Epap nods at me, his eyes warm. “We should get a move on,” he says. “It’s a ways back to the Mission. You take the lead, Gene. I’ll take the rear, what do you say?”
I see myself stepping forward, into their midst. I can almost feel their hands patting me on the back, the light dancing in their eyes, the surge of energy in my legs as I lead them back to the Mission.
But I haven’t moved. I’m rooted to the spot. Once again, I stare at the eastern horizon. I feel the pull of a million hands tugging me in two different directions.
“I get to walk behind Gene!” Jacob says, picking up his backpack.
And yet still, I have not moved.
And then Sissy, quiet for so long, speaks. But unlike the others, there is no excitement in her voice. “Gene.” That is all she says, just my name, quietly. Her voice is filled with an unbearable sadness that devastates me. She shakes her head as she looks at me, and in that small movement a thousand hidden words of realization and understanding pass between us.
The boys turn to her, confusion etched into their faces.
“Sissy?” Ben asks. “What’s the matter—”
“Gene won’t be coming with us,” Sissy says, her eyes never leaving mine.
“What? What do you mean?”
Her voice is calm. “East is his destination. It’s the path the Scientist determined for him.”
“No,” David says, his voice thick with emotion. “He’s one of us, he stays with us—”
“He’s the Origin,” she says. “His path is different from ours.”
“Sissy,” Ben says, “he wants to come with us and—”
“Don’t let Gene die,” she says. “Gene is the Origin. He is the cure. He needs to stay alive. He needs to head east. Nothing is more important.”
The boys’ faces turn pale. But their wide eyes and silent quivering lips betray the unwanted acknowledgment that Sissy is right.
“He needs to find the Scientist,” she continues with a determined calmness. “It’s what the Scientist wants, it’s what he designed from the very beginning. We can’t let our personal feelings”—her face hardens like flint—“get in the way.” She gazes at me from the corners of her eyes, and for the first time her voice trembles with conflict and anguish. “And deep down it’s what Gene also wants.”
The boys look at me. And Ben now sees something else on my face, a different expression that causes his lower lip to wobble, his eyes to tear up. “Gene?” he asks, and his question hangs in the air, dangling in the wind.
Sissy moves toward me, her face rigid. “He wants his father. Nothing—and nobody—matters more to him. We can’t deny him that. We have to let him go.” And now she is standing right in front of me, so close I see the cracks in her hardened expression, the soft crevices of ache. “You’d walk to the ends of the earth to find him, right, Gene?”
Behind her, the boys are gazing at me. The sky is a vivid deep blue above them, not a cloud in sight. Ben starts to sob and Epap puts a comforting arm around his shoulders.
“I won’t leave you,” I say.
“You must,” Sissy says. “I won’t let you stay.”
“I’m done with deserting—”
She places her finger on my lips, quieting me.
The sunlight reflecting off the granite dome draws out the deep pools of her irises. I remember the first time I saw those brown eyes, on my deskscreen at school. It was when she picked out the lottery numbers for the Heper Hunt. So many days ago, yet I still remember the qualities those eyes held, even through the digitalized pixels of the screen, of strength and softness both.
And that is how her hand feels on my face. Strength and softness.
“Gene,” she whispers, and her voice at last betrays her. She swallows hard. “Go.” For a moment, her resolute eyes break into shards of hesitation. She pauses, as if to give me a chance to speak. But I say nothing. She closes her eyes and turns back to the boys.
I don’t move. Then, in a movement that seems to take hours, I step toward the cable ladder. Nothing has substance, not the granite beneath me, not my legs, not my body. It feels as if I might get swept up in the next gust of wind, not so much blown away as quickly whittled, bone by bone, into nothingness. I plant my boot on the first rung.
“Gene!” David shouts. “We’ll see you again. One day, okay?”
I nod. He smiles back and I feel my owns lips naturally curl and part in a smile. I did not know this, that smiles could be fashioned out of sorrow. Then I do something my father always cautioned me not to do. I lift up my hand and wave it slowly. They wave back, all of them, with damp eyes.
As if pulled down by the weight of my heavy heart, I step down to the next rung and the next. The sight of Sissy and the boys is replaced by the hard granite wall rushing up before me as I descend down the cable ladder. My foot finds the next rung down and the next and the next, and then I am all alone in the world again.
39
I HIKE HARD and fast. It is better this way, to keep my heart pumping with vigor, lungs sucking for air, mind focused on what lies ahead and not what I’ve left behind. I am a tiny dot gliding across an immense, forgotten land emptied of memory, stuck in a stasis that will never shift.
As the sun begins to descend, my boots strike not hard granite but the soft floor of the forest. It’s colder in the woods, and darker, as if dusk has stolen prematurely into its midst. I keep up the brisk pace, eager to put miles under me.
But the densely spaced trees, and their similarities in appearance, disorient me, spin me around. I look to the sky for guidance, but the tall redwood trees, packed tightly together, reveal only splintered patches of sky and obscure the position of the sun. I don’t even know which way is east. The hue of the sky worries me, its tone no longer blue, but spilled with the bloodred tint of dusk.
Nightfall has begun.
I’m a city boy, unused to navigating the wilderness. I press on, panic cupping the back of my eyes. Ten minutes later, I’m forced to accept what I’ve been denying for over an hour. I’m lost, my inner compass gone kaput. I no longer know if I’m walking toward or away from the Mission. I’ve lost precious time.
With alarm, I note that a few stars are already peeking out in the twilight sky. Night is pouring into the world. Under my feet, right now, in the cavity of the mountain, hundreds of duskers are waiting for the day to recede to full darkness. The thought completely unnerves me. Shortly, the duskers will start scaling the walls of the cave, clinging to vines and other plants, and filter out of the openings through which sun columns beam down in the daytime. They will stream out in countless streams, cloaking the mountain like rising black oil as they race toward the Mission.
I hope Sissy and the boys made good time and are safely back in the Mission. I hope they will be able to convince the girls to get on the train, that they’ll be able to leave before the duskers arrive. As I walk, a growing sense of guilt begins to weigh on me. That I have deserted them. In the same way I abandoned Ashley June, I have betrayed them. I walk harder and faster, needing tiredness to rid me of thought.
A half hour later, I lean back on a tree trunk, breathing hard, eyes wide in the dark woods. I should be on the other side of the mountain by now, miles away, safely out of their path and downwind. Not lost and afraid in the darkness and silence of the woods. Days ago, with Clair leading us, the forest was teeming with wildlife. But now, there is only an eerie silence. As if all the forest dwellers have sensed the arrival of the duskers and have already fled.
When my ragged breathing quiets, I hear the faint sounds of a stream. I shuffle my way toward it, not because I’m thirsty and in need of water but because I remember a stream passes only fifty meters or so from the log cabin. Perhaps it is the same one.
It is a gurgling, fast-flowing brook. I bend down, splash water on my face. The ice water snaps me out of my cloud of fatigue and into the clear expanse of alertness.
An idea formulates in my head. Of a way out. It’s not perfect; far from it actually. But as the temperature plummets around me, the cold creeping down the nape of my neck, I realize that not only is this a viable method of escape, it is the only one. I hitch up the backpack, tighten the straps, and run alongside the river. Eyes peeled for the cabin.
Because inside the cabin is my father’s hang glider.
I almost run right by the cabin. A single wail is what saves me. It is flung up into the night sky, unnervingly close. It stops me in my tracks. And that’s when I see it. Not the log cabin, not at first, only a clearing. Within seconds I’m sprinting across the clearing and onto the front porch of the cabin.
As I turn the knob, a chorus of other cries, masculine and feline, rises into the sky, a pitched yearning to their joined voices. Thin cloud lines, dyed red from the setting sun, take on the appearance of deep bloody gashes. I stare at the woods encircling the clearing. No movement. East of me, the clearing falls away into a sudden cliff, a sheer drop. A dark wind blows across it. That’s where my father took off with the hang glider. Right off the cliff, into the skies, soaring above the Vast. And that’s where I’ll need to take off.
It’s dark inside the cabin. I take out a GlowBurn from my bag, snap it. The hang glider is right where I remember it, hung up on the bedroom wall. Now that I know I need to fly it, it seems both flimsier and more cumbersome at the same time. I examine it, trying to make out a method behind the madness of straps and bars. None of it makes any sense at all. There has to be something else. And then I remember. I open the chest of clothes, take out the odd-looking vest I’d seen days earlier. I unzip it, try to decipher the metallic hooks and cords and carabiners dangling from it. I put on the vest, fitting my legs through harnesses. Now the hang glider makes more sense: hooks attach to counter hooks, carabiners match up with same-colored carabiners.
A scream outside rattles the windows.
The window is a sheet of black now. Night has saturated the skies.
As if to officially usher night in, screams fly across the mountainside. But louder now, scraping against the cabin windows like fingernails across a sheet of ice. I hear faint cracking sounds, like toothpicks snapped—it takes a minute before I realize these are the distant sounds of trees being felled, trunks pulverized by the horde of duskers. The heper odors drifting across the mountain ranges are driving them into a frenzy.