Secret Worlds (553 page)

Even Vesper is nice to me for a few days. She picks me for her team in soccer, but I can’t exactly play with a swollen ankle. She doesn’t whisper any hateful things when I pass by her, and she compliments me on a stew I make.

But it doesn’t last. As soon as my ankle heals, and Bea asks me to model her newly designed Fireseed leaf clothes, Vesper turns ugly again.

Bea has designed a Fireseed trench coat and the cutest red hoodie with a built-in mask. They are quite fashionable! I try them on while she pins them up, which I’m happy to do.

“Turn a little to the right,” she says, her mouth full of pins. “Now to the left.” Finally, she stands back, bobbing her head in satisfaction. “You look great in it.” She comes forward and feels my ribs like a worried mom. “Don’t get too skinny on me now, or the jacket will be swimming on you.”

“She’s a scarecrow already,” Vesper snipes. “I can model that hoodie for you at the Axiom finals.”

“Maybe so,” Bea says. “But I’ve already fitted them to Ruby.”

This makes Vesper fume, and I notice that for her project, Vesper has basically copied Bea’s idea. She’s making backpacks out of the pressed leaves, and glider covers that can withstand any sandstorm. Her items aren’t exactly clothes, but still, she cuts the patterns from templates and sews them together like Bea does.

Vesper hates me more than ever. She corners me in the halls and hisses spiteful comments of all stripes. “Your skin has ugly moon craters,” she’ll say, or “You’re shriveled like a dead lizard,” which doesn’t bother me. When she says, “Your brother’s a real troublemaker. We’ll get rid of him yet,” this bothers me. I never answer her. That would egg her on.

Thorn spends all of his time out in the western quadrant, coaxing the Red from its perch, high in the tallest plant that juts above the tarp.

Sometimes it sits on his narrow shoulder and preens its leaf-like wings. I ask him all about it: “How big will it grow? Has anyone else aside from the two of us seen it? What does it eat?” But he’s stopped talking again. There’s compensation though, because the ever-present humming in my head fills in some of the blanks.
We’re growing, we’re growing, we’re growing
it hums.

What’s growing? I ask silently.

Babies, babies, babies, babies
is the answer.

Babies, huh! Yet, I only see one Red, flopping around in the high branches, poking its beak out of the tarp, blinking its huge brown eyes at Thorn with something like admiration. How is this even possible? I’m just glad that no one else from The Greening has seen the Red. Surely they would want to steal it, claim it as their own project. I again warn Thorn to keep the Red concealed. He nods and grins, nods and grins.

Blane returns from sentry duty one morning, claiming that he’s seen a hovercraft repeatedly cycle by. His pistol is still tucked in the hip pocket of his burnsuit, and the sight gives me a ripple of furtive desire mixed with dread. Blane and guns—a worrying mix.

“What color was the ship?” I ask him.

“Don’t remember,” he says as he lays the pistol down on a dining room chair, lifts off his mask and climbs out of his burn suit. His wide, rocky face gleams with sweat.

I swallow hard. My bad dreams had hovering ships, but those weren’t real, they were sick, coma dreams. “Were there hairy men with beards in the ships?”

Blane sniggers. “Hairy men? You have a filthy mind, Cult Girl.” I don’t like that he’s reverted to his early disrespectful nickname for me, and the glint in his eyes makes me furious.

“My name’s Ruby,” I remind him. “And I have a serious reason for asking.”

“Ruby,” he echoes, with bite. “What could that be?”

“Never mind.” I won’t tell him about my strange dreams. I’m tired of his teasing, and his insults. He had a nerve being hurt when he saw Armonk helping me walk.

Blane marches toward the kitchen. I hear him guzzling from the precious store of water, and I have a mind to scold him for drinking from the jug, to tell him to wipe off his mouth prints, but I hold back. Snapping at him is as unfair as him teasing me.

Instead, I call from the dining room, “If you see the ships again, let me know.”

“You’re going to help me shoot them down?”

The urge to scold is on my tongue for a second time. Something like, Is all you can think of ways to be violent? But I may need his protection again in this dangerous place. “Maybe so,” I say cryptically.

He emerges with a half-grin. I’ve pleased him, and that’s not an easy thing to do.

Later that day a bunch of us are working in the project room. Thorn is down with Nevada, who has offered to give him the rare writing lesson. Radius is on sentry duty, Bea has a bad headache and is napping, and Armonk’s downstairs repairing his bow.

I’m up here with Vesper, Jan and Blane, and tension is thick. Blane, who’s been poring over something on his laptop, comes over, slides Thorn’s stool toward me and sits on it. My traitorous body pricks to attention. He tries to see what I’m working on, but I cover it with cloth.

“Secretive, secretive!” he says.

“Tell me what
you’re
working on,” I dare.

He cocks his head in a quizzical manner. “You’d be surprised. It’s deep. You think you have a claim on deep, but you’re not the only one.”

Blane always manages to annoy me. He’s right that I’d be surprised if his project is deep. He seems more brutish than brainy. Then again, there’s often a crafty light in his gaze. As if he can meet me at any level. In that way, I guess he has the advantage because he knows I underestimate him.

“Blane is brilliant,” says Jan.

“His father was a brain surgeon, you know,” Vesper claims.

“His mother was a gene scientist,” Jan adds.

I want to tell them all to shut up, quit bullshitting and stay out of our conversation. In the midst of my disdain, I feel oddly possessive of Blane, as if Vesper and Jan don’t know the real Blane. This makes zero sense, as I don’t either. “Okay, why’d you come over to my workspace?” I tease. “Got something to tell me?”

“Since you’re so interested, I forgot to tell you before that I saw another hovercraft, a few days ago,” Blane announces loudly. And then, leaning in, he whispers in my ear, “The bearded man leaned out of it and asked me about our projects.”

“Is this a joke?” I ask. He makes an exaggeratedly insulted face.

“Ooh, Blane saw a hovercraft,” Jan echoes.

“With a hairy man inside,” Vesper cackles.

Blane’s told everyone about our earlier, private conversation? I could punch him, and for announcing this to the whole room. “Okay, so if you saw another ship, what color was it?”

“Pearl blue,” Blane answers. “And when I didn’t answer the guy’s question, the ship disappeared into thin air. I’m not kidding.”

“That’s absurd.” I shiver hard. Pearl blue! How could Blane know the exact color of the ship from my sick, coma dreams?

His eyes gleam. He’s found a cat toy and I’m the cat. “I’m giving you information like you asked me to. Want to go out to the field tomorrow and see if the bearded man comes by again? Do some target practice?”

I sigh and turn away from him. Jan’s rough laughter rings out, mixed with Vesper’s. Blane isn’t laughing though. If only Thorn was here, he might be able to pick out the lies from the truths. I’m not so good at it anymore.

I decide to search for a pearl blue hovercraft myself. When I get downstairs I’m tempted to go outside without my suit. It’s such a burden—ten tons of armor blocking out the light of day. But once I’m out there, I’m glad for it, because in the front yard next to the field of Fireseed and out further, among the dunes, the wind’s whipping up funnels of sand.

Nevada said nothing about a coming sandstorm, but if the wind keeps up, sand will cover the compound, the gliders and the yard, and the tarp will get dangerously heavy.

I mount a crescent shaped dune, hoping to feel a moment of radiance between blasts of sandy wind. Waiting, I lower the clear inner visor in my mask, to shield my eyes from the sting.

Peering upward, I scan the horizon. Nothing. I turn right, toward the western part of the fence. Look above it. Not even the usual passenger ship, cobbled together from old cars and copter parts. Turning left, I see only the darkening purples of an impending storm, filtered through grainy gusts.

I’ll have to come back out to search the sky after the storm. In the meantime, I hesitate here, hungry even a few minutes of solar energy. I’m not hungry for food, yet I feel weak, so needy of sun, as if my arms are branches that are withering.

Turning toward The Greening, I shiver to see Blane staring down at me from the Project Room window on third tier. He quickly turns away.

At dinner, when Radius passes the serving bowl to Bea, I watch her arrange a fat orange yam in the center of her plate and a circle of plump, yellow sea apples swimming in sugary juice around it. Looks like a pretty abstract painting, but my taste buds aren’t salivating, and my belly isn’t rumbling for my own portion one bit.

“Want some, Ruby?” She hands me the bowl, and I dole out a small mound. Mine doesn’t look artful, and it excites me as much as a pile of sand. What’s wrong with me? I have no desire to stick any of that near my mouth. It’s as if I forgot how to chew and swallow. Have I lost this ability between breakfast and dinner? Is this a delayed effect of the Fireseed’s toxic pollen? Has it scrambled my senses into thinking that food is non-edible putty? In all of my days matching minerals and plants and insects, and in all my days of testing the mixtures, I’ve never come across this symptom. It scares me.

Bea’s staring at me, and nodding her head toward my sea apples in a sisterly attempt to get me to eat. “They’re delicious,” she reassures.

Blane’s gaze lands on me, and a cloud of troubled emotion moves across his face. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“That’s my business,” I snap, and instantly regret it, because he looks down at his plate and his expression hardens. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a head case, and I don’t want to say what I’m really thinking.

That I pray Dr. Varik comes here soon. I need to see a doctor.

A forkful of yam in her hand, Nevada looks my way. “Ruby, eat up. You need your strength to work.”

She’s right, and it’s nice that people care. Stabbing a sea apple, I bring it to my lips. Force them open with the pressure of the pliable fruit. Push the round, warm blob back with my tongue and then down with a compression of my throat. Swallow again, because the damn thing won’t move any further down.

Coughing, I excuse myself from the table and head upstairs to dislodge the apple. Eating it feels wrong.

All I want to do is to go outside and stare at the sun. Even if it burns my irises and skin, the sun would heal me. I can’t say why or how, but it’s an elemental urge. It’s dark outside though, and the wind is still furious. When I go to the window and study the pools of sand that the storm has whipped up on the tarp, the strange humming starts. It’s as if the plants under it are speaking to me, but also inside my head:
Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow
they hum.

Tomorrow you will eat.

The next morning I feel a little better. I manage to stuff a cup of grain in and wash it down with mineral mead though I’m still not hungry. I suppose that’s what the humming meant when it said that tomorrow I would eat. The Axiom Stream blast announces a clear sky:

Huzzah, Fireseeders! George Axiom here. Only days until the finalist picks! I trust that you are polishing up projects on this sunny morning. We’re preparing fun swag for all our favorite finalists. Free drink coupons at Tiki Beach Lounge and entry to Simi-Surf Ride! Surf’s up today, huge breakers by the piers.

Brought to you by Simi-Surf. Catch a wave without breaking your leg.

After breakfast we all go to the field and help clear off sand from the tarp by pushing at it with rakes. Then Nevada sends Armonk and me out on a convoy.

Nevada has washed her hair, which used costly stores of water, and I wonder what the special occasion is. It’s flowing freely, and the wispy blond tips are freshly dipped in green dye. She’s dressed in her best iguana-cell fatigues and form-fitting shirt, cinched with an emerald scarf. Her eyes are rimmed with smoky kohl and she’s wearing her fringed lizard-skin boots.

“We need two dozen water pellets, the large blue size,” she explains. “Also, some northern grains, and vegetables for the next two weeks. Sea beets would be nice.”

Armonk says, “You have to get them from a depot with connections to Northern Dominion, above the border wall.”

I panic, thinking we’ll have to fly back to Depot Man who gets shipments from the north. No way would I go anywhere near that jerk again. As much as I’m longing for a junket, I’m about to tell Nevada I can’t when she gives us directions.

“They sell sea beets at Skull’s Wrath Depot, seventy miles due southwest,” Nevada informs us. I heave a sigh of relief.

The minute I get outside and that strange thrumming starts, I want to fling off my burn helmet and lift my head high. Somehow that makes the humming sweeter, like a thousand tiny violins played by sand fairies. But Armonk would scold me so I keep it on in the glider.

His hair is in one long braid woven through with a red twine. It slaps against his sturdy back when he walks. Limps, I should say, as it’s painfully clear the limp is getting worse. Still, his mood is good. His frequent smile reveals perfect white teeth against touchable, magnificent mahogany skin. I blush inside to have these thoughts, and to be keyed up to spend time with him, as he steers the vessel out of the hanger and guides it to the runway. It reminds me of when my dad and I went on hunting junkets, of how precious our time was together.

Soaring over Skull’s Wrath, we survey the desolation of craters and stark red rock formations that rise from the sand like monstrous beings. Some, like the ones Thorn and I saw on that first night, are shaped like glowing skulls. Others are cabbage-headed ogres and sunken-eyed hunchbacks. There’s beauty too: dunes in gently sloping pyramid shapes, and arching crescents facing windward like a hundred rusty scabbards. After a sandstorm it always seems the world is reformed.