Revolution in the Underground Read Free Page B

Evaluation,” inquired one of the younger boys.
                  “They do it so they can tell whether or not you have enough common sense to take on a particular duty or begin a certain apprenticeship.”
                  “No,” cried another, “it’s all just games the Elders play in order to unite everyone under a shared experience.”
                  “What happens if you don’t pass?” the youngest boy asked.
                  “Everyone in town makes fun of you for the rest of your life, and you have to wait a full year just to be evaluated again!”
                  “Don’t listen to him,” another person said honestly, “he’s just yanking your chain.  Most people pass their first time but it all depends on what you want to go into.  If you want to go into food production then they’ll probably ask you easy things like, ‘is this mushroom poisonous’ or ‘when is such and such ripe?’  Easy stuff your Mom or Dad probably taught you when you were young.  If you want to be an engineer, like me, they’ll give you hypothetical situations… like whether or not a particular arrangement of structures will support a given cluster of huts, or how you can repair a water mill if a something gets jammed in such and such.  They just wanna make sure that you can do your job competently.”
                  “What’s the big deal if you fail?  Sounds like you get another year to relax and do nothing.  Sounds like a good deal to me!”  All of the boys laughed.
                  Ember continued to drift in the water on his back.  He slowly opened his eyes and looked at the dense foliage of the towering canopy.  The Falls was a truly unique place, it had a little bit of everything: water, rocks, trees and sky.  It was essentially a large precipice with a large basin carved out.  Presumably the basin formed after thousands of years of weathering and erosion by the waterfall above it, but the near perfect location had caused some people to speculate that it was intentionally constructed sometime in the distant past.  Unlike the other ridges in Erosa, the Falls was not well developed.  There were almost no huts around it and there were only two bridges connecting it to the rest of Erosa—one of which was so dilapidated, it was hardly passable.
                  Ember gazed at some of the animals in the overlying branches.  He saw a pair of monkeys sharing fruit and wondered what they thought of the humans gathering below.  The sun’s rays peered between the branches but were not yet sharp enough to hurt his eyes.  As he floated through the water it occurred to him that he hadn’t said a single word since arriving.  His friends’ chattering sounded like garbled murmuring below the water, as incoherent and as rhythmic as the hum of nature.  He closed his eyes again and tried to think about how far above the ground he was floating.  He thought about how the water would soon join the very same river that carried his mother and father off into the distance many years prior.  He dipped his nose beneath the water and pretended like he didn’t exist.  When he came up to breathe, he imagined how the thin film of water slowly and smoothly fell from his face.  He wiped down his wet hair, which plastered neatly to one side.
                  Ember’s mind tried to make sense of the colors that were dancing across his eyelids.  The inside of his eyelids looked like a strangely occupied and uniquely heterogeneous landscape—composed of innumerable transient dots that seemed to flit into and out of existence.  He tried to focus on one of the dots.  He tried to make sense of the images they formed.  He tried to describe what he saw.  But like the forest and the trees, he was unsuccessful.
                  He thought about Rouge.  He had actually heard about her catastrophic Evaluation a