Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  “I know,” Trina says. “And I’m sorry.”

  “Then you gotta fix it.”

  Trina steps close to them so that only they can hear. Her throat is taut, as if it’s holding in words that can’t be allowed to escape. “I can’t fix it, not now. The other Olders will vote with the Priestess. And Heather’s gonna become the Oldest after all this. So … whatever you do, it has to happen tonight.”

  “What?” Lady asks, but Trina just shakes her head.

  “Whatever you do. Tonight,” Trina says, and Jemma feels as if she’s just been thrown a rope.

  The crowd disappears quickly once Trina and Pilar do. Hector turns back into the house to grab his stuff, and Jemma nods at him. No need for pretenses. What they need is speed.

  “What now?” Lady says.

  Jemma looks at Lady. It has to be done. Only Lady’s not going to like it, because Jemma now realizes Apple isn’t the only one who needs to escape. “Come with me,” Jemma says. “We gotta move.”

  * * *

  Lady’s head can’t make sense of the past fifteen minutes: Trina, Jemma, Pilar, Li, pain, and fear. All she can manage is to keep one foot following after the other, following after Jemma. Jemma seems to be leading them deep into the Holy Wood.

  They stop at the door of a house. “You okay?” Jemma says. “You need anything?”

  “Right now? I like your idea of cutting Li’s balls off,” Lady says, hard and bitter.

  “He needs it,” Jemma says, and she pulls Lady toward her. Jemma’s not a hugger. Lady wonders how frightened she looks.

  “He was the wrong one,” Lady says into Jemma’s shoulder. Then Lady notices that she’s been shaking.

  “We need your stuff,” Jemma says. Somehow Jemma has picked up her own backpack from the ground without Lady noticing. And now Lady sees she’s standing in front of her own front door.

  The house is still quiet when they enter. “Why do we need it?” Lady says, but Jemma shakes her head and leads her down the thread-worn carpet of the hall to her own room. Jemma picks up the pack that Lady uses for Gathering and opens it, then stuffs in a blanket.

  “Change your clothes,” Jemma says.

  Something in Jemma’s voice is so sure, so strong, that Lady starts stripping off the gown even as she asks questions.

  “We going somewhere?” she says.

  Jemma nods.

  “Tonight?” Lady says. “Why tonight?”

  “You heard Trina. What you think happens tomorrow?”

  Li’s face, leering and bleeding, is all she can see. They wouldn’t put the two of them back in the same room. They couldn’t. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she says.

  Jemma hasn’t stopped. She keeps shoving clothes and tools into the pack. It’s a good thing she knows me so well, Lady thinks, before wondering why so much is necessary.

  “Think of any girl you know that said rape,” Jemma said. “Half Holy’s Mama, anyone since. How’d that go?”

  “You don’t think I shoulda said anything.” Lady finds herself madder at Jemma at that moment than she’s been at anyone since Li lunged at her.

  “No. I’m saying that’s the Holy Wood. And now we gotta get you out of it.”

  “I don’t want to leave here,” Lady says, confused. “This is home.”

  “Come with me for a few days, and you can come back when it settles down,” Jemma says. Lady doesn’t nod, but her ability to resist is gone. She just reaches for her pants. She winces when she slides them on.

  “We gonna need bikes,” Jemma says. “Can you ride—can you ride like this?”

  “I think so,” Lady says.

  Each house has a handful of bikes next to it, and Jemma finds two that have a lot of miles left in them. She squeezes the tires on one and pushes it toward Lady. Jemma takes a patch kit and a small pump from the basket next to the bikes and stows them in her pack. For the first time, Lady notices how thick the pack is.

  “I want to be a Mama,” Lady says.

  “I know.”

  “Just not like this.”

  “I know.” Jemma touches Lady on the shoulder, lets her hand rest there. “I’m sorry, Lady.”

  But you didn’t do anything, Lady thinks.

  They don’t head toward the gates by the Circle, which would probably still be guarded tonight. Instead, Jemma winds through the backyards of the houses overlooking the Lake of the Holy Wood until she reaches a small gate that the Parents must have used to walk down to the water. She’s really thought this through, Lady thinks. Even with Apple, she’s thinking of me first.

  “Your dress,” she says to Jemma, who looks down at it absentmindedly.

  “Oh. Right,” Jemma says. She pulls the Long Gone gown over her shoulders. She’s already wearing her Gathering uniform of shorts and a tank. Lady realizes she never intended to go through the Waking.

  They open the gate and wheel their bikes carefully down the slope to the road by the lake. “Ready?” Jemma says, and Lady nods slowly. Maybe a few days away will help her think about this clearly.

  Two shadows step out of the woods near the lake. The bigger one she recognizes almost immediately, because no one else is as tall as Apple. She almost shouts to see him alive, she’s so happy.

  Then she understands that the little shape is the Exile. “He coming with us?” Lady asks. When Jemma nods, Lady realizes she doesn’t mind so much.

  Until she recognizes the silhouette rising from Pico’s shoulder. Few days, or few weeks, all that is a lie. Jemma doesn’t intend for them to come back. It’s one thing to say that she was attacked. But some things won’t be forgiven, and this is one of them. Because the Exile has the One Gun.

  “What did you do?” she says, backing toward the slope they just descended. The gate is shut again, but she doesn’t think Jemma locked it. She’ll tell the Olders she wasn’t attacked, she just panicked at being a Mama.

  “I—we need you to go with us,” Jemma says. The bells start ringing in the village, the bells that mean someone is attacking … or someone has escaped with the One Gun. Just like that, the gate above is slammed shut on Lady forever. They’ll never believe she wasn’t a part of this.

  She can’t go back.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE SKYPLANE

  Whatever the Hermana did to his collarbone with her staff, it’s not going away. Apple attempts to hold on to the handlebars, and every bump and jiggle sends tremors through his shoulder. His left collarbone hurts from the beating. It might be cracked. He shouldn’t be on a bike right now, but the clanging of the bells behind him tells him to keep pedaling.

  Angelenos try never to travel at night, not without numbers and torches. But the moon is full, and they see the landscape in sharp relief. They pedal past the lake, the moon buried in the water, and Apple thinks he will never see it again.

  They glide down the hilly streets, feathering their speed to go through the hairpins safely. The only sound is the whir of the rubber on the crunchy asphalt. They’re careful of the dark patches in the road, which hide rough pavement. Pico is good at spotting the cracks. “I’m glad we don’t gotta pedal back up,” he says. Lady doesn’t say anything.

  He’s alert for any sound that breaks through the rushing wind. Bears and Last Lifers should be in their dens, if the world works the way it’s supposed to. Right before the bottom of the hill, a coyote stands on the hood of a Long Gone car. Its head swivels and tracks them as they pass, but it doesn’t move or call to its pack.

  Lady stops at the bottom of the hill and signals them. She points ahead. The streets are thick with trees, arching and blocking the moon. The way through is a black tunnel, filled with whatever is waiting for them in the night. Even if they dared to light a torch so close to the Holy Wood, the speed of the bikes would blow it out. “You wanna go through that all the way to Downtown?”

  “Maybe we can find a house and hole up,” Jemma says, uncertainty showing for the first time. She’s been hard and clear since they left the vill
age.

  “You need to get as much distance as you can,” Pico says, pointing to the gun. “Now that we got this thing, we got the whole village looking for us.”

  “Why ain’t they on us?” Jemma says. “If they left when the bells went off, they coulda caught us right off.”

  “The only reason we ain’t fighting off an army is that no one’s sure which army should be in charge,” Apple says. “Muscle won’t follow Hyun no more, and no one wants to follow the Hermanas. But they’ll figure it out soon enough.”

  “Either way, I ain’t riding through the dark all night,” Lady says. No one can argue against her, and wouldn’t if they could. She still looks shocked, angry.

  Apple remembers: the 101. They’re close to where he and Jemma crossed it last time. The Last Lifers were able to use the height against them. If the Angelenos can get to it, they will have a clear shot to Downtown.

  After ten blocks—ten blocks of unidentified noises in the dark—they find another ramp and climb up to the 101. They’re on the west side, the empty one, and the road is all theirs except for a few rusting cars. There are no voices or torches on the hill behind them. Maybe they will get enough of a head start, after all.

  Apple sees at once why the Parents built the 101. It cuts across the city grid as if it doesn’t exist, almost as if it’s a stream flowing down from the mountains to Downtown. The 101 looks as if it were grown, not made.

  He pushes with his right pedal and they’re off, silent except for the soft squeak of Pico’s wheel protesting against the night. They ride shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, dark-wheeled silhouettes made half of night. The white pavement of the 101 gleams silver ahead of them all the way to the towers, a river carrying them through the lonely dark to whatever the future holds.

  * * *

  It must be only a few miles to Downtown, but the dark has a way of lengthening the road. The silver of the 101 contrasts with the buildings and trees around them, making Jemma feel as if the world drops off the edge around them. The road isn’t as smooth or clear as it seemed. Long Gone cars sprout up in increasing numbers, and in between them cracks emerge that threaten to swallow their tires, if not entire bikes.

  They pedal and pedal but the wheels don’t turn any faster. Jemma has the gun now; its strap digs into her shoulder, and every stroke and bump knocks the butt into her.

  “I’m gonna have a bruise,” she says in a whisper, knowing that even though they feel like they’re the only people alive tonight, they’re not.

  “You deserve it!” Lady says. “How could you steal the One Gun?”

  Pico says, “We’ll need it more than they will. The four of us in the wild?”

  “That was your idea, Jemma!” Lady says, and she swerves her bike toward Jemma. She doesn’t mean to hit her friend, but the bike aims where you look. Jemma tumbles to the pavement without warning, and the gun flips over her head with a clatter that rings out into the night.

  Lady jumps off her bike to help up Jemma—and collapses on top of her. “Goddammit, Jemma! Goddammit!” she sobs. Jemma stays here.

  “I’m sorry, Lady.”

  “You took me from home!” Lady says. “You took me from home.”

  “I’m sorry. You know I had to.…” But she stops. All of it had to be done. None of it fits into the way the world is supposed to work. Finally she says, “There’s nothing there for us now.”

  “There was for me,” Lady says, and in that phrase Jemma can feel how Lady’s perfect world has crumbled. Then Lady cries. Lady never cries. They don’t touch her or talk to her until she finishes.

  Jemma doesn’t get on her bike right away but looks up the road. When she’s still, she imagines she can see farther. She sees a black line across the 101. As the line gets bigger, it takes form. She wasn’t sure they existed, but there it is, broken but real: a skyplane, fallen from the air like a stone.

  The skyplane must have been moving fast from the north when it landed, a stone thrown rather than dropped. Cutting almost across the 101’s northbound side is a ruined line where the skyplane hit first. That lane is ripped completely in half, and the skyplane lies directly in front of her in the southbound lane, half buried in the road. The wings are gone. Jemma recognizes it only by its tall tail and tubular body.

  Even buried, the skyplane rises over their heads. The wall is curved and slippery, but Lady dismounts and takes a run at it anyway. For a moment it looks as if she’ll reach the roof, but she slides back down. She might make it, given time, but Jemma knows there’s no way over it with the packs and the bikes.

  “Do we need to go back?” Apple says. He’s been deferring to her and Pico on direction. She watches how he favors his shoulder on the bike, too, although “favors” is too small a word. He winces at every bump.

  “I hope not,” Jemma says. The last ramp is half a mile back, and the streets next to the 101 look impassable. To the north, the skyplane’s trench has broken every route, and to the south, a thick jungle of trees has sprung up.

  “Through?” Apple says, and as soon as Jemma starts to say it’s impossible, she sees that maybe it’s not. To their right at the edge of the 101, there’s a crack in the skyplane. If it’s big enough, or if it goes all the way through …

  It is big enough, just, if they get off their bikes. Pico goes in first, and Lady pushes her bike and his after him before following. Jemma pushes her bike through the skin of the skyplane, watches it swallowed as if into a giant’s sideways mouth.

  A last breath of night air and then she’s in, too. She has to step down from the roadway into the plane. To her left are the seats where the Parents would have sat. To her right is the front of the skyplane.

  She expects it to be dark, but she’s not prepared for the sight of the light streaming through the severed head of the skyplane to her right. The fliers must have sat right there. The moonlit city to the south is framed in an almost circle by the jagged walls of the plane. Apple enters the plane behind her. He puts his arm around her, gingerly, and together they watch this sliver of Ell Aye. Whatever madness they’ve left behind, the world they face together now is stranger by far.

  Pico is standing at the edge of the broken floor, looking at the mess of cables and raw metal jutting out. Lady is just behind him, her eyes on the city. Jemma looks down and sees some metal in the trees below.

  A groan in the metal startles them, and Jemma takes new notice of where they’re standing. “We sticking out past the 101,” she says. “Step back.”

  “Look at all it took to make this fly,” Pico says, pointing at the frayed edge of the skyplane.

  “Step back,” Apple says. And with a sigh, Pico stands up, but not before they feel a jerk. He races past Jemma and stops sheepishly when the plane doesn’t move.

  Jemma looks toward the back of the plane. The floor of the plane isn’t perfectly level with the streets outside. It tilts sharply, so the windows on the far side are almost two feet higher than the side they came in, and the aisle slants to the left.

  There’s light in the skyplane, from the windows and tears in the skyplane’s skin. The moon punches through it in hundreds of fist-size scars in the roof. But none of them look big enough to crawl through. There’s no way out. She starts to climb back to the 101, but Lady grabs her arm. “Down there.” And Jemma can see, masked by the smaller beams, a wider patch of light that could be anything—maybe even a door.

  Finding the light is harder than it looks. The thin aisle pitches them to the left, and they can’t push the bicycles along it without bumping into the moldering seats at every row. The seats, and other things. Jemma feels something brush against her right knee, and she realizes it’s a hand right as she feels another. The Parents are still in their seats.

  “I think they’re strapped in, to protect em from the crash,” Pico says.

  “Didn’t do em a lotta good,” Lady says, almost cheering up.

  Jemma doesn’t know how they can still talk. Every bump, every brush of bones, and she feel
s herself weaken, even with the steady presence of Apple behind her. She breathes in, and all she feels entering her nostrils is the dust of the Parents, rising in puffs when they touch the old seat cushions. Her bicycle tire rolls over something big—a leg? The steady click of her bicycle wheel echoes through the plane, and she wonders who hears it. She sees skeletons everywhere, lit by the moon so the grins are even wider. It’s like being back in the Bowl, buried in the bones.

  And then Jemma realizes how much of this, the quest for Parents’ answers, the nighttime escape, is to get away from what lies there back at the village: more death like this. They can’t outrun it. She sits down in the aisle, surrounded by the bones of the Parents who fell from the sky, and gasps for breath.

  But they can keep running all the same. She tries to shake off her fear.

  “Can we go?” Pico calls from farther down the aisle.

  “Shut up, Exile! Jemma’s losing it,” Lady says, irritated and scared. But before she can say anything more, Pico bounds toward them. He can’t get past the bicycles blocking the aisle, so he just steps on top of the seats, hand on the ceiling for support. He jumps off the last one into the row in front of Jemma—and falls through the floor with barely a sound.

  “Pico!” Lady screams, and the scream is enough to break the hold the floor had on Jemma. She crawls forward, hands never breaking contact with the carpet, and feels the floor gaping. The crash ripped pieces of the plane away, and one of those holes was waiting to swallow someone as skinny as Pico.

  “Pico, you there?” Lady says, and a low groan answers.

  “You know his name now?” Jemma says to Lady.

  “I’ll get him,” Apple says.

  “With that shoulder? Who’s gonna pull you up after?” Lady says.

  “Hold my legs. I’m gonna look down there,” Jemma says.

  With Apple on her legs, she threads her torso slowly through the floor, head dropping into the darkness. There’s no moonlight, but a gasping light seems to linger on the edges of everything so that as she waits, a boy-shaped shape emerges below her. It’s not moving, but it appears to be sitting.