Until the Beginning

by Amy Plum

  As soon as that thought bursts its way into my consciousness, I push it back out and lock the door.

  It takes us another tense half hour of driving on the main road as we watch for any vehicles approaching, either from Vaughn or from the direction of the ranch. When we pull off onto the one-lane road leading to the mountains, we both breathe a sigh of relief. Another half hour and we’re driving up into the foothills, where scattered yucca plants grow like spiky green porcupines.

  The road finally ends in a dirt path that stops abruptly at the base of a butte. We go off-road for the last bit, and do our best to hide the truck behind a rocky outcrop. There is nothing in sight—no houses, no cars, no phone, no electricity lines. It’s only us and nature. Just the way I like it.

  I step out of the car and the desert heat slams me in the face. We’re just a few hours south of where we camped last night, but the temperature is noticeably hotter. I strip back down to my tank top, then pull a pair of jeans out of my pack. Taking my bowie knife, I cut off the legs, halfway up the thigh, and then roll the hem up twice to keep it from fraying. Unzipping the pair of jeans I’m wearing, I start changing into my new shorts. Miles sees and abruptly turns around, supposedly to give me privacy.

  “Miles. You’ve seen me naked,” I remind him.

  “Although technically true, we were in the tent and it was unfortunately very dark,” he responds, but keeps his back toward me.

  “I went swimming in my underwear just yesterday, and my semi-nudity didn’t seem to bother you then,” I say with a smile.

  “You were treating it like a bathing suit,” he says. “You’re changing clothes now, and when it’s under your clothes, it counts as lingerie.”

  I laugh. “You’re a prude, Miles Blackwell.”

  “I most definitely am not a prude,” he insists, and forces himself to turn around. But by this time I’ve got my new shorts on, so there’s nothing to see. “I would describe most of my friends as letches,” Miles continues. “I, on the other hand, have always prided myself on being a gentleman. And unless you are intentionally undressing for my benefit, I’d prefer not to take the experience for granted.”

  “All just pretty words,” I say, but catch myself blushing.

  Miles notices, and crows, “See, you do prefer gentlemen to wild men! Admit it!”

  Ignoring his taunt, I clear my throat, picking up the knife, and gesture to his jeans. “Do you want me to make yours into shorts, too?”

  “Gentlemen don’t wear cutoffs,” he says, crossing his arms defensively.

  “So you’re basing your choice on fashion, and not the fact that it’s about ninety degrees out?” I ask.

  “Of course not,” Miles says. He nods up toward the mountaintop. “I was just thinking of how it’ll probably get cold up there at night, and I’d rather be too hot now than cold later.”

  “Right . . . ,” I say skeptically.

  “Juneau, there is no way on this earth that you will persuade me to wear cutoff jeans.” Miles laughs and walks away. Discussion over.

  “Your choice.” I shrug and, unable to hide the smile on my lips, slip the knife back into its leather sheath.

  I stow most of our supplies in my backpack, and Miles picks up the tent and a bag of food, and we’re off. Even though we’ll be taking the time we need for surveillance instead of rushing right in, I don’t want to lose any time.

  We climb directly to the top of the first hill. My hiking boots provide traction, which would have made the trek a quick one, if Miles didn’t keep slipping with his smooth-soled tennis shoes. It’s funny—the star on the side makes them look like sports shoes, but he might as well be wearing ballet slippers for all the good it’s doing him on the rocky slopes.

  We crest the hill after a half hour and stop to drink some water. The sun is high above now; it must be noon or just after. “Are you hungry?” I ask. Miles shakes his head, but doesn’t speak. I’m not sure if he’s able—his face is all red and he’s breathing heavily.

  I remind myself that he just went through the Rite. Plus, the pure oxygen of the mountains must be hitting him like a brick wall. I have breathed the air in Los Angeles, and considering the difference between that and this nature-filtered mountain air, Miles might as well be on another planet.

  I hand him the water bottle, and he takes a long swig. He bends over and puts his hands on his knees, still breathing heavy. “You know, it’s funny,” he says with his wry smile. “I’m in perfect shape. It’s probably just the altitude that’s getting to me.”

  “You just came back from the dead,” I remind him.

  “Oh yeah, that. It’s definitely due to my recent resurrection,” he says. “And if I asked you to take it a bit slower?”

  “With my clan on the other side of that mountain?” I say, pointing to the tree-lined peak before us. I give him a wicked smile. “Sorry, but no chance.”

  Miles stands back up and pounds on his chest with his fists. “Okay, I’m ready for anything,” he says. “Don’t pay any attention to my shortness of breath, red face, or sweat-soaked clothes. It’s all a ruse so that I can really pour on the speed at the end and impress you.”

  “Posturing,” I say.

  “Exactly,” Miles replies.

  I walk over and brush his fiery cheek with my fingertips. “If we keep up our pace, we’ll probably reach the peak in just over an hour. And, if it would make you feel better, once we get there I’ll fix lunch while you recover.”

  Miles nods, still gasping, and manages to wheeze, “Sounds good.”

  “First one to the top gets a Snickers bar!” I say, and skip out of his way as he tries to grab me.

  20

  MILES

  I’M USELESS. TRULY. IT’S BECOMING MORE AND more obvious that Juneau would be better off doing this rescue without me. While I barely made it up the mountain, Juneau scaled the side like Spider-Man, not even having to look where she put her feet.

  Once we get to the top, I sit down and put my head between my knees while Juneau scouts the ridge for a lookout point. “Come up here, Miles!” she shouts from the other side of a patch of pine trees.

  “Can’t move. Paralyzed. Think I’m having death-sleep flashback,” I yell, gasping for breath as I hold my pounding head in my hands.

  “Just walk over to me—I’m not even thirty feet away—and then you’ll have my permission to pass out,” she calls.

  “Permission?” I grumble as I push myself to my feet and weave my way toward her. I give her a choppy salute. “Yes, sir, whatever you say, sir.”

  “Come have a look,” she says. There’s an excited gleam in her eyes. I look in the direction she’s pointing and see it: an enormous wire fence, twenty feet tall, running toward the mountain through the desert, and then straight up the side, trailing halfway up one of the peaks before cutting horizontally across and disappearing in the distance.

  “That’s gotta be it!” I say, feeling strange. After weeks of Juneau talking about her clan being kidnapped, here is the material proof. We’re within walking distance of the fence—the only thing separating Juneau from her clan. Besides several thousand volts of electricity and an army of bodybuilders with automatic weapons, that is. But still . . . we’re here at last.

  I glance back at Juneau, and she is practically crackling with excitement. She looks like she’s about to burst out of her skin, and I know it’s taking everything she’s got not to rush the fence and go directly to her people.

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” she says. “We’re going to set up camp on the other side of the ridge so that if someone’s patrolling the perimeter fence, they won’t see us.”

  “I’m camp setter-upper,” I say. “Just give me five minutes to remember how to breathe.”

  “I know I offered to fix us lunch,” she says, picking up her backpack. She starts back the way we came, and even though all I want to do is throw myself spread eagle on the ground, I follow her. “But I’m so excited I’m not even hungry,” she continues
. “I want to start following the fence to see where it leads.”

  “Don’t worry about lunch,” I say, “but do you think it’s safe?”

  “I promise to stay out of view and not do anything rash,” she responds.

  “You want me to go with you?” I ask, praying she’ll say no. I silently wonder if eighteen is too young to have a climbing-induced heart attack.

  “No,” she says quickly, and then turns to me. “I mean . . . it would be great if you could set up camp for us. That way you could recover from the climb and eat.”

  Perfect, I think. We’re on the same page.

  We walk a few yards down the other side of the mountain. Once we hit a small clearing, Juneau dumps her backpack and I let my bags fall to the ground. I watch as she fills a canteen from a water bottle and then rifles through her bag for her crossbow. She strings the canteen around her neck and hangs the crossbow on a leather strap over one shoulder.

  I dig into the grocery bag and hand her a Snickers bar. “You won it. Plus, all that wholesome natural goodness should help sustain you till you get back.”

  She grins. “I’ll just be gone an hour or two,” she says, and turns to leave. Then, hesitating, she runs back to me, grabs my face in her hands, and kisses me quickly on the lips. She laughs at my surprise at this very un-Juneau-like display, and then is off. Now that I’m not weighing her down, she moves twice as fast, leaping atop a boulder and disappearing over the top of the mountain.

  I stretch out and lay on the ground for a good ten minutes, until my breathing returns to normal and I stop my profuse sweating. Opening one of the water bottles, I pour the entire thing over my head and feel a lot better.

  I pitch the tent in minutes flat, and put all of the cooking supplies in a pile, before hanging the bag of food from a tree branch like I’ve seen Juneau do. After gathering enough wood from the surrounding forest for a decent-sized campfire, I look around the clearing with pride. No way would I have known how to set up camp a month ago.

  And look at me now—living off the land! Okay, not quite, but close enough, I think, as I make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and grab a bag of chips and bottle of water and hike back up to the lookout point to eat my lunch.

  I try to look at the landscape before me like Juneau would. How did she put it? “Figure out which advantages nature gives us,” or something like that. I spot a little stream running down the mountainside a ways away, before the fence starts. I make a mental note to refill the water bottles from it. There’s the ridge I’m on—the perfect lookout. It’s surrounded by trees, so not obvious like some of the cliff tops down the mountain from me. That’s two advantages. Juneau probably wouldn’t even list those. She probably absorbed it all at first glance. For her, a landscape like this is like my living room is to me: She knows her way around it with her eyes shut.

  I see something moving far off in the mountains, inside the gated area. It looks like an enormous reindeer, but since I sincerely doubt there are reindeer in New Mexico, I figure it must be something like an elk. Although, when I imagine it strung with bells and red reins, it does look just like the reindeers in all the Christmas movies. Elk. Reindeer. Maybe they’re just two names for the same animal. How clueless am I? I think, feeling a pang of despair.

  Don’t give up just because you can’t identify the first wild animal you see. I think of what Juneau said about being one with nature, and decide to try an experiment. I do like she does and calm my breathing, trying to slow my heartbeat. I close my eyes for a minute, and then opening them, try to see inside the landscape instead of just looking at the surface. And as I become still, I grow aware of things moving around me.

  To my right, my peripheral vision catches a squirrel scampering down the side of a tree, grabbing a nut off the ground, shoving it in his mouth, and running back up to his perch. Far off in the desert, inside the gates, I see horses . . . no—zebras. A whole herd of zebras walking through the desert toward the mountain foothills. Some kind of big bird—a falcon?—soars overhead, motionless as it floats on an air current.

  I wish I had paid more attention in biology. Or at least watched more Animal Planet. The zebras and the squirrel are the only animals I’m actually able to identify. At least I know the elk-beast is some type of deer.

  I close my eyes again, and feel the heat from the rock I’m sitting on baking the palms of my hands. I think of Juneau and wonder how she feels, being this close to her people. I wonder what she’ll want to do once she’s reunited with them. I mean once they’re free, course. I hope that whatever it is, she’ll want me to come along. And, without knowing that I already made the decision, I realize I’m ready to go with her. To follow wherever she wants to go. It seems like a huge, momentous choice, but really, it’s one of the easiest ones I’ve ever made.

  I focus on the picture of Juneau in my mind, and imagine her following the fence as far as she can without being seen, scouting the surrounding area for anything she can use in her quest. A tingling sensation travels up my fingers to my arms, and suddenly I’m experiencing an overwhelming feeling of excitement, mixed with sharp jabs of anxiety. It’s something I’ve never felt before, not in this intensity. And it dawns on me that it’s because these aren’t my emotions. They’re Juneau’s. I’m channeling her feelings.

  I scramble to my feet, and stare at my hands and then down at the rock. Was I . . . I couldn’t have been. Did I just Read the Yara? I rifle through my memory for the explanation Juneau gave this morning about what kind of Readings produce what effects. Is ground for feelings? I can’t remember. I seem to recall that Juneau touches the ground and thinks of the person whose emotions she wants to feel. At least that’s what I just did, but unintentionally.

  “No way!” I yell, and do this crazed dance around the top of the cliff. I did it! I connected to the Yara! I didn’t think it was possible.

  Wait. Reality check: Juneau didn’t think it was possible. She said the Yara stuff only comes with a life change. By living in tune with nature, or whatever. How can I be close to nature if I can’t even identify a freaking reindeer? It’s the Amrit; I’m sure of it. Along with the advantages of antiaging and disease immunity, it must have a side effect of messing with people’s brains. And then it hits me. The Amrit messed with my brain. I’m not just immortal. I’m magic.

  My glee disappears and fear takes its place, slithering up my chest like a snake, and wrapping around my throat. It’s okay, I tell myself. It’s a good thing.

  I know I should be excited. This makes me closer to Juneau. I’ll be able to understand everything she talks about that, until now, has been only an abstract concept.

  But what if this isn’t the Yara. It shouldn’t be this easy. Juneau said it would take a long time. Dedication to the earth, and all that. What if, because I’m not like Juneau’s clan members, the drug that saved my life is making me go insane, and hallucinations are just the first symptom? Don’t be paranoid, I think, but now that it’s me doing the magic and not Juneau, I am truly freaking out.

  I stumble back down the mountain to our campsite, overwhelmed by the warring thoughts pinballing through my mind: On one side this is one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me; on the other it’s the scariest.

  When I get to the clearing, I am suddenly so exhausted that I crawl into the tent and flop down on the ground. It feels like residual death-sleep—the kind of fatigue that knocks you over the head and renders you unconscious.

  As I drift off I focus once more on what happened on the cliff. Did I really connect to the Yara without even trying, or am I going crazy because I took a drug that wasn’t meant for me? I can’t know unless it happens again. Until then, I won’t say anything to Juneau. No need to scare her, too.

  21

  JUNEAU

  WHEN I GET BACK TO CAMP, MILES IS NOWHERE to be seen. But he’s organized everything so well that I can’t believe this is the same guy who sat in the car while I had to set up the tent, make the fire, and co
ok just over a week ago.

  I unstrap my canteen and crossbow and lay them on the ground. Taking a piece of bread from the bag Miles hung from a nearby tree, I munch on it as I use a piece of kindling to draw a map in the dirt. Quickly, before I can forget anything, I sketch a facsimile of the section of fence leading along the mountain through the forest and down to the desert. I mark everything I saw along it: groves of trees, underbrush thick enough to hide in, several streams and the places they spill into ponds. I mark the animals I saw, on both sides of the fence, and the half-dozen metal boxes I spotted hung high up on some of the fence posts.

  When I’m done I glance back around the clearing, wondering just where Miles has ventured on his own. And then I notice that the tent flap is zipped shut.

  I walk over to investigate, unzipping it in one quick movement. And Miles, who was sleeping, leaps up with an expression so terror struck that I yell and jump back. “Holy crap, you scared the shit out of me!” he says, and pushes his way out the tent.

  “You scared me!” I say, pressing my hand to my heart, which is hammering like a woodpecker. “What are you doing taking a nap in the middle of the day?”

  Miles gets this guilty look on his face and says, “I was tired. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” I say, and walk away to sit next to my map while I wait for my pulse to slow to normal. When I look back at him, he’s just standing there, staring at me in a weird way. “What’s wrong with you?” I ask.

  “Nothing!” he blurts out. “Nothing’s wrong with me. Whatsoever. I’m totally normal . . . I mean, fine.”

  “Okay.” I turn away from him and scribble a few more details onto the map. If he doesn’t want to talk, I’m not going to force him to. But he’s definitely bothered about something.

  “What are you drawing?” Miles says, changing the subject. He stands next to me and inspects my map.