“How many GlowBurns do you have?” she asks.
“Only one left,” I say. “Why?”
She shakes her head.
“Sissy. What is it?”
“Nothing. Just difficult to fall asleep without some kind of weapon on hand.”
“No one’s coming tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or for several nights after that. We’re safe tonight.” I put my hand on her back to reassure her. Her body is tense.
“I know,” she says. “But still.”
“We’ll go get some GlowBurns tomorrow. From the lab, okay? There’s plenty of them in there. Let’s just go to sleep now. We’re safe.”
She doesn’t say anything, only stares out the window.
Less than ten seconds later, I plunge helplessly into a deep sleep.
I awaken. Perhaps hours have passed. My body stiff and sore. The room so cold, my frosty breath plumes above me. Next to me, the bedding is now empty. I touch the slight indentation in the sheets. Cold. Not a hint of heat.
Outside, it’s freezing. My ears start to ache, and I pull the blanket tighter around my head like a shawl.
“Sissy?” I say into the still air. Not loudly, although there is no one else around. Although there is no reason to be afraid. Although we are alone up here in the mountains for miles and miles.
“Sissy?”
The only answer is the crack of cold in the night air. I snap into operation the last remaining GlowBurn and hold it in front of me. Along the cobblestone streets, empty cottages flank me, dark and silent. When I reach the edge of the village, I see, gashing across the meadows, her trail in a thin layer of snow. It leads away from the village toward the darkened forest. To the laboratory where, on edge and unable to sleep, Sissy must have gone to get some GlowBurns.
I hurry along even as the light from the GlowBurn starts to fade, my boots crunching on the frozen grass and light powdering of snow. I am fifty meters from the laboratory, ten meters, one meter from the opened door, and now as the GlowBurn blinks out I am looking into the laboratory, now I am walking through the doorway, now I am inside the dark, windowless building.
Sissy is slouched over a workbench. All energy drained from her body. A weak, diffused green light pools about her, silhouetting her form. She is trembling with—is it sadness, is it shock or fear?—I do not know. The only thing I know is that something has ruptured inside her, and that she is changed, irretrievably.
“Sissy.”
She doesn’t startle at the sound of my voice. She’d heard my approach on the meadows. But she doesn’t turn to me, only continues to shiver. Even when I reach her from behind, touching her on the shoulder, she doesn’t move. Her skin is ice-cold to the touch.
On the workbench in front of her is an opened trunk. I did not see it the last time we were here, when we’d turned this laboratory inside out for a clue we hoped my father had left for us. Someone else had entered this laboratory in the interim, someone who’d somehow been able to find this hidden trunk, and who had gone through its contents.
Which now lie spilled onto this bench, hundreds of sheets of paper. They are mildewed and musty, only one crinkle from disintegrating into a fine powder. At the top of each page is a silver-tinted insignia. Of a crescent moon.
I skim through these sheets, not understanding the formulas, the official memorandums, the maps, the equations, the diagrams, the correspondence. The typescript on these pages archaic and indecipherable. A heavy musk of age wafts up from these pages, sour with the passing of countless centuries.
“Sissy? What are these papers? Where did this trunk come from?”
She points to the corner of the laboratory. I can just make out a cratered bowl of darkness in the floor. Where boards have been dug up, flung aside with the strength of five humans. Or one dusker.
She puts her hand on another stack of papers immediately before her. These are Mission paperwork, administrative forms, bookkeeping riffraff. At first, I don’t understand. But then she turns them over and on the backside of each sheet is my father’s handwriting. I rifle through a few pages. And quickly realize what I’m reading: my father’s transcriptions of the ancient documents. It was his attempt to make legible the illegible. But he’d only transcribed the incomprehensible into the unimaginable.
Sissy turns to me now. The glowing green light marbles her face. I will forever remember the look in her eyes as she settles them on mine, how they seem saturated with brokenness, how a single trail of tears falls from each eye.
“I know the truth now,” she whispers, her voice freighted with horror.
———
Transcription of Documents labeled 369–384
Excerpts of official correspondence between the Ruler and the Commander Scientist. Year of correspondence: unknown.
From: the Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: October 18
Subject: HEPER development
Your Highness,
The HEPER project (Hush-hush Exploration for Provisional Energy Resources) progresses well. Thus far, all preliminary tests performed on mice corpses have produced the desired results. Injection of the HEPER virus into dead mice has turned their dead flesh into edible, palatable food for living mice. Said dead mice have been consumed by live mice within the expected time frame.
———
From: the Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: January 5
Subject: Please reconsider
Your Highness,
I must beg for your reconsideration, Your Highness. As I tried to emphasize in our previous three correspondences, we are simply not ready to move on to people corpses as test subjects.
If you will recall, the purpose of the HEPER project was to create a virus that would, to put it bluntly, transmogrify corpses of people into edible flesh. After the catastrophic drought and subsequent famine of the last decade killed more than half of our population, we in the scientific community are pleased to follow Your Highness’s decree to create an alternate meat source. This top-secret project, initiated by Your Highness, has thus far proven to be a roaring success. Injection of the HEPER virus into dead mice has resulted in live mice devouring said corpses in as quickly as one night.
However, it is simply premature to move on to testing the HEPER virus on people corpses. There is far too much about the HEPER virus that we do not know. Even with the mice corpses, we are finding disturbing results. Just last week, when we doubled the dosage the living mice developed a craving for the dead mice that bordered on madness.
I urge you to reconsider, Your Highness.
———
From: the Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: January 10
Subject: re: increase in HEPER dosage
Your Highness,
With all due respect, Your Highness, your request simply cannot be followed. You previously chose to ignore my advice when you ordered—over my vehement objection—to start injecting people corpses with the HEPER virus. And now, you are exacerbating this mistake by insisting on an increase in dosage. The dosage level administered to the corpses already exceeded what we consider to be the maximal input. The level that Your Highness is requesting is excessive, and will likely cause unforeseen and deleterious problems.
While I understand you are frustrated with our lack of progress with people corpses, simply increasing the dosage is not the most prudent or rational next step.
I must restate my objection to further HEPER injections in the strongest of terms.
———
From: the newly appointed Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: January 18
Subject: Thank you
Your Royal Highness,
First, allow me to express my deepest thanks for the honor you’ve bestowed upon me. This promotion to Commander Scientist (and chief of the HEPER project) is humbling. And although the former Commander Scientist—whose recent and untimely death we still grieve—set a bar I cannot possibly hope to reach, please be assured that the HEPER project will continue unimpeded. In fact, I am happy to report that tomorrow we will triple the dosage level on people corpses, as Your Highness had previously requested.
———
From: the newly appointed Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: February 2
Subject: re: live subjects
Your Royal Highness,
If I may be so emboldened as to query the purpose of Your Highness’s latest request? I know I am new to this post and thus lack experience, but even so, I fail to see the rationale behind your Highness’s desire to inject live subjects with the HEPER virus. I know that the latest round of experiments with corpses has produced unsatisfactory and disappointing results, but let me assure you that injecting live subjects with the HEPER virus is highly inadvisable. In fact, it seems to go against the purpose behind the HEPER project, which, if I may be so impudent as to remind Your Highness, was to produce edible meats from corpses in order to replenish food supplies in the unfortunate event of a famine.
———
From: the Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: February 8
Subject: re: increase dosage
Your Royal Highness,
We have been observing subject FY013 over the past few nights. The injection of the HEPER virus has had little effect upon him except, apparently, to blind him. He cannot see. He stumbles about with arms outstretched, constantly bumping into things. Also, he has lost his ability to sleep. Now, he simply faints, collapsing to the floor and lying there for hours. Yet other than those minor changes, there is little else. Again, if I may state, I do not understand the purpose behind injecting live subjects with the HEPER virus. And I am at a loss why Your Highness now wants to further increase the dosage to FY013.
———
From: the Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: February 11
Subject: re: need another test subject
Your Highness,
Unexpected events have unfolded over the past two nights with relation to subject FY013. After we, at Your Highness’s behest, injected him with the increased dosage of the HEPER virus, the subject began to exhibit rather peculiar symptoms. Of note: (1) stubs of hair began to show on his limbs and underarms; (2) his incisor teeth begun to go blunt; (3) he developed an apparently unquenchable thirst (one cup of water per day); and (4), most oddly, he seemed to gain a resistance to infrared and ultraviolet light. Also of note, he has begun to give off a particularly fragrant odor.