Brave New Love (36 page)

Today, Akil had come here because, once again, he had been watching Jendayi—her hair cut nearly to her scalp, her large eyes shining, her delicate hands flickering and buzzing about
excitedly like the flickering lights. She, like Akil, had finished her lesson years at fifteen. She was due shortly for apprenticeship to a machinist or hydroponist.

Today was her time. All the others had done it already, you could tell by the gaze-scars splayed across their faces. Jendayi made a show of resistance but allowed herself to be taken,
giggling.

Struck cold inside, Akil followed from far back. He could watch from around corners, down the long hallway where he was part of the distance itself.

They took her down the cracking expanses, their chattering echoes springing back to him.

“Don’t,” he whispered after her. “Don’t.”

They moved through the pounding hum of the hallways with the temperature equipment, which made the floor vibrate and the air hot and dry, and they came to the outer wall. The window.

The window used to be closed in by a steel shutter that would be opened once a day to let in the light. It was a light unlike any from a bulb; a pure yellow that burned tears of beauty from
people’s eyes. For four minutes a day, that light would hit the grill on the far wall and charged all of the machines that kept 357 alive. Then the light would shift and dim and the shutter
would slide closed until the next day.

Sometimes people would be so taken by the beauty they’d arrange to be lifted into the light. They’d bask, and smiles of sacred enlightenment would take them. Others would gather
around them, follow them for the rest of the day and listen to them talk about the quintessence of light. Then, after two or three days, the flesh on the faces of those who had stood in the light
would begin to flake and then peel off in hot, bloody pieces, leaving seeping fissures that looked like the dripping cracks in the concrete walls.

They did this for years, such was the draw of the light. Until too many died and the survival of all on 357 was threatened. Standing in the light was then forbidden.

Akil’s mother had told him all this. Told him about sickness that could come from an invisible thing called radiation, which traveled in the light. She was a leader—brilliant, but
hated for her brilliance. That was what Akil remembered about her, mostly: her knowledge, all the things she told him.

He could hear her voice sometimes, saying those words, those things about the machines, about people, about numbers. “Repeat it back,” she would say, again and again. So many things
that Akil didn’t understand, but could recite. Slowly, over the years, he would understand one of the things suddenly, when confronted with a door no one else could open or a machine no one
else could operate. His mother’s legacy.

He remembered that about her. That and the feel of her hand on his face. Maybe only once. A soft, cool touch on a fevered cheek. No comforting word. No loving look. Just the touch of the hand on
the cheek.

She had forbidden people from the light and they found that unacceptable. So some came together and ripped the steel shutter from its place, exposing the window for everyone, at all times, so
when the light was
not
shining in, you could still look.

People did. They looked when the light was not burning in and they looked and looked and looked again. Slowly, over months, sometimes years, they would acquire gaze-scars, peeling cracks that
spread from the eyes and across the cheeks and scalp, but didn’t kill. Not immediately. Not so quickly you could prove the link. But adults, some of them parents, some of their faces a riot
of gaze-scars, forbade the children from going to look too often. But often enough, the children would sneak to the room, to steal a look out the window. For many, it was a rite of passage.

Akil had never looked. One of the things he had promised his mother before he was old enough to know what he was promising.

“It’s like a tunnel,” Risa was saying to Jendayi. “The concrete is so thick between us and there. But at the end, there’s a . . . a living gray. It
moves
,
like the smoke that comes from machines sometimes. It
breathes.
”

Voices rose in agreement and awe.

“Come on,” Risa continued, always closest to Jendayi, always the first to offer her hand. “I’ll boost you.”

Jendayi held her spot, looked up at the window, at Risa.

“Come
on
” Risa said, smiling.

Jendayi came forward.

Risa knelt, offered her clasped hands as a foothold. Jendayi stepped in, hoisted herself up. Her face rose toward the window.

“Don’t!” Akil shouted.

The uncertain tower faltered, Jendayi landed hard on her feet.

“There,” Risa shouted, pointing. They moved as one, surging toward Akil.

But he was already gone, careening down the hallways, sometimes on the floor, sometimes skittering, ricocheting from the walls themselves, using metal extrusions, pipes, crevices as hand- and
footholds to increase his momentum.

They weren’t fast enough to catch him at first but Risa and Swayne, the fastest of them, could keep him in sight and as long as he was in sight, they would catch him eventually because 357
was finite and there was only so far you could run.

So he headed as far as he could, as far as 357 could take him. To the other end, the shunned hallway.

He threw himself off one corner, sprang around the other, shot beneath the brown, trickling water, through the mad flickering light, around the curve.

Their voices echoed to him as they pounded to the T-branch.

“He went this way,” Swayne’s voice coughed out between ragged breaths.

“No,” Risa’s voice was harsh and husky. “He went down the hallway. He would go down here.”

Akil retreated further, past the spattering of water into murky puddles, toward the spot where even the flickering faltered and into the beckoning darkness. They would never dare follow.

“You’d better stay in there,” Risa’s voice echoed at him.

“Yes, stay there,” Jendayi’s voice now. “Don’t ever,
ever
come out!”

Jendayi, unaware though she may have been, had been his connection, his hope. Without her, he was set adrift without direction or purpose. He laid himself down in the shunned hallway, fetal in
the black and blind to the heart pain, not even sure whether his eyes were opened or closed.

Akil’s prostrate body was pressed against that dead-end wall, alone and trembling with grief when, for the second time in less than an hour, his world changed forever.

A razor of light suddenly cut a square shape ahead of him, as if the space behind one concrete slab of wall had illuminated.

Then, with a grinding sound, the slab of concrete recessed slowly into the space behind it and then slid to the side. Then the light burned out, scouring the filthy hallway ten feet away from
Akil. It was the same rough, filthy concrete as everywhere else. On the wall opposite the sliding slab, the bright heat lit the numerals, the same three numerals stamped on every corner, at every
turn: 357.

He scrabbled backward, pressing harder into the dead-end wall, into the shadows that still clung scantly to him in the corner. His eyes goggled from his face. Fascination, his mother’s
fascination, slowly bent his body forward.
Yes
, the part of him that was her said
, there would have to be something here. Why build a curving passageway that ends in nothing?

Abruptly, he was jolted back again. Shadows sheered out of the light, heralding figures. Three gray men stepped out from the wall.

“Do you have her?” a flat, low voice came from one of them.

“I have Persephone at 29 North, 32 West,” said another.

“Locked?”

“Locked.”

The first of them moved, heading away through 357’s corridors and with his back to Akil, who had remained hidden. The other two followed, their hard, clipped steps falling into a rhythm
with the leader. Akil saw them in profile, briefly. They didn’t seem to have eyes, but something silvery and flat, with a sheen that caught the light as they turned.

As they disappeared ahead, turning into the far curve, Akil was jolted again as the grinding sound filled the hall. The light became an outline again, and grinding cut off sharply, leaving a
void of ringing silence behind and the illumination gone.

It took Akil only an instant to decide. He rose and followed.

He stuck to the corners, let the gray men stay well ahead. They walked in their synchronized, assured march as though they knew the exact route to their destination and what would be waiting for
them around every curve and corner.

But Akil had never seen them before. No one had. The tenants of 357 were the descendents of those who were on 357 before. Despite years spent attempting to contact tenants below them and above
them, no one foreign to 357 had ever been seen, no one who had not been born here and would not die here.

The gray men reached the central zone, where there were other people. A pair of machinists stopped dead in their tracks, and watched these apparitions approach. One machinist nearly leapt out of
the way as the gray men, silent and inscrutable, swept by without a glance.

The one who said he had Persephone “locked” stopped in front of a doorway that led into a machine space, one of the hot, sweating compartments where instrumentation throbbed and
hummed. When other tenants of 357 came down the passages they too stopped frozen at the sight of these men. Akil kept to his corner, his dark, intense eyes testing every detail, burning every
moment of them into his brain.

Two of the gray men went into the machine chamber. The third man remained where he was, standing with his back to the door and his face toward the hallway.

Someone pushed their way through the gaping crowd: Karkul, the old Punisher. He came through, his face set as it would be when he came to break up fights or carry someone away for an infraction.
He advanced until he was five feet from the gray man.

“Who are you?” Karkul said in a hard voice. “Where did you come from?”

The gray man surveyed him. From his corner, Akil could see something flashing silver in the dull light of the hall instead of eyes. There was no answer.

“What are you doing here?” Karkul pressed.

“It looks like . . . ” a woman behind Karkul was craning her neck, angling to see what was going on beyond the doorway. “There’s . . . there’s another compartment
within the chamber. A door I’ve never seen. It leads into . . . I can’t tell.”

“Let me by,” Karkul said and took a step forward. The gray man didn’t move. When Karkul spoke again, his voice fell like a hammer striking an anvil. “Let. Me.
By!”

The gray man shifted almost imperceptibly so that he was facing Karkul, whose body appeared full of tension. But no immediate motion between them followed. Karkul had no more words. It was a
standoff.

Then a ripple pulsed through the crowd as the other two gray men reappeared through the door. They were carrying an oblong load between them, a box as long and wide as a person. They maneuvered
it into the hallway with some small difficulty and continued along, back the way they had come, toward Akil.

“What is that?” Karkul said in a low, crackling voice to the figure blocking his way.

In response, the gray man turned and fell in behind the others, offering only his back in answer.

Akil whipped back around the corner, hurried ahead to the next corner, pressed his back to the wall. Without peering back around, he listened, heard the sharp, rhythmic steps. He darted away
from his spot, and followed them covertly all the way back to the shunned hallway, between the puddles, silent on the softly worn pads of his shoes.

He found the darkness again, pressed himself into it. They continued with their burden, and paused. There was movement at the wall opposite to the one they had come through. Then the grinding
sounded again. Akil felt it vibrate through the wall with his fingertips. And, again, the unfamiliar light poured from the opening, illuminating the numerals stamped on to the concrete opposite.
The gray men moved back into the opening with the box and what it held—“she”—“Persephone.”

The last gray man went through into the light, the grinding returned, the light became slim, winked out, and the sanctuary of darkness returned. As inexplicably as they had arrived, they were
gone.

With a girl.

•  •  •

Akil waited until the tenants of 357 had retreated to their quarters and the corridor outside the machine chamber was empty. He entered the small room, felt the heat and the
thrum off the rusting old hulk. There were many machines in the walls of 357 and the tenants only knew what a few of them actually did.

One of the grimy concrete slabs that made up the wall of the machine chamber had come open like a door and behind it was another chamber. Akil went to the threshold.

Karkul was still within the small inner space, picking about for a clue as to what, exactly, it was. When Akil appeared, the old man’s hard eyes swung up at him.

“What do you want here, boy?” Scars and deep age-lines dueled on Karkul’s face. His old wounds were not gaze-scars—the marks had been earned at the hands of men and women
who had resisted him at one time with their nails, their tools, their homemade weapons.

“I just want to see.” Akil’s voice sounded strange to him sometimes. He didn’t have occasion to speak very often.

The hidden chamber was small, and thick with the smell of old oil and lubricants. The floor was littered with junk.

“Why do you want to see?” Karkul demanded.

“I saw the gray men come and—”

“What are they to you?”

“They’re nothing to me. I just saw them.”

“Where did they come from?”

“I don’t know. I just saw them in the halls.”

Karkul glared at him

“You just saw them,” Karkul said, his rough voice dropping low. “Your mother kept secrets, too. She was a stubborn, hateful woman.” His hard eyes, sharp like little
diamonds, drilled into Akil. “But she . . .” he stopped himself, his face tightened and his scars went pale from the stress. “Fine, then. See.” He stepped aside and revealed
the expanse of the small room.