Page 70 of Sparktopia
“You’re imagining things,” I mutter under my breath. “This weird kid is starting to get to you.”
Maybe. But I can’t deny that Idohear a generator and the line of lights above me is rather bright.
Eventually I catch up with Anneeta again. She’s lying on the floor now, directly under a light. This is when I notice her outfit. They are always kinda strange. A patchwork of things. She’s wearing a skirt—she likes skirts, and they are always kinda poofy and made of weird fabrics only little girls wear—but she never wearsjusta skirt. She’s a girl who likes layers. Which makes sense because Tau City has a dynamic climate. It’s hot during the day, sometimes extremely hot, but nights are always cold. And the temperature isn’t regulated inside the ruins. There’s enough power for lights and whatever mechanicals are used for plumbing. You can run a few small appliances, clocks and shit. But there’s no conditioned air like there is in the city beyond the ruins. No cooling, no heating. So layers are a must.
But Anneeta’s layers are odd. Mismatched things. Discarded things, most likely. Striped tights, fuzzy leggings, or sometimesshe wears two skirts at once. One practical layer under, one poofy layer over.
Still, they make her cute and give her a kind of whimsical innocence that stands at odds with the tower all around her. Her shirts are adult size, but cut up to fit her better. And again, she’s always got layers on her upper body, long-sleeved Henleys and thermals running down her arms covered by a vest of some sort.
Today she’s wearing brown tights, a light-blue ballerina skirt, a long-sleeved tan Henley, and a cropped fuzzy vest. Her feet are in boots of brown leather that go halfway up her legs. Her hair is long and brown and almost always a mess and her face a little bit pale because she doesn’t get enough sun.
But the funny thing is—as haphazard as this all seems—it also comes across as… put together. Like some fashion person personally picked out all these things and dressed her up for a runway show for eccentric children.
It works.
And I don’t like that it works. It gives off a feeling that her sloppy put-togetherness haspurpose.
“Well?” I ask.
She doesn’t move. Just lies there in the floor looking up at me, smiling. “I’ll leave you here. But I’ll wait.”
The door has a big white H minus 5 painted on it. I run the coordinates through my head again—Sector 4, quad H minus 5, floor 2. “Is floor two on the other side then?”
Anneeta shrugs her shoulders against the floor. “I’ve never been in there. Not even in a dream. This is as far as I go.”
“You can’t come? Or you don’t want to come?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” She sits up and looks over her shoulder at the door, her head slowly tipping up to look at the H minus 5. Thenher eyes meet mine, flashing a serious expression at me. “There’s too much power in there. It will make me sick. Can’t youfeelit?”
I’m about to automatically say no and roll my eyes, but I realize I actuallycanfeel it. It’s… like… a disturbance in the air. Electromagnetic something or other. Which is a word I don’t actually know the technical meaning of, but I’ve heard it enough during my time in the Sweep to understand that it fits here in this particular situation.
So I nod. “Yeah. I feel it.” Then I offer her my hand, which she takes, and I pull her to her feet. “You don’t have to wait.”
“I know. But I will. It’s my job to keep an eye on you now.”
“Is that what the god told you?”
She nods. “That’s what he said.”
It’s easy enough to dismiss her talk of gods. Or it would be, if a god didn’t actually live in this tower at one time. But I don’t dismiss it. I’m not sure what she’s seeing, or hearing, or feeling or whatever, but it’s real to her.
Which doesn’t mean it’s real to anyone else. Electromagnetic fields are like that. They can really fuck with your perception. So I make a mental note to ask Stayn—once I report back—if we could maybe get some kind of health care for her.
It’s the least I can do after all her help.
“All right then. You wait if you want. I’ll be back.” Then I open the door and walk through into the dark.
Unsurprisingly, the lights overhead do not turn on when I take a few steps. I had a feeling it was Anneeta doing that on the other side of the door, and now it’s confirmed. But it’s fine. I just get my torch out and turn it on. It’s bright enough to light up the entire length of the hallway—which, from here, makes the next door look very tiny, it’s so far away.
When I finally get to the end of the hallway and open the door up, I find myself on a stairwell landing. I’m halfway between two floors. Assuming two is up and one is down, I go up. But thenumber painted on that door is a one. Then I remember that the numbers are negative, and my assumption was wrong because floor two is below.
I go back down, confirm that the new floor is indeed two, and pull it open. Immediately the electromagnetic humming stops and the new silence is deafening. Not that the hum was loud to begin with. Extremely low frequencies don’t have to be loud to do what they are meant to do. But once you get used to the background noise, the absence of it is dramatic.
No lights in here either. This makes sense because if the hum is gone, then the power is too. Which is a direct contradiction to what Anneeta just told me. That she can’t come because the power is too strong.
