Glass and Gardens Read online

  ***

  The new map came out. Adelaide had gotten a little brighter, Sydney had dimmed as people fled the rising sea levels, and a few new outposts had cropped up out west.

  But no one talked about that.

  All the news articles wanted to know: what was that little patch of light along Stuart Highway? It was faint, so tiny as to be barely visible, but didn’t it look like words? And an arrow?

  Kirra had printed her copy quickly, before they lost the connection, and now sat with it on the hill overlooking the town she had put on the map, beading her dress in the last sunrise of summer.

  “Truck,” Zeph reported, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  Kirra heard it too, that bumbling rumble of tires on the old road, and stood to greet their guests. As the masterminds of the plan, the girls had taken it upon themselves to welcome news crews who came to document Coober Pedy, the so-called “hidden gem of New South Wales.”

  But this wasn’t a news crew. The truck—no, trucks, plural—were too big and fancy.

  Kirra’s heart caught in her throat as the lead truck turned and its side became visible. There, painted in big letters…

  “Can’t be,” Zeph said, but her voice shook with excitement.

  “It is.” Kirra hugged her before they ran down to meet the band. “Coober Pedy is a city near you!”

  The whole town came out that night to dance, their light rivaling the stars above as Riot of the Wind and Sun played on the hill. Kirra twirled in her beaded gown, her braids cutting the air like the blades of a turbine.

  ***

  Jennifer Lee Rossman is a science fiction geek from Oneonta, New York, who enjoys cross stitching, watching Doctor Who, and threatening to run over people with her wheelchair. Her work has been featured in several anthologies and her debut novel, Jack Jetstark’s Intergalactic Freakshow, will be published by World Weaver Press in 2019. You can find her blog at jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com/ and Twitter at twitter.com/JenLRossman

  Fyrewall

  by Stefani Cox

  It only took an hour on the trail for Daesha to lose Talia. Or rather, that’s all it took for Talia to give her the slip. They’d headed out of the city and into the dusty, dry hills together, feet crunching in three separate pairs though the sticklike yellow grass. But eventually, Daesha realized one set of footsteps was missing. I am never having kids, thought Daesha. I’m supposed to be doing a job, not running an internship program. Saddling her with two teenagers fulfilling their community justice agreements was yet one more sign that The Council didn’t take her position seriously. And why should they? she mused. It’s not like they really need me anyway.

  Daesha felt the sweat run down the base of her neck and underneath her shirt. Her scalp felt scratchy and hot, even though she had tied her locs up into a topknot earlier. The sun made her tired and grouchy every time.

  “Hey, Ms. Daesha,” said Carlos next to where she stopped. “Where did Talia get to? How come she gets to do whatever she wants?”

  Her remaining charge looked irritated. He slapped at his neck to kill a gnat and then wiped his hand on his khaki pants. The mop of his black hair, shiny and freshly washed when Daesha picked him up at five this morning, was already silty with airborne dirt and debris from the bushes and trees lining the trail. She noticed that Carlos was twirling a thin metal object that looked just like her— “How did you get my particlemeter?” asked Daesha, swiping it back. She was sure she had stuffed it into the bottom of her bag. Carlos gave her a cheeky half-smile through his translucent facemask.

  “I wanted to see what it does.”

  Never kids. Daesha took a slow breath through her own filter. No matter. She needed to check on the air quality levels at this spot anyway. She pushed a button on the side of the particlemeter and waited for the reading to sync and flash across her Ocu-contacts. Normal ranges. Or rather, abnormal ranges for human health, but nothing higher than expected.

  “Go make yourself useful and see if you can find Talia,” Daesha said to Carlos.

  “What if I don’t feel like it?”

  “Well, then I guess I can put that in my progress report for The Council. I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear an update on how you’ve been feeling.”

  He glowered and then slowly sauntered off toward the next hill, looking back at her once to see if she was still watching him.

  Daesha patted her pockets. “You better not have taken anything else,” she muttered. She fanned her face with a hand, and hoped that Talia wasn’t off playing with fire as she was known to do. The destructive habit had been the reason The Council placed her with Daesha in the first place. Let her see why fire is so dangerous. Help her contribute to the resistance of fire, they’d intoned. For Carlos, they&rsquo'd told her simply, There’s not much he can steal out there. Expose him to other ways of occupying his mind.

  It was hot. At least one hundred and thirty degrees hot. But the thermo-screen that they all used whenever leaving the cooled sphere of the city did its job, and Daesha was glad to know that at least her skin wouldn’t burn and peel off in flaky scales later. She’d heard stories from Grandma Jean about how that used to happen before drugstores started selling thermo-screen over the counter. First, only the light-skinned kids had to get the ointments and deep burn treatments for sun exposure. Then, as California continued to warm, even her own family members started to experience the negative effects.

  Daesha turned back the way they had come and scanned the horizon for Talia. From her vantage point among the hills she could see all of Los Angeles spread out before her. The city seemed to sparkle through the gentle translucence of the Fyrewall.

  The view of the city was a stark contrast from these dead, lonely hills she trekked among on a regular basis. Daesha remembered what Grandma Jean had said about LA being a bare desert more than a thousand years ago, which then grew to a sprawling, congested city where everyone coughed and hacked amidst brown air. She’d seen pictures in classroom holographics, but it still seemed hard to believe.

  As long as Daesha had known her hometown, it had been dense and tall, with skyscrapers filling most of the land inside the wall, and trains snaking between the buildings at all times of day and night. Walking back and forth from school, she remembered coming across lush green pocket parks full of drought-resistant plants and little shaded nooks for studying or talking. Sometimes she would bike through her neighborhood’s greenways to the edge of downtown, where she leaned against the guardrails and watched the expansive river flow past.

  Surrounding everything was the wall itself, a blue, shimmering sheet of compressed oceanwater that Grandma Jean’s team had engineered into a dome shape. It enveloped the city and protected it from the flames that used to ravage LA during summers just like this. Squinting now, Daesha could see the yellow-marked, guarded portal where she and the teens had come through the Fyrewall.

  Daesha shook her head to clear it and put her back to the city again to continue up the trail. She was always floating away in a daydream; there was not much else to do out here. With the Fyrewall pretty much maintaining itself, she felt largely irrelevant. Daesha tried not to think about what industrious, brilliant Grandma Jean would think of her only living descendent aimlessly meandering the hills. But she wasn’t alone today—she was in charge of the teens—and now she had to find both of them.

  Her instruments began to beep. A table of columns, numbers, and percentages flashed across her vision. It was a compilation that her computer had just synthesized of all the local environmental readings—air quality, temperature, moisture levels, barometric pressure, and a million other measurements she didn’t fully understand. Some of the numbers were pulsing in red. The beeping continued.

  Daesha flicked the fingers of her right hand to trigger the bar chart mode, so that she could better understand what she was seeing. In the moment that it took her to absorb the red and blue rectangles, her heart jumped. She flicked her fingers again to put the data on a timeline and saw
the dip clear as anything.

  For some reason, the energy output readings from the past month were low. Abnormally low. The Fyrewall was losing power.

  Daesha continued scanning the charts with a lump in her throat, but there was no denying it. The wall was built to be self-sustaining. In fact, it did more than sustain itself; it provided power for the whole city. But she could see that the output was going to lower soon, if the information was correct.

  Daesha swallowed. She would have to tell The Council about this, and then they would want her to tell them what to do.

  Something else was also bothering Daesha, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It was something outside of the sensors and readings themselves, something that her body was taking in about the physical environment, tingling at the edge of her awareness.

  Whatever it was triggered a memory of Grandma Jean and the times she would read to Daesha at night when her parents worked late. The two of them would cuddle in Daesha’s small bed, and she would breath in the lilac soap-scented heaven of her grandma, who was really her great-grandmother, as she listened to today’s tale. Something about the past. Something about history.

  …tore through the city…

  “Yo, Ms. Daesha,” shouted a familiar voice. “I found Talia. She’s got something you should look at.” Carlos appeared at the edge of her vison with a silent Talia in tow. The black girl was covered from head-to-toe, despite the heat. She wore a gray hoodie, dark skater shoes, and a sullen frown to complete the picture. She stared off into space next to Daesha’s head.

  “Talia!” Daesha scolded. “Where have you been? You can’t just wander off like that!” Talia’s expression didn’t change.

  “She’s not going to talk to you,” said Carlos. “She won’t say anything. But she found something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Talia blinked and pointed over the east ridge. Daesha paused. It was the direction of the Fyrewall, though a different section than the one they had come through. She was still mad at Talia, but she did need to find out what was happening to the technology. She tapped her foot against the ground impatiently, then readjusted her shoulder bag.

  “Fine,” said Daesha. “Let’s go.”

  She followed as Talia led the three of them down through the low brush and scraggly trees. They walked in silence for five minutes, drawing closer and closer to the blue shimmer. Something was still bothering Daesha, but she was distracted again as they neared the wall and her sensors started beeping faster.

  The three of them kept going until they were just a few yards from the wall, where Talia stopped and pointed again. Daesha’s instruments reached a crescendo. She was having a hard time seeing through all the data popping up in her Ocu-contacts. With an annoyed wave of her hand she turned them all off—the contacts, the sensors, everything. Her vision returned to normal, and the blue shimmer became more immediate.

  That was when she saw the tear in the Fyrewall, a gap that was hard to notice if you weren’t looking straight at it. It was a zigzag of blank air, surrounded by the water in the rest of the wall. The teenagers looked at her, but they didn’t need Daesha to tell them this was a very bad sign.

  It was also then that Daesha finally noticed the smell of smoke, faraway in the breeze.

  ***

  People referred to The Council as though it were a small circle of government officials, when in reality it was a chaotic mixture of, well, everyone. That was how The Council worked. You could elect someone to represent your group based almost any factor—geographic area, race, age, gender identity…the list went on. You could elect multiple representatives, and there was no limit, as long as representatives were active in participating with The Council and in fulfilling their assigned roles and duties.

  So when Daesha and the teenagers stood before The Council via the holoconference she set up next to the wall tear, there were actually thousands of representatives uplinking to listen in on the conversation. And since the meetings were open to the entire city, any resident could theoretically tune in. Imagining the size of the audience that might be opening the feed from numerous points throughout the city made Daesha nervous. She swallowed to wet her throat in hopes that her voice wouldn’t wobble anymore the way it had when she’d informed The Council of the problem.

  “The active fire is the biggest concern,” said one Councilmember, an older Latina woman with white-gray hair framing her face in crisp waves. “If it travels just a few miles, it could arrive at the wall and rip right through the tear. Our buildings would be immediately at risk.”

  “My community is concerned with the evacuation plan,” said a mid-thirties man in a wheelchair with caramel-toned skin. He rolled closer to the device he was using to project into the meeting. “The maps are outdated, and we haven’t been keeping up with accessibility plans the way we should have been. That’s why I kept bringing it up in—”

  “The Fyrewall is our only source of power,” said a member who represented the nonbinary South Asian community. They raised a leather-cuffed arm to trigger the holoconference technology to amplify their screen. “We have backup power stored up to last us for a year or two, but we’ll have to figure out how to keep the air purifiers running past that point if we want the city to stay livable.”

  “Forget the air purifiers. What about the other cities who come barging down to our door whenever they sense a weakness?” asked a precocious youth member. “Selling them the Fyrewall tech and keeping the barrier flowing has been the only way to keep them away long-term, right?”

  Daesha crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes for a moment. She hated Council meetings for this very reason. Too many voices, and not enough leadership. Sure, it was more fair, but it amazed Daesha that anything got done at all within this system. She suspected it was due to the multitude of citizens who ran the sub-committees for budgeting, resource management, and security. They kept the city running, while those who wanted air time made a ruckus in holoconference convenings.

  Another part of her dreaded the moment when they would stop talking and turn to her for a solution. She was the one who inherited the responsibility of maintaining Grandma Jean’s wall when everyone else in her family had passed on or moved away.

  Daesha had never been as brilliant as Grandma Jean. Yes, she’d followed along as her great-grandmother did her rounds, and learned about the various instruments for keeping an eye on the wall. Daesha mastered the data science to inform The Council of the expected energy output each week, and she’d quickly learned what ranges were normal. But she’d never understood the Fyrewall in the same way. She’d never been taught what to do in the face of an emergency, because there had never been an emergency. For Grandma Jean, it had been as though the wall were an extension of her own body, not simply an engineered structure to maintain. In comparison, Daesha felt like a fraud.

  At her sides, she could sense Carlos and Talia watching her, waiting to see if she would intervene in the conversation, if she would speak up. Daesha looked over and noticed that Carlos had gotten his hands on the special thermo-screened water bottle she kept clipped to her shoulder bag. She’d purchased it last week, since it kept water ice cold, even outside of the city, but she didn’t have the energy or attention to try and get it back right now. The Council representatives kept talking, until one voice quieter than all the rest somehow cut through the noise.

  “The Fyrewall can be fixed,” it said. The projection in front of Daesha switched to an ancient woman. The lines in her face were not wrinkles so much as deep grooves carved throughout the passage of time. She had to be one hundred and twenty or thirty at least. The wrinkles furrowed her expression into incomprehensible twists and turns, but her deep brown eyes were alive and gentle.

  It was clear that, even in the non-hierarchical structure of The Council, this woman commanded a certain weight. No one talked as she gathered herself to speak again.

  “I remember a time when wildfires conquered this city,” she
said.

  …tore through…

  “We were scared every summer that all the progress we made in making Los Angeles bigger, more inclusive, and self-sustaining, would get wiped away by the next burn. And it wasn’t just us. So many cities fought the heat and failed in those early years.”

  The Council remained rapt. Even Carlos and Talia seemed to be paying more attention now. Their eyes were dreamy, as though the bedtime stories that Grandma Jean used to tell were being passed on to them now.

  “Then your great-grandmother, my friend, came up with the Fyrewall,” said the old woman, looking right at Daesha. “We all knew immediately that she had just saved us—our sovereignty and our progress.” The woman took a long, slow breath that heaved her full body up and down. “But the wall is not a miracle,” she said. “It’s made up of earth, and minerals, and water, just like the rest of us. The wall can be fixed, and Jean believed you could do it, Daesha. She taught you, and she chose you.”

  The Council remained silent after that, since no one knew what else to say.

  “Well, that sounds like an order,” said Talia, speaking up for the first time since they’d left the city. “Guess you have to figure out how to fix this thing.”

  ***

  Once the three of them disconnected from the holoconference, Daesha noticed the smoky smell had grown stronger. A light breeze blew the scent of ashes and embers from what couldn’t be more than a couple of hills away. Even though she knew they were in no immediate danger—the next portal was close and the thermo-screen protected against fire burns—the smell still triggered a fear in her, and made her hesitate.

  “So what are you going to do about this hole?” asked Carlos, handing Daesha back her water bottle.

  “Klepto,” said Talia.

  Carlos shrugged, but he did look a little apologetic. “Sorry, I can’t help it. It’s just too easy. But I always give stuff back.”

  Talia was looking at Daesha intently. “You’re scared, aren’t you?” she asked. “My sister always gets tense like you when she’s worried about her kids.”