It works. We make it to the outer circles without incident. We disembark just before the outermost circle. We’ll walk the last part of the way.
But something is different. The last time I was here, I was shocked at the rampant poverty. The buildings were dilapidated, the people near starving. I was astonished that there was such disparity between the inner circles, where the elite live, and the outer circles. While I’d been aware that social status declined the farther one got from the Center, I had no idea that our Eden could have a place filled with crime, hunger, desperation.
So as we move farther out, I’m braced for that again, for the pity, the anger that we can’t take better care of our population.
Before, people walked around looking nervous, dejected, scared. Now the people I see appear to be relaxed and happy. There is no look of desperation in any of the eyes I meet. Before, people would avoid eye contact with strangers, but now we get a few casual smiles. There are fewer people on the street, too, which at first I think is a bad sign. But soon I notice that more of the stores are open and stocked. The windows in the offices and businesses are clean, not cracked, and I see light and movement behind them.
People are working.
They’re fed. They’re safe. They’re happy.
While there is still an obvious discrepancy between the inner and outer circles, this place that used to resemble a war zone is now comfortable, I’d almost say prosperous. We pass by a place where there once was a deep crater, where the surrounding houses had crumbling, leaning walls from a long-ago blast. Lachlan once told me that there had been an uprising. The poor had taken up arms and tried to fight for their rights to work and food. The Center had crushed them, violently, devastatingly. No one but the second children remembered. I mentioned it to Lark, and she had never heard of it before. It had happened before we were born, but the second children in their twenties and older clearly remember hearing the explosions, seeing plumes of smoke.
Now, though, there is no sign of the crater I once skirted while the Greenshirts fired on me. The road is smooth, free of debris. The buildings are whole. What’s more, they don’t look like new construction.
I’m utterly confused, and ask Lark about it.
* * *
SHE LOOKS AROUND. “Looks about like I remember,” she says. “Though admittedly I don’t go to the outer circles all that often.”
“But it wasn’t like this,” I insist. “It was dirty and dangerous.” What does she mean she doesn’t go to the outer circles? She came from the outer circles, and she went back as part of her work with the secret group the Edge, which sought to unify rich and poor, inner and outer circles.
Lark looks at me skeptically. “That was the first time you ever saw poverty,” she says. “After being sheltered, and then only seeing the inner rings, I’m sure this was a little shocking.”
No, I want to say. This is certainly different from the elite inner circles, but the people look normal and happy. This is nothing like the scary place I remember. What’s wrong with me? Why don’t my memories match up with reality? Or are my memories fine, and Lark’s faulty?
I don’t want to deal with this now, so I drop the subject. Finding Lachlan is the only thing that matters. Still, I can’t help but wonder exactly how much Lark’s epilepsy protects her from whatever memory manipulation the Center is inflicting on people through their lenses. Maybe she has a clearer vision of the world than most . . . but they might be able to get to her in some ways. I look at her out of the corner of my eye as we walk. I trust her completely. But could she be dangerous without even knowing it? How can any of us trust each other in a world where the government can meddle with your mind?
Lachlan could have tried to make his escape anywhere along the vast perimeter of Eden. This might be a fool’s errand. Lachlan found me easily when I was out in the artificial giant beanstalks. He said he sometimes hid out in the fake forest. He could be anywhere. Still, it would make sense for him to try it in the same place where I escaped, to retrace my steps in hopes of finding the same thing I did. So we head that way, passing the soup kitchen where I once saw Lachlan disguised as an old beggar.
Only, it’s not a place where the desperately poor receive a modicum of bland, filling food. Now it’s a restaurant. A sandwich board out front declares their menu and modest prices. The outdoor cafe tables are filled with people who look like they’re on their lunch break, grabbing a cheap, good meal.
It’s all so . . . normal.
A hostess sees me pause, and asks if my friends and I would like a table. “No,” I start to say, then confusedly ask, “Do you know a man . . . a young man, or an old man with a cane, who helps the poor people in this circle?”
She looks at me quizzically. “The poor? There are no poor in Eden.”
I leave before she can say anything else. I don’t want her to get suspicious at what was apparently an odd question. No poor in Eden?
Lark sees my befuddlement, and says, “Don’t worry, it will probably be a while before you can tell what really happened from what they tried to implant in you. You have memories of terrible poverty? I wonder why the Center would give you those memories. After all, there are no poor in Eden.”
I catch my breath. Her words are exactly the same as the restaurant hostess’s. As if they both are reading from the same script.
Finally we come to something familiar—the wall of refuse from the civilization that existed before Eden. It is a tangle from another world, made up of concrete beams and rusting bars, obsolete electronics, and things that defy description. Things that must have been useful back in the age when humans believed they were lords of the Earth. Now the EcoPan regulates all of our lives, from oxygen consumption to water to food, to make sure we have what we need without causing harm. Everything is efficient, recycled. The computer program and its bots take care of everything. Our lives have zero effect on the planet.
Before the Ecofail, though, people needed all sorts of strange implements and inefficient vehicles just to get through their everyday lives. Those are among the artifacts in the wall. The garbage of our past lives, keeping us secure in this one.
Secure . . . or trapped?
I have to be right. I know what I saw.
There are no guards around the wall of refuse. Why would there be, when beyond them lies death? At least, as far as anyone knows. Surely some people have crossed, those whose curiosity overrides caution or control, or the people like Lachlan, who live on the fringes and need places to hide.
Even the trash looks somehow . . . neater. Before, it was obvious that the locals in the outer circle had added their own garbage to the wall over the years. Now, though, that has all been stripped away, no doubt sent for recycling. All that remains are the artifacts, and their strangeness makes it look more like a museum piece than a wall of leftovers.
The difference makes it hard to find the spot where I crossed the last times. They weren’t ideal circumstances, what with my life being in grave danger, so it is hard to visualize the details. The longer it takes, the more frustrated I get. Every obstacle in this search seems like one more shout in my face that I must be wrong.
I sniff the air. In the Underground, the smell of that single tree permeates the air. If there was a forest not more than a mile away, couldn’t I smell something? The trees, the flowers, the dirt itself? Wouldn’t a bird fly overhead one day? Wouldn’t some hardy insect manage to get past the desert?
Nothing. No smell of life, no sign of life other than humans.
“Here it is . . . I think,” I say. There’s a place where the pattern of the jumble looks familiar, where three massive concrete beams cross. I see a little nook at the intersection that looks wide enough for us to slither through. “Yes, this is where I crossed before. I’m sure.” Almost sure, I add silently. I doubt myself enough. I don’t want to seed any more uncertainty in Lark or Ash, no matter how supportive they seem.
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“I’ll go first,” I say, and start to wiggle my way through. They follow close on my heels, which I have to shout back isn’t a great idea. It’s not like there’s a designated path through here. We have to double back a few times when we get stuck, which involves a lot of wiggling, and occasional pokes on sharp corners of things I can’t begin to identify.
Finally, I squirm free into bright sunlight dappled with shadow. “No,” I breathe.
“Wow,” Ash gasps as he exits behind me. “This is amazing. If I hadn’t seen an actual tree, I’d be sure those were real.”
“It’s wrong,” I breathe as I crane my neck up to look at the massive creations. “So much of this is all wrong.” They look like trees, but they are artificial bean plants like the giant’s beanstalk in children’s stories. Their stems are as thick as the camphor tree’s mighty trunk, and they tower hundreds of feet high. They are covered with tendrils that twine to follow the sun, their broad leaves actually solar catchers that make energy with artificial photosynthesis.
“Great Earth, this is intense!” Lark says as she crawls out behind Ash. “They’re so tall, so beautiful!”
Suddenly I snap. “They’re not supposed to be tall, don’t you understand? Most of them fell during the earthquake—smashed and destroyed on the ground. They can’t have gotten them repaired so fast. How could they?”
I clutch my head in my hands and mutter, “They’re erasing things. They’re taking them out of my brain and out of the world, and no one notices.”
“Rowan, are you okay?” Lark asks.
“No!” I shout. “And these trees aren’t beautiful at all. They’re fake! I’ve seen real trees.”
“So have we,” Ash says, trying to calm me. “We just mean that they’re impressive.”
“They’re wrong, just like everything else in Eden.” I feel like I’m losing control. The doubts that swirl in my head make me lash out at the people I love. My need to prove myself makes me feel reckless . . . and lose my reason. “The real trees are out there!” I fling my arm to point through the trees, past the desert we can’t yet see. “A forest, maybe a whole world of forests, while we’re trapped in this fake world of lies and delusion.”
And then I’m running, dashing through the impossibly tall beanstalks, while they call for me to wait, to stop. I don’t care. I have to see the forest again. It’s like something is calling out to me, summoning me home. Out there—that’s where I belong. I won’t let anything stop me.
Not even the merciless heat that hits me the instant I cross that sudden transition from dappled shade to glaring light. Reality slaps me in the face with the sudden heat. Within a few steps I stumble to my knees. My shins feel like they’re on fire where they press against the sand. What was I thinking? Something hits my back. Lark has thrown me one of the survival suits. She’s standing on the edge of the desert, hopping on one foot as she struggles into hers as quickly as possible. I tear my pack open and step into it, feeling the seals automatically bond to make an all-over covering that shields my body from the worst of the heat. At least, at first. After a moment I can feel the temperature start to rise again, though it is by no means as bad as when I was unprotected. Still deadly, I think, just not quite so quick.
Soon, Ash and Lark are suited up and hurry to join me. “What is it?” Ash asks. “Did you see Lachlan?”
“No, I . . .” How can I explain that I had to get to the forest, that a primal pull was tugging at my very soul? The forest that, for all I know, only exists in my mind, fed to me by the Center for unknown reasons.
Before I can explain myself, we’re interrupted by a jarring beep. “Nanosand!” Lark calls out as she checks a device clipped to her hip. “It’s a motion sensor, one of the spares they use to guard the entrances to the Underground. I figured it would work for moving nanosand, too.”
I can see a shimmering in the distance. It looks like heat rising, that watery effect. Soon, though, I can tell it is the sand itself shifting. A patch of the mobile death trap that can swallow a human whole—and digest them, if what Lachlan says is true—is moving slowly toward us.
“They don’t move very fast,” I say, remembering my last experience with the nanosand. “But more will be coming, and they can easily surround us if we’re not careful, and don’t keep moving.” Lark’s motion scanner might prove a lifesaver. Nanosand is easy to outrun, as long as you know it is coming.
“How long do we have?” Ash asks as we hustle away from the creeping sand.
“Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour,” Lark says. “I think. These suits were designed for the highest end of normal temperatures in Aaron Al-Baz’s day. Death Valley could get to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. This suit could take that.” She checks a scanner. “But I’m getting readings of 150 to 160 out here. This isn’t normal heat.”
“After the earthquake, the heat vanished just like that.” I snap my fingers. “And the sand shifted, and I saw what looked like vents. This desert is man-made. Fake, just like the bean trees. Just like the rest of Eden.” I wish I could wipe the sweat from my brow, but the suit covers my face. “This isn’t what the rest of the world is like, I just know it. They made this desert.”
“To keep us inside Eden?” Lark asks.
“To keep us outside of the wilderness,” I realize. “Come on!” The urgency is back. “It can’t be more than a mile. We can make it if we run!” I take off, and hear them following behind. I’m sure they’re doing the same calculations as I am. Twenty or thirty minutes. Even I, a fast runner, can’t reach top speed in this deep sand. The heat is slowing me down a lot, too. And Lark and Ash aren’t nearly as fast as me. If my memories aren’t playing me false, we can make it a mile through the desert without a problem. But if there isn’t a cool oasis at the end of it where we can recover, we might not make it back.
WE TALK TO keep our spirits up. Out loud, I manage—for now—to shut out my doubts. Shut them out, but not shut them down.
“I can’t wait for you to see it,” I gush. “The camphor tree is amazing, but it’s like . . . seeing a prisoner in a cage as opposed to seeing a happy family. Oh, once you see it, you’ll understand.”
“If there is a living, healthy world out there, there would be no need for population control,” Ash says. “No more second child laws. People could do what they wanted.”
“We did that before,” Lark says gently. “Uncontrolled breeding, expansion, land clearing, mining . . . all those things and more destroyed the planet.”
“But did they?” I ask. “I mean, what people did was thoughtless, reckless, terrible . . . but did they really kill the planet? What if it is all a lie?”
“If what exactly is a lie?” Ash wants to know.
“All of it!” I’ve read Aaron Al-Baz’s journal. I know that no matter how much damage humans did to the planet, he was the one who killed off most of humanity.
“I never did get to tell you,” Lark says. “I didn’t tell anyone. I wasn’t sure what it meant, and I wanted to tell you first. I discovered something. Remember the photo you gave me? The one from your mother?”
A lifetime ago, I gave Lark a rare relic of the pre-fail days, an old-fashioned photographic image printed on plastic paper of a starscape over a great rocky rift in the Earth.
“The technology of the plastic paper dates it to right before the Ecofail. Back then, everything was nonbiodegradable plastic. Since we came to Eden, we haven’t used that. So I know the photo was made within a decade of mankind’s collapse.”
The collapse that was sparked by Aaron Al-Baz, who decided there was no hope for humans, and created a virus to hasten their end just as the global ecosystem was collapsing. Lachlan is the only one other than me who knows this, though. We decided to keep it secret. Aaron Al-Baz is a hero. We didn’t know what unmasking him might do.
“You can’t imagine how many hours I’ve spent gazing at that photo. I lo
ve it, because you gave it to me.” I can see her cheeks flush through her protective suit. “The more I looked at it, the more I started to notice details. When we lived in the outer circles, my dad would always take me stargazing on the rooftops.”
I remember. I had my first kiss on one of those rooftops.
“My dad taught me about the patterns of the stars, the movements of the planets. Each planet travels a different distance, at a different rate. You can predict where planets will be hundreds, thousands of years in advance. And . . . you can look into the past and figure out what the night sky would look like on any given day. And Rowan, I figured out that the stars in the photo you gave me were in that position more than a thousand years ago!”
It takes a moment for this to sink in. “You mean . . . that photo was taken a thousand years ago?”
It’s Ash who says what I’m thinking. “But that would mean that the Ecofail happened a thousand years ago, not two hundred.”
Another lie from the government. Should I still be surprised?
“We have to tell people. They deserve to know! We’ve all been told that it will take a thousand years before the Earth is inhabitable again . . . and that time has passed. We think we’re only two hundred years in, so we’re content, patient. We think it will be generations before there’s any hope of freedom, so we never question anything.”
“Yeah, but . . . ,” Ash begins. “That’s not possible. You can’t just take away eight hundred years from people.” He laughs. “We have history books. We have family stories. They tell us that the Ecofail was only about two hundred years ago. You must have made a mistake about the stars, Lark.”
“I checked and double-checked,” Lark insists.
“Then it must be a forgery.” Ash sounds complacent, so sure he must be right. Content in the beliefs he’s been told all of his life.
Of course. He has the lens implants.
I think he can’t believe it. Literally can’t.