And then there’s the mournful sound of the conch shell again, farther away, softer.
Gone. Noah is gone. To where, and for what, she doesn’t know. Julia’s legs give out for real; she drops onto the lanai. And I’ve lost Evie again. Even though she knows it wasn’t real, it felt real—to have held her in her arms, and now for them to be empty again.
Beth crouches down next to her, stares pensively at the ocean’s edge. There’s a package of blue pills in her hand—she presses two out, pops them in her own mouth, grinds them with her teeth, and swallows.
“The VOCs are off the charts right now,” Beth says. “I managed to get four down your throat without choking you, but you should take two more.”
Julia ignores her, wraps her arms around her knees, hugs them to her. A poor substitute. “What happened to Noah?”
“He went off, with the others. One less problem to worry about. Not on our team, for sure.”
Our team.
Beth stands, pockets the pills. She wears olive cargo pants, brown hiking boots, a lightweight, zippered olive jacket. There’s a backpack on the floor. An embossed GREER ENTERPRISES logo that matches the packaging on the pills.
She works for Aunt Liddy. Was sent here, just like me.
“Now I’d recommend you get up,” Beth says. “There’s a lot to do and not much time.”
Julia looks at her great-aunt’s plan within a plan. How many more layers are there that she’d never been told about? “Why the hell would I do anything you say?”
Beth picks up the backpack, slings it over her shoulder. “Because there’s a boat. But I don’t get a location for the boat until I—we—get what’s left of Irene and that goddamn flower. This whole place is going to be incinerated soon, and I, for one, plan to survive, because I have people to live for too. You can come, you can stay, I don’t give a shit—honestly, I think my job would be easier without you, but Bailey said I should give it a shot, so here I am. Who knows, you might be useful. So you can tag along if you want, or not. If you do, throw some clothes on and let’s get a move on. With a quickness, ’cause I’m out of here in two minutes.”
A boat. Here, on the island. Possibly another lie, but knowing Aunt Liddy, she’d have another exit plan. Just in case.
“All right,” Julia says, slowly getting to her feet. “All right.”
Beth, unlike Noah, is a silent partner. They trek along the path toward the village without speaking, which suits Julia fine. It’s not like she’d get an answer she’d believe anyway. Beth walks fast without a single misstep, climbing over the lava rocks easily, even in the dim moonlight. Sometimes she has to wait for Julia to catch up, and when Julia does, Beth just starts off again, without a word. It makes Julia miss Noah, as annoying as he could be. He’d seemed genuine, at the end. Beth is cold, impersonal. All business.
Julia’s sneakers don’t grip the wet earth as well as her hiking boots did. She’s already twisted her ankle twice. Her dark jeans are okay camouflage in the night, but the best she could come up with for a top was a gray T-shirt, which leaves her arms exposed. It’ll be a problem when they get into the interior. The bites still throb, too, a painful reminder of what lies ahead. She’s exhausted. Hungry. And although her mind feels clearer, it doesn’t feel like it’s really coalesced back inside herself. There are ghosts of other formless thoughts inside her, that pull.
If she stopped taking the pills, would she lose touch with reality and go back to the cave? Would she at least have Evie in some imaginary realm?
She wonders what the other churchwomen are dreaming of. If they all lost someone, something important to them, and prefer to live in the twilight of a kind of induced madness. She understands the allure. But if she stayed in the imaginary realm, the real Evie would never see her again. Ethan had convinced the judge that Julia was irrelevant, a dangerous influence even. He’s probably convincing Evie of the same thing.
Her backpack, still wet, starts to feel heavy. She wonders if Beth used her lapse of consciousness to examine the contents of the backpack, if she knows about the black tin box, the GPS phone, the knife.
Probably.
She eyes Beth’s backpack. Are her missing things in there?
“So the medication,” Julia says to Beth’s back. “Where did you get it?”
“From your twitching fingers. Someone broke into my room and stole my meds, which means I don’t have enough to make it to the return flight, which means I have to get on that boat or I’ll be a brain-dead zombie myself in a few days.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Of course, I could have taken your last pack and left you, but I didn’t. You’re welcome.”
“Well then, can I have them back?”
Beth turns to look over her shoulder. “I think the person with tactical knowledge should hold onto them, don’t you?” Then she picks up her pace, putting a yard between them.
Asshole, Julia thinks. But they are, for the moment at least, in this together.
Something trills from within the depths of the jungle, a call Julia hasn’t heard before. If trying to navigate the jungle during the day almost killed her, she can’t imagine trekking through it at night will go much better, Beth or no Beth. At least they’re far from it, skirting the cliffs where big waves crash. She guesses they’re close to the coconut tree where she’d stopped with Isaac.
She’s glad she’s held the knowledge of the girl close, something no one knows but her. Beth probably has her own GPS phone—she wouldn’t be confident about finding the flower without it—but Julia senses that something else will be required, a layer even Beth doesn’t know about, that will be revealed when it’s too late to stop, turn around, go back. That seems to be her great-aunt’s standard operating procedure.
Julia hears water ahead—they must be close to the gulch. She looks up, and the sky is completely clear, even close to the top of Kapu’s craggy peak. No rain falls, but she imagines it would take a few hours for all the runoff to drain into the ocean. Will they find the nightmarchers gathered in front of a river that’s impossible to cross?
Beth hears it too, and stops, raises a hand for Julia to stop too. She does. The air seems pregnant—waiting.
“We’ll go slow,” whispers Beth. “If I say turn and run, run. Where’s your knife?”
Julia looks at her. “They’re people, Beth, people we know.”
“They’re not people at the moment.”
Julia crosses her arms over her chest.
“Fine,” says Beth. “If something happens, you’re on your own.”
Julia highly doubts this. If she wasn’t some kind of requirement, there’s no way Beth would be bothering with her at all.
Beth steps off the path onto the grass, so that the sound of her boots on the rocks and pebbles doesn’t give them away. Julia does the same. Slowly they make their way around a bend, crouching low. No cover here along the cliffs, no shrubs or vegetation.
Which makes what they see before them even stranger.
There is a river ahead of them, not nearly as massive and threatening as it was earlier, but still wide and deep.
And there’s a bridge.
Not a man-made bridge, not rope, and knots, and planks. This bridge is made of some kind of hard vine, twisting and arcing over the waters.
“That wasn’t there before,” Julia whispers.
“I know,” says Beth. She approaches it cautiously, tests the edge of the bridge with her foot. It’s firm, and doesn’t yield. Then she steps up onto it, tests it with her weight. It holds.
Julia grips the straps of her backpack tighter. “What is it?”
“Roots,” says Beth. “Tree roots. I think.”
Julia looks to where the trees are. A good two miles up the hill, at least, and on the other side of the lava-rock wall.
“What does it mean?” she asks.
Beth doesn’t turn around or look at her. “It means we should hurry.” And with that, she starts to cross the bridge, holding he
r arms out for balance, taking one careful step at a time.
Julia gets a prickling sensation at the back of her neck that someone, or something, is watching.
They don’t encounter anything else that strange the rest of the way to the village, and the weather remains clear. As they reach its periphery, Julia realizes she’s finally stopped rhyming. Her head is her own space again. But she misses it, in a way. Feels like she’s trapped in the prison of her own skin. Isolated. Alone. Disconnected.
Beth crouches low to the ground. Julia does the same.
The whole village is ablaze with light—electric by the looks of it. Light streams out from all of the bungalows, from the windows of the church, the greenhouse in the distance glowing through the opaque glass.
The power’s back on. If she can find a plug, she can get her GPS phone working again.
There’s a crowd gathered in front of the church—the churchwomen are all wearing their smocks; the tourists, all about a foot apart, are lined up evenly. They form a circle around a couple—Fred and Heather? She can’t tell; they’re too far away. What does it mean? Are they each in their own worlds, believing a reality of their own creation, where all their broken parts are healed, where all their stories have a happy ending?
Beth digs in her backpack, pulls out a pair of binoculars. Peers through them. “I don’t understand. They haven’t been here long enough to be this affected. It’s like the process is accelerating.”
“You said the VOCs were off the charts. Is it related?”
“Fuck if I know. Fuck if anyone knows. Where’s Irene’s grave?”
“At the far end of the cemetery, below the greenhouse. But her body wasn’t in the coffin. They might not have exhumed her yet.”
Beth nods, obviously calculating. “That could be a problem.”
“The Reverend isn’t affected. Why?”
“Maybe it tried him and spit him out. He’d be a shepherd with no flock if his congregation wasn’t brain-dead. Narcissistic prick.”
Julia knows what it’s like to be surrounded by people but essentially alone. The darkest form of loneliness. “Let me see,” she says.
Beth hands the binoculars to her. “We’ll have to circle around in the jungle cover to get to the cemetery.”
Julia holds them up to her eyes. Isaac has a dull, catatonic look on his face, and the redhead’s right arm is trembling. Meanwhile, the Reverend holds a Bible over her head, practically beaming.
Julia remembers that day she was visiting the Reverend, how the redhead had purposefully caught her eye before she ran to the greenhouse. She’s just about to hand the binoculars back when she sees Noah standing at the back of the crowd, his jaw still slack.
Oh God . . . Noah.
Don’t get sentimental, says Ethan. Take my word for it, only the ruthless survive.
And there are a thousand and one reasons, perfectly good ones, why she should just leave Noah behind without a second glance. Who knows what his real plans were for her?
The wind rustles through the trees; they creak, and crack, and whisper secrets. What kind of a person would that make her, if she abandoned him? The others? She doesn’t owe them anything; they’re rich and spoiled strangers, but they’re human beings with lives too. Families. People waiting at home to see them again. How could she look Evie in the face knowing that people died for her to have that privilege?
Julia lowers the binoculars. “How big is your boat?”
“What . . . why?”
“Could everyone fit?”
Beth snorts quietly. “No way. We don’t have time to be playing around, there’s—”
“You need me. Otherwise you would have let me . . . become one of them.” A nightmarcher is on the tip of her tongue, but it feels like bad luck to speak it aloud.
“It’s not—”
“If the VOCs are crazy high, it’s for a reason. And they’re part of the reason. But if you need a reason, Noah can connect with the carrier and tell them to hold their fire. He can buy us time.”
“How is he going to connect with the carrier?”
“I’d imagine the same way you’re going to get the location of the boat. You must have a GPS phone too, unless Aunt Liddy equipped you with carrier pigeons. Also, I want my pills back.”
Beth grabs her binoculars roughly from Julia’s hands. “Fine, then I’ll just go solo. Not a problem. I’m better off anyway.”
A bluff, and not a very good one. “Go ahead, knock yourself out.”
There’s a pause. Julia doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, because she means each and every word.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Beth reluctantly unzips the front pocket of her backpack, stuffs the binoculars in, and pulls the package of pills out. Julia reaches out a hand, and Beth practically slams them into her palm. “Maybe Noah. Maybe. But this is not a rescue mission. The others—
Julia slips the pills in her pocket, gets to her feet, crouching low, and starts for the cover of the jungle.
“Jesus H. Christ,” she hears behind her.
This time she’s the one not looking back to see if her partner is following.
Julia wonders if the girl is out there, hidden away from sight, watching it all unfold. Or maybe the girl was a hallucination, a ghost created by Julia’s mind because she didn’t take the medication, a layer of fantasy infusing itself into reality. Or maybe this really is some kind of purgatory for lost souls, hers among them.
They stay in the shadows, making their way to the opposite side of the clearing. All of her senses are heightened, taut. A finality is coming—it will be either one way, or another. Julia will either get off the island, and live, or she won’t. A kind of judgment will be rendered.
The last time she was judged, it didn’t go so well.
Given the family history of mental illness, alcoholism, and the histrionic statements presented by the respondent, the court finds . . .
She can hear the snaps and cracks as Beth trails behind her, although the vegetation here isn’t as thick or dense as it gets in the interior. Bits of what the Reverend says is carried by the ocean breeze.
—each of them will sit under his vine—
—fig tree, with no one to make them afraid—
—the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken—
With no one to make them afraid. No, what Julia knows now is that the nightmarchers are definitely beyond fear, and thought, and desire. She pushes aside a leaf, takes a step forward—some kind of thorny vine catches the hem of her jeans. She has to give her leg a good yank to free it.
Does Beth know what’s really happening? She doubts it. It’s like that story where all the blind men have their hands on a part of the elephant, but no one can say what it is exactly. Maybe not even Aunt Liddy knows what the whole beast here, right now, really is.
Beth uses the break to pull out the binoculars again. “They haven’t seen us; that’s good,” she says softly. “I don’t see how we’re going to separate him from the others, though, without raising a pretty obvious stink. And witless or not, there’s more of them than us.”
A bird hidden in the canopy above starts to chatter. And Julia gets that dizzying sensation again, like the ground beneath her is shivering, like the periphery of her skin is amorphous.
I spy with my little eye.
Impossible. She took the pills, she shouldn’t be—
Something that begins with the letter g.
The glass walls of the greenhouse are opaque, and she sees dark forms within it, like the organs beneath the translucent skin of the white gecko. A gentle rhythmic humming sound, like blood pulsing through veins, like air coursing through lungs.
“Greenhouse.”
Beth drops the binoculars from her eyes. “What did you say?”
But she’s already started for it.
“Let us pray!” the Reverend shouts. “Let us pray for these, our new branches!”
They made her put a hand on the Bible before she testified. . . . Do you sol
emnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth . . . Not that the truth was told in the courtroom that day. But maybe truth, like everything else, like reality itself, is a subjective experience. Maybe it’s like a quantum particle that shifts even when it’s only noticed by a passing atom—something no one can rightly put their finger on.
“Wait, Julia—”
The Reverend’s back is to her, although she thinks—feels—that someone is watching her walk up and out of the jungle’s shadow to the clearing right in front of the greenhouse door. A rickety thing, made of mildewed wood planks, a rusty knob that’s loose under her hand. Not as exotic as her great-aunt’s greenhouse, and undoubtedly less pleasant—there’s a nearly unbearable stench that seeps out from it, like the smell of a rancid, rotting body.
Like when her neighbor died, only a thousand times worse.
She opens the door and steps inside, closing it softly behind her.
CHAPTER 20
IT LOOKS LIKE JULIA WON’T have to go far to find the corpse flower after all.
So many of them growing right here, long rows stretching out end to end, releasing their sickening fragrance and yet also astonishingly beautiful. A fine mist of white pollen floats and eddies in the air, illuminated by warehouse-style pendant lights overhead. All this from what Isaac had called a small electric generator? A few solar panels? Doesn’t seem like they’d be able to put out this kind of power.
The greenhouse is about as long as three garages, with another door on the opposite side, a square, vented cupola above. She slowly walks down a row. The flowers cover mounds of earth, some low, some high, all connected by thin green vines, with white fungus stretching between them. In some places the fungus gathers into thicker cords; in others, it branches out, like nerves or veins.
And the blooms—as big as her hand, they look like massive orchids, small black beads creating a spiral at the core of each. She cautiously steps toward one, reaches a finger out to touch a petal—it’s soft and . . . warm? It releases a soft poof of white pollen; then the petals fold in on themselves slowly until it’s curled in a ball.
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