The Trap (6 page)

They don’t stop me, don’t utter a word to me. They only pace beside me, their feet mincing along with unnerving calm beside my frantic, crawling body. I bump up against the wall,
spin around. The men—three of them, reedy and swaying slightly as if blown by a breeze—surround me. Their pale skin glows with a sour-milk complexion.

White cubicle curtains hang from tracks on the ceiling, sectioning us off from whatever lies on the other side. I squirm up into a sitting position. In the far corner stands someone tall, broad
shouldered, his face blurry.

“Do not be afraid,” the man immediately in front of me says. Cold, detached, clinical.

“We mean you no harm.”

“You’re safe now,” the third man says. His thin upper lip slips up his row of teeth, exposing a pair of sharp incisors.

Instantly I’m leaping to my feet, my fist connecting with his soft, effeminate cheek. The man collapses to the ground, offering as much resistance as a daffodil. But the other two are on
me in an instant, their speed compensating for their lack of strength.

One of the men is holding a hypodermic needle.

I smack it away. It shatters, its contents—a dark-green fluid—splattering on the wall. I need to escape through the part in the curtains, but before I can get my legs in motion I
feel a sharp prick on the side of my neck. I grab the nearest man by the scruff of his neck, push him against the wall. His shades smack into the wall, crack into two, and fall to the floor.

I feel something dangling from my neck. I reach for it, pull it out. Another hypodermic needle, the syringe fully depressed, a dark-green droplet hanging off the tip of the needle. The man
squirms, trying to escape.

“Where’s Sissy?” I shout, pressing him against the wall, keeping his fangs away from me. “The girl! What have you done with her?”

Face smushed against the wall, the man shakes his head vigorously from side to side, stammering.

“Take me to her!” I shout, my words slurred and thick.

The man begins to turn. He has found a surge of strength, his arms now able to break out of my hold. A wave of dizziness hits me. The man extricates himself from my grip, faces me. The room
tilts, canting at a harsh angle. My legs wobble with sudden weakness. Leering, he shoves me, causing me to stumble and almost completely lose my balance. My vision swims. He hasn’t gotten
stronger; I’ve gotten weaker. Whatever he injected into me, it is working quickly and powerfully.

Then a set of hands clamps down on me from behind. “Do not resist.” This voice is masculine, authoritative. His grip on my shoulders is strong and assured. I turn around, realize it
is the man who just a moment ago was standing in the corner. My legs fail me, and I start falling. He catches me, lowers me to the ground. “We are not
them.
Do not resist. We are not
them.” He speaks these words softly now, with tenderness.

“Father?” I murmur.

But it is not. It is the burly man I’d seen in the catacombs an hour ago, the one who’d spoken to me in the restroom weeks ago. He looks exactly the same as he did back at the Heper
Institute, even wearing the same prissy pair of glasses. Except now he’s dressed not in a tight-fitting tuxedo but in the regal attire of the highly ranked.

“Do not be afraid,” he says gently. “Nothing is as it seems.”

And then I fade out.

G
ENE!
”

I fling my mind upward trying to break through a dome of sedated darkness. The room tilts and spins; it takes a second before everything stills.

I’m in the same sectioned-off cubicle as before. I recognize the same curtains, even see the faint splotch of green on the wall where the hypodermic needle had shattered earlier. I’m
in a bed. My ankles and wrists cuffed to the metal bed rails flanking me. How much time has passed it’s impossible to tell.

“Gene, wake up!” It’s Sissy, right next to me.

The restraints prevent me from sitting up completely. But Sissy’s cot is pushed up against mine, at an acute angle, the head corners touching. Her fingers reach out for mine through the
bars of the railings. I maneuver my hand until my fingers are intertwined with hers.

That’s when I notice. A thin plastic tube is inserted into the crooks of our arms. The tubes lead into transfusion bags hanging on each side of our beds. They’re filled with blood.
Our blood.

“How did you—”

“These cots have wheels on them. I was on the other side of that curtain in another area also sectioned off by curtains. It took me some time, but I was able to swing-push it over. Inch by
inch.” Sweat beads dot her wan face. She looks exhausted.

“They’re draining you of your blood. We’ve got to get these tubes off.”

She shakes her head. “I tried earlier. It sets off an alarm. They came storming in within minutes. Don’t do it. Not yet. We need to talk.”

“Are you okay?”

Her fingers clasp mine tighter. “I think so. Do you think David and Epap are okay?”

“They’re fine,” I say, even though I don’t really know. I try to raise my head, but it feels bloated and heavy. “Who were those men?”

“They’re human. That much is obvious. Else we’d be eaten by now.” A bead of sweat glides down her face. She wants to wipe at it but can’t; her cuffs clang loudly
against the railing. “They know everything about us, Gene. They know we’re the Origin. And they’re going to keep drawing our blood for who knows how long.”

“How many of them are there?”

“I think there’s only four of them. They call themselves the Originators. They’ve been working undercover here for years. One of them, the leader, is pretty high ranking, I
think.”

“We need to reason with them, Sissy. If they’re really one of us, we need to tell them we can escape from here. Us, the kids in the catacombs, and them, the Originators. We can take
the train back to the Mission, then head east from there.”

She shakes her head. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do for hours? But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Why not? Did you tell them—”

“I told them
everything,
Gene. Detail by detail. I left out nothing. I spoke of your father, his instructions, the hang gliders, the Nede River, everything. They just nodded and
stared blankly at me. And continued to draw blood. When I raised my voice and got combative, they . . . shot me with another injection.”

I pull on the restraints, but they feel, in my vanquished state, even sturdier than before.

“You need to know something, Gene.” She turns to me. “When I was telling them everything about the past, the history of the duskers, there were a few things that didn’t
add up.”

“Like what?”

Her jaw clenches in frustration. “I don’t know. If I wasn’t so exhausted and hungry all the time, if I wasn’t thrown into weirder and weirder environments before I can
gather myself, maybe I could put my finger on it. But my head’s spinning, Gene. I can’t collect my thoughts for even a minute.”

Sissy’s suspicion echoes my own. Even back on the train when we were fleeing the Mission, similar questions had troubled me. “What do you think is going on here?”

She pauses. “I don’t know.” Her eyes focus on mine. “But I’m not about to simply lie here while David and Epap are still in the catacombs.” She curls to her
side and with her teeth rips out the tube from one arm, then the other.

Two Originators charge in less than a minute later. They rush to Sissy’s side without speaking, attempt to reattach the needles into her arms.

“Stop moving your arms,” one says in a stern, clinical voice. They try to pin her arms down, but, even restrained, she’s able to break out of the grip of their spindly
arms.

The men stare blankly at her. One of them goes to a phone on the wall. “We need you,” he says. Then he hangs up.

He rejoins the other. They stand solemnly at the feet of our beds, waiting in silence.

A minute later, we hear the door open, then locked. I instantly recognize the broad-shouldered man as he pushes through a part in the curtains. He does not look particularly upset or in a rush.
More bemused, almost apologetic. He’s since put on a velvet frock coat decorated with Palace regalia. Judging from the number of crests and badges, Sissy’s right. He’s highly
ranked.

“What’s the matter?” he begins to ask, then sees the ripped-out transfusion cords. “Oh. Oh, I see.” He strokes his left eyebrow with his right thumb, once,
twice.

“Obviously,” he says, “by now you realize we’re your friends. We’re on the same side.”

I tug at the restraints, making them clang nosily. “You have a pretty low bar for friendship.”

The men scratch their wrists. “He has a sense of humor, this one,” one of them says, monotone and deadpan.

“Where are David and Epap?” Sissy demands.

The highly ranked man ignores Sissy’s question and places his hand on my shin. I try to pull away, but the restraints prevent movement. He strokes my leg, his palm sickly smooth and cold
to the touch. Like chilled plastic. “Seventeen years you lived among them, yet how quickly you revert to heper ways. You’ve let your leg hair grow out. Stubs and prickles of hair
everywhere,” he whispers with naked disdain. “On your arms, in your armpits, even a stubble on your face.”

The other men, fascinated and disgusted in equal parts, also touch my leg with their fingertips, probing, rubbing the short stubs of leg hair, trailing their fingers down my ankle.

“Stop touching me.”

Their fingers pause. They look at their leader. He nods, and they remove their hands. He regards me for a long time.

“Do you remember the first time we spoke?” he says. “Back in the Heper Institute, in the restroom?” His hands move to the bag of blood on the side of my bed. He expertly
seals the bag, careful not to spill a drop, and hands the bloated bag to one of the men. “It was the eve of the Heper Hunt. I was, if you recall, giving you invaluable advice. To let the
Heper Hunt take its course, then use the FLUNS on the other hunters. But you were too smart for your own good, weren’t you?” He titters. “That would have made things
so
much easier.”

He moves over to Sissy’s bed, checks her bag. “And yet, despite it all, here you are. Both of you. Both halves of the Origin, safely tucked away in the Palace. That’s just one
example of your father’s genius. Even when things fall apart, it all somehow seems to work out in the end.”

At the mention of my father, everything in the room seems to still. Everything except my heart, beating fasting now, harder.

“He was the mastermind behind it all, you know. Our leader.” The man glances at me, scratches his wrist. “I can see by your obscenely readable face that you don’t believe
me. Well, doesn’t surprise me. You thought your father only a janitor. But he was so much more. Obviously, he had to keep you in the dark out of concern for your safety.”

I turn my eyes to the floor. I suspected, but never fully knew, the passions hidden in the maze of my father's heart. Not for the first time in the last few weeks, I wonder if I ever really knew
him at all. “Tell me about him,” I whisper. “Tell me everything you know.”

The man studies me with unnerving concentration. He sees the urgency in my eyes, senses my need to know, and draws out the silence. Clearly, he is enjoying this. “There’s a lot to
know. And we have a lot of time. Later—”

“No,” I say. “Now.”

The man stares back, rakes deep scratches into his wrist. “Very well. To show that we truly are on the same side, that we are comrades in arms, I’ll tell you what you want to know.
In bite-size portions for now.” He places his hand on the bed railing. “Your father and I grew up together. Up there in the mountains. The Mission was our home, the only home we’d
ever known.”

His eyes roam across my face. “You look so much like him when he was younger. Your studied gaze, your thoughtful eyes. But I doubt you’re nearly as smart. The kid was a genius. While
the rest of us were romping around the mountains, he preferred his textbooks. He was constantly studying into the wee hours of the night. By the time he was—why, probably your
age—he’d come to believe that a cure for the duskers was possible.”

“The Origin,” I say.

He nods, examines his fingernails. “Fast-forward a couple of major setbacks and not a few frustrating years and your father was ready to lead a team into the metropolis. To collect samples
of dusker fluid, gallons of it, and bring it back to the Mission. It was crucial for his research and experiments. But it was a dangerous operation. Didn’t think he’d get even a single
volunteer. As it turned out, he had to turn away dozens. He had that way with people.”

I nod. So far everything is consistent with what Krugman had told us.

“How large was the team?” Sissy asks.

“About thirty of us. Made up of mostly young men hardy—or foolhardy—enough for the dangerous mission. Women wanted to go, of course, but it was too risky for most of them. The
operation was supposed to take anywhere between a fortnight and a month, and menstrual bleeding was going to be an issue. Imagine having your period in the middle of the metropolis populated by
millions of them.”

“But my mother went,” I say.

He nods. “Along with five other women. They were all in the early stages of pregnancy—two, maybe three months along. That was the one condition. You had to be pregnant, but not
too
pregnant, if you know what I mean.”

“My mother,” I whisper. “She was pregnant with me then.”

For the first time his eyes soften. “She was. They’d recently married, your father and her, and he didn’t want her to go. But she insisted and . . . well, she got her
way.”

“And my mother, too,” Sissy says. “She was part of this group?”

He nods.

“What happened next?” Sissy asks.

“The operation was a total catastrophe. We were so naive and idealistic! We had no idea of the dangers. Everything fell apart, and quickly. Many of us perished that first awful night.
Those who survived—we hunkered down, afraid to come out even in the daytime. That first week, we were just trying to find a way to escape the metropolis and return to the Mission.”