Even from the boat, Thea could tell New York was silent.
“Is this a horror one?” Thea asked. She was starting to grow disinterested in the AR experience for the sake of grabbing gossip; it no longer seemed worth it. She wondered if she could stop the game and go back home and forget that she ever tried to exert a little influence and failed.
Lesedi glanced over her shoulder and shook her head. “You’re impatient,” she said.
“I feel like this was a known quality about me,” Thea replied drolly.
“Well…” Lesedi drawled, facing the approaching harbor and dock with ease—their boat following a direct path, driven by the program. “What if I said I didn’t know?”
“A random one? Today? Ugh. Can you call it off?” Thea reached back to dramatically unzip out of her AR suit, but Lesedi rushed back and put her hand over her friend’s and stopped it from moving.
“It’s not a random scenario. I chose it. I just don’t know what will happen,” she said with extreme slow deliberation, weighing each word individually and not breaking eye contact with Thea. The unblinking communication was clear and steady. “This is one of the scenarios we’ve worked on. But we’ve each worked on different pieces. I’m doing a test run. I get one run.” Deliberate. She blinked. And then her voice slipped into a purposeful sing-song, “Just one test run to spot glitches. Ready?”
Thea quieted. She swallowed. There was no way the higher-ups would let Thea take a ride on a test run to a top security clearance glitch check. No way.
“Who am I?” she asked in a low whisper as the boat hit a small wave.
“Coding trainer,” Lesedi swallowed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Thea grimaced. She thought they’d pick some extravagant AR and find some fancy way to communicate via written notes. However, she remembered the test runs on top projects weren’t recorded. No documentation of their existence could exist. Smart, Lesedi, smart, thought Thea as she smiled and then immediately frowned.
Despite understanding the why, Thea wasn’t able to process the what. What was she seeing?
Thea was familiar with New York and its history. She knew the skyline, studied it—knew her land as a timeline, from the lush and undisturbed island with natives to the smoldering wreckage it became. During the Great Divide, some enemy (initial news reports steered away from placing blame on any US ally, loyal until the end) dropped a nuclear bomb in northern Manhattan. However, she’d been privy to photographs of the Land Teams cleanup efforts and knew the Freedom Tower and the financial district of lower Manhattan stood firm, if not radioactive for a few years.
But now, as the boat in their Augmented Reality Pod pulled up to the dock, Thea understood something she’d missed. The room filled with the distinct smell of burning. No, it wasn’t fog that bogged down the harbor as they made their way to the tip of the Island of Manhattan. It was smoke. All the buildings that survived all the wars, all the attacks, all the targeted hate and love, burned before them into oblivion. As the boat drew closer to the dock, the heat intensified and Thea felt the burn against her cheeks and her body.
This isn’t real. This isn’t real, she reminded herself as the flames became too intense and the heat registered against her body.
“Lesedi—” Thea groaned.
“You got this. This is just the intro. Three. Two. One,” Lesedi counted down and the boat bounced into place while the buildings of New York City burned to the ground, crumbling into a heap of ash and metal.
Chapter Thirteen
The Colony
formerly Jackson Lake, Wyoming
The Grand Tetons
LARKSPUR
The map led her to the Witch’s Castle—a monument between the borders of the Colony and the Children of the Lake. While the Colony didn’t boast any physical borders, everyone knew where the Children of the Lake started and stopped. And while it made sense there was a secret way to cut through the land, Lark was upset she never discovered it on her own.
How many times had she stumbled and studied the house on the border?
A permanent lump lodged itself in her throat.
The old mansion, now a rotting husk of brick, and its tunnels would take her close to Orin’s house and where his children waited for his return. She needed to get to them before the Fathers—she knew she was racing against time and she rushed as fast as she was able, tripping and stumbling down into the wreckage. Everything smelled like dark and dirt.
Octavia’s map was crude and exhausting. Thea walked into the old living room, turned down the stairs to the left of the pantry, and disappeared into a dark swell of stone of nothingness. Once she was safe underground, she opened the front zipper and pulled out her old crank flashlight, and she wound it until her wrists hurt before she turned it on to navigate the crumbling stairs.
Deep underground she traveled, only the first few feet in front of her illuminated.
Soon, she could only hear the sound of her breath and the light began to wane. She stopped and cranked the light again, bringing the full shine forward, and wearily she trudged down into a dank tunnel. She had a whiff of skunk and rot, but she only walked faster through those sections. After nearly ten minutes of trotting and walking at a clip, her bag bouncing on her back, Lark stopped and took in her current surroundings.
She was stuck in some earthen underground maze. Nothing smelled respectable and it was claustrophobic and warm.
Huddled against a muddy wall, Lark consulted the map.
She had to be close—so she persisted—and soon stumbled upon a series of stone steps. After a few yards, she found herself in front of a wooden door, unlatched, and she pushed it open and emerged into the woody patch of tents and cabins along the lake. She inhaled a big breath of fresh air and waited for the moment to pass.
It was the first time Lark visited the lake at all—it was the first time she saw the reflection of the stars in the water. The Children of the Lake occupied a vast swath of land around the Tetons and learned to stay undetected. All of this land was new to her. She gathered herself, took stock of her surroundings, took a breath and a beat, and looked down at the black lines on her arm.
Second house from the left.
When she arrived from the back path, stopped and looked to her left. In a row were old lake cabins—relics of a different time. One. Two. She took off and slinked around in the shadows, waiting until a man and a woman disappeared out of view, before she knocked on the wood door and waited.
The cabins didn’t have power despite its small porch light—forever silenced.
Nothing had power in the mountains.
A man opened the door. He had a long beard and he regarded Lark and her long black coat with intense skepticism.
“Curfew in place tonight,” the man said in a hiss. “Think it don’t apply to you?”
Lark saw movement and heard hurried whispers behind the door.
“I’m here for… Kansas Rose,” Lark announced, knowing she had to make an impression fast before someone discovered her who didn’t want her there.
At the mention of the code words, the man slipped outside and grabbed Lark by the shoulders. His thumbs pushed against her collarbone and his eyes glared bright and fearful. Lark swallowed, hard, unable to understand why her presence required such force, but he shut the door behind him and they squared-off in the cold. He shook her slightly.
“I know you,” he said.
The fear in his eyes made Lark flail under his grip. She couldn’t answer.
“Wrong house,” the man continued to hiss. “You careless, bitch. You think I need trouble right now? Do you?”
“No, I—”
“They set a curfew,” he said and spat.
She wondered if that was supposed to mean something. She tried to say Kansas Rose again, but the man spun her, keeping her close, and shook her toward the street.
In the moonlight, Lark could see the Fathers. The androgynous cloaked rulers of the land led a group of crying childr
en out of a house on the other side of the path. The children went willingly and without a fight, but their sobs and protestations carried down the path and fell on Lark’s eyes.
Lark tried not to look down at her arm to spot her mistake. But she’d been too late. Even if she hadn’t read the map wrong, she’d have run right into the Fathers escorting Orin’s kids into their own hands.
Lark failed the mission.
“Lake view…” she repeated to no one, understanding now it meant from the lake’s view, not from the view of the lake. She was three houses away and three minutes too late.
“The Fathers arrived,” the stranger said. His jaw was set in anger. “Our instructions are clear…”
“I know,” Lark said.
He spun her back to face him and even though Lark struggled against his strength, he kept a hold on her. The man, no different she supposed from Orin, leaned close and bit his lip.
“They told us about you…” the stranger now said with a quiver on his voice and Lark couldn’t believe that the stranger could possibly mean her. “All I have to do is yell…and they’ll be over here, grabbing you, too. And why shouldn’t I? Your people caused this trouble. We runnin’ now. All these years and we runnin’ now?”
“I don’t know,” Lark breathed, the tightness in her chest growing. “I don’t know anything…” she tried not to panic as he tightened his grip. If she screamed, it wouldn’t do any good. So, she winced and tried to pull away.
In a rough whisper, the man began to utter a small rhyme. Lark recognized it immediately as one of the same types of songs Octavia hummed and said earlier, only this time, the verse was different. “Hidden in the middle, is the Colony. Don’t go near them, that is our homily,” he said. “I should warn them…” he nodded to the side. But without explanation, he pushed her down the steps into the dirt lane connecting the houses, marched back up his steps, and shut the door, quietly.
In the silence, she understood the fear—closer than one hundred yards away, the cloaked Fathers made their way from house to house, warning people that the Colony broke the oath—and she’d been too late to rescue anyone. There were Orin’s children in tow, crying and calling and asking questions the Fathers didn’t answer.
A man-driven rickshaw operated as a jail on wheels and four of the children were shoved into one and three more in a different one, and Lark didn’t know how she was going to tell her parents of her failure. Seven children, the youngest a sleeping toddler.
She’d received no code.
Lark was about to turn away and head back to the tunnels when she heard yelling from Octavia’s house. She’d assumed since seven seemed high for the number of kids in the post-virus world that all Octavia’s brothers and sisters were in the cages already, but there was still someone inside the house.
Careful to stay in the shadows, Lark hopped over the lane and closer to Orin’s house so she could hear. Someone called out, a boy, and demanded to know where his father was. He demanded his siblings to be let out of the rickshaws and he yelled and swore and all Lark saw was several of the Fathers raise their hands before she heard a cry and then a thud.
Like a body hitting the ground.
She couldn’t think. Lark’s body responded on auto—she didn’t know how she had the strength to run, but she did. She didn’t know how she remembered the path through the tunnels and back to the maze of the Witch’s Castle, but she did. Muscle memory and adrenaline worked in a powerful tandem to flee away from that house, and she was feeling confident that she’d gone unseen.
But by the time she was safely through the rubble, her pack still on her back, the alarms began to chirp.
Her job was simple and she’d screwed it up again and again. Wrong house, unable to beat the Fathers to the children, and now they’d sounded an alarm?
She didn’t want to face her parents’ disappointment, but she knew it was better to let them know what she needed to do next. If she thought she’d be in any sort of trouble for failure, she wouldn’t have returned home, but how could she have done any better? She was late from the start?
When she approached the house, her mother and father burst outside, their faces white with agony. They seemed excited to see her for only a moment before they realized she was alone.
“The Fathers…”
Lucy didn’t need to know anything else. She turned to her husband and pointed back inside. “Send her down. It’s the only way.”
Lark didn’t know what her mother meant, but she was learning to truly keep quiet and listen. She looked at her father, eyes wide.
“She’ll hear the alarm,” Grant said. “Our plan was to move if there was an alarm… Octavia would’ve started to head out…”
“That wasn’t the plan. It was always to wait for the code. She’ll follow the plan her father—”
“She’ll intuit that she needs to run!” Grant was starting to raise his voice, the pressure of the moment mounting. But even Lark could see that his argument was futile. Lark hadn’t known Octavia but a few hours, but she seemed like the type who calmly stuck to a schedule, even if it was counting down to doomsday.
“Tell her the code, Grant,” Lucy said.
“I didn’t get the code,” Lark replied, not understanding.
Her parents argued decades worth of fights in silence between her with that one request.
Lark was still out of breath, her lungs burning, and she knew the lack of oxygen to her brain made her loopy, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to wait and see how this fiasco would play out. The stakes were higher than they’d ever been and this was the path—to test her mettle, to show she could handle tasks and knowledge.
More than anything, Lark just wanted to show her parents they could trust her with the truth and a task and a chance to prove herself. Grant walked to his daughter and put his hand on her head. He pushed and she pushed back, and they stood in that sacred tableau for a few seconds. How had everything spun apart so fast?
“Tell Octavia Dandelion Wine,” Grant said. “Orin told me. He told me in case you failed.” The pronoun and the verb: You failed. And she had. She had failed. “But Octavia must never know that, Lark. That you didn’t earn it. You understand? Dandelion Wine.”
The reality covered her in a moment: She was never needed. He had the code from the moment he sent her to the Witch’s Castle.
Before she could argue or agree or understand or breathe, Grant walked over to a large mahogany dresser pushed up against the wall. He put his hands on the edge and with ease slid the piece of furniture down five feet. Once moved out of the way, the absence of a dresser exposed a hole cut into the wood and the sheetrock. She looked between the passageway, within reach her whole life and she never noticed, and back at Grant. The smell and structure appeared similar to the underground tunnel at the Witch’s Castle, and she realized their architect of these unknown worlds was probably the same. But unlike the other tunnel, this one went straight down into the blackness of the earth below her house.
Outside, someone shouted.
Another joined in and another. Lark could tell: The Fathers were coming back.
Grant looked up, afraid and rushed, he ran his hand over his brown hair and grabbed at Lark, marching her toward the hole.
Lark scrunched her nose.
“This is it, sweetie. Your chance to really fight for the good guys,” Grant whispered. “Get Octavia to go on her way. Wait in the bunker until I come get you.”
Those seemed like instructions she could handle. She was ready for the whole ordeal to be over already. She’d received her monkey’s paw wish—all she wanted was the truth, but now burdened with a piece of the truth meant she had to tell a lie.
She wiped her brain of the memory of that sickening thud from the house. She could barely remember what the children looked like as they filed into the rickshaws and into the dark. She memorized the code her father gave her. Dandelion Wine.
“The bunker—” Lark said.
Grant nodded, a
gitated and anxious. He took his daughter’s chin and cupped it. “I love you. And you’ve been preparing for action your whole life…”
“I would’ve appreciated more warning,” Lark smirked and looked to the ground.
“I wish life worked like that.” He inhaled. She was aware of her dad’s youthfulness, his fear. She had so much she needed to ask him. In a flash, the only thing she wanted was to stay in her house and sit with her parents on the decades-old couch.
Instead, she patted her pocket to confirm she still had her crank light and dropped down to crawl toward the hole.
Someone knocked on the door. The bang rattled the hinges.
“Dad—” Lark started, but it was too late. He ushered her down and she followed without complaint. And once she was out of sight, Grant pushed the dresser back into place and flooded her world with darkness.
As she descended down the rungs, she heard the heavy feet
The Fathers were back.
They’d come to deliver the news: They were on the move. Their protection of the Colony was finished.
This time, Lark didn’t wait to eavesdrop on all the juicy adult arguments; instead, she grabbed the metal rods cemented into the earth and climbed her way down into the darkness.
Chapter Fourteen
The former island of Dominica
in the former Caribbean
KOZO
It was both the thing of dreams and nightmares. Land.
Everything about solid earth was overwhelming—from the smells to the noises, the animals, the winds. On the sea, he knew the threats. In the lush valley, overgrown and wild, he didn’t even know his way back to the ocean. No material possessions mattered, so he left the tents and journeyed forward, following the path Ethan laid out the night before.
He wanted to be angry at their abandonment but he couldn’t. They didn’t know him and didn’t trust him. They’d wanted to rescue him. Save him, sure, that was easy because there was no moral ambiguity about deciding whether or not to pull someone away from certain death.
The Bedrock Page 18
