The Eden Project Pt. 03 Ch. 19 (02)

Author's note: Hey friends. First off, thank you so much for the support thus far. The comments from those of you who are enjoying this journey have been thrilling.

The book still isn't done. I have a rough structure for how the last 30-50% of this book is going to wrap, but I'm still jostling ideas around in terms of what directions I want certain characters and plots to take.

But full disclosure: I started writing this book about a year ago, and since then my wife and I have had a baby. She's 9 months old now, wonderful in every way, and predictably quite a drain on our time. My wife is my first-line editor (I originally started writing this for her to serve our mutual kinks and storytelling interests) so my pace of publishing has been governed by my bandwidth for writing and her bandwidth for reading my chapters, masturbating to them occasionally, checking them for grammar mistakes, contrivances, and downright biological inaccuracies. God bless her.

So: What you are about to read is part TWO of chapter 19, because in my eagerness to publish more content for you guys, I published Chapter 19 in an unfinished state.

Thanks for being patient during the lapses in publishing. Chapter 20 is coming hot on the heels of this installment. I will finish this. I love these characters and I love this book, and I will see it through with all of the focus and passion it deserves.

Note on the last installment: I referenced Tad having a Jamaican accent, even though I clarified far earlier in the series that he is Haitian. I was more than a little embarrassed when I noticed that mistake. Sorry.

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"Good flight?" Crew Cut asked her as she joined their group, trouncing down the steep hill toward the smoking mess hall.

"Uh, yeah..." Ellie trailed, still dazed by the unexpected coitus she'd barged in on. Then her surroundings came into clearer focus and she stopped in her tracks. "Wait."

A middle-aged man behind her nearly collided with her and he swore, startled. Ellie didn't apologize as he routed around her.

"This is..." But while she struggled to produce words, her head shook back and forth involuntarily. "This is nuts, I don't know what I'm doing here. I need to go to the clinic and talk to Hannah. Can you help me get back to the clinic?"

Crew Cut looked slightly alarmed. "Uhh... Well... Okay, first..." And she seized Ellie's arm. Ellie nearly pulled away before she realized Crew Cut was just pulling her to the side of the pathway, out of the thickest of the moving crowd. Then she sat Ellie down on a rock, who took the proffered seat without protest -- her legs had begun to destabilize.

"Yes," Crew Cut answered, once Ellie was safely planted, "we can go up the hill and see Hannah, but..."

Ellie shot Crew Cut a glare, daring her to continue with an unwelcome counterargument.

"BUT," Crew Cut insisted, "I think you owe it to yourself to give this a few hours. That's it. A few hours. Think about it:" Ellie chewed on her tongue, wringed her hands, and stared at the ground being currently trampled by hundreds of feet while she listened. "You already gave up your life. You gave up your job. You gave up your ... wherever you lived, I don't know."

"This supposed to be helping?" Ellie snapped.

Crew Cut threw up her hands. "Nobody's gonna stop you if you want to leave, and they'll give you plenty of cash to help you out, but all I'm saying is that that's a whole lot of stuff to rebuild after coming here for twenty minutes and then bailing."

And this, Ellie acknowledged, she hadn't considered. The damage was done. Everyone she knew, including her family, had been told she was gone. How insane would it look if she popped back into existence in less than 24 hours with the task of explaining away the whole "Department of Defense" thing? Her job was gone, too. She'd already thoroughly fucked her relationship with Kathleen to come here. That which she had to lose was lost.

In the summer after sixth grade, Ellie's parents sent her to camp. She had asked to go -- begged to go -- and her parents, with their tight budget, acquiesced.

They drove an elated Ellie two hours north of Phoenix to a youth campground with no air conditioning, bathrooms that had no mirrors, showers that had no curtains, and food that wasn't any better than her school lunches. She didn't know a single one of the hundred other kids attending. Her cabin was supervised by a woman she'd never met. There were so many rules that she didn't understand.

On the very first evening, a sobbing Ellie begged to call her parents on the cafeteria phone so that she could ask to be picked up. She remembered realizing that this was what homesickness felt like. She had stayed nights at friends' houses, sure, but never two hours away. And never for three weeks. The distance and time felt like an infinite chasm, and it overwhelmed her.

Ellie's parents stood strong on the phone. They told her, gently, that she needed to give it a chance. If she still felt this way the next night, Ellie was instructed to call them back and then they would come get her.

There was no second phone call. Ellie was picked up three weeks later just like everybody else -- with a deep tan, stick-on tattoos, hand-made lanyards, and several new best friends in the whole wide world with whom she'd never speak again.

She took a deep breath on her rock, inhaled the pine air that reminded her of that July thirteen years previous, and nodded. "Fine. I'll stay for lunch."

"Fuck yeah, kid, let's hit it." Crew Cut stood up and offered her hand to help Ellie. She took it.

The lunch fare, like Ellie's last meal here, was simple: Egg salad sandwiches (on fresh-baked sourdough bread) and potato chips (cut and fried in-house). There was also a treat for the adults: Beer. Served out of damp, condensating, chilled wooden casks lined up behind the food serving station.

Ellie enthusiastically accepted a cold mug of the stuff with her food and chugged the beverage as soon as she joined Crew Cut and her crew at their table. The light lager slid easily down her throat and the effects of the modest alcohol content worked quickly on her empty stomach. She reclaimed a small sense of wellbeing which was encouraged by her breezy, sunny, chattery environment.

The manual laborers tucked aggressively into their sandwiches and many were on their way back for seconds even before Sara sat down. Schoolchildren joined for lunch as well. Their teachers --including the floppy-haired Sven and Saanvi with her swollen, exposed breasts -- roved through the chowing students, supervising. Kelsey was there too, no longer nude nor sweating through a parade of potential sires. Ellie supposed her ovulation cycle must have ended, and considered the high likelihood that she was now freshly pregnant. The teachers monitored and managed the kids into eating acceptable amounts of food before allowing them to play on the lake shore. A smattering of the younger toddlers chased their hen-pecked sandwiches with breastmilk from the nearest supplying Recruit.

Ellie noticed in passing that the counsel members -- Tad, Mitchell, and Sandra -- ate together at the quietest and the loneliest table. She remembered what they had told her during her first tour, about not necessarily wanting to be elected.

"Not that you asked, but my name's Bailey."

"Oh, shit!" Ellie's butt had just hit the bench of her group's picnic table. "Sorry!" But Crew Cut (Bailey) was grinning through a mouthful of egg salad.

"I'm fucking with you," said Bailey. "Not about the name. And that's Trevor, as you well know --" the scrawny boy wearing the fish tarp waggled his fingers -- "and Ahmed." The third member of the group -- a tall, dusty, brown boy with thick curly hair and a weak mustache -- nodded her direction.

"Thanks for eating lunch with me," Ellie directed at all of them.

"Thanks for staying," said Ahmed. "New Recruits aren't exactly a dime a dozen. Trevor's the last one before you got here."

"Why'd you stick around?" Ellie asked Trevor, slightly more directly than she intended. The group laughed. "Sorry... no, but seriously... why? Wearing that... the thing?"

Trevor absentmindedly tore a piece of bread crust in two and paused before he answered. "If I'm being perfectly honest, I've never felt a stronger sense of purpose before. Everything makes sense here." Then he grimaced, like someone at the table might yell, "LAAAME", but they didn't, and Ellie stared at him as she waited for him to continue.

"I've been working with my hands for a month now. For the first time in my life. And then I watch the work that I do directly benefit the people around me. I pick a potato, a kid here gets to eat chips. I make a cup, somebody here drinks from it. It's so A to B, you know? I do a thing and then I see that thing help someone else, and I'm taken care of too. That's it, really. It's never been so simple before. I left a job on the trading floor of an investment bank. Numbers on screens that benefitted invisible rich assholes. I made lots of money, I had lots of nice shit and lots of shallow friends, and I was miserable."

"And..." Ellie pressed, "Sorry, but... You're telling me that all the sex has nothing to do with it? You seem pretty excited to unleash the beast or whatever"

"It's release the beast, if you'll recall, trademark pending," he said, pointing a finger at her and grinning. Ahmed chuckled. "No, but seriously, what do you want me to say? Of course that's part of it."

"Trevor paid his dues," said Ahmed. "We all do. He's lived here, he's contributed, he's a real member of the community, and he's had no sexual gratification for the last month. I've watched him work his ass off. On his first day, a douchebag finance bro--"

"Hey!" said Trevor.

"Dude, the first thing you said to me was bragging about the fucking Beemer you left at home," said Ahmed.

"It was a cool Beemer..." Trevor muttered. They all laughed, including Ellie.

"Like I said, douchebag finance bro gets off that plane, and now he knows how to make stuff and take care of babies like Mary Poppins. It's crazy how people transform here. And yeah, Trevor's gonna make some Resets and probably have fun doing it."

"Real talk, if I was just here to fuck, that wouldn't be a good enough reason anyway," said Trevor. "I made a lot of money..."

"We know, Trevor," said Bailey with a groan, and Ellie laughed again.

"Shut up, I'm making a point! If I was just here for that, why would I? Girls weren't even putting a dent in my budget at home. I'M JUST BEING HONEST!" he yelled, as Bailey punched him in the shoulder and Ahmed laughed again.

"So then why did you come?" Ellie responded, not laughing. The table went quiet. "Seriously. I guess you met a recruiter like Hannah somewhere -- but you had a cool life. Why did you come?"

Trevor looked down at his sandwich crumbs and shrugged. After a couple of seconds he said to his plate, "Twelve years."

The group sat in silence for a few short moments. Then Ahmed leaned over to Bailey and shattered the solemn moment by muttering, "So who's gonna tell her?"

At this signal, Bailey broke into a manic smile.

"Tell me what?" Ellie went wide-eyed. "You know I know about the gamma ray thing --"

Bailey was laughing now. "Ohhhh, no no no, my friend. That's not what he's talking about. YOU are out of uniform, in case you hadn't noticed."

Ellie looked down at her own tank top -- which was distinctly not one of the gray T-shirts she had been told to wear. "Oh, whoops." She shrugged and looked up. "I'll change after --"

"Were it so easy!" cackled Bailey to the heavens, and Ellie was unnerved. "No, my child! A new Recruit without the new Recruit uniform must be taught the consequences!"

The talk at nearby tables had died down, and more and more eyes turned on Ellie, grinning mischievously. They all knew something she did not. Ahmed and Trevor were now standing.

"Sorry," said Trevor, grinning again. "It was really hard not to warn you this whole time."

Ellie stood too, her heart racing. "What the hell is happening right now?"

"THE PUNISHMENT!" Trevor and Ahmed yelled triumphantly together. "TO THE LAKE!"

"The lake?? Wh --"

But now several people were advancing on Ellie -- people from other tables as well -- and before she knew it, she was borne skyward by dozens of hands and arms. She shrieked as she found herself carried aloft above the heads of her assailants. "To the lake!" The swelling and laughing crowd chanted together. A huge procession now carried her mercilessly to the swimming dock. "To the lake!"

Ellie was now leering, panicked, over the end of the dock into crystalline water. People who were already spending part of their lunch break swimming cheered from below.

She understood now, and braced herself for the inevitable.

Then she felt herself lowered a few inches, and then thrust upward. She was airborne. There was a splash and a rush of cool water as it enveloped her.