A Crack in the Sky (33 page)

She was growing stronger now, and making better time than ever.

For miles there had been an evil smell in the air, sharp and foul and unidentifiable. Faint at first, it grew stronger as she made her way south, until it burned in her throat and lungs. Something about it made her afraid.

Just before sunset she crossed the New York state line. Whatever the stench was, the air was thick with it here. It made her wary. Since she didn’t know what she was afraid of, she wasn’t sure how to avoid it. She climbed one of the dead trees to the highest branch that would support her and looked ahead.

There it was. She could tell right away she’d found the source of the odor. Just a quarter mile or so ahead, she could see a vast lake unlike any other she’d yet come across. Even from here she could see there was something very wrong with it. The water was an odd purplish color, and clouds of smoke billowed off its surface. Parts of the lake were on fire.

Near the edge of the ooze she could make out what looked
like the remains of dead things, hundreds of them, perhaps. Most were skeletons, stripped clean of flesh. Without moving closer she couldn’t tell exactly what they were. And she wasn’t going to go any closer.

One thing was sure: she couldn’t stay anywhere near here tonight, even to sleep. She would have to find a path around this terrible place, even if it meant traveling in darkness many miles out of her way.

She climbed down the tree and soon she was moving west, keeping what she hoped was a safe distance between herself and the edge of the foul-smelling sludge. Minutes later, as she emerged from a patch of dead brush, she came across something crouched at the edge of a steaming pool, lapping at the ooze. She was almost on top of it before she noticed. The sky was beginning to darken, but there was still enough light to see. Whatever it was, it was skinny and hairless and long, perhaps twice the length of an adult human. It was obviously some kind of mutant. Marilyn could see right away there was something horrible about its body, something peculiar and startling. She blinked and looked again, unsure if she could trust her eyes.

Its hide was so thin, it was barely there.

She could not only make out the ridges of its backbone, but she could see the backbone itself, right through the skin. Its muscles were visible too. And what looked like internal organs.

All of a sudden it raised its gourd-shaped head as if it sensed it was being watched. Standing erect on its hind legs, it pulled itself to its full height and turned in Marilyn’s direction. She wanted to run, but for a moment she couldn’t. She was too
terrified at what she was seeing. Its face was almost featureless. Its nose was sunken into its skull, and where its eyes should have been were only two thin circles of skin. She could see into the empty sockets behind them.

It lowered its head as if trying to take in her scent. Then it lumbered toward her.

Marilyn took a step back into the thicket. And then another. Soon she was running. Behind her she heard the thing make a low, plaintive wail that seemed to hang over the wilderness. It sent shivers through her bones and filled her heart with dread. But she didn’t stop. She would run all night if she had to. And after that she would keep moving, continuing south as fast and hard as she could, for as long as it took. She had a great distance yet to go, she knew, but even now she could sense she was getting closer to Eli. She could still feel him.

As long as she could follow his signal, she wasn’t going to give up.

Not ever.

20
faith and doubt

Eli tried to keep up a brave face. No matter what Spider thought of him, he was still a Papadopoulos.

How long had he been in this place? A few days? A month? He wasn’t sure anymore. The powerful spheres seemed to warp time, and every day felt more or less the same. The manual labor never ended, and most of his waking hours were spent fighting the CloudNet. As Tabitha had suggested, he’d been finding real things to focus his mind on, but keeping alert here was a lot harder than living in the dream haze.

In a way, he almost wished she had left him there.

Every now and then the spheres gave updates about Grandfather. He was getting weaker by the day and wasn’t expected to live much longer. Huge crowds were gathered in domes all across the country. The biggest crowd of all held a vigil in front of Papadopoulos Mansion, in New Washington. Watching all this, Clarence and the other Waywards would get
teary-eyed. But for Eli it was different. It wasn’t simply some sad, historic moment to him. This was
Grandfather
.

He kept trying to imagine why Mother, Father, and Sebastian hadn’t come for him. There were two possibilities: First, maybe Spider had dragged them off to secret work prisons too. It was hard to imagine that he could get away with it. Father and Mother, especially, were high-ranking family members within the company. Still, it was a possibility he couldn’t ignore. The second possibility was that Mother and Father were
okay
with Spider taking him away. After the Fogger incidents maybe they were furious with him, thinking he’d betrayed the company. Eli worried about both of these possibilities and what it would mean if either was true. For now, all he could do was cling to the dimming hope that someone would eventually come for him. And when that happened, he would make sure Spider paid for what he’d done, and maybe someday Eli would be forgiven.

In the meantime he did his best to keep Tabitha at a distance. He wasn’t going to give her away as a Resister—he owed her that much—but it didn’t mean he wanted to risk exposing himself to more trouble. She had once been a Fogger, after all, and anything he did to cause suspicion would only give Spider more ammunition to use against him later.

Unfortunately Tabitha seemed to have no understanding of what he was going through.

She had her own ideas.

Even though he’d told her to keep away from him, the next day she approached him again in the cafeteria. He tried moving to another table, but she wouldn’t take the hint. She
followed him. She’d gotten so good at drifting, blank-faced, among the Waywards that she could do it without drawing attention to herself. There was nothing Eli could do to stop her without causing a scene. So he gave up.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she began, as if she hadn’t even noticed he’d been avoiding her. She didn’t seem to care. “Here’s why the old man you saw couldn’t have been the real Gustavo.”

“Leave me alone,” he whispered. “Don’t you get it? I’m not interested.”

“Well, listen anyway. Maybe you will be. Keep in mind, I’m not telling you what I believe, only what I heard. How much do you already know about Dr. Friedmann?”

Eli didn’t know much of anything, but he didn’t answer. He pretended she wasn’t even there.

Again this didn’t seem to faze her. “Gustavo Friedmann was a radical figure from the early years of InfiniCorp. He was a petrogeologist and a design engineer who came up with designs for experimental city-shelters with sophisticated people-management systems—what eventually became the CloudNet and the domes. After that, his continuing research into the changing climate got him kicked out of the company’s inner circle.” She stopped to sample her lunch. Today it was soggy rice and some sort of meat pudding. As appetizing as ever. He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She took another spoonful and chewed it slowly.

“So?” he said. “What happened to him?”

“I thought you weren’t interested.”

He glared at her.

She gave him the slightest of smiles. “It depends on who you ask. For a while the official company word was that he was one of the earliest victims of brain fever and that his condition led him to commit suicide. But the Friends say he went into hiding and lived Outside for years, until the desert finally took him. Either way, he’s dead now. Which proves that whoever your sky-dwelling friend was, he couldn’t have been Dr. Friedmann. He probably wasn’t even as old as you thought. The desert takes a heavy toll on the people who try to survive out there. Everyone knows that.”

“All right, so what was the Greenhouse Recovery Project?”

“So you
do
know something about Gustavo. You’ve been hiding it. If not, how would you know about the Greenhouse Recovery Project?”

“I told you yesterday, I saw a picture that seemed to be this Dr. Friedmann guy. The project name was on a folder he was carrying.”

Even through her jungle of hair he could sense her eyes studying him. “Boy, either you’re a good liar or they couldn’t have picked a more clueless Papadopoulos to accuse of being with the Fog. But dumb as it sounds, I believe you. You really don’t know anything about this, do you?”

Eli’s face warmed. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

So Tabitha went through the story as she’d heard it from the Friends. She described how after Dr. Friedmann had spent years working with the company, his research led him to recognize how dire the climate situation had become. He put together a plan for what they had to do: the Greenhouse Recovery Project, he called it. It was a detailed list of immediate, sweeping changes to the way the company did business
and the way people lived their lives. He said InfiniCorp and its employees needed to break their addiction to fossil fuels like coal and oil by switching to cleaner, renewable energies. They needed smarter power-delivery grids to get energy more efficiently from where it was generated to where the people actually lived. In the meantime everyone had to make more efficient use of the energy they already produced. All this was going to be expensive and difficult, he warned, but the consequences of
not
making such dramatic changes were unthinkable. If the company didn’t act right away, the end was certain to come. But the good news, he said, was that the solutions to the climate crisis already existed. The technologies were currently available. And, while moving forward with them was absolutely necessary to ensure human survival, they also presented a huge revenue opportunity for the company. Best of all, InfiniCorp was big and powerful enough to make it all happen. This was the moment for the company to exercise its wisdom and leadership to save the world.

But when Dr. Friedmann took his work to the other InfiniCorp leaders, they weren’t willing to accept his conclusions. They felt the measures he recommended were unnecessary and extreme. They didn’t believe the situation was as urgent as he was warning.

“And that was when, according to the company, Dr. Friedmann lost his mind and killed himself.” Tabitha was keeping her voice steady and low. “But if you believe the Friends, that’s not what really happened. They say that before Dr. Friedmann was out of the picture, he went to the other leaders again and again, trying to get them to listen to him. They were making a terrible mistake, he said. It was an error that could end up in
the destruction of everything that mattered, including humanity itself. What’s more, he told them that if they didn’t agree to address the problem right away, he would bring his findings directly to the people so they could decide for themselves.” Tabitha paused, giving Eli a chance to let the words sink in. “After that, according to the Friends, some of the company leaders decided he was dangerous. They sent a secret order to have him arrested. Some even say they were going to kill him. But Dr. Friedmann supposedly found out they were coming for him, and he disappeared. That was less than a year before the Great Sickness.”

“Do you think any of it could be true?” Eli asked.

She shrugged. “What do I know?”

He tried to keep his face blank. A Guardian against the far wall was looking in their direction. “Let’s say your people were right, and Gustavo really did end up living in the desert. If so, then how can you be sure the Outsider I saw
wasn’t
him?”

She gave him a sideways glance. “God, you’re stubborn. I told you, I’m not a Friend anymore, okay? They’re not
my
people. And in any case, it doesn’t matter which story is right. My point is that it was a long time ago, and whichever way you look at it, Gustavo is dead.”

Eli wondered who she was trying to convince—him or herself? It was almost as if she were more troubled by his story about the old man than he was. “Well, okay.… But whoever the Outsider in the sky was, he told me there might still be hope. He was crazy, but at least
that
part I want to believe. Don’t you?”

“This was the same guy who said he thinks you’re el Guía,
right? You. A Papadopoulos. So what does that tell you?” Her lip curled. “No, Eli, I don’t believe in fantasies. No one can stop what’s unavoidable. Not some crazy old man. Not some fictitious desert warrior. Nobody. However long we have before we’re all dead—whether it’s days, weeks, or years—the only thing left to hope for is one last gasp at self-preservation in the desert before the time runs out. So to hell with your old Outsider. To hell with your grandfather, and everyone else. I’ve learned the hard way that nobody’s looking out for anyone but themselves, no matter what they tell you. I’m a survivor. Right now that means figuring a way out of here, not putting my faith in some dead man’s hallucination of a hopeful future. I don’t have time for pipe dreams.”