by Jeff Sweat
“That’s awful,” says Jemma, seeing Trina as something other than the Oldest.
Trina moves to stand but only makes it to one knee. “I ain’t the best person to tell you this is a good thing,” she says, shaking her head. “Just this: I ain’t leaving nothing behind me when I go. What stays is the Holy Wood. And I want to leave it full.”
There are Last Lifers down in the streets, too desperate about the End to let someone else live, and Trina is just trying to bring life into the world. Jemma feels her cheeks redden as she tries to meet Trina’s gaze.
“If I do the Waking—could I be with Apple? I only want to be a Mama to him.”
Trina seems to think for too long. The Mamas aren’t supposed to choose in advance. The Olders decide who picks first, and then each Mama chooses a Dad one by one, like picking sides in a game. Jemma isn’t anyone’s favorite to pick first.
“Yeah, I can make it happen,” Trina says. “I’ll get the other Olders to let it go down. But none of that craziness like you and Apple pulled the day the Exiles came. You gotta stay inside the walls unless we say you can leave. Girls who play nice get the boys. Got it?”
“Got it,” Jemma says.
“And you gonna want to watch your mouth with me,” Trina says. “Not cuz I’m the Oldest but cuz you need more friends.”
Trina stands all the way up, and she’s back to being the Oldest. She can’t be friends with Jemma anymore, she can’t seem to take her side, because she needs to be seen as the person in charge. Jemma knows they’ll never have a talk like this again.
CHAPTER NINE
THE LANDS BEYOND
In her dream, Apple is driving. Jemma doesn’t know why she knows the word “driving,” but he is: driving down the 101 to Downtown, on the empty side, flying past all the Parents’ cars stranded on their left. “So sad,” Apple says. “They took the wrong way.”
Jemma sees them in their cars, still living, waiting for something. They’re not screaming in fear as she would expect at the End. Some are tapping the wheel in front of them, some are singing, others glance at the pieces of jewelry on their wrists.
For the first time she sees that she and Apple are in a car—of course, a car! It’s a type of car she’s never seen. There is no roof. The car is made of gleaming blue that ends in dolphin fins. Apple’s left arm rests on the door, and only his right arm drives. Their hair whips in the wind as they race through the air. She has never moved this fast before, and she feels words pulled from her lungs before they even leave her mouth. For the first time, Jemma realizes they’re living inside a picture frame, like the ones the Parents hung on their walls.
“I wish we had longer,” Apple says.
“I know. You not even fifteen,” Jemma says.
“Wish we had longer,” he says. He smiles at her with a mouth full of perfect teeth, and she can’t say why that’s wrong.
The frame of the picture they’re in starts to blur, a haze of blue that she remembers from somewhere. A buzz overpowers Apple’s voice, and she fights to hear him. This is a dream. Maybe it’s a vision. Apple isn’t really driving. She holds on to him harder.
Apple stretches his hand toward the window in front of them. She can see a band of clouds near Downtown, so gray they’re black, smothering the 101 where the road punches through the horizon. “Starting to get dark,” he says. Then the clouds tighten around her, squeezing out the light.
* * *
Jemma hasn’t moved, hasn’t spoken in the past thirty minutes as they grab shelter from the sun.
At first Lady thought she was wiped out from helping in the fields. All the Gatherers have been called in for Farmer duty. They don’t normally help, but the ground needs to be prepped for the summer crops and the favas need to be picked. With Heather reducing the Muscle for the Gatherers’ guard and with Zee—well, with Zee dead—it’s not safe to Gather, anyway.
“Stupid greenskins,” Lady says. “I don’t wanna see another bean.” If there’s anything they agree upon, it’s that Farmers’ jobs are beneath Gatherers.
“We gotta get outta here,” Jemma says.
“What?” Lady says. “Like, from the fields?”
“Huh?” Jemma is somewhere else.
Lady watches Li, carrying a bundle of stalks on his shoulders. The boy has a bad attitude, but he works hard when they point him the right direction. He’s sweaty. Lady doesn’t know when the sight of a sweaty boy started to do it for her, but it’s doing it now.
“Have you seen his arms? They’re as big as my legs,” she says. She can’t stop thinking about the Waking, about which Dad she’ll choose, about how quickly she’ll have a baby. Lady has kissed most of the boys her age in the village. Maybe that’s why she only thinks about the giant Exile.
He passes in front of her, scowling. She likes a boy who scowls. Li always scowls. Jesucristo, Lady, she thinks. He got you, or what?
“Hey, Li,” she says. He doesn’t look her way. It’s okay, because the boys don’t do the picking in the Waking. He just has to be there to be picked.
Mira, the Older in charge of the Waking of the Mamas, told her Li would be there in the Waking. It’s supposed to be the Priestess’s decision, but when an Exile is this old and this pretty, he’s a sure pick for the Waking.
There is Mira herself, ahead of Li in the road. She makes sure Li sees her, almost blocking him. Mira has a reputation for taking the best Dads before the Waking. “Just making sure they know what they’re doing, mija,” Lady heard her say, all fake smile. Lady feels the jealousy Jemma described about Apple stabbing her, too.
“We gotta get outta here,” Jemma says again, and Lady looks at her closer. She’s gone, her eyes vacant. Lady watches the way her fingers tremble, as if they’re tapping out some Long Gone code. Jemma blinks once, twice, and she’s back.
“Where’d you go?” Lady says.
Jemma doesn’t answer, but she looks as if she’s holding back panic. “Would you ever leave here?”
“Why?”
“If someplace was better.”
“Ain’t no place better than the Holy Wood,” Lady says. She doesn’t understand what Jemma is saying.
“If someplace was, though.”
“I got the Waking coming up. One of us could be Head Gatherer to replace Zee.”
“Yeah, I know.”
What else was there out there? Their enemies wanted to kill them. “Out there you got Last Lifers and Palos, Jemma,” Lady says. “This is the safest place in the world.”
“But not for long, Lady. Apple’s almost seventeen. We got no time left.”
Ah. Apple again. Lady doesn’t understand that feeling Jemma tried to tell her about, that wanting one person forever. She likes Apple, but people die all the time.
“Look, mija. Nothing out there gonna give you guys time. You get what you get,” she says. She gestures at the blue sky, the brown hills, the green fields. “At least you can spend it here.”
She can tell from Jemma’s face that it isn’t enough.
* * *
Apple comes to Jemma after the final Sacred before the Waking, when she and the other Mamas wore the red lipstick on the lips and the black on the eyes for the first time. Any time you do a ceremony that’s mostly for the gods, it’s called a Sacred. The Priestess took them to a room in the Mamas’ house, lit with candles on altars made from old coffee tables.
The new Mamas knelt in front of flickering images of priestesses torn from Long Gone magzines. Jemma knows they’re sacred, that beauty is sacred—that’s why the pictures of the priests and priestesses are plastered everywhere on the buildings of Ell Aye. How do the red and the black help her to Gather, though, to fight? How does it help her be anything but a Mama?
Apple finds her on a rusting swing set next to a koi pond, trying to see herself underneath the black around her eyes. The moon is almost full because the Waking is soon, and she can almost make out her face in the water. He barely notices the black and the red. He only sees Jemma.
“Can’t you get Hyun to send someone else?” she says.
“Hyun’d Exile me for it. He can’t look past his pecker, and Heather got that. So it’s got to be—”
“I know. It’s got to be secret. We’ll cover for you.”
They’ll leave before the Squawk, the monthly meeting where the Olders and Heads talk about the crops, safety, babies, everything. And since everyone wants to talk and no one listens, the Squawk lasts forever. They’d be gone for most of the day before anyone notices they’ve left. Jemma hopes.
“Pendejo. Why you gotta go after the Last Lifers?”
“Something’s wrong with em. You saw it. I gotta keep you safe.”
She pulls him down toward her, trying to kiss him into staying when words won’t work. “I’d rather keep you safe. It’s dangerous in the Flat Lands.”
“Oh, now you think it’s dangerous?” Apple says, smiling. “The nice thing about Ending soon is I get to do all sorts of crazy.”
The goodness, the bravery, the protectiveness—all her feelings for Apple come to a point like a spear. Jemma pulls him down in earnest, makes him sit on the swing next to her, and straddles him. “I want you,” she says.
“Here?”
“I’ll let you go back to my room,” she says. “I’ll even give you a running start.”
She kisses him on the swing, though, wrapping her legs around his waist. He breathes deep and she feels the muscles of his back under her hands. Her tongue reaches his and it’s hard to remember to breathe and it’s hard to remember where she’s felt something before like the sensation she’s feeling in her mouth.
I’m thirsty, she thinks. That’s what it is. I’m thirsty and the only thing I can drink is him.
Apple whispers, and she hears it through her cheekbones before she hears it in her ear. “We should wait.”
“What?” That can’t be what he said. She can feel that he’s ready.
“I’m gonna go to the Flat Lands tomorrow. I gotta be sharp.”
“Oh, do you?”
“I gotta keep my Muscle alive tomorrow, and that means sleep. And the Waking is in two days. We gonna be together then.”
“I don’t want that to be our first time to roll,” she says. “I don’t want the gods anywhere between you and me.”
“I’m gonna be back tomorrow,” he says.
“You better,” she says. Tomorrow night.
Apple disappears to the Muscle’s house. He’ll be gone by dawn, and she already wants him back. Jemma slips down a back path to her house, trying to avoid torchlight and moonlight both. She almost stumbles over something in the path. She looks closer. It’s Pico, huddled in blankets, definitely not in his bunk.
“Oh, you,” she says. “What?”
“My bunkmates decided they’d sleep better if, uh, I slept here.”
“The Farmers?” That was the only opening for him when he arrived.
“Yeah. I showed em a better way to pick corn.”
“Teevee Buddha, Pico,” she says. “Trying to get Exiled here, too?” But she helps him up and shoulders his pack. She leads him to her house and shows him the patio. It will be warmer there. “Farmers don’t like nothing too smart to pull a plow,” she says.
Pico stifles a laugh. “Thanks,” he says.
Jemma looks at him while he settles into his blankets. She can just find the outline of his face in the filtered moonlight. “Apple taking you tomorrow?”
“Don’t worry, Jemma,” he says, so serious. “I’ll keep him safe.”
The image of tiny Pico keeping Apple safe is so funny that she laughs, too. A big one. “Right,” she says. “Right.”
“I got a lot of sperience wandering in the wild.”
“I spose you do,” she says, thoughtful. “Let me ask you this: Would you ever leave a place like this?”
“This’s a good place,” he says, and is silent so long she thinks that’s the end of it. “But you can always find a better one.”
“Well, what if there was a place where there ain’t no End?” She feels stupid saying it, and stumbles over her words trying to take it back. “I mean, there ain’t a place like that. We can’t run from it. That’d be—”
“The End can be ended,” he says.
“Say that again?”
“The End can be ended.”
“Like that Leong kid. Right. Only that don’t seem like living.”
“You think we the first people to ask, Jemma?” He speaks so intensely that Jemma thinks this is the first time she’s gotten a good look at him. The rest has been the reflection he wanted her to see.
“You think someone got it figured out?”
“Dunno. But if there’s one way to beat the End out there, there’s gotta be another one.”
Jemma feels something, looking at Pico. It feels like hope.
CHAPTER TEN
THE HOLY MOTEL
Apple bursts through the door on the top floor of the Stack, bow drawn and machete close to his side, ready for a fight. The other Muscle scream in behind him: With him are Blue, Hector, Jamie, Pico, then Shiloh the Archer and Ko the Asshole. The last two are difficult but the ones you want in a fight.
The smell hits him almost as strong, of violence and shit, but it’s the only thing left in a dead room.
The Last Lifers aren’t in the Stack.
The old Last Lifers would still be there after they chased out Jemma and Apple, eating and rolling and stabbing one another. They would stay in a den until they burned through all the food nearby.
“They been gone for a while,” Hector says. The tracker. “Maybe three days.”
It’s because of us, he realizes. They knew we’d be back, with more swords and bows. Which any normal person would—but Last Lifers aren’t normal.
“Check it,” Jamie says, the littlest Muscle, only a little bigger than Pico. He points out eight, possibly nine bare patches on the floor where they would have slept. The group was even bigger than the ones who attacked Apple and Jemma.
Pico squats near the ashes of the fire and pokes them with a charred stick. They put the fire near the window on a once-white marble surface, in the hopes that the smoke would be drawn out the window and nothing would catch flame.
“Apple,” Pico says, “Last Lifers don’t cook stuff.”
“No,” Apple says. Everyone knows they eat meat raw.
“These ones do.” Pico taps some ashy bones with his stick. But not just that—there’s the remnant of a pot of beans.
“They get along, they cook,” Hector says. “Starting to act like people.”
“They got my boy from back when,” Blue says. “He ain’t turning back into a people.” She’s the only girl Muscle. Any girl can be a Muscle, but with so many other things girls are allowed to do, most don’t bother. Blue is faster than anyone else in the Holy Wood, so fast that when she fights she doesn’t always need a machete.
Blue is supposed to be a Mama, just like the other girls. But she keeps on not having babies. Word is she gets the boys drunk during the Waking and sneaks out before the rolling begins.
The seven of them wind down the stairs. Apple remembers when he and Jemma ran down them, death at their backs.
“How they got guns? I thought there’s just the One Gun,” Jamie says.
“You telling me there’s just one gun in all of Ell Aye?” Pico says.
Apple has wondered this, too. He’s never gotten an answer, but it has to do with rebellions like Pablo’s and how easily the gun helped put it down. If Pablo had his own guns …
“Maybe that’s the only one that survived?” Blue says.
“But it’s not,” Apple says. “I had one shooting at me.”
They pause at the Holy Wood Road, usually considered the southern reaches of the Holy Wood. Anything beyond that is
pure wild. The Road may have been grand once, but it’s Long Gone, torn apart by giant fig trees that buckle sidewalk and street alike and break through second-floor windows. One tree has taken over the entry of a building and wrapped it in roots until it looks as if it’s more tree cave than door. A sign with a naked woman is all that juts out from the strangling branches and marks the building for what it was. Apple catches Jamie smirking.
It’s what’s left of the sidewalk that fascinates Apple, just as it always has. It’s made of a kind of cement that’s polished like marble. Set in the middle of each square is a pink star, each stamped with a different set of gold letters. They’re names, he thinks. What were they? Priests? Priestesses? Minor gods? Was this some kind of holy road?
Pico scrapes away the leaves and dirt from one of the stars. Apple marks Pico’s eyes, moving back and forth quickly, and his lips, silently sounding out something. I was right about you, Apple thinks. Better be careful, Exile.
“Where we going?” Hector says, but he’s probably already guessed.
“Where else?” Apple says. “The Holy Motel.”
“I hate that dude,” Ko the Asshole says.
“You hate everyone,” Apple says.
“I like your girl,” Ko says.
Apple brushes off the taunt. “We can wander around waiting for the Last Lifers to jump us, or we can talk to someone who maybe seen em,” Apple says.
“Who’s the Holy Motel?” Pico says, looking confused.
“It’s a what and then a who,” Apple says.
The what is a shambly structure on the Sunset Road a few blocks away, climbing with ivy so that you almost don’t notice the tight iron gate set in the green like a belly button. The who doesn’t open the gate unless you know exactly what to call him, and that changes all the time. “Watcher!” Apple calls up to the windows above the gate. The others watch the street. “Half Holy! Watcher!”
Nothing. What was the name he gave Apple last time? Right. “Tim!”
There’s a long silence, but one that carries the expectancy of motion. Soon he can hear keys jangling on the other side of the gate. A hole the width of a thumb is blocked by an eye. Apple can see it blink. “Tim?” the voice says.