“Well, you better get used to the idea. Because that’s what we are.” A film of tears, acidic, stings my eyes. It is all coming to me now. Maybe Sissy is right; maybe my father discovered the truth only after he returned to the Mission. I can only imagine the horror of his realization in the darkness and isolation of his laboratory. The truth so devastating, so repulsive, he had to remove himself altogether from the Mission, live alone like a hermit in the woods. Away from the foul, the diseased, the impure, away from the colony of hepers.
She brushes aside wet hair strands dangling into her eyes. “I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel like a freak at all.”
Her words enrage me. I unleash on her. “Good for you, Sissy! Keep on trying to delude yourself! But you know what? Bad as this is, it gets worse. Because you and me? We’re not just freaks, we’re not just hepers. We’re something more. Something worse. You might think we’re this wonderful Origin. But you know what we are? We’re a dirty bomb. We’re a walking incubator of death and disease. The cure my father thought he discovered? He’d only rediscovered the lost formula for a deadly virus. We’re not the cure, we’re the contagion. We’re not salvation, we’re a scourge. That’s what Ashley June was trying to tell me. We are the lethal bomb that will cause the extinction of all people.”
Sissy’s fingers, unclenched and half-submerged in the water, tremble by her side, rippling the lake’s surface. Stars reflected in the lake, once perfectly mirrored dots, warp into dissolution.
I turn my face away from her, gaze at the lake, at the trees, the mountain peak, the silhouettes of distant cottages. “That’s why he abandoned us. Why he flew off east. We became an abomination to him.”
“Don’t say that,” she says. Slowly, she pushes her shoulders back. “He instructed us to fly east to meet up with him. He wanted to see us again. Don’t you remember what Clair told us at the Mission? She said, This is what your father wanted. For you to fly east. There are machinations at work you can’t even begin to imagine, Gene. You and Sissy have to fly east.”
“He said that only to get us away from them!” I laugh, a maniacal, bitter cackle. Now I understand the truth, the terrible, horrific truth. “If the Hunt really worked—if it actually brought us both out to the mountains—he now needed a plan that would entice us away. Far, far away.” I slap at the water, see the cut in my hand vomiting out blood. “That way, if the bomb detonated, it’d be safely removed from the population. The precious, pure, original population—the dusker population.”
Sissy trembles—whether it’s from fear or the cold I don’t know—her already-ashen face paling even more. “He wouldn’t feel that kind of loyalty to the duskers. Not after—”
“It wasn’t loyalty to them! It was loyalty to his own precious principles. Because my father was never about destruction, never about genocide. He was about salvation! Remember what the chief advisor said? That my father preached there was no higher purpose than to heal the sick, to purify the impure. That there was no calling more noble than to save the duskers? Except now there was nothing for my father to save, nothing to heal. Except himself. That’s the brutal irony of it. He imagined himself a savior—until he realized he was holding not a cure but a dirty bomb. Which he had to hurl away as far as possible.”
Sissy recoils, her face flinching. She is resisting, needlessly prolonging the inevitable.
Something warm snakes down my hand. Blood pouring out from the gash. “See this?” I say, holding my bloodstained palm to Sissy. “See this blood? It’s a plague, Sissy. It’s infection. It’s death. It’s disgusting! It’s abominable!”
Sissy shakes her head, eyes wide. All fight is going out of her. Her strength is failing her now, and the wall of denial is collapsing all around her like a house of cards. Her eyes blink furiously, her legs buckling.
“Look at this blood in me, in you—”
She screams.
It is a long, agonizing wail that echoes off the mountains and ends only when she falls to her knees. Her head slumps against her chest. She starts quaking. Her sodden clothes wrapped tightly against her pale whittled frame, bunching in folds.
She’s so different from the girl I first met at the dome. Gone is the mischievous light in her eyes, the square way she took me in, the warmth and strength emanating from her bronzed flesh. The boys constantly roving about her, her arms seemingly always around their shoulders, protecting, guiding. The way she smiled, eyes closed with sheer delight, head tilting back, sunlight splashing on her cheekbones. The way she sang. The way she kissed me. Her belief in loyalty, that it is the proof of love.
All of these qualities that charm me the most about her, that make my heart ache for her: they are nothing but the side effects of a once-extinct virus, by-products of a food experiment gone horribly awry.
I see none of those qualities now. Not on this blighted creature, her wet-black hair pressed against sallow cheeks and a wispy neck, bent over as if winded. Sapped of color, embossed cruelly into a canvas of mercury and silver.
She trembles; she quivers. She is on the verge, her body about to spasm uncontrollably, her eyes about to flood over with tears. My strong, brave Sissy. About to be broken at last.
Then something stirs in me. Something fundamental shifts, tectonic plates within. I speak. With a sudden and furious tenderness.
“Sissy.”
She looks up at me. For a moment, she hesitates, as if unsure she’s reading my face right, hearing my tone properly. And then I am wading toward her, and gently I lift her up, putting my arms around her.
Quiet again, only our chattering teeth breaking the silence. Then even that sound subsides as we draw tighter into each other, our faces pressing against each other for warmth. The moon lights up the whole lake, reflects off the snowcapped mountain peak. And now it is silent. Everything is still. Even our bodies have stopped shivering. The lake flattens out, becomes a mirror of the eternal skies above. We are alone in the whole wide world.“What now?” Sissy whispers, her lips moving against my neck.
I pull her into me, hold her tightly.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
Sixty-five
HOME.
Home is not the empty cottages we walk past, nor the room where we take off our wet clothes and stand shivering before the fireplace. It is not the Mission still flush with food and drink and clothes.
Home is not the metropolis. Because we could make it our home. If we wanted to. If we wanted to turn, it’d be easy enough. Gather up the sun-caked crusts of their melted flesh, boil it down into a liquid, which we’d pour into an open wound, at night, once we got close enough to the metropolis. If we wanted to.
But Sissy doesn’t want to.
“I am what I am,” Sissy says. She pulls away slightly to look me in the eyes. Firelight dances in her irises. “I could never become them. Don’t ask me to, Gene. I was born this way. I will die this way. I’m at home in my body.”
I nod, pull the duvet tighter over our shoulders. The fireplace is full with flickering fronds. Shadows dance on the walls.
“And you?” she asks. “What about you?”
I pause. Not because of hesitation or indecisiveness. But only because I want to take in this moment, because it feels like something new is about to begin, that nothing will ever be the same.
“They lied to us,” I say. “To the Mission elders, the villagers. For generations. Kept us from the truth because had we known, we’d all have chosen to turn to duskers. And if that happened, we’d have stopped propagating the heper species. And the only way to replenish the supply of hepers would have vanished. Forever.” My voice hardens. “They fed us lies to feed themselves.”
I lean forward, stare into the fire. “They killed everyone we care about. David. Epap. And Jacob. They killed my father, the man I knew him to be, anyway, the man I adored; that man they killed. How can I, how could I, possibly become one of them?”
Her hand reaches for mine under the duvet.
“They think of us as cattle,” I say. “They think of us as far beneath them, worthless. But when I think about everyone we care about, I don’t see that. I think about Epap, how he so selflessly gave himself trying to save us. Or Jacob, throwing himself out of the train before he turned. Or you, Sissy, running headlong into their midst of millions for David’s sake.”
A pained nostalgia flares in her glimmering eyes: She is remembering her boys, the years in the dome, the sunshine, the passing seasons, their shared life together. Their nights around the fire, the singing, the laughter. The tears.
“This is what we are,” I say, and now my hand is clasping hers so tightly I think she might flinch. But she only squeezes back all the stronger. “We are human. We live life to the hilt. We laugh, we smile, we love, we get our hearts broken. We hold back nothing. We live glorious lives, Sissy. For each other. If these qualities are aberrations, mutations, well, so be it. I choose them over ‘normal.’ I choose them over the stale, colorless, selfish existence they live.”
I turn to face her; the duvet slips off our shoulders, falls to the floor. Cold air slides around our bodies. But it doesn’t matter. We have enough heat, just the two of us, together. I take her face in my hands, her beautiful, strong face that is a marvel to me. My vision goes hazy, and I blink away the tears, wanting nothing to blur my vision of her.
And the words, when I say them, are the purest, sweetest, truest, strongest words I have ever spoken.
“I choose you, Sissy. You’re my home.”
Sixty-six
WE BURN THE whole damn village down. We start with the cottages that store vats of oil and gasoline. After that, it’s like a chain reaction, one wooden cottage catching fire after the next, combustible as a pile of tinder. Until the whole Mission is ablaze, sending up huge flames that lick the brightening sky.
We watch from the fortress wall. The enormous fire flings flickering light and shadow across the craggy face of the mountain. An easterly wind picks up, and I nod at Sissy. She straps herself into the hang glider she’d spent the previous day learning to fly. I follow suit, knapsacks dangling off a bar on each side of me, packed with as much food and essentials as we were able to squeeze into them. I check my pocket again, making sure that pushed securely into it is a piece of paper. I’d found it yesterday in the laboratory, among all the other papers. A letter. Creased with many folds, with my father’s handwriting.