Elites of Eden (Children of Eden #2)(76)

“If your card scans, you’re legitimate,” he had said. “They trust the EcoPan. If the EcoPan believes we belong here, no one else will question us. Thanks to your father’s ID, one of the highest-ranking Center officials is simply making a tour of the facilities, or taking care of secret business. There’s no cross-reference, no body scans at this level. They won’t analyze me and figure out that I’m thirty pounds lighter and thirty years younger than the owner of the ID.”

There was a complex assortment of scans and checks at the main entrances—biometric readings, lens scans, all sorts of detectors—but we had neatly bypassed all of those by going through the sewer. Once a person was in the building they were in the clear. It was assumed that the EcoPan had done its job. Anyone inside was one of the privileged, the elite. So even if our faces are unfamiliar, Lachlan told me, we’ll be accepted. They’ll think we work another shift, or we’re new, or the children of someone so important they don’t dare question us. Students who are children of the elite often get internships here, or high-level jobs straight out of school, so no one is surprised if we look a bit young.

“People underestimate the power of expectations,” Lachlan whispers to me as we make our way toward the prison section of the security floor. “We don’t have to prove we belong here. We simply have to be here.” In strange circular logic, our presence is proof of our right to be here.

We’re climbing the spiral staircase to the second floor. It is a strangely beautiful architectural touch, broad and lovely as a bisected seashell. Strong light streams into the lobby—the only part of the Center most civilians ever see—and everything is white, bright, with blue accents and touches of green, like a seaside. A waterfall feature cascades down from the second floor to the first, right beside the spiral staircase, flowing an unreal shade of aqua. Three tiny cleanbots scurry around the pool at the base, mopping up the few drops of water that splash onto the floor.

So far, so good.

When the spiral turns and lets us into the security section of the Center, all that beachy brightness is stripped away. This place is bare, sere. I’d almost call it gritty if it wasn’t so clean. The entire tone has changed, of the building and the people. I glance down to the lobby floor and see an innocuous maintenance worker pushing a wheeled cart full of tools and buckets across the atrium. Only the slight build clues me in to the fact that it is Lark. I wish she’d look up, give me the brief reassurance of her bright gaze. But she’s too sensible for that, and I tear my own eyes quickly away.

We pass a checkin desk with little more than a word from Lachlan and a wave-through. Somberly, seriously, we move through corridors that Lachlan mapped out from the Underground’s intelligence and water system schematics that Lark provided.

Now we go down a narrow hallway that feeds into a large chamber. I hear the sounds of human misery, subdued but evident. I smell something I can’t identify, subtle and sharp, that makes my skin prickle. Maybe it is the smell of fear.

I stop abruptly. There are prison cells lining the walls.

“Remember who you are,” Lachlan says under his breath. By which he means, remember who I’m supposed to be. A young psychology student with her Center guide, come to interview the renegade Ash about why he would betray his home, his very species. My knowledge, through my father, of the workings of high-level Center medicine will allow me to answer at least the most basic questions anyone might throw at me.

“I think the me I’m pretending to be would still be surprised at this.”

I’ve seen the violent side of Eden, but I haven’t seen it institutionalized.

Walls and bars. Through some of them I see fingers straining. For what? For aid, for food, for freedom?

Civics vids always talk about how there’s so little crime in Eden. Who would steal, or kill, when to steal is to take food from the entire human species, to kill is to end a statistically staggering percentage of the surviving human population? I suppose there aren’t many prisoners in comparison to the entire population of Eden. I can see maybe a hundred cells spread along in diminishing perspective down the long rectangular room. But there are far too many for a society that claims to be a utopia. I wonder how many people, normal people, know about this place?

Two burly guards stand at the entrance. I expected them to be armed, but oddly, they aren’t.

“We’re here to see prisoner eighty-nine,” Lachlan says brusquely, twirling a pen cleverly around his fingers. There’s another stuck behind his ear.

“You’re not on the list,” one of the guards says without moving.

“Request should have been forwarded while we were en route.” Lachlan sounds supremely bored, and adds a yawn for good measure. “Overtime for me, firing for my secretary.” He shrugs, and gestures to me over his shoulder with his thumb. “I have to shepherd this one around to make the boss happy.” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Boss’s pet.” He winks, and I look uncomfortable. Not a hard act under the circumstances.

“Do you need him out of the cell?” the guard asks.

Lachlan looks at me, and I play my part, saying primly, “The psychology of the deranged mind cannot be properly explored through bars.” I fiddle with the clipboard in my hands, taking out the attached pen and slipping it back again. “It is important to understand what inspires these societal aberrations so that we can nip such actions in the bud.” I hope I sound like a pure academic without any motivations beyond proving myself to my lead professor. I practiced the pedantic tone a lot.