First to Dance (34 page)

Aira looked even more alarmed now.
“So…what? You’re just going to live here, then?”

Acton kept his eyes on the screen and nodded his head. His smile grew larger and larger on his face until he could no longer contain himself, and he started laughing. “Don’t you see what this is, Aira? We can see everything that everyone has done. We can know what they’re planning. We’ll always be ten steps ahead of them.”

Now it was Aira’s turn to roll her eyes. “Yeah,” she said, “Until they all go searching for the three kids who suddenly went missing without a trace. You know they’ll find us here.”

Acton considered it briefly. “No,” he said. “The leaders won’t bother to look for us. They have bigger issues to deal with. And our parents won’t look for us, because they’ll quickly realize that by our disappearing when Ayita did, we’d be taken away as soon as we’re found.”

Aira scoffed. “My parents will look for me,” she said.

“We’ll see.”

“What if they already know about this place?” Aira asked. “The leaders, I mean.”

“No,” Acton said, shaking his head. “If they knew about this place they would have discovered and destroyed Ayita’s book collection a long time ago. And they’d have people here, guarding this computer. Ayita wouldn’t have ever had the chance to leave.”

“I wonder why it wasn’t found earlier,” she said in contemplation.

“Have you ever gone through the forest? I mean all the way through? It probably took me two and a half hours to get here, weaving through all those trees. Who’s going to bother with that, when we have everything we need in town? Probably a few people have walked halfway
through the forest, found nothing, and turned around to go home, but nobody’s walked the whole distance. The only reason I came this far was because I was up late, thinking about Ayita, and I saw that light in the sky. I knew it had to come from somewhere, so I came to find out where. Now I know, and I’m not going back.”

Aira had a blank look on her face.

“So,” Acton said, “Are you with me?”

She looked at him. He looked so confident, the same way Ayita looked when she spoke of things that were important to her. Aira didn’t have that confidence in herself or anything she believed, but she thought that perhaps she could follow someone who did.

She slowly nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

They stayed up until dawn, reading the history logs and memorizing as much of it as they could.
Aira went to sleep first, taking claim of the bedroom, and Acton eventually lay down on the floor in front of the computer. When they woke up, they ate a little food from the kitchen and went back to reading.

“I wish Ayita
was here,” Acton said a few times. “She’d remember it all after reading it only once. I have to read it two or three times to get it right.” Then he laughed uncomfortably; he wanted Ayita to be here for more reasons than that. Aira didn’t respond to these comments from him; she just wanted her friend back. She kept thinking that taking the other spaceship to Earth made a lot of sense, but the computer said it wasn’t fully charged yet.

As much as Acton
desired to learn everything there was to know about Ayita, he instead spent his time learning about what took place inside the secondary school. The more he read, the more convinced he was that it needed to be torn down. The people there were like Ayita: they’d found a book about Earth and chose to believe it instead of destroy it. They dared to dream, and they dared to stand up for their dreams. The people in the secondary school were shunned by society, but Acton admired them now. He also wondered what the people running the school thought about all this. If the books were truly lies, where were they all coming from? Where did this idea of Earth originate so that so many people could discover it? He read back, further and further into the history of the planet, until he came to the people who started it all. Then he found out about Etana, and he read her story through to where it ended. “I wish Ayita could know all this,” he said. “She would want to know. She left too soon.”

They continued reading, continued learning, and continued eating.
There wasn’t very much food left in the kitchen; Ayita took most of it with her to Earth, and that meant Aira and Acton needed a way to sustain themselves.

“We can just take food from the fields when we need it,” Acton said.

“You mean steal,” said Aira.

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

Aira shrugged her shoulders.

“We’ll ask her dad to help,” said Acton. Then he nodded confidently. “Yeah, we’ll do that.”

Aira laughed at the idea, and then it made her nervous. She didn’t feel comfortable with asking Ayita’s father for help. She felt a lot of guilt over bringing them to cover up Ayita’s painting, and felt it was somewhat her fault that Ayita skipped class so hastily the next day. How could she ask him for help now, knowing that she was partly to blame for the books’ destruction and Ayita’s push to flee the planet?

“You can ask,” she whispered.

He looked at her strangely. “You’re her best friend, Aira. Her dad knows you. If I ask, he’ll just be wondering ‘who is this guy and what does he have to do with my daughter?’ At the very least, we’ll ask together. I won’t be asking him without you.”

Aira just looked at him.

Acton let out a frustrated sigh. “Fine; I
will
ask without you, but only because it has to be done.” He turned back to the computer and continued reading. After a while he switched over to the video monitors and had them show him the secondary school, inside and out.

“So, what are you going to do?” Aira asked him.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Study the school until I know how to destroy it, I suppose.”

“They’ll just build another one.”

Acton glared at her. “Must you doubt everything? No matter what I come up with, you think it will fail.”

Her shoulders fell and she looked away. “I’ll keep my comments to myself, then,” she said.

“Good.”

Aira walked to the bedroom and
lay down. She didn’t feel very useful and she didn’t feel very optimistic either. What could two kids do to change the world? Not that they were kids, but a lot of times, she still felt like a kid compared to everyone else. She closed her eyes, and she saw Ayita’s painting. She studied it and considered it for a long time, and then she knew. She didn’t have to tear down a building to make an impact. She would do exactly what Ayita did: paint. Ayita wasn’t here to do it anymore, and someone had to. She smiled and got up from the bed, then walked back to where Acton sat at the computer.

“I have my plan,” he said. He looked at her and smiled.

Don’t discourage him,
Aira told herself. She returned the smile. “Will you tell me about it?”

He looked skeptical at first, but for once the girl was smiling at him. “Okay,” he said. “So I’ve rewound the video and fast-forwarded through their nighttime routines. It’s pretty much the same thing every night. Everyone is locked in their bedrooms and the guards rotate shifts between sleep and work. The guard at the north door goes in about fifteen minutes after the guard at the east door goes out. They only keep one guard out at night, I suppose because no one’s ever tried to break
in
before.  The guard walks the perimeter of the building twice before waiting at the north door, and then the guard there goes in. They always go in at the north door and out at the east door.”

Aira nodded, but she couldn’t figure out why this was significant. Rather than make any comment, she just listened.

“So here’s my plan. If I can set a fire on the west side of the building, then when the guard comes out of the east door and starts walking the perimeter, he will see the fire and call for help. The guard at the north door will come running, and I can be waiting there to slip inside. I’ll run quickly and unlock the bedroom doors. I’ll let the people out and we’ll all run for it.”

She wanted to tell him that someone would see him and stop it from happening, and that he would end up locked in one of the rooms there for the rest of his life too, but she bit her lip.

He saw the look on her face. “You don’t think it’s a good plan,” he said.

She smiled, laughing at herself for being so obvious. “There’s just so much that can go wrong,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “but so much more
will
go wrong if I don’t even try. Even if I only set one person free, we could bring that person here and have another friend to help us.”

“Someone will see you.”

“Maybe, but they’ll be thinking about the fire first, and me later.”

“Someone might get hurt in the fire.”

“I won’t set it to the building, but close enough and large enough that they’ll want to put it out.”

“What if you set it outside the east door instead? Then all the guards inside would run to that door and it would be easier to go in through the north door unnoticed.”

He smiled at her. “Thanks,” he said. “I knew you’d prove helpful for something. That’s a great idea.”

Aira
blushed a little.

“Aira, I already know you don’t want to go with me, but whenever I go, would you be here as my eyes and ears? Then when I return you can update me on anything important that I need to know. It would save a lot of time.”

She nodded. “I can do that.”

The next day, Acton set out toward Ayita’s house. He waited in the trees across from her house and watched for her parents to come home. Ayita’s father had taken to sitting outside and watching the sky at night ever since Ayita left.  Acton watched them go in together, and waited silently for him to come back out. It seemed to take much longer sitting here in person than it did when watching from the computer, but finally the door opened and out stepped Ayita’s dad. He sat down on the steps and looked up to the sky.

It was getting dark
and there weren’t many people out at this time of evening. Seeing that they were alone, Acton stepped out of his hiding place and approached the house. The man got up to go inside once he saw him, but Acton called for him to wait.

“Sir,” he said. “Please stay out and talk with me for a moment.”

“Do I know you?” he asked.

“No. We haven’t met. But I was friends with your daughter.”

He studied Acton for a moment. “Tell me your name,” he said. “And why you are here.”

“My name is Acton, and I came to ask
you for help.”

He stood
with his arms crossed, waiting for Acton to continue.

“Aira and I found the space center,” he said. “We are staying there, now. I plan to take down the secondary school, but we need help getting food.”

“Why didn’t Aira come?” he asked.

Acton shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Tell her to come,” he said. “Then I will help you.”

Acton nodded.

“How do you plan to take down the secondary school?”

Acton told him about his plan.

There was a long pause while he contemplated the idea. Then, “I will help with that, too,” he said. “Let me know when you are going to do it, and I will wait in the forest to meet the people you set free. That way, all you need to do is unlock doors and tell them where to meet me.”

“I will bring Aira tomorrow night,” Acton said. “We’ll wait in the trees there across the street.”

Ayita’s father shook his hand and turned to step inside.

“Sir?”
Acton said.

He turned and looked at him.

“Thank you.”

He nodded. “Thank you, too.
For being my daughter’s friend.”

Acton left and hurried back to Aira.

“Why does he want to see me?” she asked.

Acton shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe for the same reason you didn’t want to see him?”

Aira looked away from him.

“He probably just wants to check that I’m telling him the truth. Any boy could walk up to his house and claim to be Ayita’s friend; if you’re there, it proves at minimum that I’m a friend of a friend of Ayita.”

She sighed. “Okay, I’ll come.” They were running out of food, and Aira didn’t see any other choice.

The next evening they waited among the trees outside his home until finally he came out and walked
over to them.

“Aira,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

She smiled weakly. “And you,” she said.

He saw the guilt on her face.
This was the girl who called out Ayita for being different, but she was also Ayita’s best friend. Ayita would have forgiven her, and so did he. “I’m not upset,” he told her. “And I really am glad to see you. It shows that you’ve grown.”

She looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he told her. “You only did what you were taught to do.”

She nodded at him, but she still felt ashamed. Somehow, she thought, she should have known better.

“Ayita became an agent of truth to you two, and the truth will not die. I’ll be glad to help you in any way I can.”