“What about my friends? I can’t just leave them behind.”
She hesitates, her eyes clouding over with the same guilty expression I’d caught on her face moments before. “Maybe only Sissy…” she begins to say, then shakes her head. “No, there’s room only for you and me on the hang glider,” she says nervously. An odd, peculiar glint in her eyes, of guilt and wrongdoing.
“We need to bring the others, too.” I shake my head. “What am I saying? I have too many questions—”
“And there’ll be plenty of time once we’re up in the air.” She pulls me through the door, leaves the fading GlowBurns behind as she shuts the door. In darkness, she places cartons and boxes in front, and slides over to a slit window. “They’re coming up now.” She turns to me. “I’m going through this window, then across the wall. You’re too big, you won’t squeeze through. You head down these stairs and bump into them. Just say you were exploring.” She throws her hood over her head. “We leave tonight. Be back here in one hour. Don’t tell anyone. Okay?”
“No. It’s not okay.”
But it’s as if she doesn’t hear. She props one foot on the slit window, stops. “Your father told me something. Sometimes, he flew to the dusker metropolis. It’d take a whole day to fly there and back. But he wanted to see you. Even if it had to be from afar, way up in the skies.”
I grab her arm. “Why did you stay? If the Land of Milk and Honey really is out there, why haven’t you already taken off yourself?”
She shakes off my arm and pulls herself through the window until she’s crouching on the windowsill, half her body dangling outside. “Because your father asked me to stay. And wait for you.” She looks me in the eye. “He was a good man. I’d do anything he asked.” And then she’s out the door, into the night, sprinting along the fortress wall.
35
THEY FIND ME coming down the spiral staircase, a pair of elders, faces red from either drunkenness or exertion. Or both. They have no words for me, only hands that try to grab my arms. I shake them off and after they realize I’m not trying to run off, they simply follow closely behind me. Not a single word is passed between us. And no sooner are we back on the cobblestone path than they suddenly disappear. One moment they’re right beside me, the next they’re gone.
Odd that they wouldn’t escort me back to my cottage. I try not to think too much of it. But an uneasiness grows in me. I stop, listen for the sound of their fading footsteps. But there’s only the thin whistle of wind.
A raindrop falls on my face. It’s fat and pregnant with cold, nothing tentative about it. Within seconds, another drop, then another, splatters on my cheeks and forehead, until the rain falls heavy and full all around me.
But that is not why I’m suddenly cold. I look about. The rain curtains down a cascading wet darkness, full and thick. A TV static of flickering wet black and dark gray. Rain pitter-patters hard on the cobblestone, the sound of a thousand marbles clattering down.
I start moving. Back to my cottage. Quickly, with fear driving my feet forward on cobblestones that are slick and icy. At the village square, I stop and listen. Silence and stillness, only my heart thumping away. Something snaps in me, a conviction that drives my feet forward. In my mind, I see myself storming into the bedroom, jostling them all awake. Epap, David, Ben, Jacob, Sissy. Telling them that we must leave this very second, not only because I now know that the real Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine lies east of us, not only because I know that my father lives and breathes and awaits me there, but because I sense our time in the Mission has run out. That the last grains of sand have poured through, leaving only pools of awful emptiness and acid blackness. I already see us grabbing our bags, stealing into the dark woods as I pound my legs harder, trying to ignore the feeling that it is already too late.
I barge through the front door. I am about to sprint up the stairs—
—when something catches my eye. In the dining room. Firelight dances on the wall, small and flickering. But it is not the light that catches my attention.
It’s David.
Except he is not facing me. He’s standing in the corner facing the wall, hands cupped behind his back. As if standing at attention. Except he is trembling.
“David?”
I walk toward him, into the dining room.
“David?”
The light is flickering from a candle set on the dining table. Sitting directly behind the table, his face floodlit with light, is Epap. He’s robotically stuffing soup into his mouth, so quickly and roughly that it is spilled all over the table and down the front of his shirt.
He looks up and his eyes are red and raw. He exhibits no surprise at my sudden presence, but his eyes emote desperation. Tears are streaking down his face, but all he does is keep shoveling one spoonful of soup after another.
In the corner behind Epap stands another person.
Back to me, head bent, body trembling.
“Jacob?” I say, and already my eyes are drifting to the other corner.
Ben stands there, body pressed into the corner, his body hitching uncontrollably. He is also facing the wall. His hair looks scruffy, as if pulled and roughly twisted in different directions.
My eyes snap down to Epap again. The spoon in his hand, as if dislodged by my gaze, falls, clatters on the table. His eyes are no longer fixed on mine, but have shifted past my shoulder …
Behind me, the floorboard creaks.
I feel the coolness of a sudden presence loom over me, swift and dark as a bat’s wing at midnight. I turn around.
A bland face, spherical with rounded cheeks and protruding eyes, right over my shoulder.
Like the moon, like the full moon.
But his vacant eyes are bereft of light. He blinks, eyelids falling like guillotines in slow motion. I start to scream.
But before I can, something heavy thumps the back of my head. My skull cracks, my brain squishes against the front of my cranium. Everything about me liquefies gray and black and I fall slack and insubstantial, seeing, hearing, feeling no more.
36
DARKNESS. VISCOUS AS tar, smeared in a thousand layers over my eyes. There’s no difference whether I close my eyes or open them. It’s all blackness.Impossible to know how much time has passed. An inner instinct cautions me to hold still, to control even my breathing. Avoid panic-induced hyperventilation. Exhale, inhale with absolute silence. Gather what I can without moving, without speaking.
This I know: I’m not outside anymore. No raindrops falling on my face. No stars above, not the slightest feel of a breeze. Slowly, I place my hands palm-down on each side of me. Hard-packed dirt, dry, a grainy texture. I’m inside. An enclosure. Silent as a coffin.
Listen, Gene. Listen.
Nothing but the thumping of my heart.
I swallow saliva, and my Adam’s apple bobs.
Stay calm. Don’t panic. And again that inner instinct: Don’t move.
And then, between the loud thumps of my heart, I hear something. Just a whispery sound, barely there. Then it’s gone; perhaps I imagined it. But no: I hear it again, a faint rasping.
A breathing sound.
Somebody else is near me.
Stay quiet. Don’t be detected.
I can’t hear anymore. My heart, the blood gushing in my ears too loud. I force my breathing to steady. Slow, deep breaths, with mouth wide open to avoid making any inadvertent whistling sounds.
Where am I? Who’s in here with me?
Slowly, I raise my arms above me, swing them in a slow arc. Nothing but cold air. My left arm, descending down, touches something cool, smooth, hard. Glass? A window? I turn my head, stare at where my hand is. I see nothing. Not my hand. Not the glass. Blackness. And still that inner voice: stay quiet, stay calm, don’t move.
“Hello?”
Not my voice, somebody else’s. To my right. The voice is a tendril of smoke, so faint it hardly seems there.
It’s Sissy.
Don’t move, don’t speak, don’t move, don’t spea—
“Sissy?” I fight the temptation to sit up.
“Gene?” she whispers back.
Very slowly, inch by inch, I slide over toward her.
She does the same. Wordlessly. The same instinctive voice warning me to silence, also speaking to her. Our fingertips touch and our hands are immediately grappling one another, like separate entities tussling, wrestling to the ground. Our hands are ice cold; our grip ferocious and intense.
And like that we hold very, very still.
Because we both sense it. We are not alone.
She breathes; I breathe. Quietness.
And then: farther away, past her body, the sound of another person’s breathing. Soft, light puffs past sleeping lips.
Sissy starts to move toward that sound. I grip her hand tighter, stopping her. She pauses. Then tugs my hand. I grip harder. Don’t move.
But she’s insistent. I crawl up until my body is pressed up next to hers, my mouth by her ear.
“Don’t,” I whisper.
Then she’s moving, scuttling closer against me until her lips are grazing against my ear. “Where are we?” she whispers.
“Don’t know. Dangerous.” I feel something pressing up against the side of my leg, in my pocket. I reach down, take it out. A plastic tube. I examine the contours using my tactile senses. A GlowBurn, it has to be.
Sissy’s arms move down, stopping at her boots. I hear the whisk of leather, then the short clink of metal. She’s taken out the daggers she keeps hidden in her boots.
“I have a GlowBurn,” I whisper. “It was in my pocket.”
I hear a faint rustling of clothes, then Sissy says, “Me, too. What’s going on?”
“We need to be quiet. And still.” I feel her nod against my cheek.
“Don’t use the GlowBurn,” she says. “Not yet.”
I squeeze her hand back.
We lie still for another minute. Again, I hear the breathing, louder now, disturbed, less rhythmic. Sissy starts moving ever so slightly. She’s sweeping her legs, trying to figure out her surroundings.