“Don’t bother,” I say, sounding more defeated than I feel. “I tried it. It’s not going to move.”
“Hmm,” she answers and kneels on the block of stone before the door. She examines the nub of metal where the handle had been and pokes and prods it with her fingertips for a few moments. I watch her in silence from behind. Her fingers aren’t long and slender like Freda the tailor’s daughter, but they are deft and quick. I’ve watched Freda’s fingers flit gracefully through cloth and ribbon while mending a shirt for my father. This girl’s fingers are shorter and thicker, inelegant but efficient. Her fingernails are ragged and as filthy as my own. That alone would exclude her from the Wifing.
No doubt at this very moment my mother, in her duties as First Wife, is slimming down the list. Today she will visit two of the ten Verges, but I can’t remember which. Freda maybe, and that girl from the fishing village. Freda has long been my favorite, a reasonably smart girl who is more perceptive than her sheep of a mother could ever realize. The smartest of the ten Verges, Freda would make a good First Wife. She’s not unattractive, in her skinny, quiet way.
The fishergirl with the weird name—Vernique?—has those gorgeous green eyes, but she’s mean and stupid. Beauty will fade, but stupid girls turn into stupid women, and I need someone smart to help me protect what remains of the human race. Anyway, I don’t see why I have to pick one now, when my father won’t pass the title of Semper on to me for another ten years.
“Ah hah!” The girl rises on a wobbly leg and grabs out at a thick ivy vine for balance. She hops to the side and leans against the stone wall, rolling along it to face me. I can see how tired she is in her drooping eyelids and weak smile of triumph, in the way her whole body leans against the stone and her good leg shakes under her weight. “Try it now.” She wafts her hand at the door.
For a moment I look at her with a question in my eyes, but really I’m just stalling so I can gaze at her smooth, bronze skin and infinitely deep brown eyes, the curve of her cheeks and roundness of her nose, the raw silkiness of her black hair. A strand has fallen across her cheek, and I fight my urge to reach out and smooth it back into place. I’m fighting a lot of urges right now. I desperately want to draw my fingertips along her cheek and her jaw and her eyebrow, to feel the warmth of her skin.
A momentary frown flickers across her brow, and it spurs my feet to throw me forward in a clumsy lurch at the door. With a sudden thrust of my legs, I turn the graceless stumble into a forceful charge and plow my shoulder into the door hard, expecting to be bounced back into the dirt. I slam into the solid wood with a bone-jarring thud, and instead of throwing me back, the door creaks and groans and opens a few inches.
The girl exclaims something that gets lost in the thick pain reverberating through my head, and I stagger back to survey the scene. The door has opened maybe four inches, revealing only a strip of blackness. There’s a sort of deadness in that black air beyond the door. I get the feeling that centuries have passed since the air inside has mingled with the air out here.
“Hit it again!” The girl’s eagerness argues with my shoulder, but after a moment she wins out and my pain disappears in a surge of excitement. Her eyes are wide and locked on the door, her hand still clutching the ivy but her body no longer leaning against the stones of the house.
I drive my shoulder into the wood again, and the hinges loosen immediately, allowing the door to swing inward to almost fully open. Light from the morning behind us falls in and shows us only a cloud of disrupted dust, and we stand open-mouthed as the dust settles again like mist dispersing off a waterfall.
“Help me.” From behind, I feel the girl’s hand press down on my shoulder, the shoulder that just bashed into the door. It hurts, but only for an instant. Then the pain doesn’t hurt anymore; all I feel is the press of her hand as she uses me to help herself stay upright. Her hand trembles. I want it to be because she feels the same thrill of our contact that I do, but I know it’s just because her leg hurts so bad.
She shuffles us both forward, pushing me ahead while leaning on me heavily. In only a few steps, her breathing is hard. I feel a strength that I don’t really possess, and I straighten, stand taller. I want her to know that she can depend on me now, even if she couldn’t in those first moments by the lake.
“You know,” I suggest as we cross the threshold and taste the stale, dry air, “you can put your arm around me and I can take more weight.”
“I’m OK,” she replies flatly, and her heaving breath suddenly becomes quieter. The press of her hand lightens, and after one more step it leaves my shoulder completely.
We’re inside now, and it’s dark. As dark as the inside of my tree last night. I inhale the past, tasting age-old pine, musty rotted cloth, and the dank smells of an old fire pit after a strong rain.
Behind me, a sharp, scritching crack is followed by a sudden flare of light. The girl steps beside me holding a candle with a chipper flame which illuminates a long, thin scar on her left arm from wrist to elbow, ragged and pinkish in the flickering light.
We both peer into the small room, haunted by its eerie stillness. A table occupies the center, covered with dust and ringed by three chairs. A long, tiled counter lines one wall with a basin and what looks like a faucet without a pump handle. The counter is so dusty it looks like it’s had a layer of dirt spread across it, and here and there little things move that must be beetles or bugs. Cobwebs adorn every corner from floor to ceiling. Other items I can’t identify sit on the counter. I’m struck by a sense of awe at these ancient things, their nature and uses long ago forgotten. “What place was this,” I whisper. “Some kind of workshop?”
The girl barks out a sudden “Ha!” in response. “Leave it to a boy not to know a kitchen when he breaks into one.” She wafts the candle at different points in turn: “Knives, see?” Then the table: “These lumps are dishes.” To the counter: “A sink. Where dishes are washed, boy.” Finally: “And this box built into the wall?” She points out a sort of handle I hadn’t noticed before, a horizontal rod curving out of and back into the wall. “That’s an oven.”
Now it’s my turn to bark out a laugh. “An oven?” I step around the table, swirling dust devils in my wake. I put my hand on the curved bar, expecting it to crumble like the iron door handle had. Instead, it’s sturdy, and under the thick gathered dust it has a strange, smooth feel. Unnatural. “That—this is no oven. Where’s the chimney? Where do you put the coals?” I laugh out loud, but the slimy-smooth feel of the ancient thing, oven or not, makes me uneasy.
The girl’s sigh is a bit too loud, and she hobbles to my side, stirring up more dust. My nose burns with a stifled sneeze. She seems unbothered. “Before the War, people didn’t cook with wood,” she lectures. “And in the old days, people kept meat cold in big boxes called frigs,” she continues, pointing across the room at a big, upright box. She stands silent and motionless for several seconds, staring at the thing. “I’ve never seen one before,” she whispers, and she reaches out to touch its surface with a tentative caress. Her outstretched hand casts unsteady shadows across the counter and the wall.
In her awed silence, a sudden feeling of detachment comes over me. I’ve had this feeling once before, kneeling before the Altar in the church, on my sixth birthday. Almost exactly ten years ago to the day. My father stood atop the altar, tall and strong in his white hooded robe, his gaze intense but proud. His mouth moved, words emerged, and the congregation behind me answered at times. It was my First Day ceremony, the first time I was to be presented to the entirety of Southshaw. One of only three events every citizen must attend.
I had been prepared; I had studied hard. I knew the moments I should speak, the moments I should kneel, the moment I should bow my head to receive the Bones. All these I executed with the flawless grace of a born leader, and I felt the pride cascading off my father, over me, and spreading across the entire citizenry. I knew the precise moment I should stand tall, turn, and face the congregation.
&n
bsp; It was that moment when I felt God standing next to me. Everything was right, everything was according to scripture and law. But everything was also wrong. I stood before thousands of people, and I knew they loved me because of my mother and father, and because my name was Dane Semper, destined to succeed my father as ruler of Southshaw on or before my thirty-sixth birthday. I also felt the eleven previous Sempers, the eleven Southshaw leaders since the War, standing with me and God. I knew I belonged among them, that I was born from them and they were part of me, but I also sensed a difference.
That same feeling washes over me as I stand before the frig, this artifact of an ancient civilization that worshipped technology more than God and was smote down by God because of it. So says the scripture of The Truth, from which I recited on my First Day:
And Man rent asunder that which God had created first among all things, the brick of Creation. Adam split Atom. But Man succumbed to the sin of Pride reveling in his conquest over God. Man also succumbed to the sins of Lust and Avarice, and God was made angry. God spoke to Man, but Man did not listen. And Man made The Bomb, and he blew up the Earth, and killing or abominating all living things except the chosen people.
At this point in my First Day, I raised my hand and brought it slowly down to rest on a large, metal object. The object grew out of the ground with curved sides, tapering to a dulled point which we kept freshly painted red and black. This object was meant to look like the Bomb, was meant to remind us of the hubris that was the downfall of that ancient civilization, thirteen generations ago. Meant to remind us of the eighth deadly sin. The sin of Invention.
“What did you say about a bomb? The chosen people?”
The girl’s distant voice pulls my mind back from history, from the spirits of the ancients still haunting this place. The frig is real. I feel God standing next to me again, watching me, studying me. I have not believed everything in The Truth, have not always believed the scriptures and the stories. I did not truly believe in the ghost-men, but I broke one’s ribs just hours ago. I had not truly believed in the Bomb, or in things like cars and Hell copters. Remnants of that ancient civilization persist all around us, but I had never truly believed. And God stands beside me, watching.
She’s in my face now. The candle is inches from my nose, so bright it hurts my eyes, so hot I can taste the wax that evaporates into sooty smoke before me. When did she move? How did she get there without me knowing?
“Are you all right?” There is concern in her voice, but it sounds like she’s speaking with a rag in her mouth. Or maybe I have wool in my ears. My nose burns again with the dust and the dead air, and I want to sneeze but I can’t seem to accomplish it. The edges of the ring of candle light blur and spin, and before my knees buckle and I collapse to the floor in a puff of dust, I hear her say something else but can’t quite make it out.
CHAPTER 5
“Sit down.” The words float in and out of my ears, passing through my mind, getting lost and getting found again. I perceive that they were said only once, but they echo inside me as if a choir of mutant girls is chanting them randomly in a dark, small, wet cave.
The words fade for the last time, and I perceive that I am prone, lying on my back on a very hard surface. My head hurts, and my nose burns with an unfulfilled need to sneeze. My mouth moves, and my tongue feels thick, filled with dusty molasses. I trust that the words come out right: “Sit down? But I’m already lying down.”
“You hit your head,” chime the chorus of mutant girls with rags in their mouths, almost but not quite speaking in unison. Shadows drift and weave about me. Oh, that’s right. There was a candle. It must be flickering. A candle, and a… what was it? A fig. No. That’s not right.
“Come on,” sing the mutant girls. Some must have left because it sounds like only a half dozen now, but they’re still out of tune with each other. And there’s a grunting, and something pulling at my shoulders. I’m half lifted from the hard surface. I consider my legs and whether I can make them move. I’m being dragged. If I wobble my legs this way… no, perhaps this way…
“Stop helping.” Now there is just the one voice, and a vast, insistent brightness chases away all the uncertain shadows. Its harsh glare makes me want to shut my eyes. But they’re already shut. “There,” gasps the girl. “Good enough.” She’s panting, and I realize there was a lot of grunting for a time. Maybe a long time.
The clean smells of pine and old ivy sweep away the moldy dust that had been burning at my nose. I must be outside. She has dragged me from the house to the doorstep. My head hurts on one side, a deep, stinging ache. The right side. The clean air fills up my lungs, and when it escapes it brings my voice: “Frig.”
“OK, yeah, whatever,” pants the girl’s voice, quite close. I open my eyes to find the world is in full daylight, and the land and trees around me are swaying like I’m on a raft on the lake, on a windy day. The sun glares at me, like the eye of God, between two thick redwoods.
I sit up. The world rocks itself to motionlessness, and the girl pants herself to peace. She is watching me, her dark eyebrows knotted in a frown. I can’t tell whether she’s mad at me or concerned about me. Maybe both. We sit for ten or fifteen minutes in silence. The sun creeps behind one of the redwoods, and as its harsh heat passes, I feel that perhaps God has seen enough and moved on to examine other souls.
“You fainted.” Simple as that, the girl breaks the silence of late morning. “You fell. Your head hit that table. The air is bad in there. It may be left over from the War. Radiation sickness, maybe.”
Could it be? Could I have been tainted? Could I be stricken with the Radiation, to be banished from my own country? Images flash across my mind—my mother and father dressed for the ceremonies of the coming week and wondering why I do not return. The ten girls eager to become my wife, the future First Wife, dressed up in freshly sewn dresses and cleanly cut flowers. The barn cats that chase the Lorenz boy at milking time. The hill at Westgate, overlooking the lush, green pastures of Southport.
“I saw it once. Radiation sickness.” The girl’s voice is cold and low. “A boy from north Tawtrukk, from up in the hills, found a green rock near the lake. It glowed in his hand, and within minutes his flesh was melting from his bones. His hair smoldered, and his eyes caught fire, and within an hour even his bones had turned to dust.” Her voice was a mere whisper now.
I look at my hands. They do not seem to be melting, or glowing. They just look unwashed, with red dirt crammed under ragged fingernails and plowed into the lines of my palms.
She stares at me hard. “I think I got you out just in time.” So that’s why she’s been studying me so hard while we sat here. “But it’s funny that I was not affected.”
Of course not, I think. You were not affected because you are a mutant, and mutants are creatures born from Radiation.
I think these things but do not say them out loud. The sun has crept beyond the second of the two redwoods, and I feel God’s eye burning the back of my neck once more. I know it would be wrong to say those things aloud. But the searing heat seems to be telling me it’s wrong even to think them.
But if it’s not true—if mutants are not born from Radiation—then does the Book of Truth contain inaccuracies? Shadow falls on me again as God’s eye passes and looks away.
“Maybe,” she says slowly, “it’s not Radiation sickness after all.”
My heart skips. Yes, I think. Yes, that’s right. It’s not the Radiation. I can return home without fear of infecting everyone. I can see my mother and father again, walk through the pastures and hills of Southshaw. Swim in the lake.
“Maybe you have algies.”
“What’s that?” Algies sounds maybe even worse than Radiation, if there can be anything worse. “Is it catching?”
She shakes her head, and her black hair floats around her beautiful face. “No. Algies is something you’re born with. It means—“ She pauses and searches the air for words. “Like when someone sneezes a lot around a certain
kind of plant, or if their eyes get all teary around dogs. That’s Algies. Maybe you’ve got it for something inside that house. Maybe you’re Algic to kitchens!” She smiles broadly and starts to giggle a little. “Most boys I know are.”
“But I’m not Algic to my kitchen at home,” I protest. But that just makes her laugh more. Her laughing, and the pain on the side of my head, make the morning hurt. “Stop that,” I say. “No more laughing.”
“Oh, relax,” she says, but the laughing stops after a few hiccups. “There’s a lot of old dust, and rotted things in that house. Lots of ancient things from before The War, too. You could have Algies to any of those things.”
I turn my gaze on the dark doorway. I deeply want to go examine the wonderful, ancient things in there. The Book of Laws forbids learning of the ancients because Invention created the Bomb. But it also created the frig. And, who knows what other wondrous things?
“You really want to go in, don’t you?” The mutant girl’s voice is soft and filled with what sounds like sadness, but her smile is the same as it was when she was laughing at me.
“Yes,” I admit. Even that one word could get me exiled beyond the Wall, where I’d die of the Radiation. I shiver to think of my flesh melting from my bones in that vast wasteland. On the other hand, no one is around and I will never have another chance.
“I don’t think it’s safe for you,” the girl says as she rises slowly, with a fair amount of wincing and grunting. She wobbles a little but finds her balance on her one good leg. “But if you let me go in, I can look around and bring some things out to you.”
She can’t bring the frig. But it’s not the frig I want to see. I want to see their little machines, their clothes. Their books. “Yes, please.” It’s all I can muster. I want so badly to go inside. I want it so much I feel as if an ancient spirit has grabbed me by my naked ribs and pulls me toward the house. “But—but, maybe if I put a rag over my mouth…”
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