The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  His eyes slid from mine. “I can’t. Rebekah … she said she wants to be the one to tell you, but not until the time is right.”

  “When will that be?”

  He shrugged, still avoiding my eyes. “You may be able to do what we can do, Kenna, but you’re not one of us yet. You can’t expect us to tell you the secrets we’ve kept from the world, and then release you back to that same world.”

  “You don’t trust me,” I said, shoulders sagging.

  “We don’t know you is all.”

  I heaved another sigh. “Can’t you tell me anything? Are there other people out in the world like me?” I asked. “Like us?”

  “It’s possible, but if there are they aren’t from Eclipse. Your mom is the only person who ever left.”

  “Do you know why she left?”

  He scratched his neck, beneath his hair. “She wanted to be a part of the world. Eclipse wasn’t big enough for her, I guess.”

  “The world?” I said, thinking that didn’t sound like my mom. It wasn’t as if she’d run off to Los Angeles to become an actress. She’d bought a house tucked in the woods, as far from town proper as she could get. “Is that what you call”—I made a sweeping gesture—“everything that’s not here?”

  He nodded, coils of dark hair dangling in his eyes. “This valley is our world. Staying separate is the whole point. If regular people knew what we could do, can you imagine what would happen to us?”

  I pictured glass prison cells. Experiments. People in white coats carrying syringes and clipboards. I shuddered.

  “But it’s more than that,” Cyrus said. “I’ve lived in the regular world, and it just feels wrong. Unnatural. Everything is artificial—the light, the music, the food. Your air is poison. You said it yourself. Millions of people have this ‘asthma’ now, including you. Your words have lost their meaning because you all talk too much, so you can’t even understand each other. When you look at the sky at night, you’re missing most of the stars. You live in an endless march of technology. A relentless forward momentum of progress. But here at Eclipse, our air is clean. Our food is pure. Our needs are simple.” His voice seemed to go a little flat as he added, “We’re happy.”

  I considered what he was saying and nodded in understanding. I often felt like I’d been born in the wrong generation, that I would have fit more comfortably in the sixties or seventies, before the Internet and smartphones and gaming systems and tablets turned everyone into cyborgs waiting to happen. Maybe because I’d never really belonged, I found myself in the role of constant observer. I watched, removed, as the people I went to school with texted more than they spoke, learned code faster than they learned how to write with their own hands, turned away from their physical reality for one that didn’t actually exist. An intangible world of zeroes and ones. There was a pay phone outside a gas station in Rushing, a relic from another age, and once when Blake had stopped there for gas I watched as a girl I knew from school tried in vain to figure out how it worked before finally knocking on my window and asking if she could use my cell because she’d lost hers. It made me sad because at first I’d scoffed at her, and then realized I probably didn’t know how to use the pay phone either, and if I did, I didn’t have a single phone number memorized to call anyone.

  A sudden tremor racked my body, and I felt that internal pinch again, as if each of my organs had simultaneously experienced some kind of vicious spasm. The shuddering sound in my ears, like palpitating wings, ramped up to a low roar.

  Cyrus, watching my expression, seemed to recognize instantly what was happening. He smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “What am I thinking, keeping you waiting while I ramble on? Come on, let’s get you some anima.”

  I looked around. “Where are we going to get it?” I was thinking of the sheep’s head jar containing that white cloud of anima, and all I saw out here were actual sheep. Dread pierced my heart like a cold needle until Cyrus held out his arms and turned in a circle, as though to encompass all we could see.

  “Anywhere,” he said. “Anything living is yours to take.”

  “I don’t want to cull any animals,” I blurted, shaking my head rapidly. “I won’t do that. Ever.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said, a sly smile on his face. He bent and picked a wildflower with a crown of plum-colored petals. “Here.”

  He held the flower out to me. I took it and raised my eyes to Cyrus.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Cull its anima.”

  “But it’s just a flower.”

  “I’m not saying it’s going to tide you over forever, but it’ll be enough. Trust me.”

  He smiled.

  And I did.

  I trusted him.

  Then, before I knew what was happening, I felt that unraveling sensation. Pale veins as thin as thread emerged from my fingers and connected to the wildflower. Its energy—its anima—entered me like a deep breath of clean air after being held underwater. The anima infused and swam through me, chasing away the catharsis symptoms like dust scattered by a broom, before settling in my brain, enhancing my senses. Every color became more vibrant. Secret hues and shades that I’d never known existed bloomed in the sky, a variegated wash of blues and violets and blushes and sun streaks. The smell of the flowers and the earth and even the animals nearby was intoxicating. The sun and breeze on my skin made me sigh contentedly, and the air that entered my lungs tasted like powdered sugar and summer nostalgia.

  I breathed deep. Deeper. Deeper. My lungs had relaxed and my airways were more open than they’d ever been.

  “Better?” Cyrus asked.

  Grinning, I nodded dizzily.

  “Well, all right, then,” he said. “Time to meet the others.”

  KALYPTRA

  When we reached the dining room, I was still enjoying the wildflower anima floating through my veins and bathing my brain, making everything soft and hazy, and at the same time vibrant and alive and more in some fundamental way, like a layer of dullness had been stripped from the world, revealing the beauty beneath. I thought of those camera phone filters that turned the crappiest of photos into works of art. This was like that, only a thousand times better, and encompassing every dimension of my being. Sight. Touch. Hearing. Smell.

  Oh, lordy, the scents in the air. The layers and complexity to every inhalation.

  Inside Eclipse House, the smell of cooking food was so intense and heavenly I almost started to drool. I caught the scent of sugar and mint, baking bread and warm jam, butter and cream and tea, strawberries and peaches. My olfactory senses separated each smell and appreciated it individually before combining them in a mouthwatering medley. I wondered if this was what it was like to be a dog.

  We entered the kitchen, and Stig, covered in flour up to his elbows, saluted us from the massive butcher’s block, shouted an enthusiastic “God morgen!” and then returned to kneading a mass of bread dough. Joanna worked alongside him, cracking brown eggs into a bowl with precise flicks of her wrist, but when she saw me she hit the edge of the bowl too hard and the egg exploded in her hand. She scowled in my direction as she snatched up a towel and wiped away the yellow yolk dripping from her fingers. Beneath the sensory euphoria I was experiencing, I was dimly aware of a twinge of disquiet. Many of the Kalyptra seemed wary of my presence, but Joanna was downright hostile. What had I done to make her hate me so much?

  The kitchen and dining hall were filled with people. When Cyrus and I entered everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me in silence. I shrank under the weight of so many eyes, but a girl with a waist-length, volcanic eruption of lava-colored hair cut through the crowd toward us. She veered past me and planted a wet kiss on Cyrus’s cheek with her cushiony lips.

  “Where have you been all morning?” she asked, batting tawny eyelashes at him. She had curves that would have put a Victoria’s Secret model to shame, and she flaunted them unabashedly in a low-cut dress with bell sleeves that looked to have been
pieced together from several hundred scraps of mismatched fabric. Somehow the look worked on her, but I could never have pulled off so much color, so many different patterns and textures. I was a one-note kind of girl.

  Cyrus jerked his head at me. “Rebekah asked me to keep an eye on our guest.”

  “I bet you enjoyed that.” The girl narrowed her eyes first at Cyrus, then turned to me with her hands on her hips. “She’s pretty. Scrawny, but pretty. We need to put some meat on your bones, Kenna. You’re wasting away.”

  Even through the anima haze, I was coherent enough to be embarrassed at having my body assessed by someone who could have filled out Scarlett Johansson’s dresses. My cheeks burned so hot they probably matched the girl’s cinnamon hair.

  “Cut it out, Illia,” Cyrus said, a note of hostility in his normally cavalier voice. “You’re making her uncomfortable.”

  Was I that obvious? “It’s okay,” I said. I didn’t want to cause any trouble while I was here. The Kalyptra weren’t used to visitors invading their space, and I wanted to be as inconspicuous as a shy ghost if I could manage it.

  Illia was suddenly flustered. “I’m so sorry,” she said to me. “Cyrus will tell you I say whatever it is I’m thinking, even if I should keep my mouth shut. Everyone here is used to me, but, well … it’s been a long time since we had company.”

  “It’s been never,” Joanna put in snidely. She had finished cracking eggs, and now she leaned against the kitchen island with her arms folded, glaring at Illia with those small, oil-drop eyes. They were like snake’s eyes, I realized. Black and beady. And dangerous.

  Illia ignored her. “Welcome to Eclipse, granddaughter of Rebekah,” she said, and then hugged me so tight I heard my ribs creak. But with the wildflower anima enhancing my senses, it felt good to have her body pressed so tight against mine. I found myself hugging her back, relishing the warmth radiating from her skin. Her smell—honey and ginger and lemons—filled my head like a fog. After seven years of keeping people at a distance, I realized how much I’d missed human touch, and this was human touch to the hundredth power.

  “Don’t worry,” she said softly into my ear. “We accept you.”

  I almost melted into a puddle on the floor. I didn’t know these were words I’d been waiting to hear. That I had needed to hear for so long. My mom had told me to hide what I was, and so I did, but every day had been a struggle. A white-knuckle grip of self-control. I was exhausted by restraint. I felt stretched thin enough to rip apart.

  Or I had.

  Now I felt full and buzzing and relaxed all at the same time.

  I felt alive and I felt free.

  Illia untangled herself from my arms and held me back. I could tell by the sympathetic smile on her face that she understood what was going on in my head.

  “Since Rebekah isn’t here yet, I’ll make the introductions,” Illia said, sliding her hand down to mine and squeezing it, which caused a rush of tingling pleasure to swim up my arm. Her touch felt so good I had to fight not to swoon. I wondered dreamily if this was merely the effect of the wildflower anima, or if maybe I had a thing for girls and never realized it until Illia pressed her chest to mine. I knew people around town speculated that my mom was a lesbian. She was beautiful in a scrubbed, unadorned sort of way, and men asked her out all the time, but she always said no.

  The previous summer, I’d worked part-time in Mom’s bakery after she had to fire an employee and didn’t have time to hire someone else. I would have liked to work there more, but one of us had to be home with Erin to keep an eye on her, and since Mom had to make a living that responsibility fell to me. But during that summer at the bakery, I’d witnessed firsthand the way men looked at my mom, and the polite disinterest she showed toward them. It was like she didn’t see them, even the good-looking ones, like they all had the same face, and she didn’t need to look at it to know them.

  “Why don’t you date?” I had asked her at the end of my first day working in the bakery, during which I’d seen her hit on by three different men.

  Her answer was a shrug and an unsatisfying, “I just don’t.”

  “Well, don’t you think our lives might be easier if we had a dad?”

  She had sighed an extraordinarily long sigh. “In some ways, maybe. But then we’d have to let someone new into our lives. Someone who would want to know everything about us. I don’t know if either of us wants that.”

  She was right. I never bothered her about dating again.

  There were too many names and faces for me to remember when presented with them all at once, but some of the Kalyptra were unforgettable. There was soft-spoken Hitomi with her milk-pale, porcelain skin, who stood out from the rest of the sun-browned Kalyptra. In a sweet, girlish voice, she thanked me for coming, as though I’d been invited to tea, and then kissed me on both cheeks before introducing me to Rory, a tomboy with a smoky voice and a thick collection of dreadlocks that hung to her waist with little bells and stones and bits of feather woven into them. There was Sunday, who sported the most glorious thunderhead of an afro I’d ever seen, and whose laugh was so loud and raucous it infected everyone who heard it. Illia referred to her as “the artist.”

  “Of course, there is no shortage of artists at Eclipse,” Illia said. “But everyone knows Sunday is the real prodigy among us. She did the paintings in the hallways, and all of our tattoos.” Illia slipped her dress off one shoulder to reveal a small piece of a much larger tattoo of a moth wing.

  “You did my mom’s, too?” I asked Sunday.

  She nodded, but didn’t elaborate, and I got the impression the Kalyptra may have been instructed not to talk about my mom. Nearly everyone told me I was the spitting image of Rebekah. No one mentioned my mom. I wondered how much power Rebekah wielded over them. She definitely seemed like she was the one in charge, with her imperious tone and her expansive room with the balcony that looked out over the valley.

  I was greeted next by Diego and Yuri, who argued loudly in Portuguese when speaking to each other, but lost their accents completely when talking to anyone else. Though dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, Diego, the older brother, had a dignified elegance about him, like he’d enjoyed a privileged life. He was the only male among the Kalyptra with his hair cut short. He bowed over my hand and kissed it. “Eclipse welcomes you, bela.” Yuri, his hair a mop and his mouth in a perpetually wry smile, possessed none of his older brother’s sophistication. He elbowed Diego aside and, as though in competition, gave an even more enthusiastic—but mocking—bow as he said, “It is an absolute pleasure to meet you, Kenna. You ever need anything, anything at all, I am your man.”

  Illia hooked an arm around my waist and whispered in my ear, “Don’t be fooled by those two. They may flirt with you, but, well … let’s just say you don’t possess the equipment to play their game.”

  “You mean they’re gay.”

  She blinked at me, taken off guard, and then gave me a distrustful look. “Is that a problem for you?”

  “No. Why would it be?”

  Illia put a hand to her forehead as though she’d experienced a wave of dizziness. “Things must have changed quite a bit since my day.”

  I wanted to ask her when that day might have been, but that seemed rude, like asking a woman’s age. Illia looked twenty, but in her eyes she appeared much older than that.

  She shook her head and waved at the air with one hand. “Regardless, there are plenty of other men here for you to choose from.”

  “Oh, no, I have a boyfriend back home. Sort of.”

  “Well, we live by a different set of rules when it comes to fidelity, and while you’re here, you’re one of us.” She glanced at Cyrus. “Truthfully, if you’re going to have a dalliance with anyone at Eclipse, it should be Cyrus.” She reached up, took a lock of my hair, a lock of hers, and began to braid them loosely together. “He’s a very good kisser.”

  I darted a look at Cyrus, who caught my eye and smiled questioningly, as though to ask, Are you okay?<
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  Without losing a beat, Illia went on with the introductions, but I was so rattled I didn’t remember a single name after that.

  The Kalyptra must have been instructed by Rebekah to welcome me with open arms. Whereas when I’d first arrived I’d been treated with outright suspicion, now—with the exception of Joanna—they behaved as though I were their long lost sister. They hugged and kissed and fawned over me, but as the effects of the wildflower anima in me dwindled, their affection began to make me uncomfortable. I missed the intensity of my enhanced senses. I started to tense as I felt the pull of anima swirling inside each person who touched me, the craving to sip at it like a mosquito sucking blood. I wanted to go outside to cull another flower, but I wasn’t sure how to ask to be excused without offending anyone, and I didn’t want to seem like some kind of anima junkie, so I tamped down my craving and forced a smile.

  Rebekah was the last to enter the dining hall. By that time everyone was seated and waiting for her, and a feast lay steaming on the table. Eggs flavored with recently picked herbs, topped with blistered tomatoes and mushrooms sautéed in butter. Fresh goat cheese and jugs of velvety milk. Baskets of apple and berry muffins. Crunchy bread full of seeds and nuts, with butter so rich and sweet it was almost like whipped cream. Berries drizzled with honey and sprinkled with mint. And several pots of tea that tasted like vanilla and lemon and almonds.

  Rebekah made her appearance just as I was about to crack and start digging into the food with my bare hands. I hadn’t eaten since the stale hospital Danish I’d picked at during my interview with Detective Speakman. I’d been so distracted by hunger for anima over the past twenty-four hours that I’d forgotten all about food.

  My grandmother wore a long, white dress just transparent enough to show her lithe, long-limbed figure. Her hair was spooled on top of her head in a messy bun. She flicked a hand at us. “Eat, please. What are you waiting for?”

  She poured herself a cup of tea while the rest of us filled our plates. Rebekah ate sparingly, her knees up under her, revealing bare feet and ringed toes. She sipped her tea, gazing at me as though she were casually observing a new animal that had been introduced to an established family in a cage at the zoo, wondering how I’d get along with the natives. But she didn’t speak to me, or anyone for that matter. She merely watched us. I got the impression there were things she wanted to say to me, but not in front of the rest of the Kalyptra.