Children of Eden (32 page)

“I'll pick up some tools and the things I need in another supply closet, and be waiting for you right outside the holding cells. I won't be able to get any closer than that, but I'll be ready for anything.”

“You can't . . .” Lachlan begins, but I cut him off. I know arguing with her is useless at this point. The only thing left to do is make sure she's in a good position. A safe position.

“You can't be so close, or you'll be affected, too. Wait for us near the lobby. We may need your help there.” If all goes according to plan, we can make it out without anyone the wiser. I'm hoping not to involve Lark anymore at all. After Lachlan, Ash, and I get out, she can slip out on her own, shed her disguise, and go home. I need her to be safe. I don't think I can go through with all the hard things ahead of me if I can't picture Lark in her bedroom, lying on her mulberry-colored bed, safe and secure.

I latch onto this future, trying not to think about the in-between. After all, we only just made it inside, and we already almost died.

“That's okay,” Lark says. “I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve. If you get in trouble, I'll be able to provide a distraction.”

I envision her screaming to draw Greenshirt eyes, or even fighting. “Don't draw attention to yourself!” I insist.

She pulls the cap down lower. “No one will even notice me,” she says with utter confidence. She looks exactly like an ordinary maintenance worker, so she might be right.

My clothes are dry, thanks to the automatic seal on the exposure suit that bonded to my skin as soon as the mask was breached. Most of my hair is even still dry. When I ripped the mask off, the hood section of the suit bonded instantly to the skin around my hairline. For a second I marvel at the technology humans can create. How did we get to be so powerful, but so destructive? With so much intelligence, couldn't we see the point past which one begets the other?

We dressed for the mission in the typical gray suits of the Center elite. The pants are slim, light steel-colored with the faintest iron-hued pinstripes, the high-necked form-fitting jacket just a shade darker, layered over a black shirt for him, an iridescent silvery mother-of-pearl for me.

I don't know about myself, but he looks the very image of every young Center official I've ever seen on news vids. Except for that scar on his face. That might raise suspicions. That, and the perpetually rakish look in his second-child eyes. He covers them with green-tinted glasses, the kind he says are popular with pretentious young bureaucrats on the rise.

“You have to look more serious,” I insist as I tie my own hair into a businesslike knot at the back of my head. The colors Lark added are mostly hidden, and with the severe hairstyle I know I can pass for at least a few years older.

He immediately assumes an intensely bland face. “Better?”

I can't help but chuckle, my default mode around Lachlan no matter how terrible the circumstances. We might have just come close to death, and capture (maybe worse than death) looms ahead of us as a very real possibility. But somehow he can always make me smile. Are other people like that? Somehow, I don't think so. How is it he can always make me happy no matter how bad things get?

I catch Lark watching our interaction, and I bend my
head, flushing. Then I straighten defiantly. What's wrong with having
two
friends? Why can't
two
people make me happy? I had so little for so long. I think I'm entitled to have both Lark and Lachlan without them getting prickly whenever I pay too much attention to either.

But now isn't the time to dwell on that. I steel myself as I've learned to do, and together we head up the long, narrow steps first to the official sub-basements. There, Lark branches off from us, to gather the tools that will be part of her cover, and then wait for us in the main lobby. She blows me a kiss as we separate. I see Lachlan try to hide a scowl. Lachlan and I then go to the data storage floors, and finally to the ground floor, the headquarters of all Center law and security.

We've made it so far without incident. My father's security card buzzes us through every barrier, and the few people we've passed hardly glance at us. Lower down, I think most of the people were just trying to finish jobs that had taken longer than expected, so they could go home. They were maintenance types and lower-level data clerks, who probably wanted nothing to do with what we appeared to be—powerful young officials on the rise. People who could make trouble for them, assign them extra tasks, criticize their work. So they lowered their eyes, pretended we didn't exist, and hoped we showed them the same courtesy.

Here on the ground floor, though, things get harder. Now we have to make sure our story is perfect.

WE WENT OVER
it as many times as possible before we broke in so I'd know exactly what to do. Lachlan, buoyant with confidence, explained that even though the Center was the most secret and secure place in Eden, it relied far more on technology than on people.

“If your card scans, you're legitimate,” he had said. “They trust the EcoPan. If the EcoPan believes we belong here, no one else will question us. Thanks to your father's ID, one of the highest-ranking Center officials is simply making a tour of the facilities, or taking care of secret business. There's no cross-reference, no body scans at this level. They won't analyze me and figure out that I'm thirty pounds lighter and thirty years younger than the owner of the ID.”

There was a complex assortment of scans and checks at the main entrances—biometric readings, lens scans, all sorts of detectors—but we had neatly bypassed all of those by going through the sewer. Once a person was in the building they were in the clear. It was assumed that the EcoPan had done its job. Anyone inside was one of the privileged, the elite. So even if our faces are unfamiliar, Lachlan told me, we'll be accepted. They'll think we work another shift, or we're new, or the children of someone so important they don't dare question
us. Students who are children of the elite often get internships here, or high-level jobs straight out of school, so no one is surprised if we look a bit young.

“People underestimate the power of expectations,” Lachlan whispers to me as we make our way toward the prison section of the security floor. “We don't have to prove we belong here. We simply have to
be
here.” In strange circular logic, our presence is proof of our right to be here.

We're climbing the spiral staircase to the second floor. It is a strangely beautiful architectural touch, broad and lovely as a bisected seashell. Strong light streams into the lobby—the only part of the Center most civilians ever see—and everything is white, bright, with blue accents and touches of green, like a seaside. A waterfall feature cascades down from the second floor to the first, right beside the spiral staircase, flowing an unreal shade of aqua. Three tiny cleanbots scurry around the pool at the base, mopping up the few drops of water that splash onto the floor.

So far, so good.

When the spiral turns and lets us into the security section of the Center, all that beachy brightness is stripped away. This place is bare, sere. I'd almost call it gritty if it wasn't so clean. The entire tone has changed, of the building and the people. I glance down to the lobby floor and see an innocuous maintenance worker pushing a wheeled cart full of tools and buckets across the atrium. Only the slight build clues me in to the fact that it is Lark. I wish she'd look up, give me the brief reassurance of her bright gaze. But she's too sensible for that, and I tear my own eyes quickly away.

We pass a check-in desk with little more than a word from Lachlan and a wave-through. Somberly, seriously, we move through corridors that Lachlan mapped out from the Underground's intelligence and water system schematics that Lark provided.

Now we go down a narrow hallway that feeds into a large chamber. I hear the sounds of human misery, subdued but evident. I smell something I can't identify, subtle and sharp, that makes my skin prickle. Maybe it is the smell of fear.

I stop abruptly. There are prison cells lining the walls.

“Remember who you are,” Lachlan says under his breath. By which he means, remember who I'm supposed to be. A young psychology student with her Center guide, come to interview the renegade Ash about why he would betray his home, his very species. My knowledge, through my father, of the workings of high-level Center medicine will allow me to answer at least the most basic questions anyone might throw at me.

“I think the
me
I'm pretending to be would still be surprised at this.”

I've seen the violent side of Eden, but I haven't seen it institutionalized.

Walls and bars. Through some of them I see fingers straining. For what? For aid, for food, for freedom?

Civics vids always talk about how there's so little crime in Eden. Who would steal, or kill, when to steal is to take food from the entire human species, to kill is to end a statistically staggering percentage of the surviving human population? I suppose there aren't many prisoners in comparison to the entire population of Eden. I can see maybe a hundred cells spread along in diminishing perspective down the long rectangular room. But there are far too many for a society that claims to be a utopia. I wonder how many people, normal people, know about this place?

Two burly guards stand at the entrance. I expected them to be armed, but oddly, they aren't.

“We're here to see prisoner eighty-nine,” Lachlan says brusquely, twirling a pen cleverly around his fingers. There's another stuck behind his ear.

“You're not on the list,” one of the guards says without moving.

“Request should have been forwarded while we were en route.” Lachlan sounds supremely bored, and adds a yawn for good measure. “Overtime for me, firing for my secretary.” He shrugs, and gestures to me over his shoulder with his thumb. “I have to shepherd this one around to make the boss happy.” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Boss's pet.” He winks, and I look uncomfortable. Not a hard act under the circumstances.

“Do you need him out of the cell?” the guard asks.

Lachlan looks at me, and I play my part, saying primly, “The psychology of the deranged mind cannot be properly explored through bars.” I fiddle with the clipboard in my hands, taking out the attached pen and slipping it back again. “It is important to understand what inspires these societal aberrations so that we can nip such actions in the bud.” I hope I sound like a pure academic without any motivations beyond proving myself to my lead professor. I practiced the pedantic tone a lot.

I see Lachlan roll his eyes. “Wants to rehabilitate him, probably.”

“Too late for this one,” I snap, “but maybe we can help other people before they go astray.”

Lachlan clenches his hand and pummels his other palm. “There's only one way to correct people like this,” he says. “The fist if you catch them early, and a more terminal solution if the fist doesn't work.”

The guard laughs and, recognizing a like-minded man in the young official Lachlan pretends to be, waves us through to another man, who waves a handheld device over us, checking us for weapons. I assumed we'd bring the guns, but Lachlan said no. No weapons are allowed in the secure area, not even for the guards. Lachlan says this will make everything
easier. When there are weapons, people die . . . and some of those people might be us.

All we have to do is get Ash out of his cell.

The guard escorts us to a stark room that is bare except for two chairs, a table with built-in hand restraints, and a dark tinted window I can't see through. “Wait here,” he says. “I'll bring the prisoner to you.”

“Lachlan,” I whisper, “there will be someone watching.” I tilt my head toward the window. “And if he's handcuffed to the table . . .”

“Shh,” he cautions. “It just means we have to act right away.” The original plan was to pretend to interrogate him until we were sure the guards were in the right position. I thought I had a few minutes to brace myself, to take a few more deep breaths. I'm not ready for this!

But I have to be.

“We have to do it outside, in the main room,” Lachlan says, so we step out of the interview chamber.

“Psst!” I hear from the cell next to the interview room. Lachlan shakes his head. Don't get involved. Focus, he seems to project. But I can't help looking.

It's a small, portly man I don't recognize. He's dressed in a gray prison uniform, and there are marks on the exposed skin of his face and hands that look like burns. He creeps up to me then says the most frightening thing of all. “I know who you are.”

My eyes fly open wide in horror. He's speaking in a low voice now, but all he has to do is shout, get a guard's attention, and we're done for. “What do you want?” I hiss.

To my dismay, he starts to blubber. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to tell them, I swear.”