Origin

by Jessica Khoury

  Trembling, blinking away the tears that bead my eyelashes, I glare at him. It’s as if he’s been reading my mind these past few days and is now bringing every insecurity I have into the light.

  “Papi, stop! Can’t you see how upset you’ve made her?” Eio comes to me and tries to take my hand, but I shake my head.

  “What are you saying, Uncle Antonio?”

  “You’re not their perfect little scientist, Pia. They’ve done their best to mold you into their image, but you’re breaking free. Why else do you come to Ai’oa? Why haven’t you killed that kitten yet? But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have Ai’oa and Little Cam. You’ve felt it, haven’t you? I know, because I’ve felt it almost my entire life. You try to balance between the two, but sooner or later, you’ll just fall. Or you’ll end up like me—belonging nowhere.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. It’s as if he and Eio planned it all—this afternoon under the kapok tree, Uncle Paolo’s angry lecture, and now this.

  “What’s funny, Pia?” Eio asks.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” Does he not hear how similar Uncle Antonio’s words are to the ones he himself told me earlier today? “Anyway, if you have a tracking device, Uncle Antonio, then so must I. I can’t go anywhere.”

  “No, Pia. You don’t. They tried implanting one when you were born, but…unbreakable skin, remember? They wanted to strap one to your ankle, but I convinced them it wasn’t necessary. I told them that as long as you never knew about the outside world, you’d have no desire to see it, and you’d stay safe and secure inside your glass walls. Because I knew the day would come when you would have to run. I’ve known it for years. But if you’re caught, they won’t hesitate to use an ankle monitor, and then you will be well and truly trapped.”

  No! It can’t be! I know these people. They’re my family. They created me. I could believe it of Victoria Strauss, maybe, but not Uncle Paolo. Not my Immortis team.

  But if he’s right…I close my eyes and imagine going down to the river, climbing into a boat with Eio, and striking off for those distant corners of Aunt Harriet’s map. My heart pounds a little faster at the thought. It’s possible. We could do it. Simply go and leave it all behind for good.

  Leave what behind? So Uncle Paolo lied about the fire in B Labs. Would he do that without good reason? Uncle Paolo is the most reasonable person I know. And if I leave, I leave them to the punishment of Corpus. I remember Strauss’s words as if she’s whispering them in my ear this moment: “There are at least twenty scientists I can think of who would kill for the chance to have your job. Your job and the jobs of your entire team.” Who knows what will happen to them if I run away? Could I live an eternity with that guilt? No. I can’t do that to them.

  I feel like the set of scales in Uncle Sergei’s lab, and each new thought that runs through my head adds weight to one side. I tip this way and that way, but cannot seem to find my balance.

  “I don’t know how I can believe you, Uncle Antonio,” I say miserably. “If there’s some terrible secret I don’t know about Little Cam, then you would tell me.”

  “I’m not making this up, Pia.” His voice is low. “You know I’m not. You’re denying what you know is true.”

  “I’m not denying anything because I don’t know what to deny! You won’t tell me!”

  He lapses into silence, his eyes a muddle of frustration and sorrow. I envy him; he only has two emotions at war inside him. I have dozens, it seems, but anger is winning out.

  “I’m not leaving Little Cam,” I say. “I’ve dreamed my entire life of having someone like me. Someone who knows what it is to live forever and what it’s like to never be hurt. Someone who will…” I have to force myself not to look at Eio. “Who will stay with me always, who will never grow old and die and leave me alone, while I stay forever young.” I hold my hands out, pleading with him to understand. “You’re right. I don’t belong. Not in Little Cam and not in Ai’oa. I’m all alone, Uncle Antonio. I always have been. And if I leave Little Cam, I leave behind my chance of ever belonging to anyone. I’ll be alone forever,” I whisper.

  “You don’t have to be alone, Pia!” Eio interjects. “Why don’t you see that? I’m here.”

  “Yeah? For how long? How long, Eio? I can’t…I can’t have you only to lose you. I can’t do it.” I look back at Uncle Antonio. “The only place that I will ever have is with my own kind. And they don’t even exist yet. This is my dream, Uncle Antonio. It’s my destiny.”

  “Those are Paolo’s words,” he replies coldly. “Not yours.”

  “Uncle Paolo made me what I am.”

  “He’s making a monster of you.”

  That does it. I almost hear a snap inside my head. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to this anymore. This is—it’s crazy. You’re crazy. I’m leaving.” I turn to the window, then remember there’s a door and head for that instead.

  “Pia!” His voice stops me just as my hand touches the flimsy wood. “If you knew the truth, would it change your mind?”

  I yank open the door and don’t turn around to answer. “How can I know that when I don’t know what the truth is?”

  The jungle seems darker than it was before. I strike out blindly, tripping over rocks and nearly walking into trees, I’m so unsettled. I hear Eio behind me, hurrying to catch up, but I ignore him. It’s only when he steps directly in front of me and refuses to let me get by that I am forced to stop.

  Eio takes my hand gently. “Come, Pia.”

  “No, I—”

  “Come, Pia.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “On.”

  I give in to his will, knowing it’s useless to resist. I already saw how his stubbornness held out against Uncle Antonio. Eio’s father. That particular revelation is still raw and unexplored. How could he have hidden you from me all this time?

  Or maybe the question I should be asking is: Is Uncle Antonio right? His words terrify me. There is evil in Little Cam. But no one shows it to me. I see shadows, hear whispers, but none of it is certain. You tell me to run, but you won’t tell me why! I don’t understand why he thinks simply telling me that there is evil—without telling me what it is—will convince me to leave everything I’ve ever known. If he can’t tell me the truth, maybe it doesn’t exist.

  Be honest with yourself, Pia. You know it does. Despite the warmth of Eio’s hand over mine, I shiver. You know it’s true. You’ve seen the cells. You’ve seen the look in Paolo’s eyes. There’s something there, something no one will speak of.…

  I shake my head, trying to clear the thoughts that fog it. I used to see so clearly before all of this started happening. Before Aunt Harriet came with her wild red hair and her strong ideas. Before the hole in the fence and the boy on the other side—and his frustrating father. I saw like a scientist. Everything was black and white. Reason and chaos. Progress and regress.

  Where am I now? Progressing or regressing? Is this reason, to be out here in the jungle at night, holding the hand of a wild boy with stripes on his face? Surely not. If anything, my life is growing steadily and inexorably more chaotic with each passing day.

  “Here,” Eio says, pulling aside a thick curtain of vines. Behind it lies the swimming hole, the still water shimmering in the pale moonlight. The moon must be full tonight. I can’t see it, but only the light of the full moon ever reaches the forest floor. The waterfall looks like flowing silver, its rumble soft and soothing.

  “Wait here,” he tells me.

  “What—”

  “Just wait.”

  I shut my lips and sit on a mossy log by the pool.

  He walks to the edge and leaps into a shallow dive, skimming under the surface like an otter. The water around him begins to shine blue; the pool must be filled with some kind of bioluminescent algae, Pyrocystis fusiformis perhaps, that glows when disturbed. I catch my breath, overwhelmed by the ghostly beauty of the scene. I’ve only ever seen this phenomenon under a microscope in a lab. O
ut here, beneath the jungle moon, the pale blue light is a hundred times more captivating. Eio swims in light, his body a dark shadow that moves quietly and swiftly toward the waterfall.

  He finds a foothold on one of the rocks under the cascade and stands, his body splitting the curtain of water. It splashes off his shoulders and glitters like silver beads when he shakes his hair. My mouth hangs slightly open and I realize I haven’t drawn a breath in over a minute. Why are we here again? Am I supposed to be angry? But I can’t remember why. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. My head empties of every thought to make room for the beautiful image of Eio standing in that glowing pool as the jungle anoints his shoulders with its fragrant water.

  Eio begins climbing the slippery rocks until he’s clinging to the crest of the waterfall, which streams in two silver bands on either side of him and joins together again just below his hips. It pulls at his shorts, threatening to undress him.

  I swallow. Hard. And don’t blink for a second.

  My eyes hardly notice what his hands are doing, they’re so fixated on the way his back muscles strain beneath his skin, illuminated by the gentle blue light of the shining pool below. Then he turns, and I realize he’s picked a passionflower from a thick vine that hangs over the top of the falls. Eio carefully works his way down and slips back into the water, which shimmers brightly at his touch. He holds the flower above the surface as he makes his way through the luminescent pool toward me. Then he’s here, emerging from the water like some kind of myth, some fabled Ai’oan god, his hand smoothing his wet hair back from his face, his chest and shoulders gleaming with water and moonlight. Behind him, a pale, shimmering trail of blue light marks his passage through the water. His wet shorts hang a good bit lower on his hips than they usually do, tempting my imagination. He extends the flower, which I take with trembling fingers.

  I hear a soft, strangled Thank you and realize it’s come from my own lips.

  He smiles a small, crooked smile, and I think he knows exactly how tightly he’s bound my tongue in knots. I suspect fetching me the passionflower was only half his purpose in swimming through that glowing pool.

  “You’re welcome,” he says as he sits beside me. He’s so close that water from his hair drips onto my shoulder. I don’t brush it away. He watches me as I slowly twirl the flower between my fingers, as if waiting to see if it will cheer me up.

  “It’s beautiful,” I tell him.

  “More beautiful than your elysia?” he asks.

  I realize the question isn’t just about flowers. He’s simply using them to probe the deeper issue between us: the balance Uncle Antonio warned me about. The jungle or Little Cam? Eio or Mr. Perfect? Love…or eternity? “Eio, I—I don’t know,” I confess.

  His lips tighten and he looks down at his hands. I feel terrible, keeping him at arm’s length but not letting him go. I don’t want to give him false hope—but neither do I want to lose him. My fingers absently play with the passionflower’s petals as my thoughts wrestle in my head.

  The night is filled with nocturnal birds’ twittering and the odd howl of a monkey. I remember it was the night jungle that I first fell in love with, when I crawled under the fence for the first time. I find that hasn’t changed; the darkness is like a blanket, and the thin moonlight doesn’t invade like the sun. It lets me be silent, and it lets me have my secrets to myself.

  “He loves you,” Eio says after a short while, softly as a breeze. “If he didn’t, he wouldn’t worry about you so much.”

  I study his face. “Do you think we should run away?”

  Eio frowns and runs his hand through his hair again. “I don’t know, Pia. I don’t know what goes on inside your fence. I’m not a part of that world.”

  There’s a look in his eyes, a kind of evasion, that prompts me to ask, “Do you think he’s right, that there’s evil in Little Cam? Evil that would destroy me if I knew about it?”

  Eio waits a long moment before saying, “I think if he wants you to go, he should tell you why. You’re right about that. But maybe you should trust him a little more too. He could be more right than you know.”

  That’s just what I fear.

  His eyes are still avoiding mine. “Eio, what do you know? Has he told you what he won’t tell me?”

  Still staring at his hands, he replies, “He has told me nothing.”

  “He’s always been my favorite uncle, you know. He never calls me perfect.”

  “Then that is his error,” Eio says.

  I study his face through the paint, which remained perfectly intact despite his midnight swim. “You sound more and more like one of us, the more I hear you speak.”

  “Us?”

  “You know. Scientists. Little Camians or whatever you want to call us.”

  Even in the darkness, I can see his brow furrow. “I…feel less Ai’oan than I used to. Ever since I met you, anyway.” He takes my hand and rubs his thumb over my palm. “You’ve changed me, Pia bird.”

  You’ve changed me too. “How?”

  “Well, I’m miserable almost all the time.”

  “What!” I drop his hand.

  “Almost all the time. That is, whenever you’re not here. I can’t sleep at night, because all I can think of is you. I meant what I said today. You are my py’a. My heart.” He picks up my hand again.

  “You…really feel all those things about me?” I ask, my mouth dry and my heart drumming.

  His eyes are serious when they meet mine. “Ever since the moment you first knocked me over, then shone your stupid flashlight in my eyes and set your jaguar on me. I was angry, but mostly because I was terrified.”

  “Am I really all that scary?”

  “Your beauty is,” he whispers.

  I know what he means, because I feel the same terrified awe when I look at him. It tugs at my heart whenever he looks at me, whenever he grabs my hand and pulls me close. My memory is perfect, yet I can’t recall ever not having Eio. I’ve hardly known him a week, and yet I feel as if it’s always been us. It’s the strangest sensation. In my thoughts, everything is always clear and crisp, defined by numbers and formulas. But with Eio, my mind feels like one of Uncle Smithy’s watercolor paintings. Edges blur and numbers jumble and fade until all that is left is wonder. Wonder at how deeply and how quickly I have fallen for this jungle boy. Wonder at how he made my entire world shatter into a million shards, then brought the pieces together again in new patterns, creating a whole new world—and a whole new Pia—that never existed before. The things that were important have fallen into the shadow of new ideas and new dreams…and it terrifies me.

  “We could go, Pia. We could leave this place. Little Cam and Ai’oa too. I don’t care. The boats aren’t far from here. I’ll take you away.” He gently touches a finger to the stone bird around my neck, and I nearly stop breathing. “It can be just you and me.…I would be happy. Would you?”

  Would I? Inside my head, Wild Pia stands up, lifts her hand, and shouts yes, yes, yes! Go, Pia! She is strong and persuasive, and I waver. Could I?

  His face is very close to mine. I can see every detail—the arch of his eyebrows over blue, blue eyes. That dimple under his mouth. The straight line of his jaw, so firm and stubborn, like Uncle Antonio’s.

  “Eio…”

  “Do you feel the same way, Pia? About me?”

  “I…” Can I? Do I? Dare I? When I look at Eio, I see more than just a boy, however handsome and brave he may be. I see Ai’oa, and all the villagers, and Ami laughing and chattering, and Uncle Antonio, and even Aunt Harriet. And the jungle. Always the jungle. Deep, mysterious, beautiful, and irresistible. A place in which I could lose myself forever.

  Suddenly Eio hisses, and his hand jerks into the air. Where the water brushes up to the log beside him grows one of the massive water lilies that so fascinate the botanists of Little Cam. Victoria amazonica, I think automatically. The underside is covered with tiny, sharp thorns, and it is on one of these that Eio cuts himself.

  He
holds up a finger bright with blood. I stare at it, transfixed.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  With a shrug, he looks closer to see how deep the cut is. All I see is the blood, spilling across his fragile skin, dark and crimson.

  No. No, no, no, no, no. “No,” I say, jumping to my feet and dropping the passionflower on the ground. “No, Eio, I—I can’t. I can’t, don’t you see?”

  He stares at me with wide, shocked eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Eio, I’m immortal. Do you know what that means? I’m going to live forever. I’m never going to die! I’m going to live and live, and you’re going to—to—” I choke on the word. “I have a dream, Eio, a dream of engineering my own race, a race of immortals, where I’ll truly belong. Not in Little Cam, and not in Ai’oa. In my own place, with my own kind. I’m…sorry. But you—I just can’t. Uncle Antonio is right. I can’t balance between here and there. It’s too much.” Love makes you weak. It distracts you from the important things. It can make you lose sight of the objective.

  His eyes are filled with hurt and confusion. He holds a hand toward me, but it’s the cut hand, and there’s still blood.…

  I run.