One little Six Female held up her hand. “How did those people live without Masters?” She seemed troubled by the notion. “How did they know what to do? Weren’t they lonely?”
“They were very lonely. They reached up to the skies looking for other people. That’s how they found the Masters.”
Two caregivers were required to be with the children anytime they went up on the roof. At Sadie’s last words, Olivia, sitting near the back of the children’s cluster, frowned and narrowed her eyes. Sadie realized abruptly that she had said “they found the Masters.” She had intended to say—was supposed to say—that the Masters had found humankind. They had benevolently chosen to leave the skies and come to Earth to help the ignorant, foolish humans survive and grow.
That was never true.
Quickly Sadie shook her head to focus, and amended herself. “The Masters had been waiting in the sky. As soon as they knew we would welcome them, they came to Earth to join with us. After that we weren’t lonely anymore.”
The Six Female smiled, as did most of the other children, pleased that the Masters had done so much for their sake. Olivia rose when Sadie did and helped usher the children back to their cells. She said nothing, but glanced back and met Sadie’s eyes once. There was no censure in her face, but the look lingered, contemplative with ambition. Sadie kept her own face expressionless.
But she did not sleep well that night, so she was not surprised that when she finally did, she dreamt of Enri once more.
They stood on the roof of the facility, beneath the circle of sky, alone. Enri wasn’t smiling this time. He reached for Sadie’s hand right away, but Sadie pulled her hand back.
“Go away,” she said. “I don’t want to dream about you anymore.” She had not been happy before these dreams, but she had been able to survive. The dangerous thoughts were going to get her killed, and he just kept giving her more of them.
“I want to show you something first,” he said. He spoke very softly, his manner subdued. “Please? Just one more thing, and then I’ll leave you alone for good.”
He had never yet lied to her. With a heavy sigh she took his hand. He pulled her over to one of the walls around the rooftop’s edge, and they began walking up the air as if an invisible staircase had formed beneath their feet.
Then they reached the top of the wall, and Sadie stopped in shock.
It was the city of the Masters—and yet, not. She had glimpsed the city once as a young woman, that second trip, from caregiver training to Northeast. Here again were the huge structures that had so awed her, some squat and some neck-achingly high, some squarish and some pointy at the tops, some flagrantly, defiantly asymmetrical. (Buildings.) On the ground far below, in the spaces between the tall structures, she could see long ribbons of dark, hard ground neatly marked with lines. (Roads.) Thousands of tiny colored objects moved along the lines, stopping and progressing in some ordered ritual whose purpose she could not fathom. (Vehicles.) Even tinier specks moved beside and between and in and out of the colored things, obeying no ritual whatsoever. People. Many, many people.
And there was something about this chaos, something so subtly counter to everything she knew about the Masters, that she understood at once these were people without Masters. They had built the vehicles and they had built the roads. They had built the whole city.
They were free.
A new word came into her head, in whispers. (Revolution.)
Enri gestured at the city and it changed, becoming the city she remembered—the city of now. Not so different in form or function, but very different in feel. Now the air was clean, and reeked of other. Now the mote-people she saw were not free, and everything they’d built was a pale imitation of what had gone before.
Sadie looked away from the tainted city. Maybe the drugs had stopped working. Maybe it was her defective mind that made her yearn for things that could never be. “Why did you show me this?” She whispered the words.
“All you know is what they’ve told you, and they tell you so little. They think if we don’t know anything they’ll be able to keep control—and they’re right. How can you want something you’ve never seen, don’t have the words for, can’t even imagine? I wanted you to know.”
And now she did. “I . . . I want it.” It was an answer to his question from the last dream. If you had a way to fight them, would you? “I want to.”
“How much, Sadie?” He was looking at her again, unblinking, not Enri and yet not a stranger. “You gave me to them because it was all you knew to do. Now you know different. How much do you want to change things?”
She hesitated against a lifetime’s training, a lifetime’s fear. “I don’t know. But I want to do something.” She was angry again, angrier than she’d been at Olivia. Angrier than she’d been throughout her whole life. So much had been stolen from them. The Masters had taken so much from her. She looked at Enri and thought, No more.
He nodded, almost to himself. The whispers all around them rose for a moment too; she thought that they sounded approving.
“There is something you can do,” he said. “Something we think will work. But it will be . . . hard.”
She shook her head, fiercely. “It’s hard now.”
He stepped close and put his arms around her waist, pressing his head against her breast. “I know.” This was so much like other times, other memories, that she sighed and put her arms around him as well, stroking his hair and trying to soothe him even though she was the one still alive.
“The children and caregivers in the facilities will be all that’s left when we’re done,” he whispered against her. “No one with a Master will survive. But the Masters can’t live more than a few minutes without our bodies. Even if they survive the initial shock, they won’t get far.”
Startled, she took hold of his shoulders and pushed him back. His eyes shone with unshed tears. “What are you saying?” she asked.
He smiled despite the tears. “They say that if you die in a dream, you’ll die in real life. We can use you, if you let us. Channel what we feel, through you.” He sobered. “And we already know how it feels to die, several billion times over.”
“You can’t . . . ” She did not want to understand. It frightened her that she did. “Enri, you and, and the others, you can’t just die.”
He reached up and touched her cheek. “No, we can’t. But you can.”
The Master was injured. Rather, its body was—a spasm of the heart, something that could catch even them by surprise. Another Master had brought it in, hauling its comrade limp over one shoulder, shouting for Sadie even before the anthro facility’s ground-level doors had closed in its wake.
She told Caridad to run ahead and open the transfer chamber, and signed for Olivia to grab one of the children; any healthy body was allowed in an emergency. The Master was still alive within its old, cooling flesh, but it would not be for much longer. When the Masters reached the administrative level, Sadie quickly waved it toward the transfer chamber, pausing only to grab something from her cubicle. She slipped this into the waistband of her pants, and followed at a run.
“You should leave, sir,” she told the one who’d carried the dying Master in, as she expertly buckled the child onto the other transfer table. An Eighteen Female, almost too old to be claimed; Olivia was so thoughtful. “Too many bodies in a close space will be confusing.” She had never seen a Master try to take over a body that was already occupied, but she’d been taught that it could happen if the Master was weak enough or desperate enough. Seconds counted, in a situation like this.