SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“I know,” Kay said. “I thought that too. But I was also thinking they don’t need the light.”

“Hmm. You’re right. That is odd.”

“I want to go see what’s going on.”

“You want to go snooping around? I’m serious, you need to come back to bed.”

Kay spun around, nose to nose with Tia. “C’mon. Let’s get dressed.” The pitch in Kay’s voice was unmistakable. She’d already made up her mind.

Kay gave Tia a quick smooch and then moved toward their clothes.

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Tia said. “We’re guests, remember? Uninvited guests. Uninvited guests with nowhere to go in this storm.”

Kay grabbed her capris from the other bed and began to wriggle them on. “Well, I’m going.”

Tia was certain of that, certain that if Kay were drawn to something, she would have to go. She would go. She was courageous enough to go.

“You’re going to get us into trouble,” Tia said.

“You know you want to come with me.”

There was truth in what Kay said. Tia’s upbringing was privileged, but it was also regimented. Her childhood memories were made up of a series of nannies veering her course into the ‘ correct direction ’. Except for Sara, the one caregiver who let her try new things. Kay reminded her of Sara. From the first day they met. Neither of the two came from any such structure. Kay, like Sara, was her own woman. Against odds, she made it out of the outskirts of New Miami and all the way to the university. And she wanted to, no, was going to be, a writer, a vocation no parents, no structured upbringing, would allow.

Tia took her capris from the bed. If Kay was going to go, she wasn’t going alone.

The tiny crystal LEDs that lined the ceiling of the hall glowed the same low amber hue as the small mountaintop fires Tia saw in her dream. The subtle gleam of the lights teased her waking eyes, adding distance to the already long corridor. Her body was still half asleep, and if Kay would’ve come back to bed, Tia would have drifted off without another thought. Instead, she was pushing herself to keep up, swinging her arms front to back as she walked, pumping them, to keep her stride even with Kay’s.

“What’s your hurry?” Tia asked in a hushed voice.

“No hurry,” Kay said. She slid a sly grin toward Tia, but her eyes beamed forward, locked on her purpose.

“We don’t even know where we’re going,” Tia said. “We haven’t gone down this way before.”

“This place is decorated like a mansion, but it’s really set up like an institution. Right?”

“I guess. I hadn’t thought about it.” Tia wouldn’t have. Kay always let her imagination paint an odd picture. Tia adored that most times.

“I mean it’s like a hotel or a university building,” Kay said.

“Okay. So?”

“So—there should be another staircase near the end of the hall. All we need to do is look for the door.”

“There are a lot of doors.”

“But there will be a door at the end, and when we go down, we should be at the side of the courtyard.”

Tia’s mind was a bit fogged, but that made sense, and at the end of the hall, there were four doors. Without hesitation, Kay went for the closest handle. Tia sucked in a breath and held it as Kay gave it a gentle turn. Tia let the breath out. The door was locked. Kay went to the next. That door opened to stairs.

“See—I told you,” Kay said. “C’mon.”

“You’re lucky we didn’t wake anybody…” Kay was already heading down the stairwell. “And you’re insane,” Tia said, trailing behind.

Two flights down they found a glass door, the entrance to a dark, glass-paned corridor.

“Look,” Kay said, gesturing to the right. “The dome is over there.”

And the dome was to the right, and far more significant at ground level than from their view in the Lassiter Suite.

“I really don’t think this is a good idea.”

Kay spun her head back. “Enough.”

Tia wasn’t used to being scolded, certainly not by Kay. But this was Kay’s thing.

The panes in the corridor were made of the same transparent material as those in the dining room, muffling the thunder. The bright bubble of the dome, and the dim light in the main entry hall on the opposite side of the courtyard, were the only beacons in the darkness, except for when the silent arcs of lightning webbed the sky and strobed the high walls of the Manor in white. Tia peered through the torrents of rain in search of the dark balcony they had left but she couldn’t find it. The Lassiter Suite was somewhere in the middle of the large wall, but all of the rooms were dark, indistinguishable. The silhouette of the mountaintop that rose up around them also came into view in the flashes, as well as the other buildings of the compound scattered beyond the corridor. Squinting, she could make out darkened doors, windows, and trees, but nothing else. As they grew closer to the dome, she saw the figures moving around inside. From the bald peach-colored heads, she decided they were syns, as they thought, four of them. They appeared to be pushing tall metal carts into a large white cube in the center of the dome.

The corridor continued beyond the corner of the courtyard on into the night. Tia could not see the end, only darkness. When the flashes came, she could see the huge shadow of another structure through the glass. Kay wasn’t interested in where the corridor led. She veered to the right to the adjacent glass hall, and then boldly pushed through a set of double doors to the connected greenhouse that bordered the courtyard. Tia caught the doors as they slapped back. Kay didn’t wait for her to catch up. The dome was through another set of double doors on the far side of the room, and they were almost there. Tia was glad that they were walking along the courtyard wall. The greenhouse was dark and full of tall, wide plants that appeared to move under the rapid flashes of lightning. Kay seemed not to notice. She didn’t stop until she was outside of the double glass doors of the dome.

Tia grabbed her by her upper arm.

“All right,” she said. “Now that you can see what’s in there, let’s go back.”

“What do you suppose they’re doing?”

“I dunno. Pushing stuff into that storage room.”

“Don’t you think that’s strange? A storage room under a dome?”

“I guess.” Tia let loose of Kay’s arm. She wasn’t sure what she thought was in the cube. Up close, the cube looked huge, at least twenty-feet on all sides, maybe more. She imagined maybe a storeroom with tall shelves full of electronics and stuff, perhaps an elevator bay, which would have made sense.

“There was something like this in Lexica ,” Kay said.

“This isn’t a book. They’re liable to catch us.”

Kay leaned her face into the glass. “No way. Syns don’t care about people. They’re old Model Sevens, probably won’t even notice us walking in. Look, those two are leaving out the side. I bet the other two follow in a second.”

Tia guessed Kay’s next words before she said them.

“We’re going in.”

Kay waited for the two syns to leave the cube. This time she grabbed Tia by the arm and leaned her weight on the door. As soon as the two syns left, Kay pushed the doors open and pulled Tia through.

Tia tried to resist but then shuffled her legs to keep up.

The inside of the dome was illuminated bright white. Her eyes followed the curve of the glass-paned wall up to where it disappeared at the top of the cube. She expected to see bedroom lights flicker on across the courtyard as their hosts rallied to round them up, but instead saw only rivers of rain streaming across the panes.

A motion sensor triggered the sliding doors of the huge cube to open.