The Other Side Of Gravity (Oxygen, #1) (3 page)

“I don’t know,” she said softly and looked over at me. “Please, it’s my daughter’s day of birth.”

One of them looked at me, cutting only his eyes and then his face. “Happy day of birth, little one. Aren’t you going to be a pretty thing one day?” My mother fought against her captor with effort, but she had always told me the Militia were given vitamins to make them a little stronger than us. And I’d never been this close to one. They were huge. “Did Mommy bring you home a present?”

His question snapped me back to reality and I didn’t have enough time to school my features. My face must have given me away and then my worried look to my mother was the second blow to our plan.

“Mommy,” I whispered, not knowing what else to do.

“It’s okay, Soph,” she soothed and nodded to me. “Give him the doll.” I squinted. She couldn’t mean the doll she’d just— “Give him Lolly. It’ll all be okay, I promise you.”

I gulped. Oh. Lolly. She was being sneaky. I looked up at the giant mass of man holding me and he smiled with his perfectly straight white teeth. He probably thought he was encouraging me, but it made me feel more anxious about his intentions.

“Go on, little one,” he said, and nudged me with his leg against my hip.

I left his grasp, still treading softly, as if our neighbors didn’t know the Militia was in our house. The entire compound had to know with all the noise they had made. I took Lolly in my hands, looking at her tattered hair, and gave her hair one last stroke before I let my disappointed gaze move back up to the giant.

He took that as the cue he was waiting for and tugged the doll from my fingers, albeit gently. He bent down to be at eye level with me. “You know you aren’t supposed to have this here, don’t you?” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

I nodded. “Yes,” I answered in kind.

“You know your mother broke the rules by bringing this to you.” It wasn’t a question. “You have to follow the rules, pay for privileges, work really hard, and then get them. That’s how it works. You can’t steal and trade for things that don’t belong to you or that are above your station. Don’t follow your mother’s example.”

Mommy scoffed behind him, but the man didn’t turn to look at her. He continued. “You just keep following your routine, be a good girl, and someone will come for you soon.”

It hit me then. They were taking Mommy. “You’re taking Mommy because she gave me a doll? She’s going to confinement because of it?”

They stayed silent and that was my answer.

“Will I have to go, too? I can’t stay here?”

One of the other sentries chuckled under his breath. “You can if you can come up with your own taxes in ten days, sweetheart.”

“Quiet,” the sentry in front of me barked over his shoulder and all the men flinched a little. He must have been someone with authority, which made me wonder why he was trying to put on a show of kindness for me if he was so high up in the ranks. He did this often—took mothers and fathers from their homes and put them in confinement for the rest of their lives for not paying taxes, for breaking rules, for all sorts of things. And now here he was trying to act as if he was doing me a favor? I felt my lips twist with the effort not to cry in front of him as he looked back at me. “Listen to me, little one. Your mother broke the law.”

“For me,” I whispered. I saw his jaw clench. Even my mind could understand then. “Do you have a daughter?”

He sighed and his face hardened. Too far, Sophelia. Too far.

“She—whether or not I have a daughter has nothing to do with the fact that your mother broke the law; laws that are clearly laid out for all citizens to follow, to keep us all safe.”

“All this for a contraband doll?” I muttered, understanding even in my youth that there was clearly something I was
not understanding
.

His look over at her was swift before he rose. “Time to go, Wendy.”

It had been two years since I’d heard someone call my mother by her name and it punched me in the gut. I’d only ever heard my father call her that before.

She tried to leave the sentry’s grasp, but he held tight. “Let me,” she begged. She looked over at the sentry in front of me. “You know where she’s going. You know what’s going to happen to her. Let me say goodbye.”

They stared for long seconds, weaving awkwardness in the air that I thought the other sentries could feel, too, before he finally nodded his head. The sentry didn’t look happy about letting her go, but he did so.

Mom ran to me and fell to her knees roughly. As her arms wound around me, she whispered so low in my ear I barely heard. I thought that was probably the point. “Don’t sell the book, no matter what. Not even for taxes. Don’t ever let them find it or the doll. You’ll need it one day. Save it. Come back for it. Don’t worry. You are so strong. I know you are. Things get rough before they get better. But you’re so strong. Remember that.”

“Can I come see you in confinement?” I asked, but I knew I couldn’t. No one was allowed to.

“I’m not going to confinement, baby, and I need you to be so strong for me right now.” She leaned back and smiled through her tears again and I’d never been more scared than I was right in that moment when I looked into her worn face. “I’m going to be in a better place. I’m going to see Daddy. But you are going to help people. You are the helper, Sophelia, the one who will take all the bad and ugly and make it what it was supposed to be in the first place. You will bring this world to its knees one day.”

I opened my mouth to say…something. “I—”

“One day you’ll get to fly, Soph, just like Pan and Wendy. Fly away home to a better place where everything is brighter, boys are never lost, and mothers don’t ever leave. But right now? Don’t mourn me,” she whispered. “I love you and I planned this. All is as it should be. One day, you will understand.”

My eyes bulged. Mourn?

“That’s enough. It’s time.” The sentry took her arm and lifted her up. She stroked my face once more before making her way to the door where one sentry had already made his way out and started his decent down the ladder. She turned and gave me that tearful smile. I tried to smile for her. I tried, I really did, but it turned into tears before I could even process what was happening.

I ran to her before I could think. And before I could even enjoy my final hug with her, I was being pulled off and she was being ordered down the ladder. “It’s all okay, Soph,” she said, her soft, soothing voice meant to calm me as it usually did. “All is as it should be,” she reiterated. “Thimble kisses.”

I nodded as I fought. “Thimble kisses.”

I yanked against the man once more before I gave up, taking a deep breath when I saw her face disappear below the bottom of the door. She was gone and so was the fight in me with her. The other sentries left leaving me with the man who was part Militia, part father. And neither of those helped me right now.

His grasp on my arm stayed firm and steady, but he turned to place me in the chair gently, again with a gentleness I didn’t understand.

“Soph?” he tried. “Is that what she called you?” I stayed quiet, unable to process what was going to happen to me. I had heard stories of children who couldn’t pay their taxes after they lost their parents for one reason or another. They didn’t come back to school and from the whispers I never wanted to find out if what I heard was true. I was now one of those children. “Hey.”

I jerked my gaze up to him. “Yes?”

His jaw worked back and forth before he spoke. “Like I told you: stay here, go to school on your assigned day, do as you’re told.” I could have sworn I saw him gulp. But why? “There will be someone coming by in a few days after tax day to get you when your family’s payment doesn’t come in. They’ll…process you.”

Process. That sounded…painful.

“Will I have to leave my pod?”

“Yes,” he answered quickly. “They’ll take you somewhere. You can’t stay here by yourself forever. Without taxes the water and food will stop coming.”

“I can take care of myself,” I grunted.

When he smiled, it transformed his entire face. This was the face he used with his own daughter, I was sure of it. “Of that I have no doubt, little one. But you can’t stay here alone that long. We have to find a purpose for you, a place amongst society. Your work placement will probably happen a little sooner than others.”

“Will I do what Mommy did?”

Mom worked in the mines and she hated it. I hated it, too, on her behalf. They mined salt, minor metal minerals, building materials that were worthless on the black market, and other things like that. I didn’t want that job. It made your face and the inside of your lungs black.

His face morphed back into what it was like before and I knew he was trying to hide something from me. “I don’t think so. Okay, time for me go. You remember what I said—”

There was a loud noise outside and several screams mixed together. Somehow I knew—this was it—what Mom had been talking about. She said I needed to be strong, and I tried to remember that. My sentry ran to the door of our pod and looked down to see what the commotion was. When I saw his back rise and fall with deep breaths, I walked behind him on my soft footfalls and peeked around his arm.

Mom was lying on the ground at the bottom of the ladder, her leg twisted beneath her in a way that wasn’t normal as two of the sentries stood around her and the other two still made their way down the ladder. Our pod was eleven stacks up. There was no way she could have survived the fall. Mom had always warned me about the ladder, about how careful I had to be, about always hooking the rope around my waist before going down or coming up, even if I had to wait for other tenants to go first.

A noise escaped my mouth, startling the sentry. “No,” he barked and turned me to face the other way. “You don’t need to see that.”

Wailing continued all around me as my vision blurred. A crackling filled the air and the sentry lifted his wrist to talk into the screen on his forearm to tell them he was with ‘the girl’, and the traitor had fallen to her death.

“Traitor?” I whispered.

He ignored me and kept speaking to them. I noticed the wailing had stopped. I guess it had been me. I slid down the wall next to the door to the floor, feeling the cold metal against my skin through my thin clothes. This was a fickle planet—almost too cold in some months and too hot in others, never just right, but our pods were warm enough. When I didn’t have school I usually just left on one of my father’s shirts. It made me feel close to him and sometimes Mom would smile when she looked at it and it made me feel nice to make her smile, even if just for a second.

I looked down at my bare, dirty legs on the floor and knew that she’d never smile at me again. A sob crawled up from my gut painfully. I looked up at the man to find him watching me.

He looked fascinated. “I’m surprised you’re not bawling your eyes out, little one.”

I straightened my back and wiped under my eye. “Mom always told me to be so strong. To not let anything break me.”

He seemed angered by that. He shook his head as he got back down on his haunches and looked closely at me. “Your mother told you wrong, Soph,” he said, gentle but firm. “Being strong is not going to keep you alive; it’ll get you killed. Doing as you’re told and laying low is the way to live long on this planet, little one. And there’s many ways to look at being strong. Is it
strong
to defy your government and break the law? Is it
strong
to put your people and your daughter in danger?” I gulped. I knew what he was trying to do. “Is it
strong
to do it all anyway knowing that your daughter is going to go some horrible place that is going to—” He sighed. “She’s a convict.” I gasped because that word was only used on rare occasions, for rare people. Bad, bad people were convicts.

“No.”

“Yes,” he reiterated. “She’s an enemy of the people. A traitor. You don’t know the things she’s done. And now she’s trying to turn you into one, too.”

“No, that’s not what she—”

“Then why would she go to so much trouble just to bring you a doll for your day of birth?” His eyebrows rose in waiting.

I was starting to see that this man didn’t wait for much.

“Dad always said that one day he would earn enough silver to buy me a doll. But when he died, Mom couldn’t pay our taxes and get the doll, too.”

He softened again. “Yes. I read on your file chip that your father died in an accident. But that doesn’t excuse your mother’s crimes.”

I opened my mouth to defend her, to say
something
, but he was already moving on.

“You can stay here until the processors come to get you. It’ll be about ten days.”

“Until tax day,” I realized.

He nodded. “Yes. When you can’t pay your family’s taxes, they’ll take you in for processing.”

“And then what will happen to me?”

He hadn’t looked at me since he had said the word “processors”. He kept going as if I hadn’t asked the question so I just stayed quiet like he had told me to.

“There will be food and water for you until then. I guess I wouldn’t worry about your school day. It won’t be necessary where you’re going.”

“What does that mean? I’ll have a new school?”
He finally looked at me and I saw it.

I wasn’t going somewhere rosy and I wasn’t going to need school because they weren’t going to let me go there anymore. I was going where he’d never send his daughter, where I’d never want to go, where my mother would never have sent me if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. I was going to the place that I’d always heard about in whisperings at school, in myths, in stories that were always half-truths, half-lies.

I was going to be a slave.

Ten Years Later

Sophelia

“
T
hat doesn’t go with the common metals, it goes with the silvers. How long have you been working here?” she quipped, her black hair still shiny from wherever she came from. She hadn’t been here long enough for this life to taint her mind and body yet. But it would.