Darklandia (15 page)

She glided toward the far wall of the conference room where the map on the wall depicted an aerial view of Times Square. Someone had doodled in black marker on the lower right corner of the map a stick figure with its arms stretched straight out and eyes closed. A thick, red X had been scratched through the image and the message was clear.

“Are you okay?” Nyx edged closer to me as I stared at the map.

“Does everyone here hate the sleepwalkers?” I asked. “Because it’s not their fault they’re like that.”

“If we hated them why would we be trying to save them?”

I nodded. Of course, he was right. But that didn’t stop me from questioning whether any of this was necessary. “What’s going to happen in Times Square?”

“The Felicity Festival,” a scratchy voice said behind me.

I turned around and found a tall girl with dark hair and eyes bluer than my father’s. Her beauty commanded my attention, as did the scar that lashed across her smooth skin from her temple, past her left eye, and down to the corner of her red lips—like Jane Locke’s lips on the defiled poster. The girl leaned over and kissed Nyx on the cheek, leaving a ruby imprint of her lips. Then she pulled a wooden bench out from beneath a table and took a seat.

“This is Lux,” Nyx said, as he slipped his hand beneath her black hair and squeezed the back of her neck. “She’s my sister.”

“Your sister.” I tried not to look too relieved at this revelation.

“You’ll be sleeping with her tonight,” he continued.

Lux whipped her head around and glared at him. “I don’t think so. She’s sleeping with you,” she snarled before she turned to me. “Unless you want to get kicked in your sleep.”

“Be nice,” Nyx reprimanded her. “She has night terrors,” he explained to me. “She’s right. You should probably sleep with someone else.”

“I’ll sleep with you.” I tried not to sound too eager, but the apprehensive look on his face told me I had not succeeded.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he replied, as he waved toward a spot on the bench next to Lux. “Sit down.”

“She can sleep with me,” Gray said, flashing me a wide rotten-tooth smile as I took a seat across the table from her. “I showered yesterday.”

Lux let out a hearty laugh. “Well, that should make up for the sleep-talking. ‘Excuse me, Ms. Locke, but you’re stepping on my slippers. Can you please hand me that elephant ear?’”

“That was once.” Gray glared at Nyx’s sister from across the table. Lux threw a steaming carrot at her and Gray ducked as it flew over her head. “You’d better watch out or I just might put another lizard in your bed.”

“I’ve had worse things in my bed,” Lux shot back, as Jock strolled in and took a seat next to Gray.

“That’s enough,” Nyx said, squeezing Lux’s shoulder as he glared down at her.

Lux rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, Little Brother.”

Nyx took a seat next to me, ladled a steamy green liquid into a bowl, and placed it in front of me. “Spinach soup. It’s good.”

“I just ate the apple and my ration,” I replied, though the smell of the soup was tempting. “I thought you were going to tell me about the master levels.”

“You weren’t compromised,” Jock said to Nyx. “Both of you can go back tonight.”

“I guess I’ll have to reactivate this tonight,” Nyx said, and a shiver passed over my arm as he ran his finger over my sec-band. “What about Darla?”

“They only got her because she leveled up,” Jock replied. “The angels must have been after you because they wanted to question you.”

Before I could ask what “leveled up” meant, another guy walked into the conference room, his head slung low as he took a seat across from Nyx, next to Jock. Though I couldn’t see his face, the top of his head looked familiar.

“Hey, Tibbs,” Jock said, ruffling his golden hair. He raised his head briefly to nod at Jock and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Harry? Harry Tibbett?”

He looked up at me with a scowl on his gaunt face. His hair hung over his eyes, but I knew it was Harry.

“Sera?” His eyes widened as a smile stretched across his face. “You made it.”

I had never spoken to Harry Tibbett outside of class except for a few odd words he muttered to me while we examined the restraints inside the GAT last year, shortly before he was detained.
“I’ll bet some of them like it.”

“You skipped your ration on purpose,” I blurted.

“Harry is our second most valuable asset,” Hispa said as she took a seat next to him and clapped him on the back. Harry smiled shyly as she served him a bowl of soup and placed it in front of him. “Harry’s knowledge of the detainment process helped us save you, Sera.”

“What about Darla? She wasn’t valuable enough to save?” I asked, unable to hide my anger.

“They detained Darla because she leveled up,” Nyx said. “We didn’t know until she was already detained.”

“So you’re just going to leave her there?”

“I told you we’re going to try our hardest to get her out of the facility, but you’re going to have to work with us to free the master levels.”

I glared at him and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

“I guess now would be a good time to tell you about the masters.”

15

“The detainees are locked in their cells and they spend at least eighteen hours a day inside Darklandia.” Nyx paused to glance at the faces around the table before he continued. “We’re not entirely sure, and we won’t be until I log on to server eighty-seven tonight, but we believe that part of Darklandia’s surveillance algorithm assigns scores and levels to each user based on their adherence to the
Code of Felicity
and their use of filter words. Every infraction of the code and every filter word spoken outside Darklandia kicks up your score inside Darklandia and, eventually, you get kicked up to the next level of surveillance. Those who reach master level are detained and forced to spend the rest of their lives inside Darklandia as clones.”

“Clones? Like the clone I saw in my feed?”

“What clone?”

“I’m pretty sure they deployed a clone of you in my feed today.”

“They cloned me?” Nyx looked horrified.

“Yes. You were really scary.”

“I feel as if I should apologize, even though it wasn’t really me.”

“Who was it?”

“Just another detainee,” Jock replied, as he munched on a mouthful of carrots. “Hispa and I have been working on that damn algorithm for years and, as far as we can tell, a clone is deployed by merging the master’s feed with another feed—in this case it was your feed. The bots detect your level of awareness based on feedback from the neuro-gel. If you become too self-aware inside Darklandia, they deploy the clones and the clones deliver standard scripts that are meant to frighten you into obeying.”

“It’s a desperate move,” Nyx continued. “The clones are designed to stop you from reaching master level. Once you’ve reached master level, you’ve mastered Darklandia.”

“So it’s a game, like when Darklandia was created?”

“Except that now it’s a game no one wants to win.”

A shadow of pain twisted in my lower spine and I curled sideways in my seat.

Nyx put a hand on the small of my back, but this time I didn’t flinch. “Level six, that’s your new name,” he teased me, and I laughed as he gently kneaded my lower back. “Lux, get Yola in here. She needs to know the plan for Saturday. And tell her to bring some detox juice.”

Lux obeyed her younger brother with haste. I wanted to know how they wound up together in the village, and how she got such a terrible scar on her face, but I had a feeling it would be inappropriate to ask.

Nyx leaned over and whispered in my ear as everyone else ate and conversed. “I need you to be fully detoxed by tomorrow, so Lux can start your training.”

My body rocked gently with the kneading motion of his hand. “Am I going back to the detainee facility with you?”

“Yes… and no.”

He pulled his hand back as Lux entered with Yola right behind her.

Yola handed me a glass filled with a thick bluish-green liquid. “Drink the whole thing quickly.”

“It looks like the rations.”

“The rations taste like candy compared to that stuff,” Lux said, as she took a seat next to me. “But it’s the only thing that will fully flush the grip from your kidneys.”

I didn’t know what candy tasted like or how this would compare so I guzzled down the juice in four gulps. When the taste finally registered on my tongue a few seconds later, I covered my mouth to keep from vomiting. It tasted like the filthy gray water in our tub on washday.

Hispa shot off the bench and made her way to the back wall, to the aerial photo of Times Square. “Okay, troops, the Felicity Festival starts at noon on Saturday and continues until curfew, which gives us just enough time to create a distraction and get Nyx into the data center to insert the cold server with the modified algorithm.”

I looked to Nyx and he flashed me his signature half-smile. “You don’t need to understand any of that.”

“How am I supposed to help if I don’t understand?”

“I like her,” Lux said, patting me on the shoulder as she stood up and trudged toward the exit. “I’m going to bed. Gray can give me the details on this operation later.”

“Stop right there, Lux.” Hispa’s eyebrow shot up and disappeared beneath her silver fringe. “You haven’t told Sera what she’s going to be doing tomorrow.”

Lux heaved a deep sigh before she turned to me. “Sera, tomorrow you’re going to have an emotional breakdown.”

“What?”

“It’s only Tuesday,” Nyx said. “The festival is still four days away. Since we weren’t compromised, you need to be trained to control your emotions so you can behave as if you’re still taking the grip. Lux is going to teach you how to do that.”

“Because I’m so good at hiding my emotions,” Lux said with a smirk.

“Don’t let her fool you, Sera. She’s the best.” The admiration in Nyx’s voice was evident and it made me think of my father.

I admired my father, even after he was detained, even after I thought he had been purified. I admired his audacity. I admired his optimism. Most of all, I admired his pain.

The rest of the meeting I spent half-listening to Hispa and Jock rattle off rendezvous points around the square as they planned a grand distraction involving Jane Locke and her personal Guardian Angels. The bits I understood seemed mostly benign and straightforward, like painting red stars on doors, until Hispa spoke to Gray about her role.

“Gray, you know what I need you to do.”

Gray’s rotten grin disappeared as she nodded. “Should I stop by the apartment first to warn her?”

A flash of anger lit up Hispa’s pointy features then quickly disappeared. “She doesn’t deserve it.”

“Come on. I’ll take you home,” Nyx said, nudging my shoulder as he stood from the bench.

I slept fitfully in grandmother’s bed. When I finally fell asleep, I woke an hour later with the sunrise warming my cheek and grandmother’s sheet stuffed between my clenched teeth. I extracted the sheet from my mouth and stood.

A bright red bloodstain the size of my hand decorated the mattress. I looked down at my nightgown and nearly screamed. Streaks of fresh blood and dried blood lashed across the bottom edge of my blue nightgown. I peeled it off and found the back of the gown soaked in warm blood.

This was what the school nurse had warned us about. Before Felicity, when girls went through the change, they were plagued with a menstrual cycle.

I stuffed the nightgown underneath the mattress and pulled the blanket up to cover the stain on the bed. I had to find something to cover myself so I could make it to the lavatory to put on my tunic without my mother seeing the splotches of dried blood on my torso and legs. I opened my grandmother’s closet and immediately located a gray and blue flannel robe. I slipped my arms through the sleeves and secured the robe tightly around my bloated waist before I cracked open the bedroom door.

“Sera, are you awake?”

She was looking directly at me through the crack in the door from where she stood in the kitchen. She held up a glass of blue liquid then downed her ration in two gulps. I cringed inside at her enthusiasm, but I tried to remain cool on the outside.

I slipped out of the bedroom and kept my eyes focused on Mother’s face to gauge her reaction to the robe, but her smile never faltered.

“Good morning, Mother,” I said, as I reached into the cupboard above the ration dispenser and pulled out a semi-clean glass. I placed the glass under the dispenser and held my thumb over the blinking blue light. The ration spattered into my glass and I guzzled it down eagerly.

“Why are you wearing that robe?”

“I got cold in the night.”

My mother tilted her head and sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”

The ration dulled her sense of smell, but she could still smell the blood festering on my skin.

I shrugged. “I don’t smell anything.”

I tried not to appear too hasty as I skated into the living room and retrieved my tunic from the coatrack. I retreated to the bathroom to change. My heart thumped violently as I removed my robe and saw the reddish-brown blotches covering my abdomen, legs, and undergarments. Then I eyed the toilet—the only source of water in the apartment.

I dipped a clean section of the robe into the toilet water and wept silently as I scrubbed caked blood from every inch of my body. I cried as I thought of the fountain in the detainee facility. The stones in the bottom of that fountain were cleaner than I. The Department of Felicity valued me less than those stones.

I pulled on my tunic and stared at the blood-soaked robe and undergarments mounded on the counter. I wrapped the robe into a tight ball and stuffed it under my arm before I exited the bathroom.

My mother was nowhere in sight. I scurried to grandmother’s room and jammed the bundled robe between the mattress and the back wall. I rummaged through my grandmother’s dresser for a pair of underwear and a camisole. I slipped on the underwear and stuffed the camisole into the seat to soak up the blood.

Mother entered the bedroom as I pulled my hand out of my underwear. “What are you doing?”