New World Order (38 page)

“Uh oh,” I said. “What are they doing here?”

“They probably caught wind of what we were up to.” Jack slowed the bike and brought it to a halt.

I tensed, ready for a battle, but the soldiers did the unexpected. They formed a line and saluted us.

“What the…” I said.

We dismounted the bike and one of the soldiers stepped forward. “We’re proud to serve the Alliance, sirs.” He motioned to the others. “And we all appreciate the risk you’re
about to take.” He stood aside to give us access to the entrance.

Jack saluted them and I breathed a dumbfounded thank you.

We crawled through the crevice, followed the light coming from the far end of the cavern, and came upon a sight I thought I’d never see in my lifetime: Domers and urchins working side by side. Yeah, I knew we had managed to overcome our differences to look for Jack, but
throughout the entire search there had still been an underlying current of mistrust, epitomized in Hayley’s declaration that when we returned home we’d be fighting on opposite sides again. And yet there they all were: Reyes, Summer, Hayley, Ted, Bron, Raine, Mica and a few others I didn’t recognize. Even Ayers, Ted’s bitter copilot, was getting his hands dirty clearing rocky debris away from the
entrance to the Pit.

Hayley was the first to notice us. “Hey, I was beginning to wonder if you two were ever going to make it.”

I thumbed to the backpack slung over my shoulders. “I had to stop and get something.”

“Hey, Ted,” Jack said. “You didn’t tell me you were on your way here when I saw you in town.”

Ted shrugged. “Bron was just leaving town with a group of Alliance. She said she was coming here to help
pave the way for you two, and I asked to come along. Brought some help with me too,” he said, motioning to Ayers.

Ayers rolled his eyes. “Penance, I guess.”

“So you two don’t think you’ve had enough of the Holts?” Ted asked. “You’re going back for more?”

“Yeah.” Jack laughed softly. “Life’s been kind of boring lately. We thought we’d spice it up.” He walked to the entrance and examined the
debris that barricaded it. “Was this a natural cave-in?”

Reyes paused in his efforts to move the boulder he and Mica had been working on. “No way,” he said. “We had that tunnel braced well enough to last for at least a hundred years. My guess is that a charge was set off from the inside.”

Bron nodded. “I worked in the Pit for over thirty years, and if there’s one thing I had complete faith
in, it was a miner’s ability to stabilize a mine.”

Mica snorted. “When you actually live in the mine, it’s called home maintenance.”

Reyes laughed, teeth flashing against his dirt-smeared face. These were the boys I remembered from the Pit, coming up from the coalmines always joking about something, even when there was nothing to joke about. It both warmed my heart to see their bond and saddened
me knowing how it had been forged.

I looked over at Summer. She was moving rocks, but I didn’t think the tension I saw on her face was due to exertion. When the Dome doors had been opened last year, a lot of people had decided the great outdoors was not for them. They were too scared of radiation poisoning, or the sun was too bright, the air too cold or too hot, and on and on. The truth was,
the biodome, including the Pit, had been the only home we had ever known, and some people were afraid to leave its safety. Summer’s parents were two of those people.

I walked to where she was working at removing debris. Her face was dirty and her hair stuck to her sweaty forehead. “How are you doing?” I asked, shrugging off my backpack.

“How do you think?” she countered, without pausing.
“I’m praying to a god I don’t even know that Leisel Holt hasn’t shut off the ventilation system. Or that the explosion she set off to block this tunnel didn’t cause more cave-ins.”

I dug into the debris, working alongside her.

“Hey, Mrs. Kenner,” Jack said, pausing in his task to look at me. “Pregnant ladies don’t pick up giant boulders.”

I cocked an eyebrow at that. “But they go on covert
missions to defeat evil whackadoodles who have their finger on a button to set off nuclear warheads?”

“That’s different.” He threw a rock onto a pile of other rocks. “If a nuclear warhead goes off, we’re all dead.”

“We could use a drink of water, Sunshine,” Hayley said.

I rolled my eyes. “You know my name’s not Sunshine, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” She smirked, although I was pretty sure
I wasn’t supposed to see it.

“We’re through,” Raine called out. He had been wedged into the tunnel and backed out of the narrow opening. “There’s one big rock on the other side that needs to be moved, but the ceiling will go if we don’t brace it first. Where are the jacks?”

A large pack sat off to the side, and Reyes grabbed it and took it to Raine.

It took about fifteen minutes to get
the jacks in the right place and about two minutes with the combined strength of Reyes and Raine’s exoskeletons to roll the boulder out of the way. Smaller rocks clattered to the ground when the big rock was moved, but the ceiling of the tunnel stayed in place.

We crawled through single file and gathered on the other side. The air was thick with all the dirt and dust that had been kicked up
by moving the rocks. The smell of coal was especially strong and nostalgically familiar. While everyone from the Dome coughed and put their hands over their mouths, Reyes drew a big whiff in through his nose.

“We’re home,” he said.

“I can’t say I missed it,” Raine said.

“This way.” I headed toward the door that would take us into the main part of the Pit.

A lot of debris from the charges
that had gone off to seal the entrance cluttered the way. I was worried we would have to do more excavating to get through the doors, so I was relieved to find them clear. We entered the second level of the Pit and headed toward the stairs.

Although the sun had set outside, the lights were still on in the Pit. I recalled that the circadian rhythm of the Pit was out of sync with the sun and moon.
By my calculations, we still had a few hours of light down here before the
bong bongs
tolled and the lights went out.

“How much farther?” Hayley asked.

“To what?” Reyes asked.

“To the Pit,” she said.

Reyes gave her a confused look. “You’re here,” he said, just as we came upon the stone staircase. She stopped dead in her tracks.

An expression of horror marred her pretty features. “
Jesus Christ!
”
she said, her voice catching on a choke. “This
is where you
lived
? This is the Pit?”

Ted’s eyes scanned the enclosed hallway, taking in the low ceiling, the rock walls, and the uneven floor. “Even when Mom threatened to send us down here if we didn’t behave, I didn’t imagine it was this bad.”

Jack elbowed his brother and glanced at us. I shifted my gaze to let him think I hadn’t
seen it.

“I’m going to go check on my parents,” Summer said.

I turned to Jack. “I’m going to go with her and make sure they’re all right.”

He nodded. “We’ll go see what we’re up against getting into the Dome.”

I kissed him. “Be careful. I’ll be up soon.”

It was strange to be in the Pit with barely a soul living here. I was used to crowded stairwells and hallways, standing in line
to get my rations, and constantly bumping shoulders with someone else. Now the stairs and hallways were empty, devoid of the sound of the thousands of voices from those who had inhabited the Pit. A layer of dirt and coal dust was becoming thick in the unused areas of my former home.

“It’s kind of creepy now,” I said to Summer.

She shrugged. “I have dinner with my parents here every Sunday,
so I’ve gotten used to it. I usually bring them blackberry wine. I hope they don’t mind that I didn’t bring any this time.”

When we reached the sixth level, we followed the sound of voices to the common room. We nearly gave the ten occupants in the room heart attacks when we walked in.

“Summer!” Mrs. Nazeem said, jumping up. “I’ve been so worried about you.” She hugged her daughter and then
me.

“Me?” Summer exclaimed. “You’ve been sealed in here with a madwoman. Has she cut off your air? Food? Water? Are you okay?”

Mr. Nazeem waved her concerns away. “Leisel Holt’s just like her father—nothing but hot air.” He motioned toward the television screen in the room. “Every morning she comes on and tells us life in the Dome will continue as it always did before the doors were ever opened.
That it was too soon to leave and everyone outside is doomed to die from radiation.”

A man sitting at a table raised his finger in the air and did his best impression of Leisel Holt. “We are the future of humanity and still bound by the terms of the treaty.”

The woman sitting beside him laughed. “Yep. Hot air, all right.”

I looked for the camera that used to be in this room, watching our
every move, but it hadn’t been replaced since it had been broken during the uprising. “How many people are still living down here?”

“I’d say about seventy, give or take,” Mr. Nazeem said.

“You guys might want to get out of here for the night,” I said. “Jack and I are going to have a chat with Leisel Holt, and I don’t know how ugly things will get.”

“We’ll spread the word,” Mrs. Nazeem
said.

I touched Summer on the shoulder. “I think while I’m here, I’ll go have a look at my old place. There was some stuff belonging to Dad I always meant to come and save. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

I left the common room and headed toward my old home. The foreign, lonely silence was completely at odds with the familiar route to my family home. I must have walked it at least a million times.
The crack in the floor that Summer and I had always jumped over, firm in our belief that if we stepped on it the entire Pit would come crashing down. The recessed alcove that Reyes and I had always used as a make-out room. The hundreds of apartment units that looked all the same, and yet I could pick my home out from among them without even looking.

Even on the inside, our apartment looked
the same as every other. It was a small shack with a couple of chairs, a sink, a few cupboards, and a small bedroom off the main room. And even though it
looked
the same as every other unit, it was different. Our scent—my mother, my father, and me—still clung to the walls, the towels stacked in the cupboard, the mattress my parents had slept on, my bedroll, and our blankets. The wooden floor was
worn smooth where I used to sit in front of my mother while she colored my hair with coal or eased away my headaches with her gentle fingers. The chair my father had always sat in was still pulled up to the table where he would spread out his books and philosophize about the future of the world.

I choked back a sob as I ran my hand over his chair. A part of me still didn’t want to admit that
he was gone—wanted to believe he’d escaped from President Holt, made it outside, and had just kept on running. That one day he would come back and ask if the coast was clear, and I could tell him that it was, that he had nothing left to fear. But so far that hadn’t happened, and every once in a while the thought crept into my head that he was gone for good.

I went into my parents’ bedroom in
search of his beloved books. Stolen by my mother, who worked in the Dome’s library, they had been his only possessions. And more than once I’d thought about coming back to retrieve them. I lifted their mattress. Each one—six in total—lay flat and hidden underneath it. I gathered them up and took them back to the table. Sitting in my father’s chair, I opened them, selected familiar passages, and
let my mind wander back to a time when the house had been filled with love. My vision was blurred with tears by the time I reached the last book, my father’s favorite. It was a collection with one piece he treasured above all others:
Pacem in Terris:
Encyclical Letter of Pope John XXIII On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity, and Liberty
,
April 11, 1963.

The door creaked
open, startling me. Jack stuck his head in, and I quickly wiped my eyes.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

I cleared the lump from my throat. “Yeah,” I lied.

He came in, the door closing behind him. “You don’t look okay.”

My mouth twisted into a frown and I motioned to the books on the table. “My dad’s,” I said and cleared away another lump.

Jack grabbed the other chair in the room, my mom’s,
and pulled it up to the table. “What kind of books?” he asked, picking one up and leafing through it.

“Nonfiction political stuff. My father fancied himself an intellectual. He was always coming up with counterarguments to whatever political rhetoric the Holts were trying to shove down our throats.” I held up his favorite. “He read this to us so many times.”

Jack took the book from me and
looked at it. “
Pacem in Terris
,
”
he read aloud. “What does it mean?”

“It’s Latin for ‘peace on earth.’”

He turned a few pages and scanned them. “He underlined this passage: ‘The progress of learning and the inventions of technology clearly show that, both in living things and in the forces of nature, an astonishing order reigns, and they also bear witness to the greatness of man, who can
understand that order and create suitable instruments to harness those forces of nature and use them to his benefit.’”

I nodded, remembering my father’s discourse well. “My father was convinced that the existence of the biodome and the preservation of technology was a divine act and that the Holts were getting it all wrong. My dad underlined passages like, ‘A human being has the right to respect
and—’”

“‘
…
dignity of the human person,’
”
Jack cut in. “I think your dad was on to something. We should have been listening to him instead of Damien Holt.” He closed the book then picked up my hand and kissed it. “I’m glad I got the chance to meet him.”

I stroked the side of his face. “Me too.”

He drew in a deep breath and let it go. “The charges are set around the door, so we’re ready to
blow it whenever you are.”