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 difficult 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 three stood there, and the people stopped going by, but still Ruby held Abra’s hand on the door handle. Abra stared at her, and there was urgency in her eyes, but Ruby shook her head.

No.

A different sound came down the stairwell: two people walking very slowly. Amos and Beatrice came into view. They held hands as they walked, and Beatrice seemed to be leading him. They turned in the landing in front of the small window and began going down the next flight of stairs. Leo sighed. Abra breathed out quietly through pursed lips.

The three of them pressed against the wall and held their breath. They saw Beatrice’s shadow approach, widening in the crack at the bottom of the door. Abra put an index finger over her lips.

Beatrice turned and left, leading Amos down the stairs.

“I have to get to the Tree,” Abra said. “Now.”

“Everyone’s already eaten from it,” Ruby said in a quiet voice. “It’s too late.”

“What?” Abra said. Her face went white.

Ruby nodded. “It’s true.”

Abra stood there for a moment, finally shaking her head. “Okay, okay, we can’t do anything about that. But we still have to kill the Tree.”

“C’mon,” Ruby said, pushing through the door and running up the stairs as fast as her legs would take her. Abra and Leo followed close behind.

The three of them went up one floor and burst into the room.

“There’s the trunk,” Ruby said, pointing to the center of the room.

Tree branches held up the ceiling, intertwining with the structure. Smaller branches drooped down, heavy with fruit. For a moment, Ruby remembered that day long ago, the day she was healed, when she nearly ate that piece of fruit.

“Don’t eat it,” Abra said firmly to Leo and Ruby. “Don’t even touch it. Don’t even look at it.” They both nodded.

She marched through the dimly lit room to the trunk. “It’s covered,” she said over her shoulder to Ruby and Leo.

“What?” Leo said, running over to her.

She was right. Someone had built a wooden, circular wall around the trunk, and the branches came out of it in the ceiling, so there was no way of reaching it.

“Can’t you get your sword through?” Leo asked.

Abra tried stabbing the boards, but the sword simply stuck into the wood.

“Either it’s Beatrice’s magic or the sword is only made for the Tree,” she muttered. She jumped up and stabbed a low-hanging branch. The fruit on the branch dropped instantly and shattered, and a breeze swept through the building, carried the shards away. But the rest of the Tree remained undamaged.

“I have to get to the trunk,” Abra said to Ruby.

“The trunk is covered like this all the way up through the building,” Ruby said, thinking about all she had seen. “Except . . . ”

“Except?”

“Except on the roof,” she said quietly, remembering how the Tree emerged, remembering the view. “The Tree grows up out of the roof.”

“The trunk is exposed up there?”

Ruby nodded. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Abra said, running for the door. She stopped.

“What’s wrong?” Leo asked.

Abra turned to them with a grave look on her face. “Leo, when I kill the Tree, this whole building is coming down.”

“What?”

“The Tree. When I kill it. It dies fast, probably faster than we can run back down. I don’t think we’ll make it out.”

Leo and Ruby stared at her, trying to figure something out.

“You two have to go. You have to run and get out of here. Leo, you have to take Ruby out. If I can get out, I’ll follow you and seal the grave, but you can’t wait for me. If I don’t make it, you have to tell Mr. Henry what happened.”

“Abra,” Leo began, but she interrupted him.

“No. You have to go.”

Ruby looked at Leo, and even in the midst of everything else that was going on, one thought raced to the front of her mind.

I have a brother.

“Listen,” Leo said to Abra. “You can make it out. After you kill the Tree, go all the way down to the basement. There are tunnels there with arrows. Follow the green arrows.”

“The green arrows?”

“Yeah, the green ones. I don’t know where it goes, but I think it goes away from the water. It’s the only way we’ll get out of this city alive.”

Abra nodded. “You two take care of each other, okay?” she said. “Don’t eat the fruit. Whatever you do. Please.” She grabbed their shoulders, stared at them through desperate eyes, then disappeared up the stairwell.

“C’mon, Ruby. Let’s go,” Leo said.

Ruby followed Leo down, down, down, and the rumbling sounds of war from outside the building grew louder. There were screams and shouts. Orders. She flinched at the muffled sound of buildings collapsing, crashing to the ground, threatening to cave in the tunnels.

They finally reached the basement. There was a row of flashlights on the wall where the stairs went down into the tunnel, as if the tunnels were regularly used from that point. They each grabbed one and ran into the tunnels.

“Let’s take turns using the flashlights,” Leo said. “I don’t know how far we have to go.”

They found the first green arrow spray-painted on the wall of the tunnel, and they ran in that direction. The darkness in front of them fled from the flashlight, spilled in behind them, forever running away, forever chasing them. Ruby wondered where they were going. Everything she had ever known was behind her. Every question she had ever had about her life was walking right there beside her.