SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel) (19 page)

I was frustrated both by the weird energy between us as well as my inability to get thought control. “Why is this so hard for me? Everyone else seemed to get the hang of it pretty quick. I’m either stupid or some kind of freak.”

Derrick shrugged and his knees accidentally touched mine, causing more shivers of electricity to pass through my body. “I don’t know,” he said gently, twisting a thread from his bed spread around his fingers as he thought. “Maybe it has to do with how the spores mixed with your personality. You were always pretty easy to read before.”

“Was I?” I shot back at him, a little surprised and also a little embarrassed. Nathan had always teased me before about wearing my emotions on my sleeve. I wasn’t sure I liked hearing it from Derrick now.
As if I’m not vulnerable enough.

“Yeah,” Derrick said, not moving his knee from mine. “Like how much you hated going to Mr. Blackwell’s class or how disappointed you were when the blackberry cobbler was gone,” he said with a laugh, making me smile. I was surprised he had noticed those things about me.
Was it really the whole town, or just him?
I had thought that Derrick’s attention to me had started when we were put into the same troop. I certainly hadn’t noticed him much before that, but now I
started to wonder just how long Derrick had been noticing me. “Yeah,” he grinned, “and how the whole town knew you liked Ray before either of you ever admitted it.”

My mouth fell open. The smile fell off his face as he realized that was the wrong thing to say. I tried to fake a smile like it was okay, but I felt a little jab inside every time someone mentioned Ray’s name. But it was even more potent now. There was a new emotion there: Guilt. Guilt that I was letting myself be overtaken by the energy I felt when I was with Derrick. Guilt that I’d let myself dance with Derrick when I still had feelings for Ray. Everything was so confusing inside, like tumblers turning inside me.

He tried to apologize. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have…That wasn’t what I wanted…”Derrick’s embarrassment only seemed to add to mine.

“It’s okay,” I said, even though I knew it certainly was
not
okay. None of this was okay. Me being here, a scarb. Dancing with Derrick. Ray being gone. All of it was so messed up.

Mrs. Weatherstone spoke her thoughts to us from the other side of the door. “I just want to let you know that dinner is ready.”

Her words were a welcome excuse to flee the awkward situation with Derrick.

“Thanks for trying to teach me,” I told him, trying to bring some closure to our conversation. He looked like he was about to say something, but he didn’t. Maybe he was blocking his thoughts from me. I got up and went into the common room, looking for anything to distract me from the tumult of feelings I had turning inside me.

Nathan gave me the relief I needed. “Hey, sis,” he called from the little round table where he was trying to pile more food onto his plate than Gray—which was quite a challenge, since Gray’s already mimicked Mt. Everest. “Come sit with us. I want to tell you all about flying.”

Gratefully, Nathan and Gray took turns for the next hour telling me about their unsuccessful flight attempts. It soon turned into an argument about who was the better non-flier since neither of them could actually fly.

“I can glide over five hundred feet,” Nathan boasted while shoving turnip greens into his mouth.

“Yeah, but your landings suck, dude,” Gray shot him down and was about to stick his finger into the jar of mulberry jam when Mrs. Weatherstone saw what he was doing and snatched it out of his reach with the tendril on her elbow. “You’ve got to learn to stick it, like me.” He snatched the jar back and plopped a blob of jelly into his mouth before Mrs. Weatherstone could scold him.

Everyone laughed. Derrick’s eyes, dark as the evening sky, caught me from across the table. I was certain he had been watching me, but whatever his thoughts were, they were carefully tucked away from me.

I sighed and felt tiny pin-pricks in my chest. It seemed the longer I was a scarb, the more difficult everything was becoming.

Chapter Eighteen

Bearer

The next morning, Derrick was gone to the shipping yard before I pulled up to the round table for breakfast. I was grateful. I wasn’t sure I could face him until I figured things out. I had taken one bite of a cheddar biscuit when Jack—the grim reaper himself—appeared, looming over the table.

“We have a lot of work to do today,” he said glumly. “We’d better get right to it.”

My brain screamed at me to tell him to shove it, but Nathan shot me a look from across the table. I had to keep my promise to follow the plan.” I crammed the rest of the biscuit into my mouth and followed the tall scarb scientist away from the common room and all hope of happiness for the day.

Just like the day before, the lab was dark, humid, and stuffy. The tiny red Origin beetle was still sleeping.
I guess he’s still not too interested in talking to me,
I thought as I settled back into the seat across the room from Jack’s microscopes. Jack had told me he wanted to talk to me again, but he hadn’t even moved in two days.

“He’s preparing for hibernation,” Jack answered my thoughts matter-of-factly. I cringed internally, knowing that my study session with Derrick the night before had yielded me no more protection over my thoughts.

“Thanks,” I grumbled sarcastically, knowing that he already knew how unhappy I was about not being able to hide my thoughts.
He could at least do the decency of pretending not to hear me instead of answering my internal questions.

Another mountain of files greeted me. “Saki pulled these out for you this morning,” Jack told me, like she’d given me a gift or something. I groaned but got to work sorting and organizing them into folders.

After three hours, my lower back was sore, and there was a crick in my neck. Jack was still hunched over his microscope.
This is stupid.
I thought about Nathan off at his flying lesson, and even Derrick helping bring in shipments far below us.
At least they get to move.
I wished that I’d been given wings like Nathan so that I could be up there with him.
I don’t belong down here, stuck in this prison. I need to be out in the fresh air. I need to be looking for Iva so I can find Ray, not sorting through these stupid papers.

“Why do you study these?” I finally asked Jack, picking up a graphic of a Spur-Throated Grasshopper eating a Luna Moth
. Jack didn’t look up from his slide when he answered.

“We are part of a much bigger picture now,
Cat,
” he emphasized my name as if he distasted it. “There are
nine hundred thousand known 
species
of insects.”He turned the turret on the microscope’s tube. “That’s
three times as 
many
 as all other animal 
species
 put together. More are discovered every day. It is important to understand where we fit into the picture of it all.”

I crinkled my nose at the photograph of a Carolina Locust whose abdomen had been cut open and its guts strung out for study. “We don’t fit in,” I said automatically.

Jack put the picture down, eyebrows raised. “Is that so?”

“Yeah, we don’t fit in anywhere,” I protested, shaking the pictures. “We don’t belong with the bugs, because we’re human. We don’t belong with the humans, because we’re bugs.”

“That’s an interesting theory.” Jack narrowed his eyes. “Come and take a look at this,” he said, motioning for me to look into his microscope. He slid his chair back, giving me room to put my eyes
against the two-eyepiece lenses. The illuminator glowed yellow, revealing hundreds of tiny moving globes. Some had tiny hairs surrounding their oval bodies. Another larger one actually had four legs that it used to propel itself through the amber liquid.

“What is it?” I asked him, amazed at all the busyness and life on just one slide.

“A single drop of pond water,” he answered.

I’d never taken more than sixth
grade math or science. “Seriously? But there must be hundreds of living organisms here.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “The universe is buzzing with life down to the smallest particle. Mutation or not, we are all connected.”

I had to laugh a little. “That sounds very ‘Circle of Life’ to me.”

“It’s true,” Jack said seriously, but with a smile.

Are we actually having a moment?

“Then why am I stuck down here?” I asked, careful not to sound too demanding. “You said that the reason I’m still alive is because I possess certain valuable assets for the colony.”I motioned to the stack of files. “I don’t think paperwork is one of them.”

Jack slid his chair back and tapped the armrests with his fingers. He looked at me for a long moment, but it wasn’t him that answered my question.

“You’re a recruit,” the clear, clicky voice said. I turned to the tanks behind me. Origin was crawling down from a fat green leaf, his two antennae twitching.

“I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” Jack snorted, but I didn’t pay him any attention.

“What do you mean, I’m a recruit?” I asked, walking to the glass and crouching down eye-level with the little beetle.

“You were intentionally made scarb,” Jack answered for him.

This made me frown. “Isn’t everyone?”

“Yes, but you were specifically selected by Emerald,” Origin explained as he scuttled across the sand with his six black legs. “Somehow the spore’s mutation in humans renders the majority of them barren, particularly women. That is why the queen of this colony brought you here,” he explained as he stopped to clean his face with his front leg. “It has become apparent to her—as well as to the other queens of this world—that if they are to become stronger and increase their domain by means other than conquering, they must start to purposely Change humans.”

“Purposely Change humans?” I repeated with disgust.

“Yes,” Origin continued, “that is why you and your human friends were taken from the battle rather than killed.”

Jack added, “After Origin informed Emerald about the spore’s effect upon human genes, she understood what must be done for the betterment of her colony.”

My mind worked quickly. “So you captured us and put us into that dome with Origin, rather than kill us like you used to do before.”

“All that wasted life.” Jack clicked his teeth with his fibrous tongue. “Scarb killed humans with no more thought than you would swatting a fly or spraying for ants. We could have been so much stronger.”

I tried to put it all together. The scarb couldn’t reproduce. The queen realized that the only way to grow their colonies was to turn humans into scarb by exposing them to the Origin spores. That was why they built the dome and put us in there. It finally made sense. But there was still the question about why they chose me and supposed “abilities” that were keeping her from killing me.

“If the queen brought us here to turn us into scarb, then why am I
such a threat?” I pressed my hands against the glass. “I’m scarb now, too, aren’t I? I know I don’t exactly fit in here, but Jack told me
himself that I would’ve been exterminated if I weren’t valuable. What’s he talking about?”

Jack stood up suddenly and started walking toward us. “That will be all, Origin,” he said in a cautionary tone. “I think you’ve answered enough of Cat’s questions.”

I looked from the tank to the tall scarb towering over us. His yellow eyes glowed like a cat’s in the light from the tank.
Is he really threatening Origin?
I turned back to the beetle. He was rubbing his two hind legs together.

“Very well, Master Jack,” he said and waddled away without another word.

“You best get back to your work,” Jack told me with his eyebrows raised. I did what he said and sat back in my seat. Mindlessly, I picked up a picture.
Clearly there is still more that Jack doesn’t want me to know.
I looked back over at the tank. Origin was sleeping on the underside of a rock.
We’re nothing but recruits for this queen.

Four more grueling hours passed. Jack said he had to go retrieve something from the Archives, wherever that was, and for me not to leave the room.
Where would I go anyway?
I grumbled.
I’ll probably just be killed unless I stay in this black hole and do exactly what everyone tells me to.

I picked up a sheet of paper with notes written all over it and was about to place it into the folder labeled “Exoskeletal Observations” when Origin’s voice came back into my mind, making me drop the paper.

“The queen of this colony does not tolerate rebels. Many such as you have been executed for less reason. Difference in opinion and attitude is something she does not allow. I myself am only tolerated so much. I’m her prisoner, too. The reason you still live,” he said quickly and directly, “is because you’re more than just a recruit. Jack
and the others don’t want you to know this yet, but you need to know. You’re the queen’s greatest hope and greatest fear. You’re a Bearer.”

The word settled over me like a starless night.
Bearer.

“Unlike most scarb,” Origin continued, “you
can reproduce. No other female in the colony—not even the queen herself—is capable of such an honor. As soon as you were turned into scarb, the scientists sampled your blood and discovered that you’re a Bearer. They made the announcement in this very laboratory. You must listen to me very carefully, She Who is Called Cat, you are the most powerful weapon the queen possesses. With you, she can raise up an army greater than this world has seen. She will try to use you in just this way.”