Harvest Time

2 - The Roof

Maybe, with the Harvester gone, I should have climbed back down the tube but, with the tears still running down my cheeks, I knew I didn't want to return to the place where my sister had been taken. So, instead, I inched upwards to where the tube joined a larger mirror junction. Squinting in the intense light, I determined the next path to take – one that would lead me to the roof. From one of the other downward leading tubes, I heard more screams and closed my eyes. Should I go down there and try to help? But what use would I be against another Harvester? The things were, as far as we knew, completely indestructible and, once they had located a breeder area, they would consume everyone within it who failed to escape.

I took a side service path and came out at a normal corridor – there was no one else close by though the echoes of voices, screaming out in fear or pain, slid past me constantly. I ran along the labyrinth of interconnected pathways, heading upwards wherever possible. It was, I had been reminded several times over the years, the best way to escape Harvesters. They were too heavy, even on our light world, to negotiate the upper areas of the citadel. But they didn't need to get to the heights if they could bulldoze those floors down to their own level.

After several more turns, I came across a ladder that led to the roof. I climbed and, as expected, came out on the southern quadrant of the dome of our citadel – several breeder halls were located directly below this exit. I knew the dome intimately, its pocked surface as familiar to me as the reflection of my face in a mirror. I was a roof weeder and, one day, fates willing, I hoped to progress to become a gardener. If I had the chance to advance even further, my aim was to attain the post of mirror engineer. But thoughts of the future and my role within it were, at that moment, soured like bad milk.

Joselle had been my only family and my world since the day our parents had been snatched. Still only eleven at the time the Harvesters had last invaded our citadel, she had pulled me up into her arms and rushed us both to safety. She had continued to raise me, which is why I lived with her, even after she accepted her calling as a breeder. That had been four years ago when I was still a mirror cleaner, which was better than how I'd started out, as all children do, as a lowly dust collector.

I bit my lip, trying to prevent myself from howling in despair. The same despair I had felt upon losing my parents. But now I had no family left. I was the only one. My mother had a sister somewhere. She had travelled to another of the twenty citadels when I was young – and I don't remember which one it might have been. My father had been born in one of the breeder areas. He'd probably had more than a dozen brothers and sisters. I didn't know who they were.

A loud mechanical click nearby made me jump. It was just the mechanism of one of the clockwork mirror mounts, the tetrahedron shape adjusting its orientation to track Sun Primary and bounce the light down into a tunnel. By habit, I checked that its spring had been wound up that day. It had, but I cranked the handle another two rotations which would keep it working for an extra hour or so. As a roof weeder, it was one of my secondary tasks.

I looked around, wondering what I should do and where I should go. This part of the roof itself was as clear of weeds as it could be, with only the occasional blade of grass or tiny spray of green indicating weeds that would need removing before another seven-day was out. Glancing towards the edge of the dome, some fifteen minutes walk away, there was no evidence of the Harvester attack. I walked up the gentle incline between the roof gardens towards the centre of the dome with Sun Primary heating the back of my neck. After a while, I looked back out beyond the dome, at the parched fields that had, as I had learned in school, once been green forest.

My eye caught a movement and I saw a head poke out of one of the mirror tube entrances. I recognised the face. It was Ronnack, another roof weeder. He was about a year older than me and, although still skinny, at four feet and two inches, he was nearly grown to his full adult height. I ran towards him, noticing the expression on his face.