by Jeff Sweat
“To live longer?”
“Yeah.”
“Would I know you?” he says.
“Maybe not.”
“Then … no.”
Jemma pulls him close to her, twining their legs together. She pushes her pelvis into his. “You ready to roll, aren’t you?” she says.
“Yeah. You?”
She looks into his eyes, finds the calmness there and holds on to it. When she shakes her head, it’s with a promise. Not yet. Soon.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE EXILE
It’s a strange thing to be accepted for the first time in your life, and the little Exile doesn’t know quite what to do with it. Pico looks down at the village from the remnants of the Holy Wood sign and wonders if he really has a place in it.
The second night he’s there, the girls sit with him by the fire in the Circle. There’s no dancing that night. All is quiet. He can already tell that Lady doesn’t like quiet.
“Who’s got a story?” Lady says.
“Of the first Children?” Jemma says.
“Sure.”
“You better at it. You worked in the Daycare longer.”
“The First Mama, our Oldest Oldest, was Angela,” Lady says. “She lived before our Mamas’ Mamas’ Mamas’ Mama.”
“Ours was Carmen,” Pico says.
“Angela lived in the Holy Wood, not in the hills, but down on the Flat Lands with her Parents and her brother, Long Gone years ago,” Lady says. “She was a worshiper of the Teevee, and a follower of the great priestess Lady.” And Lady points at herself, smiling.
“One day the Parents didn’t come home, and it was just her and her little brother. They waited and waited. Parents fell in the street, and when Angela ran out to help them they was already gone. She thought the gods was coming to punish them, but the bodies lay still and she hid and hid. And on the third day they looked out the window and only saw Children’s faces staring back at them, and she knew they was alone. And if they was alone … they had to take care of themselves.”
“And her brother, Miguelito, was the first Exile,” Jemma says. “But that’s another story.”
“Do you know your Mama?” Lady asks.
“I do,” Pico says. “Her name was Mary. She was the head Fisher, and when she got pregnant she wouldn’t stop fishing. She had me, and then she went to sea and never came back—I guess so she could leave the way she wanted to. They say she didn’t End. She drowned.”
“Mine was a cook,” Lady says. “She made really good beans. She loved to hold me. Sometimes I think I remember that.”
“That can’t be true,” Pico says.
“I remember her face, looking up at her,” Lady says.
“That coulda been anyone,” Pico says. “Just cuz you remember—”
Lady jumps on him, pins him back against the ground.
“I remember her face! It was soft. Her voice was soft,” she says, and the wistfulness of her voice doesn’t match the arm pressed against Pico’s throat.
“Okay,” he says, and he lifts himself up on his elbows when Lady releases his neck. Apparently Lady hits a lot. “What about you, Jemma?”
“No one remembers her Mama,” Lady says.
“Just one thing,” Jemma says. “She was tall.”
For Lady, he’s someone to tease. He sees she teases people she likes, so he just smiles. Jemma, though, looks at him as if she’s trying to unlock his head. Her gaze is one of the few that makes him want to shift his eyes. But he never does.
No one quite knows what to do with him, though. He’s seen it with Exiles in his own tribe. The people of the Holy Wood give Pico an odd job here or there, but mostly he’s allowed to explore alone in ever-widening circles in the hills.
Today is his farthest arc, all the way to the ridge above the Lake of the Holy Wood. The trails along the ridge are so worn with so many feet that they sink deep into the sandstone, years and years after the Parents abandoned them. He walks through a passage slotted so deep that he can reach out with both hands at his waist and touch the banks on both sides. How many Parents was there? He’s tried to count before but gave up each time.
In the Malibus, he wasn’t given the gift of neglect. He was Touched, a bearer of the End. Unlike Leong, nobody loved Pico enough to keep him from being sent away.
He didn’t love them either, just his nanny and Roberto and the idea of his Mama. He wanted to, but they would fall quiet when he walked into a room. The Malibus, like the other Angelenos, never asked questions, so they couldn’t stomach a kid who only asked them. It didn’t bother him, but in failing to win their love he felt like he failed to rack up one of the only things he could earn in this life.
Still, he loved it enough, loved the mountains and the waves, that it hurt when they cast him out. He had found a Long Gone house on the cliffs above the ocean, stripped by the Gatherers long ago of everything useful but the things that he needed, his precious objects. Pico spent hours there each day until one of the Muscle reported him to the Olders. They crashed through the door, saw the book in his hand, and shrieked.
“Brujo,” the Oldest said, her finger outstretched and trembling. Witch, she meant.
The Priestess would have killed him, but the Olders took mercy, and before sundown he was walking away from the cliffs with three other Exiles.
Pico pauses on his path, a knife ridge that leads away from the Holy Wood sign to the west. To his north is a cliff; to the south is a slope that might as well be a cliff. A fire has eaten all the brush on the south slope, leaving the earth bare and dark as a bruise.
There’s a sound back along the trail, a whisper of cloth against grass. It’s someone who knows how to move through the wild. He wouldn’t have heard it if he hadn’t been watching and listening his whole life. So the Holy Wood sent someone to follow him. Ah well. No sense spoiling the view. Pico walks on.
He didn’t know the other Exiles from the Malibus when they sent him away and didn’t trust what he did know. Cole was sharp and sneaky, exiled for trading weed he found growing in the creek bed. Tomas was kind enough but stupid and quick to fight.
Li was different. He came to the Malibus from the San Fernandos and was only there a month before they decided Malibu was too small to contain him. When he spoke, Pico felt tremors of malice running under the surface, like the quakes that burst out of nowhere to terrorize the Angelenos.
It only took one night for someone to die.
They caught a raccoon the first night. Cole turned out to be a good mark with a spear, and they had a raccoon roasting by dark. Li took the raccoon off the spit, letting one end drop in the fire. He tore off a leg.
“Oy! That’s mine!” Cole said.
Li lifted an eyebrow.
“I catch it, I got first bite. Don’t you dirty San Fernandos know nothing?”
Li didn’t say anything. Pico had hardly ever heard him speak, angry or not. Cole opened his mouth—and Li swung the burning spit through the air and caught him in the cheek.
Cole howled but somehow kept his feet. Li stabbed him again through the left shoulder. Pico almost heard a sizzle. This time Cole dropped.
The fire was quiet, they were quiet. Even Cole refused to scream. That ended when Li drove his heel down on Cole’s knee, shattering the joint, then twisted until the leg jutted wrong. Pico knew Cole would never leave that spot—not in the wilderness.
“I’m gonna eat,” Li said. “Help him if you want.” They didn’t help him, not with the menace in Li’s voice, and Pico pretended the deadening whimpers were the sounds of the fading waves. In the morning Cole’s chest was moving but his eyes were glass. They left him by the fire. Pico knew if he touched him, they were both dead.
Without the Olders to contain him, Li’s thin layer of control melted. The other two boys stayed always at the edge of his sight, all calm voices and cocked legs. Even so, the only thing that kept Tomas alive was that he could almost win in a fair fight. The only thing that kept Pico alive was that he kn
ew where to go.
“You never get lost,” Li said, almost admiringly, as Pico led them through hills of fallen mansions. And Pico never let him see what was in his bag.
Pico pulls it out now—a map, folded in eight pieces, gilded in yellowing plastic so it’s almost as fresh as the day the Parents made it. On the map the Holy Wood is an oasis, an island, the only patch of green in a sea of gray. That’s why he led the Exiles to the Holy Wood. Because he saw the green mountains thrusting up from Ell Aye and thought, This is the only place that looks safe.
Despite the rustles in the grass behind him, Pico thinks he was right.
At the end of the trail is a clearing, and at the end of the clearing is a tangled tree, stark against the western sun. It’s a tree that probably isn’t old but feels like it is, the way the branches twist toward the sky, the way the roots seem to have fought for every inch of earth, the way the needles reach for the sun.
The peak is the last hill before the mountains drop down to the 101 in the pass below. Pico wonders if it held some churchy place for the Parents, because below are hundreds of flat rocks, stacked in sand-hued towers like altars. The towers almost mimic the Downtown, clustered together like a neighborhood. Each tower is roughly two feet high, with plate-size rocks at the bottom and skipping stones at the top.
Were they built by the Parents, or the Children? If the Parents, how could they have survived the quakes and the winds and the wild animals? Some are clearly made by the Children, splashed with crude red pigment from the ridge trail. But some—
Pico spies slips of battered paper peeking out between the stacked rock. Children wouldn’t have written them. The first one he ferrets out crumbles in the wind. With the second, he takes more care, moving the rocks above before teasing out the slip.
It’s a message from the Parents, to their friends and their Children. Pico recognizes more of the letters than he would ever admit. “Jory Weinstein, if you get this, we’re leaving town. Meet us in Ventura at the 101,” it says. He doesn’t understand what they mean.
The next: “Have you seen my dog? It’s a husky and he goes by Scott.”
Just messages, gifts to those who are still living. But then this one:
“The End can be ended.”
There’s a scuff on the trail, rock against rock, and the paper flutters away from his fingertips. “I ain’t that interesting,” Pico says.
“No, but you weird.” The figure steps out of a low overhanging tunnel of oak. It’s the boy Apple, who was there the first night but who Pico has somehow never seen next to Jemma since. Odd, since even Pico can tell they must be rolling.
“What’s with the rocks?” Pico says.
“Dunno,” Apple says. “Always been there. We build new towers sometime, but mostly people stay away. They get the creeps.”
“The Parents’ work?”
“That’s the Tree of Wisdom,” Apple says. “The gods put it here.”
“They carve up its trunk, too?” It’s covered with ungodly scratches. Pico sees a penis. Apple shrugs.
“So what makes it the Tree of Wisdom?”
“Priestess says Eva and Aidan used to live here.”
“It ain’t that old,” Pico says.
“That’s what I told her.”
Pico remembers other barely heard footsteps, shadows where they shouldn’t be. “You been following me the last two days?”
“Three,” Apple says. “I ain’t normally sposed to track Exiles, but the Olders are pissed at me.”
“Hope I’m worth it,” Pico says.
“Nah. Keep hoping you’ll stab someone.”
“They don’t trust us,” Pico says.
Apple hunkers in the midst of the stacks, so Pico just sees his eyes. “No. No, they don’t.” And Pico knows he’s not talking about just the Exiles. He’s talking about every boy in the Angelenos, who is used for strength of muscle and bone, who only lives to carry out what the girls think. And Pico realizes that the little Exile and the tall Muscle probably have more to talk about.
Pico says, “You wanna hike down with me, or you gotta follow fifty steps behind?”
They take a different trail down, Apple leading this time along a nearly invisible trace that must have been used only by deer. On a lower ridge, facing them, Pico sees the regular outline of crops covering the hill. Middles pull weeds away from vines lashed to rusty fences.
“Grapes?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“You plant em?”
“Parents did. Weird thing for a city.”
The lake, the fields, crops already in place—the First Mamas were lucky or smart. “You got a great spot,” Pico says.
“That’s what we fight for,” Apple says. Yes, that and Jemma, Pico thinks.
Apple’s next question surprises Pico. “You got Last Lifers in the Malibu?” he says.
“There’s Last Lifers anywhere there’s the End, ain’t there?” Pico says.
Pico remembers his nanny, who still kept watch after him when he left the Nursery at seven. Ceci would set aside food for him because the older kids would take his away, and he was too small to miss many meals. Until the day he met her behind the kitchens as they always did, and she was on all fours over a bowl of black beans.
“What causes the Last Lifers to lose it?” Apple says.
“Dunno. People get sick of holding on.”
Something in Ceci’s posture that day, in the desperation that seemed to radiate out from her, made Pico stop. That was lucky, because he was still far enough away from her when she looked up like a coyote guarding her kill. She had a snarl set in her teeth and didn’t seem to know him. She was a Last Lifer now.
“Ceci?” he had said, and without a word she leapt to her feet and sprang at him. The distance was just enough for him to make the edge of the kitchen and into the middle of a pack of Muscle before she caught him. They stomped Ceci until she stopped moving.
Everyone forgot Ceci in weeks and forgot Pico, too. The Angelenos are always moving forward.
“Jemma told me about the kid. The one who lived,” Apple says. “He lived cuz he got stupid, right?”
“Kinda. He hit his head, and he’s stuck that way.”
“Shouldn’t Last Lifers live longer if all of a sudden they get stupid?”
“It ain’t the same thing. Last Lifers ain’t stupid, they just gave up on life and went crazy,” Pico says. “They just stop thinking cuz that’s the easiest thing to do when life gets so hard. What’s the point of planning and thinking when you know none of it matters anyway?”
“Okay.” Apple stops in the middle of the trail and looks back at him. “So … what’d make Last Lifers start acting smart again?”
“That a real question?” Pico says, but the look on Apple’s face says it is.
“When we were out there,” Apple says, “I saw the Last Lifers acting like they never done before. They had a gun, which meant they found it and knew how to find and load the right bullets. They used strategy. They stuck together and hunted us in a group instead of just going berserk. Something changed.”
“The only thing that could bring the Last Lifers back is if they thought there was more to life than just Ending,” Pico says.
“So something’s changed them.”
“Someone gave em something,” Pico says. “A reason to want to keep on living.”
They walk in silence until they crest the hill above the sign. From there Pico takes in the valley of the San Fernandos, the towers of Downtown before him. “You all too close together,” he says. “San Fernandos, Downtown, Holy Wood … you all fighting over the same patches of green.”
“Someone showed you where the lines was?”
Pico shakes his head. No one did. He figured it out from the map. It’s probably dangerous to reveal that to Apple, but he trusts him.
Apple seems to make the decision to trust him, too, because a look breaks across his face as if he wants to tell a secret. “Pico,” he says, using his name
for the first time, “if the Last Lifers are getting organized, if they’ve got guns, then it’s really bad for the Holy Wood. I need to stop them, and I need your help.”
* * *
Trina doesn’t leave Jemma alone; none of the Olders do, they just let her breathe for a few days. That’s the most you get for mourning.
When Trina sits next to her outside the Mamas’ house, though, it’s as if the other Trina has disappeared after Andy and Zee died. No more arguing. No more forcing. They sit in the lush grass together, the blades brushing their chins, and she talks as if she’s trying to coax a fawn. “You know why we need you as a Mama,” she says. “I just don’t know why you think you can’t.”
All the reasons are there in Jemma’s mind—the End speeding toward her, the motherless babies, the love the Parents had—and she doesn’t know which to pull out to show to Trina. Finally she says, “It’s all wrong. It just seems wrong.”
Trina seems to hear it the wrong way, as if it’s just about the Mamas. But her words are gentle. “It feels impossible. But we ain’t gonna survive if we don’t ask it.”
“It’s all about survival,” Jemma says, shaking her head. And none of them ask why they can’t have more than survival, when the Parents had so much.
“But you got Apple now. Don’t you want him?”
Jemma grits her teeth, shaking that thought away. That’s all people have said the past days. You got Apple. Ain’t you excited to be a Mama now? “Sure. I mean, I want him,” Jemma says, telling Trina what she hasn’t been able to tell Apple, although he probably knows. “That don’t mean I ain’t scared. That don’t mean I’m ready.”
“We all get nervous. But we still gotta do it.”
“How many people died making a baby, even before Zee? I count three since Chris Mass,” Jemma says. “If the gods want us to do it, maybe they make some kids with smaller heads.”
“I didn’t want to do it, either, my boy Ended early.” Trina looks down at her hands. “And then I couldn’t, and they kept putting me with new boys who might have stronger seed, and some of em was kind, and some of em was not. And then I was pregnant for just a little while, and the Doctors just—” Trina looks angry when others might look sad. But anger is just a swifter form of sadness.