The One Safe Place Read online

  As he stared, the windows in one house seemed to move, the horizontal shutters gliding closed like eyes blinking shut. But he didn’t see any people at all. It was very quiet.

  A few cars passed him. They were larger than those he’d seen on the highway and had windows that weren’t clear glass, but darkened to a whistling brown so that he couldn’t see inside at all.

  The city looked to be almost empty, Devin thought. But then, coming around a corner to the top of the highest hill, Devin saw he was completely wrong about this. These houses, these gates and pathways and stretches of perfect grass, were only a corner of the city, a tiny section, sheltered by trees. The rest of it—the real city—lay below him.

  It was a vast jumble of buildings, one on top of the other, dusty and crowded. Some of the buildings looked half in ruins; others had huge pictures flickering on them. Great flocks of birds wheeled and darted overhead. In the middle of the confusion lay the thick brown stripe of a river, the water flowing low and sluggish around the legs of three great bridges that rose with a tangled arrangement of pillars and cables. A yellow haze obscured the farther horizon, and Devin heard a distant roar, made up of a million voices.

  For a second, his courage failed him and he thought of turning back. But he was very tired and there was nowhere else to go.

  Devin made his way through a labyrinth of streets and found an alley as the sky grew dark. He curled up in a pile of dirty paper, his hands clutched tight against his chest. At dawn three boys, older than he was and far stronger, attacked him, keeping him face down on the ground while they searched his clothes. In three minutes they had taken everything: his knife, jacket, coins, the last of his food, and even his boots. They didn’t find his grandmother’s locket, because Devin had hidden it in the hem of one of his pant legs. He lay on the ground after they’d gone, too terrified to move for several minutes. Then he got to his feet and limped to the entrance of the alley.

  He was in a street so crammed with people that he almost bumped into a woman walking past, leading a small child by the hand.

  “Please,” Devin said, his voice jerky with shock. “Please, they took everything. Can you help me?”

  The woman looked at him quickly and her mouth went tight and her eyes swung away. She shook her head with a small, angry gesture and hurried on, pulling her child with her. A boy riding a two-wheeled vehicle with a huge box on the back swerved suddenly out of the crowd toward him. Devin stumbled back and half fell. “Need help?” the boy shouted in a laughing voice. “Call the POLICE! Ha!” And then he was gone, as quickly as he came.

  Nobody else seemed to have noticed. Everyone was moving, jostling, hurrying. Most of the buildings nearby were run down, and the ground was littered with trash and pieces of brick. Devin joined the stream of people, not knowing what else to do.

  He began to walk fast and then broke into a trot. The wide street met another, and then a huge crossroads of four streets met in a knot of dust and traffic. There were more two-wheeled things, and small, old-looking cars, and men dragging light carts as they ran along. So many people, faces upon faces. Devin whirled and ducked, unable to take it all in; the clamor and color, the flapping clothes and spinning wheels, the market stalls, the doors and dark openings, the noise of a thousand things clanging and clattering.

  He was running now, his bare feet hot against the broken sidewalk, his skin burning with a hundred sensations at once, his ears ringing painfully, his head pounding. At last he stopped and crawled under a sheet of corrugated iron that was leaning against a wall. He crouched there for a long time, watching feet pass in front of his shelter, his hands pressed tight to his ears, his mind grappling with the reality that faced him.

  His idea to get help with the farm had seemed simple when he was back home. Now that he was in the city, it was a different matter. He couldn’t just go up to someone and ask. He might have if there had been three—or five—or even ten people here. But there were so many. He had no idea where to begin or whom to approach. You had to know people, he thought. Or else they would look at you like the woman with the child had. Or not look at you at all.

  Devin was very hungry. He crept out from his hiding place and began to search for food. He scavenged scraps from vegetable stalls and bins, trudging the streets as the hours passed. Water was scarce. There were long lines of people waiting for their turn at a single faucet, and it ran out before he got anywhere near the front. He didn’t understand why there was so little water when he had seen such green grass in the other part of the city, the area with the big houses.

  He noticed other things too. Like the huge, new cars that sometimes appeared amid the old, ramshackle vehicles. Or the man he saw get out of one such car with shoes that shone and glasses that were black and a strange device attached to the side of his head that he seemed to be talking into. Or the tall building, covered with glass so clean and bright that it looked as if it had descended from the sky to land among the tatty, broken-down buildings around it. These things didn’t look as if they belonged. Or perhaps it was the rest of the city that didn’t belong. It confused Devin, although nobody else around him seemed to notice. The man who got out of the car, for instance, hadn’t appeared to see a ragged old lady with bare feet sitting only a little way away on the sidewalk.

  The whole place seemed lopsided, Devin thought. Out of shape and out of balance.

  A little later, Devin spotted a man lying in the street as if he were very ill, perhaps even dead. But everyone was simply passing by. One lady actually stepped over the man’s body as if it were invisible.

  In the afternoon he came to a large, grimy-looking building. There was a word written above the main entrance: POLICE.

  That was the word the boy had shouted. Devin stopped. The letter E had slipped a bit and was tilted to the right so that it made the wrong sound, more of a stutter than a chirp. Devin hesitated. He didn’t know what the word meant or whether the boy had been right about getting help there. As he watched, a man came out and stood in the doorway. He was large and sweaty and his face was heavy with boredom. He glanced up and saw Devin and his eyes were suddenly hard and threatening and Devin was afraid. He ducked away and hurried down the street, his heart pounding.

  His plan to ask someone to come back and cut his hay and patch his barn and help him trap hares seemed stupid now.

  When darkness fell, he found his way back to the corrugated-iron shelter and tried to sleep. Even though it was night, the city remained alive with noise, but Devin could still hear the silence. It had followed him all the way from the farm, and now it was here in the city. He could feel it in the pit of his belly and all the way up to his chest.

  It was the silence of knowing he was utterly alone.

  After a day or two, Devin became less fearful and more used to the hubbub of the streets. It was easy to make a pattern of the place in his mind. The shapes of the buildings sang a song, just like the stones in the old wall that circled the farm had done, and the colors around him wove themselves into a fabric as clear as any map.

  But the silence never left him.

  Nor did his hunger.

  He was hungry when he woke up in the morning and hungry when he went to sleep; and all the time in between, he spent looking for food. He ate anything he could find. Scraps of bread, rotten fruit, a handful of potato peelings flung into the street. He had to be quick because there were always other people as hungry as he was. Many of them were children.

  The children were all ragged and thin, and they kept their eyes on the ground, hunting for shreds to eat. It didn’t seem as though anybody was looking after them. Perhaps there were simply too many children, Devin thought, and in this strange, lopsided world, nobody cared about them very much. Not the way his grand­father had cared about him. The other kids didn’t speak to Devin. They didn’t even look at him. The silence inside Devin grew until his whole body seemed to ache.

  On his third day a girl caught his eye. She was delicate, with dirty reddish hair and pale skin speckled like an egg. What made him notice her was that she was the only person he had seen since arriving in the city who was actually looking up. She walked along slowly, her gaze fixed on some point along the rooftops. Then she turned a corner and was gone.

  A day later, he saw her again. She was crouching alone in the middle of a large area between buildings, in an expanse of broken concrete and stunted weeds. Devin walked closer. The girl looked as if she was hunting for something, her fingers digging through a small pile of rubble. She was so intent on her task that she didn’t notice when Devin came right up in front of her.

  “What are you doing?”

  The girl startled and got to her feet instantly. Her eyes were small and brown and showed no expression. Something glittered in her hand.

  “What have you found?”

  She didn’t reply. Instead she simply turned her back and began to walk away. Inside Devin, the silence surged and pushed until it felt as though it would break the banks of his skin and carry him far away.

  “Please!” he cried out. “Please talk to me! Somebody has to talk to me!”

  Three

  THE GIRL TURNED AROUND. She looked a little younger than Devin, about ten or eleven, although it was hard to tell because she was so slight. Up close, her face was even more covered with freckles than he’d first thought, and her hair was very long and matted. It was tied back with a piece of ribbon that was so chewy pink and crackling that it made him want to smile. She was too wild and odd-looking ever to be called pretty, he thought. But somehow, she was beautiful. She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life.

  She opened her hand and showed him what she was holding. It was a sharp piece of something that glimmered with iridescence. She tilted it one way and then another, and where it caught the light it made a line of rainbow so sharp it almost hurt the eye.

  “I collect them,” she said. “They’re just bits. I’ve never found a whole one. Once I found half. They’re mostly buried. You have to look.”

  “What are they?”

  “Discs,” she told him. “People used to use them to store information.”

  Devin had no idea what she was talking about.

  “There’s pieces of them lying around all over the place,” she said.

  Devin reached out and took the fragment. The rainbow shimmered with icy prickles that ran down the back of his neck. “It’s strange . . . ,” he said slowly. “I never felt anything like that before.”

  The girl nodded. “Well,” she said. “Okay. So I answered your question.”

  She turned and began to walk away. Devin watched her as she went. “Hey!” he called. “You forgot your piece of disc! Hey!” She didn’t turn. Without thinking of anything except that he couldn’t let her out of his sight, Devin took off running after her.

  The girl didn’t slow down. When Devin reached her she gave him a quick look and then picked up her pace. She ran lightly, almost effortlessly, her knot of red hair bouncing against the nape of her neck. Soon she was running so fast that she was almost flying, dodging pedestrians, swerving this way and that to avoid obstacles, with Devin keeping pace beside her. They ran through crowded streets, down a long alley, and across an area of wasteland strewn with concrete blocks. At last she stopped.

  They were standing in the shadow of a tall building perhaps eight or nine stories high. It looked as if it had been in a fire—one wall was entirely blackened—and the whole thing still smelled of soot. At one point, someone must have tried to repair the place, because there was scaffolding all the way up to the top. But the effort had clearly been abandoned. Through a broken window, Devin caught a glimpse of a dark and hollow interior.

  “Can you climb?” the girl asked.

  Devin bent at the waist, panting. “Sure,” he said, thinking of the apple trees in the orchard.

  But the girl hadn’t waited for his answer. She had already swung herself up to the first rung of the scaffolding and was reaching for the second. Soon she was twenty feet above him. Devin followed. The scaffolding creaked and shifted under his weight, and he had to half jump to reach each handhold, his heart pounding. Halfway up he made the mistake of looking down and saw the earth tilt and shimmer in the heat. He stopped, terrified, the stink of the burned building filling his nostrils, his hands slippery and shaking. He looked up. The girl was already at the top. He saw her head appear over the edge.

  “The last part is easier,” she said. “Go to the left . . . grab that pole . . . that’s it.”

  Devin took a deep breath and hauled himself up the last stretch. At the top he lay for a second or two without lifting his head, trying to get his breath back. Slowly he got to his feet. They were on the roof. A faint breeze lifted his hair and cooled his face. Below him and stretching all the way to the horizon was the city, shrouded in a golden veil of haze and dust. In the far distance, he could see the hills and woods he had traveled through all those days before, and nearer, the brown stripe of the river and the bridges, tiny from this distance, like things made out of matchsticks. But it wasn’t this that made him draw in his breath and stare. It was the roof itself.

  The girl had arranged boxes to sit on and an old mattress, covered with a faded sheet. Above it was a canopy, propped up on sticks, a shimmery piece of pale green fabric that fluttered slightly in the wind. All around lay boxes and containers filled to the brim with colored scraps that glittered when they caught the sun. To one side, there was a kind of washing line, a string stretched between two corners of the roof. From the line hung many more of the disc pieces. They glimmered and twisted, flavoring the breeze with the sound of far-off bells.

  Devin turned and looked at the girl. She was standing with her arms folded, staring at him.

  “If you tell anyone about this place, I’ll kill you.”

  He nodded. “My name’s Dev,” he said. “It’s short for Devin.”

  “Kit,” the girl said.

  “What’s that short for?”

  “Nothing. It beats being called ‘kid.’ That’s all.”

  Devin frowned. A great tiredness came over him. He went to the mattress and sat down on it. It was quiet up here, but it was a different kind of silence from the one that had followed him from the farm. Above his head, the canopy fluttered gently. He lay back and stared at the sky through the gauzy green fabric.

  “It’s like the grass,” he murmured. “But thinner . . . slippery . . .”

  He closed his eyes, and in three seconds he was fast asleep.

  He woke up a long time later. Kit was sitting across from him. He didn’t know how long she had been there, watching him sleep. In her hand there was a miracle, a large orange that glowed with thunder. She tossed it up and caught it, then threw it to him.

  Devin stared at it with disbelief. “Where did you get this?”

  “Stole it. You’ve been asleep for hours.”

  Devin peeled the orange and divided it in half.

  “Don’t bother,” Kit said. “I’ve had one already.” She got to her feet and started emptying her pockets, bringing out handfuls of things, fragments of glass, screws, an assortment of bottle tops. While Devin ate, she sorted the items, examining each in turn, making little piles. When she was done, she put each pile into a different container.

  “You’ve got a lot of stuff,” Devin said.

  Kit stared hard at him and shrugged.

  “I collect.” She reached into another pocket and pulled out a last item. “This one’s a true rary,” she said. “Never seen one of these before.” In her palm was a tiny shell, delicately whorled. “You ever seen the ocean?”

  He shook his head. “I had a book with a picture of it. It looks big.”

  “All that water . . . ,” Kit said.

  “My granddad told me you can’t drink it, though. It’s too salty.”

  “I wouldn’t care about some stupid salt,” she said. “I’d stick my head in and I wouldn’t stop drinking until I died.”

  Devin got up and went to the edge of the roof to take in the view again. “Those trees,” he said. “Over by the hills. I came through those when I first got here.”

  “You mean The Meadows?”

  “Is that what they’re called? The grass there, it’s very green. I think they water it.”

  Kit stared at him, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Do you really not know anything or are you just pretending?”

  Devin didn’t know what to say

  “The Meadows is where the rich live,” Kit explained.

  “Where do they get the water?”

  “They own the water, idiot! How do you think they got rich in the first place?”

  Devin thought of the sky dark with rain and the way the stream at the farm ran too fast to hold. “You can’t own water,” he protested.

  Kit rolled her eyes. “Well, they do. They own it. They own control of it. Along with just about everything else.”

  “But how? How did they get everything?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess they just grabbed it. And everyone else needs what the rich have, so they just go on getting richer. It’s the way it is. The rich have a lot, most other people have a little, and then there’s us. We don’t have anything at all.

  “Lots of kids in our group,” she added.

  “But don’t they have homes?”

  “Used to. Some of them had good homes before their parents died or weren’t able to feed them anymore. Lots are runaways.”

  “What about you?” Devin asked. “Are you a runaway?”

  Kit shrugged again. “My parents ran away from me. I came back one day and they’d left. Best day of my life.”

  “My granddad used to live here when he was young,” Devin began. “He said it was different then. It changed when it started to get hot. People stopped looking out for each other and lots of things that used to be organized just turned into a big mess.”

  “Yeah?” Kit said without much interest. “Well, it’s like this now. And it’s not going to change. Some of the kids talk about getting out, how they heard about a kid who got adopted by rich people and went to live in luxury forever. Or that there’s a home somewhere where they feed you and you can play all day and have everything you want. But it’s just fairy tales.” Kit’s mouth set in a fierce line.