by Yannick Hill
Deep Sky. That thing Scout mentioned on TV. Missy stepped down from the trailer and stood in front of Silas in the gloom. ‘How do you know I won’t take this sword and cut you down where you stand?’ she said. She had to keep reminding herself: this was a kidnapping, no two ways about it.
‘There’s many reasons I can think of but the main one would be because you want to know what comes next, and I’m the one who’s going to take you there. We’ve got a long road ahead of us, you need to keep your strength. And you need a guide.’
Missy reached out and took her sword, unsheathed it from its black leather scabbard and angled the blade so that it caught the light of the moon. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘I want to take this opportunity to apologize,’ Silas said. ‘We had to get you out of there. They were closing in on our location at the trailer park and we had to make a move right away, no time for questions. I could tell you were feeling a little homesick . . . we had to get you out.’
‘Who’s they?’ Missy said, ‘You mean the cops?’
‘Not the cops.’
‘My father then,’ Missy said. ‘You’re wrong, by the way. I’m not homesick, I never was, not even a little. I meant what I said back there: whatever this is, I’m ready. Forget the past, I want to live in the future.’
‘That’s good to hear, Missy, it truly is. Well, now we’re friends again, me and the kid could use some help setting up camp. You know how to build a fire?’
Missy squinted with embarrassment and shook her head no. Levon had once explained it to her, but saying and doing were two different things.
‘Well, that’s not a problem because I’m going to teach you,’ Silas said. ‘Boy, take the head torches and go with Missy to find us some wood.’
‘What about Bob?’ said the boy with no name. ‘He told me he so hungry he could eat the south end of a northbound skunk.’
‘Bob can stay in the car for now. You can take him one of those juicy carrots we picked up from the store just as soon as you’ve got us some firewood. Now, scoot!’
They sat in silence for some time, all three enjoying the warmth of the fire, sausages sizzling in a hanging pot. The night sky was so very, very dark. Missy had never seen so many stars, she had this sense that she was looking into the sky for the first time, deep into space, so deep it felt like falling. And the shooting stars. They came every few minutes it seemed, always seen out of the corner of her eye.
They sat in silence and Missy enjoyed the fire, looking into it as the flames danced ever upwards, the heat almost too much but she didn’t want to back away, and the kid with no name stroking his bunny rabbit, a little too hard she thought but with a steady rhythm, head to tail, head to tail, its triangle nose moving up and down, and Silas with his eyes closed, cross-legged with his arms out to the sides like he was meditating. He’d taken off his leather jacket to reveal a leather waistcoat and nothing underneath. Across his collar bone and down his arms, shoulders to wrists, every-where you could see skin, there were tattoos. Really it was one tattoo. An entire forest, and in amongst the trees there were animals, all the animals you might find in a real forest. By his right shoulder was an owl, and on his left forearm a bear had appeared from behind a fallen tree trunk. It looked just like the bear from before, it was weird, like a snapshot of what happened. It was like this tattoo was alive, and Missy was fascinated by it. She wanted to ask what it meant to him but at the same time she didn’t want to seem too interested.
Silas said yesterday there was no turning back, but did that mean she was being held prisoner? She wanted to call her mother, to hear her voice one last time. Her mother was lost, but it wasn’t her fault. She wanted to call her on the phone, hear her voice, not the words, just her voice, her voice, her hands, her hands stroking Missy’s hair as she went to sleep, stroking her hair and pausing to touch her on the cheek. But this was memory, this was when she was still a little girl, her mother’s hands stroking Missy’s long blonde hair, the perfume lingering long after lights out, Leticia’s lullabies in words she came to understand as she grew older. She wanted to call her mother on the phone but her mother was lost, moving through Versailles like a ghost. The way she carried herself. And her voice. It was like a different person.
Missy looked down at her hands in the light of the fire. They were dirty from collecting wood, and they smelled of dirt. She’d smelled dirt before. Went through a period of burying her dolls at the bottom of the garden at Versailles, explaining to her worried mom that they were going to sleep for the winter. But this dirt out here smelled different some-how, and Missy decided she liked it. The boy with no name had shown her the different kinds of kindling. Kindling, she loved that word, it was like it was already burning. The names and explanations for the different kinds of kindling sounded funny coming out of the kid’s mouth, but Silas had been a good teacher. Extra fine kindling (‘Like matchsticks, but it’s gotta be dry, Missy, it’s gotta be dry or it’s no good.’). Fine kindling (‘Thicker than a match, but thinner than a pencil. You got that, Missy? Hey! You listening to me?’). Small fuel (‘Thicker than a pencil but not thicker than your thumb. Ha! Thumb rhymes with dumb and you’re dumber than a box of rocks!’). Main fuel (‘Sticks thicker than your thumb that you can break over your knee, but that’s my job. That’s my job breaking the sticks cus I like doing that. You got a problem with me breaking the sticks, Missy? Cus even if you do I don’t care cus I’m breaking them sticks.’).
There was a loud crack from the fire that made Missy jump. Silas slowly opened his eyes and caught her wide-eyed expression. ‘That’s just moisture in the wood,’ he said. ‘It turns to steam and explodes. Nothing to worry about.’ He smiled. ‘You must be hungry, Missy.’
She nodded.
‘Well, I think these sausages are just about done. I’ve pre-sliced buns, there’s tomato ketchup and mustard. You like hot dogs, Missy?’
‘I love hot dogs.’
‘Good then.’
Missy had three hot dogs. #yum. The sausages were kind of burned on the outside but they tasted good, like eating a hot dog for the first time, but then pretty much all of this felt like a first. When she was done she licked her fingers. She rubbed her hands together then held them closer to the fire. She wasn’t cold but it was a nice feeling. She had helped make this fire, made the spark that caused these flames. This warmth, it was her warmth, she was here because she wanted to be. And she didn’t want her phone anymore. Something great about not knowing your location.
She wasn’t sure she trusted Silas, but then again, who did she trust anymore? She trusted River. She didn’t know half the stuff he got up to on the internet, but he would always be there for her when she needed him. That’s why she regretted not telling him what happened. What Casey did had cast a shadow, and Missy had gone inside herself. She hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone about it, not even her own twin brother who she told everything, and now she might never get a chance to explain. She hated the thought of having abandoned River, but her brother could handle himself. He had an imagination as deep and wide as an ocean. He was creative, and creative people found a way to survive, they could go inside themselves and find something new every time. Like diamonds in a cave.
Missy wasn’t sure if she was a creative person. She was a friendly person, she had friends and they seemed to like her. But there was something missing. She didn’t make anything. She thought she might want to design clothes. She loved fashion, she loved experimenting with different clothes. Years of watching her mom get dressed in Versailles’ master bedroom, emerging from the walk-in wardrobe in her extraordinary outfits, half of them her own making, looking and smelling like an empress from another world. Missy dreamed of having her own perfume one day, like Scout Rose. But Missy didn’t know. She didn’t know if she had the creative thing her mother and brother had. And her father. Was his work creative? He called himself a hacker, a coder, but she knew different. One hundred rooms and only Casey had a master key.
What
happened with her father had changed things for Missy. She couldn’t talk to anybody about what had happened, not even Levon, so she went inside herself, spent less and less time with her friends, and more time alone, and when she closed her eyes she could explore inside herself, explore the cave. Every night before she went to sleep, Missy would close her eyes and explore, going deeper every time. And there she found her own kind of treasure: crystalline fragments of memory, of desire, hope, anger, all different colors, all different shapes, but they were beautiful and they had weight and they felt important, more important than anything else. She’d wanted to bring them back into the waking world, assemble them into a new whole, like a new armor for herself, a new look for her waking life. She wanted to tell Levon. Just like he’d told her about the world outside Versailles, she wanted to tell him of her own discoveries, these things about herself she never knew before. But something told her she had to hold these things close. And anyway, it wasn’t something that was easy to put into words.
The sword video came at the right time. Scout dancing with her sword in the desert in the dying light. Her look, the dance, her silhouette. She had the right shape. This is what it would look like if Missy assembled all those fragments of herself in the right order. The right shape. When Missy watched the sword video she saw herself, a strong girl who could overcome anything, hell, who’d already left everything behind and was striking out on her own, tearing through the invisible curtain with her sword and stepping into the future.
‘Deep Sky,’ Silas said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘That’s where we’re headed. It’s in the far north, we have a long road to travel, but when we get there, everything will be different for you, Missy. I can promise you that. You’ll meet people, young people such as yourself who are looking for the same things. We live in a world of attachments – the information age – of the online social network, of tri-angulation, perpetual connectivity, frictionless sharing and our insatiable appetite for affirmation. But the people who live in that world have forgotten that where there is light there must also be darkness. We all have secrets, Missy, but what those people don’t understand is that we need secrets, because without that private, inner life, we lose the ability to distinguish ourselves, we lose the sense of who we really are. You ever heard of true dark, Missy?’
‘I haven’t,’ she said.
‘There are still places in the world, far from any human settlement, where the sky is truly dark. It is the sky that once was. They talk about the dark ages. Millions upon millions of stars visible to the naked eye. It’s all there still, only we can’t see it. We build, we expand, we cast our light on every-thing and everybody, we eat the darkness. I’ve seen it, Missy, the night sky as it should be, and when I saw it I knew who I was, I knew my purpose in life. True dark. I was there when he built Deep Sky, his monument to the true dark. I was there, Missy, and soon you will see it for yourself.’
‘Who is he?’ Missy said. ‘Who built Deep Sky?’
‘You will know in time.’
‘But I know your name.’
‘Ah, yes, but I was never chosen. My role is to choose.’
‘What about your son, does he have a name?’
The kid with no name didn’t look up from stroking his rabbit. ‘My son will have his time,’ Silas said. ‘He will have his time in Deep Sky. For now, he helps me in my work, he helps me choose.’
‘Did he help choose me?’ Missy said. They were speaking about the kid like he wasn’t there.
‘Why, yes, he did,’ said Silas. ‘As a matter of fact, he wouldn’t stop talking about you in the car. He thinks you’re a real life princess . . . Don’t you, kiddo?’
The kid with no name got to his feet without a word and walked away from the fire into the darkness. It looked for a moment like the white rabbit was floating in mid-air before they both disappeared.
‘You embarrassed him,’ Missy said.
‘Perhaps, but then what are fathers for? He’ll be back in a minute.’
Missy lay on her back and waited for a shooting star. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Ask away.’
‘That video. I mean, have you ever met Scout Rose? Did you ever, like, talk to her?’
‘Sure I did,’ Silas said, ‘Matter of fact, I was the one brought her in, just like I am you.’
Missy sat bolt upright. ‘Are you serious? You know Scout Rose? You really talked to her? She’s like my favorite recording artist of all time! I’ve been downloading her music since I was a little kid.’
‘She’s certainly a talented young woman, there’s no doubt about that. And one of the best students Deep Sky ever had.’
‘So it’s really true,’ Missy said, ‘All that time she was away, when no one knew where she was, she was with you guys, at Deep Sky?’
Silas chuckled. ‘Man, oh, man, you really got it bad, don’t you? Damn thing is, you remind me of her a little bit. Her enthusiasm, her curiosity for life. I’m sure the two of you would have got on just fine.’
Missy lay back down again, one hand under her head. The stars in the sky seemed to have quadrupled since she last looked. Scout Rose. Deep Sky. Something about it still didn’t seem right, but she couldn’t help feeling a little excited. She was totally on an adventure, following in the footsteps of her hero. Her millions of followers looking elsewhere and . . . she didn’t care. Her phone somewhere, the battery gone, the velvet of the unbreakable glass. She ran her thumb over the leather binding around her sword’s hilt. Her key to the future, whatever that may hold. She closed her eyes and played the sword video in her mind; Scout in the desert, dancing slowly to a hidden soundtrack, casting shapes, perfect shapes, in the twilight. She played the video until it went to black, and when Missy opened her eyes again she saw only stars.
‘Clouds are coming in,’ Silas said. ‘An hour from now all these stars will be gone. It will be like somebody turned the lights out. You’re tired, Missy, and it’s late. I’ve made up the bed in the trailer. We can sleep out here by the fire. You need a good night’s rest in the bed. Tomorrow will be a long day and you need your strength.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Missy.
‘I’m sure,’ Silas said.
The kid came and sat back down by the fire. Went back to stroking his bunny rabbit real hard, head to tail, head to tail, so hard Missy nearly had to say something, but she kept quiet, the deep sky above pulling her upward, something like gravity, so powerful she felt a tingling up and down her neck. So far, so far from home, no one to see this now. No one she knew. Right – out – here. Wherever here was, but, yeah, she felt alive, she felt undone. She thought of Cass, the tattoos of stars, wolf howling. She felt the chill of the desert on her back, held her hands out to the fire one last time, the amber flames dancing ever upward, the warmth of this fire that she’d helped build, a skill to take away with her, on to the next place. She glanced over at Silas once more. She wasn’t sure she trusted this man. Let’s see how this goes, she told herself. I can build a fire. I can drive a car. I can handle myself. Sword by her side, her heart still open, her heart, her body, her future. Far away from Versailles, out from under all those cameras. Even the dirt smelled different. Her millions of followers looking elsewhere and she didn’t care. These stars, these millions of stars. The open road was who she was now. Destination: Deep Sky. If her father only knew. His princess hooking up with the last people on earth standing up to the social internet and Casey’s brand of freedom. If only her father could see her. But she was glad he couldn’t. The sky darker now. Clouds coming in like Silas said, drawn across like a heavy curtain.
36
Room 57. The throne room. A cathedral space, the gloomy heavens above Versailles displayed in ultra-high definition on the vast screen above, millions upon millions of stars lost in the synthetic mix, the skyglow of a nearby metropolis. The throne room. An absent king. A cathedral space rendered in black marble, the silver light of the captured moon. A steep flight of steps leading to a platform. The
throne itself. A high-backed chair built of non-reflective glass. Nearly invisible.
The throne room is empty just now, but Casey was here not so long ago. There is evidence that he is sleeping here. An orange ridge tent, the one you see in your mind’s eye when you think tent, the very same, pitched a short distance from the glass throne, a stone’s throw you might say. An orange ridge tent, lit from within by a lantern. A glowing tent. Two triangles of canvas, two rectangles. A scene from childhood. The start of an adventure. Outdoor equipment spilling from a brightly colored backpack by the tent entrance. An expensive, chrome-housed torch, no batteries. A goose down sleeping bag of the highest quality, tightly repacked inside its compression sack. A folding gas stove, scorch marks resulting from more than one failed ignition. A scene from half-remembered childhood. An open packet of Twinkies, infinitesimal crumbs visible against the dark granite floor. His time alone is precious. A scene from Casey’s present. Half-remembered skills taught him by his father. Shavings from an unfinished wooden spoon, the carving knife flecked with blood, a trail of blood to the white door. There are signs that he is sleeping here from time to time, a scene from childhood, the taste of beer years later, a college camping trip, and Casey was the one to build the fire, a hunter’s fire, the skills taught him by his father, the taste of weak beer and the mutual respect.
The throne room. His time alone is precious, away from it all, the light of the moon and the sense of adventure. A scene from his youth. His friends’ happy faces captured in the glow of a fire he built with his own hands, strong hands that now are cleaner than most. Most other people’s hands are dirty, Casey thinks. Most people’s hands are greasy, their smelly fingers, the smell of other people, too human, like and yet so unlike himself.
The throne room empty just now, but he was here not so long ago. A scene from childhood, the brand-new orange ridge tent lit from within by a nine-hour candle lantern. Evidence that Casey Baer is sleeping here from time to time. His time alone is precious. Away from it all, alive by the light of the silver moon. An adventure just beginning. Such beauty in the world, the world beyond Versailles, the starry sky above, millions upon millions of stars. He remembers. How every other weekend he would take his family away into the mountains. Versailles in the deep background, rising from the shifting marsh, brick by white brick, until one day it was complete. Their home, his pride, their house by the ocean. An American Dream. A dream turned to nightmare. Casey Baer, CEO of the world’s pre-eminent social network. A man in free fall. And the black box of his soul. The black box found among the wreckage of a forgotten life. And yet.