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CHAPTER 1

THE HOLY WOOD

All of your years are marked. At thirteen, the changes come, the Olders tell you. At fifteen, you become a Mama. At seventeen, you begin to End.

The words beat through her head as if they've always been there, because they have always been there. Only now she understands what they mean. She's breathing calm on the promontory above the Holy Wood, but the words make her feel as if she's scrambling through the village, legs pumping and lungs burning.

The sunrise breaks over the ridge and lights the roofs below, soft and gold. Jemma can make out all the shapes of her life as the sun blankets them in warmth, one by one: the kitchen, the Smiths' hut, the Gatherers' house. And then the Little Doctors' house, where Zee died, and Jemma is cold again.

There's a cough in the Daycare, and then another. Jemma soaks in the quiet because it's about to shatter. Crying, yelling, fighting, laughing ... there's nothing noisier than a village full of Children.

The quiet breaks for good, with a baby's wail, and Jemma stirs. She should get out before Trina sees her. Before Lady sees her. Buddha Teevee Jesucristo, before anyone sees her.

The sky is bleeding white, and she can see the ruined city just beyond the ridge protecting the Holy Wood. She forgets that there's a city down there, that there's a full world beyond this village. She's relied on the Holy Wood to keep her safe, but Zee reminds her that the world still cuts in. She's not any safer behind the Bear Wall.

Maybe it's time to join the world.

Jemma winds her way down to the village, padding softly instead of running like her body wants her to. There's nothing unusual about a Gatherer getting an early start on her day, even if that Gatherer is fifteen and should have other things on her mind.

She glides through the streets, ignoring the early risers and amazed at how easily they ignore her. All these years, and so few people care if she's coming or going. Until she reaches the house of the Muscle, the guards of the Holy Wood. The Muscle are mostly boys, because boys start to get stronger than the girls in their Tweens, and that strength is useful in a fight.

The house is boxy, mostly greasy glass. It used to be white but looks gray, as if generations of boys have overwhelmed it. Chicken bones and orange peels line the sidewalk. As she creeps by, two Tweens stumble out, hitting each other. She doesn't know what they're arguing about, but it doesn't matter. Tweens — and Muscle — are always hitting each other.

"Oh hey," one of them says, and he disentangles from the other. His name is Jamie, she thinks, but he's only thirteen. "You want to roll with me, chica?"

"You can't handle me," she says. "I'm more Muscle than you."

His swagger only seems to get more swaggy. "C'mon, chica, you look like you need it."

She scoops a rock from the curb and throws it at him. It just misses. "Not from you. I heard about your little pecker." She hasn't, but it's a safe bet.

The Muscle pauses, then punches his friend.

Jemma stops in the Circle, the ring of houses at the heart of the village that beats along with the Holy Wood in work or anger or joy. She fills her water bottles, the Long Gone ones they call litros, clear plastic with red lids. Everything that came from the past they call Long Gone. She watches for the Olders or the Muscle, and her eyes rest on one of the grand old houses, white walls and orange tiles dripping with creeping fig. But her eyes keep sliding into the sooty pit next to it, charred timbers clawing their way out of the earth. The blackness crawls along the ground into the street, and she can't quite see where it ends.

It was a house that caught the flu, fell so quickly to the disease that the Children couldn't leave. The Little Doctors couldn't save them — they never could — so the Muscle barred the door. When it was finally quiet, they burned the house and everything in it where it stood. Now it sits on the street but doesn't, and the Children pass by it without glances, just tiny shivers and hitches in their step. It's there by not being there.

The embers from Zee's body fire were still glowing last night when Trina, the Oldest, cornered her. "You fifteen tomorrow," she said. As if Jemma had forgotten she was fifteen, as if she didn't have every last year etched in sharp lines. "A good Day to you."

They've forgotten everything else, but they know when your Day is.

"It's time for you to become one of the Mamas," Trina said.

"Just like that?" Jemma had asked Trina.

"Oh, Jemma," Trina said. "Our whole life is just like that."

And suddenly childhood felt so short and the rest of her life even shorter. Even if she survived the baby — fifteen now, a baby by sixteen, and a year feeding it before life is all gone. Two years left, and none of it for her.

Jemma steps away from the water barrel when Lady catches her arm, almost spinning her around. Her hair, curly where most of the Holy Wood's is straight, is wild from her pillow. "Where you going, mija?"

"Gathering," Jemma says, and it's true enough. Gathering is her role in the Holy Wood.

Lady is her best friend. She's named for one of the ancient priestesses who lived in the Teevee, their most important god, but Jemma doesn't see the priestess in her. Lady lives squarely in this world, fierce and open. She studies Jemma's face and says, "By yourself?" You don't Gather by yourself, not even in times of peace, and Lady knows it. Finally Jemma says, "Just today."

"I miss her, too."

Yes, but you ain't fifteen today. You wasn't walking with Zee when she doubled over in agony, when blood stained her dress. You didn't run screaming to the Little Doctors.

Jemma can't stop thinking about Zee. Zee was the last person you expected to want to have a baby. She led the Gatherers as if it were the most important job in the Holy Wood, and with her you thought it was, as if all it took to keep the village alive was the fruit and shoes and rice in their bags. But no — what really mattered to everyone was in that belly when she got pregnant.

Zee loved it. She did. When she became a Mama, the roundness got rounder, the flush in her cheeks got brighter. A girl in there, she said, a warrior or a Gatherer or a priestess. The other Gatherers were drawn to her, this beacon of life. And then —

She wasn't old enough to End, even. But Zee Ended all the same.

Jemma's not sure she can ever say this about Zee aloud. So instead she simply says to Lady, "You didn't see me today, okay?"

"Okay, this time. But you don't come back by dark I'm gonna kick your ass."

"Deal," Jemma says, just glad to be free before Trina grabs her, too.

A Tween almost clips her with a battered bicycle, and she moves toward the iron gates. They're tall and spiked. They once held off whatever evils kept the Parents awake at night, but now they work just as well against the lions and bears that grow more fearless all the time.

Wagons are rumbling down from the Great Field to pick up the last winter spinach. Their people have claimed every flat space chiseled out by the Parents: their lawns and parks and sacred places turned from grass to vegetables and fruit, their swimming pools holding fish and water for drinking and growing. For all they built, the Parents could never have imagined building a world like this.

The lake below looks like god's hand, blue fingers pushing aside the trees and the dirt, and the Bear Wall a bracelet around its wrist. Maybe the gods did place it there behind the Wall, because in all the hills only the hand holds fish, and water that lasts through the summer when the desert winds slice through the valley. That's why they guard it. That's why it's the Lake of the Holy Wood.

And there is the Holy Wood sign on the mountain, with an aytch as tall as ten Children. You could see it from across the valley, Jemma thinks, see it calling all to the Holy Wood when the priests still walked the hills and the god Teevee talked to Children in their homes.

Today Jemma doesn't want to speak to the gods. She barrels down the hill and doesn't stop until she sees the Bear Wall, a long curved dam that spans the canyon with bears' stone faces guarding the face of it.

Her legs stretch out to cross the Wall, but strong arms grab her from behind. "Not that way, Jemma." The voice is starting to deepen. It will not last, she thinks, and she turns toward Apple. Of course Apple saw her leave. Apple is the best Muscle in the Holy Wood, not because he's the strongest but because he sees everything.

"I need to leave," she says.

"I know," he says. "I saw you at Zee's fire last night." Yes, he sees everything.

"We getting low on fruit."

"Really? I know you your whole life, and you try to tell me you looking for fruit?" He steps close to her, so much taller than she is — even though she's the tallest girl — and still growing at almost seventeen. His chest and shoulders are bare, now that the rains have gone, and she counts the raised scars on his bicep from the lion that mauled him. Gods, she asks, how do we still live?

"I'm not going back." She feels the fight starting in her stomach, and it has never let her be. Any other Muscle, any other Gatherer, he would have hit her and dragged her back, but this is Apple and Jemma.

"Believe it or not, Jemma," he says as he looks to see who's watching them, "I don't always think like a Muscle. I'll go with you."

Her heart climbs in her chest a little at that, and she pushes it back down.

"I'm sorry," he says.

Jemma thinks Apple of all people knows what she meant when she said she missed Zee. He was as close to her as Jemma was. That's the reason she doesn't have to say it.

* * *

They slide down the hill away from the Bear Wall, yellow dust cascading under their feet. They reach an unfamiliar road and push down into the ravine. In just a few turns, Jemma doesn't recognize it and wonders how in all her years as a Gatherer she's never seen this before.

Others have passed this way. The doors are all missing, probably chopped for fires, and the houses start to collapse from the wounds exposing their insides to the world. They don't scavenge those long-stripped houses, just snatch fruit from ancient trees that look as if they're about to stop bearing.

"What you gonna do for oranges when those stop?" Apple says.

"'You'?"

"We," he corrects himself, but she knows he has stopped always thinking as We.

"Don't you have Muscle-y things to think about?"

"Aren't you supposed to be a Mama today?" She can tell he senses the sting as it leaves his tongue.

The answer is slow to come and then it's gone, because she sees an explosion of red spike before her, and under it a slip of white. A wall.

"A house?" Apple asks.

"Red spike don't always mean houses." The Parents used to plant the spiky vines around their walls, called by a name no one can pronounce. Once Jemma came across a bungalow completely swallowed by red flowers. She imagined a girl like her, a girl from the Parents' time, sleeping ageless in the darkened spiked bedrooms, waiting for the End to end.

Jemma pulls her hatchet out of her belt just as Apple lifts his machete. Both of them hack at the twisting cords supporting the flowers. The red flowers are blinding and beautiful but hide spikes an inch long, so they try to touch them only with their blades.

Apple's breath hisses, two long lines of red welling on his forearm from the spikes. "That'll match your lion scars," Jemma says. "But maybe you should make up a better story about where you got em."

Beneath the spikes are the battered lip of a gate, iron studs pounded into the wood. The iron would trade well. She already knows she'll be back to this place with a larger crew of Gatherers.

"So," he says, and his voice is lower, more intimate, "you don't want to be a Mama."

Jemma swings at the vine harder than she should, and her hatchet digs into the wood beneath it. She grunts, pulls it out. "Why would I?" Talking about a choice that isn't a choice.

She never had the Mama in her. In the Daycare, she was banned from watching the babies like all the other kids did. She'd either ignore them while they wandered into the koi ponds or — worse — goad them into trouble. When she was five, she talked a three-year-old into drinking his own pee.

"We need you to be a Mama," Trina had said earlier today.

"You need me? Or this baby?"

"We need your baby," Trina said.

"If I roll with someone," Jemma said, "it'll be cuz I wanna be with him. Not to give you a goddamn baby." She smiled when Trina flinched.

"Then it's easy," Trina said. "Become a Mama — or leave."

Her life, or her tribe. Jemma feels everything tearing in two.

But as Apple looks at her right now she just says, "Being a Mama's hard. You have a baby."

"I tried," Apple says, "but it didn't work."

And he pulls her back. It's so easy with Apple. He lives in her first memories, has always been the shadow over her shoulder, but despite a life together they've almost never been alone. Every boy Apple's age has asked to roll with her, even though she always turns them down. Not Apple. Why?

Now the gate is clear. There's a rusted latch, but a few strikes at the old wood and she can kick it open. Apple lets her. Jemma needs something to strike.

The house still has its door. Jemma lifts her hatchet again, but Apple says, "Wait." He turns the knob, and the door swings open as it must have the day the Parents disappeared.

The air fills the lungs but doesn't feel as if it belongs there. Smells of things Long Gone hit Jemma, and she can't identify anything but decay.

They look for metal and glass in what must have been the kitchen. Everything else has rotted, but in those the Parents' food sometimes lasts. Most of the cans are rusted or bulged. Gatherers know to stay away from those and the death they bring. Three of them hold corn without rust, and she places them in the bag.

Gathering brings riches with it. Gatherers are the ones who find tools and supplies, and sometimes they keep stuff for themselves. Sometimes extra food from the fields can fall into their packs when Farmers need something they have. That's why all the Gatherers are girls — because girls get the good jobs first.

It's getting hard to Gather, though. The Parents' homes near the Holy Wood have been picked over long ago. They have to push deeper and deeper into the Flat Lands, the deserted city blocks at the base of the Holy Wood. In ten years, she thinks, most of it will be gone. Then it's just whatever the Children can grow or make.

"Yes!" Apple whoops. He has disappeared into another room and he emerges, arms filled with tiny rattling bottles. "Look, medsen!"

Medsen will make this trip. It can cure fevers, maybe keep another flu house from burning. Only the Parents could make it, and every year they find less.

She watches Apple celebrate, and sees a dusty fragment of herself in the glass behind him. She can see why Apple never wanted to roll with her. She's not pretty the way the other girls are — hard when she should be soft, gawky when she should be lithe. She doesn't have the kind of body that makes a good Mama, doesn't have the kind of desires. Sex is such a part of the Holy Wood, so important to the survival of the Holy Wood, that the other girls wear it like a fur. But for her it's never fit so well.

She looks down the narrow hallway where they stand. In it are the kinds of pictures that the Parents made, as if they convinced life to stand still. They had that power. She hasn't seen one up close in a long time, and she studies them now: Children frozen in place, one blinking, one crying, but mostly she sees the Parents. Bigger than the Children, faces made of tree bark. Smiling, two of them, in picture after picture.

"Look how light they are," Apple says, pointing at their skin. "I thought only cannibals was white."

It's true. The two of them are the descendants of all the peoples who lived in the Holy Wood, with skin that almost matches the brown of the hills, but this family has pink skin, blue eyes, and unnatural yellow hair. Like the creatures from their nightmares.

"Maybe the Parents was gods to live so long," she hears Apple say.

"Maybe," she answers, feeling all of her fifteen years. "Then why we stop turning into gods?"

THE STACK

Apple doesn't expect anyone to wind down the choking street — they're the first people to cross the gate since the Parents died, and no one is racing to cross it now. Still, Muscle training doesn't die — he stands with his back to the wall, in the shadow of a barren pomgrant tree, both ends of the road in view. The only motion comes from Jemma.

Apple watches Jemma pull the red spike back, weaving the lighter tendrils across the gap until from a distance he can't see a gate. It only needs to keep till tomorrow when Jemma comes back with a crew, but she's had salvages busted before by another tribe.

He admires her fingers' dance among the thorns. She's a good Gatherer, but not the best. She'd be a good Farmer, if she could stand still. She'd be a good Muscle, if she could handle the blood. He doesn't know if he likes her more for all the things she is, or for all the things she isn't.

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Excerpted from "Mayfly"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jeff Sweat.
Excerpted by permission of Feiwel and Friends.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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