The Sowing (18 page)

“
Why am I doing this?
This is not about me, Remy. You’ve pitted yourselves against everything we’ve worked for over a hundred years. The Resistance threatens to destroy everything we want to preserve of this new world we’ve created—a world you used to believe in, a world your family helped build. Now you want to destroy all that? People will starve and you’ll be responsible. Your organization wants to send us spiraling back into a world where resources are scarce, disease is rampant, and war is everyone’s default. It’s about you. It’s about why you left ... it’s about everything we used to talk about, everything I thought we shared....”

Remy is staring at me, her mouth half-open in surprise, but Soren just laughs. He twists his shoulders and tries to sit up, as if to get a better view of me.

“You really don’t know, do you?” He turns to Remy, leaning into her. “Lover boy here doesn’t have a fucking clue! Can you believe it? This is amazing. Almost worth the price of admission.”

“Soren,” Remy rasps.

“Seriously, think about it,” he continues. “The poster-boy of the whole damn Sector, and he’s dumber than dirt, doesn’t have any idea what his parents are up to. I guess they still think he’s too young and naïve to know what’s really going on.” He turns back to me now, suddenly all serious, but with a comic, exaggerated manner to his speech, like he’s talking to a five-year old.

“Valerian, I’ll tell you exactly why we left. To get away from
your
parents. To get as far away as possible from the OAC and all the people who are genetically modifying all that glorious food
you
grow and feed to
your
people to turn them into
your slaves
. Ever been to a Farm, Vale? Sure you have, but always on official business. Always with an escort. Always with Mummy or Daddy. What about on your own? Ever been out there on your own? Ever had a thought of your own? Ever wonder why most of the workers on the Farms are giants? Why their testosterone stats are off the charts? The OAC is feeding them food designed to suppress their critical thinking skills, make them bigger and stronger for manual labor, and get them to reproduce as quickly as possible. Let them breed like rabbits, live until they’re forty, maybe forty-five if they’re particularly good workers, and die off—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I? Oh, it’s a glorious, brave new world! Planned obsolescence of the worker class. You get a constant supply of drones slaving their lives away while you and your friends dine on lavish meals juiced with customized cocktails designed to amp up your cognitive abilities so you can laugh and philosophize about art and culture and science and take over the reins of government and perpetuate the whole damn cycle!”

I want to charge forward and kick the bastard in the ribs, but I can feel Remy watching me. “You’ve had your say, now—”

“Perfect, beautiful, brilliant people living perfect, beautiful, brilliant lives.” Soren is holding my eye contact as though his life depends on it, and I don’t dare break for fear of looking like a coward. “But guess what, Vale. Some of us don’t want to be perfect if it all comes from a Dietician’s beaker or a petri dish. Is any of this sinking in? We don’t want to be slaves—even if we’re the slaves holding the whip. That’s why we left.”

The muscles in my jaw clench and unclench as I stare down at him, fighting an overwhelming desire to kick his teeth in. Soren’s always hated me, and now he just keeps laughing at me. I don’t even know what to say, how to respond.

“Look at him, Remy,” Soren says, elbowing her. “Struck speechless by the miracle of it all. Hey, Vale, you still got my knife on you? You manage to keep yourself from stabbing anyone in the back since yesterday? I know going a full day is asking a lot of you, but hey—”

“Soren!” Remy says, her eyes fixed on me, a look of hesitant appraisal on her face. “He didn’t have anything to do with this. It wasn’t his decision to beat you or to not feed us.”

“Are you kidding me? He had everything to do with this! He’s the ‘Director of the Seed Bank Protection Project.’ He’s the one who orchestrated this whole goddamn mission, and he’s obviously the one responsible for our luxurious accommodations. Or wait, maybe, Remy, dear, you’re right. Maybe Vale doesn’t really have any power at all. Just a pretty face for the people to latch on to. Just another synthetically produced tool used to control the masses.”

“I didn’t ... I wasn’t—” I can’t seem to get my thoughts in order.

“You weren’t
what
, Vale?”

“Stop it, Soren!” Remy hisses.

Soren just shakes his head and stares at me. “You still think you’re the good guys?”

“I—what?” I mumble, not knowing what else to say. Suddenly, though, Soren’s eyes are not on me, but past me, behind me. His clear blue eyes grow wide, and he straightens up, leaning back against the pole, against Remy, as if recoiling as much as possible from—what? I follow his gaze and turn around. General Aulion has walked through the door behind me.

“No,” Soren whispers. “Not you … you’re dead….”

I played Soren in countless soccer games, I sat next to him in hundreds of classes, and I’ve even had a couple of shoving matches with him, but I’ve never seen him like this. Remy cranes her neck around to look at Soren and then back at Aulion, but it’s clear she doesn’t recognize the General.

Aulion pushes past me, flanked by two OAC Security Guards, and walks over to stand above Remy and Soren. He looks down at them for a moment, shakes his head in disgust, and then squats beside them and leans in toward Soren. He speaks softly, like a parent speaking to a small child. “That was a nice little speech, Soren. Impressive. Now you will answer our questions. If you choose not to, we will drug you, and you will give us the information anyway.” Aulion’s stoic, calm glare is fixed on Soren. “Make your decision carefully, Soren, or you will meet the same end as your ‘mummy and daddy’.”

Remy is straining to look over her shoulder at Soren whose face is twisted up in a hateful, terrified grimace. I half expect him to start frothing at the mouth. Remy presses her back against him, as if to hold him back—or comfort him, I wonder, and a flash of jealousy clouds my vision—and then she turns her attention past Aulion, up toward me, training her golden brown eyes on mine like a hawk tracking a field mouse.

“They killed Tai,” she says, almost gently. Tai? What is she talking about? Tai died in a terrorist attack. “It wasn’t an Outsi—”

Aulion’s hand flies out and smacks Remy across the cheek. I start forward, but Chan-Yu grabs my arm. I turn on him and his look stops me cold, but it’s a warning, not a threat. His eyes seem to say,
Don’t let Aulion catch you defending her.
I look back to Remy. Eyes closed, she tilts her head gingerly back against the pole as tears track down and over the blood-red mark on her cheek. She opens her eyes and looks at me again.

“Vale, it was the OAC. It was your—”

“Guards!” Aulion barks.

“No, Remy, stop, Aulion—” Soren leans forward and struggles against his bonds as four more guards rush past me into the room, blocking my view. Then Soren goes quiet.

Remy’s voice rises to a raspy shout. “A man in black, he killed Tai and tried to kill Eli because—” One of the guards claps her hand over Remy’s mouth, and Chan-Yu squeezes my arm like a vise, his thumb digging into a pressure point so hard my knees threaten to buckle beneath me.

“Shut her up!” Aulion yells, but I’ve heard enough. One of the guards rips open her shirt and pulls it down to expose her shoulder as the other plunges a needle in. She starts panting, her eyes roll back and she goes limp. I can’t breathe. What was in that needle?

“And get him out of here!” Aulion roars. Chan-Yu whispers something in my ear, and I try to push him away, try to get to Remy who is slumped against Soren, his head lolling sideways like it’s barely attached at the neck. But Chan-Yu is at my side, one arm around my shoulders, the other gripping my elbow, guiding me out of the room and down the hall.

I’m hearing from every corner of my brain, No, no, it’s not possible,
Tai’s death was from an Outsider attack, the OAC had nothing to do with it
, but that doesn’t explain anything, really, and it certainly doesn’t explain why a brilliant, respected scientist and the Sector’s poet laureate abruptly disappeared and took their fifteen-year-old daughter with them.

 “Sir, sir!” Chan-Yu’s face swims vaguely before me, but I wrench away and start back toward the holding room. It’s obvious now Chan-Yu’s just another one of Aulion’s tools.

“Get the fuck away from me,” I growl. But he grabs me and pushes me up against the wall with a force that nearly knocks me off my feet. He pins my shoulders and stares me in the face.

“Vale, listen to me carefully. Two things: do not go back in there. And listen to her.”

He lets me go, and I nearly crumple to the floor.
Listen to her?
I can feel him watch from a distance as I stumble through the hallways, dizzy, sick. Colors shift and blur and the walls close in on me.
Listen to her?
I find a deserted room and slam the door behind me.

I sink down to the floor, back against the door, panting. “Demeter....” In my ear I hear her say quietly, “Yes, Vale.”

“What do I do?” I whisper, lost.

“Find the truth.”

15 - REMY

Fall 90, Sector Annum 105, 11h15
Gregorian Calendar: December 19

 “Remy,” I hear Soren whisper, and my eyes flutter open. I can’t make out clear lines, only indistinct grey shapes like a dream.
Am I dreaming?
I can’t hold my head up. How long ago was it that Vale was in here? Ten minutes? I try to think of what’s transpired since then but my mind seems drenched in fog. Ten hours? Why was he here? Who was the old man with the scars?

I close my eyes and a shape swims to the surface of the blackness. The sunflower. The DNA structure we’ve been staring at, trying to interpret, to understand. It swirls around and seems to take on color, golden yellow petals with a black, piercing center. I feel as though I can see each of the little base pairs that make up the enormous, complex structure, just like those old pointillist paintings we talked about in art class. Millions of individual dots that make up a beautiful picture.

I’m delirious.

I am dimly aware of a change in Soren’s posture behind me. I try to look at him but twisting my neck results in a vicious throb of pain on the back of my head that engulfs me like a flame. I open my eyes and look at myself through bleary, grayscale vision. I am, apparently, not on fire.

“Remy,” he says again. “Are you alive?” Alive? Dead?
What are those things?
I am somewhere in between two planes of existence.

My mouth opens and forms a shape, and sounds emerge from my vocal chords, air from my diaphragm, and a word emerges: “Yes.” But I don’t fully understand its meaning.

What did they drug us with?

“Look up in the corner of the room.” I try to do as he instructs, but I can’t focus on anything, let alone a particular location in a particular room.
Where am I?
“Cameras. I noticed them yesterday. They’re watching us.”

“Have you done anything camera-worthy, Soren?” I hear myself asking and I wonder how these two parts of myself are so divided. One part, communicative. Talking. Thinking. Another part, lost in the ventilation system of my mind.

I close my eyes again and sink back into the comforting blackness, but that quickly gives way to twisting spirals, elegant double helixes that stretch and bend and turn and wrap and unwrap themselves into a thousand tiny angles, fractals arranging and rearranging themselves until a magnificent form emerges from the chaos.

“Soren,” I rasp and try to sit up. “It’s not a sunflower.”

He responds, but I don’t hear because my mind is occupied, swirling around this strange shape. But this time something is different. It
shifts
into focus, like it was there all along. The petals unfold in a different way, they’re broader, wider, perfect ovals and delicate leaves.
Why couldn’t I see it before?
Everything floats around in multicolored hues like that one time Eli, Jahnu, and I ate Rhinehouse’s hidden mushrooms, and I can’t see anything but the shifting structure of the flower, the flat open petals, the golden light at the center, the perfectly arranged pistils—

“Happy birthday, Granddad,” I say, staring up into his crinkled, warm smile. “What do you want for your birthday?” I ask reluctantly, knowing that it’s the polite thing to do. I don’t really want to give him a present—I would much rather he give me a present—but my mother told me I had to ask, and so I do.

“Thank you, little bird! I’ll tell you what I want for my birthday, but you have to come with me on a walk first.” He holds my hand and pulls me toward his garden. I frown. This isn’t something I bargained for. Giving him a present was one thing; now I have to go in there where there are funny bugs and strange, smelly flowers when I’d rather be playing with Tai.

“Follow me,” he says, pulling gently on my hand. “I’ll show you what I want for my birthday, and then you can go play with your sister.” He leads me through the narrow, winding stone path, overgrown with plants and vines and stops when we reach the little stone fountain. He points out a flower with wide, curving purple-pink petals and a soft yellow middle. It’s growing inside the fountain, resting just above the surface of the water. “Do you know what this is?” I shake my head vigorously, and he picks me up and holds me next to the fountain so I can see it better. “Be gentle with it. This is a very rare flower. I had to travel very far to find the seeds that would bring this plant to life again.” He looks at me seriously.

“Why is it so special?” I ask, suddenly curious.

“Because, little bird, its seeds are some of the strongest and hardiest in the whole world. They’re a testament to the power of life to return even after thousands of years, even after death and starvation. They spring from the ground eternally, bringing flowers and beauty back to the world, just like hope.” I screw up my face in concentration, but I don’t really understand.