The Prey (9 page)

The whole structure of his face collapses, his pallor washing out. He drops into a crouch.

“Epap?” I say, stepping out from the shadows.

He jumps at the sound of my voice. But instead of scolding me, he presses his index finger against his lips. Then flicks his chin in the direction of the window. Staying low, I sidle over to him.

Somebody is standing in the clearing outside.

A dark lithe figure cut in the white snow. A girl.

Staring right at us.

13

S
HE IS AS
stationary as we are.

A young girl; I put her at thirteen or fourteen. She looks like a wood elf with her pixie-cut bleach-white hair and waifish figure. A black scarf is cinched around her neck, dark like the shell of a black scorpion. She’s expressionless as her eyes swivel from Epap to me and back to Epap again.

“No sudden moves,” I whisper to Epap, trying to keep my lips as still as possible.

“The shutters, we need to close them.”

“No time. She’ll be on us in two seconds. If we give her a reason.”

We stay very, very still.

“What now?” Epap asks.

“I don’t know.”

She takes a step toward us. Pauses. Lifts an arm, slowly, until a finger points directly at me. Then descends down again.

“I’m going out to her,” I say.

“No!”

“Have to. This cabin offers as much protection as a paper lantern. If she wants us, she’ll have us.”

“No—”

“She doesn’t know what we are. Otherwise she’d be at us already. I go out, lure her in. Then we pounce on her.”

“That’s not going to—”

“It’s the only play we have. Now go wake Sissy.
Quietly
.” I push through the front door.

I have lived among them my whole life. I know their mannerisms, can ape them down to their smallest nuances. I walk out calmly, without betraying a trace of fear. As I step off the front porch, I pause at the rim of darkness before stepping into the moonlight, my eyes half-lidded for effect. I let my steps flow smoothly, gliding through the snow, trying not to kick up any puffs of snow. I layer on my face an expression as bland as the moon. My arms hang at my sides without swinging.

And then I remember.

The blood on my hand.

She twitches spasmodically. She is looking at me anew with fervent interest. Her arms crook, her head tilts to the side, her eyes narrowing then widening.

She takes a step toward me, then another, and another, until her legs become a blur.

She comes at me, face beaming brightly, knifing through the snow, through the night air, like a whispered curse.

I steady myself, readying for the pounce. At my neck. They always go for the neck first.

From behind me, through the open door, I hear Epap—“Sissy, wake up wake up wake up!”—his voice as distant as the stars.

And the girl—

Something’s off.

She’s still running. Hasn’t even covered half the distance yet. Her arms still pumping the air, instead of pawing the ground on all fours. Her chest is heaving from exertion, clouds of snow kicking up around her.

And then it hits me all at once. I study her even as she draws closer, my suspicions being confirmed.

But not yet. There’s one last test. And it’s an all or nothing.

I raise my finger, the one dappled in blood.

Her eyes flick to my hand, halting there for one endless second. Then shift back to my face, unmoved.

She’s not one of them. She’s one of us.

“Hey!” I shout, not sure what to say next. “Hey!”

And still she keeps running at me. From behind, I hear the clocking of feet on floorboards, drawing closer.

I spin around, arms raised high. Sissy is sprinting down the hallway; I see her dim shadow, one arm raised, the glint of a dagger about to be unleashed. “Sissy, wait!”

But I’m too late. As she clears the threshold, one foot planting on the front porch, she hurls the dagger. Because I’m standing in the direct path, she has to throw it off to the side, boomeranging the dagger toward the target.

I don’t wait—there’s no time. The boomerang trajectory has bought me three seconds.

I leap forward, start tearing toward the girl. She’s coming at me, I’m going at her. I hear a whirring sound, fading, then growing stronger.

The dagger. It’s arcing back toward her. Toward us.

I fling my body at the girl, my arm catching her across the chest. We go crashing into the snow. Not a microsecond later, the dagger sails over us.

I don’t waste any time. “Sissy! No!”

Sissy’s arm is already rearing back, another dagger perched in her hand.

“She’s like us!
She’s like us!
” I yell.

The dagger, gripped above Sissy’s head, freezes. Then slowly drifts down. The boys emerge from the darkness of the cabin. Their eyes wide, their foreheads creased with confusion.

The girl gets up, dusting off snow. “Where’s the Origin?” She stares at me, then at the others. Her eyes are a piercing ice blue, bereft of even an iota of warmth.

We stare back at her, speechless.

“The Origin, where is the Origin?”

Finally, after another moment of silence, Ben speaks. “What are you talking about?”

And now it is her turn to look at us with utter confusion. “The Origin. You’re supposed to have the Origin.”

Finally, Ben asks the question weighing on all of us.

“Who are you?”

14

O
NLY AFTER WE’RE
back inside the cabin, standing awkwardly around the table, does she tell us.

“Clair,” she says. “Like the air.”

Sissy, regarding her with undisguised suspicion, asks. “Do you live here? Is this your home?”

The girl shakes her head. “Nayden, nark,” she says.

We stare at her. “Excuse me?” Sissy says.

But Clair disregards her, turns to me. “Do you have the Origin?”

“What are you talking about?” I say. “What’s this about the Origin?”

The girl’s small chin quivers. She blinks, runs out of the room. She heads down the hallway, her eyes scanning about, and into the bedroom. By the time we catch up, she is upending Epap’s bag, spilling items of clothing and his sketchbook onto the bed.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” Sissy demands, snatching the bag out of her hands.

“Tell me where the Origin is!” the girl says.

“We don’t know what you’re talking about!” Epap says.

“You do! Krugman said you were coming. Said you’d have the Origin.”

“
Who
said this?” Epap asks. “Who’s Krugman?”

They continue to pepper the girl with questions. But not me. My heart in my throat, I grab the sketchbook off the bed, flip the pages to the portrait of my father. I thrust the page in front of the girl.

“Is this who?” I shout. Everyone stops speaking, turns to me. “Is this Krugman?”

The girl peers at the drawing. Her eyes widen as if with recognition. But she only says, “No, it is not him.”

My heart falls.

“This man who told you about us,” Sissy says. “Krugman. Does he live here?”

She shakes her head. “He lives far away.”

“Then take us to him,” I say.

“Show me the Origin first.” The girl’s voice, though light and airy, hints of stubbornness within. “Then I will take you to him.”

“Take us to him first,” I say, “and then we’ll show it to you.” Ben looks at me quizzically.

She pauses. “Okay,” she replies, but with suspicion in her eyes. “We leave at sunrise.”

“Nayden, nark,” I say. “We leave now.”

Clair studies my face. There are thoughts going on behind her perceptive eyes, mysterious and indecipherable. For a brief second, something like recognition seems to shine in them. “Okay. Get your things. It’s a ways.”

*   *   *

We’re filled with questions as we follow her, but the exertion required to keep up makes it nearly impossible to talk. I can see why she wanted to wait until sunrise. The journey is much longer than I’d anticipated. We hike in darkness past a gurgling stream, then out of the forest. Ascending, we leave the tree line far below, and traverse across a seemingly endless stretch of barren granite. We’re
hours
on these undulating granite domes, their surprisingly smooth surface shimmering under the moonlight like a crowd of bald heads. The view is glorious up here, with waterfalls cascading out of the sheer cliffs and lush coniferous forests cushioning the valley floor, but I’m too fatigued to appreciate it. And sick. My head spins, hot with fever, even as the cold wind shoots shivers through my body. The high altitude does me no favors, either, making me light-headed and dizzy.

At one point, the path hits a steep mountain face. There’s a pair of metal cables drilled into the granite face, which we use to ascend. We pause halfway up to catch our breaths. From our vertigo-inducing vantage point, I see the distant Nede River, gleaming like a silver thread far below us, impossibly small and insignificant. We push on, reaching the top in a state of utter exhaustion. Clair seems unaffected; she stands impatiently while the rest of us suck air. She kicks at loose rocks, her eyes roaming over the satchel bags worn between us. No doubt looking for the Origin, whatever that might be.

Finally, with dawn approaching and our legs shellacked from a long descent, Clair cuts a sudden left, whisking through a narrow slit between large boulders. When we exit the other side, it’s as if we’ve stepped onto a wholly different planet.

Instead of the harsh wind of the mountain face, the tranquility of a redwood forest greets us. We step gladly into it, the green of the grass underfoot, the proud brown of the redwood trees, a dotting here and there of a burst of chrysanthemum flowers. A gentle brooking sound grows louder; when we eventually come across its source—a mountain stream—Clair tells us to drink. The water is amazing: sweet and filled with a crystalline freshness. Our thirst slaked, we push on with eagerness, our feet moving at a faster clip.

“Almost there now,” Clair says.

The sun is breaking through the trees now. More color, more shapes, all of it suffused with warmth and color. Unseen birds chirp in the high trees above us. Rounding a bend, Clair cups her mouth and belts out a yodel. It’s unlike anything we’ve heard before; Ben can’t stop staring at her.

“I’m giving the Mission a heads-up,” Clair says. “Letting them know I’ve found you.”

“‘The Mission’?” I say.

She doesn’t answer. We walk for another ten, fifteen minutes.

And then. The forest suddenly collapses away. We stop in our tracks.

A fortress wall rises above us, several stories high. It is constructed out of huge boulders held together by a fibrous slapdash of concrete, metal, and tree trunks. The dawn sun creeps over the eaves of the mountaintops, and the fortress’s state of disrepair becomes obvious. Only a tower at the corner of the fortress appears to be well-maintained, armored with smooth, dark steel plates. Circling the circumference of this corner tower is a large window, the glass lit up. “That’s Krugman’s office,” Clair says, pointing.

Clair leads us through the opened gates—two hulking metallic slabs six inches thick and the height of three people. Judging from the level of rust on the ground tracks, the gates haven’t been closed in quite some time. For years, possibly. Clair brings her hands to her face again, and the same yodel ululates out.

We step through, and now we’re inside the walls.

“Whoa,” Ben says softly, as if afraid of bursting a mirage.

There is a whole village community inside. Dawn light spreads across the commune, the burnished red light bathing thatch-roofed cottages. The cottages glow with a soft hue, plush as cushions, internally lit by roaring fireplaces. Smoke lifts serenely out of tall ornamental chimneys. A window opens from a nearby cottage; I see the appearance of a head, quickly joined by another.

A brook bubbles in front of us, the water crystal clear. Arching over the brook is a cobblestone bridge, embedded with hand-hewn stones that glimmer in the dawn light, like warm eyes twinkling at us.

More windows open. Heads large and small appear in the window frames. Doors open wide, filling with bodies that spill out.

Ben grabs Sissy’s hand. “Sissy?” he whispers with excitement.

She smiles, squeezes his hand. “I think everything is going to be okay now.”

The people pour out of their homes like colorful goldfish, their clothing bright and cheerful. Neither ambling nor hasty, they make their way toward us, hobbling curiously side to side, their eyes glistening.

“How many people?” Epap asks.

“A couple hundred of us,” Clair answers.

We stop at the foot of the cobblestone bridge; across the other side, the gaggle of villagers do the same. For a minute, we stare at one another. Their faces are rotund and healthy. Many are still in their pajamas, their hair bed-headed. A pink warmth emanates off their cheeks.

A large man steps forward from out of the crowd, his ample stomach lolling about his waist. My heart freezes—but only for a second. Clearly, this bulky, towering man is not my father. The man surveys us for a second, then bends backward, arms crooked at his side, and bellows out a laugh. It’s a hearty roar, full-throated and joyous. He approaches us, his form rising higher as he walks along the arc of the bridge. Halfway across, at the bridge’s apex, he spreads his arms wide, his face beaming.

“Welcome to the Mission,” he says, his voice deep and sonorous. “We’ve been expecting you.” He stops a few steps from us, his presence overpowering, his charisma dripping down on us like raindrops off an umbrella. His large silhouette blocks out the rising sun; in his shadow, the temperature drops a notch. But only for a moment. He quickly shifts position as if realizing. Beaming down at us, his smiling face wavers. He’s trying to figure out who’s the leader of this group. His eyes bypass Epap, slide past Sissy, linger on me, shift back to Epap, then, finally, settle on me. He reasserts his smile. “The name’s Krugman. My extreme pleasure in meeting you. My delectable, indescribable delight!” His hand reaches down and swallows mine, beefy and muscular. But the skin is soft, smooth, effeminate.