by Matt Bell
Mai leans forward, her eyes blinking rapidly as she manipulates the blueprint, clicking downward through the cross-sectioned floors. The shared display shifts with every squeeze of her hand, its focus plummeting down the needle to the executive suites at its base, then past the research layer below, then more administrative offices, the medical wing, other more mundane parts of the complex. “Not that I can see. But I’ve never been to the research floors or into the needle, so only John can answer for those parts of the Tower. When you get inside tomorrow, the first place you need to reach is the security nexus, sticking out right there from the south side of the Tower, on the first main floor above the Tower’s legs. If we can take the nexus, we can control access to the elevators, reprogram the Tower’s pebble readers, shut off security cameras.”
“That’ll be your job then: we’ll get Noor to the nexus, then you’ll help her hold it. You’re going to have to be ready to fight.” Cal pauses, drums her fingers along the railing. “Which brings us to our next problem. The neighborhoods have programmable printers, but anything usable as a weapon or an explosive will be flagged as contraband, triggering a security check.”
In the Sacrifice Zone, Earthtrust security forces were fully militarized, but on the Farm, security seems to be mostly plainclothes officers, maintaining an illusion of peacefulness; despite this, the bees had found several armories, hidden in unmarked rooms in the Tower, in unmarked compounds dispersed throughout the neighborhoods. Julie flexes a hand, calling up an overhead view of the spiraling superorchard plots and cornfields closest to the Tower, then the neighborhoods tucked between, their viewpoint zooming toward a structure blinking blue with Julie’s attention. “This is the closest armory to the Tower. John’s bees didn’t see any guards outside, and if it’s only a pebble lock on the doors—”
“Then it’s hackable,” Noor says. “Anything but biometrics is easy enough. Honestly, security everywhere in the Farm is laxer than it should be. Earthtrust isn’t scared enough of its Volunteers. Eury must not have expected them to ever resist her, not when the alternatives to living here are all so much worse than this.” She shrugs. “The short answer is that I can get you into the armory, and then you’ll have to get me into the Tower.”
“But crossing the Farm armed is going to draw attention,” says Cal.
Mai says, “I can fab what you need in the medical wing, if you can give me the schematics. The alarms will go off, but if you’re already inside, it might not matter.”
Julie says, “Let’s meet halfway. We need rifles and body armor, but fabbing them is too complicated when we’re in a hurry. We’d have to print the weapons in pieces, then assemble them. Better to source those directly, despite the risks. Then while we take the security nexus, Mai can print the rest of what we need.”
“Which is?” asks John.
“Plastic explosives and detonators. If Noor can help me remove the restrictions from the medical wing fabricators—”
“No problem,” says Noor, blinking to transfer the necessary schematics to everyone’s pebbles, burying the knowledge in the same hands that will plant the bombs.
“Then Mai will print the explosives at the last moment, on her way to the nexus,” says Cal. “She’ll stay with Noor, while Julie and I bring the explosives up to John in the penthouse.”
“You’ll have to take two elevators,” John says. “One to the fiftieth floor, where the executive suites are, then another up the needle to Eury’s office. There are two ways in: the second elevator opens into an antechamber outside the penthouse, where the door can be easily bypassed now that we’ve cloned Eury’s pebble. The other entrance is in the atrium below Eury’s office, accessible through a staircase inside the office and from another running up the side of the needle, starting at the fiftieth floor. That’s another two dozen flights of stairs, at least.”
“But if the fiftieth-floor elevator is disabled—”
John nods. “Then you’ll have to take those stairs.”
“Okay.” Cal blinks the overlay away, zooms elsewhere. “John and Mai will be inside the Tower. Julie, Noor, and I will enter at one of the legs, then make our way to the security nexus, where we’ll connect with Mai. Once the nexus is ours, Julie and I will ascend the needle, where John will already be waiting in Eury’s penthouse to access the Pinatubo launch chamber.”
“That’s the next problem,” says John. “The launch chamber access controls are locked with biometrics: a handprint reader, a retinal scanner, a DNA check, a voice-activated lock. And I think we all know whose biometrics are the key.”
“You’re saying we need to take Eury Mirov prisoner?” asks Julie.
“I wouldn’t mind,” says Cal. “But that’s the hardest road to go down.”
John says, “Is there another way to stop Pinatubo? Do we have to be in the actual launch chamber to set the bombs?”
At John’s mention of the bombs, Julie and Cal share a look he can’t read. He almost asks what’s wrong, but the moment passes too fast, Cal already answering his questions. “The launch is global,” she says, “but our plan has to be to stop it here. This is Earthtrust headquarters. The fail-safe controls will be here and nowhere else. Once we’ve shut down the launch, we’ll bomb the Tower, or at least the penthouse. It might not be enough to permanently derail the project, but now that Mirov’s shown her true intentions, maybe the world will do something to stop her before she can try again.”
They pause, each considering all that might go wrong with their plan, this heist in reverse, not taking something out of the Tower but smuggling themselves in. “We do have one more trick,” Noor says, breaking the silence. “The data I uploaded our last night in Kansas City, through the satellite link we left behind? Enough made it out to the collectives I contacted from out west. They’re waiting for our word to broadcast as much of what they’ve assembled as they can, for as long as they can, while simultaneously leaking the raw data in a single dump. I don’t know what’s all there, or what might happen when it comes out. But if it takes Earthtrust’s gaze off us for even a moment, it’s worth it.”
“Tomorrow then,” Cal says. “If they broadcast at dawn, local time, it might create enough confusion to get us inside.” She plants her hands against the rail, then blinks to blank their displays, leaving only the world as it is, with its crowds of Volunteers, the bison herd below and the Tower above, gleaming black against what might be the last blue sky they’ll ever see. Still clenching the rail, Cal says, “Julie and I fought in the Secession and then fought on for Earthtrust afterward. I won’t ask to be forgiven for what I did then. But when we went west, we all told each other we could fight back without hurting anyone innocent. I don’t know if we’ll be able to make the same promises tomorrow. If you won’t accept the possibility of other people getting hurt, I won’t fault you for walking away. But I promise you those same people will be hurt anyway. Because what Eury Mirov plans is nothing more than replacing our world with a future of her choosing, a white sky hanging over an earth to be restored only when she says, containing only what she desires. That’s not the world I want. I’ll gladly give my life to stop it from happening. I know I’m asking you to risk yours, but I won’t take it from you.”
No one flinches, no one balks. These five prodigal Ohioans, come home to the last days of Ohio: once committed to seeing their task through, what else is there to say?
When it becomes clear Cal and John are going to linger, the other three say goodbye first, Mai heading back to the Tower, Noor and Julie walking away hand in hand, easy amid the other Volunteers gathered on the viewing platform, populating the picnic grounds below.
Once they’re alone, Cal asks, “Are you ready, John?” No nicknames, no teasing now. Before he can answer, she says, “I wish we could stay together tonight,” uncharacteristically direct.
“Me too,” he replies, pushing against her, summoning her arm around his waist. He tries to think of something better to say, but that’s not their division of labor: C
al gives the speeches, he believes in the cause. They’ve sacrificed before. They will sacrifice this too. “We’re doing the right thing,” he says, trying not to look to Cal for assurance.
“But the work isn’t done,” Cal says, her mind moving away from John but her grip not yet loosening. “Somehow, before tomorrow, we have to solve the launch control biometrics.”
“Actually,” John says, pulling away to access his pebble, “I have an idea about that too.”
With a squeeze of his fist, he spins the Tower blueprints back across their displays, scrolling up to an overhead view of the forty-eighth floor. He zooms in, highlights a room that remains stubbornly blacked out, its secure contents impossible for the bees to scan.
“This,” he says, “is what Eury calls the Loom.”
Chapman
Chapman, a man again, chastened and jailed by his body’s contradictions: his faun shape balks at the settled lands, but in the wilderness it never fails to attract the attention of the witches. After the death of the trapper at the hands of the witches, he admits it’s unsafe to ever be the faun again, because everywhere he goes he sees more of their signs, more evidence of the witches’ growing fury at the destruction of the wilds, their vengeance most visible anywhere civilization is only half established, wherever the forest and the swamp might reclaim a broken human inhabitation. Near the undetectable border where the Territory resumes, the brothers find an old tomahawk claim abandoned, its corn wilted on the stalk, a dead and bloated hog slashed open not in the yard but inside the shattered cabin itself. As if swine should hide inside a house. At another homestead: a well laced with arsenic, a sick family packing to return east. Nearby, a rock dam collapses, sending torrents of water rushing along old pathways to flood already-planted fields, ruining crops needed for the settlers to last the winter. Even some apple trees go sterile, their blackened blooms falling to dried ground, their dead leaves crackling with the crumbled husks of honeybees.
This was the work of witches, Chapman worries, unless, as Nathaniel argues, it’s only everywhere the effects of men competing for what men want: land to own, on which to live and to build, to husband and harvest. But how to know which signs mean what, which atrocities are the fault of the witches and which are only some more mundane ruin? One week, the brothers come upon a strand of burned and blackened log cabins, the destruction rumored to be the sign of returning natives or of advancing government cavalry, impossible to know for sure. Wherever Nathaniel’s sure it was the cavalry who’d caused some violence, they’re soon to find a half dozen uniformed men ambushed and riddled with gunshots, or else torn by claw and fang and beak. Other times Chapman is sure it’s the witches who caused the damage he sees, only to discover again the everyday negligence of common men: a stand of trees burned to hastily expand a pasture at the cost of every acre’s every bird’s nest, squirrel hollow, and fox den, so much ashy soil eroded into runoff. Elsewhere he finds a river dammed, its trout and bass and perch trapped in reshaped waterways ill-suited to their needs, unable to reach feeding spots and spawning pools they once returned to instinctively; then another stretch of swampland drained, leaving behind acres of stinking catfish, their slimy bodies flopping in the drying mud, barbels twitching, gills heaving against mud made from water they used to breathe.
All around Chapman the natural world flees west. Every improvement men make to the land is an incursion against the wild, the Territory a shifting borderland temporarily neither settled nor pristine, where for a time both men and witches might act, where a faun could move with ease, if only he’d risk it. Meanwhile more and more men follow Nathaniel and Chapman’s progress, building homes and establishing industries and ensuring there’ll soon be no space for anything else. White-tailed deer fall before human hunger, wolves and other supposed threats are exterminated in turn, no one trapper’s gory death enough to save anyone or anything.
On the edge of all this strife and struggle, Nathaniel’s aging body leaves the brothers ever more separated. Spring turns into summer and the days grow longer, the hours Nathaniel can work lessen weekly; Chapman had always been the one to crouch in the dirt to plant the rows, but now he offers his brother this easier job, even though Nathaniel’s strained back and creaking knees balk after seeding only a few rows. Gently Chapman helps Nathaniel to his rest, setting him against the broad trunk of an uncut oak before bringing him a strip of salted pork, a bladder of bartered cider. He returns to the work alone, the hot sun beating down on his newly burnable skin as he hums Eliza’s tune—The Lord’s been good to me—he plants a row of seeds, another and another and another—and so I thank the Lord—he wipes his filthy brow, wrings out his sweat-soaked hair. At day’s end he surveys the half-finished nursery, the already-hoed rows needing to be planted before the soil dries out, the brush fences that must be erected, the many other hours of work remaining.
For what, he thinks, for what? Once he’d known the answer to this question without hesitation. Now he can no longer pretend any part of what he does is for Nathaniel’s sake, this brother snoring beneath his tree, the empty cider skin beside him, his heavy beard tugging his head to his chest. After all, how many years does Nathaniel have left to make his fortune? He is fifty-five hard years old, years gifted to Chapman, a brother who couldn’t be left in anyone else’s care; years wasted on the Territory’s settlement, work for which no one but the Worths has given fair recompense. And now? If nothing changes, his last years will all be spent fleeing the civilization he’d once hoped to make manifest. An entire lifetime wasted on the fraying hem of a world whose warp and weave Nathaniel no longer fit.
Chapman plants a seed, he plants a hundred seeds as he’s planted thousands before.
Chapman saws the trees, Chapman hauls the logs, Chapman clears the brush and pushes the plow and swings the hoe, Chapman plants and plants and plants nearly every seed himself. Some days Nathaniel manages once more to work dawn to dusk, but the next he’s tired, irritable, too sore to stand, stuck on his hands and knees, his back bent as a saddle-broke horse’s, tears streaking down first Nathaniel’s face, then Chapman’s. More and more Nathaniel’s again useless by the noon meal, unable to return afterward to the sawing of trees, the plowing of cleared earth; still, by August the brothers have managed to plant two nurseries, a slim success even if their paltry seed haul means there’s no good reason to start a third. Instead they pack up whatever’s worth saving, abandoning broken tools and worn clothing to a tidy rubbish pile, then begin their long walk to the Worth homestead, visiting their past nurseries and orchards along the way.
Wherever he can, Chapman sneaks among their fully grown trees, testing an apple here, an apple there, praying that the magic he’s spent his life trying to find lives in one tree or the other, a miracle at last grown within the mundane. But everywhere they go is busier now, the State’s towns populated by growing families, their many children playing in the streets, all of the brothers’ trees now captured behind fences and walls, made private property. This is the world Nathaniel had promised, but its arrival makes him no happier. “Soon Cincinnati will be New York,” he complains, but in truth most of the State still reeks of cow shit, the deep stink of too many pigs in one place, too many hooves tearing the earth to mud.
Men had transformed the world but the world didn’t stay as they put it. The brothers see topsoil running off poorly graded farmland, they see streams choked with silt, flooding one farm and starving another. Old-growth trees are cut for log cabins, then for fuel to heat the cabins; when the forests are gone the settlers dig coal instead, every lump of coal made of what used to be a tree. Malaria sweeps through village after village, smallpox and cholera kill dozens of people in one town while everyone everywhere is always dying of dysentery. Then comes milk sickness, the slows, the trembles—the settlers call the disease different names but can’t identify the source. The witches, Chapman thinks, watching another homesteader bend to puke beside his split rail fence, a worry Chapman harbors until a Shawnee woman married
to one of the white farmers teaches the rest about white snakeroot, a plant unknown in Europe, here tainting the milk and meat of cattle whenever the cows are driven into the woods to forage.
Now the brothers see cows slaughtered but not butchered, their carcasses stacked in heaps and burned before they attract the few wolves left, if there are wolves at all, because who’d seen one recently in this county, this newly organized county named by men living in Boston or Philadelphia or Washington. Around campfires or in village taverns, the brothers listen to squatters who’ve spent decades settling Ohio discuss the cavalry sent to drive them off, the military captains charged to eject anyone living anywhere better men might claim to own.
“We told the captain, ‘Yes, we’ll leave,’” says one squatter, grinning, “‘as soon as we harvest our crops. But should we not save our cattle? We’ll need to feed the poor beasts from our grain stores through the winter, then graze them through the melting season. But the cattle fertilize the land with all their shit and piss—and if we were to leave, then we couldn’t carry that shit and piss, not with a hundred buckets, and without our fertilizer, how would we plant elsewhere, on some other unprepared land? Who would compensate us for our loss of shit and piss? In what ledger could such a loss be tallied? It’s better if we plant our seeds here in the spring, on land properly readied. Come back after planting, good captain,’ I said, ‘and by then we may be ready to leave, as you so kindly request, right soon as we bring in the harvest and feed our cattle and fertilize our land and plant our gathered seed.’”