Rebels

by Jill Williamson

  Lonn sat down and told him about the rebels and their plan to try and get a man into the Midlands.

  “I think that going over the wall is a better plan than trying to sneak through the turnstiles,” Mason said.

  “Your brother doesn’t like my plan,” Lonn said. “But there is no way to get over the wall.”

  “If only the Owl could fly,” Omar said.

  “The Owl?” his mother asked.

  Omar and Mason told them of the Owl, and what Omar had done in a few short weeks before being caught and liberated.

  Then Omar thought about the feathers in the incinerator. “If we could make a balloon with hot air, I could fly over the wall.”

  Mason grinned. “That’s a great idea, Omar. Perhaps we could make one.”

  “A balloon can’t lift a man,” Lonn said.

  “So we make more than one,” Omar said. “Or we attach a rope to it, and it carries the rope up the wall. Maybe with a grappling hook on it.”

  “There are no grappling hook stores in Cibelo,” Mason said. “Plus there are motion detectors on the wall. Still, a hot air balloon — or a collection of small ones somehow bound together — could be done, in theory. It would be a lot of work.”

  “We have a plan,” Lonn said. “And it’s a good one.”

  And no more was said about hot air balloons.

  When it was time to leave, Omar collected the paper placemats from the table and carried them outside the door of the diner. Mason had stopped, so Omar stopped beside him. He looked back through the glass door and saw Lonn and their mother back at the table. Then Lonn kissed their mother.

  What? “They’re together?”

  “Strange, isn’t it?” Mason asked.

  “Beyond so.” Omar shook his gaze away. “Why are we standing here?”

  “I don’t dare enter my bunkhouse without Lonn,” Mason said.

  Omar wanted to ask why, but he wasn’t certain he wanted to know. “Meet me tomorrow at one? If you come to the poultry slaughterhouse, I can show you the incinerator.”

  “How do I get there?”

  So Omar explained where the strikers’ entrance to the chicken yards was and where to find Omar.

  “I’ll come tomorrow, brother,” Mason said. “I’d like to see how you got your idea.”

  While Omar wanted to obey Lonn’s advice and refrain from brown sugar, he could not. When Prav and Kurwin left for Fajro that night, Omar went with them.

  There was a back entrance to Fajro that led into a private restaurant and an area with changing rooms. Rain made them change clothes when they arrived. She didn’t want her customers knowing they were playing with strikers, though she didn’t try to hide the Xs on their faces or hands.

  Omar found a pair of black pants and a dark brown satin shirt that made him think of Shaylinn’s eyes. Burnt umber. All the men’s clothing in Rain’s closets was flamboyant and lacked buttons that normal shirts had. The shirt had only three buttons at the bottom. Ridiculous.

  There weren’t many customers at Fajro that night. Two men sat at the counter, apart, one drinking, the other vaping something with lime green fog. Omar sat with Kurwin at a booth in the corner, as he had every night since his encounter with Rain last Saturday. Every night Prav had gone out with a woman. Kurwin and Omar had not. Where Prav’s muscles had intimidated Omar at first, he was glad for them now since the women always chose Prav instead of him. Hopefully they’d continue to choose Prav and leave Omar alone.

  Though he wouldn’t earn any brown sugar that way.

  “Do you get chosen much?” Omar asked Kurwin.

  “Two or three times in a weekend. That’s when the reps come out. Rarely on a weeknight.”

  “Oh.” Today was Wednesday. The weekend was coming. Omar took a gulp of his beer, trying not to think of Friday night when the reputables would come looking for pleasure.

  The mere thought didn’t at all feel reputable to him.

  Rain let her ravens — as she called them — drink as much as they wanted, so Omar was drinking, trying to keep his mind off the halffull PV in his pocket. He needed to make it last until he could afford to fill it himself. So he sat drinking and trying to think of ways he could earn credits without being one of Rain’s ravens. Maybe he could sell some art or learn how to apply ash ink tattoos to strikers. They might pay him in vials of brown sugar for such things.

  Or maybe Mason would see the feathers and know how to make a hot air balloon, and they’d all fly away.

  “What’s so bad about the bunkhouses?” Omar asked, thinking of Mason.

  “It’s the maximum security cage,” Kurwin said. “Where they put the real rotters. Be thankful you don’t live there, peer. They’re a nightmare. And it’s even worse for the strikers in sectors five and eight.”

  Mason was in sector five. “Why?”

  “Cows, peer. They’re heavy. Like fifteen hundred pounds. This one time, a cow busted through the ground, which was the ceiling of the top floor of the Strikers’ Bunkhouse in sector five, and killed three men in their sleep.”

  “No way.”

  “That beast crushed them in their beds. Sector six is safe, peer. Ain’t no turkey that big.”

  “Omar.”

  He jumped at the sound of Rain’s voice and looked up.

  She was standing across the table, looking at him. “I have a customer for you.”

  A chill ran up his arms. “For me? But it’s only Wednesday.”

  “Why does that matter? Come.” She turned and walked away.

  “Well, there you go,” Kurwin said, elbowing him. “Have fun.”

  Omar felt dizzy. He downed the remainder of his beer and slid out of the booth. Rain was waiting for him beside the beaded curtains. When he reached her, she remained standing before the doorway.

  “She’s new,” Rain said. “And she’s scared. She only wants to talk to someone, so I figured it would be a good first for you. I didn’t charge her the full price, but I’ll pay you in full, if you make her happy.”

  “What does that mean? What do you want me to do?”

  “Just make her happy. You figure out how.” Rain pulled the curtain aside. “She’s in the booth in the back. Wearing a blue shirt.”

  Omar nodded and ducked under the beads. He found the lady in the blue shirt easily enough. She looked about his mother’s age. She was pale and very thin, and she watched him approach with wide eyes.

  Omar sat across from her. “Hey.”

  “Hay-o,” she said. No smile.

  What am I doing here? He stared at her for too long, until she looked to her lap. Then words came out of his mouth. “What’s your name?”

  “Cacia.”

  “I’m Omar. Where do you task?”

  “Sector three. Textiles. I like your shirt.”

  Of course she did. “Are you sad, Cacia?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged, feeling like Mason trying to be a doctor of the brain.

  “Something in your eyes.”

  She blinked, and tears fell to her lap, tears that hadn’t been there seconds ago. “I just feel really alone.”

  “Yeah, well, this isn’t a world that encourages real friendships.”

  “That’s so true,” she said, suddenly eager. “I thought I had a friend, but she wasn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “She blamed me for something that went wrong at the office. She did it because our task director liked me, but she liked him. So she made me look bad to make herself look good. And he believed her. And I was demoted.” She gasped, choking back a sob.

  “I’m sorry,” Omar said. “That’s horrible.” And it was. People here didn’t care about anyone but themselves.

  “They were both my best friends, but she betrayed me and he believed her. So I never really had any friends, did I? It was all a lie.”

  Omar shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe not a lie. And he’ll find out what she did, eventually. Liars are always caught at
some point. Then he’ll know he can’t trust her.”

  “But that won’t fix things with me.”

  Yeah. “Probably not.”

  “So what can I do?”

  Omar recalled the advice Zane had given him a few weeks back. “Forget them. You have to decide who you want to be. And you have to like that person and believe in that person no matter what anyone else says.” He paused, thinking over how that had sounded. How like Zane. Omar added his own thought. “But you need to find true friends. There’s no pleasure in a life lived alone.”

  “Being alone means you have fewer problems,” she said.

  “Then why are you here?”

  Cacia smiled through the tears. “Because I wanted some company.”

  She’d come here and paid for company. That was so sad. Though not as sad as the guy who got paid to hang out with people because he was hooked on stims. “I used to think being alone was good because I could do what I wanted and I didn’t have to answer to anybody. But looking back, my family was only trying to protect me.”

  “I don’t understand that word. Family.”

  It was so easy to forget just how different these people were. But they were still human. “In the Safe Lands, everyone lives alone. Everyone seeks their own pleasures, no matter who gets hurt. This nation is fragmented. There’s no community here. Have you ever experienced true intimacy? I don’t mean sex. I mean knowing a person. Loving that person more than you love yourself. Being vulnerable to that person. I have, I think.” He pictured Shaylinn and all the ways he’d hurt her and how she’d always forgiven him. Did she believe he was dead right now? “It’s painful sometimes, but in a beautiful way. She loved me despite my mistakes. She loved me anyway. She forgave me.”

  “You think I should forgive them?”

  “Maybe. Because when you live without friends, you become selfish, concerned only with your own needs or rights to have your needs met. And you can come here and pay to be with a man. Or you can go on the grid and tap someone and get your thrill that way. But it’s an imitation of real love. It’s easy. And cheap. And shallow. And selfish. And if that’s all you want from this world, take it. Have a party.

  “But I want more. I want to know people. To see them and touch them and speak to their faces. I want to live with them, fight with them, and apologize to them. I want that pain and joy and difficulty — because it’s real. What you have here in the Safe Lands, it’s a mockery of what is real and good and hard and deep.”

  “But relationships are fragile,” she said. “My co-taskers hurt me. I can depend on myself. If I task hard and save, I can create security for myself.”

  “So again I ask, why are you here?”

  “Because I want to feel better. My neighbor came here and told me the pleasure would cover the pain.”

  “It won’t. There’s nothing lonelier than living only to please yourself. I’ve taken from others all my life. And I whined. ‘Poor me. Look at what everyone else has.’ But in my search for gaining the world, I lost what little good I had. Don’t you see? Life is about giving, not taking. It’s about loving others more than you love yourself.”

  Cacia sniffed. “You’re so weird. There’s no such thing as love.”

  “No such thing? Love covers all wrongs. Love is kindness and patience and discipline and trust. Waters can’t quench it or wash it away. It binds us together in unity. It covers endless amounts of mistakes. And perfect love — ah, perfect love drives out even the darkest fears. Love . . . Cacia, love never fails.”

  She laughed. “You’re a songwriter, raven. How can you be so young and so wise?”

  “Because I’ve made a ton of mistakes. And people love me anyway.” Shaylinn, Jemma, Levi, Mason, and now Mother, Shanna, and Aunt Janie. They shouldn’t love him, but they did. They’d forgiven him. Why?

  Because they had love.

  A verse came to him then from deep inside his memory. “We love because he first loved us.”

  “Let me tell you a story,” Omar said. “Once upon a time there was darkness. And a voice came out of that darkness and said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

  “Light? Had the power gone out?”

  “Cacia, just hush and let me tell the story, okay?”

  “Okay. Gosh.”

  And Omar told the story.

  CHAPTER

  11

  It was time for all the cattle to be vaccinated, so Mason started at Pen 1 and drove the cattle, six at a time, out of the pen and into the cattle lane. They were good-natured and went where Mason urged them to go, but it was tricky to get them into the cattle lane gate. Once he did, however, they moved quickly down the path, past all eighteen pens, all the way to the end of the row.

  He saw Scorpion on his enormous black horse in the second row, but thankfully Scorpion’s back was to him. Mason couldn’t bring more than six head at a time into the crowding tub, because if it was too full, the cattle couldn’t move. When the first cow reached the tub, Mason had to squeeze past them all and open the door. The heavy iron half door squeaked as he pushed it. Its hinges were rusted and could use oil.

  Once the door was open, Mason herded the animals inside. The bang of cattle bumping against the chute walls sounded like the tribal drums from Jack’s Peak. Once each cow was inside, Mason shut the door behind him and chased them into the chute system. This wasn’t difficult — the cattle knew where they were going. Mason squeezed past them again, opened the alley gate, and the first cow ambled through. The others followed.

  The hum of the hydraulic chute motor purred like one of the Old generators in Glenrock. Wayd was ahead of Mason and helped move each cow up to the chute. Over and over, a cow ran inside until his head came out the other end, where the press caught him and held him until the vet could check him over and administer the vaccine.

  Then the vet released the cow and Wayd steered it back into the cattle lane.

  The repetition meant the hours passed by quickly, and soon Mason was on his way to sector six to visit Omar at the poultry slaughterhouse.

  Mason had been tasking in the feedlot for nearly a week now, and he’d just about gotten used to the smell of cow manure. But sector six had a different stench. The chicken manure wasn’t pleasant, but there was a rotting smell too. A smell of death that hung on the air.

  He had to ask several people before he found his brother. As Mason walked over, Omar was wrestling some chickens into a flat rubber crate. Every time he tried to close the lid, a bird escaped and he had to chase it down. With Mason’s help, he managed to wrestle the lid shut. Then Omar set it on a conveyor belt, which pulled it inside a dark chute that went into the building.

  “Where does it go?” Mason asked.

  “The slaughterhouse. Trust me, you don’t want a tour, Mr. Vegetarian.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. So where is this incinerator?”

  Omar pointed to the far corner of the yard. “Over there.”

  They crossed the strange metal floor, which Mason soon figured out was a grid that allowed feces to fall beneath the surface. The incinerator was a bright red barrel the size of a Safe Lands car, with a hinged black door. Blue and silver pipes curled out from the incinerator’s sides and toward the ceiling.

  “This is good timing,” Omar said as he put on a pair of thick gloves. “We burned some birds a while ago, so it’s cooled down enough that I can open it.” Omar gripped the handle, pulled down until his actions produced a loud clank, then opened the heavy metal door.

  Inside was a chamber of smooth, dirty steel walls, like some sort of massive oven. There were two holes in one side and a rectangular hole in the very front bottom. Light gray ash was scattered on the bottom in clumps.

  Omar gripped the rectangular hole with his gloved fingers. “This is the ash pit.” He grabbed something that looked like a large hoe, poked it inside the incinerator, and scraped the ash into the ash pit. The hoe made an awful sound scraping over the steel surface. When he got most of i
t, he traded for a hand broom and brushed the rest into the hole. When he finished, he crouched on the side of the incinerator and pulled out a long drawer. It too scraped as he pulled it out. It was filled with gray ash. Omar carried the drawer over to a dumpster and emptied it, tapping it until all the ash fell out. In the sunlight that beamed through open windows above, Mason could see the particles dance in the air around his brother.

  “They use this ash to make cinderblocks,” Omar said.

  “That’s interesting.” And disturbing. That some of these buildings could be made from the remains of chickens and who knew what other animals. And he’d never seen a graveyard in the Safe Lands either, so they likely cremated people as well. Mason shuddered.

  Omar carried the drawer back and replaced it. Then he walked around Mason to a waist-high bin on wheels. He wheeled it over to the incinerator, and Mason saw that it was full of dead chickens or chunks of dead chickens. Omar tossed a few handfuls into the incinerator and wheeled the bin out of the way.

  “Back up.” Omar pulled Mason away until they were a good ten feet from the open incinerator door. “Stay here.” Then Omar walked over to the side of the incinerator. “Okay, watch this.” He pressed a button.

  The incinerator growled, then flames gushed out of the side of the chamber. It sounded like a waterfall of fire and looked like an oversized blowtorch. Omar released the button, but inside the birds still burned.

  “Come closer now,” Omar said.

  Mason inched toward the open door.

  His brother stepped up beside him. “See it? See the feathers?”

  Mason did see. Bits of feathers and ash circled in the air above the flame, the hot air a current for them to ride on.

  “Well?” Omar asked. “Do you know how to do it?”

  It tickled Mason that Omar had put on a full demonstration to show Mason something he already understood. “In theory, yes. But it will take some trial and error. And I’m not sure where we’d get the supplies. We’d need a lot of fabric.”

  “But it’s a good idea, isn’t it?”

  Mason patted Omar on the back. “It’s a great idea, brother. Let me think on it.”