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.”
Her father snorted. “Whatever happened to the Origin first? That nothing else—not even family—can get in the way? Whatever happened to your priorities?”
“You go to hell.” The doctor pulled his broad shoulders back. “Never question my commitment,” he whispered in a steely voice. “Nobody is more devoted to this cause. You know I place it above all else.”
They spoke more, and Ashley June tried to listen. But strength leaked out of her, and she could no longer hold up her body. She sank back down into the sofa and drifted into an unconsciousness that felt like death.
When she awoke again, the house was filled with the harsh glow of daylight. This was unusual. In the daytime, their house was always shuttered to keep out the dangerous sunlight that could tan or even burn their skin. But now the door was wide-open, and from where she lay she could see the dusk sun, hanging low and bloated over the line of rooftops across the street.
The doctor’s family was leaving. Even though they were on the street outside, she could hear the fear in their frantic whispers. Something was wrong with the horse. Perhaps it was all the blood, her blood—now all safely burned and bleached away—that had unsettled it.
“Maybe you should just stay,” her father said. “You’re cutting it too close.”
The doctor glanced at the sun, assessing. “No, we can make it back. Better that we not deviate from routine.”
They set off, all three of them, the report of the horse’s clip-clops growing dimmer and fading, even as it quickened in pace and rhythm.
Ashley June thought she’d never see that family again. But she was wrong. She saw them only twenty minutes later. She was awakened by an incessant knocking on her door. It was muted, deliberately, meant only for her family to hear and not the neighbors, but she heard the urgency behind it.
She sat up. The pain between her legs made her vision swim. The shadow of her father flew past her to the door. He’d been getting ready for the day, washing up and shaving. A set of fake fangs was gripped in his hand.
“Stop making such a racket!” her father said, his mouth cupped against the door.
“Let us in!” A muffled cry came from outside. It was the doctor’s voice. But it was hoarse now, bereft of composure and dispassion.
Her father was about to unlock the door when he paused. A grayness settled into him like a layer of sediment. He moved to the shutters next to the door and pressed a button to open them.
Ashley June could now see the doctor on the doorstep. Farther down the street a block away was his wife. She was carrying the young girl in her arms. The girl did not seem to be awake. Her head was slung backward, her hair dragging on the ground. Except Ashley June did not remember the girl having long hair. She peered more closely.
It was not hair.
It was blood.
Long strings of blood streaming from an open wound on the girl’s head. Trailing to the ground.
It was dusk. It was past dusk.
The girl’s legs dangled out of her mother’s cradled arms. Something was wrong with one of her legs. It was misshapen and bent at an acute angle.
The man pounded the door on the other side. “Hurry up! It’s almost night!”
“Why did you come back?!” Ashley June’s father responded angrily.
“The horse bucked. Something spooked it, threw us off before running away. A hoof caught my girl, broke her leg. We were too far from our home—we’d never have made it. Returning here was our only option.”
“You should never have—”
And then he froze. As did her father. At a single sound.
Howling. From somewhere across the street. Joined, a second later, by another howl.
The neighborhood was waking up. To the smell of heper blood.
Her neighbors were probably still dangling in their sleepholds, their half-asleep minds unable to comprehend or believe what they were smelling. But very soon, they would rush out of their homes in their pajamas and into the darkening dusk light.
Ashley June, her body still wracked with pain, sat up.
“For heaven’s sake, open the door!” the doctor shouted.
Her father: “No.”
A pause. Then the sound of pounding ensued, only louder, more urgent, even angry. “Open up! They’re coming!”
“No.”
“You can’t do this. You leave us out here, we’re all dead. You hear me? All of us.”
Her father did not say anything. He only pressed his hands against the door, his head hung low like a man pushing uphill against a heavy boulder. Ashley June glanced at her brother’s room. The door was still closed, her brother and mother staying behind it, willfully blind.
“You let us die out here and you lose me! You lose everything we’ve worked so hard for.”
Her father did not reply.
“Think of the Origin! He’s only seven! How long do you think he’ll last alone? Now let us in!” The rest of what he said was drowned out by the sound of pounding. It was her father pounding the door now, not the doctor, three, four times, tortured with indecision.
More howls broke out.
“I can’t let you in!” her father said. “She’ll leave a blood trail right into the house.”
“It’s nothing! Just a scratch. We can stem it. It—”
“No! She’s left a trail. There has to be an explanation for the trail.” And the next words from Ashley June’s father came out lower, the quiet of guilt. “I’ll let you in. But not the girl. Do you understand? Not the girl.”
There was a long silence on the other side of the door.
More howls screeched into the dusking sky.
Ashley June moved to the other side of the sofa. Her legs dragged along, paralyzed like lifeless sacks. From there, she was able to glimpse out the unshuttered window, see more of the street. She observed the doctor hurrying back to his wife and daughter. He pulled his daughter out of his wife’s arms, let the young body fall misshapen onto the ground. The leg, bent at a hideous angle, lay on the ground like a broken twig. The mother screamed, her high-pitched screech joining with the wails of the neighborhood.