*The following chapters are an advanced and unedited sneak peek of UNITY. Please disregard any errors you might spot. They’ll be annihilated before publication.
1
The Near Future
“Who did you leave behind?” the boy sitting across from me asks. When I offer no reply, as I’m prone to do, he asks a follow-up question, equally as nosey. “What did you bring?”
He seems like a nice kid. Kind, Asian eyes. Someone in the world we left behind adored him. Taught him to make conversation. So I acknowledge his presence for the first time in our thus-far, six-hour flight to who-knows-where. I hold up the weathered photo in my hand, the old-school printed-on-paper kind, and turn it around so he can see it.
“That’s it? A photo?”
“Family photo,” I tell him.
“You’re not in it,” he says. “How can it be a family photo, if you’re not in it?”
I wrap a single digit around the image and tap my mother’s slim stomach. She’s smiling, leaning back into my father, her long brown hair curling around her neck like a scarf, her blue eyes visible even from a distance, even though the photo is faded. My father’s muscular, tan arms are wrapped around her. A tropical beach in the background. “I was in there.”
“That’s…weird,” he says, lifting his Featherlight tablet, tapping it on and scrolling through an endless stream of photos with a flick of his finger. Family. Friends. Parents. Digital years pass by. “You could have brought more than one photo, you know. The limitation was set to a ‘single object weighing less than two pounds,’ but data is weightless. I have movies, books, music and—”
He stops when he looks at my eyes, devoid of emotion, locked on the still scrolling images of a life I never had. His finger stops swiping. The scrolling ends on a photo of the boy, leaping into a pool, not a care in the world.
“Sorry,” he says, somehow understanding that this photo in my hand is all that I have left of my family.
His sudden discomfort unnerves me. Not because I feel bad for him, but because his reaction means that I’m outwardly annoyed, and I don’t like people to know how I’m feeling. Emotions are messy, and I like my world neat and tidy. All fourteen psychologists who have evaluated me over the years came to the same stunning conclusion: ‘compartmentalization of emotions to avoid childhood trauma.’ Bonus points for the seven-syllable word, but it’s not really a revelation if it’s something I consciously try to do. The only time a psychologist really caught me off guard was three weeks ago, when she referred to my emotional compartmentalization as an ‘asset.’ I never got to ask why, though the following weeks of testing seemed designed to evaluate the limits of my ability to cope with trauma. And all without me cussing. Not once.
At the request of my most recent foster-mother, who is actually kind to me, despite my frosty exterior, I agreed to temper my language. My name is Euphemia Williams, and I’ve punched exactly seven people for calling me by that name, including my third foster-mother. I was just six at the time, but I still managed to draw blood. That was the first time I felt my own strength—I’m talking fortitude, not muscle—and I’ve been relying on it since. The name that anyone with a shred of sense uses to address me, is Effie. The three times I’ve been in a school long enough to earn a nickname, it’s been the same every time: ‘Eff-Bomb’—hence foster-mom’s request.
Unity was billed as a program for the gifted, but it’s closer to military basic training. In the three weeks that I’ve been here, I’ve barely spoken a word, let alone dropped my nickname’s namesake. So when the kid says, “You’re Eff-Bomb, right?” it’s like a perfectly aimed arrow through the chink in Smaug’s armor. A bark of a laugh escapes my lips, the sound waves spaghettifying as they’re pulled back into the black hole that has suddenly appeared at the back of my throat.
“Was that a hiccup or a laugh?” the boy asks.
I glance up, looking past the shock of orange-dye-tipped hair hanging over the left side of my face, and I meet his eyes. “Are you laughing?”
He is. Not loudly, but he’s having a hard time containing it. My instinct is to knock the smile off his face, but the kid, who can’t be older than twelve, wears adorability the way a turtle does a shell. It might protect him for another year, but when he hits puberty and his nose outgrows his face, he’s going to need a new survival strategy.
“Where did you hear that name?” I ask.
“Sig,” he says, sending a second arrow through the chink.
I met Sig during one of many loathsome events that make up my life. It was my first day at Brook Meadow, a school for kids who didn’t fit the rigid paradigm of modern educational institutions. The school was an unusual mix of troubled and brilliant kids, whose social skills lacked refinement or conformity. The school change was the result of being deported to a new foster home. My ninth in sixteen years. Day one in a new home, at a new school, I got in a fight, earning a ‘strike one’ suspension. When a boy grabs your butt, you introduce him to your knuckles. That’s a motto worth living by, I think. Except this boy had Asperger’s and a complete lack of impulse control, so no one but me blamed him. I tried to argue natural consequences, but his broken jaw spoke louder than my relatively few words.
I left the building in a storm, but didn’t go farther than the back of the gym; despite having a skateboard to ride, I didn’t know the way home. Sig approached with the silence of a mouse, surprising me as she sat down beside me and leaned against the warm, sunlit brick wall. Through the corner of my eye, I could see her slight grin and her radiant green irises, her hair tied back in a braid. She was just eleven then, half my size, barely noticeable. But then she did the unthinkable and leaned her head on my shoulder. That ounce of affection, from a girl whose name I didn’t yet know, undid me.
She’s the only person to have ever seen me cry. But she made up for that by introducing me to chocolate pudding, a snack I now consider one of my more indulgent vices.
Sig is one of the few people in the world I have ever called a friend. She’s now a thirteen-year-old savant who can recite the numbers of Pi until she runs out of breath or has to pee. She’s quiet because most people can’t understand what she says, though I seem to manage. I think of her as multilingual, her first language being numbers, and her second being computer code. English is a distant third, and a good portion of that focuses on space and its mysteries, a subject for which she’s given me a greater appreciation. I think she’s the only reason Brook Meadow didn’t kick me out. Without me, her ideas and her voice remain locked in her head. I thought that might even be the reason I was welcomed to—forced to go to—Unity. But upon our arrival, we were separated, and I haven’t seen her since.
That this boy knows her name and has communicated with Sig enough to 1) recognize me based on description, and 2) know my nickname, means that they are friends. And that means he’s safe. I lean forward. “Is she okay?”
He looks confused by the question. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
“She has a hard time talking to people.”
“Not us,” he says.
“Us, who?”
He holds up the back of his right hand, revealing a triangular tattoo—Unity’s logo. The sides and tip of the outlined triangle, which come to a point between the middle and index knuckles, are black. The band across the bottom is blue. The symbol marks him as a ‘Base.’ I’m not entirely certain what that means, but all of the kids I’ve met with the Base tattoo are stupid smart.
He motions to the Unity logo on my hand. The bottom and sides are black, but the top is red. “You’re a Point.”
I hold up my hand, inspecting the brand, which was applied in one quick, painful stamp. We all received them on Day One. I was told it was temporary, but it hasn’t faded yet. There are three stamps: Base, Point and Support—which has orange sides and a black bottom. No one ever said what they signify.
“Do you know what they’re for?” I ask.
“I think they’re based on personality,” he says, “rather than cognitive abilities.”
“Meaning what?”
The kid leans in close and whispers, like what he’s about to say might get him in trouble. I’m not sure why he’s bothering, since there aren’t any adults in the transport’s passenger seating. I’m assuming our pilots are in charge, but it’s only the two of us and eight other Unity students. “I haven’t seen many Points. Just a few. But from what Sig says, I think it means you’re a badass.”
He manages to get a second chuckle out of me, and I decide I like him. I extend my right hand toward him, making it official. “You know my name.”
“Really?” There’s a phrase for the kind of grin he has, but I really am trying to cut down on the four-letter words. According to my newest stand-in mother—her name is Judy—a vocabulary dependant on profanity, colorful and fun though it may be, is a sign of a ‘dull intellect.’ People can think I’m rude and standoffish all they want, but stupid? No bleeping way. Then again, research has shown that people who swear have higher IQs. Which I guess explains a lot. But I do like Judy, so I’m watching my language, for her. If the great orators of history, whom I admire, could use language in powerful ways, without cursing, so can I.
“Until I change my mind,” I tell him.
He takes my hand and gives it a firm shake. “Daniel. Daniel Chen.”
“Chinese?” I ask.
“Half. My father was born in America, though. My mother was white. Like yours.”
I’m about to ask him how he knows that, when I remember the photo in my hand. I tuck it back into my flight suit, which is black with red racing stripes and a Point triangle badge on the front.
“Your father was—”
“From Puerto Rico,” I say. Most people—foster parents and psychologists—guess Mexican, and it’s gotten annoying. It’s one of the few things I know about my real parents, and I wish, for once, someone would get it right.
“So we both had short dads,” he says, drawing some kind of embarrassing snort from my mouth. I gag on the laugh and cough.
Oh, man, I really like this kid.
“That’s horrible,” I say.
“Only if you think there’s something wrong with being short, and I hope you don’t. You’re genetically predisposed to be short, thanks to your parents and your, umm, gender.”
“I’m also genetically predisposed to kicking the butts of people who insult me.”
For some reason, this gets him laughing. Sig must have left out my violent history. Which reminds me… “When did you last see her? Sig?”
“Before boarding the transport. It was kind of chaotic, as I’m sure you remember, but I saw her get on Transport 37.”
Chaotic is an understatement. They woke us up in the middle of the night. Normally calm adults were screaming. Full-on panic mode. We grabbed our ‘go-packs,’ the contents of which are still a mystery, and our one item. Then we were herded onto transports. Now that we’ve been in the air for six hours, I’ve had some time to reflect. I think it was all some kind of elaborate test, to see how we cope under confusing conditions.
Daniel unbuckles his seatbelt and steps across the single aisle separating the two rows of inward-facing seats. He kneels beside me and looks out the long window lining the transport’s side. He taps on the glass. “There it is.”
I try to turn around, but the seatbelt, which is more like a five-point racing harness wrapping around from my shoulders, waist and crotch, holds me in place. I unbuckle and turn around.
Someone from the front says, “They told us not to unbuckle under any circumstances.”
I lift my right fist, displaying my Point tattoo, but I stop short of extending my middle finger. F-Bombs in sign language count. But the raised fist is enough to silence the peanut gallery.
Outside the window are two gray transports. Like ours, they’re long, clunky looking things without wings. Flying school buses. They’re tough, but barely aerodynamic, and they only stay aloft thanks to the repulse engines—a kind of antigravity, I suppose. Traditional wings went out of style ten years ago, though the most maneuverable of aircraft still have them. The transport beside us, five hundred feet out, is labeled 37. Beyond it, another five hundred feet away, is 38. I suppose that makes us 36, and it inspires the question, “Where are the rest of them?”
The Unity program, up until six hours ago, was held on a retrofitted aircraft carrier. When we were prodded to the flight deck and shoved aboard the transports, there were hundreds of students and a fleet of aircraft. If 37 and 38 are as loosely packed as our transport, that leaves hundreds of students unaccounted for. Not that it’s my position to do an accounting of them.
Daniel just shrugs. “Your other friend is on 38.”
“Other friend?”
“Hutch.”
“Ugh,” I groan. Hutch is like a puppy. His orange-sided Support stamp matches the orange dye coloring the last few inches of my black hair. I made the mistake of grinning at him on Day One, when I felt out of sorts and lost, like everyone else. He took it as an invitation to follow me around. To talk to me. To befriend me. While I learned to cope with his presence, I would certainly not call him a friend. “Next subject.”
“Oookay,” Daniel says. “That storm looks wicked.”
I look beyond the transports and realize we’re descending, our long flight apparently nearing its end. We’re flying low over the endless Pacific Ocean, perhaps just a few thousand feet up. The storm is coming in high, roiling in the atmosphere, spitting out bands of lightning. I don’t normally apply emotions to nature, but the sky really does look angry. The band of red light where the setting sun cuts between the horizon and the storm doesn’t help. It will be dark soon, and if we’re not on the ground by the time the storm reaches us, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
“You’re not a puker are you?” I ask.
Daniel swallows and shrinks back from the view. Great.
Then his eyes widen as though we’re in one of those old timey action movies where poignant moments are slowed down so the audience doesn’t miss all the on-screen awesomeness. In the reflection of his wide eyes, I see a flickering orange sprite. Then another. And another.
I nearly fall from my seat as I spin around. Fireballs cut through the storm clouds, trailed by steam and then smoke. Voices rise up from the front of the transport as the others see what’s happening. Some of the kids unbuckle for a better look. To my surprise, it’s me who asks Daniel the obvious question, “What is it, a satellite?”
“Too big,” he whispers, and he’s right. The fireball at the center looks far bigger than any satellite.
“Meteor?”
“Too slow,” he says, leaning forward, face nearly pressed against the glass. “I think… It looks like…”
The ball of fire erupts, the blinding light forcing us back, hands to our eyes. Shouts fill the cabin. When the light subsides, tendrils of smoke and fire drop straight down. Above the explosion, the storm clouds bend upward, propelled by the invisible shockwave.
Things are about to get rough.
I shove Daniel back across the aisle. He slams hard into his seat and looks a little wounded—emotionally—until I shout, “Everyone buckle up! Now!”
I slip back into my harness, clipping it quickly in place. Daniel tries to stow his Featherlight back in his go-pack, but his fingers slip off the magnetic strip twice, and he gives up, holding the device while he struggles with his buckles. His shaking fingers are all but useless. When I see tears squeeze from the sides of his eyes, I unbuckle and jump across the aisle.
He tries to resist for a moment, offering a brave, “I can do it!” but I quickly overpower him and fasten his harness. Not waiting for, or needing any thanks, I turn back toward my seat, but stop. What I see through the window freezes me in place. Transport 38 goes dark and drops from the sky.
Hutch…
I place my hand on the glass and say, “Sig,” just before 37 looses power and falls. I dive for my seat, looping an arm beneath one of the shoulder straps, but then the transport shakes, like it’s been backhanded by God. I’m thrown to the floor as we lose power and plummet downward.
2
The silence that follows the transport’s loss of power feels like pressure on the sides of my head. Then I realize the compression is an actual pressure change, brought on by the fact that we’re plummeting from the sky. The repulse discs mounted to the bottom of the transport have lost power. I glance at the Featherlight clutched in Daniel’s hands. The screen is black, which means nothing, but the small LED light indicating a charge has also gone out.
As I wrestle against the shaking floor, crawling back to my seat, I run through scenarios and come to a quick conclusion. That explosion, whatever it was, generated an electromagnetic pulse that fried everything electronic inside its blast radius. Part of me wants to tell the pilots that their efforts are futile. There’ll be no avoiding our fate. But I also know we weren’t very high when we lost power. We’re going to pancake into the ocean in just a few seconds.
“Twenty seconds!” Daniel shouts, putting a number to my fear.
But it seems wrong. The transports will fall like stones, slowed by drag perhaps, but their weight will more than make up for it.
“Hold on!” Daniel shouts, and my muscles react to his warning—fingers clutching the harness straps—before my mind decides he knows what he’s talking about.
Several loud clunks boom inside the cylindrical cabin. They’re followed by a hard tug on my arm, as our rate of our descent is suddenly slowed.
“Drag wings,” Daniel shouts, over the shrill voices of our fellow freaked-out passengers. “This model of transport has several crash countermeasures. Some of them don’t require power. Fifteen seconds.”
With both hands wrapped around my seat’s shoulder straps, I pull myself up while giving Daniel a dubious look.
“This is what I do,” he says. “Trust—” His voice is cut off by a shrill whistle. His eyes go wide, and I barely hear him shout, “Hold on!” again.
This time, my muscles and mind work in tandem. Daniel seems to know a lot about the transport’s systems. He’s part of Unity for a reason, and he’s a Base—like Sig—which means he’s probably got an uncanny amount of knowledge crammed into that cute head.
The transport kicks into a high velocity spin. I’m pinned against the bottom of my seat, unable to move. The air is pushed from my lungs. Pinpoints of light spiral in my vision, like silent fireworks. There’s a jarring snap and a clang that silences the whistle, but it changes our spin into a tumble. For a moment, I’m able to hold on, but the combined forces of motion and gravity conspire against me. I’m lifted from the floor and slung against the ceiling, my hands still clutching my seat straps.
I see Daniel’s wide eyes looking up at me. He shouts over the roar of the wind outside and the blood surging behind my ears. “Effie!”
I’m slammed back to the floor, eliciting a rare shout of pain. I can take a lot of abuse. I’ve taken a lot—from bullies, from bad foster-parents and from foster-siblings. But the impacts wracking my body are unrestrained by the fear of being caught. One hand falls free of the strap, and I think I hear Daniel scream, “Three seconds.”
There is no way I’m getting back in the chair and buckled up inside three jarring seconds. I’m surprised that my instinct, instead of fighting to the end, is to look in Daniel’s eyes and see a little bit of kindness before I’m erased from the world. And sent where? Heaven? Hell? Infinite oblivion? I don’t know much about the first option, but I’ve been told to visit the second option many times. And option three? That doesn’t sound all that different from hell to me. So fingers crossed that God is as merciful as they say.
A high pitched voice cuts through the chaos and prevents me from reaching out to a higher power in my last moments. It’s Daniel’s voice. Repeating something. I focus past the roar, and the words work their way into my ears. “Let go!”
My fingers snap open as I’m thrashed back up to the ceiling. Held in place, I look down at Daniel, and he’s still shouting at me. “Hold your breath!”
As my lungs fill to capacity, Daniel’s words run through my mind. ‘This model of transport has several crash countermeasures. Some of them don’t require power.’
What do you know, Daniel?
A hiss fills the cabin, building to a sudden intensity. As I’m tossed back toward the floor, I catch sight of gray, liquid streaks jutting from every side of the cabin. There’s a fraction of a moment when I think the liquid is expanding, but then it and the rest of the world is consumed. I feel nothing but tightness all around me.
I hear nothing.
See nothing.
I can’t breathe.
And then my insides shift downward. I can feel my guts push on my bladder. My head aches, as my brain bounces against my skull. My compressed lungs try to cough out air, but there’s no escape—
Something is in my nose!
A second impact pushes everything in the other direction. The force is less intense, but the pain is absolute. And then, it gets worse. I need to exhale. The pressure around me builds, pushing on my lungs, as if they were too-full balloons.
Stillness surrounds me. I can feel my heart struggling to beat inside a confined chest. People weren’t meant to feel their own heartbeats. It’s a clear sign of wrongness. And it only gets worse as the world compresses itself into my very pores, pushing past my clenched eyelids.
I’ve been trapped inside a human-sized blood-pressure cuff.
And then, like at the doctor’s, it releases.
Blood flows first, reaching my brain and clearing the lights from my vision.
My body decompresses, lungs expanding to a more natural position.
But the air still needs a release.
I still need to breathe!
The material clogging my nostrils turns to a warm, pungent liquid and drools out. I feel warmth all around me, and then nothing. I’m released.
And dropped.
The air in my lungs coughs out, as I hit the floor. I’m wracked by heaving gasps, my body curling in on itself like a terrified pill bug. Pain screams through my body, and I swear I feel an organ slip back into place. The image of my twisted insides fills me with nausea. Or is that the concussion, which I definitely have?
As confusion subsides, I’m struck by the realization that I’m alive.
And trapped in a fetid, infinite darkness. This can’t be oblivion. It smells horrible. Chemical. And while I’m in pain, I don’t think it’s quite bad enough to be hell.
Alive, I decide. Now, think.
“Daniel?” I ask, my voice sounding flat, like the sound is being absorbed. I move a hand across the floor, which is covered in several inches of goo, trying to find my bearing. But in the center aisle, where there should be a straight, flat surface, I find a lump.
A light.
We’re upside down. I’m on the ceiling.
“Daniel. Are you alive?”
A gentle coughing replies, and I know it’s Daniel because the sound is close, and above me. “Effie?”
“I’m here.”
“My head…”
“You’re upside down.”
“Oh.”
“What was that stuff?”
“It’s an REF safety system. Rapid Expanding Foam. Most new military aircraft have it for when ejecting isn’t possible. The whole system is mechanical, relying on air pressure. A sudden decrease in external pressure opens the valves, and air pressure moves the foam. When it contacts open air, well, you saw what happened. Or at least you felt it.”
“It nearly killed me.”
“Thirty-seven percent of the people it’s supposed to save are killed by it. That’s why it’s not in civilian vehicles. Even though sixty-three percent of people are saved, the manufacturer would be held responsible for the thirty-seven percent it didn’t save, because the REF would be the official cause of death, not the crash.”
That Daniel can not only assemble multiple sentences right now, but can also recall this kind of detailed information, is impressive. But it’s also a distraction. There were ten kids on board our transport. According to Daniel’s numbers, at least three of them are dead. Likely four.
“I need light,” I say, as groans and coughing from the front end make the hairs on my arms stand on end.
“Above my—below my head. There’s a cabinet.”
I find the small door, but I can’t find a handle.
“Push it in,” Daniel says. “There should be a first aid kit. Inside that you’ll find four chemical glowsticks.”
I push on the door, and it pops open. A plastic box the size of a small briefcase slides out. “How do you know all this?”
“I was on the design team. Two years ago. I was working for a private firm until Unity recruited me.”
I open the first aid kit and feel around. The case is full of unidentifiable packages, bottles and tools. “Recruited you?”
“I couldn’t turn them down when they doubled my fee.”
“Your what? You’re being paid?” Between crunchy packages that must be bandages, I find four plastic-wrapped cylinders.
“You’re not?”
“I wasn’t given a choice. It was this or a life wallowing in self-pity.”
“That’s still a choice,” he points out.
“Yeah, well, it’s not much of one.” I bend one of the glowsticks without unwrapping it. There’s a moment of resistance before the small glass cylinder inside it breaks. A dull green light emerges as the two chemical liquids inside make contact. The light grows even brighter when I shake the tube.
Daniel’s face is lit in green light. He looks far more strained than his voice let on. There are wet streaks from his eyes to his hairline.
“Hey,” someone from the front says. The voice is feminine and terrified. “Help us!”
I put the glowstick on top of the first aid kit, which is resting on the gelatinous bed of what was, just moments ago, a cabin full of rock-hard foam. It’s slippery beneath my feet, but I manage to stand and get a shoulder underneath Daniel’s legs. “Hold on to my waist.”
He wraps his small arms around my waist, while I support his body with one hand and fumble with his seatbelt clip with the other. When I find the triangular button and push it, his weight is transferred to me. We nearly topple over together, but we both release in time to shift the momentum to Daniel’s body. He flops over my arms and lands on his feet.
“That was surprisingly graceful,” I say, and I bend down to the first aid kit, recovering the three unused glowsticks. “You know how to get out of here?”
“The rear hatch can operate manually,” he says.
“Get it open,” I say, cracking a fresh glowstick and heading for the front of the transport, where several small, whimpering voices, and at least a few dead bodies, await.
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