Me and Nina and the rest of our chain, our job is digging. We all have digging-sticks, but there are only two shovels, so we have to take turns with them. We’re supposed to dig around in some old ruins and put the stuff we find into a cart. We’re looking for any Before-stuff we can find there. Broken relics, fossils, whatever.
Sometimes our SUPERVISOR, which means the raider who’s boss of our chain, takes one of us kids off the chain and sends us into some little gap between ruin-stuff where a grownup won’t fit. Sometimes it’s because the SUPERVISOR saw something interesting in under the ruin-stuff and sometimes I think he’s just a bad guesser about what spots are lucky because kids usually come out of there holding the same digging-stick they went in with and that only, no ruin-treasure, no old Before-magic, no nothing.
Nina gets sent in more than me because she isn’t scared of the dark or tight places so she never cries going into the caves. Plus one time she found a pretty green glass ball that made the SUPERVISOR happy because it was top-shelf ruin-treasure even though it had white scratches all over it like a spider web. I don’t think that’s fair because how am I supposed to find top-shelf ruin-treasure if the SUPERVISOR always sends her in instead of me?
Nina’s chain-name is THREE, because she’s the third kid on the chain now. My chain-name is FOUR.
The first few days of this new work were really hard, and my whole body was tired and hurting the whole time, and I was always hungry and thirsty but the SUPERVISOR said YOU’LL EAT WHEN THIS SECTOR IS CLEARED, which I think means never because the only thing we got was more of the stale flatbread stuff, a piece the size of my hand that was all the food I ate the whole day.
On day four or maybe five all the kids were too tired and hungry to dig. We had to try anyway but it was slow and hard and all we found was two little pieces of good metal and some tiny bits of glass and a few old bone-pieces and a tooth, and then EIGHT went into a ruin-stuff cave with his digging-stick and fell asleep or fainted so me and TWO had to reach in and drag him out by the feet.
That day it was raining and the kids were crying and the SUPERVISOR pointed at Nina and pointed at the ruin-stuff cave and tilted his head quick like HURRY UP, like words were too good to waste on Nina. That made me mad. Nina was sick, she coughed all day every day, and she wasn’t strong enough anymore to dig anything, and when the SUPERVISOR pointed at her she stood there shaking her head and quiet-crying and shivering like she was cold even though it was a hot day. So when the SUPERVISOR started moving toward Nina with a face like Did You Just Say No To Me, right for that one second I forgot how scared I was of the SUPERVISOR’s hitting-stick and I kind of scrunched myself down like a kid who could fit in a ruin-stuff cave no problem and I said I’LL GO.
The SUPERVISOR gave me a kind of up-down look, then looked along the chain at the other kids, then back to me. Then he shrugged and took me off the chain and I went in.
It was my first time actually inside a ruin-stuff cave so I didn’t know what I’d see. From the outside the ruin-caves looked more like big piles of Waste-ash with pieces of junk kind of spiking up out of it, which is how you know it’s ruins and not just a place where lots of Waste-ash has been pushed all up together by the wind.
Inside was weird, but nice. The best part was the quiet. You go in there and the whole world around you kind of stops, and you keep moving inside the stopped bubble of it, all the Before-stuff around you, the plastic and metal and bricks and things, but the Waste’s still under your feet and dusting all over everything, which is weird because the songkeeper says that in the Before the earth used to be green, not just in gardens like the one we have in Sunrise but everywhere.
So you’re kind of in both places, the Before and the now, and also not in either one of them really, and the sun shines down on you through the gaps in the ceiling, and it’s the same sun Before as now, which makes my head feel weird to think about.
I crawled in and then kept crawling for a little ways, farther than EIGHT went I guess because I squeezed and squirmed and got in too far for anyone to reach me. And then I kept crawling. Everybody knew you shouldn’t go too far in because the ceiling is just made up of piled junk and it could fall on your head any second and that would be the end of you. But I knew if I came out of there without any ruin-treasure then the SUPERVISOR wouldn’t send me back in again and in there in the quiet was way better than out there in the yelling and hitting and wind. I decided I’d find something really extra great so the SUPERVISOR would say ANEKO FINDS THE BEST RUIN-TREASURE, I WILL SEND HER IN EVERY DAY FOREVER AND THE SICK KIDS LIKE NINA WON’T HAVE TO GO IN ANYMORE. I mean I know he’d say THREE instead of NINA and FOUR instead of ANEKO but that was okay as long as my plan worked, because when I looked at Nina’s coughing sick face all I could think about was Sam’s swollen dead face and it made me sadder than I’ve ever been in my whole life but also so mad my eyes felt like fire.
I was going to outsmart the SUPERVISOR like Mama outsmarts me every time we play What Am I? And this pile of Before-junk was going to spit out some top-shelf ruin-treasure that would help me do it.
But first I had to find some. All us kids had bags tied to our waists where we were supposed to put whatever we found. Anything that was Before-stuff, the SUPERVISOR wanted. Anything old. The best thing my chain ever found was yesterday when SEVEN found the edge of a big metal box and we all dug it out together and the SUPERVISOR was so excited he took a shovel and started digging himself, but we dug out the lid or maybe door of the box but nobody could figure out how to open it and it was too heavy to move, so the SUPERVISOR took out one of those red strips of fabric that get tied around things that are too big for people to move by themselves without a cart and dogs. But there was nothing on the box to tie it to and the Waste was already blowing ash back over top of the whole thing anyway so the SUPERVISOR hit SEVEN for wasting his time and told us all to get back to work or else.
Now this was my one and only chance to do better. The tunnels through a ruins-cave are made by luck only, just the way the stuff fell when the Before-buildings came down. Where the tunnel started there wasn’t anything left to take, other kids had already gotten there before me. So I decided to keep crawling back into the ruins-cave until I found something great or the SUPERVISOR started yelling.
I crawled back and back until I counted up to forty-two, and then the little tunnel through the broken bricks and stuff got wider where the pieces of stuff fell against each other in a way to leave a sort of little room, the pointy sort-of-ceiling just a bit above my head.
It was brighter this far in. Maybe the storm blew some gaps in the ceiling ash, or some stuff fell down not long ago. Anyway, I could see just fine, which was a nice surprise.
Three sides of the little room were just big piles of broken bricks with some long pieces of metal holding them up. It looked like somebody, somebody big, the Sunrise giants kind of big, took the metal pieces and shoved them into the ground really hard and left the long parts sticking out, but really I knew it was just the way this one Before-building fell. The other side of the little room was a giant-size letter S, taller than the tallest grownup I ever saw, and some long pieces of metal leaned up against the middle part of the S made up the ceiling of the room. I could just make out the top half of the S going on above the metal-pieces ceiling where the sun shone through.