Reluctant to wake Daniel after he stayed up with me last night, I stumble out from between the columns, fighting sore joints, to look back up the slope that we ran down some hours ago. At its highest point, a barrier of gray-white dominates the view, a loop of wall that reaches far to either side, and behind it an even larger, rounded building. From the top of that stretch seven or eight towers, as though the Governors’ City has been shifted upward a few hundred meters. But it hasn’t been moved at all, I realize. I am looking at the Governors’ City, protruding out of the top of the atrium ceiling. It isn’t that the government built their city farther up into the Mass, because there is no Mass. It doesn’t exist. Only this incredible openness, and we’ve been living in the middle of it all this time. Suddenly, the city seems very, very small.
The breeze picks up again, and I hear a flapping noise behind me. A small piece of paper, tied to a string, is hanging from one of the poles attached to the columns, smacking against it whenever it catches in the wind. I glance over to Daniel, who still sleeps soundly, and tip-toe across the area, but piles of little straight pieces beneath my feet snap alarmingly with every step.
I catch the little paper and turn it over, searching the forms etched onto it eagerly. They’re letters. Hand-drawn letters. A crude representation of their printed counterparts, but I find that they are no more difficult to interpret. I can’t imagine how it never occurred to me before that this could be possible, but the implications, the usefulness and the danger of such communication leave me paused in reverence for a moment before I finish reading the short message.
The road to safety is a thin line. Be careful not to lose your balance.
And only then do I notice that the string to which the paper is attached continues for some distance up the tracks, looping occasionally around the columns and drifting lazily along the floor.
The road to safety is a thin line. I don’t even know what a road is, but I know that someone is trying to help us.
I don’t waste any time in waking Daniel, though it seems the cold night has taken a toll on his health. He is slow to respond, and even once coherent, struggles to take to his feet. This is more than just sore muscles. He needs my help even to make it to the paper.
For a few minutes, leaning against my shoulder for support, he skims the message, eyes flashing along the sheet over and over again. His silence strikes me as disbelief, and when I push him for explanation, he mutters thoughtfully, “I wrote this.”
“What do you mean? You remember?” I question, skeptical of his certainty.
“No, this is my handwriting.”
“But if you don’t remember it,” I press, “how can you know? Anyone could have written it.”
“I guess someone could have handwriting like mine,” he reasons. “But that seems unlikely.”
“But it’s just a drawing. What do you mean, hand writing?”
Daniel shifts his weight from my shoulder to the column, but only to eye me with bewilderment. “Handwriting. The way you write. You’ve never written anything by hand before?”
I shake my head, as confused as he is.
“Well, everyone’s handwriting is different. Same letters and all, but different shapes and spacing. I think this is mine. Or, at least, it looks familiar.”
“So then what do we do?” I ask, and he begins to limp away, running the line between his fingers as he traces it.
“We follow it. The road to safety is a thin line. Directions and a warning. I think we just found out where we’re going.”
A Narration of the World
The string leads us in an endless and perfectly straight line. Though the columns vary in shape and size, they are always there, always standing vigil along our path. Trees, Daniel calls them, and he tells me that they’re alive, though I have yet to see any sign of consciousness beyond an illusion fueled by the wind. Still, I find comfort in the idea that they’re protecting us, watching over us, and it keeps me from panicking as I come to recognize just how enormous this world actually is.
Throughout the day, the ceiling shifts above our heads. Clouds, Daniel says, covering a great blue surface beyond called the sky that turns black and speckled with things called stars at night. When the clouds are gone in the day, there’s a brilliant light called the sun that illuminates the whole world, and at night, a smaller, more silvery light called the moon. The ferocity of last night is a storm, the flashes lightning, and the rumbling thunder. The falling water is called rain, an appropriate name, I think, before I realize that that’s where the word I know comes from anyway. The low carpet is grass, and the open dirt patches are fields, which will eventually produce the same corn and soybeans we saw in the food stores. The ground is made of dirt, mud if it’s wet, and the columns of the trees are called trunks, their thinner poles branches, or sticks. In time, he says, little green sheets will appear on the branches, called leaves. To our left, a large plane of solid ground – a shattered and aged cousin to the floors of the city – follows our path: a road, neglected and worn, though Daniel warns that trucks may still use it, so it isn’t safe to travel on.
And as he explains this all to me, narrating the world as I experience it for the first time, I don’t question a word he says. Not the things nor their names nor even how he knows them, because I can hear in his voice that he doesn’t have the energy for justification. His tone grows weaker and weaker, and at first I attribute it, perhaps naively, to weariness at my endless questions. But then he begins to stumble, even with my support, and when we’ve walked several times the atrium’s diameter, I finally force him to rest.
“We can’t stop, Io,” he argues and pulls himself up against the tree that I made him sit beside. “We have to make it as far as we can before night comes again, and as far from the city as possible while it’s still day. They might send guards out behind us.”
“But you can barely walk. How can we keep going?” I counter and push him, maybe a little too roughly, back down.
He continues insistently, “I can make it farther than this. It shouldn’t be much longer.”
“But how do you know?”
“I just do.”
A roar suddenly starts up down the tree line, and Daniel pulls me to my knees and puts a finger to his lips. This time, the truck passes slower, pausing every so often as though to listen for the cracking of a stick or a careless voice. When a large, black something – like a single monorail car, but uglier, rougher, with an open top that reveals four bobbing heads – appears between the branches up ahead, Daniel shifts around the tree and motions for me to do the same. We’re not hidden here, not as well as we should be.
“But seriously, do you really think they could have gotten through a locked door, found their way in the dark half a mile to the trees, and not gotten killed by the storm in the process? We don’t even have any evidence that they left the city. There was an open air vent in the storehouse too,” a voice challenges, reeking of unwarranted, inflated superiority.
“Scott heard the door slam shut behind them,” someone else insists.
“Scott?” the first voice echoes dubiously. “Scott Henry? Scott Henry is an idiot.”
“Well he heard what he heard.”
“He heard what he wanted to hear,” the first voice snaps. “If they went out through the air vent, it’s his fault for letting them go. If they went out through the door, it’s the fault of whatever imbecile forgot to lock it. Simple as that. Of course Scott Henry will say they went out the door, because he wants to save his own butt.”
“But if they did go through that door…” a new voice begins, young and incredulous. “I mean, imagine that. Being locked away in the city your whole life like a bunch of chickens, and then to come out here and realize that everything was so small, so controlled. It’s like being reborn…”
Before the others can respond, the truck picks up speed and flies away, the three voices lost to its stentorian grumble.
“This is why we need to keep moving,
Io,” Daniel mutters roughly, emphatically, but without antagonism. “These aren’t random strangers passing. They’re still guards, even this far out.”
I don’t want to admit it, but I know he’s right. I know that for as long as it seems we’ve walked, the guards, in their lumbering machines, are not far behind, which means that the Governors aren’t much farther. With the anxiety of the unknown banished with the darkness, I’ve reprioritized my fears. It doesn’t matter how unfamiliar and unstable this world is; its darkest reality still can’t compare with the wickedness in the city, and the only reason I will ever go back there, I decide, is to gather up the people I love and save their lives.
The Road to Safety Is a Thin Line
“Those are buildings, or what’s left of them at least.”
Daniel’s voice is so weak, I can barely distinguish it from the wind. The hand that gestures at the squares of stone laid out on the open ground around us shakes and he leans more heavily on my support.
“Stop talking. Don’t waste your energy,” I chide, trying to convince myself that I’m not scared for him, but I’m beginning to shake too.
“This is good. A change. We’re getting closer.”
“Be quiet, Daniel.”
He’s silent for a few steps more, then, “Look, Io! There are more up ahead. They’re not torn down!”
“Shhhh.”
I glance down to make sure we’re still following the string. With Daniel so exhausted and the tracks such a firm fixture below us, I’ve almost forgotten about it. But there it lies, right by our side, visible for a long way ahead now that the trees have finally receded. I’m beginning to wonder if we even have a destination at all, or if this string just goes on forever, carrying us deeper and deeper into this colossal world.
But Daniel is right. There are buildings in the distance, and a blackened pocket of the same clouds above us is rising from one of them. But I’m reluctant to trust my eyes from so far away. They’ve never seen something at such a distance, and I don’t know what tricks the light could be playing. We walk for an hour more, and even when the ground drops away occasionally below us and the tracks cross over a different road like the bridges that connect some of the government buildings, the structures in the distance never seem to get any closer.
And then, very suddenly, they do.
When the square bases around us begin to grow higher – half-walls of those same burgundy rectangles from the tunnels, chunks of staircases rising up from the ruins – I look up and realize that the undestroyed buildings are visible in detail. Most of them are made of the rectangles – bricks, Daniel calls them, before I tell him to shut up. Some have metal panels, though it has rusted almost to orange, and others, a few others, seem to have glass left in their windows. Still more are comprised of patches of some tan-gray material, like the walls of the city uncovered. They’re all different shapes and sizes, none more than five or six stories, and the mismatched collection stands still and empty. No sign of people anywhere, except for the dark clouds rising from a pair of towers far to the left side.
A hundred meters away on the tracks, a stick, plunged into the dirt below, plays host to a another little sheet of paper flapping on a string. My heart skips a beat. Could this be where we’re going? Could this be safety?
When Daniel notices it his eyes, half closed as though to conserve energy however possible, flutter open excitedly. He pulls ahead of me, straining for it, until I become the one holding him back. And once we’ve reached it, Daniel falls to his knees without my support, grasping at the little sheet like it’s the thing that will save his life. In a way, I guess it is.
“What does it say?” I ask, trying to read over his shoulder. But the marks on this paper are different, senseless. A few lines in a zig-zag pattern, measured out with irregular tick marks, a mess of random shapes surrounding them; a circle enveloped by misshapen rectangles, a tangled mess of intersecting squiggles, a rough, uninviting pair of crossed lines scribbled in one corner. I would declare it a poor rendering of a map, a botched attempt at clarification, but I want so badly for that not to be true. I don’t want it to be something ambiguous or erroneous. I would much rather Daniel know exactly what we’re looking at and how to interpret it, so that there’s no doubt, no chance at being wrong.
He turns it over and back, eyeing it for a few seconds at each angle before moving on to the next perspective. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe someone was trying to write by hand again,” I offer, “and they were really bad at it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
I kneel beside him, feeling unsteady myself, hungry and tired and faced now with the prospect of a dead end.
In reflection of my own sentiments, Daniel puts a frustrated hand to his forehead. “It looks so familiar, but I can’t figure out why. That shape.” He points to the circle in the midst of the rectangles. “There’s something about that shape.”
Finally, I return to my first thought. Now isn’t a time for blunt dismissals of ideas anyway.
“Do you think it’s a map?”
The immediacy of the effect of my words is astounding. Daniel’s eyes grow wide, and a burst of energy from somewhere deep inside of him drives him to his feet. He gestures excitedly toward the buildings, almost lost for words, and takes a few more unsteady steps along the tracks.
“Where are you going, Daniel?” I call after him, rushing to catch up before he does himself any more damage.
“It’s a map!” His eyes, his whole face, glow. “This circle on the paper. It’s that building, over there.”
He points to a massive white domed structure off to our right, eerily reminiscent of the city we left behind. My stomach turns over at the sight of it, and I make a mental note not to draw any nearer than absolutely necessary.
“These little marks must be intersections of streets, and the shapes are all buildings. The beginning of this line” – he gestures at the left-most edge of the sheet – “is where we are, and the other end, all the way over here, is where we’re going.”
“What about that?”
I point to the towers from which the clouds are rising, but Daniel shakes his head. “Not there. That’s the ‘x’. Those might be Governors.”
“But it doesn’t look like there’s anyone else here,” I argue.
“They might be hiding, or maybe –.”
Daniel stops abruptly, and his eyes snap to the edge of the world, straining toward the cloud towers. He crouches to place an unsteady hand on the metal rail at our feet and frowns.
“What is it?” I ask uneasily.
“The tracks. They’re vibrating.”
In the distance, a deep, resounding whistle disrupts the background hum of the daylight. Daniel’s eyes widen. His voice comes laced with an anxious tremble.
“I think there’s a train coming. We need to get off the tracks.”
With the last of his strength, he heaves himself up to his feet and together we tumble down a slope away from the tracks. Under the cover of a sparse patch of trees, we crouch in waiting.
For twenty minutes or more, we sit and we listen. The whistle echoes again and my heart jumps, but the sound is distant and fading. I can feel Daniel shaking from exhaustion and strain beside me, but he takes a deep breath.
“I think we’re okay. I think we can go,” he whispers.
“But where are we going?”
He holds up the paper map and points to the end of the line. “Safety. The road to safety is a thin line. The string was one kind of line, this is another. I think we’re almost there, Io.”
A Person, a Shadow
Little droplets have begun to fling themselves onto my shoulders again, adding their weight to Daniel’s where he sags against me, barely strong enough to stand, much less walk. The buildings around us, shorter than the government’s but grander and more massive, watch our progress as we pass, their windows gaping open like so many heedful eyes. Every few minutes, a breeze sprints along their w
alls with a low moan that sounds like death itself, and when it finds its way to Daniel and me, it passes through our thin, wet clothes without hindrance, chilling us to the bone and sending shivers down my spine. Arching poles capped with broken light bulbs hang over the path, while other, shorter stubs line smaller roads running parallel. On some of these poles are fixed faded, worn signs, their ancient messages nearly erased by grime and rust. On one, I can just barely read a pair of numbers, bold black once set over pure white: 25. Another, as red as blood, reads STOP, and I almost do. But these words were meant for someone else, someone who lived here a long time ago. Now this whole place is dead, dead and forgotten like the deepest tunnels of the city.
When the rain picks up and Daniel has nearly slipped entirely away, I begin to try the doors of the buildings. We haven’t reached the end of the line, but there is little other choice. I don’t know if Daniel will make it the whole way.
Now instead of tick marks and intersections, our progress is measured in locked doors and shattered windows with edges too raw to climb through. We turn at a building alone half the length of the atrium, with an arched top twice the height of the walls themselves. I recognize it from our map and breathe a sigh of relief. Until we can find somewhere safe to stop, we have to keep following the guide that we have. I unfold the paper, now torn and wrinkled where my nervous hand has been wringing it, and set to understanding. At the far end of the enormous building is another intersection, another notch, I realize, on the line. Not far now.
Be Thou My Vision (The Population Series) Page 18