Rebellion (13 page)

“When do we go to the coal mines?” I ask him.

“Actually, we haven’t been there in a few days. Not sure why. They haven’t let us go to school, either. I really miss it. It’s much warmer there.”

I frown. “Has this ever happened before?”

“Not that I can remember.”

I chew on my bottom lip, thinking. The only reason the mines would stop running is if they suddenly have an infinite supply of coal, or if they’ve found a replacement energy source. When Charlie made his announcement about the KIMO bomb, he said the Core had become self-sufficient, so it must have its own source, though I don’t know what it is. If the Core has its own source, maybe Charlie doesn’t care if the other sectors even have energy anymore, because he’s going to destroy them all with some new bomb.

But if he doesn’t care about the other sectors, why transfer everyone off the Surface? Why not leave everyone for dead?

“How many days has it been?” I ask.

“Three, I think.” Hector scratches his head. “It’s been a bit hard to tell, since they stopped delivering meal rations every day, twice a day. Now it’s only once sometime before we all get too tired to keep our eyes open.”

Perfect
.
I’m already hungry.

But what he said about the three days is important. That lines up with when Darren learned Charlie was transferring people off the Surface too. If everything was running relatively normally before then, something must’ve happened three or four days ago that made Charlie change his mind. Something big. But the only people who might know what happened would be Charlie, his allies in the Core, and the officials who’ve been carrying out his orders.

Add that to the list of things I need to talk to Mal about.

“So what have you been doing, then, since you haven’t been in the mines?” I ask Hector.

“Sitting around. Waiting. Coming up with a lot of crazy theories about what’s going on outside the camp. Then you lot showed up.” He gives me a sheepish look. “I was sort of hoping one of you would know what’s been going on.”

I smile back, but it feels a bit tight. I do know some things. It’s obvious Hector has no idea about Charlie’s bomb, or acid leaking through the shield when it went down. He has no idea he’d be dead right now if it wasn’t for Oliver, Beechy, and me—he and this entire camp would be nothing but bone dust and debris, floating in antigravity. Charlie is probably planning to kill us for real as we speak, after he’s used us for whatever he needs.

I should tell Hector all of this, that he and everyone else in the camp are in danger and we need to do something. But I’m worried they won’t believe me, or worse, Charlie has undercover officials in this camp. If he does, my warning will be squashed before it has a chance to spread.

Hector’s smile might be sweet, and he might’ve saved me from being bitten by a poisonous croacher bug, but that’s all I know about him. I’m not sure I can trust him. And I need to be sure.

12

Camp A has almost thirty rooms of caves, most roughly the same size, all of them forming a labyrinth I’ll never be able to figure out. But Hector moves through the rooms with ease. He has the whole place memorized, down to the position of every ceiling lamp.

The latrines and baths sit in a cave room at the very center of the camp, inside wooden stalls that look like they might fall apart at any moment. The baths are turned on once a day for half an hour, Hector tells me. With several hundred people needing to use them, it’s difficult to get more than a couple of seconds in one, so most people shower less than once a week.

He takes me all the way to the other side of the camp, where another gate separates us from a cavern. But this one doesn’t have guards posted outside. The cavern beyond is also different; it’s even bigger than the last, with mostly even ground and no pools of water or arapedas. A steel structure fills much of the cavern, beneath the dripping stalactites high above. The building reminds me somewhat of Karum, but instead of one giant facility, it looks more like a series of smaller buildings connected by passageways. Smoke rises from a hole in the ceiling of one of the far rooms.

This is either a factory or the quarantine facility. Hector confirms that it’s the latter.

It looks different enough from the one on the Surface that I can almost convince myself it’s just a normal building. But not really, because I know what happens inside. I know there are rooms where twenty-year-olds are locked in, where they scratch and scream at the door on their hands and knees as poison gas seeps in through vents in the walls. The gas makes their vision blur and their muscles convulse and their stomachs expel vomit until their bodies can take no more and their lungs stop working.

Their lifeless bodies are thrown in a furnace and burnt. The guards don’t blink an eye.

I walk up to the gate and wrap my palms around the bars. They’re cold, but I don’t let go of them.

Picturing the kill chambers makes me think of my old friend Laila, who died in the Surface camp. I remember how she cried when the officials forced her into the hov-pod outside our shack. How she begged them to give her one more minute to say good-bye. How I couldn’t stop the guards from taking her away, and I hated myself for it.

I can feel the familiar panic coming on, the kind I feel when I wake from a nightmare, and what I felt in the jet with Skylar, before I shot Cady. When I lost all control of myself.
Not now, please.

To distract myself, I solve Yate’s Equation in my head, and another equation, and another, until my pulse is almost normal. Until I can think clearly again.

It’s not good to get lost in memories, especially the bad kind. I can’t save anyone that way. All I’ve done is hurt more people.

“You okay?” Hector asks, beside me. I can feel his eyes on me, but I don’t look at his face. I don’t want to see how much he could tell about how I was fighting to keep myself from going crazy.

“Yeah,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “You said Camp B is on the other side of this building, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, it is.”

Logan might be right on the other side; right now I would do anything to get to him. If only I could sneak through the facility, or walk around it, or climb over it.

My eyes skim the outside wall around the gate, searching for the lock-pad that opens it. There it is, on the wall to my left, about two feet away. I bet I could reach it if I stretched. I strain to see the pad on it. There are only six digits, but I don’t know how many are needed to form the passcode. If it’s a six-digit code, that’s 46,656 possible combinations. I’d need days to guess the right code. There’s no way a guard wouldn’t notice.

Above all, I can’t let any of them catch me doing anything suspicious. I need to keep a low profile. I shouldn’t even be standing next to this gate.

I let go of the bars and turn to walk away. But as I look back to make sure Hector’s following, the entrance to the quarantine facility opens. Two guards step outside with pulse rifles in hand, stomping up the path toward the gate where Hector and I are standing.

The guards might not be coming for me, but if they’re coming to open the gate, it means they’re here to take people away. I can’t handle seeing anyone dragged to quarantine again. I need to get out of here.

“We should go.” I reach for Hector’s hand to pull him away.

“Wait, it’s okay,” he says, laughing a little. “They’re just bringing people back from inspection.”

I pause. There are people coming out of the building behind the officials—a whole stream of people. Judging by their tattered clothing, they live here in the camp. Girls and boys. All nervous. A little girl rubs a spot on her shoulder where a small piece of gauze is stuck to her skin. It looks like she had a shot.

“Inspection,” I repeat.

“That’s what they call our health exams. We have them once a month. They give us nutrient pills to supplement our food, and sometimes medicine if we’re sick. I think it’ll be my turn soon, since today they took the nine- through eleven-year-olds. How old are you?”

I feel like something has drained out of me.

“I’m sixteen.” My voice sounds distant, disconnected from me.

“Oh, so you weren’t picked for Extraction?” Hector looks embarrassed for asking. “I’m sorry. I know how hard that must be. It’ll be my turn next year.”

I don’t say anything in reply; I’m too distracted.

A health examination might be nothing—it might be for giving people medicine, as Hector said. But the last time someone mentioned medicine to me, it was really the submission serum. These girls and boys don’t have strange, lifeless eyes like the people I saw in the Core who’d been turned into mindless, submissive citizens by their monthly injections. They
seem
normal. But that doesn’t mean a thing.

After all, it makes sense that administering the serum would be a big step in Charlie’s new plan, if he’s keeping us alive to do something for him. Subduing all of us makes controlling us easy. A simple shot, and we will follow his orders without a fight.

Hector said everyone up to age eleven has already gone through inspection. That’s at least half the people in this camp, and more will go through it in the next few days.

Half the people in this camp might already be mindless. I arrived too late to save them.

*   *   *

Sometime in the evening, the guards pass out our daily rations at both camp gates. We have to stand in a long line until it’s our turn to receive food. All they give us is a few sips of water and a wafer that tastes more like salty paper than like chunks of whatever meat is mixed in with the baked karo wheat. It makes me thirstier than I was to begin with.

None of the guards who passed out the food were undercover Alliance members, as far as I could tell. I’m still on edge, waiting for Mal to come back so I can find out if Logan and the others are all right. So he can tell me what the plan is.

“Does sunlight really burn people’s skin?” Hector asks.

He’s sitting beside me on the cave floor, licking wafer crumbs off his dirty fingers. He keeps asking me questions about the Surface, even though I’m guessing he already knows some of the answers from school.

“It can,” I say. “That’s why I’m covered in freckles. Most people’s skin isn’t as pale as mine though, at least in the camps. People like you don’t have it as bad. But your skin could still peel away if you got a really terrible burn.”

Hector’s eyes widen in horror. “All my skin?”

I laugh. “No, just some of it. A top layer. It’s not as horrible as it sounds. Not as horrible as moonshine burn, that’s for sure.”

“You’re from the Surface?” asks a little girl sitting near us. Her tan cheeks are dimpled and her messy hair is braided.

I nod, nibbling at the last bite of my wafer.

“What does the sky look like?” another girl asks. She’s closer to my age, with dark curls and an even darker complexion than Hector.

Another boy is looking at me too. A boy with greasy black hair and a cautious look in his eyes, like he doesn’t trust anyone. But his expression softens as I begin to tell the four of them about the sky. I tell them what the sun looks like, and the moon, and the stars. I describe them the way I saw them from the spaceship, beyond the acid shield: the giant moon floating in the sky, drenched in thick, lethal fog; the stars speckling the night with brilliant shades of color.

When I finish, I let my words hang in the air. All four of them are staring at me, mesmerized.

I have their attention, and it’s time I used it. I don’t know how much I can tell them about what happened a week ago—how Charlie nearly set off the bomb; how he temporarily took the shield down; how he killed Oliver and nearly the rest of us—without giving away that I’m a fugitive from the Core.

But even if they don’t believe me, even if they think I’m insane, I have to try. It’s why Beechy sent me here in the first place.

When I’m sure the nearest cam-bot has hovered on to the next room, I open my mouth and spit it out: “One of the reasons the officials took us off the Surface and brought us here is because the acid shield went down.”

Hector gapes at me in astonishment, as if I’ve told him half the planet disappeared. “What—why—how—?”

“Couldn’t they fix the shield?” the curly-haired girl asks. “It’s broken down before, hasn’t it?”

I think fast, trying to pull together an explanation that’s mostly truthful, that’ll serve its purpose. “They did fix the shield, but not quickly enough. And the shield had never broken down like this before. Usually what happens is the particles weaken and the shield starts cracking, so a rehabilitation team has to fly up there to replace the weak parts. This time, the entire shield cut out. One second it was there in the sky, shimmering like it always does, and the next second it was gone. Like someone flipped a switch in a control room and shut it off. None of us knew what was going on. The shield was down for a long time, long enough to let a lot of acid into the atmosphere, and then it came back on like someone had flipped another switch. Like they kept it down just long enough to let the moonshine in.”

“That’s insane,” the curly-haired girl says. “That must’ve caused a huge amount of environmental damage.”

Hector looks uncertain. “Sounds like it wasn’t exactly an accident.”

“No, I don’t think it was,” I say, checking to make sure the cam-bot hasn’t come back. Still safe. “I think the Developers did it on purpose.”

Hector and the two girls share a worried glance. But the greasy-haired boy doesn’t look entirely convinced. “Why would they do that?” he asks. “If they’d left you lot to die up there, I’d believe you. But they didn’t let you die. They brought you down here, where it’s safer. So why go to that much trouble?”

Because they took the shield down to make me and Beechy turn our ship around, so he could use the bomb and kill us all, and fly away to Marden.

I want to spill the whole truth so badly. But they have to trust me before they’ll believe me.

But they don’t need to know everything—all they need to know is that we’re not safe here, that Charlie is planning something bad and I’m pretty sure we’re at the center of it.