Rootless

by Chris Howard

  Got closer still and I could see people on the ridgeline, climbing up toward us from the other side of the hills. They stood there, waiting on us. And as the boat drifted to the shore, I could see they were all dressed in purple, leaving no doubt as to whose island this was.

  “Let’s go in,” Crow said, his voice as bitter as the rest of him. I hoisted him up with me, our teeth chattering.

  We huddled inside the cargo hold with the rest of the prisoners, and it wasn’t long before the boat let out a thud and slammed to a stop. People stumbled and fell, but I stayed on my feet, grabbing Alpha, and clutching Crow so he was held tight between us.

  One by one the lights blinked out, until everything was black. Then the agents cranked open the doors to the deck and we began squeezing outside, all shoved together, one big wriggling mob.

  I gripped Alpha’s hand and I had Crow on my back. But we couldn’t move all tied together like that — the crowd surged past and tore us apart. I lost Alpha between the bodies, and an agent swooped behind me, prying Crow’s arms from my shoulders and dragging him away.

  I tried to keep my head up, to suck in some air. And I peered around for Alpha but the shaved heads bobbing just all looked the same.

  The agents had run a ramp off the deck and down onto the frozen shoreline, and I waited and pushed until it was my turn to skid down, my feet numb and slippery in the snow.

  I landed in a pile on the plastic beach, amid crusty old bottles and boxes. Up on the hillside, the agents were staring down at us, wrapped in their purple fuzz, their faces buried inside huge hoods. They watched as we shivered and splashed in the puddles.

  A rough path led up the hill, and it wasn’t long before we were forced to climb it, spiked clubs prodding us forward, voices shouting for us to move. I remember staring up at the sky as the snow whirled, and I wanted to try not walking and see what happened. But my bare feet kept shuffling, staggering onward until I was at the top of the hill and staring down at a massive bio vat on the other side, steel walls rumbling as the innards worked corn into juice, sooty fumes greasing the sky.

  “Banyan.”

  It was Alpha, calling from down the path behind me. I turned, tried to wait for her. But then another voice was calling my name.

  I stared at the agents on the ridgeline, and one of them was running toward me — the same agent who was shouting for me, telling me to wait. And then the agent was pulling down her hood, and her face burst into the cold air like it might melt everything around her. Her breath steamed and her brown skin was flushed red.

  I just stood there. Froze to the snow as the bodies rushed past. And as Alpha reached me, she took my hand, and stared like I stared as Zee ran across the hill toward us.

  Chaos thawed out the whole freezing lot of us. Prisoners stumbled and fell as the agents tried to keep everything moving. But things weren’t going to keep moving. The crowd ground to a standstill, just a pile of half-naked bodies stacked in the snow. The agents waved their rifles and swung their clubs, but woven through their commands, I could still hear Zee’s voice, shouting and straining.

  “Stop,” she was calling. “Bring him to me. Bring him to me.”

  “Who is she?” Alpha whispered as she pushed in close, our plastic sheets clacking, sticky in the cold. But before I could answer, an agent had his hands on me and another was swiping the path clear with a club.

  “Wait,” I tried to tell them as they yanked me off the trail. “Stop.”

  I thrashed around, trying to find Alpha. I saw her come for me, but the agent swung his club and Alpha’s blood burst bright and sprayed at the snow. I screamed for her, stretched my fingers out toward where she’d been. Then I saw her, still on her feet, trudging away with her head down and her arm bleeding. She was keeping on. Giving up. And I lost sight of her through the trampling mob.

  “No,” I kept whispering. But then I was off the trail, surrounded by agents, and Zee was kneeling above me as I curled up and shook.

  I threw up then. Like something had popped. But it made things no clearer. It just made me more cold.

  Zee took my head in her lap, and her hands were wrapped in the same fuzzy stuff as the rest of her. I seemed to sink inside her clothes.

  I tried to speak, but I couldn’t.

  I wanted to tell her about Alpha. And Crow.

  “Bring him inside,” Zee said. She took her coat off and wrapped it around me. Then the agents lifted me up and they began carrying me, Zee telling them what to do, and them doing just as they were told.

  I slept long and deep, but woke with a start. My plastic sheet was gone, replaced by a set of soft purple robes and even softer blankets that I’d twisted all around me. I unwound myself from the bed and pried my head off the pillow. Then I sat up and stared around the room.

  No windows. Nothing to see. Just my bed with a chair beside it. A pair of fuzzy boots on the floor. I slid off the bed and slipped my feet inside the boots. I ran my fingers at my face and scratched at the stubble on my head. Then I stepped to the door and shoved it open.

  The next room was a whole lot bigger and a whole lot brighter. Whole lot more busy, too. Desks and tables and gizmos and gadgets. Neon lamps. Cables in bunches. There were consoles flashing numbers, and tiny glass tubes hung like decorations across the walls. I blinked at the confusion, the mess. GenTech’s logo was everywhere, but this hardly looked like their usual neatness. There was none of the cold precision that seemed to work for them so well.

  “You look more like him,” a voice said. “Now that you’re awake.”

  It was a woman that spoke. And at first I thought it was Zee’s voice. But it wasn’t.

  It was Hina’s.

  I steadied myself against a desk, knocking a rack of plastic vials to the floor, where they burst and splintered. Then it was silent again but for the soft hum of electricity that filled the room.

  “I saw you die,” I whispered.

  She was hunched in a plastic chair, her face caught in the glow of a monitor screen. Her hair was long and silver, and her brown skin was creased and saggy.

  But it was her, all right.

  “So,” she said, her gray eyes fixed on me. “How did I die?”

  “You were eaten.”

  “Eaten?”

  “Locusts.”

  “Sounds horrible.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

  “Well, we mustn’t dwell on such things, Banyan.” It caught me off guard, her using my name. And her voice was different. Strong sounding. More smart with her words.

  “Come closer,” she said.

  “No,” I said, just staring at her. “No. You go to hell.”

  “Be nice.”

  “Where’s Zee?”

  “She’s where she always is.”

  I just shook my head like it might make her vanish. I glanced around the room for an exit.

  “Come sit with me,” the woman said. “Please.”

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s my laboratory.”

  “So which one was real? You or the other?”

  “Real?”

  “You’re older, so I guess you were the first, right? The other was just a copy. That it? Like the Harvesters.”

  “You mustn’t try to simplify things just to make it easier.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me what the hell’s going on?”

  I started across the room but she was up out of her chair and bearing down on me. I was slow and she wrapped her arms around my waist, wrestling me against her. I was still weak. Too weak to fight.

  “Where’s Zee? I whispered, my face pressed in the woman’s purple shirt.

  “She’ll be back.”

  “My head hurts.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I turned to look at her. She was squeezing the daylights out of me.

  “It’s hard for me not to be angry,” she said, her voice calm but her eyes wild. “You don’t even know who I am.”

  “Sure I do,” I
said. “You’re Hina.”

  “No.”

  “Her copy.”

  She shook her head.

  “Her sister, then. Her mother.”

  There was a moment before the woman spoke again, when she just held on to me, and it was somehow as if I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

  “I’m not Hina’s mother,” the woman whispered as she bent against me. “I’m yours.”

  It wasn’t true. That’s what I told myself. Tried to tell her that, too. My mother was dead. Always had been. She’d starved to death. Starved. But I was having trouble focusing now. I couldn’t think straight.

  “Don’t make it harder,” the woman said. We were still wrapped together in the middle of the room.

  I shrugged her arms off me. “You’re full of shit.”

  “Why would I lie to you?”

  “You can’t know. How could you know?”

  “I don’t need to know,” she said “The science knows for me.”

  “Science?”

  “Your genes.”

  “My what?”

  “They’re a perfect match to my DNA,” the woman said. “And your father’s.”

  “My father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s here.”

  “He’s what?” My fists were clenched. My heart had shot into my throat.

  My old man. Here.

  “I’ll take you to him,” the woman said. “When you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready now.” I started to shake.

  “No, Banyan. You’re not.”

  “Take me now,” I screamed. I seized a glass monitor and rammed it at the wall, smashing it into shiny pieces on the floor.

  The woman tried grabbing at me but I slipped past her, making for a door on the far side of the room. I had her beat, but when I reached the door it came swinging wide open and Zee was bustling toward me, all wrapped in purple, big grin on her face. She started to say something but I cut her off.

  “What the hell?” I said. “Get me out of here. Get me out.”

  “I got you out,” she whispered, her smile vanishing like a sun gone down. I tried to push past, but she was all rammed up against me and I was suddenly so damn tired and my legs wouldn’t move.

  “Take it easy,” Zee said, then she stared into the room. “What did you tell him?”

  I felt the woman loom up close. “That he’s my son.”

  “And his father?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “You’ve seen him?” I said to Zee, but I was staggering now, slurring my words.

  “Get him down,” one of them said. And everything turned to sludge.

  When my mind came back, I was back in the bed and all the lights had been cut. I tried moving my limbs and each one was sore. I felt something pressed against my thigh, pinning the sheets, and I squirmed my hands free to grab it.

  Metal. Cold and jagged. I felt at the metal. The ridges and curves. I drew blood as my skin snagged on thorny steel.

  “It’s called a rose,” Zee said from the corner of the room. I looked for her, but she was all shadowed and black.

  “He made it,” she said.

  “Pop?”

  “Yeah.” Zee shuffled closer and lit a low orange globe on the floor beside me. “Our father.”

  “Ours?”

  She nodded, but I looked away. My brain wouldn’t go there.

  I tugged the flower to the light and studied the craftsmanship — barbed wire that had rusted purple, woven into a long stem and bunched into a ball of leaves. My blood was smeared upon the petals.

  “He gave this to you?” I said, and it made Zee smile the way you do at something sad.

  “No,” she said. “He made it for her. Your mother.”

  “My mother’s dead. I don’t know that woman.”

  “People here call her the Creator.”

  “I think crazy is what she is. Besides, she looks more like your momma than mine.” I set the spiky flower on the bed and turned to Zee. She’d been dead enough to haunt my dreams, but now here she was, flesh and bones and GenTech purple.

  “My mother was a replicant of yours,” she said.

  “A replicant?”

  “A copy. A perfect copy.”

  “So how come I never heard nothing of it? How come we never knew?”

  “Because our father wanted to keep you safe.”

  “Safe?” My mind groped at each word, at each new bit of information. But it was like everything was slipping past me and shattering on the ground. I wanted my father. I wanted to see him. But at the same time, everything felt wrong. And he’d never seemed so far.

  “You’ll see,” Zee said. She nudged me over so she could sit beside me.

  “So what? You’re my sister?” My hands were trembling and I dug my fists at my side.

  “I suppose,” she said.

  But I’d never had a sister. I never had anyone except Pop. I tried to make sense of it. I kept trying to start at the beginning, but then I’d just lose my way all over again.

  “I should have looked for you longer,” I told her. “On that slave ship. I got Hina out, though. But I couldn’t save her. Not in the end.”

  Zee started to cry and it was enough to make me quit shaking. I tried to breathe proper, but I couldn’t slow down.

  “I couldn’t do nothing,” I said, the words tumbling out. “For Hina. Or Sal. And I think it might be my fault. Dragging them along.”

  “No,” Zee said, and she tried saying something else, but her tears messed the words and then she just cried till she’d drained herself out. And when she’d got done crying, I could hear her wheezing through those crusted lungs of hers. That tight, shriveled sound.

  “Hina remembered,” I said. “In the end. Like she could see her whole life. And she was clean. Free of old Frost and clean of the crystal.”

  “What about Sal?”

  “He saved me,” I said, remembering him pulling me out of the mud pit. Remembering when I’d called him my friend.

  “He used to try and hide me. When Frost got crazy.” Zee started sobbing again. And I reckon Sal had been like a brother to her. No matter the shit that he’d said.

  “They took you to Vega?” I said, thinking about that spinning wheel that had arced across the plains. “The Harvesters?”

  “I don’t know. I just woke up here.”

  “I didn’t see one agent out there with a dust mask.”

  “The air’s clean,” she said. “All the time.”

  “So can it fix you up? Your lungs?”

  “The Creator says they can’t get better. But at least here they won’t get worse.”

  “The Creator.” I stood up off the bed, stuck my head in my hands. “Who the hell calls themself that?”

  “It’s her title. That’s what everyone calls her.”

  “Kind of like you still got a mom, I guess.”

  “I told you,” Zee said. “She’s your mom. Not mine.”

  “It’s impossible. My mom died. She starved herself so I could live.”

  “That’s what our father told you?”

  I rubbed at the back of my neck. I refused to believe that woman was my mother. The very idea sent a pain through my skull.

  “Our dad came to build for the bigwigs,” Zee said. “For GenTech. They wanted statues of the people who found this place.”

  “They’re making him build?” For a moment I pictured my father and a thousand others all slaving over some GenTech shrine.

  “That was when he first came to the island. Your mother said that’s how they met.” Zee scooped up the rose and placed it on the bed between us. “He made her this. But he never built the statues GenTech wanted. Soon as you were born, he took you and ran. Stayed hidden.”

  “Hidden?”

  “Until last winter.”

  “Right,” I said, and my body trembled as the very reason I’d come all this way carved through the confusion inside. “Last
winter. When he got taken.”

  “No,” Zee said, her voice soft. Her face like an apology. “He wasn’t taken.”

  I went to speak, but I couldn’t. I just seized up. Like an engine run dry.

  “He traveled to Vega,” Zee said. “He turned himself in.”

  “To GenTech?” The words crawled out my mouth and then crept down my spine.

  “It was the only way he could get back here. Through the Rift. Across the water.”

  “To the trees,” I whispered.

  “Right.” Zee almost smiled. “To the trees.”

  Don’t know how long it lasted. Once I’d let it all sink in. Zee did her best to try and comfort me, but I didn’t want Zee. All I wanted was my old man, and I shouted for him in the darkness and then I rammed my fists at the wall.

  Eventually my voice gave out. I tried breathing but it felt exactly like drowning in that yellow river all those years before. Only this time there was no one to pull me back out. And that’s what made it all hurt so damn much. Because Pop had been my only friend in the whole world. And he hadn’t been taken at all. He’d just upped and left.

  But why?

  I started for the door but Zee grabbed me, pulled me back.

  “You have to stay, Banyan. With me.”

  “No.” I tried to force past her, but I was still too weak. “I gotta see him.”

  “You can’t. The agents won’t let you.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “No one can.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’ve got him locked up.”

  Locked up? I shouldn’t give a damn, I told myself. So what if they’d tossed him in a cell and thrown away the key? Pop had left me. Ditched me. Made up some shit about hearing voices and he just snuck out the wagon and he probably never once looked back. Just ran through the dust storm. Headed for Vega. Headed for GenTech and this island of trash. Left me with nothing but things that were hollow. He’d lied to me. Always. And I’d believed in him.

  Right from the start.

  I curled up in the corner with my guts like concrete. My skin was hot. But I was shivering. Silent. Trying not to let myself crack. Zee gave up talking after a bit. And once she’d slipped into a twitchy sleep, I peeled myself off the floor.