by Tania Hutley
“Don’t feel upset for doing the things you’ve done. Edward Morelle thought you were unpredictable, but I’ve come to know you better than he did. The one thing I could count on is that you never flinch from doing what you perceive is the right thing. You and Cale are alike that way.” He chuckles. “But you surprised me when you transferred ownership of the Morelle factories to the Fist. It’s fortunate I didn’t delay becoming President Morelle any longer. Thankfully, I still have time to reverse the transfer.”
I let go of the pod and stalk to the door, moving stiffly. “In Deiterra I asked you what kind of future you’re creating, and you never answered me. Will you tell me now?”
He follows me through the library. “I’ve already made it clear that I want a unified land. Triton and Deiterra need to become one.”
“One country, with you at the wheel. You want power over it all.” I lead him into the hallway, heading toward the living room.
“Only the strongest leader can forge a path to take a billion people into a better future.”
“Will your version of the future mean more misery for Old Triton?”
“Change must occur slowly to avoid disruption. But eventually, Old Triton will benefit.”
“Slow change won’t help the people who are suffering now.” I reach the middle of the living room and stop, turning to face him. “You know what I think? One person shouldn’t have this much power, no matter how smart they are.”
President Morelle’s face is impassive. “Deiterra and Triton will be safe in my hands. Now the Beast is dead, I’ll take control of his factories. Once the consortium is gone and I run all the factories in Old Triton, I’ll improve conditions globally, rather than piecemeal, the way you attempted to do.”
The stiffness is slowly leaving my body. I flex my muscles, pumping more blood into them and testing how they feel. My human body is still strong. And thanks to my recent use of my improved Leopard Skin, I might have grown even stronger.
I doubt I could win a fight against Sentin now he’s using President Morelle’s Skin, but I need to do something. He’s not the only one with an idea of what the future should be like, and in my version, President Morelle doesn’t become dictator-for-life, or let Old Triton suffer.
“What about me?” I ask.
“You could work with me,” he suggests. “You’re resourceful and clever. I counted on you to negotiate the peace treaty with Otho, and you didn’t let me down.”
I grit my teeth, forcing myself not to say something I’ll regret. He wants me to work with him after tricking me into thinking he was dead? Not going to happen.
But I need to keep him talking, to give Keren and Spade more time. I’m not entirely sure they’ll do what I asked them to, and even if they step up, it’ll take them a while.
“Lay it out for me,” I suggest, walking to the large feature window in the living room, and gazing out at both Triton and Deiterra. “Tell me everything you have planned. Help me see what you see.”
I force my gaze to stay up, so I keep looking out at the Deiterran wall and the green fields beyond it instead of dropping my eyes. Felicity fell from this window, and the image is all too fresh in my mind. I don’t want to glance down at the ground far below.
Sentin joins me at the window, standing beside me. He wobbles a little in President Morelle’s trademark high-heeled shoes. It took me a while to get used to them too.
“Triton’s technology will transform the Deiterran landscape,” he says. “While their land is becoming more productive to feed a greater population, some New Tritoners will find ways to cross the wall. The elite will go first, searching for a lifestyle they can’t have here in Triton, with the means to buy or influence their way into a land that will remain officially off-limits for many years.”
“And then?”
“As more people settle on Deiterran lands, the Deiterran economy will prosper, and population pressures in Triton will eventually ease.”
“In New Triton, you mean?”
“To begin with. I know you’re concerned about the people of Old Triton, but without their efforts, Triton’s economy would grind to a halt. We can improve their conditions, but stability will require an active working class. That will only change once the factories are fully automated, and a new social structure is in place.”
Sentin speaks for some time, laying out his plans. I listen with only half my attention, trying to estimate how long it might take Keren and Spade to do what I asked.
“What if something happened to all the factories?” I ask when he stops talking. “Say they were all destroyed. What then?”
Sentin frowns. “Hypothetically speaking?”
“If there were no factories, what would it mean for New Triton? Walk me through it.”
As he spells out the terrible consequences, I keep asking questions. Having his plans succeed has made Sentin more talkative than usual, but I doubt it’ll last much longer.
Sure enough, he eventually checks the time on his band. “I have other things to attend to,” he says. “Before I go, I need to know whether you’ve decided to work with me or against me.”
He stares fixedly out at Deiterra while he waits for my answer, as though he’s worried I’ll be able to tell what he’s thinking if he meets my gaze. It almost seems like he’s holding his breath, although I don’t know why he wants me on his side. President Morelle is only a little taller than I am, and her frame is deceptively slight, but I know firsthand how powerful Sentin must be feeling, especially as he stares at the cities and farmland he plans to rule.
“What if I think what you’re doing is wrong?” I ask.
He lets out a breath. “In that case, I would ask you to leave the building, and our paths are unlikely to cross again. But I expect you could find a home with your mother, now that she has one.”
“You wouldn’t try to kill me?”
“I see no benefit in that.” He frowns at me. “Is that your answer? Will you insist we need to be enemies?”
I put my hand on the window, feeling the coldness of the pane. “I need to tell you something.” I let out a long breath. “I did something that’s going to mess up all your plans.”
“What’s that?”
“Down there.” I point to the Deiterran wall. “I asked the Fist to transport the Beast’s cache of explosives to the wall and blow it up.”
“You what?” I’ve never heard Sentin sound more startled. He frowns, his eyes raking the length of the wall, searching for movement.
When it comes, the explosion sounds like a long rumble rather than a bang. It’s quieter than I expected, perhaps because we’re a long way up and the sound is muffled. As the rumble starts, a cloud of dust rises from the wall, blocking our view of what might be happening beneath it. The floor moves under my feet, the enormous scraper swaying.
Sentin draws in a sharp breath, bringing both hands up to the glass. His attention is totally focused on what’s going on outside. He doesn’t see me move behind him.
As the dust billows higher and the rumbling grows louder, I gather all my strength and shove him as hard as I can into the window.
Sentin doesn’t know that when this pane of glass was replaced, I told them to use normal glass instead of the extra thick, bullet-proof stuff he had installed in the rest of the windows.
The glass shatters and we both fall through it.
Twenty-Three
For a panicked moment, I’m falling just like Felicity did, and pure, icy-cold terror floods my brain, wiping out all thought.
Then I grab for the edge of the window. Broken glass slices into my hands, but I manage to close my fingers around the window frame. Hanging below the window, I dangle in the howling wind.
Below me, President Morelle falls.
If I wasn’t so strong, there’s no way I wouldn’t fall too. As it is, it takes every bit of my strength to haul myself back inside. Long before I manage to struggle to my feet in the living room, the president has disappeared far belo
w, lost in the dust and smoke that’s still billowing from the Deiterran wall.
Wincing, I pick slivers of glass from my hands, then strip the cover from one of the couch cushions and press my palms into it to soak up the blood.
There’s no time to clean myself up any more than that. I need to get out of here.
In the elevator on the way down to the ground floor, I realize I’m trembling. Sentin must have opened his eyes in his human body by now. Just like me, he must be flesh and blood again.
My Leopard Skin is probably still in the Phoenix Industries building, in the place I was standing when Sentin wiped my chip. I have no way to transfer into it anymore, and no scanner to recode my chip. Besides, President Morelle already announced a total ban on Skins. I imagine the stompers will collect it, and destroy it. The thought is terrible, but I feel numb, like too much is happening too fast for reality to sink in.
The wall has come down.
Even though I’m the one who planned the destruction of the wall, I can’t believe it’s happened. I took a guess at what might happen to Triton without it, but there’s no way to know. I doubt even Sentin could predict what might come next.
When I get to the ground floor, I walk quickly away from the Morelle scraper, keeping my head down and using the stolen cushion cover to hide my bloody hands and the fact I have no band.
A small crowd is gathering at the side of the scraper, where the president’s body must have landed. After a fall from that height, there won’t be much left of her. She’ll probably only be identified by the band that was on her wrist, and I doubt anyone will be able to tell she was a Skin and not a real person.
More people are heading toward where the dust and smoke are still rising, and I join them, trying to mingle with them though they’re New Tritoners and I don’t look like them. Still, I make it away from the scraper without being stopped.
The bullets that take passengers down to Old Triton are jammed full, with lines of people waiting to board. Even the long twenty-eight-floor stairwell is packed, but eventually I make it down to Deiterra, forcing my way through the crowd. It seems like everyone in Triton wants to see what’s going on for themselves.
The closer I get to the Deiterran wall, the thicker the smoke and dust become. It’s gritty in my throat, and so dense that many of the people I’m walking with give up. They turn back to where the air is clearer, presumably to watch and re-watch footage of the explosion on their bands.
I pull my T-shirt up over my nose and mouth and keep going, though my eyes are streaming and I’m coughing into my shirt. I don’t stop until I’m in front of the rubble that used to be the Deiterran wall.
A figure emerges from the gloom and stops in front of me.
“Hey,” says Cale, his voice muffled by the cloth he’s wrapped around his nose and mouth.
“Hey yourself.”
He steps forward to wrap me in his arms, and I bury my face in his shoulder. Through the cloth over my nose, I catch a sharp chemical smell on his clothes. The same scent that was in the Beast’s weapons room.
We stand like that for a very long time, holding each other without talking while the smoke and dust gradually settle.
As the air gets slowly fresher, more people start emerging from the darkness of Old Triton, gaping at what’s happened to the wall.
I twist in Cale’s arms so I can see it for myself, and he lets me go. He fumbles for my hand, but I wince and draw it away.
“You’re hurt,” he says.
“Only scratches.”
His brow creases and though I can only see his worried eyes above the cloth still wrapped around his face, I can tell he wants to make a big deal of my bloody hands.
“Come on,” I say, picking my way toward the still-hazy pile of rubble. “Let’s take a look.”
Somebody brushes past me, a woman who’s hurrying toward the wall. More people are behind her. Cale and I join the flow, clambering over rocks and giant chunks of concrete. Cale sticks close beside me, and we both see it at the same moment. His intake of breath is audible through the cloth over his mouth.
So much of the wall has come down, the fields of Deiterra are clearly visible beyond it, and Old Tritoners are starting to pour through the ruins, scrambling over the rubble and climbing down into the open space beyond. From our vantage point, I can see some have already reached the giant trees and are staring up into their branches, or reaching out to touch their trunks.
Cale and I follow them, finally getting clear of the smoke and dust as we cross to the other side. With more and more people passing us from behind, it feels like a flood rushing into Deiterra. The sun is hot and bright like it is in New Triton, highlighting the dirty grey clothes and sallow skins of the sinkers around us.
Cale pulls the cloth off his face. “They’re going to eat the Deiterrans’ food and trample on their crops.”
With my own face exposed, I drag in a deep breath of fresh air. “It’ll be chaos for a while, but we’ll have to find a way to co-exist without a wall.”
In front of us, in the shade of one of the giant trees, an old woman is swaying as though she’s going to fall over. Tears are cutting tracks through the dirt on her face.
“Are you okay?” Cale takes her arm.
The woman’s face is weathered and her hands are twisted claws. Broken veins spread thin red lines over her cheeks. She reeks of street brew. A rough sleeper, no doubt, and my guess is her body won’t hold out much longer.
She blinks at Cale, then turns her filmy, bloodshot eyes to me. “It’s so beautiful.” Her hoarse voice is barely louder than a whisper. “Has this always been here?”
“It has, Gama,” I tell her gently.
“If I’d known…” She doesn’t say what she might have done, but sinks to the ground and tugs a bottle of street brew out of her coat. She offers it to us, but we shake our heads.
Cale and I leave her sitting under the tree, and walk a little further, drawn to the rows of plants as though we’re seeing them for the first time.
“What happens now?” he asks.
I run one of my uninjured fingers over the top of a leaf. “Old Tritoners will have a choice to make. Stay in Triton, or take their chances in Deiterra.”
“I don’t think Deiterra is ready for an huge influx of people.”
“The stockpiles of food we found in the Beast’s building will help for a while, and I bet we can find more stockpiles in the buildings of his cronies. There are five more industrialists in the consortium. It’s about time they shared their supplies.”
Cale is silent for a while. He’s running his own fingers over the tops of the plants, staring intently down at them as though they can give him all the answers he needs.
“What about the factories?” he asks.
“The Fist owns all of President Morelle’s factories now. They’ll need to offer good wages to attract workers. And so will the other factory owners.”
He shakes his head, looking back at the Old Tritoners still pouring through the gap in the wall. “Otho isn’t going to like this.”
“We’ll help him handle it. Tori’s with him, and she’s resourceful. And that intensive farming you were talking about? We need to get it working.”
“There’s a lot to do.”
I nod. “We’ll need to all pull together and help. You and me, the Fist, Otho, Tori, and everyone else we can recruit. The wall is gone now, and we can’t put it back. We have no choice but to make this work.”
“You know what?” he says slowly. “I think we can do it. Not that it’ll be easy, but we can find a way.” His gaze meets mine and in the sunlight, his eyes look pure gold. They’re tiger’s eyes.
My heart lifts, and I smile back at him. “Of course we can. We’ll do it together.”
Stepping forward, he runs his hand over my cheek. I barely notice when his fingers brush my scars. All I can think of is how warm his eyes are, and how much I’ve missed the feel of his lips on mine.
And when his fac
e bends to mine, I can think of nothing at all.
Epilogue
“We’ll have vegetables,” says Ma. “With creamy potatoes.”
Fussing in the kitchen of her new house, she looks so happy, it makes my heart feel light.
“Not stew?” I make a show of slumping in my chair at the dining table, pretending to be disappointed. “I really wanted stew.”
“Vegetables,” she repeats, her smile getting wider. “I want the freshest I can lay my hands on for tomorrow night. Have you tasted vegetables from Deiterra? I might be able to get some at the market. Never mind the expense, this is a special occasion.”
I exchange a glance with Cale, who’s sitting beside me.
“Has William actually said he’s coming?” Cale asks carefully.
“I spoke to him yesterday, and he promised.” Ma brings a pitcher of sweet tea to the table and pours us all a glass. Her grey hair is neatly trimmed in a new style, and she looks a lot less exhausted than she used to. She has a smudge of white powder on her cheek from whatever cake is currently in the oven, producing such a delicious smell.
Since moving into her small one-bedroom apartment in New Triton, Ma’s cooked so much food, it would take us months to eat it all. And still, she keeps up filling up more storage containers. Pretty soon we’ll need to start giving food away.
And as tiny as it is, she’s filled her apartment with plants, until there’s barely enough room to move around. Pots line every windowsill, their leaves embracing the New Triton sun. The aromas that drift from the herbs in her kitchen compete with her cooking smells in the best possible way. No wonder she looks so happy here.
“Does William know Cale and I are coming for dinner tomorrow?” I ask.
“Of course, love. I told him.”
“And he still said he’d turn up?”
“Seven o’clock sharp.”