~~~
I meet Lin later on where she told me to. The corner of W and 2nd. The streets are full of white-clad people, presumably returning home from whatever crap jobs they’ve been assigned. I’m surprised—the sun is still streaming through the glass, an hour or two from the horizon. Are their jobs really that bad if they get to go home this early? Maybe they start really early too.
Despite having made sure I’d be at the designated meeting spot well before six, the time we’d agreed on, Lin’s already waiting, smiling broadly.
Without any kind of greeting, she grabs my hand and pulls me through the press of the crowd. It’s the loudest I’ve heard the earth dwellers. They’re talking and gossiping like normal human beings. Like they’re alive and not the zombies I’ve seen walking around all day.
“Lin?” I say, still being dragged.
“Yeah?” she says, not looking back.
“What’s going on?”
“They let all the workers out early, for an—”
A three-toned sound rings out from somewhere above, cutting her off. Instead of continuing whatever she was going to say, Lin sticks a finger in the air and keeps on leading me.
A loud voice blares, immediately silencing the people. “Please return to your sleeping quarters and power up your vids for an important announcement from President Borg Lecter. I repeat…” The command loops three times, until I can’t help but to mimic it, mouthing each word. What sort of announcement? Is this about the injured soldiers we saw today?
After eating lunch, I’d gone back to the army medical building, looked through the fence. The soldiers were gone, all of them, the injured likely receiving medical attention, the dead taken to Meaty-Bun and Skinny-Bun in the morgue, one of them probably stuffed in the very drawer I slept in last night. Hopefully they didn’t need to use the drawer I stashed the weapons in. The uninjured would be back wherever they live, resting and preparing for the next mission. If there’ll be a next mission. But if they won the war already…
Lin practically yanks my arm off as she cuts to the side, out of the human flow, leading me through a door that clicks and opens automatically when she scans her wrist on a plate at the front.
We stop in front of a row of shiny, metal doors. Lin presses a button in the middle of them, which lights up bright yellow.
Only then does she turn to me. “Everyone’s speculating what the message will be about,” she says, “but I can tell you from experience that Lecter”—I like the way she says his name, irreverently, just his last name with no “President” attached—“only makes city-wide announcements if he’s trying to gloat or influence us.”
“So propaganda basically,” I say.
“About right,” she says as one of the doors opens. I follow her into a small closet, barely wide enough to fit both of us. Buttons with numbers from two to thirty-two are poking from one of the walls. Lin scans her wrist again and presses eighteen. The button lights up.
The doors close and the closet hums under our feet. There’s a lurch and we start to rise. Even as I put a hand on the wall to steady myself I can’t help but think of the long ride up to the surface with Tristan. Up to check things out and back down to the real world. That was the plan. I shake my head, wondering how the hell I ended up as a spy in the New City.
“What?” Lin says, eyeing me curiously.
“Life is funny,” I say, meaning something else.
“No. Life is crappy,” she says, meaning exactly that. Her word choice is closer to what I was thinking anyway.
When we stop and the doors open, we step out into a long hallway with many doors on each side. Like a lot of doors. There have to be at least a hundred. Weird.
Lin turns left and goes to one with the number 1808 on it. Scans her wrist, waits for a click, and then pushes through. “Avery?” she says. Funny she doesn’t called him “Dad” or “Father.” A lot of things about Lin are kind of funny.
“Here,” the familiar voice answers. She holds the door for me and I step into a long narrow room that ends in glass. Through it I can see the sun reflecting off the side of another building. Avery’s inside, fiddling with some kind of plastic wrapper.
“I brought Tawni,” Lin announces, and I almost look around for my old friend. But no, that’s my name now.
“Hi there,” he says, to the both of us.
“Hi Mr…Avery,” I say.
“Just Avery,” he says, ripping the plastic off a green rectangle. “Want to have dinner with us?”
My stomach clenches at the thought of more rectangle-food, but I know I need the energy. I can’t just not eat because the food is tasteless and shaped like bricks. “Sure,” I say.
I close the door behind me and take in my surroundings…or rather, lack of surroundings. There’s nothing to the place. A small counter runs down one side, with small metal squares, like cabinets, set into the wall—no handles, no knobs, no way of opening them. Just in front of the glass window at the end is a small table with two chairs. Running back down the other side is a bare wall, gray, with strange lines cut into it. This is where they…live?
Avery peels off another couple packages and adds a brown and a yellow rectangle to his plate, holds his wrist up to one of the metal rectangles and it opens. He shoves the plate inside and shuts the door. Yellow light glows from the edges as it hums. Maybe ten seconds later, the machine goes dark and the door pops open. Steam rises from the rectangle-food.
“You can have this one,” Avery says, handing me the plate. Rations, I think. I can’t possibly take their rations, can I?
“That’s okay, you have it,” I say.
“Here, I’ll trade you,” Avery says, setting the plate on the counter and grabbing my wrist. Why do he and Lin love to do that? He lifts my wrist to a different metal plate and then pulls it back. The door slides open and inside are three clear, plastic pouches, each with a colored rectangle inside—green, brown and yellow.
Down the counter, Lin has scanned her own wrist and is already unwrapping her food. So it’s like…unlimited food at night but rations during the day? Why would that kid have been complaining about being hungry?
I lift my wrist to try scanning it on another metal square, but nothing happens. Did I do it correctly? Is there some special technique to scanning I haven’t quite mastered, that I would have learned had I been through the proper welcome-to-Earth orientation?
Avery laughs. “I try that sometimes, too, just for kicks, hoping there will be an error with the system and I’ll get a double ration. But it never works.”
I laugh like that’s exactly what I was trying to do. Trick the system. Like I’m not the clueless idiot who doesn’t know how anything works.
But Lin’s not buying it. “You’re different,” she says, grabbing her steaming plate out of the weird-super-fast-cooker-thingy. Avery sticks the next plate in.
“I could say the same about you,” I say. “Both of you.”
“How so?” Lin asks, sitting at the table.
“Have a seat,” Avery says with a wave. I take the only other seat and Lin passes me a fork, the question still in her eyes.
“Well…” I start, choosing my words carefully so as not to offend the only two friends I have at the moment. “Lin, you’re…not a zombie, and Avery, you actually talked to me on the street.”
“Score! Not a zombie,” Lin says. “That’s what I was hoping for. Compliment of the year.”
“So I am a zombie?” Avery says, standing and eating.
Smiling, I shake my head. “No, I just meant that I walked around all day and no one seemed the least bit interested that I existed. Except for you two.”
Oh, and the two Enforcers that had stopped me on the street and scanned my wrist. “Why didn’t you just tell us it was your Anything Day?” one of them had said before they moved on, leaving my heart to return to normal speed, my knuckles to unclench.