All Good Children - Catherine Austen [4]
I slip my empty packages onto Ally’s tray, then store my own tray, pushing it into the seat ahead of me until the ultimate growls.
“Where did these come from?” Ally asks, holding my chip bags.
I shrug. “They must be yours.”
She turns them over, puzzled, before tucking them in her seat pocket. Then she leans into my chest and holds her teddy up to the window.
I kiss her head and love her like crazy, my gullible good-hearted sister.
The plane tilts in preparation for landing. I see the military escort beside us and the runway lights below. It looks like we’re heading to prison. “Holiday’s over,” I whisper.
It’s a half-hour shuttle from the Bradford Airport across the National Forest to New Middletown, but Mom still won’t give me back my RIG. I’m stuck staring at the beauty of the Pennsylvania Wilds. I kick Ally’s foot just for something to do.
“You will never get that RIG back if you don’t stop right now,” Mom says so loudly that other passengers look our way. I stare out the window like I’m not involved.
There are no cars for rent at the New Middletown station, so we take a taxi home. The driver’s id reads Abdal-Salam Al-Fulin. I’ve barely buckled up before he asks, “Did you hear about the speed-rail bombings in the southwest? Over three hundred dead. There’s nowhere safe anymore.”
We show a guard our ids and drive through the gates of my glorious town. “I feel pretty safe right here,” I say, but I know I’ll feel a lot safer once I get out of this taxi.
Ally watches a wildlife show in the backseat beside Mom, who stares out the window. Mom was RIG-addicted before Dad died. She uploaded our lives as they happened. Now she lets the world blur by.
“I love driving in this city,” the driver tells me. “Every road is a straight line.”
“It’s energy efficient,” I tell him. “New Middletown is the most environmentally smart city in the northeast. But they chopped down ten square miles of forest to build it. We’re big on irony here.”
“I don’t like the forest,” the driver says.
I shrug. “It’s beautiful.” I’ve never actually stepped foot in the forest, but I like driving by and seeing all the different shades of green. New Middletown is monotonous. Everything in town is the same age, same style, same color. What we lack in personality we compensate for with security. Half the city is bordered by forest and the other half is walled. There are only six roads into town and all of them are guarded. We don’t sprawl. We stand tall and tight. There are no beggars or thieves in New Middletown. If you don’t have a place to live and work here, you don’t get in. This driver probably hates the forest because he has to live there in a tent.
Over the past twenty years, Chemrose International has built six cities just like this to house the six largest geriatric centers in the world. Everyone who lives or works in New Middletown pays rent to Chemrose. The whole town revolves around New Middletown Manor Heights Geriatric Rest Home and its 32,000 beds.
“I never get lost here,” the driver says as he joins a line of cars traveling north along the city spine, past hospitals, labs and office towers.
“I’m surprised you get much business,” I say.
The city spines are entirely pedestrian, and each quadrant is like a self-contained village, with its own schools, clinics, gardens, rec centers, even our own hydroponics and water treatment facilities. We don’t have much call for taxicabs.
“I don’t get much business,” the driver admits. “Mostly I take people away.”
“To where?”
He shrugs. “You go to school here?”
“Sure. Academic school.”
“Lucky boy. What you going to be when you’re grown?”
“An architect.” I don’t hesitate. We pick our career paths early in academic school.
“You going to build things like that?” the driver asks me. He points to the New Middletown City Hall and Security Center, which glimmers in the distance on our left. It stands at the intersection of the city spines, in the exact center of town, rising to a point in twenty-eight staggered stories of colored glass.
“I hope so,” I say.
He