This Is the Night (26 page)

A flat look passes over the ticket lady’s face. “This is a voucher from the school down the road. The kids use these to go home for a week, to say good-bye to their families before they ship out.”

“Right,” Alan says. He wills himself calm. News of the fire has not yet reached the ticket lady. “That’s us. We got early permission. I’d like to exchange this voucher for a ticket to Western City North.” On the edge of his vision, he sees people lining up behind them. The ticket lady is taking too long. They must get on a bus before word of the fire spreads to the town.

The ticket lady frowns again and holds the voucher up to the light as though she’s trying to see into a sealed letter. Her eyebrows draw close, hovering beneath her wrinkled forehead.
We’re doomed,
Alan thinks.

The ticket lady holds up a slender finger, then turns around, pulls out a book of timetables, flips through it, and takes out another book from the shelf behind her. “Much as I’d like to accommodate a boy in his last week before shipping out, you’ll still have to make up the difference,” she says.

“What?” Alan says. It is hard to hear through the thick glass, so he leans into the perforated grille carved into the window.

“Prices are by distance,” she says, not speaking any louder or closer to the opening. “This voucher you have, well, you’re talking about a few hundred distance-units total. The trip you want? That’s a whole other type of ticket. More distance-units. Much farther. Distance equals Currencies.”

“How much?” Alan asks.

The woman frowns again and quotes them an astonishingly high number. “Not including,” she says, a gleeful shudder passing through her, “the repaving surcharge.”

“The what?”

“We’ve got to fix these roads somehow. Plus a security fee.”

“Security fee?”

“What with all the attacks on buses, we have to manually check every bag.”

People in line are shuffling and starting to grumble. Alan and Gad step aside.

The floor of the bus depot is dirty; neither of them want to sit in the muck, so Alan takes off his pack and they lean against the wall. His pack is light; there was little time to grab the essentials. Inside is an extra pair of socks, the zippered pouch of matches, the stolen sack of apples, all of the HIM pamphlets, and his folding steel-bladed hunting knife. Not wanting to be caught with illegal literature, he stuffs the HIM pamphlets down his pants.

“A question for you,” Gad says. Alan recognizes that Gad won’t quite look at him. “How far have you thought this plan through?”

“Well,” Alan begins to answer.

“Because we could still go back,” Gad says. “Deny the fire had anything to do with us, get our assignments, and everything goes back to normal.”

“Are you crazy? Normal is over.” Alan leans forward. “Now how the hell are we going to get on this bus?” Alan hopes that his tone is strong, charismatic even, but beneath his clothes his knees shake and his fingers wiggle. At any moment some smirking priest could show up, his long black robe now cleaned and victorious, wrap a thick hand around their wrists, and drag them away. Just as Gad is about respond, a Majority Group man approaches them. The man’s tongue drags at the corner of his mouth, and sweat gathers at the bridge of his nose and pools in the basins of his ears. A mercenary, dispatched by the school to capture them?

Alan stands up straight to take the Majority Grouper’s artificial height away.

“I couldn’t help but overhear that you guys are in a fix,” the man says. An amazing amount of perspiration drips from his forehead to the floor. Though he’s never been anywhere else, Alan knows that the sun spins faster, whiter, hotter, in this part of the Homeland. In some ways, the suffering man in front of him is a treat. Alan had never heard any of those complaints personally; he’d only read about them in books. Now, in front of him, as promised: a man who clearly cannot take the heat.

“Yeah, you could call it a fix,” says Gad. Alan pops an elbow into Gad’s ribs.

“You have anything worth trading?” the man says, wiping his forehead.

“Not really,” Gad says. “You see, there was this fire at our school and—”

Alan elbows him again, this time harder. Clearly, Alan thinks, Gad is less suspicious of strange Majority Groupers walking up and offering helpful information than he is.

And then it comes to him. “Apples!” Alan nearly shouts. “We have fresh apples.”

Several heads of waiting passengers turn their way.

“Well there you go!” The gap between the man’s two front teeth is wide enough that he can surely get a unique and deep whistle out of them. “If they truly are fresh, just name your price.”

After a few brief negotiations, they make the trade.

“Enjoy Western City North, my friends.” His smile is like a dog’s
—
big and droopy. “That place is wild.”

It’s been twenty-two hours since the bus left Southwest Sector. Shouldn’t take this long, a lady with twins and a toddler turns to tell them. All these damn stops, she mutters.

In the seat next to him, Gad seizes large clumps of his own hair while tapping his foot against the floor.

“Get it together,” Alan hisses. “You already look guilty of something.”

A chain of drunken Homeland sailors in khaki uniforms files onto the bus in Village 82. They sing songs Alan doesn’t know, and the babies on the bus cry even harder.

“You!” A drunken sailor points at Alan. “Soon you’ll know these songs.”

“Maybe,” another sailor slurs. “But maybe not. Some of these kids still slip through.”

“Not him.” Talking about Alan as if he isn’t there. “Look at him. Homeland Indigenous. They all serve, every last one of them.”

In Western Town R, Alan and Gad exit the bus to wait for their transfer, the final leg of the journey before Western City North. People buzz around, angry; the lounge of the small depot is packed, the articulated movement of a stumble ten people away sends waves through the rest of the crowd moments later. The air is heavy, and Alan finds it harder to breathe than he’d like. Gad still has questions for him, sure, but they succumb, momentarily at least, to the need for elbow room. Too many people in one small space. Alan grabs the arm of a thin woman next to him and asks her to explain the unfolding crowds surrounding them.

“Are you single?” she asks.

She must be twice his age, older than his mother. “I ship out tomorrow,” he says. He counts on the fact that she is looking for more than one night’s companionship. By her frown, he can see he is right.

Almost three feet of snow over Mountain Range J29, she sighs. Everything is backed up. No buses in, and no buses out.

A smile slides across Alan’s face. By now the School has surely sent forth some hired lackey who likes to treat kids with a strong hand and is willing to track them down for just a few Currencies and the fun of beating on some Homeland Indigenous kids. And though that someone is coming, the two of them have a head start. The snow in some distant place has given them time.

“What about you?” the old woman says to Gad. “You got yourself a lady?”

The snack bar has oranges, but they’re six times the cost of a small loaf of bread. Gad and Alan spend the last of their Currencies and split the bread in two. Hours pass. A weary voice comes over the loudspeaker:
There are no buses in the depot,
the voice says.
Please do not approach the window; the buses will come when the roads open
. A pause, followed by one last beleaguered crackle:
We have no idea when the roads will open.

The crowd buzzes, one step away from a stampede. Misery and anger are packed in tight, a mental unity so strong that Alan thinks they all might rush the ticket window, light a fire, rip some chairs from their bolts, no planning necessary.
We all hate each other,
Alan realizes,
but we all want to leave this place.
At this point, a power outage would be catastrophic, unbearable; they need their light. More people want to sit than there are seats. A young man with a nasty cut on his face has a portable radio. At first, the only sounds it throws out are tinny squeals and muffled buzzes. Finally he adjusts the dial, and a voice comes through. The man whose radio it is smiles and starts to speak, but people tell him to shut up and crank the volume. A blizzard in some distant place finally moves the way it should, and people start to cheer. Moments later, a faraway summit is deemed passable, and the crowd erupts again. But in the depot, no announcements are made; the loudspeaker remains silent. A few people approach the window anyway. There are no buses anywhere. The only information they return with is that no one else should approach the window.

Gad goes to wait in line for the bathroom, tells Alan he’ll be back.

“Hey!”

Alan looks up and sees a man around his age with close-cropped military hair. The man is tall, and the upper half of his face is blotched and sticky looking.

“Hey, yourself,” says Alan, hoping he has struck the right tone of casual. The man’s eyes look wet and desperate.

“You need ID?”

Alan says nothing. People around them jostle and elbow for more space.

“ID. Papers, man.” He is whispering.

“I don’t know,” Alan says, whispering back.
If I do need ID
, Alan thinks,
I should be the kind of person who knows I need it.

“Either way, seventy Currencies and I’ll get you good papers in an hour. You got time. No one here is going anywhere.”

“I don’t have seventy Currencies.”

“Sixty.”

“I don’t have that, either.”

“C’mon, kid. Fifty-five. That’s my lowest. What are you, Homeland Indigenous?”

“I have eleven Currencies. And yes.”

“Eleven Currencies? That’s all you got? Well, it will be a good thing when the Registry gets you. At least you’ll get some clean clothes and a hot meal.” He shakes his head, a small smile on his lips. “Homeland Indigenous, eh? Why not become something else with one of my papers. Minority Group C, maybe. There are no quotas for Cs.”

“What are you, crazy? I can’t pass for C.”

“Not my problem,” the man shrugs.

“How do you know about the quotas?”

“You ever seen a Homeland Indigenous who is eligible
not
serve? I don’t know anything about any quotas, I’ve just been paying attention.” The man shrugs again. “So look, let’s talk Currencies. I’m open to negotiations, bartering, that sort of thing. You gotten your greetings yet?”

“My greetings?” Alan pauses. And then, in between the silence, a new voice rushes in and hooks his arm, this new voice answering the question that is meant for him.

“Nope. Haven’t gotten those greetings yet, right, honey?”

Artlessly, he looks at the woman who has grabbed him, who is pulling him away from the man with the papers. He opens his mouth to ask who she is.

“Just shut up for a second, will you?” she hisses. Her eyes are wide and knowing, and he estimates that—in a good way—these knowing eyes occupy far more real estate on her face than that of the average woman. She pulls him into an unoccupied corner of the station. “That guy is setting you up. He’s a Reggie for sure.”

“A Reggie?”

“Undercover agent for the Registry. You’ve never heard that term? Where are you
from
?”