27. STING
The outer ring of the army consists of guards with shields, blasters, machine guns, and black sticks meant for hitting people. Overkill—for killing everyone twice. Or just scaring the shit out of us.
And the GeeGee calls us “gangs.”
Riot masks give the illusion of robots. The guards have action figure muscles, or maybe their black suits have lots of padding. Either way, I bounce off the line of shields and land on my tailbone in front of them. The impact jars a sound from my lips and my cheeks burn.
D-towners mill around the edges of the square, watching to see what I’ll do, but there are no other Bees in sight. That gives me pause—what are they up to?—and it hits me that I’ve forgotten all about my impending excommunication from my tribe for spending the night with Lawson. But that’s a problem for later.
The guards are here now.
I climb to standing again, biting down when the pain at the base of my spine worsens, and cross my arms so my fingers are safe in my armpits. I line myself up with the space between the two guards in front of me and limp forward again.
Careful. Yeah, that’s me.
My advance makes about as much progress as if I were trying to walk through a wall. I brace the soles of my new GeeGee sneakers on the broken ground and let my weight fall forward against the guards. They remain unmoved.
“Enough,” one of them says after an embarrassingly long while. He moves his shield, kind of a shrug, knocking me back.
I stumble. The second guard I was pushing against, a femme, catches his arm. He frowns at her and gestures to the back of his head.
“Why are you doing this?” I step forward again. “Please, can’t you find another place for your recycling center?”
The guy shifts his feet and starts to say something but the femme elbows him in the side.
“We need this place.” I focus on the femme guard, the one who seems to care. “It keeps the peace here. You understand, don’t you, the need to keep the peace?”
She waits for me to finish, then flips up her visor. The guy elbows her but she holds my gaze. We both know I’m non-violent. And that even if I weren’t, taking her out wouldn’t win this war.
“I’m sorry no one told you,” she says gently. “You can’t stay here. None of you can.”
My chin tilts up and I stick my hands in my pockets. My left fingers touch metal and flinch away.
“We have host families, for all of you,” she continues. “They’ve been carefully screened. There’s group homes, too, for anyone who refuses a family or who is deemed unsafe. But don’t worry, you’ll get a home for sure.” She smiles at me. “I volunteered, actually.”
That’s odd. Like she knows who I am, has been watching me. My fingers flutter across the metal in my pocket again.
“You’d be more than welcome to come home with my husband and me. Today, if you like. You seem very stubborn. I can appreciate that in a person.” She gives the other guard a fond smile; he must be her husband. “We could get you some medical treatment, get those bruises taken care of.”
She rambles on, and I just stand there, playing with the knife in my pocket.
“But, it doesn’t have to be us, of course…” She finally trails off.
“That’s very kind of you.” If I ignore the fact that her husband obviously doesn’t want me. “But—” I yank the switchblade out of my pocket and let it slip through my fingers to clatter on the ground.
I stoop, as though to grab it, and the femme bends over too. Her hand flashes out, knocking it away from me. The guy lunges out of line, and in those precious seconds I crawl past his legs, and a few extra meters, then scramble to my feet and sprint toward The Dance.
“Hi there. Liaison for D-town,” I say, slipping between construction workers. “Just a few things we’d like to keep.”
The two guards lumber after me but body armor and sheer size slow them, as does the fact that the workers—smiling away with sonic earbuds in their ears—don’t seem to consider me their problem.
I run inside The Dance, then for the back hall, skirting chunks of debris left over from when the wrecking ball fell, toward where the washrooms used to be. I scramble through the middle door, into the supply closet. At the back there’s a passage. I slip through the low opening and roll the Council table back into place behind me then crawl through a cubby to come out behind the bar.
I hunker low, listening.
The guy guard has gotten hold of a megaphone and he’s sing-songing, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” while his wife pesters him to “stop acting like a kiddy,” and boots clomp, clomp here and there, giving away the guards’s locations even amidst the bangs of deconstruction.
After a while, one pair of boots draws close.
A comm crackles. “…find it?”
The boots stop. “No, Ma’am.” It’s the femme guard. She’s just on the other side of the counter.
My heart pounds, and I draw deeper into the space under the bar.
More crackling. “…sure…last…”
“Yes.” She starts walking again.
“…others…taken…”
I strain to hear, but the comm has gone silent.
“Hansen took care of it,” the guard says tightly.
“…leave that one…”
“Yes, Ma’am,” she says again, relief in her voice this time, and moves toward the exit.
Her footsteps recede, and I sag back against the wood. The Captain has spared me again. Why? I hug my knees and turn my focus to my breath, but meditation eludes me, so I rock back and forth in the tight space and wait for my chance.
Hopefully by the time my chance comes I’ll know what to do with it.
“Aidan!” A distant shout.
I jerk awake in the cramped darkness and hit my head on…Ow. The underside of the bar. I’m folded into the space meant for storing drinks. I stiffen instinctively, but the GeeGee crowbars and saws have gone silent and in their place the baseline from the New Dance pounds on. My head throbs a battling beat, backed up by complaints from the rest of my body. I let my eyes drift shut again.
The GeeGee have gone home for the night—anticlimactic, really—and I should get out from under here, and I will, just as soon as the idea of moving doesn’t hurt quite so much.
“Aidan?”
“Law—?” Dehydration has thickened the saliva in my mouth, and I can barely speak. “In here.”
Running footsteps, then the sounds of someone tripping over wood and Lawson snarling, “Bang it! G-spot! Bloody—where’s here?”
I can’t help but smile. It’s his voice. I don’t care what he’s saying; his voice is my favorite sound. “I’m behind the bar.”
His boots crunch closer and stop. “It’s all clogged up.” He rattles something. “How’d you get back there?”
I open my mouth, but suddenly can’t think of the word.
“Aidan?”
“I used…thing, you know.” I gesture ineffectually.
His booted feet hit the wood on the other side of my head, making me jump.
“I’m—” A grunt of effort. “—coming over.”
Fabric rasps across wood and he lands with a thump above me on the bar. His feet swing over to dangle in front of my face. I touch his ankle.
He gasps. “Don’t do that! You startled me.”
I giggle, an absurd sound, and all of a sudden I’m guffawing. Big gasps explode from my mouth in jarring bursts of laughter. Lawson hops down behind the bar and crouches in front of me.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
It’s not funny; there’s nothing amusing at all, but I can’t stop. My shoulders spasm, air sawing in and out, sending shards of pain through my chest and head.
“Ai?”
“I—don’t—I don’t—know—” And I burst into tears.
“Sorry. I don’t know what that was back there,” I say.
We’re in the New Dance. We shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be near o
ther people because of the bomb in Lawson, but he’s holding me close, one hand splayed on my lower back, the other resting between my shoulder blades. We’re back in our D-town clothes, his denim chafing against mine as we move to the beat, and I can’t seem to make myself remind him.
“Don’t,” he says. “It was just too much, is all. It would be too much for anyone.”
I rub my palms on his shoulders in thanks and we dance for a while more.
“Have you seen any Bees?” I mumble.
He shakes his head, causing his hair to tickle my face.
“You’d think they’d be in a hurry to kick me out,” I say.
He’s gone stiff in my arms.
So I add, “I’m not going to leave you.”
But he doesn’t relax.
“What?” I ask.
In response he crushes me to him, presses his nose to my scalp and inhales. Alarm spikes through me.
“What?” I struggle back, peering at him in the dimness. “What!”
At the sound of his swallow, I go cold all over.
“I haven’t seen any Bees all day,” he whispers. “Have you?”
I shake my head. We’re thinking the same thing. My throat— I can’t swallow. This is what that was back there. Something being wrong. I felt it then; Lawson senses it now.
No, no, no!
Icy tingles spider over my skin. Yes.
“Have you seen any Bees,” I croak. Not loud enough. I tear away from Lawson and fill my lungs and yell, “Has anyone seen any Bees?”
My shout fills the Haven, and the dancing stutters to a stop as kids turn to look at me.
“Has. Anyone. Seen. Any. Bees?” I enunciate, like my voice alone can stop the ground from dropping away, but inside I’m already in free-fall.
With some jostling, a space clears in the center, and a guy with pale hair shoves his way out of the crowd. He raises his chin, revealing familiar features.
“Sevens,” Lawson snaps. His arm snakes around my waist, and he pulls me back against his front, offering shelter.
So. The round-faced A has a name. That seems wrong. He doesn’t deserve a name. Names are for human beings.
What am I thinking? Of course he’s a human being. Where’s my compassion? But I don’t have time to feel ashamed.
“All gone,” Sevens singsongs.
My fingers wrap around Lawson’s forearm. “What do you mean gone?”
Lawson’s pulse rushes against my fingers. Lama Karen said we each had to make up our own mind about staying in D-town. Has it been a week? It feels like so much longer than that since the pamphlets showed up. Maybe I missed the meeting and they’ve all gone to join the GeeGee.
“The GeeGee killed them all.” Sevens throws the words like punches.
They hit me in the stomach, the chest, the throat, worse than any blows, but I can’t break down; I won’t, not in front of Sevens. I swallow.
“I saw,” he says. “They didn’t even fight.”
And suddenly I’m not the least bit afraid of this, this…boy. That’s what he is, a child, the kind who fries spiders with a magnifying glass for fun.
“You watched? You just stood there and watched while they were slaughtered?” Not cold anymore; sweat breaks out on my skin.
My nails are digging into Lawson’s arm, but there’s no relaxing my grip as a collective grumble ripples through the New Dance. D-town isn’t impressed with Sevens either.
“It wasn’t like that.” Sevens’s voice wavers but turns persuasive on the next part. “And come on, it’s not like they would have fought for us.” He looks around for support.
And gets some. “Yeah!” a few people echo.
“The anarchists are supposed to be protectors,” Lin says, pushing out of the crowd to stand beside Lawson and me.
“Good riddance,” someone else calls from back in the room, probably an A, but that’s far from guaranteed at this point. “What did the Bees ever contribute to D-town?”
“You stupid, bloody fools.” Lawson speaks softly, but instead of drowning him out the crowd goes quiet. He steps into Sevens’s personal space, forcing him back. “The Bees are an integral part of D-town.” Lawson pauses and looks around. “They’re also the only ones who can resist the pulses.”
What?
“Could,” he corrects himself, the word like silk over steel, soft but deadly.
My skin prickles, each goosebump an individual sting.
“All the meditation allowed them to resist the trance, come out of it sooner, hold their thoughts in better order. They were your best chance of defeating the GeeGee.” He lets that hang in the air.
A whisper rustles through the crowd, followed by a heavy hush. Then the impossible happens; Sevens steps around Lawson to come face-to-face with me.
“Sorry,” the baby-faced A says, and he extends his hand.