Chapter Three: The Flower Girl

About seven hours after I’d discovered the Array, no one else had been found who could see the Sunsoul. On a brighter note though, a couple of Tellroan employees had come to collect John. Almost ten o’clock, and they’d still sent a vehicle from the plant over ten miles away through the sunlight for him.

It was actually a bit awe inspiring. Who would be willing to drive with that sort of risk? Then again, maybe there really wasn’t much of a risk. Tellroan was pretty much the company working on sunlight-safety these days. Its transportation was great.

I wouldn’t even want to be on one of the school’s buses this close to noon, and those things could be better described as tanks. Literally in some cases, as a few school systems had done away with risky rubber tires entirely.

Most cars these days could keep a person safe in the morning or evening sun for a couple hours. At noon, things were different. The windows could act as magnifying glasses and cook passengers alive in their vehicles. Even my top of the line air conditioning and tinted windows wouldn’t save me if I were stopped on the side of the road at noon. Driving on the rims of a flat tire could usually get the driver to safety, but I’d heard more than one story of a panicked driver with a popped tire driving too quickly. They’d break the rim and then be stuck, unable to get out of their vehicle and unable to drive to safety. At that point, their only hope was a tow, or a friendly passerby with a death wish. Worse, the car would almost certainly be ruined.

That was only at noon though. It was much less dangerous in the mornings or the late afternoons, and a smart person could get their car to any of the numerous shade stations to avoid this, even with a flat. Stepping out between ten a.m. and two p.m. would still kill a person, so the unlucky soul caught out at noon under a shade station would be stranded until the evening when getting out was safe again, or be rich enough to pay for a tow after it was safe around two or three. My family could afford this. Chase, for a grim example, was not.

This wasn’t uncommon either. I was sure John was probably a little bit terrified. I doubted he’d thought far enough ahead to realize they’d be taking him straight through to the Tower, no matter what time it was. Long habit had drilled home the fact that going outside anywhere near noon was just inviting a death sentence. The sun could and did kill the unprepared. Everyone knew at least one person who’d popped a tire, or gotten stranded at night somehow, far between the safety of hubs, where shade stations were rare. Other’s had stories of friends who had their AC blow out, or a stray crack in their anti-heat windows shatter too close to daylight. It didn’t happen often anymore, but it did happen.

Feeling a bit of pride, I thought that my car might make it through a noonday drive. It wasn’t a risk I intended to take, though.

John was gone now, and likely wouldn’t be returning at all unless he lied about being able to see Sunsoul. In which case he’d probably still not be coming back. That wasn’t exactly a punishable offense, but it was certainly not something the power company took kindly. They tended to sue people who claimed false sightings of Sunsoul.

In retrospect, my jealousy was overrated. I contented myself with the knowledge that getting rid of John might be a better gift than seeing Sunsoul would ever be.

Best. Day. Ever.

“It stayed there for over five hours. Can you believe it? Much longer and they would’ve had to start testing preschoolers!” Monroe was talking while simultaneously chewing a bite of baked chicken.

“Dude. Eat. Then talk,” April commented dryly before I could.

I chuckled and Monroe blushed a little, rubbing a nervous hand through his shaggy dark hair. He was a broad shouldered boy with a little more fat than muscle. His nasally voice never seemed to fit his body type.

“Err, sorry,” he replied lamely after swallowing his chicken. “I’m just excited! What’s different? What’s changed? The array hasn’t stayed in a fixed spot for more than an hour since… what six years ago? And now it stays still for hours before jumping! It’s almost like someone’s still piloting it, don’t you think?”

After the initial excitement in the first hour of the day, the rest of it had been boring. I’d gotten the chance to observe the array more than I ever thought I’d want to, and I was already getting sick of hearing about it.

“I really don’t care,” I said, now not even partially enthused. I enjoyed stargazing and talking about Fontaine’s Folly as much as anyone but at a certain point I just didn’t want to hear about it anymore. The number of times I’d been told “Congratulations on finding the Array, Noonday!” today was nearly countless. People who didn’t know me from Adam, recognized me now and called me “Noonday” as if it were an actual name. I almost wished I hadn’t found the damn thing.

Almost.

I hadn’t eaten much for lunch today and the early dinner Monroe and April had wanted just after the last class of the day looked awful too, which was strange. I’d always loved Panini day, but now with it sitting right in front of me, it just didn’t look good.

Maybe it was the bad dreams and the general lack of sleep, but I’d just been less hungry lately. Burn victims were supposed to be hungrier, especially after operations like mine.

Ardnocures, horrifyingly complex 3D printers which specialized in eradicating and replacing burned skin simultaneously had made burn wounds a thing of the past for the most part. All a burn victim had to do was get to the hospital before death. Most burns these days were caused by the Sun after all. I’d been healed of the strangely minor burns I’d taken saving Clara by sitting in an ardnocure for about an hour. I was supposed to be hungry after that, but instead my appetite had dwindled over the last few weeks.

Better that, than what happened Clara, though.

I shook my head to stop thinking about it and turned to something else. The first thing that came to mind was money, and getting therapy. I was surprised that Dad had mentioned money this morning but I guess maybe the ardnocure’s cost had been a little much. Even Mom’s impressive salary had trouble supporting something that expensive on short notice. Coupled with the bills for Grandma’s move into assisted living after a bad fall last year, it was apparently stretching my parents’ income.

Dad implied it was, anyway, and that might be true. I sort of doubted it though. My parents probably just wanted to teach me to be frugal. They had money now. I didn’t. They kept stressing that to me as I got closer and closer to going to college. They weren’t being mean, or malicious, and I didn’t think they’d hesitate to help me if I really needed it, but they didn’t want me to rely on them. I needed them now though. I needed to get this off my chest.

I kicked my feet out and stood from the cafeteria table and stretched with a yawn and a glance for the clock. Quarter till’ five. The Sun was cooled off enough now that I could get home, but that didn’t matter. I hadn’t visited Clara yet.

“You out, Brandon?” Monroe asked, looking at my tray. “Can I have that?”

I blinked. “Sure. Yeah I’m out,” I replied simply.

Monroe and April shared an odd look. April sat on her hands suddenly, apprehensive about something. Monroe cocked an eyebrow at her, and gave her a prodding nod.

“Uhh… something I should know?” I asked, confused.

“No!” April pounced before Monroe could open his mouth. “Ahh, nothing Brandon. Nothing important anyway.”

Monroe rolled his eyes. I wouldn’t ever claim to understand women but April was a friend. I’d grown up with her, and I could at the least tell when she was hiding something from me. Monroe’s exaggerated eyeroll only made detecting the lie easy mode.

“Ohh-kay?” I drawled, hoping to prod whatever April wanted to say out of her, but she clamped her mouth shut and stared down at her mostly finished Panini. I shrugged. Whatever it was would probably come out eventually.

“Talk to you guys later then,” I murmured and headed off.

Monroe cackled at something hilarious when I was a little ways away. I even heard him over the din of all the people waiting on the sun to go down, and I thought I heard the distinct sound of April smacking him, but whatever he’d said that had pissed her off so much was unimportant.

I had a hospital to visit.

The walk to the hospital was a pretty long one. It was almost two miles away, but easy enough to reach if you were simply willing to walk there and back. Ever since they finished the moving walkways, getting around was a breeze.

Leaving the cafeteria I cut through the school’s square main halls and made my way towards the exit from the school to the Hub.

The huge hallway, at least four stories high and wide enough to comfortably fit a large interstate inside it, was just beginning to pick up a crowd. In fact, there were places in the Hub that had once actually been parts of the highway that had passed right through the area before, though most of them were on the northern corner. Some actually still did. The halls were lined with rows of beautiful green trees that were no longer able to survive the harsh sunlight outside. The walls were painted with long mosaics that seemed almost like skilled graffiti stretching all the way up to the ceiling. The ceiling itself, though, was painted green in memory of the land that had lost most of that vibrant shade.

The Hub was basically the city of West Steppe itself. An enormously complex single building with offshoots to hundreds of other buildings, connecting them and safely sheltering anyone who wanted to get somewhere nearby in town but didn’t want to risk the outdoors.

The Hub was, quite simply, a giant mall. The only difference was that the outlets were more in the line of “School,” “Post Office,” “Hospital,” and “Residential Area,” rather than just shopping outlets. Most cities in the Midwest that hadn’t been long abandoned now had a Hub or even several, and all of them were permanently under construction as new businesses grew and expanded.

The place would grow even livelier as night came, and not for the first time I lamented the fact that West Steppe wasn’t a “Night Town.” Several cities had begun converting to a sleep-during-the-day lifestyle to avoid the Sun entirely. St. Louis was one. There were… problems with that though.

For one, it made the Hub’s original function almost obsolete. The Hub, which had cost millions to connect the city's various necessities and air condition properly, was made to function in the depth of the hottest summer noonday. That alone had probably swayed the votes in favor of keeping with the traditions of the previous generation.

“Sure would be convenient if we’d switch though,” I murmured to myself as I stepped onto one of the moving walkways and continued at a quick clip. I felt like it would be safer at least, but old folks were slow to change. And maybe as long as we didn’t change our lifestyle, they could still feel like there was a chance the world would go back to how it had once been.

I was walking down the southern edge of the Hub, the fastest route between the school and the hospital, and also the most scenic. As I walked I noticed my mirror reflecting from the marble pillars that occasionally took the place of one of the trees in the pattern.

I couldn’t be called tall, but not really short either. Boringly normal brown hair matched my eyes which held a darker shade of the same. I was what I’d always been. Average. It was even how I thought of myself in regards to everything except sprinting. Put me in long distance and I was toast, but in a sprint, no one could match me.

I’d hardly even thought about track since this whole business with Haley and Clara had come up though. I had actually missed a meet with one of the schools from St. Louis while my burns were being healed. Now with the Array on top of all that, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to keep my mind focused where it should be.

“Can you believe it? Four hours! Four whole hours!” I caught a clip of conversation as I passed, and that was mimicked on a hundred other mouths. Everyone was talking about how long the Array had stayed still this time.

“I heard it was five!” Someone yelled in response.

I rolled my eyes, tired of hearing about it now.

People from my own age all the way up to senior citizens sat on the benches or circled the many trees and pillars in small groups, all waiting for their favorite store to open at the shopping center, or a new movie to start in a few hours.

“Noonday! Hey Noonday!” Came a voice from behind me. I studiously ignored it, but began walking faster when it sounded like whoever was shouting that stupid name was trying to catch up to me. Luckily, my pace and lack of acknowledgement seemed to discourage the follower and I wasn’t bothered again.

I strode in through automatic doors to find the lobby. It was a stark white room, so bright compared to the Hub that I almost had to squint. A small lobby to the right of the door held four nurses in scrubs, who appeared to be taking a short break. I knew one or two of them, but only in passing.

Ms. Cassy McCaw sat in front of me at the main desk. She was one of the head nurses who I did know and she could only be described as a stern woman. Shoulder length blond hair framed a blocky face that had the perpetual tiredness I’d come to associate with nurses. She wasn’t fat, but she clearly had been once. Her loose skin hung off her bones, and I’d assumed she was one of many who’d lost weight during the famine when the country was still adapting to indoor farming. No matter how ugly or firm she was though, she had the heart of a saint.

I waved to her and watched her eyes sink as she caught sight of me. “Oh… Hello Brandon.”

Something in her tone told me that things weren’t going well.

“Has something happened?” I asked, concerned.

Cassy grimaced and made a glance down the hallway towards Clara’s room. “She’s… getting worse. The ardnocures just don’t seem to work on her, which is absolutely baffling. We’ve had to resort to creams to soothe her. She’s the worst burn victim I’ve ever seen still alive. I don’t want to say it’s hopeless but you might’ve gone out into the sun for her for nothing.”

“Dammit…” I sighed in helpless frustration. “Still no visitors?”

“She did have a few today, actually.” She replied a little somberly. “Quite a few, in fact, but they’re all gone now. You should go see her.”

She fished in the desk between us for a visitor’s badge with elastic that had been frayed at the edges by years of use.

I thanked her for the badge before I turned down the long hallway to the room that would hold the burned girl. I imagine visiting her every day and seeing her like this was probably part of the reason for my irritatingly vivid dreams, but I just couldn’t stop.

I opened the door and blinked.

Hard.

Clara was there alright, her burned body portraying an object lesson of the sun’s effect on human skin. Her face was still that charred mess and her body, covered in a light hospital gown, hid fringes of the same, save in splotches where her jeans had actually melted into her skin.

That wasn’t what shocked me though. What did was the flowers. Loads of them. It was almost as if someone had gone to a grocery store and just bought every flower they had. There was no rhyme or reason to them, no specific color or type. Tulips and Roses, Lilies and Lilacs were thrown together with weeds like dandelions and tiger lilies. It was almost as if someone just needed plants in the room, and that the type didn’t matter.

The girl’s hand, lying peacefully on her chest, clasped one of the yellow tulips as if it had been placed there.

Flowers on their own were rare these days and had to be brought down from the north or grown in gardens. Of course everyone had gardens and most people usually grew one or two little patches of some flower or other in them, all year round. They’d usually keep them for special occasions but these almost felt as if they’d been grown specifically for Clara.

I even had my own little plot in the lamphouse back home. So many, though. It was incredible.

“W-wow,” I breathed in unexpected awe. “Who could afford this?”

For most of the past week I’d been afraid that Clara had no family at all. Now I feared she might have an overabundance.

Even now I could hardly believe the casual way in which I’d seen her walk out that door that day. She’d just opened it and slipped right out into the sunlight. She’d done it almost nonchalantly; nothing like a girl who was trying to commit suicide. She must have felt so alone. That was what I’d thought at the time. Now, what she’d done made even less sense. She had someone, many someones apparently, who cared for her deeply. What could have caused her to abandon that so senselessly?

I walked over to one of several chairs and took a seat right next to her. She looked so… hurt. Even in her sleep she seemed in pain.

Clara had always been a thin girl. She was short, with brown hair, though after coming back from summer break last year, she had somehow died just the roots of her hair to an almost comical shade of aqua blue, leaving the rest brown. She’d never been the type of girl to stand out or make waves but she certainly had when she came to school with that change.

At the time, I’d thought she’d just grown tired of the attention because only a short few weeks later she’d gotten rid of the blue dye. Staring at the thin trace of the light blue fuzz growing on her scarred head, I realized that the brown color must’ve been the real dye, hiding her strange hair-color. Apparently a natural blue-head. Well, weirder things had happened because of Sunsoul. It was actually pretty common for those who spent time outdoors during the safe hours while the sun was up to experience unusual changes, and they were usually for the better. Arthritis curing miraculously. Eye color changing. Lifelong skin rashes healing. My mom had done some research on the phenomenon, so I knew a little.

Still, her hair had seemed so natural when it was brown…

Clara wasn’t a person I’d ever paid much attention to before I saw my almost-girlfriend being a malicious asshole to her. We were in different divisions; She was in E, while I was in B. I’d barely even known her, other than that she was a music student, who didn’t have many friends. Clara was devoted to her violin and not much else, and she resented being second string to the more-talented Brenda. That tidbit was second hand from Haley, though, so that could easily be a lie.

“Why can’t they fix you, Clara? What’s wrong?” I asked her sleeping form. She was peaceful at the moment, but even in her sleep I could see pain in her features and couldn’t help but feel like it was somehow my fault.

“Fuck. Why would you do that? I know Haley was a jerk but she didn’t say anything so horrible to make you… ugh.” I breathed. My guilt had washed away slightly over the past weeks but as I watched her deteriorate more and more, I found it rekindling.

She was dying. I’d been in the sun almost every bit as long as she, though, and I’d barely walked away with second degree burns. It bothered me. I knew I must’ve imagined it. Knew that I couldn’t possibly have seen what I’d thought but… for some reason, I recalled with perfect clarity that the girl had not started burning herself until the moment I reached her.

“…How?”

“Indeed.”

I jumped, the voice at the door startling me. I jerked my eyes away from Clara and found a tall, slim woman standing in the doorway. A pair of half-moon glasses rested upon a pointed nose. Her face was as narrow as her body, and she wore a dark sweater and long black pants. A sweater. I didn’t even know you could buy those anymore. Her dark skin made me certain she wasn’t family to Clara but something about the way she regarded me, as if I were beneath her, made me think she didn’t care much about either of us.

“You are Mr. Meadows, the boy who… saved Clara, are you not?” the woman said with a grimace. She had a clipped way of speaking that made Cassy seem like a meek kitten.

I didn’t like her, almost immediately. Something about the sarcastic way she spoke put my hackles up. “I suppose, I am. Who are you?”

“Who I am is none of your concern. For now. We’ll meet again soon enough, I’m sure.”

I growled. “Bullshit. Clara’s been here for a week and a half, and only now she gets visitors? If you know her then what took you so long?”

She ignored me in favor of approaching the girl. “You’ve interrupted a great many things of which you are unaware, Brandon Meadows. It would be best if you stopped visiting Clara.”

How does she know who I am?

It was only then that I realized the woman held a single flower of her own. I blinked when I looked at it. I’d never seen a flower that looked anything like the one the woman held. A long green stem was the only normal thing about it. Long wispy white petals stretched out and up to meet at the top, making what appeared to be a small cage for a thin red bud of some sort, held in the middle.

The woman didn’t hesitate as she approached Clara and immediately grabbed the tulip in the girl’s hand and slid it out of Clara’s loose grip, carelessly tossing it to the floor.

“Hey!” I hissed as I watched the woman methodically place the strange flower in the same place in Clara’s hand.

“I’m sorry if I have been curt, Mr. Meadows. You are not helping her by visiting. She will become better in time, but you must leave her be.”

“Why!?” I exclaimed. I didn’t remember standing up but suddenly I was. “Who are you!” I demanded again.

For the first time, the woman’s eyes softened a little as she looked at the burn victim on the bed before us. I watched her hand trail from the flower up to gently caress Clara’s forehead. Much to my shock, the comatose girl’s breathing seemed to ease almost instantly.

“C-Clara! What did you do!?”

The woman smiled and looked at me with dark, piercing eyes. “For Clara’s sake. Please… stop visiting her for a time, Brandon. She will be well.”

There was a small note of care in the woman’s tone now, where before there had been nothing but sternness. Perhaps she was not used to showing it. Her words though… She knew something.

“Why should I trust you?” I said, my anger losing its grip, as I watched Clara’s breathing seem to finally ease a little.

“Because I know what she is, and how she rescued you. You are already caught up in things you can’t understand. Best you try to enjoy the few remaining days of ignorance while you can.”

“What’s that supposed to mean!?”

“You did not save Clara, Mr. Meadows. She saved you. And in the doing, made you more.”

I shivered as the woman confirmed suspicions that I desperately wanted to not believe.

“This… is my fault?” I asked, trying to ignore the lump in my throat as I glanced back down at her. She almost seemed to be smiling. Could the flower be doing that somehow?

“Yes. As I am sure you have begun to suspect, she would have been fine had you not intervened. Consider yourself lucky. You’ve received a gift many have paid billions for.”

I winced. That was blunt. The lump grew rather than diminished.

“What? H-How? What is she? What… what did she give me?”

She looked at me sympathetically. The expression was hard to read, but I felt like she was annoyed and sorry for me at the same time. “For now, know that your visits have been keeping her from healing. You may return in four days. She will be ready to see you then.”

I twitched. I wanted to yell at her, tell the woman to fuck off and I’d visit whenever I could but something about her tone made me agree before I even realized what was happening. I tore my eyes away from Clara. Thinking that it might’ve been my fault and having it confirmed were two very different things.

“F-fine. And she’ll be okay after that?” I asked.

“She will, if you stay away. You are draining her. The flowers will help, but you must go,” she said, all sternness returned to her voice.

I gulped, then nodded before leaving.

I pounded out of the hospital, practically throwing the visitor’s badge at a shocked Nurse McCaw as I passed. My eyes were wet, and my throat filled to bursting with the immobile lump of guilt lodged there.

Fuck… just. Fuck.