“You always talk out loud to yourself, flyboy?”
I swung around, my smile fading at the sight of Raine hovering ten feet away. How much had she heard?
“You went flying?” I asked.
“You think you can sleep on a hoverboard?” she asked, playing with her gloves and ignoring my question—something that was becoming a Raine standard.
“Sure.”
She sat on her board and pushed a button to accommodate for her shift in position. “It’s beautiful tonight.”
I looked up into the black expanse. I lay down, cradling my hands behind my head. “Do you know the names of many stars?”
“No. I have astronomy next term.” Her breath puffed out in bursts of fog.
I pointed up, as if that would be accurate enough to show her which pinprick of light I meant. “That’s the north star. The brightest in the sky.” I moved my finger a fraction of an inch. “That’s actually a planet. Mars, I think.” The tension radiating from her cut me off. I turned to look at her. “What?”
“Have you had astronomy?”
“No, I have a brain.”
Most girls would’ve scowled and then thrown something at me. Or giggled. Raine simply studied me for a moment and then inhaled real slow, like she wasn’t sure she should. “Who taught you?”
“My mom.” I made my voice strong so it wouldn’t crack. An ache throbbed in my chest, something my mom used to ease. I didn’t think I’d miss her so much, so fast. I focused on the stars, remembering lectures from my genetics classes. After the Great Episode, sunlight didn’t reach the Earth’s surface for years, and almost everything died. Humans were all but extinct, and those that remained sheltered themselves inside walls. Thinkers—anyone who had some measure of advanced genetic ability—established ways to clean the air and water. They ensured the survival of the human race.
After many years the stars had reappeared. Democracy had not. And that’s just the way we wanted to keep it, if my genetics Educator was to be believed. He often said that our mutated genes were what had saved humanity, and we ought to take advantage of any ability we’d been given. When Starr had asked him how our genes were mutated, this predatory glint had entered his eyes.
“No one knows for certain what happened in the Great Episode,” he’d said. “There were fires, and nuclear explosions, and war on a global scale. Our top scientists are trying to re-create those environmental conditions in the Evolutionary Rise. In very controlled situations, of course.”
“There’s been no success there, has there?” Raine had asked.
“Not yet,” the Educator said. “But I have full faith that there will be soon. Every clone they make is one step closer to finding the exact formula to create a powerful voice, or someone who can feel and read technology, or someone like Chrome, who can make the wind obey him, or even …” he trailed off, this creepfest look on his face, “the ability to read thoughts.”
Some people in the class shared his joy at controlling others. They actually bought into the whole superiority thing of the Darwinians. I wasn’t sure what I bought into, but I didn’t like controlling others simply by speaking.
“I know all about the different animal kingdoms.” Raine peeled back the fingers of my gloves, showing me her illegal fingernails again. “Animalia, fungi, plants, protists, and monera. Go on, test me.”
“I haven’t had bio yet.”
“Just name a living thing, and I’ll tell you which kingdom it belongs in.”
“But how will I know if you’re right or not?”
She played with the frayed ends of her bootlaces. “I believed you about what’sit? Mars?”
“Yeah, Mars. It’s a planet. Have you had bio?”
“No.”
“Ah, so you have a brain too.”
She pressed a button on her board and moved closer to me. So close, her board nudged mine.
“You’re interesting, Gunn.” She reached out and swept her now-gloveless fingertips from my wrist to my knuckles, where she paused.
I sat very still, waiting and watching her. Her touch left a path of fire on my skin, and something wonderful flitted to the front of my mind. A memory, one I couldn’t quite grasp, one that made me the happiest I’d ever been. Raine was there, inside the memory I couldn’t really see.
My mind blanked as more feelings than I could identify rushed through me. I stared at Raine’s fingers on my mine.
“Right,” I said, moving my board away from hers. With the loss of Raine’s touch, the joy/wonder/peaceful feelings vanished.
Holy mind control power. I’d often wanted Raine to touch me, but I wasn’t superexcited about her controlling my mind.
“That’s tight,” she said mildly, nodding to my board and holding out my gloves.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to figure out if we were really talking about my hoverboard or not.
I took the gloves, and we hovered there, watching each other. I couldn’t stop thinking about her skin against mine. I almost felt physical pain from experiencing it, from being so close to that memory and not being able to see and feel it completely. I craved her touch, but I clenched my fists and kept my hands to myself.
Raine
6.
The dining room is all chrome and glass. Dad called it sanitary. I thought of it as prison.
He expected me to eat in there with him every Sunday night. Because I pretend to be a good daughter who makes the right decisions, I did.
In fact, while eating in the dining room, I’d found out the most information about my mom.
“So tell me,” Dad began one night in December, spearing a perfectly cooked piece of asparagus. “Have you talked to Cannon this weekend?”
I hadn’t talked to him since Friday, at school. Dad would already know that. He knows everything.
“No,” I said.
“Who have you talked to this weekend?”
His dark hair glinted in the tech lights. I looked him dead-on in the eye. “No one.”
He nodded, a tiny smile pulling at his lips. He kept track of who I talked to. And I’d passed his little lying test.
I contemplated my next words while a clone entered the dining room carrying a bowl of cherries.
“Tell me about my mother,” I said as soon as the clone left.
Dad jerked his head up, his eyes filled with razors. A few moments passed. He always closed down when I asked about Mom.
“You know the story, Rainey,” he said.
Case closed, I thought. And I hate that nickname.
“But I want to know why she breached the city walls.”
Dad’s nostrils practically stuck together he inhaled so hard. “She was seeking happiness.” He bit into a cherry and removed the pit. “In places it cannot be found. You get that, right, Raine? All you need is already inside these walls. Me. Cannon. Keep the protocol, and you’ll be happy. Your mother, she … well, she thought she could find something out there.”
If Dad thought all I needed was him, Cannon, and the protocol, he lived secluded deep inside his own dreamworld. Problem was, that’s exactly what most people needed. Someone to love. Someone to love them. Someone to keep them safe by telling them what to do.
“Out where?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter. She left the city, and when she came back, she carried more sicknesses than we have cataloged.” Dad wiped his cherry-stained fingers on his napkin. “It was mildly embarrassing for me as Director, as you can imagine.”
I shoved a piece of bread in my mouth so I wouldn’t scream at him. He selected another cherry, as if that would end the convo.
I swallowed, my Perfect Daughter act dropping. “So she died of embarrassment?”
Dad cut me a hard look. “She died of three diseases that exist in the wild. My physicians could do nothing for her. And that”—he jabbed his red-stained finger at me—“is why you never get near the wall. Ever. Am I clear?”
I nodded, too stunned to even speak. He’d never told me ho
w she’d died. He’d never even told me she’d come back. Simply that she’d breached the city walls (somehow), left Freedom (for some reason), and died (quickly) because of it.
Through the rest of dinner, he didn’t speak, but I saw the calculating in his eyes. My dad never does anything without a specific purpose. I hadn’t quite figured out what the Sunday dinners were for, but I knew he had his reasons. And they weren’t good.
After I escaped, I flicked my way through various projection screens until I found an image of the walls of Freedom. Made of gray slate, the walls stood 150 feet high. An invisible tech-barrier extended hundreds more feet, arching over the city to create a dome of protection. Workers wore special suits while working on the wall to ensure their air supply remained uncontaminated.
In the image I found, the tech-barrier shimmered in the sunlight, making the wall feel sinister and intimidating.
I’d always thought it interesting that our city is called Freedom when we have towering walls to keep us in. I’d never considered the walls existed to keep something out. I clicked off the p-screen and punched my pillow. I also hadn’t considered my father to be right, at least not in a very long time.
I plugged into my transmissions, thinking that I needed a mom in a situation like this. She’d know what to say when Dad went all razor-wire with the “who are you talking to?” crap.
If only she hadn’t died.
“But she did,” I said out loud. I shuddered, trying not to think about what bacteria lived out there, trying not to imagine what could possibly infect a person in a matter of minutes. The closest we came to discussing sickness came in genetics—and even then it was always about genetic mutation and how amazing that was. I’d never been sick; disease didn’t exist inside the walls of Freedom.
I let the images fade into the voice on my transmission. You can never leave Freedom. You will not survive. Diseases we cannot cure exist out there. The air you breathe inside is purified, enriched with nutrients. The wall must not be breached. You can never leave …
Good thing I’d had a lot of practice tuning things out. My dad? The transmissions? Hardly worth listening to.
* * *
Gunner knew. He’d seen or felt something when I’d touched him. I had too, but the shapes were black and blurry. I needed to hold on longer. My fingers ached to touch him again, but I kept them tucked under my legs so I wouldn’t impulsively reach out and manhandle him.
Jeez, the guy can stare forever. I finally tore my eyes away and looked into the city.
The Rises stretched up to meet the sky, with Rise One towering the tallest. It took up an entire square mile and functioned as a minidistrict inside the megacity of Freedom.
All the Rises did. They had their own Thinker, their own cafés and kiosks, their own solar power grids. The other eleven Rises radiated around Rise One, all operating at maximum efficiency, with perfectly compliant Citizens.
Mandatory green areas filled the gaps between the Rises, a waste of space if you ask me. It’s not like Citizens have permission to lounge around on the grass. Yet it’s there, according to my father, “making our city beautiful.”
Special-use Rises lay beyond the residential Rises, maintaining things like transportation, education, medicine, tech production, evolution, and compliance. Just as expansive and only slightly shorter, the special-use Rises provide employment for the millions of people who call Freedom home.
Because I was Raine Hightower, I’d been in almost every Rise. My favorite was the Medical Rise, because it offered me two of my favorite things in one place: sleeping and eating. The entire bottom floor alternated between juice bars, yogurt shops, coffee joints, and nocturnal lounges where physicians slept on soft cots.
Growing up, Cannon and I often spent our Saturday leisure hours alternating between doing homework while sipping peach nectar and dozing in the dark recesses of the nocturnal lounges.
Now that I’m older—and on the scientific track at school—I had a shot at a job in the Medical Rise. Cannon often teased me that then I could sleep in the lounges without the fear of getting caught. We both knew I’d be doing something for the Insiders, something covert, in the Medical Rise—if I could keep my biology marks high enough. And that was a big if.
Every building, except the Education Rise, has dedicated its bottom level to providing the workers with what they need to function in their assigned duties. Students have similar facilities in their housing Rises. Clothing, shoes, food, and medical equipment were all provided at quick and convenient kiosks on the first floor. While we slept, clones took stock and sent requests for replenishment.
Beyond the skyscrapers, the buildings shorten into smaller levels, smaller zones of control, where families live in a more suburban climate. Blocks. There are hundreds of those, extending north to the city limit, east to the ocean, south to the orchards, and west to the camps.
I turned away from the city center, having seen enough for a lifetime. Gunn and I hovered above the camps, the dimmest part of the city. The four camps housed three types of people. Those who were having upgrades done on their homes lived in Camp A.
Camps B and D were for vacationers. I’d been there twice with both of my parents and, every summer since my mom had died, with only my dad. He often got called back to work, and we usually missed our weeklong mandatory vacation time in the camps.
I wasn’t complaining about that one.
Camp C sheltered only clones.
Trek lived in Camp A voluntarily, claiming to have found many people sympathetic to the Insiders. If that was true, I couldn’t tell. None of them had joined, and I suspected he lived in the camps so his protocol-keeping, junior-assistant-status brother couldn’t find him, but I’d never say that to his face.
I swept my gaze over the camps briefly and looked into the distance. Past the wall.
Darkness bent over everything, concealing anything that might be lurking. It didn’t matter. I’d seen it all before. In the summer, a smear of green clashed with the sandy landscape of the wild.
Trees. The trees in Freedom are only a meter or two taller than me, and they all produce apples, oranges, or peaches. In the spring, the air swims with their amazing fragrance.
But now, in February, only shades of brown and gray existed. Drab sky met dirty earth.
I tried not to look into the wild too much. I tried to stay away from the walls of Freedom. I tried, despite what Dad thought.
“What are you thinking about?” Gunner asked. I jumped, and the hoverboard whined and shimmied to the left.
My heart pounded in my throat as I opened my mental cache to him. What do you think is out there?
With a murmur, Gunn maneuvered his board to face the same direction as mine. I don’t know. Sand and sickness.
Carefully, so I wouldn’t plummet to my embarrassing near-death for a second time, I brought my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. Maybe. Other people’s hoverboards freaked me out. Combined with Gunner watching me, I was just as unsteady now as I had been when I’d fallen earlier.
Maybe? Gunner turned toward me. What do you think is out there, Hightower?
I smiled—involuntarily. Gunner’s voice carried an edge I liked. And the way he called me by my last name? Sexy.
Have you ever thought about leaving Freedom? I chatted him.
No. Yes. Every day. He drew in a deep breath. You?
No. My mom died because she breached.
Wrapped up in the memories I didn’t have of her, I didn’t notice Gunner had moved closer until he touched my arm. Through the wool of my coat, I couldn’t feel anything but the weight of his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice floating on the wind.
“I was seven,” I said, as if that made her absence now less painful. I switched off my cache, worried about what he might be able to hear inside my head.
A long silence followed, disturbed only by the sighing breeze and the winking stars. Exhaustion Sadness seeped into my very bone
s. My shoulders drooped.
“Well, my dad left, so it can’t be all bad,” Gunner finally said.
“Your dad left?” I asked, looking at his profile. The pale moonlight cut deep shadows across his face.
“Yeah. There’re other cities out there, other places to survive.” He yawned and settled back on his board. “You didn’t tell me we’d be sleeping seven hundred feet up, Hightower.”
I didn’t know, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I said, “We have to wait for morning to report in at the Rise. Trek hacked into the files and assigned you to a unit we have spidered for the Insiders. That way, even though you’ll be training with Thinkers, you’ll have some way to counteract their surveillance.”
“Training with your dad has me freaking.”
“You probably won’t work with him. Whoever you’re assigned to will just report to him. And you can gather intel on whoever you’re assigned to for the Insiders.”
“You guys didn’t set up who I’ll be working for?”
This guy didn’t miss much. I especially noted the “working for” when I had said “working with.”
“We only arrange for housing,” I said. “Every time we go into their system, we could get caught.”
Gunner didn’t respond. Had he already fallen asleep? For some reason, that annoyed me. Mr. Perfect could fly, rescue me (twice) with his hoverboard, and sleep on the stupid thing?
“I’m awake,” he said.
“Oh, great,” I said. “You can read minds. I thought your talent was in your mouth.”
“It is.”
“But you—”
“I guessed.”
Yeah, right, I thought, hoping to lure him into a mental argument with my cache off. If he heard me, he didn’t take the bait.
“You work for your dad?” Gunner asked.
“Sort of,” I said, annoyed that he couldn’t seem to grasp the concept of being an Insider and sickened at what I actually do for my dad. “I do as little as possible for my father to gain as much power as possible. Just like all Insiders do. Just like you will.”
He watched me silently, as if I had more to say. When I didn’t speak, he said, “Okay. But this isn’t how I expected to spend my last six hours of freedom.”