How We Became Wicked

by Alexander Yates

  Then something made her stop.

  Natalie couldn’t be sure if she’d actually heard a noise or just felt one. But there was something—an unsettled quality to the air. She looked all around, but she couldn’t see so much as a shadow in the fog. Had she just imagined it?

  “I see you out there!”

  Her grandfather’s voice shattered the silence. It seemed to come from far away, faint in the thick fog. He must have still been down by the cemetery, talking to the birds, or the graves, or the rocks.

  “I found you!” he called again. “Don’t go anywhere until I get there!”

  Natalie felt her panic rising and had to force herself not to sprint back to the lighthouse. She remained completely still, locking her knees to keep them from shaking. It’s impossible, she told herself. If you can’t see him, then he definitely can’t see you.

  “Natalie, please tell me that you brought the baby,” he said. “Which of us do you think can throw her farther?”

  Shit.

  Frantic, she searched the fog again. Natalie began to hear the jagged crunch of little stones—somebody in the distance, moving toward her. But it made no sense. How could he possibly see her from so far away when all she could see was a wall of milky fog? The wicked man was ancient, and her eyes were much better than his.

  Her eyes.

  What an idiot—she might as well have been walking around with a pair of purple lanterns. Natalie shut them, sealing herself up in darkness. In an instant the sound of footsteps stopped.

  “Oh my,” her grandfather said, awed. “I was looking right at you, and then you disappeared!”

  Natalie listened. With her eyes closed, it was easier to tell exactly where his voice was coming from. Her grandpa was about fifty yards ahead of her, on the path that ran the length of the island.

  “You have got to teach me that, Natalie,” her grandpa called. “I want to be invisible too. No one will ever see me coming!” He giggled at the thought. “Think of all the fun I’d have.”

  For a moment Natalie considered rushing him. She’d have to open her eyes again, but it might not matter. If she set Eva down, she could probably get to the old man before he managed to take a shot. Though even if she did, then what? Instead, she quietly knelt into a squat and placed her free hand upon the ground. She groped around, plucking up a stone about the size of an egg. Natalie stood, turned her body a few degrees, and threw the stone as far as she could. Seconds later it landed with a sharp clack.

  “I love this game!” her grandfather said, clapping. “How did you get behind me?”

  With that he began to scramble around, no doubt swiping at the fog in search of her. Natalie turned her back to the sound and opened her eyes a crack. When she was sure that he couldn’t see her, she doubled back in the direction she’d come, circling around to the kayak the long way. She could still hear her grandfather when she reached it.

  “You need to give me a hint, at least!” he pleaded. “The rule is that when I say ‘Marco,’ you have to say ‘Polo.’ ”

  Natalie shifted the baby to her left arm, silently begging her not to wake up. Eva only dipped her chin, snuggled deeper into her coil of blankets, and sighed. Natalie grabbed the front of the kayak and dragged it into the water. She pulled her compass from the supply bag, stashing everything else in the day hatch. Then she lowered both herself and her sister into the cockpit. It was a one-person kayak, so Natalie had to prop Eva between her legs.

  She pressed the blade of her paddle against the rocks below and pushed off. The kayak glided out across the water, away from Puffin Island. The shore disappeared into the mist behind them. Natalie used the compass to set a course northeast across the bay and paddled out blindly into the fog. Within moments she was riding the rough channel current. Eva’s eyes blinked open as the kayak began to bounce across the choppy sea. One of the waves hit them at a bad angle and sent a splash of cold water crashing into the cockpit. It soaked Natalie’s pants and landed square on Eva’s little forehead. The baby was wide awake in an instant, coughing and sputtering. For a moment she just stared, dumb with shock. Then, clear as a bell, Natalie heard her baby sister’s imagined voice in her head.

  Oh. Oh, hell no.

  Eva began to scream. Natalie pulled the baby to her chest, trying to comfort her. But Eva would not be comforted. She was wet, and she was cold, and she was a baby.

  “I can hear you out there!” their grandfather called merrily from the unseen shore. “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving in a boat?”

  Natalie didn’t answer. She just set Eva back down and began to paddle. The baby screamed the whole time.

  “I want you to come back,” their grandfather called, “and take me with you! I could bring you into town. I could show you where our family used to live!” He fell silent for a little while, racking his brain for a winning argument.

  “I bet the people in Goldsport could help us shut that baby up!” he offered, his voice bright with hope.

  Natalie ignored him. Puffin Island fell farther and farther behind them, and as it did, her grandfather’s shouts faded to nothing. With time, even Eva quieted down. But she wouldn’t go back to sleep.

  • • •

  It took hours to cross the bay, and by the time Natalie finally spotted the jetty it was nearly dusk. She was numb, seasick, and chilled through with sweat. Eva wasn’t doing so well either. The infant had emptied one of the bottles of formula on the trip over and had then made a surprisingly horrifying mess of her swaddling blankets. Unlike her first few bowel movements, this one stank. There’d been no changing her in the kayak, so the first thing Natalie had to do after tying off was sort out the mess. She rinsed the soiled blankets in the shallows and pulled a fresh set from the day hatch. All the while, Eva seemed to glare up at her reproachfully.

  “None of this is my fault,” Natalie told her, exhausted.

  And what, it’s my fault? There was Eva’s voice again, ringing in Natalie’s imagination. It sounded high-pitched, alive with fury.

  “Nobody said that.”

  Well. You implied it.

  Natalie smiled. It wasn’t exactly a choice—hearing her baby sister’s voice in her head like this. She’d been doing it her whole life with the puffins and seals and terns on her island. Now the voices sort of just came whether she wanted them to or not.

  She wrapped her baby sister in a clean blanket. Eva squirmed, blinking up at her. It struck Natalie, in that moment, that if the vex worked, this would be one of the last times she’d see the true color of her sister’s eyes. Soon they would turn purple, just like Natalie’s, pulsing with little shards of light. But for now they were a glossy dark brown. They looked like wood after a rainstorm.

  And if the vex didn’t work?

  Natalie chased the thought from her head.

  “Come on,” she said, tapping her sister’s well-wrapped tummy. “Let’s go find those singers.” She grabbed the rest of her supplies from the day hatch and headed down the jetty with her sister. Just as her mother had promised, she found an overgrown path that led to a little cabin. The building was about the same size as her bunkhouse back on Puffin Island, though it was in much worse shape. It was rotten and half swallowed into an ocean of dead ferns and brown moss. The door stood stiffly ajar on rusted hinges, and greasy tarpaulins hung over the broken windows.

  Better be careful, Eva whispered.

  Good advice. Natalie approached one of the windows and listened for sounds of movement inside. Hearing nothing, she continued to the open door and peered through. All she saw was a dark, empty room. The walls were covered with pen-and-ink graffiti of travelers come and gone. There were boot prints on the floor, but they looked old. For all Natalie knew, they could have been left by her own father, months ago.

  Eva began to fuss. Could she be hungry again already?

  “Cool it,” Natalie said.

  Of course, this had no effect.

  “All right,” she said. “Go crazy. Nobody’s her
e anyway.”

  With Eva writhing in her arms, Natalie began to poke through the rest of the cabin. She found a bedroom with an old stone fireplace and a pair of metal cots with gummy mattresses. She found a bathroom with a shattered porcelain sink and a roll of petrified toilet paper still hanging from the dispenser. Other than that, the cabin was totally empty and silent. Come to think of it, everything was totally silent.

  That was strange.

  Natalie carried Eva back outside and stood in the forest. According to her mother, these woods should have been teeming with singers, but now that Natalie was listening for them, she couldn’t hear anything. Not a single note or hum. And it wasn’t just singers. Natalie strained her ears, but there was no birdsong. No squirrels. Not even the rustle of wind passing through leaves. Natalie looked at the canopy and saw that the trees above stood bare as winter, their branches sickly and brittle.

  Had there been a fire? She walked slowly around the cabin, but she couldn’t see any sign of burning. Besides, a forest fire would have burnt the cabin itself to cinders. Instead it looked like everything around her had simply wilted and died. She tried heading out even farther, but after several minutes of walking she still hadn’t discovered a single living plant or heard even one singer. It was almost funny. First their plan to turn off the lighthouse had gone remarkably bad, and now she couldn’t even find singers on the infested mainland.

  “You must be bad luck,” Natalie said, brushing her finger across the very tip of Eva’s nose.

  Sure, her baby sister said. Because everything was so perfect before I was born.

  “Fair.”

  Natalie stood there in the woods for a moment, considering her options. If she walked far enough, she was sure to find a swarm, but it was already getting late. She didn’t know this coast and didn’t like the idea of trying to read a compass in the dark by the light of her own purple eyes. So she decided to return to the cabin for the night. First thing the next morning, she and Eva would go out and hunt for singers. With any luck they’d be back on Puffin Island by lunchtime.

  The sooner the better, Eva said. I’m starving and I hate you.

  “You sound like our grandpa,” Natalie answered.

  CHAPTER 23

  Reggie

  IT WAS A ROUGH NIGHT. Natalie was in and out of sleep, waking more times than she could count to the sound of Eva’s crying. One time the baby wanted to eat, finishing up a half bottle of hastily prepared formula before drifting off again. Another time she needed to be changed—Natalie tossed the dirty cloth diaper into the far corner of the bedroom, too exhausted to go through the work of washing and drying it. And a few other times it seemed as though Eva simply wanted to practice her hollering. So it was a relief when Natalie finally awoke the next morning to warm daylight and the soft, soothing sound of her father’s voice drifting in through the window.

  No.

  That wasn’t right.

  She lay motionless on the cot, blinking at the mold on the ceiling. Was this a dream? She’d never had one before—a side effect of the vex—so she couldn’t tell. It took a moment to remember exactly where she was—on a cot, in a cabin, on the mainland. Eva lay nestled beside her. And outside, someone was speaking. Not her father, as she’d first imagined, but a stranger. No, wrong again—strangers. They were standing just outside.

  “I don’t know what your problem is. Let’s just junk the battery.”

  “My problem is that the battery is fine.”

  “Miranda agrees with me that it’s not.”

  “Well, two people can be wrong about the same thing.”

  Natalie sat up. She glanced down at her sister, lying in a shallow divot atop the mattress. Eva was wide-eyed—terrifyingly awake. Her mouth opened and closed. She was a little alarm bell that could go off any second. Outside, the two men were still talking, splitting the air to pieces with their strange voices.

  “Miranda!” one of them hollered.

  “What?” cried a woman from a short distance away.

  “What do you think is wrong with the disperser?”

  “Battery!”

  “Miranda is an entomologist,” grumbled one of the two men.

  “Reggie thinks that you’re full of shit, Miranda!”

  “That’s not what I said!”

  Natalie’s heart was pounding so hard that she was actually swaying back and forth. She slipped off of the cot as slowly as she could to keep the springs from creaking. Then she scooped up Eva and crept toward one of the draped windows. Pulling back a corner of the tarp, she saw a pair of tall figures standing in the wilted yard behind the cabin. They were wearing the strangest bee suits Natalie had ever seen—bright yellow and shiny like wet rubber. The suits were capped with boxy, octagonal bonnets and black-tinted visors. She couldn’t make out either of their faces.

  “Listen, you can fiddle with the disperser all you want,” one of them was going on, “but if it isn’t back up and running by noon, I’m putting in another battery. The singers are getting closer, Reggie. I saw one back at the road.”

  “One? Well, we don’t have any time to spare, then.”

  There was a sudden banging on the front door. Every muscle in Natalie’s body tightened. She quickly dropped the tarp back into place and pulled away from the window.

  Another person in an identical yellow bee suit and tinted bonnet stepped into the cabin. This must be the woman—Miranda. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder and a belt hanging low on her hips. Attached to the belt were a utility knife, a square radio-looking thing, and a holstered pistol. Natalie couldn’t tell, through that tinted visor, if the stranger had noticed her yet.

  “Don’t be an ass, Reggie,” the woman called out, scraping mud and dead leaves off of her boots. Then she turned to the wall and began to hang up her gear, unfastening the snaps on her tinted bonnet. She peeled it off and shook her head in the air. Her hair was buzzed short, save a long ponytail sprouting out of the back of her skull.

  “Just fix it, would you, please?”

  Natalie took a sliding step toward the back of the bedroom, out of view of the doorway. It was a small miracle that they hadn’t been noticed yet. It was an even bigger miracle that Eva was staying quiet—she must have worn herself out from her night of hollering. But if Natalie had learned anything in the last few days, it was that tired babies can be the loudest babies. She had to get them out of here now.

  There was a second window in the back of the room, opening out onto a patch of dead ferns. Natalie kept her movements slow and smooth, grabbing her backpack, sitting on the windowsill, and turning so that both legs dangled out. Then she and Eva slipped through the window and into the yard. On her way down Natalie remembered the dirty cloth diaper that she’d thrown into the corner of the bedroom. But that mistake was written in stone now—there was no going back for it.

  Meanwhile, out front, the strangers had begun to raise their voices.

  “I always fix it,” the man named Reggie protested. “When the hell do I not fix it?”

  Natalie pressed her back against the cabin wall. It was all happening so quickly, her brain had yet to catch up with the rest of her. How long had she been awake? Ten minutes? Fifty seconds? Inside of the cabin there were now more voices—four or five, by her count. Natalie heard boots on the hardwood and a general commotion of complaints and sighs. The cot springs squealed as somebody sat down in the bedroom, right where Natalie had been only seconds before.

  Would they be able to feel the warmth in the mattress?

  Would they see, or even just smell, the diaper?

  Would they hear the tremendous, deafening sound of her heart?

  “I hate it here,” someone said.

  “Life of a searcher,” Miranda answered. “Look on the bright side. We have just five more months before we can go home.”

  There was a quiet, depressed smattering of laughter.

  Natalie scooted along the wall, toward the water. She peeked around the corner of the cabin a
nd saw that it would be impossible to make it to the kayak. Two bee-suited strangers were sitting out there on the stoop. One had removed his helmet and was smoking some kind of pipe. He had a big purple tattoo of a singer climbing up out of the collar of his bee suit and across the meat of his neck. Natalie pulled her head back. Eva’s mouth smacked open and closed.

  “You are being so, so good,” Natalie told her sister, her lips moving but no real sound coming out. “I love you so much.”

  Don’t screw this up, Eva answered.

  Natalie bent low and hurried through the ferns and into the dead woods. None of the strangers in the cabin noticed. Their voices faded. She glanced back to see if she was being followed, which almost made her lose her footing. She grabbed at a dead blackberry bush for balance, tearing her hand up on the thorns. Almost instantly, the cuts began to bleed. They looked like they should hurt, but Natalie, numb with terror and adrenaline, didn’t feel a thing.

  Up ahead was a low hill. Natalie rushed for it, climbing over the crest. But as soon as she reached the other side, she realized that this had been a mistake.

  Someone was down there.

  It was a man in a yellow bee suit—one of the two who had been arguing outside of the cabin. He was down on his knees, examining a generator-like contraption. It was about the size of an oven, with an aluminum pole sprouting out of the top, reaching high into the trees. At the end of the pole was a rotor, crusted with some kind of blue gunk. The man had his back to Natalie. All of his attention seemed focused on the device.

  “You know that this won’t go any quicker if you watch me,” he said, not bothering to turn around. He must have heard her come up the hill and assumed she was a member of his group.

  Natalie froze.

  Eva squirmed, opening her mouth in a cranky yawn.

  The man went about his work. He pulled the front panel off of the device and reached one of his gloved hands inside. Natalie’s eyes fell on his backpack, which lay splayed open on the brown grass behind him. There were tools in there—a wrench set, a pair of pliers, and a coil of copper wire. There was also a revolver, sitting loose in an unbuttoned leather holster.