“Look down the wall, Io,” Daniel breathes beside me, pointing to a gap in the piles a few meters down. “What do you see?”
I lean out, just barely, to get a better view. “There’s a big patch of wall different from the rest, and there’s a door beside it.”
“The big part isn’t just a wall,” he whispers. “It’s a massive door. It’s called a garage door. That’s where all of this comes from. Corn.” He points to the yellow, then the green. “And soybeans.”
“How do you know?”
“I have no idea,” he says, motioning for me to keep my voice down. “I just do. Just like the way you know the word for water or people, but don’t remember when you learned it.”
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” The guard taunts from far down the rows, but it’s easy to ignore him. I know the guards’ ways. He’s only mocking us because he doesn’t know what else to do.
Daniel ushers me out from behind the air duct and toward the door. We pause before it and he puts both hands on my shoulders. His voice doesn’t tremble anymore, but the lasting effects of the tears haven’t left his eyes.
“Listen to me, Io. Before we go through there, there’s something you need to know. On the other side of that door is where I came from, and even though your Governors erased my memory, there are certain things you just don’t forget. Certain things so built into your brain, they aren’t memory anymore. And I need to warn you. It’s going to be very different from what your government tells you, okay? Different from anything you could possibly imagine, and there’s going to be a lot that you don’t understand at first, but I don’t want you to be afraid. I’m going to be right here beside you. What’s on the other side of that door may seem dangerous, and it sometimes can be, but it’s not like your government. It’s not singling you out. It doesn’t want to hurt you. Just remember that. What’s out there, no matter how powerful it seems, is not coming after you. Stay close to me, okay?”
I nod in agreement, trying to convince my pounding heart to agree as well, and slowly, even uncertainly, Daniel reaches for the handle.
He takes hold and pulls hard and fast, but nothing shifts, nothing clicks. From down the way, I hear the guard’s footsteps returning, following instinct to the only other exit in the room aside from the door through which we entered. Daniel’s motions betray the panic he hides and he pulls more frantically, throwing his full weight into it as every second the guard draws nearer.
“It’s locked!” he whispers, though it goes without saying.
From behind the nearest pile, the guard pauses to mutter to his superiors, “I’ve found the Neithers in the food stores again, but I’ve lost them in the room. Requesting back-up and a lock on all remaining exits.”
Our options have just diminished to one. We need to get through this door.
And then something clicks, echoing, before us.
I’m already halfway back to the air vent by the time Daniel tugs the door a few centimeters open, and he gestures to me, furious, not understanding my goal. The guard on the other side of the pile is still responding to someone far away when I reach it, and with just a tug I pull a small metal grate off the vent. It’s too small a space to fit into, but that’s not my intention. With adrenaline-fueled strength, I toss it as far as I can to the center aisle. It crashes to the floor and sends the guard sprinting forward to come level with me, but I’m already at Daniel’s side, struggling to catch the breath I held while waiting to see if the guard would notice Daniel as he passed. He didn’t.
Daniel grabs my shirt and forces me unapologetically through the door before him. He slips through and pulls it shut behind us. There comes a click of the lock triggering again, followed by a breath of air and a sensation of frozen needles piercing my skin, one after another.
And then the world explodes around us.
The World
The brightest light bulbs I’ve ever seen flicker violently, turning night to day in an instant. With each flash, the ceiling above cracks wide open with a ferocious roar, snapping pipes that rain torrents of water onto us. The bursts of light aren’t hanging from the ceiling, but embedded within it, hidden by folds like fabric that glow with each flare. The air itself has formed a wall, pushing and fighting to force us back through the door, and in the darkness I begin to suspect that there’s something more than just air, that among the frozen droplets and bursts of wind are guards confronting us, clubs, fists and all. But when the lights flash, there’s no one there, nothing but strange green carpet, thick and long, that stretches for as far as I can see in the split-second such a distance is illuminated.
The air is cold, the coldest I’ve ever felt, and it sucks the life right out of me as my smock, drenched all the way through, weighs me down and I fall to my knees. Water collected on the ground seeps through the fabric to my legs, darkening the white just as the dust on the floor did under the monorail. My hands begin to shake and the world turns in circles around me. There is nothing I’ve seen in my life that can explain this, nothing about the descriptions of the Mass that matches this, and nothing I’ve experienced in the city that could have prepared me for this. How can the government be this powerful?
It’s so beautiful and so terrible at once.
“Io, we need to keep moving,” Daniel reminds me, gently pulling me to my feet. He eyes the ceiling warily, but he’s as calm as ever. An opposing force to the environment around him. He holds me close to him, guiding me down a slope and farther from the door through which we escaped. I’m glad for his control, because I wouldn’t trust myself not to go running back if I had the choice. Even the prospect of facing Mack is less terrifying than this inexplicable assault.
“Remember what I told you. This isn’t your government doing this. This isn’t done by people at all. This just happens,” he repeats softly, a rhythmic cadence to match our halting progress across this strange, new world.
When I finally do find my voice a few minutes later, I blurt out, “What do you mean, ‘this just happens’? How could this just happen?”
For a few seconds, he deliberates, but just when I think he might not answer at all, he says, “The world you know is a world controlled entirely by people. Clothing, rations, work, play, even childhood. But they also control the temperature, the environment, day and night. The world out here is…is real. People are just another group of inhabitants, and people try to control the world, but in the end, the world always controls itself. This, all this noise and water, is just the result of an imbalance of pressure in the air that’s unstable, like a plate balanced on your finger. Eventually, that plate is going to fall. This,” he points all around us, “is the plate falling.”
Before I can counter the blatant simplicity of his explanation, the soft ground shifts beneath my feet and I end up face down in whatever muck it is that constitutes the floor. The ceiling gives a deep, resounding rumble as though mocking my inelegance, and Daniel kneels beside me.
“Are you okay?”
I wave away his assistance, but only manage to get myself even further immersed in the stuff.
“Hang on, hang on,” he says, as I try to wipe it off to no avail. “Leave it there. It’ll help keep us hidden.”
And he begins to scoop up handfuls of it and slop it all over his white shirt, motioning for me to do the same. I notice that he has one arm tucked against his stomach, as though protecting it, shielding it from exacerbation of the damage already done. I wonder if maybe he’s been in pain this whole time, even in the city, just hiding it so I wouldn’t question his ability to continue.
A different sort of roar starts up in the distance, one that doesn’t start with a flash or end with a blast of saturated air. Before I have a chance to look for its source, or even to be afraid, Daniel has forced me to the ground beside him, hiding us both in the long fibers of the carpet.
He lifts his head up just a few inches to see over the green around us.
“What is it?” I whisper, grateful for the noise e
choing down from the ceiling to hide my words.
“A truck.”
“A what?”
“People,” he says, and drops flat to the ground again, one hand on my shoulder to keep my curiosity at bay.
“There are people out here?”
“Shhh.”
Whatever the noise is coming from, it’s speeding toward us. I imagine something like a monorail, skimming over the top of the carpet, powerful and unimpeded by the raging mass above.
With a spray of muck, a colossal black shadow blows past just a few meters away from us, leaving a burst of smoke in its wake. I cough and choke on the foul air and try to stifle the noise with a hand over my mouth, but it only makes it worse. My throat is closing, struggling to block out the dust, but even clean air is hindered in the process.
Daniel doesn’t let me pause to catch my breath. He pulls at my arm again, dragging me behind him, unrelenting and unaware that my head is beginning to spin, that I can’t even focus on the silhouette he has become in front of me. The flashes have abated and now we’re plunged almost entirely into darkness.
“Where are we going?” I gasp, throat raw so that my voice is little more than a croak.
“We need to find shelter. There’s a line of trees I saw not far from here. The storm might have slowed down for now, but that doesn’t mean it’s finished. And I have no idea what time it is. I don’t know if your Governors run the same schedule as the actual time. The sun could come up soon.”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” I protest, but he doesn’t hesitate.
“You don’t have to. Not yet. When it’s day I can explain it all to you, but there’s no point now, not when we can’t see anything.”
“Daniel.” I stop, slipping my arm out of his grip. “I can’t just run away into nothing.”
He stops and steps back toward me. “Of course you can. What are you running back to?”
My heart sinks. He’s right. There is nothing left for me in the city now that I’ve left it all behind. I’ve said goodbye to my life and there’s nothing that can be done to help it, but it doesn’t make it any less painful to realize.
“You’re right,” I whisper, throat choked up now for a different reason.
Daniel steps closer, confused. “What?”
“You’re right. I don’t have anything to run back to. I don’t have anything at all.”
“That’s not what I meant, and it’s not true.” He speaks with firm confidence, but when he reaches out and grasps my shoulder, he does so gently. “There are people who love you in the city, and anywhere there’s someone who loves you, you have something worth returning for. But that doesn’t mean you need to go back there right now. You ran away to protect them, and now you need to protect yourself.”
I nod, but I can’t stop thinking about them: Ruth and James and Henrick – at least, the Henrick I knew a few weeks ago.
“You’re not running into nothing. You just haven’t seen where you’re going yet. But once you do, I promise, you will understand.”
He holds out his hand to me, and I can just barely see it. “Do you trust me?”
I nod even though I’m not sure I really do and accept his hand. But at this point, I realize, it’s more than just my hand in his. It’s my life.
Moving Away
Under the cover of a clump of tall columnar structures, whose long extensions creak eerily with every burst of a breeze, Daniel and I sit, and we wait. I don’t know what we’re waiting for, because the flashing and the noise have long since passed and we haven’t seen any evidence of people for hours. When we first arrived, though, Daniel immediately sagged against one of the columns, eyes closed and knees quaking, and though he assured me that he was all right, he conceded to admit that he could use some rest. So I suppose we’re waiting for Daniel to get stronger, but how we’ll ever measure that is beyond me.
After a few hours in silence, his breathing changes, slow and steady, and the deep weight of solitude begins to press on my heart. With nothing to see, nothing to contemplate, my mind turns inward where all I have are memories from the city, cycling again and again, drawing me deeper and deeper into a profound sense of loss and of being lost. I find the two little fabric hearts in my pocket and hug them close.
I want Henrick’s drama and James’ insolence, Nellie’s joy and the Neithers’ optimism. I want Peter’s grandiosity and Mr. Watson’s formality, the examiner’s indifference and even Mack’s coercion. I want it back, the guards and the chip and the hunger and all, just so that I can know my place in the world again. But more than anything, I want Ruth to be here beside me, to tell me that I’m safe and loved under her protection. And the thought that that might never be possible again, that I may never see her for the rest of my life, tears me apart with such fiery pain that I struggle not to flee right back to the door, back to the city, to find her.
When I don’t think I can handle it any more, I stagger a few steps away from Daniel, trying to keep quiet to avoid waking him, and I begin to cry. What starts with just tears quickly turns to sobs, and when I weep so loudly that I scare even myself, Daniel wakes up and comes over to talk to me, but he doesn’t need to ask what’s wrong. He already knows.
Instead, he sits beside me, one arm around my shoulders, and he begins to ask me questions. There’s nothing beautiful or romantic about it. It’s just his voice, something to cling to as the world falls apart around me. It’s the only thing that’s keeping me sane. His questions draw me back to the city too, but it isn’t the one I just left. It’s the one I knew for my whole life before it. He asks me about Ruth and James, about my life with them and how I filled my time; about how I came to be best friends with Henrick, if it took years or if it happened right away; about Optic training, not only the classes we took during the day, but the games we played after. He is most interested in the Neither colony, in the way the government allows them to be there, but then the price paid for such rare freedom. To hear again of my old friends and the fate that, unbeknownst to me, has begun to befall them nearly brings me to tears again, but as I teeter on the edge, Daniel sees it and draws me back. He knows the conversation can’t be allowed to end there.
“There’s one more thing you never explained to me, Io. It’s not about the Governors or the Neithers. It’s about you. Why is your hair different? Why are you the only one with bangs?”
Even as my chin trembles I can’t help but break into a smile. “I’m not the only one, just one of a few. It’s not technically allowed.”
“Then how can you have them?” I can hear a hint of laughter in his voice.
“Well, I always wanted them when I was little, because the Governor kids had them, so one day I found a pair of scissors and I cut off the front of my hair by myself. The trainers realized that they couldn’t just cut them off, because then I’d be bald at the front of my head, so they had to let them grow out to get rid of them. But that took at least a few months, and they couldn’t keep an eye on me the whole time, so whenever I had a chance, I would sneak off and trim my own hair before they could stop me. Eventually, they just gave up trying and now they don’t bother telling me off, as long as I keep my hair above my shoulders like everyone else.”
“You really knew how to play them, didn’t you? Even when you were little.”
I fight back a spike of pride at his observation. However flattering, it just isn’t true anymore. “I used to know how to play them, or at least I thought I did. But I had just never really crossed them.”
“So what happened, what I saw, that’s what happens when you cross them?”
I nod, half-heartedly noting that my eyes are growing heavy.
“If you’re tired, you should sleep,” Daniel says, nodding toward the column behind us. “I’ll wake you when it starts to get light, and we can keep moving.”
“Moving where?”
For a few long moments he sits silent in the darkness, and I can see his eyes reflecting in whatever meager ligh
t reaches us from some source unknown, staring off at nothing. Then he shakes his head distantly, sighs heavily and answers, “Away.”
Conspiracy Theories
In the whole of the atrium, only a single light glows, at the top of the tallest of the buildings right before they disappear into the ceiling. For the hundredth time, Mack replays the video, and his eyes search the faces of the two figures on the screen. It doesn’t have sound and their lips are too pixelated to read, but he can imagine the words they’d be saying. The sparks of a revolution, a plan to free the Optics of the Governors’ control.
In the middle of the night, while the whole city is sleeping, Mack sits before the screen seething at the boy and the girl, tiny compared to the vast piles of food around them. By coincidence or some unearthly intervention, the one thing he has dreaded, the thing that couldn’t be allowed to happen, has happened. The boy found her, and they’re somewhere in the city, out of sight and out of control.
Mack doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
The Revelation of Handwriting
The light presses on the outsides of my eyelids, waking me slowly, gently. My arms and legs are stiff from shivering all night in the cold, and though the water no longer pours down from above, the ground is damp beneath me, full of bumps and points that have been digging into my back all night. I blink against pure whiteness, and after a few seconds, my eyes adjust and the world opens up before me.
The brilliant carpet glitters and spreads out across a room a million times bigger than the atrium. There aren’t walls, just a massive domed ceiling, gray and glowing, that reaches out to the very edge of everything I can see. In the distance, how far I could never say, the carpet fades to dark brown and when a breeze blows, it carries with it a hint of that same green scent from the food stores. An irregular line of the thick, coarse columns stretches out to either side of us, and just a few meters away, two parallel beams of metal trace a path along the columns. Monorail tracks, I think, though I get the sense that it’s been some time since one passed through here. No electrified buzz: only the sound of the wind, some strange, high-pitched mechanical whistling, and a dull rumble in the distance that I almost wouldn’t have noticed had I not paused to listen.
Be Thou My Vision (The Population Series) Page 17