The Loop

by Ben Oliver

  “Let go, get off me!” he snarls as he thrashes around, trying to break free.

  Mable screams again, this time a quieter, gurgling call as her life drains away.

  “Get off me—we have to save her.”

  “Listen to me: She’s gone, Blue; we can’t save her. And if we stay in these tunnels any longer, we’ll be next.”

  I pull him to his feet and drag him back toward the platform. He continues to fight against me until Mable’s screams fall silent.

  “I hate you,” Blue whispers. “I fucking hate you.”

  “I know,” I tell him as we make our way back to the yard.

  Blue climbs first, slowly and languidly, rejecting the arms that reach for him at the top and pulling himself up.

  I follow, the echoes of Mable’s dying screams in my mind. We couldn’t have saved her; it was too late—we couldn’t have run into the pitch-darkness and blindly fought an army of rats. We had to let her go.

  Didn’t we?

  I make it to the top, the eyes of my friends on me, waiting to hear what happened. I can only shake my head, silently take the trigger back from Kina, and walk to the other side of the roof. I look out at the wasteland that the Loop sits in: a valley of dust dunes and charred, dead trees.

  The wall that leads down the other side is a lattice of concrete that offers hand- and footholds. I climb down first, sending some loose concrete tumbling to the ground, barely registering the burning in my shoulders as I move, using only one arm so as not to drop the trigger, but I make it easily to the ground. I want to watch the others climb down, offer help, but I don’t want them to see the tears in my eyes.

  Kina climbs down second and stands next to me. She puts an arm on my shoulder, and I force a smile.

  “Are you going to be okay?” she asks.

  I nod. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  We turn to help Pod as Igby directs him from above. Tyco makes it down next, followed by Pander and Blue. Blue stands on his own, staring out at the horizon.

  Malachai climbs down, leaping the final few feet. Akimi is last over the edge, carefully finding her footholds and making her way steadily down.

  “It’s a lot harder coming down than it was going up,” she calls out from the middle of the wall.

  “You’re doing great,” Kina calls up to her.

  “Thanks, this wall feels a little—”

  Akimi’s words stop midsentence as the indent where her right foot was resting gives way. The concrete crumbles into the dust in a series of heavy thunks. Akimi screams as both her feet swing out and away from the wall.

  “I can’t hold on,” she breathes. And before anyone can do anything—she’s falling. Her red dress billows out as she tumbles through the air.

  She lands heavily on the ground. A horrific snap emanates from her right ankle as she falls back.

  “Akimi!” Igby calls out as he runs over to her.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” she screams through clenched teeth.

  “Fuck! Are you okay?” Igby asks, falling to his knees beside her.

  “My ankle, my right ankle, it’s broken, I know it’s broken. Oh shit, it’s fucking, shitting broken.”

  “Guys,” Pander’s voice comes from atop a dust dune ahead of us, “we need to move now.”

  I run up the dune to join Pander, my feet sinking into the fine dirt, slowing my progress. I look to where she’s pointing. Marching along the grimy landscape is a small group of fifteen to twenty soldiers, all dressed in black, all carrying USW guns across their chests.

  “What are they doing here?” asks Kina. “There’s nothing else around here for miles.”

  “Do you think they’re coming for us?” Malachai asks, joining us at the summit of the dune.

  “Let’s not wait around and find out,” I say.

  We all jump down into the dust, sliding effortlessly toward the group.

  “Akimi, I’m sorry about this, but we have to move now,” Malachai says, running to her and bending down to grab her by the arms. “Can you put any weight on your good foot?”

  “I can try,” she says through gasps.

  Malachai gets her to her feet, and we move toward the upward slope of the valley, which leads away from our prison and away from the soldiers. Akimi limps and hops as fast as she can, Igby on one side, Malachai on the other.

  It takes an agonizingly long time to scale the dust hill and even longer to get down the other side, but after an age, we see the opening of the rat tunnel and the village train platform in the distance.

  It takes another ten minutes until we make it to the platform, and we finally take a break.

  We are all gasping to catch our breath, but slowly, one by one, we begin to smile. I watch the other inmates look around, take deep breaths of the fresh free air, and marvel at the sun, rising red on the horizon. They hug and jump and cheer. Pander even does a little dance, and in spite of the pain she’s in, Akimi laughs with joy.

  Despite everything, I can’t help but smile at the scene, all these young people who had resigned themselves to a life of confinement, of loneliness, of confinement, prisoners to the energy harvest, now experiencing the simple joy of freedom once again.

  Even though there’s a war going on, we’re still so happy in this moment, and it occurs to me that it’s better to be free in a ravaged world than a prisoner in a utopia.

  The only person not celebrating is little Blue, who sits cross-legged on the ground and holds his face in his hands. I know that he feels a sense of responsibility for Mable’s death. I do too. I feel bad for him—the burden he’s put on his young shoulders is devastating.

  I look back to the group of elated escapees and smile again. I allow myself to feel happy for a moment. But I will talk to Blue soon, try to make him see that Mable’s death wasn’t his fault. I take a deep lungful of air and smile again. The sense of happiness I’m feeling is short-lived, though, as I watch Tyco break from the hugging, laughing pack and turn to me. His eyes narrow as he pulls a gun from inside his jumpsuit and points it right at me.

  I was right, I think, completely frozen. He was planning on killing me all along. I had known it from the beginning. I should have trusted my instincts. I should have left him in his cell.

  “Wait,” I manage to say in a weak, quiet voice.

  But there is no time for me to react as he pulls the trigger.

  I feel the dart from the tranquilizer gun zip past my ear, and I turn in time to see a man of about fifty, balding with a ripped white shirt and red tie, stagger, blink a few dozen times, and fall to the ground.

  Everyone is still and silent as they look from the unconscious Smiler back to Tyco.

  His shaking hand repositions the barrel of the gun, and this time he really is pointing the weapon right at me.

  He must have picked the tranquilizer gun up from outside my cell, where I dropped it. How did I not notice that it was gone?

  “Why did you let me out? You know I want you dead; why did you do that?”

  I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t think of the right words; I can’t even tell myself why I saved him when the logical thing to do would have been to let him die.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You killed my brother,” he says, his voice shaking. “You pushed him off the roof of the Black Road Vertical.”

  “Tyco, listen to me: Do you know what Happy found when it ran the probability diagnostics? It told me that I was four percent likely to have committed that murder.”

  “Those are just words,” he roars back at me. “Words from a liar’s mouth.”

  “It’s the truth. The only reason they convicted me is because of my confession.”

  “Lies,” Tyco screams, his eyes narrowing until tears spill down his cheeks. “I saw the footage from my brother’s Panoptic camera. I saw you push him.”

  “You saw someone in a mask push him.”

  “Who was it, then? Why would you take the blame for someone else’s crime?”

  “
It was Molly, my sister,” I say, remembering the moment on top of the roof. The silence after the boy fell, only the wind whistling through the gap between the giant rain collector and the bizarre assemblage of pipes connecting the water to the thousands of apartments beneath our feet. She turned around slowly, pulled off the Halloween witch mask, and stared at me, tears forming in her eyes. I decided in that moment that she hadn’t pushed him—that it was me, I had killed him.

  “Why should I believe you?” Tyco asks. “Why wouldn’t you have told me that years ago?”

  “I didn’t know who you were. I asked you a thousand times, and all you ever said back was that you were going to kill me. I guessed that you were that boy’s brother, or at least his friend, but I didn’t know for sure. And even if I had, what was I going to do? Yell it across the yard? Do you think they weren’t listening? Do you think they didn’t have microphones in every square inch of that place? It would have been as good as sentencing my sister to death.”

  Tyco steps forward, the gun barrel shaking but still aimed right at me. I can see him wrestling with his emotions. He lets out a frustrated scream, drops the gun to his side, and then raises it up to my face again. “Why did your sister kill him?” His voice is quieter now, and there are still tears running down his face. For the first time, I feel something other than fear or hatred for him.

  “It was an accident,” I say. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you that we were the good guys. We planned on robbing him. He sold Ebb to Regulars in the Verticals—he was in the same gang as you. We knew he had Coin; we were going to force him to transfer everything he had to an encrypted account. We needed the money; our mother was dying of some undiagnosed flu and …” I trail off. “I’m sorry that your brother died, Tyco. Every day I wish it hadn’t happened, and not only because it got me locked up in the Loop but because a person lost his life. I’m not saying this just because you want to kill me; it’s the truth—I regret what happened every day.”

  Tyco sniffs loudly and swipes at the tears in his eyes. He lowers the gun. Malachai steps up beside him and takes the weapon out of his hand.

  “This doesn’t mean I like you, Luka,” Tyco says, wiping his eyes. “I’m just not going to kill you.”

  I nod my head.

  “Oh my god.” Pander’s voice is—for once—quiet and afraid.

  We all turn in the direction she’s looking, and they all see what I have already seen: the city that we all grew up in, burning and crumbling. Even City Level Two, the mile-wide piece of luxury real estate built on great graphene stilts, is burning just as bright as the rest.

  “This is so bad,” Akimi whispers.

  “The war is really happening?” Pod asks.

  “It’s really fucking happening,” Igby tells him.

  “Let’s get moving,” Malachai interjects, walking past everyone and dropping back down onto the tracks.

  Kina reaches for Blue’s hand, but he pulls away from her. “I’m not a baby.”

  He glares at me as he passes, jumping down onto the train tracks and stomping away.

  Pander walks past and plants a hand on the platform, vaulting down. “At least he’s not being a wimp anymore,” she mutters, and follows Malachai.

  Pod and Igby lower themselves onto the train track and help Akimi down. Kina and I follow on, with Tyco bringing up the rear.

  “So,” I say, trying to get the attention of the group, “I know we all want to find our families, that’s the priority, but we also have to think about getting to the Facility—that’s where we’ll all meet up in two days.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Malachai calls from the front of the group. “We’re going in the right direction.”

  “How do we know that this is the way to the Facility?” Akimi asks, wincing as her dangling foot catches the ground. She looks up at Malachai, who appears to have appointed himself leader.

  “Because I used to live on the far side of the city,” the Natural replies, pointing to the horizon. “Gallow Hill Vertical. The Dark Train used to go by every now and then, and as the Dark Train is only used to transport criminals and supplies, and it wasn’t heading south to the Loop, it must have been going to the Facility. Which means the Facility is north.”

  Pod and Igby look impressed as they nod in agreement, and for some reason there’s a slight pang of jealousy inside me. I try to figure out why and realize that it must be because they all see Malachai as the leader, despite the fact that it was me who broke out, me who saved all their lives, me who went through the rat tunnel on my own twice.

  You’re being ridiculous, I think. You don’t even want to be in charge.

  I try to accept it, but I can’t pretend that the feeling isn’t still there.

  We walk in silence, glancing up at the city from time to time, and after a while Pander begins to sing, only this time it doesn’t feel melancholy in the way it did when we were all behind the walls—out here it feels oddly hopeful. Perhaps we’re the only people who could find any kind of hope in a situation like this; perhaps the very fact that we resigned ourselves to a miserable countdown to an agonizing death has given us a unique perspective on the end of the world. I have to admit that the feeling of walking in one direction without a wall or a locked door to halt my progress is almost overwhelming.

  Kina ups her pace and walks beside Malachai, at the front of the group. The feeling of jealousy returns, stronger this time. I push it down, reminding myself that I don’t feel that way about Kina, but something about the way she laughs at whatever he’s just said makes it difficult to convince myself that I’m telling the truth.

  Grow up, idiot, I tell myself.

  We walk for about another hour, past the holiday village and through the mile-high sky-farms, where we stop and dig out some carrots from one of the troughs. When the power is on, the Ferris wheel farms never stop spinning around and around at almost imperceptibly slow speeds, growing crops for an entire city without taking up the room of old-fashioned farmland. I remember my sister and me sneaking into one of the potato troughs one summer—despite the news stories every year of kids falling from the top and dying. We lay there on our backs as the enormous piece of machinery carried us slowly up into the sky and slowly back down. We were caught by security drones, then scanned, and our information was sent to the Marshals. Then we had to spend fifteen days working on the farm, side by side with the robots, to pay off our fines. It was worth it, though, and we did it again a few months later.

  We carry on, the smell of burning and chemicals filling the air and growing ever stronger, the sounds of crumbling structures and raging fires becoming almost deafening, and the tension growing among all of us. Fear is spreading, along with thoughts that maybe we were wrong about being vaccinated, maybe any second now one of us will start grinning and blinking, and we’ll turn on one another like rabid dogs.

  My hand has been cramping for the last few hours, the muscles convulsing and twitching in protest at being held in the same place for such a long period of time. I try not to think about it, but the more I tell myself to ignore the pain, the more I focus on it. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to hold on to the trigger.

  And, as if she’s reading my mind, Kina slows until she’s beside me.

  “How’s the hand?”

  “Fine,” I lie, shrugging.

  Kina laughs and takes my hand in both of hers.

  “Careful,” I say, and she rolls her eyes.

  She takes the trigger and smiles at me. “I’ll be careful, don’t worry.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and smile back.

  And then I hear a sound from inside my chest. One long beep followed by three short ones. I swear my heart stops. Kina’s eyes widen.

  “I didn’t let go. Luka, I didn’t—”

  “It’s okay,” I say, breathing again. “I don’t know what that was, but I’m all right.”

  Kina exhales hard. “That scared the shit out of me!”

  “It’s okay,” I say a
gain. “I’m fine.”

  We both laugh nervously, trying to ignore the anomaly. We start walking again, and soon we reach the edge of the city.

  The landscape slopes down to the area of man-made dirt streets where the homeless have built their huts and shacks from scrap metal and plastic, siphoning electricity in complicated masses of wires and makeshift fuse boxes that snake down from the Verticals, the dangerously frayed cables sagging into puddles of thick brown water. The irrigation system is a cobbled-together network of pipes and ditches that carries filthy wastewater away from the houses. Ahead of us, the train tracks disappear into the shantytown and past a towering Vertical that pierces the sky. I try to ignore the deep red color of the stream of water that flows alongside the homeless town, try to somehow block out the sound of the screams from deep inside the city.

  Pander’s song grows quiet and then stops completely as we all come to a halt and stare into the destruction.

  “All right,” Pander says, taking a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

  “I can’t,” Akimi replies, her voice quiet and choked from the back of the group, where Pod and Igby hold her up.

  “What do you mean?” Pander asks, a strange mix of frustration and understanding in her voice.

  “I can’t walk; it’s really starting to hurt. I think it’s bad.”

  There’s a moment of silence as we look around, waiting for someone to say the right thing, waiting—perhaps—for an adult to tell us what to do next.

  I think: Maddox would have known what to do. And I wish he were here. I wish he had lived long enough to escape with us.

  Malachai steps forward. “Lie down,” he says. “Let’s take a look.”

  Pod and Igby help Akimi to the ground, and as her right ankle rests on the hard earth, she lets out a wail of agony.

  “It hurts so much,” she breathes.

  “We’re going to have to take the shoe off,” Malachai tells her. “It’s not going to be fun.”

  She nods, grinds her teeth together, and nods again. “Do it.”