
“Okay, then,” I say, “but why not ride the train up to the Foundation and just physically take over from Hannah?”
“Another good question,” Bill says. “He is a smart kid.”
“Maybe,” Roger replies, “but we don’t have time to sit here and humor him.”
“Quit being so rude, Roger,” Jillian says. “And remember who it is you’re talking to.”
Mrs. Hightower shuts them up with a glance.
“As you can see, boys, we’re a little like a dysfunctional family here.” Then she turns to me and says, “We can’t go up and overpower Hannah because she has to approve every train and its cargo. That, and even if we did sneak up on her, don’t think there aren’t safeguards to flood everyone down here. You saw yourself what Radcliffe had with the wave.”
“Why can’t you just bore a way out?” I ask. “I mean, if you have tunnelrats on your side?”
“We’ve been working with our tunnelrats for years to do just exactly that,” she says. “But we’re just near to penetrating the surface now. The Foundation keeps a leash on subterrenes, and we’ve had to pretend to be going after precious silver—which we use for all sorts of things, including the electronics and optics in drones—to even get permission from them to get as close to the surface as we have.”
“That’s right,” Bill adds. “And now that your flood left fewer scientists up there to monitor things, the time is right to make an opening.”
“So you’re going to sneak us three thousand kilometers south in tunnels and then somehow get us from there to East Asia? And what will Hannah do when we don’t return?”
“We already thought of that,” Mrs. Hightower says. “We plan to tell Hannah and company that you died trying to escape in one of these air shafts.”
“Now I get it,” I say. “And she can’t even investigate. And, of course, the professor can’t come down either. He’s too old. Everyone would wonder why he isn’t in Eden.”
Mrs. Hightower smiles. “Maybe you did score well on that test after all, young man. You’re very smart.
“But you don’t think she’ll be suspicious and retaliate?”
“Why would she? You gave your speech, we’re happy and sending up supplies for her so she can go on killing humans, and the retirees are lining up, begging to be rendered into Eden. There’s no logical reason to harm Holocene II, and Hannah’s nothing if she isn’t logical.”
“Okay, but then what do we do? When we get to China?”
“You’ll have to discuss that with the Chief when you get there,” Mrs. Hightower says. Then she stands from the table and adds, “Now we had better get going.”
I stand with the others, but Jimmy stays seated.
“I can’t go,” he says, shaking his head.
“Why not?” Mrs. Hightower asks.
Jimmy hikes up his pant leg and lifts his foot up onto the table, the ankle bracelet clanking loudly on its metal surface.
“Oh, no,” I say, just now remembering.
“What’s that?” Bill asks.
“Some sick trick of the professor’s,” I say. “He said if we weren’t back in seven days, it will detonate.”
“Like a bomb?” Roger asks, edging himself behind Mrs. Hightower as if to use her as a shield against a possible blast.
Jillian steps up and inspects the bracelet, feeling all the way around it, as if her delicate fingers themselves were eyes.
“He didn’t design this himself,” she says. “We had made similar devices to keep tunnelrats from straying too far. Radio-frequency identification deprograms it at the Foundation.”
“The professor said he could detonate it remotely,” I say.
“Well, he lied about that,” she replies. “We’re much too deep and far away for any signal to reach it. I could remove it fairly easily, but it has a pulse regulator, which means as soon as it registers a few missed heartbeats, it will detonate.”
“Could we take it off and toss it really quickly?” I ask. “Maybe down the shaft?”
“This thing could easily destroy any one of these shafts. You’d need some kind of quick containment system and we don’t have any time to build that.”
Mrs. Hightower sighs. “It looks like you’ll have to go on alone, Aubrey. Jimmy can buy you some time and return to the Foundation just before his seven days are up.”
I cross my arms. “No way. Jimmy doesn’t go, I don’t go.”
“I’m fine with stayin’,” Jimmy says. “Really, Aubrey. This is your chance to get away.”
“I’m not leaving without you, Jimmy. Period.”
The man with the beard steps over and takes a look at it. “What if you take it off of him and put it on me?”
Jillian pauses, considering his idea. “That might just work,” she says. “If we do it really fast.”
“How would it be deprogrammed once it’s on you?” I ask.
“Hell,” he says, “I’m a week past due for retirement. Now that the strike’s over, I guess I’ll just go u
p with the train and say I woke up with it on me. Make like you did it.”
“Wait a minute,” I say, “you’re going up to retire?”
He nods. “I’m five years older than these other youngsters here,” he says. “My time’s up.”
“But you know that Eden’s a sham, right?”
“I know it,” he says. “But we all die sometime.”
“And it’s an honorable thing to do,” Mrs. Hightower says. Then she turns to Jillian. “Now let’s get this bracelet off of Jimmy so they can get started on their journey.”
Jillian moves into action and has Jimmy and the bearded man lie next to one another atop the table, shoulder to shoulder, leg to leg. Then she hunts around the room and brings back a collection of tools to meticulously work the lock on the bracelet.
Jimmy turns to look at the man lying next to him and asks, “What’s your name?”
The man looks back at Jimmy. “What’s that?”
“You’s the only one whose name I ain’t heard yet, and I jus’ feel like I should know it, since you’s takin’ my fate.”
“Oh,” the man says. “I’m Seth.”
I expect Jimmy might thank him, or say something else, but he only nods and looks back up at the ceiling.
When Jillian frees the lock, we all stand back and hold our breath while she makes the switch. She presses a finger to Jimmy’s thigh and feels his pulse, waiting with her other hand on the unlocked bracelet. Then, with a fluid motion, she slips the bracelet off Jimmy and onto Seth. The bracelet locks with an audible click, and all in the room collectively sigh.
“So that’s solved,” Mrs. Hightower says. “Now let’s get moving. I’ve covered for Bill on Level 3, so he’s going to escort Aubrey and Jimmy out. Seth, you see them all as far as the tunnelrats’ den, since you’re on your way back to Agri. Jillian and I will head up together through the vents in Engineering.”
“What about me?” Roger asks, still twiddling his thumbs.
“Oh, sorry, Roger,” Mrs. Hightower says. “I forgot about you. You accompany Bill and the boys.”
“Me?” he asks. “Going to the surface?”
“Yes, you,” she says. “We can’t have Bill going it alone.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” he says, shaking his head.
Mrs. Hightower looks at him like a teacher admonishing a spoiled student. “Don’t be silly or selfish, Roger. You know all those horror stories we grow up learning about the surface are just that—stories. Right? It’s probably a paradise up there, and nothing to harm you at all. Isn’t it, boys?”
I’m tempted to mention bears and parasites and sunburn, maybe even sharks and drones too, but I look at poor Roger, twiddling his thumbs faster than ever, and I just nod.
We say goodbye to Mrs. Hightower and to Jillian at the ladder. Jillian’s farewell is formal and aloof, but Mrs. Hightower actually takes my hand and kisses it, wishing me good luck. Then we watch them climb into the windy dark, heading back up to their levels. I turn away from them, ready for our own climb down, but Seth hauls forth a heavy bundle of rope and heaves it into the void. It spirals and snakes down into the darkness. He repeats the exercise with a second rope.
“Why aren’t we just taking the ladder?” I ask.
“Way too far,” Seth says. “You lose your grip, and you’re ground algaeburger when you hit the turbines down below. We rap-jump down. Usually Jillian waits to pull the ropes in before she heads up, but we’re running late tonight.”
Jimmy grabs one of the ropes and wraps it in loops around his body, stepping up toward the edge, ready to rappel.
“Looks like you’ve done this before,” Bill says.
“My pa and me used to drop down cliffs for bird eggs,” Jimmy replies, looking proud.
“Well, step out of that there rope, young man,” Seth says, handing us each a harness. “We’ve got better equipment here that will keep you from using your crotch as a friction break.”
I follow Seth’s lead and slip into the harness, buckling it and pulling it tight. Bill has his secured in seconds, but Roger seems to struggle. When we’re all harnessed in, Seth shows us how to attach our harnesses to the rope and use the hand brake to lower ourselves down. Then he disappears into the shaft. Bill goes next on the other rope, and Roger goes after him.
“You sure this will hold?” I ask Jimmy, now that we’re alone on the ledge.
“I dunno,” he says, “but they dun’ seem worried.”
Then he’s gone too.
I back up to the edge, lean back, and lower myself off into the shaft. The harness bites into my legs some, but otherwise it’s a secure and relatively weightless descent. As I drop farther into the windy shaft, the rope disappears above me until it seems as though I’m climbing down the very darkness itself—deeper and deeper, heading in the wrong direction, if you ask me. I drop for a long time before there’s a tug on the rope below, and I’m pulled toward the wall of the shaft, and a strong hand yanks me into another intersecting duct, this one with no lights—just a pitch black wormhole in the middle of the Earth. I hear clinking buckles as everyone gets free of their harnesses.
“Make sure you leave them clipped to the rope,” Bill’s voice says next to me in the dark. “There. Good. Everyone ready? There are a lot of twists and turns down here, so we link up and hold hands. Here, take mine, Aubrey. And grab Jimmy’s with your other. Okay, let’s go. Steady and slow.”
We walk off together into the blackness, hand in hand like a chain of children being led to some secret fort you can only get to by trust. My shaved head is tickled by alternating gusts of wind that tell me we’re passing other ducts or fissures into even deeper voids. As we twist and turn and wind our way slowly forward, I’m painfully aware of how vulnerable I am here in this subterranean underworld with no sight and nothing to guide me but the hand pulling me ahead. Jimmy must feel it too, because he squeezes my hand in his as if it were the only thing connecting him to life.
Finally, the heads of the men in front of me are silhouetted against a growing blue light. Eventually, it engulfs the entire tunnel until we’re all standing in the wash of its melancholy glow and looking out from a raised vent onto the growing fields below. I’ve never seen so many lights, mirrors, and plants. The plants are packed together on shelves with the light reflecting through them in some kaleidoscopic trickery that makes the shelves themselves seem illuminated. Beyond the racks of plants are algae tanks, also glowing blue.
“Wow,” Jimmy says, eyeing the operation. “It’s like an underground garden.”
“Where do you all live?” I ask.
“Oh, Level 5 isn’t like your cavern,” Seth says. “It’s comprised of many smaller wings, if you will. That way we can create different conditions for different cycles of plants. Our living quarters are north of here, but we’ll be heading south.”
“And we had better get hurrying that way, Seth,” Bill says. “You’ve still got to get back in time.”
“Maybe I should stay behind with Seth,” Roger suggests.
“If I had my way, Roger,” Bill says, “I’d have left you behind up there. But you heard Hightower. Now let’s go.”
We climb down from the vent and weave our way through the towering racks of plants, walking on elevated metal walks built above some kind of drainage field. We’re still among them when a fine mist begins to rain down, soaking the plants and us with them. We walk beneath the arch of a monochrome rainbow until we leave it and the plants behind to descend onto a stone path. As the others walk ahead, Jimmy grabs my elbow and slows me until we’re lagging several meters behind.
“Whaddya think of all this?” he asks in a whisper.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “It’s all happened so fast.”
“I know it,” he says. “But dun’ let all this talk about how you ain’t who you are get ya down. I know who you are.”
“Thanks, Jimmy. I just wish we knew for sure if we could trust them or not.”
“Me too,” he says,
“but I guess we ain’t got no choice.”
“No, I guess we don’t.”
“Hey,” he adds, a minute or so later, “I meant to ask you somethin’ back there, but I didn’t wanna sound stupid.”
“Sure, what is it?”
“Where’s China?”
“It’s a long ways away,” I say.
“Like as far as we went to the Isle of Man.”
“Even farther.”
The path eventually leads us to a long, narrow cavern lined with piles of sand and clay and other minerals for mixing and making soils. We pass several large machines sitting idle against the walls. On the far end of the cavern, giant steel doors stand closed, and as we approach them, they loom above us like the forgotten entrance to some long extinct race of giants.
Seth punches a code into a keypad on the wall, and the doors groan and rumble as they swing slowly inward, revealing an enormous hidden den, its countless openings glowing a dim and hellish kind of red. Piles of waste and junk rise like some subterranean dump, nearly touching the ceiling of the cave. Tunneled paths lead into and out of these piles as if it were a huge hill built for a colony of ants the size of people.
“I’ll say goodbye to you all here,” Seth says. “Good luck out there. All of you.”
Jimmy turns and shakes Seth’s hand. He says, “I’ll never forget what you done for me, mister.”
Seth nods solemnly, not bothering to lie and say that it’s no big deal. Then he turns to Bill and they embrace. The look on Bill’s face makes it clear that they’ve been more brothers than friends, and that this will be their last farewell.
“I’ll see you on the other side, if there is one,” Bill says.
Seth forces a smile. “Just promise me when we win, which we will, that you’ll pull the plug on Eden and let me rest.”
Bill nods that he will and then steps aside so Roger can say goodbye. Their farewell is less personal, just a quick hug and a promise to take care. Lastly, Seth turns to me and I feel like I should say something, but I don’t know what. He smiles as if he understands. Then he looks at my bare feet, strips off his own shoes, and hands them to me.
“I won’t be needing these where I’m going,” he jokes.
State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy Page 8