The HEPER project is more than an unmitigated disaster. It has produced—and this cannot be overstated—a potentially devastating weapon. One which, if unleashed upon the population, accidentally or otherwise, would cause widespread death and violence, and, very possibly, complete extinction of our species. Though it appears the effects are easily reversible, make no mistake. The HEPER virus, in the wrong hands, can be used as a Weapon of Mighty Devastation. It must be wholly and completely eradicated.
Thus, by Royal decree, it is hereby declared that all formulas and data and results and paperwork related to the HEPER project be permanently deleted, destroyed, and/or burned. It never existed. The good citizens of the metropolis must never be told of its existence.
It is further decreed that the HEPER Bureau be established. The purpose of the HEPER Bureau is to give explanation for the existence of the hepers who managed to escape into society. The citizenry are curious and are demanding answers. Said Bureau will fabricate a false evolutionary history and science behind the existence of the hepers. No expense will be spared to ensure the denizens of the metropolis are forever kept from the truth behind the genesis of the hepers. To that end, the HEPER Bureau will be given unlimited resources in the years, decades, centuries, and even millennia to come.
It is also ordered that the Commander Scientist and his colleagues be injected with the HEPER virus and then detained in the catacombs of the Palace. Their fate shall be later determined by the Ruler.
In addition, it is (excerpt ends).
64
FOR ALMOST A half hour, I read my father’s transcribed pages. I turn the sheets slowly at first, uncertain of what I am reading, their meaning still veiled. But as I follow the flow of my father’s hauntingly familiar handwriting, passing over the occasional ink blot where his pen, as if paused in stunned disbelief, had bled into paper, I eventually, page by page, piece it all together.
These papers are obscene.
I pull away from the workbench, away from the stack of papers still only half-read. I stare outside. Nothing is the same; everything has changed.
“Back at the Domain Building,” Sissy says, her whispered words drained of life. “On the fifty-ninth floor. I saw documents just like these. Old, moldy papers, falling apart, each with this crescent moon insignia. They were in an opened box half-empty. Somebody had broken into that floor, discovered the box.”
I stare at the pages, their crescent moons glinting. “It was my father who broke in,” I say. “Those were his shades you found.”
Sissy nods, sadly. “These are the papers. He stole them and brought them back to the Mission. Translated them here. And afterward, hid them himself, their contents too unbearable.”
I glance at the cratered hole in the corner of the room. “Ashley June,” I whisper. “She was here. She found the papers, dug them up.”
Sissy steps toward the workbench. “Look to the moon,” she whispers, her finger trailing the moon insignia on a page. “The truth is in the moon.”
I remember those words. Ashley June’s words. And I remember something else she had said, how she had uttered them like a warning.
Sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free. Sometimes it haunts you. Sometimes you wish you never found out.
And I realize that I can’t talk. Not about this, like it is something that can be discussed, analyzed, grappled with, brought under control with mere words. And suddenly I’m bursting out the door, needing to be away from the laboratory, needing to be outside, needing to have nothing between me and the stars and the moon.
“Gene!”
And still I keep running, as if pain in my legs and lungs might erase the truths learned, the knowledge acquired, the innocence lost. And even as I sprint as fast as I can, choking back tears, I feel it: the encumbered body. So different from the soaring grace with which I’d sprinted across the Vast as a dusker, the harmony between my moving limbs, the segueing of brute power with grace. Now, my human body jiggles upon my frame ungainly and burdensome.
“Gene! Wait!”
The lake looms ahead of me, the destination I never consciously set upon but toward which my eager feet now move ever swifter. The wind howls, whipping around the nape of my neck, nipping at my exposed ankles. And then I’m running down the slight bank, leaping over driftwood logs. My feet smash through the smooth surface of the lake.
The cold cuts me like glass. But before I can wade any deeper, Sissy grabs my arm.
“Gene!—”
I pull my arm away. But she holds on and the sudden shift in equilibrium causes both of us to tumble into the water. My hand smacks into sharp rock sitting on the shallow floor; blood spills out from my cut palm. We surface gasping and dripping, all air sucked out of our lungs. The cold is a thousand needles pricking into me.
“I should have turned years ago!” I shout, slapping at the water. “Why didn’t I just turn! Why the needless fight, why the struggle, night after night, month after month, year after year!” My body is freezing, but my eyes are hot cauldrons of fury. “Why, Sissy? Why the daily struggle to survive when we’ve been nothing but mutants? When we’ve been nothing but aberrations?”
“Gene—”
“We’re the ones at odds with the universe! We should have just turned!” Hot tears gush out of my eyes, burning twin trails down my face. “When I was five, when I was six, seven, eight, when I was thirteen. I should have just turned! And this living hell would have ended! I’ve been one cut, one drop of saliva, from turning—turning back to normal, to the real me, the natural me. Not this!” I pound my chest, slap my face. “Not what I’ve always thought was true! Not this freak show that I am!”
And she looks at me, her lips trembling, and she doesn’t know what to say. Something in her face crumbles, and strange gasps and cries tumble out of her twisted mouth. Because she knows it’s true. We’re outcasts, aberrations. We’re germs, and this world of purity has no place for us.
“My damn father!” I yell, staring up at the stars, my anger unbridling. “You should have let me turn! Instead of using me as your test mouse, you should have—”
“He didn’t know, Gene!”
“He must have known! He found the formula for the Origin, he must have known its backstory.” I look at Sissy, my chest heaving. “He knew. He knew we’re food.”
I see her wilt a little. She shivers, her eyes blinking faster. But then something happens. Resistance, insistence flash in her eyes. “He didn’t know,” she maintains in a low-pitched voice. “Not in the beginning, anyway, not all those years he was with us at the dome. The way he treated us, it was like we were special. Like we were the originals, and they were the anomalies.”
She glances back in the direction of the laboratory. “I don’t think he had an inkling until he returned to the Mission. Until he transcribed all those old documents. On to Mission paper, did you notice that? It was here, after he left the dome, only after he transcribed those documents, that he realized.”
“How would you know what he thought—”
“Never forget who you are.” She looks me square in the eyes. “He’d never have said that if he thought we were…”
“Freaks?”
“That’s not how I would put it.”
“Well, you better get used to the idea. Because that’s what we are.” A film of tears, acidic, stings my eyes. It is all coming to me now. Maybe Sissy is right; maybe my father discovered the truth only after he returned to the Mission. I can only imagine the horror of his realization in the darkness and isolation of his laboratory. The truth so devastating, so repulsive, he had to remove himself altogether from the Mission, live alone like a hermit in the woods. Away from the foul, the diseased, the impure, away from the colony of hepers.
She brushes aside wet hair strands dangling into her eyes. “I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel like a freak at all.”
Her words enrage me. I unleash on her. “Good for you, Sissy! Keep on trying to delude yourself! But you know what? Ba
d as this is, it gets worse. Because you and me? We’re not just freaks, we’re not just hepers. We’re something more. Something worse. You might think we’re this wonderful Origin. But you know what we are? We’re a dirty bomb. We’re a walking incubator of death and disease. The cure my father thought he discovered? He’d only rediscovered the lost formula for a deadly virus. We’re not the cure, we’re the contagion. We’re not salvation, we’re a scourge. That’s what Ashley June was trying to tell me. We are the lethal bomb that will cause the extinction of all people.”
Sissy’s fingers, unclenched and half-submerged in the water, tremble by her side, rippling the lake’s surface. Stars reflected in the lake, once perfectly mirrored dots, warp into dissolution.
I turn my face away from her, gaze at the lake, at the trees, the mountain peak, the silhouettes of distant cottages. “That’s why he abandoned us. Why he flew off east. We became an abomination to him.”
“Don’t say that,” she says. Slowly, she pushes her shoulders back. “He instructed us to fly east to meet up with him. He wanted to see us again. Don’t you remember what Clair told us at the Mission? She said, This is what your father wanted. For you to fly east. There are machinations at work you can’t even begin to imagine, Gene. You and Sissy have to fly east.”
“He said that only to get us away from them!” I laugh, a maniacal, bitter cackle. Now I understand the truth, the terrible, horrific truth. “If the Hunt really worked—if it actually brought us both out to the mountains—he now needed a plan that would entice us away. Far, far away.” I slap at the water, see the cut in my hand vomiting out blood. “That way, if the bomb detonated, it’d be safely removed from the population. The precious, pure, original population—the dusker population.”
Sissy trembles—whether it’s from fear or the cold I don’t know—her already-ashen face paling even more. “He wouldn’t feel that kind of loyalty to the duskers. Not after—”
“It wasn’t loyalty to them! It was loyalty to his own precious principles. Because my father was never about destruction, never about genocide. He was about salvation! Remember what the chief advisor said? That my father preached there was no higher purpose than to heal the sick, to purify the impure. That there was no calling more noble than to save the duskers? Except now there was nothing for my father to save, nothing to heal. Except himself. That’s the brutal irony of it. He imagined himself a savior—until he realized he was holding not a cure but a dirty bomb. Which he had to hurl away as far as possible.”
Sissy recoils, her face flinching. She is resisting, needlessly prolonging the inevitable.
Something warm snakes down my hand. Blood pouring out from the gash. “See this?” I say, holding my bloodstained palm to Sissy. “See this blood? It’s a plague, Sissy. It’s infection. It’s death. It’s disgusting! It’s abominable!”
Sissy shakes her head, eyes wide. All fight is going out of her. Her strength is failing her now, and the wall of denial is collapsing all around her like a house of cards. Her eyes blink furiously, her legs buckling.
“Look at this blood in me, in you—”
She screams.
It is a long, agonizing wail that echoes off the mountains and ends only when she falls to her knees. Her head slumps against her chest. She starts quaking. Her sodden clothes wrapped tightly against her pale whittled frame, bunching in folds.
She’s so different from the girl I first met at the dome. Gone is the mischievous light in her eyes, the square way she took me in, the warmth and strength emanating from her bronzed flesh. The boys constantly roving about her, her arms seemingly always around their shoulders, protecting, guiding. The way she smiled, eyes closed with sheer delight, head tilting back, sunlight splashing on her cheekbones. The way she sang. The way she kissed me. Her belief in loyalty, that it is the proof of love.
All of these qualities that charm me the most about her, that make my heart ache for her: they are nothing but the side effects of a once-extinct virus, by-products of a food experiment gone horribly awry.
I see none of those qualities now. Not on this blighted creature, her wet-black hair pressed against sallow cheeks and a wispy neck, bent over as if winded. Sapped of color, embossed cruelly into a canvas of mercury and silver.
She trembles; she quivers. She is on the verge, her body about to spasm uncontrollably, her eyes about to flood over with tears. My strong, brave Sissy. About to be broken at last.
Then something stirs in me. Something fundamental shifts, tectonic plates within. I speak. With a sudden and furious tenderness.
“Sissy.”
She looks up at me. For a moment, she hesitates, as if unsure she’s reading my face right, hearing my tone properly. And then I am wading toward her, and gently I lift her up, putting my arms around her.
Quiet again, only our chattering teeth breaking the silence. Then even that sound subsides as we draw tighter into each other, our faces pressing against each other for warmth. The moon lights up the whole lake, reflects off the snowcapped mountain peak. And now it is silent. Everything is still. Even our bodies have stopped shivering. The lake flattens out, becomes a mirror of the eternal skies above. We are alone in the whole wide world.
“What now?” Sissy whispers, her lips moving against my neck.
I pull her into me, hold her tightly.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
65
HOME.
Home is not the empty cottages we walk past, nor the room where we take off our wet clothes and stand shivering before the fireplace. It is not the Mission still flush with food and drink and clothes.
Home is not the metropolis. Because we could make it our home. If we wanted to. If we wanted to turn, it’d be easy enough. Gather up the sun-caked crusts of their melted flesh, boil it down into a liquid, which we’d pour into an open wound, at night, once we got close enough to the metropolis. If we wanted to.
But Sissy doesn’t want to.
“I am what I am,” Sissy says. She pulls away slightly to look me in the eyes. Firelight dances in her irises. “I could never become them. Don’t ask me to, Gene. I was born this way. I will die this way. I’m at home in my body.”
I nod, pull the duvet tighter over our shoulders. The fireplace is full with flickering fronds. Shadows dance on the walls.
“And you?” she asks. “What about you?”
I pause. Not because of hesitation or indecisiveness. But only because I want to take in this moment, because it feels like something new is about to begin, that nothing will ever be the same.
“They lied to us,” I say. “To the Mission elders, the villagers. For generations. Kept us from the truth because had we known, we’d all have chosen to turn to duskers. And if that happened, we’d have stopped propagating the heper species. And the only way to replenish the supply of hepers would have vanished. Forever.” My voice hardens. “They fed us lies to feed themselves.”
I lean forward, stare into the fire. “They killed everyone we care about. David. Epap. And Jacob. They killed my father, the man I knew him to be, anyway, the man I adored; that man they killed. How can I, how could I, possibly become one of them?”
Her hand reaches for mine under the duvet.
“They think of us as cattle,” I say. “They think of us as far beneath them, worthless. But when I think about everyone we care about, I don’t see that. I think about Epap, how he so selflessly gave himself trying to save us. Or Jacob, throwing himself out of the train before he turned. Or you, Sissy, running headlong into their midst of millions for David’s sake.”
A pained nostalgia flares in her glimmering eyes: She is remembering her boys, the years in the dome, the sunshine, the passing seasons, their shared life together. Their nights around the fire, the singing, the laughter. The tears.
“This is what we are,” I say, and now my hand is clasping hers so tightly I think she might flinch. But she only squeezes back all the stronger. “We are human. We live life to the hilt. We laugh, we smil
e, we love, we get our hearts broken. We hold back nothing. We live glorious lives, Sissy. For each other. If these qualities are aberrations, mutations, well, so be it. I choose them over ‘normal.’ I choose them over the stale, colorless, selfish existence they live.”
I turn to face her; the duvet slips off our shoulders, falls to the floor. Cold air slides around our bodies. But it doesn’t matter. We have enough heat, just the two of us, together. I take her face in my hands, her beautiful, strong face that is a marvel to me. My vision goes hazy, and I blink away the tears, wanting nothing to blur my vision of her.
And the words, when I say them, are the purest, sweetest, truest, strongest words I have ever spoken.
“I choose you, Sissy. You’re my home.”
66
WE BURN THE whole damn village down. We start with the cottages that store vats of oil and gasoline. After that, it’s like a chain reaction, one wooden cottage catching fire after the next, combustible as a pile of tinder. Until the whole Mission is ablaze, sending up huge flames that lick the brightening sky.
We watch from the fortress wall. The enormous fire flings flickering light and shadow across the craggy face of the mountain. An easterly wind picks up, and I nod at Sissy. She straps herself into the hang glider she’d spent the previous day learning to fly. I follow suit, knapsacks dangling off a bar on each side of me, packed with as much food and essentials as we were able to squeeze into them. I check my pocket again, making sure that pushed securely into it is a piece of paper. I’d found it yesterday in the laboratory, among all the other papers. A letter. Creased with many folds, with my father’s handwriting.
The Trap (The Hunt Trilogy) Page 26
