Chapter 7
Iopen my eyes.
There’s a bird singing out the window. White curtains flutter in the wind.
A kindly lady wearing a white coat and stethoscope is looking down at me with an air of gentle expectation.
I can smell wet earth, and rain. I haven’t smelled either of those things for a very, very long time. They’re invigorating.
“You’re awake,” she says.
I smile, because she seems nice, and because I feel good.
It feels like I’ve been asleep for a very long time.
Like I’ve had the best nap ever. I’m so rested.
This must be what people mean when they say women are supposed to get ten hours of sleep a night.
I feel like I’ve slept a decade. Or a century.
I feel like Sleeping Beauty. Are those tendrils coming in through the window? Are there thorns on them?
A fluttering bird dives through the open window and flies about the room, chirping in a way that seems to indicate an air of triumph.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?”
I look at the doctor. My lips part. It’s a simple question. I’ve been answering it for as long as I could speak.
To my surprise, there’s a blank where I used to be. My lips move, as if they’re going to form the word. But nothing comes out. I search my mind. It remains blank.
“I need your name,” she says. “You’re not in trouble.”
“Why would I be in trouble?”
“You’re not. You couldn’t be. Now tell me your name.”
I try again. I fail again. I feel my face crumple as the realization hits me.
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “You’ll discover your name here. You’re otherwise well enough, so I’m going to release you.”
“Release me where?”
“Just here,” she says. “This village is called New Eden. You’ll be able to find something to do here, and I believe there’s a few bed spaces in the communal house.”
“You’re not surprised I can’t remember anything? I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am?” My voice gets pitchy as I try my best to maintain composure. It’s not easy.
“We have a few patients in your condition,” she says. “I know it’s distressing at first, but once you settle in, after a few months to years, you won’t even think about this moment.”
I frown slightly.
“Here,” she says, reaching for a crinkly bag. “This is a starter kit. There’s some clothes, and a cookie or two. The commune house is across the clearing. It’s the biggest one. You won’t be able to miss it.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” I say. I feel a great deal of trepidation, naturally, but she has a reassuring way about her.
She’s wearing a green dress beneath her white coat, and brown boots.
Her hair is salt-and-pepper curls that run down her back.
Just looking at her, I get the sense that everything will probably be fine.
I take my little starter kit, and I walk out into the middle of a forest.
Birds flit through the air, animals scamper in the undergrowth, and people are wandering around back and forth doing various tasks and things.
“Where am I?”
“Earth, of course.” A friendly young woman around my age with amazing curly hair and the biggest, most happy smile I’ve ever seen stops to talk to me. She has a kitten in her arms, which is batting at one of the curls of her hair.
“I forgot everything. Doctor says I might remember. But right now I don’t.”
“Oh,” she says. “I’m Seeker. What’s your name?”
“I don’t know?”
“You look like a Carrie,” she says. “I had a friend called Carrie once.”
I almost ask about what happened to her, but even in this very limited mental state, I realize that’s not the best question to ask.
“Maybe just call me Miss,” I say. “Then one day, when I remember my name, we can add it to the end?”
“Good idea,” Seeker says.
“Doctor says I should go to the common house and find somewhere to sleep?”
“Oh, you don’t want to go there,” Seeker says, crinkling up her nose. “There’s men there. You don’t want to end up under one of them.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t. I definitely don’t.”
I don’t know what’s going on, but I know I’m not interested in men right now.
“Do you want me to help you out and find a place in one of the women’s houses? I’ve got a spare space for a bed in my hut? There’s me and a couple other girls. Come on. We’ll go ask now.”
“Really? Thank you so much.”
We go to the edge of the village, where a pretty sort of hut sits in a small clearing.
There’s a whole lot of flowers around the door, and the hut, which looks like it was made of daubed mud that was then painted with some kind of white compound, also has flowers painted on it in orange, pink, purple, and green.
It’s so cute, with a wood pallet door and a thatched roof.
“Vani! Charger! We’ve got a new girl. Mind if she moves in?” Seeker shouts to her friends.
Vani is short with bright red hair and very pretty green eyes. Charger is bigger and quite muscly and I wish I was as strong as her immediately because she looks like she can probably rip a tree out of the ground if she wants to.
“More the merrier,” Charger says. Vani jumps up from where she’s sitting and gives me a hug.
Something inside me breaks. Not in a bad way. Like I’ve been holding on to something for a really long time, trying to be strong, and in this moment, my body knows I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s like being freed.
“Aw! Don’t cry! Or cry if you want! It’s hard being new here. Did you fall?”
“I don’t think so?” I don’t really know what she means. “I just woke up in the doctor’s hut. I don’t know where I came from.”
“Oh,” Vani says, nodding. “You arrived mysteriously. That happens a lot here. Sometimes people come out of the woods. Sometimes they fall from the sky. Sometimes they just get left in the middle of the village when we least expect it. It’s weird. But fun.”
“We should show her the place,” Charger says, running a hand through her short, dark hair. “The dangerous stuff, you know?”
“Good idea,” Seeker says. “There’s some stuff you really need to know about living here. It’s nice, but it can be risky if you’re not careful. Like, stay away from the common house. I can’t believe the doctor sent you there. That’s crazy. You’d be pregnant by morning, I bet.”
I give a shudder.
Seeker hands the kitten off to Vani, takes me by the hand, and gives me a tour of the village.
“Okay. Most important thing is the fact that there’s stuff above,” she says. “See over there, outside the village? No? Come with me.”
She leads me on one of many trail paths out of the little place. I try to remember which one it is. I think I’ll be able to, because there’s a yellow marker at the beginning of the trail and other little yellow dots on trees along the way.
I know when we’ve reached our destination because the temperature drops, the sun goes away, and the forest stops being the forest. For what looks like hundreds of hectares, it’s just scrub and weird ferns and scraggly bushy things that look dead, but are still somehow thorny and present.
“What happened here? Was there some kind of explosion or something? A fire?”
“Look up,” Seeker says.
I look up and see vast shapes above us, casting areas of the land below into constant shadow.
Nothing good grows in the shadows. I shudder a little, feeling creeped out.
I feel as though I can see things scuttling in the shadows.
Some parts of the land are so dark because almost all the light is blocked out that there’s no way to even see them.
I don’t need to be told not to go in there. Fuck everything about going in there.
“What’s up there?”
“Those are the cities of the sky,” Seeker says. “Don’t ever stand beneath them. There’s one here, obviously. But there’s others. And the edge is more dangerous than the shadow. So you want to give them a really wide berth.”
“Why? Is it bad luck to be near them?” Feels like it is bad luck.
“No. They like to drop things off the edge.”
Whump!
Almost as if to prove the theory, something heavy lands a dozen or so feet away, kicking up a cloud of dirt and old wires as it displaces what was there.
“What the hell was that?”
“Refrigerator,” she says. “This is going to be very popular.”
I hear the sound of a dozen bare feet rushing down the path behind us. Tappety-tappety-tap.
A few people rush in to see if the refrigerator has anything in it. There’s a pack of cheese slices, which are cheerfully handed out among everyone. We don’t get processed food down here, but it seems that sometimes the city above sees fit to provide it.
A couple of guys start taking bits and pieces off the fridge too, just whipping off coolant lines and copper stuff and other electric… I’m not even going to pretend I know what they’re taking.
My amnesia seems to be not entirely, well, entire.
I know how to speak. I know what a fridge is.
But I don’t know fuck all about floating cities, or where I am, or who I am.
It’s like someone’s gone through my brain and very carefully drawn lines around the parts of my mind where certain memories are stored.
It’s creepy. But not as creepy as the void of land stretching out in front of us.
I want to get away from the shadow place, back to the cute little cottage hut with the friendly ladies who have a kitten.
“We can go back home,” Seeker says. “I know how unsettling this place is the first time you’re near it. Some of the guys like to dare each other to go right into the shadows.”
“What happens to them when they do that?”
“They get cold. There’s no warmth there. So the core is kind of icy. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. I get creeped out once it gets too dark to see.”
We are walking back now, and I feel much better for it.
“Is there anything else I need to know?” I ask the question conversationally, feeling much relieved.
“Stay out of the forest unless someone’s with you. If the birds stop singing, you need to run.”
“Why?”