Akaela (4 page)

Chapter Five

Akaela

I spend the morning at the
stables, keeping myself busy so I don’t have to think about what just happened.
I don’t want to think about aunt Kara’s face lined with tears or Skip’s limp
body as they pulled him out of the patch of reeds. My cat Ash follows every
step I take as I sweep the floors, move bales of hay, and groom the horses. The
wound where Uli implanted the chip looks clean and the kitten is already
feeling stronger and better.

A message
flickers on my retina. “Mandatory battery check. Please meet in lobby.”

It’s one
of those official messages sent through the central system of the Tower. My
last battery check was six months ago and I’m not due another one in a year and
a half, so I decide to ignore it.

When I’m
done feeding the horses, I sit on the lawn outside and watch Ash chase bugs.
The sun is high and harsh, the smoke from the Gaijins’ firewall dissolved into
layers of haze blanketing the forest on the other side of the river. The tall
grass around the stables is vibrant with bugs, butterflies and grasshoppers
that skip in all directions as Ash bounds awkwardly after them. The sight makes
me smile.

Happiness,
though, is a very precarious state of mind for the Mayakes.

Wes—a
kid my age—comes running from the Tower and waves at me. I recognize him
from the awkward way he runs. Wes doesn’t have legs and
feet,
he has titanium blades screwed into his femurs. He’s so fast he can cover a
mile in
under
five minutes.

He doesn’t
even need to catch his breath as he stands in front of me, his cheeks flushed.
“Didn’t you get the message?” he asks. “They just issued a mandatory battery
check. You need to come back to the Tower.”

I frown.
“What’s all the fuss about? I had mine six months ago.”

Wes shrugs.
“So did
Skip
. Yet he’d still be alive if his battery hadn’t
failed.”

I pick up
Ash and shoot to my feet. “What are you talking about? The droids killed Skip.”

Wes shakes
his head and points to the Tower. “Let’s go. You won’t believe what they found
out.”

*
 
*
 
*

The news spreads quickly, yet many
refuse to believe it. Battery failure is a Mayake’s worst nightmare. We can
confront the droids. We can resist the Gaijins. But until we are be able to
make our own technology, our outdated batteries will keep failing and killing
us.

The ground
floor of the Tower—what used to be the main lobby back when the building
was still a hospital—is packed with people. They cluster in
groups,
the adults animatedly talking among themselves, and
the children huddled around them, clinging to their parents with a disoriented look
on their faces.

I snuggle
Ash to my chest, looking for familiar faces. I spot Yuri ogling at me and immediately
look away. It’s hard not to, the kid’s got a metal jaw with no skin graft to
disguise it, just raw metal sticking out of his face. He’s sixteen, one year
older than me, and even Athel says he’s a freak of nature. I squeeze through
the crowd, losing Metal Jaw Yuri in the sea of people. A moment later, he reappears
right in front of me, blocking my way.

“What’s
that?” he says, arms crossed over his chest and chin pointing to Ash.

“None of
your business.” I try to shoulder past him, but he keeps his stance like a
block of cement and doesn’t budge. Feeling the tension, Ash tries to wiggle
away from my clasp and digs his claws into my flesh. Metal Jaw wraps his
fingers around Ash’s neck and tries to pull him from my grasp. I bite his
forearm, making him roar in pain. He slaps me in the face, and in the commotion
Ash hops to the ground and runs away.

“Ash!” I
scream, watching his little paws skid across the sea of shoes and prostheses.

I push
through the adults, their loud voices ringing in my ears.

“Ash! Come
back!”

So many
people have gathered on the ground floor. They scold me as I force my way
through. By the end of the hallway the crowd is sparser but I can’t see Ash
anywhere. I spin on my heels, calling him. And then I hear a feeble mew.

A man on a
crutch comes limping toward me. He holds Ash by the scruff, the poor kitten dangling
in his grasp.

“He’s
mine! Let him go!” I say.

The
hallway falls silent. I feel the stares of the people. What I just did is wrong.
This man is old, one of our Kiva Members. No child yells at a Kiva Member. Yet
I hold my ground, refusing to back away until I have Ash back.

The man’s yellow
eyes scrutinize the kitten. “Does it have implants?” he asks, his voice tainted
by a sibylline lisp. He leans on his crutch and stares at the wound on Ash’s
belly, where Uli inserted the chip.

“No!” I
yell. “He doesn’t.”

The Mayake
people don’t yell at their elders, they don’t challenge their authority. The
Mayake people are loyal to one another.
They don’t lie
,
they don’t disobey
. Those who do are promptly
punished. Wela for the lesser crimes, Niwang for the unforgivable ones:
complete deactivation of all implants with no recharging. That’s why the Mayake
people are compliant, their obedience ingrained through decades of fear.

Fear.

People
tell me fear is a natural instinct, a warning for danger. Growing up, I’ve learned
to see it in others, to recognize situations that would trigger it. But I never
feel it, never experience it.

Whether
the nanobots embedded in my cells erased it or I was born like this I don’t
know.

So I step
in front of the elder, stretch my arms up and try to get my kitten back.

“This cut
on his belly—” he says.

“He got it
in a fight. I rescued him.”

“Akaela!”

I turn and
find Mom glaring at me in complete shock.
She’ll
give me away,
me and my stupid little lie to save Ash’s life
.
I snatch the kitten away from the man’s hands and run. Uli catches me as I try
to flee and embraces me in his wide arms. I hide my face in his chest and sob.

“Help me,
Uli! Please!”

“It’s been
a rough day for all of us,” Uli says in his deep, reassuring voice. Ash can’t
breathe snuggled between my arms and Uli’s stomach, so I turn and let him climb
up on my arm. They are all staring at us—the people clustered along the hallway,
the Kiva Member still leaning on his crutch, and Mom, her face hung with
shock.
 

The Kiva
Member taps the floor with the tip of his crutch. “We need to keep going with
all battery checks,” he says. “This little incident is just making us waste
more time.”

“Yes,
sir,” Uli replies.
“Akaela didn’t mean any harm. The kitten—” He
swallows, squeezing my shoulders with his wide hands. “It’s just a temporary
thing. The cat was injured and Akaela rescued it. We will release him back into
the wild as soon as his wounds have healed.”

The man’s
brows come together in a skeptical scowl. “You better,” he says, limping away. “Take
her to recharge.”

“What?” I
yell, squirming. “No, I—”

Uli covers
my mouth. “Hush!” he says. Mom’s face is a mess of worry, concern, and anger.
She comes over to take Ash from my arms. “Please don’t give him away,” I beg
her.

“This has
gone far enough,” she hisses, staring straight into Uli’s eyes.

Is she mad
at him for not speaking up about Ash’s implants?

Ash mews
and claws the hooks of her prosthesis hand.

Uli pushes
me over. “Come on, Akaela. You need to recharge,
now
.”

And the
way he says “now,” I know I can’t disobey this time. We walk silently to Uli’s
workshop at the back, where five recharging stations are lined up—old
dental chairs revamped to fulfill their new purpose. Uli motions me to take a
seat and rolls over a cart carrying one of the TBCs—the transcutaneous battery
chargers.

I climb
into the recharging chair, cross my arms, and refuse to lie down. “I don’t need
recharging,” I challenge. “Why are you all freaked out yet nobody wants to talk
about what happened to Skip?”

“Skip is
the reason why we are doing this,” Uli replies, unwinding the cable from the
TBC.

“But—“

Mom leans
closer and puts a finger on my mouth, pain still fresh in her eyes. “That’s
enough, Akaela. Lie down and let Uli insert the USB port. The battery check is
mandatory. Everybody’s recharging and you are no different than everyone else.”

I don’t
get this obsession over recharging. I can go two years without recharging and
I’m fine. I guess I use less Watts than other people. So what? I’m lucky that I
need less. Yet my parents still make me recharge every six months like
everybody else. I hate it. Most of all, I hate lying on the chair and being
deactivated.

All Mayake
people come with a switch. It’s the price we pay for the life we couldn’t have
otherwise. We have transistors and nanowires and artificial immunity that
protect us from mutated bugs. And a built-in deactivation switch, a preventive
measure our fathers established after the Astraca incident in 2110, when a
handful of out-of-control A.I. units wrecked the city, killing thousands of people.

Deactivation
switches became mandatory, as
a safety measure
should nanobots
spread virally inside our brains and turn us into killing machines. Now they’re
used when we need to recharge or as a punishment for crimes.

Once the
switch is flipped, your body goes limp and your brain shuts down. It’s not
like
falling asleep, when you’re still free to move and your
mind wanders and dreams.

Deactivation
turns you into a dead person, locked in a vegetative state with no memories or
feelings until somebody brings you back.

This is
the kind of dread that knots my stomach every time I climb on a recharging
station.

“I can
check her levels,” Uli says. “If she doesn’t feel that she needs it—”

Mom shakes
her head. “No. I’m not taking chances after what happened to Skip.” She holds
Ash close to my face so I can pet him. I pull up my shirtsleeve, exposing the
flap on my forearm.

“You’ll
see,” I say. “Won’t take long. I’m already charged.”

“It’ll be
shorter, then,” Mom says then kisses me on the forehead. And with that, Uli slides
a finger behind my head and puts me out.

Chapter Six

Athel

Day Number: 1,530

Event:
Went to the landfill to find stuff
.

Number of Mayakes left: 432.

Goal for today: Make new batteries.

Changed to: Record a map of the mesa.

Yuri sits on top of Skull Rock,
his hair spiked up and a penknife in his right hand. He sharpens a wooden stick
and glares in our direction, his metallic jaw twisted in a smirk.

I don’t
like that kid. He’s trouble. He and his brother Cal think they have a right to
boss around all the other kids just because both their parents are Kiva Members.

I tell Lukas
to move right along, but Yuri hops down the rock and follows us.

“Hey, freaks.”

“Look
who’s talking,” I snarl. “Go away, Yuri. Nobody wants to see your metal face.”

“Oh yeah?
What if I told you your baby sis got busted for her cat?”

I freeze.
“What cat?” I know he’s just making stuff up to provoke us. We’re late, after
spending the whole day at the landfill. Kael’s probably home by now, and if we
don’t show up soon after him, Mom’s going to throw a fit. We spent too much
time looking for stuff we couldn’t find and then another good hour plotting
something we’ll never be able to achieve on our own. I need to find somebody
who can help, but I don’t know whom to trust. And I don’t want to get in
trouble with Mom once I get home. If Metal Jaw is right about Akaela, it sounds
like she’s the one who got in trouble.

Yuri
tosses the stick on the ground and brushes a finger along the blade of his
penknife. The sun is setting and it shines an eerie light on his metallic jaw.
He could have it fixed with skin grafts, but the kid wants to pretend he’s
die-hard and prides himself in all those screws poking out of his jawbone.
Every single Mayake I know has some kind of prostheses—some more conspicuous
than others—but Yuri’s are the only ones that repel me. Maybe because
he’s so brazen about them.
 

“Oh come
on,” he teases, walking to the Tower with us even though we didn’t invite him
to. “Like you know nothing about her cat. I bet you even helped her put
implants in the furry thing, though neither of you will ever admit it.”

“That’s
easy to test,” Lukas says. “Just take a Geiger counter. Lithium-ion radiation
will emit in the micro-Sievert range—”

“Lukas!” I
scold him. The guy’s such a geek he doesn’t understand when to keep his mouth
shut.

Lukas
looks down and mumbles, “Sorry.”

There’s a
lot of commotion outside the Tower. Kissed by the dying sun, the gray façade
looks pink and beautiful despite the cracks and open holes on the higher
stories. People have gathered outside, talking loudly and gesticulating among
themselves.

“What’s
going on?” I say.

Yuri snaps
his penknife closed and drops it in his pocket. “It’s that girl who was
supposed to get Skip’s mechanical heart,” he says. “She’s dead.”

The
statement, pronounced so coolly and voided of any empathy, makes me want to sock
him in the face. How dare he joke about stuff like that?

“What are
you talking about?”

He shrugs,
the metal in his face glistening almost sadistically. “Open heart surgery with
a failing heart to boot. The surgeons did whatever they could. She didn’t make
it.”

“You can’t
be serious!” I insist, refusing to believe he’s telling the truth.

“The odds
were totally in her favor,” Lukas chimes in.

“Oh
please,” Yuri snarls. “Those are just numbers.”

“Shut up!”
I yell. “Both of you!” My hands are shaking. I shove them in my pockets and
tell Yuri I don’t believe a word he’s saying. I know the waiting list for a
mechanical heart is relatively long, with young children at the top of the
list, but surely I would’ve heard something if the surgery had been planned for
today. Yuri’s a filthy bastard who enjoys other people’s pain. I storm away,
not bothering to wait for Lukas to catch up on his skinny legs.

Mom spots
me from the main entrance and comes running. She hugs me in a way that’s almost
embarrassing and makes me hope everybody else is too distracted to notice. When
she finally lets go, she cups my face in her hand and hook—even more
embarrassing—and says, “You damned fool! Where the hell have you been all
day?”

Mom
talks like that only when she’s really angry.
So maybe
Yuri wasn’t lying about a girl being dead. I’m about to ask, but Mom lowers her
voice and says, “I need you to keep an eye on your sister, Athel. I’m really
worried. Things just aren’t right. And what Uli did, with the kitten… it’s
bringing even more attention. We don’t need this.”

“Did
Akaela get in trouble again?” I don’t like being the big brother responsible
for his baby sis. Especially when said sister is too stupid to be afraid.

“Ten more
spots open!” somebody yells from the main entrance. “Who’s next?”

Mom wraps
her prostheses around my arm. “Come on, now. We need to check your batteries. Mandatory
call, everybody’s being tested.”

Whatever
happened, I’m about to find out. I slide my arm out of Mom’s grasp and follow
her inside the Tower.

*
 
*
 
*

By the time they wake me up, my
retina display reads 8:24 p.m. It took less than an hour to fully recharge me. Akaela’s
still out in the recharging chair, her breathing slow and steady. I sit up and
roll my sleeve back down, covering the flap on my forearm.

Uli
crosses his arms and leans against the white workbench. “How are you feeling,
Athel?”

“I’m
good,” I say. “But I never felt bad. Can you finally tell me what’s going on?”

Mom looks
down the hallway,
then
closes the door.
 
Uli wraps the TBC cables around the cart
spools and rolls it back into the storage room. His office is on the ground
floor, at the end of a long hallway that used to connect various medical labs
and waiting rooms.

Mom slumps
in one of the empty recharging chairs and sighs. “They’re all back to
their
quarters.”

Uli
scratches a brow and nods. “Over two hundred battery checks performed in under
five hours. That’s a record.”

“Now you’ll
tell me what happened?” I ask. “I’m almost seventeen. I may be too young to
participate in the Kiva, but I deserve to know what’s going on.”

Mom and
Uli look at one another, as if deciding how much they should share.

Uli
inhales. “Skip’s artificial heart was perfectly fine. So were his nanobots,
wiring, and chips. Everything looked in working shape, however…” He sighs,
rasps the stubble on his chin with the black index finger of his mechanical
hand. “He was completely wiped out. There wasn’t a single joule left in his
system.”

Mom lets
out a whimper and nibbles on the tip of her hand hook.

I frown.
“And you’re absolutely sure it wasn’t the droids who killed him?”

“There’s a
chance the droids didn’t even see him. He probably collapsed before he got
within their shooting range.”

It’s the
same story Lukas heard from his uncle Akari. I still find it hard to believe.
“He must’ve felt something, must’ve gotten a warning sign from the nanobots
embedded under his skin.”

Uli
presses his lips together. “None of that happened. And everything recharged
just fine once hooked back to the TBC.”

I ball my
fists and shake my head. “I can’t bel—”

“Let me
show you something,” Uli interjects. He crouches by one of the cabinets and
pulls out a partly disassembled TBC—the transcutaneous chargers we all
use to juice up our batteries. He puts it on a cart and rolls it over to my
chair. “This is Skip’s TBC.”

I stare at
it. The metal box is open. Uli uses a screwdriver to gently pull a red wire
tucked behind the capacitor.

“Corroded
terminals,” he says, showing me the end of the wire. “All the other parts of
the charger are well maintained and protected, but this right here—looks
like somebody purposely wiped out the protective compounds and applied
corrosive.”

It’s happened
, I think.
What I’ve
been fearing
all along
. The Mayake people, the peaceful ones, the ones who’ve sworn off
violence after the last carnage against the Gaijins, are now turning against
one another. There’s no more solidarity or obedience when it comes to survival.

Mom slowly
gets out of her chair and walks over to Akaela, blissfully unaware of what’s
going on. She leans over her and caresses her forehead, a gesture I rarely see
Mom doing these days. She’s always too preoccupied with other stuff, especially
since Dad left.

Uli taps
the TBC with the rubber tip of his prosthetic fingers. “There’s a traitor among
the Mayake people,” he says. “Skip’s TBC had been tampered. It was giving wrong
readouts, making it look like the battery was recharged when in fact it wasn’t.”

Mom shakes
her head and gently lifts the flap inside Akaela’s forearm. “We’re facing tough
times ahead,” she says, looking at me. “Look after Akaela, Athel. Look after
her,” she repeats, and then wakes her up.