Akaela (10 page)

Uli presses
his good hand on my mouth. “Even if that were true, you are guilty of breaching
the sacred Kiva Hall, Akaela.”

I clasp my
fingers around Uli’s arm, struggling to breathe through his grip.

Tahari
steps forward from the greenish fog swirling across the stage. His hands knot
around Ash’s belly and his nails dig inside the kitten’s fresh wound, where Uli
has inserted his implant. Blood oozes from the cut and trickles down Tahari’s
arm.

“No,” I
cry. “Please don’t hurt him.
Please
.”

“This is
your punishment,” Tahari says. “Implants like yours should’ve never been made.”

“No!” I
shout. “I’m not afraid of Niwang. Put me out, I deserve it. I betrayed the laws
of the Mayake people. But please don’t hurt my kitten. He’s not at fault,
please stop torturing him. Please!”

Tahari’s
eyes narrow, cruelty dripping from his bloody fingers.
“That’s
your problem, little girl. You have no fear.”

He raises
his hand farther up and flings Ash hard on the ground.

I bawl in
pain. Uli lets go of me and I run to the mess of ginger fur and blood
splattered on the ground below the stage. Tears roll down my eyes. How could
they be so cruel? Niwang doesn’t even match this kind of punishment. I sift my
fingers through Ash’s bloody remains and his fur dissolves into a fine powder
that flies everywhere, like the ashes from the Gaijins’ factory when the wind
blows them our way. The fog is so dense now I can barely see my own hands,
matted with the thick powder. It chalks up my mouth and throat. I want to
scream but I can’t. I want to run, but my legs are glued to the ground.

My
head pounds.

It’s the fog
, I think.
I’m breathing the fog and it’s making me
sick
.

Uli grabs
my arm. “We need to go, Akaela. You can’t escape Niwang this time.”

I look up
to him, my eyes blurred with tears. “Just let Athel go. Please. Athel…”

Uli shakes
his head. “We can’t find him. The fog… it’s too dense.”

Too dense
.

“Too
dense, Akaela. Don’t breathe it. Don’t breathe the fog.”

Don’t. Breathe. The fog
.

Uli leans
over me, his shadow wavering, coming and going. He covers my face and tells me
not to breathe, his voice strange, distorted. He sounds like a kid now, as he
presses a scarf against my face and shakes my arm.

“Get up, Akaela!

“Up?” I
mumble, realizing I’m lying on the floor, my cheek pressed against the leg of a
chair. “What?”

Lukas
takes my hand and presses it against the scarf he’s put over my mouth. “Keep it
there,” he says, “and let’s go!”

Lukas
. I’m talking to Lukas, not Uli. I
recognize his voice, even though his face is covered and there’s darkness all
around us. The green fog I could see earlier… where did it go? And why is Lukas
in such a hurry to leave? There was something I was supposed to do, somebody…

Athel
!

“I screwed
up, Lukas,” I say, my whole body shivering even though I’m drenched in sweat. “They’re
going to put me out. Niwang. I couldn’t find Athel, I—”

Lukas
pulls me up, his voice suddenly angry. “It was all a nightmare, don’t you
understand? The air—it’s laced with poison. We need to leave.
Now
!”

I sit up,
squeezing the scarf against my face. It smells old, like clothing that’s been
in a drawer far too long. I look toward the stage, now plunged back into
darkness. The green fog is gone, only a wavering glow is left lingering from Lukas’s
data feeder, like a far away memory. I lift my right hand, the one I dipped in
Ash’s bloodied fur. It’s dry. No fur, no blood.

Just a dream.
It was all a dream
.

I try to
stand up and my head spins. Lukas prods me from behind. “Straight ahead,” he
says, his voice muffled by whatever’s covering his face. “Toward the door.”

I take a
step then remember. “What about Athel?”

“We can’t
find him. The air—there’s some kind of gas poison in the air. Comes out
when you step on the stage. We just—can’t.”

The stage. The poison comes from the stage.

The fog is in my head
.

Sweat
drips down my forehead, yet my body keeps shivering. Bitterness clings to my
mouth.
I was drugged. Tahari didn’t kill
Ash. Tahari isn’t even here
.

I snatch
the data feeder from Lukas’s hands. “We’re not leaving without Athel!”

“Akaela,
the scarf! Keep it on your face, you fool!”

I pull the
scarf back up and sweep the light across the stage, the torn black screen gaping
at me like a ghost. The fog rises again, but this time I know what it is.

Just a stupid hallucination
.

I hold the
scarf against my nose and blink. The fog in my head buzzes like loud static.

Think, Akaela. Think
!

There’s a
hiss. Subtle. I spin on my heels. I shine the light around me and then rest it
on the podium. I crouch by it, the hiss louder now. I need both hands, so I set
the data feeder on the floor and grope around the edge of the podium, sliding
my fingers under the baseboard. The voices come back, yelling in my ears.

“You’re
evil, Akaela.”

“You shall
be punished forever. With death.”

“Death
doesn’t scare me,” I yell back.

Death doesn’t
… I catch
a splinter in the wood. The pain shakes me awake for a moment, blood blotching
the floorboards. There’s a switch at the bottom of the podium. I see it, blink,
and then can’t find it anymore. A deep exhaustion takes hold of me. The fog
lingers over my eyes and closes them.

It’s just… a stupid… hallucination
.

I grope,
feel the switch between my fingers and pull it down.

Blackness
envelops me.

Blackness
and silence.

…

“Akaela!”

I roll
over. A hand wraps around my arm and squeezes it.

“Wake up,
Akaela! We found him! We found Athel!”

I spring
my eyes open and pull myself up.
Athel
!
The fog is gone and a dim light lingers in the hall.

“What time
is it?” I murmur, my voice pasty and my tongue dry.

Lukas
looks at me, worry written all over his face. “Almost five a.m.
They
’re going to be here soon. We’ve got to move!”

Realization
dawns on me. I sit up. “You found Athel?”

Lukas nods
and hops down the stage. I try to get up but a wave of dizziness makes me
stagger against the podium. I hear noises from below the stage, as of scuffing
against wood. I crawl to the edge and watch as Lukas and Wes, both on their
hands and knees, drag Athel’s limp body out of its hiding spot.

“Athel!” I
shout.

My brother
had been hidden inside a wood cell carved underneath the stage. The switch I’d
flipped at the base of the podium stopped the gas from being released, and
Lukas was finally able to find him. Actually, he claims an algorithm he ran
through his data feeder found Athel. It came up with three most likely
locations and underneath the stage was the one with the highest probability.

Geek
.

I climb
down the stage, kneel by Athel’s side, and touch his forehead. It’s icy cold,
his face as white as porcelain. If it weren’t for his shallow breathing—the
only movement the minimal level of current circulating his body will allow
right now—I’d think he was dead.

“I bet
they used LSD powder,” Lukas says, continuing his explanation of how the night
evolved. “Comes from a fungus, really easy to crush it into powder, leave it
near a fan and let it go off when triggered by a motion sensor.”

“I thought
you left, Wes,” I say, groping the deactivation switch at the back of my
brother’s head.

Wes
blushes. “I saw something, I swear. I freaked out. But I think I was
hallucinating already. I don’t think I ever left. Did I, Lukas?”

Lukas shines
the light from the data feeder on Athel’s face. “We would’ve never made it had
Akaela not found the LSD source,” he mumbles, almost ashamed to admit that for
once I’d done something right. There’s a faint light lingering, dawn slowly
casting away the night and filtering through narrow slats close to the ceiling.

I find
Athel’s deactivation switch and scowl at the two of them. “It’s almost daylight,
we’ve got to act quick. Ready?”

They nod.
I press Athel’s switch.

Chapter Thirteen

Athel

Day Number: I lost track.

Event: End of Wela.

Number of Mayakes left: 431, I think.

Goal for today:
Escape
?
??

My whole body aches, and my joints
screech with pain every time I move. I lean over the sink and splash water on
my face. Wes stands by the door, twitching and scraping the floor with his
blades.
 

“Dude. Can
you make it faster?”

“Give him
a minute,” Lukas says. “He’s probably severely dehydrated and in shock. His
actuators require a minimum of—”

“Shut up,”
I hiss.

They all
freeze, the three of them, and stare at me wide-eyed. I squeeze the cracked
porcelain of the sink and let the water drip down my face. My head is spinning.
I still can’t get a sense of what’s happened. I remember opening my eyes and
seeing nothing at first, then the blurred faces of Lukas, Wes, and Akaela slowly
emerging through the light from Lukas’s data feeder. They took me from the
auditorium and whisked me to the public restroom on the second floor—Lukas’s
idea after he established that whatever I was saying wasn’t making any sense.

Splash his face with water
, he said.

I can
splash myself, thank you.

“This is
not the end of my Wela,” I say, staring at my pale face through the mirror.

Lukas and
Akaela reply at the same time. One says yes, the other says no. And I’m the one
who’s making no sense.

“We
dragged you out of Wela,” Akaela blurts out, so fast I have to repeat the words
in my head twice in order to make sure I get it.

“You did
what?”

“It was
Akaela’s idea,” Wes interjects from the door, his whole body itching and
jerking against the jamb. “Can we go now?”

I flex my
fingers, blood finally flowing back through my veins.
My
sister—my
baby
sister—lured
two of my best friends inside the Kiva Hall, breaching one of the most sacred
rules of the Mayake people, in order to rescue me from Wela.

Rescue me
, when I was being
punished.

Not even
my own mother would have dreamed of such a thing. Not after I brought upon me
the public shame of stealing.

Lukas taps
his fingers on the data feeder.

Akaela drops
her chin. “It’s almost dawn, Athel. We gotta go.”

“Go
where?” I snarl. “Don’t you see? There’s nowhere to go now!”

Akaela
stares at me as though my words just slapped her in the face. Lukas gulps
loudly,
Wes fidgets by the door jamb.

Why am I so upset
?

I’m the
one who got us all in trouble. We had a plan, and it was perfect, until I
screwed up and got caught. And Akaela… Dottie, my little sister, did the
unthinkable.

I suddenly
realize why I’m angry. Even if I did finish my Wela, nothing would’ve been the
same again. Shame has fallen on me. I’m the outcast now, the unwanted.

I would’ve
left anyway, probably gone out to search for Dad on my own. And now Lukas, Wes
and Akaela have no choice either. They’ve become outcast too, just like me. We must
flee before we get caught. The punishment for what we’ve done is Niwang.

No, I’m
not mad because of this. I’m mad because deep inside I know I would’ve never
had the guts to do what my little sister did.

The first
noises stir out of the Tower.
The squeaking of doors, the
tiptoeing of footfalls across long corridors.

“Sun will
be up in eighteen minutes,” Lukas says, reading off his data feeder.

Wes cranes
his head out the door. “Still clear,” he says. “But it won’t be like this for
long.” A film of perspiration pearls his forehead.

Akaela
shuffles past me and pulls on Lukas’s sleeve. “Let’s go,” she says. “Athel
doesn’t appreciate our help.”

“No, wait,”
I say.

I feel the
pressure, the noises from the floors above us louder and more frequent. The
Tower gradually awakens, its inhabitants getting ready for their daily tasks.

“Let’s get
Kael,” I say. “And the horses.”

Akaela’s
jaw drops. “The horses?
Through the gorge?
Are you out
of your mind?”

I press my
lips together. “Do you think we have a choice at this point?”

Lukas’s
eyes dart between the two of us. “He’s got a point,” he says.

“The
terrain in the gorge is not—”

“Somebody’s
coming!” Wes shuts the door and stands against it, his face as pale as the
walls around him.

“Quick!
Hide!” I hiss, and we all disperse in the different stalls. Wes’s smooth blades
slide over the porcelain as he clasps the edge of the partition and tries not
to skid off the toilet lid.

We all shut
the stalls and stand on top of the toilets barely in time. The main bathroom door
squeaks open and heels tap inside. I glimpse the slim figure of a woman through
the slit between my stall door and the partition. I hold my breath, realizing
that between the four of us, we’ve occupied all the stalls. If she tries to
push one open…

She bends
over the sink, washes her hands for a good three minutes, then bends down,
pulls up her skirt and pries open a flap on her outer thigh.

Phew
, I think.
She’s just fixing a switch or something
.

The switch
turns out to be a yarn of cables and wires the woman pulls out of the flap,
examines, and then shoves back inside her thigh. Some people have itches. This
one has a misplaced screw she can’t locate.

I hear a
faint noise from the stall next to me. Then a beep that makes me
jump
. The woman hears it too. She jerks her head up and
looks around, quickly shutting the flap closed. She pulls down the skirt and
stares suspiciously at the stalls. We’ve all got our feet up over the toilet,
so she can’t see us, yet the beep—probably from Lukas’s data
feeder—has given us away.

I hold my
breath, count to ten. The woman steps in front of my stall, then walks
cautiously to the next and stops in front of Wes’s. I know it’s him because I
hear the subtle grating of his blades against the toilet porcelain.

“Who’s
there?” the woman demands.

Three, two
… I count.

She raises
her hand to the door and suddenly I hear it slam open and glimpse her stumbling
backward on the floor, Wes a blur zooming out of the bathroom and into the hallway
outside. Lukas, Akaela, and I all jump out of our stalls at the same time and
run after him.

The woman
shouts something—too bad we’ve got no time to stop and listen. The aches
of my few hours of Wela melt away in an instant as we dart through the long
corridor and down the stairs to the first floor. Voices echo up the stairwell
as our footfalls awake the rest of the Tower. Stirred from their nests, pigeons
coo and rats scuttle away. Lukas trips at the end of the stairs and slams
against the wall. Wes is already too far to call him back, probably out the
main doors by now and still running.

“Go get
the horses!” I yell to Akaela. She nods and darts away while I stop to see
what’s going on with Lukas.

The kid
doubles over, wheezing. His lungs are just too small for this kind of strain.

“Come on,
buddy,” I say, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and pushing through the
fire doors to the first floor.

We must’ve
taken too long in those bathrooms, trying to revive my slowed metabolism. The
hallway on the first floor seems bustling with life. I hear the determined
steps and voices of a small group of men heading down to the shops and double
back. Lukas, his face flushed up to the tip of his ears, catches his breath.

“Hold on,”
he wheezes.

“There’s nothing
to hold on to,” I say. “We’ve got to run, and fast!”

He leans against
the fire door and thumbs through the screen of his data feeder. The device
emits a long beep that has me bristle.

“Dude.
That beep almost gave us away in the bathrooms upstairs!”

“That’s
because I’m trying to do something.”

The voices
in the hallway come closer, their steps pressing. I snatch Lukas by his arm and
pull him back up the stairs when the internal alarms go off.

“Moderate
alert detected on the north wing, floor four,” the computerized voice chimes.

Lukas
looks at me and grins broadly. “I may be slow, but I’ve got brains.”

My eyes
dart to the stairwell. “Except now they’ll be flooding the stairs.”

He slides
his data feeder back to his satchel and pushes the door a notch. The computerized
voice seeps through, louder. “Yeah, but they won’t be paying any attention to
us.” He cranes his head out then pumps up his thumb.
All clear
.

We sneak
back to the hallway and squeeze behind a pillar, barely in time to spot the
earlier clique of men heading back and storming up the stairs.

“Moderate
alert,” the voice through the speakers insists. Steps and voices echo through
the walls of the Tower
while,
chins low and head bowed,
Lukas and I charge down the hallway and out the main doors.

Outside
the air is humid, laden with the faint smell of smoke from the Gaijins’
firewalls.
Factory
, I tell myself. The
sun isn’t up yet, the imminent sunrise announced by a strip of golden pink
above the forest.

“Come on, Lukas,
move!” I prod, wading through the tall grass toward the stables.

Lukas lags
behind. He may have brains, but his body isn’t made for physical endurance. For
a brief moment I wonder what we got ourselves into.
Four
kids, each one of us with our own problems.
We’ll never make it on our
own, away from the protection of the Tower and our families. And then I think
of our Dad, who sacrificed everything and put his life on the line to advocate
our cause to the Gaijins.

The whinny
of horses chases my thoughts away. Beyond the black contours of the solar panels,
I spot the silhouettes of Maha and Taeh galloping toward us.

I beam.
“They’re here. Lukas! Come on!”

Lukas looks
up at the approaching horses and a geeky, unconvinced stare lingers on his
face. Akaela is riding Taeh and carrying Wes behind, his titanium blades
wrapped up in blankets she got from the barn so they won’t scrape the horse’s barrel.
I grab the reins, lift myself up, and hop on Maha’s back. Without any
forewarning, I lean down and pull Lukas up on the saddle. He’s so light I
wonder how he hasn’t been blown away by the wind yet.

Lukas
wraps his arms around my waist and squeezes me like a little girl. Under
different circumstances, I would’ve found it funny.

“What’s
up, dude? No confidence in horses?”

“I believe
in science,” he says. “And I fear heights.”

Akaela
pulls on Taeh’s reins. “The scavenger droids will stir out of their shells as
soon as the sun comes out,” my sister tells me.

I nod.
“They’re slow this early in the morning. The solar panels embedded on their
armor take about half an hour to heat up. We’ve got a good window to surprise
them.”

“What if
they decide to chase us down the gorge?”

“We’ve got
our secret weapon,” I reply, winking.

Under the
light from the rising sun, the Tower has turned golden. I whistle Kael’s call
and wait for the falcon to reach us, unconcerned by the fact that the bird’s
flight might give away our escape route. “Kael will divert the droids should
things get iffy,” I say, smiling as soon as I spot the falcon’s black wings
high above the ledge of the forty-second floor.

The Tower
looms tall and steady against the yellow sky. Nothing gives away its inner
turmoil or the chaos that will soon be spreading among the people once they
realize what we’ve done.

Maha
stomps impatiently
,
Lukas squeezes me tighter
.

“Dude.
Gotta breathe.”

“Sorry,”
he mumbles.

Akaela
clicks her tongue and steers Taeh toward the riverbank. The mesa looms on the
other side, while a huge yellow
moon sets
behind its
jagged top. I stare one more time at the Tower, then press my heel against
Maha’s stomach and prompt her to a fast gallop.

Today I leave my home
, I think,
as I ride toward the setting moon.
Today
I leave my home and my people and start a new life.
As my own
person, this time.

No rules, no shame, no prohibitions.

Just me
.