by Tiffany Tsao
His heart was so full of happiness, he felt like he was going to explode.
Penelope walked towards him, a bouquet of red roses in one hand, her other hand resting on her father’s arm. The train of her simple white satin gown rustled behind her, and through the delicate veil she was wearing he could make out her full red lips and her enormous sea-green eyes fringed with long brown lashes. He could see she was blushing. His heart beat even faster.
It seemed to take an eternity for her to reach his side, but she eventually did. He lifted her veil and swept it back over her long wavy raven-black hair. Up close, her skin looked smooth and flawless, like it belonged to an exquisite porcelain doll. He reached out to stroke her cheek and she smiled, the pearly whiteness of her teeth almost blinding him with their perfection.
“Penelope,” he sighed.
They held hands and faced the front. The minister was talking now, about marriage, about what it meant to be husband and wife, but he wasn’t listening. All he could think about was how much he loved her, this perfect woman standing at his side. She was his. All his. Nothing could tear them apart. He would do anything for her. And together they would make a life together. They would raise a family. They would grow old. And when they died they would be buried next to each other, side by side.
He realized that this was true happiness, not the so-called “happiness” offered to him so long ago by that complete stranger when he was only three years old. The jolly bearded man was evil; he knew that now. The man had wanted to take him away from his family, from the world where he was born and where he rightfully belonged. The man had promised him adventure and new worlds, but what was opening up a new Territory compared to this? Or discovering yet another new species of plant, or yet another valley, or yet another mountain, or yet another variety of stupid, stupid mosquito? Nothing!!! In that church on his wedding day, in the prime of his life, he thanked his lucky stars that he had refused that cursed invitation that he wouldn’t have even remembered accepting if he had accepted it, which he hadn’t.
The stranger had told him lies about what a wonderful place the More Known World was and how that was the only place he would ever feel at home. He felt at home there, in the Known World, in that church, with his true love and his best friend, surrounded by the friends and family he had grown up with. Even if he didn’t feel that way when he was a little boy, over time he had adapted to the world and it had come to accept him as its own, and now look at him. He was so happy. He was happy beyond his wildest drea—
He felt a tap on his shoulder.
“Not now,” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Sorry, but it’s important. Apparently, Ann and Murgatroyd left Flee Town a few days ago.”
“What!” he roared.
His compatriot held up her hands to calm him down. “Don’t worry. They’re still in the Territory. They’re with the Originals.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “Does our contact know?”
“Of course. That’s who told us.”
“Hmm. Well, it’s not what we planned, but I suppose it might even make things easier.”
The woman nodded. “Yes. And that’s not all. I have genuinely good news too.”
He rose eagerly to his feet. “Is it the lab? Has Rosalyn finished it?”
The woman nodded again, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “She just installed the last piece of equipment an hour ago.”
He clapped his hands. “Just in time!” he squealed in delight. “Now all we need is Murgatroyd. When can we get him?”
“Our contact will let us know.”
CHAPTER 13
“You look awful, but maybe it’s just the light.”
Ann regarded Nutmeg with a bloodshot eye. “It’s not the light,” she said.
“Why don’t you go back to bed?” Nutmeg suggested. She nodded in the direction of her house, where Murgatroyd was still sound asleep. “It’s very early.”
This was true. The sun hadn’t risen, and a lilac sliver of moon still lingered in the sky.
Ann shrugged. “Being in bed won’t help.” Then, before Nutmeg could respond, she asked, “How about you? Why are you up?”
“There’s a lot to do,” said Nutmeg in a tone far too chirpy for what was essentially the middle of the night. “Chickens to milk, crops to tend . . .”
“No one else is awake,” Ann noted.
Nutmeg pointed to her notebook and grinned. “That’s because no one else glimpses.”
This was only Ann and Murgatroyd’s third day among the Originals, not including the day of their arrival, but it was already apparent that Nutmeg’s penchant for “glimpsing,” or sketching, was utterly unique to her. No one else woke up early in the morning to get a few drawings in before the day began, or sat outside in the cold, late at night, wrapped in a chicken pelt, crosshatching leaves by moonlight. No one else sketched between chores; no one else sketched after meals; no one else sketched at all. Only Nutmeg. And though Ann had been mildly curious, up to this point she hadn’t bothered to ask. She had been too preoccupied with more pressing matters, like scouring the island surreptitiously for direct escape routes to another Territory and monitoring Benn for suspicious activity—both to no avail. But now, sitting cross-legged in the still of the morning, with nothing else to do and no one else around, Ann thought she might as well find out more.
“Why do you glimpse?” she asked.
Nutmeg tilted her head thoughtfully to one side as she produced a leather pouch from the folds of her fur cloak. Unfastening the pouch, she took out her sketching tools one by one and laid them beside her notebook: several sticks of reddish rock varying in width, two tiny fur pelts, and a rolled scrap of translucent wing. Ann was beginning to think that Nutmeg wasn’t going to answer when she heard the woman snort.
“It helps me see things for what they really are,” said Nutmeg thoughtfully. “At least, that’s how I feel.”
“Does that have anything to do with why you call it ‘glimpsing’?” asked Ann.
Nutmeg nodded vigorously. “Actually the word in our language is ________.” (And here, she emitted a nonsound that was crinkly, like a chocolate bar wrapper being peeled back.) “It specifically means ‘to see something for what it truly is for a brief moment,’” she explained. “But ‘glimpse’ is how Benn translates it. He says the more exact translation is too long.”
Sensing that Nutmeg wanted to do at least a little of what she had woken up so early for, Ann let her work in peace for a while, watching silently as Nutmeg opened her notebook and applied her talents to an utterly unremarkable twig on the ground. Nutmeg worked quickly, with great precision and concentration, the scrap of wing secured under the heel of her active hand to prevent any smudging of the work beneath. As the sketch took form, it seemed to Ann—even in the dim light, even against the bumpy, vein-crossed backdrop of the pages that were visible through the one Nutmeg was presently drawing on—that the twig was coming to life. Actually coming to life—alight with energy and just as true as what Ann saw when she looked at the twig itself.
“Did you learn how to draw by yourself?” asked Ann just as Nutmeg was dusting off the sketch with one of the tiny pelts. She was genuinely in awe.
“No, my mother’s father taught me. But he taught himself. He was brilliant. Everyone said so. He tried to teach my mother too, and my younger brother and sister. But they weren’t interested or very good at it either.”
“Was he the one who called it ‘glimpsing’? Or rather, the other word you translate as ‘glimpsing’?”
“Yes.”
“Do you do it as well as he did?”
“I do it better,” said Nutmeg.
Ann looked amused.
“What?” asked Nutmeg, blinking. “I do. He said so himself.”
“And why did he glimpse?”
Nutmeg frowned. “More or less the same reason I do: to enhance the true essence of our surroundings. To see things as they really are.”
The word enhance reminded Ann of what Benn had said on the day she and Murgatroyd had arrived. “‘To complement is the highest virtue,’” she murmured. “Does that have something to do with it? Benn said it’s the principle on which Original civilization is based.”
Nutmeg laughed. “That sounds like something Benn would say.”
It was Ann’s turn to frown. “It’s not true?”
Nutmeg thought for a while. “I suppose it could be, but it’s more complicated than that. Benn means well. And, of course, we consider him one of us—just as much as he considers us his own too. But if you ask me, he thinks too much about us as an ‘us.’”
“What do you mean?”
Nutmeg bit her lip and tried to pinpoint in words what she meant. “He can be very insightful, but he always talks about ‘our way of life’ and ‘our civilization’ and ‘our culture’ as if we were one unit. Which we are, of course. We’re a community. But somehow, Benn is more . . . insistent about it. He’s always trying to take everything we do and fit in into the ideas he has about it. He’s the only one that really calls us that, you know, ‘the Originals.’”
Ann looked puzzled. “What did you call yourselves before?”
“Nothing. We were just us. I suppose it’s because there was never anybody else around to define ourselves against. Oh! Though when the first settlers arrived where Flee Town is now—that was before I was born—we came up with a name for them.” Here she emitted a floppy, wilting sort of silence. “It means ‘the Pathetic Ones,’” she explained.
“Why?” Ann asked.
Nutmeg laughed because the answer was so obvious. “Because of how pathetic they were! That’s what the older generation said. They were terrible at finding food, and they spent all their time either sleeping or bursting into tears. That’s why my uncle took pity on them.”
“In what way?”
“He left a pair of chickens behind their house and planted some decent fruit and vegetables nearby. Everyone was very upset with him. Especially since Yusuf and Benn were so opposed to us making any contact with them at all. But my uncle was always far too nice. That’s what my parents said.”
By now, Nutmeg’s references to her relatives were too numerous for Ann to ignore. “Where’s your family now?” asked Ann.
Nutmeg’s answer was what she’d anticipated. “Dead.”
“Of what?”
“Plague. It happens every few generations, and when it does it’s very bad. That’s why there still aren’t that many of us.”
Ann was quiet for a while. “That’s terrible,” she said, not so much commiserating as stating a bald fact.
Suddenly Nutmeg put down her notebook, as if Ann’s comment had reminded her afresh how genuinely sad it was. “It is,” she murmured. “And plague is one of the worst ways to die. It usually affects only the chickens, but when it passes to us, it spreads like wildfire.”
“Do you know what causes it?” asked Ann.
Nutmeg pursed her lips. “Yes and no. It’s caused by little worms that get into the bloodstream and breed. They eat you from the inside out. They can’t be removed, and death is painful. Sometimes the people taking care of the victims will club them if death is taking too long—it sounds awful, but it’s kinder that way.”
Ann was usually stoic in the face of unpleasantness, but even she couldn’t help but blanch.
Nutmeg continued. “How people get infected is still a mystery. Take my family.” She chuckled sadly. “Except for one cousin and me, we’re all dead. And no one has any clue why.”
There was something melancholy about the way Nutmeg said it—not “they’re all dead,” but “we’re all dead,” as if she were not really alive, but like the rest of her kin, gone. Perhaps it had to do with the dreams and the lack of sleep, but for the first time in many years, Ann felt something like a tear well up in her eye.
“You’ve suffered loss too,” observed Nutmeg. “I can see it.”
At this Ann started, as if Nutmeg had pressed on a sore spot or an open wound.
But before Ann could respond, Nutmeg quickly added, “It’s all right. I think everyone does, though some of us more than others. Yusuf certainly did. And Benn did too, even though he tries to be brave about it.”
And then, as if she were being borne along on a current, unable to stop, Nutmeg blurted, “You asked me why I glimpse. I think this has something to do with it too: I want to make sense of what doesn’t make sense, to see past what I can’t see.” She gestured at the drawing she had just completed. “Something happens when I draw—a curtain opening, a fog clearing. Because there’s something about peering into one thing—even if it’s a thing you think you already know, even if it’s a boring thing. Something you can’t find by covering more ground.”
Ann sat up. “That last sentence. Say it again.”
“Something you can’t find by covering more ground?”
“Yusuf said that to me when I was little. Did he say that to you too?”
“No. That’s what I said to him.”
Ann blinked. “What?”
“I said it to him,” Nutmeg repeated. “When I was small, apparently. It was before the plague, when my family was still alive. I was glimpsing a rock and he came up to me and asked what I was doing, so I told him. Then I showed him the rest of the drawings in my notebook, and they were all of the same rock. So he asked me if I didn’t want to draw other things as well, ‘to cover more ground.’ And he said I looked him in the eye and said, ‘There are some things you can’t find by covering more ground.’” Nutmeg chuckled. “He thought it was very profound.”
Ann only half heard this remark. It was only a few days ago when she had told Murgatroyd about the time Yusuf had said those very words to her. Now the memory surged up, rich and full, like a whiff of strong perfume or something chocolate baking in an oven:
Yusuf had been teaching her how to transfer a living, breathing human being across Territories—a skill that only a scant handful of Oddfit Questians had ever mastered, and that included Yusuf and the One. The One had spent weeks trying to teach Ann how to do it. “Try harder,” the One had kept urging, which little Ann had, for if there was anything she was good at, it was that. But her efforts had been without success, and reluctantly, the One had sent a letter to Yusuf requesting his assistance. Ann remembered watching the One as she wrote to her erstwhile colleague: The girl is quite extraordinary. If possible, there should be no gaps in her education.
To avoid having to see Yusuf face-to-face, the One had dropped Ann off outside Yusuf’s abode in Himalaya-Ablaze—his “holiday home,” he jokingly called it when he met Ann. “I live mostly in the Known World now,” he explained.
“I know,” Ann said, perhaps somewhat scornfully. The One was her mentor, after all, and though the One never discussed it, it was all too clear that there were tensions between her and Yusuf.
Over the course of the next few days, little Ann found herself warming to Yusuf in spite of herself. She liked the One very much, of course, and had learned a lot under her tutelage. But Yusuf was gentler—and warmer, even though he didn’t speak very much. By the second day, Ann had pulled off her first transfer, moving Yusuf from Himalaya-Ablaze to Paraguay-Penguin next door. By the third day, Ann was transferring Yusuf effortlessly across as many as three Territories at once.
Instead of urging her to try harder, as the One had, Yusuf told her to do something else. “You are focusing on the wrong thing,” he said gently, one hand on her shoulder. “You are thinking of the route you need to take, the destination you need to arrive at.”
“But isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” Ann asked.
“Yes,” Yusuf acknowledged. “If you’re transferring only yourself. But transferring a living human being requires a different skill. You have to focus on them as well. Everything about them: the colour of their hair and the texture of their skin; the smell of their sweat and how long their fingernails are; how fast their heart is beating and the sound
of their breath. You need to think about their insides too: Their organs. And their minds. And their souls. And their memories. Everything.”
This was the most she’d ever heard Yusuf say in one go. But he had said it naturally and without pause, as if the string of words themselves constituted one living, breathing being that he had to transfer from his mind to Ann’s.
“How am I supposed to know what someone’s organs look like? Or their soul? Or their memories? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“You don’t need to know everything about them. You just need to know that they exist.”
“I don’t need to think about any of this when I transfer other things.”
“Human beings are different. We’re more dense. That’s why we’re so hard to transfer, even when we’re dead.”
The technique had worked. At the end of the last lesson, when it was clear that Yusuf had no more to teach her and that it was time for her to return to the One, Ann summoned the courage to raise the question that had been on the tip of her tongue for a long time but she’d been too afraid to ask: “How come the One wasn’t able to teach me this?”
She practically worshipped the One in those days, as any former victim would worship her rescuer. Until that point, she had always blamed herself for her inability to learn this particular skill. Now it seemed it hadn’t been her fault at all.
Yusuf took his time (he always did) in answering. And at the sound of the first word from his lips, Ann flinched, preemptively, as if in anticipation of a pin bursting a balloon. But the balloon didn’t pop.
“Your mentor is the most brilliant person I know,” Yusuf said. “And so intellectually powerful that she is capable of doing things through sheer strength of will that other people simply can’t. When she tried to teach me how to do it her way, I failed as well.”
Then Yusuf winked. “Actually, my method is cheating—it’s much easier. I came up with it myself.”
This exchange took place in a field of wild wheat, just beyond the Aminah Caves, which housed Yusuf’s abode. It was time for Ann to return to the One, and Yusuf was accompanying her to the transfer point. When they reached it, Ann felt inexplicably sad.
