The Trap (37 page)

“Don’t say that,” she says. Slowly, she pushes her shoulders back. “He instructed us to fly east to meet up with him. He wanted to see us again. Don’t you remember
what Clair told us at the Mission? She said,
This is what your father wanted. For you to fly east. There are machinations at work you can’t even begin to imagine, Gene. You and Sissy have
to fly east
.”

“He said that only to get
us
away from
them
!” I laugh, a maniacal, bitter cackle. Now I understand the truth, the terrible, horrific truth. “If the Hunt
really worked—if it actually brought us both out to the mountains—he now needed a plan that would entice us away. Far, far away.” I slap at the water, see the cut in my hand
vomiting out blood. “That way, if the bomb detonated, it’d be safely removed from the population. The precious, pure, original population—the dusker population.”

Sissy trembles—whether it’s from fear or the cold I don’t know—her already-ashen face paling even more. “He wouldn’t feel that kind of loyalty to the duskers.
Not after—”

“It wasn’t loyalty to
them
! It was loyalty to his own precious principles. Because my father was never about destruction, never about genocide. He was about salvation!
Remember what the chief advisor said? That my father preached there was no higher purpose than to heal the sick, to purify the impure. That there was no calling more noble than to save the duskers?
Except now there was nothing for my father to save, nothing to heal. Except himself. That’s the brutal irony of it. He imagined himself a savior—until he realized he was holding not a
cure but a dirty bomb. Which he had to hurl away as far as possible.”

Sissy recoils, her face flinching. She is resisting, needlessly prolonging the inevitable.

Something warm snakes down my hand. Blood pouring out from the gash. “See this?” I say, holding my bloodstained palm to Sissy. “See this blood? It’s a plague, Sissy.
It’s infection. It’s death. It’s disgusting! It’s
abominable
!”

Sissy shakes her head, eyes wide. All fight is going out of her. Her strength is failing her now, and the wall of denial is collapsing all around her like a house of cards. Her eyes blink
furiously, her legs buckling.

“Look at this blood in me, in you—”

She screams.

It is a long, agonizing wail that echoes off the mountains and ends only when she falls to her knees. Her head slumps against her chest. She starts quaking. Her sodden clothes wrapped tightly
against her pale whittled frame, bunching in folds.

She’s so different from the girl I first met at the dome. Gone is the mischievous light in her eyes, the square way she took me in, the warmth and strength emanating from her bronzed
flesh. The boys constantly roving about her, her arms seemingly always around their shoulders, protecting, guiding. The way she smiled, eyes closed with sheer delight, head tilting back, sunlight
splashing on her cheekbones. The way she sang. The way she kissed me. Her belief in loyalty, that it is the proof of love.

All of these qualities that charm me the most about her, that make my heart ache for her: they are nothing but the side effects of a once-extinct virus, by-products of a food experiment gone
horribly awry.

I see none of those qualities now. Not on this blighted creature, her wet-black hair pressed against sallow cheeks and a wispy neck, bent over as if winded. Sapped of color, embossed cruelly
into a canvas of mercury and silver.

She trembles; she quivers. She is on the verge, her body about to spasm uncontrollably, her eyes about to flood over with tears. My strong, brave Sissy. About to be broken at last.

Then something stirs in me. Something fundamental shifts, tectonic plates within. I speak. With a sudden and furious tenderness.

“Sissy.”

She looks up at me. For a moment, she hesitates, as if unsure she’s reading my face right, hearing my tone properly. And then I am wading toward her, and gently I lift her up, putting my
arms around her.

Quiet again, only our chattering teeth breaking the silence. Then even that sound subsides as we draw tighter into each other, our faces pressing against each other for warmth. The moon lights
up the whole lake, reflects off the snowcapped mountain peak. And now it is silent. Everything is still. Even our bodies have stopped shivering. The lake flattens out, becomes a mirror of the
eternal skies above. We are alone in the whole wide world.

“What now?” Sissy whispers, her lips moving against my neck.

I pull her into me, hold her tightly.

“Let’s go home,” I say.

H
OME
.

Home is not the empty cottages we walk past, nor the room where we take off our wet clothes and stand shivering before the fireplace. It is not the Mission still flush with food and drink and
clothes.

Home is not the metropolis. Because we could make it our home. If we wanted to. If we wanted to turn, it’d be easy enough. Gather up the sun-caked crusts of their melted flesh, boil it
down into a liquid, which we’d pour into an open wound, at night, once we got close enough to the metropolis. If we wanted to.

But Sissy doesn’t want to.

“I am what I am,” Sissy says. She pulls away slightly to look me in the eyes. Firelight dances in her irises. “I could never become them. Don’t ask me to, Gene. I was
born this way. I will die this way. I’m at home in my body.”

I nod, pull the duvet tighter over our shoulders. The fireplace is full with flickering fronds. Shadows dance on the walls.

“And you?” she asks. “What about you?”

I pause. Not because of hesitation or indecisiveness. But only because I want to take in this moment, because it feels like something new is about to begin, that nothing will ever be the
same.

“They lied to us,” I say. “To the Mission elders, the villagers. For generations. Kept us from the truth because had we known, we’d all have chosen to turn to duskers.
And if that happened, we’d have stopped propagating the heper species. And the only way to replenish the supply of hepers would have vanished. Forever.” My voice hardens. “They
fed us lies to feed themselves.”

I lean forward, stare into the fire. “They killed everyone we care about. David. Epap. And Jacob. They killed my father, the man I knew him to be, anyway, the man I adored; that man they
killed. How can I, how could I, possibly become one of
them
?”

Her hand reaches for mine under the duvet.

“They think of us as cattle,” I say. “They think of us as far beneath them, worthless. But when I think about everyone we care about, I don’t see that. I think about
Epap, how he so selflessly gave himself trying to save us. Or Jacob, throwing himself out of the train before he turned. Or you, Sissy, running headlong into their midst of
millions
for
David’s sake.”

A pained nostalgia flares in her glimmering eyes: She is remembering her boys, the years in the dome, the sunshine, the passing seasons, their shared life together. Their nights around the fire,
the singing, the laughter. The tears.

“This is what we are,” I say, and now my hand is clasping hers so tightly I think she might flinch. But she only squeezes back all the stronger. “We are human. We live life to
the hilt. We laugh, we smile, we love, we get our hearts broken. We hold back nothing. We live glorious lives, Sissy. For each other. If these qualities are aberrations, mutations, well, so be it.
I choose them over ‘normal.’ I choose them over the stale, colorless, selfish existence they live.”

I turn to face her; the duvet slips off our shoulders, falls to the floor. Cold air slides around our bodies. But it doesn’t matter. We have enough heat, just the two of us, together. I
take her face in my hands, her beautiful, strong face that is a marvel to me. My vision goes hazy, and I blink away the tears, wanting nothing to blur my vision of her.

And the words, when I say them, are the purest, sweetest, truest, strongest words I have ever spoken.

“I choose you, Sissy. You’re my home.”

W
E BURN THE
whole damn village down. We start with the cottages that store vats of oil and gasoline. After that, it’s like a chain
reaction, one wooden cottage catching fire after the next, combustible as a pile of tinder. Until the whole Mission is ablaze, sending up huge flames that lick the brightening sky.

We watch from the fortress wall. The enormous fire flings flickering light and shadow across the craggy face of the mountain. An easterly wind picks up, and I nod at Sissy. She straps herself
into the hang glider she’d spent the previous day learning to fly. I follow suit, knapsacks dangling off a bar on each side of me, packed with as much food and essentials as we were able to
squeeze into them. I check my pocket again, making sure that pushed securely into it is a piece of paper. I’d found it yesterday in the laboratory, among all the other papers. A letter.
Creased with many folds, with my father’s handwriting.

Ashes and embers fall on us like snow.

She looks at me, her eyes shining bright, her skin radiant.

“I’m ready,” she says. We both are. We’ve done enough eating, drinking, and sleeping over the past few days to fuel us for the long haul.

I look beyond the fortress wall, to the dawn sky. I stare long and hard, the way my father did on this wall countless times. I think of his letter I’d found, now secured in my pocket, on
paper so tattered and creased and small, Sissy and I had missed it for days. The letter was not addressed to me but to a mysterious person named “Tobias.” But the letter spoke of me.
I would rather die than hurt him again.
My father’s words about me, words I will never forget.

I imagine my father standing here not so long ago, all alone on these fortress walls, a broken man. Perhaps his eyes roamed one last time along the line of trees below, both wanting and fearing
the sight of Sissy and me emerging from the forest, survivors of the Heper Hunt. And perhaps he had wept silent, lonely tears as he ran down the ramp and sailed off into the eastern skies on his
hang glider.

How heavy my father’s heart must have been. He had sacrificed everything: his wife, his daughter, and now, he believed, his son. And for nothing. The guilt, the disappointment, he carried
it alone. I can see his heart breaking as he flew, the pieces breaking off like shards and falling. Until there was nothing left. I can see him undoing his straps. I can see him plummeting to the
earth. I can see his hang glider, now unmanned and lighter, blown upward into the skies light as a feather.
I would rather die than hurt him again.

“You’re thinking of your father,” Sissy says gently.

“I am.”

She smiles, just a half smile. “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?” I say softly.

“Maybe it’s not what we think. Maybe he wasn’t sending us afar to simply perish. Maybe . . .”

“Yes?”

“Maybe he just wanted to give us a new start. In the only place he knew we would be free. Far away. A new beginning.” She stares eastward, and when she turns to look at me again her
eyes are fresh and sparkling. “Benefit of the doubt,” she says, smiling fully now.

Not long ago, not far from where we now stand, Clair had told me something about my father. I remember this now. It hadn’t really registered at the time, but her words now resonate within.
My father, she’d told me, after he’d returned to the Mission, would sometimes fly all the way to the metropolis. He did so in the hopes of catching a mere glimpse. Of me.
Even if it
had to be from afar,
she’d said,
way up in the skies.

For years, I had roamed the streets of the metropolis, gazing upward, hoping, with childish yearning, to catch sight of a remote-controlled plane. Hoping for some kind of message from my father.
Anything. But, heartbroken, I’d given up after only a year or two. But my father
had
come. Only he was too late; by that time, except for occasional forays to the fruit orchard, I
rarely went out in the daytime. He flew over the empty metropolis the same way I’d once walked its empty streets. Searching but not finding. I had given up too soon. And my father had come
too late. We missed each other.

“A new beginning,” I say. I stare at the horizon, brimming with the dawn’s glow. “Yes. I’d like to think that.”

She nods, her eyes clear and bright, her hair blowing in the wind. She makes a final adjustment on a strap. “Are you ready?”

I nod, my eyes damp. “I am. I really am ready now.” My heart is thumping, pumping. Then, because I can’t help myself, I untie my straps. Sissy’s eyes widen with pleasant
surprise as I walk up to her. We kiss long and hard, and when we finish we smile at each other, our foreheads still touching.

“East,” she says.

I nod. “Follow the Nede River on the other side of the mountain.”

We kiss one more time, softer this time. Then she is running along the fortress wall, kicking hard and fast. She leaps through the gap in the wall, and I watch as she expertly catches the
current and soars securely upward. As she breaks eastward, her hand lifts up into the air for a second, her fist pumping.

I smile. One last time, I look at the Mission. Then I am running down the fortress, leaping through the gap, sailing through the skies. Within minutes, I’ve closed the distance between us.
We’ll hold this formation. For how long we don’t know. All we know is that so long as the wind is behind us and our hang gliders hold together we’ll keep flying east.

East. Toward that very spot where the sun is rising now, peeking over the distant horizon, radiating streams of orange and red and crimson. And should we find nothing, should we find no one,
should the Nede River disappear, merging into the mythical sea, we will yet keep flying for as long as the wind continues to push us east. We will fly uncountable hundreds, even thousands, of
miles, to the other side of the sea, to the other side of the earth where no dusker would ever dare to even imagine exists. And only then will we land.

And there we will make our home. We’ll build from the ground up. From the two shall spring forth a civilization. Our children, and their children, and their children yet, until our people
are more numerous than the stars in the sky, and the grains of sand in the desert. And our weaknesses we shall turn into strengths. Our abnormalities shall be hewn into battering rams. Our
resistance to sunlight, our instinct to explore, our ability to swim, to love, our intelligence, our will to survive, our emotions, our loyalty. From these aberrations shall arise a people more
dominant than the original species.