They will be stamped EVI-2512.14 through EVI-2512.31. There are seventeen boxes, total. I have no additional information.
I repeated what he had told me to the others, my mind whirring. Seventeen boxes, total? I wasn’t even sure how big this pile was, but if it was anything like the ones we’d seen in the other room, there would be thousands of boxes here. Still, they had a designation number; maybe there was an order to the chaos that I hadn’t seen yet. A label or a map or something.
“Liana?” Tian asked, her voice carrying a note of worry. “How are we going to find our things?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I replied honestly. “But I am sure there’s a way to figure it out. Quess, is there a printed map or directory on the wall by the entrance?”
“I’ll check,” he replied, and I turned to see him moving back toward the entrance, his light in his hand. “You guys should look inside, though. Remember how the ones we found below were filled with mres?” He pronounced it as if it were a real word, with a soft M that bled into a hard R and an even harsher and elongated E sound, and I giggled, remembering how Grey had told us that the MREs were likely an acronym for something. “The entire pile was full of them, so I’m betting they are separated by what’s inside. There were designations printed on the sides of the boxes down there, so it stands to reason it’s the same here. We can eliminate the stacks that way, in case there’s no map here.”
Leo cocked his head quizzically at me, his brown eyes reflecting a simmering confusion. “I’m not familiar with the term ‘mres’,” he said. “Is it from one of the new languages you told me about? Wetmouth or Cogspeech?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, motioning to one of the piles and moving toward it. “It’s—”
“Here!” Tian said excitedly from a few feet away to my right, her face already pressed into the plastic film that surrounded the boxes, peering through the slightly opaque material. “M. R. E! Pine Industries.” She reared back and scrunched up her nose in a disgruntled look. “Wasn’t Pine the guy who killed Leo’s dad?”
“Tact, Tian,” Maddox hissed from where she was on my left, heading down the other side. “There is a nicer way to put that!”
Tian blinked, and then puffed out her chest, a cross and irritated look coming across her face. “Fine! Isn’t that the a—”
“Tian!” Maddox gasped, barely cutting off the obscenity pouring from the young girl’s mouth. I bit back a laugh, unable to help myself. Tian had developed quite a mouth recently, and while it was inappropriate, I couldn’t help but find it utterly adorable.
“—hole who killed a really cool guy?” she finished hotly, her cheeks bright red.
Maddox gaped at Tian, clearly shocked by her little outburst, but to my surprise, Leo gave a low chuckle that was rich and warm with mirth, and sent tingles of awareness through my body.
Easy, girl, I told myself, trying to do everything in my power not to respond to Leo in that way. I still hadn’t had a chance to unpack everything that had happened between us, and I wasn’t about to do it now.
“He is,” Leo said amicably. “I couldn’t have described him better myself.”
Tian beamed proudly and then had the audacity to stick her tongue out at Maddox. Maddox rolled her eyes as she turned away to head farther down the side path that faced the front of the room, but I caught a flash of an amused smile before her back was fully to us, telling me that Tian’s little show of defiance hadn’t angered or offended her as much as she let on. “More mre boxes!” Maddox called a few moments later. “I think this entire stack might be full of them.”
Well, that was a promising sign at least, although their presence here had me a little confused. Why were there stacks and stacks of them in a storage unit meant for housing evidence? It was possible that they’d always been here, and the storage was just getting filled in around them, I supposed.
Or, it meant we were in the wrong room completely. “Let’s check the next stack,” I said.
“Seriously, what are mre boxes?” Leo asked, repeating his question from earlier.
I shook my head, amused. “Quess is insisting that they are called that, but Grey said that was an acronym. M-R-E. He wasn’t sure what it stood for, but—”
“Meals ready to eat,” Leo supplied, and I blinked at him.
“You know what they are?”
He nodded. “They’re food… sort of. Lionel said they tasted like wet toilet paper at the best of times.” At my confused look, he added, “Toilet paper was softened bits of paper that were used to cleanse oneself after using the toilet. Not at all like the water guns we use now. It was more wasteful, and terrible for the sewage system.”
I frowned a little, both disgusted and alarmed by his description. The idea of using something as precious as a tree—even one that had been processed enough to be “softened”, as Leo described—was shocking and sounded extremely unhygienic. I had learned a few things about Pre-Enders, but this was really surprising. I tried to imagine a world where such a thing was commonplace, and just couldn’t see it. Couldn’t understand the desire to use a tree when water was all you needed.
But then again, they hadn’t been able to prevent the End, so maybe they had had bigger problems than how they were cleaning themselves after going to the bathroom.
“All the boxes on this side are marked with those mre stamps,” Tian announced, breaking my train of thought as she continued alongside the stack, her light the only thing illuminating her figure. It disappeared around a corner a few feet later, and I realized there was another pile of boxes, grouped under its own plastic wrap, next to this one. Leo rolled his eyes at Tian’s pronunciation, but didn’t correct her.
“Maddox?” I called, moving toward the aisle she had gone down.
“Same here!” she shouted back a second later, her voice muffled.
Tian added, “The neighboring pile has mre stamps as well.”
“Well, that’s good, because there’s no map anywhere,” Quess commented as he returned from his search. That was annoying, but not altogether unsurprising. The Attic had no direct oversight from one department, so a lot of things, like maps, fell through the cracks.
I moved farther down the wide aisle to the next pile, and sure enough, these had the MRE markings, too. “Same on this side,” I said, taking a step back. So I was right—it seemed like they were at least grouped together.
Maddox came around the corner a few seconds later and moved across the aisle, her light directed out toward the one on the opposite side of the aisle. “These are different,” she announced. “This one says EVI 121.1. Under it is EVI 121.2, then 121.3…” She trailed off, shifting a few feet down so she could peer at another box.
Relieved that I had been right, I moved to the opposite pile and doublechecked. Sure enough, these were marked with the EVI stamp—only they were marked with different numbers, moving into the 200s. To the left were the MREs, to the right, evidence boxes. And since Cali’s death was recent, it stood to reason we’d find it in the last pile.
Thank Scipio for the bureaucracy of the Tower; it certainly made things a lot easier. Within moments we were moving down the wide central aisle, checking boxes as we passed to make sure the numbers were still climbing.
Our walk ended at the final pile on the left, and I was pleased to see that it wasn’t covered with thick plastic film like the others. What was more, there was a path that seemed to move into the middle of the pile, making it a square snail shell, so we could have access to every box available in this group. The boxes were clearly marked, and within minutes, we had found the section with Cali’s items and were pulling them out, creating a little chain so we could pass the boxes to each other and save time. Tian was at the end of it, so no one was surprised when we emerged, cradling the final boxes, to find her squatting over one she had already torn open, busily pulling out the contents and inspecting them.
“I found the books,” she announced with a grin, and I saw that she was clutching so
me to her chest. She pointed to a few other boxes—also open—and then returned to sifting through the box in front of her.
I rolled my eyes, but didn’t chastise her. “The rest remain closed until we get them back to our quarters,” I told her firmly. We’d only just recovered them, and I didn’t want to waste time going through them here when they would be more secure at home. She made a little affirmative sound, but didn’t stop her endless digging. I sighed, and let it go; she was excited about seeing things from her old home, and I couldn’t blame her for it.
“Two minutes, Tian,” I said, giving her a warning.
“Okay!” she chirped brightly.
I moved over to where Leo and Quess were crouched over the boxes Tian had already opened, pulling out slim, dark gray manuals with both hands. “Is that them?” I asked, peeking in over their shoulders.
“Looks like it,” Quess confirmed, opening one of the manuals and reading a few passages. “Just as dry as when I was a Bit,” he said, and I smiled, trying to imagine him as a trainee in IT, and failing miserably. He was far too charismatic and outgoing for the Eyes. He had probably stood out like a sore thumb.
“Good,” I said. “Let’s get out of here and—”
“Shh,” Leo said quietly, holding up his hand, and I quickly grabbed the light off my baton, returned my baton to my belt, and dimmed the light to a low setting, trusting his instincts.
I looked at him, trying to figure out the source of his alarm, and realized he was listening for something, so I joined him, my senses already on high alert. These floors were supposed to be empty. If he was hearing something, then I’d be a fool to ignore it. A moment later, I heard it—a slight grinding sound that took me back to our days in our second Sanctum, and all of the vent-crawling we had done. The grates over the vent had made a unique sound when we pushed them out of our way, and this sounded almost exactly like that.
A dozen questions burst into my mind, but I ignored them, as several things could have made that sound. It was dark, and we were doing something illegal—and that was enough to make us imagine sounds in the darkness.
“Get the boxes packed up,” I ordered softly as I pressed the light to my chest, covering most of it with my hand so that only a few beams of light were trickling out through the gaps between my fingers. “I’ll go check it out.”
“Not alone,” Leo whispered, quietly putting manuals back into the box. “We should just go.”
I heard a sharp clang behind the last stack of MRE boxes that sounded just like a vent grate hitting the floor, and ignored Leo’s suggestion. Now I was curious; it seemed like someone was indeed sneaking in here, and I wanted to know who they were and why they were doing it.
I quickly crossed the wide aisle to the opposite side and slipped down a few feet to the corner of the pile, keeping my light hidden behind one hand. I heard the distinctive sound of boots hitting the floor, and froze a few feet from the corner, my heart pounding at how loud it was. The person—if it was just one—sounded like they weighed three hundred pounds, but that was probably the echoes playing tricks on my mind.
I held my breath, wondering if they would come toward me, and noticed a dark shape climbing the wall on the opposite side. It was Tian. The girl had also muted her light, so much so that it was barely visible. But I could still make out her dim form climbing upward. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but I hoped the others were keeping an eye on her.
Nothing moved for several seconds, and then the boots started walking in a slow, confident matter. I started to back up, but paused when I realized they weren’t growing any closer. If anything, they seemed to be staying exactly the same distance away— meaning they were walking in a straight line, parallel to where I was crouched.
Even more curious now, I moved forward and peeked around the edge of the boxes. I froze when I saw a teenage boy, probably fifteen or sixteen, with a lamp of his own strapped around his head with a piece of fabric. He was standing not twenty-five feet away, his back to the open vent through which he had clearly entered.
He had a rough shock of unruly auburn curls on the top of his head, and was wearing dark clothes from head to toe. I immediately noticed that he had no indicator on his wrist—and realized that I was looking at an undoc.
I backed around the corner for a second, surprised. Cali had said there were other undoc groups surviving in the Tower—that she had a relationship with some of them—and now, it seemed, I had found one! Was he alone, or was he with others? What were they like? How were they surviving, and what could they want in a place like this? Would we find them if we followed him through the vent?
I peeked out again, intrigued by what he might be doing here, and was relieved that the boy was oblivious to my presence, still looking at the pile of boxes. He’d moved away a few more feet, but he was still close. Close enough to grab.
“Who is he?” Quess whispered softly behind me, so suddenly that I almost shouted in alarm. I pressed my hand over my mouth and shot Quess a dirty look. He gave me an apologetic look, and then his eyes widened when I signed the word “undoc” to him in Callivax. Quess then turned to someone behind him—Leo, I thought. I returned my focus to the boy, wondering what he was up to.
He cocked his head back and forth, seeming to consider something, and then a moment later, reached through the plastic film around one of the boxes. And he didn’t stop there. He continued to shove himself through until he was lying on his stomach and only his legs were sticking out. I could hear the faint, muffled sound of him shifting around inside, clearly looking for something.
The MREs, I realized. They were food, and he had somehow figured it out. He was stealing them to survive.
My heart ached at the thought of this poor boy being forced to subsist on something that had been created before the End—something that apparently tasted like wood—and I found myself moving forward, compelled to help him. To at least find out more about him and make sure he wasn’t alone. If he wasn’t, then maybe I could get a meeting with his people and see if I could establish a relationship with them. Maybe they’d have an idea about what was going on in the Tower, and about any other undoc groups out there. Maybe they’d even have an idea about the legacies that were roaming all over the place. Who knew?
I just had to make sure I didn’t scare him, and that he understood that I wasn’t going to hurt him or arrest him.
Chances were that as soon as he saw me he was going to try to run, though, and I paused long enough to make a series of gestures in Callivax to tell Quess and Leo to get to the vent slowly, and have their lashes ready.
I heard a sharp click sound coming from overhead as I drew closer to where the boy was busy rooting around, oblivious to us, and glanced up quickly to see Tian easing herself down onto another column of boxes, staring at the kicking legs with curiosity. I realized she must’ve climbed up and over the towers of boxes. I motioned for her to stay where she was. She nodded and flashed me a thumbs up.
The boy emerged seconds later, his arms filled with several flat, rectangular packages wrapped in silver, the lot of them hugged tightly to his chest. He was completely focused on them, his mouth moving as he wordlessly counted each one. I pressed forward, cupping my hand over my light to make it less noticeable, and kept my movements calm and relaxed as I drew closer to him, knowing that faster ones would attract his attention sooner.
He finished abruptly, when I was about fifteen feet away, and suddenly looked up at me, blinding me with his light. I raised my hand to block it, peering at him through squinted eyes. I got a clear look at him and saw a pale face with a liberal dose of freckles under his mop of unruly auburn hair, which was almost dark brown. His eyes were a pea green, and grew wide in alarm when he saw me approaching.
I froze and then showed him my hands, wordlessly telling him I was unarmed. “Hi,” I said softly, giving him my friendliest smile. “I’m not going to—”
The boy clearly did not care. As soon as I started to speak, he flung his arml
oad of MREs at me. I ducked, and he ran, his feet pounding back toward the vent through which he had emerged. I caught a glimpse of something pale leaping overhead, followed by Tian’s call of “I got him!” and a moment later she was swinging in behind him on her lashes—and slamming into his back, sending both of them to the floor.
“OW!” the boy cried as they fell in a tangle of limbs. I raced over as Leo and Quess moved closer to help.
“You’re cute!” Tian squealed in delight a second later, sitting up from where she had landed on him. “You’re going to be my new boyf—HEY!”
The boy had been so frantic to get away that he’d shoved her off his body, and was now scrambling on all fours toward the vent, where Leo and Quess hadn’t gotten positioned in time. He slipped into it before we could get to him or Tian.
Tian wasn’t deterred, however, and immediately leapt to her feet and threw both lashes after him. I saw the blue pop as they connected inside of the vent, and then she was flying after him, using the gyros in her suit to propel her toward the vent opening. “Wait for me!” she called as she disappeared into the dark hole.
I didn’t hesitate, but plunged in after her, not wanting to lose her or the boy.
23
The vent was deep and dark, and I had to shove my hand light into my pocket so I could move more quickly on my hands and knees. I heard Leo shouting my name behind me, telling me to wait, but I ignored him, scrambling after the precious snatches of light ahead of me, where the boy and Tian were forging ahead. The sounds of rattling ducts and pounding feet filled my ears, thunderous and disorienting, but I kept my eyes on the bursts of light in the darkness, trying to keep up with them on my hands and knees. I didn’t have the flexibility to run in a hunched position like they did, so this was the only way to make sure I didn’t lose them.
The Girl Who Dared to Lead Page 23