Extraction (14 page)

I have to be. I have to make Commander Charlie like me.

“Clementine?”

“What?” I snap, turning around. “Oh. Sorry.” It’s only Oliver.

“You okay?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m fine,” I lie. The
plunk
of a knife hitting a target reaches my ears, followed by a catcall. I try to ignore it. “Where were you?”

“Looking for you,” Oliver says. His eyes are a brighter shade of blue, a clear sky behind his spectacles. I frown, unsure why he still has glasses after the operation. He stares at me.

Heat floods my cheeks. “Will you cut it out?”

“Sorry.” He blinks. “You look different, is all.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

I ignore that statement. “Are you lost too?”

“I found a way out,” he says. “But I saw you down here.”

He must not have seen Sam or my knife-throwing experiment, since he doesn’t mention them. I decide not to tell him.

“Which way, then?”

He leads me back the way I came, past several training areas and around a corner I didn’t try before. I curse under my breath. If I’d seen it before, I could’ve avoided that run-in with Sam.

The path turns into a steep set of stairs and then a corridor. The corridor becomes an elevator landing. Oliver presses the call button.

I drop onto the metal bench across from the elevators and run sweaty palms over the purple leather covering my legs. Above me, a fake window is built into the ceiling. Black frames surround silver panels that could almost slide off and reveal the sky if they weren’t screwed on. If we weren’t a million miles underground with brand-new faces and suits getting tighter by the second.

I grimace, feeling trapped again.

“I don’t look weird, right?” Oliver asks, twisting his mouth. His skin is fresher and shinier, and his hair is cleaner.

“You don’t look that different,” I say. “I don’t get why they kept us overnight.”

“My nurse said they did muscle repair and gave us nutrients through injections, so we wouldn’t be so skinny.”

“Yeah, I know they did. I guess I just don’t trust them yet, that’s all.”

“I don’t blame you.”

We sit in silence for a moment. I chew on my lip and glance at my body in the tight purple suit, curious to see if the muscle growth is obvious. The leather makes my thighs more pronounced, showing curves where I’ve never had any before. I wonder what Logan would think of them.

I shove that thought away. “How come you still have glasses? I would have imagined they’d fix your eyesight.”

Oliver blushes a light shade of red. “I wouldn’t let them. I like my glasses.”

“They let you keep them?”

“They said choice is important here, and once we’re citizens, especially, we’ll have lots of choices. They wanted me to feel comfortable.”

“I didn’t want to get rid of my scar, but they made me do it.”

He observes me, a smile teasing his lips. “I bet you wanted it.”

I scoff. “How would you know?” He’s not Logan. He barely knows me.

“We all want to look more Promising.”

The elevator dings.

The doors zip open, and Oliver moves inside. I push off the bench and follow him, trying to quell my resentment. He isn’t the one who made me undergo a beauty operation, or laughed at me because I couldn’t hit a door frame with a knife.

The elevator walls are made of glass. Without meaning to, without intending, I catch a glimpse of my face. My cheeks flush.

The door closes, and Oliver scans the map of the Core on the wall. “Where do you want to go? It’s a free day.”

“Wherever,” I say, only half listening.

The change to my complexion is subtler than it looked on that tablet when the nurses showed me beforehand. But my skin still looks smoother, and my curls do look nice without dirt in them. I don’t know whether I’m “as beautiful as I was meant to be,” but I do feel prettier. I do look more Promising. Only the missing scar makes my brow crease.

Still, I’m not a different person. Logan will recognize me when I see him again.

I wring my hands and force down the winged creatures fluttering in my stomach. I would worry about him always, but I can’t, because I need to focus.

I take a deep breath and run through the steps in my head:

I have to raise my Promise as high as possible during training.

I have to become someone who is useful here, and needed, maybe even special.

I have to pick a career that will earn me an audience with Commander Charlie.

I have to convince him to make an exception for Logan. I don’t know what exactly I’ll need to say or do to convince him. But I will do whatever it takes.

Oliver jabs a button. A
whir
rises in my ears as we pick up speed, moving to the left in a smooth fashion.

Yellow dots on the Core map inside the elevator light up, showing where we are. We’re on the eighth floor of Training Division. I can’t see anything but steel walls through the glass of the elevator. But there must be a hundred training rooms, at least, that I haven’t seen yet, since there are twelve floors in this division and an average of twenty rooms on each.

As we speed along the elevator track, the dots on the map show us departing from Training Division and entering Invention. The steel walls outside the elevator are replaced by a long stretch of window.

We’re passing one of the science laboratories, this one for food production. Most of the food people eat in the Core comes from the Surface fields and greenhouses, but down here they’re able to grow certain crops hydroponically, without soil. Plants grow in steel reservoirs under harsh lights that serve as the sun.

Oliver is quiet beside me, his eyes drinking in the view. There’s a short break in the window, and then we pass into another laboratory. This one has more adults than the last. They wear blue coats and tap on screens in the wall, or work with test tubes and petri dishes. A couple of medi-bots hover in the corner, where a young lab assistant slips a slide under a microscope. This lab must be related to medicine. Perhaps they’re developing a cure for an illness, or even a cure for the side effects of the moon’s acid, in case it seeps through the shield again.

But even if they discovered that cure, most of the kids in the work camps would never see it. Cures for sickness are reserved for those with high Promise.

We pass another stretch of steel wall before we come to the next window. This time, there’s not a room right in front of us, but a massive deck of steam and darkness far below: the flight port. The first room we saw here in the Core.

From above, the steam hides most of the ships, but their flashing lights are visible. I can see the biggest ships clearly, the hovercrafts like the ones they use on the Surface. Down here, Core pilots use them to fly through the Pipeline to visit the other sectors, for passenger or cargo transport. Sometimes they fly to the Surface on research missions for the Developers. I’ve seen ships careen through the sky toward the world outside the settlement—even, once or twice, to the stars.

I don’t know what they were looking for.

“Did you know they made spaceships so big?” Oliver asks, his voice filled with wonderment.

I smile a little. “Yes. Are they smaller in Crust?”

“We don’t have ships, really,” he says. “Mostly everyone just walks everywhere. Even the smaller pods aren’t that efficient to travel in underground … but I’ve always wanted to fly one.”

Beyond the elevator glass, steel walls replace the view again, and then drop away. The flashing lights of the Pipeline appear. Only for a moment; then there’s steel again, and the elevator shifts to a vertical shaft to carry us up a few decks.

“Well, I bet they’d train you to be a pilot, if you wanted,” I say.

“I hope so,” Oliver says, and smiles.

The elevator slows to a stop.
Ding
.

“Recreation Division,” a cool, female voice says.

The doors open, and we step into what looks like outer space.

My breath leaves my body like it’s been sucked into a vacuum. My eyes widen.

There are lights all around and above me, flashing in the dark, some the size of normal lamps, others big enough that they look like small planets and stars. Reds, yellows, greens, and purples flash in the dark of a compound so high and wide I can’t see where it ends. It might not have an end. We might be floating in the sky, somewhere far out in the universe, though the ground feels solid.

And there are people. Civilians of the Core, mostly children, but also adults. They wait in line and chatter and stomp and holler, waiting for their turn inside lit-up game stations.

There are hundreds of these stations. Blue and green lights flash across the surface of a nearby one that’s round and shaped like a pod. Three gamers inside shoot blast pistols at fighter ships on a screen that covers half of the interior glass. In another station, people swim inside a giant tank of bubbling water, lit up by purple fluorescents. On the far side of the room, there’s a giant steel dome with the word
PHANTOM
lit up on its side. I wonder what’s inside it.

There are floors above us too, made of glass. The people up there look like they’re flying as they run between the lights from station to station. Some of them really are flying, racing in small hov-pods through the flashes and darkness in a flight arena on what seems to be the highest floor.

Logan and I used to make up stories about what people do all day when they’re not stuck laboring in fields, when they don’t have to prove they deserve to live past twenty. I wish he were here to see it.

“Clementine?” Oliver asks. His eyes reflect fake stars. “Does the real sky look like this?”

I almost laugh, but bite it back. Of course he wouldn’t know. “No, it’s bigger,” I say. “Real stars are tiny, and the moon is giant and pink.”
Dangerous
, I should say. “But this might be prettier.”
Safer
.

“I still hope I see it someday,” he says. “From a spaceship or something.”

I smile at the hopeful look on his face. Part of me hopes I’ll see the sky again too. There’s something free and beautiful about the stars especially—even the moon, though it’s deadly.

But we’re still safer below ground.

“So, what shall we try?” Oliver asks, pushing his glasses up the rim of his nose.

I twist my mouth, staring at the deck before me. I don’t know where to begin.

His eyes flit through the crowd. “I wonder if they have…” Instead of finishing his thought, he grabs my hand and pulls me past game stations. His palm is soft and warm in mine.

We come to a compound of large, glass capsules. Four of these capsules are connected by giant tubes, so they all form a square. In the center sits a fifth attachment, the biggest, and shaped like an egg. Children float inside the compound, but unlike the swimming tank, this one has no water.

“Zero gravity.” Oliver grins.

“There you are!” a voice calls, to my right. “I was looking for you.”

Ariadne slips through the crowd to reach us, her fingers pressed against the purple leather on her thighs. Her hair was tangled and messy before, but it’s ravishing now. Oliver stares at her.

“Clementine,” she says, her voice filled with awe. “You’re beautiful.”

I shake my head, laughing. “Thanks. But you’re prettier, Ariadne.”

Oliver seems to realize what he’s doing, and blinks and clears his throat. “Hey,” he says. “We were gonna go inside. Do you want to come?”

Ariadne looks at the capsules. She frowns. “What is it?”

“It’s not scary,” Oliver says. “Trust me.”

He tugs me after him into a small glass box connected to one of the four outer capsules. Ariadne follows us, biting her lip. The door closes behind us and makes a loud suction noise, trapping the three of us inside the box. A moment later, the door before us zips open.

Oliver takes a step, and I take a step, and Ariadne takes a step.

We’ve already left the ground.

I move my feet, seeking something solid, but find nothing.

For a moment, I panic. I’m not used to this. Gravity is stable and strong and dependable, while this feeling of weightlessness is not.

But I’m okay. I’m okay. I suck air in through my nose and out through my mouth. It’s silly to be afraid of this. I’ve always wished I could fly.

My eyes close. I breathe in and out.

In and out.

I forget about things that used to matter. Things that hurt me, scarred me, and worried me. Floating here, I could be a cloud, a krail, a wanderer among the stars. Or maybe I am a star.

Whatever I am is a small thing with little significance in a universe as wide as this one, but in this moment, I feel big. I feel like nothing can break me.

My eyelids flutter open. Oliver flaps his arms and rises higher and higher, until his head bumps the glass ceiling. Ariadne’s laughter peals through the capsule. Oliver laughs too, and then so do I.

We pretend we’re swimming through the air, though none of us have ever swum before. We pretend we aren’t trapped inside glass. We pretend the fake sky overhead is the real sky, but a safer sky. We pretend life stretches on forever, that it doesn’t end.

We pretend we’re invincible.

I don’t know how long we float, for seconds or minutes or hours. No one makes us stop. No one slaps me awake, so this must not be a dream.

It’s the first time I understand the meaning of the word
free
.

12

“If I call your name, you’re in the physical training focus group today,” Cadet Waller says.

We’re standing in a lobby area in Training Division, floor twelve. A female instructor sits behind a high counter to my right, tapping away on the monitor in front of her and glancing at the group of us Extractions occasionally.

I feel a yawn tingling at the back of my throat, and try to stifle it by pressing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I shouldn’t be tired. I slept in until eight thirty and almost missed breakfast. But we stayed out too late in Recreation Division last night, and when I tried to fall asleep, there were suddenly knots in my stomach.