“There’s a town under there, Julia. We flooded a town so we could have more water.”
“It’s not just for us. Everyone around here shares that reservoir.”
“Maybe,” I said, and swapped my shorts for hers.
We looked down at my wet shoes and socks. “I can give you clean socks, but I didn’t bring any extra shoes.”
“It’s okay,” I said again.
“Stop saying that!” she exclaimed. Her voice cracked. I froze. She rubbed her eyes. “Everything is not okay out here. The person, the drone, you falling in the water—all of this was a terrible idea!”
“We’re going to make it, Julia,” I told her.
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
“Because we have to.”
She sighed and bent over and picked up my wet shoes. “Come on. Carefully in your bare feet. I’ll try to get some of the water out of these.”
She led me from behind the trees and over to the others, where she sat down and pulled the insoles out of my sneakers. When she twisted them, a stream of water rained down.
Theo unfolded the map again. “Assuming the tracks come out on the other side of this reservoir, if we keep walking northeast through the forest, we should meet up with them again.”
“Why not just walk the edge of the reservoir?” Julia asked.
I pulled Julia’s socks on. They were knee socks with stars all over them.
“We’ve lost a lot of time already,” Theo explained. “We need to make it up.”
“But we don’t know what’s in the woods,” Julia said.
“The forest is a whole lot less frightening than outsiders,” I said.
“Mori and I know our way around the woods,” Ilana said. “We’ll be fine.”
Julia glanced over at Ilana, but she swallowed whatever it was she was thinking.
“I guess we should get going, then,” Ilana said. She went first, picking out a path between the trees and the occasional moss-covered boulder. Her feet were steady and sure as she marched along.
“Pillow moss,” she said, and pointed to a patch growing in the shade of a tree. Just beyond it was a stretch of American pokeweed with bright green leaves and shiny purple-blue berries that were lovely and tempting, but poisonous. Maybe we did know enough to make our way through this forest after all.
“The good news is, if whoever was flying that drone saw us, then they would have been waiting here,” Benji said. “So, I think that danger has passed. Smooth sailing from here on out!”
“Benji!” I said, my voice ringing around the forest. All my friends turned to look at me. I lowered my volume. “I can’t believe you just said that. You totally jinxed us. Again.”
“Seriously, Mori, you can’t possibly believe in superstitions like that,” Theo said to me.
“I can and I do. Benji already jinxed us once.”
“That lake was there whether he said anything or not,” Theo told me.
I knew he was right. “Okay, but even if it’s not really real, why chance it?”
Theo shook his head. “You’re so smart about people and nature, but, man, when it comes to stuff like this …” His voice trailed off and he kept shaking his head. “Total nimwit.”
Next to me, Ilana stiffened, ready to stick up for me.
“Wait,” I said. “Let’s go back to that part where you said I was super smart?”
I think Theo blushed a little, but we were all pink from being out in the sun over the water. “I just meant that you have a way of understanding—of seeing what’s really going on in people. You see the truth. But there’s no truth in superstition.”
“I just think there’s a lot about this world that we don’t know,” I said. “And when it comes to our safety, why chance it? Why tempt fate?”
“Says the girl who just drank duck-poo water,” Julia said.
“Fate is just a story we tell ourselves,” Theo said.
Maybe he was right. Maybe fate and superstition were just our brains’ way of making sense of the world around us, creating a story to explain events. But still. It seemed a big risk to doubt it when your life was on the line.
6
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Theo said.
We stood at the base of the fence, which reached at least ten feet into the sky. It was topped with curls of barbed wire with rusty teeth like in a twisted shark’s jaw. It made the fence around Old Harmonie seem like a garden decoration. We’d always been told that it wasn’t the fences that kept us safe, it was us. This was a fence meant for safety.
The last of the trees put us in shade, while the sun dappled the ground on the other side of the fence. Sunshine and, of course, the tracks that we needed to find to get Ilana to Cambridge and to Dr. Varden. My feet felt like something was sucking them into the ground, and pulling me with it, and it wasn’t just the water in them. “Smooth sailing,” I muttered. “See!”
Theo dropped his bag and pulled out a pair of fierce-looking scissors. He stepped toward the fence, but Benji stopped him. “Wait!”
Theo hesitated.
“This whole thing could be wired up,” Benji said.
“Like it will shock us?” I asked.
“No. Like it will send a warning back to whoever put it up. We could be surrounded in seconds by who knows what. The people running the reservoir, most likely, which, you know, leads directly back to Krita people. Best-case scenario, we get sent home.”
I sank down to the ground and brought my knees up to my chest.
“Wait here,” Theo said. “Julia, head down that way and see if you see any—anything.” He started marching along beside the fence in one direction while Julia went in the other. Even Theo wasn’t sure what could possibly help us.
“I just can’t believe we’ve come this far and dealt with the reservoir and seeing the outsider and everything and now this. How are we ever going to find Dr. Varden? This whole thing is hopeless!”
Ilana looked down at me. “You’re giving up already?”
“No, I just—”
Her face had the smile I’d grown so used to but had almost forgotten. It made her whole face dance. “It sounds a lot like giving up to me.” She reached her hand out to me, then pulled me to my feet. “If I’d known I’d gotten involved with such a scalawag, I never would have agreed to come along.”
“I don’t think that’s what ‘scalawag’ means.”
Benji was leaning over next to the fence. “Stay here,” he said. “I need to go get some rocks.”
“A right scurvy maiden, then,” Ilana said as Benji wandered toward the woods.
“That’s definitely not what you mean. Scurvy is like a sickness. From not eating citrus or something.”
“Did you pack any citrus?”
I looked down.
Ilana put her hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Mori. We knew this wasn’t going to be easy.”
“Having to cross a reservoir and get through a barbed wire fence didn’t even occur to me.”
“Escape and evasion aren’t exactly in your wheelhouse.”
She was right. How had I ever thought that I had what it took to get her to safety? I had never had to plan anything like this because everything had always been taken care of for me in Old Harmonie. The most planning I ever did was deciding whose house to meet up at in the morning. And my parents had made sure I wouldn’t have the courage when they dampened my bravery. I should have known better than to try something so big and so important. “Maybe you shouldn’t have let us break you out.”
She glanced away.
“I just meant that I wish you had a friend who was—I wish I were better. I wish I could help you better.” My voice cracked.
“Mori,” Ilana said.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked. “I really am. Back in Old Harmonie this seemed doable. But I’m just a natural, Ilana. I don’t have all the—you know, all the stuff in my head that you and Julia and Theo h
ave. Benji’s naturally smart, but me, I’m just me and—” My words came fast and hard and choked me. I wiped hard at my eyes with my fists.
“Our heads are no better than yours, Mori. Trust me.” Her voice was soft and low, right next to my ear. She put her arm around me and pulled me closer to her.
“I don’t want to fail you.”
“You’re not going to.”
“I think I already am.” My breath caught in my throat and I coughed. “Right from the start, just by being me—”
She cut me off with a shoulder squeeze. “I need you, Mori,” she said. “We’re the Firefly Five. Between us we can work this out. But I—all of us, really—need you to be you and to believe that we can do this.”
And then she hugged me again. Her arms were long, longer than my mom’s, I thought, and when she hugged me it was like she was giving me a little bit of her strength.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Louder!”
“Okay!” I yelled. And then we broke out laughing. For a minute, it was like nothing had changed.
Then Theo came crashing back toward us. “What’s going on? Why are you making so much noise?”
Benji returned carrying two round stones. “I don’t know what’s going on with them, but I will tell you this: they make terrible pirates. Also, you’re all lucky I’m a genius.”
Benji explained that the way the fence was built, only half of the wire that was twisted into the fence had sensors in it. “We just need to cut the other side. Here’s the problem, though—you ever see those old movies where they have to defuse a bomb and they have to cut the right wires because if they cut the wrong wires, the whole thing will blow? And they have to wonder if the bomb maker used a logical system, or if the maker was trying to be deceptive and use an illogical system?”
“No,” Julia said. Little beads of sweat were gathered on her upper lip, like dew on a blade of grass.
“Well, just imagine. And the fence is kind of like that.”
“What are the rocks for?” Ilana asked.
“Ah, that’s where my brilliance comes in. I don’t want the fence to snap back and reconnect the wires or cross the wires so we can use them to hold the sections apart.”
“Or someone could just hold the sides apart,” Julia said.
“Maybe,” Benji said. “Anyway, I’m ninety percent certain I know which ones to cut. But whoever put this fence up, maybe they’re the deceptive sort.”
Theo held the scissors out to him. “I trust you,” Theo said.
So Benji cut the fence.
Nothing happened. No alarm sounded and no one appeared to arrest us or whatever other dark fate might await us. Benji kept cutting. Julia worked beside him, carefully untangling the links in the fence until there was a space big enough for each of us to crawl through. I went first, as usual, because I was the smallest. My gaze drifted up and settled on a sign:
OLD HARMONIE LIMITS
No Trespassing
Violators Will Be Prosecuted
• KritaCorp •
“We put up the fence,” I said.
Theo looked where I was looking. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Old Harmonie doesn’t come this far,” I said. “I mean, we’re outside of Old Harmonie by a lot. We left when we crossed over our fence. And we only have the one fence, right? Because it’s not the fence that keeps us safe, right?”
“Maybe this is old?” Julia asked.
Benji shook his head. “I don’t think so. Only the barbed wire is rusted. This looks well-maintained.”
“If all this land belonged to Old Harmonie, we could have room for more people,” I said. “Or farms. Mr. Quist was always saying how we needed to be more self-sustainable with food. We could’ve been doing it out here.”
“There is the reservoir,” Benji said. “That’s probably what this fence is for.”
“But all those woods between Old Harmonie and the reservoir? All that space?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Theo said.
“It does matter—”
“It doesn’t,” Theo said. “And we have to keep going.”
7
It wasn’t long until we found the tracks again. They were shining in the sun, black with a patina of orangey green, like a little kid had drawn them and pressed too hard with too many crayons.
“It’s about twenty-three miles to Cambridge. If we walk twenty-minute miles, that’s eight hours of walking, give or take.”
“Twenty-minute miles seems like a fast pace to keep up,” Julia said, looking at me. There was a leaf stuck in one of her braids.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. But my heels were already starting to burn as blisters formed from my wet sneakers.
“If we do thirty-minute miles, that’s close to twelve hours. It should still be light out when we get there, and that’s what’s important. I don’t want to be out in unknown territory in the dark.”
We all nodded in agreement. Going toward the city was dangerous enough—all the stories we had heard of it told of overcrowding, illness, and crime—but going there at night was a bit too much to even contemplate.
“Everyone packed sandwiches, right?” Benji asked.
We all nodded and Theo opened up his backpack and handed each of us a protein bar. “We have more than enough food to last us as long as we’re careful. And as long as things go as planned from here on out.”
“That’s a big if,” Julia said. “Plus, once we get there, we’re counting on someone coming to get us and bring us home. The rest of us, I mean.”
“We should have enough food to get home, too, if it comes to that,” Theo said.
But if no one from Old Harmonie was willing to come to get us in Cambridge, then maybe there would be no home to come back to.
The protein bars were heavy and tasteless, but we chewed and swallowed them down. I took a deep sip from my water bottle.
“Water is a different issue,” Theo said. “We don’t know if we’ll be able to find clean water along the way.”
I took the straw out of my mouth. “They’re just kind of dry,” I said.
“I guess we should get going,” Benji said. He stood up and walked toward the tracks. We all followed him. They stretched out in front of us like a ladder to the sky. My shoes were starting to dry out, but there was no denying the blisters popping up on my heels and the balls of my feet.
The only sound was our feet crunching as we walked, the occasional smack at a fly. It seemed entirely possible that we could walk the whole way to Cambridge without even speaking a word to one another.
As we walked on, an embankment grew up around the tracks on either side of us, like we were sinking down into a valley. Then the fences appeared. Twisted, rusted chain links with corrugated metal pushed against them. They were festooned with ribbons that hung down in the still air. Old, tattered, and devoid-of-color ribbons were right up against shining new ones in purples, reds, golds—every color, really.
“Hey, Mori, you been sneaking out here at night? Making the world all pretty?” Benji laughed.
“Oh you know me, just leaving Old Harmonie every chance I get,” I tried to joke. The air around us felt so heavy. It didn’t help that the sun was on us now, burning our skin and making us sweat.
“If Mori did it, they’d be more ordered. And in the colors of the season, of course,” Julia said. She had a smile on her face. It wasn’t her real smile, but I was grateful for it.
“I wonder who did do it?” I asked.
“Whoever lives there,” Julia replied. “On the other side of the fence.”
We were quiet as if listening for voices or some other sign of life from the far side of the fence.
“Maybe they’re like messages?” I said. “People used to tie yellow ribbons around trees to honor soldiers who hadn’t yet returned from war. Maybe these are for people who have gone. There was a song about it t
hat my baba liked to sing to me.”
Julia walked up to the fence and rubbed her fingers over the ribbons. “Some of them look like they’ve been here a long time.”
“Maybe friends do it,” Ilana said. She touched her finger to a gold-and-purple ribbon. “There was this bridge in Paris and couples, like romantic couples, used to put padlocks on it as a way of locking their love together.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Theo said.
“It’s symbolism,” Ilana said. “Anyway, it got so heavy, they were afraid the bridge would collapse.”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“I think they cut them off. Ribbons make more sense.”
“They do,” I agreed. “Locks might seem more permanent, but the ribbons are more sustainable.”
“Like friendship,” Ilana said. “Just kind of blowing in the wind. Easy peasy.”
And with her, friendship had felt that way. She’d blown in like a warm breeze and we’d hit it off right away. We escaped into the woods together, creating our own world: Oakedge. We were growing a garden with plants from our neighbor Mr. Quist—I had some of the pea shoots in my backpack. We’d climb up together into the split-trunked oak and survey our kingdom.
And then things had gone off course, so here we were peering through an old fence. It was mostly grassland on the other side and some expanses of black tar. But, off a ways in the distance, I could see some houses. “Look,” I said. “There’s an old bike over there.” It was a faded green, and only had one wheel left on it.
“Creepy,” Julia said.
“There’s a scooter, too,” Benji said. “And that looks like an old four-square ball right there.” He pointed at something pinkish red and flat as a pancake. “It’s like the place where toys go to die.”
“Stop,” Theo said. “Don’t let your imaginations get away from you. There’s a town up that way. We’re gonna walk right by it. Probably kids play out here and these are just toys they left behind.”
I slapped at a mosquito on my calf. Theo pushed his bangs off his forehead. They were sweaty and got stuck in funny spikes. “We shouldn’t be standing here in this grass getting ticks or whatever. We need to keep going.”
The Daybreak Bond Page 3