BOOK ONE: CHAPTER TWO
Zigmund Aschburner sat with his twin sister, Zerah, in the back of the Saint Crown transfer vehicle, tapping his fingers against the black leather upholstery. The twins had never been on a trip this long, and they had never been to their uncle’s home in Island County, Washington. In truth, this was the first time they had ever been past the walls of Placer County, California. At breakfast that morning, they understood without words that their lives were about to change forever, but Zigmund hadn’t realized how completely foreign it would all seem. It was as if this single trip was changing everything about the world down to its very fibers, and he knew his sister felt the same.
The Saint Crown transfer vehicle that was taking the twins to their uncle’s house was taller than any vehicle Zigmund had been in before, and it was odd to be able to see so much scenery. It made him feel important, though he knew he was not. It also made him feel dangerous, though he knew he was not. Something about the large, boxy structure of the vehicle seemed militaristic. There was a black cowcatcher attached to the grill, and Zigmund had seen such things on the front of locomotives in his history lessons. It was both funny and sad to him that what once was used to move cows out of the way was now used to move people. The juxtaposition of cows and humans being coldly pushed out of the way brought memories of Zigmund’s father, Cal.
“Damned overpops,” Zig’s father used to say. “Here we are with the country running out of resources, and those morons refuse to stop breeding. Sometimes I wonder whether they have brains at all. If they do, they don’t use the damned things.”
Zigmund sighed at the memory and then looked over at his sister with sympathetic sadness. Zerah was holding a caramel chew bar, but it was debatable as to whether she was eating it. Its wrapper was peeled back, but Zerah seemed to be holding the candy for comfort more than taking pleasure from eating the sweet. Zigmund’s sympathy vanished only to be replaced by frustration, and he frowned at Zerah. This was why the other girls at school gave her such a hard time.
Zerah was pudgy and liked carrying snacks around with her as if she were a baby carrying a stuffed animal. Zigmund wanted to slap the damned bar out of her hand and tell his sister to stop being such an easy target. But he would never do that to her. He loved her, and right now he felt as bad for her as he had ever felt for anyone. He turned and looked out of the tinted window of the transfer vehicle, into the gray Washington sky, and tried to forget everything that had happened to them over the past few months.
“One last wall,” the driver called back to the siblings. “Then we’ll be in Island County, owned by Nuevobright. You kids know Nuevobright is responsible for the technology used to create the ether screens in the rear-seat consoles, right?” Neither of the twins responded. They did know about the technology, but they both resented being called kids, and each decided to exhibit protest silently. The driver was unfazed and continued talking. “The order says your uncle’s property is right along the coast. Too bad it’s such a gray day, or the two of you might’ve enjoyed a swim in the ocean.” The man rubbed the pinkish skin of his bald head. “I used to be a fair swimmer.”
“Maybe I don’t like the ocean,” Zerah muttered, her candy bar held just inches below her mouth, like a microphone. No one replied to her comment. She hadn’t even really intended for anyone to hear her.
The expanse of the ocean was a foreign concept to Zerah and just another thing to feel uneasy about. The Aschburners had lived in Placer County, California, owned by Saint Crown Medicine. They had lived along the Eldorado National Forest, and those tall trees had been some of Zerah’s best friends. She found the green canopy comforting and safe. Leaving that forest, her home, and Placer County altogether wasn’t something she wanted to do, but she didn’t have any say in the matter. The twins were only fourteen years old. Even they understood they couldn’t be allowed to live alone.
Zerah watched the towering concrete wall get closer and closer beyond the vehicle’s windshield. The wall met the horizon to both the left and the right, obviously surrounding the entire county. It didn’t matter to Zerah that this was the last wall she and her brother would have to pass through. Each wall they had passed gave them the impression of entering a new universe, and now there were so many universes between them and Placer County that it didn’t really matter. She couldn’t find any pleasure in knowing the trip was almost through.
Zerah laughed sullenly in her mind. She had never looked at the county walls as anything other than scenery. They were just something that was. No different from the sky or the ground. She never thought about how the entire country had three-hundred-foot concrete walls separating every single county, separating the rich from the middle class and the middle class from the poor. She never thought about how those walls sometimes separated family members. She didn’t constantly wonder how the five major corporations of the United States (Arcadian Enterprises, Saint Crown Medicine, Nuevobright Technologies, Grace & Verdant Energy Co., and Gilded Financial) each owned different counties across the country and how each one felt like its own world altogether. She had taken so many things for granted when she and her family were tucked away in the tranquility of Placer County. But now, traveling through these different counties made everything seem so cold and so unfeeling.
“It’s a sad thing about your parents,” the driver said, obviously unaware the twins were not in the mood for conversation. “I suppose the silver lining is you’ve got a good uncle to take you in. Someone you’re familiar with.”
“We’ve never even met him,” Zigmund said bitterly.
“Sorry,” the driver said and cringed. After that he finally decided to keep conversation to a minimum.
Zigmund stole another glance at his sister and saw her bottom lip was slightly trembling. Tears were welling in her brown eyes. Zerah was taking the loss of their parents much harder than Zigmund was, and he knew bringing up the fact that they were now going to live with a man they had never had so much as a conversation with was not making it easier for her. He extended his arm and placed his hand on top of his sister’s.
“I’m sorry, Zip,” Zigmund said, trying to make his sister smile by using her childhood nickname. “I didn’t mean to make it sound so dark. Uncle Rainart is family. He’s Mom’s brother. He’s bound to be something like her. This isn’t gonna be bad.”
“But Ziggy,” Zerah protested, “Dad never liked him. I’ve heard Dad call Uncle Rainart nasty names a hundred times when he didn’t know I was listening. Dad said he was never there for Mom and he didn’t deserve anybody’s respect.”
“That was just Dad being Dad,” Zigmund said with a crooked smile. Then he turned back to the window. “You know Dad was hard on everybody.”
Growing up under Cal Aschburner hadn’t been the easiest thing for Zigmund. A two-sport all-American with a PhD in nuclear medicine casts a pretty-big shadow, especially for a fourteen-year-old boy with acne and the inability to grow taller than five feet four. Zigmund had always been involved with sports as a child. His father had made sure of that. But as Zig became an adolescent and had to prove his worth to be chosen for a team, things went downhill rapidly. Zigmund never made any team he tried out for, and having his six-foot-four father there to see him fail couldn’t help but intensify the sting. Especially when Cal’s idea of support was to point out the areas where Zigmund could have tried harder.
“Well, you didn’t exactly practice very hard,” Cal had said to his son.
“So sports aren’t his thing,” Zigmund’s mother, Adeline, had said in his defense. “No big deal.”
But Adeline Aschburner hadn’t understood that saying, “So sports aren’t his thing,” about a teenaged boy might as well be saying, “So he’s worthless.” Zigmund realized his mother didn’t mean it that way, but that was the way it felt to him. Being bad at sports meant being less popular with girls, it meant being less popular with other boys, and it meant being forced to hope for success in academics, which meant never being popular with anyone.
Zigmund might have been only fourteen, but he wasn’t stupid. He saw how people regarded his parents, and other kids’ parents, for that matter. No one cared that his mother had been a caring, intelligent woman who worked at a preschool. They cared that she was an attractive woman who seemingly made a good wife. As for Zigmund’s father, the man had been an abrasive asshole. That wasn’t what mattered, though. He had been physically endowed and made an enviable amount of money, so he was respected and even liked. Even if some didn’t like Cal, it didn’t matter, because people acted as if they liked him, so what was the difference?
Zigmund knew his father never had to deal with the pressures he and Zerah dealt with. He knew life had come easy for his father. He had been tall, muscular, and good looking. Zig wondered how the hell he himself had missed out on every one of those traits. He wondered how the hell his parents had been such fortunate, good-looking people and he was just ugly little Ziggy and his sister just fat little Zerah. Sometimes he wondered whether they had been adopted from the overpops.
No. Don’t think like that, he thought. Stop being so negative. They were your parents, and you loved them.
Then why didn’t you even cry at their funeral? a second, more sinister voice in his head questioned.
Shut up, Zigmund told himself.
They were now approaching the wall, and massive concrete doors were slowly shifting to let them pass. Moving from one rich county to another rich county, as they were doing now, was simple. Even moving from a middle-class county to another was easy. It was moving into or out of a poor county that was difficult and dangerous. The Saint Crown driver had avoided the poor counties as much as he could during their trip; however, they were forced to travel through one poor county. The experience had been shocking to Zigmund and Zerah, and a little scary. They had certainly heard of the overpopulation happening in the poor counties, the crowded buildings, the masses of people in the streets, fighting one another for food, space, or anything of value. It was these poor, uneducated people Zig’s father and others referred to as overpops. But seeing these people—and more importantly, being a target of their wrath—had been jarring. The driver had activated the transfer vehicle’s electroarmor so no one could assault the vehicle as it passed, and it had been a good thing he did. Filthy people in tattered clothing were cursing at them as they passed and throwing anything they could get their hands on. The vast amount of people surrounding the vehicle had been startling. It was as if they were part of a parade. Most of the overpops got out of the way as the vehicle approached, but the vehicle had to move at a much slower speed in the poor county so as not to injure people, and a couple of times, the cowcatcher actually had to be used to push some overpops out of the way.
When the vehicle had finally reached the wall to leave the poor county, no massive door opened for them in welcome as it did now. The vehicle had had to come to a full stop and was subjected to artillery scanning. Then a warning alarm blared, and from giant speakers came instructions for any pedestrians within one hundred feet to exit the passage area immediately. Most people obeyed, obviously knowing what would happen if they didn’t, but one man refused to move from the passage area. Zigmund remembered watching him stare at the speakers on the wall. He spit on the ground and made a rude gesture; then a bullet took him in the chest, and he fell to the ground. Zigmund would never forget that man, his tattered clothes, the sore on his arm, his matted hair, or the look on his face. The man was defiant in the face of death. Zigmund wouldn’t admit it, but it terrified him. At that point the doors opened for their vehicle, and the driver had pulled forward into a holding bay. Afterward, the massive concrete door closed behind them.
In the holding bay, inside the thick concrete wall, they had to exit the vehicle, give their identification, and undergo a round of body scans to ensure they weren’t carrying contraband or weapons. The officers conducting the search were rude, hardened people who seemed bitter and put out to have to be doing their jobs. The whole process had been terrible, and when it was finally over, the twins were both relieved. They were allowed to pass through to the other side of the wall, into a middle-class county, and it felt like coming to the surface of a pool to gasp fresh air. The whole process of passing through the poor county hadn’t taken thirty minutes, but it had felt like hours. The driver told them they wouldn’t need to do that again. He had apologized and said he should have taken a longer route so they could have avoided going that way. The twins had remained silent. It was at least another ten minutes before the shock had worn off.
Now, they sat in the holding bay of the wall that separated Snohomish County from Island County, two rich counties in Washington State, and a happy older gentleman was smiling and welcoming them, politely asking to see their identification. Zigmund and Zerah looked at each other and knew they were each thinking the same thing: thank God their uncle lived in a rich county.
As the Saint Crown transfer vehicle continued on its path, away from the three-hundred-foot wall, the trees on either side of the road seemed to get closer and taller, coming up to the road so it looked as if the car was about to drive through a forest.
“I thought you said our uncle lived by the ocean,” Zigmund said to the driver. “Are you sure we’re in the right county?”
“That’s what the navigator is telling me” was the driver’s answer. “It looks as if he’s up on a cliff that overlooks a small cove. We have to go across the island. You two, don’t worry yourselves. I promise that was the last wall we’ll be going through.” The driver paused, still feeling guilty about what the teens had seen in the poor county. “Is this the first time you two have ever left Placer County?”
“Yes,” Zerah and Zigmund answered in total sync.
“It’s funny,” the driver continued. “Those walls seem so ominous and depressing, but the two of you are too young to remember what it was like before they went up. It has been almost twenty-five years, and life is better now. At least in my opinion it is. Before, it didn’t matter what county you lived in, rich or poor. Life was dangerous. I was mugged ten times through my twenties by poor people looking for anything. They’d never even ask whether I was willing to give something up freely before they attacked. One time they took every bit of clothing I was wearing. It was easily the worst, most embarrassing day of my entire life. You two probably think this old dome of mine can’t grow hair anymore.” The driver pointed at his head and looked at the twins in the rearview mirror. “I shave it by choice. One time I got mugged, and one of those bastards hit me on the right side of my head with a wooden club. I haven’t been able to grow hair in that spot ever since. I got tired of answering the questions about the bald spot, so I just started shaving the whole damned thing.” The driver sighed.
“But then the walls went up, and that stuff doesn’t happen anymore. Well, not as often. People are still unhappy, don’t get me wrong, but now there’s security for some of us. I know how bad it looks in the poor counties, but at least those damned overpops can’t harm the rest of us anymore. I’ll gladly sacrifice a little freedom for security, and you kids should consider yourselves lucky. I know I do.”
After five minutes driving among the trees, the vehicle finally slowed and pulled up along a tall steel gate that barred a narrow driveway. Zigmund looked up the driveway as it continued uphill until he saw a large and blocky building at the top of the hill.
The driver whistled softly before saying, “Man, that’s a weird-looking house.”
He lowered his window and stretched his arm out so he could reach a square red button on the face of an antiquated intercom box. The man pressed the button and waited for a voice.
The wait seemed abnormally long, and Zerah fidgeted in her seat. She loved being surrounded by trees, but it wasn’t enough to comfort her in this moment. Life was changing too fast, and she had lost so much so quickly. She now sat in front of a place she would be calling home, but she knew it wasn’t. Home wasn’t something that just manifested spontaneously. It had to be earned; it had to grow. Then a more sullen thought struck her. She and Zigmund no longer had a home, not in the important sense of the word.
The intercom buzzed, and a gruff voice asked, “What?”
“Saint Crown transport from Placer County, California, sir. I’ve got—” The driver slapped his hand down on the passenger seat and snapped up a piece of paper. He looked it over quickly and robotically read the Aschburners’ names. “Zig-mund and Zeee-rah. If you open the gate, I can drive them up.”
“They’ve got legs, haven’t they?” the voice from the intercom asked.
The driver frowned, and before he could reply, the black steel gate opened. The driver turned to Zerah and Zigmund and shrugged. Once the gate had opened about four feet wide, it stopped. It was more than obvious now that the two teenagers were expected to walk up the driveway, toting their bags behind them. The driver swung his door open and jumped out of the transport vehicle. He headed to the back and pulled the teens’ bags out of the trunk.
“Why do you think we couldn’t drive up the driveway?” Zerah asked Zigmund in a hushed tone.
Zigmund just shrugged and opened his own door to exit the vehicle. It was becoming increasingly apparent that all their assumptions might as well be cast aside.
Once outside of the vehicle, both Zerah and Zigmund took their luggage from the driver. The teens thanked the man, and he quickly waved good-bye. The Saint Crown transport departed, and Zigmund and Zerah were left standing alone among the tall trees at the bottom of the long driveway.
“This sucks, Ziggy.” Zerah’s mood was souring by the minute.
As they stood at the black steel gate, under the dank gray sky, with all their possessions at their sides, it was hard to find a ray of hope. Especially as the man they would be living with had just greeted them as if they were peddling door-to-door religion. Zigmund didn’t know what to say to his sister in this moment. Things were bad, and he couldn’t muster the energy to lie and feed her some corny line about everything working out in the end. He was having a hard-enough time keeping his own spirit buoyed.
“Yeah, it does suck,” Zigmund replied. “So just deal with it, Zip.” In that moment of weakness, it was Zigmund’s father, Cal, who was talking through him. He knew it as soon as the words came out of his mouth, and it made him even angrier at the situation, at Zerah, and at himself. “Let’s go,” he added.
The teens squeezed through the gate with their luggage and trudged up the hill toward the blocky home that loomed above. At about twenty yards past the gate, they heard the hum of a small motor and looked back to see the black gate closing behind them.
“What, he can watch us, but he can’t help?” Zerah asked incredulously. She had one bag hanging over her shoulder, and she tugged at a larger rolling piece of luggage that followed behind.
“Would you stop it?” Zigmund said, getting more annoyed by the minute. “Things are different now. You need to get tougher. You need to stop complaining.”
“You don’t have to be such a jerk about it,” Zerah muttered under her breath.
Zigmund pretended he didn’t hear her.
As the teens walked on, they noticed the house in far more detail. There were three sections to the home, each a different-sized rectangle. Two of the rectangles sat next to each other, one taller than the other, like a mother holding hands with her child. The third rectangle was shorter still and came out toward the driveway from where the mother’s legs would be. It was a simply designed home, but there was nothing normal about it. From the vantage point of the teens, there wasn’t a single window on the home, but cameras could be seen oscillating slowly at the corners of the flat roof. The outer walls were flat, no siding or stucco. Instead, different shades of wood panels were laid so the walls looked like parquet flooring. The twins could see no doors, but the smallest section of the house had an inset wall that looked like a garage door. Halfway up the driveway now, Zigmund and Zerah headed for that wall, assuming it would be where they could enter the house.
Zerah laughed to herself. This isn’t a house. It looks more like a maximum-security prison for forest rangers. The thought improved her mood slightly, and she decided to continue the game. Or maybe it’s a museum for modernist wood sculptures. Or maybe it’s a compound for some cult that worships bears and pine needles. This last thought came a little too close to being possible for Zerah, and she tried to extinguish the idea that her uncle might be part of some strange religious cult.
The sky was darkening, and the twins assumed the sun was setting behind the wall of gray clouds, or as Adeline Aschburner had used to say, evening was calling the sun home for dinner. Zigmund looked at the Arcadian Loop on his wrist to see it was a little past seven o’clock. He thought that confirmed evening as the cause for the darkening sky, but just as he took his eyes away from the gadget on his wrist, a loud clap of thunder promised another culprit.
The twins were now close to what they assumed was the garage door. Zerah dropped her bags and walked to the wall, looking for anything resembling a com-screen, speaker, pressure sensor, anything at all. She found nothing, so she knocked on the wall and called out.
“Uncle Rainart, would you open the door?”
“I will when you find it,” a disembodied voice boomed from some clandestine speaker. “Come around to the other side of the house. You’ll see the stairs.”
Zerah turned around and looked at Zigmund, who rolled his eyes, mirroring her frustration. The girl’s shoulders dropped in defeat; then she picked up her bags off of the paved driveway, and the twins walked around the left side of the house, away from what they had thought was a garage. Just as they came around the corner of the house, the skies laughed derisively with rolling thunder, and then the rain came down hard.
The teens looked at each other with furrowed brows that were quickly dripping with the wetness of a north Pacific storm. At least they still had each other. That was what both Zerah and Zigmund were thinking in that moment, and both children were aware their twin was holding on to that same thought. People had always told them twins possessed strange connections with each other. Even some of their schoolteachers had regarded them as some mystical force when they were together. Mysticism seemed absurd to the twins, but they couldn’t argue that they weren’t connected in ways other siblings weren’t. They just shared more. It was unspoken and innate. As they walked around the house in the rain, they were sharing one of those twin moments, and they needed it now, more than ever.
The back half of the great house revealed itself, and it was in such stark contrast to the front that it gave the impression of being a completely different structure. Zigmund turned back and looked down the driveway. A seemingly large forest stretched into the distance. It was a view both earthly and familiar to him. When he turned away from it again, it felt like leaving a friend. He and his sister now stood at the edge of a cliff, and forty feet below the sheer rock face was the raging ocean. The skies over the sea were black, and lightning flickered out over the expanse. The rumbling thunder and the crashing waves were now competing for auditory attention. The twins tore their eyes away from the tussle of rain and waves and looked to the right. A large staircase hugged a flat wall of glass and metal. From this side the house reflected the storm like a strobe light, flashing an instant reflection to every strike of lightning. There was not much land between the stairs and the cliff’s edge. It seemed like a hellish task to have to ascend them in the rain and gathering dark. Visions of falling to their deaths, their bodies being dashed against the black rocks far below, flitted through the minds of the two teens. They looked at each other for solidarity once more and climbed the stairs cautiously.
The wind assaulted them, and they wished they could shield their eyes as they dragged their bags up the stairs. What fool of a man has the door to his home at the back of his house, twenty feet up a staircase that overlooks a cliff? Zigmund thought. He kept his gaze away from the drop, instead looking at the great glass wall to the right side of the staircase. While there were no windows at the front of the home, it seemed the entire back side was nothing but windows. However, Zigmund and Zerah couldn’t see through any of them. It was as if there were no lights on inside the house at all. They could see nothing but obsidian, shimmering with wetness, intermittently reflecting the anger of the storm.
When they finally reached the top of the staircase, Zerah pounded the metal door in front of her. She and her brother were soaked through. Zerah only hoped their luggage had resisted the water better than their clothing. Zigmund looked out over the ocean and then down the side of the cliff. He immediately regretted his decision as the dizziness of vertigo threatened to topple him. He dropped his bags and reached back for his sister, hoping to grab her shoulder for stability. In his wobbly state, he fell back against her harder than he had intended to. The door Zerah had been knocking on opened suddenly, and Zigmund knocked his sister over, both teens stumbling and falling through the door and onto a red rug inside the house.
They wiped the water out of their eyes and looked up to see their uncle’s dark eyes and coal-black moustache towering over them. The man sniffled and walked outside to grab the dropped luggage. He threw it inside the house and then walked back in, slamming the door shut behind him.
“Down the hall and to the left are two guest rooms that will now be your bedrooms,” he said, wiping the rain from his hardened face. “I don’t care which of you takes which one. After you’ve found your rooms and changed your clothes, I’ll expect you downstairs in the dining room for dinner. I’ve already started without you.”
The twins watched the tall man walk away from them and descend a staircase to the right. He moved with a noticeable limp in his right leg but didn’t seem to let it impede his pace.
“At least there’s food,” Zerah mumbled to Zigmund. The teens were still entangled on the floor.
“And another thing.” The gruff voice of their uncle came from the stairs. “I don’t serve meat in this house, and I don’t want to hear complaints about it.”
Zerah grimaced and let her head fall limply against the floor.
“I should’ve pulled us over the cliff,” Zigmund said, shaking his head.
The Saint Crown transfer vehicle that was taking the twins to their uncle’s house was taller than any vehicle Zigmund had been in before, and it was odd to be able to see so much scenery. It made him feel important, though he knew he was not. It also made him feel dangerous, though he knew he was not. Something about the large, boxy structure of the vehicle seemed militaristic. There was a black cowcatcher attached to the grill, and Zigmund had seen such things on the front of locomotives in his history lessons. It was both funny and sad to him that what once was used to move cows out of the way was now used to move people. The juxtaposition of cows and humans being coldly pushed out of the way brought memories of Zigmund’s father, Cal.
“Damned overpops,” Zig’s father used to say. “Here we are with the country running out of resources, and those morons refuse to stop breeding. Sometimes I wonder whether they have brains at all. If they do, they don’t use the damned things.”
Zigmund sighed at the memory and then looked over at his sister with sympathetic sadness. Zerah was holding a caramel chew bar, but it was debatable as to whether she was eating it. Its wrapper was peeled back, but Zerah seemed to be holding the candy for comfort more than taking pleasure from eating the sweet. Zigmund’s sympathy vanished only to be replaced by frustration, and he frowned at Zerah. This was why the other girls at school gave her such a hard time.
Zerah was pudgy and liked carrying snacks around with her as if she were a baby carrying a stuffed animal. Zigmund wanted to slap the damned bar out of her hand and tell his sister to stop being such an easy target. But he would never do that to her. He loved her, and right now he felt as bad for her as he had ever felt for anyone. He turned and looked out of the tinted window of the transfer vehicle, into the gray Washington sky, and tried to forget everything that had happened to them over the past few months.
“One last wall,” the driver called back to the siblings. “Then we’ll be in Island County, owned by Nuevobright. You kids know Nuevobright is responsible for the technology used to create the ether screens in the rear-seat consoles, right?” Neither of the twins responded. They did know about the technology, but they both resented being called kids, and each decided to exhibit protest silently. The driver was unfazed and continued talking. “The order says your uncle’s property is right along the coast. Too bad it’s such a gray day, or the two of you might’ve enjoyed a swim in the ocean.” The man rubbed the pinkish skin of his bald head. “I used to be a fair swimmer.”
“Maybe I don’t like the ocean,” Zerah muttered, her candy bar held just inches below her mouth, like a microphone. No one replied to her comment. She hadn’t even really intended for anyone to hear her.
The expanse of the ocean was a foreign concept to Zerah and just another thing to feel uneasy about. The Aschburners had lived in Placer County, California, owned by Saint Crown Medicine. They had lived along the Eldorado National Forest, and those tall trees had been some of Zerah’s best friends. She found the green canopy comforting and safe. Leaving that forest, her home, and Placer County altogether wasn’t something she wanted to do, but she didn’t have any say in the matter. The twins were only fourteen years old. Even they understood they couldn’t be allowed to live alone.
Zerah watched the towering concrete wall get closer and closer beyond the vehicle’s windshield. The wall met the horizon to both the left and the right, obviously surrounding the entire county. It didn’t matter to Zerah that this was the last wall she and her brother would have to pass through. Each wall they had passed gave them the impression of entering a new universe, and now there were so many universes between them and Placer County that it didn’t really matter. She couldn’t find any pleasure in knowing the trip was almost through.
Zerah laughed sullenly in her mind. She had never looked at the county walls as anything other than scenery. They were just something that was. No different from the sky or the ground. She never thought about how the entire country had three-hundred-foot concrete walls separating every single county, separating the rich from the middle class and the middle class from the poor. She never thought about how those walls sometimes separated family members. She didn’t constantly wonder how the five major corporations of the United States (Arcadian Enterprises, Saint Crown Medicine, Nuevobright Technologies, Grace & Verdant Energy Co., and Gilded Financial) each owned different counties across the country and how each one felt like its own world altogether. She had taken so many things for granted when she and her family were tucked away in the tranquility of Placer County. But now, traveling through these different counties made everything seem so cold and so unfeeling.
“It’s a sad thing about your parents,” the driver said, obviously unaware the twins were not in the mood for conversation. “I suppose the silver lining is you’ve got a good uncle to take you in. Someone you’re familiar with.”
“We’ve never even met him,” Zigmund said bitterly.
“Sorry,” the driver said and cringed. After that he finally decided to keep conversation to a minimum.
Zigmund stole another glance at his sister and saw her bottom lip was slightly trembling. Tears were welling in her brown eyes. Zerah was taking the loss of their parents much harder than Zigmund was, and he knew bringing up the fact that they were now going to live with a man they had never had so much as a conversation with was not making it easier for her. He extended his arm and placed his hand on top of his sister’s.
“I’m sorry, Zip,” Zigmund said, trying to make his sister smile by using her childhood nickname. “I didn’t mean to make it sound so dark. Uncle Rainart is family. He’s Mom’s brother. He’s bound to be something like her. This isn’t gonna be bad.”
“But Ziggy,” Zerah protested, “Dad never liked him. I’ve heard Dad call Uncle Rainart nasty names a hundred times when he didn’t know I was listening. Dad said he was never there for Mom and he didn’t deserve anybody’s respect.”
“That was just Dad being Dad,” Zigmund said with a crooked smile. Then he turned back to the window. “You know Dad was hard on everybody.”
Growing up under Cal Aschburner hadn’t been the easiest thing for Zigmund. A two-sport all-American with a PhD in nuclear medicine casts a pretty-big shadow, especially for a fourteen-year-old boy with acne and the inability to grow taller than five feet four. Zigmund had always been involved with sports as a child. His father had made sure of that. But as Zig became an adolescent and had to prove his worth to be chosen for a team, things went downhill rapidly. Zigmund never made any team he tried out for, and having his six-foot-four father there to see him fail couldn’t help but intensify the sting. Especially when Cal’s idea of support was to point out the areas where Zigmund could have tried harder.
“Well, you didn’t exactly practice very hard,” Cal had said to his son.
“So sports aren’t his thing,” Zigmund’s mother, Adeline, had said in his defense. “No big deal.”
But Adeline Aschburner hadn’t understood that saying, “So sports aren’t his thing,” about a teenaged boy might as well be saying, “So he’s worthless.” Zigmund realized his mother didn’t mean it that way, but that was the way it felt to him. Being bad at sports meant being less popular with girls, it meant being less popular with other boys, and it meant being forced to hope for success in academics, which meant never being popular with anyone.
Zigmund might have been only fourteen, but he wasn’t stupid. He saw how people regarded his parents, and other kids’ parents, for that matter. No one cared that his mother had been a caring, intelligent woman who worked at a preschool. They cared that she was an attractive woman who seemingly made a good wife. As for Zigmund’s father, the man had been an abrasive asshole. That wasn’t what mattered, though. He had been physically endowed and made an enviable amount of money, so he was respected and even liked. Even if some didn’t like Cal, it didn’t matter, because people acted as if they liked him, so what was the difference?
Zigmund knew his father never had to deal with the pressures he and Zerah dealt with. He knew life had come easy for his father. He had been tall, muscular, and good looking. Zig wondered how the hell he himself had missed out on every one of those traits. He wondered how the hell his parents had been such fortunate, good-looking people and he was just ugly little Ziggy and his sister just fat little Zerah. Sometimes he wondered whether they had been adopted from the overpops.
No. Don’t think like that, he thought. Stop being so negative. They were your parents, and you loved them.
Then why didn’t you even cry at their funeral? a second, more sinister voice in his head questioned.
Shut up, Zigmund told himself.
They were now approaching the wall, and massive concrete doors were slowly shifting to let them pass. Moving from one rich county to another rich county, as they were doing now, was simple. Even moving from a middle-class county to another was easy. It was moving into or out of a poor county that was difficult and dangerous. The Saint Crown driver had avoided the poor counties as much as he could during their trip; however, they were forced to travel through one poor county. The experience had been shocking to Zigmund and Zerah, and a little scary. They had certainly heard of the overpopulation happening in the poor counties, the crowded buildings, the masses of people in the streets, fighting one another for food, space, or anything of value. It was these poor, uneducated people Zig’s father and others referred to as overpops. But seeing these people—and more importantly, being a target of their wrath—had been jarring. The driver had activated the transfer vehicle’s electroarmor so no one could assault the vehicle as it passed, and it had been a good thing he did. Filthy people in tattered clothing were cursing at them as they passed and throwing anything they could get their hands on. The vast amount of people surrounding the vehicle had been startling. It was as if they were part of a parade. Most of the overpops got out of the way as the vehicle approached, but the vehicle had to move at a much slower speed in the poor county so as not to injure people, and a couple of times, the cowcatcher actually had to be used to push some overpops out of the way.
When the vehicle had finally reached the wall to leave the poor county, no massive door opened for them in welcome as it did now. The vehicle had had to come to a full stop and was subjected to artillery scanning. Then a warning alarm blared, and from giant speakers came instructions for any pedestrians within one hundred feet to exit the passage area immediately. Most people obeyed, obviously knowing what would happen if they didn’t, but one man refused to move from the passage area. Zigmund remembered watching him stare at the speakers on the wall. He spit on the ground and made a rude gesture; then a bullet took him in the chest, and he fell to the ground. Zigmund would never forget that man, his tattered clothes, the sore on his arm, his matted hair, or the look on his face. The man was defiant in the face of death. Zigmund wouldn’t admit it, but it terrified him. At that point the doors opened for their vehicle, and the driver had pulled forward into a holding bay. Afterward, the massive concrete door closed behind them.
In the holding bay, inside the thick concrete wall, they had to exit the vehicle, give their identification, and undergo a round of body scans to ensure they weren’t carrying contraband or weapons. The officers conducting the search were rude, hardened people who seemed bitter and put out to have to be doing their jobs. The whole process had been terrible, and when it was finally over, the twins were both relieved. They were allowed to pass through to the other side of the wall, into a middle-class county, and it felt like coming to the surface of a pool to gasp fresh air. The whole process of passing through the poor county hadn’t taken thirty minutes, but it had felt like hours. The driver told them they wouldn’t need to do that again. He had apologized and said he should have taken a longer route so they could have avoided going that way. The twins had remained silent. It was at least another ten minutes before the shock had worn off.
Now, they sat in the holding bay of the wall that separated Snohomish County from Island County, two rich counties in Washington State, and a happy older gentleman was smiling and welcoming them, politely asking to see their identification. Zigmund and Zerah looked at each other and knew they were each thinking the same thing: thank God their uncle lived in a rich county.
As the Saint Crown transfer vehicle continued on its path, away from the three-hundred-foot wall, the trees on either side of the road seemed to get closer and taller, coming up to the road so it looked as if the car was about to drive through a forest.
“I thought you said our uncle lived by the ocean,” Zigmund said to the driver. “Are you sure we’re in the right county?”
“That’s what the navigator is telling me” was the driver’s answer. “It looks as if he’s up on a cliff that overlooks a small cove. We have to go across the island. You two, don’t worry yourselves. I promise that was the last wall we’ll be going through.” The driver paused, still feeling guilty about what the teens had seen in the poor county. “Is this the first time you two have ever left Placer County?”
“Yes,” Zerah and Zigmund answered in total sync.
“It’s funny,” the driver continued. “Those walls seem so ominous and depressing, but the two of you are too young to remember what it was like before they went up. It has been almost twenty-five years, and life is better now. At least in my opinion it is. Before, it didn’t matter what county you lived in, rich or poor. Life was dangerous. I was mugged ten times through my twenties by poor people looking for anything. They’d never even ask whether I was willing to give something up freely before they attacked. One time they took every bit of clothing I was wearing. It was easily the worst, most embarrassing day of my entire life. You two probably think this old dome of mine can’t grow hair anymore.” The driver pointed at his head and looked at the twins in the rearview mirror. “I shave it by choice. One time I got mugged, and one of those bastards hit me on the right side of my head with a wooden club. I haven’t been able to grow hair in that spot ever since. I got tired of answering the questions about the bald spot, so I just started shaving the whole damned thing.” The driver sighed.
“But then the walls went up, and that stuff doesn’t happen anymore. Well, not as often. People are still unhappy, don’t get me wrong, but now there’s security for some of us. I know how bad it looks in the poor counties, but at least those damned overpops can’t harm the rest of us anymore. I’ll gladly sacrifice a little freedom for security, and you kids should consider yourselves lucky. I know I do.”
After five minutes driving among the trees, the vehicle finally slowed and pulled up along a tall steel gate that barred a narrow driveway. Zigmund looked up the driveway as it continued uphill until he saw a large and blocky building at the top of the hill.
The driver whistled softly before saying, “Man, that’s a weird-looking house.”
He lowered his window and stretched his arm out so he could reach a square red button on the face of an antiquated intercom box. The man pressed the button and waited for a voice.
The wait seemed abnormally long, and Zerah fidgeted in her seat. She loved being surrounded by trees, but it wasn’t enough to comfort her in this moment. Life was changing too fast, and she had lost so much so quickly. She now sat in front of a place she would be calling home, but she knew it wasn’t. Home wasn’t something that just manifested spontaneously. It had to be earned; it had to grow. Then a more sullen thought struck her. She and Zigmund no longer had a home, not in the important sense of the word.
The intercom buzzed, and a gruff voice asked, “What?”
“Saint Crown transport from Placer County, California, sir. I’ve got—” The driver slapped his hand down on the passenger seat and snapped up a piece of paper. He looked it over quickly and robotically read the Aschburners’ names. “Zig-mund and Zeee-rah. If you open the gate, I can drive them up.”
“They’ve got legs, haven’t they?” the voice from the intercom asked.
The driver frowned, and before he could reply, the black steel gate opened. The driver turned to Zerah and Zigmund and shrugged. Once the gate had opened about four feet wide, it stopped. It was more than obvious now that the two teenagers were expected to walk up the driveway, toting their bags behind them. The driver swung his door open and jumped out of the transport vehicle. He headed to the back and pulled the teens’ bags out of the trunk.
“Why do you think we couldn’t drive up the driveway?” Zerah asked Zigmund in a hushed tone.
Zigmund just shrugged and opened his own door to exit the vehicle. It was becoming increasingly apparent that all their assumptions might as well be cast aside.
Once outside of the vehicle, both Zerah and Zigmund took their luggage from the driver. The teens thanked the man, and he quickly waved good-bye. The Saint Crown transport departed, and Zigmund and Zerah were left standing alone among the tall trees at the bottom of the long driveway.
“This sucks, Ziggy.” Zerah’s mood was souring by the minute.
As they stood at the black steel gate, under the dank gray sky, with all their possessions at their sides, it was hard to find a ray of hope. Especially as the man they would be living with had just greeted them as if they were peddling door-to-door religion. Zigmund didn’t know what to say to his sister in this moment. Things were bad, and he couldn’t muster the energy to lie and feed her some corny line about everything working out in the end. He was having a hard-enough time keeping his own spirit buoyed.
“Yeah, it does suck,” Zigmund replied. “So just deal with it, Zip.” In that moment of weakness, it was Zigmund’s father, Cal, who was talking through him. He knew it as soon as the words came out of his mouth, and it made him even angrier at the situation, at Zerah, and at himself. “Let’s go,” he added.
The teens squeezed through the gate with their luggage and trudged up the hill toward the blocky home that loomed above. At about twenty yards past the gate, they heard the hum of a small motor and looked back to see the black gate closing behind them.
“What, he can watch us, but he can’t help?” Zerah asked incredulously. She had one bag hanging over her shoulder, and she tugged at a larger rolling piece of luggage that followed behind.
“Would you stop it?” Zigmund said, getting more annoyed by the minute. “Things are different now. You need to get tougher. You need to stop complaining.”
“You don’t have to be such a jerk about it,” Zerah muttered under her breath.
Zigmund pretended he didn’t hear her.
As the teens walked on, they noticed the house in far more detail. There were three sections to the home, each a different-sized rectangle. Two of the rectangles sat next to each other, one taller than the other, like a mother holding hands with her child. The third rectangle was shorter still and came out toward the driveway from where the mother’s legs would be. It was a simply designed home, but there was nothing normal about it. From the vantage point of the teens, there wasn’t a single window on the home, but cameras could be seen oscillating slowly at the corners of the flat roof. The outer walls were flat, no siding or stucco. Instead, different shades of wood panels were laid so the walls looked like parquet flooring. The twins could see no doors, but the smallest section of the house had an inset wall that looked like a garage door. Halfway up the driveway now, Zigmund and Zerah headed for that wall, assuming it would be where they could enter the house.
Zerah laughed to herself. This isn’t a house. It looks more like a maximum-security prison for forest rangers. The thought improved her mood slightly, and she decided to continue the game. Or maybe it’s a museum for modernist wood sculptures. Or maybe it’s a compound for some cult that worships bears and pine needles. This last thought came a little too close to being possible for Zerah, and she tried to extinguish the idea that her uncle might be part of some strange religious cult.
The sky was darkening, and the twins assumed the sun was setting behind the wall of gray clouds, or as Adeline Aschburner had used to say, evening was calling the sun home for dinner. Zigmund looked at the Arcadian Loop on his wrist to see it was a little past seven o’clock. He thought that confirmed evening as the cause for the darkening sky, but just as he took his eyes away from the gadget on his wrist, a loud clap of thunder promised another culprit.
The twins were now close to what they assumed was the garage door. Zerah dropped her bags and walked to the wall, looking for anything resembling a com-screen, speaker, pressure sensor, anything at all. She found nothing, so she knocked on the wall and called out.
“Uncle Rainart, would you open the door?”
“I will when you find it,” a disembodied voice boomed from some clandestine speaker. “Come around to the other side of the house. You’ll see the stairs.”
Zerah turned around and looked at Zigmund, who rolled his eyes, mirroring her frustration. The girl’s shoulders dropped in defeat; then she picked up her bags off of the paved driveway, and the twins walked around the left side of the house, away from what they had thought was a garage. Just as they came around the corner of the house, the skies laughed derisively with rolling thunder, and then the rain came down hard.
The teens looked at each other with furrowed brows that were quickly dripping with the wetness of a north Pacific storm. At least they still had each other. That was what both Zerah and Zigmund were thinking in that moment, and both children were aware their twin was holding on to that same thought. People had always told them twins possessed strange connections with each other. Even some of their schoolteachers had regarded them as some mystical force when they were together. Mysticism seemed absurd to the twins, but they couldn’t argue that they weren’t connected in ways other siblings weren’t. They just shared more. It was unspoken and innate. As they walked around the house in the rain, they were sharing one of those twin moments, and they needed it now, more than ever.
The back half of the great house revealed itself, and it was in such stark contrast to the front that it gave the impression of being a completely different structure. Zigmund turned back and looked down the driveway. A seemingly large forest stretched into the distance. It was a view both earthly and familiar to him. When he turned away from it again, it felt like leaving a friend. He and his sister now stood at the edge of a cliff, and forty feet below the sheer rock face was the raging ocean. The skies over the sea were black, and lightning flickered out over the expanse. The rumbling thunder and the crashing waves were now competing for auditory attention. The twins tore their eyes away from the tussle of rain and waves and looked to the right. A large staircase hugged a flat wall of glass and metal. From this side the house reflected the storm like a strobe light, flashing an instant reflection to every strike of lightning. There was not much land between the stairs and the cliff’s edge. It seemed like a hellish task to have to ascend them in the rain and gathering dark. Visions of falling to their deaths, their bodies being dashed against the black rocks far below, flitted through the minds of the two teens. They looked at each other for solidarity once more and climbed the stairs cautiously.
The wind assaulted them, and they wished they could shield their eyes as they dragged their bags up the stairs. What fool of a man has the door to his home at the back of his house, twenty feet up a staircase that overlooks a cliff? Zigmund thought. He kept his gaze away from the drop, instead looking at the great glass wall to the right side of the staircase. While there were no windows at the front of the home, it seemed the entire back side was nothing but windows. However, Zigmund and Zerah couldn’t see through any of them. It was as if there were no lights on inside the house at all. They could see nothing but obsidian, shimmering with wetness, intermittently reflecting the anger of the storm.
When they finally reached the top of the staircase, Zerah pounded the metal door in front of her. She and her brother were soaked through. Zerah only hoped their luggage had resisted the water better than their clothing. Zigmund looked out over the ocean and then down the side of the cliff. He immediately regretted his decision as the dizziness of vertigo threatened to topple him. He dropped his bags and reached back for his sister, hoping to grab her shoulder for stability. In his wobbly state, he fell back against her harder than he had intended to. The door Zerah had been knocking on opened suddenly, and Zigmund knocked his sister over, both teens stumbling and falling through the door and onto a red rug inside the house.
They wiped the water out of their eyes and looked up to see their uncle’s dark eyes and coal-black moustache towering over them. The man sniffled and walked outside to grab the dropped luggage. He threw it inside the house and then walked back in, slamming the door shut behind him.
“Down the hall and to the left are two guest rooms that will now be your bedrooms,” he said, wiping the rain from his hardened face. “I don’t care which of you takes which one. After you’ve found your rooms and changed your clothes, I’ll expect you downstairs in the dining room for dinner. I’ve already started without you.”
The twins watched the tall man walk away from them and descend a staircase to the right. He moved with a noticeable limp in his right leg but didn’t seem to let it impede his pace.
“At least there’s food,” Zerah mumbled to Zigmund. The teens were still entangled on the floor.
“And another thing.” The gruff voice of their uncle came from the stairs. “I don’t serve meat in this house, and I don’t want to hear complaints about it.”
Zerah grimaced and let her head fall limply against the floor.
“I should’ve pulled us over the cliff,” Zigmund said, shaking his head.
