Part I:
Earth was something Yarrow understood from a distance. She knew from school it was where humanity originated, and where they fled from. It was a ball of blue with sparse green stains and wide belts of dull, barren brown. The planet orbited the sun and the city of Asylum orbited it. She never experienced life on Earth for herself; almost no one had since Asylum lifted off the planet’s surface, but she could imagine what it was like before things like windstorms and heat waves and hurricanes caused it to crumble.
The planet was not supposed to be important anymore. Work was important. Earning the credits to buy food, getting work boots repaired, and keeping the city’s energy grid from malfunctioning were important. So when it came to the Earth, most wanted to stay as far from it as possible. It had nothing to do with daily life.
Yarrow took after her father. He was a Scavenger, and it was his job to pilot a Pod that could leave the city- sometimes flying even farther from the Earth than Asylum. Scrap metal from old satellites could be melted down for nuts and bolts or support beams for housing units. Old technology could be repurposed. Water could be siphoned from clouds or the atmosphere for life support. Her father was more aware of their former planet than most.
But Yarrow wasn’t afraid of the Earth. Her parents called her curious, Oleander called her insane. She didn’t care, not even with her older brother’s aversion to talking about it. “Why spend hours at the windows staring at that hunk of rock?”
And she was never afraid to answer him. “It was our home. Or at least it was where humans used to live,” she said to him. “And it can be our home again, can’t it?” Oleander was quiet for a moment, “You’re too much like Dad.”
And maybe he was right. But Yarrow liked staring at Earth’s swirling mass of gray-white clouds or its frothy, dark blue seas after school. The vast stretches of dusty, dry land covering much of the world made her itch to sink her fingers into the fresh dirt. Her father made three trips to the Earth in his lifetime, for rare supplies. He could tell her all about it, the farmland remnants where deserts now sprawl. Or the swamps that consumed cities, ones like Asylum except rooted to the ground, making them sink below rising waters. It all sounded so thrilling. Hearing his stories made her dream of cold seas and hot skies.
It had to be nothing like Asylum. But to keep a city as large as Asylum from falling apart, its underbelly with all its mechanisms and fuel and water filtration needed hands to keep it running. More hands than what Topside had. Asylum was crowded and sooty, tended to by its Luck Ones.
But for some reason, it was the Topsiders that got to be called ordinary people. “Why aren’t we all just called people? Or Asylumners? Something. Anything but Topside and Underside.”
“People like to think they’re special. Or different.” Yarrow’s mother tugged her thread taut, the hole in her gray coveralls sealing itself shut. Yarrow watched how her hands moved and began sewing the hole in her pants leg with the same stitch, but slower than her mother.
Topside had ancestors called Founders. But Yarrow’s were called the very first Lucky Ones. The hands that made Asylum rise into the sky. Their duty was to labor away at the city to keep it alive.
“We’re not special?”
“I never said that. And be careful, don’t prick your thumb when you push the needle through. Good girl.”
The tear in her pants vanished before her eyes. She triple knotted the thread to keep it from unravelling and bit the line to sever it. Black thread, gray cloth. Everything she owned was gray. It didn’t match her dark hair or eyes. It didn’t suit her at all, she thought.
“You’re lucky I saved Oleander’s old clothes, I could’ve donated them to the Fleets. It’ll take you a nice long while to outgrow them.”
Lucky. Yarrow didn’t know if she liked that word or not. Lucky Ones should be grateful their ancestors were spared from the conditions on Earth, however many generations ago it was when Asylum took flight, and Lucky Ones should do their part to keep Asylum alive, and they should all wear uniforms to show their unity. Their brotherhood and citizenship! Topsiders said all sorts of strange things. And she’d heard their name so many times, that when Yarrow heard the word lucky in any sense she imagined something gray.
Her mother added, “You’re plenty special, Yarrow. You’re a Lucky One. Topside might own Asylum, but the Promised Day will be ours.” She took Yarrow’s hands in her own to make sure she didn’t prick herself. “The work you do with your hands makes you one of us. You are a Lucky One.”
She was ten when her mom first decided to teach her how to sew. From then on, Yarrow had worked as a seamstress out of her family’s home after school to help salvage a few extra credits. A lot of her work was sewing buttons and mending tears, but it also helped her collect spare fabric to donate to the Fleets for a few more extra credits. Not that currency would mean anything after the Promised Day.
For however many years, Asylum functioned as one city with two sides, top and bottom. As far as Yarrow understood it, a bunch of Lucky Ones a long time ago decided they weren’t happy with living Underside. Something not even Topside with their Founders or their drones
were aware of. It was the idea of the Fleets, airships built wherever there was space to house them, that could return them to their original homeland. The Earth was so large, surely it couldn’t all be ruined. So the idea of the Promised Day became permanent, at least for the Lucky Ones. Everyone Underside hoped they’d live to see it. Yarrow included.
Every day, she wanted it to come tomorrow.
And maybe that was why she often sat alone in school, her hopes burned too hot. School #7, Quadrant 2 was based in a long, one-story rectangle several housing units wide. It stored several dozen students on a given day, from children age ten to age eighteen. Yarrow studied in the Lower Years classroom, for those ten to thirteen years old. She was in her last year before she could advance to the Middle Years classroom.
She was one of the best readers in the school. Some of the other good readers were interested in a placement in Topside as some kind of assistant or secretary. Easy work, but boring.
“Yarrow,” Instructor Young said.
She looked up from her cracked e-reader tablet. “Yes?”
“Reading time is over.”
She hesitated. “But I’m almost done.”
It was a reading for the older kids, but it talked about the types of work Lucky Ones in Scavenging did. Yarrow had her Dad, but she wanted to know more. She wanted to know about the teams that made missions to Earth. She was even glossing over the photos in favor of the interviews with Scavengers from early Asylum history.
“We’ve waited over thirty years to return to the Earth,” the transcript said, “I don’t know what anyone was expecting… the desertification, the poison in the air…”
Yarrow wanted to know how it ended. Instructor Young wove through the rows of metal desks bolted to the floor and came to stand in front of her. He held out a hand. Without a word, Yarrow shut off her e-reader and handed it over.
“Minus marks for not following directions,” Instructor Young said.
Yarrow nodded. “Yes, Sir.”
Oleander was right. Instructor Young was a hardass. Unlike them, his uniform was a crisp dark blue with polished pleather shoes. He was from Topside.
He returned to the front of the classroom. “Might I remind you all, each and every one of you are incredibly fortunate to be descended from a refugee when Asylum was first launched.” His eye met Yarrow’s. She refused to look away.
“Your ancestors were not engineers or doctors or thinkers, they had nothing to contribute to Asylum other than their hands. You are all lucky to be here. Now, let’s continue our studies in mathematics.”
As he turned his back to them, Yarrow found it hard to be intimidated by a man more than ten years younger than her father, but with half the hair.
That night, Yarrow got to have a rare dinner with her whole family. What often happened was either her mom was stuck in the Topside barracks to work longer hours, her brother was on another side of the city to do work, or her father was scavenging for Topside’s resources. Sometimes, it was all three of them off and away, leaving Yarrow to have her ration bars. On those nights, the scrape of her chair against the floor felt loud enough to echo through the whole housing unit. Unsettling, Yarrow liked to eat with her back to the wall so she could see the entrance to the kitchen.
But now that chair clattered backward as Oleander fell in it. He sat at a slight angle so he could stick one leg out to the side and stretch one out under the desk. Yarrow felt his foot knock into hers and she snorted. Her brother was all long limbs, in a way that made her think he might end up being a lanky pole forever.
Yarrow heard the swish of heavy fabric as her mother circled the table with a smile. She draped her jacket over Yarrow’s shoulders. It was her work jacket, faded, scuffed, and dirty at the sleeve hems. Yarrow grinned as she adjusted it over her shoulders, the two-sizes-two-big jacket warm on the inside and carrying the smell of something sweet. Flowers.
Their dad dropped a box of ration bars on the table. Oleander was the first to tear into it. He set down bars in a circle around the table, two for everyone until the box had just two indivisible extras left. Unlike the plain bars with the almost-taste of something salty, these were flavored to taste like seasoned chicken. Yarrow also took the time beforehand to brave their rickety electric stovetop to heat a sloshing pot of water and rice. So on that night, the table was lively and crowded as Oleander scarfed down his meal, supposedly his best one since leaving home weeks ago to work on a job for Air Quality Control.
“Are you even tasting it?” Yarrow asked.
“Of course I am.”
Unlike the gardens that existed for leisure, Topside also had farms. The bowls of multi-grain rice on the table was one of the many modified crops that could be grown and harvested in months. When Yarrow went down to the supply depot after school, she flashed her ID to indicate she was a member of a family of four. She snagged her rice, the bags labeled with words such as water efficient and high protein, and tugged them home in the box cart she pulled along. Unseasoned, it had no taste and only a starchy-chalky texture. But left to soak in hot water
with a smidge of salt and some boiled beans she also collected from the depot, it made a thickened meal that warmed her bones.
It was nice, especially considering how chilly Asylum could get at night.
“I’m just so sick of ration bars,” Oleander said.
Their father laughed. “Welcome to life, Ollie. It’s all you’ll get Underside.” “That’s why you should consider transferring to work Topside,” their mom said to Yarrow, “it’s good work.”
Yarrow frowned. “Those jobs are the competitive ones.”
“But I can speak to my supervisor about allowing you into the gardens. She might take you in. You can start transferring some of your payment to foodstuffs automatically, and it’s good work.”
“But it’s for Topside,” Yarrow responded.
Oleander cleared his throat, coughing into his fist as he gave Yarrow a pointed look. She fell silent as their dad spoke up.
He leaned forward in his seat and began to share stories of his latest Salvaging adventure. Halfway through he said, “I was minding my business, trying to grab this old satellite…” the table was silent, waiting, “but I couldn’t help looking down below. There’s a saying in Scavenging to not look down, because that’s a long way to fall if you do. But I did it anyways. And I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow the Canadian desert got bigger! I definitely remember there still being some green surrounding that cluster of lakes, but it’s all gone now. My Pod’s scanners warned me what conditions would be like it’d be if I landed. Ask me what it’d be like.”
“What?” Oleander asked, quicker than usual.
“The dust and the wind would have overloaded the Pod’s ventilators in minutes! My poor Scavenging partner, Lana, it was only her second job and her first time with me as her mentor. I had to keep telling her our Pod probably wasn’t going to crash land. So we grabbed our scrap metal and left before the universe could test us.”
“What did it look like?” Yarrow asked.
“The satellite?”
“The Earth.”
“Oh, uh… big. This endless brownish-green expanse. The usual,” her dad said from between mouthfuls of rice. It was a nice meal, but in three days for Yarrow’s birthday, they were going to use their store of spices and dried meat for curry. Even if it was the cheap artificial meat, it would be something actually worth looking forward to.
Oleander didn’t look impressed by their dad’s story. “But it’s no fun without any danger, right?”
“Ollie!” Their mom said. She was the type of person who believed words had power. “What?”
It was Yarrow’s turn to draw attention to herself. “Would flowers survive in a place like that?”
Her dad shook his head. “Maybe. I’ve never been, though. That dust pit doesn’t have much that Asylum’s interested in.”
Her heart fell, but not by much. Her dad said the flooded city he visited years before was covered in slimy, mossy green stuff. If moss could still grow on Earth, other plants could too. Animals, also. And humans were animals, Yarrow understood this from school. Humans were good at surviving.