I watch mothers standing on the dole line with children who scamper and cling and laugh and cry, all the things children do when they’re bored and waiting. Though the mothers’ clothes are worn and torn, though there is despair in the back of their eyes, when they look at their children they’re exactly like my mother. They’re so full of love and care and worry. They’ll do anything for their little ones. My eyes get hot, my throat tightens, as two small children play tag around my legs. The mother examines me curiously, but doesn’t seem to condemn me. She calls her kids over and gives me a little smile before turning away. Apparently I’m not a threat, but none of her concern. I relax just a bit . . .
. . . which, I’m learning, is generally a bad idea.
A murmuration goes through the crowd, and it starts to close in around me. I don’t know what’s happening, but they move like one entity, a multicelled animal with a mysterious but frightening purpose. I’m being closed in by a wall of people. No one is looking at me, but I can feel the heat of their bodies as some twenty people subtly move nearer to me.
Then I hear the voice, loud and commanding. “We’re looking for an inner circle girl. Have you seen anyone who doesn’t belong?”
They’re trapping me! They’re holding me for an easy capture, for the reward! I shove my way through, shouldering mothers and children out of the way, and break from the crowd.
“There!” a Greenshirt shouts, and I’m limping away again, a slow and painful half run. I look quickly over my shoulder. Behind me, the people move once more, like a school of fish, a flight of starlings, to get between me and the two pursuing Greenshirts. It is so smooth it looks accidental, circumstantial. The Greenshirts shout at them to move and force their way through after me. By now, though, I have a decent head start.
Then I hear a bullet hit the wall beside me. Without meaning to I skid a brief stop and look at the groove it gouged. That isn’t an electrical charge. That’s a real solid bullet that will tear apart my flesh!
There’s nowhere for me to go but in a straight line. The Greenshirts will have a clean shot at me. Another bullet streaks by my side and I dodge, zigzagging in what I hope are unpredictable turns. I might as well be a difficult target. Bikk! Isn’t there a place to turn? There are no alleys, no open doors.
“Hold your fire!” someone shouts. The voice is familiar. I hear feet pounding far behind us . . . but not far enough. They’re closing in!
I’m too tired to run any faster. Before long, I won’t be able to run any farther. My side cramps as if a claw was gripping my ribs, my swollen ankle throbs, and I can hardly catch my breath.
I have to get out of this open space. Finally I see a little side road between two buildings. I dodge sharply in and stagger against the wall as I run painfully on. But the walls get closer together! The road narrows into a dead end filled with piles of stinking garbage.
I whirl around, but it’s too late. The two Greenshirts are blocking the entrance. One of them levels his weapon at me. I press against the wall, fall to my knees, curl up in a ball . . . and hope the end will be quick.
There’s the sound of a tussle, a thump. I look up to see one Greenshirt standing, the other sprawled at his feet. The one who is standing holds a gun . . . but he’s pointing it at the unconscious Greenshirt on the ground, not at me.
I recognize the burly young blond Greenshirt from my first venture into the city. Rook, was that it? He looks scared. Of me? That can’t be. Could it be for me?
He beckons, but I stay cowering in the garbage.
“Come on!” he whispers urgently. “The others will be here soon.”
Cautiously, I rise and approach. His face looks so young. It doesn’t match his burly body and menacing uniform. “Do you have a safe place to hide?” he asks.
I shake my head. He looks down the road in the direction we came from. “Where is he?” he asks aloud to himself. “Look, I can’t take care of you. It’s going to be hard enough covering this up.” He gestures with his gun to his unconscious comrade. “Just go and hole up somewhere. But come back to the breadline after dark. He’ll find you.”
“Who will find me?” I choke out, completely confused. “Why are you helping me?”
Apparently the answer to both questions is the same. “My younger brother.”
His brother is another second child?
Before I can ask any more questions he curses, and hisses, “Run!” I see other Greenshirts approaching, marching swiftly in tactical formation. I stagger off, clutching my aching side, while Rook squares himself in the line between me and the other Greenshirts so they can’t fire at me.
He fires, though. And he misses, deliberately, each time.
I turn toward the only place the Greenshirts might not follow me: the wasteland beyond Eden.
EVEN THOUGH ROOK is helping me, I know I’m far from safe. I have one ally, compared to the entire might of the Center, all of the Greenshirts, the securitybots that will cut me down, even the little cleanbots that will alert all the rest of my whereabouts.
But no, I think as I limp away at a half trot. There might be other people on my side. There’s Rook’s brother, whoever he is and wherever he is. Though I can’t expect any help from him unless I can survive the day and sneak back to the breadline tonight.
And then there’s the hobo in rags, his second-child bright hazel eyes twinkling mysterious advice at me. And what had happened at the charity station? When all of those people—mostly mothers and children—crowded around me, I was sure they were part of a conspiracy to capture me. But then when I was spotted, and fleeing, they seemed to step between me and my pursuers. Did I just imagine that? It casts the first occurrence in another light. Though I’m a little incredulous, I think maybe when they closed around me they were trying to hide me, to protect me, to shield me.
But why? I’m a stranger from an inner circle. A second child who threatens the very existence of Eden. Why would anyone help me?
The part of the outermost ring I’ve seen so far is dirty, crumbling, a place of desperation and squalor—but still, apparently, habitable. As I move outward, though, what was bad becomes so much worse.
Entire buildings seem to have been knocked from their foundations and lay sprawled across the streets like disheveled drunkards. There are huge holes in the road that look like bomb craters. I’ve read about the wars people fought back in the days before the Ecofail. They slaughtered one another for the flimsiest reasons: disputes over nuances of myths, or ownership of the toxic forms of fuel that gave the world energy back then. But these craters must have been caused by something else, right? Collapsed water pipes or faulty infrastructure. There’s no way that the last remnants of the human species could engage in anything like a war.
Whatever the cause, this stretch at the extreme outer edge is like another world, an alien landscape of tumbled masonry and exposed pipes, of shadow even in the brightness of morning. Of loneliness. I don’t see a living soul anywhere out here. The wind makes a mournful sound as it wanders through the wreckage of a city.
But alone is good. Alone is safe. Surely somewhere out here amid the devastation is a place where I can hide until nightfall.
Then I hear voices behind me.
“There she is! Get her!”
I dodge behind what was once the wall of a clothing store. A faded sign still clings by one bolt to the lopsided masonry, advertising the latest fashions at a reasonable price. Just as I disappear behind the cover, a spray of bullets embeds itself in the wall. I have the impression that this time the miss isn’t deliberate.
“Take her alive!” I hear someone shout, but I can’t tell if it’s Rook. There are reasons other than compassion why the Greenshirts and the Center might prefer to have me taken alive rather than gunned down in the street. Torture. Interrogation. A public example to the citizens of Eden . . .
I break cover to dash as fast as I’m able to the next crumbled edifice. A quick backward glance shows them moving slowly in tactical formation,
as if they’re expecting to be attacked themselves. Maybe out here in this outlaw place they have more to worry about than me. I thank my lucky stars. I’m so slow now that if they pursued me at speed, I’d have no hope. But as long as they move in that cautious, stalking, defensive way, I can limp fast enough to stay ahead of them.
For a while, anyway. Until my ankle gives out, or I make a wrong turn and get cornered.
Panting, I lean against a wall riddled with what look like old bullet holes. What on Earth happened out here? My leg muscles are starting to twitch in protest, and my side is cramped, but my ankle has swollen enough that, for a little while anyway, the nerves are too pinched to hurt much. I know it won’t last, and any minute the stabbing pain will start. I just hope the ankle can bear my weight.
I know I shouldn’t rest, but my body has a mind of its own and I lean against that wall way too long. A bullet hits the masonry over my head, and with agonizing slowness I coax my legs into a run.
I round a corner . . . smack into a twenty-foot wall of twisted, tangled metal and wires, and concrete, all corners and sharp places. Bikk! The second they come around this corner, they’ll have an open shot. The wall of debris is unbroken, and there’s no way back except the way I’ve come. Back toward the Greenshirts. I try to climb—it’s one of the things I do best—but every hold either slices my hands or collapses beneath them. The wall is impenetrable, unclimbable, and stretches as far as I can see in either direction.
I want to cry. Not from grief this time, but from pure self-pity. I’m so tired! I hurt so much! I’m thirsty and bloody and bruised and my ankle is screaming now and my hands are raw . . . I can’t do this anymore. I can hear them coming.
I have no hope. I’ve reached the end.
I just want to lie down. What does it matter now? I let myself sink down, and the blessed relief of giving in to gravity—of giving in, period—is so welcome that I almost want to sprawl there, clasp my hands behind my head, and just gaze at the sky, waiting for the end to come.
But I don’t. I can’t. Not after Mom gave her life for me. I would be betraying her sacrifice if I just gave up.
Maybe I can’t go over, but what if I can go through?
I scramble to my knees and begin to paw at the seemingly impenetrable wall of debris. It isn’t long before I see it: a tunnel. Almost.
Go, my mother’s ghost commands, and I drop to my belly and begin to slither through headfirst.
“Halt!” someone bellows as my head disappears. Bullets pierce the wall around me, sending concrete dust into my eyes.
“Stop!” comes another voice, Rook’s voice, I’m pretty sure. But I can tell from his tone it’s not an order. It’s a plea. I’m shoulder-deep now, twisting and flexing to maneuver through the winding opening. “Come back!” Rook calls again as my hips almost don’t fit through, then squeeze past with a small avalanche of dust. He’s not putting on an act for the other Greenshirts. Something about his voice tells me he really believes that whatever I’m crawling toward is far worse than being captured by his compatriots.
My feet disappear, and the last thing I hear is one of the other Greenshirts saying, “Let her go. If she goes out there, she’s dead anyway.”
I don’t stop. If I’m going to die, at least I’ll die on my own terms.
I move through what feels like a maze of ruined civilization, wondering how this devastation came to be in our perfect society. Does everyone know about this, and I’m only surprised because I’ve lived a sheltered life? I’d think Ash would have told me about this if he knew. How many other truths have I missed out on for one reason or another?
I push and shove and wiggle and twist my way through, getting scraped by rough concrete and poked by shards of plastic. At the very least, why hasn’t all this stuff been recycled? There are tons of reusable material making up this wall. It stretches as far as I can see on either side, and so far I’ve crawled through at least thirty feet of tangled mess with no end in sight.
In my weary, near-hallucinatory state I wonder if it will go on forever. I’ve had dreams like that, where I try to walk through a door that seems only across the room, and yet somehow I can never get through. What if this isn’t just a wall but the world? What if Eden is surrounded by all the refuse and waste of humans’ dead civilizations, pollution and garbage stacked up to our very borders and filling all the rest of the world?
I feel as if I’ve been crawling forever when the way finally opens up. I crawl over some archaic piece of machinery, through a tip-tilted pipe . . . and emerge in a monstrous fairyland.
Mom, who has access to all of the old pre-fail records, used to tell me the stories she discovered in dusty, crumbling books made from dead trees in the times before datablocks. There was one story that was such a favorite I made her tell it over and over—“Jack and the Beanstalk.” It’s the tale of a boy who seems to make a foolish trade, giving up the security of a milk cow for the allure of magical beans. His mother is furious, but his gamble pays off when his beans grow a giant beanstalk that leads him to fortune and—more important in my childish eyes—adventure.
I think of that story as I look up . . . and up . . . and up. They stretch into the sky, leviathan plants, a green so dark it is almost black. No, not plants, I realize as I look closer. Synthetic stalks and technological tendrils and mechanical leaves that turn on whispering gears to follow the sunlight. These are like the artificial photosynthesis “plants” that decorate Eden, but on a massive scale. Each trunk is ten feet across; the leaves are as broad as houses. They are three times as tall as the algae spires, the tallest structures in Eden.
There are thousands of them.
They are so tall that they could probably be seen from the Center. And yet, when I sat on my wall, or on the abandoned spire with Lark, I never saw anything like this. Just the city, blurring into the distance, and a faint shimmer at my eyes’ farthest reach that I assumed was heat rising from the blistering desert wasteland.
But even if I’m wrong, and you can’t see them from the Center, surely I would have noticed them later, when out with Lark, or driving with Mom, or running from the Greenshirts. I definitely would have seen them loom over the wall of debris. They would have blocked out the sun! Had I been too blinded by excitement or anxiety to notice?
I look up at the gently undulating field of giant beanstalks. No, there’s no way I could have missed these.
In the bean forest, I can only see the trees, so I decide to forge my way through. It feels unnaturally still. It shouldn’t be like this, I think. In the faux-forests I’ve visited—the Rain Forest Club and the exciting laser tag arena—there were birds and bugs and the rustling of paws that step, and are still. There was life in those places, even if it was artificial.
Here, in this vast constructed forest, there is nothing but me.
I wander for hours, losing track of direction. The sun is mostly blocked by the canopy, and when it reaches the ground it is in confused angles, splitting shadows. Twice I find myself back at the debris pile, a wall that reaches to the artificial roots of the bean trees where they embed in the concrete. Finally, abruptly, the beanstalks stop in a uniform rigid wall and the desert stretches golden before me.
Heat hits my face like a slap, and I stagger back, turning my face away from the glare. I look into the cool shade of the bean trees to give my eyes time to adjust . . . and suddenly I think I know why I couldn’t see the beanstalks from Eden. Why no one can see them.
They’re camouflaged.
Not in a broken-pattern kind of way. When I look at the bean trees nearest to me, I can see them very clearly. But as I look down the row of them, they gradually vanish from my sight. Only the slightest imperfection lets me realize that the trees aren’t just in this one patch. A bit out and the trees look a little fuzzy. Past that, there is a slight metallic shimmer. Then a little farther, and I can see a strange double vision—both the bean trees and the sky beyond them.
I have to stare and pace, move backw
ard and forward across the burning sands to realize that each individual leaf, each stalk, is projecting an almost seamless image of the landscape behind it, as it would look if the trees weren’t there. Like each tree is a datablock showing me an image.
When I was in the forest there was no illusion. Out here, I can just tell it exists. If I was only a little bit farther away, I wouldn’t have any idea the bean trees were here at all.
How can all of Eden not know that these beanstalks are out here? All my life, I thought I was the only secret Eden was hiding. Now I don’t know what to think about my perfect city.
But now what? I can’t go back, at least not for a while. Maybe after dark I can creep back and make my way to the breadline.
I turn to find a shady spot underneath the synthetic bean trees, away from the desert heat that is already threatening to blister my skin. It’s a dramatic change, like stepping from an oven to a refrigerator. There must be a forty-degree difference between the forest and the desert, in just a couple of steps. In addition to collecting energy from the sun, does this artificial forest shield Eden from the heat of the wasteland the rest of Earth has become?
Suddenly, I think I hear footsteps. I can’t be sure, though. Maybe the mechanical beanstalks are just moving. The sound is soft, stealthy, just the barest crunch. If the rest of the world wasn’t so hushed I never would have heard it. I can’t see anyone yet, but the huge trees are spaced widely enough that they don’t offer much cover. In just a few seconds I’ll be able to see whoever it is . . . and they’ll see me.