Book Two of the Travelers Page 7

  Until a year ago she had lived a perfect life. As perfect as anybody could have on Quillan, anyway. She had a good job working maintenance at the Blok building. Her husband too had a good job. Neither of them made much money. But they lived a stable, modest life. And they had Nevva, their beloved daughter. For the first ten years of their marriage, Elli had been told by the doctors that she would be unable to have children. Adopting children on Quillan was nearly impossible for people without lots of money. But then one day, a miracle had happened—a miracle that brought Nevva to them.

  Nevva had been an extraordinary child from day one. And both she and Marvek had been devoted to the girl. When it had become clear that Nevva was unusually bright, Elli and Marvek had put every spare penny into sending her to the best schools. But schools on Quillan weren’t free. And the better the school, the more it cost.

  The school Nevva attended had just been too expensive for their small incomes.

  So Marvek had started betting on the games. At first he’d done well. But then, inevitably, his luck had changed. Finally, in desperation, Marvek had come to this very arcade. He’d placed the ultimate bet—betting his own life against the pile of debts he’d accumulated.

  And he’d lost. Losing the ultimate bet meant being sent straight to the tarz, the power plants that supplied all of Quillan. They were poisonous places. To work there was a death sentence.

  For the past year, since he’d lost the bet, Elli had gone on with her life. As long as Marvek was alive, she had held out a scrap of hope. Maybe things would get better. Maybe Blok would have mercy on him, let him come home.

  It was a dream. But it was a dream that helped her get out of bed, comb Nevva’s hair, make her lunch, send her off to school. But Elli knew that, like all dreams, it was empty. For a year she’d barely been able to look Nevva in the eye. She hadn’t been able to love her the way a mother should love a child. Because every time she looked at Nevva, she thought; If only you hadn’t been here, Marvek would still be coming home from work every day, giving me a kiss, reading the paper, eating dinner, smiling, laughing…. It wasn’t Nevva’s fault. But Elli couldn’t help the thought coming into her mind.

  What kind of mother would think a thing like that?

  Well. The letter had come today.

  The Blok Corporation Power Generation and Transmission Division regrets to inform you of the death of…

  And that was the end. The end of all hope.

  She had balled up the letter, thrown it in the trash, and then said to Nevva, “I have to take a walk, sweetheart. Keep working on your homework.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  So trusting. Nevva trusted her mother completely. Elli didn’t feel worthy of that trust.

  And now she was here. Now Elli Winter was here, walking down the street. A cold wind was blowing. A loud clap of thunder split the air, and then a frigid, driving rain hit her.

  The street was crowded with tense, tired-looking people in gray clothes. Elli forced her way through them. Around her the tall gray buildings pressed in.

  Elli looked at her surroundings as though she had never seen this place before. Had it always been such a miserable, cheerless, gray, ugly place?

  Suddenly she came to a halt. In front of her was a low pedestrian barrier. On the other side of that lay a huge pit. Just a few months ago there had been some buildings here. They must have blown them up. Now they were building a new structure.

  A large sign read,

  FUTURE HOME OF BLOK CORP FUN DIVISION

  THE FUN STARTS HERE!

  The sign was cockeyed, one of the support posts hanging over the side, into the pit.

  She stared in. From every direction huge streams of water flowed into the pit, turning it into a giant quagmire. Several pieces of earthmoving equipment were digging in the center of the hole. Over on the far side, a swarm of grim-faced, exhausted men were clawing at the earth with shovels. But the deepening water had turned the dirt into mud. Every time they lifted out a shovelful of gray mud, more mud flowed back into its place.

  Digging a hole that just filled itself back in. Her whole life seemed like this pit. A hopeless, pointless waste. If it weren’t for Nevva…

  Suddenly from the center of the pit came a scream. “Sinkhole! Sinkhole!”

  A man, small as an ant, jumped from the seat of a giant earthmoving machine and started running. The mud came up to his thighs, so he seemed to be moving in slow motion.

  “Run!” another man yelled. “Cave-in.”

  Then she heard it—a loud cracking noise. Something in the center of the pit had given way. A massive jagged hole opened up, like the snaggle-toothed mouth of some buried giant.

  The men in the pit were abandoning their shovels, running panic stricken for the thin dirt path leading up to street level.

  The mud and water began to flow toward the sinkhole. The pit became a huge vortex of water and mud circling down into the earth. Screams filled the air. The hole was widening. Earthmoving equipment toppled and sank into the hungry maw growing in the center of the pit.

  Is this is it? Elli thought. Is this is the end of the road?

  For reasons she couldn’t quite express, she felt drawn toward the pit. She took a step forward. Then another. Carefully she climbed the barrier. When she reached the edge, she stood as if hypnotized. Chunks of clay the size of cars began detaching from the side of the pit and falling in slow motion toward the bottom. Huge splashes of mud and water.

  I should go back, she thought. I really should. But she didn’t move.

  Something gave way beneath her. And then Elli Winter was falling, the gray world pinwheeling around her.

  THREE

  Yellow sky. How strange.

  The first thing Elli became conscious of was that the sky was yellow. She blinked.

  “Look!” a voice said in a loud whisper. “She’s conscious.”

  “Don’t let her see your faces,” another voice said. A man, harsh sounding.

  Elli blinked. Not a sky after all. It was a ceiling. Who would paint a ceiling yellow? It was just the oddest thing.

  She sat up, choked, coughed. Her mouth was full of dirt, and it felt as if there were water in her lungs.

  It started coming back to her. She’d fallen into the pit. But after that? Nothing. Blackness. Blackness and the feeling of being carried along by water—spun, flipped, slammed into things.

  “Where am I?” she said.

  There were three of them. Two of them were covering parts of their faces with their shirts. The third, a very large man, wore a black mask. “Be quiet,” the large man said harshly. “And don’t move.”

  She frowned. Was this some kind of dream? She looked around. She seemed to be in some kind of warehouse. Long rows of shelves filled the immense space. One wall was splintered and twisted. A huge slick of mud had poured through it into the large room where she was lying.

  “But…what happened?”

  “One of the old subway tunnels under the city caved in. A bunch of water flowed through it and tore out the wall of our—”

  “Quiet!” the large man shouted.

  But it started coming back then. She remembered standing by the edge of the pit. Feeling it pulling her forward. Falling. Then blackness. Blackness and the feeling of being pulled down into the ground by the flowing mud.

  The large man whispered to the others. “We can’t let her…” He let his sentence die.

  “Are you saying…” One of the others, a woman, spoke. She too couldn’t seem to finish her sentence.

  The third one, a smaller man, said, “What? You want to kill her? That what you’re saying?”

  The big man shrugged. “We have no choice. If we let her go, she’ll talk to Blok’s security people. There’ll be dados blasting through the doors in an hour.”

  Silence.

  “You know I’m right,” the big man said.

  It took Elli a minute to realize it: They were talking about her! And yet, somehow, she didn’t r
eally care. The end of the road. She’d come to the end of the road. Right?

  The woman said, “Tylee will be here first thing in the morning. Let’s let her decide.”

  “She can’t go anywhere,” the smaller man said. “Just leave her be. Tylee can decide.”

  “We have to evacuate now,” the big man said. “If Blok’s people come down that tunnel, they’ll find us. We can’t risk it.”

  “But we need to get this mess cleaned up!”

  The man shook his head. “It won’t do us any good to clean up a few boxes, and then lose half our people.”

  The two others nodded grudgingly.

  The big man turned and looked at Elli. “This place is surrounded by guards. If you try to leave, they’ll shoot you on sight. Clear?”

  Elli nodded.

  “Stay here. We’ll be back in the morning.”

  The three turned and walked away. Their footsteps echoed hollowly and finally disappeared.

  Elli stood up, looked fearfully around. There was still a disconcerting gurgle in her lungs that made her cough every few breaths. Her clothes were slick with mud. She shivered and wondered if there was someplace to clean up. She wandered around for a few minutes, looking at the warehouse. There were huge shelves running far off into the distance. Each shelf was lined with cheap cardboard boxes, some of which looked quite old.

  Elli couldn’t help wondering who these people were who had found her. They were obviously some kind of criminal organization.

  But why would a criminal organization be guarding an underground building full of cheap boxes? She decided to take a peek into one of the boxes. Inside the box she found a stack of small paintings. Elli was no expert in art, but they appeared to be watercolors. She took one out and stared at it. She looked at the date in the bottom corner. It was over two hundred and fifty years old! But the colors were amazingly bright and vivid. It was a picture of a laughing girl in a bright-colored dress, playing in the middle of a field of flowers.

  She had never seen anything like it. Something about it took her breath away. She looked at another box. More beautiful pictures. There was something about all of them—something so bright and colorful that they seemed almost to have come from another world. Another box. More beautiful pictures. Bright flowers in each one of them. Brilliant yellows, rich reds, deep blues and purples. A sense of peace and calm washed through her.

  She looked around the area where the concrete wall had been ripped apart. Boxes were sprawled in heaps, covered in mud. With horror she realized that every single one of those boxes must have been full of the same kind of beauty she’d just seen. They would be ruined!

  Elli crawled over the chunks of concrete and mud and started pulling boxes out of the mess. She had no awareness of time. She just felt impelled to save as much as she could.

  Once she’d gotten the boxes out of the muck, she began opening them one by one. Sometimes the contents were completely ruined. After she’d carefully sorted through an entire box and found every single picture destroyed, she found herself bursting into tears.

  What’s gotten into me? she wondered.

  Suddenly it struck her—she had no idea what time it was, how long she’d been working. Was it night or day? She had no clue.

  The only thing she did know for certain was that her daughter, Nevva, was sitting at home wondering what had happened to her mother. The thought made her clench up inside. But Elli knew that even if she could have left this strange subterranean place, she couldn’t have faced going home.

  So she picked up another box and tried to put Nevva out of her mind.

  With as much care as she could muster, she began cleaning the dirty pieces of paper. But she realized they needed to be dried. She wandered around the echoing building and found a room with some office supplies in it, including a roll of string.

  She brought the string back, ran several strands from one shelf to another. If a painting was wet, she hung it to dry. Soon there were papers hanging everywhere overhead.

  Elli worked and worked, cleaned and cleaned. The harder she worked, the more she cleaned, the better she felt. She felt as though she were cleaning her whole life away, leaving her old life behind.

  Eventually her eyes grew gritty and her body became heavy with fatigue. But still she worked. If she slacked up for even a moment, so much of this beauty would be lost!

  Finally, though, she couldn’t put off the inevitable.

  She sat down in a chair and slept. When she woke, her back and neck were stiff. She looked around. The mess was still considerable. It seemed as if she’d barely made a dent.

  She began to work again. As she worked, she began to mutter little phrases to herself. Advertising jingles, silly little poems she’d read. All her life Elli had been able to memorize pretty much anything she read or heard, so her head was full of thousands of useless little words.

  As she worked, she repeated them. Over and over and over.

  “It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean! It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean!” That was an advertisement for a cleaning product she used at home. There were plenty of other phrases that stuck in her head. They kept her mind occupied, filled up, so that she could stop thinking about what a terrible mother she was, so she could stop wondering where Nevva was or how Nevva felt.

  “It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean! It’s not just clean…”

  And so it went for a long time. Elli Winter had no clear idea of how much time had passed. The big man in the mask had said that he and the others would return the next morning. But they didn’t. And if there were guards anywhere, Elli never saw them.

  No one came for a very long time. Maybe as much as a week. She had no clock, so she really couldn’t know for sure.

  And in all that time, she did nothing but work. She found some food in a refrigerator. So when she got hungry, she ate. Eventually she cleaned her clothes in the bathroom, washed the mud from her face, her hair, her fingernails. But otherwise, it was just work and sleep.

  And then, suddenly, armed men were streaming through a door.

  “Get down on the ground!” one of them screamed. “Down! Down! Down! Do it now!” So Elli lay down, splaying her arms across the cold concrete floor.

  The end of the road. She’d put it off by a few days. But now it was finally here.

  Well, she thought, at least I saved some beautiful pictures.

  FOUR

  Elli Winter lay staring across the floor as the masked men moved silently through the warehouse. She’d expected them to do something to her. But instead they more or less ignored her.

  At first she had thought they were security dados. But they weren’t. They were just normal people dressed in military-style clothes, black masks over their faces. They seemed to be searching for something.

  Finally one of them spoke into a radio. “No sign of dados or bugs. Think it’s safe for Tylee.”

  The masked men stood around silently for a while. Elli lay motionless. Words and phrases ran through her head. It’s not just clean. It’s Blok clean! It’s not just clean. It’s—

  Then, finally, a thin woman appeared in the nearest doorway and walked toward Elli. She was the first unmasked person Elli had seen in the warehouse. There was something special about the woman. It was unmistakable. She had an aura of authority, of command. Everyone seemed to straighten up as soon as they saw her.

  The woman paused, studied the entire area carefully.

  “Who did this?” she demanded finally, waving her hand around her. Elli took it all in for the first time. The floor was spotless. The concrete chunks had been hauled away. The mud was gone. And every single picture that had been salvageable was now hanging in one of the hundreds of lines crisscrossing the air above her head. Remembering the incredible mess that had been here before, Elli was almost amazed at what she’d accomplished.

  “I did,” she said softly.

  Tylee frowned. “I was told this place was completely wrecked,” she said to o
ne of the masked men.

  “It was,” the man said, sounding a little puzzled. Elli recognized him as the big man who’d left her here before.

  “Get up,” the woman said.

  Elli sat up. She felt woozy and unstable, as if she were coming out of a dream. A forest of color hung above them.

  “You did all of this?” the woman said.

  Elli nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry?” The woman cocked her head, curious.

  “I shouldn’t have touched anything,” Elli said.

  “Why? Why did you do all this?”

  Elli frowned. She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t thought it through, really. She’d just done it. She looked up at all the bright-colored pictures above her. Her voice finally came out, haltingly. “It’s just—they were so beautiful. I didn’t want—I didn’t want the world to lose all that beauty.”

  The woman had deep brown eyes. Suddenly they seemed very warm. She nodded and smiled sadly. “Yes. That’s exactly it, isn’t it?”

  Elli sat on the floor and looked up at the forest of brightly colored paper above her head. She felt a warm sensation of satisfaction filling her chest. Other than taking care of Nevva, this was really the first thing she’d done in her life that seemed to have any meaning.

  “My name is Tylee,” the woman said to Elli.

  “Do you mind my asking what this place is?” Elli said.

  “It’s a storehouse,” Tylee said. “All the things that have happened on Quillan, all the writings of the ancients, all our history, all our music and art and science and inventions—everything that we Quillans were before Blok—it’s all stored here.”

  Elli felt puzzled. “For what?”

  “We are revivers,” Tylee said. “Someday we will rise up out of this place and destroy Blok. We’re keeping it all for the time that comes after. For the revival.”

  “Oh,” Elli said.

  Revivers! She had heard of them before. Only in whispers, though. A strange group that sought to destroy the established order and bring chaos to the world. That’s what people said, anyway. Mad bombers, crazed lunatics, criminals, bandits, killers!