Darklandia (4 page)

“Sera?” she said again. Though her voice carried a question, her face was a blank smile incongruent with what must be going on inside her head. That was what I hated. Not the smile itself. I hated how phony it seemed. Even the way she said my name made my nerves flicker with annoyance.

Everything about this apartment appeared different from the last time I saw it. The light-gray walls were covered in smudged fingerprints. The wall behind the sofa donned three dark shadows of filth where Darla’s family frequently rested their heads. The blue blanket tucked around Darren, Darla’s ten-year-old brother, was black around the edges from not being washed in months.

We all had to prioritize on washdays, showers and clothing first. Sometimes the water supply was shut off too soon and the linens never got washed. This could go on for months, yet here Darla was wearing a filthy pinafore under her gray tunic, dirt crusted around her nostrils and underneath her fingernails, and still smiling.

Could Darla hear these repulsive thoughts racing through my mind?

“Can we please go?” I finally asked, taking a step toward the open door, stopping myself before I placed my hand on the grubby doorframe.

Darla followed me out and held her sec-band up to the sensor to close the door.

“Did you hear about Commissioner Baron?” Darla said, as we descended the steps outside the brownstone. “It’s been two days since he raptured the mayor and he still hasn’t been purified.”

We passed a striking glass building that once was a popular tourist destination after a terrorist attack destroyed most of this block. The building was a symbol of the former misery that plagued America. It was the perfect place to use for the Department of Felicity’s New York headquarters. I didn’t want to have this kind of conversation with Darla in such close proximity to the very people who could deactivate our sec-bands, but my curiosity got the best of me.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

Lately, Darla was much less careful about what she said and where she said it. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the ramifications of discussing these topics. I think her impulsiveness had more to do with the false sense of security she got from the rations and from being matched two months ago. She knew where she would be in ten months after she graduated from Fillmore Preparatory School and had her Perfect Union ceremony with George Clink, son of Community Development Commissioner Robert Clink. In ten months, Darla would be sleeping in a twin bed with George Clink and watching Felicity Broadcasting for hours after George came home from crunching numbers at the Department of Community with his father.

“I overheard my mother telling my father she heard it from Katherine Banks,” Darla replied.

We were halfway past the Department of Felicity now. Four angels stood in front of the building and eight more stood in the courtyard, one at each corner of the two sunken fountains, the North Pool and the South Pool, neither of which had spouted a drop of water for more than forty years. I waited until we crossed the street before I spoke again.

“Why do you think they haven’t purified him yet?” I asked, trying not to picture the knife as it plunged into Mayor Hillstead’s bloated gut. I tried not to imagine the blade slicing through each layer of skin and fat until it reached his organs, puncturing Hillstead’s stomach and coating his insides in the bitter, greenish-blue remains of his rations.

“I think they’re trying to get some kind of information from him before they purify him,” Darla replied, as we approached the front gate of Fillmore Prep.

Though Darla probably didn’t know it, she had just made a daring implication about the purification process. Her comment implied the purification would wipe away whatever information was stored inside a person’s brain. I found it hard to believe that a single surgical procedure could do this, or a thousand hours inside Darklandia. That left only one rapturous option.

I didn’t speak any of these thoughts allowed and I tried not to huff too loudly as we climbed the steps into the school building.

“Sweet felicity,” Darla whispered, crossing her hand over her forehead, chest, and shoulders to form an invisible star as we passed underneath the stone arch into Fillmore Prep. The blue star set into the keystone of the arch flashed brilliantly in the morning light.

“Sweet felicity,” I muttered, forcing my hand to form the same star, though I hardly had enough energy to raise my arm.

My exhaustion and thirst kept me so preoccupied throughout our Darkling History lesson I hardly noticed when Neil Livingston placed a heavy black object on my desk until he slid the cold steel against my hand.

I nearly jumped out of my seat at the sight of the gun. “What—!”

The entire class of eight students, including Darla, gawked at my outburst.

“Miss Fisk? Are you all right?” Professor Gage asked, though the smile on his face belied any true concern.

I could not be further from all right.

“Yes, Professor Gage,” I said, as I stared at the dull surface of the pistol.

“Then please examine the weapon and pass it to your neighbor,” Professor Gage replied before he turned back to the other students. “Feel the weight of the gun in your hand. This weapon was used by many darklings to kill themselves and other darklings by blowing large holes through their bodies. Guns were also often used as blunt objects to beat someone into submission.”

Beat someone into submission.

My heart thumped wildly as I slid my fingers beneath the gun. It was heavy as I lifted it off my desk. As I examined the weight and angles, I understood how it could be used to “beat someone into submission.” I was also beginning to understand that there were other ways to pound someone into a state of total obedience… ways that didn’t require guns or beatings.

My eyes followed my sec-band as I handed the gun to Jennifer White. Under the influence of the rations, I loved my sec-band. It kept me safe. It carried my identity and all the knowledge I acquired in school. My sec-band allowed entry into my home and my Darklandia pod—my memories of my father. This titanium band attached to my wrist also had the power to render me unconscious, useless, obedient. The sec-band was charged with electricity to disable whoever was caught siding with the darklings. Only those who weren’t beaten into submission by the rations sided with the darklings.

My stomach clenched inside me and the hunger pangs that plagued me through the night threatened to divulge my secret to the class. I had to get away, but all I could think of now was my grandmother. I wanted her back. Her rapture wasn’t necessary. She could have been raptured peacefully in her bed, in private, not before a crowd of smiling faces silently cheering on her executioner.

Executioner. Where did I learn this filter word? It must have been in our Darkling History book. Darklings executed prisoners, only
they
called it “the death penalty”. They didn’t attempt to make it sound mystical by calling it a
rapture
.

An overwhelming prickling pain in my nose overshadowed my hunger pangs. My cheeks and eyes seared with a dangerous warmth that spread through my face and lodged in my throat. I gritted my teeth attempting to stop the inevitable from happening, but I was powerless against the force of it.

I glanced at the camera in the corner of the ceiling before I clapped my hands over my eyes to hide my treacherous tears. The sting of the electricity entered through my wrist, paralyzed me, raced through my nerves like gasoline set on fire, and exploded in my chest.

4

I woke on the sofa of Headmaster Tate’s office. The angels’ uniforms appeared as blurry daubs of blue at each end of the sofa. My thirst and hunger sated. My exhaustion mostly gone except for a light tingling sensation at the base of my skull and the stiffness in my left arm. More importantly, the despair, the aching grief that had etched a shadow across my grandmother’s memory, was gone.

The headmaster’s tall, slender body appeared over me. I averted my gaze and noticed the needle shoved deep inside the crook of my arm. A foam board taped securely to the underside of my forearm held my arm straight over the edge of the sofa. A thin tube dangled from the needle then curved upward toward a bag of clear fluid suspended on a hooked stand, sort of like the coatrack where I hung my tunic every day after school.

“Sera, do you know why you’re here?” the headmaster asked in his silky voice. I shook my head and his head twitched to the side making his white pompadour quiver. His smile weakened for a moment before it returned to its permanent plastered state. “You haven’t been drinking your rations. You’re ill.”

I wasn’t ill. I was electrocuted.

I couldn’t speak these words aloud, but some primal part of my brain refused to let go of this notion, the feeling that something was deeply wrong; not just with what was happening inside Headmaster Tate’s office at this moment, but with what was happening all over Atraxia. The rations, Darklandia, the sec-bands, the language filter, everything.

But I felt so much better now under the influence of that clear liquid. Was it really so bad to want to feel so good?

The headmaster continued to hover above me, his eyes beseeching an explanation for my reckless behavior. Then I noticed it, right between his eyes, the tiny scar no larger than a pinky nail. Headmaster Tate had been branded with the mark of the traitors: the letter
F
enclosed inside a star. The headmaster had once been evaluated and let off with a warning. No trace of his betrayal left behind but a blotch of marred skin between his gray eyes: the Atraxian star.

“Get up, Sera. Your evaluation is in thirty minutes,” the headmaster said, as he stepped back and I was finally able to get a better look at the two angels flanking the sofa.

I sat up and found another person in the room standing just behind the headmaster. My mother’s dark eyes were wide with a façade of shock, but her smile indicated she was quite pleased. Her smile made me smile. Even as the angels ripped the needle from my arm and escorted me off the school grounds, I still smiled.

My feet carried me willingly across the courtyard, past the dusty fountains and the empty tree planters, toward the enormous tower that soared into the sky like a wake of glass left by a rocket. One part of my mind told me I should run or at least defend my actions during the evaluation. Another stronger, or weaker, part of me knew I should just stay quiet and be happy that life was back to normal again. If I remained silent and obedient, I would be given a second chance, like my father. Only I wouldn’t waste my second chance. I would treasure it. I would drink my rations and spend extra hours inside Darklandia. I would do whatever it took to escape that despair, that blackness, that darkling mania.

The angels held the doors open for me and I stepped into a large reception area. The first thing the Department of Felicity did when they took Manhattan back from the rebels was to renovate the violence out of these interior walls. This building, which had once been used to memorialize the victims of one of the most horrific tragedies in American history, had been purified just as the rebels captured during the war were purified. Walls were torn down, shifted, and replaced. Plaques dedicated to the heroes who emerged in the midst of that tragedy were burned and new ones hung on the freshly painted walls.

We watched a video of the events of that day in Darkling History class. The entire class was rapt with attention as the paper and ash fell like snow upon the sun-drenched streets. Then the bodies began to fall as people sought refuge from the flames that seared their backs as they teetered on ledges hundreds of feet above the ground. So much violence. So much despair. The darklings celebrated the memories of the victims, but it was they who created the victims. They blew each other up with their bombs and their words. They didn’t even try to stop it. They just kept fighting one war after another with the sickening idea that this war would be the last. This one would make the bad men stop. But the wicked never rest. Not even for a little while. The bad men and women were everywhere—until Darklandia arrived.

Darklandia saved the human species from its inevitable self-destruction. Why couldn’t the rebels see that? Why did they still take the time to paint brassy red stars on the front doors of innocent people’s homes? Why did they still fight an unwinnable war?

Because they were ill.

Just voicing these thoughts inside my mind made me feel lighter. My renewed faith in Felicity had unburdened me and I practically skipped through the lobby toward the silver elevators.

“That’s a young one. Evaluation?” a thin man in a gray fedora who sat on a stool in the elevator lobby asked the angels on either side of me.

The angel on my right replied. “Third kid this week.”

The poster on the wall between the two elevators displayed a picture of an old man, maybe eighty or ninety years old, holding a blushing baby over his head while a glass of greenish-blue liquid sat on a picnic table in the background. The headline on the poster read: DRINK FOR LIFE. DRINK TO FELICITY.