Unequal

by B. E. Sanderson

  “Why are you stopping?” he said.

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell him about her last trip down an unused stairway. He couldn’t carry her, and she would never make the bottom without the dust clogging her airways. Turning her head from one side to the other, she scanned for another way out. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn Crispin had known about her allergy all along and guided her this way on purpose. What better way to instill trust than to save someone from suffocation?

  “I should’ve hit him harder,” she said under her breath.

  “Amen to that.” Bruno clasped her shoulder. “I’m surprised you let him live at all. If I could’ve gotten my hands on him, he wouldn’t have been so lucky.”

  She didn’t bother trying to explain the whole do no harm oath. Hell, she’d already done more harm than any real doctor would do. Crispin could be seriously injured, and she would’ve been responsible. It went against everything she taught herself and everything she had come to believe.

  Bruno squeezed her shoulder, as if sensing her dilemma. “If you hadn’t knocked him out, we’d both be screwed. I wouldn’t have lasted another day, and who knows what they’d do to you for refusing to help them.”

  No matter what Bruno said, Rue wasn’t in the mood to let herself off the hook. The best way she could atone for her actions would be to save the lives her uncle was intent on ending. Maybe she could balance the whole thing out.

  Maybe the balance will be stepping through the door and making it to the bottom without dying.

  Before she could give it another thought, she did exactly that.

  Her lungs were close to bursting as she pushed through the final door into the maze beneath. She’d done it. They were almost free. If only she could remember all the twists and turns Crispin had taken.

  But her memory was as dark as the tunnels they were about to traverse. One wrong turn and they’d be hopelessly lost. How Crispin found his way through the darkness by memory alone was beyond her.

  Closing her eyes, Rue tried to center herself in the blackness. The view didn’t change, but for some reason, she could visualize the journey better without her eyes constantly straining to see. Blind as a bat, but she took her first hesitant step forward. One hand gliding along the wall and the other firmly linked around Bruno’s arm, her steps grew more certain. At the first crossroads, she knew exactly which path to take.

  After what had to have been hours, her face ached from the strain of keeping her eyes closed, but she sensed they were close to the room where she and Crispin had slept. Every nerve ending burned, urging her to stop and rest, but the hiding spot would be the first place the agents would search. She had to keep them moving if they wanted to remain free.

  And even if she hadn’t been afraid of getting caught, time resting was time wasted. The span of time since Crispin told her of Winston’s plans was too long for her to imagine she had any chance of saving Justin.

  But she had to try. “Do you know where Justin is supposed to be?”

  Bruno squeezed her hand. “I was told where he planned to be around the time we left the hospital. Whether he would stay there …”

  She couldn’t see him shrug, but she imagined he had. Her guess was as good as his. “We’ll start there. If he’s moved on, so will we.”

  “To the apartments or your new hospital?”

  Images of Crispin filled her head. “Neither if we can help it. We’ll figure out a plan after we stop for the night.”

  Rue didn’t need to fill in the blanks. Bruno would do whatever it took to protect Justin, and she would do whatever it took to stop her uncle. Despite not having an iota of blame to carry, she was weighed down with years of guilt.

  At the door to the safe room, she paused. “How are you feeling?”

  “As good as I can expect. You?”

  “Mad as hell, which is probably what’s keeping me upright at the moment.” Her goal had been to keep moving at any cost, but the supplies she remembered in the safe room stopped her. “Wait here.”

  She could’ve cheered once she saw someone had restocked the little room. Whether Crispin had helped any other Unequals escape since he brought her here, she had no clue. Justin himself might’ve been down here to replenish the stores. Any of them could have been here, but the chance Crispin might be nearby made a shiver run down her spine.

  Scooping up as many bottles of water and cans of food as she could carry, she skittered back through the door and shut it behind her. Rue handed a bottle to Bruno without comment. He drank deeply as they continued their journey. Each step seemed like their millionth, but the two of them kept a steady space, retracing the path until they arrived at the exit point.

  “Up you go,” she said.

  “You first. If I slip, I don’t want to flatten you.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but his point was well taken. Without any further debate, she climbed to freedom. At least, she hoped they’d find freedom. Neither of them would know until they got as far away from the DOE as possible.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Once out onto the street, all they had to do was get from the empty storefront to Justin’s last location. According to Bruno, their leader had been at a staging area for the victims of the blast. Rue suspected it was more staging of the next phase of Justin’s war than staging for the victims. The Citizens had already been triaged. The worst of the injured had already been transported in secret to her care. The others were taken to a public facility where they’d receive the substandard care they were used to.

  Knowing where to start searching for Justin was the first step. The next was securing a transport to take them there quickly. If they had to walk the distance in broad daylight, they’d be easy targets for the DOE—if for no other reason than they would be out of place. The blood in Bruno’s hair alone would alert someone to his total inequality. If by some huge rift in the universe, someone missed the matted mess on his head, they couldn’t overlook Rue’s apparel.

  A century prior, she would’ve been mistaken for a mental patient.

  Rue stifled a laugh. Bruno glanced at her crossways in the street’s dim light, but kept his thoughts to himself. Sticking mainly to the shadows, the two moved as silently and as quickly as possible.

  In a happy quirk of fate, the DOE had maintained a low crime rate, so most people didn’t bother with locks or security. The first transport was not only unlocked, but its key card was inserted into the console.

  “You know how to drive one of these things?” she asked once they were settled inside.

  He responded by pushing a button and making the vehicle hum to life. Slowly, he eased away from the parking spot. As far as Rue was concerned, it was the last slow action he completed for an eternity. She shuddered at the rate at which things slid past her window and were lost. Several times, she was on the verge of screaming in terror. Not long after she feared she couldn’t take anymore, he slowed the transport to a crawl.

  She had no idea where they were. Rue wasn’t familiar with this part of the city, but she knew a warehouse when she saw one. Judging from the disrepair, it hadn’t been in use for decades—except in whatever capacity the Unequals required. She guessed this place was similar to the hospital facility—dead on the outside but sparkling-new on the inside.

  Her guess was far from the truth.

  Reality showed an equally dingy interior. And the whole thing groaned in the wind as though it was about to topple on them both.

  “He’s gone,” Bruno whispered.

  “Because he left or because Winston already has him?”

  This time the big man’s shrug was unmistakable. “What now?” he asked.

  “We pray he remains a free man, head for home, and hope Crispin hasn’t screwed us over.”

  “Probably not the best idea, but we have no other choice.”

  They did have another choice, but Rue didn’t want to say it out loud. And it would be so easy. Take the transport and run. Find someplace outside the city where
no one cared whether you were different. Where being Unequal was okay. Such a place had to exist. It had to.

  But running away wasn’t a choice Bruno would be willing to make. And once she allowed herself actually consider it, she had to admit it wasn’t a choice she was willing to make either.

  Whatever was wrong with this place, it was home.

  The streets were curiously empty as they sped toward the hospital. It was as though the Citizenry saw what was coming and chose to stay the hell out of it. Rue was glad. The fewer innocents between the DOE and their prize, the better. Winston had already hurt too many people, people who had no clue why they were suffering.

  She wasn’t much more informed than anyone else about why this was happening. Crispin’s little insights into her uncle’s motives weren’t enough to make any of it logical or rational. How anyone could dream of saving a society by destroying it was beyond her. Of course, she would never understand how anyone believed forcing people to be equal was a brilliant plan.

  As Bruno deftly maneuvered the vehicle, Rue’s brain tried to find reason in the insanity. The more she tried, though, the worse her headache got. A schism existed somewhere between her definition of insanity and the way most other people’s defined it. Or at least she guessed it was most other people. A whole society can’t change based on the ideas of a few of its members. Can it?

  She shook her head hard, attempting to dislodge the vise clamped around her skull.

  “Are we there yet?” she asked, rubbing at her temples.

  “Almost.” He pointed out the windshield toward a derelict building rising like a lone sentinel amongst the ruins of its brothers.

  Everything appeared to be exactly the same as the day Justin first brought her to this hospital he’d built with her skills in mind. Now that she was aware of the shield, she believed she could detect a faint shimmer in the morning’s first light. Meant to hide them from the DOE, it could be hiding the DOE from their sight.

  “Go in slow,” she said, but she didn’t need to tell Bruno how to approach a trap. He’d been at this war longer and been in it more deeply than she had. Their previous speed was already halved and as she watched, he halved it again. Soon, they were crawling along the road.

  The shield was working perfectly, but the DOE must not have had enough knowledge to understand how it worked. As they grew closer to the structure, men in uniform came into view moving around the building’s base and ruining the shield’s effect.

  She opened her mouth to warn her friend as he said, “I see them.”

  “At least they didn’t blow it up.” The idea of all those patients inside, and all her new friends trapped with them, turned her stomach. But if the DOE was guarding it, maybe those people were safe. For the moment.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Rue caught a faint blur. “It’s a trap!”

  A slight figure ducked from behind a partially collapsed wall and waved at them to stop. A slight figure with a raspberry bloom on one side of her face.

  “Shiraz.” All at once, a piece of the mounting tension fell away from her, leaving her dizzy.

  Rue hadn’t spared a thought for the girl, but apparently the girl hadn’t forgotten about her. Her lips curled into a sneer as she approached. Before the transport came to a full stop, Shiraz pulled the back door open and jumped inside.

  “If you get any closer, they’ll have you before you can blink.” She settled into the cushions. “Take the first right and get the hell out of here.”

  Rue shook her head. “We have to warn—”

  “Who? Justin? He’s not there. But if he was, wouldn’t it be a little too late to warn him?”

  Bruno didn’t bother commenting, he simply followed Shiraz’s directions. Getting the hell away from the hospital was easier than Rue would’ve guessed, but the road they used went straight through the city.

  “It used to be a thoroughfare to convey goods from this industrial complex to the transports on the other side of the city.” Shiraz spoke as if she was the director on some bizarre tour. “The DOE killed the industry, but they didn’t bother destroying the road.”

  “Wait a second,” Rue said as her brain finally caught up. “Justin’s not in there? Are you sure?”

  Shiraz looked at Rue as if she was the slow kid in class, the one who’d be disappeared next. “I contacted him once I saw what was going down. I told him to stay the hell away. Too bad he didn’t listen.”

  Rue’s headache was coming back. “But you said—”

  “He’s not in there because Winston is holding him somewhere else.”

  The transport slammed to a stop, throwing Rue against the console and Shiraz into the back of Rue’s seat. “What?” Bruno shouted.

  “Relax, big guy. I know where Uncle Hank took him.” Both of them looked at the girl as though she’d sprouted horns. In answer, she held up a phone. “I was talking with Justin when they grabbed him. One second I was talking to Justin and the next, Winston was talking to me. He told me something about watching for his niece and bringing you to him if I wanted to see Justin alive again.”

  “This doesn’t sound like the brightest idea in the world.” Bruno eased the transport into motion again. “He’ll never give Justin up.”

  Rue shook her head, making the throbbing in her skull worse. This whole damn thing was a mess. Winston wanted her for his own purposes but if he already had Justin, those purposes seemed a little moot. With the leader of the opposition in custody, there wouldn’t be any more casualties for her to treat. He could end the war before it really started.

  Unless the Unequals weren’t the real problem.

  Rue never actually pondered about what was beyond the city. Hell, she’d never been to its boundaries. Before she entered the workforce, she’d never left the neighborhood where she was raised and went to school. Afterwards, she never left the confines of the hospital. Other than the last few months, where she was moving with either the DOE or the Unequals, she hadn’t really been anywhere.

  Other cities could exist and thrive beyond the boundaries. Other countries could be unfriendly to the one she called home. The DOE could have enemies far larger and more powerful than a ragtag bunch of Unequals.

  If the idea was true, any potential plans for her gained a greater scope. And made their mission to rescue Justin much more important. If Winston didn’t need Justin to squash the opposition, he only had one purpose—drawing Rue in and forcing her to work for the DOE. Once she accepted the job, Justin would be as good as dead.

  She couldn’t speak her thoughts to these people. Maybe Shiraz and Bruno had already considered the same things. Maybe they already understood they would be fighting a moot battle. But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words and crush any hopes they might still hold.

  And Rue hadn’t held much hope about anything since she was—

  “Wait a second. What was the address again?” She prayed she’d overheard Shiraz’s directions wrong.

  “5691 Blaylock. It’s somewhere on the outer edges of Quadrant Four.”

  It is. In fact, I know exactly where it’s at. But she couldn’t tell them. She hardly wanted admit it to herself. Its soft, blue siding and pretty, lace curtains were forever etched in her memory. In the back, under a lilac bush, lay a tiny grave for an even tinier loss. The remnants of hastily created plans probably continued to grace the walls of the big basement. My kitten. Uncle Howard’s drawings.

  The chair her father had tied her to might sit in a corner waiting to be pulled into the middle of the living room. The hated television could be in the same spot, waiting for her bleary eyes to be forced open.

  Ten years had passed since she’d set foot inside. Almost as long since she’d heard from her mother. The last information she had, her parents still lived there. Unless the DOE had re-appropriated the home for a larger family and shunted her folks to an apartment deeper into the city.

  It was the last place she wanted to go. And the first place her uncle would want her to be.
Rue had no clue why this meeting he was forcing between them had to be held where they’d been torn from one another. The day he’d been disappeared. The day her life changed and she became the person she was now.

  The person Hank Winston wanted to use.

  “Rue?” Bruno said, breaking her out of her thoughts.

  “Huh?”

  “I asked if you have any idea what Winston’s after.”

  She turned to face him, but she couldn’t wipe her childhood trauma away. Thankfully, Bruno didn’t ask about what he saw written there. She was equally thankful Shiraz couldn’t see her face. The girl wouldn’t be so tactful as to leave her alone.

  It’s me he’s after. But she didn’t voice her fears. Despite having a fair idea of what Winston had planned, and how she fit into those plans, she wasn’t certain of the details. Regardless, they couldn’t turn away from where they were headed. Something had to be done for Justin. Something had to be done for the Unequals. Somehow Hank Winston, her beloved childhood friend and loathed current enemy, had to be stopped.

  Rue hadn’t paid attention to their route, but she sensed the moment they turned onto her block. Her gaze slowly drifted to stare out the window. She didn’t know what she’d expected to feel coming back to this place. Other than a sense of nostalgia, she felt nothing but numb.

  On the corner sat the big rock she used as a bench while she waited for the school transport. Beyond was the vacant lot where the other kids played without her. Always some nonsense game where no one was the winner and none of them seemed to have any real goals. She hadn’t understood them then, and she didn’t understand them now.

  As the transport slowed, house after identical house went by—reminding her of all those years ago. To the casual observer, nothing had changed. Except a scooter leaned up against the house across the street where there used to be a bicycle. And a blue transport instead of a green one at the neighbor’s house. Every perfectly groomed tree had grown a miniscule amount, but she noticed. Every garden patch had marigolds where daylilies grew, or roses in place of marigolds, or vegetables pushing their leaves toward the sun instead of roses.