One, two, three, four, five.
I gasp for air. Oxygen fills my mask and throat, relieving the pressure in my lungs.
My eyes open, and I see that I’ve sunk a little in the water, but not much. The darker water is still below me.
Above me, Beechy helps Ariadne into the water. He holds her hand to keep her near the surface.
I focus on the movement of Beechy’s arms and legs and mimic it, kicking and using my hands to push me higher. I smile to myself. I don’t know why I was scared of this. It feels like I’m floating in the zero gravity capsule, except thicker. Heavier.
“We go down.” Beechy’s voice, muffled by the mask, is clearer than I expected.
I touch a hand to the strap above my ear. There must be something inside it that helps me hear him.
Ariadne kicks hard, while Beechy pulls her down. He grins at me. I glimpse a wide-eyed Oliver peering at us from the ladder before I turn away, toward the depths of the pit. It’s so dark down there. But I won’t be alone. So I take a deep breath and swim down.
The width of the pit expands as the water darkens. I swim close to Ariadne, whose cheeks are pale. Soon she fades into the dark, and so does Beechy. I can barely see them at all.
Panic rushes over me. What if I get lost down here? I can’t tell how far the pit goes. It might go on forever.
“Will there be light?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. “So we can see the animals?”
“Yeah,” Beechy says. “We’re almost there.”
I kick harder. There’s pressure in my ears and against my legs, making my movements sluggish. I don’t like not being able to see anything. I don’t like it at all.
“Take my hand,” Beechy says somewhere to my left.
“I can’t see your hand.”
I feel a change in the water. A moment later, his fingers brush my skin. They slide between mine, warm and firm.
“I’m not afraid,” I tell him, but it’s more to convince myself.
“I know,” he says.
We swim deeper. Hollow, eerie bubbling sounds fill my ears. I stare into the darkness, my eyes wide, searching for the source of the noise.
Something touches my face, and I gasp aloud, wrenching back.
Beechy tightens his hold on my hand. “It’s seaweed.”
Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it. The strands wrap around my legs when I move so they’re below me. I kick them away and slap them out of my face. Beechy chuckles. I shoot him a glare he can’t see.
“Both of you stay here,” he says, and lets go of me.
“Where are you going?” Ariadne sounds nervous.
“I have to turn on the lights.”
The water shifts as he swims away. I float above the seaweed, slowly kicking my legs, while the water presses on my body. I close my eyes. I focus on the oxygen flowing from the mask into my mouth.
In and out.
In and out.
I open my eyes. One by one, faint green lights flicker on somewhere above me. I blink to adjust my eyes. Now I see the thin, green-and-brownish plant growing in strands in a forest below my feet. Seaweed, Beechy called it. It looks slimy. Disgusting. Beechy sticks his face out of the forest, grinning.
“Look up,” he says.
I look up. The green lights are brighter now, lining silver cages on either side of me and above. Some of the cages are giant, while others are small. They float throughout the pit, some so near, we must’ve swam right past them. My heart beats in my fingertips.
Inside the cages are the animals of the sea.
The fish are easiest to recognize, since I’ve seen pictures of ones like them before. In the smaller cages, they’re only as big as my fist, but fatter. One has eyes that change color and stringy tentacles like whiskers. Another has something like wings, the color of lead, but they’re floppier than krail wings and not made of feathers. The fish makes a screeching sound when it opens its mouth.
I smile to myself.
“The most interesting ones are over here.” Beechy swims past the smaller cages. I follow him.
Beyond the last small cage sits a giant one. The creature inside seems almost human. It has two legs, two arms, and one head, but its skin is a clear color, looking like the consistency of gel. Where it should have ears, it has gills, and its eyes are fiery red with no irises or eyelids. It curls the only three long fingers of each hand around the steel bars of its cage and watches us, unblinking.
My eyes widen.
“What is this?” Ariadne asks.
“We call it a ‘vool,’ v-u-l, after the explorer who discovered it.” Beechy reaches into his pocket and removes a small, round tin. He swims closer to the creature. I bite back my instinct to tell him to stop.
The vul reaches through the bars and takes the tin from him. It doesn’t seem frightened.
“This one’s the last of his kind,” Beechy says, swimming back a few feet until he’s beside me. “But he’s been alive for decades.”
I stare at the vul, my heart beating unsteadily. The creature lets go of the cage bars and unlatches the tin’s lid. Inside are a number of tiny, squished fish the size of my pinkie. He picks one up and chews it with teeth sharp and yellow.
“He’s so … human,” I say.
Beechy nods. “Sometimes I wish we hadn’t enslaved him.”
“How did the others die?”
He grimaces. “I’m afraid it was our fault. When they were first discovered, there were only a few left. We scared them, so they attacked. We had better weapons.”
“That’s awful,” Ariadne whispers.
I press my lips together. Murder is too common on our planet.
“He has language,” Beechy says. “It’s different from ours, and he doesn’t use it much, but he can talk.”
“Can he understand us?”
“I don’t know.”
The vul swallows the last fish in the tin and licks his fingers. He kicks his legs—his feet are webbed—and swims to the lowest part of his cage, where he tucks the empty tin into a box attached to the bars.
I wish he could understand me. There’s so much I would ask him.
Beechy’s arm presses against mine, and our fingers brush. If we weren’t underwater, my palms would feel clammy.
Worry whitens Ariadne’s cheeks as she stares at the vul. A small part of me wishes she wasn’t here, that Beechy and I were alone in the water. It’s a silly thought. A wrong thought. I push it away and focus on the vul to clear my mind.
He swims up, nearing us again, but this time he doesn’t touch the cage bars. He presses his fingers together, and they emit a soft red glow. He opens his mouth, and a string of garbled words reaches my ears. They’re unfamiliar. But I think they might be important. I think he’s trying to tell us something, if only we could understand.
We watch him for a while, and then swim back up to the pit ladder.
“How was it?” Oliver asks.
“Incredible,” Ariadne says.
We tell him about the vul, and he says, “Wish I could’ve seen it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I wish he could’ve seen it too. “We should’ve waited until some other time, when you were better.”
“It’s okay,” he says, but he stares at the water like it isn’t.
Beechy’s arm brushes mine again when he hands me a towel. I ignore the shiver that runs across my skin, and head into the bathroom to dry off and change back into my normal clothes. I don’t want to think about Beechy … not like that. It doesn’t make sense to.
I force my thoughts away from him and think of the vul again, of it living down there all alone in its cage underwater.
I can’t believe creatures like that once existed on the Surface—creatures so similar to us, yet so different. Creatures that swam and talked and maybe even walked. Maybe they existed before us humans. Maybe this was their world before it was ours.
Now they’re gone. We slaughtered all but one.
But as I slip my boots bac
k on, I wonder if there might be others. Not other vul, but other creatures like them up there, maybe hiding someplace the scientists haven’t visited yet. Or maybe the Developers already found them, and they’re just keeping it a secret.
Because the Developers kept the vul a secret. They only told the scientists. And that makes sense, I suppose, because scientists are the ones who would care the most. Commander Charlie doesn’t tell most of us anything, anyway. What we learn in school has to be approved by him, but there are bits of history glossed over in our lessons, theories of science not explored in depth, and things related to medicine that we aren’t allowed to know about, like how certain medicines work to fix people’s bodies.
The Developers have lots of secrets, I’m sure. I wish I knew what they were.
17
“Welcome to your intelligence training session,” Cadet Waller says.
We stand in one of the higher floors in Training Division, in a room filled with glowing blue, see-through capsules that hum. Intelligence machines. It looks like there are enough for all twenty-eight of us Extractions. The other twenty-eight of us went to train with Colonel Parker today.
“You will be tested on a wide array of material, everything from the principles of gravity to the action potential of cells, to the dates of key events in the Great Rebellion.”
I can’t help smiling to myself. Today’s session should be easy.
Cadet Waller walks up to the nearest capsule, her boots tapping on the floor, and pats it. “You’ll each enter one of these. The purpose of this session isn’t just to test you, but also to fill in gaps in your knowledge. These hubs are quite special. They’re teachers, if you will.”
I remember what I learned about intelligence machines: They interact with their passengers, feeding knowledge straight into their brains like they’re injecting a smart gene.
“Each of you, pick a hub,” Cadet Waller says. “They’ll open for you in a moment.”
I stuff the last of my breakfast bar into my mouth and chew fast as I move after Oliver and Ariadne. Everyone else is in a hurry, too. Excited chatter fills the room. This is the kind of session most of us will do well in.
“Over there?” Ariadne asks, pointing to three hubs near the back of the room.
Oliver nods and moves ahead to claim them, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t have his sling anymore. Early this morning, he got called down to the health ward for a checkup, and a doctor said his arm is already almost healed, thanks to that shot they gave him two days ago.
I slip in front of the hub between Ariadne’s and Oliver’s. The machine is about two feet taller than me, with a seat inside, straps, and a steel helmet hanging from the ceiling. The Core’s small insignia is etched into the hub’s plastic door: a full moon embossed in bronze.
“This is your second-to-last training session,” Cadet Waller says, walking down the rows. “One today and one tomorrow. Your time spent in these final sessions will raise your Promise to a score of at least eighty, which, as I said before, is a requirement for Core citizenship.”
My stomach jumps. I forgot about the scoring.
There’s a loud sound of suction, and the door in front of me slides open.
Everyone immediately climbs into the hubs, including Oliver and Ariadne. I shrug off the Promise score thing and climb into my own. Cadet Waller said these sessions will raise our Promise to eighty, anyway. So why should I worry?
I turn around and slip into the hub seat. Cadet Waller and the two science instructors are coming around, helping everyone put their helmets on and strap in properly. I reach and unhook the helmet from the ceiling and slip it on over my head. It’s a bit heavy. Thick tubes run off its sides, attaching it to the black machine system at the top of the capsule.
“Figured it out?” one of the science instructors says, climbing into the small space still available in my hub.
“I think so,” I say.
He twists one of the tubes to check that it’s secure. “Let’s just get your seat straps on.” He reaches behind me and slips the straps over my shoulders, clicking them into the locks on the side of my seat.
“Why do we need to be strapped in?” I ask.
“Just a safety precaution.” He smiles, and steps out of my hub. “Good luck.” He presses a small button on the side of the capsule, and the door slides shut, drowning out the noise in the room.
*
My heart beats fast in the silence. Which is strange because I’m not nervous, really. Or maybe I am. My fingers grip the sides of my chair.
A soft whir fills my ears. A thin visor slides out of my helmet, covering my eyes. Now I can’t see anything but black.
“Welcome to your Intelligence Session,” a computerized voice echoes through my ears. “Say ‘begin’ when you are ready to start.”
I take a breath. “Begin.”
“Solve the following equation,” the voice says. Small, translucent blue letters appear:
A touch of relief washes over me. Blip mathematics. Carry the numbers, solve for . It takes me about five seconds to calculate.
“7,452,” I say.
The numbers disappear.
“What is the square root of 2,396,304?” the computer says.
“1,548.”
The computer asks me another question. Then another and another. I assume I must be getting them all right, since it doesn’t correct me.
“Are any nearby planets inhabited?”
“No, we’re the only planet in the Ranim Galaxy that supports life.”
“What is the rate at which bone density decreases in low g-force?”
“Bone density decreases by five percent per month without exercise, and one percent per month with exercise.”
“How long does it take for death to occur by acid corrosion?”
“Ten minutes.”
There’s a pause, and I panic. I’m sure that’s correct—instructors have always said it takes ten minutes for a person to die once they’ve been exposed to high levels of moonshine.
“Test complete,” the computer says.
I let out my breath.
“Final score: one hundred percent.”
My lips stretch into a grin.
The whirwhirwhir of the machine rises in my ears. “Calculating approximate Promise level.”
I stare at the darkness before my eyes, waiting for the number. They’ve never told me my score before. It could be anything—but it has to be somewhat high, right? Or Commander Charlie wouldn’t have let me come here.
A small, translucent blue number appears:
84
Every muscle in my body sags with relief. I already hit eighty. Of course I did. They picked me for this, and I’ve done well in every session so far. I beat the obstacle course, after all. I must be meant for citizenship.
Something cool touches the skin above my ears. A soft flow of air coming through the tubes attached to my helmet.
I lift a hand to touch one of the tubes. It’s made of plastic that feels smooth and cold. I wait for the computer to explain what’s happening, but it doesn’t.
The number 84 flashes and disappears on the visor screen.
My lips twist into a frown.
The cool air slowly fills my helmet. A tingly feeling rushes through my head after a few breaths. It starts in my ears and trickles down to my neck, and further. The air, I realize, is gas. And it’s filling my hub.
My vision blurs.
What … What’s going…?
My eyelids droop.
I’m floating. Gentle and light, at ease with everything in existence.
The Developers are perfect; they are everything. They give me everything, and I am perfect because of them.
Only because of them.
A rush of burn hits my head, exploding through my temple.
I gag and kick and scream and fumble for the helmet.
Choking; can’t breathe.
On fire.
Got to get this
off me.
But it won’t budge. No no no no no no no no.
The computer’s talking again. It’s saying something, but I can’t tell what because I’m trying to breathe and tears are streaming down my face and I’m shaking uncontrollably. Fire still rushes through my head, getting worse, and it needs to stop.
“Who would you save?” the computer says. I think it’s repeating itself.
I see there’s something in front of me that isn’t a visor screen. Some other part of the test—holograms of people, but they look sort of real.
I close my eyes and try to stop shaking. It feels like someone’s smashing my head in with a hammer, but I have to focus. I have to finish the test.
When I open my eyes again, wetness trickles down my cheeks. I stare at the two figures standing in front of me. Girls, both of them. Their eyes are wide, and they’re both thin. Hungry. Terrified. The one on the right wears the leather suit of a Core citizen. The girl on the left clutches her faded, torn dress to her chest. She’s from the Surface or one of the outer sectors. Her hair is blond and shoulder-length, and her eyes are green. She looks so much like Laila, I must be dreaming. Laila’s dead. She can’t be here. She’s gone.
“Who would you save?” the voice repeats.
“F-from what?”
“Death.”
I look from the Core girl to the girl who looks like Laila. How could I pick anyone but her? Core kids don’t need saving, anyway. They’re safe here.
“The S-Surface girl,” I say.
“Are you sure?” the computer says.
Breathe, swallow, breathe.
“Yes.”
There’s a pause. The hammer keeps pounding against my temple. Tears won’t stop trickling down my cheeks, and I’m gripping the sides of my seat so hard I’m going to break all my nails. Stop, stop, stop, I plead.
“Calculating final Promise score,” the voice says.
A number pops up on the visor:
84
I feel relief again, somewhere far in the back of my mind.
Then the number starts dropping. Beep, beep, beep. 76, 75, 74, 73—
No. No. No.
72, 71—
Please.
70, 69—
No, no, no, this is not okay.
63, 62, 61, 60, 59.
The beeping stops.
Extraction Page 17