Jahnu and I walk through the dimly lit main corridor of our underground compound, through to the cramped cafeteria, looking for Eli. We head down the stairs toward the director’s office and our communications center. Our meager excuse for a kitchen smells like fresh baked bread and sautéed onions, and I remember how lucky I am to have escaped the Okarian Sector. If I never see a Dietician-issued Mealpak again, it’ll be a day too soon. Here we may not have a lot, but what we have is real. I breathe in deeply, hoping to get another whiff of the caramelizing onions and fragrant garlic, only to be brought back to reality by the scent of recycled air and rubbing alcohol wafting from the open door of what passes for our infirmary.
We’re in the bowels of what was, at one time, a large university, on par with our own Sector Research Institute, the SRI, today. We live like moles, hiding underground, digging tunnels and burrowing to avoid being seen by Sector drones when they venture out this far. Except that no one in the Okarian sector has seen a mole in a hundred years, or so says old man Rhinehouse. They were all killed by poisoned groundwater, habitat destruction, or radioactive waste seeping into the earth. Gifts bequeathed to us from the civilizations of the past. Some areas are still uninhabitable; others, nature has mended in her own way; still others were relatively untouched to begin with.
Jahnu pushes through the heavy double doors to the comm center, where Eli is sitting in a swivel chair with headphones on. He wears a thoughtful expression, like he’s trying to figure out how some piece of circuitry works. But there’s no circuit box in front of him—just the headphones and the array of dials and switches that make up our old-fashioned comm center. I walk over and poke him in the shoulder.
“Eli!”
He starts and looks up at me. When he sees who it is, he swivels in his chair and removes his headphones.
“Well, look who’s here. I was just about to send a messenger to find you, Remy. Your folks are calling in. You want me to put you through?”
“Jahnu and I want to go topside for our own graduation celebration,” I say, trying to dodge the question. “There’s nothing crazy on the weather forecast, is there?” The weather is so erratic these days that you can go to bed on a warm evening and wake up to a meter of snow on the ground. Then there are the thunderstorms with hailstones that can kill a man, the downpours that deposit an ocean’s worth of water in a few hours, and the occasional tornado clusters. Needless to say, we monitor the weather closely.
“Do you want to talk to them or not?” Eli asks, holding the headphones out, his finger on the incoming call switch. He can always tell when I’m being evasive. Not that I’m ever particularly subtle.
“We want to have a picnic, so we need to get everything organized. I’ll have you put a call through to them later.”
Eli cocks his head and raises one eyebrow as if to say, You’re not fooling anyone.
“Remy, you have no idea if they’re even going to be available later,” Jahnu points out. It’s true. Posing as Outsiders, nomads who live in the Wilds, my parents are constantly moving, traveling between factory towns and Farms, trying ever so subtly to spread word of the Resistance to Sector citizens willing to listen. The Resistance is so small, and most of us are defects from the elite of the OAC and the Sector government. So my parents try to spread the word, and in the meantime they work to deliver real food, information, and medicine to people in the Farms. As a doctor and an artist, they make a powerful combination. But their access to reliable communications is spotty at best, especially since they’re operating right under the nose of Sector Defense Forces, and whatever public communications equipment they might use is liable to be monitored. If Sector soldiers ever caught them, well….
“Listen, I don’t want to talk to them right now, okay? Besides, I don’t need mommy and daddy to make everything all better.”
“The world would be a better place if we all had mommies and daddies to make everything all better,” Eli says, with an edge to his voice. I wince, remembering that Eli has no idea where his parents are, or if they’re still alive. I have to be careful about what I say around him—I never know when something will send him spiraling into one of his dark moods. The kind where he’ll barely say a word for days. The kind where he forgets to eat or sleep—where I wonder if he wishes the gunman had gotten to him, too. “Your parents are waiting.”
“Fine.” I sit down at the call station and put my finger on the switch. I hear Jahnu ask Eli, “So, is it safe to go topside now? We need something to cheer us up after the ceremony. And my birthday is next week.”
“Last one to hit the big one-eight, huh? What’s it like to be a child prodigy?”
“You should know....”
I tune them out and flip the call switch. There’s a hollowness on the other end and then, “Remy? Is that you?”
“Yeah, Mom. It’s me.” My voice catches in my throat.
“Dad’s on the line, too. We saw the ceremony.”
“I’m sure everyone in the Sector saw the ceremony.”
“You okay, little bird?”
At the sound of Dad’s voice, my eyes well up and my nose tingles. I pinch the bridge of my nose to keep the tears at bay. Mom’s always been my sounding board. She keeps me grounded, but I’m more like my dad. He’s the writer, the poet, the dreamer who brought art and music and literature into the house. He’s the one who encouraged me to be an artist, who somehow found books, real books, on artists that had dared to be different. When Tai was off being brilliant and perfect, finishing her science and math classes with flying colors, I always had a pen in hand, perpetually drawing, painting, or sketching. Dad was the one who encouraged me to enter the Academy’s prestigious Art and Design program—even though that turned out to be nothing but an extensive study of propaganda. And while Mom was planning our escape route, he’s the one who sat with me the night before we left when, one by one, we went through my portfolio of drawings and paintings and decided which ones to keep and which to burn. We went through every piece and picked our favorites, and then I took the others and held them over the flames in the fireplace until they were nothing more than ashes and my fingers were hot and smudged with soot.
I shouldn’t have taken the call.
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
Talking to them on the commlink is torturous—it always makes me remember how much I miss them and Tai. I haven’t seen my parents in over a year. We talk here and there, whenever they can get their equipment connected to one of the old service towers that the Resistance has rehabbed. But sometimes we’ll go weeks without talking. I have trouble sleeping then, thinking of all the terrible things that could go wrong.
“I hope you’re going to do something fun today, maybe get outside for some fresh air,” Dad says.
“Yeah, we’re going to have a picnic later to celebrate our lack of a graduation.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. But I realize I’m being a baby, so I change the subject quickly. “Where are you right now?”
“You know we can’t tell you that, sweetie,” Mom says.
“We’re going somewhere new in a few days, though,” my dad pipes up. “That’s why we wanted to talk to you now, before we have to pack up the comm equipment.”
“Is it somewhere dangerous?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer. But not knowing would be worse. My parents volunteered to serve as missionaries to the laborers on the Farms, but I wasn’t allowed to go. “Too risky,” the Director said. “You’re too young. Besides, we need you here.” My parents agreed. They wanted me to stay at the main base, which we call Thermopylae, with Eli and the other kids from the Academy. That’s how I got assigned to Eli’s raid team with Jahnu, Kenzie, and Soren.
“It’s no more dangerous than where we are now,” Mom says gently.
“That’s not very reassuring. Don’t get caught, okay?”
“We’ll try, little bird,” my dad says. “You be safe too, okay? I heard about the last seed bank raid you guys did. It sounded much more dangerous than what we do.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I say, with a glimmer of a laugh, “but I’m sure it was way more fun than what you guys do, too.”
The last mission our team went on was a thrill. We broke into one of the OAC’s seed banks, trying to steal the backup database that had all the genetic codes for the seeds manufactured there. Security was lax, presumably because the OAC didn’t realize we knew that particular bank existed. We had the run of the place, and we each picked out something to take home with us. Eli brought back a handheld retinal scanner. Soren found a digital harp, and none of us had any idea why that was hanging around the seed bank. I brought home a touch-screen drawing pad—one of the plasma tablets we used in my art classes at the Academy. I hadn’t seen one of those since we left the Sector. It was the most successful mission in the Resistance’s history, and we were greeted like war heroes when we came back.
“Yes, well, they’re not always going to be like that,” my mom says reprovingly, “so stay safe, okay?”
“We’ve got to go now, little bird. We’ll talk to you in a few weeks, when we get everything set up at our next base.”
“Okay,” I whisper. Now that I’ve got them, I don’t want to let them go. “Bye.”
“We love you.”
“I love you, too,” I say, but the words are barely audible. I hear the click, and then the static of an empty signal on the other end. I pull off the headphones and throw them down on the table.
“Good to go?” Eli asks.
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
“I can’t come,” he says. “I’m doing a double shift.”
“No way!” I exclaim in indignation. Eli already spends at least sixteen of his waking hours working, either tinkering with some old piece of equipment or doing shifts at different stations around the base. There’s no reason for him to work a double shift.
“You covering for someone or in trouble again?” Jahnu asks.
“Apparently I have a bad attitude.” Eli smiles.
“Really?” Jahnu draws back in mock astonishment, his almond eyes wide. “What did you do this time?” Eli and Jahnu stand in stark contrast to each other. They’re about the same height, but Jahnu’s skin is the color of a shadowy night and his hair is shaved close. Eli’s brown curls, on the other hand, are usually uncontrollable, and his olive skin makes me think of sandy beaches and summer afternoons in the sun.
“I told the Director what I thought of her plans for the Arysk mission.”
“Told her politely, I’m sure.” Jahnu rolls his eyes.
“I’m always polite.” Eli grins. Eli’s version of polite typically includes shouting and slamming doors.
“That’s why back home they were feeding you OAC happy pills morning, noon, and night,” I throw out.
“And who knows what they were putting in my food.”
There’s a sort of pause, a thick silence that fills the moment when the three of us don’t want to say the next thing, the thing that we’re all thinking about, the thing that brought us all to the bowels of this old bombed-out university. To provide a distraction, I stand and try to pull Eli out of his creaky old office chair. It just rolls toward me.
“You’re coming with us. There’s nothing going on today. Everyone in the Sector is celebrating, so we’re going to have our own celebration.” I want Eli to come because it’s always more fun with him along. We need him, bad attitude and all. “And the Director doesn’t have to know you bailed on your shift,” I add.
“Besides, what’s she going to do, fire you?” Jahnu says. We all smile at the impossible idea. The Director needs Eli. He’s one of the most important members of our team. Without his skills, half of the technology we use on a daily basis would just be junk. Besides, firing him would amount to nothing. Here at the Resistance, we’re all refugees, and it’s not like anyone’s going to exile Eli into the Wilds.
Eli is twenty-four, six years older than Jahnu and I. He was two years ahead of my sister Tai, and they’d been together for several months. Tai couldn’t stop talking about him. He was a research and teaching assistant at the SRI, working with one of the professors in the genetics lab where Tai spent most of her time. Eli had always been a class clown, the troublemaker to whom everything came easy and nothing seemed to matter, and Tai was the perfectly poised favorite student, maybe even a bit of a teacher’s pet. Somehow they clicked.
He was the one who found her. He found them all, every student cut down, massacred by what the OAC called “a savage from the Wilds.” Eli is alive because he had to take a shit in the middle of a lecture and because in the wake of the Religious Wars and the Famine Years, even the Okarian Sector can’t always get its hands on reliable weaponry. Eli had been in the bathroom when the man entered the classroom, and by the time he got off the pot, it was all over. He walked back to the classroom to find the killer standing over Tai’s body.
“You’re late to the party,” the man said. “Too bad you had to miss out on all the fun. But don’t worry. Lucky for you, there’s an after party right here.” He placed his Bolt between Eli’s eyes and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Stunned, Eli stood immobilized. The man stared at his gun, swore, pointed it at Eli again, and pulled the trigger several times. Still, nothing happened.
Later, in his testimony before a secret government inquiry, Eli described how, after he realized the charge was malfunctioning, he had lunged at the man, only to be slammed back up against the wall. But instead of turning the weapon back on Eli, the man grinned at him and said: “A word to the wise, kid. Never get on Madam Orleán’s bad side.” He put the Bolt up to his own head and pulled the trigger. This time, the weapon discharged. Eli, now covered in blood and brains, staggered over to Tai’s side and passed out, and that’s where the Watchmen found him.
So, now he has anger management issues. Who can blame him? He lost his research scholarship and his job because he was “unstable,” the line involving Corine Orleán was stricken from the official court records, and Eli’s testimony was declared “compromised due to emotional trauma.” When his parents petitioned the Sector for a fair public hearing, they were transferred somewhere, no one knows where, and no one has heard from them since.
Not three months later, the brilliant Corine Orleán was promoted from head of Research and Development to OAC General Director. The whole “investigation” took about six months, but when my parents figured out the truth—and realized that Tai’s death was going to go without retribution—we left. Disappeared. We joined the Resistance and brought Eli with us. Together, Eli and I swore that Tai’s death would be avenged. That we would make whoever was responsible pay.
Now my friends and I look up to Eli. He’s our link to the reality of what the Sector and the OAC are capable of—of what they will do if they ever catch us. Plus, Eli’s just a great guy, in that big-brother-you-always-wanted kind of way. He has a serious problem with authority and doesn’t give a damn what anyone else thinks. The stuff he pulled when he used to lead teams into the field to scavenge old labs, factories, and farms is legendary—so legendary the Director rarely allows him out anymore without “adult supervision.”
“You know what? For once, you’re absolutely right. It’s time to get out of here.” He picks up his handheld and punches in a few numbers. “Firestone, get your lazy ass up here. You’re on duty.”
Jahnu and I glance at each other and smile. Firestone, Eli’s buddy, won’t be happy, but for us, the day is looking up.
“Yes, I know I was assigned your shift, but things change, my friend. And as you always say—” he pauses and winks at us—“That’s an interesting choice of words. You know swearing is the mark of a lazy mind.”
Eli holds the handheld up so Jahnu and I can hear the stream of obscenities. “Anyway, as you’re always telling me, we must approach change philosophically, Mr. Firestone, and right now your philosophical ass should be sitting in this philosophical chair. I’ve kept it warm for you all morning.” Eli gives us a mischievous grin. “I’m turning the auto-recorder on now, so you have exactly five minutes to get here before it becomes painfully obvious no one’s on duty. You’re welcome. Anytime.”
He scoots back over to the main console, types in a few commands, hits the auto-record button, and logs out. He stands with his hands on his hips and looks us up and down as if evaluating our worthiness for combat. Instinctively, we both stand straighter. That famous Elijah Tawfiq smile spreads across his face, punctuated only by a deep dimple in his left cheek. No wonder Tai was in love with him.
“Topside it is, kiddos. We’ve got a graduation to celebrate.”