Bruins Peak Bears Box Set (Volume III)

by Sarah J. Stone

  No, she would never forget. She would never forget her family’s sacrifice. She would never forget Abel or any of the other NightShade they lost. She would cherish it all in her innermost heart. She could cherish it just as well wearing these pajamas—or any other clothes, for that matter.

  She had never wanted to leave the surface. She never would have if her parents didn’t insist. She would have lived there all her life. She would have chopped wood and fed the fire and swept the floor and changed the bedding. She would have done all the jobs the computer did in Arion, and she would have done them willingly. She would have done them in joy and contentment.

  Well, she wasn’t on the Ridge anymore. She was in Arion. She wouldn’t do that work anymore. She wouldn’t even think about it. If a scrap of food fell on her carpet, she wouldn’t think about sweeping it up to keep the rats and mice away. She wouldn’t think twice about taking a blasting hot shower twice a day instead of a sponge bath once a week.

  Without thinking about it again, she opened her fingers. Her old clothes dropped into the compartment. The panel slid closed. She didn’t hear any whir of machinery inside the building, but she knew it was there. Her old clothes, the clothes she worked so hard to make, the clothes she wore for so long, the clothes that made her who she was—gone in the blink of an eye. The computer would sense the dirt and decay. It would sense the worn-out elbows and the patched sleeves. It would take them away to the recycling tumbler, just like everything else.

  Even as those thoughts passed through her mind, it was too late. Those clothes no longer existed. The computer system would reconstitute their molecular structure into something else, something useful. Maybe the wool would become the stuffing for somebody’s pillow somewhere. Maybe the clothes would become the fibers for the carpet in some new building far away on the other side of Arion. That would be just perfect.

  The minute she let the clothes go, her computer pinged next to the door. She called, “Come in,” and Serenity entered.

  Eden sighed and sat down on the bed. “I was just going to sleep. You should be in bed, too, girl.”

  Serenity took a look around the room. Nothing escaped her eagle eye. “So you got rid of your old clothes, huh? Good riddance. Have you taken a look to see what you’ll wear tomorrow?”

  Eden hung her head. “No, I haven’t looked. It was hard enough throwing away the old ones. I only went through with it because I had these pajamas to put on.”

  Serenity cocked her head. “Hard! Why was it hard? They couldn’t have been comfortable. They looked like you hadn’t taken them off in twenty years. They looked like they could scrape your skin off.”

  Eden had to smile. “I hadn’t, and they could, but I made them with my own hands. I even sheared the sheep with a pair of rusty scissors, and it took me almost a whole winter to get them made. I never thought I’d wear any other clothes. Now they’re gone, just like that.”

  Serenity sank onto a chair by the window. “Do you miss your life upstairs?”

  “Not really,” Eden replied. “It’s just… you know. It’s the only life I’ve known. Oh, I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna say I spent enough time down here to know the drill, and you’re right. I just never thought I’d leave the surface. Even when I spent time down here, I always knew I would go back. I thought I would take a mate up there. I thought I would raise my children that way, that I would grow old and die up there if the Midnight didn’t get me first.”

  Serenity closed her eyes. “Don’t talk about them.”

  “I have to,” Eden exclaimed. “The Midnight might be terrible, but they’re a fact of life upstairs. No one on the Ridge can go a day without thinking about them. That’s almost the only thing we do think about, and now I never have to think about them again. I don’t have to think about where my next meal is gonna come from. I don’t have to worry if we’ve got enough wood to last through next winter. I…I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about next.”

  Serenity regarded her from across the room. “You haven’t changed your hair yet.”

  Eden’s hand flew to her head. Then she let it fall and stretched out on the bed. “I haven’t changed it, and I’m not going to change it any time soon. Changing my clothes is one thing. I’m not ready to change my hair. My whole family wears it this way. All my friends upstairs wear it this way. I’m still one of them. If people hold that against me, then they aren’t anybody I want to have anything to do with.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you change it if you aren’t ready to.” Serenity stood up. “I can see you’re tired, so I won’t bother you anymore. Get some sleep, will you? Grandma’s got a full schedule lined up for you tomorrow.” Serenity crossed to the door, but instead of going out, she paused to turn back. “Hey, Eden.”

  Eden rubbed her eyes. “Yeah?”

  “I’m so happy you’re here. I’ve been lonely since I came to live here. I’m the only young person, and I miss my brothers and my parents. I can study better here, but that only means I don’t have anything to do but study. I understand how you feel, leaving your family behind. I haven’t seen much of my family since I came here. It’s a lonely way to live. I’m glad you’re here so I have someone to talk to about something other than the medicals.”

  Eden flashed her a grateful smile. “I’m glad you’re here, too, Serenity. Living with Grandma and Grandpa alone would be too much for anyone to bear. People our age need each other. We’re not machines who can just study or work all the time. I’ve always had my sister to talk to, but now she’s gone. I’m relieved I don’t have to live here alone.”

  Serenity’s face lit up. She nodded, but didn’t say anything. She bounced out of the room, and the door slotted back into its place.

  The room fell into silence. Exhaustion weighed Eden down, but she couldn’t climb into bed—not just yet. She had to see one more thing. She walked into the bathroom, flipped on the light, and when her eyes adjusted, she took a long look at herself in the mirror.

  She still looked like a NightShade from the surface. That hair stuck out like a neon sign. No one could mistake her for anything else. No, she wasn’t ready to change it yet. She could let go of every other facet of her old life. She could transform herself into just about anything to make a future for herself here, but she couldn’t let go of that. She had to cling to it. She had to keep being the same thing as her parents and her brother and her sister and all her friends upstairs. She couldn’t be anything else.

  60. Chapter 4

  At another apartment in the city, Eli and Damian Powers entered their living room for breakfast. Eli stopped dead in the doorway, and Damian collided with him from behind. “Hey!”

  Then he saw what surprised Eli. A dozen men crowded the living room. Damian recognized some as Elders on the council conversing with his father. The rest he didn’t know.

  Two men in dark suits approached the brothers. “Come in and sit down. We want to talk to both of you.”

  Eli cast a glance around the room until he found his father standing to one side. “What’s this about? Who are these people?”

  Old Joshua Powers clamped his lips shut and looked away. The man who first addressed the brothers spoke for him. “I’m Constable Ross Griffin, and this is my Lieutenant, Cain Graves. We’re members of the Police Corps.”

  Damian gasped and his eyes popped out. “The Police Corps!”

  “That’s right. We’re here to investigate a crime.”

  “Crime!” Eli exclaimed. “There is no crime in Arion.”

  “There is no crime in Arion, but there is a Police Corps, and it is for situations like this that the Police Corps exists.”

  Eli sank onto the couch. “This can’t be possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Joshua replied. “You better sit down, too, Damian.”

  Damian didn’t move. “What’s this all about? What crime are you investigating?”

  Constable Griffin faced him. “Ryder Law was murdered last night. His body was fou
nd outside the Elders’ council building.”

  “What’s so criminal about that?” Eli asked. “He must have gotten in a fight with somebody, and he lost.”

  “He didn’t get in a fight with anybody,” Constable Griffin replied. “His head was smashed in from behind. There’s not a claw or tooth mark on him to show he ever shifted or that his assailant ever shifted. He was ambushed and attacked. He probably never knew what hit him.”

  Eli’s hand flew to his head. “This can’t be real.”

  “I’m afraid it is very real. He was murdered in cold blood.”

  “But who would do something like this?” Damian asked.

  Constable Griffin turned on him. “As a matter of fact, that’s why we’re here. We want to talk to you boys—especially you, Damian—about your whereabouts last night.”

  “Me!” Damian cried. “What do you want to know that for? You can’t suspect me of this crime.”

  “I’ll ask the questions, son,” Constable Griffin replied. “Where were you last night?”

  “I was right here. I never left home all night. I never went out, and I never knew anything about this until just now.”

  “When was the last time you saw Ryder Law?”

  “I saw him yesterday. I see him every day—at least, I did. We had a meeting at Elder Hood’s office. Then Eli and I talked to him outside. That’s the last I saw of him.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing much. We talked about the session, and we agreed to talk again today.”

  “You didn’t argue with him?”

  “Of course not. I never argued with him.”

  “That’s not true, Damian,” Eli interrupted. “You know you argued with him all the time.”

  Damian colored. “That’s not what I mean. I never argued with him about something like that. We were friends. I’ve known him since we were kids. I would never do anything to hurt him.”

  Constable Griffin frowned. “What did you argue about?”

  Damian shrugged. “Political stuff. Nothing serious.”

  “Tell me.”

  Damian took a deep breath. “There’s a heated discussion going around the Elders’ council right now. Some young NightShade want to leave Arion. They call themselves the Emergent faction, and they want to return to the surface. They want to join the rest of the world and interact with outsiders.”

  “And you argued with Ryder about that?”

  “I argued with Ryder about that every day for the last three years,” Damian shot back. “I never killed him over it, and I never would.”

  “Do you support these Emergent people?” Constable Griffin asked.

  “No!” Damian cried. “Ryder was their leader. I wanted to stop them. I wanted to convince them to stay where they are and give their energies to Arion. That’s what we argued about, but we never even discussed the subject outside the Elders’ council chamber. I’m telling you, he was my friend. I’m as upset about him dying as anybody.”

  Constable Griffin scowled at Damian’s quivering face. “Is that what you talked about at Elder Hood’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  Damian knit his knuckles together, but he couldn’t stop his hands shaking. Ryder Law—murdered! It couldn’t be true, and now the Police thought he had something to do with it. He caught his father searching his face, and Damian dropped his gaze to the floor. He couldn’t look his father in the eye. He couldn’t face the world with this cloud hanging over him.

  He never lifted a finger against a living soul in his life, but how could he convince anybody of that? If they insisted on believing the worst of him, he was sunk.

  “Tell me everything else you did yesterday.”

  “I didn’t do anything unusual,” Damian replied. “I went to the council session with my father and my brother. Hundreds of people saw me there.”

  “What did you do after you and Eli parted from Ryder?”

  “We came back here. I studied the law circulars in my room for a few hours. Then I went down to the gym on the fifth floor. I did my workout. I came up here and took a shower. I ate, and I went to bed. That’s all I did.”

  “Can anybody confirm all that?”

  Damian waved his hand around the room. “My family can confirm it, but you should be able to find the traces logged on the computer. The system should have registered all my movements. You shouldn’t even have to ask me about that.”

  Constable Griffin let out a deep breath. “Regardless of that, you’ll have to come down to our offices for questioning.”

  Damian’s mouth fell open. “Questioning!”

  “Yes, questioning. We’ll be investigating this murder, and you are our principle suspect at the moment. We will want to ask you a lot more questions, so make yourself available to us.”

  Damian mumbled down at the floor, “Yes, Sir.”

  “From now on, until you hear otherwise from me, you’re not to move around the city without direct supervision. Do you understand? You have to be watched by a registered adult at all times.”

  Damian couldn’t look at him. “Yes, Sir.”

  He didn’t look up until the Police officers left. He would have retreated to his room and hidden from the world, but he had to stand there and take it like a man. He had to listen to his father’s whispered conversations with his colleagues before they departed, too.

  After everybody left, silence descended over the apartment. Eli sat on the couch and stared straight in front of him. Joshua sighed and came to Damian’s side. He touched his son’s arm. “Don’t let it bother you, son. It will be okay. You’ll answer their questions, and they’ll see you didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  Damian threw off his father’s hand. “Don’t touch me. How am I supposed to deal with this? Can’t you see what this means? I’m humiliated. I’m not even allowed to walk down the street without a guard.”

  “Listen, son,” his father began.

  Damian didn’t wait around to hear any more. He stormed down the hall to his room, but he couldn’t contain his mounting agitation. He hated the computer lying on his desk. He hated his whole life. In the blink of an eye, his world crumbled around him. Whoever killed Ryder, killed him, too.

  He couldn’t hold back the flood of emotion sweeping through him. He launched himself across the room, seized his desk, and overturned it in one mighty toss of his arms. The desk flipped over, and his computer crashed to the floor.

  The impact turned the device on, the screen lighted up, and it made a chirping noise. That familiar sequence drove Damian into a greater rage than ever. If he hadn’t been so consumed with doing his job, he might have noticed something that could have saved Ryder’s life. Instead, he spent yesterday evening with his face glued to the screen while Ryder lay bleeding on the pavement.

  He hauled back his foot to smash the computer to smithereens when he happened to notice the document pulled up on the screen. It was a list of names—the names and contact details of everyone on the Emergent faction roll.

  He lowered his foot to the floor. Maybe, just maybe, he could find something on that roll to give him a clue to this mystery. He picked up his desk and put it on its legs. He sat on his chair and started scrolling down the page in search of something, anything to which he could cling for the life slipping through his fingers.

  The first name he found on the roll was Ryder Law. Damian always considered Ryder a mild-mannered, friendly sort of guy. He had a million friends, but someone hated him enough to kill him. Damian went over Ryder’s record, from his first days as a school boy all the way through his graduation from the Logistics Academy.

  Damian knew Ryder all his life. They played together as boys, and they worked together learning the political game from their fathers. Now that he read the details of Ryder’s activities, though, Damian had to admit he didn’t know anything about Ryder.

  Ryder headed the Emergent faction. What else was he doing when he wasn’t sitting in on the Elders’ council sessions?
Was he involved in something more sinister? How could he be without the computer system detecting it?

  Residents of Arion took the computer system for granted. They got used to the system logging everywhere they went, every word they said, every search they made of the records. He assumed the computer system would record anything Ryder did to subvert Arion.

  He could barely comprehend any NightShade subverting Arion, but there must be a way to do it without anybody finding out. How would you communicate with other people without the computer system recording your conversation? Writing on a piece of paper? The computer system would make a video record of whatever you wrote. Damian couldn’t even think of where to get a piece of paper or a pen to write with. No one wrote on paper anymore. Everything went through the computer system.

  He scrolled down the roll and caught sight of another name he knew: Rawles Sawyer. Rawles ran the train maintenance crews. They ranged all over the city and even short distances close to the surface. The trains picked up goods grown and mined and harvested on the surface to transport them underground.

  The farmers and stock runners and miners went onto the surface. Some of them even lived up there full time. They could communicate with each other without the computer system knowing anything about it. They could talk freely about anything they wanted.

  Damian’s blood ran cold. Could one of those workers or families on the surface subvert Arion? Could they support the Emergent faction to expose Arion’s existence to outsiders? They wouldn’t dare! They couldn’t. Millions of lives depended on them keeping the secret against all odds.

  The families on the north side of the Ridge made the greatest sacrifice to hide Arion’s existence. They paid for it with dozens of lives in the Midnight bear-baiting rings, and they never once complained. They made that sacrifice willingly, and they never came anywhere close to revealing the secret.

  He couldn’t let the Emergent faction destroy everything so many people worked to accomplish. He wouldn’t let Ryder ruin everything, even after he was dead.