by Jeff Sweat
“Well, Tommy,” Jemma says, in a voice so low Lady can barely hear her even right next to her, “sorry you got stuck here with us.”
Jemma turns away from the Biter, and they both cross the campsite to Pico. Jemma takes her hatchet off her belt. It somehow looks small in her hands. Jemma turns to the Palo. “Really sorry.” And lifts the hatchet.
Lady grabs at her arm. “What you doing?” she says.
“Killing the kid.”
“What? No you ain’t. Pico?” She looks at Pico, who shrugs as if he’s being asked about farming. Couldn’t care. Lady pushes Jemma away from the Biter.
“He’s so small. Who’s he gonna hurt?” She turns to Pico. “What the hell, Pico? Peek?”
Pico winces at her words, then his gaze hardens. “Do you know what I could do at his age?” Pico asks.
“Probably not kill another person,” Lady says.
“That’s what they do,” Pico says.
“How do you know?”
“I had one friend,” Pico says, “one friend in the Malibus, a kid named Roberto. Smart like me, but better at hiding it. Then the Palos came up in one of their boats with the white sails while he was fishing, killed everyone. They took him away, dead or alive, I don’t know.
“So yeah, Lady,” he says, “if I’d been strong enough, I woulda killed him at the pipe.”
Lady looks back at the light pole and the tiny cannibal. He doesn’t even look like he’s trying to hear, just slumping at his ropes.
Pico can kill because he hates, because he’s not always good at wearing someone else’s skin. Jemma can kill because something died with Apple, and she knows she’s expected to be ruthless. But the girl who saved the little Exile is still there. She’s still there, but Lady has to wake her up.
“You ain’t being smart,” Lady says. “You being scared.”
“I’m being careful,” Jemma says.
“We don’t kill people cuz we careful!” she says. “We kill people when it’s the only way.” She wants to add: We work so hard to make life. We shouldn’t be killing anyone.
“We could leave him tied there and let the animals get him,” Pico says uncertainly.
“That’s just being a dick,” Lady says. “Kill him ourselves or let him live.”
Jemma says, “His friends could follow us, Lady! We—”
“You pendejas so smart, so smart, but sometimes you too stupid to know the way the world works. If the Biters are coming, they’re on the way already, and they’re not coming to rescue him. It don’t matter if he’s with us or not. What’s he gonna do, drop some bread crumbs? You going deep into enemy lands. You don’t know nothing about em. You got a Palo right here, who wants to leave, who wants to talk … and you want to kill him before he can.”
“That would be stupid,” Pico says. Thank the gods the kid has no pride. But Jemma …
Jemma shrugs, and Lady knows that look, one she’s earned more than once. You win. I don’t agree. Now what?
“I gotta check one thing,” Lady says. “Two.”
The tiny Palo watches her cross the circle. She’s not sure what he heard, but it doesn’t matter. She squats in front of him, locks on those creepy blue eyes. How is she gonna look at those things every day?
“You ever kill anyone, Biter?” she says.
“No,” he says, and he looks like he’s not lying.
“You ever eat anyone?”
He starts to shake his head, and she interrupts him.
“No? Not … just a little bite?”
Tommy flushes, and with his pale skin she can see it even in the firelight. “I—I didn’t want to.”
“How’d it taste?” She has to know, if this one has a soul, so she asks questions she doesn’t want to know the answer to.
Unblinking blue, tired of hiding. “Like the world was ending.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE PRISONER
When Jemma wakes in the dark, only one thought fills her head: I drove Apple out. I let him go. The night is still cold. So is she.
The Biter is tied to a kitchen chair outside her door, in the house she forced them to march to in the middle of the night. She hopes his arms are turning black from the rope. She wanted to kill him last night; she still does. Not because he did anything, not because she thought she would gain from it.
The death alone is what mattered. If she could take life from him so easily, maybe she has some control over it, after all.
The sky turns gray, then rose.
The bedroom starts to take shape around her: a musty landscape of statues. Someone carved ducks out of logs. They found the rambling, barely red house a few blocks from the river, on a gently curving street. They’re tucked behind a high brick wall, tucked behind the trees, tucked away from sight. The house is dressed with split shingles, and as the paint has peeled away, the walls have turned back to forest.
Apple pushes into her mind in the still, and she pushes him back out with an elbow and a knife twist. She can’t afford him there. The miracle of his return from death and then his true true unavoidable death—how could she have been fooled? She’s angry at him, but not just for his death. It’s that, with Apple, she let herself hope that life without death was even possible.
Pico came to her last night, when he heard a sound that might have been sobbing. But it wasn’t sobs—just Jemma’s anger. “I miss him, too,” Pico said, rubbing her shoulder with the touch of someone who knows that touch is important but can’t quite imagine why.
“You don’t know nothing,” she said, and turned away. No one gets to feel sorry for her.
Jemma thinks of Trina, who Jemma hated but who was so good at being Oldest. Trina, who hated Jemma but saved her, who must have lost her job as the Oldest when they stole the One Gun. Trina, who would never feel sorry for herself.
Trina would drop dead before she felt sorry for herself.
Neither will Jemma.
* * *
Pico disappears into the library almost as soon as they find it. The Parents in this house loved to read. Tommy sees him go, and asks Jemma, “Can he read?”
“He likes the smell of paper,” Jemma says. She’s determined not to answer any of his questions.
If the Biter is a spy, Jemma thinks, he might be the worst spy ever. He tells them everything, even when he doesn’t ask.
“Where was you going?” Jemma says.
“North,” Tommy says. He wiggles the wrist that seems to have been sprained in the flood. It’s tied to the chair arms.
“North to where?”
“To the Towers. I could see them from our hill, and I thought I could escape there.” He could see Downtown from his hill, just like she could see the Palos from hers.
“The Downtown people would kill you if you went.”
“They live there?”
“No, they guard it.” She wonders if she should have told him that. He doesn’t ask that many questions but seems to get the answers anyway.
As they surround him in the kitchen, they find out more about the Palos. Their numbers are smaller than they thought, no more than the Holy Wood. If the Angelenos combined, Jemma thinks, they could defeat them.
They dwindle every generation: They aren’t capturing enough children and have almost stopped having babies. The other people they capture aren’t allowed to breed.
“Why not?” she says.
“They’re the wrong color,” Tommy says, not apologizing. “The Chosen can’t change the color of their skins.”
“Why you all pink?” Lady says.
“White,” he says. “We was always white.”
“Why you care about white?” Lady says. “Everyone in Ell Aye is all pieces of other colors. The old colors don’t matter no more.”
“We care,” Tommy says. “I mean, my people used to when I was one of them.”
“And now you’re inbred and crazy cuz you only roll with the other whiteys,” Lady says.
Tommy shrugs. “You ain’t wrong.”
“That why you steal other people’s kids? That why you eat people?” Jemma says.
“The world was always ours,” Tommy says. “We’re just taking it back.”
“The Little Man—” And Jemma remembers the name from the Priestess, maybe the Ice Cream Men, and she knows it matters.
“Who’s the Little Man?” she says.
Tommy shakes his head. “Uh-uh.”
“C’mon, Biter,” Lady says, pushing him.
“The Head. The leader of the Cluster. You wanna stay away from him. He’s dumb, but he’s mean mean mean. He brought the Palos Verdes and the Newport tribes of the Chosen together. The Newport head said he wouldn’t fight with the Palos Verdes peoples. So Little Man sailed to Newport to talk about it and cut off their leader’s head.”
“There’s more than one of you?” Jemma says, a flare of fear rising.
“The two great centers of the Chosen world, Palos Verdes and Newport. Newport is far down the coast, past the Kingdom,” Tommy says. “Where there was riches and where there was boats, that’s where we grew.”
“How can you tell them apart?” Lady says.
“By their lances,” Tommy says. “The Newports dip theirs in fire so that the shafts are black. The Palos dip theirs in blood. So Little Man is bringing together both the smoke and the blood. It won’t last, though—too much hate between them.”
Jemma hears something strange in the way he talks about Little Man. It’s half admiration, half fear. Were they rivals somehow? This boy couldn’t rival anyone.
“Little Man is bringing guns to the Last Lifers,” Jemma says, remembering what Apple told her, what Pilar had said in the Waking under the influence of the haze. Pico walks into the kitchen with an orange.
Tommy falters. “That can’t be true,” he says.
“It is,” Pico says.
“Why would we work with the Last Lifers?” Tommy says.
“Exactly. Why?” Pico says. “But we know you did.”
Tommy shakes his head, and Pico keeps talking. “I heard it from a Last Lifer myself.”
“I feel like we heard it from everyone,” Jemma says, thinking of what the Last Lifers told Lady.
“The Last Lifers are beneath the Chosen.”
“Perfect for you to put in front of an arrow in a war,” Pico says. “I don’t think you’d turn down a thousand new warriors.”
“I just don’t—I don’t know anything about it.”
Pico leans on Tommy’s wrist, the one that’s sprained. It’s all the cannibal can do to keep from screaming. “The most talkative cannibal in the world, and now you don’t got nothing to say?”
Jemma’s never seen Pico like this, but she didn’t know how much he hated the Palos until last night. “Pico!” she says, and pulls him off.
“I’m just trying to help,” the Biter says, breathing hard. He looks at Pico with pure hate, and then, miraculously, the hate disappears.
“Cannibals’re super helpful,” Pico says. “Hey, Cannibal, what happened to my friend Roberto?”
A flicker passes through Tommy’s eyes. “I don’t know a Roberto.”
“What, you take away their names?”
“No, the Lowers get to keep their names.”
“Lowers. That your name for the people you steal? Your slaves?”
Tommy nods, and Pico says, “Well, at least they get to keep their names.”
“There’s no Roberto.”
“But you stole him from the beach in front of the Malibus. I saw you.”
“Some boats don’t make it back,” Tommy says. “A couple of years ago, the Lowers revolted against the captain of the Chosen. They killed all the Chosen but accidentally set the boat on fire. It came into the harbor, burning down to the water. Maybe your friend was on that boat.”
Pico doesn’t blink at the news.
“I’m sorry if that upset you,” Tommy says.
“I don’t get upset,” Pico says. “I fix things. So if my friend got killed by the Palos, I … I will fix that.”
This time, the Biter is the one who doesn’t blink.
“I’m going back to the library,” Pico says.
* * *
The library is no match for the big Library, just four walls and one room. But for Pico, who knows any book could unlock the past, it’s a jumble of wonders. He sent himself in there to decode what he remembers from the case and finds himself distracted by the rows and rows of book spines. Each book inspires Pico to leap from one to the other, from cars to medicine to animals to poetry to planes. He doesn’t understand everything. He feels like a Toddler. But his world gets bigger when he enters the room.
Pico floats a raft down a wide wide river, just as he did in real life, he swings from a vine with a boy in a white wolf suit, he creeps through a closet door to a lamp post in the woods. A heart beats under a floorboard. With every beat he feels his own blood pumping.
He feels giddy in here, soaking in this world that didn’t exist until he turned those pages. He thinks Parents must have been in love with learning. He thinks they must have never stopped reading. If you could read, why would you do anything else?
The Long Life Project is harder to find. These Parents didn’t read scientists. They have the books Pico is drawn to, but they mostly seemed to like soft books with shirtless men and almost-shirtless women. These books with their decaying pages come off the shelf in musty blows that hit him between the eyes with a headache. A few reads of those, and he wonders whether the Parents knew even less about sex than the Children do. Why would they roll with someone if they couldn’t make a baby?
Finally he finds a stack of thin books, made of thin paper, with a thin red frame around the edge and “TIME” on the cover. There are thirty or forty of them, identical in everything but the picture on the cover. Pico handles them gingerly, remembering the paper that fell apart at the library. He thumbs through seventeen of them until he sees a picture: a man, very, very old even by the Parents’ standards, and a boy just older than the Children. Their faces are merged together as if they’re the same person at opposite ends of life. But it’s the words that pull him in. “The End of Death,” the words say.
The End of Death. If that’s not what the Parents were seeking, then what was? A Long Life?
There’s nothing about the Long Life Project, but everything about why it could have come to be. The Parents were as frightened of death as the Children are, maybe more—they lived generations longer than their descendants but spent most of those years trying to fight death, with creams, with clothes, with doctors’ knives.
Death came anyway; they just looked younger than they were supposed to when it did. Until scientists started to believe they could find the cure by getting the body to fix itself. The body fought diseases by itself, and infections, but maybe it could do it better. If Apple was right, that the End started out as a fix, then it could have started here.
The last person the book mentions is a doctor, with a last name Pico can’t read. “Someday the brain will be able to tell the body how to fix itself,” the doctor says. The brain, that thing that’s in our heads, where the End starts.
The doctor worked in San Diego. Also where the End started.
It’s time to leave.
* * *
Lady has never done indoors well, and as their stay in the house stretches into its third day, the stillness and the stiflingness get to her. Enough to make her talk to a Palo. “What did you do there?” Lady says to Tommy, who hasn’t complained about his chair.
“When I wasn’t eating people?” Tommy says. Cannibal humor.
“Yeah. When you was taking a break from all that.”
“Fixed stuff,” he says.
“Like what?”
“I studied the Grown-Ups and what they built. Some of the machines are too big. But bikes, guns, pumps—
“Guns.”
Tommy stammers. “A people who like to fight, they like to have guns.”
“We never seen
Palos with guns.” Except for the ones who were bringing the guns to the Last Lifers, if Apple was right.
“Not until me,” Tommy says. “Now that I’m not there to fix them, maybe you won’t.”
He’s more important to the Biters than they thought, she thinks. Would they send someone to find him?
“Can I ask you a question?” Tommy says.
“Maybe,” she says.
“Why’d you leave home?”
“Why do you care?” she says.
“I know Angelenos. They—there are a lot of them in the Lowers. And they miss their hills.”
Jesucristo, I miss my hills, she thinks. The hills and the Lake of the Holy Wood and the Tweens swaggering around the Circle not knowing they don’t own it yet. And the babies in the Daycare. When will I see the babies again? I could travel through the Wilds forever and never see another baby. Jesucristo, I miss everything.
To him she says, “Sometimes they do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE FACE IN THE BOX
San Diego is southeast, but they will travel east and a little north first. That’s because Tommy warns them of danger on the map. Jemma feels herself warming to him. He seems to want to avoid danger as much as they do.
“You go south, you’re gonna hit the Chosen,” he says.
“Cannibals,” Pico says. Tommy ignores him.
“Pretty much anyplace east of here, you’re in the Kingdom. Maybe even here.”
“You scared of em?” Pico says.
“Course I am. I’m dead if they see me,” Tommy says. “But don’t think they’re gonna treat you much better.”
They stop at the river first to fill up their litros before the day’s travel. Jemma slides down the slanted concrete bank and squats next to the water’s edge, filling all their bottles while Lady guards the prisoner up top. The new sun sneaks over her left shoulder, starting to light up the opposite edge of the river.
Jemma fills up her first two bottles and turns toward the others. She stops. All three kids—Lady, Pico, and the Biter—are frozen still, their arms pointing toward the opposite shore.
Last Lifers on the far bank. A raiding party of five or six, she thinks, but that can’t be right—it would be unlikely to find the Last Lifers so far into the Wilds without villages nearby to raid. As she watches, she realizes how wrong she is.