by Jeff Sweat
She looks down the narrow hallway where they stand. In it are the kinds of pictures that the Parents made, as if they convinced life to stand still. They had that power. She hasn’t seen one up close in a long time, and she studies them now: Children frozen in place, one blinking, one crying, but mostly she sees the Parents. Bigger than the Children, faces made of tree bark. Smiling, two of them, in picture after picture.
“Look how light they are,” Apple says, pointing at their skin. “I thought only cannibals was white.”
It’s true. The two of them are the descendants of all the peoples who lived in the Holy Wood, with skin that almost matches the brown of the hills, but this family has pink skin, blue eyes, and unnatural yellow hair. Like the creatures from their nightmares.
“Maybe the Parents was gods to live so long,” she hears Apple say.
“Maybe,” she answers, feeling all of her fifteen years. “Then why we stop turning into gods?”
CHAPTER TWO
THE STACK
Apple doesn’t expect anyone to wind down the choking street—they’re the first people to cross the gate since the Parents died, and no one is racing to cross it now. Still, Muscle training doesn’t die—he stands with his back to the wall, in the shadow of a barren pomgrant tree, both ends of the road in view. The only motion comes from Jemma.
Apple watches Jemma pull the red spike back, weaving the lighter tendrils across the gap until from a distance he can’t see a gate. It only needs to keep till tomorrow when Jemma comes back with a crew, but she’s had salvages busted before by another tribe.
He admires her fingers’ dance among the thorns. She’s a good Gatherer, but not the best. She’d be a good Farmer, if she could stand still. She’d be a good Muscle, if she could handle the blood. He doesn’t know if he likes her more for all the things she is, or for all the things she isn’t.
Jemma’s been marked since they were Middles at age seven. The others are so sure of themselves, of their place in the Holy Wood. Jemma asks and asks. She doubts. It takes a special person not to be sure.
Her questions saved him.
The tribe forbade going to the Holy Wood sign after sunset. The gods return to it at night, and the Priestess says they dance and cry and will kill any Child who comes to the aytch. Jemma said, “Why? Why would they do that? If we got gods on our doorsteps I got a couple of questions for em.”
She snuck over the fence and made her way up the hill without a torch, she told Apple later. She sat on the aytch in the moonlight. She didn’t find the gods, but on the way back she found Apple getting killed by the lion.
He had been standing sentry over the field, lowly new Muscle duties to keep out the deer and pigs that raided it. And because deer and pigs came, so did the lion. He never heard the lion’s cry, just felt the bite at the back of his neck and hot fur bearing him down to the earth. He slipped free somehow, rolled loose long enough to find a rock. The lion pinned him down, ripping his bicep, its tan face and white cheeks snapping at his. He smashed at it, but it only grew angrier.
Jemma had no weapon besides the rock she threw to distract it. Even if she had, she probably wouldn’t have attacked. She was too scared. Instead, she drew herself up and screamed, “Look at me, puta! Look at me!” She puffed herself like a bullfrog, made herself taller and wider, and screamed.
Lion Tamer, the Muscle called her later. Even the lions can’t stand your voice. She was nine.
It was a stupid taboo, and only the Priestess cared when she broke it, but they sentenced Jemma to the shed for the week. The Muscle were so grateful to Jemma that they let her walk out the very first day.
She walked out with Apple’s heart.
“Home?” he says when she steps away from the gate. Jemma shakes her head, and he’s glad.
Apple sheathes the machete but takes his bow off his shoulder. All the Muscle carry bows once they pass out of the Holy Wood. They used to send more Muscle with the Gatherers. Then Pablo rebelled with the Muscle, and they don’t trust the Muscle anymore. The Muscle get smaller and smaller because the Olders are more scared of their own army than what’s out there.
Apple should care more about being mistrusted, about being pushed to the side. But this isn’t his time anymore. These aren’t his people. The only “people” he has left is holding a hatchet in front of him.
“Can we go down to Ell Aye?” she says. The great city that includes the Flat Lands. He knew that’s where she wanted to go.
He nods and gives her a quick grin, showing the dark sockets in the side of his smile that used to be his teeth. Two went missing in his Tweens, and he has never told her the same reason for the loss. Sometimes it’s him biting back the lion, sometimes it’s a rabbit bone. “How’d you lose your teeth?” she asks, returning to words from older days.
“A cannibal took em,” he says, as if he had three more answers after that. “They was the only things sharper than his skinning knife.”
“Someday you’ll tell me the truth,” she says.
“Maybe today,” he says, and he touches her shoulder, leaving his hand there until her soft skin gives way under his fingers. He wonders if she knows, if she—
She cocks her head toward him, and he smiles and slowly pulls his hand away.
“Today?”
“Maybe,” he says.
They break through trees and the entire lost city stretches out at their feet. The palms soar above the houses, all leaning south toward the sun. From above, Ell Aye looks untouched, unbroken from the Parents’ time, but on the street it’s as if the city has burst. The houses are falling apart, the streets have overgrown, and the only people who live there are Last Lifers and bears.
The Holy Wood territory ends in the wide wide Flat Lands of Ell Aye, where all territories end. They’re too difficult to defend, too open for ambush, too far from water. If you’re brave, though, it’s still rich. Gathering teams have come back loaded down with tools, food, medsen. The Gathering teams have also come back without people. They left bodies lying in the wide bolvards, carved up with a Long Lifer blade.
The whispers in the Holy Wood talk more about the Palos, because the white skin and the necklaces of teeth make for gossipy shivers. As a Muscle, he knows the Last Lifers, the ones no one talks about, are far more dangerous. They’re closer to the Holy Wood, and their minds are gone.
The Last Lifers are kids who turn sixteen or seventeen and lose hope and turn mad, unable to handle what comes next. Nothing matters, so nothing they do matters. They strip down to rags. They paint their eyes black with charcoal and hack at their hair until they look like browning skulls. They slash their skin with scars instead of tattoos. They slip away into the Flat Lands of Ell Aye until they find others like them. They nest in the Long Gone buildings. They eat and sleep and roll whenever. They hunt the Holy Wood for sport.
They should be going down with an army. “You know it’s not safe,” he says.
“Even more reason to go, huh?” She acts as if she’s without fear. He knows it’s probably creeping up inside her, and she’s fighting to push it down. Jemma does more brave things when she’s afraid than someone who’s actually brave.
He doesn’t respond, because he’s looking beyond the city to the lone hill rising up from the sea in the south. The Palos. “Smoke,” Apple says. “Always smoke.”
“They can’t still be eating. They gotta stop to kill people, right?” They laugh, but small. The cannibals put a hush on everything.
“Someday they’ll come here,” he says.
“They never come this far. Not since our Mamas’ Mamas’ Mamas’ times.”
“Then the pull’s gonna be that much stronger.” Everyone knows the Palos will come. When they do—when they do, Apple knows, they will cook the young and the old in their fires. He’s heard the stories, he’s seen the camps burned in their wake. But the in-between kids they will steal. They don’t make babies of their own, the stories say. They steal you and they turn you into them. And then your tr
ibe will see your own brown eyes in the blue ones killing them.
“Buddha Teevee Jesucristo,” Apple says, never sure which god should hear.
Not today, though. And today Jemma wants to go down. She points to the tower she calls the Stack because it’s round and stacked like plates in a kitchen, plates stabbed with a sword. “I’ve been wanting to see it my whole life,” she says, and he feels the rest of that sentence. He knows what it is to want for your whole life.
Apple follows her fingers to the spire and shakes his head. He’s taken Gatherers there before. “It’s picked over, has been before we was born.”
“Not to Gather. To see.”
To wonder why the Parents built it, he thinks, knowing how she thinks, how they could build such a thing and then vanish.
He shrugs. It’s dangerous, but he’s a Muscle. And he’s not just with her to protect her.
They drop down the hill, speedy on the winding road. Without warning they’re at the bottom and the 101 looms above them.
It was the grand road of the ancient people and figures in all the old stories. The Parents would spend days on the 101, they would say, living in the cars that litter the city. Even now, a mass of cars jams the east side of the 101, as if they all stopped and gave up.
Once a flock of birds fell from the sky in the thousands and hit the camp, their dead wings carpeting the streets and everyone scooping them up and roasting them, not caring if they were diseased. He wonders if they simply froze in the air.
Apple has never seen a car move, but these remind him of the birds. Where were they going, and why didn’t they get there? He knows but can’t bring himself to say it.
“Why is it called the 101? A hundred and one miles long?” Jemma says. This is an old question, but it’s clear she’s asking it to take her mind off the darkened bulk of the 101 now above their heads. He’s feeling it, too. Vines hang down from its belly, leaking decay. Everything the Parents built has started to rot.
“A hundred and one ways to die.”
Jemma punches him. “Now you just thinking like a Muscle.”
“Maybe,” Apple says, trying not to react to the punch or the fact that her hand lingers on his arm after it, “but it’s a good place for an ambush.”
After the underpass, the Stack climbs before them in a yellowing white pile of plates, hundreds of feet high. The plates that shade the windows are broken in places, as if a giant has chipped them against a doorjamb. A spire juts from the top, like the sundial they built in the village.
The closest door is ajar, and Jemma moves toward it, but Apple stops her. “Not yet,” he says, and leads her on a long loop of the building.
“You know peoples who left Ell Aye?”
“I met some traders once. At the Downtown. They go all around our world.”
He had escorted the Olders to a meeting with all the tribes of Angelenos, the people who own the hills of Ell Aye. All the tribes were there: the Holy Wood, the Downtown, the San Fernando, even the strange and far-off Malibu. During the meeting the Downtown had been visited by traders pedaling bicycle carts, and the giant stadio where the Downtown lived was buzzing with talk about their treasures and the world beyond. He found himself swept up in this strange new world, like Jemma is now.
“What they called?” she says.
“Ice Cream Men.”
“They men? Like, old?”
“Nah, they just kids like us, boys and girls both,” he says, “that’s why I membered their name. It didn’t make no sense.”
“There are peoples I didn’t even know about, and I barely left the Bear Wall,” she says. “I wasted so much time.”
Apple is thinking the same thing. He’s waited too long. He knows he’s waited too long. Why hasn’t he told her? Maybe because for what he feels, they’ve lost their words. A boy and a girl, they can’t just be.
They enter the Stack after their circuit, and Jemma falters next to him. Nothing about the entry room tells them what the Parents intended; there’s no message in its shape. Splinters remain of a wooden table that must have once been bolted to the floor. “Up?” Apple asks, checking her courage. He once dared her to climb down a cliff with him and she did it one-handed. She won’t say no.
“Up,” she says, and pushes into a staircase. The dim wash of the first room pales to nothing as they climb, even with the door wedged open. The door to the first landing won’t budge for them, so they keep climbing. The third door opens, and he breathes in the lightness.
“Nothing is square!” Jemma says, and then laughs. “Of course not.” The outer walls are curved. The rest of the room is a jumble of the chairs the Parents seemed to love, with wheels that let you roll anywhere. Jemma steps to the window and pushes. It holds even when the one next to it has shattered.
Apple picks up a phone. They know what they are although no one has ever used one in this life: a way for the Long Gones to talk to you from the dead. Somehow that connection is lost. What would he ask the dead if he could?
He almost imagines he can feel it coming. In the last few months he’s found a way of looking at the world, a way of understanding how all the pieces fit, and he thinks: How cruel, to finally understand it, and then to leave.
Those are the Children who die first: the curious, the wise, the calm. When the End comes, it comes first for the ones who see the world better, who control their actions, while the beastly and the stupid remain. The Children call them the Touched, as if they’re marked for a sooner death. It may be only six months, nine months shorter, but in their lives every month matters.
It feels almost as it did when he was about to leave Daycare to head to the fields before he became a Muscle, that moment when leaving means nothing you do matters. It’s not like the Last Lifers, it’s not as if he doesn’t care, it’s just that he floats through the world with a lightness as if nothing he touches will last.
They say you feel better, before the End, so much better that everyone looks surprised when they actually End. They call it the Betterment, for the way that life seems to surge through your skin. Broken bones knit themselves together, scars heal. Your vision clears, your breath arrives quicker. And then you start to bleed through your nose, as if life is draining from the inside of your head. He doesn’t feel that way yet. But he knows it’s coming.
Jemma shoves a desk out of the way to get to the window; he watches her muscles ripple. He loves that she’s a match for his strength. He taught her how to fight last year, and then she started winning. The other Muscle think that their strength is their only advantage against the Olders, the only thing that keeps them from being totally shut out, so they don’t trust a girl like Jemma. Seeing that in Jemma just makes Apple think they were born as mirrored selves.
If you asked him where he would want to be on the last day, he would have said here. Unearthing the secrets of the Parents, here. Exploring their own lives, here. The important thing is that the here is Jemma.
Now they’re looking at the towers the Downtown people worship almost as gods but never visit. She reaches out, touches Apple on the shoulder. She would never have done that before this day.
“We should leave the Holy Wood,” she whispers, and he’s not sure if he’s meant to hear, the way the sounds seem to melt right into his skin.
Apple doesn’t answer because his eye catches more pictures, this time on a table next to a kind of glass rectangle. Two Parents, two Parents with two Children. On the next desk, two more Parents, smiling.
“Something else in those pictures, Jemma,” he says. “They was always together.” He hasn’t been able to explain what he felt, but the pictures show it.
“So?”
“They didn’t just live forever. They was together. That’s what made the Parents the Parents.”
“I would take either,” she says.
“I don’t think it works that way,” Apple says. “Together takes time.” Enough time. Now now now, he says, only to himself. Now. He leans toward her, and her lips are ju
st open so that they fit right between his.
He’s waited too long.
CHAPTER THREE
THE BOWL
Jemma hadn’t imagined his look from before, the one that left her open and naked in the center of the room, because he’s looking at her that way again and then he’s kissing her, brushing her lips softly while she holds completely still.
She pulls back. “You never asked me to roll,” Jemma says.
“I never asked no one to roll,” he says, and she realizes she’s never seen him with anyone else.
“But why?”
“Cuz I feel something different for you.” Before she can show the way that cuts, he says, “Something good. Something like the Parents. And no one told me how to show it.”
“Oh,” she says, spinning that thought in her mind but still, this time, kissing him back. This time, allowing herself to feel it: the cracked skin of his lips growing softer, wetter, as they explore hers. She’s kissed lots of boys—all the girls have—but all that is gone with those lips. The two of them are kissing as if they’re trying to uncover the truth of each other under that skin.
The sun interrupts them, its rays pushing under the window coverings as it swells onto the horizon. “It’s time,” Apple says, and they reluctantly pull apart.
“A little more. We could see so much more higher,” she says, a pleading note. She knows they will never be back, and maybe Apple sees that, too, because he doesn’t argue, just climbs. Is that why he left with her today, because they are running out of time?
The other floors are more of the same, and when the sun finally sets, she’s ready to go at the next flight of stairs.
They reach what must be the top of the tower and crack the door. Unlike the other floors, it’s dark inside. Apple chokes and backs into Jemma. “You smell that?” he whispers.