The Forsaken (33 page)

Markus doesn’t reply. He just keeps trying to get the fire started.

“If you gaze upon the Monk’s naked face, you’ll be blinded forever by the sight!” the drone continues gibbering. “It is our way. It’s our belief.”

“Okay, fine, whatever,” Gadya says, sounding disgusted. “Do what you want. We won’t look.”

So we turn away to give the Monk his undeserved privacy. I hear latches clicking, as the drone removes the Monk’s mask and starts uttering soft, soothing words.

Right then, Gadya spins back around and leaps at the drone, kicking him off the Monk and pinning him to the ground. The Monk’s mask was in the drone’s hand, and it goes flying across the icy mud.

I turn, startled. Gadya is crouching over the drone with a small knife at his throat. She took it out of her ankle sheath, where it must have been hidden this whole time. “I’ll kill you right now!” she snarls, teeth bared. The drone looks shocked. The Monk curls up, covering his ruined face so we can’t see it.

Markus moves forward. “Gadya, I hate the Monk too, but we might need him later.”

“Stop!” she snaps. When Markus pauses, she turns her attention back to the drone. “You have two choices. I can cut your throat right now. Or I can let you go—if you promise not to stand in my way.”

“The Monk is the one true path to salvation,” the drone murmurs in a well-worn litany. “He is the doorway to life after death. He is the eye of the needle, and we are the threads! The multicolored threads!” He shuts his eyes and starts muttering faster and faster, his lips moving with increasing speed. It takes me a second to realize that he’s praying ferociously, maybe even speaking in tongues.

Gadya leans back and slaps him across his freezing cheek. His eyes snap open. “There’s no time for that nonsense! Do you want to live? Or do you want to die? I know you believe in the Monk, but I can make your death incredibly long and painful. Do you want my knife carving your throat out, slice by slice? Besides, we’ll probably all die out here anyway. Do you really want to get killed right now? By a girl? What would your Monk think of that? At least wait awhile. Maybe you can die a glorious death in battle later on.”

The drone hesitates for a moment.

Gadya presses the knife tight against his throat. “It’s your call.”

I notice that David does nothing to intervene. He certainly doesn’t seem interested in helping the Monk or the drone.
He has obviously been telling the truth about his identity the whole time. No drone or spy would risk their life like he did for Rika.
I just hope that Markus finally sees this.

“I want to live,” the drone finally gasps, as he starts crying. It’s clear the choice is incredibly painful for him.

“Good.” Gadya pulls back her knife and slowly gets up. The drone shuts his eyes. “That’s right. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.”

“Gadya—” I begin, worried.

“I’m just gonna ask the Monk a few questions. He owes us some truth.”

Gadya steps toward the Monk’s cowering body as all of us watch, except for the drone. He remains on the ground, eyes still tightly shut.

I follow Gadya and stand with her, Markus, David, and Rika around the Monk’s shrunken body. For a moment, I think he’s already dead, but then I see his arm twitch slightly.

“Uncover your face,” Gadya instructs, because he still has both hands over it.

“You might not like . . . what you see. . . .” He breathes haltingly, between his fingers. Some blood comes up with each word.

“Do it,” Markus commands.

Slowly, the Monk lets his hands slip away from his face, down to his side.

“No freaking way!”
I hear Gadya gasp.

When I see the Monk’s face for myself, I stumble sideways, like I’ve been punched in the gut.

I go down to my knees. The others aren’t far behind me. All except David, who murmurs, “So the rumors are true.”

I’m not just shocked because the Monk’s face is grotesquely blackened and scarred, which it is. And it’s not because of the mocking sadistic smile he wears on his blistered lips.

It’s because, against all odds, I recognize his face. And I realize why his voice sounded weirdly familiar.

Despite his grievous injuries, an older, deeper mark gives his identity away. A unique diamond-shaped white scar on his left temple.

The Monk is Minister Harka.

THE HOUSE OF ICE

RIKA STARTS WAILING BEHIND
me, in horror and disbelief. We have all seen this man’s face thousands of times back home—on posters at school, on billboards, in government-sanctioned textbooks. It’s the face of the UNA’s totalitarian regime. We all know exactly who this man is, despite his disfigurement.

But it doesn’t make any sense that he would be here on the wheel with us.

“I don’t understand,” I hear Gadya saying, her voice just a gasp.

Markus leans over, gagging.

I stand up again. “How is this possible?” I ask in a barely audible voice. If Minister Harka is here, then who is actually running things back home? I dare to look down at Minister Harka again. No wonder he hid his face all this time.

He doesn’t even have the Suffering, I slowly realize. It’s true his face is deformed—as though someone doused his head with gasoline and then put a match to it—but up close I can see that he doesn’t bear the sores and pockmarks of disease. In fact, what I thought were sores on his arms are actually old scars.

He has been pretending to have the Suffering so that he never had to show his face. I guess that explains how he has lived so long with a disease that usually kills its victims within a few months. It’s not because he has supernatural powers. It’s because he was lying all along.

His eyes catch mine. “I came here . . . six years ago.” He chokes out the words around his cynical smile.

“But how?” Markus manages. His eyes look dazed and far away. Rika has stopped screaming.

“I was condemned and sent here. Just like you,” Minister Harka rasps. He coughs, and more blood bubbles up. He doesn’t have long to live, and he knows it. He doesn’t seem to care, though. Maybe he’s even glad that he can finally reveal his true identity. My mind is filled with a million questions, but there’s only time to ask a few.

“Why did they send
you
here? You run everything! You’re the prime minister!”

“In the end I was disposable. My staff betrayed me when I tried to make changes . . . when I told them the UNA had become too corrupt. I was arrested and tortured by men more cunning than myself. Men who feared I was growing soft. . . . I woke up here on the island.”

“But we saw you back home. You can’t be in two places at once!” Gadya says.

“Lookalikes and body doubles, am I right?” David asks. “That’s what they always said. In my resistance cell.”

Resistance cell?
I’m not sure what he’s talking about.

“Yes,” Minister Harka answers, his smile finally fading. “I always had them. For security. Now they use them as my stand-ins. As human puppets to make people believe I’m still in charge.”

“Couldn’t you get off this island?” I ask, realizing that the lookalikes and body doubles explain why he seemed so ageless. “It’s a government island. As far as we know, you practically designed it! Why didn’t you find the way off? Why did you need us? And why did you start a crazy cult?”

He’s coughing, his chest making strange sounds. “I never even knew this island existed,” he whispers. “It was a secret colony, set up years before. By another regime in Old America, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. For political prisoners. They told me it had been abolished.” His lips curl upward again as more blood seeps out. “I know less about its geography than you do.”

David is nodding.

Minister Harka keeps talking, and we listen, riveted: “When I got here, the prisoners recognized me and burned me alive. They hated me . . . and I deserved it. But others rescued me and kept me alive. Made me part of their encampment. Then everyone started getting sick. Dying. Teenagers began turning up. I pretended to be sick . . . but because I knew so much, and because I never died, they thought I had mystical powers. That I was a supernatural being. I played along—”

Minister Harka is gripped by another coughing fit. I glance over at the drone. His face is a rictus of agony and disbelief. His world has been shattered.

Even though Gadya and Markus are right there, I have to ask about my parents. This is probably my final opportunity to get any answers from Minister Harka. I lean in close. “My name’s Alenna Shawcross.” I glance at David. “David said that my parents got sent here?”

Minster Harka’s eyes are shut. So much blood is coming up now, it’s like he’s hemorrhaging from the inside. “Shawcross,” he breathes. “Of course. It’s you. You look like your mother.” The breath instantly gets caught in my chest.
Minister Harka knew my parents?
“Your parents were both here. They were among the kind ones—the ones who helped me when others would not.”

“What happened to them? Where did they go?”

“Now they are free. They are—”

His body abruptly seizes, as though he’s plugged a finger into an electrical socket. Gadya rushes to my side.

“We have to do something!” I yell at her. “He can’t die! Not now!”

David runs over to him and tries to help.

But I know the life is leaving his body. I can tell. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We try to keep his arms from flailing, and eventually the seizure stops. No more blood comes out. But for him, the long journey is finally over.

Minster Harka is dead.

I can’t accept it.

“Wake up!” I yell at him, straddling his corpse. I’m crying, but my tears come from anger, not sorrow. “Wake up and tell me about my parents!”

I feel hands on my shoulder, pulling me off him. I struggle against them, but I finally get torn from his body. I look up. It’s Gadya. “He’s gone, Alenna.”

I nod. Slowly, I get to my feet. I know that everyone is watching me.

“You never told me about your parents being here,” Gadya says softly.

It all seems so unimportant now. All the little secrets each of us has kept from one another. “I know.”

“Is that the reason you wanted to come on this expedition?” She doesn’t sound suspicious of me like I expected she would. She just sounds tired.

I nod.

She looks at me. “I wish you’d told me that. I thought it was all about Liam.”

The drone staggers up behind Markus.

Gadya and I turn to him.

“You can come with us if you want,” Gadya says. “Now that you know your Monk is a fraud. He tricked all of you, understand? And us, too.”

The drone just nods wanly. He still can’t look down at the body near our feet. Neither can Rika. She’s been rendered mute by shock.

FIVE MINUTES LATER, MARKUS
has somehow managed to get a few branches lit. They emit a dull yellow glow, and little heat. “I hated Minister Harka for so many years,” he mutters. “But it wasn’t even him I was hating. It was some stupid body double.” He laughs grimly. “Now I don’t know who to hate.” He turns to David, as he tends the fire. “How did you know?”

“I first heard the rumor two years ago. My resistance cell in New Providence—” He pauses, looking around. He can barely talk because he’s so cold. He moves over toward the burgeoning fire. “I better start from the beginning, I guess. Back home I’m part of a youth resistance movement. Against the UNA and Minister Harka’s regime. It’s secret, passed on by word of mouth. We noticed Minister Harka never aged, and looked different in certain photos. We started to suspect something like this had to be going on.”

“Wait, slow down. A resistance cell?” Gadya asks him.

“Yes. Trying to sabotage the UNA and restore order instead of tyranny.” He bends in closer to the fire, letting the heat play over him as Markus fans the flames. “I was always on your side. The side of freedom. And there are a whole lot more like me back home.” We stare at him. “That’s how I could move so easily between worlds on the wheel. I’m used to it. Used to acting one way, then another. I was recruited by the resistance cell when I was thirteen, by a friend’s older brother. I’d been putting up antigovernment flyers in my building. Secretly, at night, while my parents were asleep. I knew I’d probably get sent to Island Alpha all along—either because the GPPT is real or, more likely, because I was under surveillance by the government already. I just didn’t know what to do about it, so I figured I’d make the best of it and try to figure out how everything worked once I got here.”

Gadya scrutinizes him. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

He nods.

We stand there for a moment in silence. So much starts to make sense now. “Sorry,” Gadya finally murmurs. “For not believing you. Anyone in a resistance cell is a friend of mine.”

“It’s okay.”

The others chime in with apologies too.

“We need to keep hiking,” Gadya finally says, after we’ve warmed ourselves around the fire for a long time. We’ve swapped some items of clothing around so that David and Rika have dry clothes. It means all of us are even colder, but at least they’re not wet anymore. “We’ll just leave Minister Harka here. There’s no way to bury him. The ground’s too hard.”