Passing through the tunnel beneath the second bridge, Garrett made his way into the main part of the Undecided sector. It wasn’t at all what he expected. People walked around at a leisurely pace, not worried about getting anywhere in a hurry. The smiling happy faces he had grown accustomed to seeing in his part of the city were absent here. Many of the adults wore expressions of sadness and fatigue. The only ones with smiles on their faces appeared to be the children playing in the streets—but even among them, smiles were rare.
Garrett swallowed the growing lump in his throat. No wonder Opal had been pushing him to write his Life Plan. If she’d seen people live like this once a week for three years, no wonder she didn’t want her best friend to end up like this. Garrett continued to swallow, but the lump wouldn’t disappear. For the first time since he’d turned sixteen, he felt fear at not being concerned with his Life Plan for so long. Now Submission Day was only a week away and he’d done nothing more than write his name at the top of the page.
Ignoring the lump in his throat, he continued, searching for signs that would lead him to the library. The streets here were different. No cordoned-off lanes for personal transporters to pass lined the streets nor any signs hanging from each street corner or intersection to indicate the street names. How did anyone find their way around this place?
Figuring there had to be some type of navigation signs, Garrett paid more attention to each building. Maybe they would have addresses like those on his side of the city. But there were none.
Confused, Garrett pressed on, walking blindly through the city sector until someone marched up to him. “Hey, you look lost. You’re not from around here, are you?”
Garrett peered down to see an old lady bent over on a wooden cane. The wrinkles framing her face surrounded eyes faded to an eerie pale blue from old age. As she stared up at him with an accusatory frown, her entire body shook with the effort of holding up her slim frame.
Garrett had never seen an old person so frail and fragile. For a moment, he was stunned into silence. When he dared to speak, it came out as a stammer, “Um, yes…yes ma’am. I’m looking for the library.”
“The library?” The old woman’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t they have a library on your side of town?”
Garrett couldn’t help wondering what this woman’s problem was. He hadn’t done anything to her. Why was she acting so hostile to him? “No, they do. It’s just that they don’t have what I’m looking for.”
“So what? Our library often doesn’t have what we’re looking for, but we can’t just waltz over to your libraries and find what we want, now can we? No!” The old woman tried to raise her cane and poke Garrett with it. “Why don’t you just go back to where you came from?”
The old woman’s exclamation had garnered the attention of those walking by. They stared at Garrett and the woman. A few started taking steps toward Garrett as if they wanted to intervene.
Not wanting to draw further attention to himself, Garrett quickly clarified. “I’m sorry, I really don’t mean you or your people any harm. I just want to look up something.”
“My people?” The woman’s eyes bulged, and strands of her pure white hair fell loose from her bun as her shaking increased. “What makes us so different from you all on the other side of the city?”
Backing away from the reach of her cane, Garrett held his hands up in defeat. “Okay, okay, I’ll leave.”
“Good riddance! And don’t come back here!” shouted the woman at his back.
Garrett pretended to walk away, but once he was sure the old woman had stopped watching him, he dashed into an alleyway. “What is wrong with that woman?” he muttered aloud.
“Did you say that you were looking for a library?” asked the voice of a little girl.
Garrett twisted around to see a young girl no older than five or six clutching a doll with one button eye missing close to her pink dress. Her long brown hair hung straight down to midway across her chest. Her green eyes shone with a tiny shred of hope. “Yes, I was. Do you know where it is?”
The girl nodded. “Follow me.”
The girl turned and walked out of the alleyway, not bothering to see if Garrett was following or not. She led him around the corner and away from where the old woman was sure to be lurking. She walked two blocks east and then four blocks north before taking one block south, leading him further and further to a less crowded part of the sector.
Eventually, she stopped in front of a tall three-story building brimming with the hints of character and charm that had faded with time. Now, the building lay in a terrible state of disrepair. Shutters hung loose from the windows, a few repaired with strips of tape over old cracks. Paint peeled from the siding covering the structure and several roof tiles were missing. Based on the lack of light emission through the windows, the library appeared to
