Something stirred beneath my panic and dread, an awareness nudging me to look around.
We’re outside, I thought. This is the world.
The World: $16.98
Outside the window, the world lacked the pastoral beauty I’d always seen in Ads. Instead of cartoonish green hills and sunflowers, rotten wooden stumps and poles stuck out from the side of the road at odd angles. Some held up black wires, but most had been chopped short and carried away.
Beyond the scattered wooden poles were gray-and-brown fields. Forests emerged in the distance, then came nearer to border the road on mounding hills. These were real trees, though it was sad to see them all dead. Many nearby had been cut to stumps as well, or had split and come to rest on the brown leaf-littered ground. It made sense that they’d died—they were exposed to the sun, after all. How could they survive?
I put a hand to the window. “The glass will protect us from the sun, right?”
“The sun is harmful in slow ways,” Margot said. “We will be fine. Our problem is behind us. We have left evidence for them to follow.”
I looked back at the tube we’d come from. The whole enclosure glowed a warm translucent yellow, save for where we’d exited. Light spilled out from the open doorway, which burned a brilliant, sizzling white. A dizzyingly vast field of azure and clouds stretched above the tunnel.
The sky was not what I had expected—there weren’t easily recognizable white puffs against a field of blue. Instead, the clouds formed streaked sheets in the air, beyond which the sky was a slash of blue descending to a pale haze.
“We’re outside,” I said in awe. “We made it outside.”
Norflo reached over and squeezed my arm. I put my hand on his and, for a moment, felt that warm sense of family that had been so hard to hold on to.
I took a moment to finally take in where we were—to really think about the scale of the landscape around me. I couldn’t believe it was real. Even in the hopeful time before my Last Day, I had never really allowed myself to entertain the possibility that I might leave Portland free one day. Saretha dreamed of starring in movies and seeing the ocean, but my heart had been sure that if I ever left home, it would be in a truck of Indentureds headed to an even worse place than the Onzième—and a future working in the fields, like my parents.
Old, crumbling buildings dotted the landscape, their paint flaking and planks of wood askew. Many were nestled deep in the overgrowth, and one even had an enormous tree sprouting through its roof. Some buildings had fallen in on themselves, while others stood defiantly in fields of dirt. I wanted to call them ruins, but they didn’t seem noble or interesting enough to deserve the name. The wreck of this outside civilization would have disappointed Sam. When he’d said ruins, I’m sure he’d pictured stone and majesty, not sagging, splintered rot.
The world was not beautiful. I’d known that it wouldn’t look the way it was always portrayed in films, with pristine, awe-inspiring landscapes rendered in vivid color. My teachers’ warnings had always been quite clear: outside the domes was a terrible, dangerous place to be. Even so, I had never pictured this depressing world of faded gray and dull brown. The clouds overhead thickened slowly over time, almost like magic, closing in until the horizon had subtly turned colorless.
The lack of beauty wasn’t what troubled me, though. It was the sheer scale of the world that was overwhelming.
Everything near the car whipped by so fast, while the mountains and clouds farther off barely moved at all. This contrast in speed of the objects we passed, close and distant, didn’t feel right to my mind or my stomach. The disparity didn’t look real. I wasn’t used to a horizon that stretched so far into the distance and stubbornly refused to move at a reasonable pace.
“Mulish,” I said aloud, finding a word I’d learned long ago. Speaking it seemed to quell my mounting nausea. “Skeletonic.”
“Uh,” Sera said. “Are you doing that again?”
I knew what she meant. Sera knew me before my Last Day, when I used to speak freely. I liked to try new words out, just to feel them in my mouth and enjoy the sound. Sera used to make fun of me for it.
“Why does it bother you so much?” I asked.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Sera protested. “It’s a waste.”
“Not to me,” I said.
“Ensconce,” Norflo said. “Benevolence.”
“It’s so stupid!” Sera growled. “Like, you can’t find anything better to say?”
I searched for another word, but found my mood fouled. Was she right? A knot of frustration tied itself inside me. I did have more important things to say, but had no idea how to say them—especially in front of her.
Margot gripped the wheel and kept looking in the rearview mirror, waiting for whoever was back there to find us. I saw no joy or wonder in her face.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said in a voice that suggested I shouldn’t push the issue.
I still wanted to apologize to her, but alone—or just to her and Henri. Not in a full car. But right now, the best I could summon was “I’m sorry you got dragged into this.”
“Lucretia Rog forced us to leave, not you. If you wish to apologize, apologize for not getting in the car as soon as I honked. You set a bad example for Mira.”
“She did not,” Mira said. “I came back first honk.”
“You should not have left the car at all, Mira,” Margot snapped. Then, to me, “You see my point, Speth.”
“But we’d be trapped in there,” I protested.
“It would have been more discreet to find another exit, one that did not have flaming wreckage beside it.”
“I didn’t think of that,” I said.
“No. And it did not occur to you that I had some other idea. I do not always understand your choices,” Margot said.
“I know!” Sera said, finding an opening to get Margot on her side. “She makes one awful decision after another, and I honestly just want to scream at her sometimes.”
I wanted to punch Sera, but Norflo, for some reason, was laughing. He shook his head at her. “You’re both the same.”
“How can you say that?” I cried.
“They took our guidance away, the two of you. Hard to know good choices from bad when no one shows you.”
“But you’re so perfect?” Sera asked him.
“Far frommit,” Norflo said. “But I got lucky with my brothers.”
That comment stung. Was he saying Saretha wasn’t good enough? Opposite me, Sera turned and glared out the window. The fury coming off her was palpable, but I didn’t see why. She didn’t have any siblings. Norflo hadn’t insulted her.
“I didn’t mean to put us in danger,” I said to Margot.
“Is it dangerous out here?” Mira asked, tapping on the window next to her.
“No, Mira,” Margot said. “Everything is fine.” Her voice didn’t exactly sell the idea.
The sky behind us glowed brighter than ahead, and it felt like we were racing away from that light into darkness. A cold, exposed feeling shot through me.
“Maybe they can’t follow us out here,” I said, trying to sound hopeful. “The WiFi might not reach.”
“I would not count on that,” Margot said, then, after a moment, “And even if they do not, we have been forced to flee the city. We have not talked about the map you and Henri saw or agreed on where to go.”
My heart sank. Crab Creek held the promise of my parents and Sera’s mother, but for everyone else in the car, it was a risk without reward. I took a breath.
“South,” I said.
Margot looked to our left—to the south. The tube that contained the tunnel extended off into the distance over a hill and then behind it, cutting us off from going in that direction. In some places, enormous trunk cables emerged from the ground and then burrowe
d back in, reminding me of the cables they tried to force into the city.
“Where?” Margot asked, pressing for more.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I only have a rough idea of where Crab Creek is and a cryptic message from Kel about DC. But both are south and away from here.”
The bleak, enormous landscape felt like more than my mind could handle, and I had no reason to think it would look any different south of us. The thought began to fill me with dread.
“So is Téjico,” Norflo said.
“What is it with you and Téjico?” Sera asked.
“My ’rents said if I ever got a chance, that’s where I should go.”
“Why?”
“’Cause that’s where they’d go.”
“Téjico,” I said thoughtfully. “That’s as far south as any of the maps showed.”
I only knew a tiny bit about the place. Movies always showed Téjico and Canada as dangerous places full of cheats, criminals or worse. That was how the stories stocked their villains—sometimes they called the people Téjicans, sometimes Mexicans, sometimes nothing at all.
I did, however, remember watching a Carol Amanda Harving movie where she was a Cocky™ spy and her boss warned her that the Téjicans “just aren’t like us. They don’t charge for words down there.” Dissonant music had swelled, and Carol Amanda Harving’s character had sneered at the idea, muttering something about “savages.” Saretha had nodded in agreement, but Sam and I had whispered to each other that not paying for words sounded pretty good, discordant music or not.
That movie night was long before we knew Carol Amanda Harving was just a digital copy of Saretha, stolen from a thousand Ad scans. That was before we knew a lot of things.
“You free your ’rents, Jiménez, where else you gonna take them?” Norflo asked.
“I haven’t got that far yet.”
“Téjico,” Norflo cheered.
“I’m not taking my mother to Téjico,” Sera said, crossing her arms.
Norflo replied with a shrug, like that was up to her.
“No matter how you slice it, everything we’re looking for is south of here,” Henri said.
“What about you, Henri?” I asked.
“Going south makes sense,” he said evasively, which seemed odd to me. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d heard Henri not answer a question directly.
Margot slowed at the next crossroad and pointed to our left.
“Our path might not be as easy as just going south,” she said. The southern road abruptly stopped a few yards from the luminous tunnel, its edges cracked and torn, like the road had been ripped away to make space for the tube—which was probably exactly what had happened. The way south was blocked.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “The map only showed tunnels and domes.”
“What if there is no way?” Sera asked.
“Doom,” Norflo said, half joking.
Mira let out a little fearful squeak.
“We are not doomed,” Margot said.
“Couldn’t you do a Placer thing and go over the tunnel to the other side?” Sera suggested.
“With the car?” Margot asked.
Sera seemed at a loss. “You want to wander around the wilderness and die?” I asked her.
“Okay! Excuse me for thinking of ideas,” she retorted.
“We should keep moving west, then,” I said. “That way’s open, and maybe we’ll come to something.”
“Yes.” Margot brought the car back up to speed. “But we should consider the possibility that we are fenced in by these domes and tunnels.”
“Better out than in,” Norflo said.
“Is it?” Margot asked.
We came up over the hill and a huge space opened up below us. My stomach lurched at the sight, and I realized Margot must be having the same reaction. She drifted left, then right, and kept blinking her eyes in a futile attempt to pretend everything was normal.
“Oof,” Norflo said, leaning forward from his seat behind us to see better. Mira was bouncing up and down next to him. “Amazing, no?” he said to her.
Far in the distance, the western road connected to a decrepit-looking bridge that arced above the landscape. Beneath the bridge, a massive body of dark water snaked north to south. To the left, the tunnel shot across the water on a bridge of its own.
“Is that the ocean?” Mira asked. A thrill shot through me, thinking of it, but I knew that if this was the ocean, we wouldn’t be able to see the other side.
“That is a river,” Margot answered.
“Can we drive on it?” Mira asked.
“I am afraid we cannot,” Margot said.
I assumed she was right, but I was unclear about how water worked on this scale. The bridge loomed up before us, five stories of pallid green metal spotted with rust.
“Can we stop?” Norflo asked. “’Least get a look south?”
Margot’s face scrunched up.
“See that river?” he suggested, rubbing his hands together.
“Are there bears?” Mira asked.
“No,” Margot said. “No bears.”
“It won’t take long,” I offered.
Margot dropped her head. “Fine,” she said. “But only for a few minutes, and only if there is no WiFi.”
The Bridge: $17.98
Margot slowed and stopped the car midway across the bridge. She held up a finger and opened her door. The wind from outside blew in at us.
“Hello,” Margot said into the open air. Her eyes weren’t shocked for it. The WiFi was behind us, which made me feel just a little safer. I would have expected everyone to rush out, but we all exited slowly and carefully into the oddest silence I’d ever heard.
It wasn’t really a silence at all. The wind was strong and made a noise of its own, like a sustained blast from a phalanx of cars speeding on the outer ring, but without the roar of their engines. It didn’t cease, either—my clothes fluttered around me, and it held me up when I leaned into it a little, whipping over my body in a way that made me feel alive and aware.
Beside me, Norflo let out a whoop. His voice came back, an echo in the wind, from the bare trees on the river’s bank below us. Margot held Mira back from the edge as she gazed down at the torrent of water, brown and foamy, roaring a hundred feet below.
“A bird!” Mira exclaimed, pointing to a spot off in the trees.
“See, there is nothing to be afraid of out here,” Margot said loudly against a gust of wind. “No bears.”
Henri started to growl and lumber toward Mira. She quickly hid behind Margot in mock fear.
“No WiFi at all,” Norflo marveled.
“That water looks disgusting,” Sera said to me, standing too close, our shoulders touching, like we were sharing a secret. I stepped away from her. Brown and foamy as it was, I found it fascinating. It looked powerful, and it was so far removed from the world of Ads and plastic I’d known my whole life.
In the distance, from the trees across the river, came a chirping from Mira’s bird.
“I think there’s a crossing,” Henri called out. He had stopped pretending he was a bear and was now looking up the road.
Well beyond the bridge we stood on, I could make out the shape Henri was pointing at, farther west. He was right. Something crossed the road ahead. An overpass traveled north and south, over both the road and the tunnel that was blocking our way.
Norflo pulled himself up from looking down over the bridge’s edge, his face beaming from being outside. He moved to Henri’s side, putting an arm around his shoulder and shaking him like a friend.
“You smell that?” Norflo called out. He took two great sniffs, and joy seemed to radiate from him. “The outside.”
I couldn’t find words for the smell. It was damp and loamy, like when they tilled the so
il under the trees in Falxo Park, but fresher and deeper. I inhaled and closed my eyes, breathing it all in. The smell, the sound, the feel of the air on my skin was the opposite of the stifled, close feeling of everything inside the domes. The wind let me feel every part of myself.
I opened my eyes. Mira’s bird chirped once more, and another answered. I’d heard birds before, but in the dome the sound had unsettled me. If they sang, they didn’t last very long. Whatever song a bird might sing was Copyrighted by Ascape™ long ago. Birds couldn’t be indebted or Indentured, so they were killed. There were special dropters for this.
Sera wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t even enjoy seeing a bird? Or did she fear the dropters would come and find them, even here?
“What was that?” she asked.
I tilted my head. I wanted to tell her to relax, but I heard it, too. A sound almost too faint to register under the gusting wind. A tiny hum in the distance. It was a familiar sound—a sound from the ring.
The sound of cars racing toward us.
“Get in the car,” I ordered, pushing Sera and yelling at the others. “Now. Now!”
Everyone bolted back to the Meiboch™. Norflo, slower than the rest of us, jogged the yards back as his smile turned to a grimace.
I hurried everyone inside and took the driver’s seat.
I could see the car cresting the hill to the east, behind us. It was a black Meiboch™, like ours had been.
“No,” I breathed.
I jolted us forward across the bridge and onto the highway west. Ahead of us was the overpass—black metal and half-covered in rust. Thick gray bricks held embankments of gravel in place on either side.
“Think that heads south?” I asked.
“Who cares?” Sera cried. “Go!”
I swung right and gunned the engine, leaving deep muddy grooves and scattering gravel behind us as I mounted the embankment. Behind, the other Meiboch™ raced across the bridge we’d just come from, followed closely by a second car.
As we crested the gravel mound, I turned south, ready to get us out of there as fast as I could, but the overpass wasn’t what I expected. Instead of a road, there were thousands of planks of wood in the gravel, pinned down by parallel metal rails that stretched off to the north and south.
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