Elites of Eden (Children of Eden #2)(27)

“But there’s more, even better. Now that we’re properly twitchy we have to work it off.”

I don’t know what she means, but I soon find out when we enter a warehouse tricked out like a jungle. It is almost entirely unlike the Rain Forest Club. I can see the difference now. That was all about décor and style, about creating an impression. This place is as close to real as our dead planet can get. They seem to have ripped up a chunk of actual primordial forest from before the Ecofail, complete with deep earthy, mossy smells, vines with wicked thorns, and shrieking beasts that swipe at my ankles. It seems thrillingly dangerous, utterly genuine.

It is dark, a simulated moon hanging gibbous in the sky, but I can see people dashing across open spaces, diving for cover.

“What is this place?” I ask.

Lark looks at me with burning eyes. “Primal,” she says, and hands me a stylized gun.

For the next hour, we work as a team shooting laser beams at our opponents as we leap like mad monkeys through the underbrush. It’s a battle of man against man, but also of man against nature. The jungle doesn’t take sides. Simulated serpents strike our ankles, giving us electric shocks and deactivating our weapons for several minutes. Robotic jaguars knock us to the ground just as we’re about to score a point.

By the end, Lark is out of the game, and so is almost everyone else. It’s just me against a team of three, evidently experienced players in matching uniforms. Without Lark holding me back, I scale a tall tree and annihilate them from thirty feet up in the air.

I’m panting, sweating, exhausted . . . and utterly happy.

“Oh, Lark,” I say when I slither down the artificial tree. “This is perfect—just perfect! Thank you!”

She sways toward me for a second, then pulls away. “The night’s not over yet,” she says with her quirky smile. I can’t even imagine what might be in store for me next. Dancing? Racing? Fighting?

It is something completely different. And infinitely better.

An abandoned algae spire.

“It hasn’t worked for years,” Lark says. “My dad was fixing the pumping system, but they canceled the repairs before he could get it operational. I snatched his keycard.” The door clicks unlocked, and she pulls it open on creaking hinges.

Inside, it is pitch black. I hang back, but Lark pulls me into the darkness and shuts the door behind us. “The power has been cut,” she says, “but I know the way.” Her voice is like a beacon in the black. I fumble for her hand but she’s suddenly out of reach.

“Where are you?” I call, and her voice answers from too far away.

“Walk forward,” she instructs. She sounds farther away now. I have no idea of the size or shape of the room, what might be hiding in it.

“Where are you?” I call again. I feel lost, disoriented. “Wait for me!”

She laughs, low and rich. “You’re safe. Just walk.”

“But I can’t see!” What if there’s an obstacle, a chasm, a Greenshirt lurking in the dark. I feel paralyzed.

“Do you trust me?” Lark asks again.

I do trust her. I might not have much experience with people, but I know in my heart that Lark will never do me any harm. I take a deep breath, and step into the obsidian darkness.

My paces are shuffling, tentative, but eventually my outstretched hands meet Lark’s fingers. They intertwine like vines. I can’t see a thing, but I can almost feel her smiling.

“Now up!” she says, and guides my hands to the rungs of a ladder.

We climb forever, hundreds of feet. The journey is surreal. We don’t talk, but I hear her breathing just above me, hear the sounds of her feet hitting each slippery metal rung. Without any visual to orient myself I feel like I’m climbing in a dream. And Lark, above, is leading me deeper, higher, to someplace I never imagined.

Finally, an eternity of climbing later, I hear the scrape of a metal latch and suddenly Lark is illuminated from above by a faint glow of light. She climbs out of the narrow ladder shaft, and when I clamber after her I find myself looking down on all of Eden. The pale green concentric circles stretch out farther than I can see, away from the glittering eye of the Center. I feel like the EcoPanopticon itself, looking down on all that remains of mankind.

“How did you even find this place?” I ask her, then before she can answer I add, “and what’s an inner circle girl like you doing all the way out here in the boonies anyway?” We’re far from our home circle. Though the height and the darkness lend a glamour to the streets directly below us, I can still see the squalor, the run-down buildings, the furtive scurrying of the pedestrians.

“I used to live here.”

I gasp. I knew that Lark had relocated from another circle when she was about ten years old. When she came to the Kalahari school, Ash was selected to show her around. He told me about her that night, and every night since. But I’d assumed she’d moved from the next ring out. That, apparently, wasn’t too uncommon. Moving so far inward from one of the outer circles was unheard of.

I remember that her arrival in our elite circle caused a bit of a stir. Ash told me that some of her classmates wouldn’t invite her to birthday parties, and that her parents were shunned. Even my dad wondered aloud at dinner one evening whether Ash shouldn’t curtail his friendship with a girl of low origin, as he put it.