Ashes and embers fall on us like snow.
She looks at me, her eyes shining bright, her skin radiant.
“I’m ready,” she says. We both are. We’ve done enough eating, drinking, and sleeping over the past few days to fuel us for the long haul.
I look beyond the fortress wall, to the dawn sky. I stare long and hard, the way my father did on this wall countless times. I think of his letter I’d found, now secured in my pocket, on paper so tattered and creased and small, Sissy and I had missed it for days. The letter was not addressed to me but to a mysterious person named “Tobias.” But the letter spoke of me. I would rather die than hurt him again. My father’s words about me, words I will never forget.
I imagine my father standing here not so long ago, all alone on these fortress walls, a broken man. Perhaps his eyes roamed one last time along the line of trees below, both wanting and fearing the sight of Sissy and me emerging from the forest, survivors of the Heper Hunt. And perhaps he had wept silent, lonely tears as he ran down the ramp and sailed off into the eastern skies on his hang glider.
How heavy my father’s heart must have been. He had sacrificed everything: his wife, his daughter, and now, he believed, his son. And for nothing. The guilt, the disappointment, he carried it alone. I can see his heart breaking as he flew, the pieces breaking off like shards and falling. Until there was nothing left. I can see him undoing his straps. I can see him plummeting to the earth. I can see his hang glider, now unmanned and lighter, blown upward into the skies light as a feather. I would rather die than hurt him again.
“You’re thinking of your father,” Sissy says gently.
“I am.”
She smiles, just a half smile. “Maybe.”
“Maybe what?” I say softly.
“Maybe it’s not what we think. Maybe he wasn’t sending us afar to simply perish. Maybe . . .”
“Yes?”
“Maybe he just wanted to give us a new start. In the only place he knew we would be free. Far away. A new beginning.” She stares eastward, and when she turns to look at me again her eyes are fresh and sparkling. “Benefit of the doubt,” she says, smiling fully now.
Not long ago, not far from where we now stand, Clair had told me something about my father. I remember this now. It hadn’t really registered at the time, but her words now resonate within. My father, she’d told me, after he’d returned to the Mission, would sometimes fly all the way to the metropolis. He did so in the hopes of catching a mere glimpse. Of me. Even if it had to be from afar, she’d said, way up in the skies.
For years, I had roamed the streets of the metropolis, gazing upward, hoping, with childish yearning, to catch sight of a remote-controlled plane. Hoping for some kind of message from my father. Anything. But, heartbroken, I’d given up after only a year or two. But my father had come. Only he was too late; by that time, except for occasional forays to the fruit orchard, I rarely went out in the daytime. He flew over the empty metropolis the same way I’d once walked its empty streets. Searching but not finding. I had given up too soon. And my father had come too late. We missed each other.“A new beginning,” I say. I stare at the horizon, brimming with the dawn’s glow. “Yes. I’d like to think that.”
She nods, her eyes clear and bright, her hair blowing in the wind. She makes a final adjustment on a strap. “Are you ready?”
I nod, my eyes damp. “I am. I really am ready now.” My heart is thumping, pumping. Then, because I can’t help myself, I untie my straps. Sissy’s eyes widen with pleasant surprise as I walk up to her. We kiss long and hard, and when we finish we smile at each other, our foreheads still touching.
“East,” she says.
I nod. “Follow the Nede River on the other side of the mountain.”
We kiss one more time, softer this time. Then she is running along the fortress wall, kicking hard and fast. She leaps through the gap in the wall, and I watch as she expertly catches the current and soars securely upward. As she breaks eastward, her hand lifts up into the air for a second, her fist pumping.
I smile. One last time, I look at the Mission. Then I am running down the fortress, leaping through the gap, sailing through the skies. Within minutes, I’ve closed the distance between us. We’ll hold this formation. For how long we don’t know. All we know is that so long as the wind is behind us and our hang gliders hold together we’ll keep flying east.
East. Toward that very spot where the sun is rising now, peeking over the distant horizon, radiating streams of orange and red and crimson. And should we find nothing, should we find no one, should the Nede River disappear, merging into the mythical sea, we will yet keep flying for as long as the wind continues to push us east. We will fly uncountable hundreds, even thousands, of miles, to the other side of the sea, to the other side of the earth where no dusker would ever dare to even imagine exists. And only then will we land.
And there we will make our home. We’ll build from the ground up. From the two shall spring forth a civilization. Our children, and their children, and their children yet, until our people are more numerous than the stars in the sky, and the grains of sand in the desert. And our weaknesses we shall turn into strengths. Our abnormalities shall be hewn into battering rams. Our resistance to sunlight, our instinct to explore, our ability to swim, to love, our intelligence, our will to survive, our emotions, our loyalty. From these aberrations shall arise a people more dominant than the original species.
We will take what we have learned from them and make it ours. We will incorporate their technologies into our civilization time line, catalysts to our own human progress. Architecture, computers, weaponry, science, all inserted at the right junctures in our advance, seamlessly and organically woven into our history like it was our invention all along. We will take their vocabulary, their language, make it our own, make it subservient to us. To mock them, we will use the very same names of the nations and continents and seas on which they fashioned their lies about us.
And when, centuries later, millennia later, we have conquered every land and every continent and even the seas that flow between, when our population is great, we will come for them. We will come for them. We will find them, and they will be nothing to us. Nothing. They, with their vulnerability to sunlight and aversion to long-distance travel, will still be penned in by the same provincial Vast. And we will pummel them. We will pummel them, they will wilt like candles in a blaze. We will drive them into the ground, scattering them into isolated pockets of the world where they will be holed in dark caves, forced to retreat into dark closets in shuttered rooms by day. Forced to retreat into mountain castles where they will learn what it is to be alone, to be isolated, to be an aberration. Until they are reduced to insignificant footnotes in the annals of not even history, but of folklore. All memory of them erased, they will be mocked in the pages of fiction, reduced to mere stock stereotypes, caricatured as pale and effete loners.
In front, flying smoothly, Sissy turns her head around, gives me a quick wave. I wave back. The dawn light is splashing all around us now, flaring off our hang gliders into overlapping kaleidoscopes of color. So many hues and tints, as if we have flown right into a firestorm of intersecting rainbows.
I unzip my jacket and take out a stack of papers. I release the pages one at a time, then all at once. They flutter in the wind like the manic flapping wings of an injured bird, the multitudes of silver crescent moons blinking and flickering. They drift downward, silently, almost peacefully, into the Nede River, where they will sink and disappear forever.
I think of the land we will make our home. We will not call it the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine. That was my father’s land, but this new land shall be mine and Sissy’s. It will be a reversal of the world we now know. I gaze at the Nede beneath us, thin as a silver arrow pointing the way forward. It will be the last thing we see of this land.
The name of our new home will be the reversal of the Nede.
We shall call it Eden.