Icons
Icons
Margaret Stohl
The first book in a breathtaking new series from Beautiful Creatures co-author Margaret StohlYour heart beats only with their permission.Everything changed on The Day. The day the windows shattered. The day the power stopped. The day Dol's family dropped dead. The day Earth lost a war it didn't know it was fighting.Since then, Dol has lived a simple life in the countryside – safe from the shadow of the Icon and its terrifying power. Hiding from the one truth she can't avoid.She's different. She survived. Why?When Dol and her best friend, Ro, are captured and taken to the Embassy, off the coast of the sprawling metropolis once known as the City of Angels, they find only more questions. While Ro and fellow hostage Tima rage against their captors, Dol finds herself drawn to Lucas, the Ambassador's privileged son. But the four teens are more alike than they might think, and the timing of their meeting isn't a coincidence. It's a conspiracy.Within the Icon's reach, Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas discover that their uncontrollable emotions – which they've always thought to be their greatest weaknesses – may actually be their greatest strengths.Bestselling author Margaret Stohl delivers the first book in a heart-pounding series set in a haunting new world where four teens must piece together the mysteries of their pasts – in order to save the future.
For Lewis,
writing partner and writer’s partner
on and off the page
GIVE SORROW WORDS.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u1a19fd38-ce51-5ba8-be01-6f1434aecae1)
Dedication (#ubc5d7792-13ce-5246-bdda-904c7a77a799)
Epigraph (#ubdfad4b3-4aa0-568c-a6b7-222d25ba80e5)
Prologue: The Day (#u70ac9eee-468e-52fd-9fa9-957494bd3fa2)
1. Happy Birthday to Me (#u4130ffe2-33eb-5dbf-947a-3737fce9c48f)
2. Presents (#u0bff7af1-9cfa-59be-af13-0886b6ba8653)
3. The Pietà of La Purísima (#u9a46c864-097a-5023-b667-89a8997636d9)
4. Tracks (#u24212339-f6a0-5147-bf3c-dd7b47d5f414)
5. Diversions (#uf06014ff-4f39-5ac1-887e-fd8c68343185)
6. Four Dots (#uc64aca3a-6061-51eb-9a97-82d188eee0b0)
7. A Decision (#ue0b67e3b-1904-5140-8e6b-ee31660d6be7)
8. Doc (#ue3d0f99e-5550-5b14-a7ae-de0e24292b4e)
9. The Ambassador (#u32fffc46-51c8-58df-8bda-06c729269356)
10. The Trigger (#ud290ae85-57a6-56b1-9386-291c8a4a914e)
11. Together Again (#u5291ca30-b865-57f8-ba2f-10739e164e73)
12. Long Way Home (#u2a58f15e-c1de-50ce-8967-1561550f5575)
13. Colonel Catallus (#u28293591-3b71-53e9-b5b9-544d7b98ee61)
14. Decisions (#ud35728a8-d348-5959-ab1a-7d94c9491838)
15. Brutus (#ue2e4519b-c722-5901-b46d-b3dad3c077ed)
16. Hall of Records (#u1d63aa20-ea42-5e80-ab73-c1a20097416c)
17. Disappearing (#u1b96d90f-9cb7-5c9c-9d0e-eeb19185ce7f)
18. The Porthole (#u28f1a5a8-f42f-51bc-921b-cfbd99ca281d)
19. The Hole (#udf455faf-e246-5646-88e6-f5bbc02c0987)
20. Our Lady of the Angels (#ue848b5a3-4d3b-5705-85fd-9f92b157f900)
21. Hux (#udb7b40af-b726-57d5-bb6a-e2a5fc100e66)
22. The Park (#u264e39a8-7f5b-5220-a18e-da7b0b9cf942)
23. The Observatory (#u667ff49a-5c8f-5370-b36c-6b698ad348ec)
24. Ro (#ud9d2e575-f3a0-57c8-b784-d46f87d7ef7f)
25. Tima (#uf351e072-98a4-5d56-8d73-eac09dfcfb36)
26. Lucas (#uf6ac2b59-fde4-5020-a89f-18b29fdda9dd)
27. Fortis (#u53c82047-cca9-535a-9757-2b1a61d05ca4)
28. All Fall Down (#ueb09b04c-ee8f-59f6-a2e7-988b1b883fce)
29. The Virus (#ue466c489-ea4d-57dd-8c6a-3edf21567bfd)
30. Birds (#u1dea2f96-b694-5478-9720-ee12de253fa7)
Epilogue: The Grasslands (#uccf17bc2-807e-52d3-95cb-b65a17aaba23)
Acknowledgments (#u04afe6ab-8cc6-565e-9156-7c98a9ea4f6e)
Copyright (#u40dd70e9-b265-58ac-a8c8-b7ba18fe7411)
About the Publisher (#u29314711-a5ab-5c72-9bc7-c2c1d21d4e6b)
PROLOGUE
THE DAY
One tiny gray dot, no bigger than a freckle, marks the inside of the baby’s chubby arm. It slips in and out of view as she cries, waving her yellow rubber duck back and forth.
Her mother holds her over the old ceramic bathtub. The little feet kick harder, twisting above the water. “You can complain all you want, Doloria, but you’re still taking a bath. It will make you feel better.”
She slides her daughter into the warm tub. The baby kicks again, splashing the blue patterned wallpaper above the tiles. The water surprises her, and she quiets.
“That’s it. You can’t feel sad in the water. There is no sadness there.” She kisses Doloria’s cheek. “I love you, mi corazón. I love you and your brothers today and tomorrow and every day until the day after heaven.”
The baby stops crying. She does not cry as she is scrubbed and sung to, pink and clean. She does not cry as she is kissed and swaddled in blankets. She does not cry as she is tickled and tucked into her crib.
The mother smiles, wiping a damp strand of hair from her child’s warm forehead. “Dream well, Doloria. Que sueñes con los angelitos.” She reaches for the light, but the room floods with darkness before she can touch the switch. Across the hall, the radio is silenced midsentence, as if on cue. Over in the kitchen, the television fades to sudden black, to a dot the size of a pinprick, then to nothing.
The mother calls up the stairs. “The power’s gone off again, querido! Check the fuse box.” She turns back, tucking the blanket corner snugly beneath Doloria. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing your papi can’t fix.”
The baby sucks on her fist, five small fingers the size of tiny wriggling earthworms, as the walls start to shake and bits of plaster swirl in the air like fireworks, like confetti.
She blinks as the windows shatter and the ceiling fan hits the carpet and the shouting begins.
She yawns as her father rolls down the staircase like a funny rag doll that never stands up.
She closes her eyes as the falling birds patter against the roof like rain.
She starts to dream as her mother’s heart stops beating.
I start to dream as my mother’s heart stops beating.
1
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
“Dol? Are you okay?”
The memory fades at the sound of his voice.
Ro.
I feel him somewhere in my mind, the nameless place where I see everything, feel everyone. The spark that is Ro. I hold on to it, warm and close, like a mug of steamed milk or a lit candle.
And then I open my eyes and come back to him.
Always.
Ro’s here with me. He’s fine, and I’m fine.
I’m fine.
I think it, over and over, until I believe it. Until I remember what is real and what is not.
Slowly the physical world comes into focus. I’m standing on a dirt trail halfway up the side of a mountain—staring down at the Mission, where the goats and pigs in the field below are small as ants.
“All right?” Ro reaches toward me and touches my arm.
I nod. But I’m lying.
I’ve let the feelings—and the memories—overtake me again. I can’t do that. Everyone at the Mission knows I have a gift for feeling things—strangers, friends, even Ramona Jamona the pig, when she’s hungry—but it doesn’t mean I have to let the feelings control me.
At least that’s what the Padre keeps telling me.
I try to control myself, and usually I can. But I wish I didn’t feel anything, sometimes. Especially not when everything is so overwhelming, so unbearably sad.
“Don’t disappear on me, Dol. Not now.” Ro locks his eyes on me and motions with his big tan hands. His brown-gold eyes flicker with fire and light under his dark tangle of hair. His face is all broad planes and rough angles—as solid as a brambled oak, softening only for me. He could climb halfway up the mountain again by now, or halfway down. Holding Ro back is like trying to stop an earthquake or a mud slide. Maybe a train.
But not now. Now he waits. Because he knows me, and he knows where I’ve gone.
Where I go.
I stare up at the sky, spattered with bursts of gray rain and orange light. It’s hard to see past the wide-brimmed hat I stole off the hook behind the Padre’s office door. Still, the setting sun is in my eyes, pulsing from behind the clouds, bright and broken.
I remember what we are doing and why we are here.
My birthday. It’s my seventeenth birthday tomorrow.
Ro has a present for me, but first we have to climb the hill. He wants to surprise me.
“Give me a clue, Ro.” I pull myself up the hill after him, leaving a twisting trail of dried brush and dirt behind me.
“Nope.”
I turn to look down the mountain again. I can’t stop myself. I like how everything looks from up here.
Peaceful. Smaller. Like a painting, or one of the Padre’s impossible puzzles, except there aren’t any missing pieces. In the distance below, I can see the yellowing patch of field that belongs to our Mission, then the fringe of green trees, then the deep blue wash of the ocean.
Home.
The view is so serene, you almost wouldn’t know about The Day. That’s why I like it here. If you don’t leave the Mission, you don’t have to think about it. The Day and the Icons and the Lords. The way they control us.
How powerless we are.
This far up the Tracks, away from the cities, nothing ever changes. This land has always been wild.
A person can feel safe here.
Safer.
I raise my voice. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”
He’s up the trail, once again. Then I hear a ripple through the brush, and the sound of rolling rock, and he lands behind me, nimble as a mountain goat.
Ro smiles. “I know, Dol.”
I take his calloused hand and relax my fingers into his. Instantly, I am flooded with the feeling of Ro—physical contact always makes our connection that much stronger.
He is as warm as the sun behind me. As hot as I am cold. As rough as I am smooth. That’s our balance, just one of the invisible threads that tie us together.
It’s who we are.
My best-and-only friend and me.
He rummages in his pocket, then pushes something into my hands, suddenly shy. “All right, I’ll hurry it up. Your first present.”
I look down. A lone blue glass bead rolls between my fingers. A slender leather cord loops in a circle around it.
A necklace.
It’s the blue of the sky, of my eyes, of the ocean.
“Ro,” I breathe. “It’s perfect.”
“It reminded me of you. It’s the water, see? So you can always keep it with you.” His face reddens as he tries to explain, the words sticking in his mouth. “I know—how it makes you feel.”
Peaceful. Permanent. Unbroken.
“Bigger helped me with the cord. It used to be part of a saddle.” Ro has an eye for things like that, things other people overlook. Bigger, the Mission cook, is the same way, and the two of them are inseparable. Biggest, Bigger’s wife, tries her best to keep both of them out of trouble.
“I love it.” I thread my arm around his neck in a rough hug. Not so much an embrace as a cuff of arms, the clench of friends and family.
Ro looks embarrassed, all the same. “It’s not your whole present. For that you have to climb a little farther.”
“But it’s not even my birthday yet.”
“It’s your birthday eve. I thought it was only fair to start tonight. Besides, this kind of present is best after sundown.” Ro holds out his hand, a wicked look in his eyes.
“Come on. Just one little hint.” I squint up at him and he grins.
“But it’s a surprise.”
“You’re making me hike all this way through the brush.”
He laughs. “Okay. It’s the last thing you’d ever expect. The very last thing.” He bounces up and down a bit where he stands, and I can tell he’s practically ready to bolt up the mountain.
“What are you talking about?”
He shakes his head, holding out his hand again. “You’ll see.”
I take it. There’s no getting Ro to talk when he doesn’t want to. Besides, his hand in mine is a good thing.
I feel the beating of his heart, the pulse of his adrenaline. Even now, when he’s relaxed and hiking, and it’s just the two of us. He is a coiled spring. He has no resting state, not really.
Not Ro.
A shadow crosses the hillside, and instinctively we dive for cover under the brush. The ship in the sky is sleek and silver, glinting ominously with the last reflective rays of the setting sun. I shiver, even though I’m not at all cold, and my face is half buried in Ro’s warm shoulder.
I can’t help it.
Ro murmurs into my ear as if he is talking to one of the Padre’s puppies. It’s more his tone than the words—that’s how you speak to scared animals. “Don’t be afraid, Dol. It’s headed up the coast, probably to Goldengate. They never come this far inland, not here. They’re not coming for us.”
“You don’t know that.” The words sound grim in my mouth, but they’re true.
“I do.”
He slips his arm around me and we wait like that until the sky is clear.
Because he doesn’t know. Not really.
People have hidden in these bushes for centuries, long before us. Long before there were ships in the skies.
First the Chumash lived here, then the Rancheros, then the Spanish missionaries, then the Californians, then the Americans, then the Grass. Which is me, at least since the Padre brought me back as a baby to La Purísima, our old Grass Mission, in the hills beyond the ocean.
These hills.
The Padre tells it like a story; he was on a crew searching for survivors in the silent city after The Day, only there were none. Whole city blocks were quiet as rain. Finally, he heard a tiny sound—so small, he thought he was imagining it—and there I was, crying purple-faced in my crib. He wrapped me in his coat and brought me home, just as he now brings us stray dogs.
It was also the Padre who taught me the history of these hills as we sat by the fire at night, along with the constellations of the stars and the phases of the moon. The names of the people who knew our land before we did.
Maybe it was supposed to be like this. Maybe this, the Occupation, the Embassies, all of it, maybe this is just another part of nature. Like the seasons of a year, or how a caterpillar turns into a cocoon. The water cycle. The tides.
Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.
Sometimes I repeat the names of my people, all the people who have ever lived in my Mission. I say the names and I think, I am them and they are me.
I am the Misíon La Purísima de Concepción de la Santísima Virgen María, founded in Las Californias on the Day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, on the Eighth Day of the Twelfth Month of the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty-Seven. Three hundred years ago.
Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.
When I say the names they’re not gone, not to me. Nobody died. Nothing ended. We’re still here.
I’m still here.
That’s all I want. To stay. And for Ro to stay, and the Padre. For us to stay safe, everyone here on the Mission.
But as I look back down the mountain I know that nothing stays, and the gold flush and fade of everything tells me that the sun is setting now.
No one can stop it from going. Not even me.
RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY
To: Ambassador Amare
From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke
Subject: Icon Research
We still can’t be sure how the Icons work. We know, when the Lords came, thirteen Icons fell from the sky, one landing in each of the Earth’s mega-cities. To this day, we still can’t get close enough to examine them. Our best guess is that the Icons generate an immensely powerful electromagnetic field that can halt electrical activity within a certain radius. We believe it is this field that enables the Icons to disrupt or disable all modern technology. It appears the Icons can also shut down any and all chemical processes or reactions within the field.
Note: We call this the “shutdown effect.”
The Day itself proved the ultimate demonstration of this capability, when, as we all know, the Lords activated the Icons and ended all hope of resistance by making an example of Goldengate, São Paulo, Köln-Bonn, Cairo, Mumbai, and Greater Beijing … the so-called Silent Cities.
By the end of The Day, the newly arrived colonists gained complete control of all major population centers on the Seven Continents. An estimated one billion lives ended in an instant, the greatest tragedy in history.
May silence bring them peace.
2
PRESENTS
By the time we reach the top of the hillside, the sky has turned dark as the eggplants in the Mission garden.
Ro pulls me up the last slide of rocks. “Now. Close your eyes.”
“Ro. What have you done?”
“Nothing bad. Nothing that bad.” He looks at me and sighs. “Not this time, anyway. Come on, trust me.”
I don’t close my eyes. Instead, I look into the shadows beneath the scraggly trees in front of me, where someone has built a shack out of scraps of old signboard and rusting tin. The hood of an ancient tractor is lashed to the legs on a faded poster advertising what looks like running shoes.
DO IT.
That’s what the bodiless legs say, in bright white words spilling over the photograph.
“Don’t you trust me?” Ro repeats, keeping his eyes on the shack as if he was showing me his most precious possession.
There is no one I trust more. Ro knows that. He also knows I hate surprises.
I close my eyes.
“Careful. Now, duck.”
Even with my eyes shut, I know when I am inside the shack. I feel the palmetto roof brush against my hair, and I nearly tumble over the roots of the trees surrounding us.
“Wait a second.” He lets go of me. “One. Two. Three. Happy birthday, Dol!”
I open my eyes. I am now holding one end of a string of tiny colored lights that shine in front of me as if they were stars pulled down from the sky itself. The lights weave from my fingers all across the room, in a kind of sparkling circle that begins with me and ends with Ro.
I clap my hands together, lights and all. “Ro! How—? Is that—electric?”
He nods. “Do you like it?” His eyes are twinkling, same as the lights. “Are you surprised?”
“Never in a thousand years would I have guessed it.”
“There’s more.”
He moves to one side. Next to him is a strange-looking contraption with two rusty metal circles connected by a metal bar and a peeling leather seat.
“A bicycle?”
“Sort of. It’s a pedal generator. I saw it in a book that the Padre had, at least the plans for it. Took me about three months to find all the parts. Twenty digits, just for the old bike. And look there—”
He points to two objects sitting on a plank. He takes the string of lights from my hand, and I move to touch a smooth metal artifact.
“Pan-a-sonic?” I sound out the faded type on the side of the first object. It’s some sort of box, and I pick it up, turning it over in my hands.
He answers proudly. “That’s a radio.”
I realize what it is as soon as he says the words, and it’s all I can do not to drop it. Ro doesn’t notice. “People used them to listen to music. I’m not sure it works, though. I haven’t tried it yet.”
I put it down. I know what a radio is. My mother had one. I remember because it dies every time in the dream. When The Day comes. I touch my tangled brown curls self-consciously.
It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know. I’ve never told anyone about the dream, not even the Padre. That’s how badly I don’t want to remember it.
I change the subject. “And this?” I pick up a tiny silver rectangle, not much bigger than my palm. There is a picture of a lone piece of fruit scratched on one side.
Ro smiles. “It’s some kind of memory cell. It plays old songs, right into your ears.” He pulls the rectangle out of my hand. “It’s unbelievable, like listening to the past. But it only works when it has power.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s your present. Power. See? I push the pedals like this, and the friction creates energy.”
He stands on the bike pedals, then drops onto the seat, pushing furiously. The string of colored lights glows in the room, all around me. I can’t help but laugh, it’s so magical—and Ro looks so funny and sweaty.
Ro climbs off the bicycle and kneels in front of a small black box. I see that the string of lights attaches neatly to one side. “That’s the battery. It stores the power.”
“Right here?” The enormous ramifications of what Ro has done begin to hit me. “Ro, we’re not supposed to be messing with this stuff. You know using electricity outside the cities is forbidden. What if someone finds out?”
“Who’s going to find us? In the middle of a Grass Mission? Up a goat hill, in view of a pig farm? You always say you wish you knew more about what it was like, before The Day. Now you can.”
Ro looks earnest, standing there in front of the pile of junk and wires and time.
“Ro,” I say, trying to find the words. “I—”
“What?” He sounds defensive.
“It’s the best present ever.” It’s all I can say, but the words don’t seem like enough. He did this, for me. He’d rebuild every radio and every bicycle and every memory cell in the world for me, if he could. And if he couldn’t, he’d still try if he thought I wanted him to.
That’s who Ro is.
“Really? You like it?” He softens, relieved.
I love it like I love you.
That’s what I want to tell him. But he’s Ro, and he’s my best friend. And he’d rather have the mud scrubbed out of his ears than mushy words whispered in them, so I don’t say anything at all. Instead, I sink down onto the floor and examine the rest of my presents. Ro’s made a frame, out of twisted wire, for my favorite photograph of my mother—the one with dark eyes and a tiny gold cross at her neck.
“Ro. It’s beautiful.” I finger each curving copper tendril.
“She’s beautiful.” He shrugs, embarrassed. So I only nod and move on to the next gift, an old book of stories, nicked from the Padre’s bookcase. Not the first time we’ve done that—and I smile at him conspiratorially. Finally, I pick up the music player, examining the white wires. They have soft pieces on the ends, and I fit one into my ear. I look at Ro and laugh, fitting one in his.
Ro clicks a round button on the side of the rectangle. Screaming music streams into the air—I jump and my earpiece goes flying. When I stick it back in, I can almost feel the music. The nest of cardboard and plywood and tin around us is practically vibrating.
We let the music drown out our thoughts and occupy ourselves with singing and shouting—until the door flies open and the night comes tumbling inside. The night, and the Padre.
“DOLORIA MARIA DE LA CRUZ!”
It’s my real name—though no one is supposed to know or say it—and he wields it like a weapon. He must be really angry. The Padre, as red-faced and short as Ro is brown and long, looks like he could flatten us both with one more word.
“FURO COSTAS!”
But I’ve given Ro his own turn with the earphones, and the music is so loud he can’t hear the Padre. Ro’s singing along badly, and dancing worse. I stand frozen in place while the Padre yanks the white cord from Ro’s ear. The Padre holds out his other hand and Ro drops the silver music player into it.
“I see you’ve raided the storage room once more, Furo.”
Ro looks at his feet.
The Padre rips the lights out of the black box, and a spark shoots across the room. The Padre raises an eyebrow.
“You’re lucky you didn’t burn down half the mountain with this contraband,” he says, looking meaningfully at Ro. “Again.”
“So lucky.” Ro snorts. “I think that every day, right before dawn when I get up to feed the pigs.”
The Padre drops the string of lights like a snake. “You realize, of course, that a Sympa patrol could have seen the lights on this mountain all the way down to the Tracks?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of hiding?” Ro glowers.
“That depends. Do you ever get tired of living?” The Padre glares back. Ro says nothing.
The Padre has the look he gets when he’s doing the Mission accounting, hunched over the ledgers he fills with rows of tiny numbers. This time, he is calculating punishments, and multiplying them times two. I tug on his sleeve, looking repentant—a skill I mastered when I was little. “Ro didn’t mean it, Padre. Don’t be angry. He did it for me.”
He cups my chin with one hand, and I feel his fingers on my face. In a flash, I sense him. What comes to me first is worry and fear—not for himself, but for us. He wants to be a wall around us, and he can’t, and it makes him crazy. Mostly, he is patience and caution; he is a globe spinning and a finger tracing roads on a worn map. His heart beats more clearly than most. The Padre remembers everything—he was a grown man when the first Carriers came—and most of what he remembers are the children he has helped. Ro, and me, and all the others who lived at the Mission until they were placed with families.
Then, in my mind’s eye, I see something new.
The image of a book takes shape.
The Padre is wrapping it, with his careful hands. My present.
He smiles at me, and I pretend not to know where his mind is.
“Tomorrow we will speak of bigger things. Not today. It’s not your fault, Dolly. It’s your birthday eve.”
And with that, he winks at Ro and draws his robed arm around me, and we both know all is forgiven.
“Now, come to dinner. Bigger and Biggest are waiting, and if we make them wait much longer, Ramona Jamona will no longer be a guest at our table but the main dish.”
As we slide our way back down the hillside, the Padre curses the bushes that tug at his robes, and Ro and I laugh like the children we were when he first found us. We race, stumbling in the darkness toward the warm yellow glow of the Mission kitchen. I can see the homemade beeswax candles flickering, the hand-cut paper streamers hanging from the rafters.
My birthday eve dinner is a success. Everyone on the Mission is there—almost a dozen people, counting the farmhands and the church workers—all crammed around our long wooden table. Bigger and Biggest have used every cracked plate in the shed. I get to sit in the Padre’s seat, a birthday tradition, and we eat my favorite potato-cheese stew and Bigger’s famous sugar cake and sing old songs by the fire until the moon is high and our eyes are heavy and I fall asleep in my usual warm spot in front of the oven.
When the old nightmare comes—my mother and me and the radio going silent—Ro is there next to me on the floor, asleep with crumbs still on his face and twigs still in his hair.
My thief of junk. Climber of mountains. Builder of worlds.
I rest my head on his back and listen to him breathe. I wonder what tomorrow will bring. What the Padre wants to tell me.
Bigger things, that’s what he said.
I think about bigger things until I am too small and too tired to care.
EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL AUTOPSY
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD
Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare
Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B
Also see adjoining DPPT in addendum file.
Deceased Personal Possessions Transcript
Deceased classified as victim of Grass Rebellion uprising. Known to be Person of Interest to Ambassador Amare.
Gender: Female.
Ethnicity: Indeterminate.
Age: Estimate mid-to-late teens. Postadolescent.
Physical Characteristics:
Slightly underweight. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Skin characterized by some discoloration indicative of elemental exposure. Exhibits human protein markers and low body weight indicative of predominantly agrarian diet. Staining patterns on teeth consistent with consumption habits of local Grass cultures.
Distinguishing Physical Markings:
A recognizable
marking
appears inside the specimen’s right wrist. At the Ambassador’s request, a
specimen of the
has been removed, in observance of
security protocols.
.
Cause of Death:
.
Survivors: No identified family.
Note: Body will be cremated following lab processing.
Embassy City Waste Facility Assignment: Landfill
.
3
THE PIETÀ OF LA PURÍSIMA
Feelings are memories.
That’s what I’m thinking as I stand there in the Mission chapel, the morning of my birthday. It’s what the Padre says. He also says that chapels turn regular people into philosophers.
I’m not a regular person, but I’m still no philosopher. And either way, what I remember and how I feel are the only two things I can’t escape, no matter how much I want to.
No matter how hard I try.
For the moment, I tell myself not to think. I focus on trying to see. The chapel is dark but the doorway to outside is blindingly bright. That’s what morning always looks like in the chapel. The little light there prickles and stings my eyes.
Like in the Mission itself, in the chapel you can pretend that nothing has changed for hundreds of years, that nothing has happened. Not like in the Hole, where they say the buildings have fallen into ruins, and Sympa soldiers control the streets with fear, and you think about nothing but The Day, every day.
Los Angeles, that’s what the Hole used to be called. First Los Angeles, then the City of Angels, then the Holy City, then the Hole. When I was little, that’s how I used to think of the House of Lords, as angels. Nobody calls them alien anymore, because they aren’t. They’re familiar. We never see them, but we’ve never known a world without them, not Ro and me. I grew up thinking they were angels because back on The Day they sent my parents to heaven. At least, that’s what the Grass missionaries told me, when I was old enough to ask.
Heaven, not their graves.
Angels, not aliens.
But just because something comes from the sky doesn’t make it an angel. The Lords didn’t come here from the heavens to save us. They came from some faraway solar system to colonize our planet, on The Day. We don’t know what they look like inside their ships, but they’re not angels. They destroyed my family the year I was born. What kind of angel would do that?
Now we call them the House of Lords—and Ambassador Amare, she tells us not to fear them—but we do.
Just as we fear her.
On The Day, the dead dropped silently in their homes, never seeing what hit them. Never knowing anything about our new Lords, about the way they could use their Icons to control the energy that flowed through our own bodies, our machines, our cities.
About how they could stop it.
Either way, my family is gone. There was no reason for me to have survived. Nobody understood why I did.
The Padre suspected, of course. That’s why he took me.
First me, and then Ro.
I hear a sound from the far end of the chapel.
I squint, turning my back to the door.
The Padre has sent for me, but he’s late. I catch the eye of the Lady from the painting on the wall. Her face is so sad, I think she knows what has happened. I think she knows everything. She’s part of what General Ambassador to the Planet Hiro Miyazawa, the head of the United Embassies, calls the old ways of humanity. How we believed in ourselves—how we survived ourselves. What we looked up to, back when we thought there was someone up above.
Not something.
I look back to the Lady a moment longer, until the sadness surges and the pain radiates through me. It pulses from my temples and I feel my mind stumble, folding at the edge of unconsciousness. Something is wrong. It must be, for the familiar ache to come on so suddenly. I press my hand to my temple, willing it to stop. I breathe deep, until I can see clearly.
“Padre?”
My voice echoes against the wood and stone. It sounds as small as I am. An animal has lurched into my leg, one of many more entering the chapel, and my nostrils fill with smells—hair and hides and hooves, paint and mold and manure. My birthday falls on the Blessing of the Animals, which will begin just hours from now. Local Grass farmers and ranchers will come to have the Padre bless their livestock, as they have for three hundred years. It is Grass tradition, and we are a Grass Mission.
Appearing in the door, the Padre smiles at me, moving to light the ceremonial candles. Then his smile fades. “Where’s Furo? Bigger and Biggest haven’t seen him at all this morning.”
I shrug. I can’t account for every second of Ro’s day. Ro could be lifting all the dried cereal cakes out of Bigger’s emergency supplies. Chasing Biggest’s donkeys. Sneaking down the Tracks toward the Hole, to buy more parts for the Padre’s busted-up old pistola, shot only on New Year’s Eve. Meeting people he doesn’t want me to meet, learning things he doesn’t want me to know. Preparing for a war he’ll never fight with an enemy that can’t be defeated.
He’s on his own.
The Padre, preoccupied as always, is no longer paying attention to himself or to me. “Careful …” I catch his elbow, pulling him out of the way of a pile of pig waste. A near miss.
He clicks his tongue and leans down to chuck Ramona Jamona on the chin. “Ramona. Not in the chapel.” It’s an act—really, he doesn’t mind. The big pink pig sleeps in his chamber on cold nights, we all know she does. He loves Ro and me just as he does Ramona—in spite of everything we do and beyond anything he says. He’s the only father we have ever known, and though I call him the Padre, I think of him as my Padre.
“She’s a pig, Padre. She’s going to go wherever she wants. She can’t understand you.”
“Ah, well. It’s only once a year, the Blessing of the Animals. We can clean the floors tomorrow. All Earth’s creatures need our prayers.”
“I know. I don’t mind.” I look to the animals, wondering. The Padre sinks onto a low pew, patting the wood next to him. “We can take a few minutes to ourselves, however. Come. Sit.”
I oblige.
He smiles, touching my chin. “Happy birthday, Dolly.” He holds out a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It materializes from his robes, a priestly sleight of hand.
Birthday secrets. My book, finally.
I recognize it from his thoughts, from yesterday. He holds it out to me, but his face is not full of joy.
Only sadness.
“Be careful with it. Don’t let it out of your sight. It’s very rare. And it’s about you.”
I drop my hand.
“Doloria.” He says my real name and I stiffen, bracing myself for the words I fear are coming. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but it’s time we speak of such things. There are people who would harm you, Doloria. I haven’t really told you how I found you, not all of it. Why you survived the attack and your family didn’t. I think you’re ready to hear it now.” He leans closer. “Why I’ve hidden you. Why you’re special. Who you are.”
I’ve been dreading this talk since my tenth birthday. The day he first told me what little I know about who I am and how I am different. That day, over sugar cakes and thick, homemade butter and sun tea, he talked to me slowly about the creeping sadness that came over me, so heavy that my chest fluttered like a startled animal’s and I couldn’t breathe. About the pain that pulsed in my head or came between my shoulder blades. About the nightmares that were so real I was afraid Ro would walk in and find me cold and still in my bed one morning.
As if you really could die from a broken heart.
But the Padre never told me where the feelings came from. That’s one thing even he didn’t know.
I wish someone did.
“Doloria.”
He says my name again to remind me that he knows my secret. He’s the only one, Ro and him. When we’re alone, I let Ro call me Doloria—but even he mostly calls me Dol, or even Dodo. I’m just plain Dolly to everyone else.
Not Doloria Maria de la Cruz. Not a Weeper. Not marked by the lone gray dot on my wrist.
One small circle the color of the sea in the rain.
The one thing that is really me.
My destiny.
Dolor means “sorrow,” in Latin or Greek or some other language from way, way before The Day. BTD. Before everything changed.
“Open it.”
I look at him, uncertain. The candles flicker, and a breeze shudders slowly through the room. Ramona noses closer to the altar, her snout looking for traces of honey on my hand.
I slip my finger through the paper, pulling it loose from the string. Beneath the wrapping is hardly a book, almost more of a journal: the cover is thick, rough burlap, homemade. This is a Grass book, unauthorized, illegal. Most likely preserved by the Rebellion, in spite of and because of the Embassy regulations. Such books are usually on subjects the Ambassadors won’t acknowledge within the world of the Occupation. They are very hard to come by, and extremely valuable.
My eyes well with tears as I read the cover. The Humanity Project: The Icon Children. It looks like it was written by hand.
“No,” I whisper.
“Read it.” He nods. “I was supposed to keep it safe for you and make sure you read it when you were old enough.”
“Who said that? Why?”
“I’m not sure. I discovered the book with a note on the altar, not long after I brought you here. Just read it. It’s time. And nobody knows as much about the subject as this particular author. It’s written by a doctor, it seems, in his own hand.”
“I know enough not to read more.” I look around for Ro. I wish, desperately, he would walk through the chapel door. But the Padre is the Padre, so I open the book to a page he’s marked, and begin to read about myself.
Icon doloris.
Dolorus. Doloria. Me.
My purpose is pain and my name is sorrow.
One gray dot says so.
No.
“Not yet.” I look up at the Padre and shake my head, shoving the book into my belt. The conversation is over. The story of me can wait until I’m ready. My heart hurts again, stronger this time.
I hear strange noises, feel a change in the air. I look to Ramona Jamona, hoping for some moral support, but she is lying at my feet, fast asleep.
No, not asleep.
Dark liquid pools beneath her.
The cold animal in my chest startles awake, fluttering once again.
An old feeling returns. Something really is wrong. Soft pops fill the air.
“Padre,” I say.
Only I look at him and he is not my Padre at all. Not anymore.
“Padre!” I scream. He’s not moving. He’s nothing. Still sitting next to me, still smiling, but not breathing.
He’s gone.
My mind moves slowly. I can’t make sense of it. His eyes are empty and his mouth has fallen open. Gone.
It’s all gone. His jokes. His secret recipes—the butter he made from shaking cream together with smooth, round rocks—the rows of sun tea in jars—gone. Other secrets, too. My secrets.
But I can’t think about it now, because behind the Padre—what was the Padre—stands a line of masked soldiers. Sympas.
Occupation Sympathizers, traitors to humanity. Embassy soldiers, taking orders from the Lords, hiding behind plexi-masks and black armor, standing in pig mess and casting long shadows over the deathly peace of the chapel. One wears golden wings on his jacket. It’s the only detail I see, aside from the weapons. The guns make no noise, but the animals panic all the same. They are screaming—which is something I did not know, that animals could scream.
I open my mouth, but I do not scream. I vomit.
I spit green juices and gray dust and memories of Ramona and the Padre.
All I can see are the guns. All I can feel is hate and fear. The black-gloved hands close around my wrist, overwhelming me, and I know that soon I will no longer have to worry about my nightmares.
I will be dead.
As my knees buckle, all I can think about is Ro and how angry he will be at me for leaving him.
EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL VIRTUAL AUTOPSY: DECEASED PERSONAL POSSESSIONS TRANSCRIPT (DPPT)
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD
Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare
Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B
See adjoining Tribunal Autopsy, attached.
Contents of personal satchel, torn, army-issue, found with deceased.
See attached photographs.
1. Electronic device, silver and rectangular. Appears to be some form of contraband pre-Occupation music player.
2. Photograph of woman, similar in feature and stature to deceased. Possible predeceased family member?
3.
.
4.
.
5. Dried plant leathers. Substantiates finding of probable vegetarianism in deceased.
6. One blue glass bead. Significance unknown.
7. One length of muslin cloth, stained with biological and natural material consistent with body wrapping, presumably of the wrist, as is customary for
.
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Margaret Stohl
The first book in a breathtaking new series from Beautiful Creatures co-author Margaret StohlYour heart beats only with their permission.Everything changed on The Day. The day the windows shattered. The day the power stopped. The day Dol's family dropped dead. The day Earth lost a war it didn't know it was fighting.Since then, Dol has lived a simple life in the countryside – safe from the shadow of the Icon and its terrifying power. Hiding from the one truth she can't avoid.She's different. She survived. Why?When Dol and her best friend, Ro, are captured and taken to the Embassy, off the coast of the sprawling metropolis once known as the City of Angels, they find only more questions. While Ro and fellow hostage Tima rage against their captors, Dol finds herself drawn to Lucas, the Ambassador's privileged son. But the four teens are more alike than they might think, and the timing of their meeting isn't a coincidence. It's a conspiracy.Within the Icon's reach, Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas discover that their uncontrollable emotions – which they've always thought to be their greatest weaknesses – may actually be their greatest strengths.Bestselling author Margaret Stohl delivers the first book in a heart-pounding series set in a haunting new world where four teens must piece together the mysteries of their pasts – in order to save the future.
For Lewis,
writing partner and writer’s partner
on and off the page
GIVE SORROW WORDS.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u1a19fd38-ce51-5ba8-be01-6f1434aecae1)
Dedication (#ubc5d7792-13ce-5246-bdda-904c7a77a799)
Epigraph (#ubdfad4b3-4aa0-568c-a6b7-222d25ba80e5)
Prologue: The Day (#u70ac9eee-468e-52fd-9fa9-957494bd3fa2)
1. Happy Birthday to Me (#u4130ffe2-33eb-5dbf-947a-3737fce9c48f)
2. Presents (#u0bff7af1-9cfa-59be-af13-0886b6ba8653)
3. The Pietà of La Purísima (#u9a46c864-097a-5023-b667-89a8997636d9)
4. Tracks (#u24212339-f6a0-5147-bf3c-dd7b47d5f414)
5. Diversions (#uf06014ff-4f39-5ac1-887e-fd8c68343185)
6. Four Dots (#uc64aca3a-6061-51eb-9a97-82d188eee0b0)
7. A Decision (#ue0b67e3b-1904-5140-8e6b-ee31660d6be7)
8. Doc (#ue3d0f99e-5550-5b14-a7ae-de0e24292b4e)
9. The Ambassador (#u32fffc46-51c8-58df-8bda-06c729269356)
10. The Trigger (#ud290ae85-57a6-56b1-9386-291c8a4a914e)
11. Together Again (#u5291ca30-b865-57f8-ba2f-10739e164e73)
12. Long Way Home (#u2a58f15e-c1de-50ce-8967-1561550f5575)
13. Colonel Catallus (#u28293591-3b71-53e9-b5b9-544d7b98ee61)
14. Decisions (#ud35728a8-d348-5959-ab1a-7d94c9491838)
15. Brutus (#ue2e4519b-c722-5901-b46d-b3dad3c077ed)
16. Hall of Records (#u1d63aa20-ea42-5e80-ab73-c1a20097416c)
17. Disappearing (#u1b96d90f-9cb7-5c9c-9d0e-eeb19185ce7f)
18. The Porthole (#u28f1a5a8-f42f-51bc-921b-cfbd99ca281d)
19. The Hole (#udf455faf-e246-5646-88e6-f5bbc02c0987)
20. Our Lady of the Angels (#ue848b5a3-4d3b-5705-85fd-9f92b157f900)
21. Hux (#udb7b40af-b726-57d5-bb6a-e2a5fc100e66)
22. The Park (#u264e39a8-7f5b-5220-a18e-da7b0b9cf942)
23. The Observatory (#u667ff49a-5c8f-5370-b36c-6b698ad348ec)
24. Ro (#ud9d2e575-f3a0-57c8-b784-d46f87d7ef7f)
25. Tima (#uf351e072-98a4-5d56-8d73-eac09dfcfb36)
26. Lucas (#uf6ac2b59-fde4-5020-a89f-18b29fdda9dd)
27. Fortis (#u53c82047-cca9-535a-9757-2b1a61d05ca4)
28. All Fall Down (#ueb09b04c-ee8f-59f6-a2e7-988b1b883fce)
29. The Virus (#ue466c489-ea4d-57dd-8c6a-3edf21567bfd)
30. Birds (#u1dea2f96-b694-5478-9720-ee12de253fa7)
Epilogue: The Grasslands (#uccf17bc2-807e-52d3-95cb-b65a17aaba23)
Acknowledgments (#u04afe6ab-8cc6-565e-9156-7c98a9ea4f6e)
Copyright (#u40dd70e9-b265-58ac-a8c8-b7ba18fe7411)
About the Publisher (#u29314711-a5ab-5c72-9bc7-c2c1d21d4e6b)
PROLOGUE
THE DAY
One tiny gray dot, no bigger than a freckle, marks the inside of the baby’s chubby arm. It slips in and out of view as she cries, waving her yellow rubber duck back and forth.
Her mother holds her over the old ceramic bathtub. The little feet kick harder, twisting above the water. “You can complain all you want, Doloria, but you’re still taking a bath. It will make you feel better.”
She slides her daughter into the warm tub. The baby kicks again, splashing the blue patterned wallpaper above the tiles. The water surprises her, and she quiets.
“That’s it. You can’t feel sad in the water. There is no sadness there.” She kisses Doloria’s cheek. “I love you, mi corazón. I love you and your brothers today and tomorrow and every day until the day after heaven.”
The baby stops crying. She does not cry as she is scrubbed and sung to, pink and clean. She does not cry as she is kissed and swaddled in blankets. She does not cry as she is tickled and tucked into her crib.
The mother smiles, wiping a damp strand of hair from her child’s warm forehead. “Dream well, Doloria. Que sueñes con los angelitos.” She reaches for the light, but the room floods with darkness before she can touch the switch. Across the hall, the radio is silenced midsentence, as if on cue. Over in the kitchen, the television fades to sudden black, to a dot the size of a pinprick, then to nothing.
The mother calls up the stairs. “The power’s gone off again, querido! Check the fuse box.” She turns back, tucking the blanket corner snugly beneath Doloria. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing your papi can’t fix.”
The baby sucks on her fist, five small fingers the size of tiny wriggling earthworms, as the walls start to shake and bits of plaster swirl in the air like fireworks, like confetti.
She blinks as the windows shatter and the ceiling fan hits the carpet and the shouting begins.
She yawns as her father rolls down the staircase like a funny rag doll that never stands up.
She closes her eyes as the falling birds patter against the roof like rain.
She starts to dream as her mother’s heart stops beating.
I start to dream as my mother’s heart stops beating.
1
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
“Dol? Are you okay?”
The memory fades at the sound of his voice.
Ro.
I feel him somewhere in my mind, the nameless place where I see everything, feel everyone. The spark that is Ro. I hold on to it, warm and close, like a mug of steamed milk or a lit candle.
And then I open my eyes and come back to him.
Always.
Ro’s here with me. He’s fine, and I’m fine.
I’m fine.
I think it, over and over, until I believe it. Until I remember what is real and what is not.
Slowly the physical world comes into focus. I’m standing on a dirt trail halfway up the side of a mountain—staring down at the Mission, where the goats and pigs in the field below are small as ants.
“All right?” Ro reaches toward me and touches my arm.
I nod. But I’m lying.
I’ve let the feelings—and the memories—overtake me again. I can’t do that. Everyone at the Mission knows I have a gift for feeling things—strangers, friends, even Ramona Jamona the pig, when she’s hungry—but it doesn’t mean I have to let the feelings control me.
At least that’s what the Padre keeps telling me.
I try to control myself, and usually I can. But I wish I didn’t feel anything, sometimes. Especially not when everything is so overwhelming, so unbearably sad.
“Don’t disappear on me, Dol. Not now.” Ro locks his eyes on me and motions with his big tan hands. His brown-gold eyes flicker with fire and light under his dark tangle of hair. His face is all broad planes and rough angles—as solid as a brambled oak, softening only for me. He could climb halfway up the mountain again by now, or halfway down. Holding Ro back is like trying to stop an earthquake or a mud slide. Maybe a train.
But not now. Now he waits. Because he knows me, and he knows where I’ve gone.
Where I go.
I stare up at the sky, spattered with bursts of gray rain and orange light. It’s hard to see past the wide-brimmed hat I stole off the hook behind the Padre’s office door. Still, the setting sun is in my eyes, pulsing from behind the clouds, bright and broken.
I remember what we are doing and why we are here.
My birthday. It’s my seventeenth birthday tomorrow.
Ro has a present for me, but first we have to climb the hill. He wants to surprise me.
“Give me a clue, Ro.” I pull myself up the hill after him, leaving a twisting trail of dried brush and dirt behind me.
“Nope.”
I turn to look down the mountain again. I can’t stop myself. I like how everything looks from up here.
Peaceful. Smaller. Like a painting, or one of the Padre’s impossible puzzles, except there aren’t any missing pieces. In the distance below, I can see the yellowing patch of field that belongs to our Mission, then the fringe of green trees, then the deep blue wash of the ocean.
Home.
The view is so serene, you almost wouldn’t know about The Day. That’s why I like it here. If you don’t leave the Mission, you don’t have to think about it. The Day and the Icons and the Lords. The way they control us.
How powerless we are.
This far up the Tracks, away from the cities, nothing ever changes. This land has always been wild.
A person can feel safe here.
Safer.
I raise my voice. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”
He’s up the trail, once again. Then I hear a ripple through the brush, and the sound of rolling rock, and he lands behind me, nimble as a mountain goat.
Ro smiles. “I know, Dol.”
I take his calloused hand and relax my fingers into his. Instantly, I am flooded with the feeling of Ro—physical contact always makes our connection that much stronger.
He is as warm as the sun behind me. As hot as I am cold. As rough as I am smooth. That’s our balance, just one of the invisible threads that tie us together.
It’s who we are.
My best-and-only friend and me.
He rummages in his pocket, then pushes something into my hands, suddenly shy. “All right, I’ll hurry it up. Your first present.”
I look down. A lone blue glass bead rolls between my fingers. A slender leather cord loops in a circle around it.
A necklace.
It’s the blue of the sky, of my eyes, of the ocean.
“Ro,” I breathe. “It’s perfect.”
“It reminded me of you. It’s the water, see? So you can always keep it with you.” His face reddens as he tries to explain, the words sticking in his mouth. “I know—how it makes you feel.”
Peaceful. Permanent. Unbroken.
“Bigger helped me with the cord. It used to be part of a saddle.” Ro has an eye for things like that, things other people overlook. Bigger, the Mission cook, is the same way, and the two of them are inseparable. Biggest, Bigger’s wife, tries her best to keep both of them out of trouble.
“I love it.” I thread my arm around his neck in a rough hug. Not so much an embrace as a cuff of arms, the clench of friends and family.
Ro looks embarrassed, all the same. “It’s not your whole present. For that you have to climb a little farther.”
“But it’s not even my birthday yet.”
“It’s your birthday eve. I thought it was only fair to start tonight. Besides, this kind of present is best after sundown.” Ro holds out his hand, a wicked look in his eyes.
“Come on. Just one little hint.” I squint up at him and he grins.
“But it’s a surprise.”
“You’re making me hike all this way through the brush.”
He laughs. “Okay. It’s the last thing you’d ever expect. The very last thing.” He bounces up and down a bit where he stands, and I can tell he’s practically ready to bolt up the mountain.
“What are you talking about?”
He shakes his head, holding out his hand again. “You’ll see.”
I take it. There’s no getting Ro to talk when he doesn’t want to. Besides, his hand in mine is a good thing.
I feel the beating of his heart, the pulse of his adrenaline. Even now, when he’s relaxed and hiking, and it’s just the two of us. He is a coiled spring. He has no resting state, not really.
Not Ro.
A shadow crosses the hillside, and instinctively we dive for cover under the brush. The ship in the sky is sleek and silver, glinting ominously with the last reflective rays of the setting sun. I shiver, even though I’m not at all cold, and my face is half buried in Ro’s warm shoulder.
I can’t help it.
Ro murmurs into my ear as if he is talking to one of the Padre’s puppies. It’s more his tone than the words—that’s how you speak to scared animals. “Don’t be afraid, Dol. It’s headed up the coast, probably to Goldengate. They never come this far inland, not here. They’re not coming for us.”
“You don’t know that.” The words sound grim in my mouth, but they’re true.
“I do.”
He slips his arm around me and we wait like that until the sky is clear.
Because he doesn’t know. Not really.
People have hidden in these bushes for centuries, long before us. Long before there were ships in the skies.
First the Chumash lived here, then the Rancheros, then the Spanish missionaries, then the Californians, then the Americans, then the Grass. Which is me, at least since the Padre brought me back as a baby to La Purísima, our old Grass Mission, in the hills beyond the ocean.
These hills.
The Padre tells it like a story; he was on a crew searching for survivors in the silent city after The Day, only there were none. Whole city blocks were quiet as rain. Finally, he heard a tiny sound—so small, he thought he was imagining it—and there I was, crying purple-faced in my crib. He wrapped me in his coat and brought me home, just as he now brings us stray dogs.
It was also the Padre who taught me the history of these hills as we sat by the fire at night, along with the constellations of the stars and the phases of the moon. The names of the people who knew our land before we did.
Maybe it was supposed to be like this. Maybe this, the Occupation, the Embassies, all of it, maybe this is just another part of nature. Like the seasons of a year, or how a caterpillar turns into a cocoon. The water cycle. The tides.
Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.
Sometimes I repeat the names of my people, all the people who have ever lived in my Mission. I say the names and I think, I am them and they are me.
I am the Misíon La Purísima de Concepción de la Santísima Virgen María, founded in Las Californias on the Day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, on the Eighth Day of the Twelfth Month of the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty-Seven. Three hundred years ago.
Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.
When I say the names they’re not gone, not to me. Nobody died. Nothing ended. We’re still here.
I’m still here.
That’s all I want. To stay. And for Ro to stay, and the Padre. For us to stay safe, everyone here on the Mission.
But as I look back down the mountain I know that nothing stays, and the gold flush and fade of everything tells me that the sun is setting now.
No one can stop it from going. Not even me.
RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY
To: Ambassador Amare
From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke
Subject: Icon Research
We still can’t be sure how the Icons work. We know, when the Lords came, thirteen Icons fell from the sky, one landing in each of the Earth’s mega-cities. To this day, we still can’t get close enough to examine them. Our best guess is that the Icons generate an immensely powerful electromagnetic field that can halt electrical activity within a certain radius. We believe it is this field that enables the Icons to disrupt or disable all modern technology. It appears the Icons can also shut down any and all chemical processes or reactions within the field.
Note: We call this the “shutdown effect.”
The Day itself proved the ultimate demonstration of this capability, when, as we all know, the Lords activated the Icons and ended all hope of resistance by making an example of Goldengate, São Paulo, Köln-Bonn, Cairo, Mumbai, and Greater Beijing … the so-called Silent Cities.
By the end of The Day, the newly arrived colonists gained complete control of all major population centers on the Seven Continents. An estimated one billion lives ended in an instant, the greatest tragedy in history.
May silence bring them peace.
2
PRESENTS
By the time we reach the top of the hillside, the sky has turned dark as the eggplants in the Mission garden.
Ro pulls me up the last slide of rocks. “Now. Close your eyes.”
“Ro. What have you done?”
“Nothing bad. Nothing that bad.” He looks at me and sighs. “Not this time, anyway. Come on, trust me.”
I don’t close my eyes. Instead, I look into the shadows beneath the scraggly trees in front of me, where someone has built a shack out of scraps of old signboard and rusting tin. The hood of an ancient tractor is lashed to the legs on a faded poster advertising what looks like running shoes.
DO IT.
That’s what the bodiless legs say, in bright white words spilling over the photograph.
“Don’t you trust me?” Ro repeats, keeping his eyes on the shack as if he was showing me his most precious possession.
There is no one I trust more. Ro knows that. He also knows I hate surprises.
I close my eyes.
“Careful. Now, duck.”
Even with my eyes shut, I know when I am inside the shack. I feel the palmetto roof brush against my hair, and I nearly tumble over the roots of the trees surrounding us.
“Wait a second.” He lets go of me. “One. Two. Three. Happy birthday, Dol!”
I open my eyes. I am now holding one end of a string of tiny colored lights that shine in front of me as if they were stars pulled down from the sky itself. The lights weave from my fingers all across the room, in a kind of sparkling circle that begins with me and ends with Ro.
I clap my hands together, lights and all. “Ro! How—? Is that—electric?”
He nods. “Do you like it?” His eyes are twinkling, same as the lights. “Are you surprised?”
“Never in a thousand years would I have guessed it.”
“There’s more.”
He moves to one side. Next to him is a strange-looking contraption with two rusty metal circles connected by a metal bar and a peeling leather seat.
“A bicycle?”
“Sort of. It’s a pedal generator. I saw it in a book that the Padre had, at least the plans for it. Took me about three months to find all the parts. Twenty digits, just for the old bike. And look there—”
He points to two objects sitting on a plank. He takes the string of lights from my hand, and I move to touch a smooth metal artifact.
“Pan-a-sonic?” I sound out the faded type on the side of the first object. It’s some sort of box, and I pick it up, turning it over in my hands.
He answers proudly. “That’s a radio.”
I realize what it is as soon as he says the words, and it’s all I can do not to drop it. Ro doesn’t notice. “People used them to listen to music. I’m not sure it works, though. I haven’t tried it yet.”
I put it down. I know what a radio is. My mother had one. I remember because it dies every time in the dream. When The Day comes. I touch my tangled brown curls self-consciously.
It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know. I’ve never told anyone about the dream, not even the Padre. That’s how badly I don’t want to remember it.
I change the subject. “And this?” I pick up a tiny silver rectangle, not much bigger than my palm. There is a picture of a lone piece of fruit scratched on one side.
Ro smiles. “It’s some kind of memory cell. It plays old songs, right into your ears.” He pulls the rectangle out of my hand. “It’s unbelievable, like listening to the past. But it only works when it has power.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s your present. Power. See? I push the pedals like this, and the friction creates energy.”
He stands on the bike pedals, then drops onto the seat, pushing furiously. The string of colored lights glows in the room, all around me. I can’t help but laugh, it’s so magical—and Ro looks so funny and sweaty.
Ro climbs off the bicycle and kneels in front of a small black box. I see that the string of lights attaches neatly to one side. “That’s the battery. It stores the power.”
“Right here?” The enormous ramifications of what Ro has done begin to hit me. “Ro, we’re not supposed to be messing with this stuff. You know using electricity outside the cities is forbidden. What if someone finds out?”
“Who’s going to find us? In the middle of a Grass Mission? Up a goat hill, in view of a pig farm? You always say you wish you knew more about what it was like, before The Day. Now you can.”
Ro looks earnest, standing there in front of the pile of junk and wires and time.
“Ro,” I say, trying to find the words. “I—”
“What?” He sounds defensive.
“It’s the best present ever.” It’s all I can say, but the words don’t seem like enough. He did this, for me. He’d rebuild every radio and every bicycle and every memory cell in the world for me, if he could. And if he couldn’t, he’d still try if he thought I wanted him to.
That’s who Ro is.
“Really? You like it?” He softens, relieved.
I love it like I love you.
That’s what I want to tell him. But he’s Ro, and he’s my best friend. And he’d rather have the mud scrubbed out of his ears than mushy words whispered in them, so I don’t say anything at all. Instead, I sink down onto the floor and examine the rest of my presents. Ro’s made a frame, out of twisted wire, for my favorite photograph of my mother—the one with dark eyes and a tiny gold cross at her neck.
“Ro. It’s beautiful.” I finger each curving copper tendril.
“She’s beautiful.” He shrugs, embarrassed. So I only nod and move on to the next gift, an old book of stories, nicked from the Padre’s bookcase. Not the first time we’ve done that—and I smile at him conspiratorially. Finally, I pick up the music player, examining the white wires. They have soft pieces on the ends, and I fit one into my ear. I look at Ro and laugh, fitting one in his.
Ro clicks a round button on the side of the rectangle. Screaming music streams into the air—I jump and my earpiece goes flying. When I stick it back in, I can almost feel the music. The nest of cardboard and plywood and tin around us is practically vibrating.
We let the music drown out our thoughts and occupy ourselves with singing and shouting—until the door flies open and the night comes tumbling inside. The night, and the Padre.
“DOLORIA MARIA DE LA CRUZ!”
It’s my real name—though no one is supposed to know or say it—and he wields it like a weapon. He must be really angry. The Padre, as red-faced and short as Ro is brown and long, looks like he could flatten us both with one more word.
“FURO COSTAS!”
But I’ve given Ro his own turn with the earphones, and the music is so loud he can’t hear the Padre. Ro’s singing along badly, and dancing worse. I stand frozen in place while the Padre yanks the white cord from Ro’s ear. The Padre holds out his other hand and Ro drops the silver music player into it.
“I see you’ve raided the storage room once more, Furo.”
Ro looks at his feet.
The Padre rips the lights out of the black box, and a spark shoots across the room. The Padre raises an eyebrow.
“You’re lucky you didn’t burn down half the mountain with this contraband,” he says, looking meaningfully at Ro. “Again.”
“So lucky.” Ro snorts. “I think that every day, right before dawn when I get up to feed the pigs.”
The Padre drops the string of lights like a snake. “You realize, of course, that a Sympa patrol could have seen the lights on this mountain all the way down to the Tracks?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of hiding?” Ro glowers.
“That depends. Do you ever get tired of living?” The Padre glares back. Ro says nothing.
The Padre has the look he gets when he’s doing the Mission accounting, hunched over the ledgers he fills with rows of tiny numbers. This time, he is calculating punishments, and multiplying them times two. I tug on his sleeve, looking repentant—a skill I mastered when I was little. “Ro didn’t mean it, Padre. Don’t be angry. He did it for me.”
He cups my chin with one hand, and I feel his fingers on my face. In a flash, I sense him. What comes to me first is worry and fear—not for himself, but for us. He wants to be a wall around us, and he can’t, and it makes him crazy. Mostly, he is patience and caution; he is a globe spinning and a finger tracing roads on a worn map. His heart beats more clearly than most. The Padre remembers everything—he was a grown man when the first Carriers came—and most of what he remembers are the children he has helped. Ro, and me, and all the others who lived at the Mission until they were placed with families.
Then, in my mind’s eye, I see something new.
The image of a book takes shape.
The Padre is wrapping it, with his careful hands. My present.
He smiles at me, and I pretend not to know where his mind is.
“Tomorrow we will speak of bigger things. Not today. It’s not your fault, Dolly. It’s your birthday eve.”
And with that, he winks at Ro and draws his robed arm around me, and we both know all is forgiven.
“Now, come to dinner. Bigger and Biggest are waiting, and if we make them wait much longer, Ramona Jamona will no longer be a guest at our table but the main dish.”
As we slide our way back down the hillside, the Padre curses the bushes that tug at his robes, and Ro and I laugh like the children we were when he first found us. We race, stumbling in the darkness toward the warm yellow glow of the Mission kitchen. I can see the homemade beeswax candles flickering, the hand-cut paper streamers hanging from the rafters.
My birthday eve dinner is a success. Everyone on the Mission is there—almost a dozen people, counting the farmhands and the church workers—all crammed around our long wooden table. Bigger and Biggest have used every cracked plate in the shed. I get to sit in the Padre’s seat, a birthday tradition, and we eat my favorite potato-cheese stew and Bigger’s famous sugar cake and sing old songs by the fire until the moon is high and our eyes are heavy and I fall asleep in my usual warm spot in front of the oven.
When the old nightmare comes—my mother and me and the radio going silent—Ro is there next to me on the floor, asleep with crumbs still on his face and twigs still in his hair.
My thief of junk. Climber of mountains. Builder of worlds.
I rest my head on his back and listen to him breathe. I wonder what tomorrow will bring. What the Padre wants to tell me.
Bigger things, that’s what he said.
I think about bigger things until I am too small and too tired to care.
EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL AUTOPSY
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD
Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare
Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B
Also see adjoining DPPT in addendum file.
Deceased Personal Possessions Transcript
Deceased classified as victim of Grass Rebellion uprising. Known to be Person of Interest to Ambassador Amare.
Gender: Female.
Ethnicity: Indeterminate.
Age: Estimate mid-to-late teens. Postadolescent.
Physical Characteristics:
Slightly underweight. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Skin characterized by some discoloration indicative of elemental exposure. Exhibits human protein markers and low body weight indicative of predominantly agrarian diet. Staining patterns on teeth consistent with consumption habits of local Grass cultures.
Distinguishing Physical Markings:
A recognizable
marking
appears inside the specimen’s right wrist. At the Ambassador’s request, a
specimen of the
has been removed, in observance of
security protocols.
.
Cause of Death:
.
Survivors: No identified family.
Note: Body will be cremated following lab processing.
Embassy City Waste Facility Assignment: Landfill
.
3
THE PIETÀ OF LA PURÍSIMA
Feelings are memories.
That’s what I’m thinking as I stand there in the Mission chapel, the morning of my birthday. It’s what the Padre says. He also says that chapels turn regular people into philosophers.
I’m not a regular person, but I’m still no philosopher. And either way, what I remember and how I feel are the only two things I can’t escape, no matter how much I want to.
No matter how hard I try.
For the moment, I tell myself not to think. I focus on trying to see. The chapel is dark but the doorway to outside is blindingly bright. That’s what morning always looks like in the chapel. The little light there prickles and stings my eyes.
Like in the Mission itself, in the chapel you can pretend that nothing has changed for hundreds of years, that nothing has happened. Not like in the Hole, where they say the buildings have fallen into ruins, and Sympa soldiers control the streets with fear, and you think about nothing but The Day, every day.
Los Angeles, that’s what the Hole used to be called. First Los Angeles, then the City of Angels, then the Holy City, then the Hole. When I was little, that’s how I used to think of the House of Lords, as angels. Nobody calls them alien anymore, because they aren’t. They’re familiar. We never see them, but we’ve never known a world without them, not Ro and me. I grew up thinking they were angels because back on The Day they sent my parents to heaven. At least, that’s what the Grass missionaries told me, when I was old enough to ask.
Heaven, not their graves.
Angels, not aliens.
But just because something comes from the sky doesn’t make it an angel. The Lords didn’t come here from the heavens to save us. They came from some faraway solar system to colonize our planet, on The Day. We don’t know what they look like inside their ships, but they’re not angels. They destroyed my family the year I was born. What kind of angel would do that?
Now we call them the House of Lords—and Ambassador Amare, she tells us not to fear them—but we do.
Just as we fear her.
On The Day, the dead dropped silently in their homes, never seeing what hit them. Never knowing anything about our new Lords, about the way they could use their Icons to control the energy that flowed through our own bodies, our machines, our cities.
About how they could stop it.
Either way, my family is gone. There was no reason for me to have survived. Nobody understood why I did.
The Padre suspected, of course. That’s why he took me.
First me, and then Ro.
I hear a sound from the far end of the chapel.
I squint, turning my back to the door.
The Padre has sent for me, but he’s late. I catch the eye of the Lady from the painting on the wall. Her face is so sad, I think she knows what has happened. I think she knows everything. She’s part of what General Ambassador to the Planet Hiro Miyazawa, the head of the United Embassies, calls the old ways of humanity. How we believed in ourselves—how we survived ourselves. What we looked up to, back when we thought there was someone up above.
Not something.
I look back to the Lady a moment longer, until the sadness surges and the pain radiates through me. It pulses from my temples and I feel my mind stumble, folding at the edge of unconsciousness. Something is wrong. It must be, for the familiar ache to come on so suddenly. I press my hand to my temple, willing it to stop. I breathe deep, until I can see clearly.
“Padre?”
My voice echoes against the wood and stone. It sounds as small as I am. An animal has lurched into my leg, one of many more entering the chapel, and my nostrils fill with smells—hair and hides and hooves, paint and mold and manure. My birthday falls on the Blessing of the Animals, which will begin just hours from now. Local Grass farmers and ranchers will come to have the Padre bless their livestock, as they have for three hundred years. It is Grass tradition, and we are a Grass Mission.
Appearing in the door, the Padre smiles at me, moving to light the ceremonial candles. Then his smile fades. “Where’s Furo? Bigger and Biggest haven’t seen him at all this morning.”
I shrug. I can’t account for every second of Ro’s day. Ro could be lifting all the dried cereal cakes out of Bigger’s emergency supplies. Chasing Biggest’s donkeys. Sneaking down the Tracks toward the Hole, to buy more parts for the Padre’s busted-up old pistola, shot only on New Year’s Eve. Meeting people he doesn’t want me to meet, learning things he doesn’t want me to know. Preparing for a war he’ll never fight with an enemy that can’t be defeated.
He’s on his own.
The Padre, preoccupied as always, is no longer paying attention to himself or to me. “Careful …” I catch his elbow, pulling him out of the way of a pile of pig waste. A near miss.
He clicks his tongue and leans down to chuck Ramona Jamona on the chin. “Ramona. Not in the chapel.” It’s an act—really, he doesn’t mind. The big pink pig sleeps in his chamber on cold nights, we all know she does. He loves Ro and me just as he does Ramona—in spite of everything we do and beyond anything he says. He’s the only father we have ever known, and though I call him the Padre, I think of him as my Padre.
“She’s a pig, Padre. She’s going to go wherever she wants. She can’t understand you.”
“Ah, well. It’s only once a year, the Blessing of the Animals. We can clean the floors tomorrow. All Earth’s creatures need our prayers.”
“I know. I don’t mind.” I look to the animals, wondering. The Padre sinks onto a low pew, patting the wood next to him. “We can take a few minutes to ourselves, however. Come. Sit.”
I oblige.
He smiles, touching my chin. “Happy birthday, Dolly.” He holds out a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It materializes from his robes, a priestly sleight of hand.
Birthday secrets. My book, finally.
I recognize it from his thoughts, from yesterday. He holds it out to me, but his face is not full of joy.
Only sadness.
“Be careful with it. Don’t let it out of your sight. It’s very rare. And it’s about you.”
I drop my hand.
“Doloria.” He says my real name and I stiffen, bracing myself for the words I fear are coming. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but it’s time we speak of such things. There are people who would harm you, Doloria. I haven’t really told you how I found you, not all of it. Why you survived the attack and your family didn’t. I think you’re ready to hear it now.” He leans closer. “Why I’ve hidden you. Why you’re special. Who you are.”
I’ve been dreading this talk since my tenth birthday. The day he first told me what little I know about who I am and how I am different. That day, over sugar cakes and thick, homemade butter and sun tea, he talked to me slowly about the creeping sadness that came over me, so heavy that my chest fluttered like a startled animal’s and I couldn’t breathe. About the pain that pulsed in my head or came between my shoulder blades. About the nightmares that were so real I was afraid Ro would walk in and find me cold and still in my bed one morning.
As if you really could die from a broken heart.
But the Padre never told me where the feelings came from. That’s one thing even he didn’t know.
I wish someone did.
“Doloria.”
He says my name again to remind me that he knows my secret. He’s the only one, Ro and him. When we’re alone, I let Ro call me Doloria—but even he mostly calls me Dol, or even Dodo. I’m just plain Dolly to everyone else.
Not Doloria Maria de la Cruz. Not a Weeper. Not marked by the lone gray dot on my wrist.
One small circle the color of the sea in the rain.
The one thing that is really me.
My destiny.
Dolor means “sorrow,” in Latin or Greek or some other language from way, way before The Day. BTD. Before everything changed.
“Open it.”
I look at him, uncertain. The candles flicker, and a breeze shudders slowly through the room. Ramona noses closer to the altar, her snout looking for traces of honey on my hand.
I slip my finger through the paper, pulling it loose from the string. Beneath the wrapping is hardly a book, almost more of a journal: the cover is thick, rough burlap, homemade. This is a Grass book, unauthorized, illegal. Most likely preserved by the Rebellion, in spite of and because of the Embassy regulations. Such books are usually on subjects the Ambassadors won’t acknowledge within the world of the Occupation. They are very hard to come by, and extremely valuable.
My eyes well with tears as I read the cover. The Humanity Project: The Icon Children. It looks like it was written by hand.
“No,” I whisper.
“Read it.” He nods. “I was supposed to keep it safe for you and make sure you read it when you were old enough.”
“Who said that? Why?”
“I’m not sure. I discovered the book with a note on the altar, not long after I brought you here. Just read it. It’s time. And nobody knows as much about the subject as this particular author. It’s written by a doctor, it seems, in his own hand.”
“I know enough not to read more.” I look around for Ro. I wish, desperately, he would walk through the chapel door. But the Padre is the Padre, so I open the book to a page he’s marked, and begin to read about myself.
Icon doloris.
Dolorus. Doloria. Me.
My purpose is pain and my name is sorrow.
One gray dot says so.
No.
“Not yet.” I look up at the Padre and shake my head, shoving the book into my belt. The conversation is over. The story of me can wait until I’m ready. My heart hurts again, stronger this time.
I hear strange noises, feel a change in the air. I look to Ramona Jamona, hoping for some moral support, but she is lying at my feet, fast asleep.
No, not asleep.
Dark liquid pools beneath her.
The cold animal in my chest startles awake, fluttering once again.
An old feeling returns. Something really is wrong. Soft pops fill the air.
“Padre,” I say.
Only I look at him and he is not my Padre at all. Not anymore.
“Padre!” I scream. He’s not moving. He’s nothing. Still sitting next to me, still smiling, but not breathing.
He’s gone.
My mind moves slowly. I can’t make sense of it. His eyes are empty and his mouth has fallen open. Gone.
It’s all gone. His jokes. His secret recipes—the butter he made from shaking cream together with smooth, round rocks—the rows of sun tea in jars—gone. Other secrets, too. My secrets.
But I can’t think about it now, because behind the Padre—what was the Padre—stands a line of masked soldiers. Sympas.
Occupation Sympathizers, traitors to humanity. Embassy soldiers, taking orders from the Lords, hiding behind plexi-masks and black armor, standing in pig mess and casting long shadows over the deathly peace of the chapel. One wears golden wings on his jacket. It’s the only detail I see, aside from the weapons. The guns make no noise, but the animals panic all the same. They are screaming—which is something I did not know, that animals could scream.
I open my mouth, but I do not scream. I vomit.
I spit green juices and gray dust and memories of Ramona and the Padre.
All I can see are the guns. All I can feel is hate and fear. The black-gloved hands close around my wrist, overwhelming me, and I know that soon I will no longer have to worry about my nightmares.
I will be dead.
As my knees buckle, all I can think about is Ro and how angry he will be at me for leaving him.
EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL VIRTUAL AUTOPSY: DECEASED PERSONAL POSSESSIONS TRANSCRIPT (DPPT)
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD
Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare
Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B
See adjoining Tribunal Autopsy, attached.
Contents of personal satchel, torn, army-issue, found with deceased.
See attached photographs.
1. Electronic device, silver and rectangular. Appears to be some form of contraband pre-Occupation music player.
2. Photograph of woman, similar in feature and stature to deceased. Possible predeceased family member?
3.
.
4.
.
5. Dried plant leathers. Substantiates finding of probable vegetarianism in deceased.
6. One blue glass bead. Significance unknown.
7. One length of muslin cloth, stained with biological and natural material consistent with body wrapping, presumably of the wrist, as is customary for
.
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Margaret Stohl
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The first book in a breathtaking new series from Beautiful Creatures co-author Margaret StohlYour heart beats only with their permission.Everything changed on The Day. The day the windows shattered. The day the power stopped. The day Dol′s family dropped dead. The day Earth lost a war it didn′t know it was fighting.Since then, Dol has lived a simple life in the countryside – safe from the shadow of the Icon and its terrifying power. Hiding from the one truth she can′t avoid.She′s different. She survived. Why?When Dol and her best friend, Ro, are captured and taken to the Embassy, off the coast of the sprawling metropolis once known as the City of Angels, they find only more questions. While Ro and fellow hostage Tima rage against their captors, Dol finds herself drawn to Lucas, the Ambassador′s privileged son. But the four teens are more alike than they might think, and the timing of their meeting isn′t a coincidence. It′s a conspiracy.Within the Icon′s reach, Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas discover that their uncontrollable emotions – which they′ve always thought to be their greatest weaknesses – may actually be their greatest strengths.Bestselling author Margaret Stohl delivers the first book in a heart-pounding series set in a haunting new world where four teens must piece together the mysteries of their pasts – in order to save the future.