She takes it, presses a few buttons randomly. Her shoulders slump.
“Leave it out in the sun,” I say softly, taking it from her. “Maybe it’ll dry out, start working again.”
She shrugs her shoulders disconsolately. Her strength suddenly vanishes; she half-collapses to the ground. She starts to laugh, and it is full of sorrow and torment. “Look at me,” she says. “I’m pathetic. I’ve never felt so weak in my life.”
I sit beside her and we lean against each other. The horses, still harnessed to the carriage, stand withdrawn under the shade of the tree. The sky is a pure cerulean blue, not a hint of a cloud across its wide, invisible dome.
“What now?” I say gently.
She leans her head against my shoulder. “Let’s just sit here. For five minutes. Let’s pretend everything is okay and we’re just resting from a nice, leisurely hike.”
“I think we can do that.”
“Five minutes. We can talk about what to do next after that.”
I inhale the air saturated with the fragrance of ripeness, of grass and fruit and leaves. Feel the soothing warmth of the sun, her body pressed up against my side, how she so perfectly and softly fits into the nook of my body. “Let’s make it ten minutes.”
She nods against my shoulder.
Ten minutes turns to one hour. One hour becomes two, then three. We nap, three, four times, sleep lulling us throughout the afternoon. We eat between naps, feel energy return. And now, in the late afternoon, we’re at last restored. We chew the slices of orange slowly, savoring the taste. There’s more than enough other fruit dangling from the trees, but neither of us wants to get up.
Sissy looks much better, her complexion returned to normal. Alertness again shines in her eyes. “This is where you got your fruit? Your whole life?”
I nod.
She takes in the trees. “So you’d come here with your father?”
“Yeah. Every few weeks or so. Until he . . . went away.”
She looks at me. “He never told you . . . anything?”
“No. Nothing. And then he was gone. Made me believe he’d turned, then perished in the sun.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
I pull a blade of grass from the ground. “It was lonely. A part of me refused to let go. For the longest time, I pretended he just went away somewhere.” I smile sadly. “I used to walk the streets in the daytime hoping to . . . no, never mind.”
“No, what?” She angles her body to face me. “Really.”
“It’s ridiculous, but I used to think he hadn’t died. That he had made it somewhere safe, some place far away. And that he would send me a message to tell me he was okay.” I pull another blade of grass. “Thought he’d send it by a remote-controlled plane. Yeah, I know, it was silly. But I was a little boy, alone for the first time in my life. All I could do was cling on to fantasy.”
“Well, you were right,” she says lightheartedly. “He did just go away.”
I don’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly, putting her hand on mine. “I didn’t mean to make light of what happened.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it.” I give her a quick smile to let her know everything is okay.
“I actually know what it feels like,” she says after a minute. “He did it to me, too.” She stares into the distance, her eyes moistening. “It was the suddenness of it. No good-bye. No explanation. One day here, the next day . . . gone. Like I didn’t even matter.”
I twirl the blades of grass around my finger, snap them. “That’s what I don’t get. I mean, we know why he left me. It was to go to the Institute and protect you.” I turn to her. “But Sissy, why did he leave you? And why only months before the Heper Hunt was to begin?”
She leans forward, arms on her thighs. “I can’t figure it out,” she says.
“No one can. Not even the chief advisor.”
She nods. “And you know what really bothers me as well? Why did your father leave the Mission only weeks before we were to arrive? I know he was having it bad with Krugman, but still. Why not hold out in that cabin for just a little longer?” She exhales in frustration. “Something must have happened for him to jet off so quickly.”
I clear my throat. And when I speak, it’s with a quiet, broken voice. “Maybe it’s obvious.”
“What is?”
“Something caused him to suddenly leave the Institute. And something later caused him to leave the Mission.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe it’s not something . . . but someone.”
Her eyes turn to mine.
“It’s pretty obvious if you think about it,” I say. “Each time, he moves just before a certain someone is due to arrive.” I go on, ignoring Sissy’s shaking head. “Me, Sissy. Before I’m due to arrive at the Institute, he leaves. Before I’m supposed to arrive at the Mission, he leaves. It’s like he’s avoiding me, deliberately trying to make sure we never meet again.”
“Gene—”
“Maybe it’s me.”
“We don’t know that—”
“Certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Gene,” she says, and when I don’t look up to meet her gaze she touches my chin lightly, tilts my head to her. “He loved you. You were precious to him. We can’t go jumping to these conclusions.”
“It adds up, though, doesn’t it?”
She shakes her head, her eyes never wavering from mine. “We don’t know that. There’s a dozen different ways to interpret his movements. And we’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
I stare into the distance. “I want to find him more than ever,” I whisper.
“I know, Gene,” she says. “I know.”
For ten minutes, we watch a scrim of clouds drift across the blue sky. A gentle breeze blows, rustling the tree leaves. Sissy’s stomach rumbles with hunger.
“Wish I had my daggers,” she says. “What I wouldn’t do for some barbequed game.” Her fingers absentmindedly stroke her waist where she usually sheathed her daggers.
“We still got our guns.”
She shakes her head. “No good. Dagger’s the way to go. Clean, efficient.”
“You really think you’d have energy to go chasing prairie dogs? And then make fire?”
She spits a seed out of her mouth. “Good point there.” She spits out another seed, this time with distance.
I spit out a seed from my mouth. It sails only a couple of feet away.
“You’re going to have do better than that if you want to beat me,” Sissy says, a small grin on her face.
“I haven’t even begun,” I say, and take another bite. “Game on.” I spit out a seed. Despite rising high up into the air, it falls less than halfway to Sissy’s seed.
“That’s just pathetic, Gene,” she says, laughing. She slaps the grass. “Even Ben could have done better than that. When he was, like, three.”
“Hey, this is my first time, okay! I haven’t had years of training like you guys!”
She laughs again, in her usual deep-throated manner. “If Epap were here, he’d totally school you. Nobody was better than him. That boy could spit farther than he could throw.”
We both laugh. But the mention of his name is a painful reminder of reality. Our laughter fades away, the brief moment of lightness over.
“He never had a chance, did he?” she says quietly after a minute. “We never had a chance. Of saving him. I think we both knew that from the get-go. We were clinging to a hope that was more fantasy than reality.”
“Sometimes fantasy is all you have.”
She is silent. I know what is turning in her mind, the words before she even gives voice to them. “And what about saving David?” she finally says. “Going back to the Palace to rescue him—is that fantasy, too?”
It is. I realize that now. Even if we had been able to kill Ashley June and been able to return unscathed to the Palace, the Ruler would never have released us, his promise notwithstanding.
Sissy curls her toes into the grass, turning her digits white. “The whole time we were underwater in the fountain pool, I kept thinking of David. That he was in exactly the same situation, submerged in water. But how much worse off he was. Because he was alone.” She turns her eyes to me. “I won’t leave him there.”
“Sissy,” I say reluctantly. “We both know it’s suicide to return to the Palace. We’ll surely die.”
“Then we die,” she says quickly with a flash of anger. She stands up, walks a few paces away, her back to me.
I stand. Softly, I utter words I know she will be repulsed by. “Maybe we should accept what can’t be changed.”
“What do you mean by that?” she says without turning around.
“You and me, Sissy. We have horses. We can go anywhere. Nobody knows we’re alive. Not the Palace, not the metropolis. They all think we’re dead.”
She pauses. I expect her to lash out with objections. But she has not spoken.
“We make our own world, Sissy. Away from everyone, everything. Go far, far, far away, never to be found again. Start afresh. Just you and me.”
She stands very still. A desert breeze blows through her hair.
“But we can’t go back to the Palace,” I say. “Even if we were somehow able to escape from there, they’d never stop coming after us. Not the duskers, not the Originators. Once they know we’re still alive, we’ll be hunted forever.”
And still, she does not speak.
“I’m just trying to be honest with you,” I say.
“Have you, Gene?” She turns around now, and her eyes are moist. But these are not tears of sadness or resignation but something else I can’t quite identify. “Have you been completely honest with me?”