City of Ruins by Mark London Williams Page B

to power up the particle chargers. The small time sphere being
generated is pulsing and crackling. There’s metal shielding around
it to try and protect the people working here.
    Somebody should tell them they aren’t really
safe. I wasn’t. My mom wasn’t.
    Even people who aren’t technically people,
like Clyne. Who knows if he’s safe?
    What are they still doing this for?
    “What is this?” I ask. Then I turn to my
father and look him right in his eyes.
    “Did you design this? Here? For them?”
    “Eli, you don’t under—”
    “After all that’s happened?”
    “It’s not what you think.”
    The vault doors have closed, and we can
actually hear each other now, though the crackling seems louder In
fact, the sphere seems much more alive than the early
prototypes my parents were working on. Maybe too alive.
There’s the funny smell of ozone, and the crackling is nearly as
loud as the alarms in the hallway. And there are wisps of smoke in
the air.
    “Stay back!” one of the guards yells. “It’s
already been breached!”
    “Breached!?” Thirty yells
    “By some guy holding this.” The guard hands a
small, battered book to her. She flips through the pages without
really looking at anything.
    “It’s a Bible,” she says.
    “A.J.” Mr. Howe adds. “He made it.”
    “‘He made it’?” Thirty repeats. “What
on earth do you mean?”
    “We were trying to secure the room against
floodwaters,” my dad explains, “when he broke in…”
    “Breaches everywhere,” she says, “holes in
everything.” I’ve never seen her look sad before, until right now.
“Just from the water damage, they may close this place down. And
now this.”
    My dad hands a torn piece of cloth to Thirty.
“He ran past us, soaking wet, yelling about one last chance to get
it all right, and before I could stop him, he jumped through the
sphere. Right over there. I just got a little piece of his
pants.”
    “You ran to tell her ?” I ask again,
pointing to Thirty, glaring at my dad. “You’ve been working here
this whole time, and have known I was locked up, and you go to see her ?”
    “Eli, I —” My dad looks around, a little
scared, a little confused, but I can’t believe my own father would
betray me, would sell me out like this. “Eli…they told me you had
slow pox.”
    “They told you what ?”
    “That I couldn’t see you. That you were
contagious.”
    “And you believed them?”
    “They had guards with me the whole time. I
couldn’t get any Comnet messages out. They even checked that
jersey, to make sure I didn’t write anything in it.”
    “We decided it’d be all right for him to give
you a Christmas present,” Thirty says glumly.
    “Is it Christmas?” I ask.
    “Eventually,” she says. She doesn’t seem
happy at all.
    “Eli,” my dad continues, “in all this
disruption, this was the first chance I had to go down the hallway by myself . I wasn’t sure where they were keeping you. But I
didn’t want anything to go wrong while you were here.”
    “So you were a prisoner, too?”
    “That’s enough, Sandusky.” Thirty is rubbing
her forehead, like she has the world’s most terrible headache.
“After all, we let you see him, from time to time.”
    “They let me watch you,” my dad says.
“Through the monitors. It looked like you were getting better!” he
adds, trying to brighten up the whole weird, painful situation.
    “How could you still work for them, after all
they’ve done to our family?” I ask him. “You? Of all people.”
    He’s not trying to make the best of anything
now. His eyes are wet. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a
soggy, crumpled piece of paper. It’s a crayon-and-marker drawing I
made, back when I was little. Barnstormer Robot Man. It seems to be
covered in…plasmechanical goo.
    My dad lowers his voice. “I took this from
storage. They retrieved it with the wreckage of your friend’s ship.
I kept it in my shirt. Here.” He taps his chest. By his