Where Futures End (23 page)

“We never wanted to harm—”

Reef grunted with impatience. “Why are you telling me any of this?”

“Because it cannot go on. We will separate. We must.” Another long pause. Reef couldn't tell if it was because of the translation program or something else, but he thought the alien's voice sounded strained: “And I wanted someone to admit . . .
anyone
 . . . I want you to admit that you would do the same thing if you were in our place.”

“Do what? You're going to cut us off? It'll be chaos, worldwide war. Our economies will collapse.”

Silence from the alien.

“You want to know if I would screw you over to save
myself?” Reef went on. An image came to mind: Shasta sleeping in her mother's arms. His throat constricted. “Sorry, I'm not interested in easing your conscience.”

“If you understood how the connection between our worlds is harming both—”

“You want to know what it'll be like?” Reef cut in. “Stick around and see what happens to Seattle. See what happens when China sends a nuclear warhead to the sprawl. Take a look at the death and smoke and chaos and then tell me you can keep your conscience clear while you screw us over.”

Reef cut the channel. He was shaking.

Smoke and chaos.
There was a better way to die. He could go back with the resin to his container and just float away.

His goggles flashed. Olly was hailing him. “Hey, are you coming?”

Reef hesitated, didn't know how to answer.

“You better hope there are at least a few leeches in Canada,” Olly said, “or I don't know what you're going to do with all your time.”

Reef peered down the dark street in the direction of his container. “I don't think hunting leeches did much good, in the end.”

“It was as effective a way as any to annoy China—and me.”

Reef grinned in spite of himself.

“Hey, we might need some money when we get across the border,” Olly said. “Got anything you want to sell?”

Reef tightened his grip on the bricks of resin in his pockets. He thought about going back to his container, lifting
into an electric-blue sky, lost to gravity and to the world forever.

“Reef?” Olly said, a note of concern in his voice.

Reef's tight grip on the bricks of resin was making his hands sweat. He let go.

“Yeah. I do. I'll meet you at the station.”

WHEN WE ENDED IT ALL

(more than one hundred years from now)

DYLAN

On the first day, you will tell your story. On the second, I will tell mine. On the third, one of us will die.

You will choose who.

The First Day

QUINN

My name is Quinn, and it's past time I came of age.

Some of the girls in my band of kin have already married. Even ones younger than me. But I've been busy with my Special Work.

I only started a couple years ago, but I was meant for it. Something in my bones makes me forever restless. When I was little, I would turn over every seashell nestled in the rocks along the coast. “Like you forgot what you were looking for,” Truley once told me, “and you'd remember once you found it.”

Now I know what I'm supposed to find. But I've no time left for searching. Like the other girls in my band, I must come of age.

Where I live used to be called Canada but isn't called anything anymore. When a land starts splitting into pieces, one name won't work. We live on the move between the
great crevices to the north and east, and the Ruined City to the south. Setting up tents and tearing them down, traveling to sanctuaries in season.

Coldest times, we live in the White Hall, a big block building with carved columns all around. We burn wood right there on the blackened floor and let the smoke go out through the high windows while our Eldest tells stories of the Other Place and the Girl Queen late into the night. White Hall goes away before the cold ends, just vanishes like it was never there and leaves behind a big sloping hill you could get buried under if you don't get out in time.

So we go next to the Library, where we have only a month to read before the whole building disappears, and the books with it. You can't burn anything there because you might send the papers up in flame, but we rip the soft layer from the floor and make blankets of it. Do you know, that soft stuff comes back every time the Library does, but if you try to take it with you when the Library disappears, the soft stuff vanishes too. Same with the books, although I don't mind when they go, because our Eldest tells stories about the Other Place all year round.

In burning season when the trees catch fire in the heat, we take shelter in the High Tower, which is a stacked-up building taller than the trees and all covered in vines and crawling with creatures—mice and shrews and raccoons. The creatures come there to get away from the smoke and the heat from the trees on fire, like we do. High Tower vanishes quick—you can't stay for more than a few weeks. If you were standing on one of the tallest stacks of the
building when it disappeared, you would fall right to your death, which is what happened to Truley's mom when she went back for something she forgot.

The last part of the burning season, we try to get to the coast, where it's cooler. There are sanctuaries that come and go much quicker than High Tower, like the Room With Medicines, which stays for maybe a day. And the Place Of Soft Seats—cushy chairs lined up in long rows under the trees—which you can only use for about half a day on your way to somewhere longer lasting.

I used to think that the good sanctuaries were created by magic from the Other Place, in order to give us aid. Now I'm older, I understand different: The Other Place doesn't create sanctuaries out of nowhere—our Eldest says the sanctuaries are “ghosts of our ruined past, come to haunt us as much as to save us.”

Some of the oldest ones will tell you that they remember a sanctuary—or one that their fathers had told them about—that isn't quite like the others. Because when it vanishes, it takes you with it. It launches you not back into the past but into the Other Place. Into a land of plenty—always enough food, enough medicine. Babies born all through the warm seasons and no one freezing in the cold. Sanctuaries that stay put. Houses instead of tents, and nothing ever torn down. No need to move on to the next place. No need to war with another band over what you don't have enough of.

This is the reason I have put off my coming-of-age until now. I must do my Special Work, which is to find this sanctuary some say doesn't exist, the Transporting Sanctuary.

Once every few years we might travel down to the Ruined City, to look for quarry if times are hard or we've missed an important sanctuary. But the Ruined City has a bad air. I've never gone very close myself. From a long way off I can see all kinds of High Towers that aren't sanctuaries but just old buildings stuck to the spot and probably ruled by hordes of rats. We only go there if we're desperate, because it's the lair of the evil mages, shadowy men who want only to destroy everything good. Times have happened that some kin who went into the city didn't come back out. That's what tells us the mages live there. That, and the foul look of the place.

The mages are a plague to us, venturing out in secret from their lair and setting spells to work against us. Long ago, they were banished from the Other Place, and they've been in a rage ever since. They know they can never get back there, so they plot to destroy it. In the meantime, they play spiteful tricks on anyone they think has it better than they do.

It was like that once when Artak killed his first wild dog. We roasted it on the spit, but then after we ate it, it appeared right back on the spit again. We said to ourselves it was magic from the Other Place helping us eat our fill, so we ate again, and again the meat appeared back on the spit. But this time we realized some trouble: We'd eaten the meat twice, but our stomachs felt emptier than ever. It was the evil mages—they were taking the meat from our stomachs and putting it back on the spit so we couldn't ever get full. We had to pack up camp and leave that place so the
evil spell wouldn't spread to our other food.

Sometimes the mages conjure up not-sanctuaries with food all rotten, or with great machines that grind and scream. Once when I was out scraping bark for medicines, I saw a house appear like a beautiful dream, bright yellow with a peaked roof to let the rain and snow slide off. But when I went in through the door I saw the back wall had been smashed in. There was so much rubble everywhere it was like someone had grabbed the house and shook it and shook it until everything was bits and pieces. There was something under the rubble too, which I couldn't see but smelled rotten. I turned and went out of the house. I ran hard until the bright yellow was lost in the trees.

No good magic would conjure a sanctuary like that.

I told our Eldest about the yellow Dream House once I could bring myself to talk about it. That's when she told me that the evil mages like to torment us with bad things from our past. I asked her what had happened to that yellow house in the past, why it was so terrible inside. Eldest thought for a while. Her gaze went narrow like it does when she's sorting the good dried berries from the spoiled ones. Her clothes were the only ones that hadn't gone to rags, since we always gave her the newest felt to wear, and I started to feel twisty-nervous standing in front of her with my skirt in shreds.

“How do you think the Ruined City came to be?” she finally said. I had never imagined the city as anything else but what it was now—a terrible play-land for angry mages. I started to tell Eldest that it must have been the mages who
had created the city.

Except in my heart, I knew that it hadn't been the mages. I knew from Eldest's hard stare. From the way her chin wobbled just before she turned away. Mages never create anything at all. They only conjure things that already exist from other places, or turn good things bad.

It was the people, then.

It might be difficult for you to imagine how
people
could smash up something as big as a city without any kind of magic. But I've seen a whole camp trampled and charred. I've seen the look in someone's eye when he means to kill—like there's nothing that can stop him from tearing the whole world apart. And long-ago times, people made those great screaming machines the mages conjure in their not-sanctuaries. Machines can do about as much as magic can, I'll bet.

So it was people and their machines who ruined the yellow Dream House, same as what happened to the Ruined City.

The evil mages probably sent the Dream House to me to hurt me because they hate my special love for the Other Place. No one else has ever seen the yellow house. Only me, who loves the stories of Dylan and the Girl Queen and the beautiful land they live in. Who has been visited by visions no one else has seen.

When I was a young girl I was once alone in the forest, gathering plants for medicines, when I caught a rare sight: a girl lifting up out of the ground as if out of water, her wet hair shining in the sun. Just for a moment she appeared,
only one moment and then gone—vanished like a sanctuary. She was an avatar, a magical sighting sent to us from the past for shoring up our hearts. This avatar was the Water Nymph, a symbol of that which belongs to two worlds—water and land, our world and the Other Place. I am the only one who has seen her since the time our Eldest saw her, as a young girl.

When I went back to camp, our Eldest told me that long-ago times, there had been a stream there where I had seen the Water Nymph avatar, but it had dried up like so many others and filled in with trees and dirt. She said my sighting of the Nymph meant that I had one foot in the Other Place, just as I must have put one foot into that dried-up stream.

Not long after that we went on our way to the Cold House of Bounty Sanctuary, which is a metal room full of icy-cold foods that sits on a wide gravel bank. It's one of the best sanctuaries but also the hardest to get to—not only do we have to pass over the mountain ridge, but we also have to be on the lookout for bands who don't want to share the Bounty.

We were tired and wary by the time we reached Cold House, but still we sought out the avatar that appears near there quite often who we call the Exhorter. When she appears, she looks right through all of us with her piercing stare and says, “When you finish all of your homework, you can play one hour of Mario. Just one hour, don't try to ask for more.”

Then she sits down and stares through our torsos, just stares like she's watching to see what we'll do, and
sometimes she'll move her wrist or give a snort of laughter and then watch silently again. We children stand with our hands folded before us, contemplating her words.
Finish your work and then play.
It's the simplest of commandments and the hardest to follow.

But this time when she said her words, it was different. It seemed to me she didn't look through everyone. She looked right into my eyes. And so I knew her words held a special meaning for me.
Finish your work.

Afterward, I told our Eldest that I knew I had a Special Work ahead of me, because I had seen the Water Nymph that few others have seen, and because the Exhorter had looked me right in the eye when she had exhorted.

“What is your Special Work?” Eldest asked.

I didn't know then but I knew it had something to do with the Other Place, that land of beauty and magic that Dylan first found so long ago.

I hardly ate the boxed foods at Cold House of Bounty, where we stayed for less than a day and then ran off before another band might come through. I was skinny and weak when we went on to High Tower to shelter from a forest fire, but I climbed the steps to the tallest stacks so I could be alone and think awhile. I thought about the Dream House.

I thought about how evil could eat up beauty.

And how that isn't the work of only mages.

I thought about what I had seen once from a hiding place in the forest. The look in someone's eye like there was nothing that could stop him from tearing the whole world apart. The charred and trampled camp.

After sunset that night in the High Tower, the sky went on blazing through the night, orange-red above a distant line of yellow fire. In the morning, the sky would turn to ash and fall down on us soft as snow. But for now, the forest fire was beautiful against the gray-and-black sky. A world of trees was being eaten up by flames, and from a distance there was nothing terrible about it.

I decided upon my work.

“I want to find the Transporting Sanctuary,” I told our Eldest. I thought she would say no, that it was a waste of time and no good reason to put off my coming-of-age. That I was too old to believe in stories of that fabled sanctuary. Instead, her eyes went small, as though her vision were sliding into the past. She nodded her trembling head.

Why else might the Water Nymph have appeared to me except for the Special Work of finding a doorway into such a world?

I had gotten very good at going off on my own—I was used to searching for alder bark and shrub berries for my father, who made most of our medicines. So I went off in search of sanctuaries. I made a catalog of the ones we visited and the ones other bands told us about and the ones I found on my own. I kept track of all the avatars in case they might have any clues about how to find the Transporting Sanctuary.

Our Eldest tells us to pick a certain avatar to hold in our hearts, either for courage or for wisdom or to model ourselves after. The boys all like the Moribund, a man who appears near High Tower far too often, his skin black as
he suffers through his death throes. Thankfully he goes almost as quickly as he comes, so you only see him for a few seconds at a time. My best friend, Truley, used to prefer the Melodious, a girl with a bright-painted face who sings about a boy she shouldn't love, but when I try to sing the song to Truley now, she makes her much-too-old-for-that face and picks up her baby. I have my own avatar to think on, the Water Nymph.

I would remember her when I was afraid, or just weary and hungry. Always when I was alone in the forest I called her to mind.

I kept up my work for years.

Until our Eldest came to talk to me. Our band had welcomed so few babies in the past year, and fewer had survived the winter. A boy had asked about me—Artak, who I guess is a man now, since he survived the ten-day trek along the crevice. Really, he's no older than I am. Eldest told me it was well past time for my own coming-of-age, when I should travel along the crevice in search of some token to bring back to a husband. Times have happened girls have found bits of gold down in the crevice, revealed there where the earth opened up some generations ago. But Artak would take me even if I failed to find so much as a gold flake.