by Lyga, Barry
They held each other and rocked each other until they both fell silent. Deedra would have imagined it to be impossible to sleep after all she’d been through, but she was suddenly exhausted.
“Can we sleep here?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “This is the safest place I know.”
Gratefully, she curled into a sleeping position on the grass, which was softer than she would have thought. Rose lay down next to her. Tucked against him, surrounded by the scent of the Arbor, she fell asleep almost immediately.
Hours later, certain it had been a dream, she feared opening her eyes.
But the Arbor was still there. Even more glorious by a rare, brief glow of moonlight.
Rose had gathered fruit and came to her, arms laden with it. “You did this?” she whispered in awe, looking all around them. “If you can do this, you can change the world.”
Rose gave a little half shrug. “The world has to want to be changed,” he responded at last.
“But if you can just—”
“It’s not that simple. Dr. Dimbali was a big help, too—he helped me figure out how to accelerate things.” He pointed up at an angle, and she followed his gesture. Overhead, hanging between old steel beams, were what her squinting eyes told her were panes of filtered glass. “They strengthen the sunlight,” he explained. “I sort of made this place into a giant greenhouse.”
She didn’t know what a greenhouse was, but she was impressed by the effort it must have taken.
“I read about them in a book once,” Rose went on.
“Another one? There’s more than one book?”
Rose laughed. “There are entire buildings of them!”
Rose reached up to rub a leaf between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t just snap my fingers and make this happen. I’ve always…” He shrugged. “It’s funny because I’ve always had an affinity for plants. I never knew why, but it makes perfect sense to me now. But I don’t control them. I had to do this the same as anyone else would. Or could. One plant at a time. One seed at a time. It took time just to accomplish this, my little Arbor. And that was with my working constantly.”
She touched the tree. The roughness of its bark. Her fingers lost themselves in the channels of it.
A sneeze brought her back to the moment. Her eyes watered and her head felt too full, as though someone had syringed a pound of lard into her sinuses.
“Perfect timing,” she muttered. “I think I’m getting sick.”
“It’s probably allergies,” Rose told her. “It’s been generations since anyone has been exposed to so much pollen. I’ll have to work on that, I guess.”
She sniffled. “It’s okay. I’ll be all right.” She turned a slow, lingering circle, spinning the place—the Arbor, he’d called it—around her. A montage of greens and yellows and purples and bright colors she’d seen on computer screens, but never in person. She’d never even imagined such colors could exist in the real world. A Broken Bubble full of life in the midst of decay.
“Dr. Dimbali was working with me on it,” he said sadly. “Trying to come up with ways to make it easier and faster to grow things. More widespread. Deedra, don’t…” He sighed heavily. “Don’t think I can save the world. Change the world. I don’t know if I can. All I know for sure is that I can do this.” He gestured around them.
“Maybe that’s enough for now,” she said, and kissed him.
That’s when Max Ludo’s voice boomed out at them, filling the Arbor with its poison.
Markard stood stiffly at Max Ludo’s side as the Magistrate barked into the portable PA.
“Don’t even think of moving!” he bellowed. His voice echoed and reverberated within the confines of the old arena’s shell. “If you surrender right now, we won’t open fire.”
That was Markard’s cue. He flicked at the screen of his comm and twenty handpicked DeeCees—Max Ludo’s most loyal soldiers—stood up from their hiding positions in the upper tiers of the arena. Twenty sniper rifles took aim.
“You’re in our sights, you little prick!” Ludo’s eyes gleamed. “Surrender and we’ll let the girl live.”
“Whatever you do,” said Dr. Dimbali, “don’t shoot the boy. He’s—”
“Shut up,” Ludo advised.
“My men know what to do,” Markard assured Dimbali.
They had spent the past several hours scouring every last cranny of Dimbali’s building. When they’d come up empty, the Magistrate had completely lost not just his temper, but also the very veneer of civility. He’d exploded into a rant of epic proportions, cursing with extravagant creativity and vitriol. The DeeCees present had made themselves scarce, returning to the street as Ludo rampaged through the basement of the building, knocking over screens and furniture, bawling to the ceiling at the top of his lungs. It was a tantrum the likes of which Markard had never before witnessed and—knowing the Magistrate’s moods—he would have feared for his job, and possibly his life, had not the focus of Ludo’s anger been so obviously Dr. Dimbali, who had led them inside with promises of a murderer and a weapon delivered.
In those moments, Markard had instead feared for Dimbali’s life and, if asked, would not have given the man even odds on surviving the day. But Dr. Dimbali—with his trembling and obsequious manner—somehow had the skills and the savvy to calm the Magistrate. Markard watched silently as Dimbali slowly talked Ludo down from his inchoate rage.
“There is one more place,” Dimbali said with confidence. “A place he would go to hide.”
It had been a hustle to get ready and assemble a group to mount an assault on the old arena near the Territory border. Markard had almost forgotten the place existed. And when Dimbali led them there, the mountains of debris and trash surrounding the place convinced him that no one in his right mind would flee there. Not even two kids on the run from the Magistrate’s ruthless brand of personal justice.
And then he’d seen the inside.
Agog and gape-mouthed, he’d stared at the heaven nestled within the innards of the decrepit arena. His mouth watered at the sight, the smells.
“If you or any of your men speak of this,” Max Ludo said pleasantly, “I’ll have you hanged. With your own intestines for rope.”
It didn’t need to be said twice.
And now Markard’s men had drawn beads on the figures down below, the kids doing what Markard himself longed to do—walking on that grass, touching those leaves…
Markard had seen Rose shot dead in person, had chased the kid through the factory, and had seen him perform some damn-near-impossible acrobatics. So he was surprised to see him up and walking, but not too surprised. This whole setup that Ludo and Dimbali had cooked up was obviously way, way beyond him. He wanted to know how the kid had come back to life. He wanted to know how the hell the old arena had become heaven on earth.
But asking questions was an easy way to end up on the wrong side of Max Ludo’s favor. So he tamped down his curiosity and accepted the microphone from the Magistrate.
“Ms. Ward!” He tried to make his voice soothing and reasonable, but the amplification and the echoes made it mechanical and harsh. “Ms. Ward and… Rose. This is Superior Inspector Markard. We have marksmen with you in their sights. No one has to die today. Just lie flat on the—” beautiful, gorgeous, endlessly green grass “—ground and no one will be hurt.”
He peered at them through his binoculars. They were frozen in the middle of the arena, clinging to each other. He zoomed in to the maximum magnification, but he couldn’t make out their facial expressions.
“Hurry it along!” Ludo snapped.
“Magistrate,” Dimbali said in a low, comforting tone, “if it means recovering the Rose creature without losing the work I’ve put in, it’s worth a couple of minutes—”
“We’re using plastic bullets. He shouldn’t be hurt too badly. And even if he is, you can just bring him back again,” Ludo said carelessly. “Or you can do things with the corpse, right?”
Dr. Dimbali sigh
ed. “Magistrate, I remind you that the processes required to ‘resurrect’ Rose were and remain extremely difficult, the materials arduous to obtain. There’s no guarantee that a second time—”
“Wait,” Markard told them. “They’re moving.” He blinked. “Oh, hell.” He thumbed his personal comm. “Fire!” he yelled.
“What do we do?” Deedra murmured, her lips against Rose’s cheek. As soon as Max Ludo’s voice had boomed out at them, they’d gone still. Moving only their eyes, they confirmed that there were DeeCees high up above them, aiming rifles from multiple angles.
They were at the bottom of a well, with guns ringing them from on high. Cross fire would kill them.
Deedra didn’t want to die. But she also didn’t want to surrender. Surrender, she knew, meant putting Rose back in the hands of Max Ludo. Who would just hand him over to Dr. Dimbali for more experimentation. Dr. Dimbali would use Rose to figure out how to regrow parts of the world for people who could pay, people like Max. Sure, the world would be greener, but it would be no better off. It would just have beautiful scabs on its wounds.
Surrender would mean she would die, anyway. Once they had Rose, they didn’t need her. She was nothing. No one. They didn’t care about her. Just Rose. What he could do. What he was.
What he represented.
Then again, wouldn’t she die no matter what? If Dr. Dimbali was right, someone could turn the key to one of the death machines and then it wouldn’t matter. The Red Rain would come back, and the people with the keys would control it.
“You need to escape,” she whispered.
“We need to escape,” he whispered back.
“No. I’ll run left; you stay still.” The plan formed itself as she spoke it. “They’ll all focus on me, since I’m moving. Wait until the first shots, then run to the right.”
He held her tighter. “That’s a pretty stupid plan,” he murmured.
Around them, the Arbor filled with the sound of a new voice—Markard, she thought. It was tough to tell, what with all the echoes. “It’s the only chance we have to keep you alive,” she told him.
“Well, it ends with you dead, so I’m not into that plan.”
“Rose…” She couldn’t move her hands, so the tear gathering in her eye spilled down her cheek unblotted. “I’m nothing special. You are. You have to live—”
“You’re special to me,” he said very, very calmly. “So we both have to live.” He tilted his head; his eyes were even with hers, and she saw no fear in them. “Do you trust me?”
“With my life.”
“Good thing.” She felt vines extending around her, and then he said, “This might get rough.”
And then—without warning—sepals flew up into the air, as though caught in a sudden updraft. They flared around them, blocking out the sky and the moon, and an instant later, the bullets started flying.
Rose winced as bullets shredded his sepals. But their sudden blooming had done the trick, providing a small bit of protection and also distracting the snipers.
In the same moment that he flared his sepals, Rose reached out with a vine, wrapping it around the closest of Big Boy’s branches. He pulled with all his strength, hoping that the branch was strong enough to support them.
Birds exploded from the undergrowth, ascending in a ferocious welter of squawks, twitters, and panicked music.
With Deedra tightly bound to him, he yanked them both to one side, zipping them at top speed through a thicket of bushes and then underneath Big Boy. The dull, echoing crack of gunfire overlapped itself in the confines of the Broken Bubble, merging with the birdsong to fill the Arbor with a discordant, half-mechanical, half-alive throb of sound.
He hissed in a breath as he and Deedra collided with Big Boy. A bullet had creased his shoulder. Red blood welled there, bubbling like thick syrup. It captivated him, entranced him, and the spell was broken only by a groan from Deedra.
Releasing her from his vines, he leaned her against the tree trunk. A bullet had hit her, too. In her hip.
“How bad is it?” she asked, biting out her words against the pain.
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” he told her. He examined her hip, careful not to touch too close to the wound. “It’s a bruise. I think they’re using plastic bullets. It doesn’t look bad.”
She nodded, her face pallid and slick with sweat. “I would hate to feel one that looked bad, then.”
“Might have a bone fracture,” he said. He couldn’t be sure. His own shoulder throbbed; the plastic bullet must have fragmented upon firing to cut him like that.
Her eyes refocused on his shoulder. “Damn. We’re a matching pair.”
“They don’t know what they’re in for,” he told her with a confidence that surprised him. “Can you move?”
She tested her weight on the wounded side. “Yeah, a little, but there’s nowhere to go. They—”
“There are many places to go,” he told her. “And we’re going to go to them. But first…”
“Where the hell are they?” Max Ludo cried. “What the hell is going on down there?”
Markard licked his lips as he stared down into the lush and vibrant greenery of the arena. The two kids had just vanished. The trees offered excellent cover. He thought maybe one of his men had hit someone, but there was nothing to see, no way to tell. The plant growth was messing with the infrared drones he had hovering above the arena—they’d never encountered such abundant foliage and had never been calibrated for it.
“Send the men in there!” Ludo bawled. “Get their asses down there now and have them search under every goddamn branch if they have to!”
“Magistrate,” Markard said tentatively, “my men have never encountered jungle warfare before. No one living has—”
“Your men are very capable, I’m sure,” Dimbali interrupted.
Markard ground his teeth together. “Your opinion is noted, Doctor. But—”
“He’s right,” Ludo snapped. “Send them in. And…” He trailed off, then his eyes lit up. “Give me a comm. I have an idea. If the plants are a problem, let’s get rid of the plants, eh?”
Markard commed his men: “Abandon your posts and regroup on ground level for a sweep of the arena.”
Off to one side, Max Ludo was shouting into his own comm, and Markard couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“They’re moving down,” Rose said.
“What do you mean?” Deedra’s mind was clearing after the shock of being shot. She felt as if she were hearing him for the first time, even though he’d been talking for the past minute or so.
“The men who shot us.” He gestured up. “They were up there. Now they’re moving down. Coming down here.”
“After us.”
“Yes.”
Her hip pulsed with pain. She could put weight on it, but even taking a single step lanced a hot bolt up that side. Walking would be difficult; running was impossible.
“You’re only shot in the shoulder. You can run. Go.”
He grinned at her. “That’s ridiculous. Then they would catch you.”
“And they won’t catch you. Better than nothing, right?”
“Worse than both of us getting out of this.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You can’t—What are you doing?”
He was staring up into the branches above them. “Can you climb?”
“I’ve been climbing my whole life. What do you mean?” And then she got it: the tree. He wanted her to climb Big Boy.
Unreal. She followed his gaze. It was possible, she figured. Her hip hurt, but she would mostly use her arms. The branches appeared sturdy and crisscrossed one another. It would be no more difficult than scaling a mountain of debris. Probably a good bit easier.
“I’ll give you a boost.” He squatted down, and once again she was reminded that he was so much stronger than he appeared or let on. In moments, she was perched on a low branch.
“Go as high as you can,” he told her. “Stay quiet. Hide among
the leaves.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You have to trust me.”
She shook her head. “Whenever you say that, you end up getting killed.”
“Not this time. I’ve been thinking like a human this whole time. No more. Now it’s time to think like a plant.”
CHAPTER 50
Rose strode into the middle of the Arbor.
For the first time in his life, he felt connected. Connected to Deedra, yes, but also connected to the Arbor, to this place he had grown. He imagined he could feel through every flower petal, every blade of grass. Could sense motion in the tilt of a branch or stalk.
Not true. None of it true. But he felt it nonetheless.
They were coming for him.
They would want him alive, if at all possible. That was his only advantage. They’d shot at him from a distance because they feared him. They’d tried to wound him. And they had.
Now they would try to weaken him further. And take him down.
That wasn’t going to happen.
The first men spilled out of a doorway to his left. He didn’t even look their way as an amplified voice broke the new stillness of the Arbor:
“Lie down on the ground, hands on your head! Do it now and no one gets hurt!”
A lie, like all the others. Humans lied so easily.
He didn’t lie down. He didn’t move at all.
“Where is the girl? Down on the ground! Do it now!”
More men, now—from the north. He was being surrounded. Twenty of them that he could see, all armed, all crab-walking as they fanned out in a circle around him.
It was the stupidest thing they could do. Were they really going to shoot at him while directly across from their comrades? Had they thought of this at all? Even with plastic bullets and body armor, they would be risking injury to one another.
“You will not take me!” he called out to them. “I will not be moved!”
“Get your ass on the goddamned ground!” the voice wailed in a near panic.
They knew what he could do. Or thought they did.
They respected his power.