“Why are you helping me?” In that moment, despite the danger of being caught, I have to know.
Trigger presses a quick kiss against my lips. “Because I like you. I don’t want to lose you.” His small smile makes my insides feel warm. “And because I want to see just how deep your wild roots will grow. So come on,” he whispers, tugging me into motion again.
Against my better judgment, we cross the rest of the patio toward the room full of cars. Distant memory of past history lessons labels it a “garage,” but I still can’t fathom one woman’s need for so many different vehicles.
I follow Trigger into the garage, where I see that there isn’t a speck of dust on any of the cars; then he takes a sharp left and pulls open another door. Behind it a flight of stairs leads down into the dark. He motions for me to proceed, then closes the door at his back and we are alone in the dark. Again.
“Where are we?”
“Shh.” He brushes past me and his touch trails down my arm until he finds my hand, which he places firmly on the rail attached to the wall, obscured by the darkness. “We can’t risk turning on a light until we’re farther from the house. The stairs are steep. Be careful.” His footsteps echo as they descend, headed away from me.
I feel my way slowly, and when his steps end I realize he’s stopped at the bottom of the flight to wait for me. His hand finds mine again when my shoes hit concrete.
“There’s a light up here a few feet, if I’m remembering this correctly.” He tugs me forward, and I hear the brush of his hand against the wall to our right. Something clicks, then soft light from about twenty feet ahead illuminates the concrete tunnel around us.
“Where are we?” I ask as I follow him through the tunnel.
“The Administrator’s emergency exit.”
“But we’re already out of her house.” My sneakers shuffle against the dusty concrete as I try to keep up with Trigger.
“It’s so she can exit the city, not the house.”
“Why does the Administrator need an emergency exit? What kind of emergency?”
“Any kind, I guess.”
We pass beneath the first bulb, and when Trigger flips the next switch, the bulb we’ve passed is extinguished as the one ahead lights up.
“So this tunnel leads to the city gate?”
“One of them.” His voice seems to bounce back at us from every surface of the narrow tunnel. “It’s the VIP gate. For very important people. There aren’t many of those, so the gate isn’t used much.”
“And you think that’s where we’ll find Wexler?” Or is this his way of bypassing my request altogether? Oh, well, your geneticist isn’t here, but since we are, we might as well strike off into the wild….
“That’s my best guess, if he’s still in the city.”
“How would he even know about this gate? Are geneticists that important?” Yet I know the answer before I’ve even finished asking. Without geneticists, humanity would have to go back to the old, messy, inefficient way of producing children who might die of inherited diseases and would certainly never live up to their potential, being made of random strands of DNA rather than handpicked genes ideally suited for a specific purpose.
The world as we know it would collapse without geneticists.
“Yes,” Trigger says, confirming my thoughts. “Every year the Administrator sends a delegate of Management leaders and geneticists out of Lakeview to meet with representatives from several other cities. They call it a summit. At his age, Wexler 42 has probably attended several times, and he would have left the city through the gate we’re headed for, which also happens to be the Administrator’s personal emergency exit. Since it’s only occasionally used, it’s not regularly guarded, so it’s Wexler’s best chance of getting out. Not coincidentally it now represents our best chance as well.”
“Is this the way you were going to take me before I told you about Wexler?”
“No. I was going to introduce you to the wonderland that is the Lakeview city sewer system. But since we’re headed for the VIP gate, we’ll give that a shot first.”
“How do you know all this, Trigger?” And how much more is there that I don’t know?
“We don’t all spend every day in a plant lab surrounded by tubers. The last two years of a cadet’s training is fifty percent ‘in the field.’ We participate in drills aimed to prepare us for every possible kind of emergency as well as to determine what positions we’ll be most useful in after graduation.”
“It’s much the same for gardeners,” I tell him as I flip a switch to turn on a light up ahead. “Those best at apples and pears will grow fruit trees. Those best at yams and potatoes will grow tubers. But we have to try everything to know what we’re best at.”
“Exactly. A couple of months ago, my squad trained for VIP guard duty. If we’re permanently assigned to that field, there’ll be much more training in my future.”
He’s speaking in the future tense, as if he’s forgotten that where we are and what we’re doing will forever alter the trajectory of our lives. Assuming we live.
I decide not to point that out.
“But as a year-seventeen Special Forces cadet, I’ve had a little bit of training in a lot of highly sensitive areas.”
“This is why they don’t want commingling between different bureaus,” I whisper as we near the edge of the current circle of light.
Trigger stops long enough to grin at me, his gaze caught on mine, and heat pools low in my stomach. “That’s only one of the reasons they don’t want girls like you mingling with guys like me.”
I don’t know what to say to that. This feeling I have for him—this attraction—is still so new I don’t know if it can be trusted. It’s so unexpectedly physical, and somehow similar to both winning an exhilarating relay and catching a stomach bug. The way he looks at me sends pleasant chills down my spine, yet my palms are slick with sweat. I want it to stop so I can think straight, yet I never want it to end.
Were girls in the archaic time of bodily fluids and congenital disease so mixed up and confused?
I think about that while we walk, flipping switches as we go, so that only one portion of the concrete tunnel is lit at any given time. I have no way to judge the distance, but my best guess is that we’ve been walking for half an hour when we see another set of stairs, this one leading aboveground.
“There shouldn’t be anyone here,” Trigger 17 says as we ascend. “But be quiet just in case.”
I follow him out of the tunnel and into a long, tall stone passageway, which curves gradually in each direction. “Where are we?” I whisper as my gaze roams over the dusty passage, so different from the stark, polished surfaces and clean lines of my academy and dormitory.
“Inside the city wall,” he whispers in return.
“Why is it hollow?”