Once outside the shipping container, Octavia closed and locked the metal door, and then pushed against the dirt wall beyond. The wall was moveable and Octavia slid it open to reveal a second set of tunnels and stairs. Together, without talking, they rushed through the narrow walls and up the steps, pushing their way into the night.
The alarm continued but they were well beyond it now.
Octavia moved at tremendous speed over the dirt and grass and detritus of the forest floor, but Lark was appalled at having to rush through such new surroundings. By the time they’d cleared the boundary of the Lake, the alarm was silent—steady, somewhere, but silent to them—and Lark breathed in a ragged huff, coughing and taking deep breaths.
The runaway handed Lark a canteen of water and she accepted with gratitude, swallowing massive gulps of the cool liquid.
“Thank you,” she said and stood. The runaway assessed her with a disgusted smirk—she examined her face and her body, only her eyes traveling and she took Lark with a tight-lipped frown. “Or whatever,” Lark answered.
“Come on,” Octavia said. She scanned the horizon and checked a watch on her wrist. She tromped up the hill in the dark, the forest debris underfoot. “I need to get to the cave in an hour.”
“I thought your dad said it took twelve hours to get to the cave,” Lark said.
“She was paying attention!” Octavia laughed with derision. “Yeah, different cave, little Larky. Rule number one. Rule number one.”
“I can’t know things if you don’t tell me—”
“In time.”
“Okay, but who are you?” Lark asked, spinning to look at the runaway, but she was certain she’d be fine if either girl answered. Back to Octavia, she asked, “Where are we going?”
“So many questions. No questions until the cave,” Octavia said. She didn’t look back and her braids swung when she marched.
“Why not?” Lark sighed and stopped walking.
Octavia stopped, too, and turned, and with her left hand she rubbed under her eyes and pulled the skin down to show the whites. She grumbled something inaudible and took a step forward. “You scared I’m gonna hurt you or something? You got some ancient ideas about my people?” Octavia asked. “Here.” She reached back into her pocket and pulled out a gun. Lark examined it wearily.
“No. I just—”
“Take it,” Octavia said and she shoved the barrel into Lark’s hand and directed the gun away from both of them. “Safety’s on. Keep it on. I mean, keep it off if you know how to shoot.”
“I don’t.”
“Figures.” Octavia appeared annoyed by her inability.
“I don’t want your gun.”
“Not your choice. You have the gun, you have the power, and is that enough for you to shut up? You think I wanted to take you, too? No. But until I know my siblings are truly safe…I’m not handing you back…”
Lark swallowed.
Octavia hadn’t believed her after all.
She wanted to protest and bury Octavia with shame—the girl didn’t know her or her family and why would she assume Lark lied? But Lark had lied. The gun felt heavy in her hand and she wondered if she should run. Take the weapon and run back to her parents—back to the Colony and the alarm and the certainty and the uncertainty of it all.
Lark’s chin wobbled and the runaway left her post at the end of the line and marched up to Octavia, pointing and whispering in hushed tones. Eventually, Octavia walked back and took her gun, making a clicking noise with the back of her tongue as she grabbed it and bolted. The other girl, still without introduction, pulled snot from back in her throat and then lobbed it down to the side of where Lark stood. The offering wobbled there between them.
“There’s a cave,” Octavia said, more resigned. “We’re going there. Then you can ask questions.”
She processed the offer and looked to the ground.
“Fine,” Lark replied. She bobbed her head and closed her eyes; fine, fine, fine, whatever you want.
They walked in a ragged line.
Floating down the hike, Octavia’s voice worked through a series of nursery rhymes. One-two-three, one-two-three, metered out in a careful beat.
Eventually, the words hit her. Little Lucy Larkspur, where have you come from? Building us a New World, what have you become?
“What did you say?” Lark asked and she picked up her speed and tried to catch up to the lithe little dirt pixie. She knew all about the Children of the Lake and their crazy religious beliefs; she knew they followed the 12 Fathers, or the 12 prophets, she knew they prepared for the continuance of God’s rage on earth—the virus and the floods and the famines and the swarm of locusts were harbingers of a future time of peace.
Octavia rolled her head over to Lark and shrugged, unwilling to engage.
“I heard you singing about my mom,” Lark hissed, growing weary.
“My dad sang it to me when I was a girl. It don’t mean nothing. Just gets caught in my head.” But Lark wasn’t placated by the explanation or Octavia’s willingness to be dismissive.
After a few more meters uphill, Lark felt a stitch in her side and she pushed the heel of her hand into her waist to try to work out the pain. She’d done a lot of crawling and hiding as a spy in the Colony but she realized now she had other physical deficits. She was out-of-breath and lumbering in the dark without confidence while the other two girls knew their way through pitch-black paths, overgrown with vegetation, with total ease.
Still, staying in shape was never her focus and attention—how did she know she’d be allowed to leave the perimeter before she was eighteen?
“Your mind is weak,” the stranger behind her said in full volume and it caused Lark to jump. It seemed like the final insult before she’d march right back and turn herself into the Fathers.
“My mind isn’t weak,” Lark replied. “But I’m not going to argue with someone who won’t even tell me who they are.”
“Maybe you’re smart,” the girl kept going, her little legs carrying her swiftly forward, “but that’s not the same thing.”
“Right,” Lark replied. She shut her mouth down tight.
“Your body has all the power it needs,” the girl behind her said but this time it didn’t sound like an affirmation but a taunt. Lark spun and stopped and put up her hands. She didn’t understand and she didn’t want to cry, but they were bullying her and leaving her no option to respond.
“I don’t know what’s happening, but I have a solution. Let me go home,” Lark offered in a defeated, withering whine. “I needed to give you a code. I thought I was helping—” and as she started to say it, she realized the glaring truth of her emotions: she was upset because she’d expected praise for risking herself to save the children and risking herself to deliver the final code from Orin, and neither of the girls cared about her in the least.
It wasn’t lost on her that she wanted praise for a mission she failed.
But they didn’t know that. They thought she’d braved the Fathers and rescued the children and no one was giving her any indication that what she’d endured earlier in the day was praiseworthy and it ate at her from the depths of her own selfishness.
Lark’s stomach pitched downward in the stunning realization that she was lying to herself. But no, no, no: that was part of the plan. She was still an instrument of goodness. Lark huffed and breathed along the trail.
She started the escape built upon a lie, and she would have to sustain the lie to keep moving forward. It was horrible and it ate at her. Through her endless brain chatter, she settled upon the details of her narrative: her whole life she’d maintained a single set of skills and at a time of great need, her parents entrusted her to use them.
She was there to spy.
Octavia and the stranger weren’t her friends nor her enemies but subjects for studying. She had to keep secrets. It was in the job description.
With great relief, she understood her function in the woods, and her guilt dissipated little
by little with each continued step up the mountain.
The trio continued in silence for a long stretch of the journey before Lark heard Octavia mumbling a little rhyme again under her breath as if she could not help herself. This time, however, it was different. Lark shivered and held back a growing sense of shame and the irrepressible realization that she didn’t, in fact, know much. Yet.
As they walked, Octavia sang, “Here come the Masters to put their secrets in the vault. Secrets don’t age well when someone is at fault.”
The cave, near impossible to discover without knowledge, was hidden behind a wall of vegetation up past the foothills of the Grand Tetons and well off the beaten path. The further up they climbed, the more snow they encountered, and Lark’s legs, continued to fight against cooperation.
When they reached the cave, Lark wasn’t in any condition to argue about where they were or what they were doing. She was exhausted. They’d walked for what felt like hours and she’d long given up any chance of knowing what was going on. She slipped down the wet stones and made her way to the hollowed out cavern with smooth rocks arranged in a semi-circle.
The cave didn’t offer many amenities, but Octavia lit torches and started a small fire and soon handed Lark a metal spoon and a metal bowl of soup. The cave was both pre-historic and well used, which Lark knew wasn’t surprising.
“Broccoli,” Octavia nodded toward the bowl, excited for something dehydrated and stored long ago. All the most recent MRE packages were starting to expire, so the awful tasting soup hovered on extinction.
Octavia devoured her bowl and broke off a piece of dry biscuit, gnawing it with her molars, as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Lark looked from Octavia to the runaway and for the first time since she arrived in the bunker had a prolonged chance to examine the girl. She looked thin and sick—her skin pale and covered in dark bruises. There was a gash beneath her eye, healed poorly so the skin puckered—a long scar along her left arm and back didn’t fare much better. Her right arm sported raised lines no longer than an inch carved in a ladder down toward her elbow.
When neither of the girls spoke, Lark leaned forward. “When can I go home?” she asked when the silence went on for long enough.
Octavia laughed, deep in the back of her throat and then settled an exhausted look at Lark, one she was familiar with. She’d been raised isolated, sure, but she hated when people from the outside looked at her with pity.
“You’re not going home until my brothers and sisters are safe. You aren’t going home until your usefulness is complete…”
Lark swallowed.
“I’m not a commodity.”
Octavia and the runaway both raised their eyebrows and said nothing.
“I’m not.”
“We are going to the Bayou,” Octavia answered. She nodded to the scrawny girl and her scars. “We have a job there. Bring the girl back to Ethan,” she nodded to the runaway, “and then we’ll meet up with the others in the west. If my family is intact… ”
“The west? Ethan?” Lark knew she was repeating everything Octavia told her but the plan didn’t make sense. “I already told you the code as proof…”
“The code is words. I don’t trust anything I can’t see for myself. My brothers and sisters are my life.”
Lark didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Could she say with conviction that anything was her life? Her parents? Maybe. But she often longed to escape Lucy and Grant and their stifling protection, so she refrained from saying anything. She stared at the small fire in the cave and was drawn to the oranges and yellows, and she felt so far away, her brain and her body in miscommunication.
“But I told you,” Lark repeated in a whisper. “Dandelion Wine.”
“Right, so,” Octavia replied breezily, as though Lark’s sullen repetition was vindication. “Let’s answer a few of these questions of yours…starting with what you need to know versus what I think it will be fun for you to know.” She winked. Lark forced herself to nod. “Your parents, at this point, will have retreated to the hidden rooms in the Lodge, allegedly with my family. The Fathers, after realizing everyone of importance has disappeared, will set in motion an exodus…”
As her mother predicted, Lark thought. A headache brewed behind her eye.
Octavia kept going, the runaway looked to the fire, too, watching.
“…and the movement will trigger an attack.” She sucked on a tube from her backpack and drew in an angry breath, stopping to swallow. The runaway and Lark watched with careful neutrality. “The attack will come from the Islands.”
Lark scratched at her cheek and tilted her head upward and tried to outline the ceiling of the cave with its peaks and ridges and craters.
Ethan. The Islands. An attack from things and unknowns—how had this become her life? She wanted to laugh and cry at the absurdity of the moment and the horrific power it held over her.
“Please,” Lark tried. She took a stick untouched by the fire and poked it into the ash. “When it is light…in the morning. I want to go home. I want to know what’s happening from my mom and dad.” Mom and dad, she sounded so small.
“What home?” the stranger asked. Lark turned and met the girl’s dark eyes. “Don’t you understand? Your home, my home, is compromised.”
“But my parents said it wasn’t.”
“Repeat after me,” Octavia said and she clapped her hands after each word. “You don’t know nothing. Not a thing.”
“I’m sorry—”
“And stop apologizing, ”
“I didn’t know I wa—”
“The Fathers have signaled an alarm. Which triggers a move…and when the Children of the Lake move, within ninety minutes…the place you called home won’t exist.”
“I understand,” Lark said.
And she did.
That she knew because it was the story she’d heard her whole life: If anyone saw them from the sky, the monsters would appear within an hour and a half. All the stories, all their little rhymes were ingrained into her head: move under the canopy, and in ninety minutes no more light you’ll see. “I think, maybe, I always thought that was—”
“A lie,” Octavia answered for her. “You thought it was a silly lie parents told their kids? No. It was real.”
Lark felt hotness creep up her neck and she stretched her arms, itching in her own skin and leaving behind skinny red welts. “I’ve encountered a lot of lies today.”
She was weak and she wanted to close her eyes by the fire and disappear for a bit. She didn’t want to follow a story or have any more secrets disclosed to her. No, her brain, shocked and stunned, wanted sleep and rest and nothing more.
“Are you only now figuring out your parents lied to you?” the runaway asked with a mocking cackle. “Let me see how much you know and how much you don’t. Where were you born? And where did your parents live before you were born? And tell me about your extended family….your uncles…”
The questions made Lark’s heart and mind pound. Where was the stranger going with these questions? What could she already infer and imply? She paused and decided to answer with vague and truthful responses with the answers she’d been given.
“In the Colony, here at Jackson Lake. Ummm, I don’t know. I never knew.” She looked up, conceding that perhaps she didn’t know a lot of things. “And I mean, sometimes my mom talks about just that a fight happened. A schism, she said. And that’s when my aunt Harper went to live with the Fathers. But it was vague. Then, um, all her other siblings, except Harper, died when the virus—”
The runaway and Octavia exchanged a look.
“What?” she asked, pushing, angry.
“Okay. Thank you,” the stranger said. She looked up into the ceiling of the cave, pondering, and when she looked down, she had a pained look on her face. A grimace. “I don’t know how to start a story in the middle…when there’s so much you need—”
Octavia kicked a stick into the fire and whispered down to the flames.
“You say something?” the stranger asked.
“Someone’s middle is someone’s beginning,” Octavia said. “So, this is her beginning. Not your fault she don’t know shit.”
Lark wished she had ammunition to fire back, but she knew she was weaponless. In this world, with these people, she wasn’t the master of her domain—she didn’t know secrets or the hidden tunnels, she didn’t know right from left.
“We can start with this,” the stranger said and she reached down into a pocket of her gray nylon suit and pulled out a small metal box. When she touched the middle of the box it hummed and created a picture in the air above it. Lark was wide-eyed at the sorcery of it all—what was it? And what was it showing her? A picture of a man?
Lark waved her hand through the image and it remained stable. She moved one way and then another, but the image stayed the same.
“A communication bot,” the girl said as if that was supposed to mean something. “Came with the uniform. Do you know who this is?”
Lark listened for Octavia’s reply and when she looked to see if the Child of the Lake was pondering the picture, she realized their eyes were on her instead.
“Me?” Lark questioned and she shook her head. “I don’t even know what that is…how does it work?”
“This is Ethan,” the girl said. “Recognize him?”
Lark paused. Ethan.
She ignored the fact that she didn’t know how the stranger had the picture or how she was making it solid and visible in front of her, and instead studied the face as a question formed slowly in the back of her mind and worked its way forward. The man in the image was middle-aged but had a healthy head of hair, a crooked smile, and he stood evenly on a prosthetic leg. Next to him was a plain looking woman with long brown hair who’d been mostly cropped out of the picture.
“Who is he?” Lark asked.
The Bedrock Page 21
