The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  When he got to the other side of that first street, he turned to look for Abra again. She was farther away than he expected.

  “If you get out before we do, give us some time. Leave the gate open,” he called out. “I won’t be long.”

  She turned and looked at him. He couldn’t tell if she had heard what he said, but she raised her hand in one final wave, then continued down the street that ran along the edge of the city. She reminded Leo of a tiny balloon, floating higher and higher into the sky until you can’t really see it, even though you think you can.

  He turned away and walked faster. The afternoon shadows lengthened. He wanted to be at the building by nightfall.

  But that didn’t happen.

  The farther into the city Leo went, the stranger it became. At first the only thing that seemed to change was that the forest receded behind him and the sea smell in the air grew stronger. It was unsettling, looking back over his shoulder and discovering he could no longer see the trees. He had walked nearly twenty blocks into the city, twenty blocks of high buildings and broken glass, twenty blocks of the wind howling through the alleyways. Twenty blocks and the only sound were his footsteps on dusty concrete or grinding the occasional shard of glass.

  But after twenty blocks or so he realized something else was different too. At first, he didn’t know what it was—he thought it was his imagination. Soon he realized the difference he felt was that, somewhere in all of those darkened office buildings and apartment complexes, someone was watching him. Or more than one someone. He didn’t know why he felt that way—he still hadn’t seen any real live human beings. But he knew he wasn’t alone.

  He kept expecting someone to call out to him from one of the glass-shattered lobbies or rooftop terraces. He glanced up the fire escapes, peered down the narrow side roads, glanced quickly over his shoulder. There was no one. As the afternoon waned and he got within ten blocks of the huge building, something changed.

  Leo heard a sound.

  It started off small and far away. He thought it was only the wind. As it grew louder, he thought it might be some kind of vehicle, a line of traffic or an airplane approaching from another city. By the time he realized what it was, it was too late and they had already seen him.

  A huge group of people came jostling onto his street a few blocks ahead, shouting and laughing and arguing. They were his age or slightly older. And they kept coming around the corner, more and more of them. He thought there must be hundreds, maybe even a thousand, and he tried to duck into the building he was walking past, but it was one of the few with intact front glass and locked doors. He had nowhere to go.

  “Hey, who’s that?” one of the front-runners called out, and soon the entire throbbing mob was around him and pressing in.

  “I only arrived today,” he stammered.

  “A newbie!” one of them shouted to the pack, and everyone cheered and some of them leered and their faces were close and loud.

  “Are you here by yourself?” someone else screamed, and it unsettled Leo, the way the voices came from people he could not identify. It was like the mob was speaking, and not any one individual.

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding quickly. “Yeah, I’m alone.”

  The crowd shifted, parted, and a small, brown-haired young man walked through. He had hazel eyes and his face was covered in freckles. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt that seemed remarkably clean in that environment of broken buildings and mobs of people. He smiled, pushed his hair out of his eyes, and held out his hand.

  “I’m Jeremiah,” he said. “Do you have a name?”

  A ripple of laughter spread through the mob.

  “I’m Leo.”

  The two shook hands, and Leo was surprised, almost alarmed, at how quickly he was welcomed into the group. Jeremiah was also an enigma. The strength in his handshake didn’t fit with his boyish looks. His fingers may have been small but they felt like wire traps. His forearms were thin, steel cables. Leo thought Jeremiah was probably about his age, maybe slightly older.

  “You’re welcome to join us.”

  Leo nodded, glancing down at the cracked sidewalk, amazed at the crowd of feet and legs and bodies in front of him. What he wanted to do was say, “No thanks, I’ll keep traveling alone,” but that didn’t feel like an option. He decided to go along with it for now. His eyes went from the ground up to the red sky. He nodded again.

  “We only have a few rules,” Jeremiah said.

  “Okay.” Leo felt less and less comfortable, more and more like a prisoner.

  “Three, mostly, although we have to add some from time to time. Don’t steal anything from anyone else in the group—there’s plenty to go around. That’s probably the most important one. Stay with the group—that’s number two. If for some reason you have to head out on your own, and I can’t think of a good reason you would ever do that, let me know. Number three—if one of us fights, we all fight. We stand up for each other. Always.”

  Leo nodded, the second rule sticking in his mind. Stay with the group. How did he even become part of this group? It had all happened way too fast, but he couldn’t shake the strong sense that to separate himself from the group at that point would only lead to them devouring him.

  “Don’t steal, stay with the group, all for one,” Leo repeated in a monotone voice, now staring at Jeremiah. He hadn’t come all this way to get waylaid by a punk. His sister was in the city somewhere. Abra would find the Tree and leave them all behind if he didn’t hurry.

  But for now, he had to bide his time.

  “You got it?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Yeah.” Leo shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He wished they would get on with whatever it was they had been doing. He didn’t like being the center of attention.

  “Good.”

  Jeremiah smiled and turned to face the rest of the crowd. Leo doubted his initial estimate of hundreds. There were definitely at least a thousand. He wondered how this small young man had managed to become the leader of such an unruly, disorganized bunch.

  “Welcome, Leo!”

  The crowd cheered, and some of them gave him a welcoming slap on the back. A few of the girls even leaned in and hugged him. Leo went from feeling defensive to slightly, and surprisingly, emotional. They seemed really happy to have him. In that moment, when everyone was hooting and hollering and clapping, Leo felt like he could become part of something.

  He had never had that before. He had to remind himself why he was there in the first place.

  “We’re staying here tonight,” Jeremiah shouted, and the group erupted in cheers again.

  Moments later Leo heard an explosion of shattering glass, and he ducked his head. But no one else looked alarmed, so he turned and saw a large portion of the group smashing the first-floor glass walls of the building behind them. The glass was destroyed in seconds. They kicked the larger shards out of the way, and the group moved into the building like a virus entering its host. They swarmed through, everyone looking for a comfortable place to sleep. Leo hung back, watching in amazement at the efficiency of their chaotic destruction. In less than a minute, the building had been taken over.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “Get used to it,” Jeremiah said. “This city is ours.”

  Leo nodded and watched quietly as Jeremiah walked toward the building, surrounded by six or seven others. Leo assumed they were his inner circle. There were a few girls, a few guys. They dressed the same as everyone else but carried themselves with a certain air that separated them. They seemed to be above the fray, better than the chaos. They waited until all the glass was broken before they walked in.

  “Find a spot,” Jeremiah said. “The Wailers are coming.”

  Leo walked through the glass, and it ground under his feet, coarse and threatening. He ducked under the jagged edge of a glass wall that had not been completely cleared and brushed off the bottom of his shoes on a carpet inside. A hundred or so of the group had already settled there in
the lobby, away from the broken glass, sitting in small circles, talking.

  Leo found some stairs and followed them up a few floors. He wanted to find a place where he could be alone and think for a minute. He wanted to find a floor where he might be able to separate himself from the group. He opened a door and walked into a mostly dark level. There were some desks—it looked like an office building that had never been used. He found an unoccupied desk and pushed it against the wall, then crawled beneath it and stretched out, staring through the glass side of the building that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.

  He felt very lonely lying there in the darkness. He listened to the sound of the Wailers, and soon they flashed past the window, white and black and every shade of gray in between, and the song they made was haunting but also a little beautiful. It reminded him of walking through the forest with Abra, of the nights they had spent together in the trees that lined the dirt road. They hadn’t really said much on those few nights, but he had become used to her presence.

  He wondered where she had taken refuge that night. He wondered if she had found Beatrice or her Tree.

  22

  ABRA TURNED ONE LAST TIME and watched Leo disappear into the city. He was older than her, but his slumped shoulders and hesitant steps made him look like a little boy, lost in the big world. She almost called out to him. Maybe he was right. Maybe they should stick together. But in the end, she didn’t say anything.

  She thought that would probably be the last time she’d ever see him. She knew she would lock the Passageway after she destroyed the Tree, whether or not Leo was there, and this knowledge scared her. She wondered, with alarm, if she was a heartless person.

  She continued down the long, straight road with the city across the street to her left, the forest directly to her right. Sometimes the branches grew out over the sidewalk and she had to walk in the crumbling pavement. Sometimes she peered into the shadows among the trees and wondered how far that forest went, and if it had an end, or if in every direction, if one walked far enough, there would be a gradually increasing darkness. And then nothing.

  Beatrice was always just barely at the far reaches of what she could see. Always moving ahead at a brisk pace. Always walking on the same side of the road as the trees, in and out of the shadows.

  The city was silent. The only sound was the scraping of her shoes on the sidewalk or the occasional snapping of the twigs she stepped on. It was one of the strangest moments of her life, walking along a city of that size without hearing anything. After ten or fifteen blocks she realized something else—there were no animals. No birds swooping through the air, no squirrels dashing here and there around the trees. No ants in the sidewalks. No pigeons roosting on the buildings. Nothing.

  She stared into the forest a lot because she still thought that might be where she would find the Tree of Life. She stared particularly hard when the wind blew, because she remembered how that would make it easier to see the heavy fruit hanging in the midst of the fluttering leaves. Sometimes she thought she saw something, and she stopped, peering through the vines and the shrubs and the low branches.

  Abra had never been tempted by the Tree when it appeared along the Road to Nowhere north of her farm in the outskirts of Deen. She had plunged the sword into its trunk without hesitation. But she recognized something strange inside of her as she walked that long, straight street, something deep inside of her that she had not felt four years before. It could perhaps be best symbolized by the tiniest of question marks.

  That was it. There were no words with the question mark, no tangible concerns or hesitations as to why she should not kill the Tree. Nothing she could put her finger on. But there it was anyway, a small seed of uncertainty. Was she thinking of Sam’s mother again, her loveliness gone from the world because of death? Was she thinking of the lamb that had died, its innocence erased from the world by death?

  Or was she thinking of her own mother, now not even aware that Abra was her daughter? Abra’s mother had given Abra her only firsthand experience of erasure, the kind of clean slate that death can cause. She thought back over Mr. Tennin’s words and wondered if they were true.

  Death is a gift.

  Then it happened. Beatrice was gone. Abra ran ahead, staring down each street that led into the city, peering into the trees. But somehow, at some point, she had lost Beatrice. Abra’s insides dropped. She wondered for the first time if she should have stayed with Leo.

  The sky began to fade and Abra saw something strange up ahead. The trees looked like they grew on the street, but as she got closer she could see that wasn’t it at all. The street she was on turned sharply to the left, and the forest lined that road as well. When she made the turn, she saw that, once again, this street was a long, straight street that separated the city from the forest. So the city, at least in this part, was like the corner of a square. She continued on.

  The air changed as she headed in that direction. The smell of the large body of water became stronger, more melancholy. She didn’t know how she knew it was the smell of water. She had never been to a beach. But something planted that in her mind. An image of water crashing on the sand. The endless water blending with the sky at the horizon.

  Abra smiled.

  It grew dark faster than she had expected. Already the corner she had passed was far behind her, blocks and blocks and blocks, and still she had not seen a single person or a single animal, or heard a single sound other than those her own feet made. She walked a few paces into the woods, cleared a small space, and lay down. She fell asleep.

  Abra’s eyes popped open in the middle of the night and she lay there, completely still. She thought she’d been woken up by the sound of someone, or something, entering the woods from the road. Someone, or something, that was still close by. The sky was a red that was almost black, but it showed through the canopy of leaves, and the trees rustled slightly in a warm breeze. It felt like a strange dream—the red glow, the smell of the ocean, the dark outline of the city.

  Was that it? Was it only a dream? Had she heard nothing more than the wind in the trees?

  But no, there it was again. The snapping of a dry twig, the subtle scraping of leaves breaking under someone’s foot. Abra tried to control her breathing. She lifted her head from the ground as slowly and quietly as she could, peering up and over the edge of the small hollow she had lain down in a few hours before.

  Immediately in front of her face was a large tangle of tree roots. Beyond that, through the filter of the red night’s dark light, she could see a few large rocks all in a row, poking up through the rich dirt. Trees grew in a line along the outcropping—one even sprouted out of a crack in the rocks. But it’s what she saw in front of the rocks and the thick line of trees, only ten yards away, that made her heart beat faster.

  Beatrice was leaning over, searching around on the ground. She bent her head this way and that, and the strange movement of her neck reminded Abra of a bird of prey, an eagle or a hawk, the way they study something with a sinister curiosity before tearing it to shreds. Beatrice went on staring in that curious way for another minute before standing up slowly and continuing along the line of rocks.

  Abra waited a moment. Beatrice seemed taller to her now, and she wondered about the powers of Beatrice and those like her, if they could really change their size or if they had a way of presenting themselves as bigger or smaller depending on what they needed. She wondered if Beatrice was more powerful here in this world at the Edge than she was back on earth. Beatrice’s face—what Abra could see of it—seemed strangely neutral the entire time. Her mouth was straight. Her eyes dim and unblinking.

  Abra pulled herself to her hands and knees, wincing at the sound of leaves rustling under her. She froze, again holding her breath. She rose to her feet and hid behind a tree, peeking around the rough bark. Beatrice continued on through the woods, along the jagged rocks, walking slowly and directly away from the city. Her black dress flowed quietly around her, smooth and rippling. Ab
ra stared at her back. Beatrice was a tear in space, or the moving trunk of a tree.

  Abra trembled and leaned against the tree, but she also knew she didn’t have time to spare. As she stood there, Beatrice was disappearing into the trees, still walking away from the city. Toward what? The dark borders of this strange land? The river?

  The Tree?

  Abra sighed, peered ahead into the darkness, and walked forward along the rocks, trailing Beatrice. The light in the sky was still a dark red, and it tinted everything. As she moved forward, she realized a narrow path ran along the outcropping of rocks. It was a worn path, not pressed all the way down to the dust, but she was able to see it and follow it, even in the dark. She slowed down, not wanting Beatrice to hear her.

  Every so often she came around a corner and saw Beatrice not as far ahead, so she lessened her pace. Other times the path twisted, and when it straightened again, Abra couldn’t see Beatrice, so she walked faster. Never once did Beatrice look over her shoulder. Never once did she turn to address Abra. The farther they went, the more Abra thought Beatrice might just be leading her along, farther from the city. Farther from the Tree? It might be a trap. But the slim chance that Beatrice was making for the Tree was too great a pull, and Abra continued on.

  The rocks grew taller and soon became a solid wall of rock, one she couldn’t see over. They held deep gashes in their flat surfaces, fracture lines that seemed to bear witness to a great and powerful collision, one of seismic proportion. Embedded every so often in or beside these deep fissures were long threads of silver, glittering lines that drew Abra’s eye. She traced the silver with her finger and it left sparkling gray dust on her fingertips. She smelled the residue, and if starlight had a smell, this would have been it—fresh like spring water but with a metallic, sharp foundation. She let her hand run over the rock as she walked, and soon her entire palm was coated in it, and her fingers, and it even crept up her wrist. There was something glorious about that silver dust. Something invigorating.