I grab my bag, swing it onto my back. I’m the first to the cable ladder, the boys right behind me. Epap volunteers to head down first, and straps Ben’s bag around him. “Don’t look down,” I tell the younger boys. “Keep your eyes focused on the rungs in front of you. Slow and steady, all right?”
Epap is grabbing hold of the post, planting his foot on the top rung when he stops. “Sissy?” he says.
She hasn’t moved. She’s still standing in the same spot, her face wrought with conflict.
“C’mon, Sissy!” I yell. “We have to hurry.”
Then her face becomes smooth, her inner battle resolved. She looks at me with eyes that are steady but moist.
“Hey!” I shout. “Let’s go!”
“It’s not that simple,” she says.
“What’s not that simple?” I say.
“Running away.”
“What?”
“We have to go back.”
“To the Mission? Are you out of your mind?”
“We need to warn them about the dusker boats.”
I walk back to her. “We go back, we die. We leave now, we live,” I say. “It is that simple. If we leave now, we make it to the Promised Land. We see my father again. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.”
“I’m going back to the Mission.”
I stare at her. “To what end, Sissy? They’re dead anyway. Even if we do warn them, how far do you think they’re going to get with those feet?”
“I can’t do this, Gene. I can’t just leave them to be ravaged.”
I turn to Epap. “You talk some sense into her, will you?”
But he only looks at Sissy with wavering, uncertain eyes.
“Oh, c’mon, not you, too, Epap!”
Sissy stares out to the river. “The Scientist told us we never leave our own. If we simply walk away knowing what we know, we’d be betraying everything he’s taught us.”
I point east with an angry finger. “The Scientist wants us to head east. The Scientist wants us to go to the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine. The Scientist is waiting for us there. We go east. That’s what the Scientist wants! So don’t go telling me about what you think the Scientist wants!”
Sissy’s voice is quiet next to my berating tone. “If we leave, it’s their blood on our hands. The village girls, the babies. Hundreds of them. I won’t be able to live with that.”
“Oh, c’mon Sissy, they brought it on themselves.”
“No!” she says, her voice rising. “We brought it to them! Don’t you get that?” Her eyes search mine. “It’s because of us they’re now in danger. If we never came, the boats would never have come out this far. But for us, the duskers would never have discovered the Mission.”
The wind whistles across the granite domes. Long strands of hair blow across her face, but she does not pull them away. “I’m going back,” she says. “It’s the only thing I know to do. I will tell them about the duskers. I will convince them all to get on the train, to leave immediately. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we’ll manage.”
“Are you out of your mind? Sissy, we don’t know where the train leads! That’s why we left the Mission in the first place.”
“And that’s exactly why we’ll get on. Because we don’t know. It might lead to deliverance. But if they don’t get on the train, it’s certain death.” Her voice is steeled and resolute. “Their lives have been hard enough. I can’t leave them to be torn apart by duskers if I can help it. I won’t be able to live with myself knowing I abandoned them.”
I glare at her. “Sissy, don’t do this.”
She ignores me, turns to the others. “You all go with Gene. Help him find the Scientist. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”
“No.” Epap blinks hard, his face pale. He steps toward Sissy. “I’m with you, Sissy. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Me, too,” David says, brushing tears from his eyes. “Let’s go back to the Mission.”
“And me,” Jacob joins in, his voice shaking, a small, brave smile breaking out on his lips. “I’m with you, too.”
And then Ben is running to Sissy, hugging her tightly around the waist. She ruffles the hair tufting out from the bottom of his winter hat. She looks at me.
I break my eyes away. The wind blows, and though it is no stronger than the previous gusts, it cuts through me as if I’ve been emptied out, all substance sucked out of me. I kick a rock over the edge.
“This is what you want then?” I say. “To be chased, to be hunted? To be their prey your whole life? Born prey, die prey?” I look at them in turn. “This is our chance to be more than prey. To escape all this. But instead you’re choosing to go back to it, like an escaped animal right back into the cage.”
Nobody answers. In the distance, the clot of dots on the river thickens.
“We can be free!” My voice cracks. I thrust my arms toward the eastern horizon. “That’s where we need to go. East. Where my father is.”
I’m suddenly dizzy and light-headed, the ground insubstantial beneath me. I bend over, wait for the world to stop spinning. “Don’t do this, guys,” I say, and my voice, whittled by the wind, has lost all strength. It is barely a whisper. “Don’t leave me by myself.”
For a moment, they don’t speak. They stand perfectly stationary. Only their hair, blown by the wind, ripples in this tapestry of stillness. Then David moves toward me, and though it is but a single step, it seems as if he’s closed the whole distance between us.
“Come with us, Gene,” he says. “Please?” And it is that last word that breaks me a little inside.
I turn my head, gaze at the eastern horizon. The wide expanse, empty and barren.
“Gene,” and now it is Jacob who is speaking. “Come with us. You’re part of us now. You’re with us. I really feel that. You fit so perfectly. We’re family. We won’t let you leave!”
Nobody has ever begged or pleaded for me. For a few moments, I don’t say anything, only feel a strange molten warmth fill pockets inside me where I’ve only ever felt emptiness. I turn to face them again. Ben gazes at me with eyes wide with hope and expectation. He sees written on my face the decision I’m barely aware of making, and he breaks into a wide smile. He tugs on Sissy’s arm with excitement. “He’s coming! He’s coming with us!”
Epap nods at me, his eyes warm. “We should get a move on,” he says. “It’s a ways back to the Mission. You take the lead, Gene. I’ll take the rear, what do you say?”
I see myself stepping forward, into their midst. I can almost feel their hands patting me on the back, the light dancing in their eyes, the surge of energy in my legs as I lead them back to the Mission.
But I haven’t moved. I’m rooted to the spot. Once again, I stare at the eastern horizon. I feel the pull of a million hands tugging me in two different directions.
“I get to walk behind Gene!” Jacob says, picking up his backpack.
And yet still, I have not moved.
And then Sissy, quiet for so long, speaks. But unlike the others, there is no excitement in her voice. “Gene.” That is all she says, just my name, quietly. Her voice is filled with an unbearable sadness that devastates me. She shakes her head as she looks at me, and in that small movement a thousand hidden words of realization and understanding pass between us.
The boys turn to her, confusion etched into their faces.
“Sissy?” Ben asks. “What’s the matter—”
“Gene won’t be coming with us,” Sissy says, her eyes never leaving mine.
“What? What do you mean?”
Her voice is calm. “East is his destination. It’s the path the Scientist determined for him.”
“No,” David says, his voice thick with emotion. “He’s one of us, he stays with us—”
“He’s the Origin,” she says. “His path is different from ours.”
“Sissy,” Ben says, “he wants to come with us and—”
“Don’t let Gene die,” she says. “Gene is the
Origin. He is the cure. He needs to stay alive. He needs to head east. Nothing is more important.”
The boys’ faces turn pale. But their wide eyes and silent quivering lips betray the unwanted acknowledgment that Sissy is right.
“He needs to find the Scientist,” she continues with a determined calmness. “It’s what the Scientist wants, it’s what he designed from the very beginning. We can’t let our personal feelings”—her face hardens like flint—“get in the way.” She gazes at me from the corners of her eyes, and for the first time her voice trembles with conflict and anguish. “And deep down it’s what Gene also wants.”
The boys look at me. And Ben now sees something else on my face, a different expression that causes his lower lip to wobble, his eyes to tear up. “Gene?” he asks, and his question hangs in the air, dangling in the wind.
Sissy moves toward me, her face rigid. “He wants his father. Nothing—and nobody—matters more to him. We can’t deny him that. We have to let him go.” And now she is standing right in front of me, so close I see the cracks in her hardened expression, the soft crevices of ache. “You’d walk to the ends of the earth to find him, right, Gene?”
Behind her, the boys are gazing at me. The sky is a vivid deep blue above them, not a cloud in sight. Ben starts to sob and Epap puts a comforting arm around his shoulders.
“I won’t leave you,” I say.
“You must,” Sissy says. “I won’t let you stay.”
“I’m done with deserting—”
She places her finger on my lips, quieting me.
The sunlight reflecting off the granite dome draws out the deep pools of her irises. I remember the first time I saw those brown eyes, on my deskscreen at school. It was when she picked out the lottery numbers for the Heper Hunt. So many days ago, yet I still remember the qualities those eyes held, even through the digitalized pixels of the screen, of strength and softness both.
And that is how her hand feels on my face. Strength and softness.
“Gene,” she whispers, and her voice at last betrays her. She swallows hard. “Go.” For a moment, her resolute eyes break into shards of hesitation. She pauses, as if to give me a chance to speak. But I say nothing. She closes her eyes and turns back to the boys.
I don’t move. Then, in a movement that seems to take hours, I step toward the cable ladder. Nothing has substance, not the granite beneath me, not my legs, not my body. It feels as if I might get swept up in the next gust of wind, not so much blown away as quickly whittled, bone by bone, into nothingness. I plant my boot on the first rung.
“Gene!” David shouts. “We’ll see you again. One day, okay?”
I nod. He smiles back and I feel my owns lips naturally curl and part in a smile. I did not know this, that smiles could be fashioned out of sorrow. Then I do something my father always cautioned me not to do. I lift up my hand and wave it slowly. They wave back, all of them, with damp eyes.
As if pulled down by the weight of my heavy heart, I step down to the next rung and the next. The sight of Sissy and the boys is replaced by the hard granite wall rushing up before me as I descend down the cable ladder. My foot finds the next rung down and the next and the next, and then I am all alone in the world again.
39
I HIKE HARD and fast. It is better this way, to keep my heart pumping with vigor, lungs sucking for air, mind focused on what lies ahead and not what I’ve left behind. I am a tiny dot gliding across an immense, forgotten land emptied of memory, stuck in a stasis that will never shift.
As the sun begins to descend, my boots strike not hard granite but the soft floor of the forest. It’s colder in the woods, and darker, as if dusk has stolen prematurely into its midst. I keep up the brisk pace, eager to put miles under me.
But the densely spaced trees, and their similarities in appearance, disorient me, spin me around. I look to the sky for guidance, but the tall redwood trees, packed tightly together, reveal only splintered patches of sky and obscure the position of the sun. I don’t even know which way is east. The hue of the sky worries me, its tone no longer blue, but spilled with the bloodred tint of dusk.
Nightfall has begun.
I’m a city boy, unused to navigating the wilderness. I press on, panic cupping the back of my eyes. Ten minutes later, I’m forced to accept what I’ve been denying for over an hour. I’m lost, my inner compass gone kaput. I no longer know if I’m walking toward or away from the Mission. I’ve lost precious time.
With alarm, I note that a few stars are already peeking out in the twilight sky. Night is pouring into the world. Under my feet, right now, in the cavity of the mountain, hundreds of duskers are waiting for the day to recede to full darkness. The thought completely unnerves me. Shortly, the duskers will start scaling the walls of the cave, clinging to vines and other plants, and filter out of the openings through which sun columns beam down in the daytime. They will stream out in countless streams, cloaking the mountain like rising black oil as they race toward the Mission.
I hope Sissy and the boys made good time and are safely back in the Mission. I hope they will be able to convince the girls to get on the train, that they’ll be able to leave before the duskers arrive. As I walk, a growing sense of guilt begins to weigh on me. That I have deserted them. In the same way I abandoned Ashley June, I have betrayed them. I walk harder and faster, needing tiredness to rid me of thought.
A half hour later, I lean back on a tree trunk, breathing hard, eyes wide in the dark woods. I should be on the other side of the mountain by now, miles away, safely out of their path and downwind. Not lost and afraid in the darkness and silence of the woods. Days ago, with Clair leading us, the forest was teeming with wildlife. But now, there is only an eerie silence. As if all the forest dwellers have sensed the arrival of the duskers and have already fled.
When my ragged breathing quiets, I hear the faint sounds of a stream. I shuffle my way toward it, not because I’m thirsty and in need of water but because I remember a stream passes only fifty meters or so from the log cabin. Perhaps it is the same one.
It is a gurgling, fast-flowing brook. I bend down, splash water on my face. The ice water snaps me out of my cloud of fatigue and into the clear expanse of alertness.
An idea formulates in my head. Of a way out. It’s not perfect; far from it actually. But as the temperature plummets around me, the cold creeping down the nape of my neck, I realize that not only is this a viable method of escape, it is the only one. I hitch up the backpack, tighten the straps, and run alongside the river. Eyes peeled for the cabin.
Because inside the cabin is my father’s hang glider.
* * *
I almost run right by the cabin. A single wail is what saves me. It is flung up into the night sky, unnervingly close. It stops me in my tracks. And that’s when I see it. Not the log cabin, not at first, only a clearing. Within seconds I’m sprinting across the clearing and onto the front porch of the cabin.
As I turn the knob, a chorus of other cries, masculine and feline, rises into the sky, a pitched yearning to their joined voices. Thin cloud lines, dyed red from the setting sun, take on the appearance of deep bloody gashes. I stare at the woods encircling the clearing. No movement. East of me, the clearing falls away into a sudden cliff, a sheer drop. A dark wind blows across it. That’s where my father took off with the hang glider. Right off the cliff, into the skies, soaring above the Vast. And that’s where I’ll need to take off.
It’s dark inside the cabin. I take out a GlowBurn from my bag, snap it. The hang glider is right where I remember it, hung up on the bedroom wall. Now that I know I need to fly it, it seems both flimsier and more cumbersome at the same time. I examine it, trying to make out a method behind the madness of straps and bars. None of it makes any sense at all. There has to be something else. And then I remember. I open the chest of clothes, take out the odd-looking vest I’d seen days earlier. I unzip it, try to decipher the metallic hooks and cords and carabiners dangling from it. I put on the vest, fi
tting my legs through harnesses. Now the hang glider makes more sense: hooks attach to counter hooks, carabiners match up with same-colored carabiners.
A scream outside rattles the windows.
The window is a sheet of black now. Night has saturated the skies.
As if to officially usher night in, screams fly across the mountainside. But louder now, scraping against the cabin windows like fingernails across a sheet of ice. I hear faint cracking sounds, like toothpicks snapped—it takes a minute before I realize these are the distant sounds of trees being felled, trunks pulverized by the horde of duskers. The heper odors drifting across the mountain ranges are driving them into a frenzy.
I drop the hang glider onto the bed and run outside. From the front porch, I see the progress of their stampede. Tall trees in the distance shaking.
They’re coming. They’re coming. By accident or by design, the cabin is in their direct path.
I run inside. I consider closing the shutters, fortressing myself in the cabin. But I shunt that idea aside immediately—the cabin stands as much chance resisting the duskers as a matchbox in a fire. They’d rip this log cabin into shreds within seconds.
I pick up the hang glider, walk sideways down the hallway with it and out the front door. Cold wind gusts manically around me, the echoes of howls swirling in them.
It’s now or never, ready or not. I choose now, I hope for ready.
I latch a hook to a corresponding hook on the hang glider. I start walking toward the cliff edge even as I lock carabiners into place, slide cords through loops, all guesswork and no conviction at all in what I’m doing. I can only hope they’re going where they’re supposed to.
The ground begins to rumble under me.
Shrieks loft out of the forest behind and beside me. These are different in tone, rapturous, the cries of pleasant surprises, of unexpected discoveries.
I run. Dangling, still-unhooked carabiners bounce against my body like the nudges of a needy child—fix me fix me fix me—but it is too late for that. All I feel is the razor edge of their screams, slashing not only my eardrums, but the skin on the back of my neck, the skin on the back of my heels, reaching out toward me like claws on outstretched fingers. I pull the metal handlebar of the hang glider over my head, making sure I don’t trip as I run. A single stumble now will be a fatal mistake.
The Prey Page 24