The Harvest (22 page)

“I never asked. And I still do not know. Many Outsiders do not choose to share details of our lives with others, so often, rather than ask, we wait until information is shared willingly.”

Something in the back of my mind is jostled loose. I press my fingers to my temples.

“Meera did talk about Kanaan quite a bit. And when she suggested we could come here, she told me she'd visited occasionally just to keep all of the systems running: water, solar, electricity. Maybe Meera and my grandfather knew each other better than I thought.”

“Did you ever see the scar between her shoulder blades?” Chan-Yu asks. “It was no accident. Another Outsider etched it into her skin. An oak, broad and strong.”

I rub my hand over my head, my short hair stubbly under my fingertips and think back to the day Meera sat me in front of the mirror in her apartment and cut off my curls, then shaved my head. Hair was sticking to everything, and she'd slipped her shirt over her head and turned to throw it in a pile. There was something there, thin lines embedded in her skin that reminded me of the marks on Osprey's arms but were somehow different—more artistic, more intentional. But I didn't get a good look at it, and I didn't have time to put the pieces together. Now all the pieces of the puzzle begin falling into place.

“Like the one outside this house,” I whisper.

Chan-Yu nods, holding my gaze. “My sister and I have pledged our lives to learning the secret to the communication between the acorns and the astrolabes, but thus far our efforts have been fruitless. When Osprey told me of Meera's dying words, I began to suspect that the tree she referred to was not metaphorical but literal. I found Chariya, and together we sought out the acorns. I brought them here in the hopes that the tree Meera spoke of was the oak outside this house.”

Vale stands up abruptly, his chair nearly tipping over. The sun glinting through the window catches his face at a vivid angle, and the growing shadow of a beard makes him look like a man to be reckoned with, a leader, a man I'd follow anywhere.

“What are we waiting for?” he asks, and turns sharply on his heel toward the kitchen door that leads out into the garden.

Chan-Yu scoops up the pile of pendants as Vale flings open the door and strides around the corner to where the old oak towers over the remnants of my grandfather's shade garden.

We stop under the outstretched branches of the oak, arching above us like beams in an ancient cathedral. Vale stares up at the branches, and Chan-Yu holds the tangled pendants out in front of him like a talisman.

“Meera was a Wayfarer,” Chan-Yu says finally. “But not like the other Wayfarers. She had the markings, though hers were scars, not tattoos. She didn't guide the lost to their destinations. She worked in the Sector, not in the Wilds.”

“She found me when I was lost,” I protest. I turn to Vale. “She and Snake guided me to you, or at least helped me find where you were. She led me to Bunqu. And she kept me safe.” A sharp pain slices through me, the bitter sting of an unfinished friendship biting behind my eyes.

“Maybe her purpose was to lead us here,” Vale says. “Is there something special about this tree?” He narrows his eyes and stares off in the distance. It looks like he's trying to remember something from a fading dream.

“Not really,” I say with a shrug. “It's not that large for an oak. It's not very old. There's nothing unique about it.”

“It's a live oak,” Chan-Yu observes, running his fingertips along some of the smaller leaves, a dark green color, and crisp, unlike the wide, fleshy ones of most oaks in these parts. “Live oaks are rare here. Until Old World climate change shifted weather patterns, it was almost impossible for them to survive this far north.”

In contrast to Chan-Yu's measured rationality, Vale is behaving oddly. He cocks his head to one side and sniffs the air like a dog that's caught a scent. He puts his fingers to the trunk of the tree and starts muttering to himself.

“It's too faint.” His voice is low, urgent. “At the very edge of my perception. There's something … if I wasn't thinking about it, if I wasn't open to it, I'd probably ignore it. Do you feel it?” He whirls toward us. I shake my head
no
, and Vale turns back to the tree.

“Vale?” I draw out my words, watching him with concern. “Are you okay?” He ignores me.

“It's there. Definitely there. A hum. A vibration. Like a tuning fork.” He presses his palms into the tree trunk, and a moment later, presses his whole body into the tree. “It's vibrating,” he whispers.

I stare at him, unsure what to do or how to react. I glance at Chan-Yu, seeking some reassurance that the man I love is in fact acting crazy and I'm not crazy for thinking he's crazy. But Chan-Yu is watching Vale with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. He doesn't look the slightest bit worried. Then, to my great surprise, Vale bends over and starts unlacing his boots.

“What are you doing?” I ask, a hint of panic now bleeding into my voice. Vale kicks off his boots and then rips off his socks. He tosses them to the side and digs his toes into the dirt. He stands, unmoving, for a moment, then walks a few paces away, comes back to us, and then puts his hands on his hips and looks at us with none of the makings of a madman.

“I'm sure of it.” He looks from Chan-Yu to me and back to Chan-Yu. “The earth is vibrating. But even that isn't quite the right word. I can't explain it. It's like how you know an instrument is tuned correctly. A piano or a guitar. There's nothing about it you can see, or feel, or even hear necessarily. One single note is just as good as any other, but when the instrument is tuned, when the strings vibrate just so and the frequency of the sound waves are in sync, all the notes work together, building on each other in precise mathematical intervals. It just
feels
right.” Vale pauses for a minute, staring at the ground, lost in thought. Chan-Yu watches him in silence. For my part, I'm starting to feel what Vale was talking about. Something on the edge of my perception. But it's not something I'm sensing. It's the feeling that we're on the edge of a discovery. Like climbing astride Osprey's
oiseau
, it feels like I'm in neutral, with my engine revving, waiting to shift into gear. My heart hammers against my ribcage as I close my eyes and try to let myself feel what Vale described. Then he breaks the silence.

“This is going to sound wild, but I think the pendants are communicating with the roots of this tree. Maybe that's how the technology works. The pendants and the astrolabes communicate through the soil, through the roots of the plants nearby.”

Chan-Yu nods.

“We have long known that the forests communicate in ways we cannot understand and cannot touch,” he says, and by
we
I understand that he doesn't mean anyone in the Sector. “We know they communicate through their roots, through an intricate network of fungi so dense and complicated we do not have the tools to model or understand it. We know better than most others what the trees mean to say, but we cannot understand or speak with them. Yet.”

“What if someone figured it out?” I ask. “And replicated that signaling in these pendants and astrolabes?”

“It is possible,” Chan-Yu says. Then he turns abruptly and starts walking away. He is almost back to the house while Vale and I watch him in confused silence. Then he turns around and calls to us, “Can you feel it now?”

Vale pauses, stands perfectly still for a moment, and then tilts his head to the side and furrows his brow as if listening to something faint. After a moment, he calls back.

“No.”

Chan-Yu smiles triumphantly and marches back toward us, the pendants held out in front of him. He returns to Vale's side. “And now?”

Vale closes his eyes and cocks his head again. His voice is barely a whisper. “Yes.”

The gears shift, the engine roars, and I feel as though I am launched forward. Goosebumps prickle to attention on my skin. “This is right over granddad's root cellar.”

Vale stares at me, confused.

“This is right over the root cellar,” I repeat. Then it clicks for him, too. He takes off in a sprint toward the house, his socks and shoes forgotten behind him. I follow, and can feel more than hear Chan-Yu's quiet strides behind me. At the side of the house, where a host of vines and shrubs have overtaken the old entrance to the basement, Vale rips the cellar door open, almost pulling the doors off their hinges in his hurry to get inside. It's pitch dark but for the glimmer of pale morning light shining down the stairwell. There are rows upon rows of shelves filled with canvas bags of decomposing grains, jars of canned and pickled food, bottles of homebrewed barley beer, wine, mead, kombucha. This was my grandfather's overflow cellar, where he stored food in case of emergency. Like so many of his generation who had been touched by the Famine Years, he hoarded food, stored it obsessively, kept this cellar packed
to the brim even in the heart of summer when food was as plentiful as sunlight.

As a child I was terrified of my grandfather's cellar. He would send me down here occasionally to collect things for whatever meal he was preparing—canned beans, dried grains, jars of sauces. I would walk downstairs trembling, talking myself through every step:
there's nothing here, there's nothing here, there's nothing here
. Once at the bottom I would grab whatever jar he'd asked for and bolt back upstairs as fast as I could, taking the steps two at a time, leaping back outside as though I'd just narrowly escaped a closing portal to Hell.

“Nothing down there but jars and garden tools,” my grandfather would say as I emerged back into the kitchen, flushed with fear and panting, his voice lilting with laughter.

I touch my fingers to where I remember there being a biolight activator, but when I hit the small glass panel, nothing happens.

“The power must be out down here,” I mutter. Fighting for the Resistance has cured me of my fear of darkness, but without infrared contacts, I see no better than I could as a child. Vale doesn't seem to hear me. I squint, trying to see through the darkness, but Vale keeps moving confidently forward, as if it were as bright down here as it is outside. He heads toward a dim corner of the cellar, far from the bright entrance. I don't know why, but he seems to know, somehow, where to go, and is undaunted by the lack of light.

Is he able to feel these ‘vibrations' because of what Corine did to him? Is that why he can see so well down in the dark? Why he can sense things not even Chan-Yu can?

Vale prowls forward through the corridor, which smells wet and moldy like any old root cellar would. But there's a richness here, too. It almost smells fresh, like mint or lemon.

“Something's growing down here,” I say.

“Mmm,” Chan-Yu agrees behind me, sniffing the air.

Vale stops suddenly and turns.

“Give me the pendants.” Chan-Yu hands them over without a word of protest. Holding the pendants outstretched in his palm like an offering to one of the old gods, Vale walks toward the darkest end of the cavern. Chan-Yu and I follow closely. We're expectant, quiet, holding our breath for something to happen.

But nothing does.

“What now?” My voice is so quiet, I wonder if anyone heard me. The feeling of being on the edge hasn't gone away. We're almost there.

Chan-Yu reaches past me to take one of the golden acorns from Vale's hand. Without a word, he turns it upside down and uses his fingernail to flip the beacon switch. And then, with a whispering
swoosh
, a wall at end of the cellar slides away, and I am suddenly blinded by a bright light from beyond. I throw an arm up to shield my eyes.

“By all that's green and growing,” Vale whispers. I lower my arm, squint into the light, and find his hand waiting for mine. “What
is
this?”

I walk forward, Vale at my side. The air is full of jasmine, citrus, and wet stone. I breathe in deeply. There are steps leading down to a lower level, the cellar dug deeper, I suppose, to make the ceiling higher. As we emerge into a wide, open space, with white walls on all sides and an incredible wealth of greenery, a multitude of plants are arranged carefully in rows and alleys as diverse and varied as the plants in Rhinehouse's old lab at the Thermopylae base. Even though my eyes have adjusted to the light, my brain refuses to adjust to the reality of what I'm experiencing.

I am in a greenhouse.

I am in a large, underground greenhouse lit by bright grow lights and presumably powered by electricity generated in the roots of all the plants that my grandfather cultivated above ground. I am in a greenhouse built under an old oak tree that somehow communicates with thirteen little acorn pendants and when they're all together, they vibrate in a way that Vale can sense, but Chan-Yu and I and presumably everyone normal cannot. I lead Vale in between one of the rows, staring at all the plants, tempted to reach out and touch them but remembering Rhinehouse's sharp admonition:
Don't touch anything
. I don't know what these are or why they're here. Are they dangerous? Then I see a small tree next to us, watered by a drip irrigation line, bright yellow fruits dripping off of it.