I’m watching you.

“Zedock! You didn’t tell him?” Letho said.

“Yeah, just now I did.” Zedock droppedg his arm and massaging his shoulder. “Bastard tweaked my shoulder joint.”

“Don’t you think it might have gone a little more smoothly if you had given him a heads-up before announcing it in front of the whole community?” Letho exclaimed.

“I didn’t tell the whole community, I just told the people sitting in the lunch room.”

“He looked pretty upset,” Letho said. “You might want to go talk to him.

“Nonsense. He’s a stubborn fella. If I went to talk to him while he’s in one of his moods, he’d be liable to dust me.”

“Dust you?” Letho asked.

“Yeah, knock my block off? Pop me in the chops? Dust me?” None of the colloquialisms were familiar to Letho, but he got the gist of it.

“I’ll talk to him later, anyways. He’ll be fine, trust me. He’s just gonna go to some place quiet and turn it around in his head a few times. Just like a Wartimer, I tell ya.”

Only he isn’t a Wartimer. By blood anyways.

“Well, you’re the boss. Hey, I haven’t seen Deacon since last night. Is he coming down to breakfast?”

“He’s fine. Down there with the Tarsi. Spoke with Bayorn earlier, he says he’s coming through the sickness like a champ. Still going to be a few days.”

“And what about Thresha? I’d like to go and see her, if that’s okay.”

Zedock ran the back of his hand across a sweat-spackled forehead, placed his hands on his hips, and sighed as he stared at the floor.

“Sure, I guess now’s a good time as any. Sit down and eat your breakfast, and then I’ll take you. I can give you a tour of rest of the place on the way down.”

****

 

Zedock led Letho into the kitchen through a set of yellowed vinyl flaps hanging at the back of the cafeteria. The kitchen was rather nondescript, reminding Letho of the Fulcrum food prep facilities, though these looked as though they had seen more use and less maintenance.

They stopped at what appeared to be a dead end at the rear of the galley. Zedock pushed on a small, waist-high square in the wall, and it retracted, revealing a keypad. Zedock punched in the code.

To Letho, Zedock’s keystrokes came at a glacial pace, and he had the code memorized several times over before the old man had entered the last number. As he danced from foot to foot, Letho was a bit disappointed with himself in how much he simply couldn’t wait to see Thresha. How had it come to this? He supposed that many men before him had become infatuated with deadly yet beautiful women, and he shuddered to think of the fates that been historically reserved for those who bet everything on a companion whose allegiances were at best dubious. He could almost feel the bite of a blade on the back of his neck just from thinking about it.

Get it together, Ferron.

If only it were that easy. Stop doing that thing that’s unhealthy for you. Please stop caring so deeply for that person. As if the heart and mind could resolve themselves against that which had already been chosen.

A metal grate and girder stairway loomed in the darkness of the shaft just behind the secret door. Halogens began to flick on one by one, although several stayed dark, never again to cast their pale light.

“Executive escape hatch,” Zedock said.

“Is that the official handbook label, or is that what you’re calling it? It looks like it’s going to fall apart any second,” Letho said.

“Aw, hush. It ain’t that bad. Trust me, I seen worse. This is old Arandos construction: real steel. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” Zedock grabbed the handrail and gave it a good shake. Down below, something groaned and crashed to the ground.

Letho’s eyes widened. “After you, old-timer,” he said.

“Is that any way to talk to your old man?” Zedock said. “Just remember you may be a bigger bear, but you ain’t the baddest bear in the woods, son.”

“Just move it,” Letho said, wearing a grin that disappeared as he placed a tentative foot on the rickety catwalk.

****

Zedock didn’t take Letho all the way to the bottom floor, where the shadows were long and the walls glistened with moisture and a verdant carpet of lichens and fungal growth.

“What’s down there, Zedock?” Letho asked as they stopped about midway down the stairwell, pointing to where the darkness swallowed the stairwell below them. Zedock’s mind appeared to be entangled in the arduous process of remembering the keycode for yet another locked door, and it took him a moment to respond.

“That there’s where the water comes from. The whole damn compound is sitting on top of an aquifer. Enough water to drink and bathe with for centuries. Luckiest damn thing. Lot of underground water supplies, like the one we have here, straight dried up. Sucked dry when things got bad. But this one goes on for miles, from what I understand.”

“Does it connect to Hastrom City?” Letho asked.

“I don’t know. Why don’t we hop on over to the submarine store and pick one up, so we can go down and have a look?” Zedock gave Letho a playful but slightly stinging thump to the ear. “I don’t know how far down it goes, or left or right neither, I just know it’s deeper and darker than a—”

Letho cut him a glance, and Zedock blushed. “Well, it’s just a deep, dark place, is all.”

Zedock finished his keyed entry, and the door slid open, raining a curtain of dust and rust down in front of them. Inside the doorway was some sort of meeting area. Ancient film cameras stood like children, their lifeless eyes staring off into odd directions as if waiting for something to draw their focus. Once-plush amphitheater seats now presented synthetic skin that had begun to deteriorate, spilling stuffing like overflowing popcorn. In the center stood a podium; it was adorned with a large golden medallion featuring a bear striding upon a bed of olive branches and encircled in a ring of evenly spaced stars. Perhaps a world leader had stood there once, assuring the terrified public that there was indeed a large reserve of potable water that would be evenly distributed, and that food trucks would be arriving shortly.

Zedock led Letho to the back of the room where the control deck for the cameras and lights were found. “The lights and intercom system still work, but the cameras don’t. Broadcasts are a little dangerous anyways. Lots of folks out there want what we got,” he said.

“Well, why don’t you let them in then?” Letho asked. “Looks like you have plenty to go around.”

Zedock chuckled. “Well, son, I’m glad that things appear to be that well put together, but the truth is, we’re just holding it together with a bit of all-tape and some baling wire. We got plenty of water, but we always end up with just enough food to scrape by, and don’t even get me started on medicine.”

“That bad, huh?”

“You betcha.”

They headed to the next room, where the walls were covered in dark wood paneling and an expansive oval-shaped desk was made from some dense, burled wood. On one wall was a giant computer screen whose LCD display had given out years before. On another wall was a larger representation of the bear logo that Letho had seen on the podium in the previous room.

Long live Arandos.

“How crazy is it that our country’s icon was a bear, and then a bunch of green alien space bears showed up on our planet in spaceships?” Letho said.

“I would say that it’s a coincidence of cosmic proportions, which is to say, I don’t really think it’s a coincidence at all,” Zedock said, winking at Letho.

They made their way through a complex array of hallways with sparse markings, lit with more halogens that blinked on and off occasionally as if to acknowledge Zedock and Letho’s presence. The sound of machinery grew louder, and Letho found himself remembering his days in the underneath. He never thought he would long for the mindless simplicity of back-breaking labor, but he couldn’t help but feel nostalgic as the clamor of large machinery filled his ears and set his teeth to vibrating. He felt the thrum of archaic machinery that pumped fresh air and kept the waste water from backflowing into bathrooms, and it was as welcome as his own heartbeat and the pumping of his lungs.