The Sun Dwellers

“Are you guys really buying this?” Trevor says.

“Shut it,” I say, warning him off with my eyes.

“Thanks,” Tristan says. “And I’m sorry for not telling you sooner. We literally walked outside onto the surface of the earth,” he starts again, trying to hammer home the crazy truth that I’m still trying to come to terms with. “Even with the sunglasses I couldn’t see for ten minutes, forced to cover my eyes with my hands, letting through a little more light minute by minute. My mother and Killen were the same, but my father adjusted quickly, because it wasn’t his first time above.”

My heart leaps suddenly as a thought hits me. “Were there clouds?” I ask, my voice a little too squeaky for my liking.

Tristan smiles for the first time in a while. “You should have seen it. The sky was dark red, spotted with bits of grainy clouds, which moved across the heavens faster than you would believe. The sun was nothing like our artificial suns. Compared to it, they are but a single hair on a person’s head, whereas it is the entire head of hair. Bright enough to light a thousand earths, it turned my skin red in only fifteen minutes.”

“It burned you?” Tawni asks.

“Yes, my gosh, how it burned. My skin ached for days and then became paper thin and peeled off as if I was a snake shedding my skin. There were trees and plants everywhere, but only in the Bubble.”

“The Bubble?” I say, curiosity getting the better of me.

“Sorry,” Tristan says. “I’m not explaining things right. I mean, there’s just so much to tell it’s hard to decide where to begin.”

“Tell them about the city,” Roc prompts.

“There’s a city?” I ask, my brain buzzing with too many questions to ask them all.

“Yes. That’s where we were. The only city left on Earth, at least as far as anyone knows. It’s called the New City, although informally people just call it the Bubble, because there’s a huge glass dome surrounding it, which looks like you could pop it by sticking a sword in the side. In reality though, it’s three feet thick and nearly unbreakable.”

“Who built it?” Tawni asks.

“Aha. Good question,” Tristan says, looking more and more comfortable with the subject now that we’re asking questions and not giving him a hard time about not telling us sooner. “Everything I’m about to tell you my father told us, so I’m assuming it’s true as he had no reason to lie or volunteer the information. Two hundred years ago, well before my father was born, my great-grandfather had his engineers build unma

“But you just said it’s not exactly safe on the earth’s surface,” Tawni says, her eyebrows raised.

“It’s not exactly, but I’ll get to that. My great-grandfather had a grand vision of building what he called the New City, the first city on earth since Year Zero. But he wasn’t about to go up there, not without some pretty strong evidence that it was safe. Nor was he willing to put sun dwellers in danger. So he personally recruited a collection of moon and star dwellers to be the guinea pigs.”

Trevor grunts. “Look, man, I’m trying to believe this—I really am—but do you really think your grandfather—”

“Great-grandfather.”

“Whatever. Do you really think he could’ve kept it quiet? Once he started involving people from all the Realms, surely someone would have gotten the word out.”

“I asked my father the same thing. Keeping it hidden all these years is what he was most proud of. It was easy, really. When the moon and star dwellers were recruited, they simply acted like they’d won some kind of a lottery, a chance to move to the Sun Realm, live the high life. But really, they sent them to the earth’s surface. No one was any wiser.”

“What happened to them?” I ask. Everyone’s so worried about all the damn details, but what matters—what really matters—is what’s happened to all these so-called recruits.

“They died,” Tristan says, looking down.

“All of them?” Tawni asks.

“Yes.” Tristan says the word into his lap, slightly muffled.

“That’s horrible,” Tawni says.

We all agree, which is why no one speaks for a few minutes. I stare at Tristan, who refuses to look at me. Tawni plays with her fingers. Roc taps a toe. Trevor, well, even he’s quiet, although I can tell the silence is getting to him, because he keeps sighing and looking around at everyone, as if he wishes someone would speak but doesn’t want to be the one.

“How did they die?” I ask finally. Now I’m interested in the gruesome details for some reason.

“Exposure to semi-toxic air,” Tristan says, raising his head slowly to meet my eyes.

“Semi-toxic?” Trevor says, almost bursting to join the conversation. “If they all died it sounds fully toxic to me.”

“Only to us,” Tristan explains. “They weren’t used to the air above.”

“But it’s the same air we breathe down here,” I argue. “We get it from the earth’s surface.”

“Yeah, but ours is highly filtered, going through multiple air locks where potentially harmful dust and bacteria are removed from the air. Our lungs aren’t used to the real air up there. Maybe we never will be. The initial earth dwellers only lasted a little over a month before contracting various types of irreversible cancers.”

“Let me guess, they got more moon and star dwellers for round two,” I say, feeling slightly ill.

“Yes. This time they equipped them with heavy-duty protective clothing, an earlier generation of the orange hazmat suits the guys were wearing when we first arrived on the surface. Even wearing the suits around the clock, they only lasted six months before their bodies gave out. But they had made a significant start on building a city—a city that was uninhabitable, at least if you wanted to live to see your next birthday. My great-grandfather was getting old at that point, so he passed the torch to my father’s father, who realized that even if he continued to use dwellers from the Lower Realms to build the city, replacing them as they died, he would still be stuck with a city that no one could live in.”

The story is coming together, feeling more and more real with each added detail. “So he built the Bubble?” I ask.

“Not him, of course, but yes, more ‘recruits’ built it, an airtight globe that protects the New City both from the dangerous rays of the sun and the noxious air on the earth’s surface. It filters and recycles the air using a system very similar to what we have in the Tri-Realms. A hundred thousand people now live in the New City,” Tristan says.

A big question remains. The biggest, really. “Why didn’t your grandfather tell the rest of the Tri-Realms once the city was livable?” I ask.

Deep lines appear in Tristan’s creased forehead. “Because he’s a Nailin,” he says. “Look, he and my father are cut from the same marble block. They’re cold, hard-hearted, and think they’re better than everyone else. My grandfather had a good thing going. President of the Tri-Realms, a good life, everything he ever wanted. A drastic change like Earth being inhabitable again? That might have destroyed everything he worked so hard to build. The hundred thousand people up there aren’t allowed to come back down, which is fine by most of them. Ninety percent of the earth dwellers used to be sun dwellers, and were selected over time to populate the surface of the earth.”

“And the other ten percent?” Tawni asks.

“Moon and star dwellers. Up there only to do the jobs that the sun dwellers don’t want to do, like garbage disposal, cleaning, cooking, all the same stuff they do in the Sun Realm.”

“Slave labor,” I say. The messed-up world we live in has just become even more messed up.