I wake with a gnawing, anxious sensation squeezing my stomach, at once painful and familiar. Hunger and adrenaline. Just like a Badlands morning.
“Tess.” Abel glances up from his morning tea with a pleasant smile. “Your suspended sensory activity is complete.” The steam from the cup drifts and curls as fluidly as a stream.
“Morning.” I’m unable to add a good in front of it. I sit down to a plate of lukewarm scrambled eggs and begin shoveling them into my mouth.
Abel studies me from across the dining table. I guess as far as he’s concerned, last night bought us closer together, not farther apart. “Is everything all right?”
I almost laugh. Everything might get close to being all right, however, if Ling shows up to meet me today. It didn’t take long to work out how to reply to her slew of friendly forest folk. I chose a baby deer wobbling on toothpick legs to tell her I’d be at the filtration plant at noon. I have no idea if she’ll show.
“Everything’s just great,” I tell Abel, speaking through a mouthful of food. “Peachy as peach pie. With extra peach.”
“Good to hear,” he murmurs. He’s watching me. It takes all the will-power I have not to glance at the red basement door.
Instead I meet his gaze, and swallow. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about my plan for you.”
A tiny chill skids through me. “Sounds ominous.”
His gnarled hands jitter in front of him. “I mean, our plan for what you’ll be doing. If you’re not going back to education today.”
I relax a little. Of course. It’s Monday morning. “I’ve been thinking about that too,” I say, licking some egg off my fork. “I think I just need a few weeks to get back on my feet. Eat. Sleep. Exercise at a Hub. Check out some art, spend some time at the park. Then I’ll reenroll.”
He nods slowly. “Sounds like you’ve put some thought into this.”
“Children are the future, Uncle A,” I say innocently. “Gyan said that himself. I need to take my future seriously.”
He can’t tell if I’m being sarcastic. “Yes. Of course.”
I resist the urge to lick my plate clean and instead scrape my chair backward. “I’m out, Uncle A. See you later—”
But Abel stops me with a raised palm. “Just a moment. Until you go back to education, I have some requirements of my own.”
I sit back down with slow caution. “Oh yeah?”
“I’d like Hunter to tutor you,” he says. “In the evenings, after he’s done at post-education.”
“What?”
“Tess, you’ve been out of the education system for a year,” Abel continues calmly. “That puts you at a considerable disadvantage to the other students.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“Hunter’s very responsible, very bright—an excellent teacher. And he lives right around the corner. You’ll be able to review what you’ve missed. I dare say you’ll be caught up in a matter of months—”
“Months?” I spit hotly. I’m on my feet. “I can handle a knife, I know how to defend myself, hell, I even know how to kill and cook a damn prairie chicken. Those kids should be learning from me—”
“No one is questioning your . . . abilities, Tess,” Abel says, “but this is not up for debate.”
“What if I say no?” I ask, daring him.
“If you want to live at my house, then you will have to obey my rules,” he says with surprising authority.
He’s got me. I don’t have anywhere else to stay. Abel barrels on hurriedly. “Right, he’ll be here at seven o’clock tonight and every week-night for the next month. He has access to the house. I might be here, I might not. Kimiko can fix you dinner.” He pauses, eyeing my reaction.
“Fine.” I groan. “But, can we start tomorrow?” I have no idea what’s supposed to happen at Kudzu, assuming I even get there. I don’t want to cut anything short because I’m being babysat.
He nods. “Oh,” he adds as I turn to skulk out. “One more thing. Did you turn Kimiko off last night?”
I freeze, eyes popping wide. Then I relax my face and turn to face him sheepishly. “Yeah. I came down for a snack and I didn’t want her to wake you.”
“Next time, just put her to sleep. Shutting her down resets everything in the house.”
I look at the man who’s constructing an artilect from the blood of my mother. The man who is working for the Trust. The man who keeps his sister’s killer six feet below us in a secret basement. I smile, sweet as syrup. “Sure thing, Uncle A. Whatever you say.”
At first, the Trust kept Moon Lake clean with a large-scale filtration system. A few years ago they developed a microorganism, a simple bacteria that cleans water a hundred times more effectively. Bioremediation. They trumpeted that breakthrough on the streams for months: “That’s what you get for putting your trust in the Trust!”
Eventually the old plant will be turned into offices or housing, but for now, it’s abandoned. If it weren’t for the bright sunlight and high twitter of unseen birds, it’d definitely feel a little spooky. Some of the glass windows are broken, spiderwebbed with cracks. Giant black pumps, once endlessly sucking and spitting water, are now motionless, sprayed with dark red rust. My footsteps echo from the high concrete walls. It’s just before noon. I find a concrete ledge to perch on, and I wait.
At 12:30, I wonder how much longer I should stay.
Then I hear it. A low drone, growing louder every second. I stiffen. A floater.
Ling rounds the corner. She’s wearing tight white pants, sturdy boots, and a loose white sweater. Even though it’s a typical Eden outfit, she still looks like a badass. Maybe it’s her eyes, which are narrowed suspiciously at me beneath blunt black bangs.
The hovering floater zooms straight past me. At the other end of the plant, Ling circles around, looking every which way, scoping the place out. Then she rides back to me and stops a good ten feet away.
I slip off the ledge and take a couple hesitant steps toward her. “Poká. Coméstá?”
“Empty your backpack,” she orders.
“Huh?”
She glares at me. “Now!”
I shrug it off my back, zip it open, and shake everything onto the ground. I don’t have much: the scratch she gave me, a muesli bar, a bottle of water, and Mack.
“Is that the scratch I gave you?” she asks.
I nod, holding it out for her to see. “Yeah. Look, Ling—”
“Shut up.” She putters forward on the floater to snatch the scratch from me. She smooths it open and spends a minute swishing through some streams. Satisfied, she scrunches it back into a ball and shoves it in her pocket. “So,” she says, “where were you?” I open my mouth, but she cuts me off. “You know what? Let me guess.” She presses her fingers to her temple like a mind reader. “You bought clothes in the Hive, then took an airbus to a salon in Charity. Pretty fancy one too. Later, you took another airbus back to your uncle’s from the Animal Gardens.”
I gape at her. “You were following me?”
She gives me a withering look. “Your new ID, genius. Way to lay low.”
I’d forgotten how hooked up Kudzu were. Of course they could trace my ID. “Ling, I can explain—”
“Save it,” she says, turning her floater around. “We don’t deal with traitors.”
“I’m not a traitor!” I cry. “I’m not!”
“See ya, Rockwood,” Ling calls over her shoulder. “As in, never again.”
“Ling, wait!” I race to catch up with her, throwing myself in her path. She pulls the floater to a stop, inches before it crashes into me. “I’m not a traitor. Okay, so I got a new ID. I freaked out when I got to Abel’s. I didn’t think I could handle it, that being an Edenite would be better. I was wrong. I want to join Kudzu, Ling.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because . . .” I rack my brain for a way to make her believe me. “Because yesterday at the salon, I told Izzy and the stylist and anyone else listening that we all should be using less water, and that I don’t think Gyan should’ve cut off Moon Lake!”
I’m expecting Ling to be won over by my revolutionary zeal, but instead she just stares at me, horrified. “You broke Trust law? In front of other Edenites?”
I’d just made it worse.
“This isn’t only about being able to scrape by in the Badlands, Tess,” Ling says hotly. “We’re revolutionaries. When we break the law, we do it anonymously. Not with an audience.”
I’m still standing there, dumbstruck, as Ling starts maneuvering her floater around me, muttering insults under her breath.
“Ling! I’m new to this. I made a mistake. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. You want my ID? You can have it. I won’t need it anymore. Because I want to join you. I want to stop Aevum. I want to help.”
She sits, unmoving.
“Why did you even come if you didn’t trust me?” I ask, taking a few steps closer to her. “You know I’m legit, deep down you have to know. What you’re asking me to do is huge. And I’ve already started. I broke up with my best friend, and I broke into Abel’s lab—”
“What?”
“That’s right!” I pounce on her interest. “I broke in last night. Magnus was down there. Abel is working on something, you were right.”
“Of course I was right.” She sniffs, but I can see I’ve hooked her. She’s listening.
I pull my new ID from my back pocket. In this new loop, my expression is cool and unyielding. Taking it in both hands, I snap the glossy card in two. I hold the pieces out to her. “You can trust me.”
Ling and I ride north through the gentle slope of Lakeside. Unlike the shady, oak tree–lined streets of Liberty Gardens, the relaxed and easygoing Lakeside boasts breezy palm trees and squat bungalows with water views. It’s kept a few degrees warmer than the rest of Eden, making it balmy all year round. We pass girls with long golden braids walking barefoot in short shorts and old men playing checkers in shirts splashed with bright flowers. I catch snatches of Moon Lake between the houses, winking in the sun.
We keep heading north until we clear Lakeside altogether and are on a single road surrounded by trees and scrub, heading toward the uppermost tip of Eden. The farther north we go, the higher the white city walls get, until it feels as if they’re about to topple down on us. It’s so strange—I never used to notice the city walls. Now I feel as if they’re watching me.
We veer off onto a side road, then a side road off that, then what barely amounts to a dirt track. Finally, we slow to a stop, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It’s peaceful and quiet except for the hopping song of a few birds.
Ling guides the floater to a small thicket. She grabs a piece of green canvas that’s covered in leaves and twigs and flips it back. About ten floaters are nestled underneath.
“Why don’t you use buzzcars?” I ask, watching her park her floater next to the others. “Be a lot faster.”
For a second I think she isn’t going to answer me, but after a beat she does. “Buzzcars are all on-cycle these days. Too risky. Floaters are the safest way to move around Eden.”
After pulling the canvas back, she heads off into the scrub. Her sturdy leather boots find footing in a steep pathway that snakes endlessly up through the tangled vegetation. She moves with the certainty of someone intimately familiar with this all-but-invisible mountain trail, anticipating which rocks are stable and which ones aren’t. “Just follow my lead,” she calls over her shoulder.
“I spent a year in the Badlands on my own, sister,” I reply, using Mack to slice away at some of the thicker vines. “I think I can work out how to—oof!”
A second later, I’m on my hands and knees, banging both kneecaps on sharp stones. Ling is grinning as she leaps back down the path to offer me a hand. I don’t take it, which makes her laugh. “I’ve never met anyone as stubborn as me,” she says, watching me get awkwardly to my feet. “You’re going to fit in just fine.”
This land technically belongs to the Trust, but it’s overgrown and uninhabitable, and thus, unmonitored. As we hike, I ask Ling what exactly she expects me to do today. “You’ll speak at an afternoon briefing,” she says. “About artilects.”
“What about them?”
“Explain what they are,” she replies. “Why they’re dangerous. And how we can destroy them.”
We climb steeply for over an hour. Despite Eden’s climate control, it’s uncomfortably muggy. Unlike the Badlands, this heat is thick and wet. Sweat crawls down my temples and back.
“Up here!” Ling calls, waving from the top of the path, then disappearing over the ridge.
“Yeah, yeah. So where’s this—oh.”
I stop in my tracks, stunned.
Moon Lake.
The morning sun plays on the gently rippling surface—a vast reservoir of clean blue water. Vegetation grows right up to the edge, verdant and brilliantly green. Swallows swoop above it, catching invisible insects in the air. It is living, this lake. It is life. “It’s so beautiful.” The words come in a whisper.
“Yeah, never gets old.” I hadn’t noticed Ling squatting on the ground near me, taking a sip from her water bottle. “Hard to believe it used to ice over in winter.”
“Really?”
She nods. “Back in the Age of Excess. As in, really ice over, not climate-control ice like the Smoking Mountains.”
Wow. The planet has changed so fast. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would’ve been like to live back in Excess. They didn’t have allowances then. They had money, like in the Badlands, and if you had enough of that you could do whatever you wanted. And even though they knew the earth was dying, no one really cared.
Ling arches her back in a stretch, chin tipped up toward the sun. “C’mon. We’re nearly there.”
We troop down toward the water. Ling explains that like the filtration plant, a filtration office was also shut down after the Trust switched systems.
“We found it last year,” she says. “Perfect, really. All unmonitored, lots of supplies, and we worked out how to switch the solar back on.” She stops abruptly, gesturing proudly. “This is it. Home, sweet home!”
Partly overgrown with foliage and tattooed with moss is an unassuming coffee-colored building. The single-story construction has a flat roof and is set with small, square windows. It is devoid of personality or any signs of life. This is the headquarters of the underground rebel force, Kudzu? It’s like popping a bottle of champagne to find it full of Badlands water. Ling takes one look at my raised eyebrows and laughs. “Not so impressive from the outside, I know. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, in case some lost hiker comes by. But it’s pretty great inside. C’mon!”
She heads up a path through the foliage toward the front door and goes to push it open.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Who else knows? About the ID thing, and standing you up yesterday?” If I have to deal with a thousand people all as suspicious as Ling had been, I want to be ready.
Ling sighs. “Just me and Achilles. Everyone else thinks you’re a superstar robot girl, here to save the day.”
I cringe. “Why would they think that?”
“Because that’s what I sold you as,” Ling says matter-of-factly. “Look, grudges are for whiny bitches, and I’m not a whiny bitch. I’m willing to forget about the past twenty-four hours if you are.”
“Definitely.” I nod, sticking out my hand. “Friends?”
She gives my outstretched hand an amused look. “We’re more than that now. My life’s in your hands, and vice versa.”
I roll my eyes. “Just shake my damn hand, Ling.”
She laughs and grabs it, eyes dancing. “Welcome to Kudzu, Tess.”