The Earth Dwellers (24 page)

Tawni shakes her head. “I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand you two,” she says.

“That’s because we’re mysterious,” Roc says, wagging his eyebrows.

“So back to the situation below,” I say, because I feel like the half-hour ride is at least halfway over already. “How bad is it? Am I walking into guns pointed at my head, swords thrust into my neck, or fists swinging at my gut?”

Still smiling, Roc says, “All three.”

I groan.

~~~

There was no car waiting for us when we exited the secret cave onto the streets. Roc apologized for forgetting to arrange it, calling me “Your Highness.” I told him he should keep doing that.

So we’re walking, which is fine by me. I need time to prepare myself for the uphill battle I’m about to face. The streets are dark, lit only by the artificial moon and stars, which look so pathetically inadequate after seeing the real thing. The buildings, on the other hand, seem so grand compared to the tents and basic shelters used by the Tri-Tribes. And yet I can’t hear the crying of any babies or the shushing sounds made by their mothers. Lifeless. Empty.

When we arrive at the palace gates we get guns in our faces. So Roc was wrong—not all three—swords and guns and fists—just the guns. But when they see who I am, the guards apologize quickly and profusely and let us in, asking if we’d like them to send a car down.

“We’ll walk,” I say.

The road snakes through the palace gardens, and after seeing so much sand and rock and brown, the trees and plants and flowers almost look impossible. I have to take deep swallows a few times to catch my breath.

As if reading my mind—like he does—Roc says, “At least we have some happy memories of this place,” and he’s right, because when I think of the gardens I’m always happy.

We reach the main entrance, framed by a half-dozen black-marble pillars. White, spike-like spires rise up toward the lofty cavern roof, pointing at the fake moon.

As I stride inside, I remember: I’m the President. Here I have power, and it’s my responsibility to use it the right way. “Gather all the generals together,” I say.

“But it’s the middle of the night,” Roc says, feigning concern.

“Then wake them up.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Tawni, can you try to get Adele’s mother on the main video screen?” I ask.

“I’ll do what I can,” she says.

While Roc scurries off to pound on a few generals’ doors and Tawni goes to the communications office, I make my way to the place my father always liked to refer to as “the throne room.” Lavishly adorned walls flash by on either side, but I barely notice them. After all, I grew up in this kind of luxury. It doesn’t mean anything, not to me.

When I enter the throne room, it’s empty, save for the dozens of black-marble pillars holding up the balcony above and surrounding the lone, grand seat in the middle. The throne, constructed with a thick, sturdy oak-wood frame and cushioned with generous red-velvet pads on the seat, back, and armrests, stands as a reminder of the difference between my father and me. The old President Nailin would spend as much on a place to rest his rear as a moon dweller miner made in ten years. The new President Nailin has the urge to take an axe and chop the chair into splinters to be used for firewood.

Distorted shards of memory slice through my head and I see this room as it was on the night my father died. The floor slick with blood. Steel weapons flashing, clanging, killing. Bodies falling. Trevor falling, dying. My father’s great victory, cut short when Adele shot him in the head not long after in his grand council room.

The fall of a tyrant. One down, one to go.

Although I’m tired from the trek across the desert and the midnight stroll from the hidden cave to the palace, I resist the urge to sit in my father’s plush throne. The generals would probably respond well to that kind of normalcy, but I just don’t have the stomach for it, not when so many of the decisions that exacerbated the inequality in the Lower Realms were made from this very chair.

I remain standing as a video screen lowers from a crack in the ceiling. Evidently Tawni found a palace technician to help her get things set up. Hopefully General Rose isn’t too angry with me for waking her, although I take comfort in the fact that you can’t kick someone through a screen. Even my father wasn’t able to develop that kind of technology.

I hear the first grumbling voice, echoing from a hall outside of the throne room. “If this is some kind of a joke, I’ll have you whipped a thousand times!”

I almost laugh, but the thought of facing the generals makes me feel slightly ill. I may be the president, but these are men who have done things a certain way for a long time. They’re used to winning, to crushing the enemy, not to signing peace agreements. The ceasefire pact I signed with the Lower Realms before we went above will only hold them off for so long.

A large man with a thick, gray beard stomps in wearing a heavy frown. His eyes widen when he sees me. “Good God, it’s President Nailin,” he says. I don’t miss the mockery in his tone. Not a good start. “You do exist.”

“General,” I say, not taking the bait. When all the generals are here I’ll make things very clear.

Three other men enter behind him, blinking sleep out of their eyes and registering surprise when they see me. They whisper to each other behind their hands.

“We ask for meetings with you a dozen times, and then you roust us from our beds in the middle of the night?” says the large, sarcastic man, General Aboud. “All hail, President Nailin!” He almost sounds drunk. Maybe he is. Maybe he passed out, rather than going to sleep.

I ignore him, watch as six more generals shuffle in, standing beside their comrades. Roc steps in behind them, winks at me. I rest an arm on the top of the throne. Even if I don’t have the audacity to sit in it, perhaps just having it near me will set the right tone.

I start to speak, but General Aboud beats me to it. “Where the
hell
have you been? We’ve got a war to fight and your own generals can’t even get an audience with you.”

This is one question I’ll most definitely answer. “Above,” I say. The men stare at me with blank faces.

“Above?” Aboud says. “There is no above.
We
are the above!”

“No,” I say calmly, although the red-faced man before me makes my blood boil. “We are not.” I go on to explain everything to them; everything my father would not. The secret project my great-grandfather started, recruiting the best and smartest engineers, keeping them separate from the rest of society, monitoring them to ensure no one talked; the early failed expeditions to the earth’s surface, everyone dead; the continued attempts, the construction of the Dome, reengineering the air filtration system to allow for life on earth; the slow but effective wresting of power from my father by Lecter. As I speak, there’s utter silence. Even Aboud knows when to just shut up and listen.

At some point Tawni comes in and gives me a nod, holds up a controller. She’s ready with General Rose.

“Any questions?” I say as I finish.

A bald man with blue-tinted glasses says, “Why didn’t your father tell us? We were his most trusted advisors.”

“Well, General Marx, you’ll have to ask him,” I say.

“What kind of answer is that?” Aboud bellows. “Your father is dead.”

“He took a lot with him to the grave,” I say. “I can’t answer for him. I’m not my father, or my grandfather. They kept things from you, secrets. I refuse to do that.”

“Why?” Aboud again, his frown deepening.

“Because I think you’re more than what my father made you into. You’re more than mindless killing machines who see missions of murder simply as missions, lines on a page with checkmarks next to them. You were chosen because of your brains, not your hearts, but that doesn’t mean your chests are empty.”

“What are you asking of us?” General Marx asks.

“Just to listen. Make up your own minds. If you disagree with what I propose, we’ll take a vote. This is not a dictatorship. That was my father’s way, not mine.”

There are raised eyebrows and more whispers, but no one, not even Aboud, objects.

I turn, nod to Tawni. She raises the control and presses a button. I gesture for the generals to look at the screen, which goes from black to fuzzy gray to an orange-lit room, a textured brown-rock wall in the background. Adele’s mother sits at a desk, wearing a blue uniform. A flashing red light above the screen indicates our cameras are working. She can see us.

“Tristan,” she says, her face not showing even the slightest degree of surprise. I wonder if this unflappable woman has ever been astonished by something. Adele’s got so much of her mother in her, but has a softer side, too, a side that clearly was a gift from her father. She got the best of both her parents. “Where is my daughter?” She asks the question as if I’m the only one in the room, as if there aren’t ten generals staring at her. It’s a question I’ve been dreading.

“In the New City,” I say. Unlike the generals, we told her everything before we went above. “She’s on a mission.”

“But she’s alive?” she asks. She makes the most important question in the world sound like any other question. She might as well have asked
Is my uniform blue?
for all the emotion she put into her words.

I want to, but I can’t lie to her. “I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m operating under that assumption.”

Aboud raises a fist in the air. “I want answers and I want them now. What the
hell
are you talking about?”

I nod slowly, but my eyes never leave General Rose’s. Is that a glimmer of fear I see? She blinks quickly and it’s gone, once more replaced by steel and fire. “I need your help,” I say. For the next hour I recap everything that happened from the moment Adele and I stepped onto Earth. When I finish, I ask, “Will you help me defeat Lecter?”

Aboud looks me in the eye and says, “Not with her.” He spits at the screen. “If you want us to do this, we’re doing it our way, the right way, the way we’ve always done it. Your father’s way.”

I glance at Roc and Tawni. And then I draw my sword.

Chapter Thirty-One

Adele

I
awake to a shaking bed. Not hard, more like a buzz beneath me. “Your bed will wake you up.” Now I get what Lin meant.

When I roll over and put my feet down, the bed stops and the lights flash on. The moment I take my weight off the mattress, the wall shifts and the bed disappears. I blow a sharp breath through tight lips. This world is really starting to freak me out.

My white corpse-clothes are wrinkled and smelling far less fresh than they were when I stole them yesterday. I’ll have to check with Lin to see if she has some clean ones I might be able to borrow. She’s shorter than me, but it’ll have to do.

Or not. When I scan my wrist on the metal ration dispenser, two things happen: One, the metal door opens and out pops a white-yellow rectangle, steaming hot; and two, another part of the wall moves behind me, revealing several sets of white clothes and a narrow cubicle with a metal fixture at the top and a drain at the bottom. There’s a handle on the wall in the middle. Some kind of cleaning device.

And I don’t need to inspect the clothes to know: they’re all in my size.

Suddenly I realize the power of the chips in our wrists. Not power for us, but power for him. For Lecter. Control. We have to use them for everything, and therefore, he can track and control everything we do. He doesn’t need cameras set up to monitor us, because we tell him what we’re doing each and every time we scan our wrists.

I clench my fists and resist the desire to rip off my bandage and dig out the chip. I have to be like everyone else if I want to win this fight.

Sitting down at the table—which only has one chair, I guess guests are frowned upon—I eat the egg-like block in front of me. It tastes too salty but I force myself to swallow, washing it down with the single glass of water the liquid dispenser will allow me. Finished, I stare at the wall, which has gone from white to black in an instant, like someone turned off the lights. Only the lights are still on and the rest of the room is bright.

There’s a flash and numbers appear. 6:30. A voice drones from a speaker built somewhere into the ceiling. “You have fifteen minutes to read this morning’s announcement.” Another flash and the numbers disappear, replaced by an image.

My chest heaves and the eggs rise up in my throat. I cough, choke, look away. Try to breathe. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I return my eyes to the screen, breathing through my nose. Tears blurring my vision. Seeing only bodies. Not a few. Not hundreds. Thousands, scattered in the sand, spotted with blood. Men and women and kids. A lot of freaking kids, their bodies so much smaller.

A group of soldiers stand in front of the carnage, mugging and smiling and giving thumbs up signs for the camera.

It was murder. No, even that is too soft a word for what the Glassies have done. What Lecter ordered them to do. Genocide. It’s a word I learned in school. A word that captures the very essence of the hate and the fear and the mass killing the Glassy army is set on carrying out, has already carried out.