Children of the Uprising Collection

by Megan Lynch

  “Maybe. I’d say it was crazy if you weren’t really here.” He put his hand on her belly. “Both of you.”

  They didn’t say much more for the rest of the journey. Denver laid her head on Stephen’s lap and dozed off. She stopped counting how many times she drifted in and out of consciousness. It was hard to tell anyway, with the loud shushing noises of the airship and the darkness dulling her senses. She woke up for good when she heard a magnified voice in that funny accent.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re sorry to keep you in the dark for so long, but we didn’t want anyone catching a glimpse of our cargo.” He paused while two or three people—Denver suspected Brits—gave a polite chuckle. “But we’re safely in Scotland now, so we’ll open up the windows in just a moment to give you a glimpse of your new home. Enjoy!”

  “Scotland?” Denver asked softly and immediately brought her hand to her face to shield her from the blinding light. She blinked and slowly turned to look out the window behind her.

  It was amazing, breathtaking. Gray and green, grounding shades against brilliant ones, filled her vision and she gaped at the hills, the tiny buildings, the clouds that appeared closer than they ever had before. There was no reason to expect that she’d ever fly on an airship, since she wasn’t employed in the military or anything, so she’d had no time to prepare for this experience. She’d spent so much time hardening herself, which normally prepared herself for experiences that might come close enough to her heart to touch it, but she hadn’t prepared for this. Hill and sky so beautiful that they couldn’t be possible.

  The landing was light, especially for such a monster of a machine. The magnified voice filled the space again: “Thanks for flying with us. A couple of announcements before you step off. One, please make sure to take all personal belongings, including your space blanket. There’s, eh…quite a crowd outside. Mostly they just want to offer their support to you and offer you luck on your journey. But if you’re asked a question, don’t answer it.”

  Denver looked at Stephen. “They should have met with us first to tell us this,” she said in an attempt to knit together a few shreds of old dignity. “We’re the leaders here.”

  “We’re not, baby. Not any more than they are.” He gestured over to Karale, Danovan, and Tommy, who huddled together clutching their blankets to their shoulders, looking as frightened and confused as everyone around them. “We had to make the call that we did, we had to get help, but we sacrificed something to do it.”

  Samara walked over, holding Denver’s coat and backpack out to her. In this pristine platform, she could finally smell the rottenness on it. She reached out anyway and tucked them under her blanket. Bristol and Jude walked over too.

  “Forgot to go to the road, huh?” she said to Bristol.

  “If you really knew me, you wouldn’t have even bothered to check. What kind of sister are you, anyway?”

  Denver was going to tell him that she was at least a living one, no thanks to him, but the words got stuck in her throat. Instead, she reached out and gave Bristol a little punch on the arm. He started to return it, but stopped when the hatch of the ship began to open and they heard roar of the crowd.

  Later, Denver could barely remember being escorted from the ship. Her senses had been overloaded with new faces in different colors with rowdy sounds and funny phrases coming out of every one. She could hardly piece together how she knew where they were going, that a nice lady with a chunky pink sweater with little white hairs on it had sat beside her and told her that they were going to stay in the Olympic Village until World United had sorted out their refugee paperwork.

  “We hosted the Olympics here in Edinburgh just a few years ago. We’re all so happy that all those buildings won’t go to waste.”

  It took Denver a few beats to understand what the woman meant. “What are the Olympics?” she finally asked.

  The woman just got tears in her eyes, patted Denver’s hand, and walked away to inform the next row where they were going.

  At the Olympic Village, there were more volunteers, this time in crisp cotton scrubs, to take them to their rooms—Denver and Stephen were allowed to share one—and give them shower supplies. The bathroom was connected to their own room, just like a home. She hadn’t had a shower in months—at the monastery, on the rare occasion they had soap, they just did their best with the sink. Stephen insisted that she go first.

  She turned on the water and played with the temperature. When it was close to scalding, she got in, shocked at first at how sensitive she was to the sensation of water hitting her skin. Months of enduring the cold, of carrying a putrid backpack under her coat, of not smiling, finally caught her. She allowed the pleasure of hot water on her skin to fill her with life, and, digging her fingers into her matted hair and breathing in steam, she wept.

  They said everyone needed to see the doctor, but they made Denver wait longer to see a specialist. Smiling men in scrubs herded Jude away with the other kids, but no one seemed to mind the fact that Stephen, Bristol, and Samara stayed with her, waiting together.

  Not even the doctor seemed to mind. When he arrived and Denver introduced him to everyone, he waved them all into the exam room and patted the stretcher. Denver sat on it while he asked his questions.

  “What was the date of your last period?”

  These accents were very disorienting. “My what?”

  “Period.”

  Denver looked at Stephen, who looked back blankly. The doctor scratched his nose. “When did you last bleed?”

  Denver glanced at the scrape on her right hand, wondering if the tree she’d brushed the night before had drawn blood. The doctor saw it and gently took her hand. “That doesn’t look so bad,” he said. “What I’m asking is—when did you last bleed from inside?”

  Something clicked, but Denver did her best to pretend it hadn’t. “Oh—the period. The date was…November tenth.” Probably not the exact date, but close.

  The doctor smiled and took a paper wheel from his pocket, twisting it. Denver eyed the wheel. These were the kinds of tools they tried to avoid back on the outside. She gave herself an internal shake—she guessed she was on the outside again, just a different outside. In the USA, she meant, tools that were somehow both chunky and flimsy were looked down upon. They could always just project a hologram when they needed everyone in the room to see some information. She noticed he wasn’t wearing a watch.

  “Your baby is due on August sixteenth. You’re about eleven weeks along.” He took out another tool, a little wand made from plastic, with a springy little cord on the end. “Let’s listen to the heartbeat.”

  He pointed the wand on her belly. The machine made a loud shushing noise. Denver stared at her belly. She had only a small notion that a little person was in there at all. She saw the doctor smile before she heard what he heard: a rhythmic pattern in the shushing. It didn’t sound like a heartbeat, but it sounded like something. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There wasn’t much to do in the Olympic Village. At St. Mary’s, there was the daily—or, in Bristol’s case, nightly—work to do to keep their little city running smoothly. Here, there was no work to do since the aid workers took total care of the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. When they ran out of toiletries, aid workers brought them more. There was nothing to do apart from watching an old TV and playing games of foosball on a broken table. There were books, but not enough, and just browsing the selection was usually enough for most of them to wander over to the foosball table to watch a pair of people try to turn the stubby handles with their fingertips, lunging for the intact ones. On nights when his courage was up, Bristol drew outlines of the foosball players with pens on paper. Unlike in the USA, those materials never seemed to be in short supply.

  They had been led to believe that Metrics, the United States government, had taken over the whole world, and that people in every geographic location on Earth lived as they lived. Since Metrics controlled wh
at they saw, heard, and read on the news, there was no reason to believe otherwise. Bristol knew, for example, that the country he lived in had once been called the United States, and the particular region where he lived had once been known as Pennsylvania, or something like that. He thought that these names were harmless tokens of moderate curiosity, but had long outworn their usefulness for describing meaningful aspects of a place, like laws and kinds of food and what the people looked like. As it turned out, the USA was still a place with its own culture—it had just been cut off from the rest of the world. Here, the people were still pale as paper. They ate meat, and lots of it, which was something they never did back home. Most of the refugees were constipated and miserable the first week, until the aid workers figured out that they shouldn’t shock their digestive systems with multiple servings of dead pigs and sheep and cows every meal. Bristol found the idea of meat disgusting, but the taste delicious. After so many years living as an Unregistered citizen, he was used to switching the thinking, feeling part of his brain off, so he simply did that whenever he found meat on his plate. Here, only some people wore watches, and the ones who did didn’t seem as interested in them as the people back home. Here, every night, the newscasters talked of liberating the United States.

  It was a humanitarian crisis, they said. Millions of people had already been killed in the name of saving resources, and the way things were going, another wave of murders could be expected sometime in the next decade. By this, Bristol assumed they meant that eventually the resources would dwindle so that the Fours would eventually believe life would be better without the Fives, and so on. But every night, as they gathered around the dated television hanging on the wall to listen to the reports, a question nagged at him—what should he believe?

  After all, for the better part of twenty years, he had believed whatever Metrics told him. The news didn’t come on nightly; it was on twenty-four hours a day, with product placements instead of commercials so you never had a break from it, and everything they said had been a lie. What if this place was no different? What was he supposed to believe?

  The information overload overwhelmed him and made him tired, but it had a completely different effect on Samara. In the evenings, she was the first to claim a spot right in front of the TV. She talked to aid workers constantly about what was being done to liberate their home country. It confused Bristol to no end, having just found out that he had a home country. After just finding out that the help they were getting from Canada was just a small piece of the puzzle. After having to adjust his sleep schedule to fall asleep in the early night for the first time since he was a child. It was all just too much. All he wanted to do was sketch.

  He also wanted Samara near, but couldn’t stand it when she was either. When she was physically around him, all that talk of home made him sick. Worse, she’d started to talk about subjects he barely understood, and he didn’t want to risk looking stupid by asking for the basics. What, for example, was the United Countries? Was it what they’d been told, a world government, but a different one from Metrics? Sometimes it sounded like it was an army. He’d never heard of it before, obviously, and he didn’t know how Samara was keeping up at such a pace.

  One night, about a week after they’d arrived, he asked to walk Samara to her room.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Samara stopped early on to say hi to Taye, and the two of them chatted about what they’d just heard from the newscasters for a while. Bristol crossed his arms and leaned against the wall to watch foosball while he waited for their conversation to end. When it finally did, Bristol worried that his courage wouldn’t hold.

  “Mind if I come in for a minute?” he asked when they got to her door.

  She looked at him quizzically. “Can you?”

  “I think so.”

  Samara smiled and scrunched her eyes. “It’s hard to get used to this life with no rules. Of course.”

  They went inside. His heart pounded against his ribs while he watched her take off her shoes. Ugly white tennis shoes that someone else had been walking around in before she’d decided that they were good enough for a refugee but not for her. Watching Samara with them hurt—the way she untied each with her long fingers instead of just kicking them off. She took care of her things, and she deserved better things to take care of.

  She looked up at him. “Are you okay?”

  He reached out and drew her close to him until their ribs were touching and he could feel her heart beating. “No,” he said into her hair. “I miss you.” That wasn’t the way he’d rehearsed this.

  She pulled her face away to look at him and rest her hands on his shoulders. “I’m right here.”

  “I just miss being close to you. I’ve been thinking…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking about Denver and Stephen. All week I’ve been hearing the baby’s heartbeat in my dreams, when I dream…”

  She closed her eyes under a tense brow. “Bristol, stop.”

  “We’d be great at it, you and me.”

  She turned her face away. “Stop.”

  “If we got married, we could stay in the same room and then I could take care of you and—”

  “Take care of me? Who’s going to take care of you? I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re not exactly in a place to take care of anyone right now. We’re being kept, held, until more rich and powerful people decide what to do with us. This isn’t the time to think about marriage and babies, Bristol.”

  He was glad he’d prepared for a fight. “Why not? I think this is the perfect time—we need each other now more than ever. And why would we wait for someone else to decide what our lives are worth? We tried that, both on the outside—”

  “In the United States,” Samara cut in, using the new, strange name for home.

  “Yes, both there and at St. Mary’s. And now we’re here and we get another chance at living our own lives, no matter what is going on around us.” He grasped both of her hands in his. “Marry me. Bring a baby here with me. You’re right—life with no rules is hard to get used to, but we’ll never get used to it if we don’t try.”

  She kept his hands in hers and knocked her forehead against his chest. “I can’t.”

  Bristol paused. “Is it something else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I truly don’t.”

  “Someone else?”

  Samara sighed. “It’s so many things, Bristol. I wasn’t prepared for this conversation tonight. You and I haven’t even really talked about this since…”

  “July seventh.”

  “Right. It’s been so long and we’ve been through so much that I haven’t had time to think things through. I’m not saying it’s not someone else, I’m just saying that if it is, they’re just a small part of the big picture.”

  Now Bristol closed his eyes and listened to his breath. A rising anger burned in his stomach as he recalled the sight of Taye carrying Samara out of the meeting house. Taye going with Samara at lunch. Taye and Samara chatting about the news…

  “If that’s true,” said Bristol, “will you promise me to think about it?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Bristol.”

  He waved his hand to dispel his silly dream. “Forget getting married. Forget the baby. Just promise me to think about what you want. Who you want.”

  She bit her lip. “Okay.”

  “That means you’ll have to give up some of your news obsession.”

  “That’s not fair.” Her voice was suddenly dark. “I didn’t ask you for a proposal.”

  “Well, let me know when you sort out your feelings and you won’t get another one.”

  “Fine.” She opened the door and stepped aside.

  Bristol nodded to her and stepped out, fighting every instinct he had to hold her, breathe in the scent of her hair, tell her he was sorry. The door closed behind him before he was more than a step away.

 
Chapter Eighteen

  Samara didn’t see Bristol the next morning at breakfast, nor at lunch. She was beginning to worry about him. Just because she didn’t want to add giving birth to her to-do list didn’t mean she didn’t care. She knew what Bristol was capable of, the thoughts he was capable of turning into unnerving images. The vivid beauty of his mind. She could even see his point, though she hesitated to admit it. They could be great together, and it wasn’t fair that there always seemed to be someone around to tell them no.

  But Samara was hungry, and insatiably so, not for food (there was, for once in her life, more than enough to eat every meal) but for knowledge. Bristol had a point there, too; he’d named it as her obsession. She was even a little afraid of it and noticed how willingly she’d connect the dots on bizarre theories that couldn’t possibly be true. The campers—or the Unregistered, or the refugees, or whatever people with more power were calling them now—had begun to make up their own stories of where they were and what fates awaited them, each theory as unlikely as the last. In her intense craving for information, Samara found herself wanting to pick a few to believe.

  She talked to the aid workers as much as she could, but they weren’t much use. She recognized the type: do-gooders who didn’t have an ounce more intelligence than she did herself. She saw herself in them, and she loathed herself for it. She’d wasted too much of her life following protocol, not asking questions. Now that she wanted to know, there was nowhere to turn. Her watch was probably in a police department somewhere. Not, she reminded herself, that it would be much good anyway. The search network they’d always used to get answers was controlled by Metrics and provided the public with mostly false information.

  Though it was freezing outside, she put on her new-to-her coat and hat and headed outside for a walk. The streets of Edinburgh never ceased to cheer her, though there was always a short period where she had to adjust to being one of few brown people on the street. It didn’t bother her too much, just when she saw people staring at her. She usually noticed it only at the very beginning of her walk, then had the rest of her afternoon to just enjoy the winding streets and the colorful shop windows.