Twenty
“Who are you?” Nad/Sym asks me.
“Eenralla Land.”
“Oh, you’re back from your surgery,” She says, her tone and posture changing once again.
“What’s your full name?” I ask to make sure.
“Nad Hemmings. What has gotten into you?”
My eyes shift to the camera above my door. I can just barely see the red dot behind the tinted blackness covering it.
Nad said I was a Government Official now. Did they change my job while I was gone? Did they know I’d come back? Or were they expecting to capture me?
My brain picks up speed.
Maybe they have an ID for me somewhere in this room, and maybe I can get inside the Government building walls. Maybe I’ll get my answers there. I just can’t get caught. Which is a problem, because Murkas knows my face, and so does anyone who is working close to him.
Whatever is going on with Nad, whatever they did to her, it isn’t right.
Nad seems to appear if I say my full name. When I was first talking to her, she didn’t know who I was when I said I was Eenie. But when I said I was Eenralla Land, she knew exactly who I was.
So I try something.
“Sym Lation, is it?” I ask, outstretching my hand.
I’m hoping this will work, and that I won’t be stuck with Nad, who thinks I’m insane. She’ll want to take me to the Hospital, not the Government building. But whomever the person was that I first met a few minutes ago could take me. She’s a Government Official, and I’m hoping that she’ll be gullible enough to take me instead.
He face goes blank again, and then her eyes fill with light.
“Yes ma’am. What am I doing here?”
It worked!
“I invited you over here so I could welcome you to the neighborhood.”
“I’ve lived here for six months,” She says slowly.
“Uh, yes,” I stop shaking her hand and cross my arms in front of me. “I never got to say hello, being a Government Official and all.”
She looks around and sees the white clothing hanging in my closet.
“Oh, well, hello. I don’t think I caught your name.”
“Eenie. My name is Eenie.”
“Well then, Eenie, how do you do?” She smiles, looks down at my clothes, makes a face, and then politely shifts her attention to something else.
I pick at the yellow material. Nad was lead to think I was in surgery for something, which is strange, considering no one ever gets sick. No one ever really gets injured. That’s why everything is so safe and why we have Safeties—so we stay safe.
“I needed surgery. Uh, bad. On my… hand!” I exclaim, picking up my purple arm. “I broke it falling off of… something.” I fake a smile. For my brain learning faster, I sure haven’t learned how to make up better excuses.
“Oh my goodness, it’s purple. Is it okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Uh, you said you left something at work?”
“No, I was just leaving—”
“Um,” I think quickly. “You said you left something there. A pen or an important paper…?”
“Oh,” She says, shuffling through the book and papers she holds. “Well, I guess I did,” She pauses. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Sure,” I say, glad she’s polite enough to ask instead of just leave. If that were the case, I’d have to navigate on my own. “Um, let me change first.”
She nods and smiles and sits down on my bed, moving the dress over.
o0o0o
Once I’m changed and I find my ID hooked on my mirror in the bathroom, I follow Nad/Sym to the Dame’s Dome Government building. We walk through the front doors, and only get one or two glances from the people working inside, which is a good sign. No one has recognized me or tried to report me yet.
We work our way downstairs and I follow her down long, narrow hallways. She tries making light conversation, but I don’t answer often. The white walls and floors turn to dirt after two flights of stairs, and the lights dim as we head down the long passageway. After a few minutes of walking, the hall opens up to the right. The lights are bright and the floors and walls are back to normal. There are people in white clothes everywhere hunched over lab tables and books. They don’t all work in the same room. Some are off to the side in clear rooms pouring liquids or typing furiously on computers.
This is the place my mother was brought seven years ago.
“Okay, now we walk some more,” Nad/Sym laughs half-heartedly.
We weave our way through the tables to a room in the back.
“Where exactly are we?” I ask her.
She looks at me funny. “We’re below the main Government building in the Home Dome.”
“Oh, right,” I say, my brain freaking out. “I’m going to use the bathroom.”
“Okay. I’ll go get the paper I left real quick.”
I nod, and watch her walk away. On one of the walls holds a large map of all of the halls. Across the top, it says Underground Map to the Government Buildings. It has all three Domes lined up, with the Dude’s Dome on the top, and the Dame’s Dome on the bottom. The Hunting Dome is off to the left side. One of the little squares inside of the maps’ Home Dome’s Government Building says PRESIDENT. That’s where I need to go, no matter how much I want to be away from that man. He’ll give me my answers. Maybe.
Why does everything end with me talking to him? With my job, with my strike, with my dress, with my passing out outside of the Outer Dome thing, and now with this. I don’t know why I keep going back to him. He never gives me all of the information I need.
But he’s the only one that knows about it all.
I head down the hallways, going the way the map had shown me.
Shouting is coming from a room to my left. I look in through the little rectangle of glass to see what’s going on. There is a man in a white suit over a black shirt and red hair that sticks up everywhere poking at a hologram. It’s flickering badly, but I can see that it’s an image large Dome. Inside it are four smaller Domes.
“That’s it,” I whisper.
Stupidly, I open the door and the man looks up, startled.
“Who are you?” He barks, standing in front of the hologram, trying to hide it.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It’s classified. Now leave.”
“What’s outside the Dome?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” He says, stuttering and pressing buttons to shut the orange light off. “Leave. Now.”
“I know about the Dome on the outside. Who is living outside of it?”
He pauses for a moment before saying anything else, and looks down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” He says, and presses a large button on the table that projected the orange hologram. A beeping sound comes from the table and the President’s face lights up on it.
“Yes, what is it, Wess?”
“This girl knows about the Outer Dome.”
I sprint out of the doorway before the President can focus on me. I bump into someone, and we fall to the ground.
“Sorry,” He says quickly, and runs to hide behind a wall.
“Justin?”
It’s the boy from the camp who showed me to my tent. He looks around the wall, his face lighting up, and helps me stand. He leads me into a room and shuts the door behind us.
“You’re alive!” He says, jumping once with a giant grin on his face.
“What are you doing in here?” I ask, giving him a sideways glance.
“I’m doing undercover work. They all think I’m a Government-Official-in-training,” How old is he? “Eenie, there’s something I need to tell you!”
“Can it wait?” I ask quietly, and I continue on quickly. “Look, I found something out that the President doesn’t want me to know. He said he’s going to take care of it. You have to trust that it’s true, and that I’m not crazy, okay?”
“Okay, Eenie.”
“The Home Dome, Dame’s Dome, Dude’s Dome, and the Hunting Dome are all connected. Of course. We learned that from when we were babies. But what we didn’t learn was what was outside of them.
“I can see through holograms. They flicker and flash and I can see what’s behind them because I accidentally touched the Dome wall. Because of that small screw-up, apparently my brain works faster and the holograms are becoming too ‘primitive’ for it, so it just looks past them to see what’s underneath. I was inside the Rebellion Complex and Peter—Hemmings and I escaped. But when I got out of the river, where the Rebellion is, I looked up at the moon. I remember loving the sight, and then it flickered.”
“But why would the moon be a hologram?”
“Because there’s one more Dome on the outside of these. I actually was able to go on the other side, but I think the oxygen level was low. I ended up passing out, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the Dame’s Dome Hospital, and the President was interrogating me.”
“What’s the point of a second Dome?”
“President Murkas was talking about some kind of… well, he called it the ‘Future Civilization’. But I want to know who they are. That’s what I’m on my way to do. I need to talk to Murkas again.”
“Well you gotta do it quick,” He says, standing on his tiptoes to see out the window in the door. “The rebellion’s about to start.”
“What?”
“Yeah. The plans are that we take over the system and get as many people into the Domes as possible. After that, it’s revolution time,” He grins. “We’re gonna all be okay!”
“How is everyone getting in?” I ask.
“I’m letting them in through a door down here. We have a bunch of old Computes that will shut down all of the cameras. They said we’d have a… ‘Window of twenty minutes to get everyone that we can inside the Dome’. I’m trying to get as much white clothes as I can. If anyone gets seen down here without one, someone’s gonna kill them.” He looks at me with wide eyes, and then back down to a band on his wrist. “I’m supposed to be at the door-thing in thirty minutes.”
“Where does the passageway end?”
“They said where the campsite was when the bombing happened. Or around that area. You ready?”
A sharp pain in my stomach makes me double over, and I slam my left hand on the cool wall to keep me from falling. The pain lasts for a full minute, and tears well up in my eyes. It hurts. It hurts so badly. What’s happening to me?
The pain lets up, and sweat has collected around the edge of my forehead. I try to breathe. The pain had made me lightheaded.
“Let’s go,” I say, and open the door.