by Lyga, Barry
Lissa tugged at her poncho. “Let’s go. It’ll take a while to get through the Wreck.”
They began to make their way deeper into the Territory, carefully retracing the path they’d taken through the Wreck.
“What do you think it was this time?” Deedra asked, trying to take her mind off Rose. For some reason, she had difficulty not thinking about him, in a way she’d never experienced before. “Another gridhack?”
“Nah. Another false alarm, I bet.”
Deedra shrugged. The wikinets—the Territory-wide public-information system—would report later on the cause of the alarm. Maybe. Sometimes a Citizen Alert would be sounded, then canceled, with no reason offered, leaving everyone to wonder if it was just a glitch, a test, or something classified.
In the end, it didn’t matter, she realized. One way or the other, when the drones said shelter, you had to shelter. There was no other option.
Danger meant shelter. Somewhere out there, she knew, Rose had run. She hoped he’d found shelter. She hoped he would continue to.
She didn’t know why she hoped these things. But as she picked her way through the Wreck with Lissa, she realized when she thought of Rose, she was smiling.
From his perch above the claustrophobic crush of ancient metal and glass, in a hidden nook high up on a ruined bridge support, Rose watches Deedra thread her way into the distance through the Wreck with the other girl.
“Deedra,” he says quietly. Then, drawing it out, testing it, tasting the syllables: “Dee-dra. Deeeee-draaaaa.”
He purses his lips and begins to whistle.
PART 2
NEW GROWTH
CHAPTER 2
They never learned the cause of the Citizen Alert, and by the next day, it was forgotten, just like dozens of others over the years. It had probably been another gridhack attempt. They were happening more and more these days. The Magistrate said they were cyberattacks from Dalcord Territory, preparation for an invasion. Deedra wasn’t sure she believed that, mostly because she didn’t want to believe it.
Fortunately, she could believe what she chose to believe. The first time she’d logged into the wikinets—as a child at the orphanage—she’d become lost in a bewildering array of points, counterpoints, narratives, and counternarratives. Caretaker Hullay had assured her that the contradictions didn’t matter.
“Which one is true?” Deedra had asked. “I don’t understand.”
“History is still up for debate. No one really knows for sure. Any of them could be true. You have to decide which one you believe.”
“But I don’t want to believe one of them. I want to know what’s actually true.”
And Caretaker Hullay had indulged her with a patient smile, this one fraying and brittle. “Whatever you believe, that’s the truth.”
The idea of an all-out war among the Territories terrified her. So when the grid was hacked and the power went out, there was nothing to do but stay safe and wait it out. The power would come back. It always did. And in the meantime, she refused to believe war would come.
Sometimes it helped.
Days passed, and the abrasions on her palms from trying to climb up to the bridge slowly faded. Soon the only reminders she had of the day by the bridge were the weird finger-mirror (Lissa had given it to her as a gift) and the curiously powerful memory of the boy.
Of Rose.
She didn’t know why, but he stuck fast in her memory, embedded there like pebbles in soft tar. She could remember every detail of him, from his green eyes to his lithe, limber form.…
To the way he’d simply vanished.
Which was to be expected. That was the world—good things didn’t stay for long. And good people were rarer than good things.
Several days after the Citizen Alert, she crawled out of bed from underneath her roach netting. Her little unit was four floors up in a smallish building. Her vid blinked at her, which meant a news blip. She’d already maxed out her bandwidth ration for the month, so only news blips could come through. No great loss—other than vidding with Lissa, the wikinets were really only good for conflicting news reports about the Antarctic War.
AIR QUALITY: TENTATIVE, the blip read. MASKS ADVISED.
Deedra sighed. She rummaged in her cupboard for a fruit disc, chewed it down, and swallowed the gummy blob with water that trickled straight from the tap. Masks advised. There were more and more mask advisories. The air was getting worse. Sometimes she wished she could just stay inside on days like this, where the air was at least partly cleaned by scrubbers. Even when the grid went down, it was still better to wait it out for the hour or two it took to re-establish power. Why go outside?
In fact, WHY GO OUTSIDE? was the slogan emblazoned on billboards all over the Territory, showing Max Ludo’s smiling face with a word balloon asking the question. REMEMBER, another balloon proclaimed, IT’S SAFER INSIDE!
It was safer inside. That’s why Deedra never went anywhere without the knife she’d assembled from a piece of sturdy, jagged glass and some thick tape. She tucked it into her waistband at the small of her back.
“Yeah, safer inside,” she muttered, pulling on her poncho. “But then again, it’s more boring, too.”
The factory was a ten-minute walk from her unit. She met up with Lissa halfway there, and they fell into step with a group of slow-moving citizens headed the same direction. On a tentative air quality day, no one was out on the streets who didn’t have to be; most people stayed indoors, heeding Max Ludo’s advice.
For people like Deedra, though, there was no choice. It was either go to the factory and work for her food, water, and bandwidth rations, or stay home and miss out. She didn’t have the luxury of a family to backstop her.
“What are you doing out on such a bad air day?” she asked Lissa. “You could stay home.” Lissa had a brother, a sister, and two parents. Between the five of them, they were able to stockpile rations for rough days.
“Who knows what kind of trouble you’d get into without me around?” The lower half of Lissa’s face was obscured by the mask, but her eyes crinkled in a smile. “If I’m not here to keep you grounded, you’d start climbing something and wouldn’t stop until you broke through the cloud cover.”
The security gate at the factory groaned open as they approached. LUDO TERRITORY PRIDE FACILITY NO. 12, its official name, was stamped in now-rusting letters over the gate. But everyone who worked there called it L-Twelve.
It was hard, dirty work, but better than some of the other “Pride Facilities” throughout the Territory. The food-processing facilities were grimy and stank of rejected genetic combinations. The furniture facility’s air lingered with enormous motes of dust.
At L-Twelve, they built air scrubbers. Good, solid tech, designed to make the world a little better. To literally help people breathe a little easier. She was contributing here. Making a difference. The more air scrubbers, the better the air. The better the air, the better the world, right? She usually thought the addition of the word pride to the name of the factory was nothing more than propaganda, but when she thought of what she was actually building… Sometimes she was proud.
The building itself was a low, flat rectangle cobbled together of cinder block, brick, and metal sheeting. Once through the gate, they had to wait in line as each worker’s brand was scanned. It was the only way to be sure you got your earned ration for the day. It was a small thing, the matter of a brief moment in front of a camera, but it rankled Deedra.
Because the camera was mounted on the left, to scan everyone’s brands. And her brand was on the right. Every day, she had to turn around and go through backward.
She did it again today, feeling as conspicuous as ever, even though she’d been doing this for four years, ever since the orphanage shut down, putting her out into the Territory on her own at twelve. With so few people having children now, there was no longer a compelling need for the orphanage.
Just as well. She’d been miserable there. Now she took care of herself.<
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On the factory floor, they swapped out their personal masks for work masks, designed to filter out the particles thrown into the air by the machinery. L-Twelve’s innards were a single, wall-less space, subdivided only by the serpentine meander of conveyor belts studded at regular intervals with tool holsters mounted to the side. Deedra’s usual workstation was open, as was the one next to it, so Lissa and Deedra hurried to get to them first.
“Yes!” Lissa hissed in triumph. A ten-hour workday went a lot faster next to a friend.
They quickly scanned their tool holsters: powerdrivers, cliphammers, hex wrenches. “Is the Little Magistrate in today?” Lissa asked under her breath.
Deedra stripped off her poncho. It was too loose to wear around the conveyor belt, where it could be caught in the gears. As she bound up her hair—taking care to wind her ponytail down to cover her scar—she looked up and off to the right.
L-Twelve was two stories tall, but completely open from floor to ceiling. Except along the perimeter, where a series of offices jutted from the walls like misplaced bricks. One extra office was suspended in the very center of the factory, connected by a series of catwalks. It was positioned so that it was impossible to look into it from any angle on the floor, though the resident could see out to the floor however he liked.
That was the office of Jaron Ludo. Only son of the Magistrate. No older than Lissa or Deedra, but already in charge of the entire factory. Some days, he just stayed home and let his second-in-command or his personally selected floor monitors run things. It’s not like anyone could tell.
Except for Deedra. She’d realized one day that this particular workstation sat under an air duct from Jaron’s office. She couldn’t hear anything specific—just muffled noise. But early in the day, before the machinery started up, she could hear enough to tell if Jaron was watching that day. She tried to get this workstation whenever possible, though she’d never told Lissa how she could detect Jaron’s presence, only that she could. A little secret, just for herself.
Now she shrugged. She’d been listening since taking up her position. “Yeah,” she said at last. “He’s in today.”
“Great,” Lissa muttered.
Deedra didn’t share the hatred of Jaron most of her fellow workers fostered. He was just doing his job, like she did hers. “You’ll have to be on your best behavior,” she joked.
Lissa said nothing for a moment, her expression frozen. Then she blinked and shook her head and grinned as though everything was fine. “First time for everything.”
The start-work horn blared, and hundreds of pairs of eyes fixated on the spot on the conveyor belt immediately before them. Small screens built into the side of the belt lit up with the day’s instructions for each station. Deedra gnawed her bottom lip and selected a powerdriver from the tool holster. She’d be attaching a fan blade to a motor assembly.
“What am I building today?” Lissa asked in an overserious tone.
“‘We’re building safety, security, and the future,’” Deedra deadpanned, quoting the standard answer to that very question.
Another horn blared, followed by Jaron’s voice over the speakers. Deedra mouthed, Told you, to Lissa, who grinned.
“Begin the Patriot Oath,” Jaron ordered, and hundreds of voices spoke the familiar words as one:
“I am a good citizen. I follow the rules. I do as I’m told. I swear loyalty to the City and my Magistrate, for which he stands, one Territory, under his protection, without question, with food and safety for all.”
The conveyor belt coughed, belched, and then lurched into action. Within minutes the parts were cruising by too quickly for any talk between Deedra and Lissa.
Deedra had performed this part of the assembly many times. She’d done almost every job a worker could do on the factory floor. Four years times fifty-two weeks a year times six days a week meant a lot of opportunities to sample different stations on the assembly line. She quickly fell into a rhythm, plucking the fan blades from an automated cart that brought them to her, screwing them into place with the powerdriver, then letting them go on to Lissa, who wrenched a housing cover into place on each one. She found it easy to turn off her brain and let her hands do the thinking for her. Usually, she just blanked out, but today she found herself thinking of Rose. Again. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air, then reappeared in her head. A neat trick, but an aggravating one. No point thinking about what was gone.
About a half hour into the day, Lissa waved quickly for Deedra’s attention. The preacher’s coming, she mouthed, rolling her eyes.
“Don’t be so mean,” Deedra upbraided her. “He’s harmless.”
“Whatever.”
Moments later she heard the booming, deep bass voice of Dr. Dimbali as he strode the path along the conveyor belt. Dr. Dimbali was L-Twelve’s head of engineering. Technically, he and Jaron were equals, but Jaron’s last name gave him the edge.
As did his youth. Dimbali was old—at least forty, maybe older—and insisted on wearing a threadbare suit and tie every day. He also wore an old pair of SmartSpex, the lights flickering across his eyes. A webby fissure fanned out from one corner of the SmartSpex, but Dimbali treated them like fine jewelry. He claimed to have worked for the government at one point in his life—not the local Magistrate, but the Mayor-Governor or even higher—which never failed to induce laughter behind his back. Sure he had, everyone thought. Sure he had.
He also had an annoying habit of walking the factory floor, lecturing the workers, who were the very definition of a captive audience. It was harmless, but annoying. Lissa hated it; Deedra found something soothing in his voice on bad days, but today she found it oddly cruel for Dimbali’s voice to yank her from her memories of Rose.
“E equals mc squared!” he thundered. “That is, energy is equivalent to mass times the speed of light times itself! This is fundamental! This is truth!”
“This is useless,” Lissa muttered. “This is garbage.”
Deedra shrugged. Dr. Dimbali could be pushy and annoying, yes, but he helped keep a workday from devolving into complete boredom. She had even occasionally logged on to his vid feed, though she would never, ever admit that to anyone, not even her best friend.
“Humanity descended from the baser life-forms!” he continued, now standing directly behind Deedra and Lissa. “From mighty apes, came we! Millions of years of evolutionary progress, stepping from single-celled organisms to the vast, infinite complexity of the human brain and body! This is fundamental! This is truth!”
Mighty apes? What was he was talking about? Then again, did anyone ever really know what Dr. Dimbali was talking about? If he wasn’t so talented at programming L-Twelve’s systems and designing the widgets they assembled, she suspected the Magistrate would have gotten rid of him long ago.
“Remember,” he intoned with fervor, “my vid feed is available every Thursday night! Don’t waste your bandwidth on wikinet nonsense! Plug in and expand your mind! Hearken to my lectures! They are fundamental! They are truth!”
Following this pronouncement, he came up on her left side. She flinched, too close. Her scar. The ponytail couldn’t entirely cover it; she could feel part of it exposed as her shirt had shifted while she worked. And she could feel his eyes on it.
“Child,” he asked in a slow, calm tone so unlike his usual bombast, “do you know the first element of the periodic table?”
Deedra’s mind slipped a gear. From somewhere in the well of her memory, another one of Dr. Dimbali’s lectures bubbled up to the surface, and she found herself blurting out, “Hydrogen!” without even really thinking about it.
Dr. Dimbali paused, and she detected a smile out of the corner of her eye. “Well, well,” he said softly.
Deedra glanced over at him. He wasn’t standing over the belt all day, so he didn’t wear a mask. His expression was one of delight, of joy, and for a moment Deedra felt that same joy in herself.
“Dee!” Lissa cried, and Deedra realized that she’d missed an
assembly while she’d been looking over at Dr. Dimbali. She swore and tried to snatch it back. If she could get it back onto the belt quickly enough, no one would—
The belt ground to a halt. Oh, great. An annoyed groan ascended from the workers on the line. Their ration count depended on productivity, and while an unscheduled break wasn’t the worst thing, it meant less ration with each passing moment.
Deedra’s cheeks flamed. She’d never, not even once, been responsible for the line stopping. The anger and frustration she’d felt at others in the past now doubled back on her as shame. She couldn’t even look up. Dr. Dimbali edged away from her.
And then she heard it.
A great, banging Clong! reverberated throughout the entire factory.
Her spine stiffened. No. This couldn’t be happening. It was her first time stopping the line! No one was punished for a first infraction!
Beside her, Lissa drew in a deep, sharp breath.
Clong! It resounded again, ringing out loud and clear over the background noise of hundreds of feet shuffling, of the sound of tools shifting from hand to hand to holster. She turned—everyone else did, too—to see four figures striding across the factory floor, each carrying a long, heavy metal pipe. As she watched, the smallest of the four reared back and smote the concrete floor with his pipe. Clong!
“Listen up!” he shouted into the clanging echo. “Listen the hell up!”
The Bang Boys were on the floor.
Jaron Ludo’s four lieutenants. Enforcers, more like. They projected his will from above. Deedra froze in place. She’d seen the Bang Boys “explain” a finer point of L-Twelve protocol to a recalcitrant worker before. They weren’t just called the Bang Boys because of their penchant for banging their pipes against the floor to announce their arrival. They banged on flesh, too, when needed.
First infraction. How could they punish her for her first infraction?