Also by Brenda Cooper
Wilders
Edge of Dark
Spear of Light
The Creative Fire
The Diamond Deep
Published 2018 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Keepers. Copyright © 2018 by Brenda Cooper. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover illustration © Christian Hecker
Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
Cover design © Prometheus Books
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Inquiries should be addressed to
Pyr
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cooper, Brenda, 1960- author.
Title: Keepers / Brenda Cooper.
Description: Amherst, NY : Pyr, [2018] | Series: Project Earth ; 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007214 (print) | LCCN 2018011317 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884229 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884212 (softcover)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.O5825 (ebook) | LCC PS3603.O5825 K44 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007214
Printed in the United States of America
To Martín Espada. I was lucky to study with you, and to sit at your feet and listen to your poetry.
Your character formed the seed for the rebel poet Valeria in this book, and your love of Walt Whitman inspired Jake’s love of Whitman.
Thank you for being an inspiration
Contents
Cover
Also by Brenda Cooper
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
It is fifty years from now. In the wild lands between the megacities, there are almost a third as many robots as there are people. Many of them are large and imposing, able to use tank-like treads or multiple feet to traverse almost any terrain, and multiple arms to complete almost any job.
These are the ecobots.
They are bringers of death and cultivators of life. They destroy. They rip up rotten, weed-filled roads and collect the concrete detritus for recycling. They bring down wooden houses and separate out toxins and carry them away, burning the rest. They erase all of the things that were once human from places that were towns, that were farms, that were communes.
After, they restore.
To restore is to grade and to plant, to seed and to water and to tend. To restore is to protect from anything not natural, including humans, for humans are no longer natural to the wild lands.
A few humans are still tolerated here.
These are the Wilders.
They work for the NGOs, the nongovernmental organizations, which is a fancy way of saying nonprofits. Thus, they are legally allowed outside of the megacities. Sometimes they tell the robots what to do. Sometimes the robots tell the humans what to do.
The Wilders and the ecobots are on the same side.
This uneasy partnership exists throughout the United States. It bears the most fruit in the Northwest and the Northeast, for those regions are less ravaged than the Midwest, the South, and the rest of North America. A drone flying from west to east across the Northwest would see much beauty.
Imagine you are riding with that drone, that you feel it bob in the wind and see through its cameras.
On the westernmost coast, the Olympic Peninsula rises out of the sea. It is occupied entirely by people from the First Nations who have rewilded their own land with their own robots and their own hands. Mountains spike up from moss-laden forests, jagged dark scarps that kiss a bright blue sky. Ghosts of great glaciers hide in shaded ravines, their last life melting into streams and thin waterfalls.
Crossing the peninsula, one flies over water before crossing over the long, domed city of Seacouver, which fills the inner coastline of the Puget Sound. It rises high and sharp and colorful from the troubled waters, its weather-control fields sometimes faintly visible as a shimmer or a slight bending of light. Bridges link the taller buildings in its three great downtowns—Vancouver, Seattle, and Tacoma. In spite of its industry, its metal and glass, its new-material modernity, the city is decorated with green.
Emerald City indeed.
Hundred-story buildings fill entire blocks with indoor gardens, and almost all roofs are given to year-long farms. Red tomatoes and yellow and orange citrus and the slender wavy tops of carrots compete with deep green kale and lighter green and red heads of lettuce. Flowers, berries, and edibles line the roadways that people travel using all sorts of machines, mostly powered by the humans themselves, their companion robots, or the fire of the sun. Even inside the dome—maybe especially inside the dome—the air is so clear it is truly invisible, the sort of air that humans used to buy from oxygen bars.
For all its beauty and size, its spaceports and its fabulous architecture, from way up here Seacouver is a long rectangle teeming with movement.
On the far side of the city, land rises into the Cascades. Cedar and fir forests drape the rocky shoulders of the mountains with green shawls. Here and there, the scars of fires remain visible as slashes of desolation or pale new plantings.
Topping a drone over the Cascades makes the engin
e strain. They’re big. The air grows thin and wind becomes a threat. From way up here, it’s easy to see how thoroughly the mountains control the weather. On the west side, where you have just been, everything is bright green and blue, dense with trees and birds and deer and coyotes, wet with streams and bisected by rivers. As you fly east, the rivers are larger and far fewer, the land between rivers as much folded hill and low scrub as forest, far more of it scarred by fire.
Almost immediately, you spot the small town of Cle Elum, with perhaps fifty thousand humans or maybe a few more. Far to the south, on the north bank of the wide Columbia, orchards and fields of grain surround Yakima and Selah, and then there is nothing for a long time, or at least nothing human except a few roads left for convenience, and a few silent trucks traversing those roads, and the ribbons of hyperloop that carry people quickly between cities.
If you fly lower, you see a few humans, a few robots, and a few others who are not supposed to be there.
You are now over Promise, or what was once New Promise, an upstart state that still exists as a legal entity although there are no border markings for it on the grounds. It has no legislature and no police force and not much of anything else. Spokane, the largest city in Promise, can be seen minding the border between Promise and Idaho. Before that, the Columbia—which starts north of the drone—runs a lazy course through the land. A few miles west of the river, a fifty-three-mile-long lake starts inside of the lower part of the east Cascades, hugged by ravines and lined with trees. It looks like nothing so much as a great blue worm.
Even though you can see there are only a few humans, compared at least to the billions in the cities, you don’t have enough sensors to count them. If you cannot count them, then you do not know that there are almost twice as many as there should be.
The ones who should be there are the people of the Wilders. Together, the Wilders and the ecobots are on the side of the spruce and the cedar, the prairie grass and the wild rhododendron. They support the coyote and the rabbit, the black bear and the wolf.
The other people? Some are merely lost. Some are wandering artists who have lost themselves in the wild on purpose. They are illegal but tolerated. Others are full of hatred for this new world. If they could be found, they would not be tolerated.
These are the Returners.
There are a lot of places for them to hide in land this empty.
CHAPTER ONE
Lou loved standing on the top of mountains, but standing on top of the Bridge of Stars made her twitchy. There were too many people, too much movement, and every patch of green was tightly controlled. The bridge spiraled nearly two thousand feet above Seacouver, taller than almost every building. Lou hated it.
In contrast, her younger sister looked buoyant. Coryn’s face glowed with the buzz of the city. Strands of bright red hair escaped from her loose braid, and blew around her face like a moving halo. She sat cross-legged on a white bench in front of Lou, swinging one foot in the air, gazing over the water and the western horizon. There, the Olympic Mountains cut a jagged green line against a bright blue summer sky.
She’d missed Coryn when she left the city the first time, but she’d miss her more now. Soon. It would be time to go soon.
Below and around them, the city moved. Bicyclists whizzed past so fast the wind of their wheels fluffed Lou’s hair. Walkers stopped and talked to each other, or their companion robots, about the view in voices that varied from hushed whispers to high, excited exclamations. A dog barked, and she searched until she found it tucked into a robot’s backpack. Its probable owner, a teenaged girl with long dark hair and a red skirt, leaned against the railing.
The screech of a set of brakes made Lou jump, but Coryn didn’t even seem to hear it. “Coryn?” Lou ventured.
Coryn turned, shading her eyes with one hand. “Yes?”
“Thank you.”
Coryn cocked her head and smiled, looking inordinately pleased at the simple words.
“I should have said that earlier,” Lou told her. “I’m glad you came out, glad you survived, glad you found me and joined me. I should have said that right away, that first day on the farm after I found you . . . after we found each other.”
Coryn’s smile broadened. “Well, I did make it most of the way. But if you hadn’t rescued me, I’d be dead.” She caught some of her flyaway hairs and tried to tuck them out of the wind. “I knew you were happy to see me even though you didn’t say so.”
When had her little sister learned to be graceful with words? “I was just too wrapped up in our plan to shake up the cities.” Here on the top of the tallest bridge in Seacouver, looking down at the green and blue tops of skyscrapers and the gauzy skybridges that knitted them together, she again felt the sting of her own naive choices. “I shouldn’t have believed Victor. I knew there were plans hidden inside plans, but I thought I knew the real one.”
“You didn’t. You wouldn’t have gone into Portland if you’d known people would die.”
Lou grimaced. She should never have been such a gullible ass that she got tricked into invading Portland, her well-intentioned peaceful protest hiding a far more evil attack on the city. Even thinking about it drove a sharp pang of anger into Lou’s gut. “I intend to find the bastards who sent the second wave of ecobots in. Shortly, too.”
Lou hadn’t even noticed when the dark-haired girl left the landing. Now an older woman with two companion robots stood stiffly, looking out but not down. One of her robots crowded Coryn, who scooted closer to Lou. Her voice cracked as she reached up and took Lou’s hand. “I know. Stay with me for a few more minutes.”
“Of course.” The whole time they had been growing up, it had been Lou and Coryn together and everyone else outside of that tiny circle. Everyone. Even their parents, who had eventually killed themselves. Because they were together, they weren’t bothered by the lesser challenges of being teenaged orphans: children who teased them, professors who scorned them, the city itself when it ratted on them as they broke rules. It had been Lou and Coryn, and Coryn’s old companion robot, Paula, against the world. Lou had thought she would always know Coryn inside and out. But these last few weeks had felt like getting to know a strange woman. Coryn had become more than Lou had expected her to, as if she should have always remained a child. As she squeezed Coryn’s hand, a message buzzed through on her wristlet, and she twisted her hand to shift it out of the sun’s glare.
Matchiko hurt. Come now. Yakima. Shuska.
Yakima was a place. Matchiko and Shuska were Lou’s tribe now, her people. A stab of fear made her shiver in spite of the heat.
Coryn must have noticed. “What’s wrong?”
“A message from Shuska.” Her heart ran faster with worry and anticipation. She went around the back of the bench and sat beside her sister. “I’m sorry. I have to go to them.”
The disappointment on Coryn’s face shifted to worry. “Is everything okay?”
“Matchiko is hurt.”
“What happened?”
Lou pulled her hand away and glanced down at her wristlet. No more information had come through. But then Shuska was unlikely to send anything she considered secret into the city. She wouldn’t have sent a note at all if it wasn’t serious. “I have to go to Yakima to find out.”
“Now?”
Yes, now. But the look on Coryn’s face made her say, “Soon. Julianna said I might be sent out today anyway.” Julianna was Coryn’s powerful protector. Lou looked east, toward the Cascade Mountains and her friends. “You wanted to race me down the hill. I guess we should go now?”
Coryn’s eyes widened. “Not yet. Please. I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”
It hurt, but Coryn was fine and well-cared for. Lou whispered, “If Matchiko is hurt, I have to go.”
Coryn looked away. “They’re your family now, aren’t they?”
“Like Julianna is yours. You’re my only sister.”
“You are my only family!” Coryn said, a little too loudly. Then s
he sighed. “But I suppose you do have to go. Will you come back? Can you promise?”
Lou winced, remembering she had promised to come back for Coryn’s graduation. She had screwed that up entirely. “Someday. I can’t know when. You know how it is out there.”
Coryn nodded and took a single deep breath. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” There. They hadn’t said that in years. It felt . . . good. Scary.
They stood, staring at each other for a moment, before Lou took a step forward and folded Coryn into her arms. She stank of the city, but she also smelled like home, like the past, and like family.
Lou pulled away before she could be weakened by any more emotion, and held her sister by the shoulders. “Let’s go.”
“Okay.” Coryn walked her bike away from the wall, threw her leg over it, pulled down her AR glasses, and pushed off, all in what looked like one movement.
Lou shook her head, amused. She pulled her own glasses down before she mounted, and looked around carefully, waiting for a far bigger break in the traffic than Coryn had needed. The AR world folded around her, lines and colors and flashing symbols.
She focused, identifying the three things she needed: Her sister, her route off the bridge, and the traffic immediately around her. By the time she was moving well through the other bikes and people on the bridge, her sister was already a quarter of the way down.
‡ ‡ ‡
Lou stood on the busy platform outside of the hyperloop with Coryn, Julianna, and Jake beside her. City police and private security-bots surrounded them, thankfully keeping some distance. A growing crowd had stopped to gawk at Julianna and Jake, faces reflecting awe, curiosity, and, in a few cases, the extremes of adoration or anger.
At least she’d said goodbye to Coryn on the bridge and didn’t need to say anything tender with an audience.
A news-bot dived at Lou, and she barely managed not to swat it. Julianna and Jake might not run the city anymore, but they both commanded attention. Whenever they went out, news-bots thronged them. Stupid, vapid, city-dwellers with their cults of personality.
Jake had bent with age, but Julianna had run her way through life, quite literally. If Lou hadn’t known who they were, she might have thought them from different generations. Julianna stood straight and slender, even though her hair had gone to gray and her eyes were buried in wrinkles. She looked right at Lou as she said, “I can’t thank you enough.”
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