Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  “How long you known?” she asks.

  “What really matters is how long my tribe knew.”

  That’s why they kicked him out. They knew the Parents used letters, but that was lost long ago. And at some point someone decided that all the Parents’ learning must have caused the End, and they started to think that reading meant you were a witch. A bruja. It meant you were dangerous.

  “Your priestess could have—”

  “She coulda killed me,” he finishes for her. “I was already Touched. But they Exiled me. The youngest Exile in—well, my whole life.”

  “But what is it like to read?”

  Pico is silent so long that he seems to have forgotten to answer. And then, quietly: “What if you was surrounded by pictures that the Children drew after hunts, after worshiping, and your eyes was closed? What if you never saw em? And then one day you opened your eyes and the walls all meant something?”

  Jemma imagines the hallways of their homes, the way they’re covered with exploits in chalk and paint. The capture of the deer. Trading with the San Fernandos. A lion attack.

  “When you walk through the city down there,” he says, “you walking through letters and signs and books, and they all tell you where to go and what to do, but you don’t know what they mean. But when you do—you unlock the world.”

  Unlocking the world. There’s a thrill buzzing through her now. Unlocking the world is all she’s ever wanted.

  “I want to read,” she says.

  “I’ll teach you.”

  “But first—”

  “But first you want me to break Apple out.”

  “Yeah, I do.” She pauses. “Why do I feel this way about him? Why I gotta have him so bad? This … love … was that normal?”

  “I don’t know love,” he says. “I barely got friends.”

  “The Parents, they write about it?”

  “That’s all they wrote about,” Pico says. “Love. Love and death.”

  “Now all we got is death.”

  Pico nods, then says, “Why not Lady? She’d do anything for you.”

  Jemma’s fought with herself. “Lady would do anything for me. But she deserves to be a Mama. I ain’t gonna take that from her.”

  Even though she doesn’t say everything, he seems to understand. “Okay.”

  “We need some tar, some brea? Some booze bombs?”

  “Nah,” he says. “Think this one’s gonna be a whole lot simpler.”

  * * *

  The shed is windowless. The door is steel. The walls reek of pool chemicals that seeped in for a hundred years. Apple is staying in the only building in the Holy Wood capable of holding him: a concrete-block shed next to a swimming pool.

  The Hermanas haven’t bothered with a bed for him, just a single blanket on the ground. It’s covered with yellow bears in red shirts. Whoever drew them has never met a real bear.

  He feels better somehow that only the Hermanas are guarding him. Hyun tried to put some Muscle on guard, and they walked away. They wouldn’t guard their friend. But they’re still too scared of defying the Olders to break him out. No one wants to be another Pablo.

  Apple should have seen the Hermanas coming. Maybe he believed Heather was still the fifteen-year-old he used to know. Or maybe he got too removed from everything toward the End.

  It’s pointless, he knows. His death doesn’t change anything for anyone except Heather and her stupid power grab. What does he lose? Eight weeks? Six months? It’s nothing.

  Only it’s not.

  Six months would be everything. Another week would be everything. What if that was the last time he touched Jemma, at the edge of the Circle with all the Holy Wood pouring around them? He feels tears welling.

  “Stop it,” Jemma used to say when they were only Middles and she found him crying. “You never see me crying.”

  “Just means my heart is bigger than yours,” he said back then. And that look of impatience and kindness on her face may have been the reason he fell in love.

  The door opens, and before he can blink away the sunset, two of the Hermanas leap through it with their staffs raised. The first blow catches him by surprise, catches him across the ribs. He rolls to avoid the second and the butt of the staff hits him by the spine. Another connects with his legs. The Hermanas have pounded nails into the sticks so that the nail heads make the staff hurt even more. All he can think of is the studded tip, hammering a mark into his back.

  He wasn’t planning on fighting, although he probably could. The Hermanas have started wearing machetes, too, and if one decides to pull hers out while they’re whaling on him, he could lose a hand. After the third blow he starts to change his mind, but now it’s too late. Now his breath is ragged and the best he can manage is not getting more hurt. A fourth blow glances off the side of his head and his vision blanks for a moment.

  “Jesucristo, don’t kill him,” a voice says, cool and amused. The sticks halt, and another shadow crosses the door. “It ain’t smart to have the best Muscle in the Holy Wood guarded by a couple a girls who don’t got their boobs yet,” Heather says. “I figured this’d make it even.”

  Apple touches the side of his head. It’s bleeding. Imagine if the Hermanas were less good at their jobs. The door remains open for the light, but he counts at least four Hermanas outside besides the two in here. Taking no chances that he will run or fight. Heather crouches down to get close to his face.

  “You thinking that I’m picking on you,” Heather says.

  “Nope.”

  “Not a little?”

  “I think I tried to do something about the Last Lifers that you woulda never let happen, and that’s the one thing you can’t afford. You want to replace the Muscle with something you can control.”

  “That’s part true. Don’t want anyone to think the Muscle can be trusted after all this,” she says. “But Apple, it’s also true I am picking on you. You deserve this.”

  “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “It’s what you didn’t do to me.”

  “You asked me not to.” That’s not accurate. She begged him not to. Heather was a frightened fifteen-year-old, small for her age. She picked him at the Waking, he suspects, because she knew he didn’t want to roll, either. He kissed her once, but she was shaking so hard that he stopped even before she asked. They wouldn’t do anything. They would keep it secret. She slept with her head on his chest, and in the morning he walked her back to the house of the Mamas, where she didn’t have a baby.

  “You was wrong, though. You should’ve rolled with me. You should’ve made me a Mama.” As if he were the only one who hadn’t wanted to.

  “You mad with me … cuz I didn’t put a baby in you?”

  “They made me keep trying, with worse and worse people each time. Fat and small and sickly. Then I got pregnant and … you know.”

  The whole village knew. The baby was stillborn. That happened often enough, but people remembered hers because Heather acted like she didn’t mind.

  That has nothing to do with him, though. He says so, and she shakes her head. “If it was your baby—he would have lived. I would’ve been a Mama,” she says.

  “You wanted to be a Mama?” He’s never seen Heather hold a baby. She speaks of the Mamas with disdain.

  “I didn’t want to have a baby,” she says. “But I wanted to be a Mama.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t. Cuz you a boy,” she says. “Now I’m an Older. I got an army of Tweens. I’m about to become the most powerful girl in the Holy Wood. And none of it counts half as much as being a Mama.”

  It’s true, he realizes. The Olders are tolerated as barren failures. “So you want to End me and the Muscle for that?”

  “I want to End all of this. Where the girls only get to be Mamas and the boys get to go out and fight.”

  “Cuz you only let us fight.”

  She ignores him. “I’m tired of people telling me I’m only as good as what my body can do.
”

  “Funny,” he says. He understands Heather better than he ever has, better than probably anyone does in the Holy Wood. “I feel the exact same way.”

  Heather nods at the bigger Hermana, who hammers his collarbone. This time something snaps.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE WAKING

  The new Mamas are blessed by the Priestess every month when the moon is full. Like everything meant for the gods to watch, the Waking of the Mamas will happen where the Parents used to watch the gods: the Zervatory, the giant domed building that overlooks the city.

  The Zervatory is too far from the lake to be part of the village’s daily life, but it’s its heart all the same. Every week they trek along the ochre pathways through the hills and hear the Priestess tell equally dusty tales of life before the End. When Jesucristo and Buddha talked to the Parents and the Children through the most powerful of gods, Teevee, the faceless one.

  For the Mamas, they unhitch the donkeys from the pump so they can ride them to and from the Zervatory. They joke that the Mamas won’t be able to ride a donkey for days after, so they should take their chance now. It’s probably true, but Jemma is tired of hearing it.

  Jemma barely recognizes Lady next to her and knows she is just as unfamiliar. They are made up like the priestesses on the billboards, smoky eyes and red lips. They wear gowns rescued from the moths, draping down the donkeys’ flanks and almost touching the ground. Once the Parents wore them to meet with the gods, on red carpets as long as entire streets.

  The Zervatory takes her breath as it does every time she sees it. The Parents built other buildings, but few so filled with such grandeur and purpose. It has three copper-green domes, two of them flanking the big one like a Mama with twins. The small domes house the scopes the Parents used to watch the stars, and even that sentence thrills Jemma: The Parents built a building just to watch the stars!

  It’s even more dominating from below, with a sheer white wall that could repel attackers. And it has. The Zervatory isn’t just for Sacreds like the Waking. Halfway up there is a circular pathway, guarded by buttresses, that lets their archers rain arrows below. More archers can guard approaches from the roof. It’s the Zervatory that helped end Pablo’s Rebellion.

  As Jemma rides up to the Zervatory, she sees the wounds that the rebellion left. Bricks fill the windows once left open in peaceful times. Axes scarred the massive iron doors, and flame blackened the ancient white.

  The Star Watchers Pillar still bears the bullet hole that killed Pablo. It’s a Mamas’ story already, the one bullet that killed a rebellion. The One Gun keeps the village protected and in balance. If you touch it without permission, you are Exiled. And this hole is why.

  That’s why Apple was doomed when he walked in the gate with more guns. If she’d told the secret of the One Gun to Apple, how the Olders conspired to have only one at a time, he might be safe now. But she never thought he’d find a gun on his own.

  There is time for rest after they dismount, before the Waking. She catches Pico in her sights while he studies the Zervatory. The Exiles, now that they are part of the Holy Wood, can join the Waking.

  Jemma slips toward the stairs on the west side of the Zervatory, trusting Pico to follow. During times of war the stairs are blocked with sandbags, boards, and spikes, but now she can climb right to the roof on the outside of the building, the stairs tracing a circular path. They open onto a deck that spans the entire building, broken up only by the green of the three domes.

  From where she stands, the broken towers of Downtown almost float between the domes, separate from the world. As she steps closer to the edge, though, the city widens and fills the horizon.

  “The Parents liked a good view,” Pico says next to her. He’s slipped up almost to her side without her hearing, something he does a lot. He prefers the ancient shoes with the rubber soles and can move almost without a sound.

  “Welcome to the Zervatory,” Jemma says.

  “Ob-servatory,” he says automatically.

  “What?”

  “Observatory. It’s on the sign.”

  “It’s gonna take a while to get used to that,” she says.

  Jemma looks out to the towers of Downtown, their remaining windows glinting gold in the late-afternoon sun. “You just got here. You sure you want to leave again?”

  “There’s no here,” he says. “You and Apple saved me, not them. I’m just someone eating their food.”

  They wouldn’t let her see Apple like she knew they wouldn’t, although she had to try so that it wouldn’t look strange. The Hermanas have been at the jail all day. Sometimes as many as six of them, never fewer than two. “Are the answers down there?” Jemma says, pointing Downtown.

  Pico says, “There’s a building called a library, where all the books are. That’s where the Parents kept their knowledge. If they wrote down what caused this, it’ll be there.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Reading,” he says, and then triumphantly pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. It’s a map, encased in plastic. When Pico lays it on the wall and twists it, she can see that it matches exactly what she sees before her. She can almost see the lines of the streets click into place.

  This map has pictures of some of the buildings printed on the map. Pico points at one of them, the Zervatory—Observatory, she corrects herself—and taps the map with his finger.

  “This is it, this is where we standing,” he says. His finger slides left along the map to a tight cluster of pictures. Even Jemma can tell he’s pointing at Downtown. “This is the Library Tower. We look there.”

  “Let’s look now,” Jemma says. She steps to one of the little scopes lined up against the wall, a weathered silver shell with fingerprints carved into it. The scopes require a coin to work, but the Children don’t require a coin for anything. So they just pry open the bottom of the scope, and the coins cascade out onto the roof. She holds her eyes to the holes, places a coin in the slot. The city whirs into place and the disc clatters to the deck.

  The scope is stuck in the streets directly below the Observatory. A church tower, an open belfry with four tiny spires flanking it, is so crowded with crows that she wonders if someone climbed into the belfry and died. But then Downtown and the Library Tower.

  The tower isn’t a perfect cylinder, Jemma can see right away—it’s wrinkled with folds like the barrel of a cactus. The top is crowned with glinting pieces of glass.

  “It’s as tall as this mountain! So … all of that is books?”

  He answers with a question of his own. “It ain’t that far away. How come you guys never went?”

  “It ain’t safe to travel the Flat Lands,” she says, although he knows that. “But mostly it’s cuz the Downtowns would kill you if you tried. All them towers is sacred to em.”

  “It ain’t that far,” he says again, but softer.

  They are quiet for a moment, and they can hear the bell that means the Waking is to begin. “You know what you gotta do tonight,” Jemma says. “I’ll be busy for a bit.”

  And then they go down.

  The Waking is in the chapel, under the great dome at the center of the Zervatory. The ceiling is blue, like a miniature sky. Only a little daylight reaches it, so torches line the walls and soot flares up into the dome. All the chairs, shabbily padded and able to point almost to the ceiling, face a central altar that looks like a keyhole. Inside the altar is the Ball: a bronze sphere with dozens of eyes, looking like pictures she’s seen of the moon.

  The Priestess is at the altar already, dressed in a white gown with sleeves that billow like wings. She is not made up like the Mamas, because she will never be a Mama herself, so her face is unadorned and stern. Her name is Pilar, but no one is allowed to call her that now. Jemma doesn’t know her. None of them do. She was chosen for her sight when she was seven, and she’s lived here, alone, cut away from the village for almost half her life. Her only company now is her novice, who lives here, and the sentri
es, who don’t.

  Lady seems to glow. She’s been kind to Jemma all day, but grief and sympathy don’t sit long on her. Jemma doesn’t force the pity from her. This will all be over soon. The least Jemma can do is not ruin Lady’s Waking.

  Jemma looks at her oldest friend and wishes again that she were coming with her. It would never work, though. Because Lady’s mind is on becoming a Mama, yes. But also because Lady has room in her life only for this life.

  A trip Downtown for Lady would be like a trip to the stars.

  The sermon starts as it always does, with the First Mamas, and Jemma chants at the moments they chant without really listening. The words throb like a heartbeat.

  The Priestess says that Jesuscristo will come back, the Parents at his right hand. The cars will start again, the skyplanes will fly, the medsen will flow. The Children will have the shelter they’ve always wanted, the arms of a Parent, and the End will be beaten at last. Come, Jesucristo, she thinks. But only if you bring the Parents with you.

  Then Pilar’s voice changes, somehow flatter and faster, and Jemma looks up at the altar for the first time in minutes. “The Children are waking,” she says, each word clipped. “I see the Palos moving, the Last Lifers joining them. They’re growing, getting stronger. The Little Man binds them together.”

  Jemma slides her eyes to the side and sees that no one else is tracking Pilar. How are they not hearing this? Every word Pilar says, every time her mouth moves, Jemma hears it as if it’s coming from inside her own head. Jemma feels the buzz in her head, the way she did in the Bowl, although the buzz has started to dim now that she knows to look for it. Pilar is having a vision from the haze, and the haze wants Jemma to know it.

  Jemma closes her eyes and there’s a hazy burst of images in front of her, wrapped in the blue dust that she thinks means a vision. Maybe that’s why no one else can see it. All she can focus on is a bear, charging through—a forest? A building? She can’t tell.

  “The Mamas are fertile,” Pilar says in her regular voice, and her strange words exit Jemma’s head. So do the pictures.

  “The Mamas are fertile,” the village says.