CHAPTER ONE

Emma

The crowds cleared out after Sunday mass, and Leader Tom closed the sanctuary. He leaned his forehead against the heavy iron doors and sighed, his shoulders slumping. Once a five-foot-ten, broad-shouldered, fearsome man, he now appeared small. In the past half year, he’d been showing his age, which I estimated to be around sixty. Gray replaced his otherwise jet-black hair, his gray eyes had sunk in from the weight he’d lost during our months of hunger, and he walked barefoot more often than not. It could be the August heat. It could be that he needed new shoes.

I lifted my dress and peeked at my own shoes. The tip of my big toe greeted me. I wiggled it and continued with the after-mass cleanup.

Cole, a nine-year-old boy who had come to us from the beast-infested Community Forty-four somewhere Above, nudged me and whispered, “Who do you think is next?”

We needed to find a mate for the Beast Father’s son, Amoris, whom we had captured some…three years ago, I believed, and so Tom offered him girls for his taking. When we ran out of girls, our warriors went Above and brought more down to the community. “Whitney and Maria.”

He looked up at the ceiling. “Nah. Not those two. I think it’s Celia and Jasmin.”

I extended my hand. “Let’s bet on it.”

He clasped it, blue eyes twinkling. “If I guessed right, I get your pocketknife.”

I threw my braid over my shoulder. “If I guessed right…” I frowned. He didn’t own anything but the clothes on his back. Oh! “Your backpack.”

He made puppy-dog eyes at me. “Not that.”

“Well, what else you got?”

“Stories.” He pointed up, indicating Above.

I bit my lip. Tempting. Born and bred in Community X, I’d never been Above, and we prohibited those who came from aboveground from talking about it. Only warriors told stories of Above. Warriors did what they wanted. “Deal.”

Cole continued mopping the floor while I put out the incense and threw the trash I’d collected in the dustpan into the bin, wondering for the millionth time where all our garbage went. How did we dump it? Where? I knew my community like the back of my hand, every hut, every family, every man and woman and child. I knew where and how to eat when nobody else ate. But I had no clue where the trash went. The incinerator?

Oh! I smiled to myself and glanced back at my shoes. I’d need to visit one of the incinerators to see if anyone’s shoes lingered after their death. We couldn’t bury anyone ’cause it would take up space, so we burned them in the incinerator. That was the Beast Father’s idea, not ours. Tom found it brilliant, and so we all found it brilliant, like with anything else Tom had come up with to keep us alive.

But even Tom couldn’t come up with a way to reason with the Beast Father. We’d displeased him and continued to anger him because we couldn’t find a mate for his captured son, Lord Amoris, the beast kept secured inside Sector 0. We’d prayed for food supplies, we’d sacrificed virgins previously offered to Lord Amoris, and the Beast Father promised more supplies if our warriors found his mate. This was back in September, almost a year ago, when our warriors had set out on a mission. From what I understood, the warriors spread out and gathered as many women and girls they could find and delivered them down the tubes leading from Above into Community X. Tom had greeted them and inaugurated them into our community.

With a supply of hundreds or maybe over a thousand women, you’d think one would be a mate. But no, we found nothing, and the Beast Father got mad. I didn’t know the details, but I knew some of the warriors from the last search party never returned. Their mothers, wives, and daughters all wore black on the day they were supposed to return. I presumed the unholy beasts up Above ate them. I shivered at the thought. I was safe here in my Community X. I would never have to face the unholy beasts from Above.

Also, I would never be offered to Lord Amoris. Tom had prophesied that Amoris’s mate would be “a perfect human female who would breed him an Alpha unlike any the beasts had ever seen.” This Alpha child would be the blessed child. I wouldn’t be considered for a sacrifice to Lord Amoris because I was born imperfect, so as far as that went, I felt lucky.

I had stacked the last three plastic chairs the elderly had used for sitting during our four-hour-long mass and was putting them against the wall at the same time that Tom called out to me. Cole lifted his head and waggled his eyebrows. Game time. I approached Tom. “Yes, Leader Tom.”

He leaned his shoulder on the door. “I need two girls, Emma. Who is left?”

“Shall I get your list?” Tom kept a list of breeders in his desk. They each reported their cycles to the orderly of their community sector, and the orderly reported to Tom. They’d been presenting Lord Amoris with two virgins every Sunday. They didn’t used to do it so often before, but Tom feared we’d starve without the Beast Father’s help, so he needed to find Lord Amoris’s mate.

“Just tell me who’s left.”

“Whitney and Maria,” I said.

Cole groaned.

I smiled. Got your backpack, buddy.

“How about Celia?” Tom asked.

Ouch. There went my pocketknife. “Maybe after her next cycle?”

Tom frowned. “How old is Celia?”

“Fourteen.”

“And the other two?”

“Maybe sixteen. Not sure.”

“Let’s try Whitney and Celia first.”

“Yes, but they need to be in heat.”

He nodded. “Preferably in heat, not necessary so.”

“Ah, okay. I’ll go and…”

He stroked my cheek. “You remind me of him, you know. Gingers, the two of you. He was a good man. I miss him.”

I cleared my throat. My dad had died this past winter from the flu one of the girls from Above had brought to our community. Tom had incinerated the entire Sector Eleven to prevent the flu from spreading to the rest of us. Though I’d grown up in Sector Eleven, Tom had placed me in isolation for a month so that I might prove healthy. Otherwise, he’d have incinerated me as he had the other folks from my sector, dead or alive. He’d sealed the doors, then set them all on fire. Sector Eleven, my former home, was kept closed ever since. Viruses lived long lives, apparently, and Tom couldn’t take risks.

I hardly knew my dad, so I couldn’t say if he was a good man or not. Tom seemed to think so, and therefore, I nodded. “I’ll tell Adam,” I said and waited for Tom to open the doors. His eyes glazed over as if he was having one of his visions, so I spun around and walked to the back exit, leaving Tom alone.

Cole followed. “What now?”

“I don’t know. You can’t have half the knife, and I can’t have half the backpack.”

“But I get something. I guessed one of the girls.”

I pushed the back door open, and we walked out.

Cole snickered. “Man, this is gonna take some getting used to.”

“What?” I rounded the sanctuary, opened the small gate, and stepped inside Tom’s canoe. He let me use it all the time since he didn’t move out of the sanctuary much. Taking the canoe down the channel running through our community was way easier than walking over half a mile to the girls’ sector.

Cole settled behind me and picked up the other paddle. We weaved through the water.

“This place is so weird,” he said. “That’s what I was saying. I can’t believe I’m… How far underground are we again?”

“About one hundred feet.” Community X had been built in secret about two hundred years ago to hold the US president, his family and advisors, their families, and, well, the former White House staff. My great-grandfather was the house speaker, and most of us who grew up here were descended from someone important back in the day. At one point, before I was born, the structure had nearly collapsed, and people had fled up Above. This was when they met the beasts for the first time. It was a bloodbath, I’d heard. But our people managed to kill the six beasts housed in the outpost in Retreat, Texas, a small town situated on top of the Community, so news of humans living down here died with the beasts.

“And how big is it?”

“It’s a village, currently at about three thousand people.” Our population had quadrupled in one year, mostly with women, not a lot of children. The women regulated their cycles, and men respected Tom’s authority over who would breed with whom and produce healthy humans.

One of the lights under the water flickered and went out. I looked up. Dimmed neon shone on the ceiling. Last year, we didn’t ration the power. With all the new people and the lack of resources to accommodate them, we were in trouble. I wondered if I should say something about it to Tom, but knew Adam would handle it. Tom kept allowing more people down here, kept scouting for the beast mate, but I didn’t think we could accommodate any more people. The latest newcomers lived on the sidewalks, didn’t even have their own huts. Still, nobody complained that they had to sleep on the streets near the channel, because Tom, their prophet, lived here. I didn’t know how he got from Leader to Prophet, though I have seen with my own eyes the bright light of the Beast Father when he called to Tom. Perhaps they thought it was God. It wasn’t. God came of faith. No bright lights needed.

“We don’t have water in New Mexico,” Cole said.

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen it on the map.”

“And we also don’t—”

Cole wouldn’t get a clue. I spun around and hissed, “You know the rules. You can’t yap about Above.”

He leaned in. “But why not?”

“Because… Just because. Don’t ask too many questions either. Just don’t do it.”

The canoe bumped the channel’s side. I slid on the seat, water splashing all over my dress. “Great.” I scrunched up the hem and wrung out the water, shivering from the cold touching my thigh. I picked up the paddle again and moved into the path leading to Sector Twelve.

“Se-kor Twe…twenty.”

Cole was learning how to read. “T,” I said. “Sec-Tor. And it’s twelve. You’ll know a twenty because it ends in a y, and y is a nice, curvy letter.” It was also a question everyone around here avoided. Why?