“We should do some quick reconnaissance anyway,” Tristan says. “Roc, Tawni—c’mon out.”
Roc hops down and offers Tawni a hand, which she takes, stepping gracefully from the truck. “I think my feet squished in goo,” she says.
“Roc—there’s something on your tunic,” Tristan says, pointing.
“Blech,” Roc says, prying a strip of something black from his shirt. “I don’t know what that is, but its presence in that truck alone means I desperately need a shower.”
“Can you wait like two, three hours until we get to subchapter one and kill our father?” Tristan says. “Then we can all use the nice palace showers.”
“Ooh, hot water,” Roc says, his face lighting up.
“You’ve got hot water?” I say, unable to hide the look of disgust from ambushing my expression.
“Uh, yeah,” Tristan says, chewing on the side of his lip.
I shake my head. The wonders of the Sun Realm never cease to amaze and anger me.
Changing the subject, Tristan says, “Let’s split up and check the rest of the garage. Trevor and I will dispose of the bodies.”
“We will?” Trevor says.
“Yes.”
“Are they…dead?” Tawni asks.
“No, but I want to tie them up and hide them away so they won’t be found for at least a day. Hopefully by then this will all be over.”
Translation: the President dead. Us maybe dead, too. Hopefully all resulting in a ceasefire, which might just give the Resistance enough time to get their legs under them.
The garage is small, but is still able to fit almost ten trucks, each of which is sealed up and standing idle against one edge. Like the prongs of a fork, me, Tawni, and Roc branch out, each of us walking between a different set of trucks. Seeing nothing, we meet on the other side and then walk back by different routes, thus ensuring we hit every nook and cranny where a sun dweller trucker might be hiding. We even look underneath the trucks. Nothing.
We finish by hauling each of the truck tailgates up to look inside. Every truck, except for ours, is empty, the garbage having already been hauled off to wherever the incinerator is. Like the garbage, the truck drivers are gone, too.
“Where do you think they went?” Tawni asks.
“They’re probably done for the day and have joined in the festivities,” Roc says. “Subchapter four has one of the biggest Sun Festival parades.”
That explains the drums and cymbals. A parade. Which means: lots of people. Here we go again.
When we return to our truck, Tristan and Trevor are finished with the two unconscious guys. They’ve used small swatches of rope to tie their hands and feet together, and used strips of cloth cut from the guys’ tunics to blindfold and gag them.
“We should put them in one of the empty trucks,” I say.
“They’ll find them too easily,” Tristan says.
“No, they won’t find them until the truck returns to one of the other subchapters to get more garbage. They have no reason to open the ones that are already unloaded. They’ll probably just think the other workers didn’t finish with the last truck so they could join the parade early.”
“Brilliant,” Roc says. “By the time they realize what’s happened, it will likely be tomorrow.”
“Good call,” Tristan says, his blue eyes bright.
While Tawni closes the gates on all of the trucks except two, Roc and Trevor haul the driver’s body into the back of one of the remaining vehicles, and Tristan and I lug the other one. When we slam the final gate it clicks and latches into place with a final ring that sounds eerie in the mostly empty garage.
“You should put your heels on,” Tristan says to Tawni when we’re finished.
“Ugh. I’ll ruin them,” she says.
“People don’t walk barefoot here very often.”
Her nose curls up, as she slips her filthy feet into her shoes, clasping them. “Satisfied?” she says, one hand on her hip.
“Now you look like a sun dweller,” Roc says. “But we all really need to get cleaned up before we move on. We’ll turn heads for all the wrong reasons looking like this.”
Luckily, there’s a wash basin for the truckers, full of soapy water, which we use to get most of the grime off our skin and clothes.
Finished, I say, “Let’s go,” feeling the light thrill of anticipation in my stomach. We’re almost to our destination, a place that seemed impossibly distant when we first began our trek through the Sun Realm. Despite the shortness of our journey in terms of hours, it feels like we’ve been seeking our quarry for weeks, if not months. I suddenly feel the strain of the miles and the violence in my bones, my muscles, my very being, as if it’s all become a part of me, just caked on and patted down like a lump of clay, weighing me down.
I shake my arms and legs as we walk toward the lone door that exits the garage.
“What?” Tristan says, looking at me strangely.
“I’m just cramping up from the truck ride,” I say.
Nodding, Tristan raises a hand to a push bar halfway up the door. “Remember?” he says, raising his eyebrows.
“Blend in,” I chime. “We got it.”
His eyes meet mine for a too-short moment before he pushes outward, striding through the door as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
The parade is in full swing, but, thankfully, not on our block. As Tristan and Roc lead us toward it, I look up at the subchapter roof, my eyes widening as I take it in. Another artificial sun, this one hot white, fills the city with light. Even wearing my sunglasses, I can’t look directly at it. Covering the dark ceiling roof are speckles of light, shimmering like diamonds, reflecting the rays of the sun in a thousand different directions.
“Tawni, look,” I breathe, my eyes lost above.
“Wow,” she says when she looks up. “What are those?”
“Diamonds,” Roc says.
So not shimmering like diamonds, shimmering because they’re diamonds.
“Where did they all come from?” I ask, finally looking away from the spectacle to meet Roc’s eyes.
“Where do you think?” he says, his voice lowering into an angry tone.
No, can’t be. All the blood and sweat I saw on his face and clothes when he came home from the mines. The worrying when there was a cave-in—that maybe this time I’d be the one to lose their father, not the girl down the street, or the boy two blocks over. The two Nailins a day wages, barely enough to buy half a bag of rice to eat with our week-old bread and well water. All for what? To supply the Sun Realm with a million diamonds to plaster their subchapter roof with so they have something pretty to look at every day when they wake up?
My lip turns up into a snarl. “My father mined them,” I growl.
“Some of them for sure. Subchapter fourteen was the biggest diamond mine in all the Tri-Realms. Eighty percent of the diamonds above us are from the mine your father worked in.”
He survived the harsh working conditions: the stifling and disease-causing air, the claustrophobic tunnels, the filth and the grime, the crumbling support beams, the unstable mining dynamite and razor-sharp pickaxes. All to get him to a single moment—one that haunts me still—where one man crushed everything in my world.
I slam a fist into my palm, generating a loud slap that makes Tristan turn toward me, his eyebrows raised, his mouth opening to ask a question.
“I’m fine,” I say, cutting off his unspoken inquiry.
Another reason I like Tristan: he usually knows when to let things go. He nods and continues on, leaving me to work things out on my own. Just his simple act alone helps to calm me. Come to think of it, the only time he’s ever really pushed me when I wanted to be left alone was after our fight. At the time I thought I wanted to be alone, but really, I needed him more than ever. If he hadn’t chased after me, who knows where we’d be in our relationship right now? Even when my father died and I fell into a deep, dark depression, he knew not to force my feelings out; instead, he was just there for me, by my side, every chance he had, despite the fact that he had lost a friend too.