by Holly Hook
The Grounders were silent, but regular people stood in a line, arms held by the Task Force members. Many of the prisoners were Enforcers, and all of them were adults, but I noticed Toni from the bacon and eggs stand, the one Calvin had knocked over. He stood among the others, no color in his face. Calvin hadn't saved his colleagues from getting deported after all.
My chest froze.
It wasn't a deportation.
I froze right there in the vent. Matt stopped, too, sensing that I was no longer following.
A single Grounder, a large man with dark skin and no hair, stood by the tower of departure times. Next to him sat a closed rubber tub. The line of human folks led up to it, and I guessed that thirty or forty people waited, helpless.
The big man opened the tub. A dark liquid sloshed inside, red in the light. Vomit rose in my throat when I realized that it was blood—probably human blood. Floating inside were several reddish-purple blobs, with small tentacles whipping as if they were trying to gasp for air.
These were Grounders without bodies.
And these people—
The big man reached down and drew a single, unbodied Grounder from the tub. Even from up here, the metallic smell reached me. Two more Grounders brought a man closer, a suited guy who thrashed and cursed at the Grounders and everything they represented.
The dark man raised the Grounder while a Task Force woman pushed the prisoner's head down, exposing the back of his neck.
I knew what would happen, and I scooted away from the vent. I barely held my sickness down as the man below screamed in pain, and then went silent.
Word had gotten out.
It was why people were running in panic, trying to escape. It was the Grounders' way of making all witnesses keep their silence.
The Grounders were replenishing their population. Matt and I had reduced it, and now they were building their army back up in any way they could.
And all I, a brave Earther could do, was crawl away and pretend that I hadn’t seen.
Chapter Eight
I couldn’t crawl very far away from the scene before I collapsed on my stomach and let the tears flow out. Matt stopped, too.
“Tess,” he whispered. “I saw what was happening. I didn’t see your parents down there.”
“They’re making new Grounders,” I said.
“You mean, the Grounders are taking over fresh people,” Matt said.
“You know what I mean,” I hissed. I hated that I could only see Matt’s feet right now. I needed to see him face to face. He was brutally honest, but that was comforting. I hadn’t looked upon the scene long enough to tell if my parents were there. If Matt had seen them, he would have told me.
The fact that he was truthful was my only comfort.
“Where did they get that whole tub of them?” I whispered. I didn’t want to say what was killing me inside. Matt and I were trying to save the world, but by killing dozens of Grounders, we had condemned more people to get body-snatched. I wondered if the Grounders we had taken down first somehow survived, but that was impossible. I had seen how dead they became after the gas and the heat gun.
Condemning people wasn't an Earther thing to do.
“There must be a lot of them underground,” Matt said, “waiting to come out. Come on. We need to look around, and then get out of here.”
I sucked down the tears, hating myself for my show of weakness. Matt wasn’t crying. I shouldn’t have expected to see anything comforting. It was no wonder the old man back in the museum was crazy. He must have witnessed this stuff a million times. This, and worse. I wondered what the Grounders promised him if he stayed quiet.
I had to go on. My grandfather had known the truth and now I did, too. I had to continue his mission. He might have died, but I couldn’t give up. The thought felt like I was dishonoring him.
So Matt and I continued. We crawled through the vent, circling the room. A woman screamed. A Grounder must be plunging its tentacles into her brain. Matt and I might have to fight these people. I hated that I had left the heat gun in the walker. I could have destroyed every Grounder in that vat of blood and saved the people below, at least for a little while.
It would have gotten the gas turned on, but it would have given those people down there a chance.
I didn’t dare look down at the scene again as we crawled over more vents. No one spoke in the room below, except for the condemned. One man begged the Grounders to spare him. A woman cried, trying to stifle her tears. These sounds would haunt me for the rest of my life. I’d get that traumatic disorder that soldiers used to get.
At last, the vents opened into a fork, and he crawled ahead, allowing me to get into the new opening first. He was a gentleman again. That was our relationship: sarcasm and brutal honesty.
“We're leaving the main room,” Matt said. “Check and see what we’re over.”
I led the way now, glad to be getting away from the scene in the main room. I approached another vent and looked down through it to the hallway below. It was silent, but something beeped. Carpet stretched out below, lit with a soft glow that didn’t match the brightness in the rest of the building. Wooden doors lined the hallway.
“I think we’re above some offices,” I whispered. At least the sounds of crying and begging weren't as loud here.
“Good,” Matt said. “We might find the guy who has the keys.”
“He’s probably out in the main room, putting Grounders on people,” I said, eyeing the vent ahead.
“We can still access the office,” Matt said from behind me. “We need to see if there’s a way down.”
“Good luck on that one.”
But I crawled on. I struggled to keep my thoughts straight and not let my animal brain take over. The primitive part of me wanted nothing more than to crawl out of here and get back to the museum, so I had to keep fighting against it. Besides, if the Grounders found us there, and they might eventually, they could drag us to stand in line with the others. I imagined those disgusting tentacles going into the back of my head, digging through my skull, and the thought was enough to propel me forward.
There were a lot of offices in this area. I smelled the coffee. The Grounders apparently liked caffeine, or this was just where they brewed it for the people they were deporting.
The vent forked again, left and right, and the left side went downward. A fan blew from the right side of the fork, and the left slanted down. I hated the thought of going down head first, but I didn’t have a choice. I slid down, using my palms to slow my descent down the slope, and finally came to a floor-level vent. I peered out at the blue carpet with an ugly orange pattern. The Grounders also had no sense of color.
“What’s out there?” Matt asked.
My heart raced. I pressed my face against the vent. In a panic, I realized it would be almost impossible to crawl back up the slope backward. Matt was in my way, and there was no way I could turn around in the cramped space. The only way to go was forward. “We have to break into the spaceport,” I said, “unless you can pull me back up the slope.”
“We didn’t think this out,” Matt said.
I peered into the hallway. I’d have marks on my cheeks from this. No one stood out there. In fact, a steel door closed this section off from the rest of the spaceport, and I pressed my ear to the floor to hear.
I wished I hadn’t. A woman screamed in fear and pain, and the sound of her stomping feet surged right through the ground and into my eardrum. I pulled my head back up. “I think we’re clear,” I said. “We break in and look around, and then get back out.” We had to do that, anyway, to turn around.
“How do we pop the vent off?” Matt asked.
Good question.
I poked one finger through and wiggled it. Nothing happened. I pushed on the vent, and it turned out to be one of those with tabs, not screws. Hope rose inside of me that there might be an exit from the building.
With a bit of pushing, the vent popped off. I held my breath and slid forw
ard, unable to stop myself. I gripped at the worn carpet and stood, checking the hall in both directions. No one. There were four closed doors, and none of them had an exit sign hanging overhead. Each entrance had a glass window, which revealed that they were all vacated offices. The Grounders had an urgent job right now.
I spotted no exit.
Matt emerged behind me. “We have to move fast,” I said.
He said nothing else. We were on a mission, and there was no joking now. Once the Grounders got through that line of people, there was no telling whether or not they’d enter this area. Maybe they had to call the Great Council and report how many more bodies they’d managed to snatch. They must have a quota, and now that we had started this war and all this panic, they were taking people who weren’t in power. There was no time for elections anymore.
Two of the wooden doors were locked, but Matt pulled on one to reveal an office. I got out the electric baton and handed the knife to Matt, who kept it out and ready. A knife would do little against Grounders and nothing against gas. It was best if we didn’t get caught.
“Check the drawers,” he said.
The office looked like my mother’s, but more high-tech. A platform for holographic calls stood in one corner of the room. I imagined the Great Council checking in on Space Port Nine every day, wanting numbers on the deportations. Two large desks faced each other, complete with tablets, letter openers, and paper files. On the opposite wall, holographic monitors displayed different parts of the spaceport. My senses struggled to grasp everything, but it was horrible. The most prominent screen showed the main room of the spaceport and a line of two dozen victims waiting for their Grounder treatment. I forced myself to check for my parents, but they weren’t there. The newly-converted Grounders stood among the Task Force, blank and almost lifeless, watching as their friends crept towards their fate.
Toni was halfway up the line now. I choked.
No longer would I buy breakfast from the guy.
“Tess,” Matt snapped.
I shook my head and turned away. “I know someone in that line,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” He yanked open some drawers. Pens rattled along with ID badges.
I had to help him. There was nothing I could do for Toni or anyone else in that line. I knew what my parents would say. It was terrible, but we had to save the world. Running in there and attacking over a hundred Grounders would just make us dead, or worse, would get us a spot in that line. I went to the other desk and pulled open drawers. It felt like the time I had found my mother’s security tablet.
But there were key cards.
Key cards!
A whole ring of them slid around in the drawer I opened, and I seized them.
“Matt!” I said, holding them up.
“I think that’s it,” he said. “Those must open something. There’s nothing in this desk of use to us."
“We need to go,” I said, a sense of terror washing over me. I held the key cards so tight my hand got cold from the lack of circulation.
Matt and I bolted from the room. The vent still lay on the floor, and Matt was once again the gentleman and let me crawl inside first. I scrambled up the slope of the vent, sliding down at first, but at last, I made it to the top.
“We have a problem,” Matt said from behind.
“Which is?” I asked.
“I can’t put this vent back unless I want to crawl up backward.”
“Crap.”
“I can try,” Matt said. “If we leave this off, they’re going to know. They’ll follow us to the museum.”
He had a point.
“Then you had better crawl backward,” I said.
Matt made some scraping sounds, and then something clicked as he pulled the vent back in place. We must be lying down, our feet facing each other. “Can you turn around and pull me up?”
“No.” Even the junction at the top of the slope would be too narrow to allow that.
Our mission was getting more complicated by the second. And then I heard the worst noise in the world.
A steel door opened with a loud thud. A man’s pained groans floated in from the main room.
Someone was walking into the hallway. I tried to look down, but Matt had gone silent, and I couldn't see past my shoulders. Footsteps approached, and a door opened. We had remembered to close the office one, right? My memory failed in times of extreme stress.
“We have obtained fifteen more bodies,” a Grounder man said. “We will need twenty-five more to replenish our numbers. I will inform the Great Council.”
They were going to the office. Great.
“Another cylinder has landed on the monorail station,” a woman said in a monotone. “We suspect that the Identity has sent us more assistance. Do we tell them the final plan?”
“We do not,” the man said. “If they know it will destroy them, they will not offer us their help. We need them to keep the local populace in control.”
I tensed.
The Identity people were helping the Grounders, who were planning to betray them. The old man’s words returned. He'd said something about a final plan, too.
Wasn't that a Hitler quote or something?
The Grounders seemed to walk past our vent. They continued to speak.
“If they learn that we will betray them,” the man continued, “they will turn on us. They will destroy us. We cannot tell them. It must remain a secret.”
“We must be fair,” the woman said. From the sounds of it, they had stopped in the hallway.
“Yes. We must be fair,” the man repeated.
I wasn't sure whether to laugh or scream. Below me, Matt remained still. Of course, I couldn't turn to see him.
“Killing is not fair,” the woman said.
So the Grounders weren't a hive mind. I had learned something today. They could disagree with one another.
“No. It is not fair. But we must defend ourselves,” the Grounder man said. “That is just. That is the way of nature. The plan will kill non-Grounders who remain here, but it will allow us to survive. It will be mercy. Mars cannot support all of them. It lost the ability billions of years ago. They will starve there.”
Any and all urges to laugh died as if the Grounders had succeeded in their plan already. Now they were ready to move on from deportation to just plain killing everyone.
“I did not know of this plan until today,” the woman said without an ounce of emotion.
The two of them walked off. The footsteps sounded like the loudest things in the world just then, cutting over the sound of the fan above.
I was trembling.
Matt waited, then tried to back up the tunnel. Faint scraping sounds followed as his shoes attempted to grasp the metal and failed.
We couldn't go back now. Matt had to get up the vent, yesterday. Sooner or later, we'd get detected. The Grounders would notice some things missing from the office.
“Take off your shoes,” I whispered.
“Huh?”
I kicked a little, managing to hit one of his feet with my own. Matt got the picture, and I listened as he twisted his feet around each other, removing his shoes to the best of his ability. It wasn't like he could reach back and take them off.
But it worked. The shoes slid down a bit, and Matt must have grabbed them because they didn't make a thump or anything. Little taps followed as Matt gripped with his toes and slowly backed up the vent tunnel.
It took several minutes.
The screams in the main Space Port room had stopped. The Grounders had worked through the line and brought another two dozen—or more—people into their ranks. I hoped that they had depleted that tub of blood, that there were no more Grounders left in need of bodies. Where had the new ones come from, anyway? Maybe Grounders bred fast. That was another thing I didn't want to roll around in my mind.
Eventually, after a long time, Matt said, “I'm all the way up. I'm going to have to crawl backward all the way back to the main room. I think I can turn around
at that T-junction.”
“I hope it's empty,” I said. I would envision that scene for the rest of my life, of the Enforcers and the citizens waiting for an unspeakable doom. But the Grounders only seemed to want adults. The strongest bodies. People who could have some authority. That was one point in our favor, and they might not want someone with green skin. They'd stand out too much. Matt might be safe.
But they might want test subjects for their final plan, whatever it was. I had thought that the Grounders were okay with letting us starve on another planet, but I had been wrong.
If Celeste was still alive, we had to warn her. If we could turn the radicals to our side, that could turn everything around. Even if the Identity wanted us to have a happy future on Mars, they had to agree that killing everyone left on Earth was a bad idea. I thought of the cylinder still outside the museum. We had to ally, and fast.
It didn't take as long to crawl back to the main spaceport room, which had emptied. I wondered what the Grounders had assigned their recruits. Maybe they had gone off to help Celeste, at least until it was time to betray her. Perhaps they had gone to deport some of the Enforcers, the ones they hadn't caught or used as bodies.
We reached the junction where Matt could back in and turn around. We could go much faster after that, and I let Matt crawl ahead again. We still had to move slowly, mainly so the key cards in my pocket wouldn't brush up against the metal and make noise. To say that the trip was terrifying was an understatement. Every once in a while, a Grounder would walk underneath the vent screens, or an announcement would come on and say that another ship was boarding in ten minutes. Things had returned to normal in Space Port Nine. Deportations had resumed.
I no longer had any anger at Mom and Dad for wanting to send me away. Had they known about this final plan?
At last, Matt and I reached the junction that headed down the hallway that connected the spaceport to the museum. We took that, and a check of the corridor below revealed that the mopping robot had finished up for the day, leaving the tiled floor perfect and shiny. I wasn't sure why it had bothered. No one would go through the museum right now.