Children of Eden
Page 3

With an animal gasp of relief I begin to climb a wall, digging my fingers into the handholds I know so well, jamming my toes into crevices where the mortar has crumbled. I climb these walls as part of the physical conditioning my mother insists on. Almost every night I would pull myself up to the top, some thirty feet above the ground, and slyly peer over the edge.
Tonight, that isn’t enough. Not nearly enough.
Without so much as a moment’s hesitation I fling a leg over the rough stones and sit straddling the wall, one leg imprisoned, the other free. No one will see me; no one will look up. I’m feeling reckless as I gaze out at Eden stretched before me, its concentric circles looking like some strange glyph carved into the land.
Instead of trees, tall spires of algae protein synthesizers jut hundreds of feet above the highest building. The vibrant circles just beyond the Center are lit with bioluminescence that shows off the abundant greenery that carpets the city. Most of the city is equipped with artificial photosynthesis, engineered to act almost as real plants and convert the carbon dioxide we exhale into breathable oxygen. Some of it is like what Mom cultivates in our courtyard—hardy mosses and fungi, decorative algae swirling in liquid mediums. Even in the near-dark it is a green city.
If I didn’t know better, I might be fooled into thinking that it is a thriving ecosystem instead of an artificial survival pod. What isn’t green, glitters. Unlike our stone house, most buildings are made of polymers and coated in either clear or reflective photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight into energy to power our city. In the daylight, Eden shines like a giant emerald. At night, it looks more like a huge green eye, darkly bright with hidden secrets.
Past the rings of the luxurious inner circles comes the less elegant outer circle. Here in the inner circles, where we live just beyond the Center, the houses are large and fine. Nearer the boundary, though, houses grow smaller, more tightly packed. No one would ever starve in Eden—the EcoPanopticon makes sure of that—but from what Mom and Ash told me, life is not nearly as comfortable near the boundary as it is here, near the Center.
Even at this height I can’t begin to see as far as the boundary of Eden, but I know from my lessons what lies there. Desert, burning and merciless. And beyond that, a wasteland far worse.
Compared to my courtyard, Eden is an infinity. It is so big, and I’m so small! The city teems with people. I’m just a particle in that cosmos of humanity. All my life I’ve only ever met three people. The idea of meeting anyone new frankly terrifies me even more than the very real possibility of being caught. Strangers seem like dangerous animals.
But in a world without life, I would risk being torn and rendered by fearsome fangs just for the chance to see a real live tiger up close. I would give anything, even my own life, to experience what I’ve been missing out on.
I’ve thought about going out so many times. There are days when I think of nothing else, when the lure of freedom consumes my thoughts and I can’t draw, or study, or run. Now, tonight more than ever before, as I think about that one detail about Lark’s outfit and how Ash doesn’t know it and I don’t know it and I may never know it, Eden seems to call me with its strongest voice yet, and though I’m terrified, I swing my other leg over the edge of the wall—my elation overpowering my terror.
 
 
AS I POISE on the precipice between safety and freedom, about to descend into the unknown, I hear a small sound: the melodious chime of three notes that announces someone is at our front door. Bikk! I curse under my breath. I freeze, and the air around me is suddenly cold. Did someone see me? Is it the Greenshirts coming for me? I try to steady my breathing. It’s probably just a delivery, or maybe a messenger from the hospital, come to fetch my father for an emergency surgery.
Then Ash creeps into the courtyard. I see him look around, quickly, then when he doesn’t immediately spot me, again more slowly. I whistle softly, a bird call I heard on a vid, and he looks up.
“You have to hide!” he hisses urgently. “He has a Center uniform on!”
My eyes fly open wide, and for a moment I feel like I’m pinned to the wall, immobile and helpless.
“Hurry!” Ash says, and even from up here I can tell he’s panicking. It’s only because I climb this wall every day that I can make my way down so fast. Even so, I push out and let myself drop the last few feet, landing in a light crouch.
“Who is it?” I ask as we sprint together to the house. He only shrugs, and I hear a rasping sound as my brother breathes. Nerves and even this small amount of running are making his lungs act up.
“You have to go straight for your inhaler,” I insist, suddenly more worried about him than myself.
He slows down, but shakes his head. “Gotta . . . get you safe,” he gasps.
“No!” I say too loudly. “I’ll be fine. But if you code out I won’t be fine. Can you make it upstairs by yourself?” His breathing is ragged. These attacks, mostly brought on by stress, come only rarely. But every time it happens I’m sure I’m going to lose my brother. I force my face to stay calm, because I know that any kind of worry will only make him worse at this point.
He nods, not wanting to waste his breath on speaking.
“Okay, then. You go, and I’ll use the wall hideout.”
There are four hiding places in our large and sprawling house. The best of them, a small cellar, has a trapdoor that has to be closed from above and then concealed under a carpet and heavy chair. Next best is a secret recess in the wall behind a bookcase that looks immovable but can swing out on pneumatic gliders. Unfortunately, that mechanism has a design flaw in that it has to be operated from the outside. So both of those depend on someone outside to seal me in (and release me again).
That means I have to go either up to the attic—which is spacious and comfortable but also one of the first places someone would search—or into an insufferably narrow space between two walls. The gap, no more than a foot and a half wide, used to hold some kind of ventilation system that was modernized and moved at some point in the house’s history. Now only the old air vent remains, and serves as an access port to a place that is so uncomfortable it makes torture sound like fun.
Ash is gasping now. I take his arm and guide him to the foot of the stairs that lead to his room. Our room, really. I have a bedroom of sorts, but there’s nothing of my own in it. It’s a guest room, which I make up every morning just as if no one has slept there in weeks. If anyone ever came to inspect the house, they’d find nothing more than a neat, generic bedroom waiting for a visitor.