The Rainbow Maker's Tale by Melanie Cusick-Jones
* * *
Cassie and I were lying facing one another. One of my arms still held her loosely, whilst the other was angled beneath my head as a pillow. We’d broken apart a few seconds before, and I was watching her face again – in super close-up – seeing tiny details I’d never noticed before.
At the centre of her eyes, just around the pupils, were tiny, yellow-gold flecks. Maybe you didn’t see them normally, because it was dimmer inside the station buildings and so her pupils were more dilated. Even her eyelashes were different shades of brown, black and gold, when you saw them at this distance. Such detail, in such a tiny thing.
Cassie’s lips looked soft and rosy, fuller from their recent activity. I smiled at that, before noticing that her cheeks had a different kind of warmth, from the earlier pinkiness of exercise.
“You’re not bad at this.”
Cassie chuckled, but didn’t move away. “That’s flattering, but a bit weird.”
I laughed myself, realising what she meant, and that she had not been privy to the thought process, inside my head, that had got me to that observation. “I meant your fighting ability, not your kissing. Although, both are good.”
Cassie tried to pull a face at my corny compliment, but could only smile at me. She wasn’t quite as cool as she like to pretend she was.
“Thanks. You’re not half-bad yourself,” she said, then clarified a moment later. “I meant the fighting thing, obviously.”
Obviously. Cassie rolled off my chest and snuggled in, to lie beside me.
“It must have taken you a long time to work these things out,” she said, once she was re-settled.
“I suppose.” I turned onto my side. Pulling Cassie’s hand into mine, I stroked the soft skin on the side of her palm as I answered her unasked question. “I’ve learnt more in the last few weeks since starting at The Clinic, especially about strong parts of the body, that I would never have thought of using before, and weak points to target.”
A shadow crossed her features, and I waited for words to explain whatever it was that had made her unhappy. They didn’t come.
“You’re drifting,” I whispered into her ear. “Where have you gone to this time?”
Cassie tilted her hand out of mine and began twisting my fingers between hers instead. "I was just wondering, why you’re always so interested in finding out how everything works.”
"Why are you happy to go along with what you're told without stopping to wonder why it is that way, or whether it even makes sense?" I replied, mimicking her slightly dreamy tone of voice.
"Fair point.” She pulled herself up to a sitting position. "But, can you tell me something that I’ve been told and believe, that's actually incorrect?"
I didn’t miss the defiant way her chin rose, as she issued me this challenge. Cassie only seemed half-serious, but the problem for me was that I had uncovered so many lies, there was almost too much to choose from.
In the end, I left it up to her. "You can take your pick,” I offered.
"My pick from what...?"
The long list of lies we’re told about the world we live in.
It was true, but maybe a little harsh. I decided to go with one of my more recent discoveries, as an example. It would test how much Cassie could actually question the way we lived, and maybe also give me the chance to show her one of my biggest secrets.
"How about this?” I paused for a moment, making sure Cassie was listening. “The viewing screens do more than transmit conversations and messages. They monitor us, as well."
"They do what?!" Cassie scoffed, rolling her eyes at the sky.
I frowned, turning away. "You think this is a joke!"
Maybe I should have expected her disbelief, even though it was Cassie who had asked me. Her reaction disappointed me – I wanted to share this with her.
"I'm sorry.” Cassie apologised.
I felt her fingers on my shoulder, trying to get me to turn around. But, I couldn’t move.
She tried again. "Tell me how...? Tell me how you know...?"
"You won't like it."
"Try me," she insisted.
I took a deep breath, and began again. “A few months ago I broke the viewing screen in my room. I was messing around, doing something like we’ve done today, and caught the edge of the screen with my fist, pushing it out of place – ”
“How hard did you hit it?”
“Hard enough,” I shrugged the question off. “Anyway, I was worried I’d get into trouble for breaking it. So, I got some of Father’s tools from his office and undid the screen, with the intention of re-setting it in the frame. I hoped no one would be able to tell that anything had happened and I wouldn’t get any hassle from my parents.”
Cassie nodded for me to continue, not offering any further questions.
“When I pulled the screen out, I’ll admit I didn’t finish what I’d started off doing straight away. There were all sorts of wires and circuits in there, which distracted me and, well, you know me…”
“You had a dig around to see how it worked.”
When Cassie finished my sentence, I couldn’t help but smile at how well she knew me.
“So…” I continued, “I got some more tools out and dismantled the screen and speakers, making sure I remembered where everything went so that I could put it back together afterwards – ”
“I can’t believe you did that!” She looked over to me. “What would have happened if you couldn’t get it back together?”
“I thought you said I was good at engineering?” I pouted and tried to sound offended. It was a good attempt, but I didn’t really pull it off. Or, so I thought.
“Well you are – but you might not have been able to – ”
Cassie was scrambling for words. She had fallen for it, I realised with a smirk. She looked over at me and I quickly wiped the smile off my face, but it was too late. Cassie’s sharp eyes re-focused on me with a glare.
“You didn’t know you could put it back together!” She accused, smacking me lightly on the arm.
“Nope,” I grinned. “But, I figured I’d just trash the screen beyond repair if that happened and say that I fell into it… Anyway, that’s not the point. When I was working through the speaker components, alongside the coil that transmits the signal there are the receivers that act as a microphone. What was odd, was that there were two microphones, not one as you would expect.”
“Two?” Cassie echoed.
I nodded.
“Could it be to give a better reception – pick up more from the room when transmitting?”
It was a good suggestion. “To be honest, I did wonder that myself at first when I saw them. Although, the microphones are so sensitive that shouldn’t be necessary. Then, I wondered if it might have been a back up to the main microphone – to save any maintenance being done immediately, if one part failed.”
Cassie jumped on the idea. “Maybe that’s what it was,”
“Not really,” I shook my head, wishing it could be that simple. “I followed the circuits they were fitted to. Only one ran into the standard communication system that operates throughout the space station.”
“What was the other attached to?”
Cassie sounded intrigued. It was shame I didn’t have a better answer for her.
“I don’t know. All I could do was trace the connection back to its origin point. It was transmitting along a completely separate system…one I had never seen before.”
“That is odd,” Cassie agreed, twisting her fingers absent-mindedly through the grass.
“That wasn’t the only odd part. The second microphone was also on a different kind of switching system to the first one. It appeared to be automatically triggered by movement or sound, rather than the main manual controls of the viewing screen.”
“Could it be a fault on the system? Connected into the station incorrectly or an earlier model or something...?”
I stared at her, im
“That’s one of the things I love about you,” I smiled. “You’re always looking for the alternative. Nothing’s ever black and white –”
“I know – I’m sorry – I’m always asking a dozen questions when you’re just trying to tell me something. It’s a bad thing.”
Why was she apologising?
“No, it’s a good thing – a useful thing,” I reassured her. “As much as I like to look into how things work, it’s the why that usually frustrates me. You always seem to be able to look at things in a different way and come up with the why…”
Perhaps Cassie’s alternative perspective would offer something I hadn’t thought of, on this subject.
“So…what do you think the why would be in this case? Why would there be a transmitter in every viewing screen that doesn’t relate to the normal uses we have for them? And why would it automatically trigger on movement or sound within the space?”
Cassie didn’t flinch under my barrage of questions, she just came right back at me.
“It’s not every screen is it – you’ve only seen it in the one you broke haven’t you – could it be a mistake?”
It was a rational suggestion and it would have been a sound place to start, except that Cassie had forgotten that she was speaking to me. As soon as she finished asking the question, she guessed what I had done.
“How many screens have you dismantled to check?” she demanded.
“A few,” I admitted, trying to downplay, because Cassie looked quite shocked. But, then I laughed, suddenly angry with myself for lying to her.
What was the point?
I sighed, and told the truth. “Not a few; a lot.”
Cassie frowned. “All of them have the second transmitter?”
“All of them,” I confirmed.
“How did you even find that out? When did you get the chance to take apart any screens outside your apartment?”
“I told you before, my parents work long hours – just like yours.”
“Still – how did you get into other places to take apart screens without anyone seeing you?”
I should have known she would have realised there were gaps in my story. Every gap was a secret, and I certainly had a lot of those. I gave myself a shake. If I was committed to telling her the truth, I might as well get on with it.
“I used this,” I said, reaching into my trouser pocket and pulling out the wristband I always kept there. I held it out for Cassie to see.
For a few moments, she silently examined the band. Her gaze ran back and forth, taking in the two short plastic threads attached to each side of the rectangular sliver of metal.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I think it’s metal, although I couldn’t tell you what kind.”
“Metal?” Cassie stroked her finger over the surface of the small sheet that sat on my palm. “What makes you think it’s made of metal?”
“Even though we’ve never worked with solid metals it seems to fulfil several of the properties we’re told they have.”
I turned the wristband over to show Cassie the other side. As I did, I found my own finger brushing the smooth, cool surface. I relished the sensation: different to how any other material in the Family Quarter felt. For some reason, I always found the feel of the metal reassuring: as if my discovery of it and what it could do really meant something.
“Where did it come from?”
Of course, she would ask me the most difficult question first.
“I found it in Father’s office – among some of his work tools – I’ve seen a few similar things since, but this is the only one I found that did anything.”
Cassie’s eyes widened with surprise. “Why were you searching through his office?”
“I know – I shouldn’t have been doing it.” I stopped myself from adding that I wasn’t sorry. “The first time it happened, I was looking for a tool to help me with an experiment for school, and I found another piece of metal lodged inside his toolkit. I’d never seen anything like it before and wanted to find out what it was, what it could do…”
“And what did it do?”
“Nothing…nothing at all,” I confessed, my memories of disappointment at my first failed experiments colouring my tone, before I shook them off and continued with the story. “But, I couldn’t believe Father even had something like that. He’s always told me he worked on the internal systems of the space station, within the Family Quarter and there’s no metal here at all – the only place we’re told they used metal is in the outer structure.”
“So what does that mean?”
“I’ve never been able to decide what it means. I couldn’t ask Father because I would get into trouble for what I’d done. I couldn’t tell anyone else in case it got Father into trouble – maybe he’d been into an area he shouldn’t have been in – or someone who worked on the outer structure had given it to him and he had hidden it…”
Cassie sat back, simply watching me, her expression sympathetic.
A heavy sigh squeezed out of my lungs, huffing into the space between us. “I just didn’t know what to think,” I told her, being completely honest. “Then over time I found more pieces – I know I shouldn’t be searching through Father’s work stuff, but I couldn’t help myself – I had to know more about them.”
“And now you think there’s something else to it.” Cassie spoke slowly, framing her words carefully as she correctly guessed why I had such issues over such a small thing. “It wasn’t just a one-off and so you think your father is involved in something he hasn’t told you about because he shouldn’t be doing it…? Or, that he’s lying to you about what he does…?”
I nodded, in answer to her half-asked questions. “I just can’t believe there’s any reason Father would have these things, if he wasn’t working on the outer structure.”
Cassie’s head bobbed, as she silently agreed with my theory.
“And, if he is working there – why are we being lied to about the work engineering do?”
“I always thought we were situated centrally in the space station; that the outer structure was quite separate from the Family Quarter and closer to the Retirement and Married Quarters.”
I could see Cassie working through each element as she spoke, seeing the ways in which what I was telling her didn’t fit with the world we were told existed around us.
We all knew that the overarching rule of the Family Quarter was to stay safe and protect the family unit: the future of the human race was always the most important thing. Outer structure work was dangerous, so it was done by people from the Retirement Quarter who were past the age of having and raising children. Only very occasionally would trained people from the Married Quarter work there, because they still had an important role in the propagation of the species. And never did anyone from the Family Quarter go to the outer shell – death was not supposed to be a part of our lives here.
Cassie was still mulling over her thoughts out loud, and I tuned back in to her voice. “You can’t pass between the zones unless you make a permanent personal change – so how would your father be working in that area?”
“Another thing I don’t know!” I laughed, turning away before she saw the bitterness I felt, at having struggled with this same question for so long.
I gazed out across the Family Quarter, taking in the neat lines of the avenues, the green parks and white buildings. It didn’t look real from up here. It looked like something a child might build, tidy and perfect, but lacking the reality of life. Only dolls could live there.
“Do you ever feel that thing? That there’s something not right with how we live here?”
“How do you mean?”
I turned back to face her. “Like when you and I are talking ab
Cassie just stared back at me.
“I can’t find reasonable answers, no matter how hard I look.”
“Don’t you think we might feel like this because there is something missing?” Cassie suggested. “We don’t live like humans were meant to. Surviving in the space station, in such a controlled environment, we’re bound to feel something’s missing.”
“I can accept that. But, I don’t see why The Council and our parents need to lie to us. It seems to me that we have enough information to make general sense of the world surrounding us, but when you look any deeper it begins to unravel.”
Cassie gazed at me for a long while, not offering anything else, until she bluntly demanded: “Tell me something else. Tell me something I don’t know.”
I was taken aback by the frankness of her question, and so I answered without thinking about it too hard. “It’s not just the screens that are monitoring us. Every time a scanner records our mark a second measure is taken.”
“What kind of measure?”
“A full body scan is completed, detecting your body heat, heart rate, heightened brain wave activity. Each scan is designed to monitor your emotional state; looking for extremes of mental agitation. The scans become more in depth for everyone between the ages of twelve and twenty-one.”
“And it’s some form of social control?” Cassie guessed.
“I think so.” With our society’s abhorrence for violence and aggressive behaviour, I had come to the same conclusion. “The data is fed into a monitoring system that looks at virtually every aspect of our daily lives. There are other less pleasant areas where monitoring is carried out – you’ll notice there’s a scanner outside every toilet you can access?”
“Urgh!” Cassie’s lip curled in disgust.
“Exactly,” I nodded. “Your vitamin supplement is as much hormones as vitamins and other chemicals, used to restrict your emotional range as is seen fit. That’s why it quite often changes.”
It was hard to resist telling Cassie what I’d found in her files, but without any explanation for why it was being done, it would sound crazy. I didn’t want to scare her, especially not when she was taking everything so well.
“Yesterday you didn’t take your tablets with dinner,” she recalled.
“No,” I agreed, deciding that even if I didn’t reveal her issues, I would quite happily share my own. “I have elevated testosterone levels, according to my data feed, and they’re trying to bring them down to normal levels. High testosterone levels are connected with a proclivity for violent behaviour in the system.”
“What will happen if you don’t take them? Won’t it show up in the monitoring?” Cassie looked worried.
“It would show up… But, only if I stop hacking the system and changing my data feeds.”
“You’re doing WHAT?!” Cassie exploded, her voice reaching a high-pitch squeak. “You’ll be brought up before The Council if you get caught!”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“But –”
I held up my hands to interrupt whatever she was going to say. “It’s OK – you don’t need to worry.”
Cassie fell silent and stayed that way for a long while. I could tell that she was trying to process everything I had thrown at her during that last few minutes, and so I stayed quiet and left her to it. Finally she spoke.
“You’re right,” she said, reaching over to me and taking my face in her hand.
In the face of all my questions, all my frustrations, this one small gesture gave me hope. My mouth twitched into a small smile, as I allowed myself the fantasy that I might not be alone any more. Cassie’s face loomed before mine, filling every space I could see with her. As her eyes burned into mine, she leaned forward the last few inches and brushed her lips over mine. And then she spoke the words I longed for.
“You’re not alone anymore. You have me.”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I had been alone for so long with my questions and theories and anger – and now this beautiful, fantastic girl was saying she believed me.
When she closed her eyes and kissed me, I finally let go of myself. Everything I had held in before, didn’t have to be hidden anymore – not from Cassie. My eyes drifted shut as she kissed me harder, her arm winding around my shoulders to pull me close.
Without her having to say anything more, I just knew – maybe part of me always had – that Scarlett was right. Cassie was the answer…