The Queen Trials, page 7
I hear it on my next exhale. The whirring sound of about four hundred small propellers beating furiously. Each drone flies with two forward propellers for maneuverability and two rear propellers for thrust, and roughly one hundred of them are zipping this way now.
I keep my eyes open as long as I can, slamming them shut when the first drone flies in the open door.
I listen hard while continuing my breathing. The drone flies past me, followed by another, another, another and another.
They must be positioning the drones from the back of the transport and then moving forward. I don’t hear any sounds of awakening women, though. They’re going to position the drones and then spray us all at the same time, I’m sure of it.
There are almost a hundred women in this carrier. How many drones did I hear fly past? I make a guesstimate at ten. I breathe and count, knowing that there is very little room for error. I’m on twenty-one when a drone stops in front of me. I feel its propeller breeze against my face.
My expression remains impassive. I continue to breathe, hoping that my controlled breathing is mistaken for the deep breath of the dead asleep.
When I get to ninety drones I’ll stop, I promise myself.
I count along. Eighty-seven, eighty-eight… I’m just finishing my extra inhale when I hear a loud click, like a lever being pulled back. More drones must have passed by than I realized before I started intentionally counting. I hold my breath and stay as still as a rock formation. A second later, with a hiss, a stream of wet mist coats my face.
I stay cold and silent, my bloodstream full and buzzing with oxygen, my overinflated lungs crying out to release some of the pressure.
Slowly, I do, letting air leak out through my nose. One, two, three, four, five, I count, and then – bedlam.
CHAPTER 8
All around me, female voices cry out. “Where am I? What’s happening? Who are you? Why am I here?” Variations on that theme reverberate around the metal shipping container we’re all packed into.
I almost sit up, but then I realize that no one else has risen yet. Instead, all the bodies around me twitch and wriggle, like they’re being zapped with low voltage electricity. Maybe they are… Perhaps that’s a component of how the spray works. That spray is lodged in the lungs of every woman on this transport now. Every woman but me.
Though I’m still holding my breath, I force my body to mimic some of the movement I see around me, in case I’m being filmed or watched, which, let’s face it, I probably have to assume I am from here on out.
I do not cry out or prattle random questions the way everyone else is. I don’t open my mouth at all. I hope that in the confusion, that little detail gets lost. The more poisoned air these other women suck into their lungs while they babble, the more clean air there should be for me when I finally have to breathe again, right?
One of the women near the open door rises to standing, then another one, also near the open door, makes it to her feet. They must be getting more fresh air over there.
I could not be the first person on her feet, but my lungs are screaming at me now, so despite my position closer to the rear of the transport, I rise to my feet and walk jerkily toward the exit door.
I don’t have to fake my unsteady gait. My legs feel weak and I trip over the women who mostly still lie on their sides. I seem to have trouble lifting my feet high enough to make it over their thin frames without catching the toes of my boots on their bony hips and elbows. I am not winning any friends with this routine, but I can’t worry about that now. I must get to fresh air and – oh my god – rain!
I see droplets pelting down from the sky outside the open door. I’m sure I would hear it on the metal roof if nearly one hundred women were not yelling who, what, when, where, and why questions at the tops of their lungs.
The first two women to their feet appear to have the same idea I do. They’re making their way to the door on shaky legs. I’m the fastest. I make it to the open door first. I see a rolling staircase a few dozen yards away. I’m sure Lorenda and Jessie must have used that to climb into our transport and then removed it.
I don’t care. We’re not that high up – I can jump.
And I do. I jump out of that box without another thought.
My legs are too weak to support my weight when I land, and they buckle underneath me. Again, I don’t care.
I tip my face into the rain and let it shower over me. I sluice my hands across my face, focusing on my nose and mouth, wiping away the blood, grime, and the thin, sticky residue of the two different chemicals that have been sprayed in my face since I moved into this stage of the Queen Trials.
Finally, with tiny black spots blooming before my eyes, I tilt my head down, open my mouth, and take a rasping, ragged breath in, sucking in desperately needed oxygen. My head swims as my body struggles to recover.
I hear scuffing, thudding sounds as other women make the same leap I did. They’re all still talking, though, and I finally realize I have to join in the clamor.
“Where are we?” I ask no one. “Why is it raining?”
I wipe my hand across my lips and open my mouth to come up with some new inane phrases, when a shrieking whistle pierces the air, stopping everything and everyone in their tracks.
I throw my hands over my ears. It feels like the noise being directed at us is specifically designed to make our brains bleed.
And maybe it is, because when I raise my head and look up, there’s a line of nine people approaching us in a W formation. They’re all wearing large, earmuff-style headphones that must be hearing protection because they march forward as if completely unaffected by the noise. The four people on either end of the forward end of the W formation point devices at us, triggers squeezed. Nothing obviously shoots, bubbles, or spurts out of the ends of their gun-like instruments, so I have to believe that’s where the awful sound is coming from.
The other five people in the group walk behind them, forming the smaller point of the W. They come to a stop about thirty feet away from us and spread out into a straight line. The woman who stands at the very center of the line moves her mouth. I can’t hear her over the shrieking noise, but I have excellent vision and I’m a very good lip reader.
She glances to her left and right as she talks, so I don’t pick up every single word she says. My mind has to fill in a few of the blanks. “Cut the camera feed right now,” she orders. “I don’t want any of this footage making it to primetime. What the hell happened?”
I’m watching her closely, but I flick my eyes around at the group to see if I can pick up on the answer. No one else’s lips move, but she pauses as if in conversation with someone. Maybe her hearing protection is also a two-way communicator?
Her expression sours. “I know a few of them always metabolize and recover faster, but this is ridiculous,” she responds after a moment. “They’re flinging themselves out of the cattle car like fish flopping around on the deck of a trawler. Somebody screwed up. Check the dosing. But for the love of god, cut those cameras and destroy that footage or we’ll look like incompetent fools.”
I don’t know what a cattle car or a trawler is, but I understand the rest of it. This woman is in charge, and she is pissed.
The woman puts her hands on her hips and surveys us. Her nose goes through about five different stages of wrinkled disgust. Finally, she flicks her eyes to the heavens, shakes her head, and issues an order. “Cut the warble.”
The four people standing at each end of the line relax their trigger fingers and let their devices fall to their sides. The brain melting sound stops abruptly, leaving behind a ringing in my ears.
I hear cries, questions, and more thuds behind me. I know that last noise must be women jumping out of what the woman in charge just called a “cattle car.”
“Women of Locality Fourteen!” the woman leader snaps, and this time, I’m not reading her lips. Her voice travels to us in a voice that must be amplified, though I don’t know how. “Halt yourselves this instant.”
I hear one more thud – some last person must have fallen or been pushed out of the transport – but that’s it. Everyone cuts their voices so the questions stop too, though I still hear the sniffling sounds of women crying behind me.
The woman from the center of the line moves about ten feet closer to us, flanked on either side by the four other people who formed the center of the W, though they hang back a step or two like good minions.
“I’m sure you have questions,” the woman says in a fake sweet voice. Her tone hardens. “And I don’t care. I’ll tell you what you need to know. My name is Emelda Lobos, and you are Rookies. I am in charge of all of you now. And you will control yourselves.”
The rain continues to fall all around us, forming muddy puddles in the dirt, and now I notice that where Emelda and her people stand, it’s paved.
I’ve never seen pavement in real life, only on the Maxscreen, so it didn’t register before, but they’ve been walking on, and are standing on, a real paved road. I look past them. That road stretches out into the distance and is dotted on either side by cinderblock buildings in a variety of sizes. A couple of them are small, most are medium sized, and one is enormous.
The road climbs a hill and disappears. I don’t know what’s on the other side, but I’m sure it doesn’t end in a cliff at the edge of the world, because curls of smoke coil up from beyond my visible field.
“Stand up straight, all of you,” Emelda Lobos snaps, pulling my attention back to her. “And line up. If you’d behaved yourselves, you would have come out tallest to shortest and we could have begun your processing in an orderly fashion, but…” She seems to think better of airing her complaints out loud and instead snaps her fingers at the four people who hang back, the ones with the noise guns. “Get them into line. I want oldest to youngest as best as possible, so arrange them according to height.”
It appears this woman has no idea how things work in the real world. She’s not going to get us in age order this way. What she’s going to end up with is the women and girls of surface support, the ones who get more sunlight and typically – though not always – better nutrition than those of us who chip away in the mines.
But I’m not going to be the one to tell her that. Emelda Lobos does not seem like the type of person who would ask for or appreciate helpful tips from…what did she call us? Rookies?
I think of the people who arrange us now as “the gunslingers” and the rest of them as “the minions.” The gunslingers work together to line up those of us who are already outside by height. I end up somewhere in the middle. The minions, at Emelda’s direction, push the rolling staircase over to the cattle car.
I don’t want to draw attention to myself, and the other women are twisting and turning to look all around, so I do too. The minions enter the cattle car and begin to bring women out one by one, sorting them into the line that the gunslingers have formed already. Where is Snow? She’ll be in the back of the line; she’s both young and tiny. I wish that she were somewhere near me. I wish I could whisper to her that she’s been sprayed with a truth serum. I don’t know what they plan on asking us that’s so important that they’d drug us over it, but maybe they just play fast and loose with their drugs. If they’d asked us to load into the cattle car, we would have. I mean, we already volunteered to be here. But no, instead, they gassed us and loaded us in unconscious. This might just be a thing for them, something they do without even thinking about it.
But if they ask Snow questions about her engagement to Shellor, and she answers honestly, what will happen? Will she tell them she’d never even heard of my brother before he claimed her today? Will she get in trouble? Will he? I was the one who started that whole thing. What will happen to me if she spills the truth?
Maybe they won’t even ask her. I’m sure they plan to question us. Why else would they spray us with something designed to pry the truth out of our mouths, whether we want to share it or not? But maybe it’s not about something as trivial as whether we really had a relationship with the male who gave us away. Maybe they’re digging for something dirtier. Maybe it’s an attempt to root out the resistance.
Oh my god. My knees tremble, and I have to make a special effort to keep my spine straight and my face devoid of expression. I try to never even think the word “resistance,” not after Magrar was dragged away so viciously in the middle of the night. I’m not a part of any of that. But I know Magrar was, although he was scrupulous about keeping us away and shielded from any of those activities.
And he must have been very successful at that. Otherwise, Shellor and I would have been removed as well. Usually, it’s whole families that disappear overnight. If they’d had any evidence to take us, I’m sure they would have.
Then again, how much do they care about evidence? I have to imagine that the answer is “not much.” Maybe Shellor and I were left behind for a combination of reasons. We both have excellent numbers in the mines. And someone has to be left behind, to spread the warning to others. You don’t mess around with the Rotunda.
Emelda observes the lining up process from her spot on the pavement, her hands on her hips. The rain dampens her clothing, but her ash-blonde hair remains perfect in its coif. She touches her ear as though receiving a message. She lifts her chin. “All right, rookies. Straighten up. Eyes on me.”
I’m sure that it doesn’t take any of the women standing in this line more than a half second to obey, but Emelda pauses for dramatic effect, letting the silence stretch out as the rain intensifies. It feels so good to be drenched. She could stand there staring at us until night fell and I wouldn’t care. I doubt she realizes how rare and special rain is. Something tells me that if she knew, she’d hustle us inside as quickly as possible.
“You are about to begin stage two of The Queen Trials,” she announces. “Odds are, you will not proceed past this round. There are no quotas. If you pass, you pass, but historically, ninety percent of our rookies will not.” Her upper lip curls. “Though some localities have better stats than others.” Emelda’s voice is a weird mix of grandeur and boredom. I get the sense that she’s reverential about her role in the Queen Trials but disgusted by us, as a group. I wonder if there are other Emeldas somewhere else, greeting women from other localities…women with better prospects and more potential. Hmm. Probably.
Nine years ago, one hundred percent of our rookies did not make it through Round Two, and I’m sure Emelda is well aware of that fact. I wonder how many made it during the prior Queen Trials? That would have been…nineteen or twenty years ago? I would have been a toddler and I don’t remember it at all. Though they still show footage from those Trials, of course, they never delve into those kinds of stats. And I never cared before now.
Emelda keeps talking. “The woman who will wed King Ergondy must possess many skills and attributes, some of which I’m sure you’re aware, others which will become known to you, should you progress. But the most important quality that you must know at this stage in the process is discretion. You will very likely return home after today. We will be watching and listening.” Her voice grows cold and deadly. “And if you speak of this, to anyone, you will be arrested.” She holds up a finger. “But not executed. No. You will be held while we round up your families, your neighbors, and every person you’ve ever loved. We will then connect you via a two-way video monitor while we tell them what you did to sign their death warrants, and then we will execute them one by one. After that, we’ll hold you for the rest of your life, giving you just enough nutrition to keep you alive while you think about what you’ve done.” She smiles, her teeth flashing. “Are there any questions?”
Not surprisingly, there are none.
After a few heavy moments, Emelda throws back her head and raises her hands in the air. “Welcome to the Rotunda.”
The camera drones fly back in – I must have missed it when she gave the order for them to return, or maybe that was the order.
Emelda and her crew of minions all turn as one and begin walking on the paved road toward the enormous building. Two of the gunslingers position themselves at the front of our line, and I assume the other two are in the back. Nobody needs to be told what to do next as the gunslingers begin to walk. It’s obvious we are supposed to follow along in a docile line, and we do.
The camera drones buzz all around us, swooping in for close-up shots then pulling back to get wider views. I remember seeing this type of footage from the last Queen Trials, as the women – the rookies, I guess we’re called – were led to…somewhere. The cameras have never shown that part.
I wonder if this footage is being streamed live, but I doubt it. Only the battles seem to be aired live and unedited and even then, I can’t be sure they aren’t altered somehow.
When we reach the giant building, I’m surprised by the standard size of the door. The door of the cattle car that we all spilled out of a few minutes ago was at least four times the size of the entrance to this place. I expected something, I don’t know, grander for a building this large.
The building sits on a bit of a hill, so I can watch as the camera drones stop at the entrance to the building and Emelda and her minions walk through, followed by the first women in line. I walk up the hill, trying my best not to trudge, but my legs are so tired, and my knees are sore from where I landed on them jumping from the cattle car.
But I don’t want those cameras to catch me looking weak, and a cluster of them hovers outside the door, while others zip up and down our line, making sure to catch every nuance of this journey, since they will be starved for footage after this, at least until they determine which girls and women will go home and which ones will stay.
I’m sure that’s what’s about to happen next. But what is the process?
I draw closer to the door where the cameras focus in on each woman’s face as she passes. It’s almost my turn. How do I want to present myself? Humble? Awed? Haughty? Confident? Proud? How have the other queens carried themselves? I can’t remember – I paid so little attention to any of them. But who is my real audience? The people back in the localities, or the upper class of the Rotunda? I think I know.
