“And why would someone want to kill us, anyway?” Jill goes on. She’s not slowing down for breath, making the domed room echo. “I mean, I know why I want to kill you, but—”
“Jillian,” I say. “Shut up.” Her mouth closes, her eyes wide. Then they narrow. “Listen, you can yell at me later. You can call me every name you can think of and scream for a week straight. But right now we need to talk about getting my bones mended before she gets back.”
Jill just looks at me, then snatches up her pack. “Fine.” She’s already pulling out the medical kit. And the sanitizer. “But as soon as you can stand, we’re out. Agreed?”
I don’t answer. Because I’m not sure I agree with that at all.
I search through the street outside the mound of rubble, scanning the ground for broken branches to make Beckett a splint. And all the while I’m listening, for a rustle, a shout, a change in the wind, I’m not even sure what. My own heartbeat thuds in my ears. Those two are going to show me how to Forget, or the Council is going to end this, and I’m not sure which will happen first.
And what if the Council had come before Samara Archiva? What would the Outsiders have done then? I’m not as naive as I used to be. Nita told me what happened to Sonia’s boy from the Outside, the one she couldn’t leave alone after the Changing of the Seasons. Craddock made an example of him. At the post in the Bartering Square, and he did not live. It makes me sick to think of it. I never told Sonia. I wasn’t sure how good she was at caching guilt. As things turned out, maybe not good at all. Or maybe that boy was more than an addiction. Or maybe she just feared Judgment.
But the two inside the rubble mound seem to have Forgotten danger completely. They are strange, like children. I never thought the Forgetting would make me like a child. I’m not sure I want that. But then again, children are innocent. And they can grow up again. Right now, I need for them to trust me. To help me. I need for all of us to live through this. And then I will take the Forgetting to the Underneath, destroy the Council, and let the Outside rebel. Heal everyone else. For Nita. And Adam.
If only Sonia could have waited a little longer.
And then a shadow flits across the sun. Not a person, or any other creature. The shadow of something large. Silent. High in the air.
I leap to my feet, spinning, eyes to the sky. But there’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just the empty violet beyond the treetops, now beginning to show a few telling stripes of pink. The sun is setting. And yet, I can hear that wrong kind of quiet again, the waiting stillness. I wait with it, holding my breath, and when I look back the way I came, dustmoths are rising in a line, from one end of my sight to the other. Moving toward me.
I grab my pack and Beckett’s splints and run. A careful run. Silent, no brushing of the branches. When I reach the mound I throw my things inside and start to do the same with pieces of rubble, placing them in the doorway without noise, so I can barricade the opening from the inside. I don’t have time. But if I don’t get this blocked up, we’re going to be found, and we’re going to die.
Someone shouts, not in the distance, but in the mound, noise reverberating through the empty interior. Beckett. So now he yells. Now, when the Council is here. When he’s going to bring them straight to us. I hesitate, glance at the stones that need to be stacked, then start the same careful, silent run through the darkness of the interior rooms. Beckett needs to breathe, cache, bite something, whatever it takes to stay quiet and give us time to block the door.
I hit the dark inner chamber at a full sprint, but then I slow my steps. There’s a glow coming through the broken doorway. Light like I’ve never seen. Green. Bright. So bright it’s startling. Unnatural. Wrong. My feet stop, well inside the darkness. On the other side of the open doorway, Jillian and Beckett are talking, still with the short, clipped words, but very differently from before.
“Fibula, Jill, toward the heel.”
“Is it a revelation to you, Beckett, that I can’t see your fibula?”
“That should be the angle, right there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Please let me do the infusion first. I don’t want to miss again.”
“No time! Just do it.”
I get an eye around the edge of the doorway, but Beckett doesn’t see me. He’s sitting up, concentrating through the magnifiers on his injured leg. Jillian is on her knees, looking at his injury, too, but with something in her hand, a smooth, metal cylinder, shiny, and it’s from one end of this that the unnatural greenness is coming. The other end she holds against Beckett’s ankle, and whatever happens, he doesn’t like it. I watch him wince and hiss.
“Don’t move!” Jillian instructs him. Then, “How are we doing?”
“The crack is almost filled. Just a little … There.” I hear his relief. “She did a good job setting it, didn’t she? Okay, one more, a tiny one, hurry … ”
I step back, disoriented. Their words, tone, and that odd light. It’s all wrong. And Beckett talks as if he can see his own injury, which is impossible. Then Jillian says, “Are we still alone?”
I find the wall and press myself against it.
“I think so … ”
“Scan and make sure.”
“Right this second I’m looking at a cracked metatarsal. Go two centimeters left, no, my left. Angle about fifty degrees … Now.” I hear him grunt. “You’ve got it.”
“Okay. Ten minutes to set the gel, and we’re out.”
“Jill … ”
“Ten minutes and we’re out, Beckett.”
“What about … what she said?”
“What, the locals coming to kill us?” Jillian’s voice sounds a little hysterical. “I don’t know, that seems like, oh, a really good reason to break contact and go!”
“And what about her?”
“You know the protocol.”
“So your idea of protocol is that we leave her to die?”
“Beckett … ” Jillian’s voice pauses, drops. I have to lean forward to hear. “We can’t interfere in her life, or her death. You know that. We’re lucky to have gotten this far without completely messing up. And we took an oath, remember?”
His voice comes low beneath his breath. “Well, the oath looks a little different in Canaan than it did on Earth.”
Jillian says something about how this is exactly where his oath isn’t supposed to look different, going on about commanders and ships. I’m hearing, but I’m not listening. I’m sliding down the wall, sitting in the dust of the floor, paying attention to only one word inside my mind. Earth. Beckett said “Earth.”
I go back in my memory, quick, frantic, and feel that cloth between my fingers, that shoe covering, hear the clipped speech. I see the confusion, hair the wrong color, the wrong lengths. That eerie green light. Could that be … technology? And that shadow in the sky. That’s where Earth comes from. The sky. Where they swoop down and take us. Lie to us. Use their technology to enslave us.
I don’t understand. But I think I do understand. What an inexplicable feeling it is, when your world breaks, turns upside down, and the pieces shake out all over the floor. It happened when Adam died, and when I found out about the Forgetting. When I killed Nita. I didn’t think it could happen again.
But it has.
I remember all the things the Council said, made sure we were taught. Not myths. Not lies. Truth. They taught us truth. I can’t believe it. But I do believe it. That’s the incredible part. After what I’ve just heard and seen, I don’t Know how not to. Earth is real. And just on the other side of this wall.
The reality slides through my head, like the pebble that starts a rockfall. If Earth is real, and the recitations of the learning room are true, then what are those two here to do to us? To my city? I see the blue sky and green land of the mural in the Forum, fading into the flat and ruined brown. My people, Outside and Underneath—they have to be warned. I shouldn’t be running from the Council. I should be running straight to them. But would th
e Council even listen to me? Or would they just kill me on sight?
I put my head in my hands, fingers digging into my hair. Giving myself up to the Council, giving them power over me, when I was going to take their power from them—it makes me cringe. It makes me furious. And afraid. I was going to fix so many things. But the problems of Knowing, Forgetting, the injustice of the Outside, none of these things matter if we’re dead. Taken. Our planet ruined.
And then I lift my head. I told them there was another city. A city underground. My breath stutters, stops, and I close my eyes in the darkness. The ruse begun 379 years ago was actually working. They were fooled. And I stripped the protection of my people with a sentence. Earth knows to look beneath the surface. They will find New Canaan. Soon.
I have to tell the Council what I Know. No matter what they do to me.
I Know what they’re going to do to me.
I push myself to my feet, start back across the black and empty room. Jillian and Beckett are still arguing. There’s a kind of haze coming down in my mind, clouding my thoughts, like the cold fog when I killed Nita, and when Jillian says, “Did you hear something?” I’m sure it was me.
But the words aren’t significant. Nothing is.
I don’t look back through the dark.
“We observe, we study, and we record, but we never influence, alter, or interfere with the emerging history of a developing culture.”
I had to sign that today, swear it on my life’s blood or something. But now I’m wondering. What if the culture we observe is actually smarter than we are? Maybe they should be the ones influencing us.
FROM THE LOG BOOK OF BECKETT RODRIGUEZ
Day 17, Year 1
The Lost Canaan Project
Did you hear something?” Jill asks.
It takes a second to switch the glasses to the night function, but before I can even begin to pierce the gloom, text starts rolling across the lenses. “I’ve got a message.”
“Do we have a signal?”
“No.” I’m reading fast, summarizing. “No, they broke protocol and sent in a skimmer to find us. They got the position of the city, but not until the skimmer came back. They had to fly it in low to send the orders. There’s no long-range communications, and … Wow. It looks like the scans have been … reflecting somehow. They’re going to have to go back and relook at everything, the whole planet, to find the holes … ”
“Are the air bikes coming?”
“No. They … ” I hesitate. But it isn’t right not to tell her. “They say ten humans are inside the walls, twelve including us. Our orders are to avoid interaction at all costs, but if interaction has already taken place, follow protocol to break it and get back into communication, beyond the mountain range.” I stop reading, and look at Jill through the lenses. “They’re coming for her. Like she said.”
“So, nine of them?” says Jill. “And we have to get ourselves out? But they know where we are! Message back and tell them we’re in danger, that we have a situation … ”
“I can’t. There’s nothing within range. The skimmer must have come in and out.”
She puts her hands on her head. “She changes the whole mission. You know that, right? Everything … ” She looks around the room. “What do you think this place is? Ritual?”
I don’t want to answer. Jill starts pacing.
“I mean, they can’t really want to hurt us. Whatever this is about, we don’t have anything to do with it … ”
Samara thought different. And those bruises, her palms … I don’t know what we’re dealing with, but it’s bad.
“What do you think they’ll do to us?” Jill whispers.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing … ” My words don’t mean a thing. I can see her thinking occult practice and human sacrifice. Jill snatches up the medical kit and starts putting it away.
“Can you stand? Try out your leg. It should’ve been long enough.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean, ‘and then what?’ ” she snaps. “We get ourselves out of this place and back to the base camp.”
Hope is a frightening thing to feel. The pain of losing it is deep and forever.
FROM THE HIDDEN BOOK OF SAMARA ARCHIVA
IN THE CITY OF NEW CANAAN
I stand in the doorway of the rubble mound, beside the pile of rocks I’d meant to use to block the entrance. The cold in my mind is almost a comfort. It makes it easier to do what I have to. I lift my book over my head and leave it on the ground, piling rocks on top of it. I don’t want the Council to have it. And then I step out, into the middle of an overgrown street in the Canaan my people abandoned, a city they left so they could hide from Earth.
The moth clouds are rising, a long, stretching line, advancing both before and behind me, and I think of the Council walking through the city like a fan, trying to flush me out, trap me in the middle. It won’t be hard. They aren’t afraid to walk these streets, because I think maybe they already Know how the Forgetting works. Or maybe there is no Forgetting.
If the stories of Earth are real, maybe everything I’ve thought was real is only a story.
I wander between the rows of ruined houses and think about how the Council will do it. Something quicker than bitterblack this time. A blow to the head. A knife. Or maybe they’ll flog me until I die, like the Outside boy that Sonia liked so much. I wonder if they’ll listen to me say one sentence, “Earth has come.” Or if they won’t, and I’ll die for nothing. Like Nita died for nothing. Like Adam. I close my eyes, and I don’t even try to resist the weight of my memory. I let myself sink, plunge, down …
… and Adam is painting his eyes while I jump on his bed, my braids trailing up and down through the air. “Why do you have to go Outside?” I ask between bounces. “It isn’t safe Outside. That’s where Earth can get you.”
“There’s no such thing as Earth, Sam. And who says I’m going Outside?”
“I do. Supervisors go Outside.”
“Supervisor training won’t start again until the sun rises, and that’s not until tomorrow, so I’m not going Outside.”
“You’re going Outside because you’re wearing your Outside sandals,” I tell him.
He raises a brow at me in the mirror. “Why are you so smart?”
I roll my eyes, let myself land flat on my back on the thick, soft mattress. Like six-year-olds shouldn’t be smart. Six-year-olds can be just as smart as seventeen-year-olds when you’re Knowing. Or almost. I ask, “What does the sun feel like?”
“Hot. And bright. And the sky is so big and empty it’s like you could fall off the ground and get lost in it.”
“Then why are you going Outside if you could fall into the sky?” Suddenly I’m afraid that Adam won’t come back.
Adam puts down the paintbrush and comes to the bedside. He’s tall, like I will be, with the same brown skin, only his eyes are darker, his hair braids twisted into a long tail in the back. He holds out his arms and I leap into them, making him “umph” and then laugh. He hugs me, and his arms are so strong I Know nothing can happen to him.
He says, “Would you like to see the sun, Sam? Because the next waking is a special sunrise. A white sunrise, and I’m going to take you to see it.”
“Open air?”
“Yes. Open air.”
“But the gates will be locked, and Mother says I have to go to the party after Judgment. To celebrate being Knowing.”
“There’s nothing to celebrate after Judgment, Sam. That’s not a party worth going to. So listen to me carefully. I want you to lock your door after Judgment, okay? For the whole resting while everyone is at the party. Don’t let anybody in, no matter what you hear, and then I’m going to come and take you to see the white sunrise. It’s our secret. Just you and me.”
I say, “So, I shouldn’t tell Mother and Father about the sandals.”
“No,” he replies. “You shouldn’t tell anyone about the sandals.”
“Don’t let Mother see you, th
en. She’ll notice.” I hug him harder, feel the roughness of his chin on top of my head.
“Don’t worry, Sam,” he whispers. “I’m coming back. And when I do, you’ll see the sun, and I’ll hold on to you tight, just in case you jump too high and fall into the sky … ”
He throws me into the air, and I am flying, up and backward, giggling, closing my eyes just before I hit the mattress …
… and I open my eyes, and I am still falling backward, though now I’m stumbling in the leaf-dappled light of the ruined city. Someone has me by the arm. I bump into a body, and a voice whispers, “This way. Hurry!”
I’m being shoved across the street, still half in my memory. I wish I was all the way in my memory. It was the last time I saw Adam whole and well, and the pain of it is so bitter, I only rarely allow myself to remember the sweet. Adam loved me, even though I could hurt him.
When people love me, they die.
I’m through a doorway now, my back against a white stone wall, leaves and branches and bits of violet sky where the ceiling should be. There are plants growing through the floor, pepper and tomato and oil, like Nita showed me in the fields of the Outside, and in the center of the room is a fallen door of sparkling metal, still whole. A door made of mountain rock. Who would make a door out of mountain rock?
The other body is in front of me now, a hand still on my arm, and then I see the strange silver cloth. This is Beckett. He’s taller than I’d thought he’d be, taller than I am, and somewhere in my head, I can’t believe he’s standing on his feet. He has me by both arms now, trying to get me to look at him.
“Samara. Are you here?”
I nod. His words are short, cut off, like in my dream. Except for the eyes. The eyes are different. I can see the shape of them now they’re so close, through the clear glass of the magnifiers. Dark brown and angular.
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