Children of Eden (34 page)

And I, as always, start running.

I hear a rumble, and the world around me seems to shiver. I ignore it. There have been too many strange visions dancing before my eyes lately for me to pay this one any mind at this particular moment. It might be real, it might not. It doesn't matter. Running is the only thing that matters.

THERE'S ENOUGH CONFUSION
in the Center that I manage to make a quick break and slip into darkness before they can catch me. After that, I make my way quickly toward the outer circles. I don't know how to find the entrance to the Underground, and I'm not sure if I should go there anyway. There's no immediate sign of pursuers, but they'll find me eventually. I can't risk leading them to the hidden second children. I can go to Serpentine, maybe. No, that's been compromised. The soup kitchen? Yes, that's my best bet. If I survive the night I might have a chance of blending in there, and people there have connections to the Underground.

But my hopes of reaching it are slim.

I'll die tonight. Of that, I'm fairly certain. The lull and lack of pursuit at the moment don't deceive me. How many times have I beat the odds racing through Eden? This is the night my luck won't hold. But it's okay, I tell myself. I've saved Ash, so part of me will live on in my brother. And all those second children will live on. Maybe Lachlan won't have me and my lenses anymore, but he's resourceful and dedicated. He'll always find a way to keep the second children alive and safe.

Acceptance of mortality is liberating. I start taking risks. If I'm
doomed, why not save my feet and take an autoloop? I have the eyes for it now. Feeling reckless, I skip down the stairs to a station and let the scanner check my eyes. It blinks, sending me through. Whoever I am now, whoever I'm supposed to be, I must have credits on my account. I'm welcomed.

I smile at the few people riding on the autoloop, looking them boldly in the eye. They seem uncomfortable with my boldness. They never dream that I'm an impostor. I ride all the way to the second outermost circle and exit with a feeling of lightness. Heaviness, worry are for people whose fate is uncertain.

Dawn is coming, lightening the east, and I look around marveling at the beauty that surrounds me. Yes, beauty, though I wouldn't have noticed it in any other state. Last time I was here, fearing for my very life, I saw only squalor and poverty. Now I notice how the rosy new light touches the edges of the buildings, how the quickening breeze stirs up dust in eddies that look like something undersea. Now that I'm resigned to leave it, the world seems lovely. It should make me sad, shouldn't it? Now I'm just glad to have been a part of it. Even a small part, for just a little while.

There's the food pantry, but I see someone who looks suspicious. It's probably just a hungry man waiting for them to serve breakfast, but it could also be a Center official undercover. So I don't even glance at the soup kitchen, but just walk past. He doesn't follow me. Good. Because it's not that I
want
to die or anything. I hope I can get to safety, get back in touch with Lachlan, see my brother again, spend long hours talking to Lark, resume my spying mission. I just hope it in a hopeless kind of way.

I think about doubling back and seeing if I can get into the soup kitchen unobserved after all. It will be full light soon, and I'll lose the advantage the darkness and dim dawn
have given me so far. Then I have a better idea. I'll leave Eden entirely. Why not spend the day in the forest of synthetic bean trees? It will be safe and cool. Maybe it will even occur to Lachlan that I'll go there. Maybe he'll come and find me.

I know they're coming before I see or hear them. How? It's like a little switch goes on in my brain. Like I'm seeing the scene from somewhere else, on a datablock screen maybe. Close but far away. I see myself, tiny. I see myself being spotted by a group of Greenshirts turning slowly with their handheld scanners. As if I'm watching from above I see them all focus in my direction and start to move toward me.

It's just a paranoid feeling, I tell myself. How could I see them as if through the eye of a bot or a security camera?

I have to be imagining it . . . but I start to run again anyway. There's the wall of junk, piled high, another wall to keep me in—or out? I recognize the place I managed to crawl through the last time, and I'm on my belly wiggling when the Greenshirts shout.

“She's over here, some place.”

“Do you see her?”

“Scanner says a hundred yards or less.”

Of course they can scan me now. I have lenses, real lenses that link to the EcoPan. They don't know I'm Rowan, but they must have scanned me at the Center, and now it is a relatively simple matter to have the cameras and bots that all connect to the EcoPan look for me. In becoming a first child, I've lost my anonymity.

“There she is!” one of them calls out just before my legs wiggle all the way into the dense pile of refuse. I move as quickly as I can, but I must take a slightly different route and I'm blocked in. I double back, but they've started to crawl after me.

I hear a hum, and think it must be in my head, another
weird symptom. Are my lenses humming now, as well as giving me visions?

For long moments more I crawl through the twisted junk, the refuse of civilization. I can hear clattering behind me, but I still have hope. They might get lost in the labyrinth of garbage. They might get trapped.

But then, so might I. I've lost all sense of direction. Right now I'm just crawling away from the sounds of pursuit. That seems like the best bet right now.

Then I hear more sounds, rattling from all around me. I'm surrounded? But how?

Finally I see an opening ahead, and I wiggle toward it. If I can get out ahead of them and run . . .

Then the ground begins to shift under me. There's no ignoring it, no denying it. The entire Earth heaves up like it is breathing a huge sigh of exasperation at the humans crawling across it. That first movement is almost gentle.

It is the last gentle thing for a very long time.

With a violent, jarring punch the entire Earth seems to throw me upward against the trash, then throw me down again. Things start to collapse on my head.

From the shouts and agonized wails behind me, I can tell the pursuing Greenshirts aren't so lucky. One cry is abruptly cut off. Someone shouts for someone named Wolf and gets no answer.

Piteously, one calls for his mother.

I get half of my body out of the wall of trash, and then another mighty heave of the Earth lifts me, and everything, up high and brings us crashing down again. I hear a terrible creak above me and drag myself forward, not even daring to look up. There's a deafening crash, and a huge beam shifts and pins my leg.

I scream, my cries of pain joining those of the surviving Greenshirts. At first I'm sure my leg must be broken, even severed,
it hurts so much. But as I pull, I realize it's just painfully trapped at the thigh. Not that that's much better. If the Greenshirts don't find me, I'll die a slow death of dehydration . . .

My head is clear of the tangle. The beanstalk forest is just in front of me, the massive tree-like constructs moving gently in the wind.

No, not the wind. Some of the giant bean trees are shifting from the roots up. I watch as the ground buckles, liquifies around a clump of them nearest to me. Then I see in horror what is happening. In slow motion, three of the mechanical behemoths begin to tilt. Slowly, with a grinding, creaking sound, they topple . . . right toward me.

I scream again, begging for help I know will never come, and pull with all my strength, but my leg remains wedged under the beam. With my lips curled back in a primal snarl of fear, and rage against my coming end, I watch the three bean trees gain momentum as they crash toward me. Two of them cross, bouncing and sliding off each other, sending the massive trunks in two different directions. But the third is listing directly toward me.

I want to meet my fate directly, with strength or at the very least with anger, but to my shame I cover my head at the last second. The booming crash deafens me, the sound alone so painful I almost think I've been crushed. Instead the weight miraculously lifts from my leg and I instinctively squirm free of the tangle. Only when I've crawled breathlessly away do I see that the bean tree fell at just the right angle to seesaw the crushing beam off of my leg.

But it isn't over yet. Not by a long shot. Trees are falling all around me. I drag myself to my feet and try to run, but the ground buckles under me, falling away from my feet, and I have to crawl.

The Earth is spitting the artificial trees out, tearing the
fake things from her breast and casting them on the ground. Under the ground there are cables and wires, all useless now in the face of the Earth's own awesome force. Spellbound, on my knees like a supplicant, I watch them fall.

All around me they crash, closer and closer as I desperately try to find my balance on the shifting ground. I try to tuck my feet under me and jump away, but the Earth seems to have turned liquid, as bad as the nanosand in the desert. I flop and flail helplessly, trying to get away as the huge twisted trunk crashes toward me, but I can't maneuver. I curl my body, and throw my arms over my head. I expected to die tonight, but not like this.

I feel the whoosh of air, hear a crash so loud I can't hear anything else for a few minutes, as the tree snags on another tree's vine and lands just a few feet to my side. Another miss! I use the monstrous leaves to pull myself out of the heaving, devouring Earth and on top of the stalk. The shaking has lessened, but the ground around me is like a sea and the trees keep falling. I run, slipping and sliding on the broad gnarled trunks, dodging other beanstalks as they fall.

When the heat of the desert smacks me in the face, I turn behind me, and find a ruin. At least half of the synthetic beanstalks are down. I don't even want to think what this will mean for Eden. The algae spires and the photosynthetic material impregnated in all the buildings make oxygen, too, but is it enough? Without these beanstalks will Eden suffocate?

I see movement on the far side of the massive deadfall of collapsed bean trees. Two of the Greenshirts made it through the wall and are picking their way over the tangle of trunks and vines. I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. I think of the man crying out for his mother, and want to run to the survivors, to see if they're okay, if I can help rescue their comrades.

But I don't. Because the world doesn't work like that, and people don't think like that. We're not altruistic. Humans fight and kill and follow orders, and the only way to survive is to be like everyone else, only worse. They don't ask for help, or see if I'm okay. We don't find common ground in the face of this catastrophic earthquake. We just keep fighting, running, hurting, killing.

They open fire at me, and I run into the desert. There's nowhere else to go.

It's as awful as I remember. The heat smacks me like an explosion. Each breath scorches my lungs, but I keep going because the Greenshirts keep shooting. Why do they care about duty at a moment like this, with the ground trembling beneath our feet? Or are they so persistent because they blame me for their comrades' deaths? But they don't have to chase me, shoot at me. It's not
me
making them do it. Don't they realize they could just stop?

But
I
can't. I have to keep running out into this brutal oven while they do their best to kill me for reasons none of us fully understand.

And the nanosand is coming.

Now that I know what to look for I can see it. It shimmers just a little, setting it apart from the matte dun color of the rest of the sand. There's a patch behind me, and one to my left. Maybe another ahead of me, I can't quite tell. They're moving at the pace of a brisk walk, swimming through the sea of sand directly toward me. The quaking has stopped for the moment, and I can move faster than the nanosand pools for now. But there are more now, two coming from the right, and I know however fast I'm traveling now the heat will make me slow down soon. They'll surround me, swallow me down.

My skin is scorched pink, so hot I don't even sweat. I stumble to one knee but scramble up again right away. For a
moment I look at the two Greenshirts standing on the edge of the desert. They don't dare follow me. Smart men.

What if I just walk toward them? Will they shoot me the moment I'm in range? Will they talk to me about how ridiculous it is that we three of the few surviving humans on the planet want to kill each other? The nanosand slithers inexorably closer.

Uncertain, I raise my hand to the tiny distant figures standing on the edge of the ruined beanstalk forest. I see one of them start to raise a hand, too. To wave, to beckon me in? Or to shoot at me again?

Before I can decide, the Earth decides for me. I hear a terrible grinding, cracking, exploding sound, and in the most powerful tremor of all the ground rises at least ten feet, throwing me down on my belly. From my new high vantage point I think I see the Earth begin to smile, a fierce grin of jagged, rocky teeth. Another vision from my lenses? No, the Earth really is splitting, opening up in a fissure fifty feet wide. As I watch, it stretches from the desert toward Eden, traveling like an arrow toward the Center. I see a brilliant green flash at the heart of Eden, so bright it burns an afterimage on my retinas.