Shannon nodded. She had the slightest sense of hope. They seemed to be discussing at length now. There was some kind of debate over at last part of her story. If there were some sort of disagreement, maybe that would mean that at least some of them believed her.
The judge in the center spoke up as they group split back apart. “We will have to deliberate on this for a while. Please follow the Security Officer back to your cell and await our decision.”
THE DOOR TO HER CELL closed behind her with a hard click. She sat back on her bed. One way or another, her life on the streets was over. If she was set free, she would never come to the surface again, at least not without Mimi and never for long. If she became a Runner, that was a different set of problems.
She had only been on the streets for a handful of years, driven there by her father. He was a drunk, and Shannon had watched her mother put up with it for years. Some nights, Shannon would wake to the sounds of angry yells and loud thuds. In the morning, her mother would have fresh bruises on her face, reddened wrists, and a quiet demeanor.
One night, when she was nineteen, her father came into her room drunk and began shouting at her over a water ration. She shouted back. He had gotten drunk and left the shower running and she had tried to point that out to him. Soon enraged, he hit her. She left. She never went back. Her mother might be willing to put up with his shit, but she had not been. She wondered how they were doing now, if her father still had a job repairing alcoves, or if he had been fired again. Was her mother still with him? If she were set free, maybe she would check up on them.
SHE DIDN’T WAIT LONG, she had no idea how much time had passed, but she felt certain it had been at least a few hours. When the door opened, a single guard stepped in. Her face betrayed nothing. But then, how or why would she know what the Supreme Justices had decided? The woman was probably in the dark as much as Shannon was.
Shannon noticed her flaming red hair pulled back into a pony-tail. It looked unnatural that way, like the hair was normally free, but stuck confined.
They walked down several corridors and finally arrived at the long hall. Before the woman ushered her in through the door, she said. “Good luck.” This puzzled Shannon, why would she care what happened to her?
She stepped in through the door, and it closed behind her. She walked up to where she had stood earlier and waited. All seven justices stared at her.
“Shannon Ulstis?”
Shannon said, “Yes, your honors?”
“Please approach us.”
Shannon did as she was told and moved closer. Now only two meters from the judges, she stopped and waited. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise. It was an odd feeling, having your entire life decided by a few people who you’ve never met before.
She glanced back and saw two armed SOs, but neither were paying much attention. One almost appeared to be dozing.
Could she escape? If she could push through those men and out of central security, maybe she stood a chance. She didn’t know the city as well as Mimi, but she was certain she could find some sort of entrance to the underground nearby, and once down there she could hide for a while until she figured out how to get back to Mimi.
But then, what if they said she was free to go? Would she be sentenced to the Runnercore for trying to run away? Maybe the judges would change their mind if they saw her trying to run.
She turned back to the judges.
“Shannon Ulstis, we have considered your case carefully. The testimony of one Andrew Melborne, and one Jerry McKinley were considered in our decision.”
There was something in the man’s voice that made Shannon certain of what was coming. She felt the urge to run rise. Her feet twitched, hungry for quick motion.
The judge was droning on about how they had come to their decision, about whose testimony had more weight and about some surveillance footage they had obtained for the trial.
Shannon heard none of this and when the judge said, “We find you not guilty on the charge of aggravated assault. However, we find you guilty of trafficking illegal substances,” Shannon had already submitted to her desire.
It was like watching someone from the outside. Things moved in slow motion as she ran through the benches and leaped over a barrier toward the door, and the SOs came to life. The shorter one, who had been dozing, was looking around confused. She easily dodged both the guards and ran through the door. But as she got just outside and into the hall, she slammed into something large and hard.
It was Jerry, the man who had tried to double cross Andrew and sell her to the Uppers.
“Well, well, well. Look who’s run into me all over again.”
His smile made her stomach cramp as he reached down and grabbed her. He picked up her body and threw it back into the courtroom. She crashed to the floor, slamming her head against one of the benches.
Yelling into the room, but not quite entering it, Jerry said, “So you just gonna let this one escape or what?”
All went black.
SHANNON WOKE ON A SMALL moving platform in the middle of a large open area. She glanced around, looking at the endless open space of concrete. Above, a high ceiling was occasionally punctuated with a number of mechanical arms, but mostly the ceiling was smooth and gray.
She turned her head to the side and saw that there were many raised platforms with short steps leading to the top directly below the mechanical arms. In the distant corners of the enormous space, there were small stand-alone buildings. Each was one story high. A small square in the massive open space.
Two men were escorting her. Both were in large metal suits.
“Where... where am I?” her voice shook.
Neither stopped. Neither turned. Neither answered.
She raised her voice. “Hey. Where am I?”
Still no response.
Her heart started to pound in her ears. An icy hand wrapped around her throat and it became harder to breathe
She yelled this time. “Where am I?”
Silence, a violent silence.
She tried to move and realized that she was strapped down. There was no escape, no movement.
The two forms marched her forward through the open area.
She screamed. All the pain and rage and sorrow in her released and she struggled to gain her freedom. But a part of her knew the truth. That her freedom had vanished, that the last choices she would ever have to make had been in the few moments that her and Mimi had spent together. Now her choices would be dictated by the city for the rest of her life, however long or short that life was.
Her voice grew hoarse, and when, after several moments of screaming, there was no wind left in her, she sobbed silently. Her escorts betrayed no interest.
Finally, they were moving through a set of large metal doors. Just after entering, her escorts stopped. The stretcher hovered forward between the metal encased men. As it did, she finally had a look at their faces. Her blood froze. Her breath escaped, terrified to come back.
Their faces were deathly pale. Thin blue lines traced all the major muscles in their faces. Their eyes were the worst, naked white with no pupils. As she passed between them, they both tilted their heads towards her. With all white eyes, it was impossible to tell where they were looking, but she knew, beyond all possible doubt that they were staring right at her, that somehow, they were seeing her.
Mimi had been right. There were things in this city worse than being a runner. She had never discovered her meaning, but now she knew firsthand the awful truth. She wondered if this was what happened when a Runner died. If so, then even in death there was no peace. She must stay alive as long as possible.
She wept as she floated on through another set of doors. She heard them shut behind her as the table in which she was strapped settled. She lifted upward. The table swung so that her feet were toward the ground and her head raised up as if she was standing.
A person in a mask appeared. All clad in black save for one white mask. She could see only his
brown eyes. He regarded her only for a moment and then examined a set of tools that lay just to the right of her in a tray. Sharp objects for cutting. He selected one.
“Where am I?” said Shannon.
Silence, except for the thin sound of cloth on skin. For Shannon, that sound was abrasive. When the person picked up one of the metal instruments, the one that looked like a mix between a saw and a knife, every clink of the metal felt so loud that she thought her ears would bleed. Her heartbeat started a rhythmic thumping as he approached, tool in hand.
“Oh dear gods, what are you doing? Please.”
The person hesitated and stared at her for a moment. Shannon looked long and hard into those eyes, and for that moment she saw something human. Whoever it was, it wasn’t like the things that had escorted her into the room.
Through veils of tears and blurred vision, she begged. “Please talk to me, please just tell me what you are doing. Are you... turning me... into one of those things?”
The person paused. A deer in the headlights. They lowered the tool for a moment. Then, with great hesitation, they reached up and drew down the mask.
It was a woman. Her face was hard and her jaw matched. Her brown eyes regarded her harshly.
She said, “I know not what you did to be here, but no, I am not Recycling you. I don’t think they would let a human do that. This is the first step to becoming a Runner. I won’t lie to you, what is about to happen to you is going to hurt. In fact, depending on your constitution, it may hurt tremendously.”
Shannon quivered. Her tears did not hesitate.
“Please don’t cry like that. I don’t want to do this to you any more than you want to have it done.” The woman’s voice wavered.
“Please. Just let me go. I’ll disappear.”
The woman grinned. “Disappear? To where? Where in this city could you possibly vanish to where you wouldn’t be found?”
Shannon almost said something about the underground area, almost told this woman of Mimi in her desperation. If she was just able to get to Mimi, she knew that Mimi could hide her, keep her safe. Mimi would know when someone was coming, would know exactly how to protect Shannon.
“We must all do our part if we want to city to survive,” said the woman. “Everyone must have a function; how else can humanity continue? Even the dead serve a purpose here, as you just saw. Even the dead are recycled when they can be.”
“Please, you don’t understand, I do have a place to go, a place to hide.”
The woman shook her head, “You are not the first to claim this and once long ago, I probably would have believed you. Perhaps a century ago I would have let you escape. But look.”
The table swiveled toward the door. On either side of the door was viewing glass, and Shannon could see both creatures standing and staring from outside. A mindful horror.
“You see, long ago, I did let someone escape. In fact, I was almost made a Runner myself, but instead, they returned me to work. They knew that I let a woman go because I was weak, that the best way to punish me was to grant me the status of an Upper and force me, year after year, century after century, to be one of the ones who had to perform the surgeries on the new Runners.”
The chair rotated back.
The woman shook her head, and a single tear descended the landscape of her cheek. She did not wipe it away. “I weep for you. I weep for them all. But mostly, I weep for them.” She gestured towards the Recycled. “But weeping does not change my fate. So please, do not make this harder on me. Please do not fight me, for I too am here being punished. You, like me, are now just a cog in the wheel, a body that keeps the machine running, the city walking, a kind of perpetual cycle. We cannot stop it. We must do our part.”
She reached up and covered her face again. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
The woman went behind her. Shannon tingled. She had no idea what was coming, but as a restraint leaped up over her forehead and pulled tight, she expected the worst.
A voice came from behind her. “I will give you something for the pain. It is not something I always do. Some of the people who come through here deserve every bit of pain they get. Some of those who become Runners are rapists and monsters. But I suspect that you are not one of these. I suspect that you are one of the innocent ones. Maybe you were caught in the games of one of the politicians, I don’t know. There is little I can offer you but this.”
Shannon felt a sharp poking sensation in the back of her neck and was suddenly aware of the large hole in the table at that exact spot. It was ice and fire and the burning spread quickly through her body. She yelled out in pain, but just as she started to yell, the burning became warmth. She felt an overwhelming urge to urinate but just as she thought her bladder would burst, or her bowels would let go, the warmth became a void. Her entire body went numb.
Shannon wanted to say something, that for this at least she was grateful, but even her tongue was incapable of response. Her eyelids felt like great metal doors as they continued to blink, but the effort to move them was monumental. She wasn’t sleepy, on the contrary, she was wide awake and fully aware, it was just that her body no longer felt there, only her mind seemed to be present.
The woman continued, “Now I am going to install your obedience chip. This will ensure your cooperation as a Runner. All Runners possess them, and if you disobey, you will receive a painful shock up and down your spine. This will most likely not kill you, but it will be incredibly painful. If, however, you are perceived as a threat, the chip can be used to end your life. Understand that if your life ends in this way, you will be recycled as those two who escorted you were.”
Shannon wanted to ask if those men were still conscious, if they were still alive, if they had anything left of themselves, but her tongue simply wouldn’t work.
“You will now feel a strong pressure.”
She did, it was like a hand was squeezing the back of her neck hard, but there was no pain, only pressure. There was a drilling noise. There was the smell of flesh and blood, tangy and pungent like uncooked meat.
“Are you still with me?” the woman asked. “Ah forgive me, I forgot, the numbing agent sometimes takes the speech, I use it so rarely.” She walked around front.
“Blink if you are with me.”
Shannon did.
“Your chip is installed, and I have placed a regeneration patch on the wound. Within a few hours, it will be completely healed. Now, we must augment your muscles.”
The table tilted backward and Shannon found herself lying flat and staring at the ceiling.
“Unfortunately, this process will cause rather violent muscle spasms. There is little I can do for this part of the process; despite the numbing agent, it will still be somewhat painful.”
Shannon blinked.
The woman went on, and Shannon thought that perhaps explaining it eased the woman’s burden.
“The pain is from the nanites. The nanites will work their way into all the muscles in your body and release a series of growth hormones. This will cause your muscles to double or triple in strength based on your genetic potential. It will allow you to pilot the EnViro suits. Without the added strength, you would not be able to do so for long. The nanites will also grant you much greater endurance when you are out in the barrens, what we call the world outside the city. I will begin now. I will not blame you if you scream. Do whatever it is you need to do. This will pass, and you will be stronger for it, but it will not be pleasant.”
The band that held Shannon’s forehead released and she was free to move her head around again and watch the woman work.
The woman brought over a long tube. At the tip was a sharp metal needle. She plunged it into Shannon’s left bicep. Then she brought another tube and plunged it into her left thigh. The woman worked for a few more moments, plugging these tubes into various points in Shannon’s body.
A loud buzzing noise began. Shannon had heard something like it once before, a beehive in Central Park. Her father ha
d told her as a child that the bees used to be living creatures, but now they were just tiny robots. Her father had said that the creatures still made the same noises as the machines.
Then the pain came, white-hot and searing. Her body was electric fire. It felt as if someone was holding her entire body in an oven and she was cooking. She almost swore she could smell her own flesh burning. The pain increased steadily. Shannon began to scream.
In the breaks between screams, the sliver of seconds in that space, she looked over in the corner where the woman sat. Her mask was off, her face was buried, and tears leaked between her knuckles.
Shannon decided to stop screaming. She let the pain take her. In a river, drowning. She retreated into her mind.
Chapter 12
The Red Veil
THE ANGER CAME IN WAVES. She was a boat in a storm, solitary and surrounded by a savage sadness.
Mimi sat in the circle of her new sisters and stewed.
Serah said, “The chip’s been installed already. I’m not sure there’s much we can do.”
Leahara said, “There must be something.”
Serah shook her head. “The problem is the chip. The chip can track her anywhere in the city. If I had been able to get to her before the chip was installed, we could have snuck her out and hidden her. But for some reason, she was processed immediately. That never happens.”
Noatla looked at Serah. “What do you mean, that never happens?”
“Well, usually the sentence is given, and it’s at least two weeks before the new Runner is processed. The only exception I can think of is if we are in dire need of Runners, or if there is a pending battle, but that’s definitely not an issue right now.” Serah looked at Mimi. “Really, the whole thing is strange.”
Mimi asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well, I was there. The justices deliberated. The initial vote was 6 to 3 in favor of letting her go free. They seemed to agree that she was just some poor young girl caught up in a bad situation she didn’t understand. I mean, the Supreme Justices aren’t total monsters, although when it comes to the Uppers, well...”
Mimi of the Nowhere Page 10