The wind gusts hard against us. So many succulent heper odors, I almost miss the one other distinctive non-heper smell in the desert plains. A fresh trail, only minutes ahead of us. Ashley June’s.
Fifty-two
ASHLEY JUNE
ONE WEEK AFTER her operation, Ashley June’s family went out without her. She was still bedridden and feverish, and the pain below her waist had barely subsided. They were running low on fruit, her father told her, and she needed all the nourishment she could get.
They would be gone for only a few hours, they promised.
But they were not gone for only a few hours. They never came back. She waited all day, and the next, and the next after that. But they never returned. It was the last time she ever saw her brother or her mother.
But it was not the last time she saw her father.
That happened years later, a decade after she’d long assumed him perished. After she’d spent all that time learning to survive on her own, forging a life of her own.
It was at the Heper Institute. When she along with all the other hunters were taken down to the Introduction. He had come out of the Pit and at first she had not recognized him. The same way she had failed to recognize him nights earlier on her deskscreen when he had selected numbers for the Lottery. Amidst all the screaming and drooling and bone cracking, she could not see past the pasty skin, the bald head, the languid, soft body.
She saw the body emerge from the trapdoor in the ground. An arm propping open the cover, head emerging, eyes peering out. Then he came out.
There was nothing of the straight, angular posture she most remembered of her father. This heper was slow, with a soft potbelly that spoke of surrender. But it was his eyes that had changed the most, that droop weighed down with sadness. His eyes never met hers as he studied the pens and pencils laid as bait in front of her. But it was then that she recognized him.
She screamed. A horrific scream that shook her bones and unmoored her organs.
The other hunters around her erupted with screams of their own, but theirs were filled with hunger and desire and hunger-lust, not ice and fear and horror.
And she saw everything unfolding with a maddening slowness. Gaunt Man pulling out a dagger, hacking through his restraints. She screamed yet again. But her father did not look, did not pay any attention to her or to any of the other screams echoing off the walls of the Introduction.
And when the end came, she tried to block off all her senses. Shut her eyes behind her shades to blind herself. Screamed as loud as she could to erase all other sound. But nothing could be done about the blood that splashed across her face, because her hands were restrained, her arms tethered to a pole. The droplets of her father’s blood were still warm. All she could do was scream again, but even that didn’t seem enough, her mouth was too small an outlet for the horror exploding within. And when she felt a tongue—Gaunt Man’s—licking the blood off her face, up and down, the texture of his tongue rough and coarse and wet and sticky, she screamed even louder. But their screams around her were louder yet.
Two days later, she was back in the Introduction. And as before, she was screaming. But this time, it was with fear, not horror. And this time, she wasn’t tethered to a pole but was racing across the arena, gunning for the entrance to the Pit, three duskers hot on her heels. Blood dripped from a self-inflicted gash across her palm. The scent of it enticed the pursuing duskers, drove them batty. She ran thinking of Gene, many floors above her, hoping she’d created the diversion necessary for him to get away.
Run, Gene, run! she yelled in her head. Now’s your chance to get out!
And she ran, too, the soles of her feet shredded away, her lungs singed with exhaustion. And although every step increased the distance between her and Gene, she also believed these steps were somehow bringing them back together at some distant point in the future, that she was merely running along the circumference of time. They would meet again. Gene would come for her. Theirs was a story only beginning.
She slid, then fell into the Pit, pulling down with her the pole that held the Pit door open. She hit the ground hard, the solid limestone rattling her spine. Above her, the door slammed down, sealing the darkness inside. Scrabbling, scratching sounds, claws on metal. And then curved slivers of light rimming through. The three duskers, they were wedging in their fingers and claws, trying to pry the lid off. Ashley June shot up and turned the lock-wheel until there was a click and she knew the entrance was sealed.
She found candles, matches. The interior was larger than she’d expected, the size of a small bedroom. On shelves lining the far wall sat a riffraff of containers and canisters, stacked cans of food, bottles of water in various stages of emptiness. Rough bedding lay against the nearest wall, blankets folded neatly on the ground, the pillow still depressed in the center. Candles, long extinguished, sat on small ledges that jutted out of the limestone walls. Melted wax lay pooled and hardened, some of it lining down the walls, eerily artery-like, as if these walls pulsed with life.
It was only then she felt the blood. Soaking through the back of her shirt. Her hand trembled as she reached beneath the fabric. She felt three long gashes. Running deep and wet and parallel to one another, across her spine.
One of the duskers had slashed her.
The gashes meant nothing, she told herself. She wasn’t infected, the claws were clean of saliva. She was fine, she was fine, she was fine. This was what she told herself for hours even as the adrenaline gave way to sharp pain, even as a fever erupted from deep within her bones. Only when she collapsed to the floor, cradling her legs, her body slick with ice-hot sweat, did she finally accept the undeniable.
She was turning.
Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to her knees. She would not succumb to this. She would fight the turning. There had to be something inside the Pit that might help her. She began to search. For something, anything. The Pit was a tight, confined space and it didn’t take long before she found something. But it was not what she was expecting.
Under the pillow, she found a dozen or so snippets of paper, folded many times into tight squares. There were words written on them. Not her father’s handwriting—someone else’s. She frowned, not recognizing it.
Whoever wrote them must have passed these notes to her father from the outside. But how? The Pit door was too tightly sealed to allow even paper to slide through the rim. The more she thought about it, the more she realized the notes must have been secretly passed during the Introduction—that initiation procedure when her father was lured out of the Pit by the offer of food and morsels and water and other necessities. Whoever wrote these notes must have secreted them in the bottles and cans that held these items.
She read the notes. Most were short, clipped messages of obscure meaning.
Tobias, it’s me, Joseph. I’m here.
Can’t believe you survived.
I’m sorry about what happened to your family. But know that your daughter is alive.
The Origin is fine.
The Hunt is proceeding according to plan.
Hang in there, we’ll get you after this is all over, too dangerous now.
But it was the very last sheet that most caught her attention. It was the longest of all the notes, a letter really.
Tobias,
I screwed up. I ventured back to the Domain Building yesterday and was—miraculously—able to break into the 59th floor. I couldn’t believe it. After so many failed attempts . . . But I had to hurry, had only a few minutes before the doors locked on me again.
I stumbled upon something. Almost literally. A stack of old documents in an old box. These documents—we’re talking ancient here. Not sure what’s in them. They’re written in archaic script—almost like hieroglyphics, really—it’ll take me weeks, months to transcribe them.
But I heard someone coming and in my haste to leave I left documents scattered about and I dropped my shades. Didn’t realize it until hours later. If found, those shades will be linked to me; and the missing documents are bound to create a stir. I can’t chance the attention, which could lead them to the Originators. The risk is too great.
So I must disappear. Before any link can be made, before I might be seized. I just need to poof. Quickly, immediately. I haven’t even been able to tell the Originators at the Palace what happened.
It kills me to have to leave you. And even more to leave Sissy. Obviously, without even a good-bye. The same way I had to leave Gene—suddenly and without explanation. Not a day goes by that I wish it could have been done differently. I would rather die than hurt him again.
And so . . . I must simply . . . vanish.
But the Hunt plan is still in play. The fixed Lottery, the boat, the arrangement to house Gene in the library, the sunbeams leading to the map—everything is in place. And although I wish I could be here for them when the Hunt begins, it’s too risky to stay. And so I will return to the Mission and await their arrival. For a reunion I’ve been dreaming about for a decade now. I’ll inform the Mission eldership about the Origin plan (if I trust them—please let it not be Krugman who’s in charge now, remember that cad?).
Up in the mountains, to pass time, I’ll keep working on the green-liquid weapon. After so many years, I think I’m almost there. And I’ll start transcribing those ancient documents I found on the 59th floor. I think they hold some important information, though I’m not sure exactly what. So hang tight. I will return for you. I don’t know when, but all in due time. I won’t forget you, friend. I will return for you. Stay strong. Burn this note, as I know you have all the others.
Ashley June read this last letter, over and over. Even in her deteriorating state, she could not stop reading it, mulling over it. Even as her fever intensified, even as sweat poured down her body, she read. One sentence in particular leaped out at her. I would rather die than hurt him again. Those words branded themselves into her mind. I would rather die than hurt him again. I would rather die than hurt him again.
But when the turning clamped down on her with a vicious finality, twisting her body in agonizing spasms and seizures, her mind fastened on a different phrase. Up in the mountains . . . Up in the mountains . . . Up in the mountains . . .