“Don’t leave them there,” Juliette said. She didn’t know whom they could trust, where they might be safe. “Take them with you. Dad, get them back to Mechanical. Get them home.” Juliette wiped her forehead. The entire thing was a mistake. Bringing them over was a mistake.
“Are you sure?” her father asked. “The crowd we ran into. I think they were heading that way.”
28
Elise was lost in the bizarre. She had heard someone call it that, and it was the right name for the place, a place of crowds beyond imagining, a land so wildly strange that its name barely did it justice.
How she found herself there was a bit bewildering. Her puppy had disappeared in a great confrontation of strangers — more people than she thought could exist at one time — and she had chased up the steps after it. One person after another had pointed helpfully upward. A woman in yellow said she saw a man with a dog heading toward the bizarre. Elise had gone up ten levels until she’d reached landing one-hundred.
There had been two men on the landing blowing smoke from their noses. They had said someone just passed through with a dog. They had waved her inside.
Level one-hundred in her home was a scary wasteland of narrow passages and empty rooms scattered with trash and debris and rats. Here it was all of that but full of people and animals and everyone shouting and singing. It was a place of bright colors and awful smells, of people breathing smoke in and out, smoke they held in their fingers and kept going with small sparks of fire. There were men who wore paint on their faces. A woman dressed all in red with a tail and horns who had waved Elise inside a tent, but Elise had turned and ran.
She ran from one fright to another until she was completely lost. There were knees everywhere to bump into. No longer looking for Puppy, now she just wanted out. She crawled beneath a busy counter and cried, but that got her nowhere. It did give her a terribly close view of a fat and hairless animal that made noises like Rickson snoring, though. This animal was led right by her with a rope around its neck. Elise dried her eyes and pulled her book out, looked through pictures until she could name it a pig. Naming things always helped. They weren’t nearly so scary after that.
It was Rickson who got her moving again, even though he wasn’t there. Elise could hear his loud voice booming through the Wilds telling her there was nothing to be afraid of. He and the twins used to send her on errands through the pitch black when she was just old enough to walk. They would send her for blackberries and plums and delicacies near the stairs when there were people still around to fear. “The littlest ones are the safest,” Rickson used to tell her. That was years ago. She wasn’t so little anymore.
She put her book away and decided that the dark Wilds with their leafy fingers brushing her neck and the clicking of pumps and chattering teeth were worse than painted people leaking smoke from their noses. With her face chapped from crying, she crawled out from beneath the counter and jostled among the knees. Always turning right — which was the trick to getting through the Wilds in the dark — she found herself in a smoky hallway with loud hisses and a smell in the air like boiling rat.
“Hey, kid, you lost?”
A boy with short-cropped hair and bright green eyes studied her from the edge of a booth. He was older than her, but not by much. As big as the twins. Elise shook her head. She reconsidered and nodded.
The boy laughed. “What’s your name?”
“Elise,” she said.
“That’s a different name.”
She shrugged, not sure what to say. The boy caught her eyeing a man beyond him as he lifted strips of sizzling meat with a large fork.
“You hungry?” the boy asked.
Elise nodded. She was always hungry. Especially when she was scared. But maybe that was because she got scared when she went out looking for food, and she went out looking for food when she was hungry. Hard to remember which came first. The boy disappeared behind the counter. He came back with a thick piece of meat.
“Is it rat?” Elise asked.
The boy laughed. “It’s pig.”
Elise scrunched up her face, remembering the animal that grunted at her earlier. “Does it taste like rat?” she asked, full of hope.
“You say that louder and my dad’ll have your hide. You want some or not?” He handed the strip of meat over. “I’m guessing you don’t have two chits on you.”
Elise accepted the meat and didn’t say. She took a small bite, and little bursts of happiness exploded in her mouth. It was better than rat. The boy studied her.
“You’re from the Mids, aren’t you?”
Elise shook her head and took another bite. “I’m from Silo 17,” she said, chewing. Her mouth was full of saliva. She eyed the man cooking the strips of meat. Marcus and Miles should be there to try some.
“You mean level seventeen?” The boy frowned. “You don’t look like a topper. No, too dirty to be a topper.”
“I’m from the other silo,” Elise said. “West of here.”
“What’s a westophere?” the boy asked.
“West. Where the sun sets.”
The boy looked at her funny.
“The sun. It comes up in the east and sets in the west. That’s why maps point up. They point up at north.” She thought about pulling her book out and showing him the maps of the world, explaining how the sun went around and around, but her hands were covered in grease, and anyway the boy didn’t seem interested. “They dug over and rescued us,” she explained.
At this, the boy’s eyes went wide. “The dig. You’re from the other silo. It’s real?”
Elise finished the strip of pig and licked her fingers. She nodded.
The boy shoved a hand at her. Elise wiped her palm on her hip and grabbed it with her own.
“My name’s Shaw,” he said. “You want another piece of pig? Come under the counter. I’ll introduce you to my father. Hey, Pa, I want you to meet someone.”
“I can’t. I’m looking for Puppy.”
Shaw scrunched up his face. “Puppy? You’d want the next hall over.” He nodded the direction. “But c’mon, pig is much better. Dog is chewy like rat, and puppy is just more expensive than dog but tastes the same.”
Elise froze. The pig that went by earlier with a rope around its neck, maybe that one was a pet. Maybe they ate pets, just like Marcus and Miles always wanted to keep a rat for fun, even when everyone else was hungry. “They eat puppy?” she asked this boy.
“If you’ve got the chits, sure.” Shaw grabbed her hand. “Come back to the grill with me. I want you to meet my dad. He says you all aren’t real.”
Elise pulled away. “I’ve got to find my puppy.” She turned and scurried through the crowd in the direction the boy had nodded.
“Whaddya mean, your puppy—?” he yelled after her.
Around a line of stalls, Elise found another smoky hall. More smells like rat on a stick over an open flame. An old woman wrestled with a bird, two angry wings flapping from her fists. Elise stepped in poop and nearly slipped. The strangeness all around melted with the thought of her puppy gone. She heard someone yell about a dog, and searched for the voice. An older boy, probably Rickson’s age, was holding up a piece of red meat, a giant piece with white stripes that looked like bones. There was a pen there and signs with numbers on them. People from the crowd stopped to peer inside. Some of them pointed inside the pen and asked questions.
Elise fought through them toward the sound of yipping. There were live dogs in the pen. She could see through the slats and almost over the top when she was on her tiptoes. A huge animal the size of a pig lunged at the fence and growled at her, and the fence shook. It was a dog, but with a rope around its jaw so it couldn’t open. Elise could feel its hot breath blowing out its nose. She scooted out of everyone’s way and around the side.