I nod and continue running. When I turn back, he’s still watching me, still clutching the trowel.
Run. Run harder.
When I reach that moment—when everything in my body is focused only on racing forward—that is when my mind is finally silent, when I can forget about everything the doctor said, when I don’t have to remember all that I’ve lost and will never have again.
It’s the zone. It’s why I run. That feeling of being nothing but movement. I tried to explain it to Jason once. He even went on a jog with me. He didn’t get it, but he got that I like it, and that was good enough. We walked back to his house after jogging less than a quarter mile. We didn’t talk, we just held hands, and even though I hadn’t broken a sweat with that baby run, my heart was still racing when I looked at him—
Don’t think of that.
Don’t think at all.
Run.
My thick braid swishes against my neck. I am aware of a trickle of sweat down my face, nothing else. I stop when the fields fade to gravel, then pavement. This is the city I saw from my window, although it is significantly smaller than any city I’ve ever seen on Earth. Mom once gave a speech to the biological engineering department at North Carolina State University, and they took us on a tour of the campus. This city is about the size of the old part of the campus, with stacked up metal trailers instead of dorms and college buildings. A thin tube of plastic hugs the curving metal wall behind the city. I stare at it curiously, panting from my run, then gasp aloud as I see a figure zooming up through the tube. A second later, another zooms up. People—people!—are being sucked up from that tube into another level of the ship, like the tubes of money sucked up in the drive-through bank teller line. How cool! It must be like flying! So much better than an elevator! I stare at the tube, open-mouthed, for so long that I don’t notice how close I have come to other people, not until I start to hear their whispers.
My gaze drops from the people-tube to the people who are slowly starting to gather around me. A dozen or so. My eyes flick to the trailers. There are at least a couple hundred people on the streets of the makeshift city. I feel vastly outnumbered.
They’re all a little older than me; this must be the twenty-year-old generation. They have dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair. And they’re all staring at me. I reach my hand up to my sweaty, braided red hair, bright under this false sun. My pale skin flashes white. I am different from them in every way. I am shorter, younger, paler, brighter. I am from another world.
Even from here, I can tell that their first reaction is wariness, too—but there are more of them than me. I want to speak. But none of them even smile at me. They just stare, mutely, eerily.
My heart seizes with a deep, primal fear.
“Hello,” I say, hating the quaver in my voice.
“What are you?” one of them, a man, asks. Not who. What.
“I—I’m Amy. I, uh, I live here now. Not here, I mean, at the Hospital. ” I point to the white building in the distance behind me, but I don’t feel comfortable turning my back to them.
“What’s wrong with you?” the man asks. A few of the others nod, encouraging him to ask what they’re all thinking.
Goose bumps prickle under my cold sweat. I stare at them. They stare at me. I have never felt more different, more of a freak—more alone—than now. I bite my lip. These people are nothing like Elder. Elder may stare at my skin and hair, but he’s not staring out of fear. He didn’t look at me like I’m a sideshow.
“What’s going on here?” a gruff female voice calls. A woman emerges from the fields toward the City. She scans the crowd, her eyes lingering on me. She’s older than everyone else here, older even than the doctor at the Hospital, but there’s a spark in her missing from the others.
She swings her basket as she walks. It’s filled with broccoli as big as melons.
The old woman stops a few feet away from me, glaring at the crowd. She looks at me once, slowly, from head to toe, then faces the man who spoke to me. “All right,” she says in a soft, drawling voice. “Nothing to see here. Go on, get back to your work. ”
And they do.
They don’t protest. They don’t argue. They just accept what she’s said, and they all leave. They don’t even talk to one another as they go. They just turn and wander away.
“Now,” the old woman says, turning back to me, “You’re living in the Hospital, I hear that right?”
I nod. “Yes, I mean—I—” I trip over my words. This world is crazy. Earlier, a man was going to attack me with a gardening trowel. Now, a little old lady is able to single-handedly disperse a group of people who looked like they were about to grab some pitchforks and turn into a proper mob.
The woman raises her hand to stop me. “I’m Steela,” she says. “Don’t know who you are or where you came from. But looks to me this is some of Eldest’s doing. Most of the strange stuff that happens here starts off on the Keeper Level. ”
Does she. . . does she not like Eldest?
“I don’t want to get mixed up with none of that. Had enough of Eldest’s experiments when I lived in the Ward. Worked as head agriculturalist for three decades. ” Despite herself, there’s a note of pride in Steela’s voice. She pauses, inspecting me. “You don’t look stupid. ”
“I’m. . . sorry?”
“You’re weird-looking. ” She says it bluntly, and I flinch. “You might be okay in the Hospital. The Ward’s used to weird. But you be careful out here. Most Feeders don’t know how to react to something strange. ”
“But you—all you did was tell them to go away, and they did. ”