After the End (2 page)
“AS I HAVE EXPLAINED, I CAUGHT YOUR SON cheating on his final exam.” Ms. Cochran, my English teacher, makes a face like she smells something rotten as she holds up my minuscule rolled-up crib sheet. I force myself to keep a neutral expression in front of my dad and the principal, but shrink down into my chair.
“Since when was cheating on a test grounds for expulsion?” my dad exclaims.
Mr. Riggs, the principal, glances at the open file on the desk in front of him and runs his finger down the page. “When a student has had two previous suspensions for bringing alcohol and drugs onto school grounds.”
My dad clears his throat. “Well, perhaps we can talk further about it, like we did on those occasions,” he says, glancing at Ms. Cochran. If she wasn’t here, the conversation would already have turned to donations my dad’s company could give to the school, but judging from the dark look on Mr. Riggs’s face, I doubt that would work this time.
“Yes, well, I know that there have been mitigating circumstances, but we can’t keep making your son an exception to the rule. Billingston Academy has a strict three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to enforce it in your son’s case.”
A few days later Dad gets a call from the Yale admissions office saying that my enrollment is on hold until they receive some proof that I am “receiving help for my behavioral issues.” And that’s when Dad comes up with his mail-room plan.
MY ARROW FLIES TRUE AND THE GREAT BULL CARIBOU slumps to the ground. I sling my crossbow over my shoulder, and the virgin snow crunches under my moccasins as I sprint across the field to kneel by the beast’s heaving side. “Thank you,” I say as I draw my knife from my belt. I pet the bristly fur of his muzzle and look him straight in his huge glassy eye. And then I slit his throat.
Some of our hunters go into a whole long prayer to the spirit of the animal when they kill. But Whit once told me that respectful treatment and a thank-you equaled all the lofty words in the world. I have to say I agree.
As I clean my knife in the snow, I whistle for Beckett and Neruda to bring the sled over. But they’re already on their way, their wriggling bodies bursting with excitement as they bound through the icy drifts. I sling the leather straps over the top of the beast and push the iron dowels underneath its body to pull the straps around.
This bull must weigh two hundred pounds—twice my weight—but with the help of my puller, the dogs and I manage to shuffle him over and onto the sled within minutes, the undulating crimson line he leaves in the snow as bright as a ribbon on a wreath of white lilies.
I am securing the caribou with hemp ropes when I hear something strange: a loud flapping noise, like the beat of a thousand eagles’ wings synchronized into multiple steady pulses.
I’ve heard this sound before, but only from the safety of an emergency shelter. It’s a flying machine. Which only means one thing: brigands. My heart skips a beat, and I freeze, scanning the sky.
Why didn’t Whit foresee this and hide the clan? They must not be coming close enough to us to be any danger. But in my mind, close enough to hear is close enough to hide. My stomach twists as I think of what I would do if I were the Sage.
The burden of being Whit’s successor is already beginning to weigh upon me. Like him, I will protect the clan. Predict storms or natural catastrophes. Conjure healthy crops and Read where food can be found in the lean years. Read when predators or even brigands are near and Conjure camouflage to hide the village.
I can’t see where the noise is coming from. Before me looms Mount Denali. The noise of the flying machine echoes off its foothills and is quickly absorbed by the snow-drenched valley sprawling at its feet. I hope it isn’t behind the mountain, where my village is. Surely not. Whit would have Read it.
A talon of worry scrapes at my belly. I rush to detach the huskies from the puller and clip them back to the sled. “Hike!” I yell, and we begin racing toward Denali, toward home. The noise has stopped. The machine must be gone. It was probably far away, and the valley’s echoes made it sound close, I tell myself, but I don’t cut the huskies’ pace.
Ten minutes pass and all I can hear is the hiss of my sled’s blades through the snow as we fly over the open field toward the track leading around the base of the mountain. The cold wind burns my cheeks, and I tighten the strings of my coat’s fur collar around my face.
We still have another twenty minutes before we reach the foothills. I was almost to the boundary when I found the bull caribou I had Read in my vision. It’s a good thing the animal stopped when it did, because I would never venture outside. Even a kill this size wouldn’t be worth the risk.
Suddenly, out of the silence comes the flapping sound again, closer and louder than before, confirming that I’m going in the right direction. But the source of the noise is still invisible. The mechanical rhythm of the eagle wings seems to hover and then becomes more distant.
It’s got to be behind the mountain,
I think, and my worry blooms into panic.
I pull hard on the dogs’ reins, and they come to an abrupt stop. Jumping off the sled, I use my mittened hand to clear the snow, scooping it away until I have a patch of wet ground. Jerking my pendant on its leather thong over my head, I pull my mitten off with my teeth and press my fire opal, still warm from my skin, between my palm and the sodden grass. I close my eyes and picture my father in my mind, and the earth speaks to me.
My mind is frozen by my father’s ice-cold panic. Petrified by his fear. As I feel his emotions, bile rises up my esophagus and burns my throat. I leap up, spitting and wiping my damp hand on my parka.
We must go faster,
I think. Pulling my knife from my belt, I cut the caribou free. “Hike!” I yell. The dogs hear the fear in my voice and run like they never have before. The deer shifts and then slides off the back of the sled onto the ground, and, freed of its weight, we are off like an arrow across the snow.
Almost an hour later we finally pull over the hill into my village’s valley. My throat has been clenched so tightly that it’s been hard to breathe, but upon seeing the yurts safe and sound, smoke puffing out of the chimney holes, my breath spills out of me. I feel dizzy as oxygen floods my brain.
But as I survey the scene more carefully I see no movement in the camp. I lift my fingers to my lips and whistle the note that everyone knows is mine. The one that always wins me cries of “It’s Juneau! She’s back!” from the children who run to see what I have brought from a hunt. But this time I am greeted by silence. And then I notice the disorder of the camp.
Tools and weapons are scattered around the ground. The clothes drying on the line have all been blown to the mouth of the woods and are hanging in the trees, flapping around like flags. Baskets are overturned, grain and beans spilled over the hard-packed ground. The sides of the two closest yurts have been ripped from their posts, and the canvases are snapping back and forth in the breeze. It looks like a great wind has passed through.
Beckett and Neruda begin to growl, the fur on their backs bristling. I unclip them, and they race for our yurt. They disappear through the flaps and are back out a second later, puffing and barking frantically. As they begin sniffing around the empty camp, I plunge through our entrance to see my father’s desk knocked upside down and his books and papers scattered over the floor.
He’s gone. My heart stops, and then as I look down at the ground it slams hard against my ribs, forcing a cry from my throat. In the soft dirt floor, in my father’s careful block lettering, is written:
JUNEAU, RUN!
WELCOME TO WEEK TWO OF MY OWN PRIVATE hell.
As I push the mail cart through the swinging double doors, I move from fragranced air and mood music into the mail room’s sweat/glue combo stench and bad-eighties-hair rock.
“Hey, Junior,” says Steve, a fortysomething burnout with a ponytail. “What’s up with the uniform?”
I look down at the regulation company yellow short-sleeved shirt that I’m wearing over a pair of jeans and shrug.
“I gave you blue slacks,” he says. “You’re supposed to wear them.”
“Yeah, but you see, Steve, there’s this thing called a washing machine. And sometimes you’re supposed to put your clothes in there so you don’t smell bad. Since you only gave me one pair of ‘slacks’”—I can’t even say that word without flinching—“I don’t have a spare.”
“Dude, that’s what weekends are for. I wear my uniform during the week, and then wash it on the weekend.”
From the permanent sweat marks under his pits, I have my doubts as to the frequency of his laundry habits. But I just stand there and stare at him, unblinking, until he looks away and starts fiddling with the radio dial. “Your dad said I’m supposed to treat you like everyone else,” he says, not looking at me, “and that means wearing your uniform.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, avoiding sarcasm in my tone but meaning it with all my heart.
I should be in school getting ready for graduation. Partying my ass off like the rest of my classmates. If it weren’t for Ms. Cochran, I would be coasting through the last six weeks of high school and easily into my spot at Yale.
And if it weren’t for my dad, I’d be at home watching Comedy Central. “Working in the mail room, you’ll be getting to know the business from the ground up,” he said. “Prove you’re responsible and I’ll make sure they let you into Yale for second semester. But until then, you work forty hours a week, minimum wage, no screwing around.”
His motivation is as transparent as glass. He wants me to see what life will look like if I don’t “shape up.” That, unless I change, I will be doomed to become Steve, spending my days sorting envelopes and wallowing in self-importance from bossing around lowly mail-room staff.
There’s got to be another way to prove myself to Dad instead of being stuck here for the next nine months. A few more weeks in this hellhole and my brain will explode. Or I’ll kill Steve. I imagine wrapping his hair around his neck and pulling hard. Death by ponytail. It could happen.
THE DOGS ARE HOWLING. I STUMBLE OUT OF OUR yurt and toward their sound. They are in Nome’s yurt, standing above a mass of fur and blood. Her huskies. They’ve been shot. I choke back tears: I knew these dogs as well as I know my own.
We have one rifle among the clan, and it is only used on the very rare occasion of a bear attack. Our few bullets are dispensed sparingly. But the casings scattered on the floor around me are not from our gun. Flying machines? Guns? These brigands are terrifyingly well-equipped.
I run out of Nome’s yurt and into Kenai’s. Empty. There is another heap of bloody fur behind that yurt, and at the mouth of the woods I see more dead huskies. But no people. I check all twenty yurts, saving Whit’s for last.
Our Sage’s fire is out, his hearth cold. I stand there, confused, until I remember that he left yesterday for his retreat. The cave on the far side of Denali where he goes a few times a year to “refresh his brain,” as he calls it. He has never taken me, but I know where it is. With all the exploring that Nome, Kenai, and I have done, there isn’t an inch of our territory that I haven’t seen.
My heart pinches as I think of my best friends and where they might be right now. What unknown danger are they, my father, and the rest of my clan facing? If they’re even still alive. I shake my head and refuse to allow that thought to fix itself in my mind.
I’ve got to get to Whit. Even though he didn’t foresee this attack, maybe he’ll know what happened. I take my big pack from my shelf in the back of Whit’s yurt. The one I use on our daylong lessons, when we travel into the woods to search for the plants and minerals used for the Rite.
Juneau, run!
My father’s words shake me back into action, and I sweep bags of dried herbs, vials of plant extracts, powders, and precious stones off Whit’s shelves into my pack. I don’t know what he will need, so I take a bit of everything. I grab a stack of his treasured books off his desk and shove them in with the rest.
I whistle and the dogs come running. “Good boys,” I say as they sit in front of the sled, waiting for me to clip them on. I secure the pack to the sled, and then, glancing back at my home, I tell the dogs to wait and push my way through the flaps.
I see the fire and am tempted to Read it. But I can’t ignore the words on the ground and choose to wait until I reach Whit. And although I know that the fire will burn itself out, I take the pail of melted snow water and throw it onto the embers.
I pick up the framed photograph of my parents that sits on my nightstand. It was taken the month before our clan’s emigration. A month before the war. My mother and father stand in front of their house in Seattle. Mother’s head rests on my father’s shoulder, and he has both arms around her.
In the picture she looks just like me. Long, straight black hair, courtesy of her Chinese mother, wide-set full-moon eyes and high cheekbones from her American dad. Dad said that if she hadn’t drowned when I was still a young child, we would look like twins now.
In this old photo, my father looks exactly the same as today, except for one difference: He is happier. More carefree. “The calm before the storm,” Father says when he refers to those days.
I slip the picture out of its frame and carefully slide it into my coat pocket. And before I leave the yurt, I bend down and brush out my father’s message, erasing everything but the letter “J.” If he comes back, he will know I have seen it.
I steer the dogs toward the woods. The moment we hit the trees, I hear the flying machine again. The chopping winglike noise coming from far away, barely audible but getting louder by the second. The brigands are returning, I realize with terror.
It takes great effort to push my fear aside.
Stay calm
, I think, and bring the huskies to a stop. I glance back at our camp and hesitate a second before leaping off the sled and running back toward the clearing. Breaking a low branch off a tree, I use it as a broom to sweep away the sled’s tracks, following my own footsteps well back into the trees. I look back at my handiwork—no one could see that we had been there or how we had left.
“Hike!” I yell, and we are off, streaking across the wooded path as fast as a hawk at hunt. And just in time. The noise is almost on top of us. Although I’m grateful for the thick tree cover, it prevents me from seeing what is flying overhead. All I get is a glimpse of metal shining through the branches.
We cover a distance that should have taken an hour in almost half the time. I don’t even have to tell the dogs how fast to go. They feel my fear and fly.
Whit’s cave is empty when we arrive. Not only is it empty, but from the cobwebs and the dank smell, it’s clear that there hasn’t been a fire here for months. I try to ignore the sharp sting of disappointment, the lump in my throat. Pulling the sled into the mouth of the cave to hide it from outside view, I stand trembling as the huskies clean themselves and scamper around.
I recall the mechanical
chop chop chop
of the flying machine’s wings, and it triggers a memory of reading an article in our school’s encyclopedia: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition, printed in 1983, the year before World War III. “The EB,” we call it while quoting it dozens of times a day. Like all the clan children, I am so wildly curious about the world outside ours—a world now extinct—that I’ve practically memorized the whole thirty-volume series.
But the specific memory about the flying machines stays out of reach. I gather a bunch of kindling from Whit’s stack and pile it in the middle of the cave floor, on a spot already black from a hundred former fires. I place only two logs on it. I won’t be staying here long enough to need a roaring fire for warmth.
Once the flames catch and the dogs drape themselves close to the fire, I empty my pack. Placing the books to one side, I fish through the bags and rocks and bundles of leaves until I find what I’m looking for—Whit’s firepowder—and pour some into my hand.
One of the first things Whit taught me was how to connect to the Yara. In order to Read—to make your will known to the Yara and receive an answer, if the Yara decides to grant you one—you must go through nature. We use animal bones to locate prey. Firepowder helps provide a good visual connection through fires, since you can’t actually touch them. But I use my opal for most other things. Whit says these objects are conduits, helping the information move back and forth.
I settle myself on the floor in front of the blaze. Bowing my head, I exhale and try to relax. To let the panic and terror of the day fall away from me. I open my eyes and stare into the flames and feel my heart slow and my breath become shallow. I toss the powder onto the fire.
“Father.” My lips move. The word comes out. But I know it isn’t the sound that matters. It’s focusing on who he is that directs the elements. That communicates to the Yara my desire to see him.
As images of my father appear in my mind, I do as Whit has taught me—looking just above and to the right of the flames—and see something forming in the fire’s glowing aura. I’m inside a flying machine, members of my clan sitting all around with their hands attached behind their backs. My heart lurches as I see Nome sitting next to her mother, sobbing, but unable to wipe her tears. The view must be through my father’s eyes. Out the windows there are four other flying machines: two in front and one on either side.
As I study them, it comes back to me: “choppers” was the colloquial word listed in the EB; the chopping sound comes from their spinning blades cutting through the air. Helicopters, I remember. But the machines in the fire are much bigger than those in the picture I remember from the EB. And from the size of the vehicles in the flames, there would be plenty of room for the entire clan onboard. The image is right there in front of me, but my brain can’t accept what it is saying: that there is a brigand troop large and organized enough, with working vehicles and fuel, to sweep in and take my clan.
I wish the Yara would show me more. Give me an idea of where my father is headed or even show me his face. But as Whit often reminds me, the Yara doesn’t always give you what you want. You take what it offers you.
I try to think of what the brigands could be after. It doesn’t make sense. They took my people. Not our resources. Besides the slaughter of our dogs, who were probably defending their masters, the camp was left untouched. Whatever they wanted, it seemed like they hadn’t gotten it. Because they came back. And if all they wanted was my clan, then the only reason they would come back would be to find its missing members: Whit and me.
I close my eyes and change my focus to Whit. I speak his name and picture him in my mind. Boyish face with high cheekbones. Eyes staring off into space, as if he sees a whole world that others can’t.
And in the flames I see what he sees. Pressed against either side of him stand two massive men in camouflage, who hold him by the arms. They must be in league with the brigands who kidnapped my clan, I think, and then focus harder. Whit is being led somewhere by the men, and there is water beside them. A lake? No. My heart races. The ocean. Far from our territory. Three days’ journey by dogsled, my father has said. Three days away from everything I have ever known. But that’s where I am going. What other choice do I have?
