Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Luck, Luck! There you are.”

  A boy with carroty locks and bright freckles ran up to her, out of breath. This was Rocky, who, though his hair was redder than Luck’s and his eyes were slightly lighter, had a complexion similar enough that the two of them would almost certainly be Paired, at a point in the future that was not nearly distant enough for Luck’s liking.

  “Did you just run here?” she asked. She hadn’t seen him in the group by the Rez fence. He must have heard what was happening, belatedly, and rushed to join the party as it hiked back to the town hall.

  Rocky put a proprietary hand on her shoulder and smiled. “Yes,” he said, catching his breath as he walked with her. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to the fence?”

  “Why would I?” Luck asked.

  It irked her that Rocky, who was a year younger than she was, assumed they would be spending their lives together and treated her accordingly.

  “They’re falling apart,” Rocky said unnecessarily, nodding at the sentries being carried on stretchers and pulling at the crotch of his pants—another distasteful habit. Luck suppressed an urge to slap his hands away from his body. Then he chuckled and said, “Especially the guy with no face.”

  “Don’t laugh at him,” she admonished. “If that were you, you wouldn’t want to be laughed at.”

  “But it’s not me,” he said cheerfully. “This makes five humans I’ve seen up close, Luck. How about you?”

  “Six,” Luck grudgingly answered. She was interested in the topic, even if Rocky was the one bringing it up. “But mostly just Mizter Caldwell.”

  Mizter Caldwell was the Proto Liaison Officer, the human who visited the Rez every month to perform the official examination of each resident and take DNA samples. Mizter Caldwell’s skin was a vivid aqua-blue. His arms and legs were overly long and elastic, so that it took serious effort for him to hold himself fully upright. His neck had two inconspicuous gills near his collarbone, and his long-fingered hands were slightly webbed, which made the Protos conclude that he must spend a fair amount of time underwater.

  “Plus these three sentries,” Luck told Rocky, adding up her close encounters with humans, “plus two others who came once with Mizter Caldwell.” She described those last two: a woman with a head so large it threw off one’s sense of perspective when looking at her, and a man with four arms and four legs, arranged peculiarly so he walked in a spiraling path. Whatever evolutionary split had separated humans from Protos had allowed humans to continue to evolve in many separate streams—flying sentries, amphibious Proto Liaison Officers, extra-limbed visitors, and who knew what else.

  Rocky was suitably impressed with Luck’s list. “You saw that one with four legs in person?”

  Luck nodded. “We walked right by each other in the Rec Center. Each of his hands had a different number of fingers.”

  “Like how many?” Rocky asked. “Or how few?”

  Luck shrugged. “I couldn’t count exactly, but at least ten on one of his hands and maybe only two on one of the others.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  She shrugged.

  Rocky looked both delighted with this human tidbit and eager to get away—probably to share it with his friends. For one paralyzing moment, Luck thought he might try to kiss her, but before it occurred to him, he ran off toward a group of boys his own age.

  She congratulated herself on getting rid of him so quickly. Alone now, Luck slowed her pace until she’d fallen back to the tail end of the group, where she couldn’t see Starlock and his future wife. She drifted until she was near the edge of the woods that covered much of this section of the Rez. There, shadows alternated with warm sun and the breeze was full of the scents of wildflowers. She turned and walked backward, staring down the gentle slope toward the place where the fence was no longer shimmering. The world was there. Just there.

  Without warning, a hand took hold of Luck’s elbow, startling her. It was Starlock, who, in former days, had often snuck up on her like this. He pulled her into the woods, and in a few quick steps, they were on a narrow trail used by deer, out of sight of the others, who in any case were now far ahead of them.

  “You’re touching me,” Luck said, looking down at his hand on her bare arm. Starlock automatically let go, which made her sorry she’d said anything.

  He turned left when the deer path forked, and Luck followed as naturally as breathing, as if no time had passed since the days they’d pulled each other all around the Rez, as if their unsanctioned walk together that morning had erased the last three years.

  “You know I don’t have a choice,” Starlock told her quietly, when they’d walked in silence for a long while. “I didn’t choose Moonlight.”

  Those were words they’d both avoided for so long, because there was no point in speaking them out loud. Why was he doing it now?

  “She’s beautiful,” Luck responded, trying not to sound bitter. “You’re lucky, Starlock. It could be much worse. For me, it’s going to be worse.”

  “Stop. Luck, why are you trying to hurt me?”

  Luck fell silent again. In another few minutes they were by the river, moving upstream along the bank. The Proto group carrying the humans was still visible in quick glimpses, beyond the forest, but she and Starlock were hidden.

  “I’ve stopped caring,” she forced herself to say after a while. She had been working so hard to make those words true, but they nearly burned her throat as they came out. “It took a long time, but I know there’s no reason to keep caring.”

  “Please, Luck,” Starlock whispered. “There’s every reason.”

  She stared at her feet, but she continued to follow him without question. When they’d walked a bit farther, he came to a halt on the river’s bank so abruptly that Luck almost bumped into him.

  “Do you see where we are?” he asked.

  She hadn’t been paying attention, but now she looked. Ahead of them, at the side of the river’s main course, was a deep, cool pool where the water found its way between rocks to create a secluded swimming hole. Trees overhung the bank, but the sun shone between the leaves, so its rays reached all the way to the sand in the pool’s depths, inviting one in.

  Tears sprang to Luck’s eyes.

  “Why would you come here?” she asked hoarsely. “I don’t want to be here.”

  She stepped from the path to get away, but she was brought up short by the sight of a tree at the edge of the pool. Carved into the trunk was L + S, though lichen was starting to grow over the letters.

  Starlock was directly behind her. He didn’t touch her, and yet she could feel the warmth of him only inches away. He was looking at the tree, and Luck knew that he was—just as she was—remembering that day, three years ago, when they’d come to this spot together. Their last and only intimate afternoon.

  On that day, by this very pool, they had been sitting back to back, so that Luck had felt the rise and fall of Starlock’s rib cage against her own as he spoke.

  “I turn fourteen tomorrow,” he’d said.

  Luck was peering at their reflections in the unruffled surface of the water—a reminder of why the two of them would never be Paired. Starlock’s birthday was all she’d been thinking about for weeks; fourteen was a cutoff point. After his birthday, he and Luck would be expressly forbidden physical contact and unsupervised time alone. So the era of Luck and Starlock wandering the Rez together was over.

  “Maybe they won’t find out if we spend time together,” Luck said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Starlock responded. “Like my sister.”

  Everyone over fourteen was checked every month, and if you had someone else’s DNA on you, you might be taken away. No one knew exactly how much DNA would be too much—because of course Protos ended up touching incidentally all the time at gatherings and at wor
k—and yet common wisdom was that any significant exchange of bodily fluids with an inappropriate person would be enough to get you removed. This had happened to Starlock’s sister when she was fifteen years old. Starlock had been nine at the time, and Luck had been eight. His sister, whose name had been Mist, had sworn to her parents and Mizter Caldwell that she’d only kissed a boy a few times, but that had been sufficient for her life on the Rez—and the boy’s as well—to be over. Someone was taken away every few years.

  Even if she and Starlock somehow escaped detection, if Luck ever had one of Starlock’s children, a little baby with light brown skin, and Starlock’s eyes, for instance…that baby would be taken away. Mixed children of Protos went to live with the humans, no exceptions—they were improperly blended examples of primitive and pure gene patterns. “Do you think your sister is dead?” she asked.

  Starlock shrugged against her shoulders. “Sometimes I think she’s not,” he whispered, “and I wonder what her life is like.”

  “Me too,” Luck said.

  “But mostly I think she is.”

  Luck dropped a leaf onto the surface of the water and watched tiny ripples spread. “If we all did it,” she reasoned, “if we all disobeyed at once…they couldn’t take all of us.”

  Starlock turned to her and took hold of her shoulder. He was more upset by mention of his sister than Luck had realized. “Luck, they would take all of us, or punish all of us. It would be so easy. If we make trouble, why not separate the Rez into a dozen reservations, each one with people who all look the same? Or stop teaching us anything useful? The Covenants are what keep us all together and alive.” Starlock, who was almost never frantic, was grabbing Luck’s shoulder frantically. “I don’t want them to take you away,” he whispered. “I couldn’t live with that.”

  Slowly, Luck nodded. Her daydreams of disobedience were only daydreams. The consequences of acting them out would be too severe.

  “But what are we supposed to do after tomorrow?” she had whispered.

  “I can’t imagine,” Starlock had said. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  Knowing it was their last day alone, they’d made the most of it. They’d undressed each other completely, giggling with embarrassment, but then growing serious as they slid into the cool water of the pool. Shyly at first, but then more and more naturally, they’d touched each other all they wanted. They had both been only thirteen, and nothing serious had happened, but Luck remembered it as hands gliding across each other’s bodies, smooth and chilled from the pool, chests pressed together, arms embracing, and a long, sweet kiss with both of their heads just above the surface of the water.

  Now in the same clearing, three years later, Starlock closed the space between them and pressed himself against her. Luck’s breath drew in sharply at the weight and warmth of him. His hand ran down her arm, and he intertwined his fingers with hers. She studied their fingers, locked together, dark brown and creamy white, alternating. Perfect opposites.

  “The sentries falling, no humans answering the radio,” he whispered, close to her ear. “The two of us crossing the fence line. It was like we stepped outside our lives for a minute, Luck. Just for a minute, but maybe there’s hope that—”

  “There isn’t,” Luck breathed, her heart pounding in her chest. “The Authority will come to the Rez and everything will go back to normal.” She unlaced her hand from his. Walking alone together to the fence had been a mistake, and this walk in the woods had been a bigger mistake. She couldn’t keep her voice steady as she said, “It would kill me if they took you away. And it would kill both of us if they took our children.” She stepped away and refused to look at him. “You should wash your hand extra well when we get back,” she told him, knowing this instruction was cruel and unnecessary, “so they can’t detect any traces of me on you.”

  Then she walked back to the others.

  3. THEY IGNORED THEIR ELDERS

  At the Rez medical center, the Protos did whatever they could for the sentries, which was not much. Their broken bones seemed to have no relation to their overall condition, and all three of them continued to wither up. They were dead before dinnertime. And no one at the Proto Authority was answering the radio.

  At dinner in the Rez dining hall that night, Alderwoman Twinfate launched into a meandering speech that sounded like every other speech Luck had ever heard from an older person on the Rez, all of which could be summed up this way: Life is good, our Rez is beautiful. Let’s keep it that way.

  “…everyone will continue ordinary daily work as we wait patiently to hear from the Proto Authority,” Twinfate was saying, her croaky voice fading in and out as she swayed slightly around the microphone. (Luck supposed she was tired after the walk to and from the border that morning.) “Naturally, all of the Covenants are to be followed, and no one is allowed to approach the fence line….”

  Alderwoman Twinfate had the features of the South Pacific Islanders, though her once-black hair was now mostly white. She was of the first Rez generation, one of the founding orphans, who had been drawn from different locations all over the world, just as the Great Shift was happening. She and the others of that first group had been raised by humans who were committed to keeping a population of Protos alive. That first generation of Protos had grown up and intermarried—according to the Covenants and their physical traits, of course—and the Rez population had increased over a hundred years to what it was now.

  The curriculum of the Rez school had been established for that first group of Protos and had shaped the understanding of all subsequent generations about the world—the world that belonged to humans now, and in which Protos were no longer allowed to live. It was a world no Proto could quite imagine, except for the forests and fields and the mountains that were visible around the Rez, and except as marks on old maps, showing cities that no living Proto had ever set foot in, and except for descriptions in novels, which were often hundreds of years old and might detail a world of carriages and horses and coal smoke or a world of belching automobiles and lumbering airplanes, but most certainly did not describe the actual world as it was now. Set against this unknown, the Rez, with its three hundred square miles of fertile countryside, was an oasis of comfortable life.

  For Alderwoman Twinfate, and for most Protos, that was enough. Luck, on the other hand, had made the library her second home. When you’d read Dickens, and Dickinson, and you’d read selections of Greek mythology and stories by a woman called Brontë and even a few by a man called Vonnegut—or at least, when you’d read the parts of those books that made it through the Proto Authority’s redaction process—you sometimes thought about a different sort of life.

  Of course the teachers on the Rez had explained to Luck and her classmates early on why there were no Protos in their novels and textbooks. When the writers said people and when they said humans, they meant Protos, because everyone had been a Proto in those days. That was what human had meant. Then had come the Great Shift, and the humans had taken the word human and made it mean something more than human, or perhaps, Luck thought, something inhuman. They had evolved and taken the word with them.

  “Why can’t we live with the humans?” Luck had asked her teacher once, to peals of laughter from the other children.

  “Think, Luck,” her teacher had said. “You’ve read about Neanderthals. They had much in common with Protos, and yet if there were still Neanderthals, you wouldn’t make them live with us on the Reservation. They’d want their own life, and it wouldn’t be safe for them on the Rez, with electricity and farm equipment and things like that.”

  “So the world out there isn’t safe for Protos?” Luck had asked.

  The teacher had explained about the treaty then. The new species, in its many forms, had spread over the world, but they had given Protos an ideal place to live, and protection. And the Covenants were not much of a burden.


  In the Rez dining hall, Luck’s reverie was broken when Alderwoman Twinfate was loudly interrupted.

  A young, resolute voice said, “You know the Rez isn’t self-sufficient, don’t you?”

  That was Sunchance, a man in his twenties, who took the microphone from the alderwoman without asking for permission. A murmur of indignation rose from the long table of the oldest Rez inhabitants, but he ignored this and explained the only thing that mattered—that the humans supplied thirty percent of what the Rez needed to survive. If the humans didn’t show up for months, the Rez would eventually run out of food unless they made some drastic changes.

  “Of course they’re coming back,” said Alderwoman Twinfate, trying to recapture the microphone.

  Sunchance dodged her, kept the microphone, and said, “We need to go out into the world and find out what’s happening. So we can plan. Who’s with me?”

  “They’re coming back!” the Alderwoman cried, her voice rising above the hubbub.

  But no one was listening to her anymore. People were volunteering. Luck and Starlock, who were sitting across the room from each other and avoiding each other’s eyes, nevertheless raised their hands at the same moment.

  4. THEY DID NOT SHARE A TENT

  “Luck, look! There’s something down there!” called Rocky from farther up the trail.

  Luck was hiking in a party of four, but she had fallen behind. They’d been heading northeast all day, in the direction their maps told them would take them to the city. Of course, the Proto maps were quite old, but you didn’t move a city, did you?

  Luck had relished every step taken outside the Rez—at first. But now she was beginning to feel that the world outside the Rez was a lot like the world inside the Rez. They’d seen nothing but empty countryside, and Luck was having a hard time keeping herself focused.