Kingdom of Cages by Sarah Zettel

Author:Sarah Zettel [ZETTEL, SARAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780446559775
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Tam would never have believed it was possible to stand in front of his family and feel so much anger. As stunted as his Conscience was, these were all the people who filled his life. They sat with him, arrayed on the tiers of the meeting amphitheater, their faces grave. Even the Senior Committee and Father Mihran looked frightened. All of them were excruciatingly aware that something huge, inexplicable, and irreversible had happened, and that it might even bring down the sword that the Authority had hung over Pandora.

And one of you did this. One of them had committed murder and gotten away with it. He searched the faces on the first tier and found Dionte. She sat, placid and attentive, with the other guardians, listening to Tender Cartes, who stood at the theater’s center describing how none of the subsystems had been interfered with and none of the alarms, electronic or biological, had been severed.

Everyone listened intently. Everyone wanted to know what had actually happened and how it had happened. Not because Helice Trust was murdered, although all would have said that was tragic, but because the project had not been found. Anywhere. It was most certainly not still inside Helice, but it was not anywhere inside the Alpha Complex either. Their one success, the one fetus that was going to come to term without adversely affecting the mother, was gone. Every square centimeter of the complex had already been turned over, by Aleph, and by Aleph’s tenders. The Eden Project was set back by years, and the hope for a peaceful, unchanging Pandora hung by a thread. Tam knew that every mind in the amphitheater carried the image of a mushroom cloud of dust and ash.

And there sat Dionte, his sister by both birth and branch. She sat next to Basante, whispering in his ear while she stroked his hand display. What was she doing there? What was she telling him?

Tam smelled aloe and remembered her as a little girl, playing tag with their cousins. He remembered being a little envious when she got to stay with their mother and he got taken off by their birth uncle Laplace for tutoring. However, when the complexes were first built it had been determined that the importance of the uncle-son relationship would be reestablished here, and of course the first families knew best. Wasn’t his Conscience’s ceaseless voice telling him so right now? His carefully truncated Conscience.

He remembered the night when their parents explained to them in the lowest of whispers that they were not like other children. Their Consciences would not be able to hold them as firmly as other people’s did. So they must be more careful, more attentive, and more certain of what they did. They would have a special duty when they were grown to help those who could not move without their Consciences’ approval. There would come a time when someone was needed who could stand up to the rest of the family. When that time came, they, Tam and Dionte Bhavasar, would have to take the lead.

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