Darklandia (8 page)

I reached the front stoop of our apartment building without remembering how my feet had carried me there. Cedar Street seemed unusually sinister tonight and I was struck by a sudden irrational fear that every camera in Manhattan was trained in my direction, every Guardian Angel watching over little Sera Fisk. But tonight the angels weren’t protecting me; they were protecting everyone else from me.

7

The nightly ration tasted wonderful, hardly metallic, and I fell asleep instantly, not having slept at all the night before. Aaron instructed me to drink my morning and afternoon rations, which seemed a bit odd to me considering the rations might cause me to change my mind about working with him.

I gulped my morning ration and made it through the entire school day without rousing further suspicion. Skipping my noon ration during school was difficult. I guzzled down my ration under the watchful eye of Professor Gage then pretended I needed to use the lavatory. Somewhere between all the gagging and streaming tears, I became very familiar with the soft, slippery folds at the back of my throat and soon vomited my afternoon ration into the school toilet.

With my afternoon ration slithering through the sewers below Manhattan, my morning ration began wearing off and the hunger set in shortly before three in the afternoon during our walk home from school. Darla jabbered on about how unfair it was that she had to help her brother, Darren, with his Evolutionary Science homework.

“He thinks that if humans evolved from apes there should be no more apes. Can you believe that?” Darla complained.

I didn’t want to tell Darla that Darren probably believed this because the Committee for Hereditary Intelligence did a superb job downgrading his intelligence. What a horrible thing to think much less say, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Darla, can you come to my apartment?” I asked, as we approached her street. “I need help with my Darkling History assignment.”

Never had a worse lie been told. I always scored in the top of the class on Darkling History exams. I had a knack for remembering obscure facts about violent uprisings and the various darkling illnesses.

The Civil War of the 1800s was partially fought over the abolition of slavery. There were once real
slaves
in America. World War II was fought largely because a man named Adolf Hitler wiped out millions of people by starving and gassing them to death. The bubonic plague of the fourteenth century devastated the population to the point human life held little regard to the survivors and violence skyrocketed—sort of like the first half of the twenty-first century.

“Sure,” Darla replied, as we continued past her block toward Cedar Street, never questioning my need for her assistance with my history assignment.

One thing was certain: all the history they taught us in school made Atraxia appear like an enormous improvement. An achievement to be rapturously celebrated.

My mother wasn’t home when I entered the apartment. She was probably serving her hour in the darkroom on the first floor of our building. I tried not to think of what my mother did inside Darklandia.

Darla took a seat on the sofa and leaned her head against the grubby wall. “It’s so cool in here,” she said, closing her eyes as she savored the cool air circulating over our skin.

I took the opportunity to sneak into the kitchen while she wasn’t looking. Aaron would be here in fifteen minutes. I had to drink my ration before he arrived and Darla didn’t know I’d skipped my noon ration. I shouldn’t worry her if I wanted any hope of convincing her to accompany Aaron and me.

The ration plopped into my glass, heavy as lead in my fist. I gulped it down quickly and wiped the glass clean with a freshly washed rag. I slipped the glass back into the cupboard and joined Darla in the living room.

I wanted to slip her a note the way Aaron had slipped me a note yesterday, but only government employees had access to such luxuries as loose paper.

“Isn’t it a little early for your nightly ration?” she commented, as I took a seat next to her on the sofa.

“I was thirsty.”

Her smile disappeared as her eyes flashed toward the camera on the ceiling behind me, but she remained silent.

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

She glanced at my sec-band then her eyes swooped toward her wrist. “We should work on your homework.”

“I can’t. I’m going somewhere and I want you to come with me. Can you please come with me? I’m going with Aaron.”

“Aaron? The boy from the Felicity department?”

I suddenly felt as if someone had lit a flame inside my belly and I didn’t know if it was my paranoia over the cameras or my ration being digested. A layer of sweat sprouted over my brow as the sofa swayed beneath me like a tree bough about to break. I clutched the arm of the sofa and leaned forward to steady myself, but it didn’t work. I was falling.

“What’s wrong with you?” Darla asked, her voice sounded garbled and slow. “Sera? Are you all right?”

My hands and feet went cold as I dropped onto my knees. The vomit showered the matted carpet like an electric blue waterfall. It would have been beautiful if it didn’t feel like liquid fire. My stomach clenched tight as a noose inside me, my eyeballs set to explode out of their sockets.

Darla knelt at my side and held my braid to keep it from dangling forward and getting soiled by my spew. “Sera, I didn’t drink my rations today,” she said, her voice sounding back to normal as she whispered these words so close to my ear her breath tickled me.

I sat back on my heels and swiped the back of my hand across my mouth. My arms shimmered with sweat as my hands trembled with the weight of Darla’s words.

“What time is it?” I asked. “We have to go downstairs.”

Darla nodded before she quickly helped me sop up my vomit and throw the rags down the garbage chute. My mother would notice two rags missing from the drawer in the kitchen, but I could conjure an excuse for the rags. I couldn’t make up an excuse for the vomit.

The smell of the VITALIS factory across the street was refreshing after a long vomit-filled afternoon, but my head still pulsed with Darla’s confession. I couldn’t shake the feeling in the pit of my hollow belly that I had corrupted her. I couldn’t let anything happen to Darla. I loved her like I loved my father and my grandmother. Darla felt more like family to me than my own mother.

I could sense Darla’s discomfort with what she had just confessed to me as we stood on the crumbling curb outside the apartment building. All over this city the streets and buildings were caked in multiple layers of filth and in various states of decomposition, but I had never felt more full of hope that the slowly rotting heart of Manhattan would one day be revived. Maybe I—maybe Darla and I would be its salvation.

Aaron rounded the corner and from this point of view it was easy to appreciate the confidence of his swagger. He looked like everyone else: healthy and happy and, most importantly, undaunted by the presence of the cameras and the angels. A fear of disappointing him bellowed inside me, a critical voice shouting,
“You didn’t drink your ration like he told you to.”

“I can’t do it,” Darla whispered.

“What do you mean? He’s almost here.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to get marked. I’m—I’m so sorry, Sera. I have to go.”

She bolted across the street and that feeling I got when I thought of my grandmother yesterday returned; the unbearable longing for everything to be different.

“Hello, Sera,” he said, his eyes aglow with a question I couldn’t glean. “Are you ready for the grand tour?”

I hesitated a moment before I replied, “Yes.”

“Follow me.”

I didn’t know what Aaron meant by “grand tour”, though I was almost certain this word was for the angels’ ears.

We rounded the corner onto Broadway and I made a deliberate effort to appear confident and happy—like Aaron—not showing the aching misery plaguing my belly and mind. I studied his movements through quick and careful sideways glances. He nodded at almost every passerby. An old woman with glazed eyes returned his nod from a bench in Zuccotti Park. A young gentleman appeared dazed by Aaron’s friendly gesture, but he returned the favor, nonetheless.

He seemed to get away with more odd behavior than the average Atraxian citizen and I desperately wanted to know his secret. It couldn’t just be that he worked for the Department of Felicity. There had to be more to it than that.

“You drank your ration before I arrived?” he asked, as we approached Chambers Street.

“I did,” I replied. “But I couldn’t hold it down.”

He didn’t reply as he continued toward the entrance to the Chambers Street subway station.

“Where are we going?” I asked, unable to hide the tinge of fright in my voice.

Aaron continued down the steps toward the iron gate, which blocked off the entrance to the station. “I’m taking you on a tour, remember?”

I stood still at the top of the steps remembering the videos I’d seen on the Community Information server of subway trespassers being purified. No warning. No branding. Just straight to purification.

“Are you coming?” Aaron called to me from the pit of the station entrance.

I descended the steps slowly, allowing the weight of gravity to pull me closer toward the truth about my father. When I reached the bottom, Aaron held his wrist inside a scanner in the concrete wall and the gate clanged as it swung open. “After you.”

The deserted station evoked a feeling of nostalgia for a time I never knew. A time when darklings hustled through these stations with a million destinations in mind. It wasn’t my past, but it still felt within reach.

A nervous anticipation flooded my limbs. I had seen videos and pictures of the interior of a subway station, but I had never stepped inside. Only government employees with high security clearance used the subways. A sudden paranoid thought washed away my anticipation.

What if Aaron wasn’t trying to recruit me into the rebel movement? What if this was a test of my loyalty to Felicity?

I jumped at the clanking sound of the gate as it closed behind us, trapping us like sewer rats. The subway station was surprisingly clean; no trace of the thick layer of grime that coated the streets above us. A glass door enclosed an alcove at the far end of the station. Above the alcove a sign read
Ration Dispenser,
and it dawned on me that Aaron still hadn’t said anything about the fact that I vomited my ration.

The soft rumble of an approaching subway car plunged me back into panic mode. “Should I try to drink my ration?”

He glanced at the dispenser booth then back at me. “No, that would be a violation of Section 10-3.71 of the
Code of Felicity
,” he replied, that same questioning look in his eyes that I couldn’t quite grasp. “You should know the code word for word by now, which is obviously why this tour is necessary.”

Now I was really beginning to question whether Aaron was putting on an act for the cameras or if I had stepped willingly into an elaborate trap.

We descended another flight of stairs down to the platform level. The subway slowed, grinding to a halt in front of us and a hot, plasticky scent filled the station. Aaron stepped forward, nearly at the edge of the platform. The car stopped and the doors slid open. A thin man in a blue suit stared at us from a cushy seat inside the subway car.

“Wrong line,” Aaron called out to the man. After a long, awkward silence, the doors finally closed, whisking away the puzzled man.

Moments later, an empty subway car arrived. We stepped inside and the car inhaled us with a whoosh of air as the doors slid shut behind us.

Aaron exhaled a deep breath and took a seat on one of the cushioned seats. “Now we can talk,” he said, patting the seat next to him.

The subway jerked forward and I clutched the safety pole to keep from toppling. My heart raced as I scrambled into the seat beside Aaron, who chuckled at my terror.

“It’s not funny. I’ve never been inside a moving vehicle,” I said, as the motion of the car hurtling toward some unknown destination made me queasy.

“Well, at least now I can tell you where we are going,” he began. “I’m taking you to see what it looks like when a person is purified.”