The leader unlocked the apartment door by running a magnetic tool across the edges. The door clicked open. They all rushed inside, silent as ghosts. I followed them, trying to mimic their light steps.
The big one turned out a padded black cylinder from a long foam bag. It was about twice the thickness of a baseball bat and about a quarter as long. He began working a small screen at the top and held it out into the air. My ears instantly felt like they needed to be cleared. I could no longer hear my breath or my footfalls or anything. The air felt strange. The cylinder was suppressing the sound.
They all waited for me before an enormous wooden bookcase. I could not help but stare. I’d never seen a book in person before—only in movies and shows. The people who lived here, the two sleeping yellow-orange blobs a few rooms away—they were people with money. A lot of money. You didn’t just have books in your home. You had to have permits. You had to have means to protect them. Books were dangerous things filled with uncontrolled words and Copyrighted ideas. You could show a book to anyone, replicating the ideas at no cost at all. You could cut up the pages and rearrange the words into who knows how many combinations. You could keep the words, no matter how many times the Copyrights changed hands and prices on the Word$ Market?. It was shocking just to be in the presence of them. I wanted to run a finger down their spines. I wanted to pull one out and crack it open and see the words. Who knew what they might contain?
The leader blocked my view, and waved me back. I had to shake myself. She held her Pad up, scanned around one more time and pulled out one of the books. I thought, for just a moment, she was going to read it, or hand it to me, and that made me feel giddy. Instead, she reached her hand into the gap on the bookcase and gave a little tug. There was a mechanical sound, and my heart seemed to click into a lower gear as I realized the books weren’t real.
They concealed a hidden door. What looked like paper between the covers was only a carefully printed matte plastic. The covers were just a fa?ade. One Leatherette? bump rippled into the next as the bookcase split open without a sound to reveal a secret room beyond.
SQUELCH: $16.99
Penepoli Graethe once took Nancee and me aside at school, to a secret spot where the wall juts out and no Ads or camera could see. We were nine years old and giddy at the idea of doing something we shouldn’t. Penepoli showed us a handful of paper bits—words carefully cut, she said, from a book. She said they belonged to a cousin who had a boxful hidden away. She wanted us to be impressed. We were only nine years old, and could talk freely then. But even so, we anxiously read the little slips of paper, both delighted and terrified.
Woeful, his palms, each, warm summer, flick, Argentine, smelly.
We were risking a lot for a handful of words that didn’t add up to anything. After the briefest thrill, Nancee told her to get rid of them, quick.
“What if they find out?” she hissed in a panic. “If they don’t find out now, they’ll find out when you have kids, Penepoli, or grandkids, and then they’ll have to pay!” The Historical Reparations Agency had cut a swath through our class, and a lot of parents were gone.
Penepoli’s joy fizzled away. I tried to think of where she could get rid of them. She plucked the two I was holding back and clutched them all in her hand. Before we could figure out what to do, Sera Croate appeared, like she had been looking for us.
She slapped Penepoli’s hand and sent the lot flying. They were lifted up and carried away like confetti into the Quatrième. A sickening longing wormed its way through my chest as they fluttered away.
Sera tried to report Penepoli, but the evidence had flown away. When Principal Ugarte demanded to know what happened, Nancee, Penepoli and I all said the paper was Sera’s. A week later, Sera Croate’s parents were gone.
A terrible, guilty quiet fell between us for weeks. The three of us were stunned and horrified by what had happened. The few times we spoke, we tried to convince ourselves that the events were unrelated. I succeeded, I think, in making them think it wasn’t our fault, but I was less sure. I had to remind myself that Sera hadn’t thought twice about squealing on Penepoli.
We should have known Sera would show up. Our secret spot wasn’t very secret at all.
*
The bookcase the Placer opened concealed a perfect hiding spot. Who even knew it was there? The four of us squeezed inside, with just enough space to not be in each other’s faces. A round circle of deep red carpet gave us each a place to sit.
I had the distinct impression this was not the first time the Placers had been here. The bookcase closed behind us. I heard nothing. I felt like I’d gone deaf.
The big Placer with the cylinder swiped at its controls, and the sound was released. The leader turned to me and asked, “What is your plan?”
Her question startled me. I had no plan. The media treated me, and the rest of the Silents, like some great gang conspiring to bring down the economy, but how could we plot anything? We couldn’t communicate with each other. I had no idea what Nancee thought she was doing, or even where she was.
Did she want to be free to say whatever she wanted, like I did? I wanted things to change; I wanted, maybe, to be left alone, but my desires were hardly a plan.
“How did you get the others to do it?” the little one asked.
Maybe this had been a mistake. If they knew who I was, why were they asking me questions? They had to know I wasn’t going to talk. I suddenly felt afraid. I was standing in a secret room with three people dressed head to foot in black, their faces covered by masks. They could have been anyone. They could have done anything, and no one would ever know. No one knew where I was.
What did they want from me?
The big one asked, “Do you know where you are?”
I thought about this and, somehow, feeling a little on the spot, it made me think about the dome and its place in the world. I wasn’t sure exactly where we were. I knew we were part of the States, but my history classes were vague about what, exactly, the states were and how they connected. We were in the Northeast, near or against an ocean, but I’d never seen a map, so I couldn’t tell you where we were in relation to other domes, like DC or the Great Dome over Athens, Florida.
The big Placer didn’t mean any of this, of course. I didn’t know what building we were in, either.
“If she does not know, then she will not answer, Henri,” the small one said with a note of exasperation. I startled, even though it wasn’t exactly unexpected that she should speak.
“It’s called a Squelch,” the big one, Henri, explained, gesturing widely to the small room around us.