We run through the forest, away from Harmonia, that paradise I thought was my reward. Carnelian pauses now and then to check his heading against the stars that peek through the treetops, and corrects our course.
The terrain is growing more hilly. Stones threaten to twist our feet in the dark. Another hour of jogging through the woods and we come to a rocky outcrop.
“Here it is,” Carnelian says. “They made sure it is far enough from the village that no one will stumble on it accidentally.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Look, right there,” he says, pointing to a high but narrow cleft in the rocks. The depth of blackness behind hints that there might be a cave, but the opening is far too narrow for anyone to get through.
Carnelian leads the way. Then, seemingly at random, he moves one rock to pile it on top of another. He frowns, cocking his head. “It’s hard to remember, but I think that’s right.” Then he very deliberately leans against the skinny trunk of an almost leafless sapling right by the fissure in the rock.
“Carnelian, be careful!” I cry, because it looks like he’s knocked the young tree over. It tilts about fifteen degrees, and I hear a creaking sound.
To my amazement, the crack in the rock grows wider. With a grinding of seldom used gears, the cave is opening up to reveal a small room inside. Lights come on automatically, revealing metal walls, and elevator doors. From the outside I can see there’s only one large button, with an illuminated arrow pointing down.
“That’s amazing!” Mira says, looking closer. “I can’t see any mechanism in the rock. It’s so cleverly hidden.”
The first and only warning I get is a single snap of a twig. Then suddenly it’s like there’s a bear in our midst. Zander springs from the forest seemingly out of nowhere, swinging a huge club studded with spiky knobs. It’s so shocking that we just scatter, diving out of the way of his weapon. He swings wildly, with full force. If it hit us it would break our bones, smash our skulls.
The attack is so fierce and so fast that before we know it he’s gotten between us and the door to the hypertube. We stand ringed around him, out of reach of his swinging club as he easily holds us at bay. Mira wants to fight, I can tell, but even with her considerable skills the club is a serious threat.
“Stay back!” he shouts. “Do you really think I’m going to let you destroy all we’ve worked for in Harmonia?”
I glance at Lachlan. At least Zander doesn’t have a gun. There’s no such thing in Harmonia. But this club he’s fashioned out of wood is almost as lethal. We could probably subdue him if we worked together, but not without at least one of us getting hurt.
“Zander, stay out of this,” I shout at him. “We’re no threat to Harmonia. In fact, we’re leaving. You’ll never have to deal with us again.”
“I don’t believe you,” he growls, swinging his club as Lachlan makes a feint toward him. “You want to open up the prison and let all the scum spill out, bring their abhorrent technology and destructive ways to our paradise.”
“Zander, people from Eden aren’t scum,” I say in my most reasonable voice. “They’re just people. Just like you.”
I have to hand it to him, he’s brave. Sure he’s bigger than any of us, and armed. But there are four of us against one.
Not bad odds. But five against one is even better.
I see a shadow come from around the rocks, and then quiet as a panther, a hooded woman slips around from behind the rocky outcrop and tackles Zander from behind. It catches him totally off guard and he sprawls, rolling to kick her off him. But it’s all we need. Mira springs, wresting away his club, and the rest of us pile on top of him. Mira raises the club over her head . . . but she just holds it there, threateningly.
The hooded woman takes a case from her bag, snaps it open, and pulls out a needle and a vial of clear liquid. While Zander struggles, she slides the needle into his arm, and a few seconds later his eyes roll back in his head and he flops limply.
The woman stands, holding up the needle. A glint of moonlight catches a liquid drop on the tip. The plunger is still half-full. She shakes her head, letting her hood fall back.
It’s Mom.
WHILE MOM STANDS threateningly near us, I dash between Mom and Lachlan.
“Mom, don’t put me in this position,” I say, my voice dangerously low. “You know what I’m doing is right. Don’t make me choose between you.”
“Rowan, you’re not thinking straight,” she begins, taking a step closer.
“Don’t!” I warn, and slip my hand into my pocket where I can feel the knife hilt. I never would. Of course I never would.
But I can’t let them take Lachlan back. I can’t let him be executed.
“I’m not your enemy, sweetheart,” she says, advancing slowly.
I don’t know what to do. I can’t fight my mother. My hand comes out of my pocket, empty.
“Please, Mom, just go back to Harmonia and pretend you never found us. He won’t be a threat to your way of life, I swear. I’ll take him far away, and no one in Harmonia will ever see him again.”
There are tears in my eyes as I say this. I always knew that saving Lachlan would strip me away from Harmonia forever, and that meant losing my mom. I almost managed not to think about this inevitability. There’s no sacrifice I wouldn’t make for Lachlan. But that doesn’t mean my heart isn’t torn in two.
“It’s not going to work,” my mom says. “They’ll find you and bring you back.” She takes another step and I stand frozen between two people I love. Then she smiles. “At least, they will if you’re using second-rank codes. Carnelian, don’t you know they’ll shut down the hypertube and lock it if you attempt to actually ride in one. You’d be held there until the whole village arrived.” She grins at me. “And what would happen to Lachlan then?”
“You know this is Lachlan?” I ask, amazed.
“Sweetie, I’ve known you all your life. Do you think I can’t tell when you’re lying? I remembered your description of him and put two and two together. And of course I knew you were going to rescue him. So I pretended to go to sleep, and waited for you to make your move. Which was a spectacular one, by the way.”
I tell Mom how we used the plants to wake him.
“He’s still pretty wired,” I say.
“But otherwise in good shape,” Mom says after looking him over. “They gave him intravenous hydration and nutrients so he’s actually in pretty good shape.”
“Heal him so they can kill him?” I ask wryly.
“They’re wrong. So completely wrong. I always knew it, but I was so concerned about protecting Harmonia. They are, too. The elders aren’t evil people. They’re just blinded by their beliefs. So blind they’ve forgotten how to think. I had been planning to tell everyone in Harmonia the truth, force them to weight their conscience against the elders’ decision. Even if most people agreed, there might have been enough dissent to save him. At the very least, the elders couldn’t hide their actions.” She stands up, so straight, so strong. “I refuse to live in a city of secrets again.”
“You only just got your first tier ranking,” Carnelian says. “How do you know how to run the hypertubes already?”
“I don’t, not really. I’ll be relying on you for the details. But they gave me the codes as soon as I got my results after the test,” Mom adds, puling a little notebook from her pocket. “I was supposed to be studying the codes and procedures, memorizing them precisely so I didn’t have to carry around a written record that might fall into the wrong hands.” She giggles. “Looks like mine are the wrong hands!”
“I can’t believe my mom is actually having fun on this adventure,” I say in an aside to Lachlan.
“Like mother like daughter,” he answers. “I remember seeing just that look in your eyes when we were running away from trouble.”
“And running into it,” I add. Somehow my hand has found his.
“We should hurry,” Mom says. “If Zander is here, the others must know, and can�
��t be far behind.”
But there’s no other sign of pursuit. “Maybe not,” I suggest. “Zander seems like the kind of guy who would just come after us by himself. If he saw what happened he would have sounded the alarm, but if he came up later he might have decided to try to track us on his own.”
“I hate to admit it, but he’s a good tracker,” Mira says. “Almost as good as me.”
So we might not be in any more immediate danger.
The others head to the door, but I hang back. “You . . . you’re going to leave him?”
“What else are we supposed to do?” Mira asks, looking at Zander’s unconscious form with disdain. “He tried to kill us.”
“I don’t think he would have . . .” I begin, but Mira interrupts.
“I know you always want to think the best of people, but he would have bashed our skulls in or dragged us back to the elders if he could. He’s like . . . a rabid animal. It might be part of nature, but it’s not a part you want around you.”
“He’s doing what he believes in” I say. “We should try to change his mind.”
“And if we had time, I’d agree with you,” Mom interjects. “But now we have to go, while my codes still work.”
They enter the building, but I linger behind. There are panthers out here, and bears. Wolves, too. While he’s unconscious he’s at the mercy of any predator that wanders by.
Seriously, Yarrow asks with an exaggerated sigh inside my head as I grab Zander under the armpits and try to drag him into the room. Do you forget that he broke our fingers! Maybe a bear will gnaw off a few of his.
Shut up, I tell her. If you can’t help . . .
I am helping. I’m amazed you managed to keep us alive for so long, Rowan. You have awful survival instincts.
“Oh, no, Rowan,” Carnelian groans as he sees what I’m doing.
“Rowan, come on,” Mira says. “You can’t . . .” She breaks off when she sees the determined expression I throw over my shoulder. I can only budge Zander’s bulk an inch at a time, but bik it, I’m not going to leave him out here. I wouldn’t do that to anyone.
“We can keep him sedated, and leave him here in the station. He’ll be able to get himself back to Harmonia. It’s not like they won’t be able to track us themselves once the sun comes up. They’ll figure out where we’ve gone. We just have to have a good head start. But I won’t leave him unconscious alone in the woods. I can’t.”
With a sigh them help me drag him inside, and the rock doors slide closed behind us.
It feels cramped with all of us in this little room. Mom consults her book and enters a code. The elevator doors soundlessly open, and we step inside, leaving Zander on the floor.
I can barely feel the movement of the descent, just a faint sort of tremor beneath my feet. But we go down for a long time. Finally the doors open.
“Wow,” Mira breathes. “I mean, I’d heard about the hypertubes. You can keep a lot of secrets, but you can’t keep everything secret. But I had no idea!”
We’re gazing over a huge, illuminated room. The air is cool and dry. The cavernous room is starkly empty except for a giant metal pipe that looks like a mutant worm, silver and segmented. It bisects the echoing space. I can see clear access doors on the side.
Mom punches in another code. “Looks like my codes still work.”
The clear door opens to reveal a capsule inside the tube. The curving walls are a shimmering mother-of-pearl, and the sides are lined with plush seats upholstered in bright turquoise.
“Where are we going?” I ask, watching with some amusement as Mira and Carnelian dare each other to cross into the threshold first. They look as apprehensive as I was the first time I tried to swim across the river. I guess the world is full of currents that push us out of our comfort zones.
“We want to get far from Harmonia. My initiation study book lists places the hypertube links with hundreds of miles away. I don’t know anything about any of them, but there are basic descriptions. What do you think of this one?”
She flips a page and shows me a map with a neon blue tracing leading south, then west: the path of one of the hypertubes. I study the topographic lines, figure out the mileage, then realize what the change of elevation and other indications are hinting at. “Is that one by the ocean?” I ask with excitement.
She nods, grinning.
“The ocean!” I say with a sigh, turning to Lachlan. “Can you imagine it?” I’ve forgotten all danger at the prospect. For someone who grew up in a world with nothing but city and humans, any aspect of nature is still a boon. But the sea! I never dreamed I’d see it, swim in it. I can picture the majestic beauty of the crashing waves, the endless bounty of life hidden in its depths. Yes, I can imagine a home by the sea with Lachlan . . .
“But what about Ash?” I ask. And then I realize that in the excitement I didn’t even tell her. “Ash is alive! Or, he was, after the explosion.” I told Mom what happened when I blew up the Underground, but I had no idea what happened to my brother. “We can find him, get him out of Eden . . .”
Mom sighs. “You can’t just go charging into Eden, Rowan. How would you cross the desert? And even if you made it, there’s a price on your head, and mine. And how would we get him out again? Oh, Rowan, I know you want to save him. So do I. And we will!” She sounds brightly enthusiastic, and for a second I wonder if she’s humoring me. “But we have no idea how. Right now we have to get away from Harmonia. You know what will happen to Lachlan if they catch him.”
I gulp. “Okay,” I concede. “We get far away first.” I don’t like that my mission has changed so dramatically. I’m happy beyond belief that I have Lachlan, but I can’t give up on everyone else.
Can I?
What if Lachlan is enough?
What if the idea of breaking into Eden is a foolish, suicidal dream?
Maybe I should be happy with what I have. It is so much more than I ever thought possible. Mom. Lachlan. My two dear friends. Freedom. The ocean, and a whole world to explore. Realistically I know that will most likely all slip from my grasp if I try to get back into Eden. I’ll loose it all.
“How long will it take to get there?” Lachlan asks.
“Um, I’m not sure,” Mom says. “We can’t get directly there anyway.”
“Why not?”
She studies the maps a moment longer. “Looks like this is a direct hypertube, just to one destination: the central terminal. We have to go to that main station. It’s the place where all the tubes branch out. From there, we can take a direct line to the ocean.”
“Okay,” I say. “How far away is the main station?”
Mom presses her lips together in a thin line before she answers reluctantly, “It’s not far. In fact, it’s directly outside of Eden.”
A SHIVER RUNS through me, head to toe, and when it reaches my feet I actually stand, poised as if I’m going to run away. But there’s nowhere to go.
Eden.
For the last three months, since my miraculous release, I’ve told myself I’m going back. But it was all hypothetical, a future I’d face when the time came. Now I’m zooming underground toward my old prison home and I’m terrified.
Against all conceivable odds you escaped, Yarrow says, and now you want to go back?
No, I don’t, I tell her in my head. I want to run away from here as fast as I can. With Yarrow, my other self, I can be honest, even if I’d never confess the shameful depth of my fear to anyone else.
That’s the trouble with you, Rowan, Yarrow grumbles to me. You know the best way to keep us alive. You just never actually do it.
It doesn’t matter now, I think as the hypertube builds up speed. We’re not going to Eden. We’ll just be stopping near the outskirts. We probably don’t even have to leave these subterranean depths. We just change tubes and take off.
Still, it is far too close for comfort. I feel like the power and authority of the Center can reach out across the divide and snatch away my freedom if I even get close.
I make myself settle down, and I can finally talk about what’s most important to me. “Lachlan, what’s been happening in Eden?”
The tale he tells turns my selfish dread inside out, replacing it with incredulous fury.
Eden had a civil war.
And in a way, it was my fault.
“My brother Rook helped me escape when they stormed the Underground. It’s good to have a greenshirt on your side. But an explosion had gone off right near me, and it was weeks before the dizziness passed, or I could hear again. By the time I was ready to fight, a lot had happened.”
The more prosperous middle and inner circles had often been largely spared from interference in their memories and neurons. The wealthy and educated were always more easy to control by traditional methods. Financial incentives, comfort, and a feeling of superiority were usually enough to keep them in line.
“Not so now,” Lachlan says. “Everyone, rich and poor, knew there was something deeply wrong in Eden. Chief Ellena feared she was losing control, and that made her even more ruthless. There was unrest everywhere. But no one could agree on the exact nature of the problem, or the solution. Rebel factions were springing up in every circle.”
Tales started to spread of a prophet who the Center had tried to imprison but who slipped through their clutches. “The prophet spoke of a green land beyond the desert, a world of plenty just waiting for humans to take over.”
A sick feeling settles in my belly.
“She was a prisoner of the Chief, but many, many people in the Center heard her prophetic ravings. An orderly, a menial worker, recorded her words. He was a member of the Dominion sect.”
I gasp. The Dominion is a very secret organization that believes humans should have dominion over the Earth and all living things. It is the exact opposite of everything Eden is supposed to stand for. They think animals are made to be eaten, that the Earth is vast enough to be abused and still recover, still give humans her blessing.
Rebels of Eden Page 15