Dust City (22 page)

Fiona watches me. “Enough for what?”

I take out the sack of beans. I can see she’s still puzzled and unimpressed. I’m nearly as confused as she is.
How much should I use? How much will get us there?
I pass the sack back and forth between my paws, gauging the weight.

I gaze up at Eden, a vast airship on a static voyage. Jack used the sliver of a single bean to escape over a thirty-foot wall. Now then: Exactly how far away is Eden? Of course, it doesn’t take long for me to give up the calculations. “What the hell,” I whisper, emptying the whole bag into the pit.

Fiona cringes. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Quick,” I tell her, ignoring the question, “cover it over again.” We shove the soil back into place as if refilling a grave, firming it down with a few hard smacks. “When you see a good strong vine,” I say, repeating Jack’s words, “grab hold tight and it’ll pull—”

Before I can finish the ground swells up with enough force to chuck me sideways. Instantly, the rising earth is as tall as I am. It spreads fast, separating me from Fiona.

“Forget what I said! Just run! Get outta the way!” I skitter backward, crabwalking myself into the trunk of a deadwood. I can’t see Fiona at all now. A mountain of earth is climbing higher and higher between us. I shout her name, but there’s
no answer. Or if there is, I can’t hear it, not over the growl from beneath my feet.

The first sprouts tumble and burst from the ground like serpents, already thick as saplings. Half of them rocket straight up, while others coil down, weaving themselves into mangrove-like roots. And the
noise
of it—the earth-shaking, skull-rattling noise—it’s immense. The ground’s quaking so much I can’t get to my feet. I’m down on all fours, not for speed but for stability—I need both right now.

The mound of earth widens in a flash; a wave of soil chases me, uprooting the trees as it comes. I hear them creaking and toppling behind me, gnarled dominoes falling by the hundreds. I’m out in the open now at full gallop. Ridges crackle up and snake out in every direction, the lightning-fast forks of an instant root system.

Maybe using the whole bag wasn’t such a good idea.

“
Hen . . . are . . . you?!
” Fiona’s voice is clutching at me through the gaps in the noise. I see her, wobbling toward me on all fours, stumbling drunkenly over exposed roots and shifting earth. All the while, a monstrous column of deep green is erupting behind her.

“. . . crazy . . . I . . . and . . . is that thing?!” I can easily guess the beginning of her question.

“It belongs to Jack!” I scream at her.

At last, the growth is beginning to stop, the bone-shattering thunder is subsiding. But the thing’s still rising.
Tendrils whip upward, twining themselves into the main stalk. Leaves as big as bedsheets quiver in the wind. We stand and watch, and I see this thing for what it is: the beautiful otherworldliness of magic. Looking at it, rising up into the clouds, I’m hit with a strange nostalgia.
What if this is it?
I used up the whole bag. Could this towering thing before me be the last of it, the end of the old magic?
But no
, I think.
There’s more up above us—and we’re about to go find it
.

Fiona, however, isn’t pleased. There’s a scowl on her face when she punches me in the shoulder.

“Ow!”

“I don’t
believe
you!” she cries. “Did you really think I could actually
grab hold
of one of those things? It would’ve torn my arm off! I would’ve been killed!”

“How was I supposed to know? It’s not like I plant one of these things every day! What exactly were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Fair warning, maybe.”

A furrow of clouds gathers above us. The moon, the peaks of the city’s buildings, the top of the stalk itself—everything is obscured from view. Eden has been swallowed up entirely. There’s no way to tell if Jack’s enchanted plant will get us where we’re going. But there’s one way to find out.

“We’ll have to climb it,” I say.

“No kidding.” Fiona points her camera straight up and flashes off a few pictures. “This way,” she says. “When they
find me splattered on the ground down here, they’ll know what killed me.”

As we move closer, we’re forced to climb over uprooted deadwoods lying everywhere. The plucked-up roots resemble skeletons, with moist soil clinging to them like rotting flesh. Up and down the huge stalk, tiny vines and more conventionally sized leaves blossom sluggishly. The ground bubbles with roots, burrowing after precious water. There’s a low creak from the stalk itself, as the huge thing finally comes to a stop. Its trunk is a mosaic of shadow, brightened here and there by spillover from the city’s neon. There’s plenty to hang on to. I grab a hefty vine and pull. It doesn’t sag, not even when I lift myself off the ground.

“Seems pretty solid, but we should hurry.”

“Wait,” she says and gets out her camera. “I’m never gonna get another shot like this.” She snaps a picture of me, hanging from the base of something that can barely be explained.

“Perfect,” she says. “Now let’s go.”

36

A THOUSAND OCTOBERS

THE TUNDRA LIES FAST ASLEEP BELOW US. IT’S DIFFICULT TO TELL HOW MUCH
farther we have to go because of the ceiling of clouds fanning out above us. Fiona’s climbing higher, her clothes buffeting in the wind.

“This is crazy!” she yells back at me. “I can’t believe we decided to
climb
to Eden! I can’t even see where I’m going!”

My arms are beginning to tremble, but Fiona looks strong, pulling herself up with a determined steadiness. “Keep climbing!” I call up to her. “We can’t stop now!” What I don’t say is that we have to get there before this thing crumbles like it did back at St. Remus.

Fiona growls at me and yanks herself up, climbing even faster. I take a moment to rest, straightening my arms and hanging off the stalk like a fly—tiny and eminently swattable. The city looks peaceful from up here, a quilt of twinkling lights, silent as the stars. When I look up again, Fiona’s gone, vanished into the clouds. I follow her, letting the mist swallow me up.

Inside, it’s cool and surprisingly wet. The air is calm, the clouds acting as a blanket against the wind. Suddenly, the serenity of the place is shattered by a scream.

“Fiona?!” I search the clouds above me, but all I can see is a dim white mass. I pull myself up as fast as I can. I’m frantic. I’m climbing recklessly.

Then, fluttering into view is what appears to be a slip of paper. It curls and tumbles down and all I have to do is reach out and . . . catch it. It’s blue.

Steadying myself against the stalk, I flip it open with one paw. There’s a smattering of words written on the page in a childish hand:

DER SIS,

THANK YOO FOR TECHING ME REEDING.

I LUV YOO,

ROY

It’s the letter Roy didn’t want anyone to see. He just wanted to thank his sister for teaching him to read. He was trying to better himself.

“Fiona?” I call up to her again. No answer, so I keep climbing.

The underside of Eden emerges lazily from the fog. It fills the sky, gray and craggy and silent. The stalk begins to tilt, leaning backward slightly to rise over the clifflike lip of Eden’s edge. Then it twists again, until it’s horizontal, broad and firm enough to walk on.

“What took you so long?” There she is, sitting cross-legged with her face in her hands.

“You okay?”

“I lost something,” she says. “On the way up.”

“Could this be it?” I take out the note.

She stares at it, dumbfounded. “You caught it?” She throws her arms around me like she did before, and I’m rewarded with another kiss. Then our faces slide forward, and we cradle our heads on each other’s shoulders. “Thank you so much,” she says. We sit there like that a while, the exhaustion of the climb setting in. We’re simply too tired to move.

“I was there,” I tell her, pointing to the note, “when Gunther took it away from him.”

She nods, beaming at the slip of blue paper. “It’s the first thing he’s ever written to me. Prob’ly the first thing he’s ever written in his whole life.”

I take a breath. “I need to tell you something. It’s about what happened to Roy.”

“I think I already know.”

“You do?”

“It wasn’t hard to figure out,” she says. “Roy told me he was planning to audition for Skinner. So when you told me you got the job, I put two and two together. If you won the race, you must have been at least partly responsible.”

My tail dips as low as it ever has. “Maybe more than just partly.”

“I know they dose you up beforehand. It wasn’t the real you.” She almost laughs. “Anyone can see that.”

“I hope so, but that’s not how they explained it. They said it would bring out our true selves.”

She shakes her head. “It was
bad dust
, that’s all. They can design it that way. Which is why we’re gonna find the fairies. Right now. And we’re gonna bring back the good stuff.”

Down below us, there’s the glow of lamplight. It’s rising up like steam. “We should keep going,” I say. “We need to find a place that’s close enough to the ground to jump off—and quick, too. Before it’s too late.”

Fiona lets go of my face. “Um, what’s that supposed to mean?”

As if in answer to her question, the stalk begins to tremble.

“Hurry,” I tell her. “It’s starting!”

“What
is starting?”

“It’s how Jack covers his tracks. This whole thing is gonna disappear!”

But Fiona isn’t moving. She crosses her arms and pastes a stubborn expression on her face. “You do realize that’s
Eden
down there, right?”

“Where else did you think we were?”

“If this thing we’re sitting on disappears, how’re we supposed to get back? You have more of those beans, right?” The trunk sways beneath us. There’s a crackling sound like
a newly set fire. The spongy green we’re sitting on is turning brown and brittle.

“I thought if I used the whole bag it’d last long enough for us to get back!”

“The whole bag? You mean you don’t have any more?”

“You were there when Jack gave them to me! All he told me was—” But I can’t finish. The trunk’s melting all around us. It swings over the fancy lampposts, over an empty street, over the Eden treetops.

“Hang on!”

We both try, but the swaying is too violent. We pitch sideways with enough force to throw us over the side of the stalk. We’re left hanging from the thickest vines, and there aren’t many of them left. Everything is fading in our grip. Huge leaves—red, orange, brown—wrinkle and curl and break away, fluttering to the earth like a thousand Octobers.

Then it’s our turn.

The final vines wither away and we tumble down. Instinct pitches us forward to all fours, cushioning the fall. We land on grass, close-cropped and irrigated so thoroughly it’s springy as a mattress. We’re in some sort of park, more clear and quiet and beautiful than any I’ve ever seen. We’re safe.

One flame-red leaf, big as a newspaper, snows down from above. It shatters at my feet with a hushed magic, moldering to nothing before my eyes.

“Idiot!”

Fiona punches me again—same arm, same place. She turns in an aimless circle, her arms at first spread wide and then collapsing angrily at her sides. “This is
just great!
What’re we supposed to do now? We’re stuck!”

We
are
stuck. We’re stranded a mile up in the air in the one place the city’s animalia are never allowed to be. We’re in Eden.

37

CREEPING DISEASE

A CAR, A BIG ONE—AN ENORMOUS ONE—THUNDERS DOWN AN ADJACENT
street. The headlights strobe through the trees, blinding us both. It’s a giant’s car, overwhelmingly huge and rumbling as loud as a thunderstorm. We duck behind a dense row of hedges to let it pass (not that whoever’s driving would notice us).

When the air’s silent again, Fiona stands up. She lets out a low whistle. “Look at this place. It’s gorgeous!”

I have to admit, Eden has an austere beauty, with its pillowy earth and finely cropped grass, its ornate lampposts and coiffed greenery, its polished benches with silver fittings. Rising above it all are the tapered cones of fairy palaces, places we’ve been told all our lives are devoid of fairies, places I’ve wanted to see ever since I was a cub.

“No wonder the Edenites keep all this to themselves,” says Fiona. “It’s beautiful.”

Breathtaking. Majestic. Eerily perfect. It’s all of these things, but there’s something missing. It’s as if you have to hold your hand out in front of your face to make certain it’s
got three dimensions, that it’s not just a painted backdrop. Then, when your senses tell you it’s really there, you can’t help feeling like you’re standing in the midst of a full-scale model railway set, everything cast from plastic and pressboard.

“I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t smell right. It smells like—actually, it doesn’t smell at all.”

Fiona laughs. “That’s because it’s clean. It’s not that Eden doesn’t smell, it’s that the City
stinks
.”

I take Fiona’s paw and lead her past perfect trees, tiered fountains, huge firebrick urns that erupt with blossoms.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

I point to the highest spire of all, dead in the center of Eden. We both know it from the Nimbus TV commercials. It’s the hub around which the whole corporation spins. And we know the story that goes with it, too. Once upon a time, it belonged to the fairy queen, the first of her species. They said she could still communicate with moths and butterflies. But now it’s the epicenter of Nimbus Labs.

We stick to the trees and shadows along the edges of the street, but everywhere is deserted. There’s none of the bustle you find in the rest of the City. The only sound is the cool buzz of electricity. It comes from the lampposts, each hung with a squidlike chandelier, the tentacles tipped with bluish bulbs.

The homes aren’t homes at all. They’re castles and palaces. Everywhere you look, you see spires and ravelins, steeples and domes, all of them rising high above the trees
that seclude them from the street. It’s lonely to think there’re folks buried deep inside all that stone and glass.