The Isle

  “That’ll cost me more than it would to admit fault, save face, and return the surplus! Never.”

  “This is not negotiable. I’m getting Engle—and any other city you’ve cheated—on the intercom.”

  No one notices the invisible signal Harcourt sent to his military. But like a clock striking midnight, each and every ranger drops to one knee.

  Thousands of muzzles point at the barge simultaneously. Thousands of fingers, triggers, and bullets wait for the magistrate to give the final signal. I imagine the rounds being fired into the first five hundred of our small army—the bullets hitting organs. Organs repairing themselves. Officers standing and taking it again, round after round, until the water’s all used up and the regeneration slows . . .

  Stops.

  In the tense air, Dunn’s cuffcomm crackles with static. “Sir—”

  Dunn’s hand is back on the shooter, eyes focused on his target—now hidden behind a row of his rangers. Dunn doesn’t move a muscle. His ears just listen.

  “Sir—” the voice repeats, pitched with excitement. “We have found freshwater. I repeat. We have found freshwater.”

  Dunn’s gaze loosens. “Repeat that,” he says, loud enough for his comm’s mic to pick it up.

  “Freshwater, sir. We’ve found it. That ex-agent of yours—the Dane girl? She brought us right there. Died smack in the middle too. Her boyfriend had to fish her out and everything—a damn disgusting scene. But it’s a freshwater spring, all right, deep enough to pipe off.”

  Everything stops here.

  I rush for the intercom. I’m water, screaming over rocks. Dunn’s arm throws me to the floor—he holds up his other arm in a time-out, high enough for the magistrate to see. There’s more negotiating, then jumping and screaming, hugging and shouting—electric nets fired into the sky.

  I don’t hear it. I cry into the orange-and-white tiger’s heart, pummeling her with both my fists. I want her to fight back—she has to fight back. Because she’s a tiger . . . and that’s what tigers do.

  Ren doesn’t just die. It’s not possible.

  58

  REN

  I am emptied from one universe into another universe.

  It has no stars. No galaxies growing in wombs, no cells dividing. No double-crossing double helixes. It has no planets. No gravity. It has the color black, but black’s not a color, just an absence.

  It doesn’t even have me. Not really, not yet.

  It has nothing—it’s a void.

  Deep in the absence, a spectrum ignites. At the speed of disappearing light, the curved universe flexes around the nothing of me, like a muscle. I fall and I fall through a dark matter tunnel, a barren wasteland.

  The absence has dropped me.

  I’m thrown into light but not air. In my third universe, I can’t breathe. . . .

  I’m born mostly dead.

  “The umbilical cord—” a woman in a white coat says, then she curses. “It’s wrapped around her neck.” She counts how many times it’s tried to strangle me. The number is five. “I need you to push, Emilce. We have to get her out, now.”

  “Stay strong, sister,” says a woman with a loose topknot.

  But my shoulders are too wide . . . now isn’t possible.

  Here for half a moment, I’m emptied yet again—and for the first time—funneled back into absence. The black, curving void holds me. Because I am nothing, I have eyes everywhere: I watch as my mother pushes, but it’s too late.

  I’m already here, in the absence.

  Twenty minutes later, the doctor pulls a still, blue body out from my mother. Her face, freckled and dark and round, changes shape. Horror fills the gasping O her mouth makes. The woman with the topknot, Miss Nale, rushes to Emilce’s side. She squeezes her hand, kissing it a hundred times.

  “I’ll give you a moment while I inform your husband,” and I watch my mother cradle the body as the doctor leaves the room. My mother cries against the skin I was born into.

  Her tears are my first rainfall.

  Like a ragged animal cursing the moon, she screams. Her scream carries through universes. It pokes holes in the void, it wakes the strange blood in my body. It calls it to action. Come back, it begs. Come back.

  I see now, this universe—it has a bone to pick.

  Laying out the whirlpool of time, it finds a chaos that hasn’t been ordered: A spring. A test. The first man who killed too many to make it his own. The second man. And the girl he made, who could undo it.

  Humanity will fail the test, but they will fail with flying colors.

  Seeing all of time’s forward-backward tumbling, the Earthbound universe intervenes, and the absence obliges.

  It unhooks me. Throws me into the spectrum.

  I scream.

  My mother’s face is a sun rising in the west. She cleans my body. She kisses my wet, round cheek—the one with freckles, soon.

  “What in God’s name . . .” Miss Nale staggers backward and clutches the headboard for support. “How can this be real?” she whispers.

  My mother’s hand cradles my head and then, like tripping on a rock, her smile slips away. I feel her heartbeat chase itself into the distance, each one faster than the next. She holds me close, pats my back, but her anxiety is in my blood too.

  “Shut the door!” Emilce yells when the doctor returns.

  The woman steps back. Hands cupped over her mouth, she whispers, “She couldn’t breathe for twenty minutes. . . .” Her eyes dart between us. “I’ll get your husband—”

  Emilce’s eyes don’t leave mine. “No—you will do no such thing,” she says softly. She doesn’t want me to worry. “Neither of you will ever say a word about this to my husband. Or to anyone else, for that matter.”

  Beaming down at my round face, Emilce coos.

  The doctor lays her stethoscope against my back, breathes, “But—but this is a miracle.”

  “Exactly,” Emilce says. “My husband . . . he will ruin this child. She wouldn’t be his daughter . . . she would be his greatest advantage. He’d find out what makes the miracle tick. He’d say it was for the ‘greater good,’ but she’d still end up empty. He’d empty her. And I don’t care about the greater good. I care only about the precious face staring back into mine.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” the doctor says, puzzled, as she looks at Emilce.

  Miss Nale touches her sister’s shoulder, and her worried eyes meet mine.

  “My husband is not the man I once married. He’s grown obsessed—” My mother looks away shiftily, not wanting to say too much. “He will want to find out just how big of a miracle she truly is. And if I’m right—if he’s changed as much as I fear he has—she could spend the first year of her life in a lab.” Emilce closes her eyes and exhales. One last time, she kisses my forehead and then passes me to the doctor. She dries her nose with a handkerchief.

  “Will you take her back to the Ward with you?” Emilce asks Miss Nale.

  The doctor, jaw agape, reaches for Emilce’s shoulder. “Mrs. Voss, you’re tired,” she says with sympathy. “You don’t know what you’re asking of your stepsister. Why don’t we leave you and your child alone, and we’ll see how you feel in an hour?”

  “Doctor, I have all my wits about me. I had a clean delivery, no drugs. My mind is not addled. Sister, tell me, will you do this thing I ask? Will you take her?”

  Miss Nale kisses Emilce’s head and retrieves the blue quilt from a chair in the corner. She wraps me up in it, then cradles me in her arms, and that is her answer.

  “Doctor.” Emilce’s voice is pure iron. “If I learn that you’ve told anyone about this, you will see your future as a medical professional ruined. Am I understood?”

  The doctor points at my mother, opens her mouth. She quickly closes it. “It seems I have no choice,” she says bitterly. “I only hope you’re making the right decision.”

  “Time will be the decider in that. Not you, and not I.”

  “Don’t you want to give her
a name?” the doctor asks accusingly.

  Emilce thinks. “My husband is a great Latin scholar. I think the name ‘Renata’ fits her well, ‘reborn’ as she was.”

  “Renata,” Miss Nale whispers, tucking me away.

  “Renata,” my mother echoes, watching as I’m taken.

  The scene evaporates behind us as the universe tumbles ahead. I’m fast-forwarded through moments like seedlings, reliving every juncture that grows me into me—who I am, or was, when I left the universe in Derek’s arms.

  I’m six, looking out at the West Isle, and for the first time, I understand they have more.

  The first girl I almost become friends with shakes my hand. She’s taken to a sickhouse the next day.

  The first mother and father glance around Nale’s classroom, looking for a child—I ignore them, and they ignore me.

  Kids taunt me, call me mean, and so I get mean.

  Aven . . .

  When I see her, time and space stop. This Earthbound universe closes its eyes. Bending to one knee, it places infinity in my hands. Asks if I want to take it. If I say yes, Aven and I could spin off together, create new universes. She wouldn’t get the Blight and I’d be born with uncomplicated blood. We’d be adopted. Together—sisters.

  It would let me out of here, if I wanted.

  A choice.

  Because the universe has rules, and even it is not free to break them. It saw a chaos; it intervened. But actions have equal, yet opposite, reactions, and now . . . now it must turn a blind eye. Tumbling backward and forward through infinity, I’m being given the opportunity to live for myself—not die for it.

  I could say yes.

  I could.

  But I won’t.

  Back in the cave, I decided to be the thing that ends it. You don’t just return from a choice like that, even when a universe offers you paradise. I’m changed . . . freed. I already broke my paradise apart and gave its nucleus away. Now there are thousands of new paradises germinating without me. No single one—not even my own—could grow so large.

  I close the fist of the universe.

  59

  AVEN

  12:15 A.M., SATURDAY

  Ter carries me from the barge. He lays me down in the front seat of the Cloud, and then he takes the wheel. I don’t speak. I don’t move. I don’t know what words are anymore. They can’t bring her back.

  Callum directs a team of officers to transport Benny’s gurney off the barge—Benny’s choice. Something about trusting his own equipment and not wanting to see his Cloud abandoned in enemy territory. I think the truth is he’d just rather be here with us.

  As Callum ties the gurney down, his cuffcomm buzzes.

  “Who is it?” I ask, making a ball of myself in the seat corner.

  Callum reads the message. “It’s Derek,” he says, hesitating. “He wants us to meet him at the Bone Vault.”

  I swallow a hundred times, but more tears escape. They find their way down the sides of my nose and the banks of my cheeks, into my mouth and behind my ears. I shiver thinking about where we’re headed.

  The Bone Vault.

  A place to pray for the dead, decorated entirely in bones. The last place in the world I ever wanted to go—I imagine it’s like being inside the stomach of some monster. Ren knows this.

  “But—I don’t understand . . . ,” I say, watching my tears make tiny pools on the floor between the seat and the Cloud’s hull. “How did she do it?”

  Callum explains—her blood, the protein. The way she never got sick once in her life, never even broke a bone. Understanding crashes over me. Every cell in my body reacts, shaking, frenzied. She gave her blood to destroy the spring.

  “You said her plan was risky, Callum, you didn’t say it was suicide!” I cry, digging my palms into his knees, wanting to hurt him. “You didn’t tell me, how could you not tell me?”

  “Is there any chance she survived?” Benny asks slowly, his voice thin.

  Callum rubs the bridge of his nose. “My calculations . . . I found that she’d need every ounce in her body to raise the protein concentration high enough. Otherwise, it wouldn’t kill off the entire ecosystem. I told her this.

  “And now that we’re meeting Derek at the Bone Vault—I think it’s safe to assume . . .” His voice trails off.

  Ter guns the Cloud; its engine bawls into the dark. “We could have done something. We could have stopped her!” I cry over the noise.

  Can she really be gone?

  I don’t know if I can believe that yet. Ren was never the one who’d die first—I’ve never even thought about it.

  I cover my mouth as something else occurs to me. “The water,” I whisper. “We don’t even have it anymore.”

  Ter’s jaw drops—we’re thinking the same thing. He slumps forward over the wheel. “Was it . . . ?” he begins, and I nod.

  Sipu’s Omni.

  “What?” Callum asks. “What happened to it?”

  Ter answers so I don’t have to speak the words. They’re the final nail in the coffin.

  “Aven had both bags at Sybil’s Cove, when we met Sipu. The first bag went to prisoners, but the second one . . .”

  “The crash,” Callum breathes, sliding on the floor of the Cloud. “That bag had everything—the spores, the algae, the rocks. Without the spores, the water’s gone for good.”

  Over our heads, a hawk shrieks like he understands.

  Ter reaches for me. I stop him. There’s no such thing as comfort right now. There’s only me and every memory I have left. I can’t forget any of them, not one. I have to remember, otherwise she really is gone.

  I start at the beginning, with the day we met—from that first moment, she was my favorite. She was standing there at the edge of Nale’s roof, a loner, and she didn’t even look up when Miss Nale introduced me. Everyone else said, “Nice to meet you, Aventine,” in a tone Miss Nale would approve of. But Renny just stayed where she was, staring off. Nale didn’t make her do anything—Ren was a lifer at the orphanage, there since before she could make memories. Other kids said she was mean, but I knew different. It was because she was afraid. People came and went, or people came and died. I wanted to make her less afraid. I wanted to be her One. I knew I could do it too.

  I knew she’d like me.

  As soon as she agreed to be friends that night before the races, it’s like we made a secret pact to never die on each other. I was the first to almost break it, getting sick with the Blight. Never in a million years did I think . . . did I think—

  Folding into myself, face slick with salt water, I clutch at my penny necklace. She’s wearing hers now, I bet. I gave it to her because it was lucky, but she said she didn’t want luck. So I told her “Good skill” instead, and she liked that.

  I liked it too, because Ren never needed luck.

  Maybe, this time, she did.

  I force my head up, hair unsticking from my cheeks. I can’t believe it, I won’t. Leaning my head against the rail, I pretend to sleep so that the others leave me alone. Really, I’m feeling the wind against my eyelids, hoping it freezes the tears underneath.

  I wonder if it’s cold where she is too.

  60

  REN

  The closed fist of the universe isn’t done with me.

  It takes off, wheeling through every moment of the rest of my short life.

  Benny—he called me “kiddo” during my first race and I wanted to smack him. . . . The night I was nabbed, Aven hiding behind a corner, watching. Later, when it wasn’t so sad anymore, she said it was like watching me be carried off by the worst stork ever. . . . The day I enlisted with the Blues as a mole—I was already hated, and the pay was decent. . . . Returning to the Ward. I hunted Aven for weeks, found her nearly dead in a sickhouse. It was the most terrible feeling I’d ever known. . . . Becoming a dragster, officially. . . . Meeting my very own bookie, a guy named Derek. . . . Crushing impossibly on said bookie . . . Race after race after race . . . Callum . . . The spring . . .
Delivering the serum . . . The raid . . . Aven, kidnapped . . . Our escape . . . Bellum pestilentia . . . My mother, my father . . .

  My choice.

  I’m seconds away from my second death—

  The cave . . . Derek speaking to me in words I don’t understand now—only dying me could understand those words. Him holding me to his chest, while water soaked up every ounce of my blood.

  I empty away, a destroyer.

  For a third time, the absence folds itself around me. I’m back in the universe that is between others, cast in nothing. I’m in its very eye, watching all that is Earthbound go on without me.

  Which is, I guess, why I did what I did.

  Earth’s history unfolds like a spherical holo right before my eyes. It happens in the closest thing I have to real time, because here in the nothing, time is also nothing. It’s watery. It travels in whichever direction I push.

  The view is panoramic. Every thought, every wish, I hear them spoken in my mind, part of some core I can’t begin to understand.

  Curious, I roll the ball of Time back toward my body—toward Derek.

  I watch as he swims fast from the dying cave. From the fresh memories of me dying and of me dead. My limp body floats behind him like a comet’s tail, knees banging against the walls. I’m not there to feel it.

  Now, seeing Derek like this, thinking his thoughts—I understand. He needed me more than I ever needed him. I wanted him—a different thing. Distantly, I call myself cruel. I begged for us to begin, and we did. Then, I ended us.

  My everywhere eyes pull back—Aven’s voice cracks dimensions. I travel the Ping-Pong globe of Earth thirty miles north, where armies converge—and there she is, the axis balancing two heavily weighted scales.

  I deny that there is no center of the universe: my chosen sister is living proof.

  Vision shifts again—

  The DI unit breaks into the airlock. A man in a wet suit swims to the last location saved in my GPS tracker and finds shriveled, dead caps hovering on the water’s surface. He did not find what he was looking for—

  He finds something else.