As he buckled himself in beside Sela, Desmond spoke over the intercom again, "Alright we're ready to go, Amos."
"Roger," the pilot answered with a slight downhome drawl. "We have clearance to fly, and she's rarin' to go."
The motors wheeled up, whining through the cabin. Soundproofing only went so far. Sela could feel the shuddering of the engines vibrating through the frame and into the seat. Her nervousness gave a jump.
Sela felt her weight increase as the craft rose into the sky. She could see the buildings falling away beneath them, even the Tower of Hope a mile or so off. She could see sparkles below where the mirrors reflected the brightening sky.
Megora was stirring. She could see some movement in the streaming lines down on the sidewalks, although they were already too high to make out individual people. She tried to pick out the headlights of a car in the city, couldn't see any. High as many buildings in Megora were, most streets were obscured, except for those directly below.
To the east was the dark blue of St. Claire Lake, and south of that Lake Erie stretched off into the brightening horizon. Sela had never been to either. They were rumored to be rancid and miserable, strewn with trash and laced with chemical pollution.
The Remaking had failed badly in that respect. The lakes were polluted enough that all of Megora's fish were imported from elsewhere in the world. And once there had been a small fishing industry in Detroit.
And then the buildings cut off, the city surrounded by a broad stretch of barren land, gravel and dirt and scrub. It was kept clear of any obstacles to make monitoring easy.
Past that, there were thousands of acres of Council-run farms. More than half of the massive plots were covered with thousands of solar panels, drinking up the sun and offsetting the nuclear production that primarily sustained Megora. The rest of the farms were various types of crops.
Sela watched the landscape roll by, hardly able to believe she was outside of Megora. When the Remaking began to gather speed, it had been made clear to everyone entering a supercity that they would not be permitted outside of the cities ever again.
It was too dangerous they said, sometimes. Too dangerous with the storms and with the wilderness. And it was wrong to harass the environment with human presence. That was the other excuse that kept popping up. Somehow it was always tied in with the first, as though the planet just knew that people were there. Like it tried to smash them.
Sela knew better. Her father had pointed out that natural disasters had always wiped people off the planet, as far back as history had been recorded. For the most part, technology and prosperity had saved lives, rather than cost them.
Property was another matter. It was difficult for property to be destroyed if it hadn't been created. So of course a tornado in a suburb would cause much more damage than it did before there were so many houses. Still, fewer people died.
Sela put all of those thoughts out of her mind. She just wanted to watch Megora recede. It already looked like a miniature, surreal and tiny in the dim morning light.
A flare of sunlight bathed the helicopter, momentarily blinding Sela. She leaned back and blinked until her eyes adjusted. Desmond was staring out the window on the other side.
Down below, the land looked much darker now. Sunlight would splash down there in a few minutes. Sela really had no idea how high they were or how long it would take for dawn to drop that far.
Megora had a blue tinge, the color of night slowly washing off of the white buildings. A mist obscured all details. Lights mounted to the high buildings and the towers shined out. Sela could see the top of the Tower gleam yellow with the first rays.
She didn't want to see Megora in the morning light. To see it glisten like a crystal on the horizon, to see beauty in a place she hated. She sighed and turned away.
The farmlands ended, all of the region surrounded with a high-tech security wall. After that, another long expanse of razed ground, wider than the first.
Sela's family had come to Megora before all of this had been developed. The sheer scale of just one supercity staggered her mind. Even with the years she had spent within this outer boundary, she had never explored more than a scant fraction of all this territory.
And yet, she knew that the supercities all combined didn't even consume five percent of Earth's land. She had some idea of how many miles lay between Megora and Sovereign City.
The notion of hundreds of miles was simply not something that she could relate to, though. A mile was a distance she could imagine walking. Ten, she knew what it felt like to run.
But a hundred? Several hundred? It all became abstract, too intense to think about.
The flight carried them over small forests and fields now, spotted with the occasional farm, or even a small town. None had lights. In the early morning mist, Sela could see the abundance of green that was encroaching onto those areas abandoned by humanity.
Sela watched it all slide away beneath them. Watched and heard only the chop of the rotors outside.
Desmond's fingers brushed into hers and clenched her hand.
She turned and looked at him. Wondered what was going through his mind. He stayed silent, eyes still trained on the landscape below. She squeezed his hand.
He turned and looked at her, his cryptic eyes tough to read even straight on. He smiled at her, a smile of confidence and friendship and hope. Not the hope that was so falsely depicted in the Tower.
This was the hope, the confidence in a brighter tomorrow. Desmond was a man of values, and Sela was coming to envy that portion of his character, having watched him over the past month.
Values, character, integrity, hard work, respect, generosity, happiness… That was what Sovereign City represented. That was the beacon of hope that was somewhere out there, somewhere on the continent.
Desmond and Sela just looked at each other. He squeezed her hand back. Sela smiled meekly. The chop of seemed to recede, its regular, persistent thump tuned out of Sela's mind.
A while later, Sela hadn't kept track of the time, Amos told them over the intercom that the landing site wasn't far off.
Sela searched the ground, saw they had descended, although not slowed. The ground was rushing by, perhaps five hundred feet down.
Sela expected to see wilderness. Instead of grass and trees and creeks, her eyes met short buildings, roofs with massive air conditioners, vast parking lots with a sprinkling of cars.
There was grass though, scraggly weeds pouring out of the islands in parking lots, overgrown trees whose roots were cracking through the pavement nearby.
Bushes piled up in tall grass, spilling over the sides of the medians that stretched each direction, outlined by the blacktop of roads that were once busy.
The lonely emptiness was striking, even as it all moved underneath the helicopter. Neither of them saw any people of course, didn't see any wildlife, except for the occasional bird rooting around for morsels to eat.
"This's it," the pilot said.
He brought the Fen into a wide bank, bleeding off excess speed. Then the chopper descended quickly, until only a hundred feet or so remained.
She watched the cracked pavement and faded lines of the parking lot approach. With a gentle bump, the Fen settled to the ground.
Here we are, Sela thought.
On our way to Sovereign City.
She looked at Desmond. He squeezed her hand and gave her another warm smile. The sunlight shone along the side of his face.
She smiled back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.T. O'Connell is the author of Sunlost and Sunlost: Underworld War, two young adult books set in a post-apocalyptic future. He lives outside of Cincinnati, Ohio and has a beagle named Moose.
You may e-mail comments or questions to him at [email protected] or visit his website, jtoconnell.com.
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Remaking
The Remaking Page 33