Once (17 page)

I ran up the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, ignoring the burning in my legs. Fifty flights went by quickly, my body energized by the sudden thought. Finally, there was something I could do.

“THE BUILDINGS THAT ARE TO BE RESTORED ARE FIRST
determined by your father,” Charles said, spreading the photos over the table. “We tour the place, take measurements, see what kind of shape it's in. Then I go through all the information I've recovered from before the plague—floor plans, blueprints, photos—to learn about the building's original condition, decide what can be restored and what we want to do away with.”

I nodded, my eyes darting to the long drawers on the other side of the room. The suite on the thirtieth floor had been converted into Charles's office. The bed and dressers had been replaced with wide cabinets, and the desk sat in front of a glass wall overlooking the main strip. A long wooden table was set up with models, miniature versions of some of the sites I'd seen in the City center: the domed conservatory, the Venetian's gardens, and the Grand's zoo. A smaller room held more models, some piled one on top of another. I'd asked him for a tour of his office at breakfast that morning. Charles's face had brightened. The King had urged us to go, even though our plates sat on the table, the food still hot.

I picked up another photo of the roller coaster and arcade in the old New York, New York compound. “It's fascinating,” I offered. The worn snapshot showed people strapped into the car, screaming, their cheeks blown back by the wind. It
was
fascinating to see the world as it once was, so many years before. But it was impossible to look at it without thinking of how we got here, now—of the boys in the dugout or the scars that crisscrossed the top of Leif's back.

“I'm relieved to hear you say that,” Charles said. “I could talk about this for hours. Sometimes I worry I'm boring you.”

I let out a low laugh, remembering one of Teacher Fran's sayings. “Only boring people get bored,” I said softly. I turned a photo over in my hands, trying to decipher the smudged writing on the back. When I glanced up, Charles was looking at me. “The Teachers used to say that.” I shrugged. “It's silly, I know.”

“The Teachers,” he said. “Right. I just realized we've never talked about your School.”

“If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all,” I added, pointing the photograph at him. “That was another thing they used to say.” I looked through the doorway behind him. This one room contained so many documents—papers piled high in corners, blueprints of most of the buildings in the City center. There had to be more information here, something that would be useful to Caleb—I just had to find it.

“But you were the valedictorian.” He plucked the photo from my grasp and set it down. I suddenly felt awkward, exposed even, now that I had nothing to do with my hands. “You must've enjoyed it somewhat.”

“I did while I was there,” I said, knowing I couldn't tell him the truth right now. About how our Teachers had twisted our lessons. About my friends who were still trapped inside. I walked over to his desk, pretending to look at a baseball resting on a stack of loose-leaf notebooks. Every surface was covered with maps. Scribbled notes were taped to the window.

“You like my paperweight?” he gestured at it. “You can still see the grass stains if you look closely. It's one of the few things I have from when I was a kid.”

I held it for a moment, studying the faded red stitching that was coming undone in places. “Where did you grow up?”

He opened his hands, signaling for me to throw it to him. “A city in Northern California. There were government transports during the migration, trucks that made the trip here week after week. It took us nearly two days with stops. Everyone had to be cleared by a doctor beforehand.”

I tossed it across the room in a slow arc. I thought of the quarantine wing at School, how lonely those first weeks were. The Teachers would only speak to us through a window in the door. I was so young, but I still remembered how I'd check myself every morning, searching my skin for any sign of the bruises symptomatic of the plague.

“They gave us these masks to cover our mouths,” Charles went on. “I remember being fifteen and looking around at all these faceless people, most of them traveling to the City alone. It was surreal.” He threw it back to me.

“What was the City like in those first years?” I turned the ball over, rubbing at the grass stain with my thumb.

“Depressing,” he said. “Still so run down. People had come from all over. Some of them literally walked for weeks, risking their lives to get here. It wasn't the glimmering place they'd imagined. At least not then.”

He walked over to the cabinets on the other side of the room. I followed behind, thankful when he opened one of the wide, flat drawers, exposing all the papers inside. “Those first few years we were here, all I saw was possibility. I knew I wanted to do what my father did, to work with him one day. The City center changed, building by building. You could feel the sadness lifting as people settled in, as the City began to look more like the world before. Obviously, it's still a work in progress. We're still putting the life back into it with restaurants and entertainment. But I've been tossing around some other ideas …”

Each drawer was labeled. A few read
OUTLANDS
with different directions beside it—northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest. Others were named after old hotels: two drawers each for the Venetian, Mirage, Cosmopolitan, and Grand. “When they started construction, they turned every lawn and golf course in the City into usable gardens. Which we needed, yes,” Charles said, riffling through a stack of papers in the drawer. “But the public doesn't have access to those. We have clean water now, the ability to sustain plants. I wanted to create outdoor space for everyone.” He spread a sheet of paper down on the table.

I stared at the wide expanse of green, broken in places by winding pathways. Trees were drawn in intricate detail, their limbs spread out over ponds and rock gardens. The giant lake in the center was surrounded by three stone buildings. I ran my fingers over the light pencil marks. It was as good a drawing as any of the ones I'd made in School. “You sketched this?”

“Don't be so surprised.” Charles laughed. “It'll be four hundred acres if it's ever built. The largest park inside the City's walls.”

Every tree and flower was carefully drawn. Boats floated along a pond. Red and yellow blooms were clustered around the shore. One of the buildings was labeled
RECREATION CENTER;
another,
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM
. A third had a patio and chairs. “A library,” I said, unable to stop from smiling. “There's none in the City?”

“We restored one off the main road, but it's small and always overcrowded. This would be four stories, with a view of the water. It's just a matter of sorting all the recovered books. There's a whole building full of them just three blocks east.” Charles pointed to the room behind him. “I have the model somewhere—would you like to see?”

He stared at me, his blue eyes wide. He looked like one of the dolls on Lilac's bed in Califia, with his square jaw and strong features, his mop of black hair perfectly in place. I knew he was objectively handsome. It was clear from the way Clara stole glimpses at him, or how clusters of women whispered when he passed. But every time I saw him I was reminded of my father, of the City walls that rose up around us, locking us in. “I'd love to,” I said.

As soon as he disappeared into the cramped room, I walked over to the cabinets, running my finger down the labels on each drawer. The first one contained papers from the old hotels. The next had blueprints from a hospital building, another from the two schools that had been restored inside the City. There were ones marked for something called Planet Hollywood. I knelt down, studying the last few drawers. Charles shuffled around in the other room, searching through the stacked models, his footsteps quickening my pulse.

“Where
is
it?” I whispered, reading the labels. Three of the lower drawers were marked
EMERGENCY PLANS
. I pulled the first open and started flipping through its contents, papers showing the gates in the walls, inventories of the warehouses in the Outlands—medical supplies, bottled water, canned goods. None of them showed the flood tunnels.

Charles's footsteps stopped for a moment, then started again, growing louder as he came toward the door. I pulled the last drawer open. I didn't have time to think, simply rolled the whole stack of papers up as tightly as I could and squeezed them down the side of my boot. I slid the drawer shut and stood just as Charles came back into the room.

“This,” he said, setting the model down on the table, “should give you the full idea.”

I wiped at my forehead, hoping he didn't notice the thin layer of sweat that had settled on my skin. The miniature version of the park took up half the table, the buildings crafted out of thin pieces of wood. Blue paint had hardened to form the still ponds. A green, mosslike fuzz covered the ground. Charles kept looking at me, then at the model, as if waiting for some kind of approval.

“It's great, it really is,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. But with the plans tucked away, I just wanted to be alone again.

“There's more,” he added, pointing over his shoulder, at the side room. “I used to build these with my father. I can show you the others—”

“That's all right,” I said quickly, stepping away. “I should really get back.”

Charles's face changed, his smile suddenly gone. He looked stricken. “Right. Some other time then,” he said, taking a deep breath. His eyes searched mine, looking desperately for something more.

“Another day,” I finally offered, giving in to the lingering guilt. I tried to remind myself that he worked for my father. That we'd only spent a few hours together—if that—and that he probably had his own motivations for seeking out my company. “I promise.”

I started out the door, leaving him there, his face half lit by the sun streaming through the blinds. A soldier waited for me in the hallway. He followed me into the elevator and up to the top floors of the Palace.

When I was alone in my suite I sat down on the floor and pulled off my boots. As I sorted through the thin sheets, any guilt I felt about deceiving Charles disappeared. There, just ten papers into the stack, were sketches of tunnels.
LAS VEGAS DRAINAGE SYSTEM
typed across the top in beautiful, perfect print.

“YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO DO THIS,” CALEB SAID WHEN WE
reached the top of the motel stairs. He grabbed my hand, pulling me to him, his arms wrapped around my shoulders. “But I'm glad you did.”

The faint sounds of music drifted from a room at the end of the corridor. We'd traveled through the Outlands to Harper's apartment, looking for Jo and Curtis. Now we stood on the upper landing of the run-down motel. Faded plastic chips were strewn everywhere. Broken chairs covered the patio. A man bathed his small son in the half-empty hot tub below, using an old juice carton to rinse the soap from his hair.

Caleb led me through the corridor. We stayed close to the wall, hidden below the awning. A few lights were on in the other rooms, visible through windows covered with tarps and ripped sheets. Caleb knocked five times on the last door in the hall, the same way he had at the hangar. Harper was inside, his hearty laugh breaking the silence.

“You two again.” Harper grinned, opening the door. He wore a long blue robe, a tight gray tank top visible just underneath it. “What are you doing out here?” He ushered us in, checking to make sure no one had seen. The room was crammed with worn mattresses and stacks of the City's newspapers. Curtis and Jo were sitting on warped wooden boxes, drinking from a jug of amber liquid. Curtis set the jug down when he saw me. His eyes were tiny black specks behind his thick glasses.

“I have a present for you,” I said, unable to stop from smiling. I kneeled down and unzipped my boot, handing the roll of papers to him.

Jo helped Curtis spread them out on the floor. “Are these what I think they are?” she asked, flipping through the pages.

“Where did you find them?” Curtis pulled one from the bottom of the stack, tracing his fingers over the sketches. He glanced sideways at Jo, his face breaking into a smile. He covered his mouth as if trying to hide it. “I don't believe this.”

“I think what you mean to say is ‘Thank you,'” I corrected. Harper let out a little laugh and winked at me in approval.

“That's where the collapse is,” Jo whispered, pointing to a spot on the map. She moved her finger across to the other side. “We need to access this tunnel to the east. All this time we've been thinking we should keep digging north.”

A pot was boiling on a hot plate next to the refrigerator, the steam filling the air with a strong, spicy scent. Harper moved around the makeshift kitchen, taking another jug and emptying it into glasses for Caleb and me. “You did good,” he whispered, handing me one.

“Eve stole them from Charles Harris's office,” Caleb added, as if that provided some greater understanding.