Office of Mercy (9781101606100) (22 page)

Applause swelled from the crowd, and several speeches followed, but Natasha did not hear a word. She grabbed her own wrist at the place where, days ago, Jeffrey had touched her last. There was an anger growing within her, anger and resentment and a bitterness that she could not control. She knew something. She knew what she had never allowed herself to know. Her breaths came quick and shallow, and when she closed her eyes, she saw fire.

•   •   •

The smell of smoke wafted through the trees, rich and unmistakable. But it was wrong; it was not the comforting sensation it should have been, not the harbinger of warmth for the long night or a feast of meat about to fill their bellies. Instead the smoke was ominous, a sign of a danger too great and too big and too hot to control. The smell pervaded all. It saturated leaves and clothing and wrapped between the moving bodies. This smoke was a bad smoke; the smoke of a bad fire that would consume the trees and rabbits and deer and climb the hills and stop only when it hit the ocean.

Natasha cowered, clutching tightly around the neck of the man who carried her. She was small; gravity hardly pulled on her, and her sweaty, clumsy little fingers could not keep their hold on one another.

In a flicker of thought, Natasha knew it was really quite odd, her smallness. Only four or five times had Natasha ever experienced a simulation at an age different from her actual one—and never had she asked the computer to situate her perspective so far back in her youth. But this was Free Play. She had not directly asked for anything. She had come into the Pod with a mind of hot and jumbled emotions, and now the computer was reading her thoughts—thoughts too deep for Natasha to name. Though it was also true that Natasha knew these images and feelings, that she recognized them as
hers
as soon as they leapt into life before her wakeful senses.

She held on tight, squeezing her legs around the man's torso, her chin knocking against his hard shoulder as they moved. She tasted the smell, and yet she saw no flame lighting the brown-green mesh of forest from where they had come with such hurry.

A question sounded from her own self in a voice that was hers and yet not hers, because it had a highness and ungainliness that she must have shed long ago.

“Where is the fire?”

No one answered, though many people swarmed around her now: women with their lips stretched back in gummy shouts of fear, the babies strapped to their backs wailing and slipping by at eye level; hearing them cry made Natasha cry too.

The forest was quiet and then it was loud and then it was fast. They were running, running from the smell. Natasha's chin knocked hard, making her teeth crash together. From where they had come, there were others; fear made their faces long and tight and their legs weak so that sometimes a pair of eyes would be looking ahead and then the eyes would be down in the dirt. Others banged against their sides, crushing Natasha's legs.

She wanted to stop. She pushed around and saw the sharp gray-green cliffs that shot up to the sky. The people were trying to climb the cliffs, but that was silly, they had never climbed them before. Here in this valley, they slept on clear nights with the stars white pricklings in the black that shimmered
hello hello
if you looked for long and lay still.

She could taste the smoke in her throat; she coughed. She did not like the scrape of bodies climbing the cliffs and falling limp-limbed to the ground, and she did not like the screaming. The smoke arrived now, lazy and billowing black against the sky; and then she could see the bright orange, brighter than sky, winking at her through slats in the forest.

There. She pointed and spoke its presence without words. Two hands grabbed her around the middle, the familiar hands of a woman but not her mother—because her mother was gone with the other mothers and fathers to fight—these arms held her and rocked her back and forth.

But the fire was coming closer now and Natasha wanted to see; it was a bad fire to run around on its own, all the good fires stayed in one place and never wanted to eat the trees.

When the bodies pressed back, Natasha slipped out of the arms and landed on her open hands and knees. She scampered fast over the feet and legs that kicked and kept moving until she got away from them, but it was still hot.

The fire glared and the trees were torches. There was no place to go that would not be hot and then her body shook and shook and she coughed and she looked up to find the sky between the smoke. All she wanted was for the blue sky to reach down and lift her away. She raised her face to the blue, pleading for the white clouds to reach down and cradle her in their grasp.

And then the arms came, long and white from above. Arms like clouds; they grabbed her and she was flying over the tops of the flames. Her cheek pressed against something cool and soon the trees circled around her again; and she could breathe easily now, and she held on to run away from the fire.

The world faded to black. A bang sounded behind her. Natasha hung suspended in the quiet as the soft blue glow slowly illuminated the Pod. Three bangs now, muffled by the thick door, but insistent.

Natasha had just finished unbuckling herself from the harness when the door rose up and two people ducked inside.

“Sorry,” Sarah said, in a breathless voice, closing the door behind her. “We couldn't wait any longer.”

“I hope we didn't put your mind into shock,” Eduardo said. “Did we?” he asked, examining her. “You look a little shaky.”

“No—no, I'm fine,” Natasha said. “I was out of the simulation already. What's the matter?”

Eduardo's face brightened. “Raj has a plan. He says he can get all of us out of the settlement.”

“All of us?” Natasha repeated. “What about the sensors on the green?”

“Oh, they'll be off,” Eduardo said.

“Everything will be off,” added Sarah.

Natasha shook her head, not following their logic.

“Ever since we first met with you,” Eduardo said, with giddy hurriedness, “Raj has been trying to figure out a way to use his position in E and P to override your Department's security. For a while, he thought it was impossible, because he didn't have access to half the systems and, anyway, he always worked in supervised teams. Even if he managed to cut the main power somehow, he'd get caught before he made it to the backup generator.”

“The backup generator delivers power to essential systems,” Sarah filled in, “including the Strongroom.”

“So what changed?” Natasha asked.

“Raj got promoted,” Sarah said. “It's really great. It got back to the Alphas how Walker treated him during the New Wing construction, and they transferred Walker and gave Raj his position. Now Raj has full access to every room on level nine, and he controls the shifts of the other workers.”

“We're going right now to Mercedes's sleeproom,” Eduardo said. “At midnight, Raj is going to cut the power, and the three of us and Ben and Mercedes—we're going to steal a nova and deliver it to the Pines. And then that's it. Don't you see? Once the Pines have the nova, no one will be able to stop them. The other citizens will have to do as we say and open the Strongroom, and then we can take our time getting the novas to the ocean.”

“Hey,” said Sarah, squinting her eyes at Natasha, “are you sure you're all right?”

Natasha bit her lip, forcing herself to calm down, to come back to this world.

“Fine,” she told Sarah. “Better than ever.”

15

T
he spark of consciousness is all, thought Raj as he walked down the deserted corridor of level three, passing sleeprooms on his left and right. Not the convoluted rules of the Ethical Code, or the too-convenient dogmas that we are meant to live by, but only the spark—that unisolatable ineffable something that makes cold matter leap awake into that strange reality we conscious beings ourselves can neither see nor smell nor touch nor taste nor hear but for the delicate music of our own thoughts, and not even then, not even tuned in to our own breadth of feeling and embedded knowledge, not even with our own familiar hand held before our own two eyes can we hope to say,
I am this
, to say,
I am
.

Raj pressed the command for the elephant. Arrow down.

Because here is the hand, he thought, blandly wrinkled and fleshed and tipped with nail, ordinary and yet wholly inexplicable because why should it be bland and usual, why this?—and there it is again, the mystery, and that is the spark, the spark that convinces without plea or argument that it, the spark, is all, and worth preserving.

With a final glance over his shoulder, Raj stepped into the tall box of the elephant, his lips moving soundlessly as the doors closed and he began to sink deeper and deeper into the earth. The dial over the door arced from five to six to seven to eight until, with a low grind of gears, the elephant settled on level nine, the absolute base of America-Five. The doors parted open, leading him into a short, wide hallway of low, water-stained and yellowish walls. Raj knew it well; this level had become his workplace ever since his transfer from the Archives. The familiar, pungent smell of mold and engine oil met above his lip as his boots marched, as if by their own accord, to the metal grate that blocked access to the backup generator and the main power cells.

He took a ring of small, tarnished keys from his pocket and, with the one sharply grooved in the middle, he opened the lock. He heaved the grate upward with the help of its system of pulleys and chains. Almost nothing ran on computer down here; it had, at one time, but the leaks and mold had caused too many shorts of simple systems and, in the end, the engineers had backed off and allowed level nine to lapse to the technologies outdated even tens of years before the Storm.

Gingerly, Raj stepped out onto a narrow, mesh metal balcony that ringed around a deep pit, the backup generator recessed at its center. He could hear the hum, or more, feel it, rising up through his feet, through his legs, through his groin while he stood holding the thin railing at the balcony's edge. He gazed downward: the backup generator, the massive cylinder that allowed citizens to sleep fearlessly at night; the backup heart lodged deep, so deep, and ready to awaken into thumping life should the main solar and wind-powered cells fail—as they would, by Raj's own hand, tonight.

The spark is all, he thought, the spark of consciousness. Only the spark in this otherwise universe of rock and aimless molecule and distance.

He took a long breath into his gut, closing his eyes, focusing, seeing without seeing. This is how it had to be done. He had tried other methods, more peaceful methods, but the citizens would not stop, they refused to stop, and he could not stand by and allow them to murder more people in the name of their cool rationality, their indefectible philosophy.

He would disable the backup generator first. He had learned how to do it during his initial training sessions, in case of a fire.

With precise steps, he descended the short ladder into the pit, and soon his fingers were moving nimbly over the wires. Emergency shutoff, then cross the T with the W thread so that the reset lever will short the system. He took a pair of clippers from his pocket and hacked off a bundle of multicolored connections that he knew would take weeks to repair.

He stepped back and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck. The humming had stopped, and the new quiet affected him deeply. Did that make him a sap? he wondered. That even a mechanical death roused a feeling of sadness within him?

He turned and climbed the short ladder back to the balcony. Another key. His hands shook, and Raj observed them shaking with a kind of bemused curiosity. In all his life, his body had never behaved like this before. The door opened and he was in a room of two-by-two-foot shining metal squares, forming the walls from ceiling to floor. These were the main power cells that held the charge from the solar panels and the wind turbines outside. He opened the control box, disconnected the holds, and slashed with fury at the wires until the world disappeared and no tension remained.

Raj cried out. He had never experienced this, the complete elimination of sight. But it had worked; if there was darkness, then it had worked.

Releasing his hold on the wall, he stepped forward, waving his hands, his eyes wide and useless. His head slammed into the still-open door. He fell to his knees and his fingers found the holes of the mesh balcony. He crawled forward—the metal flooring sharp on his legs—until he had managed to slip his arms around the railing that marked the balcony's rim. There were no lights, no sound within the dark. He tried to measure his movements, 180 degrees around to the grate from where he had entered, but he could not gauge it; and anyway, now, the immensity of what he had done was enveloping him with its own kind of blindness.

On the higher levels, up in the Dome, fear would come over the citizens now. As the moments of darkness lengthened, they would gradually realize that both power systems had failed. The older ones would guess a human agency behind it, and probably many independent minds would settle on him.

But the others—Natasha, Mercedes, Eduardo, Sarah, and Ben—if they had done it, if they had broken into the Strongroom and escaped from the settlement, then nothing else mattered. Because it was all darkness, all coldness and triviality except for the sparks of life on the globe, except for their own minds to imply that some other bend of physics existed along the untouched plane. Or no, not physics, Raj corrected himself, but the dimensionless world of pure emotion. Or no, not that, but self, selfless mind, pure timelessness and simultaneity. But here the mystery covered all and the muscles of human thought could push no further. Raj's long fingers gripped the railing, his weight shifted from his toes to his heels and back again, his forehead grazing cold metal as he swayed.

“God,” he said, reaching for something, an ancient concept, a future idea, the amalgamation, the spark of sparks. “God. God. God. God.”

•   •   •

It happened fast. A series of precise movements in the chaos. Down the dark hall of the Department of the Exterior and into the Strongroom. Then, once the door had closed, Ben and Eduardo, under Natasha's directions, maneuvered a small G3 nova into a canvas sling to carry between them. Mercedes and Sarah led the group to the Office of Exit, shoving confused, wandering citizens out of the way, a task which, in the absolute darkness, was as easy as it was anonymous. (“What's going on,” the voices cried after them. “Who's there?”) They passed swiftly through the airlock, through the supplyhouse and up the stone stairs that glowed a hazy white-gray in the moonlight.

“We're outside,” Mercedes screamed. “Alpha believe it, we're outside!”

As they jogged in an uneven mass across the green, leaving the blacked-out Dome behind them, the others answered Mercedes with their own shouts. All but Natasha. She remained fixed on their destination, and she led them with quick, confident words and careful movements through the trees and over the gnarled forest ground, eastward to the shore.

They found the Tribe, finally, about four miles south of the Crane sweep site, the orange eruption of their fire like nothing else in the night. It was difficult to say who was more timid upon first seeing the others: the Pines, who darted out from the trees and then hastily back toward the fire; or Mercedes, Eduardo, Sarah, and Ben, who were cursing under their breath with amazement, and each of whom stopped several times during the long approach down the sand, until the person walking beside them nudged them on in encouragement. When the Pines saw the nova, though, and recognized it for what it was, the atmosphere changed. Suddenly there was no doubt, no fear. The pact they had offered this group of “god-people” became tightly sealed in their minds. Now the plans were all in place, now they had what they needed to force their way into the glasshouse; and soon it would be as fate had determined, the Birds of Fire destroyed at last, the fire swallowed up by the water, and the age of terror brought to an end.

Likewise, the excitement and trust evident in the Pines served to dispel the citizens' fear. Soon Ben and Eduardo had laid the nova carefully down on a patch of high, dry sand, brushed smooth by Tezo and Mattias. And once they were free of this burden, the introductions began. Each group was wide-eyed at the mere flesh-and-blood existence of the other, amazed that, despite a difference so strong they might have hailed from different planets, as opposed to the same strip of forest, each shared the same purpose, and would reach that purpose together or not at all.

Near the fire stood Axel, Sonlow, Tezo, and Raul. Natasha had worried about what her reception would be, considering the hysterical manner in which she had left them last. But Raul appeared calm, Sonlow had an aura of hopefulness, Axel grinned openly at her, and one look at Tezo was enough to put Natasha's trepidation to rest. As soon as Natasha reached them, Tezo held his arms open. Grasping his burly shoulders, she allowed him to wrap his thick, bare arms around her. The pungent stench of his body enveloped her too, at once high and sharp with sweat and deep with the echo of brine and muddy shore; and yet, far from being disgusted, Natasha felt comforted. For the first time in a long time, she remembered the smell of home.

They could have stayed like that, quietly side by side, but Axel interrupted them.

“I was afraid we'd lost you,” Axel said. “Maybe we said too much. What happened was years ago. The more years that pass, the slower the telling should be.”

“No,” said Natasha, standing back. “I'm glad. I needed to know.”

“You believe us then?” Tezo asked softly.

“Yes,” Natasha said. “I didn't right away, but mostly because it was too much to face all at once. I've spent the last twenty-two years forcing myself to forget. But I never fully forgot. I dreamed about the Outside, I feared it and I loved it too. And it was there the whole time, my connection to you.”

She looked at Tezo as she spoke these last words, and received in return a second embrace, more gentle than the first.

“Have they confessed at last?” Sonlow asked. “The people who took you? Did they tell you why?”

“They didn't tell me anything,” Natasha said. “But I've seen things, certain images in the settlement. It's hard to explain. There's still a memory of what happened, a kind of a memory. I've seen enough to make me believe.”

The vision of the white arms reaching down to clutch her overtook her mind, the feeling so vivid that it seemed momentarily unleashed from the past.

“You remember us?” Sonlow asked.

“Only a little,” Natasha answered. Her eyelids flickered as a flush of heat passed over her. “I mostly remember the fire.”

“You remember your brothers and sisters? You were with them, in the beginning. Did you see what happened to them?”

“I'm sorry,” said Natasha, shaking her head. “I wish I could.”

“But you lived,” said Sonlow. “And I will always be grateful to God for that.”

Natasha did not know how to respond, how to thank Sonlow and acknowledge her as her relation. She felt it would not show proper respect to hug Sonlow as Tezo had hugged her. So she took Sonlow's soft, grimy hand in hers, brought it to her lips, and kissed it. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ben watching her with amazement. Eduardo and Mercedes were whispering together; and Sarah regarded her with a mixture of curiosity, pity, and awe. They must be realizing now, by her actions, Natasha's true relationship to the Tribe; that what they had as a group so easily dismissed as a trick was not a trick at all.

She, Natasha—Nassia, as they called her—was one of the Tribe, not only by belief, but by blood. These voices were her voices. This Outside was her home. And if any in the Tribe still doubted the strength of her allegiance, well, they were wasting their worry. The memory in Free Play had changed her; it had stripped away the settlement's deceit and endless justifications. Once and for all, the hypocrisy of America-Five lay bare before her: the vast destruction and death they had caused. Never could Natasha go back to being the person she had been; she knew who she was now. She had found it out despite their lies. And, amazingly, the truth was burning bright within her, giving her strength and fusing her body into one powerful whole.

Natasha gently released Sonlow's hand, feeling the love present in the old woman's gaze. Her thoughts were swirling, because here in a moment was a taste of the life that Natasha should have lived. Her real life if not for the fire and arms like clouds reaching down to deliver her into the life that she
had
lived, the wrong one. The heat came over Natasha again. Jeffrey. She could not think about Jeffrey without wanting to scream. Her body trembled as though trying to throw the arms off her, the arms that were the Dome and the Office of Mercy and the person she had become in the settlement. And she
was
throwing them off, breaking free of their hold, because she was here in the Outside and they could not stop her. She was here with her family and
he
could not stop her.

“We will be together now,” Axel said, heartily. “Once we destroy the Birds, once we put an end to the murders.”

“Does that mean we can show them?” London asked, pushing through to stand by Axel's side. “Can we show them the guns?”

“Yes!” said Axel, his face growing brighter. “Our friends gave us a Bird, now let's show them how we will protect it.”