The Only Ones

by Aaron Starmer

  ALSO BY AARON STARMER

  DWEEB

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Aaron Starmer

  Jacket art copyright © 2011 by Lisa Ericson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Starmer, Aaron.

  The only ones / Aaron Starmer. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After setting off from the island where he has been leading a solitary existence, thirteen-year-old Martin discovers a village with other children who have been living similarly without any adults, after the grown-ups have all been spirited away.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89919-5

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ.S7972On 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010040383

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For William and Randi

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Summer People

  Part I Chapter 1 - The Mainland

  Chapter 2 - The Boy

  Chapter 3 - The Trail

  Chapter 4 - The Church

  Chapter 5 - The House

  Chapter 6 - The Web

  Chapter 7 - The Marble

  Chapter 8 - The Declaration

  Chapter 9 - The Treadmill

  Chapter 10 - The Rube

  Chapter 11 - The Head

  Part II Chapter 12 - The Diary

  Chapter 13 - The Team

  Chapter 14 - The Island

  Chapter 15 - The Skyway

  Chapter 16 - The Tarp

  Chapter 17 - The Supermarket

  Chapter 18 - The Prophecy

  Chapter 19 - The Sleigh

  Chapter 20 - The List

  Chapter 21 - The Alley

  Chapter 22 - The Dragon

  Chapter 23 - The Rifle

  Part III Chapter 24 - The Trial

  Chapter 25 - The Hole

  Chapter 26 - The Trust

  Chapter 27 - The Pilot

  Chapter 28 - The Light

  Chapter 29 - The Lie

  Chapter 30 - The Hospital

  Chapter 31 - The Sequel

  Part IV Chapter 32 - The Knife

  Chapter 33 - The Theater

  Chapter 34 - The Kitten

  Chapter 35 - The Soap

  Chapter 36 - The Scope

  Chapter 37 - The Wristband

  Chapter 38 - The Kazoo

  Chapter 39 - The Luau

  Chapter 40 - The Dream

  Chapter 41 - The Bottle

  The Summer People

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “The yeas have it. The Council has made its decision. He lives.”

  “But he knows too much, Crawford.”

  “That’s precisely why he should live.”

  “What about the other one? The little weakling? We could get the information from him too.”

  “They lost track of him, somewhere west of the mountains. Few people know what he looks like, anyway. He never let anyone inside with him.”

  “How long will it take the apprentices to learn?”

  “Hard to say. Why don’t we call in the expert and ask?”

  “He’ll bring his security.”

  “So? Let him. The decision’s made. Nobody lays a finger on him or any of his people, at least not for now. You do realize we’re still talking about a child, don’t you?”

  “This is different. It’s Martin Maple.”

  The Summer People

  MARTIN MAPLE lived on an island, in a gray-shingled cabin perched on a scrub-choked cliff that plunged down into the ocean. He lived there with his father and a machine. His father was a gentle man who never yelled but also never hugged his boy. The machine was an elaborate bundle of knobs, levers, gears, motors, and propellers, and when it was turned on, it sang out with a comforting whir, but it didn’t do much else, because it wasn’t finished.

  Next to the cabin was a ladder that led down the cliff to mussel-encrusted rocks and a crooked but sturdy dock, where Martin and his father kept a skiff for fishing. They had a small garden that gave them root vegetables and greens, and at the end of a small path was a bigger field for grains and corn. The soil was rocky, but Martin’s father understood how to tame it. There were deer on the island, and Martin and his father set traps for them and ate them. From the sea, they pulled mackerel and cod and lobster, though they were careful not to steal from lobster pots.

  “They might shoot you without a thought,” Martin’s father would say as he pointed to the raincoat-clad men piloting the trawlers that bobbed along the frosty horizon. Not stealing from lobster pots was one of Martin’s father’s rules. He had many rules.

  The air on the island smelled of salt and seaweed and firs, but as far as Martin was concerned, that was how the air smelled everywhere. He had never left the island. His father had never allowed it. When he asked his father what lay beyond the island, the answer was always the same: “Not what we’re looking for.”

  In the cabin they had one book, a dog-eared paperback that Martin’s father had passed along after he had witnessed his son puzzling over the markings that decorated the sterns of boats. The cover was missing, so Martin didn’t know its title, but it was a collection of stories about men traveling to other planets, meeting aliens and doing fantastically strange things. Martin’s father had used this book to teach Martin how to read. When Martin asked if this was what it was like beyond the island, his father said, “No, someone just had an active imagination.”

  The book was about men, but there was one story that featured the line They piled aboard the vessel, fathers and mothers, and all of the children. Martin knew what women were, but he had never heard of mothers.

  “What are mothers?” he asked his father.

  So his father sat him down and had that talk fathers have about men and women and falling in love and playing soft music and turning off the lights.

  “Who is my mother?” Martin asked.

  His father smiled at this and took a moment to himself. When he finally responded, he said, “Your mother doesn’t exist.”

  “She’s dead?” Martin asked.

  His father shook his head and said, “Have you ever seen a bubble taken up by the air from the foam of the sea?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know how it seems perfect? How it floats? You know how all the colors of the world seem to be dancing on its skin?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was your mother. But like a bubble …” He flicked his fingers out as if to pantomime something bursting into nothingness. He left it at that.

  The summer people arrived every year when the days were at their longest. They stayed in tall houses on the other side of the island and came and went on shiny boats with steering wheels and hulking motors or blindingly white sails that reminded Martin of heron wings.

  When the summer people were on the island, there was a special set
of rules. You never spoke to them. You didn’t trap the deer. You stayed close to home. And you never let the summer people see the machine. You would tuck it in the cramped back room of the cabin and you would pull the blinds. You wouldn’t touch it at all for months.

  They seemed like reasonable rules, and Martin followed them as much as a boy could. When he wasn’t fishing or tending the garden with his father, he would hide among the pines and rocks and he would watch the people from a distance, though he was much too scared to approach them. The island had no shops or restaurants, or even roads. The summer people brought their supplies by boat and kept to the trails and rocky shores near their houses. There was never any reason for paths to cross, and Martin’s life went on without incident. That is, until the inevitable showed its face.

  The inevitable was named George.

  Martin was nine years old when he met George. George was nine too, but Martin didn’t know that then. He only knew that George was a summer person and he had long blond bangs and a few large freckles on his face and he stayed in a maroon house with a rowboat in the backyard and a flagpole in the front that rattled when the wind blew.

  “You live here year-round, don’tcha?” George asked Martin when he snuck up on him in a thick patch of blueberry bushes.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to people like you,” Martin whispered.

  “And I’m not supposed to talk to people like you,” George said.

  “What sort of person am I like?” Martin asked.

  “Stranger,” George said.

  “Stranger than what?”

  “Than anyone I’ve ever met.” George laughed.

  It was easy to like George. He was kind and curious and loved dirt and nonsense. It wasn’t easy to see him, though. Martin couldn’t tell his father about this new friendship. It had to be a secret, and the guilt such secrets carried was nearly unbearable. The thrill, however, was unbearable too. And the thrill inevitably won out.

  Late at night, Martin would sneak from his room and make his way across the island until he found himself at his friend’s flagpole. If George had raised a flag that he called the Jolly Roger, it was okay to knock on his window and rouse him from his sleep. Then the two would take off into the woods together.

  Martin introduced George to all the mysterious ways of the island. He showed him the hollow tree where he hid things. He brought him to the rock outcropping where he would climb up and look at stars and watch boats come and go. He taught him how to trap animals.

  In return, George told Martin stories. Martin desperately wanted to know what life was like off the island, and George always satisfied with tales of chaotic schoolrooms and bicycle stunts and older kids who did scandalous things, like smoking cigarettes and kissing with open mouths. There were a million questions Martin could have asked, but staying up late was exhausting, and their time together lasted only an hour or two each night. So he simply let George talk about the things that were happening in his world, and that was more than enough for Martin.

  “Why doesn’t your father let you leave the island?” George once asked.

  “He says there’s nothing for us out there,” Martin responded. “Our destiny is here.”

  “Why doesn’t he let you talk to people? He doesn’t even let you have pets, does he?” George shook his head in disbelief.

  “Losing a pet will break your heart, and you’re bound to lose them all,” Martin said, echoing his father’s words. “And people? People leave. They always have.”

  “Does he lie to you?” George asked gently.

  “Do your parents?” Martin shot back.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  Martin could have told him that he didn’t know, that his father was hiding the truth about her in metaphors and silence. But he wasn’t ready for that yet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said defensively. “Just tell me more of your stories.”

  George and his family left the island at the end of the summer, but he promised Martin he would be back the next year. That autumn, after the last boat of summer people took to the water, Martin celebrated his tenth birthday. Then he and his father pulled the machine out into the yard, where there was room to get at its insides. Like every year since Martin could remember, they went back to work on it.

  All day, every day.

  It was school for Martin. Through the machine, he learned about physics and engineering, electricity, and everything his father had the ability to explain. It wasn’t a particularly big machine. A man and a boy could fit in it, but not much else. Inside, next to a control panel, was a glass door that opened up to a tall and hollow chamber with a small shelf and a round basin at the back. His father said the chamber was the machine’s heart. All the while, the purpose of the machine remained a mystery.

  “It’s our destiny, right?” Martin once asked. “But what does it do?”

  “The less you understand, the better,” his father explained. “For your own protection. It’s a powerful thing, and if it’s misused, the results could be devastating.”

  “I promise I won’t misuse it,” Martin assured him. “And I would never tell anyone about it.”

  “Magic, then,” his father said. “It’s going to help us start over. That’s all you need to know. Life is a path, Martin, and you follow it. Sometimes you follow it blind. Maps are for doubters, and I raised a believer.”

  It was a typical answer from his father, astoundingly elusive, but to a boy of ten, it seemed like wisdom from a life lived. Martin knew only a few details about his father’s days before the island. He knew his name was Glen. He knew he had owned a farmhouse. He knew he had even lived with a circus for a time. “It’s funny,” his father told him with a smile. “I didn’t run away to it. I ran away from it.”

  “Is that where you learned to build the machine?” Martin asked.

  “It’s where I learned about it,” his father said. “It was my father’s circus. There were carnival rides there. Not many, but we had a carousel and a Ferris wheel. Basically things to spin you in a circle. I always helped the mechanic when the rides needed fixing. One day, he gave me a piece of paper. It had small ink sketches of the machine. Showed the inside, showed the outside, not much else.”

  “Did he tell you what it did?” Martin asked.

  “He didn’t know,” his father said. “He’d found the paper folded and jammed in the gears of the Ferris wheel. There was one word written on it. Hope. That didn’t explain much, so he gave it to me, thinking a smart kid with fresh eyes and loads of imagination would figure it out. I gave it a close look, but I didn’t have all that much interest. A few days later, I ran away. I threw the sketches in a trash can somewhere.”

  “But you did figure it out?” Martin asked.

  “Eventually. But not for a long time, not until I’d almost completely forgotten about it. You were just a baby then. We lived in a farmhouse, far away from the island. And I—it’s sad to say—was a desperate person. Completely lost, full of regret. The only thing that saved me from going over the edge was a knock on our door one evening. The mechanic, by that time an old man, had found me. He asked if I still had the sketches. I told him I’d thrown them out. It didn’t upset him, but he gave me a pat on the shoulder and said, ‘I think about that machine every day. I guess it’s better to just imagine what it might have done.’ Then he left.”

  “But you didn’t just imagine, did you?”

  “No I didn’t. The realization hit me like a fist to the jaw: the machine could give us exactly what the paper had advertised and exactly what we needed—hope. I started building it from scraps of my memory.”

  “Where did you get the pieces?” Martin asked.

  “I bought some. Stole others. I started the construction in the farmhouse, but it was trial and error. People thought I was crazy. I was a bit crazy, I suppose. I was also careless. There was a fire. I managed to save you and the pieces, but that’s all. Not the house, not all the other things. We moved to this island, where I could tak
e my time, be safe and deliberate. It was also a place where no one would bother us.”

  “And we have everything?”

  “Almost.”

  Almost was the problem. They had almost everything. But on a rainy spring morning, about a month before the summer people were scheduled to arrive, Martin’s father put on his coat and told him that he had to leave for a while. He had to get the final piece for the machine.

  “Can I come with you?” Martin asked.

  “Someone has to stay with the machine.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Hard to say,” his father said. “Could be a few days. Could be longer. No matter what, I’ll be back for your eleventh birthday. In the meantime, it’s your job to carry on.”

  A few hours later, his father got into the skiff and set out onto the spitting ocean, heading to where the trawlers bobbed.

  Days passed. Martin climbed up to the rock outcropping and watched the horizon. The skiff didn’t return.

  He wasn’t too worried, but as the days became weeks and there was still no sign of his father, seeds of doubt were planted in his mind. How far did he have to travel to find this final piece? Was it a dangerous journey? Could he die along the way?

  It was still months until his eleventh birthday, so Martin pushed those concerns aside and did what his father had told him to do. He carried on. He tended the garden and the field. He mended the frayed wires that transmitted electricity from solar panels to their cabin. He trapped deer and caught fish. He kept the machine clean and polished, and every morning he practiced the procedure of turning it on. In the evenings, when the distractions of survival were furthest from his mind, loneliness would take hold. So he would sit by a lantern and read the book his father had given him, over and over again. It provided more comfort, perhaps, than it should have.

  Finally, when the summer people arrived, he used levers and fulcrums to lift the machine onto dollies, and he moved it to the back room. He spied the Jolly Roger and tapped on George’s window.

  He had thought long and hard about what to tell George. On one hand, George was the only person in the world he could trust, and Martin wanted to express how worried he was about his father. On the other, he couldn’t betray his father’s wishes. The more he thought about it, the more he began to believe that carrying on had nothing to do with surviving. It was all about the machine. And no one else was ever supposed to know about the machine. So he pretended that nothing had changed. The friendship was treated as a secret, relegated to nighttime meetings in the forest.