Everything that Ruby saw expanded her reality. She had heard people speak about the water, heard them whisper about the woods they had walked through to get to the city, but whether or not she had believed the legends, she had certainly never seen anything outside of the ten square city blocks where she lived. Now she was seeing everything. Everything! And everything was so much more beautiful than she could have imagined, and so much more desolate, and so much more heartbreaking. The city was so much smaller than she had imagined. And the water . . .
The water.
Her breathing slowed. She had an indescribable urge to drink it, drink it all. She had a thought that if she could drink the river, she would become even greater than her father. Weightier. Holier? More sacred at least. Perhaps that’s not the exact word, but something like it. Could she be the queen of the city along the river? Could she be the ruler of the city under the red sky?
Instead, she stepped back from the edge. Something had reminded her that she was still young, and something else had reminded her that it is no fault to be young, and she should not race to leave her youth behind. Perhaps the reminder had come from a wisp of her hair as the breeze she had watched caress the trees arrived at the top of the building and dashed playfully around her. Perhaps it was the sudden desire to take off her shoes and lie barefoot on the top of the tall building, staring at the sky in search of the shapes of things. She sighed (with relief?) and turned to find her father.
She saw that it was not only herself and her father on the roof anymore. A group of men had come up through the door and were working on something at the edge of the building, not far from where she stood. It was a cylinder, at least ten feet long, with a huge lens on one side and a small eyepiece on the other.
It was a telescope, and it was aimed across the water.
Someone stood beside her father, and at first Ruby would have described her as a girl her own age, but as Ruby approached them she came to understand that while this person looked like a young girl, she was not, in fact, a young girl. She was something else entirely.
“Hello,” Ruby said hesitantly.
“Ruby, I’d like you to meet someone very important,” her father began. “Someone who will help us make this city exactly what it should be.”
The young girl who Ruby knew was not a young girl stepped forward with something that looked like a smile but was certainly not a smile. Perhaps it was some kind of upturned-at-the-corners grimace.
“Hi,” this something-else-entirely said in a voice attempting to be kind.
Ruby nodded at her but did not immediately reach out her hand to the not-quite-a-girl.
“I’m Beatrice,” the something-else-entirely said in a quiet voice.
Those were some of the only words Ruby would ever hear Beatrice say. Beatrice spent most of her time crowding in close to Ruby’s father, whispering in his ear.
“What is this building?” Ruby interrupted, somehow aware that her father had at some point faced the same questions and desires that she had faced standing there at the edge. The urge to drink the entire ocean. The lust to control everything within view. And she was also aware, somehow, that he had not turned away from that desire, that he had embraced it. That he was embracing it.
Beatrice stood up on her tiptoes and whispered into her father’s ear. He leaned over slightly, nodding a bit.
“Yes, yes. This building,” he said, turning his attention back to Ruby, “is only a symbol of what we can do here. We will rebuild this city, and it will be unlike anything you have ever seen. Anyone has seen. Every building will be this tall. Taller! Every building will reach up to the sky. Do you know why?”
Ruby shook her head. No, she didn’t know why, but for some reason the thought of a city filled with buildings like this terrified her.
Beatrice whispered again.
“Soon,” her father said with a whispered intensity, “we will be high enough to see over the water. Beyond death! We will be able to see beyond death!” He waved his arms and looked at his hands, his own thin hands, as if he could not believe what he was seeing, as if the vision he had presented to Ruby was a vision that still brought him awe.
Ruby looked at him, and a strange sensation rose up in her. She did not know this person. She did not know her father anymore. He was gone, and she wondered when exactly he had wandered off, or where he had drifted to. She wished she could go back to that moment when he’d left and grab his hand, keep him from going. She wondered if that was possible, if a child could keep their parent from wandering down paths that were not good for them.
“What’s that?” Ruby asked, pointing at the telescope.
He sighed. “Ruby, we built this building first and foremost because we wanted to house the Tree, but as it grew, we realized we might be able to build it tall enough to see over the water. Now that we’re here, we realize we need some help. Those men are almost finished building a telescope that will let us see beyond death. We will see what lies beyond the water, and then we will build Over There here. And maybe someday we will even go Over There, and it can be ours as well. Everything will be united and beautiful: the old world, this world, and Over There.”
“Soon,” he began again, but Beatrice tugged on his arm and whispered into his ear, and he nodded. “We need to go, Ruby. Time is short. Everyone is arriving, and it’s time to tell them everything. All of it. They’ve come early because we are out of time. You will have to hear it along with everyone else, and we will begin. A new world.” He shook his head in disbelief at the intense beauty of his own vision.
Beatrice led him away by the hand, to the door that led down the never-ending stairwell Ruby had climbed up only a few minutes before. When Beatrice led him, their hand-holding was not romantic. Not in the least. She held his hand the way a stranger might hold the hand of a naughty child when they are trying to find the child’s parents.
It made Ruby want to cry, but she followed them anyway, because she did not know what else to do.
35
TEN OF AMOS’S GUARDS joined them inside the door, crowded together uncomfortably in the narrow landing. Ruby allowed herself to drift to the back of the pack. They did not descend that many floors before Ruby immediately sensed something different about the building. It buzzed with some kind of activity. Literally buzzed. She raced down a level and caught up with her father as he and the rest of his group went through a door that led into one of the upper floors. She didn’t know which floor they were on.
She heard one of the guards whisper into her father’s ear, “The building is full, sir. Every floor. Completely full.”
Amos nodded, trying to tame a giddy smile that threatened to take over his entire face. “Good. Good,” he said, glancing at Beatrice. She moved her head up and down once, conveying her own subdued sort of approval.
Ruby followed her father, jostled by the crowd, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the tree. It grew up through the floor, and its branches spread far and wide throughout the entire level. Its fruit hung down, heavy and full. The trunk had been surrounded by a thick wooden wall, but the branches, many of them at least, had been used to support the floor above. The tree had literally grown into the building, had become the building.
Images rushed through Ruby’s mind, things she had always thought were simply dreams.
Leaves with sap that hung in long, loping strings.
Fruit she could see into.
A woman who devoured the fruit whole and offered her a bite.
Ruby’s breathing came heavy and fast, and she tried hard to control it. She remembered that moment clearly now. She remembered she had never eaten the fruit. Her father had stopped her.
She swallowed hard and looked around, and while at first everyone’s eyes had been on her father, now they all stared at the fruit, enraptured by what they saw in its translucent flesh. Ruby did too—stared at the piece right in front of her. And she saw . . . her mother . . . a beautiful house surrounded by trees . . . a boy . . . a man�
��her father—carrying her into a dark doorway . . . the visions went on and on, flashes of things that came so quickly she could barely see what they were before the next image oozed into being.
And now she was holding a piece of fruit with no memory of plucking it from the branch. She dropped it and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed her take it. No one had, because everyone else had done the same thing. Everyone was holding a piece of fruit. Except Beatrice—Beatrice stared at her and smiled.
“Today is a good day,” her father began, and his voice was pumped through the building with some kind of sound system. He sounded archaic and scratchy. After he spoke, all the floors erupted in cheers so that it felt as if the entire building might crumble beneath their excitement. Her father apparently had the same concern, and he frantically waved for them to stop clapping.
“Yes, yes it is,” he said in response to Beatrice whispering into his ear, something she would continue to do for the duration of the speech.
“You know,” Amos said, “there was a day when this building was no more than three floors high. Three floors! But here we are today, with a tower stretching higher and higher every month.”
More applause. The floor shook.
“For those of you who have never heard the story, let me give you a brief version. I brought my daughter here years ago, escaping that old world the way many of you escaped. The world that held nothing but death and sadness. We came to this city with nothing. No, that’s not true. We had hope. We came to this city with hope. And we came with a Tree. That’s when we found this building, and inside we planted this very Tree, and it was the leaves from the Tree that healed my daughter and made her well again.”
All eyes were on Ruby. She blushed, not so much at the gaze of all those strangers, but at learning that so much of what her father had told her, so much of what she had been brought up to believe, was a lie. What old world was he talking about? Coming to the city with nothing? What of her mother and brother? She stared hard at the ground, wishing he would talk about something else.
“Of course, there is the fruit. More about that later. But as we settled in the house next door, and as we saw the chaos the Frenzies caused, we realized we had to keep the Tree safe. We had to keep it secret, or they would destroy it the way they destroy everything else.”
His voice was sincerely angry now, and silence echoed through the building on every floor.
“Many of you came to my aid. We blocked off the streets around our neighborhood, built walls out of the rubble left behind by the Frenzies, and eventually drove out the Frenzies to the borders of the city. We thought we had done our job, but we noticed something strange. Do you remember that day?” he asked with a smile, and many of the people on that floor nodded and smiled.
“Do you remember when we realized the Tree was growing? So quickly. Before long it was through the top of the building, branches pressing against the outer walls. So we changed our focus. We fought back the Frenzies, yes, but we also continued to build the building higher and higher to hide this amazing Tree. We continually trimmed the inside branches, and we used them in higher floors to stabilize the levels. This building and this Tree are literally one being! It’s an accomplishment made possible only by our most capable architects and engineers.”
He motioned toward a small group of men and women standing off to the side, their hands behind their backs. Another roar of applause, and Ruby looked around. It was beginning to make sense: the way the Tree grew up through the middle of the building, the way the branches were trimmed so precisely and ended in the walls, rippling up and down through the floors like sea monsters frozen in time.
“Today, though, is a new day. It marks a new era for us. Today, thanks to this Tree, we can get rid of the Frenzies and bring peace to this entire city!”
Anticipatory applause rumbled as people waited to hear the glorious plan.
“Today, we will launch full-scale war on the Frenzies, and we will eliminate them. But. But. But.” He held up his index finger, quieting the crowd. “We have nothing to fear. We waited until today because now, finally, the Tree is large enough to feed all of us at once.”
He held the silence at the tip of his finger, and in that moment, he seemed all-powerful to Ruby. He held it all, right there, right at the end of his finger. Everything. When he said his next line, he said it in a whisper barely loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Because this is the Tree of Life.”
The silence grew heavier, if that was even possible.
“We will all eat from this Tree today, and we will go out and fight a war we cannot lose, because we cannot die. The fruit will keep death away from us, and the leaves will heal our wounds, and all that will be left of the Frenzies will be their bodies, which we will assemble and launch into the Great Water.”
Silence.
“After that,” he said, “we will rebuild this city exactly as the Great City has been built over the water. We will live in peace, forever.”
This brought out the loudest cheers yet. Pieces of fruit fell from the Tree in the tumult, breaking where they hit the floor. People began reaching for new pieces of fruit—the ones they had initially taken had already rotted—and devouring it, eating as if they had never eaten before, as if the more they ate the stronger their immortality would be. Amos sat back and smiled, and Beatrice whispered into his ear.
Ruby eased her way among the people who ate loudly, greedily. She did not eat—in a moment, she was in the stairwell, running down the stairs as quickly as she could.
At each level she heard people cheering and congratulating each other. There were small floor numbers beside each door, and it seemed a never-ending journey down.
63.
58.
46.
32.
Floor after floor, and behind each door an elated crowd, newly immortal, still eating.
She was breathing heavily and her legs ached by the time she arrived at a door that led to the only level with no one cheering, no one eating. She peeked through the glass and saw a long hallway flanked by more doors. She glanced up at the number beside the door before pushing her way through, into the dimly lit passageway.
Ruby was at level 27.
36
RUBY PUSHED OPEN THE DOOR. It was cool against her small hands, and the air inside was warmer than the stairwell, and stale.
“Hello?” she called out, and at first the dark hallway swallowed up her voice, and nearly her courage with it. There were many doors, but all of the rooms behind them were empty. She was surprised there were no guards and thought they must have run upstairs with everyone else, giddy at the excitement taking over.
When she came to the last door on the right, she took a deep breath.
“Hello?” she said. No one said anything, but she thought she heard someone walk over to the door.
“Hello?” she said again. She found courage in the sound of her own voice.
“Is that you, Ruby?” the voice on the other side of the door asked. It was the voice of the young man from the abandoned house. She was sure of it. The young man who had said things that had brought her world crumbling down around her. His words still rang in her head like a bell, far off and full of hope.
“Is it true,” she asked through the door, “what you said?”
“Ruby,” the young man said in a trembling voice, “I’m your brother. Our mother is alive.”
Her breath caught.
“I am your brother,” he said. “I’m Leo.”
Ruby sat down with her back against the door. She sat there for a few moments without saying anything, but those few moments were like long periods of time. Cities were born and ground to dust. Forests grew and burned down and were reborn out of the ashes.
“Are you still there?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said, her voice wandering down the empty hall. “I . . . It’s so hard to believe.”
“There’s more,” he said. “Things even more dif
ficult to believe than that.”
Ruby took a deep breath and leaned her head back. She heard, or felt, the young man inside sit down against the door too.
“Ruby,” he said, “I’m your brother. I’m Leo. Please let us out?”
Ruby waited longer than she should have, longer than was good for any of them, but her thoughts were a thousand-piece puzzle. She stood up and stared at the door, and when she reached for the latch that slid back the bolt, she watched her own hand as if it belonged to someone else, as if it was moving in slow motion. The metal was cold against her fingers. It made a loud snapping sound when opened.
“This is Abra,” Leo said to Ruby, and Ruby nodded as if she understood, but she didn’t. “How can we get to the Tree?”
Ruby’s eyes went wide as if she had finally awoken, as if she had finally decided whose side she was on.
“Follow me!”
They sprinted down the dark hallway to the door that led into the stairwell, but they stopped there, held back by a deep rumbling sound. At first Ruby thought the entire building was coming down. She held up her hand for them to wait.
People began flooding past the small window in the door, running down the stairs like people on fire. Some of them fell as they descended, and others stepped on them and pushed past, and those that fell eventually pulled themselves up by the rail and followed, always running, always shouting. They weren’t shouting words that Ruby could understand, or that anyone could understand. The sounds they made were full of excitement and anger and wrath. They were heading for war.
People streamed by for minutes on end as the building emptied. The rumbling sound spread to the streets outside the building, and the brick walls shook as if huge projectiles were colliding against them. Dust fell from the ceiling.
Abra pushed past Ruby, trying to get into the stairwell, but Ruby hissed at her, “Wait!”
The Edge of Over There Page 24
