Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  Lady smiles. It’s true. Everyone knows the wide Mamas make the best Mamas, because they don’t get hurt as bad when the baby’s born. And Lady’s wide. Maybe that’s why Jemma doesn’t want to be a Mama. She’s not built for it.

  “Being a Mama is all I ever wanted,” Lady says.

  “Good,” Trina says. “Join the next Waking.” And that’s it.

  The Waking is the ceremony that every girl goes through before she becomes a Mama, and the rolling that comes after. It’s the first full moon after she turns fifteen. They will go to the Zervatory, the holiest of places in the Holy Wood, and they will pick a boy to be the Dad of their baby.

  “More babies’ll help, right?” Lady says.

  Trina doesn’t respond at first, lost as her eyes wander through the empty streets. Then: “It’s gonna take a lot more than you.”

  “What else we gonna do?”

  Trina almost snorts. “Live longer, I guess. Grow faster.”

  “That ain’t possible.”

  “I know,” Trina says. She points to the house where her nanny used to live. “If we can’t, that ain’t just an empty street. That’s the real end of the world.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE MAYFLIES

  The night after the Circle Jemma dreams, not of Apple, but of the Exile. It doesn’t feel like a regular dream. The Exile’s still still eyes peep out of a blue haze that seems familiar. He limps. He pulls a silver case out of a hole in the floor. He’s followed by a buzz in her ear. The haze showed me something new, she thinks. But why does it care about the Exile?

  The next morning when he’s sitting in front of her door, only the quiet eyes are there. She almost wonders where the case is.

  She lives in El Tercero, the third house claimed by the First Mamas. Only the oldest Gatherers live there, so Lady has not yet made it to El Tercero. It’s the first time they’ve ever been separated.

  El Tercero is on a winding, quiet street away from the Circle, so he’s the only person outside it. He sits as he did before, taking in the street as if he’s not even on it.

  Jemma looks at him, trying to puzzle it out from his face. All her memories from last night are crowded out by Apple. Finally she gives up. “What’s your name?”

  The Exile doesn’t look offended, and she suspects he never is. “Pico,” he says. “What, you forgot that you saved me?”

  “I save a lot of people. It’s easy to lose track,” she says. She looks around the deserted street. “No one would show you around?”

  “They hope I’ll just go away.”

  “I understand that,” she says. “You need a guide? Fine.” Lady’s probably still mad at her. Trina, too. Apple got sent off on night watch as punishment for taking her to the Stack, so he’s sleeping all morning. Showing the kid around will keep her out of everyone’s way.

  The Holy Wood and the Malibu are supposed to be the same people, but nothing Jemma shows Pico seems to be the same as what he knew in the Malibus. He looks like the type who would mock her little tour. Instead, he listens like he’s stowing it all in a box for safekeeping.

  The Bicycle Kids are a team of Middle Children, seven and eight years old, who learn to repair the prized fleet of bicycles—patching tires with ancient glue and raiding the Parents’ bikes for parts. “There’s always three?” Pico asks.

  “At least three of almost anything, of all ages,” Jemma replies. “That’s new. Two of our Animal Doctors died a few weeks apart, and no one could deliver a goat.”

  The Daycare is in a sprawling single-level house. Babies and Toddlers live there, but their caretakers are not much older: Ninos, five and six, with some Tweens watching everything. “Daycare?” Pico asks. “Even though they stay all night?”

  “That’s what the Parents called it,” Jemma says.

  On the way to the Great Field, Jemma shows Pico the kimchee pit, where they bury cabbage and peppers in pottery and let them ferment for weeks. This is one of the foods the Children remembered from the Parents, from the Korenos. They can smell the kimchee long after they pass it.

  Most of the Middles work in the fields, and Pico can’t stop staring at the plants. In the Malibus they eat so much fish that farming is only some potatoes and squash. But the Great Field is full of peas and favas, which heal the ground for the other vegetables. The Middles are harvesting the last of those to get ready for the summer crop of tomatoes, melons, and peppers. Behind them, an ancient sign shows a dog squatting. “We think they used to raise their dogs here,” Jemma says. “Maybe they ate em, too?”

  The Great Field Pump is a miracle from the past, fueled by donkeys that move in a slow circle to pull water from the lake. “But that’s two hundred feet below,” Pico says.

  Jemma doesn’t answer. She’s never thought of it before.

  “Did the Parents make it?” Pico presses.

  “No, the first Children did.”

  “Children made that?”

  “That’s what the stories say.”

  Pico falls silent, the first time all day. It’s not until they’re on the lake in the canoe, trying to net one of the koi that live there, that he speaks up again.

  “If Children could make the pump, they could make something like it again,” he says.

  “If you say so.”

  “We keep talking about the Parents—but we used to be almost as smart.”

  Jemma digs in her paddle and pulls them into one of the lake’s fingers. There the koi are bigger—some as long as her arm. The fish avoid the surface, but she can see distant glints of red and orange below. In the afternoon sun, none swarm after the bait.

  “Those fish aren’t meant to live here,” Pico says almost absently. “They’re too bright.”

  They paddle into a cloud of flies, not dragonflies but something daintier. One of them lands on her knuckle. It looks as if it’s trailing threads behind it—twin tails that stretch almost the length of its body. Wings like bows—in fact, the whole body curves like a bow already fired. Jemma twitches her finger to let it go, and, sputtering, it dives into the lake.

  “Mayfly,” Pico says.

  “What?”

  “They got em in the creeks in Malibu. The eggs last a long time, like a year. Then the flies all climb out, they look around, they roll with each other, they lay eggs. They’re dead a day later. Before the eggs even hatch.”

  “They don’t even got time to be Parents.”

  Together they watch the lacy swarm, the water giving way to the tiny pressure of the flies’ feet. They think of it at the same time, but only Pico voices it. “We the mayflies,” Pico says.

  “No,” Jemma says. “I ain’t a mayfly.”

  “You sure?”

  She isn’t. But with Apple she’ll make it sure. And then Jemma remembers one of the first things Pico said to her.

  “You said something last night,” she says slowly. She doesn’t know why she looks over her shoulder at the shore, but she does. There’s no one there.

  “I thought you might not remember, with everything else.”

  “It’s the only question that matters, right?”

  Pico begins slowly. “I wanted to be a Little Doctor, in the Malibus. They wouldn’t let me.”

  “Shaky hands?”

  “No. Cuz I’m a boy.”

  “Oh.” There aren’t many boy doctors in the Holy Wood, but they happen. “You smart enough.”

  “Too smart for a boy,” Pico says.

  Yes, she thinks, too smart for a boy. Probably too smart for an Angeleno. And if he didn’t do a better job hiding it than he’s doing now, the Malibus would have shied away from him because they thought he was Touched, someone who was marked for death because they were too smart or too Grown-Up for their age. The smart ones, the mature ones—the End always comes to them first.

  “They had me haul the trash,” Pico says. “So I hauled it for the Little Doctors, watched as much as I could without em noticing.”

  “You know how to do the doctoring?”
>
  “Not all. But some I know better than em.” There’s a wisp of anger in his voice, the sound of a boy who’s smart where boys aren’t allowed to be smart. “There was a Tween in the Malibus, Leong. He was almost thirteen, and he fell off some rocks and hit his head.”

  “But he didn’t die,” Jemma says.

  “Not then. And not now,” Pico says. “That was six years ago.”

  “Then…” And she remembers how it hit her the first time Pico told her, and she struggles to find her breath again.

  “No one’s ever lived that long. Not since the Parents.”

  Even Old Steve, who died when Jemma was six, didn’t make it past seventeen. “How?” she says.

  “When Leong woke up, he wasn’t a Tween anymore,” Pico says. “He was more like a Middle. And he don’t change. He don’t grow … up.”

  “But he don’t die.”

  “I think—I think we die cuz we grow up. Something changes, and that’s the End. That’s why the Touched die first.” Like himself, she can see. He expects to die young.

  “What they doing with Leong?”

  “The Priestess says that Leong is defying the gods. She wants him put to death.”

  “Like the fools,” Jemma says.

  “Like the fools.”

  Sometimes babies are born, and something is wrong with their minds. When they’re Toddlers and the differences show, the tribe pushes the child into the Flat Lands of Ell Aye. Jemma has seen mama coyotes fight bears to protect their pups. But in the Angelenos, there are no Mamas left to protect their kids—they’re dead by the time the kids become Toddlers.

  “But ain’t no one gonna let the Priestess kill him,” Pico says. “And some said it might mean we don’t all have to die.”

  Jemma sees everything that he doesn’t say washing over his face. “Some, eh? I think I figured why you had to leave.” Some of the superstitious shun the Touched, because they trail death after them. In a world where death comes quickly, you don’t want to be next to a smart kid who’s going to find death even quicker. That’s why so many kids pretend not to be smart, and, the whispers say, why the Children stopped reading the letters. The ones who could read them didn’t want to admit it.

  Malibus are supposed to be churchy freaks, and the churchy freaks like smart even less than the other Angelenos. If he gave the Olders even the slightest excuse, they would send him off.

  Thoughts spiral through Jemma’s head, too fast to grab for long, but one keeps circling back. “Would that work for others, too?”

  “Getting hit on the head?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Getting stuck in the Middles forever?”

  Jemma thinks of herself at seven, dancing with Lady, feeling that the Middle wasn’t really the middle of her life, watching Apple in the corner of the room watching her. “It would be worth it,” she says.

  * * *

  Lady sees Jemma and the Exile coming up from the lake and descends upon them, angry, giddy, and protective all at once. “Where the hell you been?” she says, half hitting, half hugging. “You shouldn’t be wandering around without me.”

  “Like every day since I was born?” Jemma says.

  “Since yesterday.”

  “She can take care of herself,” Pico says.

  “Shut up, Exile,” Lady says. He’s got a lot of sass, speaking up like that.

  “You remember the Exile,” Jemma says. “Apparently I saved him last night.”

  “Among other things,” Lady says.

  Lady puts her arm around Jemma’s shoulder like she’s shutting a door on Pico and shifts her focus to Jemma. It’s a mark of her concern that she can hold that focus for more than a few seconds, with everything else happening. “How are you feeling? After all you been through last night?”

  “Okay. I didn’t get hurt.”

  “And … Apple?” Putting a lot into that word.

  Jemma smiles like her face might freeze that way, shakes her head. “Apple,” she says.

  Lady smiles back at that, but she’s mad again, and Jemma notices. “I shoulda told you,” Jemma says. “About everything.”

  “You shoulda,” Lady says.

  As if that gives Lady permission to move on, she does. “I got news,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Trina says I can join the Mamas early—even though I’m not old enough! Cuz my bod’s ready.” Lady gestures down at her curves. “This Mama’s ready to roll.”

  Jemma hugs her.

  “Salud,” Pico says, giving the traditional blessing. They’d forgotten he was there. He’s watched the whole thing without blushing, unusual even for an Angeleno boy.

  “Shut up, Exile,” Lady says.

  * * *

  “You still wanna run away from here?” Apple says, then punches her in the stomach.

  “I never said run away,” Jemma says. “I said leave.” And she swings for his head. He ducks.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Speed.” She fires two tapping blows at him, and they both connect, on each cheek. He looks flustered and confused for a moment, then smiles.

  “Show-off.”

  Apple believes anyone could be a Muscle, even a girl, and has been fighting with Jemma since she was seven. From the beginning she couldn’t shoot, couldn’t hold her quivering muscles still long enough to aim properly. But with fists or a machete or an ax, she was nearly the match of him.

  Still, this comes second nature to Apple, not to her, and he still teaches her. “Where’s your guard?” he says when his fist makes it to her chin.

  She takes another punch to the gut.

  “Why you giving me such a big target for such a skinny girl?”

  She connects with his chin, but not with force.

  “Don’t swing for my face. Swing through the back of my head,” Apple says.

  She grabs his head with both hands, holds his face a finger away from hers. “You talk too much,” she says, and kisses him hard. He seems to pull away, and she pulls him back.

  “Yield,” she says.

  “Too late,” he says, and pushes her away. She feints at him and he catches her arm somehow, rolling her over his shoulder and throwing her hard to the ground. Her wind gets knocked out, and she breathes in raggedly before she can exhale. And then he’s on the ground with her, wrestling at first, and then not. She holds her lips to his until they have to break to breathe.

  “When I said we should run, things was bad,” Jemma says.

  “Now?”

  “Things got better.”

  “Same for me,” Apple says. “A lot better.”

  They fight even more since they became boy and girl together. It gives her a reason to be close to him, to touch his skin. And somehow, by fighting, they’re protecting the space between them, a space that feels as fragile as a bubble and just as hard to hold in her hands.

  “Maybe we should stay here. The Holy Wood is safe,” she says.

  “Yeah,” he says, “only…” Only no one’s safe from the End, so no place is really safe. She knows that never leaves his mind, the End looming over him. It pulls him away, from time to time, and she has to pull him back.

  “But still,” Apple says, “I seen the maps and heard the traders talk, Jemma. There’s places and places beyond the mountains, more than we can ever think on: trees as thick as a house, trains that go in upside-downy loops, boats big enough for three Holy Woods. Places where the earth breathes fire and the deserts are painted red. We could walk the world and never reach the end of it in my life, in yours. You don’t think one of those places has figured out how to grow old?”

  There it is. Asking her to run. There is a buzzing in her ear, and she can see the haze of blue that she’s started to believe is showing her things, true things, and it shows her a forest made for giants. As if to say, Yes, it’s there.

  She gets herself ready to say yes, but fear grabs at her guts and this is what comes out: “But we ain’t never gonna get to one of those pl
aces.”

  Apple collapses a bit. “If they leave us alone, if they let us be together, then maybe we could stay,” he says.

  “Won’t they?”

  “You got the Waking coming up. The Waking of the Mamas.”

  “Well, I’m ready to roll now.” Only she’s still not, even with Apple sitting in front of her.

  “What if they don’t let you pick me? I ain’t even sposed to be one of the Dads this time.” They pick enough Dads at each Waking for each of the Mamas—the boys who’ve never been a Dad before, but also a few who have. It’s the strong ones they want. If a Dad has helped make a baby or two, they want him at the Waking again and again. Apple has been picked for the Waking before, but he’s never made a baby. He might not get asked again before he Ends.

  Jemma hadn’t thought of that. Once she kissed Apple, she’s only thought of him. If she was gonna roll, it would be with him. But what if they didn’t let him be in the Waking, or let her choose him? “I’ll ask Trina,” she says.

  “Cuz she likes you so much right now. Like Hyun and Heather like me.”

  She’s distracted, though, by what he said to her in the Stack, right after he kissed her. “Apple … you never asked anyone to roll with you.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “But you rolled with someone in the Waking?” She knows she’s seen him there in the Zervatory, gleaming in the torchlight, waiting for a Mama to pick him. But she’s never thought about it.

  “I did. Cuz we sposed to. I—I didn’t want to, but I did. Twice. The third … both me and the Mama didn’t want it, so we told everyone we did.”

  She knew that he must have rolled with others, but she’s never let herself think it. The Holy Wood doesn’t really trade in jealousy. No one owns anyone, the way the Parents seemed to do. If the boy you want is with someone else, another will roll along. But Jemma feels it grab her, refuse to let go. He had to do it, or he would have been Exiled. It’s the rules. Still: Her Apple. Her boy.

  He doesn’t say he’s sorry. He shouldn’t be. But she thinks he is sorry all the same, as she is. “It’d be different,” he says. “To want it. To want you.”

  “That kid who lived, the one the Exile talks about,” Jemma says. “Would you do what he did if you could? To live longer?”