ONE
“TELL ME!” WHISPERED HELIX AS HE AND HONOR CLEARED
the orphans’ table after dinner. “Did you get a good look at
her?”
“Just one look at her face,” Honor whispered
back.
“Are you sure?” Helix asked.
She nodded and piled her stack of plates on the
cart to return to the kitchen.
Suddenly she didn’t want to talk about seeing
her mother. She didn’t want to tell Helix about seeing those blue
eyes and those small ears. She was afraid if she spoke about it,
she would forget. She would lose the feeling of seeing her mother’s
face.
But Helix was full of questions. He couldn’t
wait. “Did she make a sign? Did she recognize you? Did she try to
tell you anything?”
“How could she tell me anything?” Honor
whispered furiously. “They can’t talk. You know that.”
“But she could give you a signal. She could tell
you without words.”
“She didn’t give me any signal. I got in the
elevator. She went to the bakery floor and started decorating
cakes. She did the fairy cake and the kittens and the baseball
cake. . . .”
“The erroneous cake, the one we ate,” said
Helix. “Maybe that one was for you.”
“She made it up,” said Honor. “She started to
write my name on it. Did you see?”
“Yes! She must have been trying to send a
message.”
But what message had Pamela sent? For days Helix
and Honor thought about it. There was the baseball diamond. There
was the message, Happy Birthday, Honey. Did honey mean something?
Or was Pamela just disguising Honor’s name? And how did she
remember it was Honor’s birthday? She must have some memory. But
did orderlies have a sense of time?
“I heard Fanny say they get drops in their eyes
every day,” said Honor. “That’s why they only see straight ahead.
They get drugs in their food.”
“They get trained to do just one thing as long
as they’re awake so they don’t have time to think,” said Helix. “I
don’t know how they’d keep track of days.”
They were up early before the others and had
begun weeding in the vegetable gardens. They were whispering with
their heads down.
“There was a baseball diamond and a pitcher and
a man on second base. Did she play baseball with you?” Helix
asked.
Honor shook her head. “I don’t think she knew
anything about baseball. She knew how to draw.”
“Something about drawing . . .” Helix tugged at
the crabgrass sprouting between carrot tops. “Did she teach you to
draw?”
“No.”
“What did she do with you?”
“Number games,” said Honor. “When we were
walking home from the bus stop. She taught me how to count in
different—” She stopped short.
“What is it?” asked Helix.
“In different bases,” said Honor. “She taught me
how to count in base two.”
“The little plastic baseball player on second
base,” said Helix.
“And he had the number seven on his shirt. She
moved number seven from pitcher to second base.”
They stared at each other.
“It’s a code,” said Helix. “It’s a secret
number. What’s seven in base two?”
“One hundred eleven,” said Honor.
“That’s it, then. She was sending you a secret
code.”
“One hundred eleven isn’t a big enough number,”
Honor protested. “How could that be a code?”
“It is; it is.” Helix was excited. “It must
be.”
That night Honor stayed awake in bed. She lay in
the dark and waited until she heard quiet breathing all around her.
Then she snuck outside into the night. Of course sneaking out at
night was Not Allowed, but she wasn’t frightened. She felt so calm
she might have been dreaming. Ever since she’d seen her mother, she
felt as though she were living in a dream.
She ran as softly as she could in her pajamas to
the vegetable gardens, where Helix was waiting. He held a key to
the potting shed and gestured for her to follow him.
Hour ten. Indigo. The night was warm. The
artificial moon was almost but not quite full.
“Where did you get the key?” Honor
asked.
“Shh.”
Helix opened the potting shed door. It was dark
inside, and the shed smelled of dirt and dry moss and the grass
clippings that stuck to the lawn mowers orderlies pushed across the
school grounds. There were no windows in the potting shed. Once
Helix closed the door, it was safe to turn on a light. He pulled a
string to a dim lightbulb. Then he dragged a huge bag of fertilizer
to one side of a table and revealed an old utility sink full of
rusty trowels, garden stakes, flowerpots. The sink was lined with
yellowed newspapers. He lifted a stack of newspapers to reveal
white pages underneath. These were pieces of books, cut scraps he’d
saved from the recycling plant and even whole sections of books
without their covers and their binding threads hanging out. There
were torn-up red cards and folded papers. There were more keys,
small ones like the key to the potting shed. There were tools, a
pliers and a screwdriver, and there were paper packets of salt and
pepper, the kind the school stocked in the kitchen. There were
pictures. Colored photographs from magazines. Flooded cities.
Bridges, boats, streets flowing with water.
“See,” Helix whispered to Honor. “This is my
collection.”
She must have looked disappointed, because Helix
turned on her with some indignation and said, “I have the end of
Bridge to Terabithia, and I have the middle of A Wizard of
Earthsea. I have an almanac of Old Weather.”
“What’s an almanac?” asked Honor.
“It gives you advice and tells you what the
weather used to be and predicts what it will be like
next.”
“Is it an almanac for the Colonies?” Honor
asked.
“Yes,” said Helix, “but it’s very ancient. “It’s
called Poor Richard’s.”
“This isn’t going to help anything,” said Honor,
turning the torn pages of the almanac and staring for a moment at
the calendar of the old month February with its little pictures of
the phases of the moon. “‘Waste not, want not,’” she read, and then
she pointed out, “That’s just a saying of Earth Mother.” She handed
the almanac back to Helix and folded her arms across her chest. “I
thought you had something important.”
“Look at this, then,” said Helix, and he
carefully unfolded a creased paper.
“What is it?” Honor asked, even though she saw
what it was. “Where did you get that?” she whispered in
awe.
Helix had unfolded the entire paper, and Honor
was looking at something she had never seen before, in school or
out, a detailed map of the entire island.
There was the island, like a short-tailed fish
with a sharp nose and big fins. The volcanic mountains across the
middle of the island looked like the fish’s spine. The Capital City
was colored pale green. The rest of the island, beyond city limits,
was tinted yellow. On the City Side, the map showed neighborhoods
rising up between the ridges of the volcano. There were the bus
routes drawn in blue like veins leading from the City up to the
highest houses. The other side of the island was easily twice the
size of the City Side, but it was almost empty. There were no
neighborhoods. There was only one road shown on the other side of
the island. That road emerged from the mouth of a tunnel into a
valley. In the valley was a square camp of buildings labeled
Barracks. “The tunnel is gated and locked at both ends,” said
Helix. “You can’t get into it. Only the bus drivers have the keys
to the tunnel. They drive in a convoy and the first driver unlocks
the tunnel and then the last bus driver locks up after them. But
look. If you climb up through the Model Forest, you can get into
the real forest. Then you hike over the mountains.”
Honor was gazing at the drawings of the
Barracks. The buildings were all rectangular. There were hundreds
set up in a quadrangle with an open square between them. At the
corners of the camp, the map showed small square buildings. “Those
must be watchtowers,” Honor said.
Outside the camp there were only two other
buildings. One was labeled Maintenance and the other
Transportation. “I think those are for the buses,” said
Helix.
Honor stared hard at the Barracks. “She’s
there,” she whispered.
“All the taken parents are there,” said Helix.
“And I’m going to get mine.”
“But how?”
“I’m waiting for a storm. A big one.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed, “but the last one
was over two years ago. Remember?”
She nodded. Of course she remembered the night
she and her parents had stayed with Helix and his parents in the
safe room. She missed that night when they had all been safe
together.
“Approximately every three years,” Helix said,
quoting the climatology textbook, “there has been a typhoon in the
Colonies. When the storm comes and everyone runs to the shelter,
I’ll escape.”
“But even if you could escape, how would you get
to the other side?” Honor asked. “And how could you find
them?”
“The map,” said Helix, as if it were
simple.
“They’d catch you,” said Honor. “They’d . . .
Wait,” she said suddenly. “Why should you go? What about
me?”
Helix bristled. “I could get them
out.”
“How do you know?”
“I stole this map from the library, didn’t
I?”
“And how did you get it?”
“I started a fire in the bathroom—just a little
one. Then, when the alarm went off, I stole the map from Miss
Tuttle’s desk.”
“But it was my mother who gave me the code,”
said Honor. “She’s waiting for me. Even if you got to the other
side, she might not recognize you. I have to go.”