Chapter 10

  Elizabeth

  Summer is yellow and bright

  It is the sun in clear skies

  It is laziness, it is work, it is satisfaction

  Summer is lakes and rivers

  It is hot and full

  It is placidity

  It is taste and smell

  It is dust and wind

  It is sunlight and fields and empty stretches of sky and land

  It is fruition and enumeration

  Summer is joy and impatience

  It is things happening

  It is memory

  Fall is red and yellow and black

  It is the closing of a book

  It is shadows and wind and the moon

  It is ripples in water

  It is leaves crunching and swirling

  It is stealth and ambiguity, it is union, it is desperation

  It is sorrow and mystery and fear

  It is night, it is cleverness

  It is festivity

  Winter is white and grey

  It is fire, warmth, and comfort

  It is wild and cold and empty,

  It is security

  It is death and stars and slumber

  It is stillness and patience and waiting

  And all things vast and infinite

  Winter is fog and darkness and space

  It is loneliness and wastelands

  It is lights in the distance

  It is obscurity

  Spring is green and blue

  It is freshness and light

  It is clarity

  Spring is wild and fun

  It is air and energy

  It is running fast and long

  Spring is water and frost

  It is movement, it is motion

  It is awakening

  Spring is rain and life

  It is ideas

  It is the blue sky and low clouds

  It is friends and freedom

  It is music and poetry

  And love

  - Elizabeth Eddison, “Seasons”

  Elizabeth had fond memories of snow. On winter days when school was out and AJ wasn’t too busy with her friends, she and Elizabeth would play in the woods and fields. They built snowmen and snow forts, sledded on steep hills, played hide-and-seek with each other and with Callie, who was nearly invisible when standing still in a sunny snow-covered field. Elizabeth relished the mixed sensation of being active in the cold, sweating under layers of clothes. She loved the burning in her fingers and toes after coming inside after a hard day’s adventuring. She associated that burning with comfort, because it meant hot chocolate and cozy blankets and perhaps a cheery fire dancing in their seldom-used fireplace.

  When Elizabeth Eddison fell through the doorframe onto the frosted golden flower, she first felt fear, for herself as well as for Jimothy. But as she took in her snowy surroundings, nostalgia gradually usurped concern. A peculiar warmth rose within her when she saw the darkness and ice around her. The snowflakes, fat and lazy as they floated down from the night sky overhead, calmed her. No rush, they said. Be still.

  She sat up and checked herself. Uninjured. The yellow umbrella lay half-open nearby on the strangely textured surface to which she had fallen. She reached for it, stood, and popped it open to be a shield against the snow. She zipped up her jacket, but realized that although it was nighttime and snowing, the air was not too cold. Not sub-zero, at any rate.

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  She returned to the door which had slammed behind her. To her surprise, it opened easily. But she saw no Jimothy, no Hazel, no six-sided room. Just more snowy darkness. The door and its frame stood all alone, without a wall, going nowhere.

  Elizabeth closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She held it for a count of eight, then let it out over another count of eight. She repeated this, then did it again but counted each time to twelve, all the while turning and turning the silver ring she’d received from AJ. She had to think. She had to think about this. Step by step, carefully.

  First, she had to find out where she was. What kind of place was this? There was light; something illuminated the falling snow in a warm glow from below the strange platform she stood upon. She would get to that in a moment.

  Second, Jimothy. Where had he gone? He had his own door. Was he here somewhere as well? Could she text him somehow? She would try in a moment.

  Third, everyone else. Were they okay? Amelia and Elmer? AJ? Kate and Eric and the rest? She needed to find out what was going on. She would check her message history for clues in a moment.

  She hesitated before opening her eyes. If none of this was real, how would she know? If she was Jimothy, she would use the Line. This all seemed like a crazy dream, or like one of Isaac’s silly stories. She saw AJ roll her eyes and heard her voice, exasperated after her little sister Liz had asked her one too many questions: “Well if you don’t know, then go find out! And if you can’t find out then you just have to do the best with what you have!” For AJ, everything was that simple. You just did the best you could with whatever you had. Elizabeth had always admired that about AJ. She didn’t hesitate or become lost in speculation. She got things done. They weren’t always the right things, but they were at least things done, which had always seemed to Elizabeth far better than her own nonexistent mountain of things undone, things delayed out of trepidation.

  AJ was right. She didn’t know if any of this was real, but she had no recourse but to treat it as such. What other reasonable choice was there?

  Elizabeth opened her eyes.

  She stood on a flower, a giant frozen flower with six sides. The only thing on it was the white door. The flower was gold, flat, slippery. And huge, of course, for a flower. Likely factitious.

  The light rose from below. At the edge of the flower, by leaning against the rock-solid doorframe, she could observe its source: an enormous glass building, effulgent in the snowy night. It spread out below her in irregular shapes, like an assortment of glassy objects all jammed together randomly, lit from within by a cheery light. The platform on which she stood decorated the apex of this structure. She couldn’t make out any interior details because all the glass was either fogged over or concealed by a layer of snow. The building illuminated the snowy hillside around it, causing trees and bushes near the perimeter to cast endless shadows into the darkness beyond.

  Hulking dark masses, which she took to be nearby mountains, rose in the gloom around her. She deduced that she was currently at considerable elevation on one of their slopes, because a double string of lights swept down from the brightly lit building at her feet, down and down a great distance to a cluster of lights far away, and far below. A town?

  Beyond this town, out in the hazy remoteness of the night, she glimpsed little pinpricks scattered through the dark. Houses. People. People no doubt huddled up warm and cozy on this snowy night. The thought comforted her. Amid the cold of winter, when half gone was the night.

  She twirled the umbrella, dislodging some snow which had accumulated. A ramp over on the other side of the flower led down to the building. She stepped carefully toward it over the flower and then heard a meow behind her. It was Callie’s meow, deeper and throatier than any other cat Elizabeth had heard. Callie sat in the middle of the flower, holding something white in her mouth. She meowed awkwardly around the object.

  Elizabeth took the pale object from Callie. She brushed off the snow, turned it over in her hands and held it up to the light. It was a thin ceramic hexagon the size of her palm, divided into six triangles. Each triangle had a symbol. Two symbols glowed faintly: the flower in gold and the paintbrush in green. Herself and Jimothy.

  The object had a chain, like a medallion or pendant. Elizabeth looked down at Callie, who meowed again and nodded at her as if in affirmation. Elizabeth put it on. Nothing extraordinary happened. It was cold against the skin of her chest.

  “Now is it okay for us to get in out of this cold?” she asked. In reply, Callie rolled over in the snow and stretched luxuriously. She’d always loved snow. She was a lynx, after all.

  The ramp took Elizabeth down at a steep angle toward a glowing dome. It was slick with snow. Her first thought was that Jimothy would have a difficult time here. If he was here in the snow somewhere, she had to find him. She gripped the handrail with one hand, her umbrella in the other, and half-slid down to a fogged glass door.

  It opened easily, and a wave of warm humidity rolled over Elizabeth, releasing a cloud of glowing steam that billowed up into the snowy night. She entered quickly and closed the door behind her to keep from letting too much of the warmth out. But it was very warm here, and very humid, and full of a rich, pungent scent which she knew at once: greenhouse. This was a greenhouse. She could smell the earth, the pollen, the leaves.

  When her eyes adjusted to the light, she found a recreation of a tropical jungle below her. She stood on a metallic mesh catwalk encircling the dome. Stairs led down at several places, and paths cut through the dense verdancy below. It was a gardener’s dream, a panoply of blossoms in every size, shape, and color. The view took her breath away for a long moment.

  She recalled the aerial view of this place afforded by the flower platform up there in the snow. This dome was one room out of many. She resolved to wander until she found the owner. Obviously, someone took care of this place; given its size, there was likely an entire staff.

  She sloughed off her jacket, closed the umbrella, and tucked both under an arm. She checked her phone as she descended from the catwalk into the jungle. No internet, no service–same as in the Museum. But CHIME still worked. She tried Jimothy to no effect, then remembered someone saying he didn’t have his phone. It had, apparently, been destroyed. He was here somewhere, presumably, and without a phone. How would she find him?

  She left the tropical chamber for a darker, cooler hall. It ran to her right and left, branching off farther down. A small directory hung on the plaster wall in front of her. To her left: Conservatories A-C, the Vegetable Garden, the Orchard, the Observatory, and Lift Station/Lobby. To her right: Conservatories: E-G, Quarters, Guest Housing, Botanical Garden, Dance Hall, Studio, Library.

  Dance hall? Studio? Curiosity compelled her to turn right. She kept an eye out for other people, but saw none. The hall wound past Conservatories E and F, and went straight through G. G enclosed a section of woods that could have been transplanted directly from the forest behind her house in Pennsylvania. Mossy oaks and tall maples. The path took a rustic wooden bridge over a burbling brook.

  She passed by the library, then returned and perused a few books. They were her books–some of them exactly the same, others books she had intended to read, or books she had never heard of but which immediately piqued her interest. With increasing astonishment, she continued on to the studio (which contained punching bags and training dummies), and then the dance hall (which included various shoes in her exact size, and only in her size). By the time she arrived at Quarters, the conclusion was inescapable: this place had been prepared for her.

  A row of white peonies in full bloom lived in a flowerbed of dark soil just outside of a bedroom. Callie waited for her inside. Elizabeth saw that Callie had her own small bed next to the human-sized one, but Callie had nevertheless opted to recline on the bed.

  It wasn’t her room from back home, not exactly, but it was close. It was what someone who knew her well would create for her. A room designed by AJ, for her, might look like this. Comfortable, simple, elegant.

  The bed looked very soft, the sheets very warm. She yawned just looking at them. A wave of exhaustion swept over her. A thick quilt, brocaded with ilex patterns, invited her to burrow beneath it and snuggle with Callie. A dark window, set above the headboard, revealed only drifting snowflakes beyond. She propped the umbrella against the wall by the door and dropped her damp jacket onto the back of a nearby chair. The door behind her had no lock. But with Callie in the room, that didn’t seem important.

  Elizabeth almost gave way to the sudden but powerful desire to sleep. She could collapse on the bed. It would be so easy. But Jimothy might be out there somewhere. Did he have his own flower platform somewhere? Did he have his own slippery ramp to navigate? Who knew whether he had a warm greenhouse of his own, or whether he might be cold and alone in the dark? She didn’t intend to write any poems about losing Jimothy.

  She paused long enough to grab the umbrella, then stepped back to the hall. Why the umbrella? It might snow more heavily, of course, and she might have to venture back outside. But perhaps just as much, the absence of other people in this huge greenhouse unnerved her. A closed umbrella was not much of a weapon, she knew, but it was something. And apparently she required something , because apparently her years of taekwondo training were completely useless . No, she didn’t need to think like that. That man had been armored and well-trained. Of course he had no difficulty with a teenage girl. It still hurt, though.

  She took a different path back toward Lift Station/Lobby and resisted the urge to explore every room she passed. Not all of the conservatories were warm, and some were more dimly lit than others. She caught glimpses of many beautiful flowers, many of them species she did not recognize.

  It didn’t take long to reach the Lift Station/Lobby. It looked like a large waiting area, white and happy, with flowers and benches to her left and right when she entered. A single window comprised the entire wall across from her, stark and black in contrast to the cheery brightness of the lobby. A massive pulley dominated the center of the room, connected to unseen machinery above and below. A white windowed capsule the size of a small bus dangled from a thick cable adjacent to the machinery. Several of these cables swept out into the snowy night through an opening in the far wall.

  She passed the cable car and stood at the windowed wall. The trail of red and blue lights demarcating supports for the gondola system descended in a smooth curve far down to the collection of lights she had seen earlier. It certainly looked like a settlement.

  She returned to the car and saw a simple console within, similar to one nearby on the lift machinery itself. Start, stop, emergency brake, speed settings, all simple enough. Only the three switches along the bottom gave her pause. They were labeled Detach, Emergency Shielding, and Terminate Lift System. A plastic lid covered the first two switches so they could not be flipped by accident. The third was embedded into the control panel and covered by a thick layer of plastic. Adjacent to it, the words “Override–Authorized Access Only” decorated a hexagonal depression in the pale metal. She knew at a glance that the pendant Callie had given her would fit.

  She was still alone here. No one could help her find out about this place, or about Jimothy. Maybe in the town. She stepped into the gondola; it shook slightly with her weight. Callie waited for her inside, on the seats, licking a paw.

  “I’ll probably take a nap on the way down,” she told Callie as she climbed into the car. “Wake me up when we get close, okay?”

  It was a risk, certainly. What if the residents of that town were not friendly? But she had to make sure of Jimothy. And Callie would keep her safe.