The Secret City Read Online Free PDF Page B

world. As soon as they can, they’ll pull us home. “
    They put all their beacons in a vault in the center of the city, locked up tight. Our people will home in on them and take us back. If we don’t stay near, our people won’t know how to find us.
    Everything is better on our homeworld, the technology more advanced, also the views more beautiful, the flowers, the sky, the birds, the two moons…. “Oh, Oh,” they said, “the two moons, one blue of ice, one iron-oxide red. Oh, the sun shining on the sky dust….”
    But sometimes, when I go out from under the canopy or if I climb a tree all the way to the top, I see a sunrise that’s so beautiful I think: What could be better? Even though I know on our world everything is. Everybody says so. I can’t wait to get there. I wonder if there will be creatures like foxes and blue jays I can tame.
    The old ones thought all these piles of mossy rocks, all these half-standing overgrown walls would make the town harder to find even if approached from the ground. They didn’t think about archeologists. So far those are our only…. We call it eliminations. They thought they’d found a place a thousand years old and of a civilization never known before. They had a GPS. They were so excited they were shouting. Thank goodness cell phones don’t work here in the mountains or they’d have phoned out right away. They were scraping at the lichen and pulling down vines. We didn’t have time to think: Wrong or Right. We had to act fast before word got out that the city exists.
    Youpas took care of all four of them by himself with bow and arrow. I was afraid of Youpas even before that. I suppose we’re all wild up here—how could we not be, but Youpas is the wildest. He left the Down when he was only six. (I was only two years older.) But the old ones all said the natives were way worse than any of us could ever be. They said we were the civilized ones. If the natives are worse than Youpas, that scares me about being in the Down, but I liked life there more than here even though I know there are bad people and bad things that happen there all the time.
    Now that we’re so few left up here, we don’t bother with lookouts anymore. That’s how this man sneaked in without us knowing. He could have been here several days before I realized he was among us. That’s the disadvantage of a place like this, we can hide out here easily, but so can anybody else.
    This man must know how to get back to the Down. I hope he didn’t just get lost and end up here by mistake. I wonder if he’d be willing to go back and take me with him or at least show me the way.
    I lean close and examine him as he sleeps. How fascinating a whole new person is. I haven’t seen somebody else for a long time. Makes me feel, even more, that I want to go back to the Down. Or, actually, anywhere else but here.
    I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t one of us. He has the eyebrow ridges and the barrel chest, the ruddy complexion, the black hair with reddish streaks. But sometimes some of them do look a lot like us. That’s why the old ones had no trouble coming here as tourists. I wish I could see if his eyes are that aluminum gray ours always are. I wish…. I hope…. But… well, how could he not be us?
    His clothes are machine-made. Only his shoes seem to be of leather but they’re finely smoothed. We used to have clothes and shoes like that, but even our hiking boots are worn out by now. His shoes are just regular. They’ll be ruined in no time. One of his heels and the sole, too, is raised on one side. He must be lopsided. And he has a cane.
    He’s been burned across one side of his face. It’s raw and blistered. If not for that, he’d be a handsome example of one of us. Of course the natives wouldn’t think him handsome, they like a smoother blander face. I used to think as they do, I didn’t want to be one of us, but I like his looks. A lot.
    I spend the night nearby, he on one side of the wall