Once An Eve Novel

was surreal.” He threw it back to me.
    “What was the City like in those first years?” I turned the ball over, rubbing at the grass stain with my thumb.
    “Depressing,” he said. “Still so run down. People had come from all over. Some of them literally walked for weeks, risking their lives to get here. It wasn’t the glimmering place they’d imagined. At least not then.”
    He walked over to the cabinets on the other side of the room. I followed behind, thankful when he opened one of the wide, flat drawers, exposing all the papers inside. “Those first few years we were here, all I saw was possibility. I knew I wanted to do what my father did, to work with him one day. The City center changed, building by building. You could feel the sadness lifting as people settled in, as the City began to look more like the world before. Obviously, it’s still a work in progress. We’re still putting the life back into it with restaurants and entertainment. But I’ve been tossing around some other ideas …”
    Each drawer was labeled. A few read OUTLANDS with different directions beside it—northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest. Others were named after old hotels: two drawers each for the Venetian, Mirage, Cosmopolitan, and Grand. “When they started construction, they turned every lawn and golf course in the City into usable gardens. Which we needed, yes,” Charles said, riffling through a stack of papers in the drawer. “But the public doesn’t have access to those. We have clean water now, the ability to sustain plants. I wanted to create outdoor space for everyone.” He spread a sheet of paper down on the table.
    I stared at the wide expanse of green, broken in places by winding pathways. Trees were drawn in intricate detail, their limbs spread out over ponds and rock gardens. The giant lake in the center was surrounded by three stone buildings. I ran my fingers over the light pencil marks. It was as good a drawing as any of the ones I’d made in School. “You sketched this?”
    “Don’t be so surprised.” Charles laughed. “It’ll be four hundred acres if it’s ever built. The largest park inside the City’s walls.”
    Every tree and flower was carefully drawn. Boats floated along a pond. Red and yellow blooms were clustered around the shore. One of the buildings was labeled RECREATION CENTER; another, NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM . A third had a patio and chairs. “A library,” I said, unable to stop from smiling. “There’s none in the City?”
    “We restored one off the main road, but it’s small and always overcrowded. This would be four stories, with a view of the water. It’s just a matter of sorting all the recovered books. There’s a whole building full of them just three blocks east.” Charles pointed to the room behind him. “I have the model somewhere—would you like to see?”
    He stared at me, his blue eyes wide. He looked like one of the dolls on Lilac’s bed in Califia, with his square jaw and strong features, his mop of black hair perfectly in place. I knew he was objectively handsome. It was clear from the way Clara stole glimpses at him, or how clusters of women whispered when he passed. But every time I saw him I was reminded of my father, of the City walls that rose up around us, locking us in. “I’d love to,” I said.
    As soon as he disappeared into the cramped room, I walked over to the cabinets, running my finger down the labels on each drawer. The first one contained papers from the old hotels. The next had blueprints from a hospital building, another from the two schools that had been restored inside the City. There were ones marked for something called Planet Hollywood. I knelt down, studying the last few drawers. Charles shuffled around in the other room, searching through the stacked models, his footsteps quickening my pulse.
    “Where is it?” I whispered, reading the labels. Three of the lower drawers were marked EMERGENCY PLANS . I pulled the first open and started flipping through its contents, papers showing the gates in the walls, inventories of the warehouses in the Outlands—medical supplies, bottled water, canned goods. None of them showed the flood tunnels.
    Charles’s footsteps stopped for a moment, then started again, growing louder as he came toward the door. I pulled the last drawer open. I didn’t have time to think, simply rolled the whole stack of papers up as tightly as I could and squeezed them down the side of my boot. I slid the