“Good-bye, Sandra. Thank you.”
They were already gone.
There are a lot of things to think about when you’re walking almost silently through pitch-black tunnels beneath a city about to go to war. You’ll find you have a lot of questions about life, about yourself, about where you’re going and where you might go back to. Leo did. He wondered all of those things and more. As he walked, step-by-step, his hand sliding along the rough walls of the tunnel, he wondered about his father. He wondered about his sister. He wondered about what this city was, how it had gotten there, and what would happen once it was destroyed.
Most of all, he wondered about Abra. He wondered if she had found the Tree, if she had already left and locked the Passageway behind her. He didn’t think he could live with that if it was him. He didn’t think he could lock people out of the world for the rest of their lives. But he didn’t know Abra, not really. He didn’t know what she would do or what was at stake.
He hurried forward, one hand on the wall, the other hand waving in front of him in case something blocked his path. At first, he didn’t trust the darkness and he walked slowly, but the farther he went, the faster he allowed himself to walk. The passageways seemed clear—every time he lit a match, he noticed there was nothing there except more empty passages. Most of the intersections were four-way crossings.
There was the blue arrow, and it had consistently been the one pointing to his right for quite some time. The green arrow always seemed to be pointing to the left. The red and yellow arrows both pointed straight ahead. He walked forward, one hand guarding the flame, keeping the light as long as he could. It sizzled out, and he dropped the match and kept walking forward into the darkness.
Sometimes he sloshed through shallow puddles, sometimes he even heard water trickling down the sides of the gray cement walls. When he struck a match at the intersections, he saw naked light bulbs in the ceiling, broken or burned-out long ago. Or maybe they had never worked. That was the thing about the city—you never could tell if anything was old or new.
At some intersections, all the arrows pointed down the same passage, which made him think there must be multiple ways of getting somewhere, which in turn made him wonder if they weren’t set out in a grid like streets, with multiple crossings, multiple meanderings. But the red and yellow arrows ran together almost every time.
His hand swept off the wall and into midair. Another intersection. His matches were getting low. A surge of panic overwhelmed him as he thought about running out of matches and wandering this endless underground maze for the rest of his life. He imagined trying to chart it all in his mind—the grids, the paths, the darkness. Trying to find his way without light. Counting steps. Counting breaths.
He pulled out one of his last matches and struck it against the cement wall. It hissed and scratched, bringing light out of nothing, light out of emptiness, light out of death. To his left, a narrower passageway with the green arrow. To his right, also a narrower passageway with the blue arrow. In front of him a door with two large circles drawn on it: one red, one yellow.
A door.
Leo turned the doorknob. It was locked. His match went lower and lower. He held it, staring at the lock until the flame burned his fingers.
“Ouch!” he said, throwing the matchstick to the ground.
He pulled out his lock-picking set and flipped out the correct wire. He didn’t even bother to light another match, simply inserted the pick and nudged it here, twitched it there, and tried the knob again. It turned, and the door eased its way open, not making a sound. He walked into a room. Dim light entered through short basement windows that lined the top of the walls.
He looked around. He thought he was in a cellar of some sort—the walls were stone with white plaster sealing the joints, the ceiling was bare crossbeams and wires and pipes, and there was a stairway at the far end. He walked over and around the contents of the basement, which were numerous and strange: aluminum pails, tools in a plastic container, a pink bicycle, three long, flat boards, a pile of nails, a pile of stones. He would have classified every single thing as junk except the contents were so well organized that it seemed someone must have cared about what was there. He got to the stairs and walked up, through another door.
He was no longer looking for the arrows. The rooms on the main level were normal rooms, although the house looked abandoned. There was a back door, locked, so he went toward the front of the house, cutting through a kitchen, a dining room, and into a front room. Everything was dusty, and his shoes left tracks as if he was walking through dirty snow or ash. He looked through the front window, out onto the street.
That’s when he saw her.
Ruby.
She was much older, but he’d recognize that soft nose anywhere. Her eyes.
“Ruby,” he whispered, tears forming in his eyes.
She ran up the street, and she was fast, but she was only growing into her body, and there was something clumsy about the way she moved. There is a striving in the way a young person runs at that age, as if their uncertain emotional journey is reflected in their physical movement. Her feet slid on the street as she changed direction. She pumped her arms. She kept looking over her shoulder as if she expected a tidal wave to crash around the corner at any moment. Leo waved to her through the dim glass, tapped on the window, anything to get her attention. He ran to the door, pushed it open, and shouted for her.
She glanced up at him and for a second he thought she would run past. He prepared to chase after her, but at that very moment she veered in the street and ran for the abandoned house where he stood. She came up the steps and ran past, through the doorway, without even stopping to look at him. He followed her inside and pulled the door closed behind them. Immediately everything felt still. The empty house around them was like a bubble.
“Who are you?” she asked, breathing hard.
“There isn’t time,” he heard himself saying, but it all seemed like it was happening in some far-off place. “Come on.”
They snuck back into the dark house. She paused in the front room.
“Don’t stop now,” he hissed, going back farther into the house, into the darkness. The only thought in his mind was of Abra and the key. He wondered if she had already found the Tree and left them behind. He pictured walking into the darkness only to find that the darkness was all there was—no door outlined in light, no way out.
“Who are you?” she whispered, and her voice was precisely as he had always imagined it would be. The words were muffled in the empty house, like sand through a sieve. In the flash of a moment he remembered singing her to sleep or sitting beside her bed or feeling her forehead when she was sick, feeling the heat.
“There isn’t time,” he repeated. Tears rose in his eyes again. He pushed them back with the palms of his hands. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to hold her face. “You need to come with me.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Are you Ruby Jardine?” he asked, wanting to hear her say it.
“Who are you?” she asked again, but now there was a hint of recognition on her face, as if she had seen him in a dream long ago.
“Are you Ruby Jardine?” Leo insisted.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m Ruby.”
They got to the back of the house.
“Ruby,” he said in a quiet voice, “you’re not going to believe me.”
He paused.
“I’m your brother. I’m Leo.”
Suddenly, pain surged from the top of his head and traveled down the core of his being. He fell to the ground, grabbing behind him to try to ward off his attacker, but another blow dropped him further. A group of hands lifted him, and a voice that he thought he recognized said, “Take him up with the other spy. Level 27. I’ll come up later.”
Strange sounds. The same voice said, in a suddenly gentle tone, “Ruby, Ruby, are you okay?”
The darkness he traveled through in those moments was darker than the under
ground passageways, a kind of darkness that swirled with loose pieces of light, and for a time he thought he might be lost forever in it, the shifting shadows and the piercing moments of pain like a match being struck. They carried him, and he bounced up and down and sometimes caught the corners of walls as they passed by. Up and up and up, stairs and stairs and into the sky, until he lost count of the floors and the men who carried him puffed hard breaths of weariness. Finally, through a door, and oh how his head hurt, and they opened a side door and went down a long hall and through another door, and they threw him inside.
Pain surged when he hit the ground and he nearly gave in to the darkness again, but he didn’t, because he heard a voice. And he realized it wasn’t his imagination. The voice was coming from right there in the corner, in the shadows of a windowless room.
“Leo, is that you?”
27
THERE ARE THINGS that happened to Ruby before Leo showed up, things about her and her father Amos, that are important. Not too long before Leo appeared to her in the abandoned house, claiming to be her brother and upending everything she knew about her world, she was sitting in her bedroom, her father delivering some important news.
“Very soon, Ruby,” her father began, and he held his own breath with the anticipation of it all. When he couldn’t hold it in any longer, he practically popped with the words. “I’m going to take you somewhere. I’m going to take you for a tour in the building.”
She looked at him with questions in her eyes, to see if it was really true, and he nodded his head in a flurry of up-and-down movements, giving a crooked grin.
Ruby glanced away from him and stared out the window. The tall building behind their house blocked most of the sky, so that the shadowy light that fell down in the alley was tinted the color of rust. The narrow shards of sky she could see on either side of the building were a dark maroon. Night was falling in that city under the red sky.
The building behind her house was always growing, always getting taller. Carpenters and masons and engineers had worked on it for as long as she could remember, and every year it climbed higher, until it grew so tall that sometimes the low-lying orange clouds obscured the top of it and at night it seemed to rise right up through the blood-red sky. She wondered if they would ever finish working on it. She wondered what went on inside.
Her father stood in the doorway, staring at her. She could tell he wanted to see some kind of excitement, some sign that she was as eager to walk through the building as he was eager to show it to her.
“That night, after I give you the tour, there’s going to be a meeting with all the people I know in the city who are ready to . . . make changes,” he said. “We’re ready to make this city into something wonderful. Something new.”
“Dad,” she started to say, but her voice trailed off. He took over again, going on and on about the glorious future, the new days ahead, the shining city. He started pacing from the hallway and into her room. Back into the hallway. Back into her room.
“We’re not far off. But we have to maintain . . . space. The Frenzies. We have to eliminate them. After that we can build a new foundation. A new . . . ” His voice faded.
He stopped walking and looked up at Ruby. “Very soon, you’ll understand. Very soon. Ha! Oh, Ruby. I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to tell you any of it. I’m sorry for all the secrets.” He took a deep breath. “But soon you’ll understand, and you’ll know everything. This city will be . . . it will be . . . wonderful. Better than anything from . . . before. Better than anything.”
He turned abruptly and walked into the hallway. He closed her door carefully as if it was made of tissue paper and might tear. The latch clicked. Ruby heard him turn the key and lock her into her room. He did it every night. He said the city was unsafe. He said it was for her own good. He said it was to protect her in case the Frenzies came into the house.
This is what he told her, and she believed him, the way a child will often believe their parent even when their parent is not telling the truth.
She stared at the building again, thinking about the word she thought she’d heard her father say.
“After that we can build a new foundation. A new . . . heaven.”
The house Ruby lived in, her father’s house, was a house of many doors.
Of course, there were many windows too, but they didn’t interest her—perhaps because they had large metal bars over the outside, so that even if you opened the windows as high as they could go, there was no way to get through. The bars were an inch thick and four inches apart, black as shadows. Ruby could reach her arm through them, right up to her shoulder, but no farther. The black bars were cold to the touch, even in the summer. Once a year, her father spent three or four late afternoons painting them in slow up-and-down strokes with a look on his face that made Ruby think that even though he was painting he was not thinking about painting. The paint he used was black, black, black, like spilled ink.
While the windows did not interest her, the many doors did. Her father kept most of them locked, but there were no bars over them, so there was at least some hope of passing through, if she could only have the keys. There was the large wooden front door, stained with a light cedar stain, and it creaked when it opened. The front door led into a small entranceway, and then another door like the first led into the house. There were the two large pocket doors to the left of the hall as you went in, heavy as cinder blocks. They slid smoothly over their rollers and covered the entrance to her father’s study. There were the white, five-panel doors that led to three second-floor bedrooms, all empty, the doors always locked. And there were the third-floor doors, the ones that opened up to her bedroom, her father’s bedroom, and the attic.
If only she had the keys.
All of those doors had antique keyholes below the doorknobs, the kind that are large enough to peek through. They were set in decorative brass plates with raised images around the edges: flowers and leaves and oblong shapes that looked like tears. Her father kept all the keys to all the doors hanging in his study on a square arrangement of hooks. Under each hook was the name of the room the key belonged to, and every single hook had a key on it.
The narrow door to the attic was down the hall from her room, and Ruby had heard from someone that the attic connected all the houses on her street. Even if she had the key, she never, never, ever would have opened that door because her father had told her that opening it would let all manner of terrible things into the world, things that would take up residence under her bed and never leave. They were awful things. Some of them were alive and could think for themselves, he said. They were growing things, and while some would remain under her bed, other things that came through the door would go out into the city: the seeds to poisonous trees or plants that could bring down entire buildings, ivy strong enough to crumble cement blocks, flowers with roots that upended sidewalks. Irresistible things. And the only way to keep them out of their world was to keep the door to the attic shut tight.
“Doors are made to keep things out,” her father always said, raising his eyebrows and pointing his finger with each word.
She believed anything he told her, and the stories stuck and hardened like plaster, and no matter what she told herself, those stories remained, impossible to chip away. She didn’t have the right tools for that.
These days her father was always writing, writing, writing in a stack of journals he kept on his desk. Or making frantic phone calls in his office, his voice rising until she could hear every word he said. He was very concerned about the city. He was very concerned that the Frenzies were driving it into chaos. She started hearing words that alarmed her, words like “surrounded” and “only option” and “last stand.”
But sometimes he would stop working, stop making calls, and sigh, and relent to her endless pleas for attention. He would tell her about the tunnels that ran under the city, full of things that children shouldn’t have to know about, and he would tell her about the back alleys in the cit
y where all the terrifying people lived, and he would tell her about the river to the south of the city that had no far side—just an endless stretch of waves and shifting shades of blue.
She liked the stories. She liked how the scary ones made her insides quiver. But most of all she couldn’t stop thinking about the river.
“If it doesn’t have a far side, why is it a river and not an ocean?” she asked her father one day, and he looked surprised.
“Why, that’s a good question, Ruby. I guess it’s because it flows in one direction, like a river.”
“Seems like it must have a far side, if it’s flowing,” she said.
He stared at her for a long time. “You must be right,” he whispered. “You are a very smart little girl.”
“I’m not a little girl anymore, Dad,” she protested. “I’m thirteen!”
She asked him often about the War. She asked him over and over again about the fate of her mother and her brother.
“Do you remember much of those days?” he would say.
“No, Dad, I don’t remember anything.”
He always seemed relieved at her answer. “Yes, yes. You were very ill.”
He told her how the War had ravaged the city soon after she was born. He told her about the last days of her mother and brother, when the War had taken them.
“Ruby, after your mother and brother were killed, we joined a group of citizens here in the city who finally drove the Frenzies back into the woods. The city was safe for most of your childhood, perhaps most of your life that you can remember. It was safe. But time passed, and more people entered the city, and for some reason most of them sided with the Frenzies. And the Frenzies joined together. This was . . . unfortunate.” He clenched his jaw, licked his lips, and shook his head as if trying to gather his thoughts. “They’ve been advancing. We’re preparing again for war, but this time we have a weapon.”
Ruby loved when her father told her stories because those were the few times her father actually spoke to her, only her. He wasn’t ranting on the telephone or talking in hushed tones to someone on the front porch. He was talking only to her, and she loved his stories, loved them the way she loved the taste of something sweet. She craved those stories, the deep rumbling sound of her father’s voice, the way his eyes flashed in the light.
The Edge of Over There Page 19
