by Zach Hines
“She came to hate the idea of extinguishing,” he continued. “This is when you were about five or six years old, back when she was working at the Lake. Back before . . . she was let go. She would tell me that she never wanted you or your brother to extinguish. But she knew it was unrealistic. Just a pipe dream. She knew that you would have to do it one day. I mean, that’s just the way of it. She knew it was an impossible wish, and . . . well, maybe that’s why she wished it. Why she kept it between us. Why she didn’t want to share it with you.”
Julian looked away from his dad. He looked down at his hands spread on the kitchen table. His thumbs were still too small. They would always be, he realized, no matter which body he was in.
“Why are you telling me this, Dad?”
Julian’s father rubbed his chin as he spoke. “It’s why I’ve never put pressure on you to extinguish while you were growing up. You never wanted to. And she never wanted you to. But we all knew it was a fantasy that that kind of life could last forever.”
“Yeah, I get that now,” Julian said, looking up.
“So I want you to know that I don’t take it lightly that I ask you to do this. After your Three, I will never ask anything like this of you again,” his father said. He cleared his throat with a raspy cough and swallowed. “You will be your own man,” he continued, speaking slowly to keep his voice even. “You can make your own decisions.”
Julian nodded, not knowing how to respond to his father in this state.
“When your mother was let go . . .” His father took a lengthy pause. “That’s when it all went wrong. That’s when everything started with her sickness. When the money problems began.” He wiped at his eyes, as if he could clean the sadness away like the residue of sleep.
“I still have no idea what happened at the Lake. Why she was let go. Or why they ended up finding her Nine body there. But I swear, if there were any way to find out what happened to her . . . that’s all I would want. Some conclusion to all of this.”
A conclusion.
That’s what Julian was going to get.
He shook off the memory and returned to the road, to the strange line up in the sky.
It suddenly expanded, doubling in size, then it arced downward, forming a ragged S figure on the purplish-red backdrop of the sunset.
“What is that?” Rocky asked from the passenger seat.
Julian had no idea. He leaned in closer to the window, peering.
The S shifted again, now twisting unnaturally, as if it were a living thing. It turned, expanded again, and . . .
It started coming for their car.
The closer it came, the more it grew in size. As it got closer, he could make out that it was no solid cloud. It was actually a composite of tiny specks.
“Cicadas,” Julian said.
A swarm coming up from Retro Row.
The cloud loomed over his car now, rattling overhead with an awful, horrible scratching sound. The millions of insects blotted out the last of the sunlight. Individual cicadas that strayed from the swarm pinged off his windows like hailstones. Julian flinched, holding his breath in the sudden eclipse. Rocky looked at him, his face stricken with worry.
“It’s all right,” Julian said. “They’re not coming for us. They’re just passing over.”
Julian slowed and pulled to the side of the road as the swarm eclipsed them.
Plink, plink, plink . . . Errant cicadas lost from the storm bounced off the windshield.
He grabbed Rocky’s hand to calm him.
And then . . .
It passed.
The awful clatter quieted as the dark cloud left, and the last few rays of the daylight returned. Julian leaned over and watched out the window as the cloud of insects twisted up and off toward the horizon. He exhaled, suddenly aware he had been holding his breath.
He looked over at Rocky and forced an off-kilter grin.
“See? They had somewhere else to be. Someone else to terrorize.”
Rocky laughed a little, softening up. “That’s freaking creepy, though.”
“It’s just as creepy as the dust house, really,” Julian said.
The strong older brother. It was a role Julian was beginning to feel comfortable with.
He was going to own it, and he was going to bring a truth back to the family—the most important one. For his brother as much as for his father.
And so, as big brothers do, Julian had to shoo Rocky quickly into the house when they got home later that evening.
He wasn’t going to let his little brother see the other bizarre twist of nature that day, which Julian had spotted in the headlights as they pulled up, crumpled under the window outside the living room.
Once Rocky was inside, Julian approached the strange animal form that lay under the window in the shrubs. It was on its back, unmoving.
It was a cat.
He turned it over.
It had a white patch over its right eye.
And it was dead as hell.
Chapter 19
JULIAN STOOD IN THE DARK ALLEY BEHIND BARDO BOOKS holding a garbage bag containing the dead cat. He watched, impatient, as Cody cleared a space on a concrete step leading down to the basement. “Put it here,” she said.
He had sent her a picture the night before, and she had responded immediately—she had to inspect the body.
“Shouldn’t we go inside?”
Julian could feel the eyes of other cats in the shadows, watching.
“Don’t think that would go down well anymore.” She looked up at him and blinked. “The Friends got a call from the Lakes. They were asking a lot of questions, so . . . Yeah. That was the end of that. Bookstore’s just for books now.”
“That Robbie kid came for me at school,” Julian said as he brought the bag over to the step.
“He what?”
“He was running down the hall shouting for me. Telling me to stay away. The guards stunned him or maybe killed him, I don’t know.”
Cody frowned, dimpling her cheeks.
“Do you know what he meant?” he asked. “Stay away from what?”
“He’s unhinged,” Cody said. “Retrogression can be enormously destructive. It can really erode someone’s mind.”
Julian nodded. He understood that all too well. But still, between that incident and Cody saying that the Friends got a call from the Lake, something felt wrong. Ominous. It felt like there was something at play that he couldn’t identify, that he maybe didn’t even have the faculties to identify. But Julian didn’t press it right now.
Cody extracted the cat from the bag with small, delicate motions, like she were handling a baby bird that had a future in front of it.
But this was no baby bird—it was just an inert heap of fur that used to be a cat. It had once been animated and alive. It had watched him. Studied him. Followed him. Julian had discovered scratch marks on the paneling outside the window where he found its dead body. He had no way of knowing how long those scratch marks were there, but he felt sure that the cat was trying to claw inside the day it died. Why? He had no idea.
But now it was just a body.
Julian thought about how things were phrased like that: now that the cat was gone, it was no longer a he or a she, even though it was still right there. It wasn’t a being anymore. This “body” is just a thing that was left behind. The little linguistic trick of calling dead things “bodies” reminded him of the Lakes, with their orderly lines and complimentary towels and no-nonsense nurses and watchful prelates. A deceptive and soothing system, keeping people one solid, crucial step removed from the horror of death and rebirth.
Cody crawled through the fur with her fingers, stopping to examine the cat’s head, leaning in close to its eyes. “Definitely a Lake cat,” she said. “You can tell by the markings on its face and neck. Like this patch on its eye. It’s very symmetrical and precise. Telltale sign.”
She carefully placed it back in the bag. “We need to take it to Cat’s Cradle. Do you have
a car?”
Julian looked at her, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Most Lake cats have been microchipped. Glen can check for the chip and look it up at Cat’s Cradle,” she said.
“Glen? Cat’s Cradle?” Julian asked.
Her mouth bent into an impatient frown. “Can you drive us there or not?”
Cody sat in the front seat, the bag containing the cat body on her lap. Julian tried to steal a glance at Cody’s face, but it was hidden in the shadow of her rusty coils of hair. Cody didn’t look over at him. Her eyes were always on the window, constantly scanning outside for . . . something.
As they drove, she explained that as the retrograde population continued to grow over the past few years, many of the retros left children behind. Kids whose mothers and fathers had forgotten to come home. Forgotten they had kids. These orphans often ended up on the Row, searching for their parents. They mixed in with the rest of the retros. At some point, after the county of Lakeshore stopped providing aid to Retro Row and just cordoned it off, they also began rounding up these orphans and putting them in group homes. Quite often, children in these homes would disappear forever—the authorities explained that they were sent to other homes that were less crowded in different states, but no one knew for sure. That’s when the Friends of the Lake intervened. One of the wealthier members donated an old house to the cause. It was off in the elm forest, halfway up a mountain. He named it Cat’s Cradle, after Cody’s propensity to befriend cats. It was full of the children left behind by retrogrades—and it was Cody’s home.
That was where they were heading now.
Cody was insistent that Julian stay off Lake Road and the other main thoroughfares. She directed him down alleys through the main heart of town, and then led him out onto a winding two-lane country road. The elm forests were dark corridors on either side of them.
That’s when Julian realized that there was a pair of headlights behind them in the distance, always there, taking every turn they took. Cody was aware of this too. She was nervously pulling on her hair.
Finally, after the headlights continued to tail them down two more unlikely turns, she looked over at him. “Mr. Julian, I was hoping we weren’t being followed,” she said. “But that looks increasingly like it’s not the case. We’re going to have to lose them.”
“Lose them?!”
“There’s a dead orchard up ahead,” she said. “It’s like a maze.”
Julian turned to her with a snap. “If it’s the cops, we should just pull over and deal with this.”
“This is not the cops,” Cody said. “If you don’t take this turn, then I will.”
She reached across him for the wheel. Julian swatted her hands away and slammed the brakes, throwing them forward against their seat belts. Cody clutched the bag with the dead cat to her chest to stop it from flying into the windshield. The car skidded along the road sideways. Julian pumped the brakes again, and they jerked to a stop facing the entrance to the orchard.
Cody looked at him with a wild look.
“Mr. Julian, we do not want to be caught by these people. Gun it!”
Julian swallowed a lump into his stomach that exploded in a burst of adrenaline. He slammed the gas, and they squealed into the orchard. Cody clutched the cat to her as they jostled over the tractor-hewn rows between shriveled apple trees. Behind them, there was a swish of lights as their pursuer followed.
Julian was nothing more than a racing pulse and two hands on the wheel. Cody called out turns to him, weaving him left and then right into different rows. Tree branches lashed the windshield. The lights of their pursuer grew more distant and finally disappeared behind a row heading the opposite direction.
“We lost them!” she shouted, elated.
Cody spotted an opening up ahead that spilled out into a field and a dirt road beyond it. “This field loops around and we can get back on the road.”
When they rocked out onto the clearing, Cody collapsed back into her seat and released a long whistle. “Boy! That was close, huh?”
Julian’s heart was throbbing in his throat. He wanted to stop the car right where they were. Kick her out. Turn around and go home.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t stop now. The pursuers could again appear behind them, or some other threat that Cody had failed to mention could pop out at them from nowhere. He gritted his teeth and kept driving.
Once they were back on the road, Julian turned to her with a nasty frown.
But Cody spoke first: “I know what you’re thinking. What the hell did she get me into? And why am I still in it, instead of just kicking her out right now?”
Julian glared at her.
“The answer is, there’s something wrong with this world. And we need to find out what it is. I know you feel it, too. I knew it the minute you showed up at the bookstore.”
Julian didn’t reply. He drove on in stony silence. But their pursuer did not return. Soon enough, they were following a winding road through the elms until they reached a small clearing of vegetation on the side of the road. It was easy to miss in a quick glance, but a narrow dirt trail was cut into the trees beyond the clearing.
“Told you this place was a real rustic getaway,” she said.
They proceeded down this old trail, which was nothing more than a row of weeds running down the middle of two ruts. Eventually, they emerged at a ranch house that was half-hidden in the shadows of two towering elms.
Two old cars in various stages of disrepair were parked at the garage entrance, up on concrete blocks, the tires removed. Cody directed Julian to park beside the porch. As he turned the car off, Julian saw there was a large greenhouse behind the house with rows of browning, sorry-looking plants.
On the porch, two boys with dusty blond hair watched them warily. They looked about ten or eleven years old. Rocky’s age. They both had a handkerchief tied around their neck.
“Why don’t you come in and let the heat cool off a bit, huh?” Cody said. “You still look a little jumpy.”
Julian had the same feeling that had driven him into trouble in the past: he needed to look. He had to see what this was.
He climbed out of the car and followed Cody inside.
“Welcome to Cat’s Cradle.”
There were about a half dozen kids in the living room, young ones who were six or seven and older teens who looked like they were in high school—but they certainly weren’t enrolled in the academy. Maybe they went to Poplar Public High like Cody did?
The house was a mess. Clothes and stacks of books were everywhere. Musical instruments and toys for the younger ones were heaped in the corner. Cody explained that Friends volunteers visited them from time to time, but the visits had become increasingly erratic and so they were working at becoming self-sufficient. There was a rotation for the chores, which she described as an example of “emergent organizational principles.”
She showed him out back to the greenhouse, where they were trying to grow vines of tomatoes, though the vines looked shriveled and brown-gray. Tiny, withered gourds were poking out of the soil in planter boxes. “We’ve been having a hard time getting these plants to take. I think it’s the water table coming from under the Lake,” she explained. “It’s spreading to all the farmland and corrupting things.”
The thing that struck Julian the most wasn’t the controlled chaos of the house, or the vain attempt by a bunch of apparently orphaned kids to establish actual live crops—it was the fact that most of the kids had on scarves, or handkerchiefs, or wraps that otherwise hid their numbers.
“We don’t talk about numbers, life scores, or burning,” Cody said. “We just live like we’re all Nines.”
Julian shook his head in wonder as Cody led them through the living room to a hallway in the back. A world without life scores . . . an existence that Julian never dreamed was possible except, perhaps, on Mauritius.
Cody was right about one thing: the world did contain multitudes.
“You’re a
n orphan?” he asked her.
Cody looked at him over her shoulder and winked.
“You don’t go to Poplar High either, do you?”
Cody nodded. “Now you’re getting it.”
She took him down a hallway.
There was a red door that was open and Cody rushed for it, closing it before Julian got close.
“My room. And I’m a private person,” she said, and then led him to a computer room at the end of the hall.
It was like an electronic junk shop filled with computer towers and monitors. Cabling ran across the floor like a swarm of stranded eels. A big black kid sat in the back, his hair a large frizz. He turned to them when they entered, sipping chocolate soy from a jug with a straw.
“We don’t knock now?”
Cody set the bag down on his desk and turned to Julian. “This, however, is not a private space, even if some people think it is.”
The boy rolled his eyes.
“We like to think of it as the command center,” Cody said.
The boy pushed his chair over to the desk and inspected the bag. “What’s this? And who’s that?” he asked. “The kid who freaks out the cats?”
“I’m Julian,” Julian said.
“I remember you,” the boy said, peering at him. “From the Lake a few weeks ago.”
“That’s right. Glen, isn’t it?” Julian asked. It all came back to him. The bonfire that night with Cody.
“You sure it’s a good idea to bring him here?” Glen asked.
Cody nodded. “He’s got a good vibe.”
Glen frowned and gave Cody a stern look. She just stared back, a wordless conversation between them. Then Glen sighed and put the straw back to his mouth. As he took a big sip, he opened the bag to peek inside.
He spat his milk out all over his shirt. “Goddammit! What the hell, Cody? There is a dead cat in this bag,” he sputtered. “That is 100 percent gross.”
“It’s a Lake cat,” Cody said. “Julian found it outside his house. It had apparently been following him around. Can you find the chip and look it up?”
Glen wiped the milk from his shirt. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll run it. Give me a few days.”