The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  The three stood there, and the people stopped going by, but still Ruby held Abra’s hand on the door handle. Abra stared at her, and there was urgency in her eyes, but Ruby shook her head.

  No.

  A different sound came down the stairwell: two people walking very slowly. Amos and Beatrice came into view. They held hands as they walked, and Beatrice seemed to be leading him. They turned in the landing in front of the small window and began going down the next flight of stairs. Leo sighed. Abra breathed out quietly through pursed lips.

  The three of them pressed against the wall and held their breath. They saw Beatrice’s shadow approach, widening in the crack at the bottom of the door. Abra put an index finger over her lips.

  Beatrice turned and left, leading Amos down the stairs.

  “I have to get to the Tree,” Abra said. “Now.”

  “Everyone’s already eaten from it,” Ruby said in a quiet voice. “It’s too late.”

  “What?” Abra said. Her face went white.

  Ruby nodded. “It’s true.”

  Abra stood there for a moment, finally shaking her head. “Okay, okay, we can’t do anything about that. But we still have to kill the Tree.”

  “C’mon,” Ruby said, pushing through the door and running up the stairs as fast as her legs would take her. Abra and Leo followed close behind.

  The three of them went up one floor and burst into the room.

  “There’s the trunk,” Ruby said, pointing to the center of the room.

  Tree branches held up the ceiling, intertwining with the structure. Smaller branches drooped down, heavy with fruit. For a moment, Ruby remembered that day long ago, the day she was healed, when she nearly ate that piece of fruit.

  “Don’t eat it,” Abra said firmly to Leo and Ruby. “Don’t even touch it. Don’t even look at it.” They both nodded.

  She marched through the dimly lit room to the trunk. “It’s covered,” she said over her shoulder to Ruby and Leo.

  “What?” Leo said, running over to her.

  She was right. Someone had built a wooden, circular wall around the trunk, and the branches came out of it in the ceiling, so there was no way of reaching it.

  “Can’t you get your sword through?” Leo asked.

  Abra tried stabbing the boards, but the sword simply stuck into the wood.

  “Either it’s Beatrice’s magic or the sword is only made for the Tree,” she muttered. She jumped up and stabbed a low-hanging branch. The fruit on the branch dropped instantly and shattered, and a breeze swept through the building, carried the shards away. But the rest of the Tree remained undamaged.

  “I have to get to the trunk,” Abra said to Ruby.

  “The trunk is covered like this all the way up through the building,” Ruby said, thinking about all she had seen. “Except . . . ”

  “Except?”

  “Except on the roof,” she said quietly, remembering how the Tree emerged, remembering the view. “The Tree grows up out of the roof.”

  “The trunk is exposed up there?”

  Ruby nodded. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Abra said, running for the door. She stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” Leo asked.

  Abra turned to them with a grave look on her face. “Leo, when I kill the Tree, this whole building is coming down.”

  “What?”

  “The Tree. When I kill it. It dies fast, probably faster than we can run back down. I don’t think we’ll make it out.”

  Leo and Ruby stared at her, trying to figure something out.

  “You two have to go. You have to run and get out of here. Leo, you have to take Ruby out. If I can get out, I’ll follow you and seal the grave, but you can’t wait for me. If I don’t make it, you have to tell Mr. Henry what happened.”

  “Abra,” Leo began, but she interrupted him.

  “No. You have to go.”

  Ruby looked at Leo, and even in the midst of everything else that was going on, one thought raced to the front of her mind.

  I have a brother.

  “Listen,” Leo said to Abra. “You can make it out. After you kill the Tree, go all the way down to the basement. There are tunnels there with arrows. Follow the green arrows.”

  “The green arrows?”

  “Yeah, the green ones. I don’t know where it goes, but I think it goes away from the water. It’s the only way we’ll get out of this city alive.”

  Abra nodded. “You two take care of each other, okay?” she said. “Don’t eat the fruit. Whatever you do. Please.” She grabbed their shoulders, stared at them through desperate eyes, then disappeared up the stairwell.

  “C’mon, Ruby. Let’s go,” Leo said.

  Ruby followed Leo down, down, down, and the rumbling sounds of war from outside the building grew louder. There were screams and shouts. Orders. She flinched at the muffled sound of buildings collapsing, crashing to the ground, threatening to cave in the tunnels.

  They finally reached the basement. There was a row of flashlights on the wall where the stairs went down into the tunnel, as if the tunnels were regularly used from that point. They each grabbed one and ran into the tunnels.

  “Let’s take turns using the flashlights,” Leo said. “I don’t know how far we have to go.”

  They found the first green arrow spray-painted on the wall of the tunnel, and they ran in that direction. The darkness in front of them fled from the flashlight, spilled in behind them, forever running away, forever chasing them. Ruby wondered where they were going. Everything she had ever known was behind her. Every question she had ever had about her life was walking right there beside her.

  37

  ABOVE GROUND, the war had begun. In the midst of the screams and the blood and the debris, Beatrice stood beside Amos, still holding his hand. She looked around with a smile. The ones who had eaten from the Tree would purge the Edge of Over There of those who had not. Only the immortals would remain. And then? Who knew what they could accomplish.

  But then Beatrice felt a chill. A tingling sensation slipped from the base of her skull down her spine. She dropped Amos’s hand, closed her eyes, and took in a deep breath through her nose.

  How could she have neglected the girl?

  Beatrice ran back toward the building, no longer a little girl, not even close. She was the something-else-entirely that Ruby had sensed, and she shot up through the air like a firework, realizing their weakness had been left exposed.

  38

  ABRA’S WALK TO THE TOP of the building was long and quiet. The muscles in her legs ached and she breathed hard, all the time trying not to think about the quick retreat she would have to make down through all of those levels if she did end up killing the Tree. Every ten floors or so she peeked into the main area and glanced at the trunk of the Tree, hoping to find a floor where it had not been covered, but no floor had been missed. Wide boards formed walls she could not penetrate, so she continued climbing.

  When Abra went through the door at the top of the tall building, the beauty of the view stopped her in her tracks, then drew her to the edge. She stood there looking over the city, up to the road she and Leo had come down, straight through the trees. She looked to the side, and she could see the long, flat plain of stone and red light glaring off the dimple-shaped pools of clear water.

  She pulled herself away from the edge, and there, in the middle of the building, was the Tree.

  It came up through the roof as if this was the only part of it, as if it was only a ten-foot-high tree, not a thousand-foot tree that grew up, up, up through an entire building. The part she could see looked young and immature. She pulled out her sword and walked toward it. The bark was as she had remembered it, soft and leathery, and she took a deep breath, preparing to plunge the sword into the Tree.

  Her eyes snagged on one lone piece of fruit dangling in front of her. It was lime green, the color of a lollipop, with the same translucence as clear candy. She tilted her head to the side and stared at it. At first, she
could see through it to the distant buildings, and beyond that the water, far off and far below. But the fruit clouded up as she stared at it, like steam on a bathroom mirror, and then she could see inside the fruit. What she saw made her tremble.

  It was her mother. She was old, much older than she was at that time, and she was in a bed, her head propped up on two pillows. Her face was pale and her eyelids closed, and Abra realized she was at the end of her life. She was dying. Abra reached up and held the fruit in her fingers. And she watched.

  Her mother coughed. A tear slid down Abra’s cheek. She wondered if she was seeing the future. She wondered if she was seeing the present. Was her mother at home, dying, right now? She pulled the fruit from the branch, and as it pulled away the leaves recoiled and danced back and forth.

  She would take the fruit home to her mother. Her mother would never die. Her mother would . . .

  “No,” she muttered to herself, staring at the fruit in her hand. “No.”

  It started to brown, and she dropped it onto the roof, where it shattered like a Christmas ornament. A breeze blew and it was gone. She found herself stumbling along, following the dust as it flew to the other side of the building. The vision of her mother dying had distracted and disoriented her.

  That’s when she saw the large telescope propped up on two massive tripods. The men must have finished building it before the speech, and there it stood, waiting for Amos to gaze through it after the war was fought, after the Frenzies were destroyed and the city was his. She stared at it, and the weight of the decision pulled down on her shoulders.

  Should she look?

  She glanced over her shoulder at the door to the roof.

  One glance wouldn’t hurt.

  She bent down and peered into the eyepiece. She couldn’t look for long, because it was like looking directly at the sun. She fell away from the telescope and sat on the roof.

  Abra wept. She had seen a faraway, terrifying darkness, yes, but that darkness had been pushed to the farthest fringe by a place of such beauty that it made her chest hurt. It was the ache a child feels when she wants to go to the moon, when she first comprehends the distance between herself and the faraway stars. It was the overwhelming joy of Christmas morning and first love and the unexpected warmth of a spring breeze, rolled into one. She felt all of that in the instant she looked through the telescope, and at the end she was left with a deep and impenetrable sadness that she could not be there now.

  A desire to be there, in the beautiful place, had pulsed so strong that now she felt weak, limp.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” Beatrice said from the other side of the building. Abra looked over her shoulder. Beatrice stood there, and she was glowing with shadows, if that was possible.

  “Beatrice,” Abra said in a heavy voice, “I have to kill the Tree. You know that.”

  “First, let me show you something,” Beatrice said.

  “I’ve already looked.”

  “No, no, not that. Come here. Come close.”

  Abra crossed the building, her sword ready.

  “Tell me what you see,” Beatrice said.

  Abra looked out on the city. The Frenzies had started fires in all the streets around them, so that the flames licked at the buildings and the shadows danced like old ghosts. The entire city, as far as she could see, glowed orange, and in the distance a portion of the forest had already caught. There were the sounds of war: the loud, booming crashes of destruction, and the howling of people who have allowed themselves to be turned into animals.

  “This is hell,” Abra whispered. “The fires, the screams, the people who cannot die but have to go on living in this.”

  “No,” Beatrice said spitefully. “This is not hell. This is people living forever. Forever! They will never have to die!”

  Abra stood there, and the red of the sky deepened as night approached.

  “With your key,” Beatrice said, pointing at the sword, “we could open all the gates. We could create new worlds where people would never have to die. What would be so wrong with that?”

  Abra didn’t move. She felt like she couldn’t. Sadness was a weight on her shoulders. It all felt like too much. What could she, a teenage girl, do in the face of all this evil? How could she possibly make a difference?

  But her head was shaking almost of its own accord. She felt her hand tighten around the sword’s handle. Her jaw clenched.

  Beatrice made a quick motion to push Abra over the edge, but Abra ducked and jumped backward. Beatrice was on top of her, and she was too strong, but Abra rolled and rolled and stabbed with the sword and somehow they were both on their feet again, facing off. Lightning or something like it crackled from Beatrice.

  There was no way in the world anyone would have mistaken Beatrice for a little girl in that moment. Her clothes were in tatters, and they flapped around her in the breeze like the unwound strips of cloth from a mummy. Her skin was translucent like the fruit on the Tree, and she wasn’t quite standing on the roof of the building but rather hovered a few inches above it, slowly approaching.

  “What did you see through the telescope?” she asked Abra.

  Abra tried to hold the sword steady. “You know what I saw.”

  Beatrice shrugged. “Soon you will be there,” she said in the voice of an adult simplifying a complex concept for a young child.

  Abra shook her head and held the sword tighter. Beatrice rushed at her, and Abra could not tell if she was flying or running. She whispered to the sword because suddenly she felt like the two of them were in this together, and the words helped her to gather confidence. She felt intimately connected to it.

  Abra swung the sword once as Beatrice knocked her over. Abra landed on her back, and the wind was knocked out of her. She pulled herself up onto her hands and knees and waited. She felt certain that in the amount of time it had taken for her to get to her knees, Beatrice would be standing over her, gloating, ready to kill her. But nothing happened.

  Abra heard a whimpering from the edge of the building. She turned around. Beatrice lay on her side, moaning. Abra’s sword had caught her, and this time it had gone deep. Abra stood on shaky legs and walked over to where Beatrice lay. She looked down at her, and again she was overcome with sadness. Those figures, the Tennins and the Jinns and the Koli Naals and the Beatrices—they were so incredibly made that even the evil ones emanated a fierce kind of beauty. The sadness Abra felt was at how far some of them had managed to fall.

  “Go ahead,” Beatrice wheezed.

  Abra lifted the sword and put the tip of the blade against Beatrice’s throat. The skin in that spot was pale and vulnerable. Abra stared hard and thought that by any account, she should do it. She should end Beatrice. But she knew she couldn’t the moment she felt Beatrice’s life pulsing at the end of the sword.

  She pulled it away. “Go,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Go!”

  When Beatrice didn’t move, Abra shrugged and walked over to the Tree. She pushed her sword into it. It was like pushing a dull knife into softened butter, and the trunk immediately went from velvety brown to a lifeless gray-white. The pale color spread out and down. The fruit fell, heavy, and the leaves drifted to the roof and withered, and everything was swept away by a strong breeze. The entire building trembled as if an earthquake had rocked the foundation.

  Abra turned and ran to the door. She looked over her shoulder once.

  Beatrice was gone.

  Abra ran down through the building, level beyond level, stair after stair, usually two or three at a time. As the Tree withered and died—and it happened slower than the Tree in Abra’s valley, perhaps because it was older and more established, or perhaps simply because of its size—it shrunk away from the walls and the ceilings that it supported. The entire building was structured around the Tree, and these subtle shifts were enough to begin bringing it down.

  But fortunately for Abra, it didn’t happen all at once. An outer wall collapsed o
n the 78th floor as Abra ran to the 77th floor, and a portion of that side of the building fell outward, into the streets. The Frenzies cheered, thinking they had done something in their fight against Amos. At one point the stairwell partially collapsed, and Abra fell straight down ten feet. She didn’t have time to check herself for injuries—she scrambled to her feet and kept running.

  Above her she could hear the building falling, bricks crumbling. A cloud of dust chased her down the steps, threatened to overtake her and choke her and steal away her vision. But she held tight to the rail and ran, all the way to the basement.

  She saw a line of flashlights, and she grabbed one, turned it on, and when it didn’t come on she shook it. The beam flickered on. She put her sword away and took two flashlights with her into the darkness of the tunnels, following the green arrows. She kept hearing things in the tunnel behind her, and she spun around and pointed the yellowing light into the darkness. She expected to see Beatrice.

  Nothing.

  39

  LEO AND RUBY JOGGED side by side for as long as they could, Leo trying to hold the flashlight steady. The tunnel in front of them stretched on without any markings apart from the occasional spray-painted green arrow on the cement walls. They kept up a good pace for as long as they could, but eventually they both tired out and had to alternate between jogging and walking.

  Every so often, Leo turned the flashlight to see if anyone was coming up behind him. It was always a quick glance, and Ruby didn’t ask who or what he was looking for. They went on silently in this way for a long, long time, the only sound that of their feet scuffing against the cement floor, and their breathing, heavy when they ran, slowing and relieved when they walked.

  Leo stole glances at her, taking in how much she had grown since he had seen her last. She was nearly a young woman. She was strong—he could see that in her eyes and the way she held her chin. She wasn’t the kind who gave up easily.

  When he looked away, peering into the never-ending tunnel that stretched ahead of them, he shook his head, still barely believing it was her.