Greyson
I’m hefting a bundle of red and yellow cables for the others to duck under when I hear it, a rasp-scrape of metal on concrete that runs chill-shivers down my spine and dries my throat out real quick, like I’ve swallowed a cupful of sand. That’s the only warning I get before a creature with one giant glowing eye lurches from the gloom. Doesn’t stop my embarrassing high-pitched squeak. Thankfully my manliness is preserved by the synchronised screams of Bryn and Lenora. There’s a flurry of limbs, someone grabs onto my jacket and yanks, Zipper’s hissing in my right ear and I stagger backwards, my heels scuffing against the smooth edges of pipes and tangling in wires.
“Wait!” The Snaith cries out and we freeze. It’s a he. His voice’s hoarse and loud and human-like.
Ma used to tell me stories about the Snaith, one of many monsters she paraded out to make sure I ate my carb cubes and got home before lights out. In my mind I envisioned something more shadow than flesh, teeth sharp as broken glass and reeking like sulphur brimstone and damp rot. This Snaith’s a bit shorter than me, wearing a cloak that may’ve been black in a previous life, but now’s a powdered dust-grey. It flaps opens to reveal a full modal suit. He clear has the prerequisite limbs of any standard humanoid. The monstrous glowing scarlet eye is a torch strapped to the man’s modes and covered in red cellophane.
“It’s me.” The man rips off his modes, revealing a pale face with sharp-cut cheekbones and eyes that look real black. When he blinks down the barrel of my own light, they’re a bright bottle green. Bryn looks over my shoulder, her breath puffing against my cheek, warm and still a bit fast from her fright.
“Bryn, it’s me. Jonas. I know you don’t remember, but it’s really me.”
My head snaps between the two of them so fiercely I hear an audible crack. Bryn’s brother. Why in sky’s he lurking about inside the walls like some freaky cannibalistic devourer of naughty children?
“Jonas? I’ve been looking for you!” Bryn accuses. I can sense her uncertainty across our open link and I offer her a gentle nudge. She shuffles forward, smiling nervous-like, but hopeful too. Jonas rushes forward, wrapping his arms around Bryn with enough force to lift her off her feet and squeezes a laugh-wheeze out of her. He inhales her in before he settles her back down, hands still grasping her shoulders like he can’t bear to let her go. I expect Bryn to shrug him off like she does everyone, but she seems frozen by a mix of nerves and delight.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on things. Only thing I can do, really, since my Cyberinth chip is deactivated. I’m sorry I left you in the lurch like that, but look at you. Is that a sword?” His eyes light up as his grin stretches from ear to ear. “You’ve managed just fine without me.”
“So you know about Ashville and the Evictions?” Bryn asks, her words real soft-like. I can sense her emotions, a twisting mess of guilt and envy, relief and regret, and a freaking city sized amount of confusion. “Undercamp? What my mothers, our mothers, traded hundreds of lives for?”
Jonas doesn’t look like he expected that. Startled, his mouth drops open as if someone’s smacked him in the head with a fire hydrant. Nothing comes out and he snaps it shut with a grimace. When Bryn shrugs his hands off, he lets her.
“Oh, Bryn,” murmurs Lenora. I want to reach out and grab Bryn’s hand. Offer her some comfort cos her lips tremble and her breath catches.
“Come on, I’ll take you and your friends somewhere safe and I’ll answer your questions,” Jonas says. “You all deserve that much, at least.”
As we walk, Jonas fills the quiet space by saying how Bones offered to have him secreted away to the Undercamp. He hadn’t wanted to leave Bryn on her own (when in all reality he’s done just that) and, to avoid the Mediators, he’s been hiding out in the walls, and did we know we can reach anywhere in the station through these tunnels? It’s true, he insists, and all I can think is we’re running out of time and this guy sure likes the sound of his own voice.
He then reminisces about Activation Night and how he took Bryn to see the sunset through some of these very passageways, enthusiastic as he swings his hands about to illustrate his tale, the light splashing across the wall like bloody ripples. Bryn looks sick, she’s weaving on her feet, and as the passageway widens I get a bit closer, a step behind. Close enough to grip her elbow and keep her steady.
I don’t remember him being there, she says to me. I remember the sunset, the sun like a juicy orange being eaten by the earth, but I can’t remember how I got there. It’s all a blur, like a dream.
He could share the experience.
It’s not the same. And it truly isn’t, but what else can I say?
“Here we are. Mind your heads,” Jonas warns, and we squeeze through a doorway, one by one, into a room no larger than my old kitchen, its ceiling so low I’ve got to duck real uncomfortable-like. The space’s occupied by a camp bed, a tiny icebox and a portable stove. A cooking pot rests on top, dark from use, and beside it is a bag full of food pods labeled SpagBol and ButtChick. The walls are plastered with notes, pictures, maps and articles. The air-con makes them flutter lightly, as if he’s pinned a few dozen butterflies to the metal surface.
“Sit, please,” Jonas points towards the bed and we do, Bryn in the middle while I’m closest to the door, my impatience manifesting in the bop-bop-bop of my right knee. Jonas unclips his cloak and hangs it off a nail driven into the metal doorframe before settling on the floor, his knees bent up around his chin. If he offers tea, I’ll punch him in the throat, so help me.
“Right, first, who’re your friends, Bryn?” Jonas asks, the picture of relaxed congeniality, but is he wondering about her other so-called friends – Teo and Chevette, and that long-haired ponce Harpsichord or Harpy, something starting with H?
“Oh, umm, this is Lenora Rey,” Bryn waves towards the pale girl beside her and Jonas grins.
“Ah, yes, you haven’t been quiet the entire time you’ve been in here. All those little messages you’re sending out with the precision of high velocity bullets. Your rank’s rocketed to number one in the shortest space of time ever, stripping that slime ball from his number one position for the first time in five years!”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“You hate Torin Hunt, too?” Lenora asks.
“Not much to love, I’m afraid,” he snorts. “But that’s beside the point. Chaim Bones tried to outwit them by being a nobody, and that got him a long plummet into the belly of the space station, but you, my girl, you’ve done the exact opposite! All one hundred and fifty-thousand of us know your name, who you are, and while not everyone believes you’re about to be Evicted, the fact they’re thinking about you means you can’t be! It’s brilliant!”
“Right,” she says. “It’s like I planned for my father to Evict me all along.”
Jonas ignores her comment, swinging his unnerving eyes towards me.
“And you are?”
“Greyson Ward.”
“Makes sense. Son of Professor Thaddeus Ward. Good to meet you too.” Before I can even begin to lay into him for wasting our time, for abandoning Bryn, for being a patronising prick, the man claps his hands the exact same way Bryn does. The similarity of it startles me so much he’s moved on before I can say anything. “You must have questions!”
“Well,” Bryn jumps in. “How’d you know something was wrong in the first place?”
“I got suspicious when I became Active and began to make myself a name as an Experiencer. I was sorting through my childhood memories in search of inspiration.”
“So you noticed the differences in the neighbourhood, too!” Bryn blurts.
“Yeah. Took me a while to link the dots together and I had help, too. There’ve been others who’ve discovered what the Guardian was doing and they left clues.”
“Others?”
“I don’t think many knew the full extent of what’s going on, just pieces. I figured out your dad,” he nods at me, “our Mom and, if you’re the same Rey I’m thinking of, your father, too, Lenora, played an important role in Ashville’s elimination.”
“They knew each other?” Lenora asks and she sits real abrupt-like, as if her knees have no strength no more. “Their names wouldn’t happen to be Hannah, Thad or Rhia, right?”
“Yeah. They were year-mates. Could almost be considered friends. The Guardian recruited Professor Ward to lead the technical division, our Mom to be the surveyor, and Mediator Rey was security and data manipulation. I don’t know what your fathers had to gain,” Jonas says to Lenora and me, and I bristle. My pa had nothing to gain, just everything to lose. “But six hundred and eighty-seven people were forcibly removed from their homes to make space in a station that should’ve landed decades ago.”
“Am I …” Bryn swallows, and tries again, her eyes never leaving his face. “Am I our parents’ reward?”
Jonas hesitates before answering. “Mom worked on the initial survey before you were commissioned and your existence ensured her silence and compliance. During the years leading up to the Eviction, she began to have doubts, but there was no way she’d risk you. I don’t think Mum knew at all in the beginning. No idea how their memories have been adjusted due to my Eviction. Maybe they think their reward was jumping the baby queue instead of having a second child.”
“So it’s my fault.”
“No!” I twist to face her, my knees banging against hers. “You’re in no way to blame.” She doesn’t look like she believes me. “It’s like I’m not to blame for my pa’s actions, either. It isn’t any of our glitching fault.”
“Bryn,” Jonas says. “I’ve never regretted having you as my sister.”
“I wish I could remember being a sister,” Bryn admits.
“But you can. I haven’t been hanging around in the dark for nothing. Experiences are never truly deleted, and as soon as I was Evicted I found out where they store the discarded memories. Mediator Rey keeps them in his office.”
“I saw them! Father has a drawer of them, thousands of hard drives like grains of rice,” Lenora says.
“I’m afraid we’ve bigger problems, though,” Jonas says, all reluctant-like. “I think the Guardian’s closing off another neighbourhood to be Evicted right now.”
The bed squeaks as we all stiffen like puppets with yanked strings.
It’s true, Grey, Zipper admits privately. Those readings you requested on Activation Night, when compared to previous records, it’s obvious it’s not the first time they’ve occurred.
Let me guess, fourteen years ago?
“The target?” I ask.
“Level Eight, a neighbourhood called Preston.”
The room contracts, the walls rush inwards, and my heart stop-stutters. The ringing in my good ear drowns out Bryn’s voice and it isn’t until Zipper nips the back of my neck that the world’s dragged into focus.
“That’s his neighbourhood,” Bryn says to Lenora and Jonas. “They call it Depreston, but that’s his home. Hey,” she murmurs to me. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” I utter. “Yeah, okay. Well, glitch.” I rub my mouth and swallow hard.
“Greyson?” Bryn prompts.
“Zipper, project the map of the station Hugo sent you.” She pokes her metal head out and mewls.
“Glitch, where did that come from?” Jonas snap-jerks back, then leans forward in fascination. “It’s stunning!”
“This is Zipper. Zip, the map?” I say.
Of course.
Her eye-bulbs blink and a shimmering orange image appears in front of her, a detailed representation of the space station with the blades spinning slow around it like the shell of a nut.
“How’s the station meant to land?” Bryn say. “It looks more like a missile from one of the Cyberinth battle simulations than a station.”
“What I figure is there’re eight levels for a reason,” Jonas says.
“Technically there are eighteen,” I say, but Jonas isn’t listening, too busy with his own self-importance.
“Can your pet show us a cross section of Level Five?” Jonas asks.
Pet? Zipper hisses, but she does what he asks, L5 slotting out and rotating about so we see the highlighted sections.
“It’s like half an orange.” Bryn points to the segments. “They’re all compartmentalised.”
“That’s how we’re meant to return to Earth,” says Jonas. “Each section is jettisoned separately.”
“Course!” My brain crunches all the pieces together. “The sections beneath Undercamp!”
Jonas and Lenora look at me blankly, but Bryn catches on.
“There’re more levels under our eight – nine actually if you include the hidden level on top. They’re like the levels up here,” she explains. “A mirror image, except instead of homes, there’re full of supplies! All those useless things Rayburn talked about, the boats with canvas sails and the machines with wheels taller than me.”
“Exactly! Get us the main map, Zip?” The projection changes again. I point to the sections beneath Undercamp, the levels Rayburn’s people had explored, full of supplies and equipment designed for the sole purpose of repopulating the earth. “These sections here are meant to pair up with a quadrant. Each section, no matter where it glitching ends up’ll be self-sustainable.”
“They become their own city,” Lenora says with awe. “But why are we still up here?”
“I was Evicted before I could find out,” Jonas scowls.
“Maybe your dad’s invention will tell us?” Bryn says, and I half-shrug.
“Hopefully. I really don’t want to make things worse.” And I mean it. What if Old Earth’s still a toxic wasteland? “And what about Undercamp?”
“I’ve left Rayburn a message, but who knows when he’ll check it,” Bryn says.
“I can’t lose my Ma again,” I say.
Jonas heaves a deep puff. “Endless buckets of sunshine and optimism, you are.”
“Got a better idea?” I growl.
“You’re just going to have to wait for them to get in contact with you. In the meantime, we’ve work to do.” He doesn’t voice what we’re all thinking. It’s up to us to correct the sins of our parents, a chance to do things the right way.
“Well, Preston’s our first priority.” Bryn tugs on a braid, the lines around her lips tight.
“And then we’re going to land a station,” I say. I turn to the starlet and she’s looking washed out, but determined too. “Lenora, you and Jonas are going to evacuate Preston.” I hate it isn’t me doing the saving.
“Actually, I’ve somewhere else I need to be.” Jonas is looking at Bryn and, glitch, I wish this man would give me a fair fine reason to deck him.
“What’s more important than saving a neighbourhood from glitching Eviction?” I growl.
“Bryn’s memories.” It’s the only thing he could’ve said that I agree with. Bryn deserves to be someone’s priority.
“Fine, Lenora?”
“I’ll get it done,” she says with a nod.
“Head to the markets. It’s busiest there and the quickest form of communication is gossip,” Jonas suggests. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t have access to the system on Level Eight, so you’re going to have to pass the word by old-fashioned mouth.”
“Right.” I stand, avoiding the roof with a last minute duck. “Let’s get this sorted.”
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