All the Whys of Delilah's Demise

by Neve Maslakovic

  “Only what I had to.”

  I’m in the middle of a snowy field talking to air, being chased by a mirage. I make a sharp turn and now I’m off the path and on the pristine snow. I zigzag, knowing all the maneuvering is pointless. Thought precedes movement and Renee knows my thoughts. “Come back, Scott. Going after the number ones… It was a mistake. I understand that now. I need each and every one of you.”

  A merciless salvo descends into my mind, commands ordering my legs to turn around—as she did in CC Central to protect the remaining stock of chips, Renee is breaking through the wall between the second inner voice and the pathways of my brain. If only I could get some peace and quiet, claw her out. The tree line seems so far away, it’ll take years to reach it, every step an eternity. I call out “Leave me alone!” but my voice is small, lost in the middle of the hostile plain. My field of vision narrows, a speeded-up nightfall from within. With a last effort, I take a few running strides toward the forest before my body stumbles and my mind fades into nothingness.

  40

  I wake up with a start. Darkness has settled onto the plain and a fierce wind whips daggers of snow into my eyes. The plunge in temperature has rendered my ears and nose numb. A blizzard. I take a moment to identify a clicking sound—it’s my own teeth, an involuntary motion accompanying my shivering muscles.

  Guardedly, I send a command for the people map. Nothing. I must be just out of range of the heartbeat signal.

  My fingers grope around for the helmet but I fail to find it and stumble to my feet, fighting to stay upright in the wind. Though I can barely make out the Dome in the onslaught of white, if I aimed for the flickering lights, I could reach it. I’d bang on the glass and the night guard would let me in and I’d hurry inside to look for Dax, make sure he’s all right.

  Only I can’t do that.

  I swivel so my back is to the Dome and stumble along in the knee-deep snow, my goal to keep the lights behind me, make them fainter, farther. So that’s what I do. Walk—not toward something but away.

  A break in the storm reveals a tall figure up ahead. I wave to it. It’s hard to see with the flakes sticking to my eyelashes but there’s a response, an arm waving back. Wait… more than one arm. Confusion envelops me. The figure seems to have multiple arms. Either my brain has turned to mush, a symptom of hypothermia—or Renee is messing with me and I’m not really out of range. I can’t decide which would be worse.

  Nevertheless, it’s a destination to push toward, and I do.

  The figure turns out to be a tree, its limbs shaken by the wind. I’ve been tracking the edge of the forest. I pass into it. The wind is less fierce here, the trees offering some protection. In the recesses of my brain—the sole connections in it internal, organic, mine alone—I dredge up a memory from a survival story I heard in school. Long ago, a climber on Mount Rainier, the tallest peak of the Cascades, found themselves caught in a blizzard. They built a cave of snow and survived the night. A plan, then. I choose a tree and get to work with the arm that’s not swollen with red-hot daggers of pain. Sweat mixes with the flakes melting on my brow, but soon there’s a well with walls of packed snow. It’s enough to encase my whole body but I don’t know how to make it have a roof.

  Exhausted, I squeeze into the well, my back against the tree, my knees drawn up. Of pressing concern is how to warm myself—the physical exertion seems to have made me more shivery—but even if I knew how to start a fire, that being an undesirable skill to teach youths living in an enclosed space full of wooden structures, the twigs and leaves of the forest floor are wet. Fumbling in the dark, I unzip the snowsuit halfway and pull one arm out of its sleeve, then the injured left one, which makes me cry out and wonder if it’s broken. But this allows me to sink into the suit on my good side and pull the heavy waterproof fabric above my head to form a cocoon with a narrow gap for air. Soon my body heat is warming the nest I’ve made and my shivering subsides. Dax’s binoculars are a solid object against my heart as the branches above me groan and creak with the wind. A sound cuts into the fury of the storm, the howl of an animal. I hold my breath until the howling fades away.

  Before long my eyes grow heavy. The tree roots are padded with wet, withered leaves, a pillow provided by nature. Is it dangerous to sleep when the environment temperature is so low? I have no idea… Best to stay awake. There’s plenty to keep me up. How did I manage to get myself into such a mess, sunk into my worst nightmare? Outside, alone. Not like I was on the Agency roof but really alone for the first time in my life. Worse than that, I’ve hurt Dax… With every fiber of my body, I try to will him into being well and safe.

  I was compelled to find out why Delilah died not only to clear my name, but because I looked up to her, because she took an interest in me, treated me like a person, not a number. She died before I had the chance to thank her for the advice, for seeing something in me… For giving me life.

  But I poked into things better left alone and this is where it led to: darkness and fear and loneliness. I’m unlikely to last the night. The news that I’ve disappeared into the blizzard has probably hit the Commons by now. “Poor Scott. The curse felled her in the end…”

  41

  8:15 a.m.

  Tenner Meeting Room

  “Renee, welcome.”

  In the past Jada would have said it to flatter and manipulate, but subterfuge isn’t needed today. Renee is…well, she belongs. Yes, that’s a good word for it. It’s a new experience for Jada, this trust she feels toward the striking woman at the head of the table. Renee is in a pearl-white gown, her halo a red crown above hair rolling down to her waist.

  “Welcome, Renee,” the others in the room echo the greeting eagerly. Even Chase’s customary snark is missing, despite the fact that they’ve come together quite early in the day and no one has supplied breakfast.

  Renee’s voice as she acknowledges the greeting is vibrant and slightly husky. It reminds Jada of someone. From the number one chair she’s gracing, Renee glances at the single empty one. “Scott won’t be joining us today. But she’ll be back.” She turns to the person on her right. “Bonnie, how’s the head?”

  The bruises on Bonnie’s face are down to a pale yellow-green. “Much better.”

  “Glad to hear it. The town is stronger with you in it.”

  Bonnie beams at this and Renee turns to Chase next. “Chase, keep the coffee flowing and those crowds happy. But,” she wags a finger, “no more reusing of coffee grounds—and no more fight club.”

  Next is the Joker duo. Samm pulls his chair closer in and Sue, by his side, leans forward on her elbows. Renee sends them a smile. “I’m glad to see that you two have made up. Keep making ’em laugh.”

  And Poulsbo. “There’s no reason to weep, Poulsbo, not anymore. I’ll make sure your load is fair.”

  Finally Renee turns toward her and Jada can hardly wait. “Thank you for letting go of all the secrets, Jada. You’ll be the better for it and so will everyone else.”

  Jada understands. It’s a new beginning. She’s free.

  The next person to be freed is Blank Jack. “Your pain is worse than most, but I hope now that we’re all family, it’ll hurt less,” Renee tells him. The tavern caretaker rubs the frown line on his forehead with a calloused thumb. His features relax. “Thank you, Renee. I think it does help.”

  The feeling of closeness in the room has thickened to an intimacy Jada hasn’t felt since childhood, when she and her peers would burst into familiar songs over meals. She summons her courage. “Renee… Can I ask a question? What brought you to us—to New Seattle?”

  Renee laughs, a sparkling note in the room. “I believe I was meant to come in, to fix things. First on the agenda—we’ll no longer kick out bottomers.”

  “We never did have to, did we?” Ben says with a slow nod. “It was the easiest—and cruelest—punishment we could come up with. It wasn’t only that we shuffled them into a spartan greenhouse or out into the unforgiving cold. They left behind everything
and everyone.”

  “There was a practical reason,” Jada counters, but only because Renee is new and may be unaware of how things work. “To make room for youth center grads.”

  Renee leans forward. “But now we know. A growing population of equals is better than a flat one where people climb each others’ backs and aim for bloated perks. The more of us there are, the more powerful we will be.”

  “Of course.” Chase slaps his forehead. “Like money in the bank, only with people. Why didn’t I see that before?”

  “None of us saw it,” Bonnie adds her voice. “We all dreamed of being number one. Material things. Eternal Life.”

  Renee shakes her head. It’s a soft movement. “Eternal Life was a lie, too…or rather, the original purpose was forgotten, distorted. The stocking list for New Seattle talks of a case of multivitamins, an amalgam of needed supplements for the body. Over time, as the quantity diminished, its importance became exaggerated. Dissolved in water along with aspirin, other mild health-boosters, and a crushed coffee bean, the vitamins became Eternal Life, a sought-after cocktail.”

  A brief flash of anger crosses some of the faces around the table. Jada never cared about Eternal Life and the revelation passes her by.

  There’s a sigh, a sound at odds with the mood in the room. “The lure of the number one wasn’t just Eternal Life.” The words come from the only person not given encouragement yet. “It was the chance to get away with, well, almost anything.”

  “I know what you desire, Ben.” Renee gets to her feet and circles the table to place a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “A child.”

  “Yes.” Ben runs a knuckle across his upper lip. “Delilah dangled it in front of me, a carrot I could one day have if I cooperated. We were to team up and she’d make sure I inherited the crown after she was gone. I said no, not that way. I wanted to earn the spot, then introduce a resolution to allow children.”

  At this a stab of anger does go through Jada. Delilah told her the same thing—that she’d inherit the crown one day, if she waited patiently and cooperated. Jada should have turned on her sooner. As with everything, Delilah had pushed the boundaries of the Code and admitted to it one night when particularly drunk—the last time she drank, in fact, some years back. It was the same desire as Ben’s: a child. It wasn’t hard to figure out who it was. Jada relayed the information to Rick the evening of the town party. It gave Rick a heady rush of power. He was going to confront Delilah, insist she step down or he’d tell everyone about the secret child, but by morning Delilah was gone…

  As quickly as it came, Jada’s anger dissipates. None of it matters now. It’s all in the past—done with. Renee, having sat back down, says, “No more random spins of the genetic wheel. We’ll switch the reproduction genes back on and welcome natural offspring.”

  Ben’s eyes are moist. “We can do that?”

  “And more. Going forward, we’ll share everything equally, a harmonious life. No more perks, no more rank. There’s one issue…” A hint of bother mars Renee’s blemish-free features. “The birds.”

  Ben rushes to report that he’s finished marking the nests on the paper map and Poulsbo, his stutter and customary anxiety wiped away, offers, “We’ll start trapping the sparrows at once. Is there anything else we can do, Renee?”

  “Yes,” the response comes. “You know what word isn’t mentioned in the Code of Conduct, not once? Love. For us to form a strong, unbreakable bond, that’s what it’ll take—for you all to love me.”

  “We do, Renee. We do,” Jada says.

  42

  “Hey, look eve’yone, it’s a Domer!”

  “She’s wearin’ a funny suit.”

  “Now Mikey, it’s their way….”

  “Mikey, get out of the way, let me see…”

  It takes me a moment to realize that the voices aren’t coming from within a dream. I rub my eyes, raw from little sleep; I dozed on and off throughout the night. Sunshine streams through snow-laden branches and sparkles on the fresh layer of white all around.

  A young girl, maybe eight years old, is peering down at me. “Look, she’s awake. Hello, I’m Tawnie. These are my parents and over there’s my older brother Sal, and that”—she elbows back a boy a couple of inches shorter as they jostle for the spot—“is my kid brother, Mikey. He’s being annoyin’. We’re the Hewletts.”

  I’m briefly puzzled by what the girl means, then understand. The quintet of Outsiders, all of varying heights, is a family and they are called Hewlett. Under the woolen scarves, the children’s faces are as similar as the apples in Bonnie’s barrel. They’ve arrived on a pair of snowmobiles pulling sleds loaded with supplies.

  My lips are cracked and dry and I have to clear my throat before speaking. “Pleased to meet you, Tawnie Hewlett. I’m Scottie… I don’t have a last name.”

  “Strange,” the girl says, “but I supp’se it’s okay.”

  “Now Tawnie, you know that Domers don’t have last names,” the mother admonishes her. “Let’s help her up.”

  I brush snow off and accept help getting up, as my legs are cramped and stiff. The arm I hurt in the fall off the bike is still swollen and sore, but not, I decide, broken.

  “This is the firs’ time I’ve been allowed to come a’tradin’. I’m old enough now, Dad said,” Tawnie informs me and then asks with frank curiosity, “Did you get kicked out of the Dome?”

  I slip my arms back into the snowsuit. Where would I even begin in explaining about Renee? Worry about Dax goes through me like a knife. “No, I came out to…to explore. I got caught in the blizzard and lost my helmet. I was worried the cold would turn my nose a waxy black and, I don’t know, it’d fall off or something.”

  Mikey chortles at this.

  “Now Mikey,” the mother admonishes, “be kind. She doesn’t know how frostbite and hypothermia work. Hello, Scottie. I’m Jo.”

  Behind his mother, Mikey is pretending his nose has fallen off. To one side, Sal, the older brother, tall and broad-shouldered, is attending to one of the snowmobiles. His father shakes his head at my foolishness of heading out into a blizzard. I wonder if I should be concerned. I’ve heard that sometimes trains get robbed and presumably people too. But I have no possessions beyond the snowsuit, and the Hewletts are already dressed warmly in layers of clothing and sturdy leather boots and woolen hats.

  Jo turns to one of the sleds and pulls out a charred bowl. She sets it on the ground and tucks in a piece of wood and a wad of hay under it, then flicks a lighter on. The flame jumps to the hay, then the wood. “Here, come’n warm up your hands. It’s true that hypothermia and frostbite are real dangers, especially in a blizzard, but that’s over and when the sun’s out like this, it’s not bad at all. Didn’t used to be that way—right after the Dimmin’, my grandpa told me, you couldn’t expose your face to open air for more’n a minute, it was that cold. It’s been warmin’ up. The sky’s gettin’ less white and more blue each year, only you’d really have to pay attention to notice.”

  I’m looking not up at the sky, but down. The fire in the bowl is dancing red, the heat prickly on my fingers. I’m alive. Alive to fight another day. Letting the warmth drive away the numbness in my hands, I listen to Sal and the father discuss whether to attempt to reach their village by nightfall—going will be slow in the fresh snow—or spend a night at a way station. Tawnie pulls on my elbow. “Wanna see? Sal’s been all the way to Old Seattle. Brought me back a souv’nir.” She pulls something out of the recesses of her clothing and shows off a chunk of concrete, irregular and gray. “It’s a piece of the Space Needle. Sal said the ice ate at its base, so the Needle is crumblin’. But you c’n still get to it.”

  I have a picture in my mind of a path winding its way through the mountains all the way to a city that dwarfs New Seattle. A city beneath an open sky. And on the way, the Hewletts’ cabin, hearth-warmed and cozy and surrounded by identical cabins. Tawnie provides more inside information. “We came to trade wood for fruit’n veggies. We were goin’
to head back yesterday but then the storm came, so we had to wait out the night in the g’eenhouse. Scottie, do you know Jack?”

  I flip my hands to warm their backs. “No… Wait, do you mean Blank Jack?”

  Tawnie wrinkles her forehead. “That’s a strange name.”

  “Jack Jablonowski,” Jo says with sadness in her voice and I gather that Upper Maple Grove must be their village. “Poor man… Has he settled in okay? We all told him not to go, that it wouldn’t help him escape the memories, but he’s a stubborn ‘un.”

  I smile at them. “He’s settled in fine. In fact, he’s one of the people helping govern New Seattle.”

  It was the truth, for a brief moment at least.

  The father shakes his head. “Well, what do you know.”

  “Is everything okay, dear?” Jo says. “You’re welcome to come with us, no questions asked. We can always use another helpin’ hand.”

  “We don’t need ’nother mouth to feed, Jo,” the father grumbles, but not unkindly.

  “Now Braith, we should help her if we can.”

  The flames are making quick work of the slim chunk of wood. “I need to stay,” I say. “But thank you.”

  Braith nods at me. “Follow our tracks that-a-way and they’ll lead you out of the forest.”

  Before we part, I say, “Oliver. Uh—no family name. He left New Seattle about a month ago.”

  Braith upends the embers onto the snow, where the red turns gray and dark. “He’s with us, in the village. Quiet fellow. He’s plannin’ on going south soon—most Domers don’t stick around for long.”

  “Dad says that if you keep goin’ south you get to a place where you can walk on grass for miles,” Tawnie says excitedly. “He promised we could all go when I’m old enough.”

  Sal revs the engine.

  Tawnie and I shake hands, hers small and warm in my own. As she’s lifted up onto a snowmobile by her father, Jo sneaks an apple into my hand. “If you change your mind, follow our tracks. We’ll overnight at the way station.”