The Green Ones

Episode 1, Part 1

The odds favored both my brother and me manifesting symptoms of the twitch virus. Odds. Statistical probabilities. Since testing positive at puberty, it’s become my belief one makes one’s own odds, and I say ours are good.

Lying flat on my back in the perimeter garden, I coil my blue-black braid around my head like a snake. From this angle, the concave mesh of the shield dome above me appears as a solid surface. Hanging from it by a single screw, a faded sign commemorates New Teo’s millennium.

If I didn’t know what it said, I’d no longer be able to read it. New Teotihuacan’s twin cities, a thousand years of building a brighter future together. It’s hard to imagine cramming more irony into thirteen words.

A thousand years of the twitch virus and the telekinesis it unleashes, and this is the best we’ve done? Thinking in years, or even weeks, is a luxury I can no longer afford. Five more days as a citizen of New Teo’s Worker City, I recite to myself. Five days until registration for Masa Academy—me and my little brother’s only hope for a future, bright or not.

The earth tremors as the 7:36 security detail passes through the mind pits ten meters beneath me. I’m not privy to the official Masa call-sign for the mid-level assignment, but I recognize its timing. I know the rhythm and flow of masazin through the mind pits better than the coursing of blood through my own extremities.

“If you’re done figuring what the masazin had for breakfast today, could we get some?”

The ozone from the daily identification burn still lingers in the air, and my brother, Olin, has already mentioned breakfast twice. I lie perfectly still, anticipating the deep-level Masa car sliding north toward the heart of Worker City. There. The rumble registers in my gut. “Can’t you sit quietly for five minutes?” I breathe deeply through my nose, inviting the scent of flowering hibiscus to erase the tingling sensation of the ID burn.

“I once sat quietly for two straight weeks, or so I’ve been told.” Olin ensures a cold bite to his speech whenever he references his time spent in a coma. It irritates him that I haven’t spoken the whole truth surrounding the event that killed our parents, and put him under for two weeks.

Our parents had planned for us to be actively infected. Only around 40% of Worker City’s population remains passive carriers of the twitch. Unfortunately, none of their planning accounted for being killed in a telekinetic outburst from their own son.

“What do you have against the quiet?” I sit up. Peeling the cotton fabric of my tzotzomatli from my sticky back, I work it like a bellows in effort to expel the humidity. Midway through the rainy season, there is nowhere for the moisture to go.

Olin shivers in preparation for one of his melodramatic speeches. “I will share the ingesting of my meals. I will share their expelling. I will share everything within this gods-forsaken cage,” he gestures toward the shield dome less than twenty meters distant, his eyes like slits, “but quiet is one thing I will not share, and there simply isn’t enough in New Teo for a scraggly chadzitzin boy to have his own.”

I chew the inside of my cheek until I taste blood. “Enough.” Digging my fingers into the loose soil, I find a pinyon cone completely by accident. In a swift movement, I thunk it off my brother’s head.

“Xoxochueyi!” He barks the expletive and eyes me. Instantly, his look lingers somewhere between pouting and apology.

The violent outburst doesn’t solve anything, but it makes me feel better, briefly. Until I too am sorry. Olin is partially right. The copper and nickel mesh of the shield dome does not cut us off from the sounds and smells of the forest, or its gentle breeze. But in exchange for protection from the constant threat of telekinetic attack, the working class of New Teo surrender their autonomy.

Olin’s wrong about the rest—I will not let him die a hopeless chadzitzin, even if I have to force the academy to accept us. The two years since our parents’ death have been hard on him. I’ve been hard on him in order to make him stronger.

We both know he is the more telekinetically gifted, but if he can’t control it…I dismiss the thought. We’re too close to our goal to dwell on the negative. Wrapping my braid loosely around my neck, I contemplate how to apologize. When I make eye contact, I see by his watery eyes I’ve waited too long.

He starts into it before I can stop him. “Let’s spend the day outside the dome. We could hunt,” his words spill into each other. “Fresh peccary cooked over an open fire, just the two of us,” he’s pleading. “We’ve almost a full twenty-four hours until the next ID burn. We could just—”

I have been shaking my head since he spoke the first word. Finally, I cut him off. “Olin, we can’t. We’d miss the—”

“The busiest day of the market,” he slumps. “I know.” His gaze falls to his purple hands as he holds them in his lap.

I look at my own hands, dyed a rich purple from a late night of working in a logwood dye bath. It’s our trademark—my blue-black hair, our purple fabrics. Over a practical pair of trousers, I’m wearing my favorite tzotzomatli made by alternating streaks of acidic-purple and basic-blue logwood dyes. The garment always draws plenty of attention to our booth.

It would draw more if I had larger breasts to fill it out. I work the best I can with what I have. I’m tall, and if I let the garment list slightly over a shoulder, I get favorable deals from most of the working-class men.

As the 7:41 security detail rumbles beneath me, I remind myself our situation is not Olin’s fault. And we’re not as desperate as some. Despite our active infection with the twitch, our homelessness, orphan status and phony license for dye trading, we technically lack the most important qualifiers for chadzitzin classification. Neither of us is yet sixteen, and we’ve never missed an ID burn. We’re still citizens.

With any luck, we will have the money for our academy uniforms, forged papers and bribes by the closing of today’s market. In five days my brother and I take our first step in defeating the odds by forcing our way into the academy.

The odds of surviving five years as masazin in order to become ometeotl, one of the immortal class, have been put at one in ten. That’s something I can work with. As chadzitzin, the odds of a nasty death from the twitch by age twenty-four are absolute.

I stand, cross the path to the bench where Olin is sitting, and plop down beside him. “Xoxo?” I use the shortened colloquialism for the word green, despite finding it base and lazy, in hopes of lifting his spirits.

He nods. “You throw like a girl.”

“You squeal like one.”

He shoves me in effort to conceal the smirk on his face. We sit in silence for nearly a minute, Olin’s way of hugging and making up. Finally, he rubs his stomach. “I know where we can get some roasted tapir.”

I’m about to remind him of our budget when I sense something is out of place. The forest canopy of the perimeter park has fallen quiet. It takes a full second for me to realize the 7:43 shift through the mind pits is at least five seconds late. It’s the worst discrepancy I’ve ever noted.

The constantly rotating shifts of telekinetic youth beneath the city provide the only means of stabilizing the mental charge of the shield dome against potential telekinetic attack from outside. I’m torn between the impulse to push my brother away from the perimeter and the need to put my ear to the ground.

Gripping Olin’s hand, I choose the former. “We should g—” before I finish speaking, my words are incinerated along with the air overhead.