As I take a bite, I ask her the most important question. “Do you know what happened to Lark?”
Iris shakes her head sadly. “She was there in the prison, I know. I saw her when they marched me to my cell. But I never saw her in the escape. I don’t know what happened to her. I’m sorry.”
I bow my head. The darkness in my mind grows, and I think she must be dead. But by sheer force of will I make myself cling to hope. Chief Ellena said she was going to use her as a test subject. As horrible as that is, it gives Lark value in the Chief’s eyes. She might be tortured, but that means she might be alive—she’s strong, a survivor—and if she is, I’ll come for her.
If the situation wasn’t so dire, it would be funny watching Carnelian and Mira being introduced to synthetic Eden foods.
Mira makes a face when she sips a hot-pink blended algae drink flavored with artificial strawberry and vanilla essence . . . then she immediately dips her head for another sip. “It’s awful, and I want more!” she says as she licks the pink foam from her upper lip. “It’s like they took a strawberry and, I don’t know, squeezed out its soul.”
“We’re drinking strawberry souls?” Carnelian asks.
“Tortured souls!” she sputters as she tries a savory, salty stick of fried starch. They make a similar concoction in Harmonia, out of sliced potatoes and other tubers, cooked in oil. “Delicious, tortured souls.” She crams three of the tasty sticks in her mouth.
Carnelian takes a tentative bite of one. “They’re scientifically designed to be enjoyed,” he says. “It’s like they pinpointed the places on the tongue that would react, programmed the exact amount of salt and fat that would make a person happiest.” He looks across the table at me. “I understand why people want this.” He puts the fried snack down and pushes his dish away. “Machines, computers, science can give you everything you want, all the things you are programmed by nature to crave.”
“It’s what humans worked for since the earliest days of civilization,” I say. “Crafting a world to suit them.”
I eat to maintain my strength, but the food tastes too artificial to me. It is too perfect. When you eat a wild berry, you take your chances. Some are sweet, delightful. Some are bland. For every perfect berry there’s a tart under-ripe one, or a too-ripe fruit just starting to ferment. There’s a little bit of an adventure to every bite. Here, each bite is predictably perfect.
Beauty lies in imperfections, I think.
In about an hour we hear a soft tap on the door. Iris goes to the door and opens it a crack, talking to someone there I can’t see. Then with a nod she excuses herself, calling the reluctant Rainbow after her. After she goes out, the door opens fully and Pearl walks in. There are three people behind her wearing deep hoods that must have shaded their faces from any scanning securitybots or cameras. Two tall figures, one smaller and slender. One of the taller ones carries a pack that looks familiar. But my attention is on the smaller one. Could it be Lark? My hopes rise, my heart leaps, despite my more pessimistic brain calculating the odds and telling me to brace myself for disappointment.
The smaller one pulls back her hood to reveal a disarray of bright red hair.
“Flame,” I say, unable to completely keep the disappointment from my voice.
“My first success story,” she says wryly. “Well, partly successful. Any trouble with the lens I couldn’t remove?”
“You mean, besides being blind in that eye?”
“Touché,” she replies with a cocked eyebrow, and accepts Lachlan’s welcome, and a quick introduction. Then she steps back, leaving the other two front and center.
I glance at Pearl and see her look of expectation. She nods to them, and as one they pull back their hoods.
Ash.
I’m in his arms so fast I don’t even see who the third person is. Oh, great Earth, my second self! My brother! I babble incoherently, feeling his tears—or are they mine—on my cheek.
“You’re alive,” we both say simultaneously, then laugh at that harmony, and at the joy of finding it to be true. I give Iris an accusatory look over his shoulders, and she shrugs, mouthing the word, “Surprise!”
Then Mom has wrapped her arms around both of us and we rock in the middle of the room, crying, laughing, not able to believe the astounding good fortune that has brought us together again. Lachlan, Mom, Ash . . . my circle is almost complete. Almost.
“Here,” he says, thrusting the pack into my hands. “When they attacked the Underground I looked for you. When I couldn’t find you I grabbed your pack and managed to escape. I never thought I’d be able to give it back to you!”
He hands me that old familiar satchel, worn and now with a few scorch marks.
“I thought you’d want that notebook back in particular,” he says.
“You read it?” I ask.
“We all did,” Flame says. “As little faith as I have in humanity I can’t say I’m surprised that our hero Aaron turned out to be murderous scum. It was a shock at first, but it really served to unite the rebel factions in the end.”
I’m glad they know the truth. I start to ask Ash more about how he escaped, and what happened after, forgetting about the third hooded figure.
“I followed you that day,” Ash says. “I was running to the Underground when it exploded. The rubble half buried me. I never dreamed you’d make it out alive. Where have you been?”
“You don’t remember?” EcoPan must have wiped his memory.
I draw breath to tell him, but notice that Mom’s gaze has traveled over Ash’s shoulder to the third newcomer, who has finally pulled back his hood. Instinctively I put myself between him and Ash, an angry, protective wall.
Mom looks at the husband she never thought she’d see again.
I look at the man who tried to kill me while I was still inside of my mother’s womb.
“What are you doing here, Dad?”
FOR A MOMENT the three of us stand together, touching, connected, a unified force against him. This man hurt us, hurt our family. He was the physician general for the Center government. When Mom was pregnant with twins, he tried to terminate one of the fetuses—me. Without her knowledge, under guise of giving her a checkup (she couldn’t go to an outside doctor, who would report the illegal twins) he sent a focused sound wave into her womb that was supposed to end me. But it went wrong, and ended up damaging Ash’s lungs instead of harming me. It left him weak and left me a prisoner in my home for the first sixteen years of my life.
Then later, he betrayed me to the government in exchange for power, for a cushy position. He betrayed Ash, sending him to jail for his role in hiding me. And his actions led to Mom getting shot and, as far as any of us knew at the time, killed.
He always resented me, maybe hated me, though I know it was at least partly because of the deep and crushing guilt he felt at what he’d tried to do to me, and what he wound up doing to Ash.
And now here he is, standing in front of us at the rebel hideout.
“Is he a prisoner?” I ask, forcing my voice not to shake. My shoulder is touching Mom’s, and I can feel her tremble beside me.
Ash separates himself from us and goes to stand beside his father. Our father. “He’s one of the leading members of the rebellion, Rowan.”
I shake my head. “No. You can’t trust him.”
“He let everyone go,” Pearl points out. “All the second children trapped in the Center cells. He saved dozens of lives.”
“And he knows everything there is to know about the inner workings of the Center,” Ash continues. “Not to mention about their mind control system.”
“That’s because he was one of the people who stuck needles into my brain and stripped away my identity!” I shout, balling up my fists. “Maybe he did save the second children, but in his heart he only thinks of himself. You can’t trust him. He’ll betray you.”
Then Mom, too, leaves my side, and when she and Dad embrace I have to look away.
I don’t know what to feel, w
hat to believe. I spent most of my life feeling my father’s distance, his animosity, and having no idea why. Then I learned about everything he did, and hated him. Can a person change? Can one generous, noble act make up for past wrongs?
“I’ve missed you, my love,” Mom says.
My father is weeping, blubbering, and I want to be disgusted, accuse him of hypocrisy, but when I look at them together I see something so tender, so true, it seems to transcend all past, all future, existing only in this moment with crystal clarity.
She loves him. She forgives him.
I wonder if I ever can.
“He told me everything, Rowan,” Ash says. “I can’t hate him. People do bad things sometimes because they are scared, because they see nothing but a world of bad choices before them and tell themselves they have no option but to pick the best of all the bad choices. That’s what Dad thought he was doing.” Ash takes my hand. “Not everyone can be a revolutionary like you, Rowan.” He gives me a crooked little smile.
I don’t forgive my dad, not in my inmost heart. But I have to respect Mom’s decision, and my brother’s. So I won’t say any more now.
I push him from my mind, focusing on being happy at my reunion with Ash. (Why isn’t anything just unmixed happiness with you, huh? Yarrow asks me. We never get something good without something bad tagging right along.) I introduce him to my Harmonia friends. Mira seems giddy to meet him, ridiculously optimistic about our chances on our mission here. Like the luck that brought us all together is a sign for future success. I want to tell her that this isn’t a storybook, or a romantic vid, with coincidences and simple happy endings. But it won’t do any good to bring her down.
“Enough with the happy reunions,” the efficient Flame says briskly. “Lots of love and resentments, all tangled together—we get it. But now we have to get to the matter at hand. Angel filled me in on your story. So, the tales of the outside world are true?”
Lachlan shows her the flower. Dad and Ash and Angel are as enraptured as Iris and Rainbow were, and immediately start chattering about plans for the future.
“Interesting, yes,” Flame says dryly. “It could prove useful in the future. But it doesn’t really matter much to us now. No point in dwelling on step twenty when we haven’t even taken step one.”
“No,” Lachlan says. “We have to think about the outside world. It is our future, our beacon of hope.”
“It’s a pipe dream,” Flame says, blowing the floating flower so it spins in the glass of water. “Oh, I believe that it is there, but we can’t give the people that kind of wild hope. It’s too big. We rebels have to have manageable goals. We need a fight we can win. I don’t see how we can get more people past the desert, but I do know one way to fight the Center, and from that, greater things may come.
“Rowan, Lachlan,” Flame goes on, “you couldn’t have come at a better time. And with allies no less.” Flame examines the capable-looking Mira and Carnelian.
“What’s been going on?” Lachlan asks.
She reiterates what Lachlan and our rebel guides told us—after a war that involved many rebel factions, the Center has finally gained the upper hand with an all-encompassing mind control device that goes far beyond the original intent of the lenses. The majority of the population has been forced into an eerie contentedness, ignoring all remnants of the war as the Center rebuilds. The only holdout is the outermost circle.
“I learned a lot from my surgery on you, Rowan,” Flame explains. “Sorry you had to be my less-than-successful test subject, but thanks to you I’ve been able to disconnect people’s lens implants with about a 95 percent success rate.”
Don’t ask about that other 5 percent, Yarrow advises me.
“And more than that, now that I have a better idea how the mind control signals are transmitted, I found a way to block them. But only in a limited space. We have blockers throughout the outermost circle, so that almost everyone out here is immune to the mind control. And Lachlan has been busy setting them up here and there in the inner circles.”
“I thought that might be you that invented them,” Lachlan says. “Rook got the devices through his contact, but the way things were set up, no one knew anyone else’s name.”
“A wise precaution,” Flame says. “Some of our other agents weren’t as careful, and when one got captured and tortured, he named names and the entire cell was captured. Did the devices work as well as I hoped?”
“I’ve been focusing on the security points, forcing the Greenshirts to see things clearly, at least for a while. There has been some rebellion among the ranks. Not nearly enough, but I hope it made some difference.”
“You’re doing good work out there,” my father says. “Now we have a new assignment for you.”
“What is it?” I ask, bristling. The others might trust my father, but I still half think he might be sending us into a trap. Or he might actually mean well now, but if he gets captured, he’ll sell us out for a chance at personal safety.
“We’re just barely holding out here,” Flame says as she starts to pace. Her restless energy needs an outlet. “All it will take is a concerted push from the Center to take down our defenses and overwhelm us.”
“Why haven’t they done that already?” I ask.
“We don’t know. Maybe they need all their resources in the inner circles now. Maybe they figure we’re not going anywhere, so there’s no hurry to crush us. We need to take advantage of the time we have, and stop them once and for all. And now, finally, I know how to get control of the signal. Once I do, I can cut the link and get the Center out of our heads forever.”
She goes on to explain in great technical detail how the signal interacts with the lenses, then notices our blank looks. “Never mind that. You don’t need to know how I take it down. The important thing is . . .”
To her surprise, Carnelian breaks in with a question. “Okay, but if you just destroy the transmitter while the signal is active, won’t it send out such a blast of power that every brain connected to it will be fried?”
She looks at him in amazement. “How did you . . . ?”
Carnelian shrugs. “We use principles of crystal resonance in our farming techniques. The soil is infused with microcrystals, and when a low signal is broadcast through the soil it resonates in the crystals at a frequency that repels insects and grubs. We don’t have to use any pesticides. It seems like the idea behind this is more or less the same.”
“I’m impressed,” she confesses. “We’ll talk more later. I can use your help when I break into the Center. But yes, first the signal has to be disconnected from everyone’s brain. We can’t just blow the place up!”
“Wait, you want to break into the Center?” I ask. “That’s suicide.”
“You did it once,” she points out.
“Yeah, but they weren’t expecting an attack. Now they’re at war, they’re ready.”
“Leave that to me,” Flame says. “And your friend is right. We can’t just destroy the crystal dome. We’d turn most of the population into vegetables at that rate.”
“You know,” Carnelian interjects, “we’ve found that vegetables can actually communicate chemically for long distances . . .”
Flame gives him a withering look. “I already said I was impressed. Now stop showing off. When we get into the center, it is a pretty basic hacking and reprogramming job to change the frequency so it no longer resonates with human brain activity. That will shut down the mind control. But we also need fighters.”
“I know which one I’ll be,” Lachlan says.
“There’s only one problem,” Flame adds.
“Oh, only one?” I say with a hysterical chuckle. “Break into the most tightly guarded facility on the planet, reprogram a complex bunch of code, figure out what to destroy, and then how to do it . . . and there’s only one problem?”
“EcoPan set up the original system,” Flame says after one of her elaborate eye rolls. “From what I can tell from all the lens connections I�
�ve examined, its original purpose was pretty benign. Monitoring, that kind of thing. I don’t like it, but I guess EcoPan needed to know what was going on with the people it was protecting.”
“It was a little more insidious than that,” I begin, but Flame dismisses me with a wave.
“Now isn’t the time for philosophy, or history, or whatever you were going to lecture me on. We can all agree: Mind control bad, freedom good. Death bad, life good. Right? So pay attention!”
She sighs, and resumes her pacing. “EcoPan didn’t want anything to be changed without its permission or knowledge. So it set up a system that could not be broken by any casual hacker. The system doesn’t need a password to access. There’s no code, no cheat, no retina scan or thumbprint that will let someone access the system. Many lives were lost getting the truth about how to access and change the mind-control program. A dear friend of mine, a spy in the Center, discovered it and relayed the information with her dying act.”
Flame swallows hard, fighting back emotion. “At the heart of the Center, the hardware access point, there is a small dish perched under a scanner. Only when a certain thing is placed in that dish will the system be unlocked. Only then can I change it.”
“What thing?” I ask. “What is it?”
She pauses—she sure has a sense of the dramatic—and then says softly, “A seed.”
“But that’s easy,” Mira says with a laugh. “We can just . . .” She breaks off, remembering where she is.
“No seeds, my dear,” Flame tells her. “Not a single bikking seed in this sterile place.”
Lachlan and I exchange a look with sinking hearts.
“I could have taken a seed,” he says numbly. “I plucked a flower, and I could just as easily have taken a seed . . .”
“If only we’d known!” I say. It doesn’t seem fair. The one thing we need to save Eden is found in abundance just a few miles away.
“We could cross the desert again,” Carnelian suggests.
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