How We Became Wicked

by Alexander Yates

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Astrid said. “You can’t just steal a town.”

  “Can’t you?” Ria asked, her voice sharpening more and more. “Says who?”

  Astrid hesitated. “This was before the wickedness,” she said, less certain. “There were supposed to be rules.”

  “Of course there were rules,” Ria said. “Books upon books of them.” With each breath, Astrid’s mom seemed to be slipping out of sadness and into a well-worn bitterness. “Rules written by people like your grandfather. People like Mr. Bushkirk. By them and for them. The rules didn’t stop it. The rules helped.”

  At this point Ria had gotten herself worked up enough that she stood. But there wasn’t anywhere to go, so she just stayed there, boots cratering the wet sand. “At first the investors tried to buy up all of the houses,” she said, turning to face Astrid and Hank. “Nobody wanted to sell, but they tried all the same. They offered more than the houses were worth. Your grandpa . . . He always used to remind us of that. Whenever we would fight about what happened, Ronnie Gold would trot it out. ‘We made them a generous offer,’ he’d say. As though that made it all okay.”

  Ria’s boots dug deeper into the sand and came upon something hard. She kicked at it, revealing a chunk of greenway glass about the size and shape of a piece of pie. The edges were rounded, and the glass itself had turned opaque. Ria reached down and grabbed it. She gripped the glass tight in her gloved fist.

  “In the end Ronnie Gold offered to share the town with them. The people of Port Emory were frightened too. Everything on the news was so terrifying, and the idea of Ronnie Gold swooping in and paying to build a great big wall and a bunch of glass domes and tubes sounded good to them. So they signed over everything. The agreement was that as soon as construction finished, they’d be allowed to come back.”

  “But then the wickedness fell,” Hank said.

  “Yes,” Ria said. “Quicker than anybody thought was possible. When the people of Port Emory tried to come home, they found the wall that they’d been promised, only they were on the wrong side of it. And there was a tank guarding the gates. In the old world, they could have gotten their homes back. The courts promised to help them sort it out, in a year or two. But the old world was already slipping away. The courts themselves didn’t last a year. By then Port Emory was already gone.”

  “But how did they—” Astrid stumbled, not just over the sentence but also over the thoughts behind it. They seemed too horrible to consider all at once. “Where did those people go?”

  “Different places,” her mother said. “A few headed across the bay and into Canada. Others tried moving inland, up toward Baxter, to make a stand in the forest. And the rest settled on Puffin Island.”

  “Eliza’s family,” Hank said.

  “Maybe,” Ria said. “Probably.” Then she fell silent. It seemed to Astrid that, for the first time since they’d cornered her mother out on the tidal flats, Ria was once again debating whether or not to say something.

  “What is it?”

  Her mother only shrugged. “They did this,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Hank asked. “Did what?”

  “This,” Ria said, holding up the piece of greenway glass still clenched in her gloved fist. She cast her free hand in a circle, indicating the entire ruin of the north shore. “The attack,” Ria said. “It wasn’t the wicked. It was the people from Port Emory, trying to come home. And it was us, trying not to let them. It was us, trying to keep what we’d stolen. It was us, being worse than wicked.”

  With that Ria wheeled back and chucked the piece of greenway glass out across the beach. It landed in the shallows, slipping in almost without a splash. Astrid felt the cold chunk of glass settling down into her own stomach. Pressing at her insides with hard, rounded edges. She couldn’t shake the image of the sandy-haired girl. The child grinning beside Amblin in that old photograph. Eliza. Eliza who had been put out of her home. Eliza who had fallen wicked. Eliza whom they’d shot and burnt to cinders. Which of the investors had taken her house? Who was sleeping in Eliza’s bedroom today? It may as well have been Astrid—the theft spread quick as wickedness, infecting everybody who touched it. There was no immunity from this.

  Astrid stood bolt upright from the driftwood. Her skin felt hot.

  “Are any of them still out there?” Hank asked. “On Puffin Island?”

  “I don’t know,” Ria said. “I didn’t think so. A lot of them died in the attack, and the ones who didn’t wanted to get as far away from here as possible. But then the lighthouse turned on, and . . .”

  “You don’t think it’s just old batteries?” Hank asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ria repeated. “It might be.”

  Astrid took a single step forward. Her legs felt amazingly solid beneath her. “Then we have to go and see,” she said.

  PART IV

  THE VEX

  CHAPTER 21

  The Baby and the Book

  THE NEXT TWO DAYS PASSED slowly for Natalie and her mother. They stayed locked in the lighthouse the entire time, safe for now behind the storm walls. They ate sparingly, drank all they wanted, and spoke hardly a word—holding out hope that Natalie’s wicked grandfather might forget that they were in there. Though he never did. And by the time the baby came, it didn’t matter anymore. Even the puffins on the far side of the island could hear her mother screaming.

  It happened on the morning of the third day. Natalie’s grandfather danced about the lighthouse walls, reveling in the sounds. He understood what was about to happen. “I’m going to be a grandpa!” he chanted, perhaps forgetting that he already was one. “I’m going to live forever!” The old man sang himself hoarse, and it was to the sound of his voice that the baby was born.

  A baby sister.

  “Eva,” their mother named her. Natalie couldn’t tell if she’d been thinking of this name for a long time, or if it came to her on the spot.

  Other than the fact that they were locked up inside the lighthouse, everything went as they’d rehearsed. This seemed a miracle to Natalie—both the birth itself and the fact that nothing went wrong. She wiped her new sister dry and cleaned out her tiny mouth and nose. She cut the umbilical cord with a pair of shears salvaged from the bunkhouse. Then she draped Eva across her mother—across their mother—and pulled the duvet up around them both. It was everything they’d prepared for.

  But there were other things—things you couldn’t prepare for. Surprises big and small. The way Eva’s skin felt on Natalie’s fingers. Or the way her arms and legs were all curled up, like pink fiddleheads. Or the striking strangeness of her features—her little nose, and lips, and eyes. It was only the fifth face Natalie had ever seen in real life, counting her own reflection. An entirely new face. An entirely new person. Natalie found herself overwhelmed by the thought.

  She felt as though she might float away on it.

  It wasn’t an entirely pleasant floating. It was a light-headed, dizzy, nauseous floating. “She isn’t really here yet.” Natalie whispered the words out loud, trying to pull herself back down to the floor. Trying to calm herself. “This isn’t permanent until she has the vex.” Her own feeble attempt to keep from getting attached. After all, there was a real chance that Eva wouldn’t make it. The vex could very well kill her. Just because their mother was in denial about this didn’t mean Natalie was. And if Eva didn’t survive, how could the two of them possibly go on?

  As if in answer to this, the baby began to cry. Tiny as she was, she had a set of lungs on her. She wailed so loud that their grandfather stopped singing.

  “Oh—oh—oh,” he called from down below, “can I have her, please?”

  How he guessed that the baby was a girl, Natalie couldn’t say.

  • • •

  Natalie’s mother got stronger over the following days. The more she ate, the more her appetite came back. Soon she was licking clean tins of salmon and peas and chugging water straight from the lip of the jerrican. Th
e baby, too, seemed healthy and strong. Whenever Eva wasn’t screaming, or sleeping, or blazing through their dwindling supply of cloth diapers, she was nursing with an intense, squint-eyed abandon. It might have been Natalie’s imagination, but the baby looked bigger on the second day than she had on the first. Bigger still on the third.

  But her mom’s ankle wasn’t getting any better. The bruise had spread down the foot and up the shin, like a horrible purple mold. They tried fashioning a splint out of chair legs and torn strips of bedding, but still the ankle would bear no weight. It soon became clear to them both that walking wasn’t in her mother’s immediate future. Not tomorrow. Not in a week. Maybe, depending on how the broken bones healed, not ever again. Meanwhile, if Eva didn’t get the vex within the next few days, she’d miss her chance. Natalie knew without being told that she and her sister would be heading to the mainland alone.

  “There’s a place where your father and I used to go,” her mother said. “A little cabin about five miles up the coast from Goldsport.” She grabbed a worn notebook off of the nightstand, flipped it open, and began sketching out a rough map. “It’s safe. You can’t see the cabin from the water, but there’s a jetty,” she said, marking the location with an X.

  “Is it deep enough for me to tie off?” Natalie meant their lobster boat, which sat rusting in the shadow of the lighthouse.

  “It is, but I don’t want you to take that boat,” her mother said. “Your grandpa will hear the motor, and he still has that rifle. The people in Goldsport might notice it too. Better use the kayak. You can come and go quietly.”

  The word “quiet” must have been offensive to Eva’s ears, because it was at this moment that she tumbled out of her nap and into a full-throated fit of bawling. Seconds later her grandpa began to harmonize from down below, screaming his own head off. Natalie’s mom lifted Eva up and began to comfort her. Then she thought better of it. She held the screaming baby out for Natalie to take.

  “You do it,” she said.

  Natalie hesitated. Holding the baby still felt vaguely unnatural to her.

  “Go on,” her mother said. “You’re going to need the practice.”

  So she took Eva. She rocked her, and bounced her, and made little kissing sounds. None of it worked. The baby only screamed louder. From outside, her wicked grandfather laughed. “Okay, okay, you win—I can’t get that high!” he called.

  “I think she’s hungry,” Natalie said. She made to pass the baby back to their mom.

  “What?” Her mother had already turned her attention back to the notebook and the map that she was so carefully sketching. “No, honey. I won’t be there to feed Eva when you two are on the mainland. Better figure out a bottle.”

  She meant the old formula that Natalie had salvaged from the bunkhouse, vacuum-sealed in a heavy-duty plastic bag. Her parents had found it on the mainland years ago. The formula inside was specially treated to last for years, and her dad had drunk it a few times without getting sick. All the same, Natalie hesitated.

  “Is it still good?”

  “Try it,” her mother said without looking up. “If it’s turned, you’ll know.”

  So, with Eva screaming herself purple, Natalie set about mixing up a bottle. She tipped the white powder into some water and shook it vigorously. She held it under her armpit for a few minutes to warm it. Natalie gave the formula a taste and found it sweet, and distinctly gross. But it wasn’t rancid. She tried putting the rubber nipple up to her little sister’s mouth. Eva latched on to it at once, and a little bit of the formula spilled out at the corners of her lips. Then she pulled away, coughing and smacking her gums. She’d hardly swallowed any.

  “You two will get the hang of it,” her mother said, entirely unconcerned. She finished the map, holding it up so that Natalie could see. It showed the entire coastline in surprising detail, from the south shore of Goldsport up to the old Canadian border.

  “This is Highway 191,” she said, tapping on a double-edged line that ran inland, parallel to the coast. “It’s pretty beat-up, but you can’t miss it. If you reach the highway, that means you’ve gone too far. Turn around and look for the cabin again. I don’t want you straying from there. The woods out back will have all the singers you need. And if you get delayed for any reason, you’ll have a place to spend the night.”

  With that her mother closed the notebook and tucked it into Natalie’s bag. “That’s where I brought you,” she said. “When you got the vex.”

  It seemed like she meant this as a kind of encouragement. But Natalie didn’t find the thought of herself as a baby, covered in bloodsucking singers, to be all that comforting. “How did you know?” she asked.

  “Know what?”

  Natalie hesitated. Somehow she’d never been able to ask this question before. But now she had a practical reason to. Now the occasion finally demanded it.

  “How did you know the vex wouldn’t kill me?”

  “I—I didn’t know,” her mother stammered. “I believed that you’d survive. But I didn’t know for sure. How could I have?”

  “Dad thought it would kill me. He said—”

  “Well, it didn’t,” her mother snapped. “Your father was wrong.”

  For a time the only sound in the lighthouse was Eva finally, half-heartedly, gumming the bottle. Natalie’s mother closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they seemed to glow all the brighter.

  “There’s a chance you might see him out there,” she said. “Your dad.”

  “I know,” Natalie said.

  “If you do . . .” She trailed off. There were so many ways the sentence could have ended. Like: Tell him I never want to see him again. Or: Tell him to come home. Instead, her mother simply said, “Hide.”

  • • •

  It was only later, as Natalie studied the map drawn in the notebook, that she realized what she was holding. She turned a page and found, to her surprise, that it was filled with writing. The penmanship was careful, precise. She turned another and found more still. Then it struck her. This was her grandfather’s diary. This was his “book for writing,” the one he’d seemed so desperate to find back when she’d raided the bunkhouse.

  What an odd thought it was. Her wicked grandfather keeping a diary. Settling down to write about his day every night before drifting off to sleep. Natalie had been sure at the time that his rant about the book was nonsense. But here it was, sitting open in her hands. The entries were strange. Some were simply descriptions of the meals her grandfather had eaten. Others were about interesting things he’d observed from his high windows. For one of the days, all he’d written was: “I saw a whale!” The rest of that page was filled with nothing but carefully etched exclamation points. Another entry contained a surprisingly beautiful drawing of a puffin, while still another included a list of people the old man intended to kill. Natalie’s entire family appeared on the list, along with about a hundred other names that she didn’t recognize. For all she knew, those people were already dead. Or maybe they’d never even existed.

  It didn’t feel right to keep the diary from him. Natalie tore out the map and folded it up for safekeeping. Then she grabbed the pencil and wrote an entry of her own.

  Dear Grandpa,

  I found your book for writing. I want to give it back to you, so that you can keep it up. I hope you don’t mind, but I read some of the entries. I’m really glad that I found it. I hope you’re okay down there. I love you.

  Your granddaughter,

  Natalie

  She thought about it a moment more before adding something at the bottom. A warning. Natalie didn’t know if her grandfather would be able to understand it, but still, it was only fair to tell him.

  Please stay out of my way, Grandpa. If you see me outside of the lighthouse, please keep your distance. I don’t want to hurt you. But I will if I have to.

  When she was done, she carefully edged toward the shattered window and tossed the diary outside. The cover opened in the breeze, and the pages flutte
red. It seemed to glide for a moment. Then the diary fell straight down, like a bird shot out of the sky.

  CHAPTER 22

  Across the Bay

  NATALIE SET OFF THAT AFTERNOON with a bag of supplies over her shoulder and Eva in her arms. It was a rushed departure—they’d planned to leave the following morning, but the conditions became too good to pass up. A heavy fog fell upon the island, thick and dark as a thundercloud. And Eva had nursed herself silly, falling into a deep sleep. It meant that Natalie would have places to hide and at least a temporary guarantee that the baby would stay quiet. Her odds weren’t likely to get better than that.

  She crept down the spiral staircase, pausing for a moment by the iron door to listen. The last she’d heard of her grandfather was an animated, one-sided conversation coming from somewhere around the cemetery. Now there was nothing but silence.

  “Grandpa,” she whispered.

  No answer.

  Natalie unlatched the iron door as quietly as she could and slipped outside. The fog was wet as a damp towel upon her skin, so thick that it was almost hard to breathe. Natalie blinked into the white emptiness. All she could see were the stones immediately around her, merging into the fog. She stayed still, listening. She heard only the waves and a distant murmur of nesting seabirds.

  Natalie locked the door behind her and tossed the keys inside through the food slot. No going back now. They kept their last remaining kayak down there, hidden in a nook between the boulders. No one else would ever have been able to find it in this weather, but she’d memorized every inch of Puffin Island. She stepped deliberately, avoiding patches of gravel and wobbly stones. Her boots felt weightless, and she moved without making a sound.