Part 8 (1/2)

Harper threw his head back and laughed. ”Old man yourself,” he grumbled, landing his fist into Caleb's arm. Then he looked at me, pointing at the ceiling for emphasis. ”There are millions of stars, each one s.h.i.+ning and burning out at the same time. They die like everything else-you have to appreciate them before they're gone.”

”I won't forget,” I said.

The wide office was empty except for the table and a stack of boxes. A hole nearly three feet across gaped open in the floor. I stood there, waiting for the other two to speak, but they were still perched over the paper, their faces half-lit by the lanterns. ”No progress with the collapse?” Caleb asked them.

The man was tall and thin with cracked gla.s.ses. He wore the same uniform s.h.i.+rt as I did, except the sleeves had been ripped off. He shook his head. ”I told you, I'm not discussing this in front of her.”

Caleb opened his mouth to say something but I interrupted. ”I have a name,” I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice. The man kept his eyes on the paper, studying sketches of different buildings throughout the City, notes scribbled next to them in blue ink.

”We are all well aware,” the woman said, glaring at me. Her blond hair was rolled into thin dreadlocks, her pants spotted with mud. ”You're Princess Genevieve.”

”That's not fair,” Caleb jumped in. ”I told you, you can trust her. She's no more the King's family than I am.” My stomach tensed as I remembered this afternoon. I hadn't pulled away when he'd hugged me, had felt close to him when we'd spoken of my mother. A sinking part of me wondered if maybe I was guilty of something.

The couple returned to the sketches. ”Give 'em time,” Harper whispered, patting Caleb on the back. Then he looked at me. ”If Caleb says I can trust you, then I trust you. I don't need any more proof.”

”I appreciate that,” Caleb said, grasping Harper's arm. ”Harper was the one who started building the tunnels out of the City. He realized we could use the flood channels as a starting point. Parts of them have collapsed or are too unstable, mostly from all the King's demolitions. We're constantly digging through rubble, or finding parts of them blocked off. We've nearly gotten under the wall on this one, but then we hit a whole section that had collapsed.”

Harper hiked up his belt. ”It's too dense to dig through. We need to figure out an alternate route through the flood channels. Without maps of the drainage system we're just feeling our way in the dark.”

”This is the entrance to the first tunnel,” Caleb said, gesturing to the hole. Behind us, the couple hovered over their work. ”We try to keep the hangar the way it was when we found it, just in case any troops come through. The rubble is taken out at the end of the night, a little at a time, and then the construction starts again the next evening-or at least it used to.”

”Where are the other two tunnels being built?” I asked. ”Who's working on those?” The man and woman raised their heads at the sound of my voice.

”Please don't answer that,” the man said, his voice flat. He smoothed down the paper with both hands.

Every muscle in my body tensed. ”You know I was an orphan,” I said. ”Up until a few days ago, I believed both my parents were dead. I'm not some spy. I have friends who are still locked up in those Schools-”

”You sat in that parade, didn't you?” the man with the cracked gla.s.ses interrupted. I could see my shadow in his lenses, a black figure against orange lantern light. ”Were you not on that stage, in front of all the City's residents, that stupid grin on your face? Tell me that wasn't you.”

Caleb stepped forward, raising his hand to s.h.i.+eld me from the man's accusations. ”Enough, Curtis. We're not going into this again, not now.”

But I ducked under his arm, unable to stop myself. ”You don't know me,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I leveled my finger at his face. ”Have you been in the Schools? Please, since you seem to know so much, tell me what it's like there.” The man stepped back, but his eyes were still locked on mine, refusing to look away.

We could have stayed like that for hours, staring each other down, but Caleb took my arm, pulling me away. ”Let's get out of here,” he whispered. He gave Harper a little half salute, and then we were back in the hangar, the door clicking shut behind us. ”I shouldn't have brought you here. Curtis and Jo have been good to me since I've arrived-they were the ones who found me a place to stay, who backed me when the others were unsure about letting me lead the digs. They're not usually like that. They've just seen what can happen to dissidents who are discovered.”

”I hate the way they looked at me,” I muttered. We moved through the silent warehouse, under the rusted bellies of planes.

When we reached the door Caleb stopped, resting his palm on the side of my face. ”I know,” he said, pressing his forehead to mine. ”I'm sorry. They may never completely trust you. But I do-that's what matters.”

We stayed there for a moment, his breath warming my skin, his thumb grazing my cheek. ”I know” was all I could manage. The tears were hot in my eyes. Here we were, miles from the dugout, from Califia, and there was still no place for us. We were bouncing between worlds, he in mine, I in his, but we'd never be able to truly be together in either one.

Caleb looked down at his watch, its gla.s.s face split in two. ”You can take the second street parallel to the main strip. Turn through the old Hawaiian marketplace to get back. It's empty at this time of night.” He looked into my eyes. ”Don't worry, Eve,” he added. ”Please don't worry about them. I'll see you tomorrow night.”

I pressed my lips to his, feeling his fingertips against my skin. I held them there, wanting the awful, uneasy feeling to subside, wis.h.i.+ng we could be back on the dock, those three words floating between us. ”Tomorrow night,” I repeated as Caleb slipped another folded map into my pocket. He kissed me good-bye-my fingers, my hands, my cheeks and brow. I stayed there for just a moment. The rest of the world seemed far away.

But when I started across the City, alone but for the sound of my footsteps, Curtis and Jo's words returned. I found myself arguing my case to an imaginary room, explaining away my place in the Palace-something even I wasn't completely certain of. It wasn't until I pa.s.sed the wide fountain, its surface gla.s.sy and still, that I thought of Charles. I saw his face in the conservatory that afternoon as he pointed to the gla.s.s dome, describing all his plans for the restoration.

I ran up the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, ignoring the burning in my legs. Fifty flights went by quickly, my body energized by the sudden thought. Finally, there was something I could do.

twenty-four.

”THE BUILDINGS THAT ARE TO BE RESTORED ARE FIRST determined by your father,” Charles said, spreading the photos over the table. ”We tour the place, take measurements, see what kind of shape it's in. Then I go through all the information I've recovered from before the plague-floor plans, blueprints, photos-to learn about the building's original condition, decide what can be restored and what we want to do away with.”

I nodded, my eyes darting to the long drawers on the other side of the room. The suite on the thirtieth floor had been converted into Charles's office. The bed and dressers had been replaced with wide cabinets, and the desk sat in front of a gla.s.s wall overlooking the main strip. A long wooden table was set up with models, miniature versions of some of the sites I'd seen in the City center: the domed conservatory, the Venetian's gardens, and the Grand's zoo. A smaller room held more models, some piled one on top of another. I'd asked him for a tour of his office at breakfast that morning. Charles's face had brightened. The King had urged us to go, even though our plates sat on the table, the food still hot.

I picked up another photo of the roller coaster and arcade in the old New York, New York compound. ”It's fascinating,” I offered. The worn snapshot showed people strapped into the car, screaming, their cheeks blown back by the wind. It was fascinating to see the world as it once was, so many years before. But it was impossible to look at it without thinking of how we got here, now-of the boys in the dugout or the scars that crisscrossed the top of Leif's back.

”I'm relieved to hear you say that,” Charles said. ”I could talk about this for hours. Sometimes I worry I'm boring you.”

I let out a low laugh, remembering one of Teacher Fran's sayings. ”Only boring people get bored,” I said softly. I turned a photo over in my hands, trying to decipher the smudged writing on the back. When I glanced up, Charles was looking at me. ”The Teachers used to say that.” I shrugged. ”It's silly, I know.”

”The Teachers,” he said. ”Right. I just realized we've never talked about your School.”

”If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all,” I added, pointing the photograph at him. ”That was another thing they used to say.” I looked through the doorway behind him. This one room contained so many doc.u.ments-papers piled high in corners, blueprints of most of the buildings in the City center. There had to be more information here, something that would be useful to Caleb-I just had to find it.

”But you were the valedictorian.” He plucked the photo from my grasp and set it down. I suddenly felt awkward, exposed even, now that I had nothing to do with my hands. ”You must've enjoyed it somewhat.”

”I did while I was there,” I said, knowing I couldn't tell him the truth right now. About how our Teachers had twisted our lessons. About my friends who were still trapped inside. I walked over to his desk, pretending to look at a baseball resting on a stack of loose-leaf notebooks. Every surface was covered with maps. Scribbled notes were taped to the window.

”You like my paperweight?” he gestured at it. ”You can still see the gra.s.s stains if you look closely. It's one of the few things I have from when I was a kid.”

I held it for a moment, studying the faded red st.i.tching that was coming undone in places. ”Where did you grow up?”

He opened his hands, signaling for me to throw it to him. ”A city in Northern California. There were government transports during the migration, trucks that made the trip here week after week. It took us nearly two days with stops. Everyone had to be cleared by a doctor beforehand.”

I tossed it across the room in a slow arc. I thought of the quarantine wing at School, how lonely those first weeks were. The Teachers would only speak to us through a window in the door. I was so young, but I still remembered how I'd check myself every morning, searching my skin for any sign of the bruises symptomatic of the plague.

”They gave us these masks to cover our mouths,” Charles went on. ”I remember being fifteen and looking around at all these faceless people, most of them traveling to the City alone. It was surreal.” He threw it back to me.

”What was the City like in those first years?” I turned the ball over, rubbing at the gra.s.s stain with my thumb.

”Depressing,” he said. ”Still so run down. People had come from all over. Some of them literally walked for weeks, risking their lives to get here. It wasn't the glimmering place they'd imagined. At least not then.”

He walked over to the cabinets on the other side of the room. I followed behind, thankful when he opened one of the wide, flat drawers, exposing all the papers inside. ”Those first few years we were here, all I saw was possibility. I knew I wanted to do what my father did, to work with him one day. The City center changed, building by building. You could feel the sadness lifting as people settled in, as the City began to look more like the world before. Obviously, it's still a work in progress. We're still putting the life back into it with restaurants and entertainment. But I've been tossing around some other ideas ...”

Each drawer was labeled. A few read OUTLANDS with different directions beside it-northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest. Others were named after old hotels: two drawers each for the Venetian, Mirage, Cosmopolitan, and Grand. ”When they started construction, they turned every lawn and golf course in the City into usable gardens. Which we needed, yes,” Charles said, riffling through a stack of papers in the drawer. ”But the public doesn't have access to those. We have clean water now, the ability to sustain plants. I wanted to create outdoor s.p.a.ce for everyone.” He spread a sheet of paper down on the table.

I stared at the wide expanse of green, broken in places by winding pathways. Trees were drawn in intricate detail, their limbs spread out over ponds and rock gardens. The giant lake in the center was surrounded by three stone buildings. I ran my fingers over the light pencil marks. It was as good a drawing as any of the ones I'd made in School. ”You sketched this?”

”Don't be so surprised.” Charles laughed. ”It'll be four hundred acres if it's ever built. The largest park inside the City's walls.”

Every tree and flower was carefully drawn. Boats floated along a pond. Red and yellow blooms were cl.u.s.tered around the sh.o.r.e. One of the buildings was labeled RECREATION CENTER; another, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. A third had a patio and chairs. ”A library,” I said, unable to stop from smiling. ”There's none in the City?”