The Killing Jar (21 page)

LUNA COLONY

AUGUST 14, 2232

“She won’t talk to me,” Abraham said into the datalog camera. “So many days I’ve lost count.” Frustrated and at a loss, he logged off.

Abraham couldn’t remember why he was supposed to document his experiences on Luna, only that he was supposed to document them. He didn’t know who would watch the vids, or if anyone ever would. But the datalogs were part of his duty, as they were Charlene’s, and so he did them.

He could only imagine what she said into the camera.

Charlene refused to let on to the kids that anything was wrong, but it was clear to Abraham. Other than communicate tasks she needed him to handle, Charlene was as warm as the surface of their dark world.

But today, there wasn’t anything to fix, so Charlene went about her day as if he wasn’t there, as if he didn’t exist.

So he went about his day as if it didn’t bother him.

But it did. It bothered him quite a bit.

Abraham couldn’t decide why it concerned him so much. He felt dirty, soiled, like he wasn’t fit to keep her company. He had disappointed her, the only other adult in the world—literally.

With the canvas bag under his arm, he was free to pick tomatoes that would be their sauce, cucumbers that would top their salads. He was free to visit the aquaculture tanks and harvest a few fish for their biweekly protein.

She wasn’t there to pester him with unanswerable questions or bring up a past he couldn’t remember.

The silence grated on him as it never had before. Where once he had found solace in being alone, now he loathed it. He wanted to be with the kids, to be with her, only he couldn’t.

Only she hated him.

Abraham couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t live his life this way.

So he finished up at aquaculture, put his produce in the kitchen, and went about finding her.

It wasn’t all that hard. The colony was a network of chambers and maze-like corridors, but Charlene always kept to her schedule. Even had he not known where to find her, he only had to listen for the sounds of children.

Excited shrieks emanated from the moderate chamber dedicated to physical activity. Bright red balls whizzed through the air and laughs erupted.

Charlene leaned against the opposite wall and laughed along with them. That is, until she spotted him in the doorway.

Then her smile disappeared.

Abraham almost turned back, almost darted to the safety of the kitchen, but he couldn’t.

He held his head high as he wove through the tangle of busy children so he could stand at her side.

“What do you want?” she asked without looking at him, her tone icy.

Abraham gulped and shifted his feet.

“Well?”

He rubbed the back of his neck as he tried to force out the words. Any words, in fact. Anything to keep her from blowing up again.

“Seriously?”

Charlene pushed off the wall and made it a few steps before he said, “Do you need help with anything?” The words shot out of his mouth like bullets from a gun, but at least he had said something.

She spun on a heel. Her eyes narrowed as her gaze all but speared him. “Really?” she finally asked.

The thaw was slight, but it offered him just enough strength.

“I have a few minutes before I have to start cooking. I thought I would see if you needed anything.”

“I think I’m okay, actually,” she said. Charlene regained her position next to him, an arm’s reach away.

“Let me know if you change your mind.” Abraham wouldn’t move, though, too afraid she would slide back into silence.

He tried to think of something, anything to say. But there was nothing. Only questions.

So she stood beside her and watched Sander roll a large red ball back and forth to Kellan while Alana and Lorde played some sort of game with covered eyes and roaming arms.

Twelve busy children in a single room, yet Charlene took it all in stride.

“You’re really great with them. They’re lucky to have you.”

Charlene looked away and muttered, “Thanks,” though he could hardly hear her over the din.

Abraham didn’t know what to do, what he’d said wrong. He should have left while he was ahead.

But he didn’t get the chance to fix it. Instead, they watched as the red ball hit Kellan hard enough to knock him onto his back and produce dramatic cries.

Holding the blonde curls at the back of his head, his face contorted with pain and screams. Kellan ran towards them.

To both their surprise, he headed straight for Abraham, only reaching his arms out in request to be lifted up. When Abraham did, Kellan clutched against his chest and finally quieted.

“Aba-ham, he hit me,” he complained with his sweet curls on Abraham’s shoulder.

“All right, guys. Free play is over. You have three minutes to put away your toys and line up to head back to the classroom,” Charlene announced over the group. The children froze at the sound of her instruction and, one by one, they walked to the large container by the door and placed their balls inside.

“Just bring him back in a few,” she said as she moved across the room. Her jumpsuit swayed with the motion of her hips.

Abraham put his hand on Kellan’s shoulders and rubbed back and forth. The soothing motion took effect in seconds. When Abraham brought him back to the group minutes later, Kellan was asleep on his shoulder.

“Again?” Charlene asked with a smile as she peeled the toddler off him.

“Yeah, sorry. I don’t mean to.”

“It’s all right. It’s good that he’s comfortable with you. Sometimes boys just need a guy around, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Abraham knew nothing about kids, or what they needed. He could feed them well enough, but that was the extent of his knowledge. He would never be like Charlene.

“What are you cooking tonight?” she asked, the first time she’d voluntarily spoken to him in at least a week.

Abraham smiled. “Baked fish filets with asparagus and a green salad. Is that all right?”

Charlene squeezed his upper arm with her hand as she returned to the kids with Kellan on her hip. “Sounds fantastic.”

Abraham nearly skipped back to the kitchen.

CPI AUDITORIUM

AUGUST 14, 2232

The recruits gathered in the auditorium for the team assignments like it was a big deal. Mable had already picked out her handler. The others she didn’t give two shits about.

Still, she sat in the auditorium and listened to Pastromas drone on. Arrenstein stood against the wall like a ghoul, his face hidden in shadow.

“We’ve analyzed your test scores and made the final decisions regarding your assignments. As a word of warning, romantic and intimate relationships are strictly forbidden. So while we have placed each of you on a team with a person of the opposite gender, that should in no way be taken as permission to behave inappropriately.”

The three columns floated mid-air above Nick’s tablet. Mable’s name was listed with Theo. The soul-sucking Scholar Theo.

Arrenstein was still a liar.

And Mable was still a stupid, trusting moron.

Mable felt the heat in her cheeks. Arrenstein shook his head and looked up at her.

“Fuck you.” Mable pointed a good angry finger at him. Even across the auditorium, in front of the other recruits, she made sure he felt the impact of her fury.

She bolted for the door. Arrenstein tried to grab her arm, to restrain her so he could explain, but she fought him off. “Get away from me! Go fuck yourself!” She seethed with venom. When he continued, she landed the heel of her hand straight against his cheekbone.

He didn’t fight her after that.

Mable ran for her room. The unfairness of it stung her eyes. How could she have trusted him, even with something so small?

From the bottom drawer of her desk, she pulled out her bag. It was such a small thing to carry everything she held dear. A book of fables. A Japanese teacup covered in cracks. A small blanket with pale blue stripes. A half-filled sketchbook. Anyone else in the world would consider it a bag of junk, but to her, they were treasures, the most valuable objects in the world.

The teacup would have sold for enough to let her live the rest of her days in wealth, though she would never sell it. Her sketchbook, too, had real value, but only because of its paper. Even faded and old, the pages were worth thousands. Her drawings were worthless.

Only Hadley had loved them, more than she thought any person could. She had insisted on hanging them wall to wall in their little cave.

Mable looked about her room, little more than a hospital or hotel room. A room for everyone and no one. She decided to do something about it.

Knox was kind enough to share a bit of flour and sugar in a small bowl. She mixed them with water to make glue as she’d done in the Root. Then she set to hanging her sketches.

Mable picked only a handful, the five she liked enough to display, but felt comfortable removing from the sketchbook. Some memories didn’t need to revisit the world.

Mable stood with her hand pressing a page into the glue and holding it long enough to stick when Arrenstein knocked on the door.

“Go away,” she shouted, unable to move from her still-wet glue.

“Nick told me to come up here.” Mable was milliseconds away from screaming something about growing a backbone when she realized it wasn’t Arrenstein at all.

“You can come in,” she shouted, though not as loud as before.

It was Theo that entered.

She should have known.

His shaved head and mocha skin complemented his sad-puppy expression.

“What?” she barked.

“Uh, Nick sent us some case files to go over. We’re supposed to get familiar with some previous extractions so we can be ready when they give us a job. What are you doing?” he added when he saw her standing on the desk chair and pressing her sketch into the wall.

“None of your business. And I already went over the files and extraction vids.”

“Nick said we’re supposed to do it together. We’re supposed to be a team.”

Nick said. Nick said. For a smart person, this Theo kid sounded like a total dipshit.

“Well you can tell Nick that I already went over the files.” Mable turned her attention back to the sketch. She pulled her hand away enough to see if it would stick or fall. Satisfied it would stick, she climbed down to an empty room.

Theo was gone.

Mable smirked. Boys usually lasted more than ten seconds before they ran hiding. Then again, Theo was probably more horrified at their assignment than she was.

The more someone prescribed the broken system known as ‘society’, the less Mable wanted anything to do with them. Rules were only good for breaking. People like Theo loved the rules, lived, ate, and breathed them. They had zero common ground.

If he had bothered to stick around, she could have told him she’d found something in the case files, a pattern Arrenstein hadn’t mentioned. Either he didn’t want her to know about it, or he didn’t know about it himself.

She needed to talk to someone. Not Theo and certainly not the liar Arrenstein. Only one other person came to mind.

Mable arrived at the bizarre wooden door, the one that looked more like it belonged in a castle than a state-of-the-art facility. She knocked and waited.

“Come in, child.” The voice was so quiet she could barely hear it.

When she entered, it was as if she’d been sucked into a portal. Every item, every cushion, every surface was from another time. Someone had worked for decades to produce such a collection of near-extinct finery.

In all the well-kept clutter, it took her several moments to find the woman in the small green chair.

“You must be Ramona.”

“Ramona E. Lilliwood. You must be Maggie.” Her eyes hovered and her face tilted in not quite the right direction. Mable realized the woman was blind.

“I go by Mable now. Only Arrenstein calls me Maggie.”

Mable found an empty spot on the floor and sat cross-legged.

“He knew you before you were Mable.”

She found that a strange way to put it. But even Mable was smart enough to respect her elders.

“He told me to come talk to you.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said we could help each other.”

Ramona’s paper thin lips crept into a sly smile. “Yes, child. I believe he’s right.”

Mable had no idea what she was supposed to say to the woman, what they could do to help each other. “Arrenstein said you were a Scholar.”

“Still am.”

“How did you lose your vision? The Gleam?”

Ramona let out a quiet laugh. “No, child. But thank you for asking. No one wants to ask an old woman of her blindness anymore.”

“Then how?”

“Old age. A century ago, genetics wasn’t what it is today. Even Scholars have imperfections. Though of course you know that. ”

Mable still didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t as if Ramona were aware of her genetic short-comings.

Still, at least Ramona was interesting. More than could be said of most the residents of the Center for Prison Inmates.

“Silas told you about the bugs?” Ramona asked.

“Yeah, gave me the tour of the lab. Sent me some files and vids.”

“And?”

Mable’s eyes went wide. “And what?”

“What have you learned?”

This was a test she could pass. “There are four types, The Echo, The Gleam, The Yield, and The Slight.”

“No, child. I know that. Silas knows that. Everyone knows that. What have you
learned
?”

Her brow creased. How was she supposed to know what they didn’t know yet? She hadn’t been given a single assignment. There was only one thing she could think of. “They have a tendency to infect Scholars.”

“Go on.”

Encouraged, Mable continued, more thinking aloud than anything. “The case files, they include dozens of documented cases of infection. The earliest ones were the Echo. I don’t know if there weren’t any others around then or if CPI wasn’t looking, but that’s all they found. Most of them infect Scholars. Maybe seven out of every ten.”

Ramona sat in careful consideration. Mable couldn’t remember the last time someone bothered to listen to her, to take her seriously.

She felt immense pressure.

“And what could be the connection between social class and parasitological infection?” Her tone was one of curiosity rather than accusation.

“I don’t know. There can’t be one. That doesn’t make sense,” Mable admitted.

“What about the Scholar Academy? It’s a centralized location for Scholars. Might they be infected during their internships?”

“No. Many of the cases are international. Japanese and Spanish Scholars would have no reason to go to one of the Scholar Academies in North America. Unless every academy was infected—”

“Unlikely,” Ramona decided.

The silence returned, the two minds busy thinking through the massive problem. Mable wished Ramona could be her handler. The woman was sharp as a blade. Even in her old age, she made Theo look like a pet rock.

“Arrenstein paired me with Theo,” she said aloud, not at all sure if Ramona even knew who Theo was.

“And whose fault is that?”

Mable’s mouth fell open. Good thing Ramona was blind or she might have been quite offended. “How could that possibly be my fault?”

“You didn’t take the tests.”

“So?”

“So don’t expect special treatment. Play by the rules if you want to get ahead around here.” Despite her useless eyes, Ramona leaned forward and pointed a knobby-knuckled finger at her.

“I don’t expect special treatment.” Her tone was defensive.

“Then you shouldn’t have any disagreements about your partner. You were assigned a team and now you must operate as a member of that team. End of discussion.”

Mable pushed her lips together. Damn she hated it when someone else was right.

“Fine.” She pushed off the plush rug and got to her feet. She could only take so much advice. “Can I come back and see you sometime?”

“Anytime you like, child.” Ramona smiled, though it was a sad sort of smile.

Mable wondered how much time she spent alone in this room. Probably too much. She would come back and see Ramona as often as she could. It was the least she could do.