38

ABRA’S WALK TO THE TOP of the building was long and quiet. The muscles in her legs ached and she breathed hard, all the time trying not to think about the quick retreat she would have to make down through all of those levels if she did end up killing the Tree. Every ten floors or so she peeked into the main area and glanced at the trunk of the Tree, hoping to find a floor where it had not been covered, but no floor had been missed. Wide boards formed walls she could not penetrate, so she continued climbing.

When Abra went through the door at the top of the tall building, the beauty of the view stopped her in her tracks, then drew her to the edge. She stood there looking over the city, up to the road she and Leo had come down, straight through the trees. She looked to the side, and she could see the long, flat plain of stone and red light glaring off the dimple-shaped pools of clear water.

She pulled herself away from the edge, and there, in the middle of the building, was the Tree.

It came up through the roof as if this was the only part of it, as if it was only a ten-foot-high tree, not a thousand-foot tree that grew up, up, up through an entire building. The part she could see looked young and immature. She pulled out her sword and walked toward it. The bark was as she had remembered it, soft and leathery, and she took a deep breath, preparing to plunge the sword into the Tree.

Her eyes snagged on one lone piece of fruit dangling in front of her. It was lime green, the color of a lollipop, with the same translucence as clear candy. She tilted her head to the side and stared at it. At first, she could see through it to the distant buildings, and beyond that the water, far off and far below. But the fruit clouded up as she stared at it, like steam on a bathroom mirror, and then she could see inside the fruit. What she saw made her tremble.

It was her mother. She was old, much older than she was at that time, and she was in a bed, her head propped up on two pillows. Her face was pale and her eyelids closed, and Abra realized she was at the end of her life. She was dying. Abra reached up and held the fruit in her fingers. And she watched.

Her mother coughed. A tear slid down Abra’s cheek. She wondered if she was seeing the future. She wondered if she was seeing the present. Was her mother at home, dying, right now? She pulled the fruit from the branch, and as it pulled away the leaves recoiled and danced back and forth.

She would take the fruit home to her mother. Her mother would never die. Her mother would . . .

“No,” she muttered to herself, staring at the fruit in her hand. “No.”

It started to brown, and she dropped it onto the roof, where it shattered like a Christmas ornament. A breeze blew and it was gone. She found herself stumbling along, following the dust as it flew to the other side of the building. The vision of her mother dying had distracted and disoriented her.

That’s when she saw the large telescope propped up on two massive tripods. The men must have finished building it before the speech, and there it stood, waiting for Amos to gaze through it after the war was fought, after the Frenzies were destroyed and the city was his. She stared at it, and the weight of the decision pulled down on her shoulders.

Should she look?

She glanced over her shoulder at the door to the roof.

One glance wouldn’t hurt.

She bent down and peered into the eyepiece. She couldn’t look for long, because it was like looking directly at the sun. She fell away from the telescope and sat on the roof.

Abra wept. She had seen a faraway, terrifying darkness, yes, but that darkness had been pushed to the farthest fringe by a place of such beauty that it made her chest hurt. It was the ache a child feels when she wants to go to the moon, when she first comprehends the distance between herself and the faraway stars. It was the overwhelming joy of Christmas morning and first love and the unexpected warmth of a spring breeze, rolled into one. She felt all of that in the instant she looked through the telescope, and at the end she was left with a deep and impenetrable sadness that she could not be there now.

A desire to be there, in the beautiful place, had pulsed so strong that now she felt weak, limp.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” Beatrice said from the other side of the building. Abra looked over her shoulder. Beatrice stood there, and she was glowing with shadows, if that was possible.

“Beatrice,” Abra said in a heavy voice, “I have to kill the Tree. You know that.”

“First, let me show you something,” Beatrice said.

“I’ve already looked.”

“No, no, not that. Come here. Come close.”

Abra crossed the building, her sword ready.

“Tell me what you see,” Beatrice said.

Abra looked out on the city. The Frenzies had started fires in all the streets around them, so that the flames licked at the buildings and the shadows danced like old ghosts. The entire city, as far as she could see, glowed orange, and in the distance a portion of the forest had already caught. There were the sounds of war: the loud, booming crashes of destruction, and the howling of people who have allowed themselves to be turned into animals.

“This is hell,” Abra whispered. “The fires, the screams, the people who cannot die but have to go on living in this.”

“No,” Beatrice said spitefully. “This is not hell. This is people living forever. Forever! They will never have to die!”

Abra stood there, and the red of the sky deepened as night approached.

“With your key,” Beatrice said, pointing at the sword, “we could open all the gates. We could create new worlds where people would never have to die. What would be so wrong with that?”

Abra didn’t move. She felt like she couldn’t. Sadness was a weight on her shoulders. It all felt like too much. What could she, a teenage girl, do in the face of all this evil? How could she possibly make a difference?

But her head was shaking almost of its own accord. She felt her hand tighten around the sword’s handle. Her jaw clenched.

Beatrice made a quick motion to push Abra over the edge, but Abra ducked and jumped backward. Beatrice was on top of her, and she was too strong, but Abra rolled and rolled and stabbed with the sword and somehow they were both on their feet again, facing off. Lightning or something like it crackled from Beatrice.

There was no way in the world anyone would have mistaken Beatrice for a little girl in that moment. Her clothes were in tatters, and they flapped around her in the breeze like the unwound strips of cloth from a mummy. Her skin was translucent like the fruit on the Tree, and she wasn’t quite standing on the roof of the building but rather hovered a few inches above it, slowly approaching.

“What did you see through the telescope?” she asked Abra.

Abra tried to hold the sword steady. “You know what I saw.”

Beatrice shrugged. “Soon you will be there,” she said in the voice of an adult simplifying a complex concept for a young child.

Abra shook her head and held the sword tighter. Beatrice rushed at her, and Abra could not tell if she was flying or running. She whispered to the sword because suddenly she felt like the two of them were in this together, and the words helped her to gather confidence. She felt intimately connected to it.

Abra swung the sword once as Beatrice knocked her over. Abra landed on her back, and the wind was knocked out of her. She pulled herself up onto her hands and knees and waited. She felt certain that in the amount of time it had taken for her to get to her knees, Beatrice would be standing over her, gloating, ready to kill her. But nothing happened.

Abra heard a whimpering from the edge of the building. She turned around. Beatrice lay on her side, moaning. Abra’s sword had caught her, and this time it had gone deep. Abra stood on shaky legs and walked over to where Beatrice lay. She looked down at her, and again she was overcome with sadness. Those figures, the Tennins and the Jinns and the Koli Naals and the Beatrices—they were so incredibly made that even the evil ones emanated a fierce kind of beauty. The sadness Abra felt was at how far some of them had managed to fall.

“Go ahead,” Beatrice wheezed.

Abra lifted the sword and put the tip of the blade against Beatrice’s throat. The skin in that spot was pale and vulnerable. Abra stared hard and thought that by any account, she should do it. She should end Beatrice. But she knew she couldn’t the moment she felt Beatrice’s life pulsing at the end of the sword.

She pulled it away. “Go,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Go!”

When Beatrice didn’t move, Abra shrugged and walked over to the Tree. She pushed her sword into it. It was like pushing a dull knife into softened butter, and the trunk immediately went from velvety brown to a lifeless gray-white. The pale color spread out and down. The fruit fell, heavy, and the leaves drifted to the roof and withered, and everything was swept away by a strong breeze. The entire building trembled as if an earthquake had rocked the foundation.

Abra turned and ran to the door. She looked over her shoulder once.

Beatrice was gone.

Abra ran down through the building, level beyond level, stair after stair, usually two or three at a time. As the Tree withered and died—and it happened slower than the Tree in Abra’s valley, perhaps because it was older and more established, or perhaps simply because of its size—it shrunk away from the walls and the ceilings that it supported. The entire building was structured around the Tree, and these subtle shifts were enough to begin bringing it down.

But fortunately for Abra, it didn’t happen all at once. An outer wall collapsed on the 78th floor as Abra ran to the 77th floor, and a portion of that side of the building fell outward, into the streets. The Frenzies cheered, thinking they had done something in their fight against Amos. At one point the stairwell partially collapsed, and Abra fell straight down ten feet. She didn’t have time to check herself for injuries—she scrambled to her feet and kept running.

Above her she could hear the building falling, bricks crumbling. A cloud of dust chased her down the steps, threatened to overtake her and choke her and steal away her vision. But she held tight to the rail and ran, all the way to the basement.

She saw a line of flashlights, and she grabbed one, turned it on, and when it didn’t come on she shook it. The beam flickered on. She put her sword away and took two flashlights with her into the darkness of the tunnels, following the green arrows. She kept hearing things in the tunnel behind her, and she spun around and pointed the yellowing light into the darkness. She expected to see Beatrice.

Nothing.