The Bone Wall Read Online Free Page A

me, Papa.”
    “I think it is,” he admits as he bears my tear-swollen face in his hands. “I wish I could tell you otherwise. I wish you could hold your hope and innocence in the palm of your hand and find peace, but I fear hard choices lie ahead for all of us.” He kisses each of my eyelids. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”
    Slowly we creep down the ladder, rustling the ivy curled around the rails. I’m so tired; my arms ache and my hands slip on the metal rungs. Reaching the yard first, he lifts me from the last steps and sets me down on the grass. My hand in his, he hauls me around the hub, across the courtyard, heading for the women’s residence in search of my mother. Word has spread through the heart of Heaven, carrying with it an aura of desperation, people hurrying between buildings, seeking spouses and children. Those leaving us scrounge for anything that might serve as a weapon: hoes and shovels, hammers, axes, wood poles and iron bars, awls, levers, and picks.
    Beneath a flickering lamppost on the stone pathway, I glimpse my beautiful mother wringing her hands, blue eyes searching among the frantic men and women. A short cry escapes her at the sight of us, and she bursts into tears, clutching at my father’s arms and face as if she foresees his death. “Come with me,” he says, pulling us both to the library.
    Heaven’s library barely clutters up a tiny building, a single room with books lined up on a mismatched assortment of shelves. We have no paper, so the books count hundreds of years old, collected from before the breaking of the world, relics of the past, of places and things so foreign to us that they often make little sense. Some books are falling apart, the bindings unglued, pages yellowed and stained, or crisp and crackling, or torn out in binges of censure. I can read many words but find most books unreadable.
    My father opens the drawers of a cabinet and pulls out wrinkled papers, edges frayed and corners ripped. He lays them on a table as the three of us bend over to inspect them. “These are maps,” he explains, “of the world before the breaking. There were seventy-two Gardens, five within a thousand miles of us.” He shuffles through the pile for the one he seeks and slides it from the short stack. He orients it east to east, pointing to the map’s compass. “Here lies Heaven.” He stabs a finger at a tiny black dot in a swath of green, Heaven written in minute script beside it. “This is Paradise, here, to the southeast. This is Utopia, then Retreat, then Sanctuary due west. When it’s time, follow the riverbed to Sanctuary.” His finger traces a faded blue hairline west. He folds the map into quarters and offers it to my mother, but she steps back, her hands hiding behind her.
    “Julian, you can’t expect—”
    “Don’t wait until it’s too late, Bria. Paradise made it here. You can find a way to Sanctuary.” He pushes the map toward her.
    “I can’t,” she cries, her palms pressed to her head, her eyes shuttered. “No, Julian.”
    Without a moment’s hesitation, he slips the folded map in my apron pocket and reaches for my mother, embracing her as he embraced me, expending his strength comforting us when it’s he who will leave the protection of Heaven to face the Biters.
    An hour later, while my father meets with the other men determined to change places with Paradise’s children, my mother and I steal into the women’s residence and collect our bedding. The three of us will sleep in the library, my parents intent on spending the night fornicating, permission or no.
    For a brief moment, I’m mortified at the blatant disregard for God’s laws, the flagrant sin, and wonder if this perversity is rampant throughout Heaven, the cause of our troubles after all. But I know it’s not, or it’s too late, or it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what to think, so I carry my bedding to the library and fashion a bed on the floor behind a