Superior

Chapter 14

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.