All the Whys of Delilah's Demise

by Neve Maslakovic

  A winning brand can shoot you up the List. And those high up, something told me, are allowed to get away with bending rules—even section F. To find out who I am, I needed to figure out first who I could be to others.

  All this thinking meant I’d stood still for a few minutes and a sparrow had arrived. I watched it peck at the bits of straw that had escaped the wine crate. There was an ominous element in the persistent up-and-down of its beak, something unsaid and enigmatic in the pinprick eyes. “You’re not worried about Gemma Bligh’s curse, are you?” I asked it. “More to the point, bird, where am I going to find a brand now?”

  It bopped away unconcernedly and I reached for the next bottle.

  Delilah had just about thirteen hours left.

  3

  7:45 p.m.

  Lu exhaled, having come down off the stage as Yoshi and Pearl went up for their fruit baskets. “Whew, Scottie, that was more intense than I expected—all those people watching me.”

  I had worked a bottle-toss booth for a while and was now on my free hour. After we left the square behind us and entered the crowded Edge Garden, I asked Lu if she had plans to move to a bigger living space now that she had a sparkling new brand sure to send her higher up in the Top Thousand. The roof of Housing Fifteen, her assigned residence, peeked above the treetops of the garden; back in Founders Square was her workplace, the Oyster, the eatery run by Jada. Lu has hopes of becoming a chef one day. “Never mind a better room,” was her response. “I can dine at Top Thousand eateries now—and bring a guest. You should come, Scottie. I’ve heard they serve chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream, and you can order both if you like.”

  I shook my head at her. “You’d have to pay my way and that’s no good.”

  “Chocolate?” a voice from behind us said. “If that doesn’t convince Scottie to show up, nothing will.”

  It was Dax, a crisply clean shirt and slacks taking the place of the grass-stained overalls he usually wears. The second of my PALs works in the Gardens Center as a soil scientist. While Lu owes her rank to her outgoing personality, Dax owes his—also in the Top Thousand—to an athletic skill. He’s the Racquet Ace; the tennis tournament starts in January of each year and stretches all the way to April to accommodate day jobs. Dax is half a year older and has little interest in perks. It’s never occurred to him to pay a visit to an upscale eatery, much less invite anyone along—or to come to a party with plenty of time to spare.

  “Discovered by the Duchess, that’s a nice one,” he said to Lu. “I didn’t miss it, arrived just in time to watch from the back of the crowd.” Turning in my direction, he added, “Scottie, that dress…”

  “What about it?”

  “…is a nice color.”

  Strawberry jam was the color of the dress I borrowed from Lu for the occasion; since the dress fit her just right, it hung loose on my smaller frame.

  I have little idea how genetics works—the Knowledge Repository doesn’t have much to say on the subject, other than that gene editing ensures our bodies produce no sperm or eggs—but I do know that the Birth Lab brings into the world no closer than third cousins, and the three of us were evidence of that. Lu and Dax stood taller than me. Lu’s soft features were a contrast to Dax’s angular ones as he eyed all the people off-path in the garden. And only I have the tooth gap... In short, we are definitely not three peas in a pod.

  “Let’s keep to the path,” Dax said disapprovingly. “With this many feet, the grass will get clobbered.”

  “Yes, sir.” I saluted.

  “I’m not being bossy, it’s section L of the Code. Respect all town spaces. Gardens are subsection L-3: Avoid damaging plants, including unauthorized fruit picking. Stay off grassy areas except where permitted.”

  “Only you would be able to quote that without consulting your CC,” I say. While conversing with one’s second inner voice is a private activity, it’s almost impossible to perform it without breaking eye contact. Everyone unavoidably glances down and to the side—the telltale low-left look.

  Dax worked on his hair with a fist, a sign that something was bothering him. I chalked it up to the trampled grass. Around us, lanterns illuminated activity stations, bright streetlamps lined paths, and, as Dax said, there were many feet. With the toasts and the prize-giving over, the festivities had begun in earnest and the band was banging out a beat that carried into the garden over speakers. Through a break in all the people, I caught a glimpse of Delilah. She was gliding along, her elegant gown of cream-colored silk making my borrowed dress seem pedestrian, the glass in her hand filled with what I knew was punch, not wine—she didn’t drink alcohol. Tagging along was Rick, the number two, in a showy pink shirt, with one arm around Magda and the other shared by Mia and Audrey. His back blocked my view as Delilah disappeared into the crowd.

  That was the last time I saw her.

  We had stopped, though we were still some distance from the refreshments stand. Dax and Lu exchanged a look over my head, making me ask, “What?”

  “How are you doing, Scottie?” Lu asked. Dax had gone back to rubbing his scalp.

  “You mean because Delilah chose you instead of me for the brand? I’m happy for you, you know that.” This was true. I was happy my PALs were doing well but couldn’t help feeling that everything was changing—that I was being left behind.

  “It’s the List bottom,” Lu said quietly.

  Kept busy all day with the party setup duties, I’d forgotten to check who ranked ten thousandth this week. Cece, who’s in last place?

  The answer came fast and furious, or at least it seemed so to me. Cece was merely being prompt.

  Oliver.

  With that, the party hum around me faded away, memory taking over. I was back to being ten years old, our PALs quartet—Lu, Dax, Oliver, and me—on the school playground in a game of hide-and-seek. Dax is counting down, having covered his eyes, and Lu has folded herself under the playground slide. I’m looking around for a place to hide and spot Oliver peering out of the building dumpster. He gestures a Here. I hesitate a moment, then run over and tumble headfirst into the week’s garbage waiting to be sorted into compost or reusables. Oliver helps me right myself. We’ll both get chewed out by the teachers because of the mess we’re making of our clothes, but Dax will never think to look for us here.

  And then it’s a couple of years later. Oliver’s voice has deepened and it’s not the only change. His laughter comes less frequently now. He’s pulling away and I don’t know why.

  The ground rumbling under my feet snapped me out of the recollection, a train leaving the underground depot, the tracks a level below us. The segment of the path where we had stopped grazed the panels of the Dome; I watched the four-car train emerge aboveground on the other side, powering through snow banks, its lights faint in the softly falling snow and the dark, its destination unknown. Oliver could be on it, headed to a greenhouse to work for room and board—if he’s lucky.

  If the moon, somewhere above the snow clouds, were looking down at us, it’d have seen the well-lit Dome surrounded by greenhouse lights twinkling in all directions—except to the west. That way stands the forest, dark and mysterious, and beyond it the Cascades rise into the sky. The villagers who live on their rocky white slopes eke out a living in the cold, forage in cities abandoned after the Dimming, and come on Tuesdays to trade. Outsiders live in family units, rudely known as cave-clans, though their dwellings are said to be wood cabins.

  Most List bottomers live out their lives in the greenhouses. A few do return into the senior wing of Medical Three after years of back-breaking work. But for the one or two List bottomers a year who don’t make it into a greenhouse, their one-way destination is the mountains—through the forest, without a snowsuit, on foot. Alone.

  Lu had gone to find Wayne—they were dating, having met in the cafeteria of their assigned housing; he’d watched her big moment from the back of the stage. I still had a quarter left of my free hour. Dax and I wound our way farther along th
e curve of the garden. Under a streetlamp, I saw him wince as a tipsy group stomped over an area marked Newly planted, keep off. “It’s just grass, Dax.”

  This innocuous statement got Dax all riled up. “Hey, I’ll have you know that grass is quite useful. It converts carbon dioxide into oxygen and lightens the load on the air filters by absorbing pollutants. And don’t even get me started on agricultural grasses— Sorry. I’m just passionate about…”

  “Grass.”

  “Guilty as charged.” He hesitated. “Scottie… Are you sure you’re all right?”

  I struggled to put into words what was bothering me. “Oliver and I, we shared the same conception day, even got our names from the same Founder. We didn’t look alike but that didn’t stop me from secretly pretending we were twins. I still don’t know why he turned away—if it was something I did. I kept asking, but he never said.”

  Dax took his time answering as we walked. “Oliver was always different… He tried with us, but he was a loner at heart. The rest of us were bumbling around as best we could, growing up in bursts and stages, and Oliver just steadily got taller, dispensing wisdom and help from the sidelines—until he no longer could.”

  “He did stand apart… Remember the time the three of us snuck out after midnight to look for Gemma Bligh’s scratches in the Dome glass? Oliver thought it was silly and didn’t come along.” The recollection brought a brief smile to my face. “We came here, to the garden. You said that fingernails couldn’t affect glass, but if Gemma wore a diamond ring, there could be scratches from that. We did a full loop with a flashlight, only we never found anything.”

  “I remember that night. It took us three hours to make the loop.”

  “And whatever we used to prop the dorm door open rolled away and we had to throw pebbles at Oliver’s window. He came downstairs barefoot and in his pajamas to let us back in—Lu and I snuck past the teacher on call into our wing and Oliver and you into yours, only you stumbled over something or other and the two of you got in trouble.”

  “It was a chair…”

  The tipsy group had caught up with us and one of them was now attempting to climb a tree on a dare. Dax called out a stay-on-the-path reminder, which sounded like a life instruction to me—one ignored by the interlopers.

  As to Oliver, he had sought his own path and lost his way. “We failed him,” I admitted with not a small dose of shame. “Did you know he was doing so poorly? I was too busy worrying how I was doing.”

  Dax shook his head. Before going off to look for Wayne, Lu had told us that Oliver was doing all right for a while but his life took a turn for the worse the past couple of months. He sank into the bog—the sequence of four nines; the next to last spot on the List is known as such because people tend to get stuck in it before either managing to pull themselves up or not. Oliver had a cleaning-crew job, Lu said, and was spending nights in a sleeping bag in hallways as he couldn’t afford a room. He never responded to her invitation to stay with her. The three of us, a glass of hard cider in hand, had toasted our lost PAL. It was at this juncture that Lu had slid her hands into our elbows, the middle link of a friendship chain, and made us promise that we’d truly be PALs forever and accept help if we needed it. And then, as if to seal the deal, she gave us each a bracelet she’d knotted from neon-green yarn.

  Twirling my new bracelet, I continued, “I should have tried harder to reach Oliver back then. When he started pulling away.”

  “No—uh, if anything, you pushed too hard.”

  “I did?”

  Dax threw a glance in my direction. “You all but tried to knock some sense into him with a shoe.”

  This was an exaggeration and I stuck to my guns. “Because he forgot what the P in PALs stands for.”

  “Look, Scottie, you have this way of not giving up. It’s a good trait to have in general. But in Oliver’s case what he needed was space—and like I said, you tend to push.”

  I pondered this statement as we passed under a streetlamp; its buttery light caught his hair playfully. I looked away. “I don’t always push… What’s going on over there?”

  A boisterous group was gathered near the waste processing plant—it juts into the garden—and the tree there. “An apple tree,” Dax informed me. Under it, on an upturned crate, stood a man of my height—Ben the Birdman. Ben had shot up in rank on the strength of a campaign to rid New Seattle’s buildings and streets of the sparrows—with no competition or predators, keeping the avian numbers down is an ongoing problem. He had stalled at eleven, also known as “stuck on the shelf,” the most likely scenario being that the person gathers dust hoping to become a Tenner before usually tumbling down in defeat. As to Ben’s day job, I’ve never visited his high-end tailor shop—it’s way out of my budget.

  The lantern mounted on the tree didn’t reveal any birds in the branches but Ben jerked a thumb up. It was a long and graceful thumb, a mismatch to his height, and I could picture him measuring cloth precisely and fast. “The sparrows! It’s time for them to go!”

  Agreement erupted in his audience, two dozen or so people. “You said it, Ben!” … “One stole a shirt button right off my windowsill, had set it there for a second!” … “Dirty little creatures, want them gone!”

  “Help me get into the Ten and we’ll do something about it!”

  “We’ll give ya rubies, Ben!”

  I made a side comment to Dax. “Well, that’s one way to spend a party, isn’t it?”

  Dax pointed to his ear and I received a thought as Ben continued his spiel in the background. “What, Scottie? Can’t hear.”

  “Why DO the birds seem to be a bigger problem these days?”

  “They’ve always been like this—noisy, stealing seeds and berries, digging holes in the soil.”

  “You don’t think they’re acting, I don’t know, more like themselves?”

  “Nah, Scottie. Ben’s just drawn attention to the problem, that’s all. I’m curious about this big plan of his, if he gets into the Ten.”

  “Maybe he’ll chase all the sparrows down with a big net.”

  We moved on, leaving Ben and his followers behind, and I grabbed Dax’s elbow to avoid tripping on a garden rock, his arm strong and sturdy under mine. It struck me, not for the first time, how right it felt. But PALs cannot be romantic partners and I let go. It’s a concrete-hard pillar of the Code, same as section F.

  But there’s a difference. When I violated section F, that was for me and me alone. After Oliver froze me out, it was as if I found myself in a dark room looking for a way out…and the door that beckoned was finding out who my parents were—a fixed, immutable fact no one could take away. In one of Pike Place Market’s darker corners—I was all of twelve—I found a shady-looking character selling homemade medical concoctions and figured he must have under-the-table connections. I offered him a jar filled with coins. I’d saved up the conception-day gift we got each year plus extra I earned doing chores for classmates and converted it all into old-world money. The shady character turned out to be law-abiding after all and reported me. The result was the onyx from the Code Enforcement Office, a warning to others and a penalty that would kneecap me—not at the time but six years later when I graduated onto the List.

  As to section Q, even if I were willing to break the PALs-cannot-be-romantic-partners rule—not that I’ve ever seriously considered it—Dax certainly wouldn’t be. Between Cece and me, that part of the Code is known as Quit-your-dreamin’, Scott.

  Dax and I walked on and ran into Lu before long. Wayne was with her, making me ask, “Is my free hour up?”

  “Probably, but I’m now on my free hour, so I’ll pretend I didn’t see you, Scottie.” Wayne ran a hand across his jaw. “I’m parched—anyone up for heading to the wine station to sneak a sip or two? I feel I’ve definitely earned my event-planner-extraordinaire brand this week and I’m sick of cider.”

  Lu and I were onboard with a bit of discreet rule-breaking but Dax woodenly pointed out that the wine was on
ly for the Top Hundred, making me roll my eyes. “Don’t mind him, he’s just annoyed everyone’s trampling his grass.”

  Wayne feigned horror. “Maybe we better alert the Agency boss—last I saw McKinsey, she was headed to… Oh, yes. The wine station. That-a-way.”

  Dax accepted defeat and we made our way back to the square. The band was on a break and an inebriated Samm and Sue were entertaining the crowd. The comedy style of the numbers five and six is not my cup of tea as it often involves pranks or digs at other people. With their matching hair—wavy and down to the waist—it would have been hard to tell them apart, except that Sue’s outfit had vertical stripes and Samm’s horizontal ones. Crouched to mimic Ben’s height, Samm was pontificating about the evils of town birds while Sue, bent over like an old woman, lobbed paper airplanes at him, each lob accompanied by a screech. As the onslaught made Samm (in the role of Ben) sink to his knees, I realized Sue was meant to be Gemma Bligh, the paper airplanes represented sparrows, and the interpretation of the curse that the birds were about to take over the town any day now.

  Circling the stage, where Sue and Samm had switched gears and were now telling knock-knock jokes, we found McKinsey at the wine station—it served as a base for those of us on the organizing side of things. Elegant in a gown of indigo velvet, with two-inch teardrop glass earrings and chunky heels, she instructed Wayne and me to stick around in case anyone needed anything, then took pity on us and filled four glasses.

  I’d never had wine before. The experience was sweet and tart and mellow all at once.