Darklandia (6 page)

“Sera!” I whipped my head around to find Darla bounding toward me through the cool shadows of the buildings on Cedar Street; her pale face transformed a marvelous pink by the afternoon sun. “I’m so glad they let you go.”

“Let me go?”

“Yeah, the committee.”

Anything. I would do anything to erase her words. Then the committee’s words came to me:
Go home. Drink your ration. Get some rest.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Aren’t you happy they let you go?”

I shook my head instantly. “No. Why would I be happy? Do you know what I did?” Darla’s smile tapered. “I stopped drinking my rations. I should have been purified right then and there.”

A crease formed between her ginger eyebrows. “But I thought it was a mistake? You didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Yes, I did.”

Darla glanced over her shoulder to where a hulking angel stood on the corner of Broadway and Cedar. Then her eyes flitted above us at the camera mounted on the wall beneath an apartment window. “You’re frightening me. I don’t want to talk about this.”

We stood in silence for a moment before I spoke. “You’re right. Let’s go inside. It’s almost time for our rations.”

“Did you serve your hour today?” she asked warily. I could see it in her face. My best friend thought I was becoming a darkling. She was probably right.

I had seen the change in others before. The transformations quick and terrifying, and inescapable, like a leap from a hundred-story building. The gravity of the descent too powerful to reverse. It was only a matter of time now before I was detained, my identity washed away like the grime in our apartment.

I could go upstairs and drown my growing fears in a glass of greenish-blue liquid, or I could go to the darkroom with Darla and pretend there was nothing to fear. I could pretend I didn’t know there was someone else out there who knew my secret; someone who knew my father’s secret; someone who believed suffering was not optional.

“Let’s go to the darkroom on Broadway,” I replied.

“But it’s so far,” Darla complained as we made our way toward Broadway. “We’ll miss our next ration.”

“A couple of hours won’t make a difference.” Not to me, not since Grandmother contaminated me with her diseased words. “You can always drink your lifesaver, if you need to.”

“But the waiting list for lifesavers is up to forty days now.”

Of course. The longer the waiting list, the more accustomed people would become to not using them.

The thing with lifesavers was that you couldn’t take any refillable container and deposit a ration inside to take with you anywhere. Lifesavers were a concentrated version of your ration packaged in a hermetically sealed vial to prevent contamination. That’s what they were making in the VITALIS factory across the street. Production of the glass vials and the metallic rations produced a sharp odor that seeped into my window on humid days and cut through my dulled senses.

“There’s a dispenser at the darkroom on Fifth,” I replied, trying to ignore the glare of the angel on the corner. “We can get your ration first then go to the darkroom on Broadway.”

“I hate that dispenser,” Darla complained, absentmindedly twisting her lifesaver between her slender fingers the way she always did when she was concentrating on a difficult problem. “Even after I drink my ration, it still smells like a toilet in there.”

I wanted to make a disparaging comment on how the rations dulled our sense of smell and how this meant we had been shielded from both the bad and the good smells. Grandmother once told me the most wonderful thing she had ever smelled was her mother’s spring garden in full bloom with rows of English lavender.

What in the world was English lavender and what did it smell like? Did it still exist? Grandmother tried to answer my questions, but I didn’t know what she meant when she said lavender smelled sweet and soapy. I had never smelled anything sweet and the soap we used to wash our bodies and clothing didn’t smell like anything. Maybe everything smelled different to a darkling.

I had a different question today; a question no one, except perhaps the Department of Felicity, could answer. If I continued assaulting my senses with the rations, would I eventually lose my sense of smell, and the rest of my senses, altogether? The numbing agents in the rations were powerful, but they still weren’t strong enough to damper the most ferocious smells, like the toxic lifesaver factory and the sewage-encrusted toilets at the darkroom on Fifth.

“Just cover your nose with your shirt and you won’t smell a thing,” I said, as we crossed Fulton toward the abandoned chapel.

“I wish that were true.”

I tried not to look at St. Pauls’ Chapel as we passed, but the crumbling columns kept drawing my attention. I imagined the darklings that used this building during the war as a sanctuary from the Department of Felicity—until not even the churches were safe. Men, women, and children wearing white bandannas with red stars huddled in the pews as bullets fired in all directions, terror flooding their hearts as everything they once believed in crumbled and splintered around them.

We did this, not the darklings.

We stole the fractured light shining through the stained glass into the cathedrals of yesterday. We pillaged the history and strength in the pillars that once welcomed the weak. We killed the hope in those pews and gave birth to a false hope, a false idol: Felicity.

We did this.

Our professors told us it was the darklings who destroyed the city with their violence and unconquerable urges. They took too much and gave too little. They reproduced too much. They killed too many, yet not enough because there were too many of them clogging the subways and apartment buildings, until the subways were destroyed and apartment buildings abandoned in the war. They used each other, cheated each other, discarded each other. They destroyed each other.

Our professors had it wrong. We destroyed them. Darklings were extinct not because of a grand evolutionary shift brought on by civil war and technology. Darklings were extinct because we wiped them out. We purified them. And the purification wasn’t complete.

The streets of Manhattan were bustling by year 2147 standards. During our four-mile trek to the darkroom on Fifth, we encountered nearly a hundred citizens outside on this warm August day. I wondered how many of them were out for the same purpose as I was: to seek a private darkroom. Most New Yorkers were content to utilize the darkrooms built inside the apartment buildings in which they lived.

The darkroom on Fifth was built inside an old restaurant. Where steaming pizzas were once served, a delicacy I had only seen in ancient pictures of New York, now recycled plastic cups were filled with alien-like goo and served as dinner. The former dining area had been rebuilt to accommodate four darkrooms and a lavatory, accessible by a long corridor that ended in a brick-faced wall. The dispenser jutted out of the wall, right outside the lavatory door where the stench of toilets that hadn’t been properly scrubbed in years oozed from the walls.

Darla held the clear plastic cup under the dispenser, caked with mildew and limescale. She held her finger over the flashing blue sensor and out plopped her ration. She guzzled it down quickly and tossed the cup into the recycling bin under the dispenser.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she proclaimed.

“Right,” I muttered, as I clasped my thin tunic over my nose. “Let’s get out of here before the smell devours us.”

“Aren’t you going to drink your ration?”

The stench was making my eyes water. “I’m not drinking anything from that tap. I’ll drink mine at home.” Another lie.

The walk around the corner to the abandoned apartment building on Broadway brought with it a strange sense I was being watched. The feeling dug its claws into me as I glimpsed an angel with his helmeted head pointed in our direction. The glass face of his bubbled mask reflected the waning sunlight. I looked away quickly, afraid he might have some special x-ray software inside his helmet that allowed him to see inside my empty belly.

I glanced up and the video screen on One Times Square displayed a picture of a young man and woman standing side by side in front of a tiny black coffin, like the ones they used for children. The headline over the image read:
Hereditary Intelligence benefits everyone. Report illicit breeding immediately.
The image changed, now depicting an entrance to the abandoned subway system with a red exclamation point superimposed on the image. This image didn’t need a headline. The message was clear. Do not enter the old subway or you’ll be sorry.

I pondered the words hereditary intelligence for a moment as we approached the apartment building and came to a sick realization. What if the job of the Hereditary Intelligence Commission wasn’t to select partners as a means of preserving health and intellect, but rather to ensure a steadily declining intellect?

The screen changed again and a twenty-foot tall image of Executive Minister Jane Locke splashed across the screen. Her brown and gray hair was pulled into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck and fell to the middle of her back, the mandated length. Her broad smiling face tilted up toward the upper-right corner of the screen. I’d seen this image a million times on video screens and posters across the city. My mother lovingly referred to Jane Locke as “the face of Felicity”. Examining that face now, I had never noticed Locke’s thin lips, hooked nose, and lumpy cheeks. It looked as if the Hereditary Intelligence Commission had bumbled the DNA for her facial features.

Why couldn’t I stop this onslaught of negative thoughts?

As we entered the lobby of the apartment building on Broadway, I found myself both grateful for and disturbed by Darla’s silence. She had nothing to say about those images on the screen and I found this frustrating. But my annoyance with Darla was quickly forgotten when I noticed someone leaning against the wall outside the darkroom: Mr. Half-smile.

6

The shadows of his spiky black hair clawed the wall behind him. His blue coveralls were unnaturally spotless, not a speck of dust or a hint of a wrinkle. His half-smile was gone as Darla approached the scanner, but he never looked at her. Even as she held her wrist inside the scanner and her sec-band flashed green, his gaze never left my face.

The steel door slid open and she glanced over her shoulder at me. “See you in an hour,” she said, as she disappeared inside the darkroom.

The door slid shut behind her and I tried to ignore Mr. Half-smile as I approached the scanner.

“Don’t do that,” he said, as he grabbed my forearm.

“Don’t touch me,” I said, yanking my arm out of his strangely clean hand.

He appeared to be stifling a laugh, but he quickly composed himself. “They’re watching you. They know everything.”

I didn’t have to ask whom he was talking about. I lifted my arm toward the scanner and again he clutched my arm to stop me. He quickly pulled me by the arm around the corner into a dimly lit corridor out of the view of the camera.

“They know,” he whispered more forcefully.

“They know what?”

“Vomiting the rations, your grandmother’s secret, the cherry soda, everything.”

“The cherry soda?”

Of everything he said, it was this detail of my life inside Darklandia that stuck out like the spikes of his hair. The Department of Felicity knew what I did inside Darklandia.

“No, it’s not what you think,” he continued.

He passed me a note with the words
South Pool, 8 p.m.
scrawled in crisp handwriting. I stuffed the piece of paper into the front pocket of my tunic. “Isn’t this location a bit risky? And I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Aaron,” he replied quickly. “That location is ideal because of the lack of cameras and exactly because it’s risky. They won’t expect it. That gives us the advantage.”

“You talk about this like it’s a game.”

“It
is
a game… to them.”

This was the guy who saved me from being marked, possibly from being raptured, offering to lead me further into the vast darkness, further from the comfort of yesterday. According to him, that comfort was an illusion.

“Okay, Aaron,” I said. “But only if you tell me your real name?”

He paused before he answered. “Your father called me Nyx, but you can call me Aaron.”