Brave New Love (37 page)

Dim light filtered in from the outer chamber, illuminating detail in a stingy, selfish glow. A shape that Akil judged to be the size of the oblong box the gray men had carried away made an empty
silhouette on the floor, but everywhere else was a scatter of machine parts, bunches of wire, panels of rusting metal. But there were rotting things here, too, things that had once been alive.
Vermin, even hydroponic edibles . . . many nibbled down to their cores. Someone had been here. Persephone. Akil could picture her, hunkered down, on her own, surviving on what she could scavenge.
Small enough and young enough to be able to crawl through the spaces between the walls. Perhaps Akil’s age or a little older. She could have been one of the forgotten tenants. Akil imagined
that she had always run from the gray men, fought a war with them in the spaces the other tenants of 357 couldn’t see, in the hidden spaces behind the walls, all alone.

“Where do the gray men come from?” Akil asked, aloud. “Where did they go?”

Silence, then: “They say there are floors above us and below us,” Karkul nearly whispered. “And they say there is a floor below everything, below all the others, deeper than
the bottom. Your mother spoke of it sometimes, before the fire burned her away. That the lords of this place live down there beneath the bottom. Maybe that’s who these gray men
are.”

Akil’s eyes were riveted to Karkul’s face.

“Where they go,” Karkul shrugged, “no one knows.” His own eyes were hard and hot with accusation. “
Do
they?”

•  •  •

Some had fashioned flashlights for themselves, rough, shoddy things. But Akil, who had embraced the dark, had never needed one. So he returned to the shunned hallway swathed in
darkness. He went to the dead end and then, his fingers brushing the rough concrete of the walls, he stepped slowly to the spot where he believed the gray men had come through. His fingers probed,
felt the seams between slabs, the dampness that ate into their surfaces. Here. Was this one warmer than the others?

He took the small hammer from his belt, a tool he had fashioned himself long ago from a piece of a pipe and a dense chunk of metal. He had a small supply of similar tools that he had made and
deposited in various hidden places throughout 357, though he seldom found use for any of them.

But now he did, and drove the head of the hammer as hard as he could against the concrete he judged to have the telltale signs of heat. The space rang with the sound of the impact, the force of
which strained his arms immediately. The tiniest pebbles of shrapnel backfired into his face. He squeezed his eyes shut in the darkness and saw Persephone, alone and trapped by the gray men, their
hands clamping over her thin, expressive lips so she couldn’t scream. Coiling rough cord tightly around her arms so she couldn’t struggle as they packed her into the box and took her
away. The image drove strength through his own arms—thus the hammer into the wall, harder and louder, so loud that the ringing of it must have carried along the shunned hallway and down
lengths of passage back to the other tenants.

The wall did not yield. But neither did Akil’s strength, fueled as it was by his image of Persephone, his heart pounding under both the stress of his effort and the stress of his need to
see her. What did yield, finally, was the hammer. The head flew away from the handle, tumbled into Akil’s shoulder and knocked him backward on to the floor.

In a heap, his heart and his shoulder pounding, his breath coming in gasps, he glared at the concrete wall in perfect darkness. In the darkness, Persephone reached out for him. He thought, at
first, it was a plea for his help, but in truth she was merely reaching out to touch his cheek, fevered with effort and obsession, to touch it with her cool hand. The fingers neared him, her eyes a
dark, shining liquid beyond the fingers, and in the darkness of her eyes a spark, a glimmer of life.

The numerals.

Akil rose and spun around to the opposite wall. There had been numerals on this wall, Akil had seen them illuminated by the light that had come from within the other wall. These numerals had not
been faded, however, as all the other ones were. These were solid, dense, and they struck something in his head, like a tuning fork. The sound an echo of his mother’s voice.

Find the numerals
.

His hands searched the wall and his fingers found heat, 357 embedded into the surface.

His mother’s voice directed him to touch the numbers, feel their surface, trace their values. Years ago, in the months after her death, he had spent weeks of his life finding every fading
numeral throughout 357, tracing them with his small fingers. Nothing had happened, nothing had come of it—just another one of her dozens of futile, memorized directives.

Until now. It was one of those mysterious legacies that had seemed worthless at first, until he found himself in just the right place, at just the right moment.

He found the first form: 3.

Tracing the next numeral: 5.

The last: 7.

The wall behind Akil began to grind and then spilled out light. Akil scooped up the heavy lump of metal that had served as his hammer once and, holding it, stepped into the light, into another
world.

He was in a metal box, tall enough to stand in, large enough to fit, maybe, five men. The entire ceiling was a sizzling, white light that poured down, reflecting from the walls. On one of them,
buttons: numerals from zero to nine.

Akil’s hand flashed up, struck buttons without thought: five, eight, two, seven, seven, one—

A slim screen above the buttons lit up with green numbers: five, eight, two. The slab began to grind closed.

The slab shut.

And the box moved.

Akil scrambled against a wall. It felt as if he were falling . . . but
not
falling. Falling . . .
up
. That was what his stomach told him. He looked again at the numbers: 582.

The sense of movement gathered, rushed through him—his stomach and his ears and his skull—then petered out, came to a stop. The door again ground open, spilling light.

He was back in the shunned hallway. Except here, the numerals on the opposite wall read 582.

Akil strained to poke only his head out, prepared to see this other world but not willing to commit to it. But, then, he already knew what he was going to see. Up the hallway, around the curve,
he could see the spastically flickering bulbs, hear the dripping water, smell the rust and grime.

582 had a shunned hallway.
Every
floor had one, his mother nudged in his head.
Because
, she said,
the lords don’t want anyone to know where they are, how they move
around
.

Persephone must have realized that, too. Others wouldn’t have believed her, of course. She would have gone forward on her own, through the darkness, through the fear, found the other
floors, hunted by gray men the entire time. Until they finally caught up with her on 357. So close to Akil, so close he could nearly see her face, look into her eyes, feel her hand.

Together, with enough time, the two of them could go from floor to floor, gather the tenants, show them what was here. Together. But Persephone was below.

Below.

Akil faced the buttons again.

Zero, he pressed. Zero, again and again and again and again and again.

He kept pressing until the screen gathered five zeroes and the door ground shut and the sensation of movement—falling down now—clutched at his insides and he hunkered down in a
corner, waiting, feeling the speed in his chest. He clutched the metal of the hammerhead with sweat-soaked hands.

The slowing came eventually, full minutes later, then a thunk and a shudder through the box. At the jarring, Akil sprawled himself across the floor, pressing himself flat. It happened again and
again, five times all told. Then—no grinding—but a metallic rasp. Akil looked up.

The box opened into a lighted hallway, made not of concrete but of metal, rusted along some edges, but showing a dull gleam of the light from above. Akil rose, darted out of the box and, pressed
against the opposite wall, looked both ways. The hall stretched in front and he saw a second sliding panel before him, a second moving box, he presumed. The light here was of a different quality.
Not bruised or sickly, but sterile.

Sounds—footsteps, voices—came from one end of the hallway. Akil quickly moved the other way.

He flashed by doorways, twisted through turns and branches, trusting that his instinct would record the route. Everything here was different than what was above, but also the same: all metal,
better looked after, better maintained, marginally cleaner. The structure was the same: doorways the same size, evenly spaced, the ceiling the same height.

“Stop!” someone shouted at him. He didn’t even look, just rebounded off a wall, took flight down another branch.

It took him to a space that was different to what he’d seen before: wider, with a single doorway at the end that was the size of two normal doorways.

He paused, uncertain, until he caught a hint of movement in his peripheral vision. He shot toward the door. It parted before him in the middle and he careened through, faltered and stumbled.
Sheer awe drove him to his knees.

Gray men stood throughout the room, interacting with machines, if that’s what the things were—gleaming without rust, glowing in parts, slick, they looked like no other machines Akil
had ever seen but for their shape and the way the men were using them. Above, filling out the vastness of this room, was a domed ceiling that reached up many times 357’s full height. Across
that domed ceiling, an image, of dream or nightmare.

Was it a window? No, they were beneath everything, were they not? Where the lords lived: 00000.

Not a window—a screen.

Surrounding Akil, filling his vision and battling with his mind, was—must have been—the rumored area beyond the walls of 357 and 582 and all the other levels of this place. It was
the place on the other side of the window that fed the grill in 357’s outer hall.

The outside.

The floor was not made of concrete, but was brown and black, cracked and burned. Where it left off, filling the rest of the space above, roiling gray, puffs of . . . what? Something like smoke,
but dense and moving, shifting—as one of Jendayi’s friends said—
breathing
. From behind these things, light. Just snatches of it, winking through intermittent spaces,
scorching down like a vast, limitless weapon.

Occupying this landscape, growing from the cracked ground and clawing up at the gray sky, not just a tower that might conceivably hold six hundred floors of tenants, but
towers.
Dozens of
them, hundreds, spaced various distances apart from each other, growing in every direction and all formed of concrete, blackened and fissured where the light sliced it.

Not merely thousands of trapped, fearful tenants, but millions,
billions
, a number
beyond
numbers.

Akil’s eyes were streaming tears. His stomach muscles tightened and fluttered uncontrollably. This was what Persephone must have seen, why she had run from the lords who controlled it all.
He felt a physical
need to
see her now, clenching his body like a vice. They were the only two who had broken beyond the walls. They were bound by it more inextricably than they would have
been if they’d made a family, than by a lifetime together. Their bond was truth that only they knew and could never be forgotten.

He spun around to retreat but the gray men stood behind him, blocking the doorway. A weapon rose. At the tip was a sharp blue light, pulsing slowly. It strobed and like razor blades it sliced
his eyes. His skull flashed with needles of this light. His jaw went loose and slack, his chest, arms, legs seemed to fill with liquid concrete and drew him to the floor. His brain was swallowed by
flaming blue light.

•  •  •

He awoke under the illumination from a different light. The section of ceiling directly above him and the floor directly below him were between them projecting a harsh white
glow as though the sections themselves were large, square bulbs. Where he felt that glow on his body, a buzzing current of electricity seemed to pass through him. He was able to look around, and
realized he was trapped within a small, drab metallic room. A gray man stood just beyond the glow, his flat eyes reflecting the white of the light as though his insides were filled with it and
couldn’t contain it.

Akil was sitting on something, his body puddled into it. He wasn’t bound but, even though he could make his arms and legs move, they felt hollow and empty, as if they’d fallen
asleep, and the simple act of flexing his fingers sent waves of electricity through his entire body. A small table stood at the gray man’s side. Resting on it were the misshapen metal of
Akil’s hammerhead and the few other possessions he had been carrying: a length of cord, a small bunch of wires, a set of dull pliers. They were practically within his reach, if only he could
summon the strength to grab one.

“How did you find the elevator?” The gray man’s voice buzzed through Akil’s ears like an angry electric arc, the sound warped by what the light was doing in his head.

“Don’t . . . know that word,” Akil’s voice slurred like a viscous liquid from his crackling jaw.

“The moving compartment that brought you here is an elevator. How did you find it?”

“I was in . . . the hallway when you . . . when your people came. I saw it . . . open.”

“You were
in
the hallway?” The gray man’s expression was flat, like a machine. His tone was hard to distinguish, but he seemed surprised by Akil’s claim.

“Yes . . . the hallway.”

“How often do people on your floor go down that hallway?”

“Never. Just me.”

The gray man stood and shifted his head as though he were looking at a mechanism that was far more complex once its surface had been penetrated.

“How did you operate it?” he asked.

“Buttons. Numbers.”

The gray man cut the answer with an impatient slash of his hand.