And we’re standing up, together, her hands grabbing at my shirt and pulling it off, my fingers undoing the buttons of her blouse pressed against her skin like barnacles. Under the glow of dying green light, our eyes roam over each other’s skin. My fingers glide across the soft span of her body, searching for punctures, scratches, cuts.
Her hands drift down my right leg, to my ankle. She flinches.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Gene,” she says, her voice husked with fear, “your pants are all torn up down here.”
In the longest two seconds of my life, she peels up the ripped material. Her mouth drops in horror. At the long gashes scratched across my skin, mostly whitish lines where fingernails grazed. But there is one long bloody gash. Where its claws broke skin and cleaved an opening for its contagious saliva to enter me.
Our eyes meet. Then I’m kicking away from her.
“Get away from me!” I shout. “Sissy, run!”
But she doesn’t move, only stares intensely like she’s trying to inject a cure into me by her very gaze.
“Sissy! You have to leave. Before I turn!”
“Gene! Are you?”
“What?”
“Are you turning? I don’t think you are.”
And it’s like I’m struck dumb by her question. I grab my chest as if an answer lies there. But she’s right. I’m not experiencing any of the symptoms of turning that my father drilled into my head all those years ago. No shaking. No sense of my internal organs ripping apart. My skin isn’t burning feverish hot.
“You told us the symptoms always appear within a minute at most. But it’s been well past a minute, and you seem fine.” Her eyes sweep across my body. She stands up, walks over to the front row where I’d seen the spectating elders. The row is empty now, only a few GlowBurns left behind as they’d beat a hasty exit. She picks up a GlowBurn, snaps it.
Green light blazes out.
I don’t flinch or squint. I don’t even blink. The light doesn’t hurt me in the slightest. The opposite, in fact: it is the most radiant, beautiful color I’ve ever not flinched at. The color blurs, and I realize I’m tearing.
I hear the crack of plastic, then liquid is splashed on my face.
“Hey,” I say, “cut that out.” Bright glowing green spots splatter about my face and clothes.
“Sorry,” Sissy says, suppressing a glad smile, “I just had to make sure.” She reaches up, wipes a few glowing beads from my face. Her finger wipes lightly over my cheekbones, resting there for one long second.
“Gene,” she whispers, “you really are the Origin. You were cut, you should’ve turned. But look at you now.” Her eyes glisten with marvel.
All I can do is gaze back, momentarily speechless. The dusker was slavered in its own saliva, its hands and nails covered in drool when it first plunged into the well after me. But perhaps by the time it cut me, water had washed away the saliva. “I don’t know, Sissy.”
“It’s really true,” she whispers as if she hasn’t heard a word. “You’re the one. The Origin.”
I shake my head doubtfully. “Its saliva might have washed away by the time it cut my foot. I mean, that’s a lot of water in that well. If it cut me with fingernails washed clean of any droplets of saliva, then I wouldn’t have been infected. And that could be the reason why I’m not turning. That could be all.”
But she’s still looking at me with wonderment.
“I need to check you,” I say, quickly. “Turn around.” She does, slowly, bringing the wet sheen of her back into the pale green light. My fingers lightly trail over her protruding shoulder blades, drift down the valley of her spine. Her back, curved and smooth like the inside of a shell. My fingers come to rest in the small of her back. I hold still, sensing a shift in her. Her rib cage starts to expand and contract, faster, deeper. She turns her head, regards me from the corners of her eyes over her shoulder.
“You’re okay,” I say, softly. “No scratches.” I pick up her shirt, and she puts it on. “You breathed air into me. How did you know what to do?”
“The Scientist described it to us,” she says. “He was always afraid we’d drown in the pond back at the Dome.” She falls silent; she’s looking at the doors. They’re rimmed with the morning light outside. “It’s not safe out there,” she says. “Nowhere is safe anymore.”
“They were in here,” I say. “A group of elders. Spectating our deaths.”
She nods. “I saw them, too. Why would they do this to us? Why would they want to kill us? I thought the Civilization’s Order would have shielded us from being … killed.”
I pick up my shirt, start wringing it. “We stepped over a line at the station platform. In front of the whole village. We physically attacked the elders, even if it was in self-defense. They couldn’t let that go. Not with all the girls watching. They had to make an example of us, Order be damned.”
“We’ve got to get the boys,” she says, buttoning her shirt quickly. “Then we run into the woods, as far from here as possible. Forget about waiting for the bridge to lower for now. Let’s go.”
I put a hand on her arm. “I need to tell you something. It’s huge.” I recap everything Clair told me. I speak quickly, all the time feeling the urgent need to get back to the cottage, to the boys.
“East of here?” Sissy says, gobsmacked. “The Scientist’s still alive?”
“It’s a lot to digest, I know. But what we need to do now is flee. We can digest and understand later. But now we run, we descend the mountain to where the river flows out and follow it east.”
But Sissy’s no longer listening. Or looking at me. Her eyes are latched onto something just outside the chamber. Skin blanching, she points at the well opening.
The dusker—facedown and unmoving—has floated up to the surface, a lifeless blob. Its black hair is splayed across the surface of the water like cracks in glass. Its talons were caught in my pants, and I’d dragged it through the bottom tunnel and over to the other well. Where it had floated slowly and lifelessly upward.
Sissy moves toward it.
“It’s dead, Sissy.”
“Gotta make sure,” she says, and reaches down. The dusker is waterlogged and too heavy. Sissy drops it on the rim of the opening, and its upper body hangs out like a black, diseased tongue.
With my foot, I nudge its head until its side profile comes into view. Its eyes are closed, mouth open like a gaping maw, the tips of its incisors pressed against its lower lip.
It moans.
Sissy and I leap backward.
Its face begins to give off smoke, thin gray tendrils. It begins to whimper, fingers trembling. It’s the light from the GlowBurn: not bright enough to kill it, but more than enough to excruciate a slow burn on it.
“We need to end it. Destroy it. I’m taking it outside into the sunlight.”
“Sissy, let’s not risk it. Or waste time.”
“I’ll never rest easy knowing there’s a dusker in the mountains.”
“Sissy,” I say, my voice urgent and questioning. “It’s too dangerous. It’ll revive.”
But she ignores me. She bends down and links her arms under the dusker’s armpits. She hoists it out of the slot, then drags it backward, its heels dragging along the ground. But the waterlogged dusker is too heavy. After only a few steps, Sissy loses her grip on it, and it drops to the ground. It grunts lowly.
I pick the dusker off the ground, hoist it over my shoulder. Its head flops against my shoulder blade, its fangs unnervingly close. Wanting to keep its fangs in sight, I flip the dusker around until I’m cradling it. Its face holds an unexpected fragility. Long black eyelashes, in harsh relief against the white face. More smoke rises from its skin, the raw stench of burning flesh filling my nostrils.
We stand before the exit door. Daylight rims in through the edges.
“It might come to. From the pain. Be careful, watch its mouth, its teeth.”
Sissy positions herself next to me, her body pressed against my side.
“I’ve got its arms pinned against me,” I say. “You watch its mouth, its fangs—”
“Got it,” she says.
I grip the dusker tightly against my chest and sprint toward the double doors.
On impact, the doors smack open, banging loudly against the outside wall. Sunlight blinds us, smacking into us like a wall. But we don’t stop; our legs keep pounding the ground even as the dusker starts flopping in my arms, even as its skin starts to sizzle with the singeing glare of the sun. We run as fast and as far as possible from the Vastnarium, from the darkened inside in which the dusker might yet seek refuge.
Bathed in early morning sunlight, the dusker gives a bone-chilling scream. Its jaws start snapping, the sound of marble cracking.
I trip. I don’t know how, if it was over a rock or my own panicking feet, but I’m suddenly in the air. I plummet to the ground, knocking Sissy over, and the hard wintry ground sucker punches me in the gut. I curl up, gasping for air, hardly aware that the dusker has escaped my grasp.
“Gene!”
Incisors fly past me, gritted and grinning. A blur as its sleek body leaps over me, then it is bounding away.
I leap up a half second later and give chase. The dusker is fast, but compromised: already weakened by the near-drowning, it is pummeled by the devastating effect of sunlight. Its speed drops precipitously; then it stumbles, its legs soft as butter in a hot pan, its bones turning to gelatin. The body droops, definition fading quickly as muscle and skeleton carbonize away.
I leap at it, tackling it to the ground. All fight has gone out of it. Dragged by my momentum, it sheds warm lumps of skin and fat on the ground as we skid across. Coming to a stop and lying astride its body, I pin its head down, clamping the slowly snapping teeth away from me. My hands sink into the decaying skull, soft as a boiled egg now.
And then the dusker is all weakness. Not a muscle left to move its limbs, not the desire to live or to eat. Its chest, rising and falling weak as a rabbit’s sigh. It shrivels before me, only its thick raven hair undamaged by the sunlight. It is over.