Chapter 12: I'm Only Bleeding

The day opened with rolling brownouts, dimming the grow lamps and delaying the lifts. They didn’t prevent the two grim-faced security patrolmen from marching into Hydro right after shift change, looking for Lily.

She’d expected this. But instead of Naomi or a firing squad they hauled her up to Level 2, marched her into a cramped office, and presented her to Ishmael.

He had more lines on his face than she remembered, and more silver in his hair. The light above his desk was in its death throes.

“Sit,” he said.

Lily sat.

Her escort left, and Ishmael slumped in his chair the minute the door closed. “How have you been? Staying out of trouble?”

“Yes,” Lily lied. “When are you going to let us out?”

Ishmael blinked a few times. He looked down at his folded hands, then back up, and Lily felt a stone settle in her throat. He was smiling faintly. “Us?”

No way out of this corner. She folded her arms and leaned back.

“I suspected you knew each other on the surface. Where is Michael now?”

“Down here somewhere.” Lily shifted. “Why?”

He opened a desk drawer. Lily expected a pistol, but was instead confronted with a battered, plastic-wrapped red book. Ishmael opened it tenderly to a marked page. He started to show it to her, then cleared his throat and pulled it back.

“Station bylaws, everything regulated for two centuries. That’s how long we’re supposed to be down here, you know. Before the USDC sends its envoy.”

Lily knew exactly where this was going. She wanted to explode. “When will that be?”

Ishmael laughed; a single, sharp syllable, more like a bark. “They’re late, and no one has heard from them in decades. Until this morning, when a message from their headquaters in Philadelphia popped up on my terminal. Ever been there?”

She shook her head.

“What about Michael?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“The message was automated,” Ishmael went on, unfazed. “We’re to follow the envoy’s instructions, prepare to depart for the settlement that’s been built for us. Only there is no envoy, and there is no settlement. What did you do last night?”

Lily recognized how badly she’d underestimated him. She’d assumed he was too stressed and overworked to be a problem, and worse, he’d been kind to her. So she’d let her guard down. “You’ll have to ask Michael.”

“You mentioned that. Any idea where he might be?”

“I thought you knew everything.”

Again, Ishmael smiled. “He didn’t go to work today, and his ID card hasn’t been used anywhere in the Station. We can’t find him. What did he do?”

He had a face that made her want to like him even now that he’d shown his hand. Lily bit the tip of her tongue. Then, carefully, she asked, “What does USDC stand for?”

“United States Defense Coalition. Judging by your face…that means something to you.”

It meant that no matter how far she walked, she would never be free of them. Lily’s mouth hurt. She felt like she’d been poisoned.

But why would the Coalition build a place like this and not put any Coalition in it? Maybe they hadn’t been able to get here in time. The bombs would’ve fried the circuitry in their flying machines, and it was a long way from Delphi.

“Lily?”

She gathered herself. “Whatever he did, it was an accident. He’s not an envoy and you don’t want the Coalition to find out you’re here. Trust me.”

Ishmael laid his hand flat on the cover of the book. Then he swept it indelicately into the desk drawer and kicked it shut. “I’d like to. And I’d like you to trust me.”

She must’ve done something with her face again, because he laughed a little as he slid back his chair. It was not a friendly sound.

“You’re free to go. If you see Michael, tell him I’d like to speak with him.”

Out in the hallway, half the lights overhead were dead.

—

Afterwards, the air circulator fans dragged the smell of burning down to the residential levels. It clung to the walls and seeped into Lily’s clothes and hair. The two events blurred into each other: Ishmael, and the fire.

She heard three different rumors at lunch: A generator blew and caught fire and three levels were lost. A mob stormed the Engineering level. Someone’s cigarette ignited a gas leak.

Lily picked at her breakfast, but it tasted like smoke. Seven people died. That was the consensus. Seven dead and two dozen hospitalized, and she couldn’t shake her lingering fear over the timing of it all.

There had been no sign of Michael. In a moment of thoughtless stress she’d pushed the beds together and slept diagonally across them, so that he would have to wake her if he came back.

She’d slept undisturbed.

Down in Hydro, red-suited figures were now sprinkled in among the workers in their water-stained blue jumpsuits, holding guns. Everyone had to line up for a search before leaving for the day — maybe for weapons, maybe for improvised explosives. Maybe for cigarettes.

Lily found herself next to Maggie, who looked deflated.

“Is Ellis ok?”

Maggie flinched. “What? Oh. Yes.” She let out a shuddering sigh. “That book you wanted to borrow. I’m done with it. Come by after dinner, you can have it.”

“Book,” Lily repeated.

They were almost to the front of the line. Maggie kept her eyes forward. “Later tonight.”

The search was brief and perfunctory. Before Lily could figure out a suitable answer, Maggie was lost in a sea of tired blue shoulders, sweeping everything toward the lift bank.

—

Lily had lived in her unfurnished apartment longer than she’d occupied any one place since Omaha. She’d caught herself thinking of it as ‘home’, which made the weight of all those years fall on her like a hammer. Running water, electricity, a door that locked from the inside and a bed she didn’t have to share: if that wasn’t a home, what was?

The door was shut tight when she arrived. She’d left it ajar. Lily swiped her card and shouldered her way in.

Michael slept, sprawled out across both beds with his legs hanging over the edge. His hair was dark with sweat and he smelled of smoke. Swallowing guilt, Lily nudged his foot with the toe of her shoe.

He sat bolt upright with a sharp intake of breath, but his alert expression faded immediately to narrow-eyed, exhausted confusion. “What?”

“I need to move the beds.”

He looked around, scraping his fingers through his hair, upsetting the curls. “Oh.”

It took a few seconds. When the cots were a room apart again, Lily collected her pillow and held it against her stomach. “Ishmael brought me in for questioning yesterday.”

“Did you tell him anything?”

“Yeah, I — don’t look at me like that, I told him it was an accident, and that I hadn’t seen you since. Where were you?”

Michael shook his head. He lay down on his back, arm over his eyes.

Darkness, for once, was preferable. Lily shut off the light and lay out too, listening to Michael moving restlessly. Even once he quieted she couldn’t will her body to relax.

“Michael?”

She heard him roll over.

“You knew this was a Coalition base before we went down there.”

It was impossibly black, like being buried alive. She couldn’t see him or even where he was supposed to be. Maybe he’d disappeared. Maybe he’d never been there at all.

“I wanted to be wrong,” he said.

The knowledge was corrosive. It bubbled and chewed at the lining of her stomach, bored holes in her heart.

She sat up and switched the lamp back on, and found him also sitting, elbows propped on his knees. They faced each other, unspeaking.

“Alpha Base had a second exit,” Michael said at last. “But I don’t remember where.”

Lily bit her tongue to keep from voicing her theory. He already knew too much about her, and anyway until that instant it had only been a rumor. No one ever put eyes on it.

“The layout of this place is different, though. I couldn’t find blueprints.” He dragged his hands down his face. Stubble rasped under his palms. “I don’t think it matters. Down in Engineering they were talking about forcing open the door.”

Lily smothered an exhausted laugh. “What have you been doing?”

“Encouraging them,” Michael said, and she couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking.

She wished they were still friends — or whatever it was that they’d been. It hit her out of nowhere, like a punch or a bullet.

The sour feeling returned. Lily tied up her hair and cleared her throat. “I forgot, I have to go see somebody. Just…I don’t know. Make sure no one sees you when you leave.”

Michael blinked a few times.

“Or I can tell you about it when I come back,” Lily said, pocketing her keycard.

He nodded, then, and lay down.

—

Most of the lights in Maggie’s hallway were dead. Lily felt the dark patches like cold spots in the water as she banged on the door and waited, bouncing on her feet. “It’s me!”

Something heavy scraped across the floor. The door opened and Maggie yanked Lily inside; Ellis moved the little table back into position, barring the entrance. He had a black eye.

Em sat unsmiling on the rug, stacking colored blocks.

“It was true,” Maggie said. The nails on her plump fingers were bitten to the quick. “Ellis found the footage. They tried to erase it, but he saw you being brought in. And someone else, a man. Ellis saw him in Engineering before the riot.”

Lily suppressed a wordless fear. “Are you…blackmailing me?”

“What? No. No, of course not.” Maggie tried to smile. She touched Ellis’s arm, so casually. In return he squeezed her knee. “You’re not the envoys. If you were, we’d be home now.”

It was a question and not a question.

“We aren’t anything,” Lily said. “We want to go home too.”

Maggie nodded. A single tear slid down her cheek, and she palmed it angrily away.

“It’s bad.” Ellis’ voice was a low bass rumble. “They’re saying that blackout in the middle of the night was planned power rationing, but the head of my department got a message on his terminal advising him of an automated, staggered shutdown of the generators. We’re trying to stop it, but—”

On the floor, Em’s block tower collapsed with a clatter. She froze and looked to her mother.

“It’s ok, baby,” Maggie whispered, with an expression of indescribable sadness. “No one heard.”

Lily picked the skin around her thumbnail. A small bead of red welled up.

“They must’ve gotten one in Supply, too, because they rushed us. Tried to make us open the airlock.”

The lights seemed to dim again. Maybe not. Lily wished she’d asked Michael to come with her. “Could you?”

“No. Head of Security and the Station Head have to authorize it simultaneously, and no one can get in to see Naomi. Or Ishmael, for that matter.”

Ishmael, who’d been having her followed. Lily looked from the door to Em, who was doggedly rebuilding her tower as a pyramid.

“What is it that you want me to do,” she said, when no one immediately kicked the door in. “Exactly.”

“Ellis thinks we can get you out of the Station,” Maggie said. She hadn’t noticed Lily’s panic. She hadn’t stopped watching her daughter. “But you have to take us with you.”