The Trap (14 page)

It weighed on Ashley June’s mind the whole night at school. When she returned home, the first thing she wanted to do—even before taking off her shades—was give her mother a
hug.

Except she was nowhere to be found.

“Mama?”

Ashley June stood very, very still in the foyer. Her mother was always home when she returned. She’d greet Ashley June in the foyer, help her out of her shoes, and when the door
clicked shut run her hand over her cheek. “Don’t grow up,” she’d often say, squeezing Ashley June’s chubbiness a little.

But today, her mother wasn’t in the foyer. Confused, Ashley June took off her shades. And that is when she heard the voices, hushed and urgent, coming from her parents’ bedroom.
She walked over. From behind the closed door, she heard her mother’s raised voice—high-pitched and panicky, a tone she’d never heard her speak in before. Then came another voice,
and this caught Ashley June by complete surprise. It was her father’s voice.

He was never home so early.

She knocked on the door, but they must not have heard, because they began to speak again, over each other.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Her mother was standing with her arms folded across her chest, her head bent. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed red, and her hair—usually pulled in a tight ponytail—was disheveled.
Ashley June’s father was standing in front of her, listening, an arm outstretched, holding her shoulder. Despite the volume of their voices, his touch on her was tender and comforting. And it
was this last fact that transformed Ashley June’s curiosity into something that bordered on fear.

“Mama?”

Her parents startled at the sound of her voice. They turned slowly until they stood side by side, their arms hanging awkwardly at their sides.

The front door opened. Her older brother was back early from school. The clump of shoes kicked off, the click of the front door closing and locking.

“I’m home!” he declared in his jovial voice. “Practice was canceled!” After a whole night of keeping his voice even-keeled and monotone at school, it was
freedom to be back home. All the pent-up emotions finally released. Their parents allowed a short burst of emotion when they came home, as long as the door was locked and the shutters were down and
they weren’t too loud. And after dinner—for ten minutes and only if they’d completed all their homework—they let Ashley June and her brother play. It was a wonderful time
when they could smile and sing and frown and burp and fart. When they could let it all out.

Her father would not look at her. Then her mother began to do something she had expressly forbidden Ashley June to ever do. She started to cry. Tears rushed to her eyes, lined down her
face.

And before too long, Ashley June was crying, too, for although she did not know why, she somehow knew enough.

A few days later, a man—whom Ashley June had never set eyes on before—arrived sometime between dawn and noon. She spent as much energy staring and trying to
figure out the reason for his visit as she would later—for the rest of her life, in fact—spend trying to erase him from her memory. Through the opened front door, she saw the hot sun
still rising in the hazy, stone-gray skies. The man—who carried his broad shoulders and muscled body with surprising grace—carried a large steel briefcase, which he set down carefully
on the dining table.

He was accompanied by a woman with a little girl—his wife
and daughter, Ashley June surmised. She stared at them. Ashley June’s family never received visitors. But she
noted the beads of sweat glistening on their heads, the sweat stains banding around their armpits, and so she knew they were like her.

She walked over to the little girl. She was carrying an empty tote bag in her tiny hand as if on her way to pick fruit. Shyly, Ashley June reached out slowly and touched the younger
girl’s hair. The girl flinched, gripped tighter her mother’s hand. The girl’s mother squeezed back to let her know it was okay. The girl’s eyes were big and
innocent.

Ashley June let a small smile form on her lips. The tiniest expression.

The girl’s eyes widened with surprise. Then she began to smile in return, tentatively, the corners of her lips curling upward like the margins of burning paper.

“Stop it,” the man barked. He was stricter than Ashley June’s parents. Instantly the young girl’s mouth straightened into a tense line. The man didn’t say
anything more. He went to the table, opened the briefcase.

And that is when Ashley June’s mother quickly took the young girl and her mother into the bedroom. The bedroom Ashley June shared with her brother, where he’d been the whole
morning. This was odd, Ashley June realized. Why hadn’t her brother come out?

But not as odd as what happened next. It was only her father and the other man in the dining room now.

They laid out strange objects on the table, carefully, as if setting the table for a meal. But these weren’t forks and knives and spoons. These were scalpels and needles and other
things she didn’t recognize. They were small things with sharp edges. They frightened her.

Ashley June moved to the corner of the room and stood there.

The men murmured to each other in low voices. Ashley June strained to hear and she caught the sounds of foreign, odd words like
anesthesia
and
bilateral
and
ovaries
. The strange man picked up a glass cylinder with a long needle and dipped it into a clear
liquid. He pulled back a syringe, drawing liquid into the needle. He nodded at her
father.

And her father turned to her.

“Come here, honey,” he said to her.

She took a step forward, stopped.

“I need to tell you something. Come here.” He sat down on the sofa, patted the empty spot next to him.

She thought about sitting in his lap. Sometimes, when he was in a good enough mood and had drunk too much, he let her sit in his lap. He’d bounce her up and down, letting her giggle
and laugh for three seconds. For Ashley June in those moments, his lap became the funnest and safest place to be in the whole world. But she did not sit there that day. She sat next to him. And for
weeks afterward she wondered if things may have turned out differently if only she’d sat in his lap instead.

“Honey, there’s something we have to do,” he said. His hand on her shoulder, usually warm and comforting, was clammy and shaky.

“What, Daddy?”

“You’ll hardly feel a thing,” he said.

“What, Daddy?”

He was quiet and turned his head to the side. Away from her, as if he didn’t want her to see his face.

“You’re getting older,” he said, still looking away.

Ashley June didn’t say anything.

“And when you get older, your body . . . changes. Things start happening beyond your control.”

Ashley June felt her cheeks turn hot. “I get boobs,” she said timidly, quickly, hoping for this moment to disappear. “Mama already told me. She said it won’t happen
for a few more years. And not to worry when it does. It’s natural.”

The strange man tapped on the dining table. It was to get her father’s attention. The man’s broad shoulders hummed with impatience. He flicked his chin at the clock on the
wall.

“There’s something Mama never told you, though,” Ashley June’s
father said. “She never told you about another change that’s going to come upon
your body. Soon. Maybe. We don’t know when exactly, it might not happen for another two, three, five years. But because your diet is almost all meat, it might happen soon. A month, a week.
Tomorrow.” There was a hardness in his voice and a foreign quality to his taut body that made him seem like a different person. “And we can’t chance being caught off guard, having
this . . . change suddenly arrive at school, in the classroom, on the bus, on the streets. In the midst of a crowd, in the middle of the night.”

“What kind of change?”

“Better to do it now rather than later, it’d have to be done anyway. Might as well be now before the change comes.” He was rambling. As if trying to convince
himself.

“What kind of change, Daddy?”

He jolted as if surprised by her presence next to him. “You’ll start to bleed.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. “I’m always careful. Just like you and Mama always tell me,
Be careful not to get any scratches, any cuts,
I—”

“You can’t stop this one. It’s not from a cut.”

“A nosebleed? I know what to do if—”

“No.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to. Not after . . . we do this.”

“Now, Tobias,” the strange man said from the dining room. He had moved all the utensils to the side and placed a large plastic sheet over the table.

“Who is that man, Daddy?” Ashley June asked. It was odd to hear the man address her father by his designation.

Her father paused. “He’s one of us, dear. He works at the Domain Building and he’s very, very smart. He knows a lot about the body and today he’s going to be your
doctor, okay? He’s going to help you be safe. He’s brought his wife. She’ll help him later, if necessary.”

Ashley June stood up. “What’s happening?” She glanced at the closed bedroom door. “Mama? Mama!” she cried out, fear suddenly surging in her. “I’m
scared!” But the door did not open. Her brother, her mother, the little girl, none of them came out. It was silent behind those doors.

The doctor stepped toward Ashley June and her father. The needle in the doctor’s large hand looked ridiculously small and thin, and he carried it with great care.

“You won’t feel a thing, honey,” her father said as if that were the only thing that mattered. His eyes were glistening, but there was nothing beautiful about the tears she
saw welling up. He stood up, and a line of tears coursed down his cheeks.

The two men stood before her.

Ashley June started to shake.

The doctor took a step toward her. Something snapped inside her, and she spun around to sprint away. But his hand grabbed her arm.

She resisted; she did. With flailing arms and kicking legs and biting teeth. They restrained her anyway, her arms and legs pressed firmly down on the floor like a pinned, encased butterfly.
She felt the prick of the needle somewhere below her waist, and then the world went murky and her body went soft and lax.

“You won’t feel a thing, you won’t feel a thing, you won’t feel a thing,” her father kept saying a million miles away.

He was wrong.

She came to. She was lying on the living room sofa. The pain was a smoldering fire within her, affecting even her vision: a film of purple, like a bruise, covered over
everything she viewed. She felt weak. Drained. The air was thick with the smells of ammonia and cleaning agents.

“Mama?” she whispered weakly, each syllable a burden to utter. Tried to speak louder, but her voice was even frailer than before.
She heard the men speaking. Her father.
And the doctor. She glanced over the back of the sofa, saw them by the bookshelf. They were speaking in hushed tones, their bodies hunched.

“Are you serious?” her father asked the doctor.

“Somebody has to go. Those kids can’t survive all by themselves in the dome.”

“Joseph, I don’t know.”

For a long moment, the two men stared at each other, neither folding.

The doctor’s hands clenched and unclenched. Flecks of dried blood dotted his hand. Her blood. “It’s either you or me, Tobias,” he said. “We both know that.
We’re the only two left who can pull off being a scientist at the Heper Institute. And I’m not about to give up my position at the Domain. It’s strategically too vital. Besides,
I’ve almost compromised the security safeguards to the fifty-ninth floor.”

“You can always go back,” her father said. “Even if you did move out to the Institute, you can always go back to the Domain in the daytime.”

“You know what, you’re an idiot,” the doctor lashed back. “There’s no way I’m leaving my family to fend for themselves.”

Her father’s upper lip snarled upward. “Oh, so you’re just going to let the girl fend for herself in the dome? Do I need to remind you that she’s one half of the
Origin? And that she’s only seven, that all the dome adults are dead now, that she’s got no one else around but a bunch of babies? That it’s another ten years before she’s
past the gestation period?”

Indecision flickered across the doctor’s cheekbone. “And do I have to remind you that the other half of the Origin is my son? Who is young, who is prone to making mistakes, who
we keep at home as much as possible, like today. I’m
not
about to up and leave him for weeks, months at a time!”

“He’ll still have his mother—”

“No!”

“Then we go in and grab the girl now. You leave us no choice. We take her back to the Mission with Gene!”

“No!”
the doctor yelled, so loudly her father flinched. “We swore never to do that. If we simply pluck her out, they’ll know, they’ll come after us, all the way
to the mountains—”

“Then go to the dome!” her father said. He stepped forward until his nose was almost touching the doctor’s face. “No one but you can pull it off. Only you can handle
being in their midst, rubbing shoulders with them at the Institute. You’ve proven as much at the Domain. Because you have ice water running through your veins. No one else holds up under
those conditions. Certainly not me. Only you. And deep down, you know that.”

The doctor did not blink, did not soften his expression. He only uttered, “I have my family to consider.”