Page 32 of The Infinite Glade
“Welcome to the Evolution.”
CHAPTERTEN
Day of the Dead
Darkness filled the sky around them, and slowly all her favorite colors of “the day of the dead” filled the sky, too. Green and turquoise hues danced upward. Faintly, the colors were there within the night sky. Ximena had never seen anything like it. Storms had occasionally colored sunsets yellow before a terrible lifting wind, but rarely pink or red, never the teal of Abuela’s hand-painted pottery.
“What is all that over there?” Jackie asked. “Some kind of colored smoke signal?”
Ximena didn’t like feeling as if she knew less than the islanders. “Yeah. Qué pasa?” she asked.
“Man. It’s brighter every day.” Erros drew another puff on his cigar.
“Brighter everynight,” Cian corrected Erros.
“Wait, we were out here, along the coast—we never saw this at night before?” Isaac asked before turning to Jackie, “. . . did we?”
There was no point in Ximena’s intuition fighting her eyes about what she saw. Something wasn’t normal, but she was too in awe to be scared. “It’s . . . unreal,” is all Ximena could mumble.
“Um . . . Frypan, is this what the sky looked like before that whole solar thing happened?” Jackie stood so close to Old Man Frypan that her shadow from the fire overlapped his. “Is there going to be another Flare?”
“I don’t think so. . . . I don’t know. I’d like to think I’d remember something like this, but they made sure I didn’t remember much of anything.” Frypan rubbed his forehead.
Cian packed up some of his other supplies. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. It’s part of the Sun’s evolution. We just happen to be alive to witness it.”
“What’s that mean?” Isaac asked. “I thought the Evolution everyone talked about was human evolution, not the Sun’s?”
“Is the sun going to explode? That would suck.” Jackie took a step back.
Ximena wanted to think that was an absurd idea, but her inner-knowing held the wordexplodein her mind, as if that were exactly what caused the colors. “Tiny explosions . . .” she said. “The colors are sparks in the atmosphere from all the tiny solar explosions . . . ?” Jackie was right in a way.
Cian and Erros just looked at each other. Their silence confirmed it. Adults always had trouble telling teenagers when they were right. Why was it so hard to admit?
“How? Why?” Ximena asked.
Erros shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
Jackie seemed distressed. “We’re dead, aren’t we? This is the end?”
Ximena wanted to grab the girl by the shoulders. She hated how the islanders jumped to the worst possible conclusions.
“Well?” Cian looked to his brother, “you want to tell them everything, go on then . . . tell them . . .”
“I can’t . . .” Erros rubbed his fingers over his upper lip. “And if I can’t even explain it to a bunch of Immunes”—Eros pointed at Jackie and Isaac—“Then how will I explain it to the Sequencers?”
“You keep saying that word, sequences,” Isaac commented.
“Sequence-ers,” Erros corrected him, but didn’t say more until Ximena’s and the others’ expectant and waiting looks forced him to. “Humanity and its evolution is a sequence, one that grows exponentially, doubling and doubling in size and technology.”
Cian snapped a fallen twig in half and drew a circle in the loose dirt directly in front of the fire. A terrible-looking circle that spiraled around itself again and again. “But not just in all thegoodthings . . . humanity multiplies in evil, too.” Cian looked at his brother. “You don’t just have to use words to explain things, pictures help. Remember that, okay?”
Ximena felt that truth vibrate through her bones.
Humanity had multiplied in evil.
If the sky was any clue to what was coming, things would get worse before they got better.
Trust isn’t born with Orphans, it’s earned.
