The Prey (23 page)

“He must have slept here,” Sissy says, pointing at a hammock hanging in the corner. “A lab rat, researching, investigating, studying around the clock.”

I pick up a notebook. It’s filled from front to back, top to bottom with nonsensical chemical equations and formulas. If there’s any meaning to them, it’s lost on me. They have no more meaning to me than the mad, delusional workings and scribbles of a man pushed over the edge.

“I went through all the notebooks,” Sissy says. “And they’re all the same. Filled with those equations. Do they mean anything to you?”

I shake my head. I walk along the wall, eyes searching. In a tall glass cabinet, endless rows of vials sit in racks, many half-filled with a translucent liquid. “What was he doing in here? What was he working on?”

Sissy’s voice from the other end of the lab is echoic and distant. “I think he came up with the glowing green liquid inside the GlowBurns.” She walks over to me, opens the glass cabinet, and removes two vials. She pours the contents of one vial onto the surface of a work bench, splattering the liquid into a small pool. Then she opens the other vial, pours its liquid content atop the pool. Instantly, the intermixed liquid begins to glow green.

“From what I’ve been able to gather from the notebooks,” she says, “he was working on this liquid for a few years. It’s an alternative-energy light source of some kind.” She picks up a notebook and taps it on her thigh. “I’ve wondered if there was more to it. A hidden agenda.”

I pick up another notebook. More equations, chemical formulas, nary a single sentence with subject, verb, object. Not an iota of a personal pronoun. “That’s it? That’s all he did in here? Worked on some stupid glowing liquid?” I pick up another notebook, flip through it, let it fall to the ground. “There’s got to be more.”

“I’ve been through all the notebooks, Gene. There’s nothing but formulas and equations related to the glowing liquid.”

I move between workbenches, eyes swiveling around, searching. Open a few drawers containing dirty beakers, flasks, grimy plastic goggles, metal rulers beginning to rust. “A sign, a clue, something. It’s somewhere in here.”

“Maybe,” Sissy says. “It’s a long shot, but if I missed something, I thought you might pick up on it.”

I open glass cabinets, pushing aside cylinders and beakers, searching for an etching in the wood benches, a hole in the wall through which a sunbeam might form. But after an hour of searching, there’s nothing but smoothness, blandness, emptiness. An empty shout of silence.

“Gene. We’ve looked through everything.” She bites her lower lip. “There’s nothing here.”

And now I start shoving racks of test tubes off the benches, not caring when they break on the ground, not caring that they shatter into shards on the ground, and now I’m knocking over stools, kicking them out of my way. I’m pulling dusty parkas and scarves off wooden pegs. I’m looking for my name, written, etched, chiseled, on wood, on plastic, on glass, I’m looking for the letter
G,
the letter
E,
the letter
N.
I’m looking for my father.

“Gene.”

I’m grabbing more notebooks, riffling through them, and they offer up nothing but more nonsensical equations and clouds of kicked-up dust that get into my eyes, making me blink, and the backs of my eyelids grate against my eyeballs, drawing wetness. So much time spent to write, so many letters penned. But never once the letters
G
and
E
and
N
used in combination.

“Gene.”

And then I’m grabbing the covers of his notebooks, ripping them into two, the spines cracking as if filled with cartilage, throwing the torn halves at the glass cabinets. And then I’m switching off the light, scanning the dark, hoping for letters and words glowing in the dark, a secret message left for me. But there is nothing but a blank slab of darkness. And then I’m flinging open the door, needing air, eyes shut tighter than my own fists punching the metal frame, my racked body shuddering with an anger that feels like grief and despair both.

“Gene.” And Sissy is next to me, stepping into the small column of bright clear moonlight beaming down on me. It is like a silver tent, and her hair is lit with a sepia haze.

She touches my face. Eyes fixed on mine, fingers lightly tracing my jawline. I feel every pore of her fingertip, feel the softness of her skin turn to the sharp edge of her fingernail as she grazes along my chin, down my neck, over my Adam’s apple.

I press my face against the cold metal door frame. A clean hush falls on us. “There was this night, when I was seven. My father had to go look for a tooth I’d lost at school and he was gone for hours but it felt like forever. I was just a boy and I thought he’d been devoured for sure. But just when I’d given up hope, he came back and I made him promise that he would never leave me. And he told me he never would, he told me that even when it seemed like he was gone for the longest time, he would always come back. He promised he would never leave me.”

I shake my head, let out a pent-up breath.

“Why did he promise only to later abandon me?” I say. “And why bring me here, only to desert me again? Not a single note. Not a single damn word. How difficult could it have been for him to write
Dear Gene
?”

Her hand strokes the side of my head, her fingers gliding through my hair, her skin grazing across the top of my ear.

“If it’s true that I am the Origin, was I nothing more to him than a science project?”

“Gene,” she whispers, her thumb brushing my cheekbones, spreading a dampness. She leans forward, slowly. Our lips touch, silently and softly, like two clouds touching in the sky, coalescing into the softest spot in the universe. I close my eyes.

And then the ground begins to rumble. Ever so slightly, a mere vibration.

We open our eyes, and it is as if my whole vision—and all that matters in the world—is her brown iris with radiating spokes of green. Her pupils, dilated and dark, enlarging, drawing me in. I feel her hands slip down my back.

And then I am grabbing her, drawing her toward me, and our bodies collide and our arms at last find their way around each other. We pull each other in tightly, and the rightness and wrongness of this pelts me until I don’t know what to do but hold her even more forcefully. Our temples, pressed against each other, pound-pound-pound-pound in synchrony. The pulse at her temple is as light as a feather, and the strands of her hair touching my skin feel like soft fingers undoing knots within me.

And then the rumbling becomes more obvious, rattling even the glass beakers around us. She pulls her head away, and I feel landscapes of emptiness whoosh between us.

We pull apart. “What’s going on?” she says.

We step outside. Beneath our feet, the ground hums ever so slightly. But it’s the sound that is drawing our interest: a metallic rattling, the expulsion of a loud hiss. From the other side of the woods.

“The train,” Sissy says.

Something else catches our attention. In the distance, groups of farm girls are shuffling toward what must be the train station. Like black ants, emerging out of their holes, marching dutifully and silently through a meadow dotted with a million glistening raindrops.

31

S
ISSY AND
I
steal along the periphery of the woods where we won’t be so easily seen. On the other side of the forested peninsula, we come upon a large clearing. Sitting in the middle is what looks to be a train station. Dozens of girls are already standing on the two platforms, busy at their tasks. Sissy and I crouch behind a large black spruce at the lip of the forest. Moonlight through the branches falls dappled on the ground.

A train sits between two platforms. Steam pours off the lead engine car still hot from the long journey; it hisses, clicking and clacking as it winds down. At least a dozen cars are strung behind the lead car like black links of a metal chain. Ribbed with arched steel bars, each car has the appearance of a large, hideous birdcage. The bars, too closely set for even a skinny child to squeeze through, still leave the interior fully exposed to the outside elements: rain, snow, wind. And, most crucially, sunlight. In other words, these train cars are built dusker-proof. Even the flooring is meshed steel. Any stowaway dusker catching a ride on this train would find little shelter from sunlight. Within minutes, it would be reduced to a sloppy puddle, dripping through the mesh floor, trailing along for miles between the train tracks.

All manner of items are stored in these cars, from cans and bottles and jars stored in large translucent plastic boxes, to tables and chairs stacked perfectly together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and wrapped with translucent plastic sheets. Bottles of wine and whisky and beer are encased in climate-controlled glass chests with air-ride suspensions.

“Look,” I whisper. On the platform closest to us, a girl picks up a hose attached to some kind of generator. She widens her stance, bends low for support, and depresses a button.

A continuous jet of water shoots from the hose. The girl is pushed back a few steps by the powerful propulsion before righting her stance. As she starts hosing down the contents of the train car, she is joined by a dozen other girls on both platforms. Spread along the length of the train, each girl mans her own hose. It becomes immediately obvious: cleaning the plastic boxes and containers is a task of highest priority. Not a square inch is missed. Even the underside of each compartment is hosed down. A mist of spray cocoons around the train.

Small groups of elders walk down each platform, clipboards in hand. But if they mean to inventory the shipment, there’s no apparent rush. They amble to the last car where a crowd of girls have gathered.

“Let’s move in closer,” Sissy whispers, and we scoot under cover of the trees, then glide along the meadows. Nobody notices us; all attention is fixed on the train. And on the last car in particular. The elders gathered there yell at the girls to stop spraying. The generator is turned off, and the jets of water sputter into drips. Gradually, the misty cloud enveloping the last car begins to dissipate. The ribbed car slowly emerges from the mist.

Sissy takes my hand, squeezing tight.

Inside the compartment, water dripping off the ribbed, metal bars, something moves.

Sissy and I are the only ones who tense with fear. Nobody on the platform shrieks or even flinches. A silhouette shifts, then shuffles to the edge. More shapes emerge inside the last car, moving incongruently with one another like the waves of a turbulent sea. As the hum of the generators dies down, sounds sift through: bleats and squawks and clucks and oinks of fear and fatigue and hunger.

I exhale sharply through my nose. A palpable relief fills my chest as I reach for Sissy’s hand.

“What is it?” she says.

“It’s livestock,” I say. Her eyes sweep questioningly over me, trying to understand. “Duskers love to eat certain animals,” I explain. “Like cows and chickens and pigs. Their appetite for these meats is nothing compared to their lust for our flesh, of course, but still. They’ve driven cows, chickens, and pigs to scarcity. Now, these meats are only available to the upper elite class on the rarest of occasions. The general population
never
gets to consume them; most make do on synthesized, artificial meat products. Sissy,” I say with growing excitement, “duskers would never give up these livestock. Especially not for humans.”

Realization flares in Sissy’s eyes. “Which means whatever’s at the other end of these tracks—”

“More than likely isn’t duskers.” I say, squeezing her hand. “It’s got to be a place filled with our kind. The Civilization is the Promised Land! Jacob’s right: we’ve been worrying over nothing.”

Sissy’s eyes sweep down the length of the tracks, following them as they disappear into the darkness.

I continue speaking. “I thought the meats we’ve been eating here were from the farm. Not shipped in. But now it makes sense. At the rate we consume meat, there’s no way the cattle could be self-sustaining. Most of the meat would have to be brought in.”

But Sissy’s head is turned away down the length of the train tracks. Her jawline ridges out, hard as a granite cliff face in moonlight. She looks at me out of the corner of her eyes, then down to her exposed forearm. At her branded flesh. “I don’t know, Gene,” she whispers, frowning. She bites her lower lip. “Call me overcautious but I still need more.”

We quietly observe the activity on the platform. More elders arrive. There’s laughter and smiles, their pleasure with the shipment obvious. Already, a few of them are opening the alcohol chests, uncorking a few bottles. I hear Krugman’s laughter lifting into the night air seconds before his face glides into view. He’s gripping two bottles by their necks like a man strangling a pair of geese.

The girls work en masse in a silent, coordinated movement: lines of them radiate out from the train station carrying containers, while other girls—empty-handed now—sweep in like a returning tide. They move slowly on account of their diminutive feet but their sheer numbers ensure that progress is steady. They will be finished unloading by dawn, noon at the latest. Then the train will be ready to make its return trip.

Sissy knows what this means. She has to make a decision soon. But her face is twisted with uncertainty.

“I have an idea, Sissy,” I say. I shift position to face her as I place my hands on her shoulders. “I’ll get on the train. But only me. You and the boys stay here. No, hear me out. I’ll go to whatever is on the other end of these tracks. If it’s everything we hope it is, if it is indeed the Promised Land, I’ll return on the next train back and get you and the boys. Then we all leave here together.”

“And if—”

“If I never make it back, you’ll know not to go there.”

She’s still shaking her head but slower as I finish speaking. A brief hesitation ripples across her face—the plan makes sense, and she knows it. But then she stares straight into my eyes. “No way,” she says.

“Sissy—”

“No. You don’t get to play sacrificial hero.”