Alight (The Generations Trilogy #2)(20)

The heat is worse here than it is in the city. It’s so humid. It seems that every other step squishes into mud, which hides jagged old sticks and a brown plant that has sharp thorns. Each time we step on one, we have to stop so someone can carefully pull thorns from the soles of our feet. That slows us down, makes me hate the Grownups anew—they dressed us up like dolls, so couldn’t they have given us shoes?



The sun is descending on the far side of the city. The wall casts a growing shadow upon us. I don’t want to be outside when night falls, but it looks like we can’t avoid that. Animal noises reach out to us from deep in the jungle, the cries and howls of creatures that might be waking up from a day’s sleep to hunt when darkness fully sets in.

So many questions. These six-sided buildings, scored and gutted, covered by the undying jungle—how far do they reach? Does this massive wall go all the way around our ziggurat city?

Spingate gestures to the sprawling ruins on our left.

“Maybe a big fire burned them all,” she says. “Or it could have been a meteor shower, rocks hitting so hard they made craters, caused explosions that started fires.”

Bishop laughs at this. “Spingate, are you joking?”

“Not at all,” she says, bristling that he would doubt her. “Rocks can come from space at high speeds, partially burning up as they hit the atmosphere, and—”

He holds up a fist, which means we’re supposed to stop. We do. He faces her.

“You really don’t know what caused all of this?”

She seems defensive. “No. Do you?”

Bishop nods. “War.”

One word. So simple. And from looking at the devastation around us, so horrible.

We start walking again. It seems so obvious now—how could I have thought so much damage came from anything but war? Destruction, killing…just like on the Xolotl, but at a scale that is hard to conceive. How many people died? Thousands? Millions?



On one side of this wall lie endless ruins and carnage. On the other, untouched buildings damaged only by plants, only by time and neglect. It doesn’t take a genius like Spingate or Gaston to figure out what happened. My kind destroyed a city so they could build their own in the same place. Even down here, we can’t escape the Grownups’ violent touch.

Bishop raises a fist. We stop.

He crouches down, stares off into the darkening ruins.

“Em, come here,” he whispers.

I squat beside him. He points to a ruined building. Three of its six vine-choked walls have collapsed. There is no roof to stop the young trees growing tall from within.

Bishop leans close to me. “Do you see it?”

I look, but see nothing that should cause concern. “It’s a ruined building. We’ve passed hundreds of them.”

His eyes narrow, like he’s disappointed. My heart plummets—I can’t stand the idea that he thinks poorly of me.

“Not the building itself,” he says. “Look just above it.”

Now I see it: against the barely lit sky, a thin column of smoke rises up from somewhere beyond that building.

“A campfire,” he says. “Someone is out there.”

People. People who are not us. We’re not alone after all.

Bishop looks at me. Once again we’re close enough to kiss, but this isn’t the time for that.

“I’ll go look,” he says. “See what’s there.”

“No, it’s too dangerous. What if it’s another spider?”

He considers this carefully, then shakes his head. “The spider didn’t try to open the door. It easily outweighs all of us combined. All it had to do was push, but it didn’t even try. If it’s not smart enough to open a door, it’s not smart enough to build a fire.”



He’s right. It’s an animal—an animal that attacked us.

“The spider is inside the city walls, where the rest of our people are,” I say. “We need to get back to the shuttle as fast as possible. And besides, it’s almost dark. There could be more spiders in the jungle.”

Bishop considers this, bites at his lower lip. He used to just act. Now, he thinks first. It’s definitely an improvement.

“The fire means someone lives out there,” he says. “Doesn’t that mean they must have food that isn’t poisoned by the mold?”

From behind me, Spingate lets out a cough of surprise.

“He’s right,” she says. “I mean, they could be immune to the toxin somehow, but however they beat it, we need to know.”

Bishop has a good point. And looking for food was the whole purpose of this trip.

“All right,” I say. “We’ll check it out.”

He smiles, starts to rise.

“I said we, Bishop. You’re not going alone.”

He wasn’t expecting that. “Then I’ll take Farrar.”

I touch the back of his hand. “No, all of us, together. We shouldn’t have split up before.”

He pauses, then pulls his hand away, his eyes cast down.

Together, he and I made the choice to abandon Bello, and did we learn from our mistake? No. At the waterfall, we let Spingate, Farrar and Coyotl go off by themselves so we could be alone together. The spider could have hurt them, and that’s our fault.