This story, by Ross O’Donnell, is one of three winners of the 2025 Sustainability Writing Awards hosted by the Office of Sustainability. You can read more about Ross here.
The city barely looks like a city from overhead. The generations who first paved its overgrown streets and erected its shored-up high-rises would struggle to recognize their old nesting grounds now. Jaz likes to think that all the birds who land here must be confused, to find so many of the gardens and prairies seen from above perched atop concrete towers. But many of the birds who come to Adon stay, so they can’t be too put off by the growing city.
That’s their motto: the Growing City. It’s painted in the murals you see when you come in via dirt road. Though the philosophy of Adon is one of regrowth, the main roads in are still regularly weeded and worked over to keep them safe for transport. There are no vehicles inside the city, but plenty of neighbors still use them, and Adon encourages visitors and trade as a part of its natural life, just like the cranes and the milkweed.
Jaz banks and turns on her kite-wings, a sturdy construction of wood and canvas that hugs her securely around the chest and stomach. The canvas sails loom out beyond the reach of her arms, letting her glide around the city. The group that invented them, scholars in the overgrown moss building which houses so many practical workshops, had originally devised them as a way to get from the green roofs down to the ground. But since their implementation in Adon, others, like Jaz, have discovered ways to gain altitude, catching the winds from out over the lake and climbing up above even the highest peaks of the city. It’s a euphoric feeling. Jaz feels it now.
But flying too long leaves her arms tired and her breath thin; she’s ready to come down to Earth, and Adon prides itself on being a welcoming place to land. With subtle shifts of her limbs and back, she begins a gentle spiral down to a soft, open space—a miniature prairie of pollinator-friendly wildflowers which sits between two ancient libraries. In the center, a circular pond ripples, fed by filtered lakewater to provide a watering hole for the people and animals of Adon. It serves as a guide for Jaz’s careful descent, and she loops it a dozen times before a practiced landing takes her into the prairie flowers, her canvas-padded knees driving into the soft soil until she slows to a stop. It takes a lot of work to train that landing; kite-wings are integrated firmly, artfully, into the arms and hands of the flyer, such that one can’t hold their arms out in front of them to meet the ground. This design is an excellent preventer of broken fingers and sprained wrists, but it takes discipline to give up your arms to wings. Jaz has spent years learning to glide. It’s worth every second.
On her knees in the wildflowers, the remaining tide of momentum catches her, rocking her forward, but she knows by now how to trust the weight of the wings on her back, how to lean into them and counterbalance her inertia so she doesn’t end up face-first in the dirt. The smells of milkweed and prairie phlox mingle around her as her head swims momentarily. A neighborhood of insects, who shied away as Jaz came in, is slowly returning, buzzing and chirping around her head. Slowly, like waking from a dream, Jaz gathers the strength to stand.
Two soft pressures against her back stop her. Capable, trusted hands, already flipping some of the heavy latches that sit against Jaz’s shoulder blades.
“Mind if I get you out of there?” a warm, rough voice inquires, already working at it. Linel, a baker-archivist who works at the library west of the field. Jaz has known them since they were children, telling stories in the library of colossal ships on distant oceans, and glistening, choking oil slicks. They’d always had a morbid interest in the past. Jaz relaxes into their touch.
“Please,” she sighs, whistling in relief as her left forearm comes free of the heavy frame. “You saw me come in?”
Linel always keeps an eye on the pond-prairie while they’re at work. For incoming gliders, as well as for the deer and coyotes who occasionally come through—though rarely at the same time.
“I did. Solid landing.”
“I thought so.”
Linel works free Jaz’s entire left side from the kite-wings, letting her droop with exhaustion. Now that the frame is no longer holding an arm, Linel turns a series of safety latches, and it collapses easily against itself on Jaz’s back, canvas folding crisply along pre-set lines.
“You look beat. How long were you up there? I thought you were at the apiary today.”
Helping Nona with the beehives is one of Jaz’s favorite tasks, in part because she gets to taste samples of raw honey during harvests, of which one should be coming up. The city’s main apiary is set up far west of the big libraries and pond-prairie, in a much larger field bordered on two sides by stands of shoreline trees. Jaz had set out there this morning—on foot this time; the bee-prairie was too far from major buildings to make for reasonable gliding—but had been interrupted on the way by Nona and her apprentice on bikes, towing an empty beehive frame. Jaz relates this to Linel, gesturing with her free arm.
“Apparently, someone exploring the Isthmus yesterday found a wild hive in one of the old roofs. It’s on the way to collapsing, so Nona went to go track them down and see if she could relocate it.”
The Isthmus is a more treacherous place than most; when the lakes rose, it was hit hardest, a low-lying stretch of land between the two bodies of water. In the decades since, even after the worst of the flooding drained, a slow metamorphosis has begun. The stretch is well on its way to the wetland it once was, the remains of old wood and brick buildings slumping into eager grass and sedge. It’s a beautiful place, in many respects. But it’s not steady ground, and Adon doesn’t have the kind of workforce needed to restore it one way or the other.
Feeling recovered, Jaz helps Linel detach her other arm, both their hands working at the straps and buckles that hold residents of Adon up in the sky. A grasshopper with short, stout little antennae hops curiously onto Jaz’s bent knee for a second before disappearing into the grass.
“You didn’t want to go with them?” The clup, clup, clup noise of tense metal buckles flipping open against leather. Jaz feels only a slight vibration where the wings are still harnessed to her right side.
“Didn’t have a bike with me.”
Linel hmms skeptically. This is an excuse, and they both know it. Bike racks are set up all across the city, most teeming with a menagerie of bikes and scooters. They’re assembled and tended to lovingly by Adon’s mechanics, who take pride in the city’s only vehicles. Jaz gives in.
“Alright, plus it’s a dark moon the next couple of days. I saw the last sliver of it last night; it was barely a thread.”
Linel chuckles. “Oh, I get it. Hoping to catch an earlybird coming through?”
Jaz shrugs, but she knows her face isn’t hiding her excitement. They always come more frequently this time of the month, just like fish coming to the surface, no longer cowed by the light of the moon.
“I just finished my orientation training last week, you know? I’m finally old enough to actually talk to them, I don’t want to miss my chance.”
“I don’t know,” Linel huffs, and heaves the kite-wings off of Jaz’s back, finally, their strong baker’s arms taking the weight better than Jaz’s whole body.
Jaz rolls her shoulders in relief before getting to her feet, a couple of bees swerving indignantly as she jostles the flowers. At last, she can turn to face her helper, who’s just finishing folding up the kite-wings, the straps repurposed to fix the contraption into a single Jaz-sized bundle.
Linel’s rounded shoulders relax as they set the bundle down in the grass. Their long, dark hair, which they keep tied back in the mornings as they bake, now hangs down around their face.
“Maybe I just know too much about them from work,” they say, with a nod to the library, “but I don’t think you’re missing much.” They never were interested in meeting history face-to-face.
–
Adon is a unique and spectacular place, in many respects. It’s a survivor of catastrophe, built on the damaged bones of what came before. It’s lush, and green, and fruitful under the hands of its caretakers. Its residents fly on hand-built wings, and walk through prairies planted a hundred feet in the air. But what makes Adon truly different, to its neighbors and to those travellers who stumble upon it, is its ghosts. Adon is a haunted city, as well as a growing one. But its residents don’t like to talk about the guests that way. They call them the earlybirds.
The first time Jaz saw one, she was six. She has a hazily lit memory of walking down one of Adon’s smaller streets, the asphalt long cracked down to gravel and sprouting with hardy plants. Her father walked with her, pointing out each pioneering species, the mosses and the weeds, and explaining to her how someday, after generations of those brave plants had grown and died on this very street, the gravel beneath them would be transformed. Their roots and matter would have slowly worked the grey crust into a true soil, deep and soft enough for blooming shrubs to grow, then sprawling trees, taller even than him. Jaz didn’t quite see the point, since by then they’d both surely be old and grey and decrepit, and anyway she thought the scrubby little dandelions and the chunks of pavement she could kick down the street were just fine, but she liked the animated way he talked.
Then they’d seen her, Jaz’s father first, straightening up. A woman, or the shape of a woman, walking down the street toward them. The woman’s whole body was warped by a dull translucence, and faintly glowing. Jaz was reminded, impossibly, of her own night-time reflection in the lake, weakly lit by the stars. A shimmering, perfect image of herself, only distant, warped by the depth and movement of the dark water. The woman looked like that, or she didn’t look like anything Jaz could imagine.
The silvery outline of the strange woman’s arm swept completely through a bent lamppost as she walked, as though even her body didn’t know it was there. Or that she was here. A few steps later, and the woman was just meters from Jaz and her father, who had kept walking, quiet now, with a focused calm. She seemed to be getting less lake-y by the step, color settling in her face and hair and her peach-colored top. As they approached, she stopped fully, her face falling as she glanced around her. She took in the buildings, storefronts near-unrecognizable under trellising plants and makeshift structural repairs. The overgrown road, left to nature’s devices.
She stepped back, snatched a device from her pocket, and tapped at it, but whatever she’d hoped for— walkie-talkie chatter, or a flashlight, or Jaz hadn’t known what that little thing was for—didn’t come. Her father tapped Jaz’s shoulder twice, firmly, a touch that always meant “hold on while I go ahead.” She didn’t know if he’d ever outright told her that; it was just what they did. When there was a weird sound in the woods during a hike, or when that shelf had fallen on Anthony when they were fixing up the city pantry, leaving him walking around in a big boot the rest of that autumn. So, burning with curiosity about the woman who looked like she’d come out of a reflection, Jaz stopped, and her father went ahead.
That was about the end of the encounter—Jaz’s father had stopped a short distance from the apparition, spoken quietly to her for a bit, and then gray-haired Juniper, who had apparently been keeping watch from overhead, arrived on the scene, folding up her kite-wings and led the strange woman east, towards the domed orientation hall.
Her father had explained, later, about the earlybirds. About how they were residents of Adon from before it was Adon, back when it had a population of hundreds of thousands, and grew out like a crown of artificial branches from between the lakes. About how shortly after the storm, when the water was still a storey high between the buildings, the survivors started telling tales of figures in the water—not bodies, not swimming, but walking beneath the surface, talking to unseen companions, entering flooded lobbies, before fading away again in the murk.
Those first years had been hard, after the storm that filled the lakes and sent them scouring over the land. Weather had been building to extremes for some years by then, scalding, murderous hot summers and tearing winds and winters that nearly froze the city solid. Many residents had already left for climes promised to be more stable, and more thinned out as the heavy rains began that spring, running in rivers through the streets, and an evacuation order was put out as the big storm whorled in from the west, picking up speed and water as it went. Many left. The birds were gone weeks before. But too many people stayed. Out of ignorance, or loyalty, stubbornness, or a lack of means, there were still thousands left when the lakes rose and drowned the old city. Cars barreled through the streets, buoyed on the invading tide. Waves crashed into foundations, and buildings groaned and came apart in a din drowned out by the wind and thunder. It was a wreckage that lasted days.
When at last it settled, the storm spinning out and dispersing eastward in lashes of bitter wind and rain, the city was left in an eerie, apocalyptic silence. Trees and cars floated lazily downstream. Every so often, a chunk of masonry would slough off a crooked building and splash down below. The scarce survivors, those lucky people who had been high enough to avoid the floodwaters and whose buildings had stood the test of catastrophe, looked out of windows and climbed onto rooftops, squinting as the sun returned for the first time in weeks to shine on a drowned city. They caught their breath. Took stock of their food, their bruises, their hearts. They looked for their neighbors in the stairwells, or visible across the detritus-filled canals of streets and avenues, and the luckiest ones found someone looking back.
Adon began as a string of neighbors, calling to one another from fire escapes and hanging signs out of windows. Ropes and ladders were slung between buildings, food lowered in baskets and ferried across crude pulleys or tossed into waiting hands. Gardeners, their projects washed away, began anew with their leftovers on sun-warmed rooftops. The sense of apocalypse faded, imperceptibly, with every shouted greeting, every meal shared over flooded streets. They weren’t the lone survivors of the old city anymore; they were the seeds of something new, growing in hard soil but lovingly tended.
The waters drained slowly, so that by the time people stepped shaky foot back onto the cracked streets, they’d already grown used to the provisional infrastructure above. It remained a part of Adon even as its people descended from the buildings, a process so resembling apes coming down from the trees that people joked they’d become a new species entirely. That wasn’t true, of course. There was nothing more human than lending a neighbor a cup of sugar, no matter how far you had to toss the bag. Adon, as a battered sign washed into the city named it, was a community before it was a city again, open to anyone who washed up on its streets.
That spirit was what Jaz grew up with, why the moment she turned eighteen she took the optional training with Juniper to be able to properly handle an earlybird when one came through, stumbled tangible and scared into Adon like the woman she’d seen as a child. To talk, in words familiar to them, gently explaining where they were, that they’d be back soon enough, sure as the tide.
“And when they ask what’s happened to their city, between us and then,” Juniper had told her in her clear, strident voice, “you tell them a disaster, unavoidable. But you tell them they can prepare, that’s the crucial thing. Lay the groundwork for survival and growth. Plant the seeds. Community ties, preparedness, cultivation of the connections to people and city and ecosystem. That’s what we need from them, Jaz. As many as we can meet.”
Jaz had nodded—on board, of course. If she was going to get to be an ambassador from the “future” for these people, she wanted to give a message of hope. But she was curious.
“There’s no way they can stop the storm, is there? I mean, most of these people will probably evacuate anyway, right?”
“But some of them won’t.” Juniper’s steely brows furrowed. “Some of them will be in these buildings when the storm comes. Some will be there after. It’s our duty to help them grow as best we can while they’re in our care, or else we may find we don’t have the foundations to grow in ourselves.”
Jaz thought of the cracked asphalt under her father’s feet, studded with weeds. Of the tall purple flowers that grew in the sandy surface of that street now. Her hands, calloused from years of climbing ladders and handling ropes as she explored the rooftop gardens, clasped in her lap, the weight of speaking with an earlybird settling onto her like heavy wings.
–
Grinning at dubious Linel, Jaz takes the bundled apparatus back from them.
“Not missing much? Think of what those poor birds are missing, not getting to talk to me?”
Ignoring their rolled eyes, she turns and heads for the orientation hall, the tall building lovingly restored by Adon’s handful of historians and architects, to remain recognizable across the generations. A lot of earlybirds end up drifting that way on their own, comforted by its silhouette. That’ll be the place to look.
People like to compare the earlybirds to fish, skittish, swimming up at the darkest cycle of the moon. But Jaz thinks they have the name right. They’re just circling, looking for somewhere to land. Just like everyone who finds themself in Adon, past and present. They’re birds.