“Eleanor?” August looked up. “That scared little kid?”
“She’s the property of the prophet.”
“She’s twelve years old,” Kirsten said. “You believe everything the prophet says?”
The archer smiled. “The virus was the angel,” he whispered. “Our names are recorded in the book of life.”
“Okay,” Kirsten said. “Where are the others?” He only stared at her, smiling. She looked at Sayid. “Are they behind us somewhere?”
“The clarinet got away,” Sayid said.
“What about Dieter?”
“Kirsten,” Sayid said softly.
“Oh god,” August said. “Not Dieter. No.”
“I’m sorry.” Sayid covered his face with his hands. “I couldn’t …”
“And behold,” the archer whispered, “there was a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had passed away.” The color was draining from his face.
Kirsten wrenched her knife from the archer’s chest. He gasped, the blood welling, and she heard a gurgle in his throat as his eyes dimmed. Three, she thought, and felt immensely tired.
“We heard a whimpering in the forest,” Sayid said. He walked slowly, limping. “That night on patrol. We were about a mile from the Symphony, about to turn back, and there was a sound coming from the bushes, sounded like a lost child.”
“A ruse,” August said. He had a glazed look when Kirsten glanced at him.
“So like idiots we went to investigate, and the next thing I know something’s pressed over my face, a rag soaked in something, a chemical smell, and I woke up in a clearing in the woods.”
“What about Dieter?” It was difficult to force the words from her throat.
“He didn’t wake up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly that. Was he allergic to chloroform? Was it actually chloroform at all, or something much more toxic? The prophet’s men gave me water, told me they wanted the girl, they’d decided to take two hostages and broker a trade. They’d guessed we were headed for the Museum of Civilization, given the direction of travel and the rumors that Charlie and Jeremy had gone there. And the whole time, they’re explaining this, and I’m looking at Dieter sleeping beside me, and he’s getting paler and paler, and his lips are blue. I’m trying to wake him up, and I can’t. I couldn’t. I was tied up next to him, and I kept kicking him, wake up, wake up, but …”
“But what?”
“But he didn’t wake up,” Sayid said. “We waited all through the following day—me tied up there and the men coming and going—and then in the late afternoon, his breathing stopped. I watched it happen.” Kirsten’s eyes filled with tears. “I was watching him breathe,” Sayid said. “He’d gone so pale. His chest rising and falling, and then one last exhale, and no more. I shouted and they tried to revive him, but it didn’t … nothing worked. Nothing. They argued for a while, and then two of them left and returned a few hours later with the clarinet.”
49
THE TRUTH WAS, the clarinet hated Shakespeare. She’d been a double major in college, theater and music, a sophomore the year the world changed, lit up by an obsession with twenty-first-century experimental German theater. Twenty years after the collapse, she loved the music of the Symphony, loved being a part of it, but found the Symphony’s insistence on performing Shakespeare insufferable. She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.
A year before she was seized by the prophet’s men, the clarinet was sitting alone on the beach in Mackinaw City. It was a cool morning, and a fog hung over the water. They’d passed through this place more times than she could count, but she never tired of it. She liked the way the Upper Peninsula disappeared on foggy days, a sense of infinite possibility in the way the bridge faded into cloud.
She’d been thinking lately about writing her own play, seeing if she could convince Gil to stage a performance with the Symphony actors. She wanted to write something modern, something that addressed this age in which they’d somehow landed. Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare. He’d trotted out his usual arguments, about how Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Traveling Symphony. But look, she’d told him, the difference was that they’d seen electricity, they’d seen everything, they’d watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare hadn’t. In Shakespeare’s time the wonders of technology were still ahead, not behind them, and far less had been lost. “If you think you can do better,” he’d said, “why don’t you write a play and show it to Gil?”
“I don’t think I can do better,” she’d told him. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying the repertoire’s inadequate.” Still, writing a play was an interesting idea. She began writing the first act on the shore the next morning, but never got past the first line of the opening monologue, which she’d envisioned as a letter: “Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.” She was distracted just then by a seagull, descending near her feet. It pecked at something in the rocks, and this was when she heard Dieter, approaching from the Symphony encampment with two chipped mugs of the substance that passed for coffee in the new world.
“What were you writing?” he asked.
“A play,” she said. She folded the paper.
He smiled. “Well, I look forward to reading it.”
She thought of the opening monologue often in the months that followed, weighing those first words like coins or pebbles turned over and over in a pocket, but she was unable to come up with the next sentence. The monologue remained a fragment, stuffed deep in her backpack until the day, eleven months later, when the Symphony unearthed it in the hours after the clarinet was seized by the prophet’s men and wondered if they were looking at a suicide note.
While they were reading it, she was waking in a clearing from an unnatural sleep. She had been dreaming of a room, a rehearsal space at college, an impression of laughter—someone had told a joke—and she tried to hold on to this, clinging at these shreds because it was obvious even before she was entirely awake that everything was wrong. She was lying on her side in the forest. She felt poisoned. The ground was hard under her shoulder, and she was very cold. Her hands were tied behind her back, her ankles bound, and she was aware immediately that the Symphony was nowhere near, a terrible absence. She’d been filling water containers with Jackson, and then? She remembered a sound behind her, turning as a rag was pressed to her face, someone’s hand on the back of her head. It was evening now. Six men were crouched in a circle nearby. Two armed with large guns, one with a standard bow and a quiver of arrows and another with a strange metal crossbow, the fifth with a machete. The sixth had his back to her and she couldn’t see if he had a weapon.
“But we don’t know what road they’ll take,” one of the gunmen said.
“Look at the map,” the man who had his back to her replied. “There’s exactly one logical route to the Severn City Airport from here.” She recognized the prophet’s voice.
“They could take Lewis Avenue once they reach Severn City. Looks like it’s not that much longer.”
“We’ll split up,” the prophet said. “Two groups, one for each route, and we meet up at the airport road.”
“I assume you have a plan, gentlemen.” This was Sayid’s voice, somewhere near. Sayid! She wanted to speak with him, to ask where they were and what was happening, to tell him the Symphony had searched for him and Dieter after they’d disappeared, but she was too nauseous to move.
“We told you, we’re just trading the two of you for the bride,” the gunman said, “and as long as no one attempts anything stupid, we’ll take her and then we’ll be on our way.”
“I see,” Sayid said. “You enjoy this line of work, or are you in it for the pension?”
“What’s a pension?” the one with the machete asked. He was very young. He looked about fifte
en.
“All of this,” the prophet said, serene, “all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it’s all part of a greater plan.”
“You’d be surprised at how little comfort I take from that notion.” The clarinet was remembering something she’d always known about Sayid, which was that he had trouble keeping his mouth shut when he was angry. She strained her neck and saw Dieter, lying on his back a few yards away, unmoving. His skin looked like marble.
“Some things in this life seem inexplicable,” the archer said, “but we must trust in the existence of a greater plan.”
“We’re sorry,” the boy with the machete said, sounding as if he meant it. “We’re very sorry about your friend.”
“I’m sure you’re sorry about everyone,” Sayid said, “but while we’re discussing strategy here, there was absolutely no reason for you to abduct the clarinet.”
“Two hostages are more persuasive than one,” the archer said.
“You’re so bright, the lot of you,” Sayid said. “That’s what I admire most about you, I think.”
The gunman muttered something and started to rise, but the prophet placed a hand on his arm and he sank back to the ground, shaking his head.
“The hostage is a test,” the prophet said. “Can we not withstand the taunts of the fallen? Is that not part of our task?”
“Forgive me,” the gunman murmured.
“The fallen walk among us. We must be the light. We are the light.”
“We are the light,” the other four repeated in murmured unison. The clarinet shifted painfully—the movement brought a storm of dark spots over her vision—and craned her neck until she saw Sayid. He was ten or twelve feet away, tied up.
“The road is fifty paces due east,” he mouthed. “Turn left when you get there.” The clarinet nodded and closed her eyes against a wave of nausea.
“Your clarinet friend still sleeping?” The archer’s voice.
“If you touch her, I’ll kill you,” Sayid said.
“No need for that, friend. No one will bother her. We’re just hoping to avoid a repeat …”
“Let her sleep,” the prophet said. “The Symphony’s stopped for the night anyway. We’ll catch up to them in the morning.”
When the clarinet opened her eyes, the men were apparently sleeping, bundled on the forest floor. Some time had passed. Had she slept? She was less ill than she had been. Someone had placed a cloth over Dieter’s face. Sayid was sitting where she’d seen him last, talking to the boy with the machete, who had his back to her.
“In the south?” the boy was saying. “I don’t know, I don’t like to think about it. We did what we had to.”
She didn’t hear Sayid’s reply.
“It hollows you out,” the boy said, “thinking about it. Remembering what we did, it just guts me. I don’t know how else to put it.”
“But you believe in what he says? All of you?”
“Well, Clancy’s a true believer,” she heard the boy say very softly. He gestured toward the sleeping men. “Steve too, probably most of the others. If you’re not a true believer, you’re not going to talk about it. But Tom? The younger gunman? To be honest, I think he’s maybe just in it because our leader’s married to his sister.”
“Very shrewd of him,” Sayid said. “I still don’t get why the prophet’s with you.”
“He comes along on patrols and such every now and again. The leader must occasionally lead his men into the wilderness.” Was she imagining the sadness in his voice? The clarinet lay still for a while, until she located the North Star. She discovered that it was possible, by lying on her side and arching her back, to bring her feet close enough to her hands to loosen the rope that bound her ankles. Sayid and the boy were still talking quietly.
“Okay,” she heard Sayid say, “but there are six of you, and thirty of us. Everyone in the Symphony’s armed.”
“You know how quiet we are.” The boy sighed. “I’m not saying it’s right,” he said. “I know it’s not right.”
“If you know it’s not right …”
“What choice do I have? You know how this … this time we live in, you know how it forces a person to do things.”
“That seems a strange statement,” Sayid said, “coming from someone too young to remember any different.”
“I’ve read books. Magazines, I even found a newspaper once. I know it all used to be different.”
“But getting back to the subject at hand, there are still only six of you, and—”
“You didn’t hear us come up behind you on the road, did you? This is our training. We move silently and we attack from behind. This is how we disarmed ten towns and took their weapons for our leader before we reached St. Deborah by the Water. This is how we took two of our leader’s wives. And look, your friend for example”—the clarinet closed her eyes—“we came up behind her in the forest and she heard nothing.”
“I don’t—”
“We can pick you off one by one,” the boy said. He sounded apologetic. “I’ve been training since I was five. You’ve got weapons, but you don’t have our skills. If the Symphony won’t swap you for the girl, we can kill you one at a time from the safety of the forest until you give her back to us.”
The clarinet began to move again, frantically working the knot at her ankles. Sayid could see her, she realized, but he was keeping his gaze on the boy’s face. A long time passed when she didn’t listen to the conversation, concentrating on nothing but the rope. When her ankles were unbound, she struggled to her knees.
“But I’m not sure I quite follow,” Sayid was saying. “That part in your philosophy about being the light. How do you bring the light if you are the light? I wonder if you could just explain to me …”
The clarinet was one of the Symphony’s best hunters. She had survived alone in the forest for three years after the collapse, and now, even sick with whatever poison they’d used on her, even with her wrists bound behind her back, it was possible to turn and vanish noiselessly between the trees, away from the clearing, to make almost no sound at all as she stepped out onto the road. Running as night faded to gray dawn and the sun rose, walking and stumbling through the dragging hours, hallucinating now, dreaming of water, falling into the arms of the Symphony’s rear scouts in the morning as the sky darkened overhead, delivering her message—“You must change the route”—as they carried her back to the Symphony, where the last tree blocking the road had just been sawed away. The first raindrops were falling as the conductor heard the message and ordered an immediate change of course, scouts sent to find Kirsten and August—fishing somewhere along the road ahead—but unable to locate them in the storm, the Symphony veering inland into a new route, a circuitous combination of back roads that would take them eventually to the Severn City Airport, the clarinet slipping in and out of consciousness in the back of the first caravan while Alexandra held a bottle of water to her lips.
50
THE KNIFE TATTOOS on Kirsten’s wrist:
The first marked a man who came at her in her first year with the Symphony, when she was fifteen, rising fast and lethal out of the underbrush, and he never spoke a word but she understood his intent. As he neared her, sound drained from the world, and time seemed to slow. She was distantly aware that he was moving quickly, but there was more than enough time to pull a knife from her belt and send it spinning—so slowly, steel flashing in the sun—until it merged with the man and he clutched at his throat. He shrieked—she couldn’t hear him, but she watched his mouth open and she knew others must have heard, because the Symphony was suddenly all around her, and this was when the volume slowly rose and time resumed its normal pace.
“It’s a physiological response to danger,” Dieter told her, when Kirsten mentioned the soundlessness of those seconds, the way time stretched and expanded. This seemed a reasonable-enough explanation, but there was nothing in her memories to account for how calm she was afterward, when she pulle
d her knife from the man’s throat and cleaned it, and this was why she stopped trying to remember her lost year on the road, the thirteen unremembered months between leaving Toronto with her brother and arriving in the town in Ohio where they stayed until he died and she left with the Symphony. Whatever that year on the road contained, she realized, it was nothing she wanted to know about.
The second knife was for a man who fell two years later, outside Mackinaw City. The Symphony had been warned of brigands in the area, but it was a shock when they materialized out of fog on the road ahead. Four men, two with guns and two with machetes. One of the gunmen asked for food, four horses, and a woman, in a flat monotone voice. “Give us what we want,” he said, “and no one has to die.” But Kirsten sensed rather than heard the sixth guitar fitting an arrow to his bow behind her back. “Guns first,” he murmured, close to her ear. “I’ve got the one on the left. One, two—” and on three the men with guns were falling, one staring past the arrow protruding from his forehead and the other clutching at Kirsten’s knife in his chest. The conductor finished the others with two quick shots. They retrieved the weapons, dragged the men into the forest to be food for the animals, and continued on into Mackinaw City to perform Romeo and Juliet.
She’d hoped there would never be a third. “There was a new heaven and a new earth,” the archer whispered. She saw the look on August’s face just afterward and realized that the gunman had been his first—he’d had the colossal good fortune to have made it to Year Twenty without killing anyone—and if she weren’t so tired, if it didn’t take all of her strength to keep breathing in the face of Sayid’s terrible news, she could have told him what she knew: it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.
Where was the prophet? They walked mostly in silence, stunned by grief, Sayid limping, listening for the dog. The signs for the airport led them away from the lake, out of downtown, up into residential streets of wood-frame houses. A few of the roofs had collapsed up here, most under the weight of fallen trees. In the morning light there was beauty in the decrepitude, sunlight catching in the flowers that had sprung up through the gravel of long-overgrown driveways, mossy front porches turned brilliant green, a white blossoming bush alive with butterflies. This dazzling world. An ache in Kirsten’s throat. The houses thinned out, longer spaces between the overgrown driveways, and now the right lane of the road was clogged with cars, rusted exoskeletons on flat tires. When she glanced in the windows, she saw only trash from the old world, crumpled chip bags, the remains of pizza boxes, electronic objects with buttons and screens.
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