The Sun Dwellers (22 page)

“We deserved to know before we went on this mission.”

“I know,” he says. “The longer I waited the harder it got. It’s the best-kept secret in the Tri-Realms. It’s why my father tried to capture or kill me back in the Moon Realm—when we first met. I think he knew I would tell someone eventually.”

“This is ridiculous,” I spout, my anger growing.

“Would it have changed anything?” Tristan says, his voice rising. “If I told you just before the mission, or the moment we met, or anytime along the way. Would it have changed your mind about coming, or changed the Resistance strategy, or had any impact at all?” His own hands are fisted now, too, his jaw a tight line.

I fill my lungs once, twice, three times. Try to get control of my emotions. Think logically. If he had told us there were people on the surface of the earth before we left on the mission, how would I have reacted? My shoulders slump.

“No,” I say. “It would have just fueled our desire to overthrow your father. Knowing he’s kept such a truth from the very people he’s meant to be leading…”

“Unforgivable,” Tawni finishes for me.

“That was my reaction when he told me,” Roc says. “It took him a few weeks to tell me, too. Give him a break, this is a big deal. It’s not something you tell someone in normal conversation. Can you all just back off and let him tell the rest of the story? It’s important.”

Tristan’s eyes flit to Roc’s, soften somewhat, and then return to mine, seeking approval. “Okay. I’m sorry,” I say, not sure if I mean it yet.

“Are you guys really buying this?” Trevor says.

“Shut it,” I say, warning him off with my eyes.

“Thanks,” Tristan says. “And I’m sorry for not telling you sooner. We literally walked outside onto the surface of the earth,” he starts again, trying to hammer home the crazy truth that I’m still trying to come to terms with. “Even with the sunglasses I couldn’t see for ten minutes, forced to cover my eyes with my hands, letting through a little more light minute by minute. My mother and Killen were the same, but my father adjusted quickly, because it wasn’t his first time above.”

My heart leaps suddenly as a thought hits me. “Were there clouds?” I ask, my voice a little too squeaky for my liking.

Tristan smiles for the first time in a while. “You should have seen it. The sky was dark red, spotted with bits of grainy clouds, which moved across the heavens faster than you would believe. The sun was nothing like our artificial suns. Compared to it, they are but a single hair on a person’s head, whereas it is the entire head of hair. Bright enough to light a thousand earths, it turned my skin red in only fifteen minutes.”

“It burned you?” Tawni asks.

“Yes, my gosh, how it burned. My skin ached for days and then became paper thin and peeled off as if I was a snake shedding my skin. There were trees and plants everywhere, but only in the Bubble.”

“The Bubble?” I say, curiosity getting the better of me.

“Sorry,” Tristan says. “I’m not explaining things right. I mean, there’s just so much to tell it’s hard to decide where to begin.”

“Tell them about the city,” Roc prompts.

“There’s a city?” I ask, my brain buzzing with too many questions to ask them all.

“Yes. That’s where we were. The only city left on Earth, at least as far as anyone knows. It’s called the
New City
, although informally people just call it the Bubble, because there’s a huge glass dome surrounding it, which looks like you could pop it by sticking a sword in the side. In reality though, it’s three feet thick and nearly unbreakable.”

“Who built it?” Tawni asks.

“Aha. Good question,” Tristan says, looking more and more comfortable with the subject now that we’re asking questions and not giving him a hard time about not telling us sooner. “Everything I’m about to tell you my father told us, so I’m assuming it’s true as he had no reason to lie or volunteer the information. Two hundred years ago, well before my father was born, my great-grandfather had his engineers build unmanned probes to send to the earth’s surface. When they returned, the rock and air samples they brought back were very encouraging. After weeks of analysis, fact checking, and experimentation, the scientists determined there was a greater than fifty percent likelihood that Earth could be safely inhabited once more.”

“But you just said it’s not exactly safe on the earth’s surface,” Tawni says, her eyebrows raised.

“It’s not
exactly
, but I’ll get to that. My great-grandfather had a grand vision of building what he called the
New City
, the first city on earth since Year Zero. But he wasn’t about to go up there, not without some pretty strong evidence that it was safe. Nor was he willing to put sun dwellers in danger. So he personally recruited a collection of moon and star dwellers to be the guinea pigs.”

Trevor grunts. “Look, man, I’m trying to believe this—I really am—but do you really think your grandfather—”

“
Great
-grandfather.”

“Whatever. Do you really think he could’ve kept it quiet? Once he started involving people from all the Realms, surely someone would have gotten the word out.”

“I asked my father the same thing. Keeping it hidden all these years is what he was most proud of. It was easy, really. When the moon and star dwellers were recruited, they simply acted like they’d won some kind of a lottery, a chance to move to the Sun Realm, live the high life. But really, they sent them to the earth’s surface. No one was any wiser.”

“What happened to them?” I ask. Everyone’s so worried about all the damn details, but what matters—what really matters—is what’s happened to all these so-called recruits.

“They died,” Tristan says, looking down.

“All of them?” Tawni asks.

“Yes.” Tristan says the word into his lap, slightly muffled.

“That’s horrible,” Tawni says.

We all agree, which is why no one speaks for a few minutes. I stare at Tristan, who refuses to look at me. Tawni plays with her fingers. Roc taps a toe. Trevor, well, even he’s quiet, although I can tell the silence is getting to him, because he keeps sighing and looking around at everyone, as if he wishes someone would speak but doesn’t want to be the one.

“How did they die?” I ask finally. Now I’m interested in the gruesome details for some reason.

“Exposure to semi-toxic air,” Tristan says, raising his head slowly to meet my eyes.

“
Semi
-toxic?” Trevor says, almost bursting to join the conversation. “If they all died it sounds fully toxic to me.”

“Only to us,” Tristan explains. “They weren’t used to the air above.”

“But it’s the same air we breathe down here,” I argue. “We get it from the earth’s surface.”

“Yeah, but ours is highly filtered, going through multiple air locks where potentially harmful dust and bacteria are removed from the air. Our lungs aren’t used to the real air up there. Maybe we never will be. The initial earth dwellers only lasted a little over a month before contracting various types of irreversible cancers.”

“Let me guess, they got more moon and star dwellers for round two,” I say, feeling slightly ill.

“Yes. This time they equipped them with heavy-duty protective clothing, an earlier generation of the orange hazmat suits the guys were wearing when we first arrived on the surface. Even wearing the suits around the clock, they only lasted six months before their bodies gave out. But they had made a significant start on building a city—a city that was uninhabitable, at least if you wanted to live to see your next birthday. My great-grandfather was getting old at that point, so he passed the torch to my father’s father, who realized that even if he continued to use dwellers from the Lower Realms to build the city, replacing them as they died, he would still be stuck with a city that no one could live in.”

The story is coming together, feeling more and more real with each added detail. “So he built the Bubble?” I ask.

“Not him, of course, but yes, more ‘recruits’ built it, an airtight globe that protects the New City both from the dangerous rays of the sun and the noxious air on the earth’s surface. It filters and recycles the air using a system very similar to what we have in the Tri-Realms. A hundred thousand people now live in the
New City
,” Tristan says.

A big question remains. The biggest, really. “Why didn’t your grandfather tell the rest of the Tri-Realms once the city was livable?” I ask.

Deep lines appear in Tristan’s creased forehead. “Because he’s a Nailin,” he says. “Look, he and my father are cut from the same marble block. They’re cold, hard-hearted, and think they’re better than everyone else. My grandfather had a good thing going. President of the Tri-Realms, a good life, everything he ever wanted. A drastic change like Earth being inhabitable again? That might have destroyed everything he worked so hard to build. The hundred thousand people up there aren’t allowed to come back down, which is fine by most of them. Ninety percent of the earth dwellers used to be sun dwellers, and were selected over time to populate the surface of the earth.”

“And the other ten percent?” Tawni asks.

“Moon and star dwellers. Up there only to do the jobs that the sun dwellers don’t want to do, like garbage disposal, cleaning, cooking, all the same stuff they do in the Sun Realm.”

“Slave labor,” I say. The messed-up world we live in has just become even more messed up.

“Pretty much,” Tristan says.

“And your father wanted to maintain the status quo, too?” I ask, already knowing he’ll answer in the affirmative.

Tristan nods. “He knows telling the people will just encourage them to rebel. They’ll demand to go above, to see what they’ve been deprived of their entire lives.”

“Then we have to tell them,” I say firmly, clasping my hands together, daring him to contradict me.

“I agree,” Tristan says.

Roc, who’s been relatively quiet for a while, says, “Tell them about your mom, Tristan.”

Tristan’s eyes immediately go glassy. He closes his eyes, opens them when he starts speaking. “My father took us on a tour through the
New City
, told us the whole story along the way, bit by unbelievable bit. He didn’t hold anything back, probably because he didn’t realize how negatively my mom and I would take it. I’m not making excuses for Killen, but he was younger, more in awe of what my father had accomplished than anything else.

“Well, my mother just took it all in, not visibly reacting, just listening to every word, capturing every sight with her eyes. I took my cues from her, staying mostly silent and trying not to miss anything. When the tour finished, and it was time to go back into the pod and down to the Sun Realm, my mother refused. She said she wasn’t done taking mental notes so she could accurately share what she’d seen with the world.”

“She was a strong woman,” I say, immediately thinking of the risks and sacrifices my own mother has made.

“She was. But not strong enough. My father was livid. What he did to her on the way up in the pod was nothing to what he did now. He punched her in the face, breaking her nose and blackening her eye. When she fell to her knees, he kicked her in the ribs repeatedly, until she collapsed from pain and exhaustion. I tried to stop it, but he was stronger than ten men, such was the intensity of his rage, and he threw me across the room like a jewelry box. I broke my wrist and couldn’t walk for a week. My mom couldn’t get out of bed for a month.”

“He’s the Devil,” Tawni says, her voice a whisper, almost reverent.

“Not far from it,” Tristan says, his eyes dark and brooding. So much of the pain he’s hidden from me is in this story, it takes me by surprise. Because I’m a moon dweller and he’s a sun dweller, I’ve taken for granted that my life is harder than his, that, if anything, he owes me. In reality, however, neither of us owes each other anything. We’ve both had it bad. We’ve both felt pain and loss. We’ve both lived in a world where nothing felt right.

But something’s still missing.

“What else about your mother?” I ask, knowing this story is far from over.

Before I’m half-finished with the question, Tristan’s nostrils are flaring as he sucks in a breath. “She recovered, of course, eventually. When she did, she came to me. I’ll never forget what she said. ‘Tristan, your father is a bad man,’ she said. ‘We need to tell everyone about what he showed us. We’re in this together—you and me. You understand?’ I did understand and I told her. I promised her I would do whatever I could to tell the world the truth. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Wait for what feels like the right time.’

“Then she got all misty-eyed, hugged me, and said, ‘I might not always be around, Tristan, but know I’m always with you, in here.’ She patted my chest, a tear dripping from her chin. ‘I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to protect you the way I should have.’ I was crying, too, and I didn’t know why at the time. I mean, yeah, I loved my mom, but it’s not like she was going anywhere. I didn’t realize until she disappeared three days later that she was saying goodbye.” There’s moisture on Tristan’s face but he either doesn’t notice or isn’t bothered by it. My heart wells up for him, a dull ache in my chest that doesn’t sufficiently encompass the emotion of losing a mother. I give him my hand again, which I’ve so selfishly denied him as he’s told the hardest story he’s ever had to tell. When he grasps my fingers I shiver, because his hand is as cold as ice, almost blue.