The Kingdom

by Jess Rothenberg

  That I was thinking again about final rest, about what it would feel like to be over, to be nothing. When all I wanted was to be something, to be someone.

  Owen had made me want that.

  Nothing could take that away now.

  “Why do you keep them?” he’d asked. He was talking about my buried treasures. I’d shown them all to him; he knew everything now. A pair of broken reading glasses. An expired parking pass. A tiny flamingo key chain a little girl from the Philippines once gave me as a gift. Even the nonsense note from Nia. “All these random objects?”

  “Because they are meaningful.”

  “Meaningful how?”

  The branches swayed overhead in a breeze I couldn’t see, except … I could. This is what love is, I suddenly realized. Something invisible, that makes everything it moves through sway and change.

  A lone leaf shook loose and drifted down toward us, infinitely slowly.

  “Each one tells a story,” I explained to him. “And stories help me understand the world.”

  “I want to help you, too,” he said after a pause. “You believe me, right?”

  Believe.

  “Tell me again,” I said quietly. “Tell me the truth.”

  Owen took a deep breath. “I’m not a maintenance worker, Ana. I’m a Proctor.”

  Proctor.

  The word sent a pressure, no, a pain—as beautiful as it is agonizing—tensing through me. Is this what it feels like? Is pain what it feels like to be human?

  “And what does a Proctor do?” I asked, trying to push the wretched feeling down, even as I craved more answers.

  “I was hired to study you. I was hired to watch you for any signs the pattern could be spreading among the Fantasists, like it is with so many of the hybrids.”

  The hurt intensified, a blade, twisting into my chest cavity. “So all those times. All those talks. Safari Land, the stables, the observatory, even the lagoon. Were all of those interactions with me … on purpose?” I shake my head angrily. “Were all of them planned?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding frustrated. “But also … no.”

  Two things, instead of one.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They were on purpose,” he explained. “I’d been watching you from a distance for months. And I knew you were watching me. At first, I was following orders, finding ways to interact with you and report my findings back to the Supervisors. But then”—he pauses—“something changed.”

  I started to scan his irises, but quickly stopped myself. I didn’t want to rely on my program to tell me the truth. I needed to feel it for myself.

  “What changed?” I asked.

  Owen hesitated, something like shame flickering across his face. “Well, I guess I started to enjoy it. Even, to look forward to it. Talking to you, I mean.”

  “But why?” I pressed.

  “Because. I found you fascinating.”

  My vision narrowed. “You mean because I’m a freak. Because I’m a monst—”

  “No,” Owen cut me off, tilting my chin up until I had no choice but to look into his eyes. “Because you’re amazing, Ana. Because I’ve never met anyone else like you. Your thoughts, your feelings. The way you live, laugh, love…” His brow furrowed, his voice flustered. “Look. I never expected this to happen, you know? I could never have predicted I’d start to feel something … more.” He shook his head. “But I did. And that’s the truth, too.”

  “Is that why I didn’t recognize you?” I asked softly. “Is that why I couldn’t find your face in any of my memories, even though we’d met before?”

  Owen nodded. “They erased me from the Kingdom database before I started the job. Since I’d been to the park as a guest a handful of times, they wanted to ensure none of the Fantasists would ever recognize me.” He brought my hand to his lips, lightly grazing my skin. “I’m so sorry, Ana. I’m so incredibly sorry for breaking your trust. But you have to believe me. That was me you were talking to. Not them. I swear on my sister’s memory.”

  At that, my eyes flooded with tears. The burning rage I’d felt in the tunnel had died down—and for that I was grateful—but in its place I now felt something worse. A kind of gut-wrenching sadness, pressing on my chest. Suffocating me.

  The truth was, I had two choices, and neither of them was good. I could either accept that Owen had lied to me; that he used me as some kind of horrible science experiment engineered by my own Supervisors. Or … I could choose to believe him. Believe he was telling me the truth. Believe that he cared and genuinely wanted to help me.

  Maybe even … that he loved me.

  Of course, I’d already made my choice.

  And yet, this choice—the one in which Owen tried to help me escape to some other place and life—was pointless. Useless. Hopeless. Nia and Eve had proven it, each in their own way. In the end, there was only one way out of the park for hybrids.

  Shutdown.

  Final rest.

  “You can’t save me,” I told him, despair taking hold. “Escape is a lie.”

  Owen shook his head, misty-eyed. “I won’t give up. There has to be a way.”

  I smiled faintly and touched his cheek, remembering something Kaia always says.

  It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

  I leaned into him and felt the wheels of my mind turn. If I was adapting, if I was evolving, my time was running out. Soon—maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow—it would be my turn. The Supervisors would load me into an armored van, power down the gateway, and take me miles away to the Kingdom’s Hybrid Laboratory.

  The place where I was born.

  And the place where I would die.

  “I’ll never escape,” I said quietly, the whisper of the branches dancing all around us in the Graveyard. “They’ll never unlock the gates.”

  “That’s true,” Owen replied. “Unless…” He goes quiet a moment. “Unless they have no choice.”

  My eyes met his. “What do you mean?”

  “If we make it look like you’ve done something terrible,” he added, “something unforgivable … then they’ll have no choice but to remove you from the park for shutdown.”

  Little by little, like a glimmer of starlight cutting through the dark, I began to follow him down a path I had never considered.

  “If we can make it look like I malfunctioned … like I hurt someone, or even killed someone.”

  Owen nodded, his voice steady, strong. “They’d have to shut down the gateway. They’d take you straight to the Hybrid Lab. Like Eve. Like the tiger, even.”

  “But who would I kill?” I exclaimed.

  After a pause, he whispered, “Me.”

  * * *

  We talked about it as the hours ticked closer to my curfew, the darkness around us deepening.

  “You want me to try to kill you?” I asked, pushing him away. “I would never.”

  “I know; it would be pretend. A performance. They cart you out, and then I sneak out of the park and come for you once you’re in the lab beyond the gateway.”

  I felt dizzy. Things were either right or they were wrong. This plan was wrong. No, worse—this plan was dangerous.

  “What if you can’t get to me in time?” I asked. “What if someone sees you? What if it’s like Romeo and Juliet?”

  “There’s a twenty-four-hour waiting period,” he assured me. “A mandatory waiting period—government and military sanctioned. The park isn’t allowed to perform a shutdown before first completing a thorough analysis to figure out exactly what went wrong in the hybrid. All for legal and insurance purposes, to make sure they don’t repeat the same mistake in the next generation.”

  I lowered my head.

  Mistake.

  “I understand what you’re saying. I think.”

  Owen paused. “The only question is how the hell I’d get to the lab without them tracking me.” His brow furrowed. “I’d need to find a different way out of the park, too. A
way to sneak past the gate without being seen. They’ll be looking for me by then.”

  “There’s nothing like that,” I said, an overwhelming feeling of defeat creeping into my muscles, tissues, joints. “Nothing that I know of.”

  We thought in silence for several minutes.

  Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d never met Owen at all. Maybe I was better off not knowing what I was missing. Why couldn’t things have remained as they always were? I thought of Nia. And of Eve. And of a time when days passed simply. Routinely. Without worry. Sadness. Lies.

  “Maybe I should just throw myself in,” I murmured, thinking out loud. “At least then it would be on my own terms.”

  Like what Eve had wanted; what I’d ruined for her, by trying to save her. By telling them the truth.

  Owen’s body went rigid. “Throw yourself … in where?”

  “The fire. The incinerator.”

  His breath shuddered in his chest—I could feel it move through me. I turned to look at him in the darkness. His face was heavy with sorrow. But suddenly, like an unexpected break in the clouds—a beam of sunlight, streaming through a storm—his sorrow turned to illumination.

  “The incinerator.” He clutched my hand, and something unnameable surged up within me. “Ana. That’s it.”

  I shook my head. “What’s it?”

  “We force them to turn it off.”

  I frowned, wondering if maybe Owen had the pattern, too. He wasn’t making any sense.

  “They shut it down every time there’s a big security issue,” he went on. “Like when Eve disappeared.”

  I struggle to process what he’s saying. The park completely shut down their sanitation system? How could that be? But then, I remembered noticing a strange scent in the air the day Eve went missing. A smell … like rot. “What does the incinerator have to do with the gateway?”

  “The Supervisors need the extra power,” he explained. “They always ramp up security along the gateway during lockdowns, so that means shutting off all the ancillary systems.”

  My head snapped up. “Is the incinerator … an ancillary system?”

  “Yup,” Owen said. “The whole thing goes dark. All the way to the reservoir.”

  I stared at him. “We already have a weapon,” I said, holding up his knife.

  He smiled. “You terrify me.” He saw my face then. “I mean, in a good way.”

  “But we’ll need to make it convincing,” I went on.

  “We’ll stage a fight,” he said. “Where they can all see it.” He was getting excited, too.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, more ideas flowing through me, as if I’d been born to do this. Made to do this. “But also: we’re going to need someone’s help.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Casey.”

  “Why would we ever trust that dirtbag?” Owen said, sitting up.

  I sat up, too. “We don’t have to trust him,” I said, smiling now with the certainty of it. “We just have to trust that he’ll do what’s expected.”

  “What are you talking about?” Owen asked me, his eyes trying to read me in the growing dark.

  “We know Mr. Casey likes us Fantasists … more than he should. Right? So we lure him—lure him out so we’re sure he’ll be the one to find me. Covered in your blood.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Just tell him what he wants to hear,” I said. “You’ll think of something.”

  And that was it—that was how the plan was formed.

  66

  THE SEPTEMBER OF THE SAOLA

  ONE YEAR BEFORE THE TRIAL

  Branches lash my arms and face as I run, but I barely feel a thing.

  Did I say you could leave, Owen?

  Not even when I lose my footing and stumble, head over feet. I rub my eyes as I scramble up. My vision is slightly impaired. He went overboard with the dirt.

  But you’re hurting me. Ana, please! Stop!

  “Go!” Owen’s voice is everywhere. “I’m right behind you!”

  Get back here! Don’t make me chase you!

  It’s going to work. It has to work. There is no other way.

  “How fast can you really run?” Owen had asked me breathlessly one week ago, the day I threw his notebook into the fire. “How much weight can you feasibly carry?”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  “Do you think you could carry me? Let’s say I was unconscious. Or, like, badly bleeding. Could you drag me through the woods and down into the tunnels? How long, Ana? How long would it take to get down there and back?”

  Centuries ago, in the forests of Vietnam and Laos, there once existed an animal known by many names. The Vu Quang ox. The spindlehorn. The saola.

  The Asian unicorn.

  This creature, once considered to be an incredibly rare and lucky species, has been extinct for generations. But earlier this evening, the Supervisors briefly powered down our gateway. They beamed with pride. And they transported their newest hybrid, a Formerly Extinct Species, into the Kingdom.

  Tonight, that animal happened to be the saola.

  Which is fortunate given that tonight, we need all the luck we can get.

  We need a unicorn.

  “How would I know? I’ve never timed it.”

  “Could we do it in thirty minutes? How about twenty?”

  My motor is racing. My head is spinning. I can hear him behind me. Branches breaking. Mud splashing. Boots crashing through the brush. “Come on,” he calls, grabbing my hand. “We’ve got this!” We race through the night until we’re just a few hundred feet from the tunnel entrance. Then Owen is pulling off his shirt. “Do it!”

  I open his knife, switchblade out, and begin to cut. I cry out in anger as I work, tearing wildly through fabric, shredding it. Then Owen takes the knife, wincing, swearing as he cuts himself. Superficial cuts along his arms and chest that won’t impair his movement—he’ll need to move, after all, faster than he ever has—but will still provide the blood we need for evidence that I have killed him. “It’s not enough,” he mutters. Then he looks at me. “You’ve gotta punch me, Ana,” he whispers. “Punch me hard. Right in the nose. Make it bleed.”

  “What?” I draw back. “I’m not doing that!”

  “You have to. I can’t punch myself, can I?” Owen looks behind us, checking for guards, but thankfully, we’re still alone. For now. “Come on. Right now. Just do it!”

  I grit my teeth. I ball my fist. “I’m sick of being told what to do!” Then I pull my arm back and swing hard. When my fist meets his face, the force of my punch knocks him to the ground.

  “Ow!” he cries, blood spurting everywhere. “Jesus!”

  “I’m sorry!” I cry, too loudly. “You asked me to do it!”

  “No,” he says with a grin, red staining his teeth. “That was perfect. You were perfect.” He smears the blood all over his shirt and my dress. Then he takes out a prosthetic wound—stolen right from the Nightmare Costume Shop in Dream Land—and sticks it onto his neck, creating a fast and impressive illusion of a slashed throat, the sight of which makes my stomach knot.

  “Okay, Wonder Woman,” he whispers, lying down on the ground. “The clock’s ticking. Do your thing.”

  “Lights!” I locate the pressure point at the nape of my neck. “Camera!” I press down gently, but firmly—the Goldilocks of pressure points—until I feel a small but satisfying click. Right on cue, a red light begins to blink in my direct line of vision.

  Action.

  Breathing hard, my motor thudding so fiercely I wonder if it will break my metal sternum, I take Owen by the arms and drag him as quickly as I can through the dark woods, like a bloody trail of bread crumbs for the Supervisors to find. I make sure to glance down at him regularly, not only to ensure that I’m not hurting him, but to capture footage in case my cameras happen to link back up with the spotty signal. After several minutes, we reach the tunnels and I pull him into my arms with ease, as if he weighs no more than a child. “Please don’t dr
op me,” he whispers as I race him down the stairs.

  A hundred feet.

  Two hundred.

  Three hundred.

  “You have arrived at your destination,” my GPS announces.

  I put Owen down and we are running, racing through the tunnels, the sounds of the compactor blades swinging, a giant scythe slicing through the air before every scrap of the park’s trash sweeps down into the wide-mouthed shoot. A river of garbage flowing into a blazing, blinding fire.

  We reach the bridge, gasping, hands linked.

  Suddenly, I am petrified. “No. Owen, no.” I’m shaking so hard I have to grip onto the rails. “You can’t do this. This is insane.”

  “It’s already done,” he says. “It’s already happening. You have to go, Ana—now. You need to get back to the parking lot so they’ll see you on camera without me.”

  “What about Mr. Casey?” I demand. “Did you tell him what I told you to say?”

  Owen nods. “Everything’s set. I told him you and Kaia would be skinny-dipping at the lagoon. Cameron Casey, Pervert Extraordinaire, will for sure be watching the cameras. Then he’ll see you there alone—he’ll see you covered in blood—and then he’ll be the one to sound the alarm.” He grins. “It’s genius, Ana. The Supervisors will come for you, and in the meantime they’ll finally bust Casey for being the creep he is.”

  “But are you sure there’ll be enough time? For you to get out alive?”

  Owen puts his hands on my shoulders. “Listen, I’ll have plenty of time,” he assures me. “Once they power down the gateway, I’ll have at least thirty minutes, maybe more.” He smiles again. “That’s plenty of time for me to slide down the chute into the central pipeline.”

  About as long as they had the incinerator shut down when Eve went missing; when they needed to redirect all the park’s energy toward heightened surveillance.

  Hence the stink I had noticed. The sulfur. But it hadn’t been sulfur; I just hadn’t realized it then. It had been opportunity.

  “But is it enough time to get to the reservoir?” My voice catches. “What if something goes wrong? What if the fire turns back on … while you’re still in the tunnel?” I think of his artificial valve. How fast can he really run?