Foghorn for the Fallen

KIAN

It was 5:00 a.m. when the family parted ways, the children entering the green-framed column and their mother, the other. “Alright, you guys ready?” Nari said. Kian noticed the smile that was usually there back on Nari’s face. It eased the fear nesting in his chest a little.

Nari placed the full of his left palm against the cool glass beside the door. Then, the floor beneath them burst upward at an unbelievable speed, stopping 9,000 feet from where they previously stood after just five minutes. When the door slid away from the column, the Kona siblings stepped forward into a dark corridor with green lighting illuminating the upper and lower crevices of the walls.

“Home again for two days, huh?” Nari mumbled.

“This place sucks.” Said Kian.

“You can say that again…” Nari agreed. Lely said nothing.

The siblings dragged their feet forward as if they were made of lead. The walk was long, dark but lit in that sickly shade of green, and silent among the three of them until they reached a hexagonal opening through which bright lamplight shone and voices could be heard. Ten groups of families occupied the space; the Konas were the last to arrive. Some voices were filled with tears and concern for the friends who still needed to spend two days getting through Selection alive. Like Emi and her family, Kian thought. And Dr. Rallus and his family.

Most of the other voices in the room, though, were filled with natural, unbothered conversation and laughter. Relief, comfort, and security sweetened their tones. They were already handing out the reserved Plate chips to one another—Cerulean blue, Orchid purple, Rosewood pink-red, and Vermillion red—to be placed into the chip receivers against the sides of their head. The same chips the citizens 9,000 feet below were dying to obtain.

Up here in the safehouses, there was nothing left for these people to worry about.

“Gahma!” Lely screamed suddenly, letting go of Nari and Kian’s hands as she rushed forward to greet a little girl she’d met during Selection three years prior. This left her brothers staring after her from where they stood at the threshold of the lounge, not exactly in, but not out, either.

Kian turned his eyes on Nari, who had a smile on his face while he watched Lely laugh animatedly with the friend she was only able to see once every few years. Even so, Nari pushed the word, “Sickening,” through his lips, barely loud enough for Kian to hear.

It was then that Kian realized that Nari’s eyes weren’t smiling, too.

Only two hours remained of Selection and Kian was getting antsy. Two days had crawled by, and the past few hours had tiptoed so slowly he, Lely, and her rather annoying friend Gahma had played two rounds of that old world card game, Old Maid.

God, I’m so bored. Kian groaned within. He wanted to go to the new Vermillion Plate already. It’d be a few leftover structures and buildings short of a red glass wasteland. Almost like entering a new world, rubbed clean of what some claimed were the extra old and the uselessly weak. Desolate.

But, to Kian, anything was better than waiting somewhere in the far-out to see if friends like Emi and Dr. Rallus made it through the last several hours alive. When the Plates moved down as if on a rope that can no longer support the tower’s whole weight, and the old Vermillion dropped off into the endless dark below, Kian always hoped the others didn’t go down with it. He and Nari talked about it all the time.

Kian looked toward his brother now who he’d last seen grabbing a snack in the safehouse’s shared kitchen, and found him, by chance, walking toward the lounge’s exit.

Nari! He thought and hurried after him. Just before Nari reached the column that would take the ten governing families back to their respective Plates, Kian called out his name. Nari spun around, surprise on his face. “Hey, Ki. What’s up?”

“You’re going already?” Kian asked about Nari’s trip down to the new Vermillion Plate, soon to be settled as the lowest part of The Glass Tower for the next three years. He’d seen Nari go down twice before, during the last two Selections, remembering how excited he was when he came back up, claiming to have helped some people survive.

“Yeah,” said Nari, using his left palm to open the glass door to the column, “it’s about that time.”

“Yeah…” Kian said. He watched Nari get in, time feeling slow, his breath loud in his ears. He felt his heart tug toward his brother. That had never happened before. “Can… Can I go with you this time?” He felt himself almost yelling, desperate, but for no reason.

It made Nari laugh, “Sure, man, but quiet down. C’mon, get in.”

On the way down, Nari was tapping his foot as if to a song in his head. “Finally decided to start helping people with me, little bro?”

He was happy. The smile in his voice was in his eyes, too.

Kian lied, “Sure.” He chuckled for good measure because he didn’t know how else to sort out what he was feeling. He didn’t want to go anywhere near an active Selection. He’d heard that it was a battlefield, a blood bath, a sea of tears and betrayals and long-held regrets. It was too late to turn back, though.

When the column’s floor panel deposited them on the level of the new Vermillion as the Plate continued to move downward into its final position, Kian felt his knees on the verge of buckling. He swallowed, but it was hard to do even that.

“Let’s go,” Nari said, and then as if sensing Kian’s apprehension, “Don’t worry, we’re going into the safe zone. We’ll be fine.”

Emboldened, Kian nodded and followed his brother across the pitch-black floors from before and into a door-shaped, red cut-out seeming to float before them. They stepped into a huge, circular chamber with a tile stone floor.

“This building is called the Assembly, Kian.” Nari began, his voice echoing off the wall like a tour guide’s, “Everyone who comes in during Selection stops right over here,” he walked over to the exact center of the room where illuminated blue shoeprints were imprinted into the floor, “then they step on these, and then receive their new Plate chip.” As he spoke, a device spiraled down from a mechanical attachment on the ceiling and stopped before Nari’s face. A thin arm-like joint sprang outward from the mechanism and produced the same sort of red electronic chip Kian had already inserted into his receiver on day one of Selection. The mechanical arm clipped the chip into the receiver in Nari’s head, retracted, and spiraled back upward into the ceiling. Kian watched the fiery Vermillion color spark to life in Nari’s previously clear-colored hair.

This was Nari’s routine. He chose to wait until Selection was nearly over before getting his own chip replaced, keeping the other chip reserved as a spare for someone who might really need it. The other governors’ families laughed at and mocked him for it.

“What—do you think that makes you a saint, kid? You better than us now?” They’d say. “Putting your chip in now or later doesn’t make a difference. You were here with all of us the whole time. Safe from the start. You’re no better than we are.”

“Stop making a fool of yourself, Vermin.”

“They know nothing about you,” Kian had said at the last Selection, annoyed especially at the usage of the word ‘Vermin,’ a nickname given by those higher up in the tower to refer to some Vermillion peoples. Even the governing families from West, Mid-West, and East Vermillion had snide remarks for Nari’s antics.

Nari had replied at that time, “I know they don’t. That’s why I don’t let it bother me, and you shouldn’t either.”

Kian could hear their annoying voices now as he stood looking at Nari beam from ear to ear. “Cool, huh?” Nari asked, stepping away from the shoe imprints.

Kian nodded, honest this time, “Yeah, cool.”

The two exited the always-open front doors of the Assembly and Nari showed Kian everything. “Even though we’re safe from Selection,” Nari said, “we should know what other people experience.” Outside, they stood at the center of the light red circle of one of Vermillion’s twelve safe zones. Open space stretched all around them for three hundred meters, all directions lit up with the same red glow. Just beyond the safe zone were luscious trees and bushes of varying sizes, broken-down buildings, and dirty streets. No individual could be harmed by any weapon or projectile while they stood inside the safe zone. If fired, a projectile such as a bullet would disassemble mid-flight, leaving the target untouched.

Kian found that comforting.

Next, Nari pointed upward. “Look above us.” Far above their heads, projecting from the bottom of the pink-red Rosewood Plate, was an enormous analog clock ticking down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the end of Selection for all Vermillion people to see. “Right now, everyone who’ve survived so far are either below ground or in the upper floors of this building and eleven other Assembly buildings across Vermillion Plate. So now, we wait to help anyone we see who might need carrying into the safe zone until Selection ends. Easy enough?”

“Got it.” Kian said.

They waited an hour and twenty-eight minutes before they caught sight of a woman carrying an infant swaddled in a blanket. She came into view from between a forest of tall, dilapidated buildings blown apart by projectiles of every sort. The woman appeared exhausted, hungry, and possibly injured, teetering on weak legs.

Then, the foghorn started to blare. There was less than one minute left.

It was clear that she and her baby were not going to make it.

Nari was up on his feet in a second. “Stay here!” he shouted after Kian made a move to follow. Kian got up anyway and watched his brother make a mad three-hundred-meter dash to the woman just outside of the safe zone. He fumbled around in his pocket for something as he neared her.

Kian jogged toward them, now, fearing he might be too far in case his brother needed help with the woman.

Nari snatched his hand from his pocket, waving it around, “I have one extra chip!” He shouted over the deafening foghorn, stopping before the woman. Kian could only just barely make out his words. “I-I’m sorry, it’s only one!”

The exhausted mother dropped to her knees, glancing up at the time overhead. Thirteen seconds left. “The baby!” She yelled, “Give it to my baby!”

Nari reached out the arm holding the chip but didn’t see the crazed man barreling toward him the way Kian did. “Nari! Nari, look out!” Eleven-year-old Kian called, his voice too small, drowned out by the foghorn.

And the night started to blur.

The man shoved his body weight against Nari, flinging Nari to the ground and pinning him down. The struggle for the extra chip—the one Nari had refused before and saved for moments like these—lasted only several seconds but seemed lifetimes longer. The man’s elbow was everywhere, bashing Nari’s forehead, his nose, his eye. Kian was sprinting now, trying to get to his brother’s side. Nari threw the chip away with his left hand as best he could, somehow in the woman’s direction. Kian couldn’t see how Nari fought back. There were tears in his eyes. The man’s two fists gripped either side of Nari’s head, pulled back, and slammed it back down against the blood-red glass of Vermillion. Twice. Three times. A fourth. Kian was screaming, screaming, crying at the top of his lungs. The man held Nari’s head down with one hand and jammed his thumb and first two fingers into the chip receiver at the side of Nari’s head, ripping the chip from its socket.

By that time, Nari was already unresponsive.

The man put Nari’s chip into his own receiver with bloodied fingers and crawled a few paces away from him, into the safe zone, where he collapsed, exhausted. Kian ran right by him. The mother clicked Nari’s spare chip into her baby’s receiver before collapsing with barely a second to spare, her last breath catching in her throat. Kian skidded on his knees, finally reaching Nari’s side, close enough to see his brother’s fading eyes.

Lost there, all Kian could hear were those words again— Help some people, Ki. Help as many as you can…

Make the world better for everyone.

His cries were guttural, choking him, taking up all his air as he sobbed over his brother’s bludgeoned head. He was covered in blood, sitting in a growing pool of it, unable to stop his hands from shaking. And Kian heard himself, but he heard the cries of the orphaned baby louder.

Though it was the damned foghorn that wailed loudest of all, signaling the end of Selection number fifteen.