The Burn (8 page)

But I bring the anger to a simmer and I nod. I will
bury the feelings for Jessa, the longing and sadness deep in a
grave in my heart and leave those skeletons there for always.

“Not a problem.”

Then Gaea reaches over to a table by the monitors and
faces me with a gleaming scalpel.

“I don’t think you understand, Terra. You will be
unable
to speak of the colonies. Open your mouth.”

My jaw clenches. I fall over myself and scrabble
along the floor. Now I seriously doubt Gaea’s sanity and her
ability to help me. My mouth runs dry as she stalks me with the
scalpel held by white knuckles.

“That’s the only way?” I choke out, never taking my
eyes off the sharp blade.

“I think your sister is the most precious thing to
you. What would you do if you accidentally gave her away? If you
were sleeping one night and spoke out in dreams of her at the
bottom of the sea? If those sleeping by you heard such a thing?
Would you risk Jessa that way?”

I stop at the door. This is the sacrifice she wants
me to make. She must have dreamed of it all along. This is the
price I will pay to earn my way to the Burn and protect the
colonies. To protect Jessa. To seal her away forever. My dad’s
words come floating to me again. “Anything worth having is never
easy.”

I stand up, taking an hour-long minute to straighten
my knees and shoulders and look Gaea in the face.

“Fine.”

Gaea’s green eyes bore into mine, and they flash once
as they look for any trace of—what? Regret? She will find that
etched all over me. Or maybe deception. To know that I can keep
everyone down here a secret. Or maybe certainty. To know that this
is what I want. Whatever she finds on my face leaves her satisfied,
and she motions for me to sit on the wicker chair again, next to
the burner. The metal piece on it shimmers in the heat.

“Now that’s settled,” she says, wrenching open the
door to the supply room. She rustles for a few moments in there,
and comes back with a syringe and a vial. She smiles
condescendingly at me.

“I’m not a complete witch, you know. I will give you
a little anesthetic.” She stabs the needle into the vial and pulls
back on the plunger. “Now open your mouth.”

The moment of hesitation grips me before I can steel
myself. I freeze to the chair, icy fear seizing my muscles into
paralysis. Gaea clucks her tongue.

“A tongue is a small price to pay for your dream,
isn’t it?”

My tongue is the only muscle I can move. “What will I
do up there if I can’t talk to anyone?”

Gaea rubs down the scalpel with a disinfecting wipe.
She shrugs her shoulders. “My dear, you have a lovely face and a
lovely figure. You have very expressive eyes. You’ll do just
fine.”

She tosses the wipe on the floor and steps closer to
me with the scalpel in one hand and the syringe in the other. The
burning in my stomach moves to my chest, and suddenly I can move my
arms. But still they grip the arms of the chair. She binds me with
her logic and my burning need to leave the colony.

“Now open your mouth.”

Slowly I unclench my jaw and open it just a fraction.
Gaea chuckles.

“That will never do. Do you want me to wrench it open
for you?”

I open the rest of the way, and Gaea pricks the
needle into the top of my tongue at the back of my mouth. I wince
at the sting. Then she pricks with the needle again and again
around my tongue, numbing the whole area. By the time she’s done, I
can’t feel anything. She puts the syringe on the dresser and pulls
a white towel from a drawer and holds it under my mouth.

“There will be quite a bit of blood, so keep your
mouth open wide as you can. I’ll cauterize the wound as soon as I’m
done.”

Did she say cauterize?

“Are you ready? Relax, dear, you won’t feel a
thing.”

Then she puts the scalpel in my mouth. The bitter,
metallic taste of blood floods my mouth and I choke. She turns from
me quickly, my tongue dangling from her right hand, and grabs the
hot metal piece from the burner. I open my mouth wider—I don’t want
that searing metal to touch anything more than my bloody stump.
Gaea presses it in with a hiss, and a wisp of smoke curls from my
mouth. I smell burning flesh and gag. Gaea pulls the metal out
quickly, and I retch all over her floor. I look up, and tears
glitter in her eyes.

Why is she crying? She intimidated me so much, why
the moment of vulnerability? She smears a tear away with the
blood-stained towel and the moment disappears like shadows.

“Now then, that should do it.” She hands me a pill.
“An antibiotic. Mouth wounds do heal quickly, but we want to be
safe, don’t we?” She turns and walks through the door.

I roll my stub of a tongue around in my mouth. I
can’t reach the roof of my mouth anymore, only the soft palate. The
bitter blood taste washes away with the water I drink for the
antibiotic.

Gaea refuses to look at me as she grabs a backpack
off a shelf and shoves supplies in it, rattling off names as she
goes. I struggle to keep up with it all.

“Sunscreen—be sure to put it on, especially with your
skin tone. I see you’ve already had a bout of UV exposure, and it’s
not any better up there. MREs—you eat these—blanket, first aid kit,
flint and steel wool—for lighting fires—a knife,” she holds up a
large, mean-looking knife, then sheathes it and puts it in the
pack. “You’ll probably want to carry that on your belt. Let’s see
here, what size?” Then she rifles through the stacks of clothes
until she finds a few things that will fit me. She eyes my dress.
“You’ll definitely want to put these on before you land.”

She puts the pack into my trembling hands, and I
follow her numbly back to the sub dock.

“I think that should be all you need to start.” She
bends, her skirt pooling around her feet in brilliant colors, and
opens the hatch.

I’m halfway down the ladder when she speaks, a
heaviness in her voice that almost forces me the rest of the way
down the hatch.

“You will never speak of us, Terra. But don’t forget
us.”

Her eyes fill with tears again, but not just of
sadness. There’s also a triumph there. And suddenly those eyes look
so familiar to me. But I must be going wonkers with all the
pressure on me now. So I just nod and close the hatch behind
me.

I don’t notice the absence of my tongue in the sub.
There’s no one to talk to, and I’m not going to pick up Dad’s habit
of talking to someone who isn’t there. I look at the coordinates
Gaea programmed into my sub. It will take two days to reach the
Washington coast and then just a few hours to maneuver through the
waters into the Puget Sound.

Two days to myself aboard a claustrophobic sub. The
thoughts of loneliness press like fingers into my brain. I close my
eyes and breathe deeply to keep myself from screaming.

The sub follows the trench north through the system
of canyons that are used for navigating this territory. At the
precise latitude, it will ascend and go straight east toward
Washington. After gazing through the window at nothing and studying
the monitors until my eyes are fuzzy and dry, my body aches with
tiredness. I’m hunched over the controls, tracking each mile of
endless progress, and feel like my mind is on the verge of shutting
off.

I need sleep. I didn’t sleep well the night before,
and now it’s five o’clock in the morning. I lie down on the bunk
that lines one side of the sub but my eyes feel wired open. I force
them shut, and behind my lids all I see are forests, rain, rocky
beaches. Over and over these images flash, faster and faster as
they count down to a future that just might explode in my face.

The Burn. Most often I picture the desolation the
colony has fed me—deserts, crumbling buildings, the blazing sun.
But I saw beauty on Gaea’s monitors. Maybe I will belong up there
and it won’t just be this childish fantasy I always dream of. It
will be real, and I can touch it and feel it.

I fall asleep after my mind stops racing along faster
than my body can keep up with. I wake up when the computer
announces, “Now leaving the Northwest Pacific Territory. Entering
the Northeast Pacific Territory.”

I look at the clock. 18:00. I slept for thirteen
hours. I again sit in the controller’s seat. Just a few more miles
and I’ll pass Hawaii. That is the half-way point between my old
life and my new.

Just as I pass it, the monitor blips at me,
indicating a message is waiting for me. Surely Gaea wouldn’t risk
transmitting a message. Mr. Klein? But he can’t let anyone know he
knows where I am.

It is from Jessa. Should I even be tempted by this? I
need to entomb this part of me to have a chance of happiness on the
Burn. But my heart aches for one last piece of her. I press a
button. Jessa’s face appears on the monitor.

“Look, Terra, I know you’ve left for the Burn. I’ve
known for a while you weren’t happy here.”

She sits in our room. She manually locked the door,
not just relying on the computer locks that can be overridden. She
brushes tears off her cheeks.

“I just wish you would have told me so that I could
understand. I want to understand. Listen, I haven’t told Dad yet
that I know, but he’s trying to sort through all the archives right
now to figure out where you’ve gone. So wherever you are, please
hurry and be safe. So you can get where you want to go without any
of us stopping you.”

There’s a knock at the door. Jessa’s head whips
around. “Just wait a minute, Dad!”

“I’ve got to go. I think Dad’s almost caught up.
Listen, I love you. I know you were trying to tell me that all day
yesterday. Be safe.” Her face freezes on that moment, and my eyes
burn. The screen goes black except for one line:
Print text of message?

My finger hovers over the keys. Can I keep one
reminder of her? One that I can actually touch? I too am crying.
Then I press
Yes
.

The paper prints slowly. I find a waterproof cover
and carefully slide the sheet in place, then fold it and lay it
perfectly parallel to the edge of the bunk.

Needing something to cling to, my hands grab the
folds of my dress. I look down. I need to change into the clothes
Gaea gave me. The fabric is rough and dull colored, like
brush-cleaning water. How often in painting class, one of the
regular enrichment curriculums, we would paint a landscape. That is
what the old masters painted. But the teachers never gave us a
photo to paint from. Always the images in our heads. We weren’t to
be misled by what the Burn looked like before the Event. It would
undoubtedly be a bastion of death and decay now, and those images
were too violent, too corrupting to be allowed into the
curriculum.

Now I will see it all. And it will be more
magnificent than the images on Gaea’s monitors. If it can look as
beautiful as it did sent from a satellite to an outdated monitor
several miles under the ocean’s bulk, it will be astonishing in
real life. It has to be.

I strip out of the dress. The Burn clothes are too
big, but they’ll do. I pull on the hiking boots, and my feet feel a
hundred pounds heavier. All the shoes in the colony are feather
light and small. These are clunky, but maybe you need something
like this for walking on rocks.

I toss the dress in the bottom of the pack, put the
clothes and other supplies on top, then fold Jessa’s message twice
more and slip it into a zippered pouch on the front.

I’m hungry finally, after the memory of swallowing
blood has faded, so I search the sub’s supply bins. A few energy
bars, and a first-aid kit with a sedative. Just what I need to
sleep until Washington.

When I wake up, my head feels heavy like a bucket of
water. I don’t feel rested, and my stomach cramps from eating too
many energy bars. When the computer says, “Three miles to the New
America coast,” I vomit into the empty supply bin.

I gargle some water and wipe my mouth clean and force
myself to breathe deeply. Then I notice the water through the
window. It’s still murky, but less oppressive and more open, and I
feel like the floating metal tank I sit in is weightless in that
half-light. The depth gauge reads 200 feet. I have never been this
close to the surface before. The euphoria shrieks through my veins.
I’ve seen this much light—just a shadow, really—and I ache to go
higher.

I pull my trembling fingers from the controls. I need
to follow the plan. I sit on my hands and lean back in the seat,
watching the computer take us just high enough to skim along the
ocean floor. The vague outline of the sloping ground, almost the
same color as the water with the sand churning in the currents,
hovers in front of the window. Is it stormy up there? The monitors
show a pattern of swirling clouds and heavy rain. I don’t have a
poncho in the pack. After living for sixteen years in a metal
shell, I didn’t think about something like rain.

Is there any plastic sheeting in the sub? Sometimes
the researchers use it to lay their specimens on. Yes, there in a
cubby. It is a small sheet, maybe three feet square, but it’s
better than anything else at hand.

“One mile to the Puget Sound.”

The sub slows even more, and the water turns brown.
Bits of plant life roils through the currents. It must be really
bad up there, and I have the first real, solid doubt I’ve had this
whole trip. Can I weather even a storm? And if not a storm, how can
I weather the people? I clutch my head and lean into the control
panel, rocking myself to the sway of the sub as it buffets along
through the turgid water.

The sub does its best to plow through, but it rocks
back and forth, and I feel sick again. I lose track of time. But
after what feels like hours later, the computer beeps at me, and we
bank violently off course.

“Water patterns unstable. Suggest immediate
docking.”