Tunnel Walls

Chapter Three

“Hey,” her now almost familiar voice yanks me out of sleep. “I brought you something to eat.” Artie places a plate with some unknown food on it near my bed and sits down on the floor and I drag myself out from under the blanket and pull my T-shirt down to cover the scar across my chest. I don’t want her to see that. Slowly, I place my bare feet on the cold stone floor and walk over to her. When I take a bit of the food, now cold but I expect it’s meant to be served hot, the tastes in my mouth are like nothing I have had before. I’ve become so used to the food at home that this triangular shaped thing is almost exotic. Every week the same tasteless food was delivered to our door; my mother said it was something about equality, as if that was an achievable concept. This new food, the stuff that Artie has given me, it’s so different. “I let you sleep while we went out, you looked like you needed a rest.” I smile in reply as I take another bite of the food, even cold it tastes delicious. “Take this.” She carefully puts a dark grey v-neck T-shirt on the ground before gracefully standing, holding her own slice of the food which she then tells me is called “pizza, if you were wondering. It’s good, right?” She starts to walk towards to door not waiting for my reply, “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she then turns around to look at me again, “get dressed.” Her brown hair flutters around her back, not tied up as it was before and not cut in the traditional way with Parker denoted for all girls and all women of this city. I swear everything here is ‘government-approved.’

After Artie came back, in the exact time she had said and after she had leant casually against the wall while I attempted to rein in my mess of hair, conversation sparked between the two of us.

“I promise I don’t usually look this bad.” I say sheepishly and then turn to face her, making sure my T-shirt is pulled down enough to cover my stomach.

“Surprisingly enough, Luca, your appearance isn’t my main concern, you know what with planning to overthrow the Government.” I guess I hadn’t really thought of this whole thing as ‘overthrowing the Government’ but that’s what it is in essence, that’s what we’re doing. “Come on, I wanna show you my lair.” Her lair?

Artie leads me into a room, small in some respects but God she has made the most of the space. In the centre is a large table, metal I think, with alien machines and equally confusing diagrams piled onto its cluttered surface. The light in here is a lot brighter and reflects off some of the more shiny objects in the room including a large device which I think, I might be wrong, is a microscope. I wonder what she uses it for. Sitting on the shelf on the far wall is pile of tangled wires, a multitude of colours, none of which are connected to anything, waiting to be brought to life with a shock of electricity

“Did you tidy up just for me?” The sarcasm is blatant in my tone but not abrasive.

“I actually did!” She replies with mock-horror, the smile returning to her face again. “What do you think?” Her eyes stare at me intently, expectantly.

“It’s amazing.” This time I am not being sarcastic, this is sincere. It really is incredible in here. “What is all this stuff?”

“Experiments and projects mainly. This is where I spend most of my time.” She runs her dainty hand delicately across the table-top, the one bit where there is no clutter. “I kinda suck at all the running and sadly I’m not very artistic.” She laughs, more to herself than anything else I think. “Ever since I’ve been here I’ve always been in charge of tech, the others are pretty strong and pretty pretty but none of them ever really got the tech side of things like I did. It’s a good thing though,” she looks up at me with happiness playing across her lips, pink, “it kinda makes me indispensable.”

I continue to let my eyes roam around the room, taking in every detail of it’s beautiful disorder and then it hits me. “Where are the books?” I must have let my genuine shock leak into my voice because she laughs at me. 

“You sound completely horrified, Luca. We don’t really have any books here. We used to, a while ago, we had some but they are so hard to get hold of.”

“I managed to get them.”

“Yeah but I’ve read all of them, we were looking for more interesting books and trust me the ones you can get don’t tell you a whole lot about anything important. I’m not saying they’re not good to read but we’re doing something bigger than that, Luca, we gotta make sacrifices and books are not worth the risk.” She turns her gaze back to the table and picks up a small metallic object which she then proceeds to throw to me. Surprisingly enough, I manage to catch it. It’s round and about half the size of my palm. There’s a groove in it’s side, which I only discover by tracing my thumb along the metal, where I assume it was connected together, the two halves. Before I can ask what it is and inquire as to what exactly the silver button in the centre, only visible when you slide down one of the pieces of metal, does Artie speaks again. “It’s a tracker. I thought you might find it useful if you ever join us on a trip out. Not that you’re going to get lost or hurt or whatever but, you know, I’d rather you were safe.”

“Does everyone have these?”

“Nah, we all have chips.” her pride blooms from her voice.

“Chips?” All these words that I’m sure are pretty basic in HQ, I’ve never heard of.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot you won’t know what those are.” She almost looks embarrassed at my own ignorance. “I invented this device that allows you to communicate with one other person, kind of like each chip has a partner chip. They only work over short distances and they’re not one hundred percent reliable but I”m working on it. They also have an inbuilt tracker which I can access from here at HQ.”

“That’s amazing.” My voice is so soft that I doubt she could have heard it over the gentle whirring which I’ve now become used to in the short amount of time I’ve been in the room but the grin on her face tells me otherwise.

“You gotta broaden your vocabulary Luca.” 

“How, you haven’t got any books.” I reply quickly with a lilt to my voice. Although I cannot believe that they don’t actually have any books here I think the people, the friends I can make, might just about make up for that.