by Lydia Millet
I had a chance to talk to Kate while we were waiting for the scouts to come back with their report. Xing was helping with the babies and with one person who’d been hurt in the evac, an old man with an injured foot. Kate must have seen me sitting alone and decided to be nice to me; she sat down beside me and inspected my injuries, taking the bandage off my head wound and checking to make sure that it wasn’t infected, then moving down to the bandage on my side.
Because she wasn’t the kind of person who was content to do a single thing at once, she also told me more about the camp.
And about the rest of the world.
While she was looking at my injuries, and trying to distract me from the soreness while she patted more disinfectant onto the stitches, she talked on and on in her matter-of-fact voice. And a realization dawned on me: I’d always lived in the kind of cave we were huddled in now. In a way I’d always been sheltered like that, always had a thick roof over my head and no signals from the outside.
Because I hadn’t tried to hear those sounds. I’d never worked at it, not like Sam had. I’d done my collecting; I’d only wanted to look at things that were beautiful.
I hadn’t wanted to look at the opposite.
Kate said the corps were mostly trying to get rid of people—as fast as they could, because it was people who were the biggest carbon footprint, and the corps wanted to make the world livable again.
And of course, she said, there was nothing wrong with wanting fewer people to live on Earth. “Everyone knows there are too many of our species, by orders of magnitude. But the answer isn’t Death Math. Now, the corps aren’t doing their kills because they think it’s right; they simply don’t care what’s right. They just want a stable world back, and they want it for themselves. They think they can groom it back to being their playground again—and mind you, dear, our world being a playground for all the powerful corps is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. For them, Death Math is the fastest way back.”
The Resist, she said, believed in livability too, just not through Death Math, and for the poors as well as the First. Only by not having many babies and by raising the ones that were abandoned or targeted.
She added that there was a powerful movement in the corps that didn’t believe the last tipping point was irreversible. They believed if we took people out now the globe could recover more quickly, and then they could have it for themselves. But Resist scientists said it would take hundreds of years no matter what, and all we could do was reduce our numbers slowly, live simply, try to rebuild a better culture, and wait.
In the Resist they believe in science and philosophy, she said, literature and art and even some kinds of the softer godbeliefs, as long as the beliefs are open to anyone.
Corps mostly believe in math. And not math in the best sense, but math only as it served them.
“So Sam had these lists of numbers I found,” I said. “In his room. Some of them were really big numbers, hundreds of thousands …”
“You know what those were, now, don’t you?” she asked softly, and closed up my last bandage.
“They were numbers of people killed, weren’t they?”
She didn’t nod because she didn’t have to; she just went on talking. She hadn’t seen Sam’s lists but he’d mentioned them. Those numbers, she told me, were whole populations taken out by corp-army actions. Because bombs had a big footprint, they mostly used sneakier weapons, like gases and chemicals that killed people but left buildings intact. Sometimes they poisoned water supplies, if they knew the water supply would recover. There were poisons that had a shelf life, she said, poisons that disappeared from the water over time, so that a few months or years after they did their work the water was safe to drink again.
Then Kate rose to her feet. She told me not to give up. She told me the Resist was all over the world, with spies in corporate, even, inside the corporate machine, who gave us information.
“In the end,” she went on, and leaned forward to pat my shoulder, “in the end we will win. But it may not be in my lifetime, Nat. Or even in yours, possibly. Our task is to keep going. To remember that we, and those babies, deserve a second chance—we do, and so does everything else in creation.”
A scout came back in then and whispered in her ear, and she stood up and announced to all of us that the storm had officially passed.
And we could go outside again.
We had to move out slowly, along the tunnel, and it was a frustrating couple of hours, wanting desperately to be outside and see what the island looked like but having to move steadily downward through the lava tube in this orderly fashion. And because it was dark in there except for our lamps, it was like it was night still, and no time had passed.
Or maybe all time had passed, and the world was simply gone.
It felt unreal.
And when, after two or three hours of careful walking, I finally emerged behind others into the light of day, my eyes seemed newly blind. I’d been away from sunlight for less than twenty-four hours but my eyes had already forgotten how to look at it.
A great brightness fell on us, as we stood there on the side of the mountain. The whiteness struck me and before I could see anything out of it—I was tearing up and blinking—I could feel and smell. We moved along this kind of lava shelf on the mountainside, where there was space for us to stand. The air was warm and wet but seemed so expansive around me, so alive and moving compared to the closeness and stillness of the cave. It was delicious, full of the smell of rain and earth and leaves and of the salt breeze off the sea.
Still, fear moved up through me, tingling, from the soles of my feet to the tips of my fingers, and I shivered.
As I stood there blinking, the white light faded and resolved into a picture. We were on the mountainside and the sky was bright blue and clear. It had been a fast, vast storm, and now it was definitely gone. I knew something had been destroyed, I knew that things had been lost down there, things and people, but it somehow seemed to me that this was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. It was the freshest, best-smelling air I’d ever breathed.
Here I was loose, here I was open to the world. It was the lightest I’d felt in my whole life: anything in the world was possible.
Maybe this was what it would feel like, I thought, living and dying unmanaged.
Beneath our feet on the lava shelf the jungle spread out, a sparkling emerald green, water reflecting off leaves. There were dents in it, I saw, flattened holes here and there in the canopy where you could tell a bunch of trees must have fallen. There were hills and jagged lava outcroppings, there were clearings that must have once been farmland, orchard rows of fruit trees in the distance, and over us in the blue there were just a few small clouds, white and gray and even purple on their edges.
All that remained of the Six.
The Six that might just have killed my baby brother, I thought then, and my exhilaration caved in and practically turned inside out. Here I was, soaring, with a weird, frightening feeling of newness. Of liberty, maybe, as I’d imagined it. And where was he?
We had a view all the way to the ocean, though it was harder to see what was there, since it was far away. I remembered when Sam and I had climbed the lower slopes of the volcano together, how we’d looked back and been able to see the white structures of the hotel—a clear view. But we were much farther away here, I guess, and up higher in elevation …
I shaded my eyes from the brightness above and peered in what I thought was the hotel’s direction, but couldn’t really see past the trees.
“Here, look,” said someone beside me.
It was Keahi. He’d been in the shelter with the goats so I hadn’t seen him at all during the storm, and I felt another skip of euphoria when I peered at his face again, its clean and handsome lines, the eyes and the set of his mouth that always looked like he knew something I didn’t and it might be just slightly funny.
He stood close to me and I felt the warmth of his side through my
clothes—more, I think, than I’d feel someone else’s.
“It’s not going to be easy,” he said, “but you need to look through these.” And he lifted these teched-out specs so I could see through them. They had small screens inside.
But my hands were shaking as I held them so Keahi put his hands over mine, standing behind me. It felt right to have him there. I wanted to relax back against him, but I was too shy for that, so I just looked through the specs again.
On the small screens, which came together into one as I looked, there was a dab of white. I looked harder, trying to make out its shape.
“I’ll zoom for you,” said Keahi in my ear.
And the picture got bigger and nearer.
Keahi let me hold the specs myself and dropped his arms so they were around me—almost holding me up, I think now.
It was the hotel all right. But it also wasn’t anymore. Just a shell, torn into pieces with big struts and beams sticking out in a jumble. There were fallen walls and empty holes in the ones that hadn’t collapsed; pieces of the buildings looked like a giant claw had dropped down and scooped into them.
I let the specs fall and just stood there with my throat closed up. I couldn’t say anything.
Sam. Sam.
And the others. I knew there were others. But I could only think of my own brother.
Keahi dropped his arms from me and turned me to face him. “Nat, it’s going to be okay. You’re strong.”
“Listen, we can’t stay here,” said Xing from a few feet away, and I saw people were moving downward quickly, into the path in the trees, hiking back down the mountain. “We’re visible in the clear and we can’t risk it. We need to get under the tree cover. Come on.”
Sure enough, as we weaved our way through the jungle to find out what was left of the camp—me trying uselessly to get my head around the mangled remains of those huge hotel buildings and what they must mean—the black dragonflies whirred overhead again, headed out to sea.
They were leaving the island entirely. Nothing left for them here, now that the resort was a ruin.
“They’ll be going to rendezvous with a ship, most likely,” said Keahi.
He was walking right behind me, and Xing was in front.
“They can’t make it all the way to the mainland. Not with the small size of those helicopter fuel tanks. They’re probably meeting a corp marine transport of some kind, a big one that wasn’t swallowed up by the Six.”
I was thinking I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be one of the guys in those choppers—one of the guys who’d left a whole resort full of people to fall under the waves.
But then I thought, But I left Sam. And where is he now? Where’s my brother? He trusted me. He trusted all of you too.
And maybe I was just like the corporates at Twilight, only they had two thousand people to kill.
And I’d only had one.
Keahi must have read my mind—maybe he had ESP. Or maybe I had said my thoughts aloud.
“It’s not the same at all. Don’t beat yourself up. They built this system. They built a hotel without evac capacity and they made big, big money off of it. They did their Death Math and yesterday they were just following the equation like they always do. Innocents died under their watch—innocents always do. And there was nothing you could have done to stop it.”
I noticed, as we walked on in silence, that I wasn’t as down as the day before, that I was still scared for Sam, I was full of all of this new knowledge I hadn’t really understood yet, my mind muddled with anger and grief and the confusion of my new unmanaged life—the strange, scary looseness of being at large in the world.
But I didn’t have the flat depressive feeling I’d had when I was coming off the pharma, and I was so glad of that one part that I could have yelled.
My mind was clear as the sky I’d looked up at when we came out of the cave. I felt like I could take on things, like I wanted to live a new way, and it filled me with a kind of excitement and determination.
I felt as if maybe, for the first time in my life, I was going to really do something. Something my parents, once upon a time, could have admired.
But when we came off the mountain path and got down into the camp, my heart sank.
It was like a bog or a marsh or something. There were ponds in some of the lower places where the tents had been, all the potted trees everywhere were down and flattened on the ground, and some of the big trees actually growing around the clearing were down too. The mess of the downed trees was everywhere, some of them floating in the pools of muddy water.
The Quonset was just a frame now, all the sides ripped off and flapping in the breeze. It was like the skeleton of a great beast, a massive, empty rib cage like they have in face museums.
I thought the place was wrecked and I stood there beside Keahi, just gazing out at the water and the collapsed edges of the forest.
Then Kate moved past us, carrying a loop of cable over one shoulder and smiling. “Not bad!” she said. “We can fix this, Nat. Don’t worry. We just need some elbow grease.”
I had no idea what elbow grease was; it sounded disgusting. But she was smiling, so it couldn’t be that bad, I guessed.
And then the best thing happened.
Out of the ruined Quonset stepped Keahi’s friend from the resort, the one who’d helped me escape.
Behind him was Sam.
I couldn’t help it, I shrieked. And ran up to him and threw my arms around him.
When I stepped back, I saw he wasn’t looking that great, he had a black eye and a cut on his lip. And there were deep bruises and more cuts on his wrists, like he’d been bound.
But he was alive. And right then, that was the same thing as perfect.
Xing came over, and Keahi, and we were all standing around grinning and talking fast and asking too many questions. Sam spoke in a kind of subdued voice, and I thought he looked older—what he had seen, I guess, or what he knew had happened.
The storm was what had saved them, he explained quietly. Because the storm had diverted all the corp’s attention. The storm had taken out everything, all those people vacating, he said—it must have. But it had saved him.
Yet even before he told the story, he said, right now he needed to talk to Kate privately. He and Keahi’s friend, whose name was Mano, needed to talk to Kate right away.
So they went off to the side and huddled. I was curious and stood there waiting, watching their faces to try to figure out what they were talking about.
Then Kate went away for a while to talk to some other people in the camp, and then she was back, and nodded. And Sam and Mano went into the jungle again, and when they came back they weren’t alone.
Behind them was a group of hotel refugees.
The only people, Sam told me later, who had survived, as far as he knew.
I didn’t recognize any of them at first, they were so bowed-over and wretched. Their clothes hung in rags and they were shivering and holding themselves protectively, their arms folded, their shoulders bent. Some of them didn’t even have shoes. But as they filed into the clearing—I think there were eighteen in all—I finally picked out two I actually knew. There was the meathead guy from our survivor group, one of his arms in a sling that must have been made out of his torn-up shirt, because he was bare-chested. He looked shell-shocked. And at the very end of the line, limping, there was a shivering, thin woman, her long yellow hair matted and tangled, with nothing on but a once-beige bathrobe, now dark brown with mud, and a pair of tattered slippers.
It was LaT.
“The rest of them are just guests. She’s the only corp staff,” said Sam. He was beside me now. I hadn’t even noticed he was there, what with staring at them.
“Hey, I’m surprised you didn’t bring Rory,” I said, making a weird and lame attempt at humor. I must have been nervous, and it was a shock to see her there, since she was what we were escaping from.
I was also thinking how exposed the camp would b
e to bugs, with these new people here—the more people, the more vectors. That was what they always taught us on healthface. Even before we were old enough to read on face we had to recite it, practically in our cradles: Hug strangers, bug dangers. Then I reminded myself of what Xing had said: the bug danger wasn’t as big as they always told us it was.
Still, I wondered if Kate would let them stay.
“At first we didn’t have a choice, we had to let LaTessa come,” said Sam. “She clung to us, tagging along. We were just running and soaked and scared and the winds were coming up and it was chaos. And then we hid out in this little hut she knew about, a ways back from the hotel, this little hut made of stone that was really old and built more solidly, into a hillside. Back toward the snorkeltank where we went on the fieldtrip. She helped. She actually led us there.”
“LaT. saved you?”
“She pretty much did. And we talked a little, during the storm. You should hear where she came from. Her whole family was wiped out, she was starving for a while and she had a bad sickness that almost killed her, and when she got better she tried a lot of things before she took the corp job. Things that were way worse, for her. Things that can …” He shook his head as though he didn’t know what to say, and then moved on. “But she’s tough and she survived. In the end, you know, she was just making a living the best way she could. She’s not so bad since she dropped that corp act.”
He sounded sad, and I thought again how much older his voice was. He was way past fourteen.
“You did good.” I reached out and squeezed his arm. “You’re here! I’m so proud of you. I’m—I’m so happy. I was really scared.”
“Not as scared as I was,” he said.
“And I’m sorry I was so harsh to you about—what happened. To Mom and Dad. I felt so bad later—”
“No, there’s nothing you should say sorry for. Don’t sweat it, Nat. I just knew we didn’t have time to talk. Or even think. It was life or death for us too.”
We watched as Kate and Xing handed out water and blankets to the refugees and then led them back into the trees to rest. Before long, someone was going around giving them shots.