Oh, the Places We’ll Stay by Karl Lykken
Beams of sun and steel entranced Elvi, who crouched in the shadows of the crumbling concrete stairway. The still, stale sparkle beckoned to her, but the sting of even the indirect light on her skin kept her in place. She remembered her uncle, the burns and blisters.
The slowly shifting shadows covered the third row of windows, telling Elvi her time was up. The others would be waking soon, and she couldn’t be caught daydreaming.
She shambled down the stairs, then paused while her eyes readjusted. Gazing into the dark tunnel, she still saw the street above. She knew in a few hours she would be walking where now she only dared look, but it wouldn’t be the same. Not in the dark.
On her way home, she wondered what Lucy would say if—when—Elvi finally accomplished it. She knew Lucy believed in the mechanics’ mantra, Maintain and sustain, invent and repent. She knew Lucy would never have taken her on as an apprentice if Elvi revealed her true ambitions, and she feared Lucy would never forgive her when she discovered Elvi’s secrets, her lies. Elvi sighed, and thought instead of the way even the sidewalk seemed to glisten in the sun.
Passing the mushroom farm, she whispered a small “thank you” to the broken pipe that would afford her a foray onto the surface. She reached her cot at the far end of the farm, and did her best to get a little sleep—bags under her eyes would invite unwanted questions about whether the irrigation sounds truly helped with her insomnia or if she had ulterior motives for spending the daylight hours so far away from the others. So she closed her eyes, and thought of what life would be like far, far away from the tunnels.
Lucy squinted in the bright moonlight, while Elvi squinted in a struggle to recognize what she’d stared at all day. “We’ll meet back here at the count of ten thousand,” Lucy said, pulling on her gloves. “And try not to count so slow this time.”
Elvi managed a small smile. “Lucy, what was the machine that burned out the surface?”
“Glad to see you’re focused,” Lucy replied. “What’s got you thinking about that?”
“I dunno. Just, we see so many things up here, and I wonder which of them—”
“Don’t. Don’t wonder about what they did, or what they were meant to do. If we needed them, the Founders would have brought them down to the tunnels. And you know what they did bring down? Pipe. Let’s do the same, okay?”
“Yeah, okay. So back here at the count of twenty thousand, right?”
Lucy laughed, and headed off toward the nearest gleaming, glass giant reaching up into the sky. Elvi headed the opposite direction. She didn’t bother to count; she would just check for Lucy out the window periodically. After all, you couldn’t keep a count going while solving a puzzle like the one she had waiting for her in the third office from the staircase on the sixth floor.
Stepping carefully through broken glass, she entered the lobby. She looked at the pair of heavy metal doors directly ahead of her, and remembered when she’d pried them open the prior year, so excited by the possibilities of what she might discover, only to find: another tunnel. A vertical tunnel, sure, but a tunnel nonetheless.
She made her way up the stairs, and thought of what might be found outside the land of tunnels. Were there other peoples? How did they live? On the surface?
She reached the sixth floor, and walked past two open doors, each revealing a whole host of electronic gadgets that she was forbidden to touch. She scowled.
How could Lucy support the Founders’ rules? Punishing everyone because of mistakes others had made in the past. Banning invention, ingenuity, discovery. For what? What were they so afraid of? She wasn’t going to destroy anything.
She entered the third office, and her scowl gave way to a smile. She looked at the diagrams which fate had placed in her path, and the parts she had painstakingly gathered. Together, they comprised her golden opportunity to build something, to contribute one of the wonders of the world she stared at every day. More than that, to use what she created to get away, to go to the far away places she could currently only imagine.
Mobility. Freedom. How could Lucy honestly believe this was wrong? What harm could possibly come of creating a working car engine?
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