Chapter Seventeen: Order and Argument
The night Rhyme beat me was the night something changed in Ollie. He seemed eager to open up to me. He told me of his Masters, their harsh rules and guidance, of a government he named Probe, of cities with millions of people held inside of a wall, like ours, but in secret. Freedom’s Progress, he called it. He spoke of wars and bombs and history.
I was in awe of him. He knew so many things and had seen so much of the world. He knew of science and history and math, and, most of all, he knew of books. He’d finally told me that a book was something that held old information. He’d been eyeing it in the previous few days, but only on that night did he stare at it for long periods of time, his eyes roving back and forth as if it was communicating some hidden message not meant for me. After he did this once, he couldn’t seem to put it down, and I saw that he had one of his own. We talked of what books did, how they communicated, who they were for.
Until, finally, he asked me if I wanted to know what mine said.
“Oh, yes!” I cried, unable to restrain my excitement. “Very much so!”
“I will…if I can ask you a favor.”
I opened my mouth, and my excitement suddenly felt cheap.
“So the truth comes out,” I said, immediately narrowing my eyes. “I should have known there was an agenda.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just forget it. I need to know why this book is worth dying for, now that I think about it, so name your price.”
“What?” he asked, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“My mentor Evergreen came to me dying of Undeath because she said that it was my mother’s given to me. She died getting it back to me. Said something about Great Deviant and death and Outlanders. These were the strange and painful circumstances of your arrival.”
“Oh…” His face was blank now, carefully so. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry. She said Great Deviant, you said?”
“Yes, but Skate, Evergreen, and maybe my parents are the only ones who seem to know what this means. I’ve heard it over and over. They also said ‘Alpha and Omega.’ They all called me…what was it? Aio. Do you know what that means?”
He hesitated only a second. I could tell he did. There was a great battle in his eyes, like there always was. Only this time, the side I wanted won, and his will to resist seemed to collapse.
“I think so,” he finally answered. “But I need to ask a favor. If I tell you, can I ask you a favor?”
“You’re free to ask at your leisure,” I said, smirking. “Whether or not I comply is another story.”
This wore at his short temper.
“Why not? I haven’t asked you for anything the whole time I’ve known you!”
I made a “psh” kind of noise.
“Forget this, Ollie! I don’t like the way you went about asking for it.”
“Just hear me out.”
I was irritated, but he seemed sincere.
“Fine, I will listen,” I replied coldly. “But probably nothing more.”
“Can I go with you tomorrow?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“Outside,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.
“What? No! Out of the question! No! Absolutely not!”
“Then I can’t tell you what an Aio is!” he said, almost as if he was frustrated for me, not because of me.
“You risk Undeath – not happening.”
The look in his eyes showed me that he knew how badly I wanted to know the contents on the inside. He knew if he held out long enough that I would break.
“Ollie, this is not fair!” I said loudly.
“What’s not fair is that you don’t trust me enough to look after myself,” he said plainly, or as plainly as he could. Part of it was a lie. I wasn’t sure what his angle was for that lie, so I didn’t judge it.
“Why is this what you want?” I asked further.
He didn’t have an answer.
“I have nothing to hide. I have been open about it from the start. I don’t lie like you.”
I hadn’t meant to say it, and I looked away to apologize. When I looked back, he seemed to understand, not begrudge me for my contempt.
“It’s boring, anyway,” I said. “And I worry that you do not have immunity to the Undeath.”
“Necrosis, I told you,” he snapped irritably. “It’s not Undeath. It’s called Necrosis.”
“Why do you care, anyway?” I asked, annoyed.
“I just do. It’ll be fine.”
I hesitated now.
“Things are never just fine with me,” I said uncertainly.
He could tell he was wearing me down.
“But if I’m there, I can make it fine, right?”
I looked at him, and he gave me one of those half smiles. I marveled at it, a rare thing. It had been many months since his arrival, and only a few times had I actually seen it in all its glory.
“I managed to get in here without being attacked by the Horde,” he pressed further.
“That was luck, not skill.”
“Maybe my good luck and your bad luck will cancel out and then we can just be very prepared,” he said confidently.
“I don’t know, Ollie, I…” I thought about it. “It is unwise to go out just you and I alone. You should know that. There’s a reason that I am reviled by my society.”
That smile faded at this.
“Even Foot does not dare venture so far from the gate,” I said to him. “It really just isn’t safe.”
“We can make it safe!” he said beseechingly.
Again, I eyed him with suspicion.
“Why are you pursuing this so aggressively?”
“What?”
“Why do you want to see what I do?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I –”
“There’s something going on,” I accused, sitting forward rigidly. “What is it?”
He looked angry now.
“So I need to have an agenda to want to spend time with you?” he asked a little louder than was necessary.
This ground at me, and my hesitation evaporated into resolve.
“You are manipulating me, Ollie!” I replied harshly. “You do need an agenda to want to spend time with me in such a dangerous way!”
He’d lost. He saw it in his eyes.
“Fine, then I guess you’ll never know what’s inside that book!”
I snatched the book from him.
“Then neither are you!” I said louder.
“What? Why?”
“This is mine!”
I stood, away from him as he reached for it. He stood too.
“Fine!” he finally said loudly.
“Fine!” I said louder.
“FINE!” he yelled.
I stormed out of the back room and onto my own mat where I struggled to decipher anything worth knowing of the adventures on the pages within. The following morning was not much better, but I felt less inclined to be angry and more inclined to be tired. I’d spent too many hours trying to do myself what I knew I could never do without Ollie’s help.
He whirled me around on my way out, and the look in his eyes communicated messages that frightened me. He looked so sad, but I knew I had to pay heed to his safety before my lust for knowledge.
“I don’t need another thing to look after,” I said finally.
“You don’t have to look after me!” he said quietly, almost desperately. “I can hold my own!”
I rubbed my sore eyes with much weariness.
“If you let me come,” he said, obviously reading my fatigue, “I will read to you. I promise. You’ll get the truth. About everything.”
His voice suddenly seemed desperate.
“I need to go with you. Just once…”
He glanced down at me then, but his hands were on my arms. He had never touched me, not since the night we didn’t speak of, the night of my near passing.
“Why are you touching me?” I whispered, barely capable of moving my lips.
I took a step away from him and he released.
“I’m…I have to go.”
The words tumbled out of his mouth with a rush of guilt.
“What?” I asked, stepping back a little.
He reached for my shoulders again, but I shifted away.
“I’m…”
His own face was ashamed and fearful. He seemed nearly broken by his words. He couldn’t look at me at first, but when he did he couldn’t take his eyes away.
“I…I’m going to leave.”
“When?”
“I have to go by – we have twenty nine days. My Master –”
“What do you mean your Master? You have not spoken of him since the first weeks of your coming until last night when we spoke of him. I thought maybe it was a phrase you spoke of only in jest. Since when has he mattered to you?”
“He’s always mattered to me.”
“But why now? You’re here, you’re safe.”
I couldn’t hide my sudden overwhelming explosion of emotions. I was hurt. I felt used. I’d thought that maybe all his talk of his world in the last night had been the friendly reminiscing among friends.
I saw now that the things he’d been telling me had been the desperate redacting of months and months of lies and cruelty. He wanted me to know before the end, not because he actually had any interest in me knowing, really. It was his way of groveling.
I felt now like I was being led to the truth from the poison of a lie.
“Why do you have to do what he says?” I asked, feeling bitter.
“I do what I must.”
“Says who?” I asked.
“My Master.”
And it was as simple as that.
“And…and he says I have to go,” Ollie explained.
To my surprise, this crushed something small inside of me, and I turned away to hide mild tears. He fought desperately to explain it to me.
“I have to go! Please, understand! There’s nothing I can do!”
He tried to stand in front of me. I pushed past him wordlessly.
“Just – come on! Please, listen to me! Let me try to explain!”
He put a hand on my shoulder. The contact seemed to wake me up as I swung my hand back and slapped him across the face.
“You used me!” I snapped at him.
Maybe it was unfair, but I’d lost so much already that my pain had become a monster of selfishness. Not that I suspected he would care.
“So it’s all true then?” I asked him. “You’re a killer and you have to get back to it?”
He began to answer, but I found I didn’t actually want to know.
“Shut up,” I ordered preemptively in whisper. “Follow me but…”
I turned away from him again, sad but angrier than that.
“Shut up.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered behind me.
“We don’t have time to talk about this,” I snapped, shushing him.
“Why not?”
“Rhyme will be leaving soon, and I won’t be able to stay his hands this time. So grab your gun and follow me.”
“What?” he asked, blinking in shock.
“Your gun,” I said, sneering. I pointed as I walked out the door. “There’s a small area in the front room. All of your guns are there.”
“You said our guns were hidden far away!”
“I lied,” I said with a shrug.
Considering all the lies he’d surely told me, this one didn’t seem too heinous. He seemed to share this sentiment because without another word, he entered the house and reemerged with the giant, shiny gun from his homeland. I eyed it for just a moment, feeling uneasy at its renewed presence, before he placed it on the strap on his back. It attached there magically, and I was sure that science was involved. My own gun had a strap, which I used to twist around onto my back, allowing my hands to remain free. The sight of Ollie with his gun once more made me want to take it in my hands again, but the presence of such large guns unnerved the colonists, I knew, so I resisted. I turned my back, stowing my worries, walked quickly out the clearing. It was no time at all until there were only two of us.
Ollie trekked behind me silently, and I listened to the hum of his weapon uncomfortably.
I interpreted his silence as dejection.
“If you did not want to come, I don’t understand why it was so important for you to come get me alone!” I snapped at him over my shoulder.
He said nothing, and my words echoed in the vacuum of the outside.
“But maybe that was your original intention, after all,” I continued, goading him. “Back me into a corner.”
I sneered then, still sensing silence from behind me.
“I thought it was more, but I guess you’re like everybody else. I’m just some stupid girl with a place to stay and food to eat and shelter to sleep in. You used me, and now you’ll just go your merry way.”
He finally grabbed me and whipped me around to face him.
“Look!” he began, angrily, but he’d pulled me a little too hard, and I was close to him. Suddenly, I forgot where I was, who he was, all that had happened. I felt lost, and he looked it. In fact, I was moved by the look in his eyes, and my own filled with tears. The yearning had never been plainer or more desperate than right in that brief moment.
Then, his hand tightened so firmly around my forearm that I made a small noise.
“You’re hurting my arm,” I whispered, looking away.
Whatever he’d wanted to say, he’d lost his chance, and he released me, muttering a sheepish “sorry.”
I turned away and began the hike again.
“What now, Ollie?” I asked him. “I refuse you’re out here because of idle curiosity.”
Silence.
“I saw you talking to the other Outlanders,” I called back, trying to get a rise out of him. “Do they support this?”
Then, with a chill, I thought that maybe it was his intention to finally end me, now that I was his friend, now that I trusted him enough to turn my back to him. I stopped and flipped around to look at him. He looked at me very strangely.
“We’re alone,” I said to him, glancing at the now very distant ridge on which the tower marking my town perched.
“Yeah…” he said, furrowing his brow like he was confused. “So?”
I felt my pulse quicken.
“No one is around,” I said further.
He shook his head.
“I’m…not sure what that’s supposed to mean, kid.”
But his eyes were guarded. He thought me such a complete fool. I decided to be bold.
“You won’t hurt me, will you, Ollie?” I asked him, tensing my muscles for a fight.
The gun felt heavy on my back. My pack, empty and deflated, waiting to be filled with the items of the day, blew against my hips uselessly, and the silence was astounding. I stared into his eyes very evenly.
“What?” he finally asked.
“You’re here now. With me. Alone.”
The look in his eyes changed. A flush ran up his cheeks.
“That’s not why I’m here,” he said quickly, looking away.
We walked on in silence after that, but still, I felt on edge. I opted to carry my gun now in my hands, and I felt a little better. Eventually, I nodded my head north. A door led into the ground and under the rubble.
“That, Outlander, is my Gallery. It is where I keep my most prized and hidden possessions in all the world. I will make you privy to them if you swear never to reveal this location to anyone.”
He nodded solemnly.
I pushed myself through the gray rubble, over the stoop, and through the rotted door made of bent metal. The building had but one room and a partial roof, but what mattered was the basement, which opened up before us like a mouth into darkness. I hopped briskly down the rickety stairs, skipping the last three. The room was dar
k but for the light from above the stairwell, and it smelled quite simply of age, a byproduct of rotting away in relative peace for so many years. Despite this fact, it was obviously a large room full of delicate fancies. I turned the knob on the oil lamp and light fell about the room like the sun hit the Earth.
“This is a Gallery?” Ollie asked.
He tried to hide it, but I could hear that he was impressed.
“My father was the first person I took here,” I said to him.
I smiled at the long gone memory.
“He was with me the first time I found something great.”
Ollie said nothing, but that was okay. He seemed to enjoy his surroundings, and that made me happy. My collection was vast, and I’d worked hard for it. There was a tire, a sort of hard round thing that used to make little carts called cars move, a full window I had found on the ground, and a small, hard ball that I had come to know as a baseball. I had many, many light balls (bulbs, are what the people used to call them,) and they were my specialty.
They required science, which I only practiced in secret.
“What is all this stuff?” Ollie finally asked in wonderment.
I glanced up at him and saw his back, and his hands trailed over the shelves and tables full of these decrepit signs of life. Very abruptly, I was taken by a sensation of having already seen what I was seeing, and in Ollie’s constant rummaging, I remembered thoughts of my father.
He’d been the first person I’d taken to show him my Gallery. It had been much smaller then, much less full of goods.
I found myself smiling at the memory.
“I have found these things in my time exploring,” I explained. “Secrets of old.”
He was fascinated with a bottle I had found. It looked brown and darkened on the outside. He shook it hard. I couldn’t help but laugh, but the laughter in me died when he pulled the top off. With dismay and anger, I made a noise of protest.
“You broke it, Ollie!” I said loudly.
He just laughed and looked up at me.
“Do you have any idea what this is?”
I shrugged coolly, angry. Was it my responsibility to know the items of old? I collected them, surely, but that was for my own enjoyment or for potential usefulness later, not for knowledge’s sake. But, out of pure propriety, I asked,
“What is it?”
He laughed and put some on his hand. A vibrant color I had never seen had come from a little brush inside. I gasped and rushed over to him. Poison of every kind was common in Dwindle.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This is pink. It’s nail polish.”
“What’s it do? Is it poisonous?”
“No, people, women mostly, put it on their fingers – on their nails, like this, see?”
He put some on my fingers. It was surprisingly vibrant, a color I had never seen before.
“How do you know of this?” I asked with a deep frown.
“We have women who maintain this custom in my land,” he said.
“It seems like a strange and silly custom to me,” I said back, suddenly desiring to be sullen.
But Ollie would have none of it, and it brightened my mood slowly. My collection overjoyed him. He continued to move about the room happily. He enjoyed the other balls I had found and told me they were named things like “football” and “soccer ball.” I didn’t believe him, for those names were ridiculous, but I said nothing.
“Where did you find these?” he asked of my lights. “How did you get them whole like this?”
“Only in the deepest darkest places do they stay this way,” I said to him with a fondness for them. “They are special.”
He glanced up at me.
“Why?”
“Often, the darkest places, anywhere underground, is where the hives are. If I find one and clear it out, I find the light balls there.” I smiled. “Risk danger for great things.”
He made a quiet noise of approval.
“If I show you something, can you tell no one?”
“Who would I tell?” he asked, turning back to me now.
“Okay,” I said, smiling nervously. “Okay, watch this. Come here.”
I nodded for him to come over to my favorite light ball. It was in a black holder.
“Watch this. Look what I can make it do. If you put these…”
I took little boxes out and placed them in the black holder.
“Into here, like this…” (I smiled,) “Watch.”
After several dim flickers, light exploded from the tiny sphere.
Ollie flipped around to face me. He looked upset.
“How did you do that?”
His glare was evident. I felt crestfallen.
“I knew what it was supposed to do, and I made it work,” I said defensively. “It isn’t science if I do nothing with it!”
“It is science if you do nothing with it!”
Disappointment was a terrible thing. With disgust at his disapproval, and also shame for it, I took the light ball away from the black box, replacing it gently where it once laid.
“Why don’t you just go home, Ollie?” I asked him wearily. “I thought…I thought you might be pleased by it.”
“What is that?” he asked suddenly, looking over my shoulder. His tone was colder and harder than I had ever heard it. It actually made me annoyed.
“Did you even listen to anything I just –”
“There’s something over there,” he said, nodding his head.
“It’s nothing, just –”
“No…” His tone was sharp. “No, kid, I really think you should look at this.