Where the lockwood grows, p.1
Where the Lockwood Grows, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Olivia A. Cole
Interior art: Tree shadow copyright © merrymuuu/Shutterstock.com. Vine border copyright © Olga Illi/Shutterstock.com. Interior design by Vivian Jones and Jenny Kimura.
Cover art copyright © 2023 by Erwin Madrid. Leaf pattern © benntennsann/Shutterstock.com. Cover design by Jenny Kimura.
Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cole, Olivia A., author.
Title: Where the lockwood grows / Olivia A. Cole.
Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2023. | Audience: Ages 8–12. | Summary: “In this dystopian tale, young Erie and her older sister, Hurona, leave the only home they’ve ever known and discover that the world is much larger and more complicated than they’d ever imagined.” —Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022032152 | ISBN 9780316449120 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316449328 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Secrets—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction. | LGBTQ+ people—Fiction. | LCGFT: Dystopian fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C6429 Wh 2023 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022032152
ISBNs: 978-0-316-44912-0 (hardcover), 978-0-316-44932-8 (ebook)
E3-20230628-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Begin Reading
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Olivia A. Cole
For everyone who believes we still have time
In the lockwood we have a formidable enemy and a powerful friend. It can’t be cut by any ordinary axe; it can’t be burned. It grows to a towering height overnight. But like a loyal friend, it is dependable. It does what we need when we most need it. The oxygen it provides is equivalent to a rainforest; it stops wildfire in its tracks. The lockwood’s trimmings can be used to make toilet paper, brick, packaging. And then the pods! What a gift of science and nature. There were some mistakes in the early execution of the lockwood’s power—but we have learned from those mistakes. To dwell on them is to take our eye off the shimmering promise of our future.
—GOVERNOR MAVELON WILE
BEFORE I WAS called into the trees, I would daydream. Before tree shoes, I was barefoot. Me and my sister, running through the tangle once the light broke through. Hurona flapped her arms big and slow. She was a dragon.
What are you?
Whatever she was, I was too. Two dragons. Two flying elephants. Two griffins. Flying through the almost-dark.
She’s older, so the lockwood trees called her first.
When it was my turn, I gave up bare feet for tree shoes.
Do you remember what I told you?
Yes.
Stay small. Move slow.
We weren’t dragons anymore.
1
I’M NOT AFRAID of the dark.
If you think about the darkness the wrong way, it might seem like it’s hiding something from you. A spider, or a monster, or a ghost. But it helps if you make friends with the dark. Like I have.
The old folks need headlamps to get dressed, but when I wake up, my hands and feet find their way. Cave dark. Belly dark, like our entire town of Prine has been swallowed. But we haven’t been swallowed, because I hear the tiny, sticky steps of a beetle on my window’s screen. I imagine it’s saying good morning, and I answer under my breath. Then I press my ear against the wall beside my bed, where I hear my sister, Hurona, murmuring, and I smile. She says I’m always talking to myself, but she does too. Especially lately. I think it’s something about the dark—it makes you want to whisper, just to fill the space.
The gloom is thickest in the morning—we haven’t cut the lockwood back yet. The lockwood… I’ve seen things like it in old, old comic books. A plant that grows like it wants to choke out the sun. Maybe it would if the kids in Prine didn’t climb up every morning to cut the vines and let the light in. Until then, it’s dark. And this is the time when the dark keeps my secret for me.
It’s hidden under my mattress, and I find it easily. The old phone fits in my hand like a flat pink brick. I duck under my covers, fully dressed, and a moment later have it pressed against my ear, listening to Aunt Josie’s voice.
I never met Aunt Josie, but these are the voice messages she left Mom before she died. I found the phone one day when I was looking for socks and Hurona’s drawer was empty. In my mom’s dresser, it was tucked into the back behind flannel pajamas. Nothing saved on it but the voice messages.
Mom didn’t notice I had it until the day I asked her, What conservancy did Aunt Josie work for? and Mom’s eyes jerked up. She knew I could only have learned about it from one place, and told me to put the phone back. And I did. For a while. But the recordings of my aunt’s voice were like listening to a ghost whisper in my ear, and I’ve never been scared of ghosts: I’d welcome them if they came—Aunt Josie, my dad, Gran’Ida. I’ve even asked them to come before. They take up enough invisible space in our house. They might as well come inside. But they never do.
What’s gone stays gone, my mom always says. She’s not interested in memories unless there’s something she thinks she can learn from them. Like when she figured out our great-uncle, who was dead, used to go to fascist rallies. That kind of thing is like a mutant octopus, she says. Just cut off its tentacles and it will grow ten more until you actually deal with the problem of a mutant octopus. But it’s not like that with Aunt Josie. Just that the fires took her, and that keeping our eyes on the future is how we prevent more loss. Mom doesn’t think there’s anything to learn from just missing people.
And I don’t know if there is either. But I sit and listen to Aunt Josie’s voice under my blanket anyway. So many voice messages, some short, some long. Dozens of them. I have a rule: If it’s thirty seconds or less, I can listen to two. Otherwise I only listen to one each morning. Today is a two-message day.
1. Hi, it’s me, just returning your call. I’m at the zoo until four. I’ll call you after. Later.
2. You left just before they brought the falcon out! You really missed out. Only nineteen left in the world. I know it depresses you. Maybe I shouldn’t have invited you. Are you going on a date with the guy you met in Kincade? I wish you’d let me meet him. You don’t have to be so secretive all the time! Well, thanks for coming anyway. I hope it wasn’t too much for you. Next time invite me to your lab! Or is that a secret too? Gotta run. Love you! Later.
All her messages end with that one word: later. I whisper it under the blanket, wondering if my voice sounds like hers, since it doesn’t sound like Mom’s; wondering what secrets my mom kept from Aunt Josie, wondering if they’re the same ones she keeps from me.
Then the phone goes back under my mattress, and I take a deep breath. In the familiar dark, I reach for the place I know my doorknob will be, but before I turn it, I whisper one more thing to myself:
“Stay small. Move slow.”
The orb in the kitchen is illuminated—Mo
“Good morning, Erie,” she says, without taking her eyes from the scope. “Eat.”
“Good morning.” I sit down at the wobbly folding table. I feel my eyes get big. “You made bread.”
She looks up then, a brief glance. Her smile is like a quick bird.
There are two kinds of bread: soft bread and hard bread. The hard stuff is what you buy in the general store, the kind they ship in from Petrichor. The soft stuff is what my mom makes when we’ve gotten a little bit of money. The bread tastes good, but that’s not what makes me smile. It’s what the bread means. She only makes it when she’s feeling hopeful. It makes me feel guilty for having her phone under my mattress.
“Enjoy,” she says. “Sorry about the mess.”
She always says that, like we’re not used to it. The “mess” is overflow from the shed behind our small, square house—the shed is where all her real projects are. It’s spring now, the ground and air thawing. She’ll be back out there soon. Until then, the sprawl of all her work stuff looks strange compared to the bareness of the rest of our house. Mom grew up in the fires. She says it only takes losing everything once or twice before you stop wanting to own anything at all. Including memories, I think. I know she had to have lived somewhere outside these trees at one point—they’ve only existed for so long. But it’s like she never kept the memories, or they burned in the fires too.
“I don’t mind,” I reply. And I don’t. I like the cold months, when she’s still in here before I go to the trees. I like watching her. She’s still staring at something through the microscope, adjusting a dial here and there. Her soldering iron sends up the faintest plume of gray smoke. I try to imagine myself the same way. Warm. Ready. I place my lockwood knife on the table and sit down to eat.
I’m only two bites in when Hurona’s door opens. My stomach twitches. Sometimes I think I’m hungrier for my sister than the eggs. She enters the kitchen with the smooth expression she always wears. Unlike me, she wakes up wide awake, no lag time. Part of why she was so good in the lockwood before she sized out.
“Hi,” I say, and she waves a little wave. She hears the little sister in my voice the same way I do. We’re like the two lakes we were named for—close, made of the same stuff, but just far enough to be different. Of the five Great Lakes, only Huron and Erie haven’t dried up. It makes no sense, because the other ones were bigger and should’ve lasted longer. You’re survivors, like them, our mother says when she talks about naming us. I always wonder: What will we be when those lakes dry up too? I could ask. I know she’d have an answer. But I don’t really want to know.
“Thanks for the eggs,” Hurona says. She will only eat a few bites. It reminds me to slow down.
“I could use a few more.” Mom doesn’t look up. The buzz of soldering makes her sound far away. “Mind grabbing some before you go to work?”
“They overcharge at the general store,” my sister says. Her face tightens. I stop chewing.
Our mother looks up.
“And what would you suggest?”
“I hear they’re half the cost in Petrichor,” Hurona says.
“I’ll wait here while you walk fifty miles for eggs,” Mom says. Her eyes flash.
Hurona and Mom look at each other. As usual, I feel like a moon that can’t decide which planet to orbit. Sisters are supposed to always be on the same side, but sometimes it feels like Hurona can track down a fight like a hound tracks blood.
I want to say, Don’t you see the soft bread? Don’t you know what that means? Why do you want to ruin it? But like so many other things, I swallow the words. Maybe she finally notices the bread, because Hurona’s prickled face smooths out again. She turns her eyes to me.
“Walk with you?” she asks.
“Okay,” I say quickly, before she can change her mind. I take one more tiny bite. If Hurona notices how tiny, she doesn’t say.
“Hatchet?” Hurona says when we get to the door.
I freeze, then pat my hip. My knife is still sitting on the table, and my face heats up. My sister has been out of the trees for as long as I’ve been in them. Two years, and I still sometimes skip the important stuff.
“Headlamps,” Mom reminds us, as if we could forget. You can forget a blade, but you can’t forget the dark. It won’t let you.
2
MOST MORNINGS, WHEN I leave the house by myself, I switch on my headlamp before I step out into the black. It’s so dark that if the ground had disappeared overnight I wouldn’t know until I was falling. And though I’m not afraid of the dark, I am—like every kid in Prine—afraid of falling.
Today, though, with my big sister by my side, I do as she does, and that means putting on our headlamps but not turning them on until the door closes behind us. And for a moment we don’t exist. Belly dark. But if you’ve been up top, then you know better than to think the lockwood is a beast. It’s just a plant. Even if it is a very hungry one. Still, for the few heartbeats before we switch on our headlamps, it does feel like we’ve been swallowed.
“Ready?” Hurona says softly, and even though she can’t see me, I nod.
My fingers find the switch the way they could find my ear, or my navel. Then light: an orange pool ahead. Then a second pool joins it. Hurona’s.
“Let’s do it,” she says, and even though I walk this path alone every morning, now I follow just half a pace behind her as we make our way through the black streets of Prine.
Once we get to the Spine, we can actually see without headlamps, but leave them on anyway. The Spine is the avenue down the middle of our tiny town, one thing lit up with Prine’s precious solar power. From somewhere in the dark beyond the Spine I hear a few of the little kids’ voices raised in song:
The Spine of Prine is glowing;
it’s the only thing that will
until they beat the lockwood back,
which grows tomorrow still.
I glance at Hurona, see the tight smile lift one corner of her mouth.
“Remember singing that?” I ask. It makes me feel older, thinking about kids’ songs as something of the past.
“Yes,” she says.
“They’re up early.”
“Probably have siblings going to the lockwood. Whole house awake,” she says.
I eye her sideways.
“Do you ever miss going to the top?” I ask.
“For the first year, they had to climb,” she says. “Before they brought the cranes. Did you know that? I did it too once. Climbed all the way up without the crane just to see if I could.”
This isn’t an answer, but I hadn’t really expected one. She folds her smile up. I don’t say anything else until we get to the corner where we will go on our separate paths: she toward the general store for eggs, and me toward the cranes.
“See you,” I say. “I’ll try to drop you some pods if I see them.”
“You’re not supposed to do that,” she says, already half gone. “Focus on the trimming. Let the pod kids take care of the pods.”
“I was just kidding,” I call, but she’s far enough away now where she can pretend not to have heard me.
“Thank you for your service!” someone calls from one of the black streets off the Spine, and even after two years in the lockwood, I still think they’re talking to someone else. I wave at the face I can’t see and nod my head. The light from my headlamp swims around.
My mom invented the type of headlamp that we all use—her one success. I used to want to be an inventor too. Daydreams from before I went into the lockwood. My very first invention was an ant trap that didn’t hurt the ants. I’ve always loved bugs—so tiny, so strong. Even now as I walk, I search the glow of my headlamp for lines of black ants.
“Don’t be late!” another voice calls to me from the dark. “I’d like to see the sun before noon today!”
If Hurona was here she would mutter, Then let’s see you go up. I’m too afraid they’d hear me. I look up into the knot over Prine, but my headlamp is like a feather trying to pierce stone. I keep my eyes on the ants. We all march to work.
