The Sky Inside

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “No,” Martin said. “Just wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  When Cassie heard Martin come down the hall a few minutes later, she opened her door. He expected her to be mad at him, but she wasn’t. “Mom came in just after I left,” she said in a low voice. “If you hadn’t made me stop watching that show, I’d be in trouble!” Good old Cassie, always convinced that her big brother was looking out for her.

  “Why do all your dolls have those same big spooky smiles?” he muttered, wandering into her room. He sank down onto the thick purple carpet, and his dog snuggled up beside him.

  “You poor baby,” Cassie crooned, sitting down to pet it. “You’re stuck with my nasty old brother! If he’s mean to you, you can come and be my dog. What’s his name?” she wanted to know, and the shepherd looked up, dark eyes alert. Apparently, it wanted to know too.

  “I’ve kind of settled on Chip,” Martin said. “You know, because of his computer chips.” Chip’s tail thrashed wildly in approval.

  “Chip. Chip.” Cassie rolled the name around in her mouth as if she were trying out a new flavor of ice cream. “I don’t know.

  He’s so beautiful, and Chip seems too plain. I’d name him something like Ravenhair or Stoutheart.”

  “That’s so fairy-tale!” Martin scoffed. “Chip’s a dog, not a knight in some dumb after-school special. See, he likes ‘Chip,’ don’t you, boy?”

  The shepherd licked his face and tried to climb into his lap. Martin grabbed his legs and tipped him over, then joined him in a wrestling match.

  “Last night, it was ‘That dumb toy,’” Cassie said. “Now you’re giving him hugs. Mom said you would. You never like things till you’ve had them for a while.”

  The doorbell rang, and Martin attempted to rise. “It’s Matt and David. I need to go.”

  But it wasn’t his friends. Baby wails came down the hall, and an angelic-looking toddler appeared in Cassie’s doorway. She wore a blue velvet dress, shiny black shoes, and a big sparkly bow in her hair. At the moment, her face was beet red, and her nose was running like a faucet.

  “I can’t stand it anymore!” she bawled. “I can’t put up with this for another minute!” And from the sound of the voices in the living room, it seemed her mother felt the same way.

  “Look, Laura,” coaxed Cassie, pulling the toddler onto her lap. “Look at the beautiful German shepherd! If you study his coat, you’ll find red, beige, brown, and black hairs all intermixed. But from a few feet away, your eyes ignore the exceptions and see only the main colors. That’s why he’s called a ‘black and tan.’”

  Chip wore a patient expression as Laura sobbed into his fur. She calmed down after a minute or two and parted his coat to look at the hairs. “You’re right,” she sniffed as Cassie mopped her face with a tissue. “And the hairs are in a pretty pattern. How do they know to grow like that?”

  “This fur doesn’t grow,” Cassie replied. “It’s just a simulation. But on a real German shepherd dog, hair growth is controlled by genetics.”

  It’s like these kids are in school all the time, Martin thought in disgust. He got up and left the room, taking the genetics exhibit with him. Freaks, he thought without meaning to.

  “She’s not like a baby at all,” Laura’s mother was lamenting in the living room. “I hold her on my lap, and she wants to talk about why skin wrinkles when you age. I worked so hard to plan her room, and she won’t touch her toys. I wouldn’t give her a handheld, so she used her chocolate pudding today to write division problems on the wall!”

  “Laura’s a Wonder Baby, Monique,” Mom pointed out with a sigh.

  “It’s not fair!” Monique wailed. “I wanted a regular baby! I didn’t want one of these fancy models. Why can’t the stork bring us regular babies anymore?”

  “Mom, I’m going over to David’s,” Martin called, heading out the door. Slime demons—that was what he needed! Yes, he desperately needed slime demons to bring the day back under control.

  That night, Martin lay in bed and watched the bright numbers on his clock count up toward midnight. Bug wouldn’t do it, he thought. Bug wouldn’t turn Chip in and get Martin in trouble. It was a stupid plan. And even if he did, it wouldn’t matter because Martin was just a kid. Kids weren’t criminals; everybody knew that. No one would put Martin on the game shows.

  The game shows! Images filled his mind: the pudgy woman falling, the man sliding into the pit. What ingredient gives the popular bouncy toy FlyBall its amazing spring? Who would even know that kind of thing?

  And what about Chip? Whenever you see a bot act unusual, you should report it for demolition. That settled it. Martin wasn’t about to let somebody demolish his dog.

  “Come on, Chip,” he whispered as he sat up and reached for his sneakers. “We better go take care of this.”

  In the middle of the night, the alley above the loading bay was as dark and creepy as the suburb’s underworld had been. The dome’s faintly glowing skylights seemed to hang in the blackness overhead like incandescent slabs suspended in an eerie void. Martin had to take out his Hi-beam to key in his father’s password.

  “Hurry up!” Bug hissed in his ear.

  They rode the elevator down to the loading bay, and Martin turned on the fluorescent lights. He had thought he would feel better down here, but he didn’t. Instead, he felt the vague unease that comes from being in familiar surroundings at the wrong time of day. Nothing about the brightly lit room seemed to have changed, but something was out of place. That something was Martin, standing in the loading bay in his pajamas. He belonged in bed.

  The freight bots, with their strange and powerful steel shapes, came out of the corners. Chip spoke to them in his vibrating tool bot hum, and they drew back. There was no need to be scared of them, Martin told himself; he’d practically grown up with these bots. But tonight they seemed different. He didn’t want to turn his back on them.

  Bug made things worse. He was in a state of panic. “Okay, let’s go!” he shouted. “Out of here! Now! Wow! Pow! Get those doors open!”

  “Look, I think you should think about this,” Martin said. “I mean, you shouldn’t just walk out there. It’s nothing but sand, and you ought to have a bag or something over your face for the poison, and anyway, you don’t even have any stuff to take with you.”

  Bug walked down the rails a few feet, bouncing on his toes and swinging his arms like a runner before a race. “Kid, we both know I’m gonna die out there,” he said. “And you’re telling me I need to pack?”

  Chip seemed to be acting unusual. He no longer fawned on Martin and looked for petting and guidance. Instead, he surveyed the packet rails and held a humming conversation with one of the bots. For the moment at least, it seemed as if Chip had forgotten to be a dog.

  “Look,” Martin said to him in a low voice, “I want you to take Bug outside if you can, but don’t let anything happen to you. I don’t want you getting caught by some alarm and getting sent back to Central for demolition. I’m sorry, I think he’s nuts for doing this, but whatever, if it makes him leave us alone. Just be sure you stay safe. I’m gonna worry till you get back.”

  Trotting between the rails, Chip led the way to the steel gates. About ten feet from them, he froze and glanced back at Martin. Martin turned to Bug.

  “Okay, this is it,” he said. “Here’s my flashlight. It’s got water in the cannon part in case you need something to drink.”

  He tried to give it to Bug, but Bug wouldn’t take it. He was staring past Martin without moving, as if he had turned to concrete. Martin looked around to see why. “Holy moly!” he breathed.

  A very odd-looking packet car now stood on the rails, waiting for the gates to open. It was about two feet high and flat on top, like a rolling table, but this “table” had a German shepherd’s black saddle spread out as a design across its surface, and its square legs faded to tan. A stylized tail of sorts hung down from the back, and Chip’s head poked out the front. The head, panting slightly, looked per
fectly normal, as if it didn’t realize its body was gone.

  Martin felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He had to swallow before he could speak. “I think,” he whispered to Bug, “that he needs you to ride out. You know, so you won’t set off the air horn.”

  Bug walked over to the dog-car in a kind of dream. He had a strange look on his face, as if he no longer saw or heard anything. He sat down gingerly, crossing his long legs, and the car gave a lurch and started to roll.

  “Good luck,” said Martin. Too late, he realized he had whispered.

  The gates swung wide, dwarfing the miniature packet, and the crazy-looking pair rolled through. Martin cringed, expecting the earsplitting horn to go off, but they rolled into the washing room without incident, as his father would have said. After a few seconds, the gates swung shut again, and he was left alone.

  He sat down on the cement floor and waited. The loading bay was very still. The multiarmed freight bots had stopped right where they were, and he wondered what they were supposed to do. The chilly floor made him cold, and he began to miss his warm bed. After a few minutes, small things started to spook him: the occasional creak of packet panels shifting and settling; the drone of a fan motor kicking on.

  What if Chip was stuck out there? What if his dad found them both in the morning? What if his parents knew he had snuck out tonight and were waiting for him in the living room? But now the steel gates were opening. A packet was coming in. Seconds later, his dog was in his arms, licking him on the face.

  They ran most of the way home through the darkened streets and crept into the quiet house. After his exhausting day, all Martin wanted was to get into bed. But once there, his dreams were torture. In his sleep, he thought he could hear banging on the thick steel plates of the dome. Bug stood outside in a cloud of blowing sand, screaming to be let in.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next day was Rest Day, traditionally devoted to an afternoon nap and the best meal of the week. When Martin smelled brownies, he thought about Bug’s cooker never making desserts and went into the kitchen to eat a piece in his memory.

  Mom was sitting on the living room floor with her eyes closed, breathing in and out slowly in time to quiet music. On the television, three women in color-coordinated workout clothes were sitting there and breathing too.

  “Where’s Dad?” Martin wanted to know. “Isn’t his fishing show on now?”

  “Your father had to go in to work,” Mom said, opening her eyes and adjusting her sweatband. “Thank goodness! That fishing show is so boring.” She closed her eyes and went back to breathing.

  “Work on a Rest Day? What’s up?”

  “The bots called. Some emergency,” Mom said between breaths.

  Martin wandered back to his room. All the flavor had gone out of his brownie.

  A couple of hours later, Dad returned. “Great news, Tris!” he said, kissing Mom. “The best possible news.”

  “What is it?” she asked. But Martin was on hand, dishing out another brownie, so Dad smiled and shook his head.

  “Let’s just say we found something that’s been lost,” he said, reaching into the refrigerator for a beer.

  Good news? What kind of good news? Martin abandoned his plans for the rest of the day and devoted the afternoon to some serious espionage. Cassie begged him to come to the park with her, but he sent Chip in his place. Matt and David joyfully reported that they had installed blender demons in all the ImCity kitchens, but he didn’t go admire the carnage. Instead, he loitered in the hallway just out of sight of his parents, memorizing the pattern of picture-hanging holes in the wallpaper. He had long ago memorized the pattern of the wallpaper itself.

  During This Week in Sports History, his persistence paid off. Dad couldn’t contain himself any longer.

  “There he was, Tris!” he said. “Right there in the loading bay. Security was holding him, and a darn good thing, too. He was raving like a broken bot.”

  “You’re talking about . . . ,” Mom said in a low voice, and Martin heard Dad’s recliner creak.

  “That’s right! And right before this . . . before everything gets started! I was afraid they were going to find us off in our body count. Who knows what would have happened? But no worries now. Perfect timing!”

  “Where had he been?” Mom asked quietly.

  “Oh, who cares? He looks like hell, out of his gourd, too, hair all over like I don’t know what. Social took him down to quarantine and gassed him for me, so there’ll be no trouble tomorrow. Pickup’s at nine thirty.”

  “Poor JoAnne,” sighed Mom. “Did you tell her and Ben?”

  “Of course not! They might file an appeal, and I’m not risking that right now. Besides, it’s better that they don’t know. You should see his face, Tris. He does look bad.”

  So they got Bug, Martin thought. How did he get back inside? It was weird that he wasn’t dead, but maybe the poison air outside had made him go crazy. Well, crazier, anyway.

  The front door opened, and Cassie caught him crouching in the hallway. She giggled, but he motioned for silence, and she and Chip followed him into his room. “Your dog made me come home,” she said. “He was a wreck without you.” Chip greeted him the way a starving man greets a pepperoni pizza.

  What if people found out his dog had led Bug outside? But maybe Bug was too crazy to tell on him.

  “Are you listening to me?” Cassie’s little face was stern. “You shouldn’t lurk around in the hall. You looked like some kind of criminal.”

  “I just like to know things,” Martin said vaguely. And what about the keypad on the elevator door? Did it store the times and dates of log-ins? He should have thought of that.

  “What good does it do you to know things?” Cassie said. “You never do anything about it, and you never tell what you find out. We Exponents share our knowledge with the community to help make it a better place.”

  And then there were the freight bots, Martin thought. How had they called his father? Could they tell their packet chief about Chip? “No one in the community wants to know what you Xs know,” he said. “You guys just learn school-type stuff.”

  “Okay, what have you learned today with your spying?”

  “None of your business.”

  “There, you see? No good to anybody.”

  But Martin wasn’t listening. Nine thirty, he thought. That must be a packet’s arrival time. He had to find a way to be there.

  > > > >

  Next morning, Cassie protested when Martin brought Chip along on the walk to school. “Mom wouldn’t like this,” she said, stopping to pull a curl out from under her backpack strap. “Mom says toys need to stay at home.”

  “Yeah, but she won’t find out,” he said. “She’s gone to her stained-glass lesson. And Chip knows his way around, don’t you, boy? He can let himself in before she gets back.”

  At the schoolyard, Chip was aloof but not impolite to the children who crowded around to stroke his rough coat. When the bell rang, Martin waited for the playground to clear and then held a conference with him.

  “Look, computer chip,” he whispered into the velvety pricked ears, “we have to meet a packet car at nine thirty so I can see what they’re doing with Bug. That means you’ve got to get me out of class. Interrupt school until the teacher sends me out. Don’t do anything nontoy, like bite anybody or talk bot, because everyone will be watching. And don’t believe me if I tell you not to come back. I’ll have to say that. Just keep showing up till the teacher makes me leave.”

  Those intelligent eyes drank him in, and Chip wagged, but Martin wanted to be sure he understood.

  “I’ll tell you to go away,” he said. “I’ll even tell you to go home, but I mean for you to come back, no matter what I say. But not right away. Give it five or ten minutes.”

  Martin came through the doorway of his classroom a fraction of a second before the tardy bell rang. The mere sight of the place was enough to sap his energy and ruin his mood. Maybe it was the vomit gre
en color of the walls, or maybe it was all those identical desks in rows. No amount of interesting decoration ever made up for the rigid lines of desks.

  Martin’s teacher seemed to agree. Mr. Ramsey seldom spoke above a halfhearted monotone. Only a few years out of school himself, he was stuck in a classroom while his less gifted peers sat at home drawing factory salaries. “Last as usual, Martin,” he remarked with a touch of envy.

  “Yes, sir,” Martin said. He stuffed his backpack under his chair and plugged his handheld into the desk. The screen jumped a bit as it synchronized itself with the school computer.

  “Class, bring up the first exercise,” Mr. Ramsey said. Sighing quietly, they did so. “Now, enter these answers as I give them to you: For number one, a. For number two, c. For number three, . . .”

  Martin blinked at his handheld in surprise, then glanced sideways to discover his classmates doing the same thing. Why was Mr. Ramsey giving them the answers? There was no time to ask or even wonder. They came so quickly that he had to scramble to catch up.

  “For number seventeen, e,” continued the teacher. “Martin, is that your dog?”

  Martin looked up, startled, and Chip licked him on the nose, tail thumping against a neighboring desk. “Oh! Yes, sir, he is,” Martin replied, trying to fend him off.

  “And why is he in class?”

  “Well, sir, he likes to be with me. I let him come along on the walk to school, so maybe he decided to stay here.”

  “This is not the time for foolishness,” said Mr. Ramsey severely. “Principal Thomasson is visiting our class this morning, and she’ll be here any minute. Get that toy out of here.”

  Martin hustled his dog to the classroom door. “Okay, the plan’s off,” he whispered. “If the principal sees you here, I’ll get in huge trouble. You go home and wait for me. Understand?”

  Chip wagged. I understand perfectly, his dark eyes seemed to say.

  “No, you don’t get it!” hissed Martin. “She keeps the permanent records! She can change what jobs we get. I don’t want her mad at me. Go home!” Chip trotted off down the hall.