Extraction (13 page)

“Welcome to the Core, Clementine,” he says, his voice too cheery. “How do you like it so far?”

No one starves here, and I’m far from the moon, and everyone lives a long life. But there aren’t any windows, either, and every door leads to another corridor. This place is freedom and suffocation at the same time.

But all I say is: “It’s wonderful.” This feels like another test, and that’s what Commander Charlie would want to hear, if he were listening. There’s no way to be certain he isn’t.

“We’re glad you think so.” The surgeon moves to Nurse One, who hands him the tablet. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.…”

“It’s mostly standard,” the second nurse says. “Though I’m sure you’ll want to do something about that scar.”

“Definitely.”

“Um.” I clear my throat. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing to fret about,” Nurse One says.

“We’re here to help clean you up and make sure you’re healthy,” Surgeon Pond says, handing the tablet back to Nurse One. “Every new Extraction receives a special procedure—a simple one. The most important thing we do is speed up growth of your muscle fat so you’ll be a healthier weight, and stronger.”

“What about my scar?” I ask.

“Well, we also use the opportunity to clear up slight imperfections, things like bruises and birthmarks. Scars you shouldn’t have anyway. Because who likes scars? We’ll help you look as beautiful as you were meant to be. It will help you feel that you belong here.”

I force my lips into a tight smile. But I don’t want to change; I want Logan to recognize me when I see him again.

Plus, something tells me there’s more to the reason behind the procedure than making us feel like we fit in here. I want to press the matter, but Surgeon Pond is already heading back out the door.

“Show her in the mirror, will you?” he says. “And help her into a surgical gown. I’ll be right back.”

He exits. Nurse Two moves to a cabinet and returns with a rectangular mirror the size of a textbook.

Nurse One helps her slide the tablet into a slot in the mirror.

With the press of a button, the mirror hums and glows red around the edges.

Nurse Two places it in my hands, not seeming to notice they’re trembling.

I stare at my reflection. The bags under my blue eyes are prominent. I bite hard on my pale, flaking lips. My red-orange curls are wound with old, crusted dirt that won’t come out with water. The scar trails along my right jaw line. For now, I’m still the small girl with mud on her cheekbones, who somehow got lucky.

Nurse One taps the edge of the mirror, and the image dissolves into another. “
This
is how you will look after.”

Now my skin appears smooth with a soft pink hue, no longer covered with a layer of dust. My lips aren’t chapped anymore. My curls seem fresh and elegant, flowing about my shoulders. The scar has disappeared. When I part my lips, my teeth are half a shade whiter.

The changes are simple, but it still looks like someone else. A girl who never felt the butt of an official’s gun slam into her jaw when he caught her trying to climb to the school rooftop. A girl who doesn’t know what it’s like to live on almost nothing, afraid her nightmares about the moon will come to life, afraid she’ll die in a gas chamber at twenty.

I’m not this girl.

But … deep down … I almost want to be.

“It’s all right to be nervous,” Nurse One says, sliding the mirror out of my grasp. “I promise, you’ll feel wonderful, and it won’t hurt a bit.”

I’m not sure I believe her.

But refusing to do this would make me seem disobedient. I have to do what Commander Charlie wants. I have to get on his good side, or he won’t listen when I beg him to save Logan.

And … maybe this will be worth it.

I tuck a curl behind my ear. This isn’t a big change, after all. I’ll always be Clementine, no matter how I look. And if Logan is the boy I know, he won’t care if my appearance is a bit different when I see him again.

“Here, let’s get you into a special gown for the procedure.” Nurse Two moves to a drawer in one of the cabinets. “You can leave your shirt on.”

When she comes back with the gown, I let her ease it over my head. I don’t know if I’ll love how I look after this, but I’ll have to learn to love it. This is the life I won and the life I wanted.

The nurses tie the back with easy, quick movements.

“If you’ll please climb onto the table,” Nurse One says.

I lie back on the metal. A small mesh pillow cushions my head, but the comfort doesn’t ease me all the way. My heart pounds in my chest, but also in my arms, legs, hands, and head.

Surgeon Pond hums as he reenters the room. Cabinets open, and metal instruments click and clang. Water runs in the sink.

“We’re ready,” Nurse Two says.

I hear the sound of suction. Nurse One appears, holding a clear mask in her gloved fingertips with a wide, purple tube attached to its end. She fits the mask over my nose and mouth, trapping my lips with plastic.

“Deep breaths,” she says.

A sweet smell fills my nostrils.

“Scalpel.” The surgeon’s voice.

I press my hands into the metal, so I won’t decide at the last second to rip off the gas mask and not go through with this. But my limbs are already softening, my eyelids drooping. I couldn’t fight if I wanted to.

It’ll be worth it, I tell myself as the edges of my vision blur.

Pond’s face leans over me.

I see a flash of silver, a surgical mask, blue lights.

They darken …

… darken …

… darken …

Then nothing.

11

Fingers guide the rim of a cup to my lips.

“Drink up, honey.”

The liquid is pink and sweet.

Dots speckle my vision. I blink, and the world clears a little.

Two drip bags hang on poles to the right of me, one with blood and the other with clear fluid, both connected to IV lines. My legs hang over the side of a thin mattress, but I don’t remember sitting up.

I’m wearing a purple bodysuit made of stretchy leather fabric. One sleeve is rolled up to my shoulder, revealing a thin strip of gauze in the crook of my arm. A blue curtain hangs around my bed, and quiet speech and movements come from beyond it, all around me. They must have moved me to a different room after the procedure.

Nurse One takes the cup away and smiles. “How do you feel?”

With a hesitant finger, I touch the skin of my face. It feels soft, smooth, and shiny. Unnatural. The heartbeat is loud in my ears, a touch faster than usual.

“How do you feel?” the nurse asks again.

“Awake,” I say.

“No hurts? No aches?”

I take a breath and stretch my fingers and toes. But there’s nothing. My body feels normal—better than normal, even.… Stronger. Adrenaline flows in a calm, steady stream through my veins.

”I feel fine.”

“Wonderful!” The nurse pulls my sleeve down. “You’re free to go, then. You have free time for the rest of the day. I can bring you a mirror if you’d like to see how your surgery turned out. You won’t find any scars on your face.”

That makes my stomach squeeze. I’m not sure I’m ready just yet to see what I really look like without my scars.

“I think I’d like to wait,” I say.

“Whatever you’d like, dear.”

When I stand, my legs are steady. To my body, it’s like I was never asleep. One second, my eyes closed; the next, they opened.

“How long was I out?” I ask.

“The main procedure lasted three hours, but we kept you overnight to fix more minor concerns.”

I momentarily forget how to breathe.
“
I thought it was a simple operation. That’s what you said.”

“It was. The muscle growth takes time, that’s all.” She gives my head a light pat.

I forgot about the muscle growth. Still, I can’t believe they used the word
simple
and then kept me all day and night.

It makes me wonder if they lied about something, or left out part of what the operation involved. It makes me wonder if I look completely different.

The nurse pushes the curtain back, and I see that there are other curtains in the room, each probably hiding another bed with another Extraction. She tucks her arm through mine and leads me through a door into a hallway.

It’s okay, I tell myself. Whatever they did to me, everything is going to be okay.

Please, please, please be okay.

“I hope I’ll see you again, Clementine!” The nurse waves me off.

I don’t say anything to that.

Down the corridor, I come to a glass window. For a moment I pause, staring at a spot to the left of the glass. If I flit my eyes less than an inch to the right, I’ll see myself. I’ll see my new face, a face Logan might not recognize.

I run, even though it makes me feel like a coward.

*   *   *

I take a staircase down and pick a corridor that should lead to an elevator. But every corridor looks the same, and I don’t know where I’m going.

I end up lost in the maze that is the main floor of Training Division. Blue lights flash everywhere, reflecting off the stark white walls. I pass doors and sections of glass wall that show me some of the training areas I saw from above: the room with the intelligence capsules; the room with the battle screen for a floor. But they’re empty now. I don’t see students, let alone instructors. Small, rectangular bots hover on the sidelines in the battle room, but they can’t help me find an exit.

I recite all the digits of pi I have memorized to keep calm: 3.1415926535897932384626 …

Around a corner, I reach the end of the pathway, the last door to the last room. I’m definitely moving in the wrong direction.

I’m about to turn back when I realize where I’ve ended up. The last doorway leads to another empty training room, but this one has fighting mats on the floor, and knives lining the far wall.

This must be one of the places where officials learn how to fight. All of the officials in the outer sectors grew up here in the Core, which means they trained here too. That patrol I met when I climbed the restricted building trained here. And so did the man who gave me the scar I had before I lost it during the surgical procedure.

Red light floods the entrance to the training area. I take a step forward. The entrance makes a sound—a soft hum that reminds me of the acid shield, and the moon.

Frowning, I stretch a hand toward the red light. The instant I touch it, a shock reels through my arm. I pull it back with a gasp.

“Sorry, officials only,” an amused voice says behind me.

I whip around. A boy smirks at me, flanked by two others.

“Ah, an Extraction,” he says. “Are you
lost
? You’re short, so I guess you can’t see the exit.”

His snickering friends move through the entrance and head to where the knives glint on the far wall, but he just stands there, smiling at me.

I take in his blond hair that’s sticking up a little; his tight gray suit with the Core insignia on his chest pocket; his belt with several gun holsters; his green gloves; his knee-high black boots. The sound of a gunshot rips through my memory.

His name falls into my head:
Sam
. This is the Core boy who shot an Unstable two nights ago, in some sort of demonstration for Commander Charlie. The killing didn’t even faze him. He stood there smiling when it was finished.

“Can you talk, Shorty?” he asks.

I press my lips together. I don’t want to talk to him, but now I’ll look stupid if I don’t. “Can you help me find an elevator?” I ask.

“Sorry,” he says, bumping my shoulder as he moves past me and through the red-lit doorway. “I’d love to help, but it’s training time. Gotta practice throwing knives.”

I narrow my eyes a little as he heads to the weapons wall. Commander Charlie likes this boy. He loved it when he killed that Unstable.

Sam trails his fingers over the options for weapons, then picks one. He turns back around and walks straight toward me, knife in hand. “You any good at throwing knives?” he asks. “Did they teach you that wherever you came from?”

“No.” As if officials would teach us how to throw knives so we could throw knives at them.

“Figured.” He stops in the doorway and gives me a smug look. The kind of look bullies used to give me in school when I was little, when they thought I was short and small and afraid. The red light glints on the sharpest edge of Sam’s blade.

An idea hits me. A bad one, maybe. But before I can stop myself, the words come spilling out: “I meant, no, they didn’t teach us. But I learn fast. I bet I’d be good at it.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” He twirls the knife’s hilt in his fingertips, then holds it out to me. “Show me.”

This isn’t smart. But I grab the knife from him anyway and take five steps back, giving myself some space between me and the wall. I’m not sure where to aim. The actual targets are around the corner in the training area.

“Hit the very edge of the door frame,” Sam says, stepping behind me, “and I’ll help you get out of here.”

The door frame? The edge is thin—a couple centimeters wide. But I’m not about to back down, so I hold the knife out in front of me and close one eye. I’ve never done this before, but I’ve seen an official throw a knife, and I think they did something like this. I line the tip of the blade up with the left edge of the door.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I pull my arm back and bring it down.

Sam’s boot kicks my ankle, knocking me off balance as the knife flies from my fingertips. The weapon sails into the training room, a good fifteen feet from where I aimed it. It clatters on the floor near one of the fighting mats.

“You messed me up!” I say.

“Oh, did I? It looked to me like you lost your footing. Might want to work on that.” Sam saunters through the doorway and disappears around the corner. I can hear his friends laughing.

I glare after him. If I could walk into the room without getting zapped, I’d grab that knife and aim it at his throwing hand. He thinks he’s stronger and smarter because he’s lived here forever, but Core kids aren’t any smarter than those who live on the Surface. We have just as much potential. We can be just as Promising, if not more.