by Maguire, Ily
10
The car is parked in the dried up streambed about a quarter of a mile from the house. Ezekiel gets into the driver’s seat. He starts the car. It squeals and then rumbles to life. I can see the navigation light up on his wrist, too. It’s reactivated. He turns it off. He doesn’t need it. Pike eyes it, warily. As if someone else is watching us. If someone else is here.
Ezekiel puts his foot on the clutch and the car quiets. Then he shifts into first gear, grinding them before the car is put into second. The engine revs and the car jumps out of the ditch. We drive behind my house, tearing up the overgrown lawn. He turns onto the road.
“There were a few monitors along the way that I think I can sync to my armband. Then we’ll know if Dory went this way. She’d have to if she were going to the Mine Fires. She’d want to take the road rather than go through the woods. It’d be much faster.”
I pay careful attention to where these monitors would be located and prepare to look for them out the window. I immediately notice monitors on almost every tree and lamppost. He drives past them all. I look out the back window as we leave my house behind. Then we come upon more houses. Houses that are in my neighborhood that all look the same. House after house after house. Off white, white, eggshell colored houses. All scattered about the landscape. They aren’t even close to each other, but they’re so large, it would be impossible to not see them from a distance. I can’t see my house anymore as another has taken its place in the rearview.
“These are all out.” Ezekiel doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “We might be able to catch a residual image off of some of the others up ahead.”
“You’ve heard of Lye Island, right?” Pike asks. In the time since I’ve met him, I’ve gotten to know him more than anyone else. Maybe that’s why I feel so connected to him. Is that what love is? Is it love if it isn’t reciprocated? I want to love him. Does it matter that he doesn’t feel the same?
“Lye Island near the Sunken City,” he says again, turning his gaze from out the tinted windows to me in the backseat.
“I have,” I answer. “I learned about it with Jenny.” Whatever I feel for my family or Jenny is different from Pike. But he feels for me as I do my sisters. My heart sinks.
“When most of the coastline collapsed from the rising tide and people left for the interior, whoever stuck around isolated themselves in those pocketed microcities or the self-sufficient neighborhoods,” Pike says.
I know. On many levels, though, my self-sufficient lifestyle wasn’t that different from Aegis or The Hollow. Isolated.
“The Sunken City was closed off to the public by the Imperial Bead,” he continues. “Because the Beadledom needed to keep control over a smaller territory. The Sunken City was about to succumb to the rising sea, but it didn’t.”
“It shouldn’t have,” I say. I remember this lesson distinctly. Jenny shouldn’t have taught it. It wasn’t part of my curriculum. Of the Imperial Bead curriculum. But Jenny taught it anyway. She taught me how the Sunken City was intentionally flooded to cut off the outlying microcities. It would prevent people from moving out, rather than moving in. It’s coming back to me.
“It shouldn’t have,” Pike repeats and his hand goes up to the handle above the window.
With a jolt, Ezekiel pulls off of the road where the pavement was so smooth it was like floating instead of driving, onto another dirt and gravel embankment. My head almost hits the ceiling of the car, which is a dirty gray cloth that hangs down in patches that have pulled away from the edge. He drives down toward the streambed and every hole he drives into, I feel the bump inside my body. The vibration travels up my fake arm, reverberating through my shoulder and up my neck. He stops the car at the bottom and puts it into neutral letting it idle. He opens the door and runs out. A camera monitor is tucked deep within the branches of an evergreen tree. The only bare part is where is camera is mounted and aimed. He stands below, clicking something into his arm. He taps it again and again and then waves his wrist around. He turns back to us, shaking his head.
According to the clock on the dash, we’ve been driving nearly an hour.
“Nothing?” Pike asks, his window is rolled down..
“It’s out. They’re all out. The grid’s been terminated. There’s no information here.” Ezekiel gets back in the car.
“We still think she came this way, though?” I ask. I wonder if there’s really any way to know.
“If she’s going to Mine Fire City, she would have to have come this way before going west. We’ll catch up to her even if we take a day at the safe house.” Ezekiel puts the car back into gear and we drive along the stream for about 100 yards until he finds a shallow spot and drives the car through it. It wasn’t as shallow as I expected and water comes up through the metal slats on the floorboard. I move my feet to the hump in the middle of the backseat so they don’t get wet.
Pike’s hand grips the bar above the window, his knuckles turning white this time. Ezekiel downshifts and the car speeds to the other side. I put my feet back down on the floor and Pike let’s go of the handle. Ezekiel drives the car to the right, finding some sort of an access road on which to drive.
Ten minutes pass. Then twenty. We’re no longer driving on the access road, but now we’re on a trail. Worn only by the treads of bicycles, not car tires. What must’ve been another neighborhood has been retaken by nature. Ezekiel’s driving has slowed down considerably and I’m able to get a better look around. While is seems as though there’s nothing out here, there’s quite a bit I would’ve missed or wouldn’t have cared to notice. Where people once lived here, the only reminder of that are crumbling foundations and collapsed walls, overgrown with weeds and trees. People abandoned this area to get closer to the cities. It’s just too far away to sustain itself.
I glance back up at the clock. We’ve been driving for well over an hour and my legs are getting stiff. The land is so uneven that every jostling bump is felt throughout my entire body. I’m ready to get out.
“If the roads Dory has to travel on are anything like these, she’s not going to make it,” I say, more and more scared for my sister.
No one answers. They don’t have to. I know they’re thinking the same thing I am.
More time passes and still I glance outside for even a glimpse of my sister in the woods surrounding us. I know that’s impossible, but I’m still hopeful that she may have wandered north instead.
“So everything you know you’ve learned from books. Did you ever go out?” Pike asks, regaining my wandering attention.
“Of course,” I say. “We went outside all the time.”
“No, I don’t mean that.” Pike turns around. “I mean, did you ever go out and do things with other people?”
“Did you?” I ask. I’m trying not to be defensive. I realize in this moment that while I may love Pike, I know very little about him and he knows next to nothing about me. How could I love him, then? How could he love me? My back is starting to sweat and my neck is hot.
“I did before the Beadledom threatened the end was near. Then no one went anywhere unless they left. My question remains, did you go anywhere?” Pike turns around again. His eyes search for an answer.
“No. We didn’t need to.” I’m embarrassed answering. I shouldn’t be. We were just like everyone else around us. We streamed in all movies and only shopped through intermediaries that would ship direct. “We always had everything we needed.”
And now I need this car to stop. My arm is heavy and I can’t get it comfortable. I shift to the side to prop it on the seat back. It only makes it worse. The floor is still wet and it smells like must and mildew.
“What about friends?” he asks. “Did you have any?”
“I had Dory. And Jenny.” And I have Leland and Christophe. I think to myself, though I know they don’t count. I get that he’s making conversation, but why does it have to be so personal?
Ezekiel stops the car short and turns it off. He opens the door.
&
nbsp; “We’ll walk from here.” He gets out. He opens my door and I slide over and step out, too. Blood recirculates through my legs and it’s hard, but I lift my arms over my head. I’m instantly rejuvenated.
“Is this the way you came with the others?” I look around trying to get a sense of where I am.
Ezekiel shakes his head and I slam the door behind me. I walk after Ezekiel and Pike. The car is parked beside a large boulder at the edge of a dense forest. We couldn’t drive through there if we tried. We step into the trees and even though we’re away from the stream, the ground isn’t dry. There are patches on the ground of liquifacted Earth. Of quicksand. I know enough to avoid them as they’ll surely suck my boots down into them.
“Dory got out,” Ezekiel states. I stop, but not for long as neither of them even pause. I have to walk faster just to keep up.
“What do you mean?” I ask. A bit confused.
“She told me that she used to get out,” Ezekiel says. “She said she would meet up with a bunch of other kids like you. Pretty often, actually.”
I don’t have anything to say. I’m not so much surprised as I am hurt. Deep inside, I must’ve known. How could I have expected she would remain in isolation? I had Jenny, but who did Dory have?
Ezekiel continues as we step over mounds of pine needles, orange instead of green. “She and the other homeschooled would plan where they would go if they got away. She told me they would talk on the web and then would meet up somewhere away from the neighborhoods. They didn’t know what was beyond this immediate area and most of them were too scared to go too far. That’s what she told me.”
“Dory wasn’t too scared, though,” I say, recalling my sister before I went into the hospital. She was always so self-assured and strong.
“She didn’t have any real plans to leave, as far as I knew.” Ezekiel still stomps ahead. We’ve only been in the woods about twenty minutes and I can already see the glimmer of light beyond the darkness of the forest.
“You asked her to come to Aegis, didn’t you?” I ask. “To be with you.”
Ezekiel stops, but doesn’t turn around. I’m glad for the break. My legs are still stiff from the car ride.
“I did. I told her I could come and get her. She wanted to come, but would never leave you. Or your little sister,” Ezekiel finishes and continues to walk ahead.
“But how would she know where to go if she left? If she never really went anywhere,” I ask. I’m still not sure why she would want to go to the mine fires unless someone made her go or she really thought Evie was there.
“I don’t know,” he answers and says nothing more.
Mushrooms pop up through the needle cover, decomposing whatever is below. Ezekiel walks us to the light that has begun to penetrate the forest. In another ten minutes we are out of the forest and in a clearing where the landscape changes drastically. There is more tall grass instead of tall trees. We hike through the grass, it itches my skin as it brushes against me. I am reminded of my arrival in Aegis. There are definite similarities with the tall grass. Just as it starts to get oppressively hot, a breeze blows up, cooling down my skin.
Within a few minutes we are back beside the stream. If it’s the same stream we followed off and on from my house, I wonder why we went through the woods instead of following the water.
The woods continue alongside us, but the only thing I can see now ahead is the blue sky of the horizon. Pike and Ezekiel stop and take in the surroundings. They huddle together, probably to review some plan I’m not privy to. It’s okay. I look down. The banks of the stream are a golden sandy color. There isn’t any dirt despite just leaving the forest. Curious, I take my boots off and dig my toes into the sand. I’ve never felt sand before and it’s warm and then cool as I scrunch my toes deeper in. It sends shivers up my legs.
“Don’t do that! Put your boots back on!” Pike yells at me and rushes over. I fall back onto the sand. Pike takes my foot, wipes it on his pants and crams it into my boot. He does the same with the other.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. Pike pulls me back up. He’s breathing hard.
“There are chemicals in the sand.” Pike takes my hands and wipes them, too. Not on his pants, though. With his own hands. “It was used to dissolve the whales.”
“Whales?” I ask. He nods his head.
“Whales were slaughtered here and the lye is still in the land. See-” He points to lifeless corpses of frogs in varying stages of early development, all apparently trying to scramble their way up the sandy banks along the shore, but not making it because of underdeveloped or nonexistent limbs. “Dead frogs. Not evolution.” Pike brushes his hands on his pants and hurries to catch up to Ezekiel, waiting just up ahead.
I crouch down in the sand to tie my bootlaces and see tiny specks in the water along the edge. They undulate as one, but upon closer inspection, each individual flagellum is a tiny tadpole. No wait, each tadpole has two. Two tails. I stand up and shiver. Then look back at the dead frogs that I somehow hadn’t noticed before and hurry ahead with the frightful realization that there is something drastically wrong.
“Isn’t it dangerous to have a safe house way out here?” I ask, knowing full well that it is. “If the lye is just under the surface-”
“It’s all gone from the Sunken City and Lye Island’s pretty clean as well,” Pike tells me. “There’s a constant transfer of water over there. Here, not so much. This water is too stagnant.” I think about the hopelessness of those tadpoles. They don’t stand a chance.
“Are we close, then?” I ask.
“We are. Maybe another mile,” Ezekiel answers. We’ve already walked a mile or so.
“It’s just up ahead that the stream empties into the ocean. Once the water starts to rise, we’ll want to move up, too,” Pike adds. As the water rises, secluded pools of brackish water appear where fresh water from the stream starts to mix with salt water from the ocean. I still don’t see much up ahead, but we keep walking. It’s so quiet out here. There isn’t the sound of anything. Not the water flowing, no birds chirping, or even animals rooting around among the trees beside us. Nothing.
“The saltwater moves upstream and the fresh flows down. Their densities are different enough and they separate. Saltwater having a greater mass per volume than freshwater, it’s denser. It can even conduct electricity.” I almost bump into Pike who’s stopped to stare at me. “I learned that with Jenny,” I admit. He smiles. My head held a little higher, I walk ahead.
“We’re almost there. A little less than a quarter mile,” Ezekiel says and points up ahead. What looks like a blue horizon is the reflection of the sky in the ocean. It spreads out before us as the land beside us narrows. I don’t glance back, but can feel Pike’s presence behind me. The breeze is warm on my shoulders and I can smell sweetness all around.
“I can’t wait to rest,” I say envisioning comfortability disguised as a hidden safe house.
“It’s just up ahead.” Ezekiel says again. “See how the land narrows and then just out toward the horizon.”
I look out. The horizon hasn’t changed and the water doesn’t seem any closer. The sun beats down and my body is having a difficult time regulating the temperature of my bionic arm. Instead of cooling it down, it’s heating up and I’m nervous. It’s hot to the touch and I worry that I may be doing damage to my shoulder. I can’t feel anything on that side of my chest. My feet have begun to tingle, though I may be imagining that.
And then, as I focus my vision, I can see exactly what he is pointing to. It looks like a land bridge.
“There’s a path we’re going to follow up and over.” Ezekiel hikes up and over to the left. The trees from the forest are now behind us. “The stream dumps into the ocean just up ahead and the land bridge separates the ocean from a reservoir.”
Pike is beside me now. The speck on the horizon gets closer. “The land bridge goes over the Sunken City to Lye Island. The safe house is on the island.” We walk side-by-side. His pace matches mine, whi
ch still lags behind Ezekiel.
“The city was flooded to create the reservoir. It would be used during drought to water the territories. You can see the old clock tower when it gets low enough. It sticks out of the center,” Pike informs me. Ezekiel is too far ahead. I stop walking. It’s hot.
“Hey Zeke, slow down,” Pike calls, his hand on my lower back guides me out of the direct sun and into the shade. Under a lone willow tree that overhangs the widening streambed.
“Thanks.” I lean down on my knees, taking deep breaths in and out. My feet definitely burn, but I won’t take off my boots.
“You okay?” Pike asks as I wipe my brow.
“I’m okay. The pace was just – I’m just hot. I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure you will.” Pike grins and his smile warms me. And then he puts his hand on my head and rubs my hair. Like a brother. If I had a brother. He pulls his hand away, as if he’s shy all of the sudden. It doesn’t matter.
A low hiss in the weeds behind us, warns us away and I get up. There is sea grass all around. Light grey and off white with a bit of blue, it’s tall and unkempt. No human evidence whatsoever.
Ezekiel returns to us. He takes some water from a canteen he had strapped to his back and offers it. Pike shakes his head, but I accept and take a sip. I hand it back and Ezekiel takes an even bigger swig.
“We cross the bridge. We stay along the middle of the path. We’ll have to move fast,” Ezekiel says.
“Move fast,” I repeat. I’ll have to pull out the last bit of energy my legs have left. I ignore the throbbing pain in my feet and hope for numbness.
