The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  “Some say—no one you know, mind you—but some say that Beatrice has been talking about larger goals.”

  Abra nearly tripped at the name of Beatrice.

  “C’mon, girl, watch your step,” the man behind her said. “What’s Beatrice saying?”

  “Beatrice . . . ” The man paused. “You didn’t hear this from me, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Rumor is, Beatrice wants to defeat the Frenzies and take this whole show over the water.”

  “Over the water?” the man said, his voice incredulous.

  “Over the water. Over There. Take over.”

  The men walked in silence again. Abra could tell the man behind her was thinking through this new information.

  “I don’t know,” he said hesitantly. “Amos seems pretty intent on cleaning this place up. Second heaven and all that.”

  The man in front laughed. “She’s leading him along, one thing to the next. If you think that man makes any decisions Beatrice doesn’t approve of long before the idea comes into his head, then you’re dumber than you look.”

  “Hey!”

  “She runs this place.” The man in front stopped, and Abra nearly ran into him. She heard him pull a ring of keys out. “She won’t stop until . . . ”

  His voice faded away. The door opened. The man behind Abra nudged her through.

  The smell changed so suddenly it was like someone had flipped a switch. Everything around her went from the odor of a musty tomb to that of springtime air and butterflies. Her growing sense of panic eased, and she felt relaxed. It was the same feeling she’d had . . .

  She was overcome with a realization. She stopped walking, only to be pushed forward again.

  It was the same feeling she’d had while standing under the Tree of Life at the end of the Road to Nowhere, back in Deen, four long years before.

  The Tree was there somewhere. It was close. She would never forget that smell, not if she lived to be a hundred years old. She would never forget the pleasant visions it brought to mind, the gentle rocking of the soul, the sweet memories it managed to revive.

  If she didn’t focus, she could easily get lost in them, those memories of being a child and going on a picnic, or riding the Ferris wheel on a summer night, or running hard through a cool autumn evening, the alfalfa rustling around her knees, the fireflies lighting like a galaxy around her. Adventures with Sam and long walks into the shadowy trees that lined the mountains.

  The Tree of Life! What a beautiful thing it would be, she thought, to sit under that Tree and smell its leaves, to eat its fruit, to remember everything that was good about the world, to have no worries or cares, to sleep soundly and wake more refreshed than you’ve ever felt before. What a beautiful thing.

  But not here, not now, she reminded herself. Not here, where things are so imperfect. Not here, where death is a gift that rescues us from pain and disease and the crippling effects of age and accidents. Not here.

  They led her up and up and up, stairway after stairway, until her legs were numb and her breathing hard. Finally, when she didn’t think she could go up any more stairs, they veered off to the side, through a door, down a hallway.

  “This is it, girl,” the man in front of her said. He took off her blindfold and untied her hands.

  “What are you doing?” the other man asked.

  “How old are you, girl?”

  “Sixteen,” she said.

  The man who untied her looked at the other man. “She’s a kid. Relax. You’re a kid, right?” he asked in a playful voice.

  She nodded.

  “You’re harmless, right?” He laughed.

  She nodded again.

  “See?” he said, closing her inside the room and locking the door. Abra listened to their footsteps recede down the hallway.

  “You’re not even going to search her?” the man who had been walking behind her asked.

  “Seriously? She’s a kid.”

  Abra walked to a dark corner of the room and sat down. She thought of her mother, and she thought of the Tree of Life. She wondered what these people would do with it. If they ate from the Tree, would they try to go back to the other side of the grave and rule the world as immortals?

  The wall behind her was brick, and the bricks were unevenly laid so that some stuck out a little farther than the others. She traced a path with her finger along the mortar, and she imagined it was her walking through the city streets, trying to find her way home.

  That was a long, dark time for Abra, sitting in the shadows, communing with the darkness. She never came out of the back corner when the guards opened the door. She hid her face in the crook of her arm, the sword still tucked inside the waistband of her pants.

  She was particularly deep in her thoughts when she heard the door open, and she put her face in her arm because she didn’t want them to make eye contact and stay and maybe find out about the sword. She noticed again how her skin smelled like the earth, like dust. It had been so long since she’d had a bath.

  Abra had a strange feeling, a sense of falling, because she realized the door had never closed. She looked up quickly and her heart started beating rapidly. She had to work very hard to control her breathing. A small person stood in the doorway.

  It was Beatrice.

  “I thought it was you,” Beatrice said in the sweetest voice, and Abra had to remind herself that this was not a friend. This was something else entirely. “I knew it! They didn’t even describe you to me—you believe me, don’t you? I had a sense, I guess. I knew it.”

  Abra took a deep breath and put her face back in her arm.

  “Oh, don’t be sad,” Beatrice said, still in a kind voice. “Abra. Abra! It’s me. It’s B.”

  “I know who you are,” Abra whispered. “You tried to kill me. Remember?”

  “Then you should be very afraid,” Beatrice said in a surprised tone. “If you know what I am, you should fall to your knees and worship me so that I don’t destroy you in a moment.”

  Abra’s fists clenched, and she wanted to pull the sword out and fight Beatrice right there in the cell, but there was something inside of her that knew it wasn’t time. Not yet.

  Abra looked up. “I hope that when I stabbed you by the pools it didn’t hurt too much,” she said in an even tone. Beatrice winced and involuntarily flexed her forearm.

  So that’s where I got her, Abra thought.

  “We are so close, Abra. So close. You need to know that once everyone eats from the Tree and I unite all the people here, the first thing we will do is march back to the other side of the grave. I will take you with me so that you can witness it all. We will take over the earth! We’ll let people roam freely between there and here, and everyone will eat from the Tree. And you, the holder of the key, the one who locks and unlocks the door, will no longer be of use to us.”

  Abra still said nothing, and her silence seemed to agitate Beatrice. B’s eyes widened, and her voice grew louder with each sentence.

  “We know what you did to Jinn! We all know!”

  Abra felt strength grow inside of her. Beatrice took a step back, and Abra remembered, for the first time in a while, that she had been the one to bring Jinn down. She had no reason to be afraid.

  “You should be careful,” Abra said.

  Their eyes locked, and there was the first battle, before anything took place on the streets, before the armies marched, before the leaders met. The first battle was there in that dark room.

  “You will rot here in this building,” Beatrice murmured. “You will rot, and you will be the last person in this city, and no one will ever come looking for you, not even when time ends.”

  She spun around and slammed the door behind her.

  Moments later the door burst open again, and two guards flung another figure into the room. Abra stared at the young man who was now on his hands and knees. The guards closed the door, and the sound of it echoed through the building.

  “Leo,” Abra asked, “
is that you?”

  It took a long time for them to catch up on what they had each been through. They both seemed older, like two people in middle age reflecting on a long-ago childhood. First Abra went, because Leo was still catching his breath, and his head still hurt. She told him of the pools and the man by the water and her experiences with Beatrice. Leo spoke after that, rubbing his head gingerly, talking about the Frenzies and his sister.

  His sister.

  They were there in the darkness for a time they could not measure. They tried to figure out how long they had been separated, but even those days were difficult to define, impossible to count. It went on and on like this, until one day the building began to vibrate with an immeasurable number of people—they could hear them, sense them. The crowd settled, the building throbbed, and Amos’s voice echoed out over a loudspeaker. There were no speakers on floor 27, but they could still hear him, his voice coming from some faraway place.

  They heard his plans.

  They realized the building was the Tree.

  And it seemed like there was nothing they could do.

  32

  RUBY STARED THROUGH her bedroom window, the window that faced the tall building, and in the dim glow of the alley lights she monitored the red door. Her mind could only focus on one thing.

  There was a young man in that building and he had said he was her brother. She believed him, though she didn’t know why, maybe because of the way the words had come out of him, sincere and intense. But if her brother was alive, where was her mother? Ruby wondered if the young man knew.

  She had heard her father tell the others where to take the young man. But if he was her brother, why had her father had him dragged out of the house? Surely he would have recognized him! If that young man was her brother, wouldn’t her father have fallen to his knees in thankfulness?

  She remembered her father’s words.

  “Take him up with the other spy. Level 27. I’ll come up later.”

  Someone wasn’t telling her the truth, and no matter how hard she tried to convince herself otherwise, she kept circling around to the strong sense that her father was the liar.

  Then came the night her father said he would take her to the important meeting in the tall building. He said it would be the next day, which meant there were only twenty-four more hours and all the secrets would be gone, or at least that’s how he had made it sound. Did the secrets involve her mother? Her brother? Did the young man know the secrets, and had he come to tell her the truth?

  The air was cold in the house, and she pulled a blanket off her bed and wrapped herself in it. She walked to her bedroom door and opened it. Her father hadn’t come up to say good night yet, so it was still unlocked. She walked down the stairs slowly, trying not to trip on the train the blanket created. The steps creaked under her weight, but for some reason her father didn’t hear her walk into his study.

  Ruby stared over his shoulder. He was reading letters, a bunch of them, and they were spread out all over the desk. Each one was written in different handwriting, different ink color. She wondered where they had all come from.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  She didn’t expect a real answer. He rarely gave her real answers when she asked serious questions. But her father surprised her.

  “These are letters from other leaders in the city who want to see things change. They want to see an end to the Frenzies. They are pledging their loyalty, Ruby. We are finally ready.”

  She didn’t make eye contact with him, only stared at the rows and rows of letters. “Ready for what?” she asked.

  “Ready for war,” he whispered.

  The word “war” sent a shiver through her, and it felt like that shiver put a crack in her heart—a crack into which darkness and fear and uncertainty all started to leak. She shuddered.

  “Is this how it was when Mother and Leo . . . died?” she asked.

  Her father nodded and cleared his throat uncomfortably, and Ruby knew by that sound that he didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t like the feeling of being lied to, though she still tried very hard to find the best in her father. She reasoned to herself that if he was lying to her, he was doing so for a good reason.

  “So, I can still come along to the meeting?” Ruby asked.

  Her father nodded.

  “Is it safe?” she asked.

  “That’s a good question, Ruby. A very good question. This city is never completely safe, which is why these meetings are so important. Our defenses are still standing. We are going to make it safe. We are. The entire city. And that is only the beginning. The beginning! After that . . . But first we have to secure the city. I will do anything . . . anything . . . to make this city safe for you. For your future.”

  She looked up at him and felt a surge of affection. Competing with it was the urge to run out the front door and never come back. Everything he said to her was now filtered through her suspicion that he had lied to her about the most important things in her life.

  “Come with me,” he said, leading Ruby across his study. He gave her a sad smile and walked over to his board of keys. He scanned them quickly, reached out and took one off its hook, then came back over to Ruby and messed up her hair playfully. He held out the key.

  “This is the key to your room,” he said in a serious voice. “I think you’re old enough to have that now.”

  She took it from him, and the coldness of the key bit into her hands as if he had pulled it from a freezer. She looked at its jagged teeth, pressed her fingers against the sharpness. It was a heavy key for its size. She wondered what it was made of.

  Ruby looked up at her father to thank him, but he had already returned to his desk, his face glowing in the light of the lamp, eyes scanning the letters in front of him. She slipped the key into her pocket and backed slowly out of the room.

  That night, Ruby lay quietly in her bed, staring at the ceiling. Her third-floor bedroom was large, almost large enough to be its own living space. The windows were tall, and in the summer she left them open a sliver so she could hear the city. At night, there wasn’t much going on—people stayed inside to avoid the Frenzies and the “riffraff.” That’s the name her father used for the inhabitants who didn’t live in one house, who roamed the city freely.

  And there were a lot of those people out at night, a lot of riffraff, although they stayed in the shadows and the alleyways, always more comfortable in the darkness. Her father seemed to know a lot about what went on in the city, considering he stayed inside most days. She wondered what he wrote in his notebooks. She often heard him talking seriously with someone, and she wondered who was on the telephone when the heavy sliding doors were closed.

  She got up and walked to the window. She wondered what the young man was doing. He had looked older than her, but he was still young, much younger than her father or her teacher or anyone who lived in their neighborhood. Besides occasional glimpses of the Frenzies, she hadn’t seen another young person for a very, very long time. Her father said all the little children in the city went to their own school, and they all had to stay inside in order to be safe. He said the young people had all joined the Frenzies.

  Ruby pulled the curtain back a few inches and looked down at the red door at the base of the tall building. She saw the outline of a man standing in the alley along the fence. He was nothing more than a shadow. Two more people came around the corner and looked down the alley before jogging back the way they had come.

  She heard her father coming up the stairs, so she hopped into bed.

  He peeked his head in through her door. “Good night, Ruby.”

  “Good night.”

  “I’m going to close the door, okay?”

  She nodded quickly, almost nervously.

  “But tonight, your door stays unlocked unless you lock it. Are you okay with that?”

  She nodded again, this time one bob of her head.

  He smiled, pulled back into the hallway, and closed her door.


  Ruby sat in her bed. Her father’s manner toward her had been changing recently. He was letting go of her, or pulling away, she couldn’t tell which. Things were shifting. She appreciated her newfound freedom, but there was a dark edge to her father’s recent treatment of her. It left her feeling empty, anxious, like she was being freed from a cage but into something that was somehow even worse.

  Something else was going on. Something big. She was sure of it.

  She waited and waited and counted to a hundred at least four times before creeping to her door. She realized for the first time, as she stood there with her hand on her bedroom doorknob, that her father had ingrained her with a deep fear of opening doors. She hadn’t identified it before that night, but every time she reached for a doorknob and began turning, she had this moment where fear surged up through her throat, threatening to choke her. Every time she turned the knob on the bathroom door at school or walked through the front door of the house.

  There she stood, hand on the doorknob, recognizing it for the first time.

  That she turned the knob and looked into the hallway was a feat of great bravery. Her father’s door was closed and locked. He always locked his door at night, as if preparing for an invasion that never happened, or hadn’t happened yet. She thought about what he always said to her when he locked her in every night.

  “For protection,” he would tell her as the door closed.

  There was no light coming out from under his door. Ruby’s mind immediately went to the back door, the one that was always locked, the one that led into the alley that spilled down to the red door at the base of the tall building. She wondered if the red door was locked.

  She stared at the attic door at the end of the hall and thought of all the stories her father had told her of the terrible, awful things that would come rushing through the door if she opened it: the unspeakable horrors, the indescribable beings, the forces that would tear the city up by its roots. She wondered if that young man was one of those forces. It certainly felt like it.

  “I’m your brother. I’m Leo.”