Origin
Page 24
I know Uncle Paolo has always dreamed of influencing the future of humanity by creating immortals, but he’s taking it a step further by inserting his own genetic code into the gene pool that will eventually produce Mr. Perfect. And when one of the female subjects gives birth to what will essentially be Uncle Paolo’s son, will that child be treated differently than the others? Suddenly I wonder whether this plan of his is designed not just to have even more influence in the Immortis project, but simply to have a daughter or son. It’s a question I’ve never asked him or any of the scientists: Do they want children? All living creatures have the built-in urge to procreate; that’s a basic part of biology and one that most of them have sacrificed in order to work here. By the time they retire, it will be too late to have children.
Once again, I’m reminded of how much is invested in me and in the Immortis project, and when I think of how close I came to abandoning this place last night, I feel ashamed.
Yet a little regretful. The hurt in Eio’s eyes when I ran.…
But I can’t think about that. I have to stay strong.
There’s a slender path leading the way, and instead of matching the others’ excruciatingly slow pace, I take the lead. As a result, I reach the glen a good five minutes before them. After climbing a small rise drenched in vivid green ferns and red heliconias, I descend again and find myself in Falk’s Glen.
For a moment, all I can do is stare. The clearing is no bigger than the courtyard in Little Cam, but it’s flooded with purple orchids, like a cup of violet-tinted wine. They’re bigger and more elaborately composed than most species of orchid, and the ends of the petals are tipped with gold. They’re indescribably beautiful. The sight of the glen, after so many years of wondering, lifts my spirits a little. Surely Uncle Antonio is wrong. Such beauty can’t possibly exist beside the evil he imagines, whatever it may be.
I suddenly wonder if the catalyst flower might grow here too, but all I see is elysia.
I’m met by a guard whose name is Dickson, one of Uncle Timothy’s crew. He asks where the others are, and when I tell him they’re struggling with equipment, he groans and spits on a fern and goes to help them, leaving me alone in the glen.
A smooth rock sits on the edge of the pool of flowers. I sit on it and lean over the flower closest to me, and there, in the small cup formed by the petals, I see a few ounces of the immortality nectar. Amazing, how death and life can be so closely connected in this one blossom, and the presence of the catalyst makes all the difference between the two.
“Pia?”
I whirl and see a face framed by fern leaves. Stiffening, I rise to my feet and clench my hands into fists at my sides. “What do you want?”
Eio’s nearly invisible; he might have stood there all day and gone unnoticed. “I wanted to say I’m sorry. I never meant to make you angry.”
“Eio, the scientists will be here any minute. You should go!”
He shakes his head in that stubborn way of his. “Everyone will miss you, especially Ami. She asks for you.”
“Just forget about me, both of you—and Uncle Antonio too! I’m where I belong now, doing what I’m supposed to do. Being who I really am! Can’t you understand that?”
“I understand that I made you angry, and I’m sorry.” His face is pained, eyes pleading. It’s so hard to maintain my resolve when he looks at me like that. “Punish me if you want, but please, not Ami. Not my father.”
Glancing at the path to be sure we’re still alone, but knowing we don’t have long, I scowl at him and point toward the jungle. “Go, Eio! Leave me alone! I mean it! I don’t want to see Ai’oa anymore, or you or Ami or anyone else. Just go, will you?”
He looks as if I’ve shot him with a poisoned arrow. “I came here to deliver a message for Papi. He said that if you must know the truth, you will have it.”
“Really?” I eye him skeptically. “He’s going to tell me everything? Why Alex and Marian ran? Why he wants me to leave?”
“Yes. No. Well, yes, you’re going to learn all of that, but it’s not Papi who’s going to tell it to you.”
I throw up my hands. “Who, then?”
“Kapukiri.”
My hands fall back to my sides. “Kapukiri? What does Kapukiri know?”
“Will you come? Tonight?”
“I…” I remember my anger and Uncle Antonio calling me a monster, and I decide I won’t give in so easily. “I don’t know. Probably not.”
Suddenly I hear voices. The others are coming over the hill; I can see the tops of their heads already.
“Eio! Eio, go!”
He seems on the verge of saying something else, but then he clamps his jaw shut and disappears into the jungle again. I whirl around just as Uncle Paolo descends into the glen, and I hope he can’t see a flush in my cheeks or the leaves shaking from where Eio was standing. But Uncle Paolo’s eyes are on the elysia, not me, and I exhale slowly and will my heart to calm.
So Uncle Antonio wants to tell me the truth—the whole truth. Will I go? I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe it’s a trick, and maybe Uncle Antonio is going to force me to leave, since I won’t go on my own. Or maybe this is it—my chance to finally find out what all the whispers have been about. But from Kapukiri?
The others finally arrive. They immediately begin breaking out cameras and notepads, stepping gingerly through the flowers as they document down to the last speck on each petal.
“Well,” says Uncle Paolo, “what do you think, Pia?”
“It’s beautiful. Too much for words.”
He nods appreciatively. “And to think, in all the world, these are the only flowers of their kind.”
“Can I do it?” I ask tentatively. “Can I collect the nectar?”
Uncle Paolo looks at me thoughtfully. “Yes…I think that’s a good idea.”
Trying my best to be the composed, businesslike scientist Uncle Paolo is, I take the small vial he gives me and follow his instructions carefully. Mother, who has a camera in her hands, documents each second of the process.
“Now,” says Uncle Paolo, “pick a flower. Any one will do. Good. Put the vial under the lower petal, and simply tip the blossom. Excellent, Pia. Well done.”
I hand the vial, half-full of the shimmering clear liquid, to Uncle Paolo. He stoppers it and tucks it carefully into his vest pocket.
“Just one vial?”
“That’s all we need today.”
It takes thirty minutes for the team to repack their equipment, half of which they didn’t even take out of their bags.
I feel regretful when Falk’s Glen disappears behind us. It’s the kind of place to which you know you’ll never find the equal. A place to which memory can’t quite do justice, a place so rare and beautiful, it feels sacred.
On the ride back, I find myself emerging from the dark cloud Uncle Antonio pinned over my head. Maybe things aren’t going to be so bad. I look around at my team and see smiles, camaraderie, and hope. These aren’t monsters. These are my colleagues and mentors. My friends. Even my mother…she sits by Uncle Paolo, laughing at something he tells her, and her hand is on his knee. She killed Sneeze, yes. But she did it to save the most important person in her life. Maybe I can learn to accept that.
I feel more and more confident that my return to Little Cam was the right thing. This is my place, and whatever secrets have been kept from me, they can’t be as bad as Uncle Antonio thinks.
I consider Eio’s invitation to go to Ai’oa tonight and learn the truth. It’s tempting, but I don’t think I’ll go. After all, I’m a scientist now, and Uncle Paolo will soon tell me all the secrets of Immortis, including the nature of the mysterious catalyst. Despite Uncle Antonio’s doubts, I am one of them—so I should start behaving like one of them. Let Uncle Paolo tell me the truth.
As we rumble through the gates of Little Cam, I’m almost happy again. I made my decision last night when I returned, and I’m sticking to it.
Today is the first day of forever.
Later that evening, when I try to go for a swim, I find Uncle Antonio waiting for me. He sits on the edge of the pool, feet in the water. There’s no one else here; I know I can’t avoid him much longer.
“He talked to you?” he asks as I slip into the water.
I sink to the bottom of the pool and sit for nearly a minute before rising to the surface, where I wipe the water from my eyes and nod.
“And? Well?”
“I’m not going.” I float on my back and wish he would just give up and go away.
“Pia, come here.”
“No.”
“Come here.”
Reluctant and irritated, I slowly drift his way. When I’m close enough, he grabs my wrist and holds me close, preventing me from disappearing under the water again.
“Uncle Antonio!” I jerk against his grip, but he only tightens it.
“Did anyone ever tell you what happened to your grandparents, Pia? And to my parents?”
“They left Little Cam,” I respond angrily. “To start lives in the outside world.”
He shakes his head. “Lies. They never left Little Cam. They never had the chance, because after Alex and Marian’s ‘accident,’ they were locked up in B Labs, where they…” He draws several short breaths, as if trying to quell some great surge of emotion. His eyes burn with it. “Where they died.”
“Died?” I whisper. “How?”
“Sato was in charge at the time. He was less patient than Paolo and wanted to find a way to bypass the five generations of waiting for an immortal to be born. He wanted immortality for himself, and so he…” Uncle Paolo closes his eyes, his chest swelling as he breathes in. When he opens them again, the anger is gone, replaced by sorrow. “He used them to test different strains of Immortis. They all died within days of each other, and their bodies…”
“Stop,” I whisper, because he looks so wretched. And because I don’t want to hear it.
But he is merciless. “Their bodies were thrown into the jungle to decompose after Sato was done with them.”
“But Mother—”
“Your mother knows the truth, Pia, but she became one of them long ago. God knows why. Fear, maybe, that the same thing would happen to her. And then there’s Paolo, of course.” He shakes his head. “She fell for him the minute he arrived, years ago. She was only fifteen or so when he came, but the moment she laid eyes on him, she was his. Completely. And from that moment on, she hated your poor father. Paolo was everything Will wasn’t, and she resented being paired off with Will. Though she’d have done better to choose him. He’s a better man than Paolo, he just never lets anyone see it.”
The water feels thirty degrees colder, but it’s not the temperature that accounts for the goose bumps prickling down my arm. No. Please, no. He was right. It is more terrible than I ever knew. I think of the rooms in B Labs, the stains on the floors and walls…bloodstains. The scratches made by fingernails belonging to my own grandparents, driven insane, perhaps, by pain or claustrophobia. How long did they survive in those dark cells before Sato’s experiments claimed their lives? When they did die, was it with relief?
How does my mother live with herself, knowing what happened? My father? He’s so quiet and shy…maybe this is why. He’s always seemed to be hiding from something. I just never knew what.
But even these terrible truths—for though I want to, I cannot doubt they are true, because no lie could produce such anguish on Uncle Antonio’s face—are not the worst of it. He still hasn’t given me the one answer I’ve been seeking most of all. Though after what he just told me, I’m not so sure I want to hear it.
“Why did Alex and Marian run, Uncle Antonio?”
“Come with me to Ai’oa, Pia, and you will find out. I swear I will never ask anything more of you. Come with me this once, and if your mind still isn’t changed, I’ll know you truly are one of them. I’ll even hand you your lab coat myself.”
His words are hard and clipped, but his eyes are filled with almost desperate pleading.
“If you won’t go for me,” he continues, “go for Eio. One last time. From what I hear, he risked his life to save yours. You owe him this much.”
With that, he stands and slips his sandals on, leaving me free to bury myself beneath the water once more. But I don’t. I watch him go and meet his eyes when he pauses at the door and looks back.
“I’ll be waiting at the tunnel at midnight.” The sadness in his eyes is deep enough to drown in. “It’s too late for Alex and Marian, Pia. Too late for me and your mother and your grandparents. It’s not too late for you, but you’re running out of time.”
He leaves, his wet sandals squelching on the tile. I float on my back, drifting to the middle of the pool, thinking of the picture my mother showed me on my birthday and of the blurry form that was my grandfather.
The past seems to float around me, staining the water black, trying to drag me down and drown me. The pool holds no solace for me any longer. When I stare up at the glass panes of the ceiling, I see instead the blurry faces of people I never knew. People whose blood runs in my veins and who suffered terrible deaths. They are frozen in my memory now, and nothing I can ever do will erase them.
TWENTY-NINE
You came.”
“Yes.”
Eio looks behind me. “Papi.”
“Hello, Eio,” Uncle Antonio replies softly. He’s said hardly two words since meeting me in the powerhouse. He seems drained, as if digging through the past stole every ounce of his energy and willpower.
“What’s Kapukiri got to say to me?” I ask apprehensively.
“He’s here, waiting,” says Eio. “He said you would come.” His eyes drop to my neck. “You’re wearing the necklace.”
His fingers brush the stone bird as I nod.
Eio leads us toward the center of the village, which is illuminated by half a dozen low-burning fires. Ami comes hurtling out of nowhere and slams into me, arms and legs coiled like lianas around my middle. “Pia! You’re here! You’re here! Eio said you weren’t coming back, but I didn’t believe him!”
I hug her as Eio asks, “Why did you come back?”
“To see Ami, of course.”
She likes that. She laughs and pokes her tongue at Eio.
“Where’s Kapukiri, Ami?” I ask.
“Over here, Pia! Come on, come on!” Ami pulls me down the row of huts until we’re at the last one, the largest one, where Kapukiri lives. He sits in the center of the hut, cross-legged in front of a bowl of manioc. Burako and Achiri are with him, and the rest of the Ai’oans are gathering outside the hut. I smile at Luri, who smiles back.
Eio motions for me to go in and then follows. We sit across from the medicine man, Uncle Antonio standing behind us. I take some manioc, to be polite, and then, following Eio’s lead, I sit and wait. Kapukiri operates according to his own good time, and there’s absolutely no use in trying to rush him.
Eio reaches out and takes my hand. I stare at it and then slowly wrap my fingers around his. His skin is warm and a little bit dry, and, as always, his touch is accompanied by an electric thrill that runs up my arm and into my heart.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
He squeezes my hand. “I know. Me too.”
Staring into his steady blue eyes, I feel a tightening of my heartstrings. I had thought I could just forget him—that if I tried hard enough, my feelings for him would vanish. But trying to push Eio out of my heart would be like trying to hide a shadow by turning off the light. The harder I resist, the deeper he falls into my heart.
Fortunately, Kapukiri doesn’t make us wait long. I have no idea what to expect from
him, but I’m still surprised when he starts speaking in a deep, slow, ceremonious tone.
“The Legend of the Kaluakoa, the Ones Who Were but Are No More,” he begins solemnly in Ai’oan.
“The Kaluakoa were a gentle people, like the Ai’oa, and their sign was the jaguar, mantis, and moon. They lived as one with the forest, and even the great anaconda offered himself to their cookfires.”
“But over the mountain lived the fierce Maturo, the Face-Eaters. They believed that the more people they killed, the stronger they became, and they took the faces of the ones they killed to make into coats to wrap their babes in. They killed many Kaluakoa.”
Kapukiri pauses to take a handful of manioc and chew it. Since he has few teeth, this takes some time. I stare at the fire, imagining a distant past when no karaíba had set foot in the jungle and only the Ai’oan ancestors roamed through the trees.
Kapukiri smacks his lips and resumes speaking.
“The Kaluakoa prayed to the gods to send them a protector. So the gods sent Miua, the god-child. Miua saw the cruelty of the Maturo and the dead, faceless Kaluakoa, and she wept many tears for them. From her tears grew the yresa, and in the flowers, her tears collected.”
I look at Eio. “The origin of yresa,” I whisper, recalling what he said to me the night he first showed me the river: “You don’t know, do you? About the origin of yresa?” It’s the first time I’ve thought back to that moment.
Kapukiri clears his throat, and I realize he’s annoyed at my interruption.
“Sorry,” I whisper.
He keeps his eyes narrowed at me and continues.
“Under Miua’s instructions, the Elders drank the tears of the yresa and died. The wise man of the village cut the palms of the dead and placed one drop of the Elders’ blood on the tongues of the living. This became Miu’mani, the Death Ceremonies. After they drank the blood of the Elders, the people wept and mourned in the valley, and from their tears more yresa grew. From then on, no Elder died in his sleep. Instead, he went to the valley of yresa and drank their tears, and his lifeblood was given to the people. The lifeblood flowed from mother to daughter, from father to son, and every generation a protector was born. The protectors were mighty warriors, swift and sure. They were called the Tapumiri, and they could not die. When the Maturo came over the mountain, the Tapumiri defended the Kaluakoa and sent the Maturo away with no faces but their own.”