The Edge of Over There by Shawn Smucker

Author:Shawn Smucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction;Quests (Expeditions)—Fiction;Teenage girls—Fiction;Christian fiction;YAF051030;YAF011000;YAF001000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

22

ABRA TURNED ONE LAST TIME and watched Leo disappear into the city. He was older than her, but his slumped shoulders and hesitant steps made him look like a little boy, lost in the big world. She almost called out to him. Maybe he was right. Maybe they should stick together. But in the end, she didn’t say anything.

She thought that would probably be the last time she’d ever see him. She knew she would lock the Passageway after she destroyed the Tree, whether or not Leo was there, and this knowledge scared her. She wondered, with alarm, if she was a heartless person.

She continued down the long, straight road with the city across the street to her left, the forest directly to her right. Sometimes the branches grew out over the sidewalk and she had to walk in the crumbling pavement. Sometimes she peered into the shadows among the trees and wondered how far that forest went, and if it had an end, or if in every direction, if one walked far enough, there would be a gradually increasing darkness. And then nothing.

Beatrice was always just barely at the far reaches of what she could see. Always moving ahead at a brisk pace. Always walking on the same side of the road as the trees, in and out of the shadows.

The city was silent. The only sound was the scraping of her shoes on the sidewalk or the occasional snapping of the twigs she stepped on. It was one of the strangest moments of her life, walking along a city of that size without hearing anything. After ten or fifteen blocks she realized something else—there were no animals. No birds swooping through the air, no squirrels dashing here and there around the trees. No ants in the sidewalks. No pigeons roosting on the buildings. Nothing.

She stared into the forest a lot because she still thought that might be where she would find the Tree of Life. She stared particularly hard when the wind blew, because she remembered how that would make it easier to see the heavy fruit hanging in the midst of the fluttering leaves. Sometimes she thought she saw something, and she stopped, peering through the vines and the shrubs and the low branches.

Abra had never been tempted by the Tree when it appeared along the Road to Nowhere north of her farm in the outskirts of Deen. She had plunged the sword into its trunk without hesitation. But she recognized something strange inside of her as she walked that long, straight street, something deep inside of her that she had not felt four years before. It could perhaps be best symbolized by the tiniest of question marks.

That was it. There were no words with the question mark, no tangible concerns or hesitations as to why she should not kill the Tree. Nothing she could put her finger on. But there it was anyway, a small seed of uncertainty. Was she thinking of Sam’s mother again, her

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