Revolution in the Underground (6 page)

“Careful! don’t rip it!” He cautioned.

“I won’t… I won’t rip…” her words trailed off as the newly cleared surface revealed, even more unequivocally than before, that it was indeed a letter that lay protected between the plastic sheets.

Maggie and Ember looked at each other again in utter amazement, and hugged each other.

“We can’t open it hear,” Maggie said, stating the obvious.

“Your room?” he suggested excitedly.

“Yes, but we can’t let anybody else see.”

Ember nodded.  They were in complete agreement.  Ember and Maggie ran all the way back to Erosa, slipping and sliding in the mud at random intervals, too excited to be afraid and too anxious to care.

              Maggie and Ember were out of breath when they entered her hut.  Though their faces were worn, they bore the distinctive mark of irrepressible exhilaration.  Ember tried, unsuccessfully at first, to remove his saturated and muddy shirt.  It stuck uncomfortably against his skin.  Maggie held the note hard against her chest, her two arms crossing each other as if the note needed protecting.  During one of her falls on the way back, she had scratched herself under her right eye and though the dried blood was hardly noticeable against her dirtied face, the pain was surprisingly present.  With each beat of her heart, the sting would resonate up to her temple and down the back of her head.  She began subconsciously blinking more frequently as a way to cope with the annoying throb.

             
Ember threw his wet, heavy shirt on the floor, which made a resounding and satisfying
plop
.  Maggie looked at Ember enviously.  “Face the other way and close your eyes,” she demanded.  With her arms still crossed around the note, she pointed delicately to the corner of her room.  Ember gave a weak protest before ultimately obeying.  Maggie jettisoned her muddied clothing by her dresser and wrapped herself tightly with a cover and sat on her bed. 

“Okay, you can look now.”  Ember turned around and looked at his sister.  “Read it to me,” she ordered, using her eyes to insinuate the note’s location.

Ember grabbed the note from the top of the dresser and joined his sister on the bed, sitting upright.  He wiped his hands against his pants and tried to dry them against his sister’s blanket, but she moved away before he had the chance.  Ember unzipped the plastic seal and carefully parted the two plastic sheets.  He pinched the parchment with his index finger and thumb.  The paper was thin and surprisingly coarse.  He looked up at his sister as if the mere touching of this historical artifact was enough to transport him to a distant time.  “I want to feel it,” Maggie voiced in almost a begging and helpless tone.  He brought it close to her, further opening the plastic seal to make it easier for her to touch.  A single finger popped out of the safety of the covers.  She stroked and caressed the note with her index finger, not sure exactly what to make of it.

Suddenly an upside down face appeared through a hole in the ceiling.  It was an opening that connected Maggie’s hut with that of the overlying one—such designs were common in Erosa, particularly in the girls’ clusters.  Maggie and Ember jolted backwards.  Ember impulsively drew the note close to him as if he were guarding a critical secret.  “What ch’you all up to?” the upside-down face from above called down.

“Nothing.”
              “Go away.”

The upside-down face frowned—though it appeared more as a smile—and looked in the direction of Ember’s voice.  Recognizing it as foreign, the upside-down face addressed it, “Hey, who’s this guy?”

“Go away!” Maggie insisted forcefully.

“Oh, Ember!  It’s you!” the upside-down face continued with an unbearably slow and enthused tempo—one that strongly suggested that it wanted to hang out, make small talk, and maybe come down for some snacks.

“Oh, hi Jade,” Ember managed to say politely.  Now that he was addressed by name, he felt pressured to act respectfully.

“What ch’you all up to?” Jade asked again, in case they didn’t hear her the first time.

“Go away Jade!” Maggie said again.

“Oh, Ember?!  By the way…  How did your Evaluation go?”

The Evaluation seemed so long ago that he hardly remembered it, and so unimportant now that he didn’t care to.  “Oh…  I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he said, still trying to be polite.

The upside-down face seemed to be dissatisfied.  “Hey…  What’s going on here?  I’m sensing that I’m not wanted.”

“What gives you that idea?” Maggie said viciously and sarcastically.  She was actually very good friends with Jade, but knew that unless she made her feelings abundantly clear, she wouldn’t go away.

“What’s going on?  Is everything alright?” Jade asked, feeling that she had a right to be concerned for her friend.

“Please, Jade.  Go away.  I’ll tell you everything tomorrow,” Maggie said, trying a new tactic.  She gave Jade a look that only a girl can give another—the type of look that explained that something really important was happening now and promised to tell, in excruciating details, everything the following day, including an explanation as to why the information couldn’t be shared earlier.  Jade paused for a moment as the words bounced around her head.  She smiled and winked at Maggie, before leaving.

“So easily manipulated,” Maggie mumbled cynically.

“So you’re not going to tell her?” he whispered.

“You kidding me?  It’s Jade.  I’ll make something else up.  The truth probably wouldn’t interest her anyway.”

Ember nodded.  “Do you think she’s going to listen in?”

Maggie thought for a little bit.  “I don’t think she knows that’s possible… and besides, it wouldn’t be in her nature.”

“You think we should wait just in case?” Ember asked, still whispering.

Maggie thought again before answering.  “No.”  Ember uncovered the plastic from his arms and pulled out the note suspiciously.  “Go already!” she insisted.

He looked down at the note.  It was handwritten with a blue pen.  “It’s in cursive,” he reported.

“So?  Can’t you read cursive?”

“Yes… but…  no one has wrote in cursive for a long time.” 

“Just read it!”  Maggie didn’t seem to appreciate the comment.
             

Ember cleared his throat.  “Dear Unknown Future.”  Ember paused to consider the significance of the address.

“It’s not a note, it’s a letter!” Maggie exclaimed.

“…and it’s made out to us… well… sort of…”

“She probably wrote this never knowing whether or not someone would read it!  Oh, read on Ember!”

“My name is Abigail Williams and I am from the past.”  Ember looked back at his sister before continuing.  “I had originally planned to write about my life’s story.  I had originally hoped that my memory, and that of my family’s, would endure through this message.  I know now, however, that I have a more important task—I need to remind you of what the past was like.  I don’t know what the future will be like…  I won’t ever know.  I don’t even know if there will be a future…  I want you, whoever and whatever you are, to know that it wasn’t always like this… there used to be lots of us.  We used to play in the sands of the beaches, ski on the slopes of the mountains and love each other in the warmth of our homes.  Our cities bustled, our minds grew, and our hearts beat proudly.  I want you to know, that as I write this message, I am crying.”  Ember looked up sharply at his sister.  She had a grave look on her face and water was pooling in her eyes.

“I am crying for all the love that will be lost.  The billions of souls that will never again walk this Earth.  Who will remember their stories?  How can I possibly do justice for them?  I want to write for them all but I fear I don’t have the talent to do it properly.  Every word that I write seems to die as soon as it falls on the paper.  I fear nothing that I will say will come out right. Pretend, whomever you are… pretend that I wrote something so powerful and so emotional that it took your breath away.  Pretend that I wrote so powerfully that I seemed to give a voice to the billions.  Pretend that I renewed your love for life and inspired you all to build a new world—a world so great that no one would ever know suffering.  I am sorry I could not do any better than this.  I am sorry if this comes across all disjointed and repetitive.  I do not have the words to explain my feelings.”

“You are doing just fine,” Maggie whispered as if she were talking to Abigail directly.

Ember nodded.  “There’s one more thing on the back,” he said. 

“Read it.”

“I just want to know why.  I want to know what happened.  Maybe you know?  How strange this is…  you in the future… me in the past.  I wish I could travel to your time and meet you.  Perhaps if you ever learn to time travel, you can come back and rescue me or prevent whatever it is that caused all of this to happen.  I am almost accepting of what is to come.  My parents and older sister died last week.  All that is left for me is my younger brother.  There is little hope for us.  Tomorrow we will look for one of the sanctuaries.  It is rumored that the government had built some just in case…  but I don’t know where to look and I don’t know if I believe it.  I’m scared.  I know this is really strange…  I know I don’t even know you…  but I love you.”

“I love you too,” Maggie whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“There’s a tracing of a hand,” Ember reported.  “It says ‘place your right hand here and know that once my hand was there too.’” 

Ember looked up at Maggie, waiting for her to tell him what to do next.  “Let me see,” she demanded.  Maggie hovered her hand over the tracing and stared at Ember as if the task of touching it would usher in an irrevocable bond between her and the past.  As she closed her eye, a tear rolled down her face and fell onto the parchment.  She touched her hand to the tracing and exhaled deeply.  Maggie tried to imagine the past and tried to take Abigail’s words to heart.  In the back of her mind, she had secretly expected that touching the tracing would give her visions of the past, and was slightly disappointed when she discovered that that was not the case.

Ember watched his sister for nearly a minute before rising to his feet.  “Well, I think I’m going to head off to bed.”

“What?!” Maggie exclaimed, opening her eyes.

“Ya.  I’m tired.  Too much has happened today.  I need to think.”

“Well think then! Don’t you want to discuss it?!  Don’t you want to read it again?  And again?!”  Maggie was shocked.  She thought this would be the type of thing that Ember would pour over and analyze to death.

“I…  I want be by myself for a little while.  We… we will discuss it a lot over the next few days…  I’m sure we will read it many times.” 

He started walking to the door when Maggie asked, “Don’t you want to touch it?  Her hand?  I mean, the tracing of her hand?”  She looked at his face intensely.  He was quiet.  “Touch it Ember.  Touch the hand.”

He walked over to the parchment and put his hand on the tracing and tried to think about something deep but couldn’t manage anything coherent.  There seemed to be a million thoughts buzzing around his head, yet he couldn’t seem to focus on a single one.  Ember was overtired and overwhelmed.

“What’s the matter Ember?  This is it!  What more could you have wanted?  Don’t you like it?!”

“Yes…  It’s great…  It’s everything I’ve ever wanted…  I’m just tired that’s all.”  Ember wasn’t sure what he felt but hoped that he might find some clarity on the walk back to his hut.

“Goodnight,” Maggie said at last, wrestling with her own emotions and succumbing to her own weariness.

When Ember walked outside he was surprised to see how dark everything was.  Strangely enough, when Ember lied down in bed that night, this was the memory he remembered most about that day.

              Nothing was quite the same after that night.  Maggie and Ember had originally planned on meeting every night for two weeks to discuss the letter, but after the first three days they no longer found it necessary.  Ember was the first to lose interest.  After the tenth reading, he casually tossed the letter onto her bed.  Although Maggie knew he had no malicious intent, she couldn’t help but find this action deeply irreverent.  She knew that it was the beginning of the end.  Driven by her emotional momentum, her interest could have lasted for several weeks.  Ember’s growing disinterest seemed to sap her curiosity, and she secretly hated him for it. 

             
The letter had, in a very strange way, evolved into a symbol of Maggie and Ember’s relationship, and critiquing it seemed somehow blasphemous.  The letter was their joint secret—they both had vested interests in maintaining its significance.  Since a derided work was less valuable than a praised one, both were slow to mention any shortcomings.  By the second day they had built it up to such a great height that Ember began feeling the pressure of the mounting façade.

The consensus between the two of them was that Abigail’s letter was intrinsically valuable though upsettingly short on details.  Ember waited until the third day to raise this criticism.  He did so tactfully and almost apologetically.  Maggie was angry at first—she saw the denigration as an attack on their very relationship.  She had initially hoped that they would forever bond over the interminable splendor of the letter—that it’s secret would serve as a unifying connection between their hearts and minds.  She reluctantly agreed with his criticism, though in more modulated words than his, in hope that the modicum of honesty might breathe life back into the letter.  His interest was waning, and she could see it.  The writing was on the wall.

Once Ember had a taste of candor, however, he couldn’t go back.  Before long he went into an all out lambast on everything from the sincerity of Abigail’s words to the styling of her prose.  He couldn’t stop until he had so defiled the letter that it could never again rise to the pedestal on which it had initially been placed.  Maggie simply couldn’t keep up and by the end of it they both agreed that it would be unnecessary to ever talk about it again. 

The truth was that Ember didn’t even believe in all of his criticisms and he truly did value the letter—he just couldn’t accept the idea of a perfect, unassailable object.  The thought of it ever increasing in sentimental worth disturbed him.  He needed to debase the object before he could love it again.

Towards the end of the first week he had a resurgence of interest in the letter.  With a healthy and controlled curiosity, he felt he could again approach Maggie about it.  Maggie, however, didn’t want a controlled curiosity, she wanted an obsession and when she found out that she couldn’t have it, she turned back to her friends.  Ember and Maggie had even discussed the possibility of sharing the letter with the public, but in the end both agreed that it’s dubious value as a historical testimony was not enough to justify such an irrevocable decision.  As disheartened as they both were, they knew it was, in someway or another, a connection alone for them to share and that it should remain that way until sometime in the distant future.

Things were awkward between Ember and Maggie for some time after.  Ember seemed to be locked in a quiet dissatisfaction while Maggie found herself acting more and more wild with her friends in hope to fill the void.  When they ran into each other, their conversations seemed forced and always abruptly ended with Maggie running away with her friends.

One night Maggie unexpectedly came over to Ember’s hut and confronted him about her feelings—about how she felt that something was different and how she wished it wasn’t.  She gave an impassioned speech expressing the desire that everything return to the way it was before the letter.  The awkwardness remained for a few days after the confrontation, but overtime things settled down into a new state of normalcy.  Maggie was as fun and lively as ever and Ember as pensive.  Soon they were staying up late, conversing about life, nature and happiness, just like old times.

A month after their discovery it was announced, much to everyone’s surprise and Maggie’s embarrassment, that Ember would be appointed as the Chief Protégé.  Maggie had told Jade about Ember’s disastrous Evaluation in order to keep from telling her about the letter, and by indirect word-of-mouth all of Erosa had come to know the tale.  Everyone had expected Ember to fail.  Maggie had a difficult time explaining things to Jade, and everyone else who cared to inquire further, but after a while people stopped questioning her.  Maggie enjoyed such an unquestionable monopoly on all Erosan happenings and information that the event hardly made a dent in her credibility.

Ember was surprised as well—but not as surprised as everyone else.  He knew that a rejection by the Council would only fuel his own speculations that they had something to hide and he knew that the last thing the Council wanted was a bad perception—even if it was only amongst a single individual.  By accepting him, they showed that they were tolerant of dissent and understanding of criticism. 

My thoughts can’t be bought by an acceptance,
Ember found himself thinking on more than one occasion. 
You’re not fooling me.  I distrust you now more than ever.

When the Council published the rationale behind their decision, as was traditional for high appointments, they cited his “remarkable contemplative capacity, commanding critical reasoning, deep intellectual inquisitiveness, and extraordinary emotional passion.”  Ember laughed at their justification and would often find himself snidely remarking, “I don’t think there was anything more I could do to get rejected,” in response to any form of congratulations, be it from a close friend or passerby. 

Just as Ember was preparing for his new life, and as Maggie was blissfully going about hers, something incredible happened.  Something so extraordinarily rare and so extraordinarily momentous, that it would forever alter the direction of Maggie and Ember’s lives.  Someone had escaped the underground.

***

              It was the dusk before Ember’s training was slated to formally begin.  Rather than joining his friend Onyx at the Falls, Ember opted to spend a quiet night with his sister.  He balanced across a thick, moss-covered slat connecting the Erosan center to his sister’s cluster—a path that was popular not so much because it was shorter as it was because it was more thrilling.  There was something about balancing on a six-inch-wide piece of wood, far above the forest floor, that made even the bravest and most skilled climber’s heart beat fast.  The feeling of the moss between’s one’s toes, the creaks the slat would make as one walked across it, and the way it bowed dangerously downward just as one got to the middle, all made for an exciting short-cut.

             
“Hey Ember!” Rouge called out as he approached her cluster, which happened to be the same as Maggie’s.

             
He looked around, systematically scanning for the source of the sound.  It was difficult to locate things in Erosa by sound alone since there were nearly always a three-dimensional array of possibilities—any where along the two-dimensional surface on which the individual was standing, and above or below that plane.  The echo through the trees and sounds of nature only compounded the already difficult problem.  She was calling out from her balcony some three huts above him.

             
“Hi!” Ember shouted, pretending more interest than he felt.  Ever since the news of his appointment they had been meeting more and more frequently.  She was curious how he had been accepted after his rumored mental-breakdown, while she had not, and had made it a point to spend more time with him until she found out why.  Ember tolerated her company because he felt that it was the right thing to do—he would be settling into a practice and felt it only natural to acclimate himself to a more intimate form of female companionship.  Plus, on the whole of it, Rouge was a fun person to be around.

             
“Do you think you can do me a favor?”

             
“Need some water?” Ember asked, already knowing the answer.  In Erosa, fetching water for one another was more than expected propriety, it was automatic.  Such a gesture, while definitely positive in nature, was generally considered neutrally as if it were no different than getting dressed in the morning or washing your hair at night.  In general, this was a task that was completed equally by both sexes, though there were a few heavier lifts that the men operated more frequently.

             
“Hello,” Maggie said to Ember while walking in his direction, and then again when she noticed Rouge.  “Hey, why weren’t you at the market this morning?”

             
“Oh, I decided to sleep in.  Did I miss anything?” Rouge responded, lowering her bucket by a rope for Ember to take.  He untied the bucket, tied it to a new rope and began lowering it into a reservoir.

             
“Well…” Maggie began with more than a hint of excitement, “Jet was there showing off his juggling skills… and by that I mean he dropped four of the farmer’s apples!”  Rouge laughed, if for no other reason than Maggie’s chuckle seemed to invite it.  “And then towards the end, Cyan and Orchid finally kissed each other!”

             
“Really?  I’m glad they finally got it done with!”

             
Maggie smiled diabolically and shot Ember a quick, fiend-like stare, but he was unavailable to receive it.  “Speaking of which…  When are you going to finally kiss my brother?”

             
Ember pulled the heavy, water-filled bucket from the reservoir, and walked past Maggie—trying hard not to show any emotion.

             
Rouge laughed awkwardly.  Maggie raised one eyebrow—conveying as much suspicion as knowledge.  “What makes you think we haven’t already,” Rouge said between laughs.

             
Maggie smiled.  “Ember, look at you!  Hey, are you blushing?!”

             
“The things I have to deal with,” he said in a grumble as he tied the filled bucket back onto Rouge’s rope.  Ember pulled on the other end of the rope, which was threaded through a pulley in such a way that it brought the bucket back up to Rouge.

             
“Hey Ember, are we still on for tomorrow night?”

             
“Yes.  I look forward to it,” he lied.

             
“Where are you two love birds going?” Maggie pried with an un-concealable smile.

             
“I’m not telling,” he said with a grin.

             
“The Comedy Club!” Rouge said, almost as soon as Ember finished his grin.  “But afterwards, we’re going over to the cave near the market.  Just the two of us.  So don’t go telling everyone, okay?!”

             
“Okay!” Maggie responded enthusiastically, smiling in Ember’s direction.

             
Ember nodded acceptingly.  “Alright Rouge, I’ll see you later.  Come on Maggie, let’s go.”

             
“Bye!” Rouge yelled, blowing a kiss.

             
“Where are we going?”

             
“The observatory?” he said with a shoulder shrug, already turning around and walking back toward the market center.

             
“Sure,” she acquiesced, running to catch up.  They decided not to take the shortcut back to the market, though the thought did independently cross both of their minds.  They walked slowly, but with the poise of purpose—each stride intentional and confident, assertions against the humdrum roll of the day’s mundane proceedings.  “So…  Tomorrow’s the day…” Maggie murmured at last.

             
“I suppose it is.”  Conservation did nothing to alter their inexorable synchronized gait. 

             
“Are you excited to start?  It’s quite an honor you know?”

             
“I suppose.”

             
“Everyone was really surprised that you were nominated.”

             
“I wasn’t.”

             
They continued steadily in silence.  When they arrived at the market square, they climbed a series of dilapidated wooden rungs to a small platform bolstered against the trunk of a tree.  The platform had been given the overstated name of “observatory” for no other reason than the fact that it supported a large converging lens through which Erosan ornithologists and naturalists would peer.  The observatory had fallen into disuse over the years, due dually to the decline in popular interest in bird species—of which no new ones had been discovered in the last three decades—and the significant dulling of the lens which was now almost impossible to look through—though it was not clear
which
caused the other or even
if
one caused the other.  

             
Though the sun was setting, its brilliance was lost on Maggie and Ember, both of whom were preoccupied with other thoughts.  Maggie lit several torches in preparation for the ensuing darkness.  The orange-red hues and pink splotches became no more than a subconscious backdrop under which a conversation could be had.