Elites of Eden (Children of Eden #2)(80)

THERE’S ENOUGH CONFUSION in the Center that I manage to make a quick break and slip into darkness before they can catch me. After that, I make my way quickly toward the outer circles. I don’t know how to find the entrance to the Underground, and I’m not sure if I should go there anyway. There’s no immediate sign of pursuers, but they’ll find me eventually. I can’t risk leading them to the hidden second children. I can go to Serpentine, maybe. No, that’s been compromised. The soup kitchen? Yes, that’s my best bet. If I survive the night I might have a chance of blending in there, and people there have connections to the Underground.

But my hopes of reaching it are slim.

I’ll die tonight. Of that, I’m fairly certain. The lull and lack of pursuit at the moment don’t deceive me. How many times have I beat the odds racing through Eden? This is the night my luck won’t hold. But it’s okay, I tell myself. I’ve saved Ash, so part of me will live on in my brother. And all those second children will live on. Maybe Lachlan won’t have me and my lenses anymore, but he’s resourceful and dedicated. He’ll always find a way to keep the second children alive and safe.

Acceptance of mortality is liberating. I start taking risks. If I’m doomed, why not save my feet and take an autoloop? I have the eyes for it now. Feeling reckless, I skip down the stairs to a station and let the scanner check my eyes. It blinks, sending me through. Whoever I am now, whoever I’m supposed to be, I must have credits on my account. I’m welcomed.

I smile at the few people riding on the autoloop, looking them boldly in the eye. They seem uncomfortable with my boldness. They never dream that I’m an impostor. I ride all the way to the second outermost circle and exit with a feeling of lightness. Heaviness, worry are for people whose fate is uncertain.

Dawn is coming, lightening the east, and I look around marveling at the beauty that surrounds me. Yes, beauty, though I wouldn’t have noticed it in any other state. Last time I was here, fearing for my very life, I saw only squalor and poverty. Now I notice how the rosy new light touches the edges of the buildings, how the quickening breeze stirs up dust in eddies that look like something undersea. Now that I’m resigned to leave it, the world seems lovely. It should make me sad, shouldn’t it? Now I’m just glad to have been a part of it. Even a small part, for just a little while.

There’s the food pantry, but I see someone who looks suspicious. It’s probably just a hungry man waiting for them to serve breakfast, but it could also be a Center official undercover. So I don’t even glance at the soup kitchen, but just walk past. He doesn’t follow me. Good. Because it’s not that I want to die or anything. I hope I can get to safety, get back in touch with Lachlan, see my brother again, spend long hours talking to Lark, resume my spying mission. I just hope it in a hopeless kind of way.

I think about doubling back and seeing if I can get into the soup kitchen unobserved after all. It will be full light soon, and I’ll lose the advantage the darkness and dim dawn have given me so far. Then I have a better idea. I’ll leave Eden entirely. Why not spend the day in the forest of synthetic bean trees? It will be safe and cool. Maybe it will even occur to Lachlan that I’ll go there. Maybe he’ll come and find me.

I know they’re coming before I see or hear them. How? It’s like a little switch goes on in my brain. Like I’m seeing the scene from somewhere else, on a datablock screen maybe. Close but far away. I see myself, tiny. I see myself being spotted by a group of Greenshirts turning slowly with their handheld scanners. As if I’m watching from above I see them all focus in my direction and start to move toward me.

It’s just a paranoid feeling, I tell myself. How could I see them as if through the eye of a bot or a security camera?

I have to be imagining it . . . but I start to run again anyway. There’s the wall of junk, piled high, another wall to keep me in—or out? I recognize the place I managed to crawl through the last time, and I’m on my belly wiggling when the Greenshirts shout.

“She’s over here, some place.”

“Do you see her?”

“Scanner says a hundred yards or less.”

Of course they can scan me now. I have lenses, real lenses that link to the EcoPan. They don’t know I’m Rowan, but they must have scanned me at the Center, and now it is a relatively simple matter to have the cameras and bots that all connect to the EcoPan look for me. In becoming a first child, I’ve lost my anonymity.

“There she is!” one of them calls out just before my legs wiggle all the way into the dense pile of refuse. I move as quickly as I can, but I must take a slightly different route and I’m blocked in. I double back, but they’ve started to crawl after me.

I hear a hum, and think it must be in my head, another weird symptom. Are my lenses humming now, as well as giving me visions?

For long moments more I crawl through the twisted junk, the refuse of civilization. I can hear clattering behind me, but I still have hope. They might get lost in the labyrinth of garbage. They might get trapped.

But then, so might I. I’ve lost all sense of direction. Right now I’m just crawling away from the sounds of pursuit. That seems like the best bet right now.

Then I hear more sounds, rattling from all around me. I’m surrounded? But how?

Finally I see an opening ahead, and I wiggle toward it. If I can get out ahead of them and run . . .