A Crack in the Sky Read online

  For my wonderful parents,

  Suzanne Winnell Hughes and Peter Hughes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Part 1 - The Artificial City

  Chapter 1 - Eli

  Chapter 2 - The Family

  Chapter 3 - Ruins

  Chapter 4 - Tabitha

  Chapter 5 - Foggers

  Chapter 6 - Grape Soda Sky

  Chapter 7 - The White Room

  Chapter 8 - The Wild Orange Yonder

  Chapter 9 - A Few Innocent Questions

  Chapter 10 - Girls in Boots Crushing

  Chapter 11 - A New Mission

  Chapter 12 - Through the Looking Glass and What Eli Found There

  Chapter 13 - The Way of the Future

  Part 2 - The Tower at the End of the World

  Chapter 14 - Control and Disposal

  Chapter 15 - Savages and Kings

  Chapter 16 - Animal Instinct

  Chapter 17 - Learning Floor 9-B

  Chapter 18 - Another Resister

  Chapter 19 - The Nature of Nature

  Chapter 20 - Faith and Doubt

  Chapter 21 - One Small Victory

  Chapter 22 - Special Training

  Chapter 23 - Revelations

  Chapter 24 - A Cog in the Grand Design

  Chapter 25 - The Brain Room

  Chapter 26 - Wasteland

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Learn More About Climate Change

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  prologue

  I am thirsty all the time now. The air is heavy with bugs and the dust coats my throat. Our little reservoir, the pool in what used to be somebody’s leaky basement, is almost dry. Soon we will have to leave this place.

  Rosalia is not well. She needs water.

  I am careful not to show my concern. As each day passes I catch the others looking up at the sky, watching for signs of the first storm. We hope for rain even though we all know that it will arrive as it always has—like an angry fist that will blast away our shelters, sweep through the few buildings that remain, and flood the streets. The hard, red earth will turn to mud so thick and soft that we won’t be able to walk without sinking to our waists. The flooding will also bring more insects. They will buzz in our ears and fly into our mouths. They will bite us night and day, covering our skin with sores until our eyes swell shut.

  There are seven of us now. There is safety in numbers. Last month the twins found a little girl wandering alone in the desert, weak and disoriented. We all argued, but in the end we agreed to take her into our clan. We fed and washed her and have since been showing her how we survive, where we look for moisture in the dry times and where we can find shelter during the storms. We are teaching her to stay off the main roads. The old highways, most of them crumbling and overgrown with weeds, are not safe. They leave you exposed to enemies waiting to jump you.

  Most of all, we are teaching her to stay hidden.

  We sleep during the daytime to avoid the heat. At night we hunt animals and search the ruins for anything useful, anything that might be traded on the black market. But always we gather again before dawn and take cover together wherever we can. An abandoned gas station. An old bus left to rust in an open field. Sometimes we construct temporary shelters out of car doors or plastic bags, whatever we can find.

  We are survivors.

  We are thieves of fortune.

  We are gods and goddesses of the wild.

  Yesterday amid the rubble I found an old magazine. Amazingly, the paper was unspoiled. There are beautiful glossy pictures of smiling kids our own ages, teenagers relaxing beside swimming pools. It’s hard to imagine there was a time when people had so much clean water they used to collect it in backyards and splash around in it. But here are the pictures.

  In the magazine there are also advertisements for makeup, music video downloads, and old-fashioned movies. There are images of celebrities I’ve never heard of and articles about things I’d never even considered:

  How to Find the Perfect Pair of Jeans.

  Five Ways to Detect True Love in a Kiss.

  Everyone keeps asking me to read the magazine aloud. I have already worked through it cover to cover three times.

  This morning we got word they are selling oranges in the open-air markets by the dome. It might be a trick and it might not. Either way, I volunteered to make the long trek, not just because of the fruit but also because they say filtered water flows inside the dome walls. If this is true I will try to tap into it. I told Rosalia this, but she said not to try anything foolish. She told me she is worried I will fall prey to bandits or to one of the packs of starving, mutated animals that roam the wasteland. I told her not to worry. What else can I do? As long as there is no trouble, I can be back in two or three days and she will get better.

  Rosalia met an old man once. She says his hair was long and gray and that he breathed through a machine. He told her he could remember back when things weren’t this way, before the bugs and the bad smells and the heat and the storms and the highwaymen. He said these are the Final Days, the last gasp at the end of the world. But someone is coming for us, he said. El Guía—a child veiled in shadow, a great leader who will appear accompanied by a disfigured beast of terrible power. He will deliver us to a new place where there are no dry times, where water is plentiful and storms don’t kill. He said he saw all this in a dream.

  Rosalia believed him, but I do not. I don’t believe in prophets any more than I believe in the perfect pair of jeans. What I do believe—what I know—is that too much sun affects the brain. Heatstroke makes people imagine things that aren’t there.

  Things are getting bad. I hold Rosalia’s hand as she talks nonsense in her sleep. This evening I will go deeper than ever into the ruins in search of water. If I cannot find any, maybe I will at least come back with something to trade with the black-market water dealers.

  “Sleep,” Rosalia whispers beside me. “And when you go, be sure to come back before light.” She drifts off again, and I lie awake listening to the metallic echo the wind makes as it whips through the debris. Eventually my eyelids grow heavy.

  When I sleep, I dream of swimming pools.

  —From a torn notebook discovered in the

  desert at the edge of the Atlanta Dome

  PART I

  the artificial city

  1

  eli

  Something was wrong.

  Thirteen-year-old Eli Papadopoulos could feel it.

  Just as thunder boomed in the distance, there was a faint bursting sound from somewhere outside his bedroom window. Eli spun his head just in time to witness a tiny spray of sparks falling from the artificial sky. Debris drifted to the ground like faraway fireworks and quickly disappeared, leaving an empty space where some of the pixels had gone out—a dark spot, almost unnoticeable in the five-mile-wide hemisphere of blue light.

  Whatever the little explosion was, it was so quick and small in the vast expanse of the protective dome over the city of Providence that anyone might have missed it among the digital clouds if they hadn’t been in just the right position when it happened. But Eli did see it, and for a while he kept staring. Sky malfunctions were supposed to be rare, and yet this wasn’t the first time in recent days that he’d seen something troubling up there.

  He felt again the vague dread that had been growing inside him for weeks.

  Nobody else in Eli’s room seemed to have noticed anything.

  Stretched across the windowsill at his elbow, Eli’s mongoose, Marilyn, yawned. A recent birthday gift
from Grandfather, Marilyn was a small, scruffy animal, shaggy and gray, with a short snout, a skinny body, and a long, bushy tail. If she’d observed the unsettling burst of sparks, she didn’t show it. Her eyelids drooped, and after a moment she laid down her head and began to snore quietly.

  Not even Dr. Toffler, the surly old instruction robot seated on the other side of the desk from Eli, seemed aware. It continued plodding through the day’s lesson as if nothing strange had happened, droning on and on about project management.

  Today’s lecture was even duller than normal.

  “Nurturing a customer’s sense of well-being through positive message repetition,” Dr. Toffler was saying, its voice crackling with age, “not only encourages complacency but is also a useful tool that ultimately leads to widespread respect for authority and obedience to rules.” It paused. “Representative Papadopoulos, you’re not paying attention. Please try to stay engaged.”

  Eli pointed, startled out of his reverie. “I just saw something break. Up above those silver trees, see? There were sparks, and then part of the dome just … fizzled out!”

  Dr. Toffler’s slender plastic head swiveled to see. By then, though, everything appeared normal. The dome ceiling shimmered a cheerful blue. The synthetic sun, a perfect sphere of blazing gold and red, was halfway through its daytime journey and now glowed above the shopping mall at the center of downtown. The dark spot had grown smaller, as if the surrounding pixels were adjusting their positions to leave no trace of their missing brothers. Even Eli was having a hard time making it out anymore.

  “I see nothing peculiar,” Dr. Toffler said. “I’m sure it was just part of a cloud-vertisement.”

  “No, it wasn’t a cloud-vertisement! I’m telling you, something exploded!”

  The droid’s head swiveled back, its optical sensors fixing on Eli. Dr. Toffler was so old that the rubber at its joints had almost worn away, exposing the wires that ran up its neck and the steel rods at its elbows and knees. “This wouldn’t be another of your attempts to divert our discussion from the lecture, would it? Your tactics are becoming rather tiresome.”

  Eli ignored the jab. As a member of the powerful Papadopoulos family, the family that owned the giant company that managed everything in the domed cities and kept the millions of domed employees safe and productive, he was being raised differently than most kids. Instead of attending a normal school and getting a regular job at age thirteen, as most children did, Eli was tutored at home, years of management instruction so he could help his family run InfiniCorp someday. The problem was, he tended to zone out during Dr. Toffler’s long lectures.

  The mongoose grunted quietly at his elbow, still lost in sleep.

  “I’m not trying to get out of the lesson,” he insisted, starting to lose his temper with the droid. “I saw part of the sky shatter. Pieces fell to the ground!”

  “Sky parts don’t simply burst apart.” It raised its metal hands in frustration. “First it was suspicious sky formations that you believed could only mean the dome was about to crumble to the ground. Now you’ve convinced yourself you saw pixels explode? Really, Eli, enough of this nonsense. Senior Management has already assured you there’s nothing to worry about. No more pointless distractions. You have to focus. Mother and Father are concerned about you.”

  Eli threw his weight back into the chair. He was aware of his parents’ concern, but he wasn’t making up stories! This time he’d seen something seriously alarming, and it burned his insides that Dr. Toffler wouldn’t believe him. The robot was already starting over, though, and all Eli could do was glower out the window again, his heart pounding and his black hair falling over his eyes. If he went out to the street and found broken sky parts, then nobody could deny that what he’d seen was real. Not that Dr. Toffler was about to let him out of his lesson without an argument.

  But Eli made up his mind. This was too important, and he’d had enough of arguing with a machine.

  “Excuse me,” he said, getting up from his chair. “I need to take a break.”

  The mongoose lifted her head. Whiskers twitching, she eyed him with what looked like suspicion. If Eli hadn’t known better, he would have sworn she somehow knew he was up to something.

  Dr. Toffler sighed. “All right. You have two minutes.”

  Eli left the room and closed the door behind him. Then he ran down two flights of stairs and straight across the long foyer to the front door. As he slipped on his cloak, he noticed his brother’s Image-Capturing Spyglass on the table by the front door. Perfect! He slid it into his pocket.

  He’d seen what he’d seen. He was going to prove it.

  For a couple of weeks Eli had been noticing anomalies in the sky—little quirks, mostly, like lights that blinked or random shapes that flickered and disappeared. He’d read an old story about a sea captain who ignored a tiny leak on his boat, and it ended up sinking the whole ship. What if this unexplained sky behavior was the first sign that the protection systems were corrupted somehow? If it turned out that the dome was heading toward a breakdown, it could potentially leave the entire city exposed to the elements.

  Yet for some reason nobody else seemed concerned. The family elders kept telling him everything was fine and that it wasn’t his job to worry about these things anyway.

  But what he’d witnessed today was different. This time he’d actually seen something break into pieces.

  He sprinted down Hope Street. The East Side was teeming with activity. As transport pods whooshed by, InfiniCorp employees on their lunch hour milled along the sidewalks and jammed the shops and restaurants, stepping around the little yellow cleaning droids that swept the walkways. The InfiniCorp logo—a crowd of smiling faces protected in the palm of a strong, gentle hand—was everywhere: on every store window, every trash-disposal tube, every shopping bag. And just below each logo was the company slogan in thick, purple letters:

  DON’T WORRY!

  INFINICORP IS TAKING CARE OF EVERYTHING!

  As Eli rounded the corner of Manning, there was another roll of faraway thunder, the last remnant of the storm that had kept him awake the previous night. He’d lain in bed listening to the wind Outside and the metallic hiss of rain against the dome’s exterior. Here Inside, though, the sky seemed as calm as ever, with only a few three-dimensional cloud-vertisements breaking up the vast canopy of blue.

  Tired of your nose? read one of them just then, a low-hanging cloud with flashing red words over a sad, long-nosed face. Isn’t it time for a new one?

  Higher up and closer to the center of the dome, five digital kids with musical instruments were dancing on a different cloud. Check it out! It’s the new groove from Five Go Splat!

  Up ahead he spotted the silver trees below the place where the pixels had burst. The trees were inside an enclosed lot surrounded by a brick wall. DEPARTMENT OF RELIABLE POWER SYSTEMS, read a sign near the top. From where he stood, Eli saw nothing peculiar about the sky, but he was sure he’d have a better view if he went inside the enclosure. All he had to do was find the entrance.

  He followed the wall as it turned another corner, but there he froze. Not far, near the arched door in the brick, stood a Guardian, one of the white-uniformed kids who patrolled the streets. A thickset girl with flashing purple eyebrow enhancers, she was watching the pedestrian traffic with one finger pressed to the InfiniTalk in her ear. It occurred to Eli that Dr. Toffler was sure to have realized he’d skipped out on his lesson by now, and the droid had probably alerted Mother and Father. It wouldn’t have surprised him if they’d already sent word for the Guardians to keep an eye out for him so they could drag him home again.

  As if to prove his point, the Guardian looked up, and for a moment their eyes met. “Hey, you!” she called. “Stop right there!”

  He lingered a heartbeat longer, but then he doubled back and ran. Shooting around the corner again, he scrambled along the wall and into an alley at the other end of the enclosure. He pressed his back against the bricks. The Guardian ran past
.

  Eli waited a few seconds. Just over his shoulder a sign said KEEP OUT! AUTHORIZED EMPLOYEES ONLY! He hesitated, but only for a moment. The Guardian could be back in an instant, and if Eli didn’t get in there and capture a few images to prove to Senior Management that the dome was breaking apart, it was possible nothing would be done about it until it was too late. What if he was the only one who saw the explosion?

  He made his decision.

  Grabbing an iron bar at the top of the wall, he hoisted himself up, swung his legs over, and dropped to the other side. Now he was in what looked like a small, tidy garden carpeted with synthetic grass. Much of the center was taken up by the top of a power generator, a metal cylinder maybe ten feet across and three feet high. It hummed softly. Other than that and the trees, the enclosure was empty, although it was lined with artificial hedge on two sides. Eli climbed onto the generator and squinted at the sky.

  Being only a few blocks from the city perimeter, the dome came down at an angle here, and the lower surface of the sky floated no more than forty or fifty feet above the trees. He took out the spyglass, switched on the green light, and zoomed in. The individual pixels seemed fine. In fact, nothing at all caught his eye except a perfect, unbroken canopy of light. He climbed down from the generator and walked around, scanning the ground for charred material, any shards of metal or broken glass or melted plastic, any evidence at all that something had exploded overhead.

  He found nothing.

  Disappointed, he abandoned the spyglass and stared back at the sky from the top of the generator with his naked eyes. He’d been so sure the burst of sparks was real. So where was the debris? Was it possible the cleaning droids could have so quickly discovered the mess and cleared it away? Or had Dr. Toffler been right after all, that it was just a digital image he’d mistaken as genuine? No. Eli could tell the difference. He’d arrived after the cleaning droids, that was all, which meant now he had to go home empty-handed, unable to prove what he was sure he’d seen.