I know I shouldn’t rest, but my body has a mind of its own and I lean against that wall way too long. A bullet hits the masonry over my head, and with agonizing slowness I coax my legs into a run.

I round a corner . . . smack into a twenty-foot wall of twisted, tangled metal and wires, and concrete, all corners and sharp places. Bikk! The second they come around this corner, they’ll have an open shot. The wall of debris is unbroken, and there’s no way back except the way I’ve come. Back toward the Greenshirts. I try to climb—it’s one of the things I do best—but every hold either slices my hands or collapses beneath them. The wall is impenetrable, unclimbable, and stretches as far as I can see in either direction.

I want to cry. Not from grief this time, but from pure self-pity. I’m so tired! I hurt so much! I’m thirsty and bloody and bruised and my ankle is screaming now and my hands are raw . . . I can’t do this anymore. I can hear them coming.

I have no hope. I’ve reached the end.

I just want to lie down. What does it matter now? I let myself sink down, and the blessed relief of giving in to gravity—of giving in, period—is so welcome that I almost want to sprawl there, clasp my hands behind my head, and just gaze at the sky, waiting for the end to come.

But I don’t. I can’t. Not after Mom gave her life for me. I would be betraying her sacrifice if I just gave up.

Maybe I can’t go over, but what if I can go through?

I scramble to my knees and begin to paw at the seemingly impenetrable wall of debris. It isn’t long before I see it: a tunnel. Almost.

Go, my mother’s ghost commands, and I drop to my belly and begin to slither through headfirst.

“Halt!” someone bellows as my head disappears. Bullets pierce the wall around me, sending concrete dust into my eyes.

“Stop!” comes another voice, Rook’s voice, I’m pretty sure. But I can tell from his tone it’s not an order. It’s a plea. I’m shoulder-deep now, twisting and flexing to maneuver through the winding opening. “Come back!” Rook calls again as my hips almost don’t fit through, then squeeze past with a small avalanche of dust. He’s not putting on an act for the other Greenshirts. Something about his voice tells me he really believes that whatever I’m crawling toward is far worse than being captured by his compatriots.

My feet disappear, and the last thing I hear is one of the other Greenshirts saying, “Let her go. If she goes out there, she’s dead anyway.”

I don’t stop. If I’m going to die, at least I’ll die on my own terms.

I move through what feels like a maze of ruined civilization, wondering how this devastation came to be in our perfect society. Does everyone know about this, and I’m only surprised because I’ve lived a sheltered life? I’d think Ash would have told me about this if he knew. How many other truths have I missed out on for one reason or another?

I push and shove and wiggle and twist my way through, getting scraped by rough concrete and poked by shards of plastic. At the very least, why hasn’t all this stuff been recycled? There are tons of reusable material making up this wall. It stretches as far as I can see on either side, and so far I’ve crawled through at least thirty feet of tangled mess with no end in sight.

In my weary, near-hallucinatory state I wonder if it will go on forever. I’ve had dreams like that, where I try to walk through a door that seems only across the room, and yet somehow I can never get through. What if this isn’t just a wall but the world? What if Eden is surrounded by all the refuse and waste of humans’ dead civilizations, pollution and garbage stacked up to our very borders and filling all the rest of the world?

I feel as if I’ve been crawling forever when the way finally opens up. I crawl over some archaic piece of machinery, through a tip-tilted pipe . . . and emerge in a monstrous fairyland.

Mom, who has access to all of the old pre-fail records, used to tell me the stories she discovered in dusty, crumbling books made from dead trees in the times before datablocks. There was one story that was such a favorite I made her tell it over and over—“Jack and the Beanstalk.” It’s the tale of a boy who seems to make a foolish trade, giving up the security of a milk cow for the allure of magical beans. His mother is furious, but his gamble pays off when his beans grow a giant beanstalk that leads him to fortune and—more important in my childish eyes—adventure.

I think of that story as I look up . . . and up . . . and up. They stretch into the sky, leviathan plants, a green so dark it is almost black. No, not plants, I realize as I look closer. Synthetic stalks and technological tendrils and mechanical leaves that turn on whispering gears to follow the sunlight. These are like the artificial photosynthesis “plants” that decorate Eden, but on a massive scale. Each trunk is ten feet across; the leaves are as broad as houses. They are three times as tall as the algae spires, the tallest structures in Eden.

There are thousands of them.

They are so tall that they could probably be seen from the Center. And yet, when I sat on my wall, or on the abandoned spire with Lark, I never saw anything like this. Just the city, blurring into the distance, and a faint shimmer at my eyes’ farthest reach that I assumed was heat rising from the blistering desert wasteland.

But even if I’m wrong, and you can’t see them from the Center, surely I would have noticed them later, when out with Lark, or driving with Mom, or running from the Greenshirts. I definitely would have seen them loom over the wall of debris. They would have blocked out the sun! Had I been too blinded by excitement or anxiety to notice?

I look up at the gently undulating field of giant beanstalks. No, there’s no way I could have missed these.

In the bean forest, I can only see the trees, so I decide to forge my way through. It feels unnaturally still. It shouldn’t be like this, I think. In the faux-forests I’ve visited—the Rain Forest Club and the exciting laser tag arena—there were birds and bugs and the rustling of paws that step, and are still. There was life in those places, even if it was artificial.

Here, in this vast constructed forest, there is nothing but me.

I wander for hours, losing track of direction. The sun is mostly blocked by the canopy, and when it reaches the ground it is in confused angles, splitting shadows. Twice I find myself back at the debris pile, a wall that reaches to the artificial roots of the bean trees where they embed in the concrete. Finally, abruptly, the beanstalks stop in a uniform rigid wall and the desert stretches golden before me.