Moments of Wonder

Diggory Leon spun his tusked gas mask between his palms as he waited in a long, stark hallway in the ORA Sector Four Middle Ring Offices. The chair beneath him was straight-backed and hard, as was the rest of the furniture in the building, but Leon wasn’t sure he would be comfortable in a velvet recliner.

He had lost. Criminals had been feet away from him, actively growing illicit organics, and they had escaped him. The mask lost its momentum, and Leon tried to crush it in his hands, but without his exoskeleton, he might has well have been pushing against a building. It didn’t budge, and Leon immediately felt stupid, and all the angrier for it.

Still, why wouldn’t he be angry? His failure chafed at him, but the rage that rolled through him rose mostly from a deeper place.

Illegal farming put the entire city of Portas in danger. Everyone knew that—there were signs saying as much on every major street in the city, daily public knowledge broadcasts on every news frequency, and Leon had personally volunteered to appear in ORA-funded holovision specials to educate the city’s youth.

From the second they were old enough to step out of the house, every citizen understood the stakes—it was impossible not to—and yet the ORA was flooded with reports of transgressions. Every day, evil, selfish citizens spat in the face of the city that sheltered and provided for them, always reaching for more and more and more. Leon had seen half-built basement nurseries, back-alley seed trades, foraging expeditions to search for seeds and soil in the desolate wasteland beyond the city walls. There were more every day, ungrateful swine who would bring the sun crashing down to Earth just to hold it in their hands.

The door to his right slid open with a hiss.

“You can come in now, Agent Diggory.”

Leon was quick to his feet, hooking his mask to a loop on his belt. The door slid shut again the second he was through it, nearly scraping against his ass as it closed.

“Have a seat.” It was the same voice that had called him in, and it belonged to the Sector Four Supervisor, Atherton Fima. She sat as straight-backed as the chairs outside, and her black ORA uniform matched the straight black hair that she kept chopped in a severe line along her jaw. Like all non-combat uniforms, hers was buttoned along her left side and emblazoned with the agency’s golden shield across the chest. She was a small woman who hadn’t served in the field in years, but she was intimidating as the ORA’s fiercest fighters.

So, Leon took the seat.

“I just finished reading your report,” Atherton said, projecting the document on the desk before her. “Is everything exactly as you stated here?”

Leon furrowed his brow. “Of course, it is. I would never lie on an official mission report.”

“I’m not saying you would. You’ve long been one of the most thorough lower-level agents in my sector. Still, I need to be sure here—there’s no chance you were mistaken about anything of the events you described?”

“None at all. If I wrote it in the report, that’s exactly how it happened.”

“I was afraid of that.” Atherton waved her hand, and the projected document vanished. “You’re off the case, Diggory.”

“I’m what?” It took all of Leon’s self-control not to leap from his seat. The supervisor looked down on those with poor self-control. “Ma’am, I don’t understand. Is it because I failed to capture the criminals? They took me by surprise, I’ll admit, but next time I’ll bring them in, whatever it takes.”

“This has nothing to do with your performance, Agent Diggory, but I’m afraid there won’t be a next time for you. At least, not with these particular criminals. If everything in your report is indisputable truth, this mission is well above your pay grade. Above mine as well, possibly.”

“Above me? Ma’am, with all due respect, they’re just illegally farming. I’ve worked dozens of illegal growth cases and arrested and eliminated plenty of similar criminals. I can handle them, even if the big one was tougher than I’d expected.”

Atherton, who had already returned to cycling through a menu of projected reports, spared Leon a look that set him boiling again. It was a look you would give a child who was being ridiculously, confidently wrong.

“Now, now, Diggory, I’m sure you can understand why this case is different from the ones you’ve worked before. Don’t let your pride cloud your judgement.”

“Well, of course. This group is closer to successful growth than the others, but that doesn’t mean anything. Even if a tree were to grow successfully in the lower levels, everyone knows that any fruit it bore would be toxic. Whatever trick they’re using won’t be able to overcome that.”

“And yet,” Atherton said, cycling back to Leon’s report, “by your own admission, one of them caused seeds to sprout in seconds, into vines plentiful enough to fill the alley and block your passage.”

“I know what I wrote, ma’am, and while that is what I saw, I’m not naïve enough to believe that the vines were truly organic. They’ve managed to synthesize a convincing substitute, but it’s a trick, it can’t be the real thing. Organic life can only be safely cultivated under the supervision of the ORA.”

“That may be so, but their ‘trick’ is enough to get the attention of the higher-ups. An upper-ring agent is already on his way down to take over the case. You will resume regular patrolling and offer support only on request. Do you understand?”

Leon clenched and unclenched his hands, desperate for a way to vent his frustration without ruining whatever esteem the supervisor held him in. In the end, he found nothing.

“I do.”

***

Ray sunk again into the faux-leather armchair in the sitting area to the side of the main nursery, watching Sylvia guide a plant from a sprout to a full-flowering bush with a wave of her hands. Ade and Yves stared with wide eyes as it grew, the latter letting out a long whistle and punching his palm. Ray was sure he’d worn the same expression when he had first seen her powers, and he knew that Legs had.

Legs.

In the whirlwind that had seized him when he had awoken to blinding lights, Legs had slipped from Rays mind, but when a moment of peace had come, so too had the grief. And worse than the grief, the guilt.

“Is it not as exciting when you’ve seen it before?” Watane lowered himself into the seat to Ray’s left, his gloved fingers wrapped around a rolled cigarette—Ray had yet to see him without one.

“It’s still pretty incredible,” Ray said, “but not as surprising after the first couple of times.”

“Sylvia is on her fifth demonstration and Yves is still cheering like a schoolgirl. Ade’s heart hasn’t slowed down once. But you, you’re hardly paying attention. I can’t imagine the excitement disappears quite so quickly.”

“No, it’s not that.” Ray grimaced, looking for words to explain. “I’m just…my mind is somewhere else.”

“I would be surprised if it wasn’t.” Watane stared off into space as he spoke, his milky eyes fixed on nothing in particular. “After all, you did die this afternoon. I’m sure it’s a lot to process.”

“That’s not what I’m having trouble with.”

The blind man took a long drag from his cigarette, waiting for Ray to continue.

“Dying happened so fast, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. In my memory, there are only a few seconds between me hitting the ground and me waking up in the closet. And I don’t even have a scar; there’s no proof that it ever happened. It’s so easy to just write it off as a dream.

“But I know it’s not a dream. I know that I was stabbed, and I know that Legs was too.”

“You can’t blame yourself.” Watane could hear heartbeats, but he wouldn’t have needed his heightened senses to catch the crack in Ray’s voice.

“If it wasn’t for me, Legs never would have been within a mile of that tree. I made him come with me, I handed him the apple that got him killed. He didn’t do anything wrong, and now he’s dead, and I’m still here with an armchair to sit in and a field of real food in front of me.”

“You aren’t the one who took that from him. You didn’t drag him down to the abandoned levels, and you didn’t put a blade through his head. Legs followed you because he wanted to, and he died because another’s evil actions.”

“He followed me because he was worried about me, not because he wanted to. He knew that I slept in the lower levels, that I never wore a vent-box. When I told him what I’d found, he thought I was hallucinating from the toxins in the fog.”

“Any reasonable person would have thought the same.” Another drag, and Watane brushed his long hair back from the lit end. “Tell me, Ray, when Legs saw the tree, how did he react? Was he as giddy as Yves? As awestruck as Ade?”

Ray nudged his own hair aside to get at a collecting tear. “Well…he never got to see the tree, but he did get to taste an apple. A real one—I had brought it to work with me. And when he tried it…he was like a kid again, discovering the world for the first time.”

The image would never leave Ray’s mind, he was sure of it. Legs’s widening eyes, his rush to take a second bite. “I felt the same way,” he added.

“And that’s a gift that you gave to Legs. A small moment, to be sure, but a rare one. It’s moments like those that the ORA takes from us. They like to tell us that we live in the City of Innovation—you’ve seen the propaganda they spout. We’re a testament to humanity’s will and ingenuity, a proof that we can overcome anything, even the Wastes. In a city like that, we should feel those moments of wonder every day, shouldn’t we?”

Ray nodded, not sure how else to respond, and Watane finally turned to him, catching him in his ruined gaze.

“But we don’t. We aren’t conquering the Wastes; we’re barely surviving them. When is the last time you saw an innovation that really changed our lives down here, that really helped humanity? The factories get bigger, but only until the fog creeps up and they’re abandoned. The ORA’s exoskeletons get tougher, but who benefits from that? They speak of growth, of evolution, but there is none. We live in a dead old tree that has long been petrified, only they want you to believe it’s still growing. Promise me, Ray, never blame yourself for what they take from us.”

“Legs didn’t see it that way,” Ray said. “He always said that the factory took good care of him.”

“Right up until it took his life.” With a touch of a button, a small ashtray emerged from the arm of Watane’s chair, and the blind man added to a pile of butts before it retracted. “You can get a good night’s sleep, sure, as long as it’s in factory housing. Want a clean breath of air? No problem, just buy a vent-box from the factory store. I’ve lived the life Legs lived, and I thought I was taken care of too. It took a lot for me to realize—you only feel free because they haven’t allowed you to feel the real thing.”

“Bumming out the new guy on the first day, Watane?” Yves took a flying leap and landed stretched out on a couch across from Ray.

Ade smacked Yves in the back of the head, jostling his hair from its perfect position. “Jump on the couch like that again, and I’ll disassemble everything in your room. You’re already on my bad side, don’t push it.”

“I already said I was sorry,” Yves said, hurriedly combing his hair back into place with his fingers.

Ade, along with Sylvia, sat on a second couch, so they were all sitting in a circle. “And I told you not to try using Form Four until I’d fully tested it. What if you’d broken it and I had to restart from scratch?”

“I knew it wouldn’t. If anything, consider this mistake a vote of supreme confidence in your work.”

Ade rolled her eyes and shifted her position so that her back was to Yves.

Watane took advantage of the brief silence. “Sylvia,” he asked, “how do you find our little nursery?”

Sylvia smiled, and she was a completely different person than the goddess that Ray had met only the night before. She had tied her hair up into a tail and traded her dress for a pair of brown trousers and a thick, brown, hooded sweatshirt. Her smile was still stunning, but just above it, her face was heavily bandaged where the ORA agent had slashed her.

“It’s quite impressive,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what to expect in this city, but after my short experience, this seems to be an achievement.”

“We appreciate that,” Watane said, inclining his head. “Though I understand how it would appear rudimentary to someone with an ability like your own.”

Ade raised a hand. “Well,” she said, “I spoke to Sylvia while I was bandaging her up, and it looks like we might soon have those powers at our disposal.”

Sylvia nodded. “Ade was quite gracious in offering me a place to live safely. I would be happy to assist you in any way that I can in exchange.”

“Two rookies in one day,” Yves said, chuckling from his couch. “I might have to give up my closet.”

“Watane, I assume you have already made the preparations,” Ade asked, completely ignoring Yves.

“Of course,” Watane said, a smirk slowly spreading across his face. “I was listening in on your conversation, so I’ve already moved all of his clothes out of the spare room. We should have more than enough room for both of our new companions.”