Across the corridor, Sissy is gazing at me, her head turned to the side, breathing hard. She lifts her arm, places her hand flat against the glass, whitening her palm. I do the same. For a moment, our eyes lock. We made it, we made it.
And then the lights go out, and everything goes dark and black.
Eight
THEY COME AN hour later, gray phantoms gliding in the brine of darkness. Mercuric light spills out of their flashlights, giving them optimal vision. The dozen or so duskers stand before each enclave, shining their flashlights on the occupant before moving on.
Turn around.
Let us see your face.
When they reach Sissy’s enclave and peer inside, they perk up. I see the sudden infusion of energy in their silhouettes, a perky enlivening. Even from behind the glass wall, I can hear the cracking of their necks. Judging from their regal, highly decorated uniforms, these men must be the highest echelon of the Palace.
Then they turn around, walk toward my enclave. Their faces are orbs of sickly paleness.
Turn around.
Let us see your face.
Fingernails rap on the glass, insistently. Tap tap tap. I reluctantly lift my head to them.
They stare at me without speaking, and recognition flows into their eyes. For I know what I am to them: the heper boy who lived his whole life in their midst, who pulled the wool over their eyes by brazenly masquerading as one of them for almost two decades. The very one who then escaped from right under their noses during the Heper Hunt.
One face floats out of the darkness until it is almost pressed up against the glass. It is the Ruler. He’s smaller and more diminutive than his carefully crafted public image. Saliva drools from the corners of his mouth, twin lines that converge at his chin before dripping down in a glutinous ooze. His tongue snakes out, licks his thin lower lip.
Another face emerges. A man. I’ve seen him before. Not too long ago, in fact, but I can’t quite place him. He’s burly and tall, with mountain-range shoulders, so different from the other observers with their oversized uniforms and twig-thin arms. His eyes stare hard at me, circled by a pair of rimless round glasses.
The Ruler whispers to his retinue. A second later, they glide away as one. They apparently have no further need to inspect other enclaves. They’ve found what they were looking for.
I stare across the corridor, trying to locate Sissy in the darkness. I see nothing.
“Sissy! Can you hear me?” I press my ear against the glass. I hear her muted, faraway response but can’t make out a single word. I yell back, but her reply is again muffled. Eventually, we both give up, resigning ourselves to our isolation.
Three minutes later I jolt up, banging my head on the enclave ceiling. I remember the broad-shouldered man. I’d bumped into him at the Heper Institute only a few weeks ago, the night before the start of the Heper Hunt. During the Gala. The man had cornered me in an otherwise empty restroom at the Heper Institute. He had asked me questions about the Heper Hunt, made a few odd suggestions regarding it, and I’d dismissed him as a paparazzi hack. But then he told me—and I remember his exact words—something odd as he exited: Things are not as they appear.
A skein of fear shoots through me, cocooned inside a metal coffin, deep in the darkness of the earth. What is that man doing here? Who is he?
Things are not as they appear.
And I suddenly recall something else he’d uttered as he exited the restroom, words spoken with an almost flippant casualness but which now echo off the walls of the metal enclave. Cryptic words about Ashley June.
You need to watch out. She’s not who you think she is.
Nine
ASHLEY JUNE
ASHLEY JUNE PILLAGED the village all night. For the first hour, it was sheer delirium: a rampage through heper-ladled streets, a frenzied romp of a hunt with hundreds of other duskers. The hepers—almost all girls—tried to flee, but their strides were oddly plodding and ungraceful. The duskers picked them off as easily as dandelions in a field. Some heper girls tried to hide, just as futilely, under beds and inside wardrobes. They were eaten right where they cowered in an explosion of splintering wood. For hours, the snap of jaws and the rattle of teeth cracked the night skies. Afterward, when there were no more hepers to eat, the duskers licked up dots of blood splattered on walls, wooden floors, the cobblestone paths.
They ran their tongues over the village like a ravenous pack of wolves licking a bone clean.
Still, the night was not without its disappointments. A large number of hepers slipped through their clutches, escaping on a train. More than a few dozen duskers made a dash for that runaway train, ramming through the bottleneck at the bridge, and managed to cling on to the ribbed cages of the train. The smarter ones U-turned, headed right back into the heper village. They knew the train was picking up speed and that the hepers were, in any case, unreachable behind impenetrable steel bars. There were more hepers in the village ripe for the picking.
Afterward, the duskers’ bodies sated, their tongues licking bloodstained lips, they dozed upside down from street lamps and rooftops. Or they ranged toward the fortress wall, drinking from whisky bottles discovered in the dining hall, where narrow slit windows served as near-perfect, almost custom-made sleepholds. They stared into the night sky, and their bloated, engorged bodies quivered with satisfaction. They knew for a fact that no matter how many years lay ahead of them, they had experienced the apex of their lives. Nothing could ever top this. Perhaps that is why they were so careless—they had nothing ahead of them anymore. Filled and satiated, they drifted into a deep, bottomless sleep, forgetful that they were outside, that they were facing east.
But Ashley June did not sleep. She was haunted by her encounter with Gene. She had hoped to meet him in the mountains, but in her most honest moments she had suspected him dead already. A victim at the hands and fangs of a hunter, or perhaps of the Nede River. And yet there he was, standing in the middle of an empty street in the village square. As if by mutual arrangement, a midnight tryst.
She had felt two emotions. Most keen was an urge to protect him, to shield, to embrace. She approached him slowly, and how her lungs wanted to scream out. She had expected, with the turning, some dilution or diminishment in her feelings for him. But they rumbled deep as ever, amplifying along her jaw and collarbone and spine.
But she felt something else, too. She wanted to devour him. To taste his flesh on her tongue, the warmth of his blood filling her, his body broken down and digested and fused seamlessly with hers, merging with her muscles and bones and eyes and hair and molecules and atoms. To feel him saturate her as he passed through her and, in passing into death, into her very being.
The inherent conflict between these two feelings overwhelmed her, stopping her in her tracks. Until a third feeling plowed right through her, dismantling everything. Jealousy. She saw the girl standing next to Gene and noted all too easily the intimate, natural bond between them. Jealousy raged in Ashley June, springing her into action. She found a target and it was not Gene.
Ashley June sucked down the girl’s blood. Virginal and hot and pure, it flowed down Ashley June’s throat like lava. For a short spell, she forgot Gene. But only for a few seconds. Another hunter moved in, eyeing him. A surge of protectiveness swept over Ashley June, and she made quick work of the interloper. But then Gene was gone. She chased after him as he fled down the meadows, toward the train station. She ran not to hunt but to protect him. She raced to the front of the pack, broadsided many hunters, sent them tumbling away. But there were too many and she was quickly overwhelmed.
But Gene got away. She saw him crouched inside the train as the distance stretched between them. And then the train was across the bridge, gaining speed. But no matter. She stared at the train tracks disappearing into the folds of the mountain. They would lead her to him. She would find him again.
Resolve energized her, rendering sleep impossible. While everyone else—after every heper had been devoured, every spot of blood licked up, every bone chewed and sucked on—fell into a sedated slumber, she roamed the streets, the buildings, the fortress wall. The night was hers alone. She was a solitary pale dot moving under a canopy of a billion stars.
Stars. She remembered the night (it was not so long ago, yet how far away it seemed) when it was her with whom he held hands, the skin of their palms touching. They lay (so bizarre a body contortion to her now) on the rooftop of the Heper Institute under the sprinkling of those bright, celestial dots, unaffected by the moon’s full brightness. The muted sounds of the Gala beneath them lifted harmlessly into the night. Gene had whispered to her, and a weird slip of laughter escaped his lips as she scratched her wrists.
Gene was careless that way, less disciplined than her. Or was it because his heperness was more native than hers, a life force that could be tamped down only with vigilant, deliberate effort? Either way, it was she who succumbed first, and that fact still surprised her.
Through the hours of the night, she roamed alone the streets of the village. She walked aimlessly, but at one point she caught a scent. Only a whiff, but it froze her.
It smelled of Gene.
Not quite. Even with the scent so faint, she knew immediately it was a few degrees off. The way the scent of family members could be so similar yet slightly different along the edges. Between siblings. Mothers and daughters. Fathers and sons.
She followed the wispy trail, losing it when a breeze blew. She waited; she was patient—she had time. And after the breeze died, she found the scent again. The frailest tendril. It led her away from the center of the village and toward an outcast building that sat alone at the lip of the forest. The building resembled a cinder block for its lack of windows and aesthetics. She stood before the closed door, sniffing. The door, like the building itself, had been spared from violence. No heper had taken refuge in this outcast building during the night, and so no hunter had pillaged and gutted the inside.
It was a laboratory. The almost-Gene scent bloomed thicker inside, months of accumulated smells. They pulsed off test tubes and vials and flasks and goggles, off the workbench tops and stools and the hammock in the corner. She closed her eyes in concentration, her nostrils flaring. The almost-Gene scent had the pungency of someone related to Gene, older, male. Gene’s father, perhaps?