“If they’re not there, then they’ve already left the area and the team won’t find them either.”
Eric set the wine bottle carefully against the wall. With the argument continuing near the hub, no one was paying any attention to them.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Until this moment, the idea of leaving the settlement had felt wild, locked within an aura of impossibility. But now, she and Eric were walking through the groups of people toward the Department of the Exterior doors. They were going to do it; they were going to walk right out of America-Five.
Just as they were entering the hall, a shout sounded from behind them and Natasha looked back. She could not see through the crowd to the center of the activity, but what she did see, Natasha found startling: Raj Radhakrishnan, standing slightly apart from the others, his placard dropped to his side, watching Natasha and Eric with steady and curious eyes.
But then he was gone. The doors closed, and Natasha hurried to catch up with Eric, who was already a little way down the hall. They were lucky; with only a scattering of people working tonight, the hall remained deserted as they slipped into the Office of Exit. A row of biosuits hung on a rack near the wall, ready for tomorrow’s team. Wordlessly, they stripped down and each found the best fit—Natasha took Claudia’s biosuit and Eric took the one made for Douglas.
“We’re really going out there,” said Eric.
“Yeah, we are.”
“I don’t think the Alphas even have a reeducation plan for something like this.”
“Hopefully,” said Natasha, “they won’t need to write one.”
They put on their helmets and entered the airlock. Then, as they had done on their mission, they passed through the two white cube-shaped rooms and into the supplyhouse. Natasha kept thinking that someone would stop them, that, at any moment, the door behind them would open and a clamor of furious and incredulous citizens would arrive to drag them back Inside. But no one came. The supplyhouse was pitch black and silent until, with a click, Eric flipped the lever for light. The dust kicked up from under their feet and hung lazily in the glow.
“What should we take?” he asked, eyeing the guns.
Natasha had thought about this already. “Nothing,” she answered firmly. “They’ve seen what our weapons can do. If we walk into their camp with a couple of LUV-3s, there’s no chance they’ll stick around long enough to hear us out.”
The light from the Dome cast a warm glow across the green and the inner circle of trees. They found that their helmets had lights, and they switched them on. Even in the dark, they knew the way. They had practiced navigating this area hundreds of times in the Pretends. What a strange way for their vigilance to pay off, Natasha thought. They made it possible for us to do this; they taught us everything we know.
Neither Eric nor Natasha had brought a tracking device, which served a secondary purpose of showing the time, but they guessed they had reached the plateau in just under three hours. The beams of light from their helmets swept across the empty camp as they examined the scattered, ash remains of the old fire and the bits of sensor parts abandoned near the birch trees. All was still. An owl hooted from one of the branches behind them. The lights reached into the large, curving dark of the cave, hitting the far stone in two circles made jagged by the uneven surface.
“They’re not here,” Eric said.
“They’re probably still underground.” Natasha started for the cave’s mouth. “One of those rocks has a tunnel behind it, that’s how I escaped.”
Something moved, cutting the beam of light in half. Then a shout. People running from the trees.
Within seconds, Natasha and Eric were stumbling backward, standing on the charcoal remains of the fire, with five people coming at them, the shiny points of their spearheads thrust menacingly out.
Natasha saw Hesma and Mattias. The violent ones whom she had feared in the cave. Hesma wore the same red beads. Mattias’s chest was bare and his skin was painted with thick white lines over each rib.
“Hesma,” Mattias said, “take away their weapons. London, go tell Axel.”
The smallest Tribesperson, a skinny boy years from being full-grown, sprinted into the cave, while Hesma, the only woman in this group, came forward and began pulling at Eric’s airfilter.
“Hey, come on!” Eric protested. “We didn’t bring any weapons. No guns.”
“We came to warn you,” Natasha said, as the woman’s tugs now threatened to dislodge her own airfilter. “The people—the same people who swept, I mean, attacked you before—they’re coming back.”
“Quiet!” Mattias said. While Natasha had been talking, she had turned to him, and the beam of light from her helmet glowed in his face. He put his hand up, squinting against it. Natasha turned off the light and told Eric to do the same, but he shook his head. Natasha could hear a quiet stream of curses from behind his visor.
The boy emerged from underground.
“Axel says to bring her down,” he said, pointing to Natasha. “But not the other one. He doesn’t want him to see where we live.”
The boy beckoned to her, maybe even smiled a little. Resigned to do anything to make their warning known, Natasha started to follow—until Eric stopped her.
“You’re not going down there,” he said.
“Yes, I am. I have to. Listen, I know that name. Axel. He’s their chief. If we want to save these people, we need to tell him directly.”
“No way. They’re going to kill you, and kill me too. This was stupid. Really, really stupid. No one knows we’re here. No one’s coming to help us.”
“We won’t need help.”
Though even as she said it, she had doubts. Since the mission, Natasha had convinced herself that the Pines had never intended to harm her, not when they abducted her and not even when they had her bound in the cave. And yet, even if she was right about that, it was no guarantee that they wouldn’t hurt her now. She remembered one of their units in school on primitive ethics: Revenge. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. The most rudimentary idea in all justice-based social systems. If the Pines trusted their human instincts, which they almost certainly did, then murdering Natasha would be a perfectly fair, if not lenient, response to the death of three of their own. She paused a moment, looking at the boy, who was scratching a red welt on his calf while he waited. Then she squeezed Eric’s arm and spoke some hushed instructions about not scaring the Tribespeople and, before Eric could stop her, she walked between two spear-holding men and into the cave.
The boy—London, they had called him—led her through the same opening in the rock from which she had escaped weeks before. He carried a bit of fire (a candle, Natasha thought, remembering the name), though even with that light and the calm motions of the boy’s bare shoulders to guide her movement, Natasha still had trouble on the tilting, bumpy ground. They took two turns where the tunnel split, both turns to the left, and then the path began to level and smooth. London put the candle forward to reveal a strange sight: the cave wall did not seem to be of rough, mountain stone, but of smooth concrete. In the concrete was a large square of glass, like the windowpanes in the settlement but smaller and, as Natasha saw in a moment, movable too. London raised the glass and pushed aside a hanging piece of blue-and-green checkered fabric. He stepped through the opening and Natasha, because she had come this far already, followed boldly behind.
She did not know how many she had expected, but it certainly was not the number that greeted her on the other side of the glass. They rose to their feet as she entered—forty or fifty of them in all. Their eyes fixed on her and did not look away. They wore dark, earth-soiled fabrics, and the space smelled foul. A bright energy showed in their movements, which gave Natasha a chill.
“You don’t have to wear that, you know.” It was Axel. Natasha recognized his round, open face and dimpled cheeks. He indicated her helmet
.
“We don’t wear them,” a second man added, “and we’re all perfectly healthy.”
As the man emerged from the shadows, Natasha was surprised to find herself face-to-face with the beautiful man she had spotted on the sensors. She stared at him a moment, transfixed by his perfect arrangement of features. In return, his expression showed a mixture of hopefulness and welcome that made her inexplicably glad.
Natasha had a feeling the Tribe’s standards of health did not quite match the cell-by-cell perfectionism of the settlement doctors. But figuring that she had already breathed the Outside air once before, and had come out all right, she unclasped the helmet from the biosuit collar and lifted it over her head.
As she looked around, the Tribespeople showed no signs of aggression; in fact, they seemed positively happy to see her. She could observe the room better now too: a small fire crackled at its center, the smoke rising up through a hole in the ceiling and drifting through a rectangular opening in the far wall, too perfect to be natural, and with the unmistakable dimensions of a manmade door. The floor was littered with a patchwork of trampled furs, clay jugs, and baskets. It seemed that the Pines had set up a semipermanent home here, though why they would resort to such measures, why they would stay close to America-Five when they had the whole forest at their disposal, Natasha could not imagine. The cave itself was strange, the walls not rough but square and smooth, with sharp corners that formed near-perfect rectangles. But Natasha had no time to reflect on this strangeness because they were all staring at her, waiting for her to speak.
“My name is Natasha Wiley,” she said. “The man who I’m with is Eric Johansson. We came back Outside by our own choice. No one else from our settlement knows that we’re here. We came to warn you. The people—the people where we’re from—they plan to nova these caves in the morning. I guess you don’t know what that means. But it’s bad. Like fire, but worse. You have to know, you’ll die if you stay here.”
Axel, far from being startled by her words, remained impassive. And seeing his reaction, the others took on a similar countenance.
“The weapons we used to attack you last time,” Natasha pressed on, “those were guns and thermo-grenades. Those are nothing compared with a nova. You can’t outrun a nova, and you can’t hide from it. This whole underground place will collapse. Most of the time, we don’t find a single body. You have to run away. Go over the mountains like the rest of your Tribe. Go as far south as you can and never come back here.”
But at this, there was an unhappy murmur, and a shaking of heads.
“Sit with me, Natasha Wiley,” Axel said.
He knelt on a clean-looking pelt of fur and indicated the place between the beautiful man and himself. Natasha knelt. The other men and women squatted down where they stood—all except for London, who, at a motion of the chief, handed over a small wooden box of what looked like rolled papers. Axel took one of these papers, lit it in the fire, and somehow sucked the smoke into his mouth from the opposite end. He then handed it to the beautiful man, whom he called “Tezo.”
“We do not plan on going anywhere,” Axel said. “We made the decision to stay and that will not change.” Natasha began to protest, but he went on. “We know about your fire weapons, and the power they have. It is an old story, all the people know it. How the god-people who live underground brought night and death to the earth. Many generations considered the god-people the stuff of legends only, but not us. We knew that the god-people who made the skies black still dwelled here.”
Natasha was disturbed by what he was saying, and a moment later she realized why: this group had memory of the Storm, however hazy it was. That wasn’t accounted for in the ethical practices of the Office of Mercy; the Tribes weren’t supposed to have any notion of past annihilations.
“We know that you still use these fire weapons,” Axel continued. “And that you send them from your glasshouse. We know about your eyes in the trees. How do you think we survived these last two seasons without knowing?”
“But how?” Natasha asked, curiosity fully overtaking the last remnants of fear. “You never entered our field before April, but you came knowing exactly how to evade us. You must have seen other settlements before, haven’t you? America-Six or America-Seven? They made some mistake and you figured out the Alpha system of observation. . . .”
Axel seemed, if anything, amused by Natasha’s assumptions. He also seemed ready to satisfy her curiosity, and would have done so had it not been for the low growl of another person sitting near him: Raul, the man who had lost his children and their mother in the manual sweep.
“Tell her nothing.”
“But my friend, didn’t we all agree? We could tell by the look of her, by the way she came to us in the woods. She was the god-person sent to help us, just as fate intended. And look! She understood by the grace of the divine that we only meant to keep her safe when we restrained her in our home. Isn’t that right? Didn’t you understand?” Axel was suddenly prompting Natasha, who nodded despite her confusion. “And now,” Axel continued to Raul, “look how much she has risked in coming back to us. Why would she lie?”
“How can we know what she risked?” Raul asked. “By what she told us? She could be lying about that too. Who knows if there will be an attack if they can’t drive us into the open first? Like Ollea, like my children.”
“She didn’t kill your family,” Tezo interjected. “That was the others.” He looked appraisingly at Natasha. “She is the one who will help us. I’m sure of it, and I trust her.”
Axel seemed to weigh both men’s words, and said, at last, “How about this, Natasha Wiley? If you are telling the truth about the attack tomorrow, then we will meet you again in the place of your last murder, at the next full moon, and I will give you the answers you want. If you are lying . . . well, your people will suffer for it. We know our way around this land.”
“I know you do,” said Natasha. “That’s partly what made me see things differently—your intelligence. No other Tribe is like you, except maybe the Palms.”
“The Palms?”
“I don’t know what they called themselves,” Natasha said, “but they were a Tribe that entered this area a couple of decades ago. The settlement swept, I mean, killed them. But only just barely. They got within a quarter-mile of our home before we even saw them. No one’s threatened us like that before.”
“Twenty-two years ago,” said Axel.
“What?”
“The attack on your settlement, the murder of those people, it happened twenty-two years ago.”
“How did you know that? Were you here, underground? Did you see it happen somehow?”
“I know because we are them.”
“Axel!” Raul said, horrified. And even Tezo looked shocked.
But this time, Axel ignored them.
“We were children then,” Axel said, indicating the faces around him. “All the people here. I was very small. Tezo and Raul were a few years older, but not the age of a fighter.” The mood among the Pines had changed, a tense stillness descending over them. “We lost our parents, our siblings. Tezo here watched as his dearest friend was crushed by a burning tree.”
“That can’t be the same attack, though,” Natasha said. “The Tribe I’m talking about all died.”
“Don’t you remember the deaths, the fire weapons?” Axel asked Natasha, intently.
“No, no,” Natasha said, “I was too young. But it can’t be you,” she repeated, her head still reeling from his claim. “We swept the Palms. It was clean. The Office would never have left survivors. . . .”
No one was listening to her. Axel, Tezo, and Raul were rising to their feet, and the others too. Then Natasha heard what they heard: a voice calling her name from a near distance. Eric was somewhere inside the cave, he must have broken free of the others. Before she had fully processed this fact, there came the sound of a
small metal object clanking onto stone and rolling down the passage outside. A fine white mist began leaking through the checkered fabric that covered the window. Everyone began to cough, deep hacking coughs. Natasha’s eyes streamed with tears; her throat was closing up. It was dispersion gas, it had to be; a gas designed to drive Tribespeople out of closed areas before a sweep. Eric must have taken a canister from the supplyhouse when she wasn’t looking. The men and women scattered, pushing through the doorlike opening on the other side of the room. Natasha managed to put on her helmet. She could still hear Eric calling for her and, furious, she went to find him. The dispersion gas would not harm the Pines, though Natasha guessed it would damage her cause. She should not have asked Eric to come. She would have been better off alone. But there was nothing more she could do now: the Pines would have to decide their fate for themselves.
• • •
Was it possible they had gotten away with such a blatant act of treason? Natasha could only wonder, awestruck by what she and Eric had done. Of course they had left the settlement at a time when the sensors were off on the green, and Natasha’s and Eric’s knowledge of the field had allowed them to keep securely within the deadzone. And yet, it still seemed as if they had done what should have existed only outside the realm of the actual; as if they had acted out in real life an experience that belonged to a fantasy world in the Pretends. When they returned to the Office of Exit, they found the room as empty as they had left it. The chemical bath and UV lamps had cleaned and dried their borrowed biosuits, and so they were able to restore them to the rack seemingly as good as new. They slipped into the Department hall unseen and, first Eric and then Natasha, joined the late-night stragglers in the Dome. The clock on the maincomputer read 0326 as Natasha boarded the elephant in the company of a male Delta and a female Gamma, both looking ready to collapse with exhaustion. (The Department of Health, Natasha thought, will have their hands full tomorrow.) She found Min-he sprawled over the covers, still dressed with only her shoes kicked off, her snake necklace coiled at the foot of her bed.
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