Abandon

my cache came online, a red band flickered across my vision-screen, indicating I had unread messages.

I blinked, pulling up my comms. I had two from Saffediene, both flagged as urgent.

The first read, Zenn, I couldn’t sleep and heard people talking. I went to investigate and got caught.

Heard people talking? I thought. Out here?

The second message read, Zenn, I’m inside Cedar Hills. The Greenhouse is secure. Make your way here as soon as you can. Sorry they took your hoverboard. You’ll have to walk.

I knew immediately that the second e-comm wasn’t from Saffediene. Number one, she would never mention the Greenhouse in something as traceable as an e-comm. Number two, she knew I didn’t need a hoverboard to fly.

I dropped to a crouch, taking refuge in the tall grass while I thought. If the second message wasn’t from Saffediene, maybe the first wasn’t either. Sneaking off in the dead of night to eavesdrop sort of sounded like her, but at the same time it didn’t. Why wouldn’t she wake me to go with her?

On the other hand, if someone had taken her while we were asleep, why did they leave me? With a blanket and nothing else?

Nothing made sense. I stood up and walked straight toward the border—and the person still loitering at the well. As far as I was concerned, the plan had changed.

* * *

The boy lingered near the well, his job already done. A wet patch of dirt to his left showed where the well had been leaking. He’d likely been sent to repair the couplings or adjust the connections.

I couldn’t tell his height, crouched as he was, drawing in the dirt with a stick—a behavior that alerted me to his heightened thinking skills. The brainwashed don’t dawdle in their tasks, and they certainly don’t create art.

He wore the traditional clothing for a Cedar Hills Citizen: white long-sleeved shirt, brown cotton pants, a pair of rubber shoes, and a hat that blocked the morning sun.

His milky-colored fingers snuck out of the pool of shade created by his hat as he directed the stick this way and that. The boy seemed unconcerned that the gate lay a mere hundred yards away, and anyone could observe him breaking the rules.

I searched his mind and found his worries were few. That, or he’d learned to hide thoughts he didn’t want anyone to read.

“Hello,” I said in my most placating voice.

Instead of startling to a stand as I expected, the boy simply looked over his shoulder. “Hello.” He continued to draw.

“I’m Zenn Bower,” I said, advancing with deliberate steps. “I need to get inside your city.” I quickly catalogued all sensitive information and filed it away in the furthermost parts of my mind. Half of me thought he could probably read my every thought, and the other half wondered if he was mentally slow.

The boy stood up, dropping the stick on the ground. He brushed his hands on his pants, obliterating the picture in the dirt as he shuffled his feet. At his full height, I could see he was no boy. In fact he was probably a fair bit older than me.

“Can I get through the gate with you?” I asked, willing him to say yes.

“Yes,” he said in a hauntingly low tone. A brainwashed tone.

“Perfect,” I said. “Tell me your name.”

“Greene Leavitt.”

My pulse jumped. Greene’s name was listed in the journal. “How old are you?”

“Twenty.” His answers came quick and sure. He stared at me—no, almost through me. I couldn’t tell the color of his eyes because of the shade of his hat.

“Why are you out here alone?”

“I was waiting.”

“For what?”

His shadowed eyes shifted, then found mine and held them. “For you.”

I took an extra breath before continuing. “Well, you found me. Let’s go.”

Entering Cedar Hills turned out to be crazy-easy. With Greene by my side, I simply walked through the gate and into a world of glass houses. The very air seemed to be holding its breath. The streets were paved with packed dirt, barely wide enough for Greene and me to walk side by side between the Greenhouses.

Freedom had maintenance crews to clean every surface to a silver gleam, but here, a white film clung to the metal frames. A metallic square with a number hung from the top of each door. The Greenhouse in front of me bore the number thirty-nine. The soft sound of sprinkling water added to the peacefulness of the city.

“Are you ready, Zenn Bower?” Greene asked, tearing my attention from the decor. The way he spoke my name sent tremors down my spine.

“Yes,” I said. “But first I need to find another friend of mine. Maybe you’ve seen her? Saffediene Brown?”

Greene suddenly turned down another narrow path between two Greenhouses. I followed him just as plodding footsteps approached from a direction I couldn’t place. The sounds echoed between the metal and glass, making it impossible to pinpoint.

Greene strode away, his narrow shoulders brushing the glass of the flanking Greenhouses.

He ducked into Greenhouse Sixty-Four (how had we gone from Thirty-Nine to Sixty-Four?), casting a cursory glance at me as he did. Inside, the smell of soft roots and wet dirt hit me like a punch. I’d never seen so much disorder. Little shovels lay in a metal tray by the door. Muddy boots and coils of hose festered in heaps under the metal tables holding flower after bush after tree.

I’d only been in two Greenhouses, both of them on the roof of Rise Twelve. Neither of them looked like this. There, plants were laid in neat rows, organized by height. This seemed like someone had held a giant handful of seeds and simply dropped them. Wherever they landed, they grew.

Utter chaos, this gardening in Cedar Hills.

Greene stood a few feet down the first row, his back to me. The stillness of his body and the way he hardly spoke set my nerves on edge. And I was used to being the cool one.

“Eighty-Nine is one rung north,” he said, turning to face me. “Then go west until you get to Eighty. It’ll be on the left.” He removed his hat and wiped his forehead. “I believe Saffediene is there.”

I nodded, unable to look away from his face. Or his scalp, which was almost blindingly white and utterly hairless. His milky skin couldn’t hold pigment if it tried. His eyes, a strange shade of pink, dared me to say something.

“Who are you?” I asked, wondering how his name had landed in the journal.

“I am a rescuer,” he replied. “Your friend shouldn’t have gone snooping.”

Worry caused a sharp snag in my airway. “Is she okay?”

“Minds had to be tampered with,” he said. “And that takes talent and energy, neither of which we have much of here in Cedar Hills.”

“Is she okay?” I repeated, disturbed by his oh-so-white eyebrows and color-of-cream complexion. And the way he held so deathly still.

“She is waiting for you in Eighty,” he asserted, as if that answered my question. “I must get back to the city center, Zenn Bower.” With that, he snapped his fingers and disappeared without a sound.

I hadn’t seen a ring on his albino fingers, so either Greene Leavitt was tampering with my mind, causing me to think he’d turned invisible, or he had access to tech that didn’t need to be contained in an object to be used.

I chose to go with the tech. Maybe he was like Vi and could control it somehow. I took a deep, cleansing breath and immediately regretted it. Dirt and rot and dung didn’t exactly make breathing pleasant.

Outside Greenhouse Sixty-Four, all was quiet. A wind blew across my face, hot and lazy. I stroked it with two fingers, whispering for it bring me a cooler draft. Wind shouldn’t be hot.

A moment later, the current dragging across my skin turned cold, almost icy. “Perfect,” I murmured. “Now mask any sound I might make.”

With the wind as my ally, I crept toward Greenhouse Eighty.