Chapter Fourteen

Delaney

I stayed up late that night, restlessly searching through file after file, trying to find anything worth investigating further. Suffice to say, none of my homework was finished. Though I'd transferred so many files, every single page that appeared on my tablet screen seemed to be unimportant. It all had some regard to taxes, statistics, or some other such hopelessly useless subject.

As it approached midnight, my stomach grumbled. I had skipped dinner, much to the dismay of my mother, telling her that I was working on a project to get her off my back. Now, though, she was probably asleep, so I had no chance of getting a free meal.

Muttering to myself tiredly, I got up from my bed and padded out of my bedroom, down the stairs, and into the kitchen, taking my tablet with me. As I paraded through the darkness, feeling the wall for the light control, I tripped over the hems of too-long pajama pants and ended up face-first on the cold tile floor.

"Just kill me now," I mumbled, angrily getting to my feet. I found the light and brightened it to its dimmest setting; bright enough more me to see, but dim enough not to wake anyone. Thankfully, no harm had come to my tablet. But as I staggered to the table to set it down, I realized the the movement of my fall had caused the file I had open to switch. It was one I hadn't checked before, I was sure of it. If I had, I would have remembered its name.

"The Pro-Inferiors," I read in a whisper, "deviant rebels against the Superior government."

Midnight found me sitting at the kitchen table, eating cold pasta with one hand and holding my tablet with the other. I was completely absorbed by the Pro-Inferiors, whom the document-writer described as "angry, misguided mutineers whose only purpose is to destroy that which the people hold dear." Obviously, it was a very biased report, but that certainly didn't stop it from being extremely captivating.

At times, the writing was a bit hard to follow, but I got the gist of it. The Pro-Inferiors were a rebel group hell-bent on taking down the Superiors. Though they were considered a threat by the government, it was estimated that their forces were no higher than two-hundred strong, which, in comparison with the Superiors, was nothing.

I wondered, at first, why I'd never heard of them. But as I continued reading, I found a passage stating that "we must keep this group a secret from the general public. If word of this gets out, it will either send people into a mass panic, or turn them all against us."

I froze at that, suddenly feeling cold. They were hiding it from us, and so diligently, too. In a separate document, there were reports of public clashes between the Superiors and Pro-Inferiors, all of which had been successfully excused by government workers. I skimmed the list.

There was only one that I recognized, as it had happened close to home only a few years ago. It was the collapse of the Magnolia Bridge, an overpass bridge that connects the Magnolia and Interbay neighborhoods to the rest of Seattle. It came down one night, when everyone was asleep; its destruction wasn't noticed until the next day. The city had told us that it was a result of faulty infrastructure, and promptly scheduled it to be rebuilt.

The thing was, though, the bridge had already been rebuilt several decades before, after being damaged in an earthquake. It was replaced with the best material of the time, and had stood for years on its own. The city had checked it frequently, too, for any signs of wear and tear.

Suddenly, it all made sense. In this document, the writer explained that the Pro-Inferiors had been the true reason for the bridge's collapse; they had detonated explosives beneath its legs, sending it plunging down. So it had nothing to do with faulty infrastructure at all.

There were tons stories like this, more acts of vandalism committed throughout the years, all over the country. Spray paint on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Anti-Popularity banners hanging from top of the Empire State Building. All of these little deviations, which had dismissed by citizens because it was the easiest to believe. All of these things had been projects of the Pro-Inferiors.

I had to know more.

Given that these documents were so partial, I decided to turn to the Net for more. I made sure to use a private browser and network so that they could not be traced, and got down to work.

My bowl of pasta lay forgotten beside me as I scrolled through the results on my tablet. There were only about a hundred hits, which, considering the amount of junk on the Net, was rather surprising.

The first few results were meaningless, nothing more than pages that used the words "pro" and "inferior" in a different context. But as I continued down the page, I found an article boldly titled, "The Pro-Inferiors: Do They Exist?"

I clicked on it.

Is our government as perfect as we believe it to be? Sources tell me, no, it is not. I have recently been approached by an anonymous source, who spoke to me about the Pro-Inferiors, a rebel group that the Superiors have been trying to keep under wraps for decades.

This group has allegedly been responsible for various acts of vandalism over the years, including the famous spray-painting of the Golden Gate Bridge. But apparently, their efforts are not random or misguided.

The people who make up the Pro-Inferiors have one purpose, and one purpose only: to destroy the government as we know it, and take down the Superiors. If our leaders are as flawless as they lead us to think, then why would they have such vehement opposition?

That is, of course, assuming that these Pro-Inferiors are the real deal. They've never been publicly mentioned, nor has any sign of them appeared on the media. Maybe some people, scattered across the country, have heard stories of these mysterious miscreants.

But the question is: are they true? The choice is up to you.

The article was featured on a conspiracy theories website, and was dated back nearly a year ago. Strangely enough, though, it seemed to have been deleted, then re-posted only a few weeks ago. I checked out the person who wrote it—a guy named Max McEnroe—and he didn't have another article after the one on the Pro-Inferiors. In fact, according to his time-line, he had abruptly resigned from his position as staff writer a mere three days after posting said article. Coincidence?

My heart was in my throat as I went back to the search page. Of course, Max's resignation and the article's appearance could have just been a chance event. Maybe he'd been planning to quit for a while, but wanted to write one last article. But after everything I'd just just read, that seemed unlikely. If the Superiors were going to such lengths as to blatantly lie to keep the Pro-Inferiors a secret, what would they do to anyone who tried to expose them?

One thing was for sure: I'd never find out without doing more research. And so, fighting back a yawn and ignoring the time—almost twelve-thirty—I dove back into the Net, and the secrets of the Pro-Inferiors.

○●○●○●○

I woke up the next morning with my face in the kitchen table and my hand in the long-forgotten bowl of noodles. My tablet was playing a frantic electro-pop song, its screen flashing in wild colors. As soon as I opened my eyes, a robotic, prerecorded voice droned, "Good morning, Delaney. It is time to wake up and get ready for school."

I jerked to my feet, my heart running a marathon. As I did so, the chair I had been sitting on toppled over and skidded wildly across the kitchen floor. I brought a hand to my stomach, glancing around in confusion. Why was I in the kitchen, and not my bedroom? Why was my hand covered in soggy cheese sauce?

A glance at my tablet brought it all back. Suddenly, I remembered all my research from the night before, and my discovery of the Pro-Inferiors—whoever they were. I slowly reached forward and turned off the alarm, sinking slowly to the ground in the heavy silence that followed.

My mind was racing, trying to keep up with all the information it was processing. I closed my eyes against the flood of thoughts, but it was no use; nothing made sense. And there was no doubt that I'd have a massive headache by the time first period rolled around.

It was on the kitchen floor that my mother found me, clutching the legs of my pajama pants and trying to sort through my cluttered brain.

"Delaney," she said reproachfully, "get up off the ground. School starts in forty minutes, and I will not have you being late. I have a meeting to get to."

It was that word, meeting, that triggered the memory in my head. I rocketed to my feet with my heart in my throat, suddenly very alert. My mom, huffily picking up the chair I had knocked over, didn't notice my sudden burst of energy.

Meeting. In at instant, those last words I had read while half asleep suddenly came back to me. And with that knowledge came another, less appealing realization: I had to tell Caleb.