All the Whys of Delilah's Demise

by Neve Maslakovic

“As things stand, no one volunteered for the catching part, nor—”

  “Told you. Who wants guano on their hands?” Chase interrupts.

  “—nor the transfer of the birds into the huts. I was able to—”

  “Or a faulty snowsuit giving them frostbite?”

  “I asked Jobs And Housing to re-classify it from a hobby to a job,” Ben finishes loudly. “Renee was eager for it. It’s a good fit. Given that she’s used to the cold, she’ll be able to go in and out without a snowsuit—and move nests and trapped sparrows faster.”

  “So much for the hobby idea,” Chase gets in the last word.

  “Once Renee has the chip and is all settled in, let’s bring her in here and welcome her properly.” Bonnie winces as she adjusts her position again. “Still a bit of a lingering headache. Scott, thank you for passing the Eternal Life cocktail on to me this week.”

  “How generous of you, Scott. But you are new here.” Chase leans across the table, not toward me but Bonnie. “What’s it like, Bonnie?”

  “The cocktail? You know I can’t say.”

  “Not even a hint? Does it taste sweet, like honey? Bitter, like medicine? Is it a drink, a pill, an injection, what?”

  Bonnie’s response borders on rude. “It’s only for those of us who’ve sat in the number one chair to know.”

  That’s pretty much the tone for the rest of the meeting, but with it behind me, the next day, Wednesday, finds Dax and me at the west gate. The guard, Yesler, has his feet up on a desk and his hands behind his head. The feet hit the floor and he greets us with a wide-eyed, “Whoa, it’s Scott the Curse Slayer.”

  “Dax here is no slacker himself,” I attempt to deflect the attention. “Fans call him the Racquet Ace. He’s playing in the tennis finals later today.”

  “Is that right.” Yesler rises to his feet, stretching his back. “Pax, you said? I’m pretty good at shooting hoops myself. What can I help you with?”

  “We want to go Outside,” I say.

  Yesler ceases stretching. “Are you sure?”

  Dax grumbled about venturing into the cold on the morning of his big match—but changed his mind once I pointed out that learning about what’s on the frost side of the glass was his idea in the first place. And the weather, the backdrop to our lives, is cooperating—the sun’s out after a two-day spell of clouds and snow.

  Yesler, somewhat reluctantly, takes us behind the gate office into what he explains is called the mud room and points to where snowsuits hang against one wall, rubber-duck-yellow down-insulated ones. As if verbally dusting off the warning, Yesler cautions us, “No exposed skin or you’ll risk staying out there forever. It starts with frostbite—your nose and toes turn black—and ends with hypothermia, where your body temperature plummets and you sit down and get nice and drowsy and die.” He scratches his chin, as if his day has taken an unexpected turn, and continues. “To be honest, haven’t had anyone ask to go out in ages. The other gates, they’re closer to the train tracks so they have maintenance workers going in and out. Here it’s mostly just the traders on Tuesdays—yesterday was busy. The traders don’t wear snowsuits, just layers of stuff.” The last sentence is delivered as if he’s speaking of another species entirely. “Poulsbo and Blank Jack have been coming through for the bird hut. Other than that, there’s a drunk Top Hundred group now and then wanting to go out on a dare and I tell them to find something daring to do inside, where it’s nice and warm.” Yesler scratches his chin again. “One last thing—your CCs won’t work if you go past the edge of the forest. So stay out of the forest. Which is a good idea anyway, as there are wolves.”

  As we digest this, he leaves us to it. The snowsuits, one-piece except for the gloves and helmet, are lined up by size. Dax heads to the taller end of things and I to the shorter. The intense cold on the other side of the Dome glass might take a chunk out of us if we’re not careful, but the word frostbite has a beauty of its own, I decide, donning the suit. A bite of frost. Like a line from a poem we might have learned at school.

  Yesler comes back and fusses, checking that our suits are zipped up all the way. Helmets in hand, we follow him out of the mud room to a set of double doors, padded and cold-proofed, which Yesler unlocks. A short passageway with a low ceiling leads to another set of double doors, these made of heavy glass, smudged and cracked in places with use and time. Yesler unlocks these as well.

  Donning our helmets, Dax and I step through.

  27

  A path about as wide as Dax’s arm span leads away from the Dome, the snow on it packed down by traders and their snowmobiles. The cold, let in by slits in the visor of his helmet, claws at his skin, tempered by the warmth of his own breath. He has to turn his head to see. To one side of the gate, an elevated aviary stands at the ready. No sparrows yet. Farther out, greenhouses sparkle in the sun, and to the west, the forest sits like a dark green city on a rising slope. Beyond, the Cascades carve an angular line into the sky.

  The mid-morning sun to their back, he and Scottie follow the path uphill, an awkward proceeding in the puffy boots. She shakes her head at him under her helmet. “It’s not what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I thought it would feel…freer, somehow. I’m looking at the sky through a smaller dome, that’s all.”

  But it does feel more free, Dax decides, even with the snowsuit limiting his movement and the added challenge of the climb. Inside the Dome, all his life, he’s moved along channels: streets, elevators, hallways, walkways, garden paths, stairs, back alleys. Here he and Scottie can take any direction they want and walk for hours and hours.

  As if thinking the same thing, Scottie steps off the path, marring the pristine snow. Her boots sink in to the knees. She keeps going, each step leaving a treaded footprint behind, and Dax is reminded of the footage of a long-ago generation walking on the Moon, back when that kind of thing could be done. He veers off the path himself, packing snow down under his boots with each step.

  Scottie is making strange movements.

  “Scottie, what are you doing?”

  “Trying to run.”

  Her voice is muffled but he can hear the laughter in it. She takes a tumble and he’s briefly concerned but a snowball lands on his suit with a thump. Dax retaliates and soon they’re pelting each other, racing uphill.

  They stop to catch their breath at top of the hill, the forest to their back. Sweat is trickling down Dax’s brow. He was worried about the cold locking up his muscles before his big match—truth be told, he only agreed to come because Scottie had her heart set on it with an intensity that surprised him—but it’s hot in the suit and his skin itches. He wishes they’d brought water. There’s all the snow, of course… He blithely informed Wayne that the land has been warming up. Time to put his money where his mouth is. He slides off his helmet. The rawness of the air is an icy hand reaching down his throat. Scottie is staring at him. He hopes he won’t lose consciousness or turn blue. A minute or two later, when it becomes clear that he’s doing neither, she takes off her helmet as well. She exhales and a tiny breath cloud emerges. “Oh, that’s cold… And the air—it’s different—crisper, with a hint of rosemary in it.”

  “It’s all the trees.” He slides off his gloves to melt some of the pristine snow in one palm and wets his lips. “Ready to head back?”

  Scottie is studying their home, the half-sphere sparkling in the bright sunshine. “Just like my snow globe, only with snow on the outside. Let’s go into the forest.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good—”

  But Scottie’s gone ahead. Helmet and gloves in hand, he follows her in under the trees, and now the path is narrower, the ground rocky and tree-rooted under the snow. The canopy is a roof breached here and there by shafts of sunlight, leaving much of the forest floor tinted with silent shadows. The vast firs and pines are a contrast to Dome gardens, where dwarf and high-yielding are the prevailing adjectives. He spots an animal track—a fox, he hopes.

&nbs
p; After several minutes of walking, Scottie slows down and he passes her, only to hear her exclaim, “Oh.”

  Dax whips around. “Is it a wolf?”

  “It’s Cece… I asked her if there’s a snapshot of wolf tracks in the Knowledge Repository but she’s not responding. Then I tried sending you a thought to wait up and that failed too. When Yesler said our CCs wouldn’t work, I assumed we’d still be able to think at each other.”

  Dax tries it himself. The attempt to send a thought to Scottie across the path fails. It’s unnerving, a limb gone numb. No, as if one of his senses evaporated and he can no longer hear or see. “The heartbeat signal,” he says. “That’s got to be it.”

  “Right—Cece mentioned it once. It’s like an off switch, isn’t it?” Scottie says. “Back when ConnectChips were invented—before domes, as a way to socialize and chat—people were worried about their minds being taken over. Cece said that CC Central transmits a signal to keep all the chips on.”

  “Well, the problem’s easily solved—all we need to do is walk back a bit.”

  He starts to do so, but Scottie steps into the middle of the path. “Since we are all alone…”

  Dax forgets all about the unresponsive chip in his brain. “Scottie, what are you doing?”

  “Something I’ve wanted to do for a long while now.”

  Kissing, I discover, counters the cold quite nicely. After a long, very interesting minute, Dax and I pull away. His voice sounds different, rough and warm, a blanket enveloping us both. “I’ve wanted to do that myself so many times,” he says. “I was worried I’d be responsible for sending you to the last place on the List.”

  “And I assumed you’d never go against the Code. But I figured the Code doesn’t apply out here and grabbed the chance and hoped for the best.”

  After another enjoyable minute, he pulls away again. “Scottie?”

  I bury my head in his shoulder. “Hmm?”

  “You know we have a bit of a problem, don’t you?”

  “You mean section Q.”

  “Look, I’m good either way. We can tell people at once if you like, but if you want to enjoy being number one for as long as you can, I’m fine with that too.”

  I groan. “I’m not sure enjoy is the right word. I’m beginning to see why you never cared about perks or your tennis fame. People are staring at me wherever I go, the cafeteria, the bathroom, the street. Asking for gems and favors. Offering things they hope will lead to gems and favors.”

  “Tennis fame is simpler—it’s just an equation. If you win, they like you; if you lose, they don’t.” Dax adds insightfully, “That isn’t what’s bothering you, is it? It’s something else.”

  “I went to the Birth Lab.”

  “Go on,” he says quietly.

  “Turns out I was right. The number one can just walk in and ask about their genetic record, section F be damned. Only the lab technician didn’t even have to look me up. She already knew.” I pull away to pace back and forth, the legs of the snowsuit swishing with each step. “According to her, Delilah leaned on the previous technician—that’s how she put it, but I knew what she meant. Blackmail… Really, the story began earlier, when Delilah first went onstage. Tadeo was the theater manager and much older, forty-two to her twenty.”

  When I delivered invites to Delilah, I’d often pause in the lobby to study a framed photo. It showed a man with somewhat wild salt-and-pepper hair and deeply-etched creases around the eyes, not of worry but of laughter. Tadeo lived a full, happy life, which included a puppeteering hobby, until his death at age sixty-four, a decade before Oliver and Scott were assigned to a pair of three-month-olds who shared a conception day. Well liked, he was number eight at the time of his death.

  “The lab technician said people whispered behind Delilah’s back that she used Tadeo to get her first role,” I relate more of what I learned, “but she’d heard that the relationship started after Delilah was already a star. Either way, at some point Delilah started gifting her doses of Eternal Life to Tadeo, week after week, until he passed away. Cancer of the bone—I guess even Eternal Life has its limits. And after… After, she wanted a child to remember him by. That must have been when her obsession with secrets started.”

  “Are you saying Delilah got her way? She was your mother and Tadeo your father?”

  “She saved a lock of his hair. That and her skin cells, and a petri dish.” I thought I’d walk out of the Birth Lab feeling whole. Instead, all that’s there is anger. “Delilah never said a word, never dropped a hint, never sent an unguarded look in my direction.”

  “Maybe she thought you’d find it a burden, having to live up to her level of success.” Dax pulls me back close and cups my face with his hands. “I suppose, now that you mention it, there is some resemblance. Your hair is darker”—he gently runs his fingers through it—“but you have her eyes.”

  “The Birth Lab made sure that I didn’t resemble her too much. Her eyes—and her tooth gap. The technician—she seems to have been waiting for the chance to tell the whole story to someone—says Delilah spent her first five or six paychecks on a dentist.”

  “Well, I like your tooth gap. It goes with your smile.”

  “You’ll have to learn to live without it. I have a dentist appointment on Friday. Look…” I hesitate, then come to a decision. “Let’s keep this ours for now, but not because I care what others think. It’s Jada.”

  The feeling that Jada may have gotten away with murder has been eating at me since the gala. I relate a moment from the tavern basement. “There was an apple barrel with its lid off, as if Bonnie was interrupted in the task of inventorying it… Maybe she was—by Jada, who bonked her on the head, dragged her to the back, and heaved a burlap sack down on her. Bonnie said she slipped on an oil slick, but she doesn’t actually remember.”

  Dax takes all that I’ve said in stride. “What about what Bodi said, about the map showing no one but you and Bonnie?”

  “Jada has the box of secrets now,” I remind him.

  “You think she got to Bodi—bribed or blackmailed him to look the other way?”

  I shake my head. “Nah, Bodi is un-bribable and has nothing to be blackmailed with, I’m sure of that. I think she has a way of making herself invisible on the map. Don’t ask me how—maybe someone in CC Central helps her or she’s wearing layers of tinfoil on her head or whatever. She may have slipped out of the basement seconds before I got there, watched me go down. I did get a sense of there being eyes on me.” A shudder runs down my spine, not from the cold.

  Dax strokes my hair again. “I’m glad you didn’t run into her. Who knows what might have happened.”

  “With any luck, I’d have managed to think at you ‘It’s Jada!’ before she pushed me down the stairs and broke my neck.”

  “Scottie, you need to be careful… You’re the number one now.”

  “What about me being— Oh. You mean I might be the next target. Well, that’s just great. I was just getting used to not being in the bog and now this. Jada isn’t happy at all with me sitting at number one, I can tell you that much. I wonder if she knows about Delilah being my mother and that’s why she dislikes me. Well, I’m not just going to go away. It’s why I have to stay at the top, because it’ll be easier to take her on from there. If she is behind this, she killed my mother.”

  Every part of that statement—and most of all the words my mother—is heavy indeed.

  “Like I said, be careful.”

  Dax’s arms around me and the sunlight dancing on the forest floor make me feel as if maybe I should let it all go—pretend I never found out Delilah was my mother, pretend Jada’s just an ordinary eatery manager and nothing more. I murmur, letting my head rest against Dax’s shoulder again, “What if we just kept walking all the way to Old Seattle? We could find an abandoned house and live out the rest of our lives together.”

  “How would we get over the mountains?”

  “We’d go up one side and down the other.”

/>   He gives a practical response to my daydream. “It’d take some preparation. But I’d say we’ve just learned a couple of things: that the cold is not too bad and that CCs won’t do us any good out here. We’ll have to come back out and experiment some more.”

  “I’m all for that,” I say and we lose ourselves in one another again.

  When we come up for air, Dax says somewhat formally, as if worried I’m going to change my mind about the whole thing, “Scottie… You’ll always be my number one. You know that, don’t you?”

  The words are hard to get out as there’s a lump in my throat. “And you mine.”

  I slip my hand into his and we walk side by side until we’re out of the forest. Once in view of the Dome, we pull apart and don the gloves and helmets. My world has changed—there’s no going back, but Dax and I will have to stay PALs in the public eye.

  Yesler greets us with a sigh of relief. “Couldn’t find you on the map for a few minutes there, Scott—almost had a heart attack. Enjoy yourselves?”

  “Very much,” I say.

  28

  Dax scans the crowd packing the bleachers of the arena as he stretches. Left leg…right leg. Left leg…right leg. Angus is doing his own stretches on the other side of the court. Dax hopes no one has bet too much on him today—No betting is in the Code but the enforcement office turns a blind eye unless large sums are involved. He and Angus have played seven times. Dax lost every match.

  “You thought I’d forget to come, didn’t you?”

  Scottie’s at the side door of the arena, keeping a low profile. He breaks the stretch to wave to her and finds himself breathing a silent sigh of relief. He was worried something bad happened. “I thought you might be busy with the town-leader stuff,” he responds.

  “Nope, just went to pick up my bike from the shop. Nice shorts. I had no idea your knees were so bony. Where do I sit?”

  “Tacoma is saving you a seat.”

  “Where?”