The Sun Dwellers (9 page)

As I lie down facing away from her, she nestles in close to me, tracing my legs with her own. The gentle beat of her heart taps lightly against my back, sending slight vibrations along my skin. The feelings from before reappear: warmth, flittering excitement, floating.

My strength sapped, I close my eyes and feel wakefulness start to slip away.

“My mom said it’s no accident that we met,” Adele whispers in my ear.

“Mmm,” I murmur, unsure of whether I’m awake or in a dream.

Adele

D
espite the warmth in my heart and body as I lie next to Tristan, sleep doesn’t come easy. For a while I can’t turn off my brain, as I think about the conversation I’ll need to have with Tristan now that I’ve told him what my mom said to me. In my mind it goes something like this:

Tristan: So if it’s not an accident that we met, then who caused it?

Me: I dunno.

Tristan: Did you ask your mom?

Me: Nope.

Tristan: So what does this mean for us?

Me: I’ve got no clue.

Yeah, not very productive. I vow to pretend like I never told him.

Eventually, however, I do slip into something of a half-sleep, my mind alternating between awake and asleep. At one point when I open my eyes, a dark figure looms over me, holding something long and sharp. I try to scream as the blade hovers over me like a guillotine, dripping something wet and sticky on my face. I place a hand on my cheek to wipe away the moisture, and when I pull it away, it’s red with blood. In the split-second before the blade slashes downward, my brain sizes up the situation. The intruder, the blood, the blade: at least one other of my friends is dead, maybe all of them.

With the long knife arcing toward my chest, I have no time for grief, no time to grasp the reality of my horror-filled life, no time to be
human
. Instinctively, my body reacts to the attack, rolling to the side and narrowly avoiding the death blow as it rips into my bedding, tearing straight to the rock floor and shattering into shards of metal that tinkle like broken glass as they scatter around me and my attempted murderer.

Pushing hard to my feet, I take a few quick steps back to buy time while I size up my enemy, but it’s unnecessary, because the looming shadow doesn’t advance, just stares at me with invisible eyes.

“You killed my friends,” I state, my words like splinters of metal. My body is empty, like there’s nothing left inside me; no heart, no blood, no tears—I’m just a hollow shell of flesh and bone. I know in that moment I will kill this man, and then I will kill the President.

Silence fills the dark gap between me and the swordsman. “Answer me!” I roar, my face and hands clenched and full of rage.

Instead of responding, the shadow laughs, heavy and arrogant and
evil
. He takes a step forward but I remain firm, revenge my only motive; there’s death on my fingertips, making them twitch and jerk.

Another step takes him into a beam of light from an unseen source, perhaps a hastily discarded lantern.

I gasp when I see his face.

The attacker is President Nailin.

This is it. This is my moment. The culmination of our mission in a strange fated meeting. My friends dead; me soon to be. But not before him.

Screaming out senseless words, I charge, wrenching my knife from its ankle holster in the same motion. The President keeps laughing even as I approach him, and I hesitate for a moment, wondering why he would let me kill him so easily. And where are his guards? His soldiers?

In the moment of hesitation, I leave myself open. With a speed that seems inhuman, he pulls another sword from behind his back, where I couldn’t see it, and thrusts it forward like a javelin, piercing my gut just above my bellybutton.

I know the pain has to be intense, but I don’t feel it. I feel nothing. No pressure, no agony, nothing.

Leaving the sword—which is bouncing up and down slightly—embedded in me, President Nailin moves forward, leaning his sweaty, red face close to mine, so close I taste his hot, foul-smelling breath on my tongue. “I will kill you,” he breathes.

I don’t understand why he would say that, because he’s already got me on a skewer like a stuck pig; threats aren’t necessary. I look around us and I realize: it’s not real. The cave is gone and we’re surrounded by white pillars, sparkling with diamonds. Huge wooden chairs surround us, each occupied by lavishly adorned men and women, wearing jeweled necklaces and bracelets, brightly colored silk tunics, and gaudy fur hats. Spectators.

I shut my eyes so tight I feel like I might squash them in their sockets, will myself to awake from this nightmare, to return to a place where I’m warm and safe in Tristan’s arms, a place where my friends are alive.

Wake up, wake up, wake up!

WAKE UP!

My eyes flash open to murky darkness, broken only by the flickering glow of soft candlelight—our night light. I’m breathing heavily, almost panting, my heart racing unnaturally in my chest. As I deepen my breaths, Tristan’s long, slow exhalations whisper next to me. We’re no longer tangled together, but I’m still warmed by the waves of heat radiating off his body.

Warm and safe.

For now.

Although I’m pretty sure I’ve only slept for a couple of hours—if I’m lucky—I’m wide awake now. My eyes feel like they’re being held open by matchsticks, unable to close even if I want them to.

I sit up and Tristan stirs, his eyes fluttering for a moment as he rolls onto his side, away from me, but he remains sleeping. The others are asleep, too, Tawni the closest, on her stomach, her arms along her side. My heart rate’s back to normal, but with my normalized breathing comes an empty feeling inside my gut. It’s not hunger, I realize, but loneliness, a loneliness I haven’t felt since before I met Tawni and Cole in the Pen. I know it doesn’t make sense because I’m surrounded by my friends, but it’s there, like a creature of evil inside me, eating away at my soul.

My father’s face flashes into my mind and tears well up before I can even consider holding them back. The loneliness is because I know I’ll never see him again, never hear his words of wisdom, his heavy laugh.

Grief’s a funny thing. You think you’ve got it under control, and then it’s right there again, creeping up on you when you least expect it. It seems like no one really knows how to grieve, or even if there is a good way to do it. Me, I stayed in bed for a long time, but when I got up, I wrongly assumed I’d left the grief in the bed. Really it followed me like a shadow, waiting for a moment of weakness to pounce.

I wipe away the tears, thinking of how to best distract myself. I consider waking Tawni so I have someone to talk to, but she needs her sleep. My hand absently fumbles through my pack, extracting items and returning them. Then my fingers close on an unfamiliar item: a book. The diary my father gave Tristan, which he gave to me. I’d read maybe twenty pages of it since, and was shocked by the truth of Year One, of what the girl, Anna, had to go through. It’s just the distraction I need now.

I flip to the earmarked page and begin from the top of the entry. It reads:

Today the President assigns me to my new family. I don’t see the President, but that’s what the big soldiers say when they come for me. They say my last name is Nickerbocker now—except I like my old last name just fine. I don’t say that though, because no one argues with the soldiers.

The Nickerbockers are all right, I guess. They don’t say much, just stare at me and at each other. They explain everything when I move into our new “house
,
” which is made of stone and barely big enough for us all to sleep in. Mr. Nickerbocker—“Call me Dad”—isn’t exactly married to Mrs. Nickerbocker. He was assigned to her after we moved underground. His real wife and three kids were left aboveground, so they’re probably dead, just like my family. Mrs. Nickerbocker—“Call me Miss Fiona”—wasn’t married when she got selected in the Lottery. Neither of them smile much, but then again, neither do I.

I cry today when I think about my real family and how they were left above. My last memory: their faces, cold, harsh, and devoid of emotion. I know they did it to help me be strong, but it only makes it hurt more. Their smiling, happy faces are lost to me. When the tears start falling, my new dad tries to calm me, by telling me stories and singing to me. Miss Fiona tells us both to shut up, which makes me glad I don’t have to call her Mom.

Later the Nickerbockers let me go out to play. The streets are crowded, full of kids and adults milling about with zombie faces. Under the dim light of the candles and flashlights everything is an awful, bland shade of gray. A few kids try to get a game of tag going, but no one seems too interested. Me, I can barely will one foot in front of the other. Before I left, my mom told me that time would make the pain go away, but I’m not so sure.

I go back inside without looking at my new parents, who are ignoring each other across the room, staring into space. I huddle under the tiny blanket on my thin bed pad, willing myself to another place, to another time, when bedtime meant a story from my real dad and a tuck-in from my real mom.

My new world vanishes beneath my eyelids and for just a moment before I fall asleep, I smile, the first time all day.

I finish reading Anna’s passage and close the book.
Anna
. My mom’s name. I still have my mom, my sister. Although the pain of losing my dad continues to ache in my chest, the empty pit of loneliness in my stomach disappears. Anna lost everything: her entire family, all her friends, her way of life. Everyone has struggles, and although mine might be more than most, there are those who have worse things happen to them. Now is not a time to languish in grief while a power-hungry madman destroys our way of life. Now is a time to act.

It’s strange to think about how things work out sometimes. Despite all the terrible experiences I’ve had since leaving the Pen, I’m still alive, still fighting, against some pretty slanted odds. I mean, if Tawni hadn’t spoken to me that day, I might still be in the Pen, Cole might still be alive, Tristan might still be just a celebrity in some faraway land…

But instead I’m in that faraway land, fighting for something worth fighting for. Doing my part. Trying to—

“Couldn’t sleep?” a voice says from behind me.

I glance back and spot Roc’s brown skin, which is even darker with the candlelight as the backdrop. He’s grinning slightly, the way he seems to be a lot of the time. He’s a good-looking guy—with full, dark hair, serious eyebrows, and three days of black stubble. Tawni could have done much worse, that’s for sure.

“No. You?”

Roc shakes his head. “Too many things for this active brain of mine to think about. I can’t seem to shut it off.”

I laugh. “I know exactly what you mean. Although I think mine’s broken sometimes.”

It’s Roc’s turn to laugh. “Hey, do you want to get something to eat?”

“Sure,” I say, relieved I’m not the only one awake anymore. Perhaps Roc can save me from my own thoughts.

We shuffle over to the unused fire pit, where a single candle provides a bobbing halo of light, and sit on a right angle to each other. Roc digs through his pack and eventually pulls out a small bundle of paper. I eye the parcel curiously as he unwraps it delicately, like it might shatter into a thousand pieces. Once the paper is peeled away, I get my first look at what’s inside.

“What is that?” I ask.

Roc grins. “Dried fruit,” he says. “I’ve been saving the last of  it since we left the Sun Realm. I guess now that we’re back I don’t need to save it anymore, as we can get more of it quite easily now.”

I’ve never had fruit. Occasionally, a shipment of it would come into our subchapter, and all the kids would gather around and watch as those who were able to spare a few Nailins would buy brightly colored fruit they called apples, red and yellow and green. I never asked my father whether we could have any because I already knew the answer.

When I asked Dad how they made fruit in the Sun Realm, he told me they grew it, from trees and bushes and such.

Trees? Like in the books grandma reads me?

Sort of like that, Adele, but these are underground trees. They have technology in the Sun Realm that allows them to grow things underground.

Daddy?

Yes?

I wish we could grow things down here.

Me, too, honey. Me, too.

“Uh, do you want one?” Roc says, snapping me out of the memory. He’s staring at me strangely, holding out a piece of dried fruit. I wonder how longs he’s been holding it like that.

“Yes, of course, thank you,” I say, hastily grabbing the crispy morsel from his hand.

“It’s not the same as fresh fruit, but it’s still delicious,” he says, crunching on a piece.

I don’t care if it’s been dried, kicked around the yard, soaked in water, and then stepped on. I’m barely able to stop from shoving it into my mouth like a half-starved madwoman. Instead, I turn the coin-sized piece of fruit over in my hand, examining it, committing it to memory, for that’s all it will be in a moment.

I pop it in my mouth and just hold it there for a moment, allowing the flavor to reach my taste buds. It’s sweet, but not overly, with a taste that I can’t compare to anything I’ve ever tasted before. It’s…it’s…