“It’s called failure to thrive,” Ben said, as they walked into the scorching sun. Lucy tried to ignore the feeling that her skin was trying to creep off her bones upon being reintroduced to the heat. Nora had warned her against walking too much on her injured foot, but she wasn’t going to let Ben know how badly it hurt her to keep in stride with him.
“What’s that?”
“That’s what’s wrong with me,” he clarified. “Up here.” He pointed toward the building that was their destination, mercifully near.
“I didn’t realize there was something wrong with you. Physically,” she added.
“Oh, there is. Failure to thrive,” he repeated, as if naming it provided an enemy. “I’m eighteen years old.”
“You’re not,” Lucy contradicted. “You don’t even hit my shoulder.”
Ben shrugged. “That’s why it’s called failure to thrive. We do very well for ourselves here now, but that hasn’t always been the case. When I was little, I didn’t get everything I needed, nutritionally speaking.”
Lucy was about to point out that he was still little when she stopped in her tracks, awed by an eerily familiar sight she couldn’t quite place. “I feel like I’ve seen that before.” She gestured at the building across the street, which rose into a graceful point in the sky.
“Not that, exactly. At least I doubt it,” Ben said. “That’s a replica of the Eiffel Tower. The original is in Paris, France. Do you know where that is?”
“Europe,” she immediately shot back, suddenly grateful to Lynn for forcing an education on her, even if it was only culled from encyclopedias during the long winter months when their hands could be idle.
“You can’t catch my disease.” Ben changed tracks quickly, obviously surprised that she knew the answer.
“I wasn’t going to ask that.”
“Maybe not, but you were wondering.”
They walked on in silence, the towering presence of the empty buildings silencing any retort she might have come up with. Even though her memories of Entargo were limited by time and the fog of childhood, she could recall uniform skyscrapers like rectangular siblings. The buildings here were different, each a vibrant explosion of glass and cement, their colors dulled by time and the joy of life they strived to express stilled by the emptiness of the streets.
Ben veered to the left, steering her by the elbow toward a huge building, bleached bone white by the sun. “Careful,” he said. “The railing is starting to give in a few places. You don’t want to fall in.”
“Fall into what?”
“That used to be a lake,” Ben said, nodding toward what looked like a miniature desert trapped by white barriers. “We can’t keep the sand out of everything, though we try to keep the streets clean. You step out onto it and you’ll sink.”
Lucy looked over the undulating plains of sand, carved by the hot breeze that felt like a blast from a wood fire. “Would it go over my head?”
“No, it’s not that deep, but digging you out would be a job. I’m not strong enough to pull you out, and everyone else is busy enough as it is.”
She didn’t ask who “everyone else” was, as they had passed no one on the streets. The shadow of the building they approached stretched out toward her, and Lucy resisted the urge to run the last few feet into its inky coolness.
“A lake, huh?” She glanced back over her shoulder at the miniature desert. “Where’d all the water go?”
Ben opened a door for her, and she stepped through into the heat of the building, its trapped air stuffy with the exhalations of generations. “It was all taken out and stored by my grandfather a long time ago,” he said, his chest swelling with the importance of his ancestors. “The pools too.”
“What’s a pool?”
“It’s—” Ben stopped and looked at Lucy as condescendingly as possible, since he was a foot shorter than her. “Exactly how country are you?”
“Very,” Lucy said, her voice lost in the faded opulence that surrounded her. The lobby stretched for what seemed like miles, far past the daylight streaming through the sand-grimed windows behind her. The rounded arcs of light cast by the windows were quickly eaten by the depth of a darkness so complete Lucy could only guess at the height of the ceiling, or where the walls ended on the far side. The heat from the outside had tapped the last of her rebuilt strength, and her lungs struggled to pass the weighty, warm air in and out of her body. Her foot throbbed so deeply she could feel a pulse in her knee.