Out There (25 page)

One afternoon I was on my way back from the Village and I got lost. It was bound to happen at some point, but at the time I was sure I would never make it back home. I wandered through the trees trying to find the glow of the Bubble, which could be seen better later in the day. After walking for almost an hour, I stopped to rest on the ground.

I rested my head in my hands and thought through my options until I decided to shout for Derron to come and get me. I looked up, about to call out, when I heard a loud crunching noise from behind me. My head spun round to see something shiny rolling through the trees, them parting as it passed. I quickly hid myself behind a bush, heart racing, and waited to see what it was.

Finally, it got close enough for me to see that it was a large silver machine, almost my size, with wheels helping it move. There were different things poking out of it on the sides and all sorts of buttons and controls, but it basically looked like a giant container. I marvelled at it as it passed, crunching the earth and twigs beneath it with a loud sound. Not very discreet.

I watched as it moved and noticed it was carrying pieces of trees in it. There were also doors on the side labelled
Minerals
,
Crops
and
Metals
. It was like the machine was collecting something. Then I saw it. The tiny little plaque nailed on to the front. It was hard to read but I knew it was the crest of Emiscyra. The script golden E intertwined by deep green vines, to represent growth.

It was clearly a city robot; therefore it would lead me to the city. I waited until it was quite a bit ahead of me before I leapt out from my hiding spot and crept behind it through the trees.

It navigated its way through the forest until it reached the clearing and the Bubble. I waited under the shelter of the trees as it passed through the Bubble wall without hesitation. So it let robots through, but not people. Maybe it was just sensitive to a certain body heat emitted by animals and people.

I stayed in my spot for a while until I felt the coast was clear, then I ripped a piece of bark off the tree and ran downhill through the Bubble wall, holding the bark above me. When I reached the other side it was nothing like what I was expecting. The entire place was covered in huge buildings, bigger than anything I'd ever seen. There were robots milling around and dropping off their collected items at the appropriate places. I snuck over to the back of one building, being careful not to be seen, and peered through the window. Inside were smaller robots, all busy preparing things on conveyer belts. In the room I was looking at they were making clothes.

I must have been at the factories, which were what they were called. Apparently, robots farmed outside the Bubble and collected things, sometimes from far parts of the land, and brought them to be assembled into our everyday needs, like furniture, clothes and food. It was on such a huge scale though that I was stunned. There must have been thousands of robots all programmed for different jobs.

I knew I was on the other side of the city, so I would have to find a way to get back home without being caught. So I snuck along the back of the building until I reached the corner. I then checked around it and continued walking until I reached an alley between two buildings, which I hid in. I saw the exit up ahead and was about to emerge when two large robots ran past me. I slammed myself against the side wall as they passed.

One of them stopped, I heard it scanning, and a red light shone on the ground near my feet. I scooted away, but it kept scanning the ground, approaching my hiding spot. I held my breath and waited. The light inched closer and closer, each centimetre making my skin crawl. My breath came out ragged and I tried as hard as I could to flatten myself further. Then it stopped, just millimetres from my feet. I held my breath. Finally it beeped and flashed green then retracted and I heard the robots move on.

I took that as my chance to run for the exit, but as I passed into open space I saw a building with several large doors on it and several robots entering and exiting from them. Above each door there was a label. They read
Collectors
,
Long Distance Collectors
,
Assemblers
,
Checkers
,
Analysers
and
Security
.

Security? That was the only door that was closed. I didn't have time to analyse it further, because I heard robots coming in the distance. I reached the door on the fence which stretched around all of the many huge buildings, but it was locked and it didn't budge when I yanked at it. I spotted an iris scanner on the side and bent down so it had a clear view of my eye. The light scanned me and beeped:

“Goodbye, Donna Hart.”

There was a click sound and the door unlocked. I threw it open and ran until I was as far away from it as possible.

The strangest part was that when I turned round it looked like office buildings from the front and the fence covered the large open floor where the robots roamed. It didn't look nearly as intense as it had from inside. I wondered why.

“Mother, I'm home!” I yelled up the stairs as I walked through the door.

No answer.

“Mother?” I began walking upstairs to her room. “Mother, are you on the phone or something?”

When I walked in there was no one there, of course, and the entire floor was covered in clothes. The place was a mess: bed unmade, clothes dangling all over the place like they'd been tossed out of the wardrobe in a rush. Mother must have had trouble finding one of her suits again when she was late for a Council meeting.

I sighed and began making the bed for her. It wasn't the first time that had happened and most times she didn't even notice when I cleaned up for her, but I knew it would take off a tiny bit of the stress that seemed to overwhelm her life. After I had tucked in her covers, I picked up all the clothes off the floor and folded them as neatly as I could. Balancing a mountain of clothes in one hand, I tried to open the wardrobe door with the other. As I manoeuvred the clothes on to the shelf and pushed them into place, something fell off the top shelf.

Reaching down to pick it up, I realised it was paper. For a moment I thought back to that leaflet I brought home so many months before, but it wasn't that. It was a small white scrap lying on the ground. It was such a shock to see paper outside of the archives that I didn't want to pick it up for fear that it would combust in my hands.

Cautiously, I bent over and picked up the tiny scrap and flipped it over to reveal a photo. I sat down on the bed and looked at it. There was a woman with dark black hair lying on a hospital bed wearing the kind of gown that Katelyn wore. In her arms was a tiny little baby with clenched fists and its eyes tight shut. Its face was all red and puffy too and it had a full head of black hair. The most surprising part of the photo was that there was a man there too, with his arms around the woman, looking down at the little baby. Both of their faces were full of such love and affection that I almost jumped. The woman only had eyes for the man, and in those eyes was nothing but pure love – it was clear even through the tiny scrap of paper. And I knew who it was all too well.

The woman was my mother, except far younger, and I was the baby. I realised then just how much I looked like her – not just our hair and eyes but every other feature as well. The same flick at the end of our noses, the same wrinkle in our eyes when we smile. I also realised something far more important. That man was my father.

And my mother was looking at him like he was the centre of her world. She loved him. And she lied to me.

I had always been taught that women needed men for children. That was it. But I had just realised that women could love men too, like the way I loved my mother or my best friend. And men could love too, like the way my father looked at me like I was his everything, as ugly as I looked in that photo.

Mother told me he was evil, her exact words were, “Your father was pure evil, just like the rest of them.” I remembered so clearly her reciting these words as if she had said them so many times over and over again that she actually believed them. Why did she lie to me?

I felt so betrayed by her that my heart felt like one of those fish that Derron speared. They had all lied to me, to everyone. Almost half of our city knew that men and women loved each other and probably loved one themselves, and the rest of us were manipulated to believe that they did nothing right. What gave them the right to decide what I thought about men?

Anger ripped through me and tears began welling up inside me. All this time I was right. I was right about everything. I shoved the photo into my pocket and stormed out of the door.

Within a flash I was at the Old Village.

“Derron! Derron, it's me!”

“Why are you back so late?”

I looked up to see him jump down from one of the trees, his face barely visible in the dark shadows.

“I-I-I just missed you, that's all.” I threw my arms around him and buried my face in his chest.

He rubbed my head. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah I'm fine,” I said and wiped the tears from my face.

“Do you want to go to the hill and talk?”

I nodded my head.

“Come on.” He put his arm around my shoulders and walked me up to his favourite spot. “So,” he said as the two of us sat down side by side, “what happened?”

“It's just I…” I looked up at the sky and gasped. “What is it?”

“What are those?!” I pointed at the sky, which was covered in millions of tiny white lights.

“Ah, those are stars.”

“Stars…” I marvelled at the beautiful array of white dots and how they glittered against the dark sky.

“Sometimes you see shooting stars, that's when one flies across the sky.”

I remembered standing in my backyard months before and seeing a flash of light beyond the Bubble. “I think I saw one once. It was like a flash of light.”

“Yeah that was probably it, or it could have been lightning.” “What's that?”

“During a storm you see this flash of light strike the ground followed by this boom sound called thunder. We always hope one doesn't hit the trees near us.”

“What would happen then?”

“It might catch fire.”

“You can make fire without a digital fireplace?”

He laughed. “It's like no one ever told you about all the best parts of life. You have all these things that duplicate natural occurrences, but you've never experienced the real deal. How do you live like that?”

I sighed, “How do you pine for something when you don't even know it exists?”

We sat there in silence for a moment.

“Did you know that men and women could love each other?” I turned to him.

He thought for a second. “Well, I didn't even know that women were real,” he said with a smile, “until I met you. Actually Cain once told us that women were said to be able to make men fall in love with them. He described it once as ‘a beautiful spell'.”

“Beautiful, huh?”

“He said that it was different from the way we all loved each other as brothers, it was like there was a special type of love that you could only share with a soul mate or something like that. He said that it pulled at every nerve in your body but was incredible.”

“How did he know about it?”

“One of the men told him before he died. But Cain only repeated it to me and Kevin, he said the others wouldn't understand.”

“Well, it sounds amazing and it kills me to think that I would never have known about it.”

“But now you do.” He smiled with his eyes, just like he had done so many times before.

“And no one in my city will ever be able to experience it!” I threw my hands in the air. “It's like they kept it from us so that we wouldn't feel like we were missing out. How could they do something like that?”

“Well, I would say the same thing about my Village, but I can't.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Go on.”