After the Red Rain (35 page)

“None of this should have happened,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. None of this should have happened.”

They held each other and rocked each other until they both fell silent. Deedra would have imagined it to be impossible to sleep after all she’d been through, but she was suddenly exhausted.

“Can we sleep here?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “This is the safest place I know.”

Gratefully, she curled into a sleeping position on the grass, which was softer than she would have thought. Rose lay down next to her. Tucked against him, surrounded by the scent of the Arbor, she fell asleep almost immediately.

Hours later, certain it had been a dream, she feared opening her eyes.

But the Arbor was still there. Even more glorious by a rare, brief glow of moonlight.

Rose had gathered fruit and came to her, arms laden with it. “You did this?” she whispered in awe, looking all around them. “If you can do this, you can change the world.”

Rose gave a little half shrug. “The world has to want to be changed,” he responded at last.

“But if you can just—”

“It’s not that simple. Dr. Dimbali was a big help, too—he helped
me figure out how to accelerate things.” He pointed up at an angle, and she followed his gesture. Overhead, hanging between old steel beams, were what her squinting eyes told her were panes of filtered glass. “They strengthen the sunlight,” he explained. “I sort of made this place into a giant greenhouse.”

She didn’t know what a greenhouse was, but she was impressed by the effort it must have taken.

“I read about them in a book once,” Rose went on.

“Another one? There’s more than one book?”

Rose laughed. “There are entire
buildings
of them!”

Rose reached up to rub a leaf between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t just snap my fingers and make this happen. I’ve always…” He shrugged. “It’s funny because I’ve always had an affinity for plants. I never knew why, but it makes perfect sense to me now. But I don’t
control
them. I had to do this the same as anyone else would. Or could. One plant at a time. One seed at a time. It took time just to accomplish this, my little Arbor. And that was with my working constantly.”

She touched the tree. The roughness of its bark. Her fingers lost themselves in the channels of it.

A sneeze brought her back to the moment. Her eyes watered and her head felt too full, as though someone had syringed a pound of lard into her sinuses.

“Perfect timing,” she muttered. “I think I’m getting sick.”

“It’s probably allergies,” Rose told her. “It’s been generations since anyone has been exposed to so much pollen. I’ll have to work on that, I guess.”

She sniffled. “It’s okay. I’ll be all right.” She turned a slow, lingering circle, spinning the place—the
Arbor
, he’d called it—around her. A montage of greens and yellows and purples and bright colors she’d seen on computer screens, but never in person. She’d never even imagined
such colors could exist in the real world. A Broken Bubble full of life in the midst of decay.

“Dr. Dimbali was working with me on it,” he said sadly. “Trying to come up with ways to make it easier and faster to grow things. More widespread. Deedra, don’t…” He sighed heavily. “Don’t think I can save the world. Change the world. I don’t know if I can. All I know for sure is that I can do this.” He gestured around them.

“Maybe that’s enough for now,” she said, and kissed him.

That’s when Max Ludo’s voice boomed out at them, filling the Arbor with its poison.

Markard stood stiffly at Max Ludo’s side as the Magistrate barked into the portable PA.

“Don’t even
think
of moving!” he bellowed. His voice echoed and reverberated within the confines of the old arena’s shell. “If you surrender right now, we won’t open fire.”

That was Markard’s cue. He flicked at the screen of his comm and twenty handpicked DeeCees—Max Ludo’s most loyal soldiers—stood up from their hiding positions in the upper tiers of the arena. Twenty sniper rifles took aim.

“You’re in our sights, you little prick!” Ludo’s eyes gleamed. “Surrender and we’ll let the girl live.”

“Whatever you do,” said Dr. Dimbali, “don’t shoot the boy. He’s—”

“Shut up,” Ludo advised.

“My men know what to do,” Markard assured Dimbali.

They had spent the past several hours scouring every last cranny of Dimbali’s building. When they’d come up empty, the Magistrate had completely lost not just his temper, but also the very veneer of civility. He’d exploded into a rant of epic proportions, cursing with extravagant
creativity and vitriol. The DeeCees present had made themselves scarce, returning to the street as Ludo rampaged through the basement of the building, knocking over screens and furniture, bawling to the ceiling at the top of his lungs. It was a tantrum the likes of which Markard had never before witnessed and—knowing the Magistrate’s moods—he would have feared for his job, and possibly his life, had not the focus of Ludo’s anger been so obviously Dr. Dimbali, who had led them inside with promises of a murderer and a weapon delivered.

In those moments, Markard had instead feared for Dimbali’s life and, if asked, would not have given the man even odds on surviving the day. But Dr. Dimbali—with his trembling and obsequious manner—somehow had the skills and the savvy to calm the Magistrate. Markard watched silently as Dimbali slowly talked Ludo down from his inchoate rage.

“There is one more place,” Dimbali said with confidence. “A place he would go to hide.”

It had been a hustle to get ready and assemble a group to mount an assault on the old arena near the Territory border. Markard had almost forgotten the place existed. And when Dimbali led them there, the mountains of debris and trash surrounding the place convinced him that no one in his right mind would flee there. Not even two kids on the run from the Magistrate’s ruthless brand of personal justice.

And then he’d seen the inside.

Agog and gape-mouthed, he’d stared at the heaven nestled within the innards of the decrepit arena. His mouth watered at the sight, the smells.

“If you or any of your men speak of this,” Max Ludo said pleasantly, “I’ll have you hanged. With your own intestines for rope.”

It didn’t need to be said twice.

And now Markard’s men had drawn beads on the figures down below, the kids doing what Markard himself longed to do—walking on that grass, touching those leaves…

Markard had seen Rose shot dead in person, had chased the kid through the factory, and had seen him perform some damn-near-impossible acrobatics. So he was surprised to see him up and walking, but not
too
surprised. This whole setup that Ludo and Dimbali had cooked up was obviously way,
way
beyond him. He wanted to know how the kid had come back to life. He wanted to know how the hell the old arena had become heaven on earth.

But asking questions was an easy way to end up on the wrong side of Max Ludo’s favor. So he tamped down his curiosity and accepted the microphone from the Magistrate.

“Ms. Ward!” He tried to make his voice soothing and reasonable, but the amplification and the echoes made it mechanical and harsh. “Ms. Ward and… Rose. This is Superior Inspector Markard. We have marksmen with you in their sights. No one has to die today. Just lie flat on the—”
beautiful, gorgeous, endlessly green grass
“—ground and no one will be hurt.”

He peered at them through his binoculars. They were frozen in the middle of the arena, clinging to each other. He zoomed in to the maximum magnification, but he couldn’t make out their facial expressions.

“Hurry it along!” Ludo snapped.

“Magistrate,” Dimbali said in a low, comforting tone, “if it means recovering the Rose creature without losing the work I’ve put in, it’s worth a couple of minutes—”

“We’re using plastic bullets. He shouldn’t be hurt too badly. And even if he is, you can just bring him back again,” Ludo said carelessly. “Or you can do things with the corpse, right?”

Dr. Dimbali sighed. “Magistrate, I remind you that the processes required to ‘resurrect’ Rose were and remain extremely difficult, the materials arduous to obtain. There’s no guarantee that a second time—”

“Wait,” Markard told them. “They’re moving.” He blinked. “Oh, hell.” He thumbed his personal comm. “Fire!” he yelled.

“What do we do?” Deedra murmured, her lips against Rose’s cheek. As soon as Max Ludo’s voice had boomed out at them, they’d gone still. Moving only their eyes, they confirmed that there were DeeCees high up above them, aiming rifles from multiple angles.

They were at the bottom of a well, with guns ringing them from on high. Cross fire would kill them.

Deedra didn’t want to die. But she also didn’t want to surrender. Surrender, she knew, meant putting Rose back in the hands of Max Ludo. Who would just hand him over to Dr. Dimbali for more experimentation. Dr. Dimbali would use Rose to figure out how to regrow parts of the world for people who could pay, people like Max. Sure, the world would be greener, but it would be no better off. It would just have beautiful scabs on its wounds.

Surrender would mean she would die, anyway. Once they had Rose, they didn’t need her. She was nothing. No one. They didn’t care about her. Just Rose. What he could do. What he was.

What he represented.

Then again, wouldn’t she die no matter what? If Dr. Dimbali was right, someone could turn the key to one of the death machines and then it wouldn’t matter. The Red Rain would come back, and the people with the keys would control it.

“You need to escape,” she whispered.

“
We
need to escape,” he whispered back.

“No. I’ll run left; you stay still.” The plan formed itself as she spoke it. “They’ll all focus on me, since I’m moving. Wait until the first shots, then run to the right.”

He held her tighter. “That’s a pretty stupid plan,” he murmured.

Around them, the Arbor filled with the sound of a new voice—
Markard, she thought. It was tough to tell, what with all the echoes. “It’s the only chance we have to keep you alive,” she told him.

“Well, it ends with you dead, so I’m not into that plan.”

“Rose…” She couldn’t move her hands, so the tear gathering in her eye spilled down her cheek unblotted. “I’m nothing special. You are. You have to live—”

“You’re special to me,” he said very, very calmly. “So we
both
have to live.” He tilted his head; his eyes were even with hers, and she saw no fear in them. “Do you trust me?”

“With my life.”

“Good thing.” She felt vines extending around her, and then he said, “This might get rough.”

And then—without warning—sepals flew up into the air, as though caught in a sudden updraft. They flared around them, blocking out the sky and the moon, and an instant later, the bullets started flying.

Rose winced as bullets shredded his sepals. But their sudden blooming had done the trick, providing a small bit of protection and also distracting the snipers.

In the same moment that he flared his sepals, Rose reached out with a vine, wrapping it around the closest of Big Boy’s branches. He pulled with all his strength, hoping that the branch was strong enough to support them.