by Julia Keller
“How are you going to find your way around down there?” Sara said. “It’s all just a big dirty jumble. Your console’s GPS won’t work. Even people who’ve gone down there before have gotten lost.”
It was a fair point. Violet had asked herself the same question.
And the answer is—I don’t have the faintest clue.
She was scared, but she still wanted to try. Maybe she wanted to try because she was scared.
She felt a brief sliver of worry about how the Intercept would classify that when it did its regular eavesdropping on her emotions—as bravado, maybe. Or ego. Or recklessness.
It didn’t matter.
* * *
A few minutes later, Violet stood in front of the thick pod door. She was nervous. She didn’t try to hide it. When she reached up with an index finger and traced the stern march of red capital letters in three lines across the top, her hand trembled:
BY ORDER OF OGDEN CROWLEY
ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED USE
VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO PROSECUTION
“Are you sure about this?” Sara said. “Really sure?”
“Really sure.”
“Really really sure?”
“They can’t trace it back to you, Sara. I can activate it from my console. And I’ll erase the console record.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Sara looked a little hurt at the idea that fear and self-interest were at the heart of her concern.
“I know. But it’s important. This is my decision,” Violet said. “Nobody else should get in any trouble for it.” She tapped her console. “I’m ready.”
“I know you’re ready. But are you sure?”
“Sara.”
“Okay, okay.”
Sara swiped the lock with her ID.
The door to the pod opened with a creak and a scraping sound. After a second’s hesitation, Violet stepped inside. The pod smelled a little musty and a little oniony. A lot of people had sweated in here. They sweated because a new world awaited them, and unfamiliar things were scary. Or they sweated because they were going in the wrong direction—back toward Old Earth, which they knew well, and familiar things were sometimes even scarier.
The pod door closed, accompanied by another creak, and then a click and a whoosh and a heavy cha-THWUNK, followed by a brief whirring sound. Violet looked out through the inch-high, inch-wide slit. The glass was so dirty she had to rub it with her sleeve to see anything.
She spotted Sara’s face, filled with worry.
Violet couldn’t give her any last-minute words of reassurance. The pod was soundproof.
She waited. She took a deep breath. It didn’t relax her one bit. She took another deep breath. The second one was similarly useless as an anxiety-fighter.
She would have to activate the switch herself. If Sara did it from outside the pod, the signal would be instantly relayed to Protocol Hall. They’d know. They’d check it against the list of authorized trips. They’d discover that it wasn’t authorized.
And they’d come. They would stop her.
So: If Violet was going to do this, she had to do it on her own. No help. Which was another way of saying: Nobody else would have to take the blame. Only her.
Maybe this is a bad idea, after all. Maybe I’ll just bang on the doors and when Sara comes I’ll tell her that I’ve changed my …
She thought about Danny. His face flashed before her mind. She pictured the way he looked when he was thinking hard about something, when his dark eyes acquired that faraway glow. Even though he often frowned when he was concentrating so fiercely, it wasn’t a grim frown. It was a frown of serious focus. It was one of the reasons she loved him: When he sensed he had a duty to fulfill, he gave it everything he had.
And so she would do that, too. She would discover the secret in that notebook. Even if it meant that she got into terrible trouble, even if she ended up disappointing her father—or maybe even getting suspended, kicked off the team at Protocol Hall as her punishment. Didn’t matter. She had to go.
She was going to go.
She flipped the switch.
Suddenly her body began to quake violently. It felt as if someone had grabbed her by the waist and was trying to twist her viciously so that the top half of her body would face in the opposite direction from the bottom half. A furious heat seized her. She was dizzy. She was confused. She didn’t know if she was moving up or down or sideways.
She crossed her arms. Closed her eyes. Said a quick prayer.
In less than one one-trillionth of a second the pod was flung aloft like a burning star, a lozenge of light instantly lost amid the silken darkness.
Violet opened her mouth to scream at the drenching shock of it all. She wanted to call it off, to reconsider. Okay, so I was wrong. I don’t care about any lab or any notebook. This really IS a bad idea. I don’t want to do this I don’t want
She dropped out of the sky, bound for the swirling darkness below.
PART TWO
20
Welcome to Old Earth
The gray was amazing. Gray everywhere: the trees, the sky, the ground. A long, steady, soaking rain had knitted a thick curtain of gray. Even her skin looked gray now.
But was her skin really gray? Was that the right word for this color?
Violet stared at her hands. It was as if all the color had leaked out of them, escaping through some hole she wasn’t aware of. She turned her hands over and back, over and back. They stayed gray. In fact, the color that had replaced the original shade of her skin was, she now saw, something other than gray. Something lesser. Was it the color of smoke? No, not smoke. That wasn’t right, either.
It was a color she’d never seen before. It was a washed-out, fed-up, done-in color that spoke of emptiness and lack.
If she’d been asked to define the color, she would’ve said: sadness. Her skin was the color of sadness.
Violet took a step. She also took a deep breath. Mistake: The smell was like a poke in the nose. It was a disgusting medley of vivid, insinuating odors. Dead things, old things, forgotten things, rotting things—the smells groped and climbed all over one another, spreading out. They twisted and they oozed, growing more intense as she began to move. She took one more step.
And then one more.
She looked at the horizon. It was yet another shade of gray, a gray that was shot through with squiggles of pink. The pink reminded Violet of spongy, undercooked meat.
All at once, she felt a vicious blow to the right side of her head. She cried out. She barely managed to stay upright. Hot blood sluiced through her hair and down her neck. She was instantly woozy. She wanted to scream from the pain.
Someone grabbed her arms, pinning them behind her back.
Struggling to free herself, bucking wildly, flinging her head back and forth despite the dizziness it caused her, Violet saw that she was surrounded by three mean-looking men and two women who looked even meaner. Their faces were inked with grime; their eyes glittered with menace.
The man who stood in front of her had his filthy hands gripped around a long rusty pole as if it were a baseball bat. That’s what he had hit her with, she surmised, as he’d rushed from out of nowhere and cracked it hard against the side of her skull.
Violet looked at the wetness on the upper part of the pole and thought, My blood. The thought made her shudder, and then it made her even sicker.
She was astonished by the pain. She was also confused by it.
Where’s the Intercept? Why hasn’t it kicked in? Why aren’t these people falling down and screaming, knocked down by a grievous memory? Why isn’t the Intercept disabling them?
And then she remembered.
Nobody on New Earth even knows this is happening. Nobody’s watching Old Earth. Nobody routinely monitors it. The drone feeds are pretty much ignored by Protocol Hall.
So: no Intercept. She was on her own down here. There was no Reznik, sitting smugly but knowledgeably in front of his computer, punching buttons. No sp
inning circuits and crackling digital synapses set into flickering, instantaneous motion beneath the floor of Protocol Hall, making the floor tremble, a trembling that was so familiar that nobody even reacted anymore. Nobody said, “What’s that?” Nobody paid any attention.
Sort of like what was happening now on Old Earth. Sort of like this attack.
Nobody knew.
So this, Violet thought with a wonder that momentarily displaced her panic, is what life’s like without the Intercept as protection. Raw, unpredictable—and really, really painful.
“Check her pockets,” growled the man with the pole. His hair was pus-yellow and wild, and it looked like it had been oiled with sweat. “Make sure she doesn’t have any weapons.” Two of them rammed their dirt-smeared hands down into her trouser pockets. One of the women tried to wrench off her shoes, but didn’t have the proper angle and almost fell over when she probed without the right leverage.
With her arms pinned, Violet was helpless to fight back. Her head was throbbing. The pain started at the spot where she’d been hit and radiated out in a red-hot spiral of sheer agony. She was afraid she might faint. The idea terrified her. It would mean she’d be even more helpless in the clutches of these people.
“Please,” Violet said. It came out as a desperate gasp. “Please. It hurts.” She was crying. She didn’t want to cry—she felt weak and silly—but she couldn’t help herself. The tears had started up on their own and now they gushed. “Please.”
The man with the pole gave her a greasy little smile. Only a few teeth were left in his mouth, and they looked as gray as weathered tree stumps. He laughed. The laugh went on a long time. Too long. The others joined in, but fitfully, as if they weren’t sure when he might turn around and use the pole on them.
Through the livid haze of her pain, Violet realized something: The man wasn’t a man at all. He was a kid. He was younger than she was. It was the dirt that had fooled her. The dirt on his face was ancient, permanent, baked on, a hard ceramic glaze of filth.
“Please,” Violet said, and again it came out as a gasp, because she didn’t seem to have enough air in her lungs to do anything except choke and whimper. “Please. Please. I’m from New Earth. I don’t mean you any harm. I’ve never been here before. I’m just looking for—”
The blow to her stomach that interrupted her seemed to come from out of nowhere. It was the rusty pole again. The kid had slammed it into her midsection. The pain made Violet, bending double now, cough and sputter. Bile spun out of her mouth and ended up sprinkling the gray ground.
The kid laughed again. He spread his feet, to give him better balance. He lifted the pole. He wasn’t finished yet.
“Welcome to Old Earth,” he said in a grizzled voice that made him sound like an old, old man who had done a great many bad things.
21
The Woman in the Red Bandana
The kid was just about to hit her in the head again when something happened.
Violet wasn’t sure at first exactly what it was. But as she stood there, waiting for the next blow, she heard a noise that was a cross between a boing and a thwunk, with a little of pinch of a kerwhamp thrown in for good measure.
The kid suddenly got a funny look on his face. His mouth popped open. His expression was a stew of surprise and confusion and pain and a sort of goofy grogginess. Suddenly he toppled forward, almost head-butting Violet as he pitched in her direction.
The moment the kid was down, she understood. Standing directly behind him—or behind where he’d been before he fell face-first on the ground—was a small, almost elfin-looking woman who held a huge cast-iron skillet over her head with two hands.
“I told you to stop!” she yelled. It took Violet a few seconds—she was still dazed from the earlier blows—to realize the woman wasn’t talking to her, but to the kid. Or at least to the back of the kid’s head. The kid stirred in the dirt. He mumbled something.
The others in the group had all scampered away the moment he went down. Apparently the kid was the leader. Without him, they were directionless and flailing.
“You okay?” the woman asked. She had lowered the skillet by now but still held on to the handle with both hands, just in case.
Violet didn’t know how to reply. Was she okay? Her body felt like one big pulsing ache. She wanted to throw up. She put a hand to her right ear, and the wetness on her fingertips perplexed her at first, until she realized that it was blood.
“You okay?” the woman repeated. She squinted, giving Violet a peculiar look. “Maybe you oughta come sit down.”
That sounded like a very good idea. Violet let herself be led over to a set of broken wooden steps. The steps were attached—barely—to a battered, nearly roofless house whose two burnt-out front windows looked like the empty sockets after the eyes have been gouged out of a corpse. The houses on either side were just shells. One had only a single outside wall left standing; the other had two walls, but a strong wind would’ve made short work of both.
“That kid’s all trouble, all the time,” the woman muttered. She sat down next to Violet. “Now, if my boy was here, he’d keep that punk in line. No question. He kept ’em all in line.”
Violet was still in pain, but it was better now that she was sitting down. She took several deep breaths in a row. She realized she wasn’t going to die.
She took a better look at her rescuer. The woman had a thin face that hadn’t been washed in quite a long time. Her dark curly hair was partially covered by a soiled red bandana. She had dark eyes and a round chin. The chin was marked by a white scar with a kink at the end, so that it resembled a backward capital L.
She was much older than Violet had realized upon first glance. At least thirty-five or forty. Ancient, in other words. The dirt functioned as accidental but highly effective camouflage. Just as it had obscured her assailant’s real age, it had also hidden this woman’s age, but in reverse. The idea of her rescuer having a son—and one old enough to have once ruled this benighted block—was entirely plausible now that Violet had seen her up close.
“Who are you, anyway?” the woman said. “We don’t get many people down here from New Earth.”
“How’d you know I was from New Earth?”
The woman laughed. It was a big, rich, hearty laugh.
“Oh, honey,” the woman said. “Where do I start? To begin with, you’re not filthy. You’ve obviously had a shower recently. You smell good. Soap, am I right? Yeah. Soap.” She closed her eyes. A look of ecstasy flitted across her small face. “Mmmmmm. I love soap.” She opened her eyes. “I haven’t smelled soap in—oh, never mind. And your clothes aren’t torn. And your fingernails aren’t dirty. Do I need to go on?”
Violet didn’t answer. She felt silly that she’d even asked.
“So why are you here?” the woman said. “Believe it or not, this is not on most people’s lists as a top vacation spot.”
She laughed again, and then she kicked at a small pile of garbage at the foot of the steps. Her boots, Violet saw, were just strips of rotting leather held together by fraying string. Her pants and her shirt were filthy. Anywhere that her skin showed—her neck, her hands and wrists—was a place streaked with grime and marked with scratches.
“My name’s Violet.” The effort to speak made Violet need to cough. She suddenly had to spit, too, and out came a great rubbery gob of phlegm. It didn’t seem to faze the woman at all, but it embarrassed Violet.
She had deliberately left off her last name. Ogden Crowley was famous—and not for reasons that made him popular on Old Earth.
“Ever been here before?” the woman asked.
Violet shook her head. “No. First time. I’m looking for something.” She didn’t want to reveal too much—including her full name—until she knew more about this woman. For all Violet knew, she could be as bad as the kid who’d attacked her. Only smoother and trickier.
By this time the woman had picked up a broken-off tree branch that lay nearby and was tapping it in the di
rt. She tapped it three times, paused, then three times again. It seemed to be a nervous habit.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, I’m Delia.”
“Thanks for saving me, Delia. I think that guy would’ve killed me.”
Delia looked at the spot a few yards away from them, where the kid was still face-down in the dirt. He was certainly breathing; his back rose and fell, and every now and again he snuffled and he twitched. Violet fully expected the woman to dismiss the notion, to say something like: Oh, no, he’s harmless, really—he would’ve just roughed you up a bit and then let you go.
Instead, Delia said, suddenly solemn, “You’re right. He would have. This is a very dangerous place.” She reached over and touched Violet’s right shoe. “These? This nice pair of shoes you got here? They’re real pretty. They don’t have any holes. They look almost new. You’ve taken good care of them. And that kid out there? He could’ve sold them in about ten minutes. And with the money, he would’ve been able to feed his brothers and sisters for a couple of weeks. Maybe a whole month.” She rubbed the sleeve of Violet’s jacket. Violet was tempted to pull her arm back, out of the woman’s reach, but she didn’t, because it might seem rude.
“And this?” Delia went on. “This jacket? The others who hang out with the kid—the ones who ran away once I’d smacked him down—well, they would’ve taken this fancy little jacket of yours and used it as a blanket this winter. It gets really cold down here. Material like this—good and thick and sturdy—it’s like gold.” She patted Violet’s arm and smiled before withdrawing her hand. “And if you’d kept on fighting back, if you’d tried to keep your shoes and your clothes, and if I hadn’t shown up, then they would’ve cut them off of you. Your arms, your feet—they wouldn’t care. As long as they got what they wanted. What they needed.”
Now Delia reached up and touched the side of Violet’s head. Once again, Violet’s impulse was to duck and scoot away very quickly, but there was something in Delia’s voice—a quality of regretful honesty, Violet wanted to call it—that kept her right where she was.