Swans and Klons Read online

  “Ah, the library,” Rubric said as they arrived at the small white building. “Just where I was expecting us to go. What’s going on?”

  They swiped their cards and smiled grimly at the Security Klon.

  Salmon Jo steered her toward two terminals that were slightly hidden behind a potted plant. They entered their identity numbers. “Pick something plausible,” Salmon Jo told her.

  What did that mean, plausible? Rubric selected a recent episode of Who Shall Be My Schatzie? Then they left the terminals and ran downstairs.

  Rubric thought it made sense when Salmon Jo took her into the utility tunnels in the basement. But she was confused when she led her to a door to the Geothermal Pump marked Staff Only Please.

  “Salmon Jo, they photograph who goes in and out of these doors,” she said. She pointed at the scan camera.

  “Good,” Salmon Jo said.

  She opened the door, setting off a tinkly alarm no louder than a wind chime. The Geothermal equipment took up only a tiny part of the room. There were stacks of mysterious rectangular objects that might have been paper books or other historical artifacts, all covered in drop cloths. Before Rubric even had time to really think this, Salmon Jo climbed onto a teetering pile of the artifacts and unhooked a transom window that was over a boarded-over door. Like a gecko, she slithered up the wall and hooked one leg through the window. “Come on, Ru!”

  Rubric clambered onto the wobbly stack of artifacts. She handed her arm up to Salmon Jo, who pulled with a mighty grip as Rubric climbed up to the window in an incredibly undignified fashion. She kicked, scattering rectangular artifacts that fell to the floor with a dusty thump. She finally got one leg over the window, and Salmon Jo hauled her up.

  “Urgh,” grunted Rubric, as she practically knocked Salmon Jo out the window on the other side. Salmon Jo fell lightly to the ground, and Rubric threw her other leg up to the window. Rubric had never felt more ungainly in her life. She slithered down the other side of the wall, collapsing in a heap on the floor. They were back in the steam tunnels.

  “Can I stand on your back?” Salmon Jo asked. “I need to shut the window. I’m trying to cover our tracks and throw them off the scent.”

  Rubric knelt down, and Salmon Jo stepped up on her lower back, heels digging into Rubric’s kidneys. “Okay, done.” She hopped off.

  Salmon Jo led them to another part of the steam tunnels, where there was a padlocked door. There were no cameras here. Salmon Jo hauled a lock clipper from her jacket. She snipped the lock, and they opened the door. Blinking, Rubric followed her out into the sunlight. They were on some sort of disused loading dock.

  “Why were you looking for me at Stencil Pavlina’s?” Rubric asked. “There was a Doctor talking to her?”

  “First of all, I got a visit from a Doctor too,” Salmon Jo said, jumping off the dock. “She brought me to her office.” She pulled a bag out from under the dock and hoisted it onto her shoulder. “This is some camping stuff. I stored it here last week, just in case. I should have just left it in my room, maybe. It’s possible I overplanned this.”

  They started up the slope away from the library, and Rubric knew they were taking the shortest diagonal route off campus.

  “It’s okay. Just tell me about the Doctor. What was she like?” Rubric couldn’t help asking.

  “She was my Jeepie Similar! She was so smart, really smart. I never met anyone so smart. Wow, she looked good in that saffron-colored robe. She was taller than me or Panna Madrigal and kind of queenly looking. She said she had heard that I was spreading a lot of rumors about the origins of Klons. She said ideas like ours sometimes floated through Society. She used the words legend and myth.”

  “Like a unicorn,” Rubric said.

  Salmon Jo gave her a funny look.

  “So the Doctor was saying we’re wrong?” Rubric asked hurriedly.

  “She started out like that. But then she said something like, ‘Legends sing of both fact and fiction,’ and she quoted something in Latin. She said, ‘Only the most intelligent people can handle this information about the Klons. We need people who understand the truth about how Society works. People like that run Society, but they have to be loyal and have the right attitude. For really intelligent people like us, there’s not just the Golden Rule, there’s also the Iron Rule.’”

  “The Iron Rule! What’s that?”

  “Protect the Doctors, who wield knowledge wisely, and reveal nothing that could be misinterpreted by the populace.”

  “Misinterpreted,” Rubric muttered in disgust. “That’s not from some ancient text of wisdom, like the Golden Rule is. They just made that up. It’s not even well written.”

  “Sssh,” Salmon Jo said. They were walking fast past a group of girls who were talking and laughing. “Act normal.”

  Rubric didn’t know how to act normal. What was normal when they were fleeing? Salmon Jo didn’t look normal. Her skin was ashen except for red spots on her cheeks, and she was practically trembling with anxiety.

  “I wonder how she found out what we were thinking,” Salmon Jo said. “Panna Lobe must have told.”

  “Or maybe Nanny Klon did,” Rubric said. “She was replaced by a new Nanny Klon today.”

  Salmon Jo whistled. “Wow. Could be either one of them. Or both. In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t have gone yapping to everyone.”

  A girl from Yellow Dorm waved at Rubric, and she waved back uncertainly. “So what did the Doctor do next?” Rubric demanded.

  “I thought I was in real trouble, but the Doctor started saying all these nice things to me. She asked did I want to be trained to be a Doctor myself, and that someone like me could really help Society.”

  They had reached the outskirts of the campus. Here was Salmon Jo’s favorite tree. She liked to sit in there and think and stare out over the wall at the city. For the first time, Rubric realized you could climb from the tree to the brick wall that surrounded the campus. They were only about a hundred paces from the handsome arch with a wrought-iron gate, where a Security Klon sat, that was the entrance to the campus. Great, more climbing, Rubric thought. The Security Klon never even looked their way as they inched up the tree and over the wall. Rubric began to feel a little better. Everything was so relaxed and trustful in Society, maybe it wouldn’t be that hard to be a fugitive.

  When Rubric jumped off the wall, she could feel the thud travel all the way from her feet up her spine. They walked quickly down the street, away from the trolley stop that Rubric usually took to Stencil Pavlina’s.

  “I’m not seeing the mortal danger yet,” Rubric said. “They just want to recruit you.”

  “I asked the Doctor about you,” Salmon Jo said. “I wasn’t sure if I should. I thought maybe they didn’t know about you. Then I thought, who am I kidding? If they know about me, they know about you. Or do you think I did the wrong thing?” Salmon Jo squeezed Rubric’s hand anxiously.

  Rubric really wanted Salmon Jo to keep her cool. Otherwise she might lose it herself. “It’s fine, S.J.,” she said. “I think you did right. What did the Doctor say?”

  “She asked me how close I was to you. Everything else she said was totally clear and confident. But that one thing was a bit tentative. Then suddenly, she was like of course you could become a Doctor too. But…Ru, I think she was lying.”

  Rubric laughed. “I know I’m not Doctor material. I don’t want to be one of those slave merchants. My Jeepie Type is a visionary, not a bureaucrat. So then what happened?”

  “Then nothing happened. She thanked me and told me to think about it. I left. And there were a bunch of Klons in blue robes in the waiting room outside her office. Just like the Klons who came to take Hollyhock away. And then I knew.”

  “Oh, scheiss!” A Panna they were passing on the street frowned at Rubric. “They were going to give me treatment. They were going to come get me. That’s what they want to do.”

  Once when Rubric was small, she had gone ice skating on a pond with her dorm. The ice ha
d cracked, and she had plunged right through. It had happened so fast. One moment she was skating happily, the next she was churning and choking in the frigid water. Her Nanny Klon had rescued her. Rubric had lain on the ice, teeth chattering, cold and surprised. That was exactly how she felt now.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Salmon Jo’s plan was to hide out on Mt. Sileza. Rubric was afraid they would have to walk there, and it was several klicks away. But Salmon Jo had figured out a way to take a trolley without having to swipe their cards. “I’ve noticed that on about ten percent of the trolleys, the card reader is broken, and the Conductor Klon just waves you on. The system seems very poorly maintained. So all we have to do is wait for a bus where the card reader is broken. It shouldn’t take too long. We just have to try to remain inconspicuous.”

  Rubric wasn’t sure if she could do that. She was shivering and it wasn’t from cold—she was wearing a thick, long-sleeved woolen cloak—but from pure fear. It was really sinking in that they were on the run. Part of her mind kept insisting the whole thing must be some terrible mistake. This part tried to soothe her and tell her everything was fine. But the other part of her mind kept going over what Salmon Jo had said, evaluating and reevaluating it. The conclusion was the same every time: FREAK OUT!

  She might never return to Yellow Dorm or see her friends. Never fulfill any of her dreams: to display art, have glam parties, be an amazing mentor to young Jeepie Similars, have a key-exchanging ceremony with Salmon Jo, live in a big house with her, help Salmon Jo invent an airship. But the death of those dreams wasn’t even the problem. If they got caught, she would get treatment. She had seen Klons who had been through treatment who were fit for only the simplest tasks because their brains had been totally fried, and they couldn’t remember how to do complicated things.

  At worst, she would be compost.

  Other people were chattering and carrying on with their activities and getting on the trolleys. She and Salmon Jo were the only ones who stayed at the steel-and-glass shelter. Trolleys came and went, and none of them had broken card readers. This fretted Salmon Jo incredibly. She kept muttering stuff about how she was sure her calculations were correct and it didn’t make sense. She kept rejiggering some figures in an incredibly boring way. It was driving Rubric up the wall, but she knew that was how Salmon Jo was keeping a grip on things. She nodded and yessed her when necessary. Privately she wondered if this was even necessary. Would anyone try to track them through their cards?

  The seventeenth trolley had a broken card reader. It wasn’t going directly to Mount Sileza, but nearby. Neither of the girls wanted to wait any longer, so they took it. By the time they finally arrived at the foot of Mount Sileza, it was only an hour before dusk. Everyone they encountered was leaving.

  Rubric was tired before she started hiking, mentally tired. The path took many winding switchbacks. The season was turning to autumn, and slippery leaves covered the trail, so Rubric had to stare at her feet as she went. Salmon Jo was much more light-footed—did the girl have radars in her feet? She was looking around her at the scenery instead of down at the path.

  At times, they were on level ground and walking was easy. At other times, it was quite steep. Rubric plodded along without complaint, but she kept mentally projecting toward the end of their journey. They would be sitting snug and cozy in a tent, and Salmon Jo would crack out the food. Something really good, like chocolate-covered peanuts. Then Rubric would snap back to herself and realize she was still laboring up some incline and she felt like keeling over. She wondered if she was losing her mind. They stopped to drink some water, and Rubric felt much better. This isn’t so bad, she told herself. Then realized they weren’t moving and that’s why it felt so easy.

  “Isn’t this beautiful?” Salmon Jo said and sighed.

  Rubric forced herself to actually look at her surroundings. The last time Rubric had been here, during the annual outing, it had been the height of summer. The trail had been surrounded by dense greenery. Now, most of the foliage was gone, and she could look through the trees and down the mountain. In addition to some lakes, she could see the whole city spread out. It looked very sparkly and jaunty from here. She couldn’t see their own campus, but she could see another academy’s campus. The crown jewel of the city was the hospital, which had been designed to look like a sailing ship from the days of old. All the round buildings, which up close were plain and unremarkable, from here were quite striking. Those were the buildings where Klons were raised, trained, housed, or given treatment. The Karela Bridge hung ethereally over the river, and not far away was Pearl, the art-materials center. Rubric could just barely see the skylines of other cities, other nature preserves. Far off in the distance was a shimmering line that was the fence that separated Society from the Land of the Barbarous Ones.

  “Yes, it’s pretty,” she said grudgingly.

  They continued on their way. Rubric felt quite a bit better. She thought maybe she had been dehydrated. But, still, her relief was almost indescribable when she glimpsed the huge boulder that she remembered from her last trip, a landmark that showed they were almost at the summit.

  They reached the clearing just as darkness fell. Salmon Jo wrestled the tent—which she had carried the whole way, Rubric realized—out of the bag as quickly as she could. But it was almost pitch dark before they had even unrolled it. She and Salmon Jo didn’t have to say anything; they were both aware of how hard it was to set up a tent in the dark. Each held a flashlight in her mouth. Fumblingly, Rubric snapped the almost-weightless poles together and fitted them into the rings. Her entire self was focused on setting up the tent. She and Salmon Jo said only a few short sentences to each other, stuff like, “No, I think it’s this one,” and, “Can you turn that thingy over?” They worked almost like one organism.

  As soon as the tent was up, they unzipped it, crawled inside, and flopped down. Salmon Jo clipped her flashlight to the roof of the tent, but a few seconds later she clicked it off. As Rubric lay there, her eyes began to adjust to the dark, and she could make out the shape of Salmon Jo and see her eyes and her teeth.

  “It’s so weird that one second the tent isn’t up and then the next it is. And suddenly there’s an indoors in the middle of the outdoors,” Rubric said.

  Salmon Jo didn’t answer for a long time. Rubric thought she was considering her statement deeply, but when she spoke all she said was, “I’m lying on a huge pointy rock.”

  Rubric groaned. “Do I have to get up? Do we have to move the tent, the rock?”

  “No. Can you rotate like ninety degrees though? Then neither of us would be lying on the rock. No, no, other way.”

  “Where’s the food?” Rubric asked.

  Salmon Jo rifled through her bag with one hand, without looking at it, and tossed a packet to Rubric.

  Chocolate covered peanuts! Rubric was so happy that tears came to her eyes. She spread her sleeping bag over her like a blanket, planning to crawl into it later, and began eating the peanuts. She could hear Salmon Jo crunching something loudly. It sounded like carrots.

  As soon as she was done eating, she was going to thank Salmon Jo for carrying all the camping bags, and bringing her favorite protein-packed bedtime snack, and planning the whole venture and guiding her and having the foresight to get the hell out in the first place. Then maybe she would recite a nature poem to Salmon Jo. But, to her surprise, the next thing that happened was she woke up to a beam of sunlight coming through an unzipped flap in the tent and hitting her in the eye. She was still lying under the sleeping bag with the packet of chocolate-covered peanuts in her hand.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rubric felt filled with energy. She was eager to do something productive after being such deadweight the day before. In addition, she was quite hungry. She found all the oatmeal Salmon Jo had been hoarding and left the tent as unobtrusively as possible, which turned out to be not very. Salmon Jo slept on.

  It looked to be quite early, earlier than Rubric had thought. It
was maddening to have no timekeeping device. Salmon Jo wore a watch pendant around her neck, but Rubric was used to looking at her handheld screen.

  She was sitting on a stump eating oatmeal and gazing at birds in the leafless shrubbery when Salmon Jo emerged. She handed her a spoon.

  “Thanks,” Salmon Jo said, digging into the oatmeal.

  “I hope you weren’t planning to hide out on this mountain for the rest of our lives?” Rubric asked.

  Salmon Jo shook her head.

  “This isn’t real wilderness,” Rubric said. “People come here all the time. Ranger Klons patrol the mountain. If someone was looking, it wouldn’t be too hard to find us.”

  “We didn’t bring enough oatmeal to last the rest of our lives,” Salmon Jo said, her voice scratchy from sleep.

  “I wouldn’t even want to be in the real wilderness anyway. I’d get lost without paths. I don’t know how to gather nuts and berries and all that stuff. Probably I’d eat a poisonous mushroom and die.”

  “There is no wilderness like that,” said Salmon Jo. “Not in Society. Maybe outside the fence, where the Barbarous Ones live.”

  The birds were singing raucously. Rubric wondered where she had gotten the idea that nature was quiet and peaceful. “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  Salmon Jo took another spoonful of oatmeal. “First of all, I just woke up maybe three minutes ago. Second of all, I don’t really have a plan. Getting here was as far as it went.”

  Rubric realized she had been depending on Salmon Jo to come up with all the answers for a while now. It was her turn to step up to the plate. “I forgot to thank you for all that. I thought I did, but I was actually asleep.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Salmon Jo said, looking down at the pot and stirring the congealing porridge. The tips of her ears turned pink. She was always embarrassed when someone thanked her. It was incredibly cute.

  “We need to figure out what our goals are,” Rubric said. “To get the truth out about the Klons? To topple Society?”