interests me or that looks to be potentially helpful, and when I return to the front room, Pax is sitting on the floor behind the coffee table picking through a small pile of stuff he’s found.
I drop to the floor next to him, spilling the four or five things I brought out next to his. “Maps! Where’d you find them?”
“In that room with the desk and the old-looking communication device. Where’d you find that crap?”
“Bedroom.”
Until I ran away from the Sanctioned City of Des Moines, I’d never seen a map of anything besides the sky. Star and planet maps, constellations, solar systems. But the Others don’t supply us any clues as to the size or terrain of this place we live.
I push aside the extra flashlight, batteries, a floppy book titled Holy Bible , and fingernail clippers that were hiding in the bedroom, and poke through Pax’s find. Besides the maps, he’s unearthed another lined disk like Lucas’s clue—this one with the name Johnny Cash on the outside of the case—two more books, and what looks like a family photograph.
The books remind me of the ones we found at Fort Laramie—textbooks that tell what happened on Earth before now. I hope the stories aren’t as depressing as the ones about what happened to the Native American people when the white settlers came to their land.
It’s frustrating, only knowing half of the stories and being unable to fit the rest of the puzzle together. To know terms and places and dates but not the how and why of things, the ins and outs of what made a group of people decide they could take what belonged to someone else because of the color of their skin.
I suppose if I understood that, I would understand the Others, too.
After all, they believe they are superior to the people of Earth because they have greater technology, and because they have mental capabilities that outstrip the ones of the inhabitants of this planet. But those things, in my estimation, don’t make the Others better than humans. It simply makes them different. I’m sure that if— when —humanity returns to its former state, it will have plenty of strengths to show off.
And weaknesses.
I think of the Native Americans and wonder what they would think of now, if they could have seen into the future. Certain humans had been bad enough to commit those crimes we learned about traveling west, but surely after all of these years people had learned from their mistakes.
We shove the books and Johnny Cash out of the way to make room for the first map. It’s been folded in perfect creases, and takes up over half of the coffee table with its width. The one we found before showed the Sanctioned Cities—along with several more places that had been foreign to us—but this one is more confusing. There are seven land masses interrupted by vast expanses of blue. These are not lakes or rivers. The blue stretches forever, and I know they are oceans like the one near Portland. I never imagined that water could stretch so far.
We try to make sense of the thing for a while, to find a place to get our bearings and start from, but soon frustration curls my fingernails into my palms. I rummage through Pax’s bag until I find the previous map, and smooth it out next to the new one to see if anything looks familiar.
I’m starting to believe they can’t both depict Earth when I spot a long, extended shape that matches on the maps. On the one we took from the Cell, it’s marked as Florida . On this new one, it’s not marked at all but appears to be part of a place called the United States of America , in an even bigger area titled North America .
I stab my finger at the word America ; it triggers a memory. “Cadi said when the Others first came they sent the Elements to four corners, and that my mother came here, to America. I bet it’s where my dad was from.”
So much time has passed since that night in the woods, months, and Cadi dumped so much information into my brain I can’t recall all of
I drop to the floor next to him, spilling the four or five things I brought out next to his. “Maps! Where’d you find them?”
“In that room with the desk and the old-looking communication device. Where’d you find that crap?”
“Bedroom.”
Until I ran away from the Sanctioned City of Des Moines, I’d never seen a map of anything besides the sky. Star and planet maps, constellations, solar systems. But the Others don’t supply us any clues as to the size or terrain of this place we live.
I push aside the extra flashlight, batteries, a floppy book titled Holy Bible , and fingernail clippers that were hiding in the bedroom, and poke through Pax’s find. Besides the maps, he’s unearthed another lined disk like Lucas’s clue—this one with the name Johnny Cash on the outside of the case—two more books, and what looks like a family photograph.
The books remind me of the ones we found at Fort Laramie—textbooks that tell what happened on Earth before now. I hope the stories aren’t as depressing as the ones about what happened to the Native American people when the white settlers came to their land.
It’s frustrating, only knowing half of the stories and being unable to fit the rest of the puzzle together. To know terms and places and dates but not the how and why of things, the ins and outs of what made a group of people decide they could take what belonged to someone else because of the color of their skin.
I suppose if I understood that, I would understand the Others, too.
After all, they believe they are superior to the people of Earth because they have greater technology, and because they have mental capabilities that outstrip the ones of the inhabitants of this planet. But those things, in my estimation, don’t make the Others better than humans. It simply makes them different. I’m sure that if— when —humanity returns to its former state, it will have plenty of strengths to show off.
And weaknesses.
I think of the Native Americans and wonder what they would think of now, if they could have seen into the future. Certain humans had been bad enough to commit those crimes we learned about traveling west, but surely after all of these years people had learned from their mistakes.
We shove the books and Johnny Cash out of the way to make room for the first map. It’s been folded in perfect creases, and takes up over half of the coffee table with its width. The one we found before showed the Sanctioned Cities—along with several more places that had been foreign to us—but this one is more confusing. There are seven land masses interrupted by vast expanses of blue. These are not lakes or rivers. The blue stretches forever, and I know they are oceans like the one near Portland. I never imagined that water could stretch so far.
We try to make sense of the thing for a while, to find a place to get our bearings and start from, but soon frustration curls my fingernails into my palms. I rummage through Pax’s bag until I find the previous map, and smooth it out next to the new one to see if anything looks familiar.
I’m starting to believe they can’t both depict Earth when I spot a long, extended shape that matches on the maps. On the one we took from the Cell, it’s marked as Florida . On this new one, it’s not marked at all but appears to be part of a place called the United States of America , in an even bigger area titled North America .
I stab my finger at the word America ; it triggers a memory. “Cadi said when the Others first came they sent the Elements to four corners, and that my mother came here, to America. I bet it’s where my dad was from.”
So much time has passed since that night in the woods, months, and Cadi dumped so much information into my brain I can’t recall all of
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