“How much longer until we get there?”
“Aaron.”
“Okay,” I say, fighting back a laugh. “Okay. No more questions.”
“You swear?”
“I swear.”
She makes an exclamation of delight before kissing me quickly on the cheek, and then takes my hand again. This time, I let her drag me forward, following her, without another word, onto an unmarked road.
The street curves as we go, unwilling even now to reveal our destination. We ignore the sidewalks, as cars aren’t to be expected here, but it still feels strange to be walking down the center of a street, our feet following the faded yellow lines of another world, avoiding potholes as we go.
There are more trees here than I expected, more green leaves and patches of living grass than I thought we’d find. These are vestiges of another time, still managing to survive, somehow, despite everything. The limp greenery seems to multiply the farther we walk, the half-bare trees planted on either side of the pockmarked road clasping branches overhead to form an eerie tunnel around us. Sunlight shatters through the wooden webbing above, casting a kaleidoscope of light and shadow across our bodies.
I know we must be getting close to our destination when Ella’s energy changes, her emotions a jumble of joy and nerves. It’s not long before the dead road finally opens up onto an expansive view—and I come to a violent halt.
This is a residential street.
Just under a dozen houses, each several feet apart, separated by dead, square lawns. My heart pounds wildly in my chest, but this is nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s a vision of a bygone era; these homes, like so many others on unregulated turf, are in various states of decay, succumbing to time and weather and neglect. Roofs collapsing, walls boarded up, windows broken, front doors hanging from their hinges, all of them half-destroyed. It’s like so many other neighborhoods around the continent, save one extraordinary difference.
In the center is a home.
Not a house—not a building—but a home, salvaged from the wreckage. It’s been painted a simple, tasteful shade of white—not too white—its walls and roof repaired, the front door and shutters a pale sage green. The sight gives me déjà vu; I’m reminded at once of another house of a different vintage, in a different place. Robin’s-egg blue.
The difference between them, however, is somehow palpable.
My parents’ old house was little more than a graveyard, a museum of darkness. This house is bright with possibility, the windows big and brilliant, and beyond them: people. Familiar faces and bodies, crowding together in the front room. If I strain, I can hear their muted voices.
This must be some kind of dream.
The lawn is in desperate need of water, the single tree in the front yard withering slowly in the sun. There’s a duo of rusty garbage bins visible in a side alley, where a surprise street cat languishes in a streak of sunlight. I can’t recall the last time I saw a cat. I feel as if I’ve stepped into a time machine, into a vision of a future I was told I’d never have.
“Ella,” I whisper. “What did you do?”
She squeezes my hand; I hear her laugh.
I turn slowly to face her, a wealth of feeling rising up inside me with a force so great it scares me.
“What is this?” I ask, hardly able to speak. “What am I looking at?”
Ella takes a deep breath, exhaling as she clasps her hands together. She’s nervous, I realize.
This astonishes me.
“I had the idea a long time ago,” she says, “but it wasn’t workable back then. I always wanted us to be able to reclaim these old neighborhoods; it always seemed like such a waste to lose them altogether. We’re still going to have to demolish most of them, because the majority are too far gone for repair, but that means we can redesign better, too—and it means we can tie it all into the new infrastructure package, creating jobs for people.
“I’ve been in talks with our newly contracted city planner, by the way.” She smiles tightly. “I never got to tell you about that yesterday. We’re hoping to rebuild these areas in phases, prioritizing the transplantation of the disabled and the elderly and those with special needs. The Reestablishment did everything it could to throw anyone they deemed unfit into the asylums, which means none of the compounds they built made provisions for the old or infirm or all the orphans—which, I mean—of course, you already know all this.” She looks sharply away at that, hugging herself tightly. When she looks up again I’m struck by the potency of her grief and gratitude.
“I really don’t think I’ve said thank you enough for all that you’ve done,” she says, her voice breaking as she speaks. “You have no idea how much it meant to me. Thank you. So much.”
She throws herself into my arms, and I hold her tight, still stunned into silence. I feel all her emotions at once, love and pain and fear, I realize, for the future. My heart is jackhammering in my chest.
Ella has always been deeply concerned with the well-being of the asylum inmates. After reclaiming Sector 45, she and I would talk late into the night about her dreams for change; she often said the first thing she’d do after the fall of The Reestablishment would be to find a way to reopen and staff the old hospitals—in anticipation of the immediate transfer of asylum residents.
While Ella was in recovery, I launched this initiative personally.
We’ve begun staffing the newly open hospitals not only with reclaimed doctors and nurses from the compounds but with supplies and soldiers from local sector headquarters all across the continent. The plan is to assess each asylum victim before deciding whether they need continued medical treatment and/or physical rehabilitation. Any healthy and able among them will be released back into the care of their living relatives, or else found safe accommodations.
Ella has thanked me for doing this a thousand times, and each time I’ve assured her that my efforts were nominal at best.
Still, she refuses to believe me.
“There’s no one in the whole world like you,” she says, and I can practically feel her heart beating between us. “I’m so grateful for you.”
These words cause me an acute pain, a kind of pleasure that makes it hard to breathe. “I am nothing,” I say to her. “If I manage to be anything, it is only because of you.”
“Don’t say that,” she says, hugging me tighter. “Don’t talk about yourself like that.”
“It’s true.”
I never would’ve been able to get things done so quickly for her if Ella hadn’t already won over the military contingent, a feat managed almost entirely through rumor and gossip regarding her treatment of the soldiers from my old sector.
During her brief tenure in 45, Ella gave soldiers leave to reunite with their families, allocated those with children larger rations, and removed execution as a punishment for any infraction, minor or major. She regularly shrugs off these changes as if they were nothing. To her, they were casual declarations made over a meal, a young woman waving a fork around as she raged against the fundamental dignities denied our soldiers.
But these changes were radical.
Her effortless compassion toward even the lowest foot soldiers gained Ella loyalty across the continent. It took little work, in the end, to convince our North American infantrymen and -women to take orders from Juliette Ferrars; they moved quickly when I bade them to do so on her behalf.
Their superiors, however, have proven an altogether different struggle.