C James - Dome Six

“I’m sorry,” Tosh said.

She could hear the pain in his voice. Like her father, he’d beaten the drum for years that the Dome was on borrowed time. But was he more upset about Patrick or because it could’ve been her who died instead of the hapless monitor?

Dee won whatever maze they were playing and excused herself to her room, leaving Tosh and Byron alone on the couch. She snuggled her head into the crook of his meaty upper arm. He leaned his chin on her head. His stubby beard felt rough on her scalp. Her hair was thinning on top.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

That was always the question, because it was always a problem. The boredom was indescribable. When the Originals moved in, they were still connected to the world. They could talk to friends and family on the outside and follow the news. A galaxy of entertainment and knowledge was at their fingertips. But apparently Cytocorp never gave a thought to what happened if it went away.

Generations in the Dome had grown up with only a vague idea of life in the Time Before. The Cache only painted it in the broadest of strokes. When someone went to their first Epoch and saw the footage from outside, it was the first glimpse they’d ever had of the world outside. It told you all you needed to know about the outside world, and for most, it made them grateful for the Dome’s protection. Tosh would’ve loved to feel that way again.

“You could talk to your Legacies,” Byron said.

Tosh pulled away from him. “Not this again.”

“You need to confront this one way or another, Tosh. Look what it’s done to you.”

“Oh? And what has it done to me?” she asked. Her voice seemed to grow in volume without her trying.

“I don’t know. All I know is, you used to be more light. Lately there’s only dark,” he said.

It would’ve been easy to get indignant, to cross her arms between them and insist she was the same person. His first relationship since losing his wife to a freak accident in the Stores. But he wasn’t wrong. To see the monitor die in front of her gave her almost orgasmic joy. Didn’t that alone indicate some kind of psychosis?

“You’re right,” she said. “I should talk to them. But on my own time and not in front of you.”

“I don’t need to be there,” he said, running his fingers through her black hair. “But I do need to know you’ve confronted it. Until you do, I’m not sure this is healthy for either of us.”

How ironic. She’d come to him expecting he would need her to lean on about Patrick, only to realize that she, too, was hanging by a thread. The only thing between her and the abyss was a safety feature called Byron, and like so many other things in the Dome, it was on the verge of breaking.

Tosh and Dee walked to class together the next morning. The shield was low enough that they could discern slate-gray clouds through it, bringing hope for rain.

The Authority curriculum’s treatment of history was appalling. All Tosh did to get in trouble was to teach her students what she’d learned herself. According to the curriculum, all of human history was a litany of evil and shortsightedness, whereas the Dome was a little bubble of hope clinging to the edge of a ruined world.

Tosh could’ve let herself slip back into the same ennui that built up since the monitor came, but she had other things on her mind. Specifically, Hideki.

They’d been close as kids. Not just in the way of other twins, but on a deeper level. Their father’s job as a sought-after technician kept him away for long and inconvenient hours, often while their mother was tending to patients at Clinic 4. That left them alone for hours at a time, during which they read practically every page in the Cache.

Dek was more like their mother. He might’ve lost his leg to a serious infection at age six were it not for the microbe-eating Macros. From then on, he was fascinated by all things technical, particularly synthetic biology.

Tosh took after their father. He repaired mechanical and electrical systems, which interested her, but not so much as the information systems that kept the Dome humming. What she couldn’t learn from the Dome Project’s technical documentation she pieced together through shadowing Art.

Fittingly, Dek’s initial Placement was in bioprinting and hers was in central information systems. The algorithms that determined the course of your life had seemingly worked in their case. They moved away into the apprentice dorms and met new people from all over the city. Things were going as well as they could.

But one fateful afternoon, just a few weeks into her apprenticeship, her father visited her at her dormitory to ask about hacking a tablet. She confirmed it was possible and told him how, but he was cagey about the reason. It had to do with retrieving location data stored in his CHIT, but that didn’t make any sense. Why would he want to know where he’d been? How could he not know?

Her father’s eccentricities were nothing new. He was always trying to solve one problem or another, almost to the point of obsession. He liked being the guy the Authority would call in a pinch, though he personally despised them. If one of the trains went down or somebody’s IDA terminal was being flaky, he was the man they called.

Between this aspect of his nature and her confusion over his visit, she gave him what he came for and went off to the cafeteria with her roommate.

Later that evening, after returning from an O 2drill that sent them scrambling to the Towers, she was asked to accompany an Authority officer to an extra room in the dormitory. Dek was inside. Her initial thought was that she’d need to give him an alibi. But then the director of Production told them there had been a terrible accident in the FPC. It seemed their parents crawled inside the processing equipment during the drill and were still there when the FPC came back to life.

She laughed.

Daisuke and Minori Yamamura, two of the Dome’s most capable people, had not simply wandered into the machinery of the FPC. They were mistaken. It was someone else. Tosh even offered to help get to the bottom of it. Her brain could barely fathom that a grisly accident had taken her parents from her. Such accidents happened in the FPC but not to people like them. It seemed like some kind of cruel joke.

Only it wasn’t.

No one ever saw their parents again. They didn’t know why her father triggered the alarm and descended into the FPC with their mother in tow. The Authority’s official explanation was so-called Dome Fever, the Authority’s catch-all explanation for suicides and other such “mishaps,” as Elle might say.

She couldn’t fault Dek for talking to their parents’ Legacies. Perhaps she would, too, eventually. But he was still searching for answers and she was still trying to move on.

His unit mirrored her own almost exactly. She entered the complex, took the stairs to the third floor, and knocked on 314. Hideki answered so quickly she wondered if he didn’t have his ear to the door. One wild eye peered out from where he’d cracked it.

“Were you followed?” he asked.

“Gimme a break, Dek,” she said, pushing her way inside.

He gave her the finger, then grabbed a handful of her sleeve and yanked her inside. He pushed it closed and immediately locked it.

“Seriously, though,” he said.

“No!”

“Okay, okay.”

His unit smelled just as bad as he did. The shades were pulled tightly, and his IDA screen was the only light. On the display was the smiling face of her mother. A wave of emotion crashed over her and she frowned.

“I’ll come back later.”

“Toshiko, is that you?” Her mother’s Legacy looked down on her with kindly eyes. Tosh looked away and made for the door. Dek jumped in front of her.