“And the girl. The pretty one you were just dancing with. Be careful about her.” His eyes fl ick to me for the fi rst time. I expect to fi nd sternness in them, and it's there. But the hint of kindness, I did not. “You need to watch out. She's not who you think she is. Don't let her lead you astray.” And with that, he brushes open the door and disappears.
Freakin' weirdo, I think to myself. I grab a paper towel and am about to scrub my armpits when a party of four or fi ve come boisterously in. They're loud, unsteady, and clearly inebriated. I step out. I scan quickly for the paparazzi guy, but he's nowhere to be seen.
“Come with me.” It's Ashley June materializing out of nowhere, whispering at my side. “We've done our due diligence. Everyone's so hammered, they won't notice we've gone. Come,” she says, and I do.
She leads me out of the hal , her slim fi gure weaving right through the dance fl oor, between dark moving shapes.
Outside the banquet hal , the corridors are empty and the music grows dimmer the farther we walk away. I think we're heading to her room, but on the stairwel we walk past the third fl oor and continue heading up until there are no more fl ights of stairs to climb. At the very top, she pushes open a door on the landing, and a burst of starlight fal s on us.
“I've been up here a few times. Nobody ever comes,” she says softly. The Vast lies spread before us like a frozen sea, its plates calm and smooth. And above us a slew of stars, shimmering slightly, suggestive of an even deeper emptiness.
She leads me to the center of the roof, the smal pebbles beneath our feet shifting as we step. She stops and faces me.
I am right behind her. Our shoulders touch as she turns, and she does not pul away. She is so close, I can feel her breath on my lips. When she looks up at me, I see the refl ection of the stars in her eyes, wet as with the eve ning dew.
“Did your parents ever give you a designation?” she asks.
I nod. “They did. But then they just stopped using it one day.”
“Do you remember what it was?”
“Gene.”
She is silent for a few moments; I see her lips gently mouthing the word, as if trying it on for size.
“What about you?” I ask.
“I don't remember,” she says quietly. “But we shouldn't be cal ing each other by our family designations anyway. We might get careless and inadvertently cal each other by our designations in front of others. It might draw unnecessary —”
“Attention,” I fi nish for her.
For a moment, we suppress the smile spreading on both our faces, as if my lips and hers are two sides of the same mouth. We stop ourselves, as we always have, and start scratching our wrists.
“My father used to tel me that all the time. Don't draw unnecessary attention to yourself. all the time. Guess yours did, too.”
She nods, a sadness crossing her face. Together, we look out at the Vast, at the Dome sitting smal in the distance.
From below us, we hear a group of partyers heading out, probably to the Dome, their drunken voices slurred and garbled. Their voices grow dimmer, then fade out altogether.
“Hey, let me show you something,” Ashley June says. “Can you do this funky thing? We need to sit down fi rst.” She then plants her right foot down on the bal s of her foot and starts bouncing her leg up and down in a quick, vibrating motion. “When I'd get impatient or restless, I used to want to do this with my leg. My parents warned me against it, but I'd still do it when alone. Once your leg gets going, it goes on autopi lot. Look, I'm not even consciously thinking about it, it moves on its own.”
I try. It doesn't work.
“You're overthinking this,” she says. “Just relax, don't think about it. Make quicker, shorter jerks.”
On the fourth try, it happens. The leg just starts hopping on its own, a jackhammer bouncing away. “Whoa- ho!” I shout in surprise.
She smiles the widest I've seen; a smal sound escapes her throat.
“That's called ‘laughter,' ” I tel her.
“I know. Although sometimes my parents called it ‘cracking up.' Ever heard that one?”
I shake my head. “It was just ‘laughter' for us. And we didn't do it much. My dad— he was always worried I'd forget myself and slip up in public.”
“Yeah, mine too.”
“Every morning, he'd remind me. Don't do this, don't do that.
No laughing, no smiling, no sneezing, no frowning.”
“But it got us here. Alive still , I mean.”
“I suppose.” I turn to her. “My dad had this one really odd saying. Maybe your parents used to say it to you as wel ?
‘Never forget who you are.' ”
“ ‘Never forget who you are'? Never heard that one.”
“My dad would say it maybe once a year. I always thought it strange.” I stare down at my feet.
“When did yours . . . you know?”
“My parents?”
She nods gently.
I stare at the eastern mountains. “My mother and my sister, years ago. I don't remember much about them. They just vanished one day. Then my father, about seven years ago.
He got bitten.”
We fal into a silence after that, comforting and shared.
Music from the banquet hal comes at us muted and indifferent, a thousand miles away. Eventual y, our eyes drift over to the Dome, tran-quil and sparkling.
“Ignorance is bliss,” she whispers. “To night, asleep, blissful y unaware of what awaits them tomorrow. The end of their lives. Poor things.”
“There's something you should know,” I say after a while.
“About what?”
“The hepers.”
“What is it?”
I pause. “When I got water from the pond, I wasn't like in and out. I actual y interacted with them. Spent time there.
And you know, they speak. They even read. They're not the savages I thought they were, not even close.”
“They speak? And read?” She looks incredulously at the Dome.
Nothing moves inside.
“They love to. They have books in the mud huts. Shelves of them. And they're creative: they draw, paint.”
She shakes her head. “I don't understand. I thought they were raised like barn animals. Why were they domesticated and trained?”
“No, I know this is hard to grasp, but it's not even about them being domesticated or trained like circus animals.
They're beyond that. They're, like, normal. They think, they're rational, they joke around. Like you and me.”
A frown creases her face. She is quiet, mul ing something over.
“So you haven't told them about the Hunt,” she says matter- of-factly.
“They have no idea,” I answer. “Sometimes ignorance is bliss.”
“What did you tel them about yourself?”
“The Scientist's replacement.” I hesitate. “It would have been too . . . awkward to say I was a heper hunter. Maybe I should have said something to them. Maybe I should have let them know about the Hunt.”
“No, you did the right thing,” she says. “What good would it have done? They'd still be as good as dead.”
A zil ion mil ion thoughts plummet through my mind over the next few seconds. Then: “Think we should do something?”
She turns to me. “Pretty funny.”
“No. I mean, seriously. Instead of our plan, should we do something to help them?”
Her eyes widen a smidge, then droop back down. “What do you mean?” she asks.
“Shouldn't we . . .”
“What?”
“Do something to help them?”
“Don't be ridiculous.”
“I'm not. They're us. We're them.”
Deep surprise sets in her eyes. “No, they're not. They're way different from us. I don't care if they can speak, they're stil glorifi ed cattle.” She grips my hand tighter. “Gene, I don't mean to come off as coldhearted. But there's nothing we can do for them. They're going to die during the Hunt whether or not we use it to our advantage.”
“We could, I don't know, we could tel them not to leave the Dome. That the letter informing them about the Dome malfunctioning is all a hoax.” I run my hand through my hair, gripping it hard. “This is really hard, Ashley June.”
When she speaks again, her voice is softer. “If they die to night according to our plan, then at least their deaths give us a chance of a real life. But if we just sit on our hands, their deaths are not only meaningless, but will ensure our deaths. We can make their deaths meaningful, giving us a chance of a real life, Gene.” Her eyes are wide and pleading. “Our new life, Gene. Together. Is that so bad, to make something good come out of this?”
I don't say anything.
Tears start to wel in her eyes, and perhaps for the fi rst time in her life, she doesn't hold them back. They stream out and trail down her cheeks. I reach out with my arm, meaning to wipe them away with my sleeve; but she grabs my hand and places it on her cheek, palm pressed right atop the trail of tears. Her soft skin, the wetness of her tears, tingling my open palm. My heart, melting everywhere now, her tears intermingling.
“Please?” she whispers, and the plea in her voice breaks me inside.
Our shoulders touch. When I turn, she has already turned to face me. So close, I can see a tiny mole at the corner of her eye. I brush it lightly with my fi ngertips, back and forth.
“It's a mole. No amount of rubbing will wipe it away,” she whispers.
“I'm not trying to wipe it away.” I don't know what I'm doing.
all I know is that my heart is bursting out and overfl owing, and I don't know what to do with myself.
She lifts her sleeveless arm slightly. Her eyes are wide, inviting.
The skin of her armpit is exposed, and she is waiting. She gazes at my elbow, then at me.