Authors: Jill Williamson
Levi walked over to Dallin’s desk and found the man talking to himself. “Yes, sir … I haven’t run the other one yet … I understand. Thank you, sir.” He turned to face Jordan. “Okay, Mr. Harvey. You’ll serve your first six months in maintenance for the Grand Lodge. The task director general says this will allow you to visit your lifer, uh, I mean, your … wife.”
Jordan gripped the end of the counter. “Can I see her now?”
“After you’re fully processed, we’ll set up an appointment.”
“An appointment to see my own wife?” Jordan yelled.
Levi elbowed him. “That’s good, Jordan. You’ll get to see Naomi.”
Jordan frowned, but reined in his temper and released the counter.
“You’ll be housed in the Grand Lodge,” Dallin said. “Your room number is 345. First thing tomorrow, report to the maintenance room in the Grand Lodge to meet your task director.”
“What about me?” Levi asked.
“If you’ll be patient …” Dallin fiddled with his glass computer screen in what seemed like slow motion. “Mr. Justin, your first run is street cleaning in the Highlands. Your task director is Dayle Mardon at Highlands Public Tasks. Go see him today, and he’ll get you a schedule. You’ll reside in the Larkspur Building in the Midlands. Has a great fight club called the Hunter. I spent a lot of time there as a graduate. They put little arrows in all their drinks.”
“When can I see Jemma and my mother?”
“Surrogates are not permitted visitors.”
“What? How come Jordan gets to see Naomi?”
“Mr. Harvey’s lifer is already pregnant, so she cannot complete surrogacy duty.”
“What does that matter? I want to see Jemma and my mother.”
Jordan elbowed him. “Naomi can tell me how they’re doing.”
Levi bit his tongue so hard he tasted blood. “Fine. But why does Jordan get to live in the Grand Lodge, and I have to live in the … whatever you called it?”
“The Larkspur.” Dallin shrugged. “I’m not a programmer, Mr. Justin. I just do as the computer says.”
“Of course you do,” Levi said.
Dallin handed Levi a sheet of paper with his task test results. “Use the SimTag in your hand to open doors and to make purchases, including meals.”
Levi held up his fist. “How many things can I buy with this?”
“You’re given four hundred credits to start. Nationals are paid every Friday. You won’t get more until credit day, so be smart about what you purchase.”
Levi and Jordan left City Hall and stood on the sidewalk in front of the building.
In the light of day, people filled the sidewalks, the majority wearing red or black and sucking on metal cigarettes. The streets were clean—no sign of trash here. And the cars …
“What kind of rides are those?” Jordan asked.
Levi watched the vehicles. Strange and sleek, shaped like bullets, the roofs and doors tinted glass, the carriages shiny. Taillights and headlights were rimmed in glowing tubes of red, blue, or green light, and fat tires spun like pinwheels. “They don’t make any sound.”
“Let’s get one and drive it,” Jordan said.
“Focus, Jordan. See that place?” Levi nodded toward the grassy expanse adjacent to the City Hall building. “Let’s meet there tomorrow, just after dark. I’m going to see if I can find my pack. I had some two-way radios in there. Wouldn’t mind scavenging up some of those electric guns either.”
A yellow car that had
Safe Lands Taxi
written on the door stopped at the curb in front of them. A video of a half-naked woman dancing over the words
Ginger Oak Gentleman’s Club
showed on the car’s windows, turning the side of the vehicle into a TV screen. A man got out of the taxi and yelled at Levi over the front hood of his car, “Hey, you need a ride, or what?”
“Suppose I do.” Levi slapped Jordan’s shoulder. “Say hi to Naomi for me. And don’t get into any fights.” Levi walked to the passenger’s door of the taxi. No door handle.
“The back, shell!” the driver yelled. “Get in the back!”
The back door had slid up onto the room, so Levi obeyed, though he felt ridiculous sitting in the back seat when the front was empty. Once the door shut, Levi marveled that he could see through the windows—no dancing woman on this side of the glass. The car was so silent that the fuzzy static of a radio caught his attention. He looked between the front seats at the dashboard, which appeared to be a giant computer.
“ID?” The driver tapped a black square on the console between the two front seats.
Levi stared at it a moment, then set the side of his hand on the pad. Something beeped, and Levi’s picture appeared in a little square on the windshield.
“Where to, Mr. Justin?” the driver asked.
“Uh …” Levi fumbled for his task test results and read from the sheet of paper. “I need to go see Dayle Mardon at the Department of Public Tasks.”
“You got it.”
Looking over his shoulder and out the back window, Levi watched Jordan and City Hall shrink away. He was glad Jordan would get to see Naomi, but the idea of his not seeing Jemma was unacceptable. And he certainly couldn’t allow her to become a baby machine.
“Dispatch to all cars. I’ve got a man at the Whetstone looking for a ride to the Midlands.”
“Taxi 248, I can get him.”
“Thanks, 248.”
“Is that a two-way radio?” Levi asked the driver.
“It’s the cab company’s private frequency,” the taxi driver said.
“You can talk to other drivers?”
“Yeah, but it’s not a Wyndo, shell. Dispatch can hear everything we say.”
Of course it wasn’t a window, but before Levi could clarify, the taxi stopped in front of a gray building. Inside, Levi found Dayle Mardon in a huge garage filled with a half dozen bullet trucks that read
Department of Public Tasks
on the doors. Dayle was a short man
with cropped black hair and muscular arms that were painted in black, red, and blue tattoos.
Dale gave a gruff speech about basic cleaning protocol and took Levi before a wall map of the Safe Lands. “I’m gonna assign you Mornin’ Glory Way, Sunflower Drive, and Buttercup Lane.” He pointed at a section of streets. “You got four days to clean it each week. Three days off, then back on for four and so on.”
“I clean streets?”
“Sure, shell. You get down on your hands and knees and scrub ’em real nice like.”
“With what?”
“Fortune, save me. Look kid, I was jokin’, right? You sweep leaves off the streets, pick up trash, mop up spills, paint over graffiti, blow leaves off the sidewalks in the fall, shovel snow off the sidewalks in the winter, knock icicles off street signs, stuff like that. Stay out of the buildings. I don’t care if some dandy pearl asks you to carry in her shoppin’ bags. You on duty, you stay out of the buildings. Got it?”
“Can I clean the streets by the Grand Lodge?”
“Rewl cleans them streets already. I need you on Mornin’ Glory, Sunflower, and Buttercup.” He walked to a metal cabinet filled with gray jumpsuits and work boots. “When you work, wear your uniform and boots. Check out two in your size and take the extra home, got it?”
More flimsy Safe Lands clothes. The boots were nice though. “Yeah, Mr. Task Director, I got it.”
“Don’t call me Mr., and don’t call me Task Director. It’s Dayle.”
“Got it, Dayle.”
“You can drive, right?”
“Sure.” Though Levi had only driven an actual car a couple times. He mostly drove his ATV.
“I’ll assign you a truck. Use it as your private vehicle if you want. Just call in when you arrive and when you’re ready to go home for the day. If I find out you aren’t fulfilling your task, I report you. And you don’t want to be reported. It’s a trust thing. Can I trust you?”
“Yeah …” Until he couldn’t anymore, of course.
“They always be sending me Xs. What you get yours for, kid?”
Levi stared at Dayle. The guy was crotchety, but there was something real in his eyes. “They’ve got my girl over in the harem.”
“What’s your problem, then? She’s having the time of her life up in that party house. Don’t you worry ‘bout her. And don’t you go snooping around the harem, neither. They don’t like uninvited guests.”
Great. Levi checked out two uniforms—gray jumpsuits with the letters
DPT
embroidered on the front pocket—and put one on. He loved the feel of a pair of sturdy boots on his feet and tossed the sissy slipper shoes.
Dayle took him to the parking lot and assigned him a shiny white bullet truck, then quickly showed him how to start it with the SimTag in his hand and how to tap an address into the dashboard computer and get directions to wherever he needed to go.
Levi left his clothes and second uniform on the passenger’s seat while Dayle showed him the supplies in the back of the truck—trash bags, cleaning sprays, brooms, a leaf blower. Then he showed him the dumpsters in the parking lot where Levi would dump his trash bags, and the supply closets in the garage where he’d get new supplies when he ran out.
The truck had a radio that allowed Levi to talk to what Dayle referred to as the dispatcher for the Highlands Public Tasks system, or talk to other Highlands DPT taskers. “You can tap channel two and talk to Midlands Public Tasks, though you got no business doing that unless I tell you to. Dispatch will let you know if there’s a problem in your area.”
“What kind of a problem?”
“I don’t know. Accidents, fire, flood, some rebel with a gun. It’s rare, but stuff happens.”
Once Levi found his pack, he’d have to be careful to find an unused channel.
He entered his assigned street names into the GPS and started the truck. It felt big and smooth beneath him. He steered it out the driveway, waited for a break in the line of moving vehicles, then pressed
the gas—make that electric—pedal. The truck shot out into the lane and over the yellow stripes in the center, headed straight for another vehicle. Levi wrenched the wheel to get back into his lane, narrowly missing the other car, which honked its horn.
His arms shook, and he gripped the steering wheel with both hands. He recalled his father explaining the freeways in Denver City and how there had been rules to driving in the Old Days. Levi should’ve listened better. Road rules made sense with so many cars around.
The words
Highland Harem
captured his attention. A beige building with a brown roof peeked up over a wall of thick bushes. Levi could barely see curls of barbed wire poking between the thick green foliage. A car horn jerked his attention back to the road. How’d he get in the other lane again? He steered back to the right. The harem was behind him now. He saw City Hall ahead on his right, then the Grand Lodge, and just past it, the Rehabilitation Center.
Well, this was all good to know. Jemma and the others weren’t far. He just needed to locate the boarding school Penelope had told him about. And find a way to keep in steady connection with Jordan. He suspected Otley had intentionally separated the two of them so they couldn’t plan an escape. As strange as Otley looked, the man clearly wasn’t a fool. Levi supposed he’d better do his job if he wanted to stay out of the RC long enough to make a plan.
The GPS told him to take Marcellina Road west. He obeyed and quickly located his route. It was a residential neighborhood, but instead of little homes like the Old ones near Mt. Crested Butte, these looked like metal shoeboxes standing on their ends. Some lawns were green and colorful like the field of wildflowers outside Glenrock. And some were … odd. One had pink grass and black flowers. Another was a checkerboard of grass and dirt.
He started on the east side of Morning Glory Way and drove his way down one side of the road until he reached a dead end, then circled around the other side until he came to Sunflower Drive. He picked up litter and swept leaves off storm drains, tempted to climb down one and escape. It wouldn’t do him any good to be free without the others, though.
He came across some graffiti on the sidewalk that looked like
FFF.
He found a can of gray paint in his truck and sprayed himself in the chest while trying to figure out how to open the thing.
People were everywhere, walking, driving, riding bicycles, but Levi could rarely guess where they were going by how they were dressed or what they carried with them. Weird that people dressed so similarly. Mostly red and black. Were they uniforms of some kind? He didn’t see any other DPT uniforms.
Sunflower Drive took him to Buttercup, which made him think of Jemma. Buttercup brought him back to Sunflower, which turned out to be a long road. He worked his way along one side, around the dead end, and all the way back until he arrived back on the opposite side of Morning Glory Way.
The sun was now low in the sky, and he figured that meant he was done for the day. Plus, he was aching for food. He picked up his “wet paint” sign and drove out onto Marcellina Lane. A few blocks down he pulled into a parking lot, drawn by the words
Marcellina Steakhouse.
The one-level log structure with a red slate roof was dwarfed by all the tall buildings around it. Inside, the aroma weakened his knees. Most of the red-clothed tables were occupied, and Levi stood feeling helpless until a woman, whose nametag said Londie, greeted Levi and sat him at a table by a window. Londie looked normal compared to most of the women he’d seen today, except that she had orange eyes. Levi tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help it.
“How do you make your eyes look like that?” he asked her.
“They’re contact lenses, dim.”
That didn’t bring Levi any closer to understanding.
“Did you order in advance?” Londie asked.
“How would I do that?”
“On your Wyndo.” Londie pulled a leather book out of her apron pocket and handed it to him. Inside it was a glass screen with pictures of different food options. “Our special today is a bacon-wrapped sirloin for ten credits.”
She’d won him at bacon. “Can I have that, please?”
“Sure thing. You want salad with that?”
“Okay.”
“What kind of dressing?”
“What’s good?”
“I like the ranch.”
“Uh … that sounds fine.” He closed the leather book and handed it back to her.
She reached out for it but hesitated. “And what can I get you to drink?”