Children of Eden (20 page)

“Tell us your name.”

I turn toward the unfamiliar voice. A hand grabs the back of the bag, along with some of my hair, and yanks my head back, exposing my throat. I am exposed, vulnerable. “Where
did you get those uniforms? Who is that boy with you?” He shakes me until my teeth rattle. But I say nothing.

For some seemingly endless time they question me, about my own identity, Lachlan's, where I'm from and where I was headed. I don't say a word, not even a lie. Not when they slap me hard across the face. Not when they tip me backward under a faucet that sends a steady drip, drip, drip of water onto my nose and mouth. I suck in pitiful amounts of air through the sodden bag, getting more water in my lungs than oxygen.

I pass out twice, and each time they haul me upright, pull the bag away from my face to give me a little more breathing room until I'm fully conscious . . . then tip me backward again. I don't know how long it lasts. It feels like hours.

The voice comes close to my ear, growling through the bag. “This is only going to get worse. If you talk now, you can be a Center witness against the others. You'll get off easy.” He sounds almost reasonable now. “That boy doesn't care about you. You're just a pawn in his traitorous schemes. He's
using
you.”

“No,” I start to babble. “He saved me. He was taking me someplace safe.”

“Where?” the voice demands.

“I don't know. Please, let me go.”

“What is your name?”

I bite my tongue.

“What is his name?”

I shake my head, and he cuffs me on the temple.

The questions begin all over again, in an endless nightmare. I feel like if I could see my captors, look them in the eye, I could bear it better. But these hard hands and harsh voices coming at me in the choking darkness are almost more than I can take. I don't want to tell them anything. But I have a terrible feeling I will if this lasts much longer.

I start to cry, and every time I breathe I can taste the salt of my own tears. I talk, begging, pleading, swearing I know nothing . . . and as the questions continue, I think I hear triumph in my interrogator's voice. I might not be giving him useful information yet, but I'm talking, terrified, desperate, and he knows it is only a matter of time now.

Then he makes a mistake. In one of his good-cop moments when he's leaning close to my ear, making tempting offers of clemency in exchange for information, swearing I'll be safe if only I tell him what he needs to know, he says the wrong thing.

“Your mother didn't die so that you could protect scum like that boy we caught you with.”

A white-hot rage rises up within me, burning out my fear. How dare he talk about my mother! Was he the one who killed her? Him, or someone like him.

I all but snarl beneath my soaking hood. My mother died for
me
. She died so that I could have a chance at a decent, safe life.

No matter what this man promises, I'll never have that with the Center or the Greenshirts. Maybe I'm caught. Maybe I'll be imprisoned, or killed. But if what Lachlan said is true, there is a community of second children, living the safe, happy life Mom wanted so desperately for me. For their sakes, and for Mom's memory, I won't tell them a thing.

My interrogator's head is still close to mine as he murmurs his persuasive words. His fingers clutch my shoulders.

“Get your hands off of me, you
bikking
Greenshirt!” I snap, and head-butt him in the nose.

I hear a deeply satisfying crunch, a curse . . . and Lachlan's voice saying, “That's enough, Flint. I think she's proven she won't break.”

THE WET BAG
is stripped from my face, and I find myself in a stone room without right angles, a rounded, cave-like chamber. Lachlan is standing a few feet from me, his face hard. There's another man in the room, too, an imposing man in his forties with silvered black hair. His eyes are blue-gray, almost as flat as implant eyes, but the dark blue rings around the irises mark them as natural, and him as a second child. Blood drips from his slightly off-center nose.

“Everyone breaks, given time,” Flint says, his face impassive.

I look from one man to the other. “This was a test?” I ask, incredulous. “This wasn't real?”

“It was completely real,” Flint says. “They'll do that to you, and worse, if they catch you. We had to know you wouldn't talk. At least, not right away. I'm responsible for every second child here, and I can't risk their safety by letting in someone who is weak or untrustworthy.”

Part of me is relieved. I was sure the nightmare would continue until it was unbearable, ending only in my death. But another part—the part that head-butted Flint in the face—is furious that they fooled me, frightened me, tortured me.

Of the two, Lachlan is in arm's reach. The knuckles I split
punching that outer circle gang open up again on his cheekbone. I don't care, because his face splits, too, right across that long crescent scar beneath his eye. He takes it without flinching, without the smallest movement of retaliation.

Flint wraps his arms around me and effortlessly picks me up, turning me around and setting me down out of reach of Lachlan. I'm shaking, and I clench my hands together so they won't see . . . and so I won't punch anyone else. Violence doesn't seem to have much effect on them anyway.

“How the hell could you do that to me?” I ask, my voice furious and hurt. “Lachlan, I thought this was supposed to be a brotherhood, a family of second children. I trusted you with everything about myself. Why couldn't you trust me?”

I expect an apology, but he looks at me levelly and says, “The Underground is bigger than any one person, more important than one night of suffering. We've only known about you for a matter of days, so we know less about you than we typically do about second children. Most we find when they're very young, even babies, or before birth. Our hunting methods are sophisticated—more so than the Center's, anyway. But we missed you entirely, and only found you by luck. Most second children come here so early they
are
part of the family. They're loyal. But you . . .”

“We don't know where your loyalties lie,” Flint supplies.

“I've been a prisoner all of my life because of Center policies!” I rage. “I've been in constant danger of prison or death. The government killed my mother! Do you really have any doubt about my loyalties at this point?”

“People can be surprising—even to themselves,” Flint says. “You don't know what you'd do in the worst situations, until they happen to you. But for now, I'm willing to let you into the Underground. You're one of us . . . sister.”

He offers me his hand. I stare at it, considering. I under
stand why he did what he did. I really do. In theory. But the fact that he did it to
me
makes it different. There's a world of difference between what is rationally necessary and what a good person should actually do. Logic shouldn't always win.

But my hand rises and clasps his firmly. Something seems to surge through me. Flint is a natural leader, I can tell. Just looking at him makes me feel like he has everything firmly under control. He's inspiring, and I feel like I can rely on him.
Sister
 . . . I'm no longer alone.

But when Lachlan holds out his hand, too, I glare coldly at him and then deliberately look away. We confided in each other. We talked about our lives. He shouldn't have let that happen to me. I understand why Flint did it, and forgive him, but somehow I can't forgive Lachlan. It might not make perfect sense, but there it is.

“Come,” Flint says, touching me lightly on the shoulder. “Let me introduce you to the Underground.” We exit the torture cave—just a room now—and step out into something I could never have imagined.

I'm inside a jewel. A faceted, glowing, many-hued jewel.

“Are . . . are we still under Eden?” I stammer, not believing my eyes.

I look out over a huge crystal cavern, maybe half a mile across. The entire roof and most of the walls of the gigantic cave are covered with clear bright jutting stones that look like colored ice. In subtle shining shades of palest pink and amethyst, of smoky silver and water-blue and pure clear diamond they surround me, catching the dim artificial light, so beautiful that for just a second I don't notice the even more remarkable thing below them. In the center of the twinkling crystal cavern, rising almost to the ceiling and spreading its canopy more than a hundred feet across, is a tree.

A tree.
A living tree.

The trunk is massive, twenty, thirty feet across, lumpy and gnarled. Roots spread aboveground for around the trunk before plunging into Earth. Earth? Dirt? It can't be. The ground of the cavern looks like a forest floor, Earth covered in brown fallen leaves.

My eyes rise to the tree again, and for the first time in my life I make the gesture they make in temple. My fist rises from my belly to my face, my fingers branch out, like a seed growing, sprouting. I feel reverent awe, like I should fall to my knees, hide my face in the presence of something so radiantly beautiful, so perfect as a tree.

Then dawn breaks over the green, living canopy, making the crystals above seem to dance, and tears fall silently from my eyes.

“It can't be real,” I whisper. But I can smell a sharp-sweet scent, and beneath that something rich and moist. Leaves, and Earth. I've never smelled anything like that—no one has, for generations—but some part deep within me recognizes the scents right away. Somewhere in my blood is a memory of nature, and it rejoices.

The sky goes from gray to pearl touched with pink as the sun breaks an unseen horizon and bathes the world with gentle morning light. That part has to be illusion, technology. We're deep underground, with rock all around us. Somehow they've made an almost perfect simulacrum of breaking dawn. But it's not just color, or light. I feel a flush of warmth hit my skin from where the sun is rising. The crystals in the roof and walls shine brightly beautiful.

“The tree is real,” Lachlan says from beside me. I'm so awestruck I don't even think to move away from him. “And the Earth.”

“But . . . there aren't any more trees.” That's what we've been taught. The world is dead, the dirt is toxic, all living
things extinct except for a few hardy lichens, single-celled organisms . . . and a handful of humans.

“There's one,” Lachlan says.

“But how?”

“Aaron Al-Baz, of course,” Flint says, his voice low and reverent. “The man who saved us. The man who will save the world. He made a perfect Eden, and humans corrupted it. We mean to bring Eden back to the paradise he intended it to be.”

“What is this place?”

“The backup Eden,” Flint answers. “This is where humans would have had to live if Eden wasn't ready in time, or if the world was more toxic than predicted. Underground. He kept it as a secret fail-safe in case humans managed to ruin things once again on the surface. It is self-contained and self-perpetuating, set up on computer controls and automation entirely separate from EcoPan.”

That's amazing, I think. We've been taught that EcoPan took over control of every computer and electronic system on the planet.

“But he knew man can't live completely apart from nature,” Flint went on, “so he managed to preserve this tree. The dirt is real organic soil from the surface, clean, good, uncontaminated pre-fail dirt. It goes down fifty feet, so the roots can bury deep. Hidden panels among the crystals simulate sunlight. As far as the tree knows, it's still on the surface. It gets sunlight, water, nutrients, seasons . . . and it gives us almost all the oxygen we need to survive down here with the place entirely sealed.”

“He must have loved us, Rowan, to give us all this,” Lachlan says. I won't look at him. “He must have loved humans so much, to save us from ourselves.”

“I have work to do,” Flint said abruptly. “Lachlan, show her around.”

I try to protest, but Flint turns on his heel and is gone.

Lachlan reaches for my hand, but I shake him off before he can so much as touch me. Every time I look at him, I feel like the wet bag is over my head again, and I'm choking. He steps back and nods, gesturing for me to precede him, giving me space. I want to stay up here gazing at the tree, but then he says, “I know you want to touch it.”

I can't resist that offer. I storm ahead of him, but it's all I can do not to smile.

The walls are high, ringed with galleries at multiple levels. I can see many cave-like rooms all around. The interrogation chamber I just left is four stories up along the curving walls of the cavernous hall. I fly down stairs cut into the stone, getting curious glances from a few people. I'll look at them later. Just a few days ago, other humans were exciting. But a tree! For the moment, nothing else exists.

I sprint across the smooth stone floor until suddenly my feet hit dirt. I skid to a stop and look down at my boots. Lachlan is behind me. “Take them off,” he urges, and I do, laughing as my bare toes grip the real, natural packed Earth. I touch it with my hands; I kneel. Ecstatically, I kiss it. I must look like an idiot, dirt on my lips, but I don't care. I never thought I'd experience this in my lifetime. Everyone in Eden must endure artificiality for generations so that one day our descendants might know the glory of nature.