“Careful,” one of the guys whispered, still handling the quiet thing we’d crafted with care.
Hands guided hands through the new tangle of limbs and dried leaves around us. Something about grasping the boughs with my palms and the upward climbing felt completely natural. Primal. I pushed Tarsi up behind Kelvin and followed so near to her that my hands clutched holds above her feet, my head brushing against the backs of her legs. We seemed to be climbing up a hole in the tight weave of limbs, a continuation of the cave that bore through the canopy. It almost went vertical, and I could feel people climbing up behind me, all of us spreading out and fighting to reach the end. We were powered along by some intense, internal desire to be safe. To rest.
I felt as if we would soon break free, but the tunnel through the tangled wood began to level out. Then it descended slightly, and I felt a moment of panic, wondering if we yet had a long way to go. The branches underfoot became damp as the ground dipped down, then gradually rose back up. More rustling ahead, someone above us crying out. A thick flap of leaves somewhere above was pushed aside, and a crisp light filtered down through the darkness. I felt the energy around me—
Tarsi and I reached the lip, and Kelvin pulled us out. The three of us collapsed with the others on top of a flat spread of foliage where we laid on our backs in a new silence of hushed awe. Above us hung a sight we were vaguely familiar with from years of dreaming but had never before seen with our own eyes: a wide tapestry of blackness specked with pinpricks of brilliant light.
Stars. Countless stars. Bright and shimmering. Chaotic yet somehow ordered. The same, yet different. Some seemed so much closer than others, and some were clumped together in tight packets of camaraderie. One third of the sky was especially dense, a wide band of white dots so intermingled they seemed fuzzy as they stretched from horizon to horizon.
“Holy shit,” one of the guys whispered, a reminder to the girls and me that they hadn’t seen this either. The rain clouds had been yet another canopy overhead the night they’d explored the roof of our strange home.
I tore my eyes away from the view and surveyed our group, thankful for the collected illumination from all those distant suns. I wondered if we were lucky for so many to have survived, or unlucky to have been so close to the top before it happened. One of the girls moved over and embraced Vincent, whispering her condolences. Tarsi squeezed my hand, and I reached for Kelvin with the other. My chest hurt with the thought of losing either of them.
In the distance, I saw shapes moving, a train of vinnies sliding across the pale green carpet. Looking around, I noticed many more of them and saw the leaves rustling here and there as the large beasts burrowed down or reappeared. It was an alien landscape, even as I reminded myself that it was my only home. Nothing in the training modules had prepared us for this. And when I thought about the presence of so much air beneath me—separating us from the hard earth below—I felt faint. Like we were floating on a cloud and willing its firmness to hold.
Without a word—just a soft chorus of sobs—our little group tightened, our bodies pressing together like our first night outside the fence. Hands interlocked with other hands, no care for whose they were. They were all ours. All squeezing. All loving and all fearful. I rested my head on someone’s arm and gazed up at the stars, watching them twinkle through my tears, as mesmerized by the complete blackness between them as I was by their light. I soon found one patch that was startlingly devoid of anything, a lonely little patch, and I lost myself in it, drifting off to nothing.
• 24 •
The Blue
I slept better that night than I had reason to and woke to a sight far happier than I figured any of us deserved: open sky—the sun washing out the black and most of the stars. It replaced them with a dull gray that started on one horizon and faded to a bright blue on the other. Sunrise. I could feel myself reading something mystical into it, like an apologetic gesture from the heavens for having to take one of our number away. As that sensation stirred within me, I found myself thinking of Oliver. I began to understand him, if only a little—mainly his seemingly irrational grope for joy in times of hardship.
Our sleeping tangle had loosened overnight as some of us tossed and turned and tried to get comfortable. I brushed Tarsi’s hair off her forehead and kissed her softly above the brow, so thankful nothing had happened to her. She stirred, her lips parting slightly, but didn’t wake. I worked my arm free and pushed away from the group, the ache in my joints demanding movement; or perhaps it was something in my jittery thoughts that made me feel compelled to force myself into motion.
I was the only one up. Not even the vinnies stirred as they had the night before. Turning to look for them, I felt overwhelmed with the vast sameness stretching out before me, the undulating carpet of several varieties of overlapping green leaves. Some of them were larger than a man with his limbs spread wide; some were small as my hand, dark green, and just as thick. When I spun halfway around and saw the mountains behind me lit up by the rising sun, my breath caught in my throat.
I knew what mountains looked like, just as I knew of earth-quakes and guns and kisses. But once more, reality shattered concept. Majestic, towering pyramids of earth rose up beyond the canopy, their tops slathered in snow and tinged pink by the morning sun. The peaks were arranged in countless layers, each fading through various hues of blue until the furthest receded into purple. They seemed to stretch off into a forever that made the green carpet in the opposite direction pale by comparison. They even dwarfed the majestic trees, which had already upset my innate sense of scale.
A cool breeze drifted across the treetops from the west, the air seemingly chilled by the mighty blocks of ice-topped granite. They could have been a thousand miles away or ten, my sense of distance was so completely obliterated. Between the last glimmer of morning stars above, and the size of the leaves beneath me, the mountains provided one last blow to my ego—my sense of belonging to this universe—and made all else seem insignificant by comparison.
“It’s gorgeous,” Tarsi whispered. Her arms encircled me from behind and I rested my hands on top of hers, feeling a joy from our contact that somehow grounded me from the enormity of my surroundings.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” I said, thinking of Britny. I wanted to say I wish she could have seen this, but it felt too trite and sad to utter. Tarsi replied by squeezing me. I felt her chin find a sore muscle in my back, her head sagging and heavy against me.
“We were supposed to
The thought stirred something within me. Something angry. Then it floated off on the freshening breeze, lost among the gentle flapping of blanket-sized leaves.
It didn’t take long for the growing light to wake the others. While everyone took in the amazing sights to all sides—the boys reveling in our delight as we saw it for the first time—a gradual giddiness seemed to conquer our loss. All except for Vincent, who remained silent and detached despite our efforts to include him.
Part of me felt guilty for taking excitement in anything, and we all seemed to pay homage to his greater sadness by tempering our enthusiasm. When one of us accidentally laughed or grew excited, a sheepish, apologetic look tended to follow.
We sorted through the gear that had survived the previous night’s ordeal, several of us bemoaning the loss of a precious item: a thermos, a strip of tarp, even an entire pack. We inventoried what was left, none of us speaking a word on what Britny had been carrying even though I’m certain we were all silently, guiltily, tallying her things.
The girls broke out what remained of the cooked vinnie meat while Karl and Samson crawled back down the hole to search for dangling bombfruit. We rationed our water carefully, the brilliant blue sky overhead a refreshing novelty and also a cloudless curse.
“We should have known that was a possibility,” Kelvin said, plopping down beside me and shaking his head. “Why would the tunnel be that size unless they came that big?”
“Yeah.” I nodded and picked splinters out of my calloused feet.
“You think those were the adults? Is that as big as they get?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Or it’s a male-female thing.” I glanced up to see several others following our
