Why did Mr. Blake not seem bad?
Unless good could extend beyond the wall, just as evil had reached within….
While doubts roiled her mind, while Euripides climbed over the fence to spill its wan light down Main Street, the adults prattled on.
*
Li’s voice!
Rikki peeked around a corner to find Dana and Blake at gunpoint. A cluster of children, wide-eyed, peered back from the shadows. “We’ve got to stop Li,” she whispered to Antonio.
She took out her air gun. Antonio took out his.
“On three,” she whispered. “One. Two.”
The gun rammed into her back preempted “three.”
“Hands up,” Carlos said.
He took her weapon. From the corner of an eye she saw him disarm Antonio.
“I’ve got them,” Carlos called loudly, herding them forward, “and their guns.”
*
Adult conversation often bewildered Eve, but this was the worst ever. Not just the words but entire concepts were without meaning to her. Milankovitch cycles? Tsunami? Social justice? Utopia? Extinction? What was phosphorus, and why would they always need more of it? What were the proletariat, totalitarianism, and sociopath loons?
Still, Eve made sense of snippets. Something about the bunker. Embryos, she knew, was the adult term for all the children waiting to be born. Electricity and power (were they the same thing?) made light and heat and refrigerated food. Mr. Carlos had once told Eve that electricity was a wonderful thing and that, if she would study very hard, someday she could understand it.
Power, apparently, also kept the embryos cold enough not to spoil.
Why would Ms. Li threaten to take power from the unborn babies?
And why was it the four who knelt on the ground, the supposed bad ones, who pleaded for the defenseless?
Stepping from the shadows, Eve said, “No one will harm the babies. I will not allow it.”
Ms. Li motioned her over. “Come here, little one.”
Her skin crawling, Eve repeated, “No one.”
“I’ll explain later,” Li said, still beckoning. Her gun hand never wavered from those on their knees before her. “Child, know that evil speaks cunningly to confuse you.”
Am I confused? Eve wondered. Or for the first time, am I seeing and hearing clearly?
She took from beneath her shirttails the weapon she had found. Finger on its trigger, mimicking how Ms. Li held her gun, Eve swept the barrel back and forth. Tears ran down her cheeks. “No one harms the babies.”
From Mr. Blake, a sharp intake of breath.
“This is your brave new world, Li?” Ms. Rikki asked. “Children driven to kill, to save other children?”
“Eve, bring me that,” Mr. Carlos said, a vein twitching in his neck.
“No!” Eve sobbed. “I need this to save the babies. I must save the babies. Somebody help me.”
“Come to me,” Ms. Li ordered. “Now! You will do as I say!”
Eve held her ground. She knew that tone of voice all too well.
“I don’t want you to get hurt, Eve,” Mr. Carlos said.
Sobbing, Eve raised her weapon. It did not matter, least of all to her, if she got hurt. She must save the babies. She must spare the other children—especially the girls—from evil.
From bad, bad, evil Ms. Li.
“Carlos,” Ms. Li growled, “It’s time that you put an end to this foolishness.”
“I agree,” he said.
He pivoted, and the gun in his hand sputtered: pfft, pfft, pfft.
On Ms. Li’s pale shirt, dark splotches blossomed. She toppled face first to the ground.
Mr. Carlos handed Ms. Dana his gun. “It’s over,” he said. “Above all, it’s over for that poor abused child. For what it’s worth, whether or not you believe me, I never touched these kids.”
Dropping her weapon, sobbing with relief, Eve crumpled to the ground.
EPILOGUE
(Spring, Year Eleven)
“This isn’t a race,” Blake called out.
Castor, revving the engine, showing off for his friends, didn’t hear. At least he pretended not to hear. Four boys and three girls, waiting their turns on the tractor, cheered him on.
Eve, who already had had her turn—and squashed three plastic traffic cones, a personal best—gazed up at Castor with round, adoring eyes. He revved the engine even louder.
“Slow down!” Blake shouted. What had he been thinking, assigning those two kids to the same group? “And take it easy on that curve!”
With an innocent expression, letting up on the accelerator, Castor made it around the curve at the north end of the driving course without tipping over. But two more traffic cones went down.
They needed more tractor drivers to put additional fields, distant fields, under cultivation as insurance against future floods. And so: driving lessons on the barricaded-off end of the landing field. None of the kids had acquired the finesse to drive on a slope or over uneven, boulder-strewn terrain, much less on the shifting-beneath-your-treads surface of a silt plain, much less to till or sow. If they had mastered driving, it remained too early in the season to farm. Snow mounds still dotted the landscape, and a final wintry blast remained possible.
Blake hoped not. On Main Street, two potted cherry trees had already bloomed.
“Time’s up,” he called. “Andrew, you’re up next.”
Castor used the brakes as overenthusiastically as he had the accelerator. The tractor jerked to a stop, rocking the boy in his seat.
“Take it easy!” Blake yelled. “Set the parking brake. Turn off the engine.”
“Yessir,” Castor mumbled abashedly, before climbing down from the tractor.
Into the transitory, blessed quiet drifted the sounds of the settlement. Laughter from Main Street, where Dana lectured a group of kids, their daily milking chores done, on basic cultivation. Happy chatter from the greenhouses, where Rikki had yet more kids—Beth and her inseparable friend Todd among them—hard at work. Clanging and banging from inside the garage, where Carlos assembled more tractors. From the playground, where Antonio supervised the little ones, hollers and squeals of glee. And from the classrooms of the childcare center, led by Marvin (who also kept watch over the toddlers and babies), the competing drones of several group reading lessons.
Andrew climbed up onto the tractor. With much gnashing of teeth, both Blake’s and within the gearbox,
