Daniel Miller: TRST founder
Born 1983 —Final Liberation 2033
Taylor James: Founder of the enforcers
Born 1995 —Final Liberation 2045
Poet Levon: Theater entertainer
Born 2016 —Liberated to Seven 2066
Joie Champion: Communications anchor
Born 2021 —Liberated to Three 2071
Bristol Cruz: Engineering
Born 2032 —Liberated to Five 2072
Liberated. So strange. And too bad for Bristol Cruz. Skottie had said they’d changed the liberation date to forty back in seventy-two. Bad timing to lose ten years of your life, even if you were supposedly born into the next one.
When Skottie showed up, they took the elevator to the sixth floor. “You’re going to love this,” Skottie said. “One of my femmes tasks in Surveillance as a gatekeeper over the RC.”
“What’s a gatekeeper?”
“She’s in charge of the locks. Nothing opens unless she says so. Now that, my peer, is a position of power.”
The doors opened to the clamor of voices. Surveillance consisted of rows of narrow hallways lined with massive Wyndo monitors, three screens down and a dozen across, each screen divided into nine or twelve images. People wearing headsets sat on rolling chairs facing the screens, one person to every six screens.
Skottie led him to the far left of the room where there were several little offices behind glass walls. He walked straight ahead to the office in the left corner and tapped on the glass.
A curvy woman looked up from an L-shaped desk. She had lots of curly black hair that poofed out around her face. She grinned at Skottie and waved him in. Skottie opened the door and entered. Omar followed.
“Hey, Camella, how you doing?”
“Just working, trigger. Kind of quiet this morning. Who’s your friend?”
“This is Omar. He’s new to our world.”
“New?” Camella’s eyes shifted up and down Omar’s body. “You look good, Omar. Where you from, baby face?”
Omar’s chest filled with heat at her scrutiny. “Glenrock.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know where that is.”
“Cammy, show Omar what you do,” Skottie said.
Camella rolled her eyes. “Come on back, then.”
Skottie grabbed Omar by the sleeve and dragged him around behind Camella’s desk. She had three screens. One huge one hung on the wall on the long side of desk. It had nine images up at once, but they were changing every few seconds. The other two screens were side by side, built into the GlassTop desk. One showed a close-up of a door, and the other showed a screen that said SimTag Authorization System and had a keyboard beneath it.
“What happens is, I get a tap when one of the enforcers needs a door opened. Then I pull up the location on my GlassTop. The enforcer has to verify who he is, and I check each name in the Authorization System. Once I’ve cleared them all, I code in the entry, and the door will open. Then I log it in.”
“No one can open a prison door without you?” Omar asked. “Not even Otley?”
She chuckled. “Much to Otley’s chagrin, no. Even he needs —” Camella touched her ear and turned away. “Please verify identification.”
“Who’s she talking to? I don’t hear anything.”
“SimTalk. You should get one. They shoot it in your ear just like a SimTag, then you can talk without your Wyndo.” Skottie waved Omar over to the office door. “Hey,” he whispered. “Wait outside for me, will you? I want to talk to Cammy alone for a minute.”
“Yeah, sure.” Omar slipped out of the office and turned around. He didn’t want Skottie to think he was eavesdropping, so he strolled down one row of monitors, then another, looking at images of pedestrians, streets, offices, medical facilities, holding rooms, and stores.
This must be where enforcers monitored the feeds from all those yellow cameras.
A man tapped Omar’s arm. “Sir? Harem women in the hallway.” He glanced up from his screen long enough to realize Omar wasn’t the “sir” he’d been looking for. “Sorry.” He called out to an enforcer at the end of the hallway, “Sir, the harem women?”
Omar leaned in to study the image of a group of women walking down a wide hallway. He recognized Naomi, Jemma, Mia, and … was that Shay? His heart thudded inside his chest. It was his first look at anyone from home. And they looked good, dressed in Safe Lands clothes. Omar felt a little lighter—clearly they were much happier here than Glenrock. His bringing them here had made it possible.
“There should be four heading back to the dormitory from the spa,” a nasal voice said. “Tyra Grant and Kendall Collin should be with them. Can I help you?” the enforcer asked Omar.
“I’m just looking,” Omar said.
“On whose authority?”
“Uh … I’m meeting with General Otley in a few minutes.”
“Then you should wait in the reception area on the first floor, Mr. Strong.”
A rush of heat seized Omar. Was he in trouble? How’d this man know his name? “I’m sorry.” He hurried to the elevator. Forget waiting for Skottie. He glanced back at the enforcer, wincing when he saw him talking to himself. Hopefully not speaking to Otley with one of those SimTalk implants.
Omar went straight to the first floor reception area, announced himself to the woman behind the desk, and sat down.
By the time the woman called him, he’d waited forty minutes.
Otley’s office was plain and a tenth of the size of the task director general’s. Bright lights glared down on a cracked GlassTop desk, three mismatched metal file cabinets, a set of black chairs on Omar’s side of the desk, and Otley himself, sitting behind his desk with his beefy arms folded across his massive chest.
Omar would sketch Otley as a giant boar ramming its tusks into the side of a house. The children would like that. But the children were in the academy now.
Otley grunted. “Sit, little rat.”
Omar sank onto the black metal chair and studied the tusk in Otley’s nose.
“Don’t like traitors,” Otley growled, “so I don’t like you. Don’t want you in my department. Don’t want you owning a rank. But I have little choice, so here’s what’s going to happen: Report to training every day from eight in the morning ‘til five at night. Take an hour off for lunch. Training is closed Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, so stay home those days. Don’t want to see you. My people don’t want to see you. Snoop around again, and you’re cleaning streets. Get me?”
That enforcer in surveillance had tapped Otley. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Get out.”
Omar stumbled over the legs of his chair but managed to make it out of Otley’s office alive. He went straight to the elevators and up to the second floor.
Training turned out to be school, which had started three weeks ago. There were twenty guys in the classroom, all sitting at GlassTop desks. Omar saw Skottie and Charlz in the back.
Enforcer Stiller, a thick man with a flat nose and squinty eyes, was Omar’s instructor. He asked the class to read up on tactics, then sat with Omar at the back of the room.
“So you got your captain’s stripes without taking one minute of classes,” Stiller said. “I bet you’re proud of that, aren’t you?”
Omar shrugged one shoulder and fought a smile.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. TeleFlash, shell. None of us are impressed that Renzor pulled rank to get you a promotion, got it? So watch your back, Captain. The guys like to hammer cheats. And I won’t stop a good hammering every now and then, if you get me.”
Omar wanted to run, but he sat very still and forced himself to maintain eye contact.
“First, shell, get some muscle on those arms. I’m going to teach you pretty much everything you need to know for your head, but I can’t make you strong and neither can your last name. Most of these guys have been training for years. So run to the gym. Move in, if you have to. You’re going to hurt for a while, but stick with it. How old a
re you?”
Omar looked around and lowered his voice. “Sixteen.”
“Walls. You should be at the boarding school, kid. All right, sit in back with Charlz. He’s too thick to know you’re a shell. You make friends with him, you might survive training.” He nodded to where Charlz was sitting in the back row. Skottie was sitting just in front of Charlz, reading from a Wyndo. “The manual is on the GlassTop.”
“Yes, sir.” Omar sat at a GlassTop desk in the back row beside Charlz.
Skottie turned and whispered, “What happened to you upstairs?”
“An enforcer kicked me out and tapped Otley.”
“My fault there,” Skottie said. “Shouldn’t have abandoned you.”
“Mr. Skott,” Stiller said.
Skottie turned back to his Wyndo.
Omar tapped on the surface of his desk, opening little folders until he located the manual. He perused the table of contents. There were sections on arrest and booking procedures, investigation techniques, radio communications, report writing, weapons care and safety, marksmanship, stress management, community relations, hate crimes, missing persons, patrol procedures, building searches, vehicle stops, use of deadly force, and shooting policy.
Overwhelmed, Omar closed his eyes. Levi used to leave him in charge of the lookout in Glenrock, which had always felt like a child’s assignment. When Renzor had promised to make Omar an officer in the enforcers, Omar had imagined that someone would give him a gun and put him in charge of some men. His naiveté stung, as did the realization that he was again the youngest, that Otley hated him, and that some of his new classmates might resent him.
He wished he were standing in the lookout back home and that none of this had happened.
He shook the thoughts away. This was home now. And he had to prove to everyone that this place was better. Because if it wasn’t … If he’d done all this for nothing …
Later, while Omar, Skottie, and Charlz were eating lunch in the cafeteria, Charlz started in on a whole apple pie, the flaky crust the same color as his skin.
“They got the best desserts in this caf.” He pushed his tray toward Omar. “Try it.”
The mere idea that a flake from Charlz’s skin had fallen onto that pie made Omar queasy. “Thanks, I’m full.”
Skottie inhaled a long breath on his vaporizer, then tipped his head back and blew a plume of black vapor above his head, leaving behind a spicy smell. “Tonight, we take you out. We show you the Safe Lands DarkScene.”
Charlz howled like some kid pretending to be a wolf. “Ginger Oak, please, Skottie, please?”
Skottie nodded in slow motion, his frizzy brown curls swaying over his eyes. “Oh, yes. Ginger Oak for the outsider. Precise. It’ll be a night to remember. I still can’t believe you’ve never paired up. That’s prude.”
Omar’s cheeks burned. He wished he’d never told them.
“We should pair him up with Diamoniqua,” Charlz said. “Think she’ll do it?”
“For enough credits, she’ll do anything!”
The guys roared at their private joke, Charlz laughing so hard his neck turned pink.
Omar wasn’t certain he could be one of the guys—especially without violating the rules the task director had set him to. But he was certainly going to try.
After classes, Skottie drove Omar to a store where he purchased his own Wyndo transmitter. He paid extra for the program that would allow him to design his own SimArt and couldn’t wait to learn to use it. Then they went to Surface, and Omar got a SimTalk installed in his right ear.
After that, Skottie dropped Omar off at the Task of Art store because he had planned to meet Camella for dinner. “I’ll pick you up around nine for Ginger Oak, okay?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Omar said.
Omar entered the store. Charcoal, pencil shavings, and the chemical smell of oil paints made him happy. He was more intoxicated by the sight of art supplies than he’d been from the drinks he’d had at Main Event last night.
He grabbed pads of paper, several canvasses, two sets of oil paints, paintbrushes, some turpentine, an easel, a palette knife, some charcoal pencils, a package of pastels, a pack of colored pencils, and some art markers. He stopped himself from taking one of everything in the store—unlike in his raids of the abandoned stores around Glenrock, these items would remain just as numerous and varied the next time he came.
When the clerk saw all that Omar intended to purchase, he asked, “You sure you can afford all this?”
Was it a lot? Omar wished he’d paid more attention when Dallin had explained costs. “I think so.”
“Most enforcers only make four hundred credits a week.”
“Oh. Well, I’ve been saving up,” Omar said.
The clerk raised one brow and added up Omar’s purchases. “Okay, that comes to 1,349.29 credits.”
All this stuff was worth three weeks’ credits? He pressed his fist against the pad and waited. He had millions of credits. Didn’t he? Maybe the task director had taken them back or hadn’t given them out yet.
The clerk suddenly gave him a wide smile. “Thank you, Mr. Strong. Let me put all this in some bags for you.”
Since Omar didn’t really know where he was, he wasn’t sure how to get home. He walked for several blocks, carrying his art bags, then, after seeing several people wave down a taxi, he tried it. The taxi cost him only twelve credits.
He carried his bags up to his Snowcrest apartment and set up his easel. He wanted to play with his new Wyndo, make a SimArt owl, or tap someone to try his new SimTalk implant, but he wanted to paint more. He hadn’t drawn or painted in days. Omar stood at his easel and used a piece of charcoal to sketch his neighbor Bel, from memory, from the waist up onto one of his new canvases. Once he was happy with the outline, he squeezed red, brown, orange, and white onto his pallete and started to paint her hair. He instantly noticed how soft the paint was, how smoothly it moved over the canvas. The colors came out exactly how they looked on the tubes, not like Old paints that were dull and thick and goopy or his homemade paints that were so thin.
When Artie tapped to tell Omar that Skottie was waiting downstairs, Omar almost didn’t want to leave.
Almost.
CHAPTER
16
Levi parked his rig in a grove of aspen, swung his rifle over his arm, and crept to the edge of the trees. A rocky expanse with tufts of wild grass separated his location from the northern edge of the Safe Lands. The outer wall stood three stories high and was wide enough to support a two-way road on top. Beyond that wall was the canal, then the inner wall. A Jeep was driving south along the outer wall at the moment, and Levi waited for it to pass out of sight. He’d be exposed as he approached the storm drain, but he couldn’t risk waiting until nightfall to get inside. Who knew what had happened to Jemma and the others already.
Once the trill of the Jeep’s motor had faded, Levi scrambled down the hill, keeping to the tall grass. He still wore the camouflage clothing he’d put on last night but had added the bulletproof vest, his backpack, a pair of gloves, and brown rubber chest waders he’d scavenged from a house in Denver City. They’d keep him dry from what he was about to wade through.
The sun was high in the sky; no sign of rain. That, and his own adrenaline, had him in a full sweat. He’d never been inside the Safe Lands, no matter how many times he and Jordan had dared one another. Elder Eli had instilled a fear of this place that Levi knew not to toy with.
Blackberry bushes scratched at his boots as he started up the hill to the wall. Overflow fed out of the bottom of the concrete wall in four large drains, evenly spaced around the bell-like perimeter. Each was a half circle, about six feet wide and four feet tall, covered with grates of crisscrossed iron. There was no way to swim through such small openings and no way to cut the iron that wouldn’t call attention to his presence. The grates had hinges on one side, padlocks on the other. The hinges were Levi’s way in. He repeatedly struck them with a hammer, checking his surroundings a
fter every five blows to make sure no one was approaching. After about an hour his strikes began to crush the concrete around the bolts into powder.
From there it wasn’t long before the bolts were loose enough for Levi to pull them out with his hammer, like nails. He pulled back the grate until he was able to slip past. His boots slushed in the water, and he tried not to think about what he was wading through.
Chest waders and gloves had been wonderful inventions of Old.
But it didn’t smell like waste water. It even looked clean. With great care, Levi pulled the grate back into place and edged through the flow, careful to make as little noise as possible. The tunnel that passed under the outer wall looked to be about fifteen feet long, though he couldn’t see where it let out from his position. All he could see was the inner concrete wall.
When he reached the opening, the sun warmed his face again. He stood in ankle-deep water in the mouth of the tunnel that branched off the main canal: a concrete gutter that cut a four-story gash around the Safe Lands compound, a manmade path for the river that was open to the sky. Levi’s storm drain had let him in at water level, leaving three stories of walls towering overhead. Why were the walls so deep? The water would never reach such a depth. He supposed the real reason was to keep people from getting out, which made him very aware of how exposed he was to anyone who might be patrolling the wall above.
The water didn’t look deep or fast, but he supposed the dam held back much of the flow. Still, he turned and slowly lowered himself off the storm drain’s ledge feet first, and was thankful to feel the bottom quickly. When he stood on the bottom of the canal, the water reached his waist. The surface was mucky under his boots. He swung his arms, slogging upriver, toward the city for what felt like miles upon miles. It was hard to tell from his position, but he knew from looking through his rifle scope up on the mountain that the Safe Lands had three areas separated by huge walls and gates. He should be in the middle area now, and guessed that Jemma and the others would be in the upper city, the farthest away from escape.
He stayed close to the outer wall, hoping such a position would make him invisible to patrols above. Every few yards, pipes opened into the canal from the inside wall, discharging trickles of brown waste water into the river. Most were about a foot in diameter, but there were a few bigger ones: some two feet in diameter, some about four. Levi hoped to find a six-footer, like the one he and his father had explored in Denver City. Large drains tended to lead right under city streets.
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