He spoke to us but once. On the morning of the third day. We were leaning against each other, bracing against the cold wind of the lower mountains. David was lying across our laps, his head in the crook of Sissy’s elbow. The dawn sun was lilting orange rays on our skin, and the whole world was lent a softness, despite the cold.
David’s eyes opened, and for the first time he met my gaze, then Sissy’s. His eyes were weak but clear.
“You came back for me,” he whispered.
Then he closed his eyes, his eyelids falling heavily and with a sigh. A single tear fell down his face.
His eyes never opened again.
Sixty-one
WE KNOW WE are nearing the Mission. There are telltale signs. Splotches of encrusted yellow dotting the rails, like desiccated bird droppings, then larger sheets dangling off nearby tree branches like hung laundry. The remains of the duskers who’d attacked the Mission nights ago. The train slows; an hour later we round a bend in the mountain, and the bridge to the Mission, still lowered, comes into view.
It is daytime and our earlier fear, that we might arrive in the dark hours of night, hand-delivered into the lap of whatever hardy duskers might still be roving about, is put to rest. So, too, is the apprehension over the duskers. None have survived.
The cobblestone streets are empty. Everywhere we look, windows and doors to the empty cottages have been smashed apart and left gaping like stunned eyes and shocked mouths. Sunbeams shaft into them. We enter the nearest one, and go from room to room, piling on layer after layer of clothing over our shivering rib cages and concaved stomachs.
Even the Vastnarium, where we feared some duskers might be holding out, is empty. The back wall has been smashed down and ground to powder, probably from the outward pressure of a panicked horde seeking shelter from the sun. Inside, layers of desiccated yellow, a foot high on the floor, an inch thick off the walls.
Evidence of their mass demise is everywhere in the Mission: on the meadows, at the farm, along the fortress wall, everywhere there are desiccated crusts of yellow. And there is not a human bone to be found anywhere, not a strand of human hair, not a stain of human blood. Everything devoured, licked up, wiped from existence.
Death has run roughshod through this blighted village, no respecter of species. Nothing moves in this village; nothing sounds. No shuffling girls, no morning chimes, no singing choirs, no midnight screams. There is only the sound of cold wind fluting between the ribs of this ghost-town carcass.
At the laundry deck by the stream, we cup our shaking hands into the ice-cold water, drink in gulp after gulp. We raid the kitchen, gorging ourselves on the nibbles of food we find scattered amidst the carnage. Pickles in cast-off jars, cucumbers snapped in half, trampled-on loaves of bread. We can’t get enough; if it’s edible, it’s in our mouths.
Afterward, still unable to stop shivering, we sit before the fireplace of a nearby cottage. The fire is soothing; the combination of food, water, warmth, and a comfortable sofa conspire to lull us toward sleep. But Sissy’s hand in mine tightens with realization.
“David,” she says. “We can’t leave him out there like that.”
We head back outside, trudge to the train station, shovels in hand. He is in exactly the same position we left him, lying in the empty train car, only seemingly lonelier. A stab of guilt digs and twists in both of us. We’d wanted to carry him with us when we first arrived, but we were too weak at the time. Now, we dig a grave. Sissy chooses a spot next to the train tracks, in the vicinity where Jacob had leaped out of the train, where he had met his unspeakable demise. The boys would have liked this, to be buried next to each other, if not in fact, then at least in spirit.
After we shovel the last pile of dirt, we stand silently. Thin wind whistles through the bare branches of the forest.
Sissy’s lips tremble. “I’m sorry, David. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”
And she turns to me, buries her face into my jacket, and screams right into my heart.
Sixty-two
WE WALK ALONG the fortress wall, scanning the landscape. Nightfall has begun, and the bleeding dusk skies sag under the weight of fresh darkness.
“How long,” Sissy asks, “before they come?”
We stare down the steep mountain slope, past the rocky outcropping, and into the dense forest canopy. The Vast stretches beneath us in the far distance, a threadbare, endless carpet.
“A lot of them perished in the desert,” I say. “Maybe over a million. But there are millions more. And they will come. Give them three consecutive days of heavy rain and cloud cover and they’ll make it here more or less intact. It depends on the weather.” I stare somberly at the darkening horizon. “And even if it doesn’t rain for weeks, if we have sunshine every day, still they will come. They’ll build more dome boats, or repair the broken ones. Or they’ll build a dome train. Whatever the case, we don’t have more than a fortnight.”
We walk down the length of the fortress wall, our minds preoccupied. “We find two working hang gliders,” Sissy says after a while. “Clair mentioned there might be some operable ones. Then we fly east.” She stares a long time, her face turned away from me, eastward. When she speaks, her voice is filled with self-recrimination. “You were right, Gene. We should have all listened. Back when we had a chance. We should have all kept heading east with you. If I hadn’t been so obtuse, we’d all still be alive.”
“Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true.”
“Maybe it’s not.”
She turns to look at me. “What do you mean, Gene?”
“We don’t know what’s east, do we?” I say. “We don’t know anything.”
“We know enough. We know your father wanted us to go there.”
I stuff my hands into my coat pockets. “And what do we really know about him?” And now it’s my turn to look east, into the gaping black nothingness. “We don’t know why he abandoned the Origin plan. We don’t know why he left here mere weeks before we were to arrive.” I shake my head. “What caused him to abandon his dream? And desert me for good this time?”
Sissy stares at the cottages across the meadows, crouched in the shadows. “It was something here. Had to be. Something spooked him. Something changed him.” Her eyes light on the isolated shadow of a building set close to the forest edge. The laboratory where he spent all his time. When we were last here, we searched it from top to bottom, but it never gave up any of its secrets.
But she only keeps staring at it, her eyebrows knit together in deep thought.
“What happened to him?” I ask. “How could he change so drastically?”
The questions unfurl above us like rising smoke, unanswered.
It doesn’t take much time to find the operable hang gliders. Sissy comes up with a methodology that is as efficient as it is effective: inspect the hang gliders for dust. Any hang glider relatively free of dust must have been used fairly recently by Clair. Using a few GlowBurns we find scattered about, we work up and down the corridor, inspecting the hang gliders—virtually all covered in thick layers of dust—hung on the walls. After less than half an hour, we find two hang gliders relatively free of dust. We leave them by the door where tomorrow we’ll give them a closer inspection under sunlight.
Blackness blots the night sky. An abrasive wind sweeps across the mountain face, freezing the evening dew on the meadows to glitters of ice. We squint our eyes against the bitter gust, staring despondently at the distance between us and the cottages.
“Let’s go to Krugman’s office,” I suggest. “We can bunk down there. Use the fireplace.”
The office is unrecognizable. A constant wind blows through the smashed windows. The upturned furniture is pressed up against the wall, as if pushed there by the wind. We know that is not the case. It was the rush of duskers into this office that destroyed everything—and everyone—in it. Even the heavy oak desk is flipped upside down, three of its four legs snapped off like twigs.
Sissy walks to the desk. She stares at the deep claw marks gashed into the oak, at the white, splintered wood poking out at all angles like broken bones breaking skin. A semi-encrusted yellow substance is puddled in one of the smashed drawers. The remains of a melted dusker. Sissy grabs her arms as if to ward off a sudden cold.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
She only shakes her head. But something is clearly bothering her. Her shoulders are too bunched, her face too shaded gray.
“No, really. What is it?”
She draws a deep breath. “When are we going to talk about it?”
I sweep my eyes over her, trying to understand. “What is ‘it’?”
She looks at me uncertainly. “We should have talked earlier. But . . . the moment never seemed right. Not on the train, not with David . . .” Her voice trails off, and the sentence hangs unfinished, as if waiting for me to complete it.
“What are you talking about?”
A silence descends between us. Her eyes are on mine, and when I look up our gazes meet and hold. And then I know. What she’s trying, reluctantly, to bring up. A topic conveniently pushed aside the past few days by fight, flight, and fatigue, but which is now no longer avoidable.
“You know what, don’t you?” she says, her eyes almost pleading for this to be true.
I nod slowly, reluctantly. My next words, softer than a whisper, uttered like a forced confession. “Why it felt so natural. When we turned, why it felt so natural—so much better, actually—to be a dusker.”
She walks over to me, arms snaked across her chest. “Why, Gene?”
I pull her gently into me.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Sixty-three
WE DON’T SLEEP in Krugman’s office that night. The carnage inside it, the ghost of Krugman gliding between its walls, the cold wind funneling in, makes the walk back to the cottages preferable. We sleep in the fabric and design cottage. We bed down in front of the fireplace, exhausted. I close my eyes, trying to stir up the energy to make a fire. Sissy, next to me, still sitting, her body tense.