Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  “Pico, can you move?”

  “I don’t know,” the shape says, and its edges blur again, re-forming a foot away. “I guess so, but—ow! Ow!”

  “Pico!”

  “Not that way.” And the voice sounds weaker. “Something’s wrong with my leg, my right one.”

  “Can you stand?”

  “Can you reach down and give me your hand?”

  She calls to Apple and Lady to let her slide, and now she’s buried to her waist. Her hands stretch down to Pico’s voice, but she can’t find his hands if they’re anywhere near. The blood is filling her head, and she feels thick and pulsing.

  “If you can see me, Pico, get closer.” Jemma hears a rustle, and then a soft whoosh and a slap that shocks her when it hits her wrist. Her fingers automatically grab for whatever that was and close on a strap.

  “You got it? Pull,” Pico says.

  She pulls and feels her shoulders strain. Pico is heavier than he looks. She feels herself scraping the side of the hole until her stomach is flat on the floor.

  “Get him, Lady,” she says, because her arms have lost their strength and she feels pinned to the floor. Lady roughly grabs Pico’s hand, and then all of them are jumbled on the floor, panting. There is another shape in the mix that doesn’t belong, though, a shining rectangle pinched between Pico’s thighs.

  “Jesucristo, no wonder you so heavy!” Lady says, voicing what Jemma felt. “Why you pull that out? You’re so weird.”

  “I fell on it, and it felt like a box,” he says.

  “So?”

  “Boxes’re usually useful.”

  And Jemma has to admit that makes a sort of sense. Then she realizes she has seen this before, Pico pulling a silver case from the floor. The blue haze showed it to her. Now he has the case. What else has it showed her that hasn’t happened yet? Didn’t it show her a charging bear at the Waking? She hopes that one isn’t true.

  “Can you stand?” Jemma asks, and in reply Pico slowly rises. He takes a ginger step, gasps, then takes another.

  “I can’t run, but I think I can—yeah, I can walk,” Pico says, and he hobbles toward his bicycle, the silver case under his arm.

  “Jesucristo, both of you injured now?” Lady says, taking in both boys. “We only been gone two hours!”

  The rest of the aisle is clear, and then Jemma is at the door of the skyplane, open to the pavement only a step above.

  First she smells the air, rich with jasmine. Then she sees the stars and knows that daylight is not far from them. They need to find cover by morning.

  “Can we reach Downtown by morning?” she says, but then sees that the others’ attention is elsewhere. Pico is looking at the silver case, and Lady is looking at Pico. His pants are torn, a long slit going from his ankle to his knee.

  “It don’t open,” Pico says.

  “You bleeding,” Lady says. “You don’t feel that?”

  Pico shakes his head. Jemma lays down her bike and lifts his torn pant leg.

  A patch of skin glistens wet and black in the moonlight. The cut is deep and wide, and not flowing enough to cleanse the wound. “It’s gonna feel really bad soon,” Jemma says. But she has to get them moving first, especially if the boys are traveling slow.

  Pico can mount his bike, but the case is more of a problem than the leg is. He can’t figure out how to carry it, and he won’t leave it behind. Finally Apple slips a belt through its handle and throws everything over Pico’s shoulder.

  “That ain’t worth the effort,” Lady says.

  “I hurt myself to get it,” Pico says.

  “You hurt yourself cuz you didn’t watch where you going,” Lady says.

  “I’m still hurt,” he says.

  Jemma looks down the 101. The Downtown are ahead of them, the Holy Wood and Last Lifers behind. The sky is starting to glow behind the shapes of the Towers. If there’s enough light for her to see the Towers, there’ll soon be enough light for their enemies to see them.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE SILVER FLOWER

  They crawl the last miles into Downtown—that’s how it feels. Pico can only pedal with his left leg, and Lady can hear a lopsided rhythm every time he pushes with his left and moves the right leg around without putting pressure on it: grunt, tire squeak, wheel clicks, grunt, tire squeak, wheel clicks, grunt.

  Apple doesn’t make a sound, but when Lady catches his unguarded face she can see him wince.

  They have to get into Downtown before dawn—but Lady has no idea where they’re supposed to go when they get there.

  “The Library Tower,” Jemma says when Lady asks.

  “What? And what’s a library?”

  “The biggest tower in Downtown,” Pico says.

  “Oh, you mean the biggest thing in the sky? Say that first.”

  The Downtown tribe doesn’t live Downtown, but they guard all the roads into it to keep their sacred place empty. This place means something to them that it doesn’t to the rest of the Angelenos, but even she can understand the pull it holds on the horizon. She’s visited the Downtown twice in their village, built into a giant stadio from Long Gone. And even though she knows their faces, even though they are sisters and allies, Lady knows this: If they find the people of the Holy Wood entering Downtown, it will mean death.

  She almost thinks they can make it there in the dark, but when she can see where the 101 enters Downtown, the sun bursts between the towers. “They can see us,” she says to the others, but realizes that if anyone has been watching, they already could. They’d just need enough light—

  Enough light to aim.

  Beneath them, beneath the 101, is the other great road that marks the boundary of Downtown. The cars on it look on fire in the morning sun, and then they’re gone as the bikes cross into the sacred city.

  The walls and buildings around them take a whole new shape, and she sees what the Muscle would see—too many places to attack, not enough places to hide. They’re on a wide concrete plain sparsely populated with cars. Ahead is a steep canyon with giant buildings looming. They’re bristling with arrows in Lady’s mind. If the Downtown were guarding the 101, wouldn’t this be where they are?

  Apple sees it when she does. He would have seen it sooner if he weren’t dulled by pain. “Stay as low as you can, everybody,” he says. “Stay low and by the cars.”

  The first arrow doesn’t make a noise until it hits the car to her right. It would have torn through her neck, but it clatters off the window. “Hide!” Jemma says ahead of her, and all of them are off their bikes and pushing them behind cars. Lady collapses against the side of the car and hears two more arrows, one of them clanging off the metal. It takes four more breaths before she can look up to see that Apple is next to her, and Jemma and Pico are safe behind another car ahead of them.

  Not for long, though. The next car is fifty yards away, so they can’t move from car to car without being seen. If they stay, the Downtown can walk right up to them and slit their throats.

  Fortunately, they brought their own Muscle.

  Apple nocks an arrow and waits for a movement. He pulls the string back—

  And screams. The string snaps back without the arrow, which drops harmlessly to the ground, and Apple holds his collarbone in agony. He collapses against the side of the car just before two arrows, tracking his screams, sail overhead.

  Lady can see the building that launched the arrows. It’s nearly windowless except for a glass block of a tower at the top, capped with a giant corkscrew of metal. She watches it for movement, and then she sees a slender shaft flying from the roof below the corkscrew.

  She’s not strong enough to reach the archer with that bow. The Downtown have practice and gravity on their side.

  But then Lady almost laughs out loud: They have bows. We have the gun.

  She calls to Jemma in a whisper that just carries between cars, and Jemma nods. Lady watches Jemma unsling the gun from her back.

  An arrow glances off the glass in front
of her. Lady doesn’t think the gun will have the same problem. And now they have a target. She gestures to Jemma, who follows her finger to the roof and sees the archer’s head.

  Jemma lays the gun on the car, keeping her body hidden as much as possible. She squeezes the trigger.

  The stone next to the archer shatters. She fires again and it hits the stone below. If noise alone could kill the archers, they’d be fine.

  “You’re the worst shot I’ve ever seen!” Lady yells at Jemma.

  “I don’t know how to shoot!” Jemma shouts back.

  “Let me try!”

  Jemma shakes her head at first, but then slides the gun toward Lady along the road. Lady’s never held it as a weapon before, but she’s seen the Oldest use it and thinks she understands it. She pushes the brass shells into the chamber, flicks the safety switch, and crawls toward the flattened rear of the car.

  The gun feels at home in Lady’s hand, and she can see in its sights the head of the archer, too stupid to duck even when his targets carry a gun. She breathes, stilling her chest until nothing can move the gun, and squeezes it so gently that she doesn’t realize she’s fired until she hears the crack—and then a shriek.

  She didn’t hit her target in the head, but she hit him. He won’t fire again.

  “Ride!” she yells, but Lady sees Pico and Jemma already pedaling hard from the corner of her eye. She makes sure Apple has made it onto his bike and then she rides, too, the gun across her shoulders and her bike in motion before another Downtown archer can step to the ledge. Lady and Apple catch up in a few seconds, because although Pico seems to have forgotten his injured leg, he still can’t pedal as fast as she can.

  A short ramp opens to their right and they peel off toward it. Jemma chances a look over her shoulder and shakes her head, grim. “About five of em. On foot, thank gods,” she says.

  They pedal through brush so thick that the buildings above seem to glow green, filtered as they are by the leaves. And then it opens up in front of them, more a giant silver flower than a building. Lady has never seen it from the Zervatory, has never seen anything like it ever: a steel structure not made of walls, but of sinuous, curving petals like a rose that opens up to welcome them. As they ride cautiously toward it, she sees it’s covered with thin panels of metal. Some of them have been peeled back as if a giant were opening an orange, and green is bursting out of every crack, but it doesn’t take away from the grandeur. She feels as if she’s stumbled into the garden of the gods.

  A thin stairway beckons them up into the blossom, and Lady feels compelled to follow it. She hesitates, thinking of Pico and the blood caking on his leg.

  “We can make a stand here,” Apple says, looking at it with a Muscle’s eye. It’s overgrown, it’s easily blockaded, and it can give them as much protection as anything else around. And Pico shouldn’t be riding on that leg.

  Pico makes it up the steps with his arm over Jemma’s right shoulder, and his bike in her left arm. Apple can put a bike on his good arm if someone else lifts it for him. Lady carries the other two bikes, and they climb slowly up the stairs.

  Metal gates, covered with a mesh of wires, block the stairs almost at the top. One of them is open, and they shut it behind them. The lock doesn’t work, long rusted in place, but a sturdy branch locks it for them.

  If Lady thought she was in the garden of the gods before, this is a garden for very small gods. It’s filled with trees and flowers crowding out a path of winding flagstones. They push into the garden and find another rose, a fountain made out of shattered blue china. Lady knows it’s a fountain because water is miraculously still bubbling up. The water and the rose are edged with slime, but when Lady sips it, it still tastes pure.

  “I never seen a fountain still working,” Lady says, awed. “This’s gotta be a sign from the gods.”

  “The gods can wait. Right now, I want to clean this leg,” Pico says, a trace of his old self pushing through the pain.

  So Lady opens her pack to her store of medsen. The Gatherers cut themselves sometimes on their foraging trips, and they can’t count on making it back to the camp for supplies. She has ripped cloths and stuff for pain. Jemma dips her canteen into the fountain and pours its contents over Pico’s leg, over and over until the wound seems clean and open, and Pico winces. The pack has nothing for fections. The Parents taught them that fections are things you can’t see but can still kill you. A lot of Children die from fections.

  “I wish we had booze,” Jemma says.

  “To drink,” Lady says, so quick and deadpan that even Pico laughs.

  When they have bound his wound and tried to immobilize Apple’s shoulder with a sling, they collapse on springy tufts of grass growing up along the pathway.

  “What is this place?” Lady says, and she thinks of how rarely she’s ever asked that question.

  “I saw the words ‘hall’ and ‘concert’ on our way up,” Pico says, and Lady almost chokes.

  “Oh yeah, he can read,” Jemma says.

  “That explains a lot, you freak,” Lady says. “That news to you, too, Apple?”

  “I knew,” Apple says. Of course.

  “I think this place is for music,” Pico says.

  Lady’s thoughts are climbing up the silver petals, in a direction they’re not used to going. They sing in the fields of the Holy Wood, but to build this?

  The travelers are beat after traveling all night, so Jemma and Lady draw straws to stand watch, and Lady loses. Pico and Apple they let rest.

  Next to the stairs is a narrow passageway that twists through the metal to a low wall, where Lady can crouch and just see the street where they came from. With the trees it’s only a narrow band, but she’ll spot anyone who comes their way.

  The search party, when it arrives, is not as motivated as expected. They glance toward the steps, and Lady reaches for the One Gun, but it’s almost as if they don’t want to see the hiding place. And she thinks she’s right: They don’t want to see her. The stairs are easily defended, and if she’s really there with the gun, which she is, she can kill all five of them before they reach the top. They’re Angelenos. They don’t want to kill Holy Wood any more than they want to die.

  The Downtown party moves east, toward the morning sun, and from the way the sounds trail off, she thinks they turn north to the 101. She holds her post while the others sleep. After all they’ve been through, they need some peace.

  Doesn’t she need that, too? Lady’s alone with her thoughts for the first time since Li attacked her, and now she wishes they would go away. She’s not used to thinking about her feelings, and they stretch her mind like an unused muscle.

  She thinks about a village of girls pretending that rape isn’t a word, about Jemma saving her from it and then ripping her away. She shakes her head, refuses to give Li a permanent place in her mind.

  She hasn’t slept since yesterday morning, and she isn’t sure she can make it through the watch. So she explores the garden. The moment she moves along the silvery curtain of the hall, Lady is awake. The walls above her flutter in shining waves, holding down and reflecting the blue of the sky.

  Glass doors, broken by time, split the wall. She walks through without having to touch the handles, into a silence she hasn’t known—the interior is as hushed as a grove of trees, and every sound seems to disappear into the fir beams jutting from the wall. Then she notices more: bear droppings, tiny animal skeletons, and, farther in, human skeletons.

  What if a bear still lives there? She hopes it doesn’t come home while they’re here. But something about the still of the hall draws her in, deep into a giant room filled with seats that remind her of their church in the Zervatory. Light filters down from a tear in the roof. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to see a thing.

  “So this is where you sang.” The words hang in the air for a moment longer than they should, and the feel of them pushes a song to the surface, one that she hasn’t thought of since she was in Daycare.

  Her throa
t is tight, choking on tears that won’t come out. But where the tears won’t, the notes will, and they rise through the light like motes of dust.

  I could be a farmer

  A tailor, a doctor

  A fighter, a lover

  None of it matters

  All of me in this world is you.

  You will not know me

  No one will tell me

  The steps that you take

  The hearts that collapse

  All of me in this world is you.

  So stay with me, child

  Drive back the wild

  The world has no life

  Beyond the one in your eyes

  All of me in this world is you.

  The room still rings when she finishes. Now she understands why they built it, to make music soar like nowhere else in the world. The words still swim through her head.

  She won’t cry. She won’t be a victim. But she still wants that fat little baby. She wants the swell in her stomach. She wants to touch and be touched. Screw you, Li, for turning a roll into something to fear.

  Searching for a familiar sensation, she combs through the curls of her hair with her fingers as she has every day of her life since she was a toddler. No one else in the Holy Wood has those curls. But this time they brush across something hard, sharp.

  The hairpin. The one she stabbed Li with, which probably saved her life. She’d left it in her hair in the scramble down the hill from the Holy Wood. This one is as long as her hand is wide, with a flat shimmering back that looks like abalone shell. She picked it because it looked like something the Children could never make.

  But now she only sees the point, a tiny dagger still crusted with Li’s blood. She doesn’t wipe off the blood. She wants to remember that she drew it. Lady has always worn her hair loose and tangled, but now she pulls it up in one hand like she did for the Waking and slides the pin in place. Not because she wants to look like one of the old priestesses, but because she always wants that pin within reach. For the next time.

  The sun has crossed into the western side of the sky, and sharp beams glance toward them from the silver rose, before she wakes them. “It’s afternoon,” she says.