Then he slows. He’s caught sight of the mural, stretching across the cavern’s entire back wall—the green Earth, the scorched Earth, the white city and the black, the sign OUR TRUTH CANNOT BE FORGOTTEN—and he is studying it, intent. I’m wondering what he thinks about our view of Earth when he pulls me to a stop, puts a finger to the edge of the glasses, and points to the far side of the Forum, to the corridor we’re aiming for. The dimmest of lights is bobbing down the entrance tunnel.
I yank him backward, farther into the darkness, and then behind the curtain of one of the caching nooks. I’m careful to arrange the curtain back exactly the way I saw it, to still any movement of the fabric. And then we huddle back against the cold black stone. Breathing. Waiting.
Beckett puts a hand on my face, feeling me, to make sure I’m not panicked or falling down into a memory. I’m not. For once. I’m straining to listen. I tilt my head, lining up my sight with the edge of the curtain, and there is a face, not ten centimeters away. I only just hold in my noise. Martina Tutor is passing in the light of a covered lantern.
Maybe she could be one of Thorne’s watchers. She was in the Cursed City. Or she could just be remembering Sonia.
I don’t think she’s remembering Sonia.
When Beckett nods, telling me she’s gone, we leave the caching nook, and we’re almost running. Seeing one of the Knowing has my heart pounding, body tingling. We sprint through the short tunnel where Martina came out and up the stairwell that goes to the upland parks. We reach the seventh level, panting. Beckett checks beyond the door, and then we are in the long, silent corridor of the medical section.
I duck left, into an empty room with beds ready to receive the sick people who never come; through an operating theater where I would have much rather had Michael, a room that to my Knowledge has never been used; and then right into supply rooms, and examining rooms, and storage rooms. Taking the back way through the medical section is less direct, but maybe a safer option than the long, straight corridor. Every time we come to a door, we pause for Beck to check our route, and when we come to the last one, I whisper, “The chemistry labs.”
“It’s big,” Beck says, staring through the door. “Are you sure this is a lab?”
“One of them. But I’m medicine. I’ve only been inside this one once.”
Beckett shrugs. “Okay, go.”
I push open the door. Only it doesn’t open. It’s locked. I should have thought of that. Beckett squats down, peering at the keyhole, then looks up.
“Give me one of your hairpins.”
I find one I can spare and pull it out, confused. Beckett plays with it, bends it, ruins it, then sticks it inside the lock and fiddles with it until something clicks. He grins up at me.
“Sometimes it’s good to be the son of Dr. Sean Rodriguez,” he says, straightening up to tuck the bent pin back into my hair beneath the scarf.
I have no idea what this means, but I want him to teach me how to do that. He’s already through the open door.
“Lock it back up, Sam.”
I do. “Are we alone?”
“I have the alarm set.”
I relax just a little. The room is big—huge—and I can see why Beckett asked if it was a lab. It looks like a field from the Outside. A potted field. Plants are everywhere, on tables, on the floor, all different sizes, shapes, and colors, some reaching for the ceiling. Lamps hang every few meters, shining a different light than what we normally use, and it’s warm. Almost hot. I can smell the growth. It doesn’t look like the kind of place where our wellness would be made.
I’m wondering if I should go back into the medical section and try to find the bottles Reddix was filling, since Beckett is so good at opening locks, when he says, “Look.”
He’s partway down a sort of crooked aisle, beneath a climbing amrita vine heavy with white berries, but what he’s examining is a tree, an infant one, growing in a pot on a table under a dome of clear glass. Only two leaves sprout from its stem, one bud hanging podlike between them.
“It’s from the Cursed City,” I whisper. I would have recognized it even without memory. I certainly saw enough of them.
Beckett asks, “Is everything in here used for medicine?”
“I would think so … ” Except the amrita, I think. We drink that.
Beckett looks around again. “Let’s check the next room.” I follow him to it. There’s no lock this time, and when he pushes the latch, only one light, a pale kind of flame, hangs from a ceiling wrapped in dusk. But the room is aglow, hundreds of luminescent petals.
“Moonflowers,” I say. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“They look like faces,” Beckett say. “Sleeping faces … ”
I turn to look at him. He actually looks a little sick. I squint my eyes. I guess they could look like that, the way the petals fold. “Are there no moonflowers on Earth?”
“No. They couldn’t grow there.” He sounds relieved. “Not naturally.”
“Why?”
He takes my hand, weaving our way through the glow while he talks. “Because there’s only one moon, and it only lasts for a few hours before the sun rises again. And the sun only lasts for a few hours, until it’s dark again. Sometimes there’s no moon at all.”
I try to imagine having dark and light on the same day, every day. I don’t see how that could even work. “Do you have stars?”
“Yes.” Now he’s smiling at me. “We’ve definitely got stars. And we have oceans. Millions of square kilometers of water, and there are waves … It’s really beautiful.”
I can’t picture what would be beautiful about that. But Beckett is thoughtful as we stop in front of the next door.
“Do you miss it?” I ask. “Earth, I mean.”
He stares down at the door latch. “A little.”
“Would you go back?”
He shakes his head, looks back at the room of glowing flowers. “Being here, it’s what so many people have dreamed of. And now I’m the first one to see it. That’s an amazing thing. But Earth … That will always be home.”
His smiles, a little guilty, and I wonder what it must feel like to be thirty-nine trillion kilometers from everything you’ve ever known. For even the dark and light to be different. I touch his chin, and he kisses me very gently on the mouth, and this is a memory he is giving me, I think, to cling to when I have to stay, and send him back to the Outside.
He opens his eyes. “And anyway, there are other compensations on this planet.”
Now he’s teasing me, and I’m embarrassed. And he’s not.
He has to use my hairpin again, and the lock on this door takes longer this time. But when it finally clicks, we steal through the door, lock it back, and now we’re in a proper lab, almost as big as the first room of plants, with worktables, tubes, and liquids distilling. Bright, steady light hangs down in glass jars from the ceiling. Glowworms. Thousands of them. Beckett shakes his head.
“So all of this is for medicines that are never sent Outside, and that the Knowing never need?”
It’s one of the things I plan to fix, if I can. “We’re alone?” I ask.
“Alarm set,” Beckett says. “Tell me what we’re looking for.”
“The liquid is clear, a little viscous, and there’s a smell … ” How do you describe a smell? “Not bad, but sharp. Like fresh air.”