The Sowing (4 page)

Several hours later, the party is winding down, and most everyone else has already gone home or on to other parties. I plop down at our now-empty table, my head reeling from the fullness of the evening. It was almost perfect. I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. In the background, the performers play a final ballad and the lights dim slightly. In the alcohol-and fatigue-induced haze, Remy Alexander’s face swims up before my eyes. I see her copper skin, her round hazel eyes, her flush lips and brown curls—fifteen-year-old Remy Alexander, the last time I saw her. The last time any of us saw her. She’s eighteen now, of course … I wonder what she looks like, if she still has that silly giggle, the glint in her eyes like when she was teasing me. Or did her sister’s death tear that happiness from her?

I start as Moriana appears out of nowhere. She looks lovely with her long dark reddish brown hair framing her freckled cheekbones and tired green eyes. Her silky black dress rustles and dances around her as she pulls up a chair and sits at my side.

“I miss them, too, Vale,” she says, somehow reading my thoughts.

 “I know,” I say after a minute. “I just don’t know why they left. They had everything. Why throw that away? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s time to move on. Tomorrow you start your new job and a whole new set of opportunities will open up for you, for both of us. It’s what we always dreamed of.”

 “I know it’s stupid, but sometimes I can’t stop thinking about her. Remy, I mean. She just left. Everything seemed perfect and then, well … then Tai. One day she stopped talking to me, and then she was just gone. Everything we shared, thrown away with no explanation.”

“Vale, you were seventeen. She was fifteen. You were kids. Now you’re twenty, you’re a citizen of the Sector, you’re an officer in the Defense Forces. We live in a different world.”

“Where’s Miah?” I ask, closing my eyes. I can’t believe how exhausted I am. How the hell am I going to face Aulion in just a few hours?

“He’s waiting outside. I told him I needed a minute.”

“Look, just—”

“I won’t say a word. But Vale, seriously. It’s time to leave them behind. Just like they left us behind. I miss Jahnu, but he and his parents made their choice.”

“Do you ever wonder why he left?”

“I used to, but not anymore. I have no idea what my aunt and uncle thought they would find out in the Wilds. Some sort of agrarian paradise? Did they go to live with the Outsiders? Who knows—but I suppose every society has its rebels. We can’t change that.”

“Yeah, I know,” I mutter. I want to agree, but I don’t. I can’t. There are too many unanswered questions, too many ghostly memories that cling to me like a second skin, and I can’t seem to shed them. There’s something wrong here, something I’m missing. And tomorrow, at 07h00 hours, I intend to start looking for the answers.

3 - REMY 

Fall 47, Sector Annum 105, 18h02
Gregorian Calendar: November 6

Jahnu and I walk through the dimly lit main corridor of our underground compound, through to the cramped cafeteria, looking for Eli. We head down the stairs toward the director’s office and our communications center. Our meager excuse for a kitchen smells like fresh baked bread and sautéed onions, and I remember how lucky I am to have escaped the Okarian Sector. If I never see a Dietician-issued Mealpak again, it’ll be a day too soon. Here we may not have a lot, but what we have is
real
. I breathe in deeply, hoping to get another whiff of the caramelizing onions and fragrant garlic, only to be brought back to reality by the scent of recycled air and rubbing alcohol wafting from the open door of what passes for our infirmary.

We’re in the bowels of what was, at one time, a large university, on par with our own Sector Research Institute, the SRI, today. We live like moles, hiding underground, digging tunnels and burrowing to avoid being seen by Sector drones when they venture out this far. Except that no one in the Okarian sector has seen a mole in a hundred years, or so says old man Rhinehouse. They were all killed by poisoned groundwater, habitat destruction, or radioactive waste seeping into the earth. Gifts bequeathed to us from the civilizations of the past. Some areas are still uninhabitable; others, nature has mended in her own way; still others were relatively untouched to begin with.

Jahnu pushes through the heavy double doors to the comm center, where Eli is sitting in a swivel chair with headphones on. He wears a thoughtful expression, like he’s trying to figure out how some piece of circuitry works. But there’s no circuit box in front of him—just the headphones and the array of dials and switches that make up our old-fashioned comm center. I walk over and poke him in the shoulder.

“Eli!”

He starts and looks up at me. When he sees who it is, he swivels in his chair and removes his headphones.

“Well, look who’s here. I was just about to send a messenger to find you, Remy. Your folks are calling in. You want me to put you through?”

“Jahnu and I want to go topside for our own graduation celebration,” I say, trying to dodge the question. “There’s nothing crazy on the weather forecast, is there?” The weather is so erratic these days that you can go to bed on a warm evening and wake up to a meter of snow on the ground. Then there are the thunderstorms with hailstones that can kill a man, the downpours that deposit an ocean’s worth of water in a few hours, and the occasional tornado clusters. Needless to say, we monitor the weather closely.

“Do you want to talk to them or not?” Eli asks, holding the headphones out, his finger on the incoming call switch. He can always tell when I’m being evasive. Not that I’m ever particularly subtle.

“We want to have a picnic, so we need to get everything organized. I’ll have you put a call through to them later.”

Eli cocks his head and raises one eyebrow as if to say,
You’re not fooling anyone.

“Remy, you have no idea if they’re even going to be available later,” Jahnu points out. It’s true. Posing as Outsiders, nomads who live in the Wilds, my parents are constantly moving, traveling between factory towns and Farms, trying ever so subtly to spread word of the Resistance to Sector citizens willing to listen. The Resistance is so small, and most of us are defects from the elite of the OAC and the Sector government. So my parents try to spread the word, and in the meantime they work to deliver real food, information, and medicine to people in the Farms. As a doctor and an artist, they make a powerful combination. But their access to reliable communications is spotty at best, especially since they’re operating right under the nose of Sector Defense Forces, and whatever public communications equipment they might use is liable to be monitored. If Sector soldiers ever caught them, well….

“Listen, I don’t want to talk to them right now, okay? Besides, I don’t need mommy and daddy to make everything all better.”

“The world would be a better place if we all had mommies and daddies to make everything all better,” Eli says, with an edge to his voice. I wince, remembering that Eli has no idea where his parents are, or if they’re still alive. I have to be careful about what I say around him—I never know when something will send him spiraling into one of his dark moods. The kind where he’ll barely say a word for days. The kind where he forgets to eat or sleep—where I wonder if he wishes the gunman had gotten to him, too. “Your parents are waiting.”

“Fine.” I sit down at the call station and put my finger on the switch. I hear Jahnu ask Eli, “So, is it safe to go topside now? We need something to cheer us up after the ceremony. And my birthday is next week.”

“Last one to hit the big one-eight, huh? What’s it like to be a child prodigy?”

“You should know....”

I tune them out and flip the call switch. There’s a hollowness on the other end and then, “Remy? Is that you?”

“Yeah, Mom. It’s me.” My voice catches in my throat.

“Dad’s on the line, too. We saw the ceremony.”

“I’m sure everyone in the Sector saw the ceremony.”

“You okay, little bird?”

At the sound of Dad’s voice, my eyes well up and my nose tingles. I pinch the bridge of my nose to keep the tears at bay. Mom’s always been my sounding board. She keeps me grounded, but I’m more like my dad. He’s the writer, the poet, the dreamer who brought art and music and literature into the house. He’s the one who encouraged me to be an artist, who somehow found books, real books, on artists that had dared to be different. When Tai was off being brilliant and perfect, finishing her science and math classes with flying colors, I always had a pen in hand, perpetually drawing, painting, or sketching. Dad was the one who encouraged me to enter the Academy’s prestigious Art and Design program—even though that turned out to be nothing but an extensive study of propaganda. And while Mom was planning our escape route, he’s the one who sat with me the night before we left when, one by one, we went through my portfolio of drawings and paintings and decided which ones to keep and which to burn. We went through every piece and picked our favorites, and then I took the others and held them over the flames in the fireplace until they were nothing more than ashes and my fingers were hot and smudged with soot.

I shouldn’t have taken the call.

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

Talking to them on the commlink is torturous—it always makes me remember how much I miss them and Tai. I haven’t seen my parents in over a year. We talk here and there, whenever they can get their equipment connected to one of the old service towers that the Resistance has rehabbed. But sometimes we’ll go weeks without talking. I have trouble sleeping then, thinking of all the terrible things that could go wrong.

“I hope you’re going to do something fun today, maybe get outside for some fresh air,” Dad says.

“Yeah, we’re going to have a picnic later to celebrate our lack of a graduation.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. But I realize I’m being a baby, so I change the subject quickly. “Where are you right now?”

“You know we can’t tell you that, sweetie,” Mom says.

“We’re going somewhere new in a few days, though,” my dad pipes up. “That’s why we wanted to talk to you now, before we have to pack up the comm equipment.”

“Is it somewhere dangerous?” I ask, afraid to hear the answer. But not knowing would be worse. My parents volunteered to serve as missionaries to the laborers on the Farms, but I wasn’t allowed to go. “Too risky,” the Director said. “You’re too young. Besides, we need you here.” My parents agreed. They wanted me to stay at the main base, which we call Thermopylae, with Eli and the other kids from the Academy. That’s how I got assigned to Eli’s raid team with Jahnu, Kenzie, and Soren.

“It’s no more dangerous than where we are now,” Mom says gently.

“That’s not very reassuring. Don’t get caught, okay?”

“We’ll try, little bird,” my dad says. “You be safe too, okay? I heard about the last seed bank raid you guys did. It sounded much more dangerous than what we do.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I say, with a glimmer of a laugh, “but I’m sure it was way more fun than what you guys do, too.”

The last mission our team went on was a thrill. We broke into one of the OAC’s seed banks, trying to steal the backup database that had all the genetic codes for the seeds manufactured there. Security was lax, presumably because the OAC didn’t realize we knew that particular bank existed. We had the run of the place, and we each picked out something to take home with us. Eli brought back a handheld retinal scanner. Soren found a digital harp, and none of us had any idea why that was hanging around the seed bank. I brought home a touch-screen drawing pad—one of the plasma tablets we used in my art classes at the Academy. I hadn’t seen one of those since we left the Sector. It was the most successful mission in the Resistance’s history, and we were greeted like war heroes when we came back.

“Yes, well, they’re not always going to be like that,” my mom says reprovingly, “so stay safe, okay?”

“We’ve got to go now, little bird. We’ll talk to you in a few weeks, when we get everything set up at our next base.”

“Okay,” I whisper. Now that I’ve got them, I don’t want to let them go. “Bye.”

“We love you.”

“I love you, too,” I say, but the words are barely audible. I hear the click, and then the static of an empty signal on the other end. I pull off the headphones and throw them down on the table.

“Good to go?” Eli asks.

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t come,” he says. “I’m doing a double shift.”

“No way!” I exclaim in indignation. Eli already spends at least sixteen of his waking hours working, either tinkering with some old piece of equipment or doing shifts at different stations around the base. There’s no reason for him to work a double shift.

“You covering for someone or in trouble again?” Jahnu asks.

“Apparently I have a bad attitude.” Eli smiles.

“Really?” Jahnu draws back in mock astonishment, his almond eyes wide. “What did you do this time?” Eli and Jahnu stand in stark contrast to each other. They’re about the same height, but Jahnu’s skin is the color of a shadowy night and his hair is shaved close. Eli’s brown curls, on the other hand, are usually uncontrollable, and his olive skin makes me think of sandy beaches and summer afternoons in the sun.

“I told the Director what I thought of her plans for the Arysk mission.”

“Told her politely, I’m sure.” Jahnu rolls his eyes.

“I’m always polite.” Eli grins. Eli’s version of polite typically includes shouting and slamming doors.

“That’s why back home they were feeding you OAC happy pills morning, noon, and night,” I throw out.

“And who knows what they were putting in my food.”

There’s a sort of pause, a thick silence that fills the moment when the three of us don’t want to say the next thing, the thing that we’re all thinking about, the thing that brought us all to the bowels of this old bombed-out university. To provide a distraction, I stand and try to pull Eli out of his creaky old office chair. It just rolls toward me.