Inside Out Page 6

  “Oh, yes, I understand,” she said with an even flat tone. “I find myself having to swallow wrong things all the time. They leave a bitter taste. Makes me choke. Churns my stomach.”

  I had no answer. My mind buzzed with warning signals.

  She studied me for an eternal minute, then said, “Hour zero. Time to report to your station for your next shift. Air duct twenty-two, I believe.”

  “Yes, sir,” I managed to squeak out. I joined the flow of scrubs to the hallway, not daring to look back at the LC. She had been reading my file. She knew all about me, and she wanted me to know. Damn.

  An interesting fact about air duct number twenty-two was it crossed right above the kitchen, and eventually, if you followed it far enough, it passed right on top of Broken Man’s hideout.

  Once I reached my cleaning station, I hefted the troll into the air shaft. Then I raided a maintenance closet for extra supplies. Crawling behind the troll, I built a crude skid. I kept glancing behind me, checking to see if LC Karla had sent a couple of RATSS to spy on me.

  When the troll reached my stash of food, I shut it down while I rigged the skid up to it. I peered through the vent. The kitchen bustled with activity. Scrubs filled containers and chopped vegetables. Two ensigns strolled through the chaos. They were probably keeping track of the knives, counting in their heads to make sure a scrub didn’t steal one and attack the Pop Cops.

  No sign of Karla. My relief surprised me. Subconsciously I must have been expecting her to ambush me; to reach through the vent and cry “Gotcha!” before she kill-zapped me.

  With that awful image in mind, I loaded the food onto the pallet as fast as I could, then restarted the cleaning troll. The troll’s engine strained with the extra weight. I had to smile when I flipped open one of the control panels on the side of the troll and turned a tiny thumbscrew. Cogon had shown me how to increase the machine’s throttle, so it could move faster. An increase of speed meant I would finish my work sooner, and would have more time off—provided no one caught me.

  The troll lurched forward as the engine roared. Its speed stayed the same, but it had no trouble pulling the skid.

  Paranoia made me keep checking for RATSS, but the troll and I reached Broken Man’s rooms without incident. I popped the vent off and swung down, dropping to the floor.

  “Hello, Trella,” he said.

  I spun. He sat in a corner of the living room. I smelled him from here. He was ripe.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” I said. Pulling a chair under the open vent, I used it to reach the food.

  “Here, let me help.” Broken Man sprawled on the floor and used his arms to drag himself across the room. He wriggled into a sitting position and held his hand to me.

  I handed the supplies to him, and he made a pile next to his legs. When the skid was empty, I hopped off the chair and carted the food into the kitchen.

  “Hungry?” I asked from the kitchen.

  “Very.”

  I brought him a spoon, and he dug into one of the yellow vegetable casseroles. When everything was put away, I stepped onto the chair again.

  “I’ll be back after my shift with fresh clothes,” I called. He waved his spoon in goodbye. I climbed into the duct, turned the troll on and completed the air shaft.

  When I finished my assigned ducts, I headed to the washroom. Fresh laundered uniforms and clothes were always stacked in large canvas bins on wheels. Empty bins were then used for dirty garments.

  I collected a bunch of clothes, linens and soap and bundled everything together with a towel. At my next stop I added some cleaning supplies, hoping to reduce the black dust coating every surface of Broken Man’s rooms.

  He had returned to the corner when I plopped down with my bundle. I showed him what I had brought. He smiled in relief, but I cringed over the black grit between his teeth.

  “Shower?” I asked.

  “Please.”

  I hesitated for an awkward moment. How to go about this? Fortunately, he had thought ahead. Poor man, he had hours alone with nothing to do, and I didn’t think to bring him anything to occupy him.

  “Get a chair from the kitchen and put it in the shower,” he said. He set a businesslike tone as he gave me instructions.

  As I placed the seat under the nozzle, he pulled himself into the bathroom and began to undress. His short commands only faltered when I tugged off his pants and underwear and hoisted him into the chair. I turned on the water and gave him the soap and the washcloth, leaving him to wash himself in private.

  As I cleaned the dust, I wondered how he had gotten the long jagged scar stretched across his lower back. Shorter scars marked his arms and torso. His withered legs had flopped when I had moved him. I stopped wiping for a second to try to envision his life before the accident. One insight I did have while helping him into the shower. He was a natural blond, and I should probably apologize for the harsh comment I had made when I first met him about going back to the upper levels to have his hair dyed.

  When I checked on Broken Man, he had turned the water off and sat dripping. I handed him a towel and assisted in drying and dressing. I debated how to move him. Despite my smaller size, all the time I’d spent climbing through the ducts and pipes had strengthened my muscles. Not wanting him to drag his clean clothes over the floor, I wrapped his arms around my neck, pulled his weight onto my back and in a hunched-over shuffle managed to get him into the chair in the living room.

  “Thanks,” he said as he combed his fingers through wet hair.

  “Food?” I asked.

  He nodded. I brought him a bowl.

  As he ate, he pointed to one of the walls where a rippled pattern was the only notable feature.

  “See that? I bet it’s a computer terminal. I couldn’t reach it from the floor. Can you lift it?”

  I studied the pattern. It consisted of horizontal sheets of metal about two-centimeters wide connected like a curtain. A dent at the bottom allowed my fingers to slide under.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  I pulled it up, then stepped back in alarm as the metal curtain disappeared under the wall with a rolling sound. Behind the sheet were a flat computer screen and a console of buttons and plugs.

  “Yes!” Broken Man said. For the first time since we had rescued him, his face glowed with excitement. “Help me get closer.”

  I pushed his chair next to the wall. He reached out to touch a button.

  “Wait,” I said in alarm. “If you turn it on won’t the Controllers know about it?”

  “No. It’s only when you hook up to the internal system. The basic public system for the scrubs doesn’t require a port. Besides, I just want to see if it works.”

  He pressed a series of switches. His hands moved with a practiced grace. The computer screen brightened, and the symbol for Inside appeared. Typically unimaginative, the symbol looked like a cube with a capital I on the front panel. As the children in the care facility would say, “Boring.” Little did they know the activities and schooling in the CF would be the most interesting part of their lives. I shook my head of the gloomy thoughts as Broken Man changed the image on the screen.

  After a while he said, “It’s still connected to the main system. We could access my disks from here.”

  “Which would lead the Controllers right to us?” I asked, again afraid this seemed too easy. Too convenient. It made sense the upper worker who used to live here had a computer hookup, but that it still worked was suspect.

  “Yes it would. Except I have a program to reroute the tracking software, so the Controllers would be led to another computer station on level four.”

  “You know it works?”

  “Well…” Broken Man rubbed his back, considering. “Obviously my original program had a few flaws, but I had found another more effective program hidden in the system. I copied it onto my disks. Unfortunately I was caught before I could use it.” The memory of pain spread across his face. His blue eyes squinted into the past.


  “Who created the other program?” I asked.

  “The security on it was too good to crack. But I believe it was probably a member of the Garrard family.”

  “Garrard?”

  “They are unhappy with the status quo. All the major families were upset with the Trava takeover, but in time they grew complacent and believed there was nothing they could do to restore the original balance of power.”

  “Hold on. The Trava takeover?” I asked. “The Travas have always been in charge.”

  “No, they haven’t. The Travas want the scrubs to believe that, and they’re hoping eventually, with enough generations born, the uppers will forget they ever had a say in the running of Inside. But I’ve uncovered the truth. All nine families at one point had an equal vote. Each family elected one of their members to be a part of Committee. This Committee made decisions and supervised the various mechanical systems of Inside.” Broken Man frowned. “Each family had a specialty—air systems, waste water, electrical—which turned into a major disadvantage.”

  “Why?”

  “The Travas’ specialty was security and only they had access to the stunners and kill-zappers.”

  “Oh.”

  Broken Man met my gaze. The wrinkles on his face deepened as if he alone shouldered all the responsibly in letting the Travas dominate. I guessed he was around forty-five centiweeks old.

  “There was a group of uppers who tried to regain control of a few systems, but they failed,” he said.

  “Would the group be willing to help us if you actually find Gateway?” I asked.

  “No.” Broken Man fiddled with the computer. “The consequences of getting caught are too great for the uppers.”

  It had been a hypothetical question. I planned to prove there was no Gateway. Prove to Cog that the people of Inside had been sealed off from Outside.

  Besides the Pop Cops’ insistence of a purely spiritual final resting place for the good people, the rumors surrounding Outside ranged from wild guesses to tales of horror. I knew something had to be beyond our walls. And whether this place was Outside or something else, speculation ran rampant.

  A few scrubs claimed it was a vast wasteland, others a magical kingdom where fairies flew through the air, a number declared water surrounded us and a couple maintenance scrubs thought our own garbage was piled around us. We reused and recycled everything, but a small portion of pure waste disappeared through a flushing system the Controllers maintained. Cog had tried to use that fact in his argument about Gateway.

  All the rumors didn’t sway me. I didn’t care. Why worry or speculate about an inaccessible place? We were trapped in Inside until we ceased to exist and Chomper turned our bodies into fertilizer. End of story.

  I concentrated on Broken Man’s statement about getting no help from the upper families. It fit—uppers wouldn’t risk themselves and their cushy life for a bunch of scrubs. Although, I couldn’t help thinking about Riley in his hideout on level four.

  His family names seemed important to him—a source of pride. How did he feel about the Travas controlling our world? Maybe Riley and a few uppers would like to see life altered? I grimaced. Sappy bull. I was getting soft, letting hope grow a centimeter. Snip. Snip. I mentally cut it back.

  “If the computer works, all I need to do is retrieve your disks and you can access them? Right?” I asked.

  Broken Man bit his lip and said nothing.

  “What’s wrong? I thought you have a gap in your mouth for the port.”

  “I have the gap.” He paused. “Problem is…I don’t have my teeth.”

  “What?”

  “They’re not real teeth. We just call them that. They’re needed to access the internal computer network. They’re designed so the Pop Cops can keep track of who is in the network and restrict access to the computer system by pulling an upper’s port.”

  I sank to the floor. Rubbing my face in my hands, I said, “Now you tell me.”

  7

  NOTHING MORE I COULD DO. THE END. THE POP COPS had Broken Man’s port. Without his port, he couldn’t access his disks and the information. No information meant no proof or disproof of Gateway’s existence.

  “Lieutenant Commander Karla has my port,” Broken Man said.

  I stared at him. Was he serious? “You want me to ask her for it back?”

  “Think, Trella. She doesn’t know about the disks. Pulling my teeth is standard procedure. She would have sent it to computer ops to check what I’ve been accessing in the system, and they would have returned it with their report.” Sudden understanding lit his gray eyes. “The report! I should have known. A few of the files I’d viewed probably made Karla suspicious and she set a trap in my room. If only I heard about you before she rigged my quarters.”

  His comment reminded me of how I had gotten involved. Cog knew I couldn’t resist a challenge. “If Cog hadn’t told you about me, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  He shook his head. “Your reputation as Queen of the Pipes intrigued me first.”

  “Yeah, but Cog was the only person who knows what I’m really capable of. And he’s too quick to trust, he falls for any line and is too eager to get involved.”

  “The opposite of you?”

  “Of course. I’m not the one getting my hopes dashed every time a new prophet arrives.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  In trouble with no solution in sight. “A moment of weakness and an excellent lesson on what not to do in the future. Provided I even have a future.”

  “From what I’ve seen in the lower levels, do you really want to live the rest of your life in these conditions?” he asked.

  The standard scrub reply was to shrug and say there was nothing I could do about it or to regurgitate the Pop Cop line about a better afterlife. But I had the opportunity to actually prove or disprove the theory about Gateway and Outside. If I wanted to risk my life. Was being alive enough for me? Could I really walk away without trying?

  Broken Man could see the answer in my eyes. “Karla’s office is on level four, Sector—”

  “A. I know. It’s the only area I avoid.” Last thing I needed was for the Pop Cops to catch me in an air duct above their offices and holding cells. I enjoyed a challenge, but I wasn’t crazy. And I limited my time spent in the Gap above four to trips to my box.

  Contemplating the theft of his port from the lieutenant commander, I crossed over from rational to insane. “Do you know what type of security measures are installed in her office?”

  “The door’s always locked, but I’m guessing you’re not going to use it.” He smiled. “Probably the usual motion sensors.”

  LC Karla knew someone had used the pipes to get the disks. Would she rig the air ducts above her office with sensors? Broken Man had said she was smart, so I assumed she had. But did she know about the Gap above the ductwork? I needed to do a reconnaissance mission to her office. It would require a great deal of planning.

  “How do I know which port is yours?” I asked.

  “There’s an identification number etched into the bottom.” Broken Man recited his number and I committed it to memory.

  “I need to eat before my next shift. Hopefully I’ll think of a way to bypass the LC’s security measures.”

  Various scenarios ran through my mind as I returned to the main corridor of level two. No brilliant ideas had formed by the time I shuffled through the cafeteria line and sought a free seat. And consuming the casserole of the day failed to ignite any exceptional plans.

  The only way I could enter Karla’s office would be to find the wires for the motion detectors and disable them without setting them off. It would be time consuming and dangerous. The probability of missing a sensor would be high.

  The noise in the room rose to an uncomfortable level. I grabbed my tray, intent on leaving, but two scrubs stood right behind me. A young man and woman. They both had the same nose—a distinctly petite feature with a perfect shape. Combined with their matching oval faces and light
greenish-brown eyes, I knew they were related. They wore the drab-gray and shapeless overalls of the recycling-plant workers.

  Pitching his voice so the sound cut through the din, the man said, “We want in.”

  I stepped aside so he could claim my seat.

  He shook his head. “We want to help you.”

  “With what?” Confused, I glanced at each one.

  She gestured to the table. Two more seats were empty. The scrubs sat and she pulled me back down.

  I yanked my arm away. “Who do you—”

  “I’m Anne-Jade and he’s my brother, Logan. We want to help you find Gateway.”

  Stunned, I gaped at them a moment. “But, I’m not—”

  “Save it for the Pop Cops,” Logan said. “We know what you’ve been up to. We saw you with Cogon before he entered the lift. Saw the lift stop and Cogon leave the elevator’s maintenance room with the laundry bin. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

  They hadn’t told Karla, which meant a bribe. “What do you really want?”

  “To help,” Anne-Jade said. Her lips pressed into a thin line, drawing her oval face into a serious expression.

  “Why? You could get recycled.”

  She swept her hand out, indicating the mass of people. “This is intolerable. I’d rather be recycled than to continue to live as livestock.”

  Instinct kicked in. Too many people increased the chances of getting caught. Besides, I couldn’t trust them and I preferred to work alone. “Sorry, no. I can’t get anyone else involved.”

  “We’re already involved,” Logan said. “Who do you think covered for Cogon?”

  I scrambled for a reply. “Look, I’m thankful you saved Cog, but I really don’t know how you can help right now, and—”

  “Listen.” Logan held up a metal wind-up toy near his ear then handed it to me.

  “What—”

  Logan gestured for me to listen to the toy. Not happy, I brought it close and almost dropped it when Broken Man’s voice whispered in my ear. He talked about Gateway and the disks, and I heard my own harsh reply. I stared at the little mouse murmuring in my hand. Its metal key turning. “How?”