The Isle (26 page)

T
er carries me from the barge. He lays me down in the front seat of the Cloud, and then he takes the wheel. I don't speak. I don't move. I don't know what words are anymore. They can't bring her back.

Callum directs a team of officers to transport Benny's gurney off the barge—Benny's choice. Something about trusting his own equipment and not wanting to see his Cloud abandoned in enemy territory. I think the truth is he'd just rather be here with us.

As Callum ties the gurney down, his cuffcomm buzzes.

“Who is it?” I ask, making a ball of myself in the seat corner.

Callum reads the message. “It's Derek,” he says, hesitating.
“He wants us to meet him at the Bone Vault.”

I swallow a hundred times, but more tears escape. They find their way down the sides of my nose and the banks of my cheeks, into my mouth and behind my ears. I shiver thinking about where we're headed.

The Bone Vault.

A place to pray for the dead, decorated entirely in bones. The last place in the world I ever wanted to go—I imagine it's like being inside the stomach of some monster.
Ren knows this.

“But—I don't understand . . . ,” I say, watching my tears make tiny pools on the floor between the seat and the Cloud's hull. “How did she do it?”

Callum explains—her blood, the protein. The way she never got sick once in her life, never even broke a bone. Understanding crashes over me. Every cell in my body reacts, shaking, frenzied.
She gave her blood to destroy the spring.

“You said her plan was risky, Callum, you didn't say it was suicide!” I cry, digging my palms into his knees, wanting to hurt him. “You didn't tell me, how could you not tell me?”

“Is there any chance she survived?” Benny asks slowly, his voice thin.

Callum rubs the bridge of his nose. “My calculations . . . I found that she'd need every ounce in her body to raise the protein concentration high enough. Otherwise, it wouldn't kill off the entire ecosystem. I told her this.

“And now that we're meeting Derek at the Bone Vault—I
think it's safe to assume . . .” His voice trails off.

Ter guns the Cloud; its engine bawls into the dark. “We could have done something. We could have stopped her!” I cry over the noise.

Can she really be gone?

I don't know if I can believe that yet. Ren was never the one who'd die first—I've never even thought about it.

I cover my mouth as something else occurs to me. “The water,” I whisper. “We don't even have it anymore.”

Ter's jaw drops—we're thinking the same thing. He slumps forward over the wheel. “Was it . . . ?” he begins, and I nod.

Sipu's Omni.

“What?” Callum asks. “What happened to it?”

Ter answers so I don't have to speak the words. They're the final nail in the coffin.

“Aven had both bags at Sybil's Cove, when we met Sipu. The first bag went to prisoners, but the second one . . .”

“The crash,” Callum breathes, sliding on the floor of the Cloud. “That bag had everything—the spores, the algae, the rocks. Without the spores, the water's gone for good.”

Over our heads, a hawk shrieks like he understands.

Ter reaches for me. I stop him. There's no such thing as comfort right now. There's only me and every memory I have left. I can't forget any of them, not one. I have to remember, otherwise she really is gone.

I start at the beginning, with the day we met—from that first moment, she was my favorite. She was standing there at the edge of Nale's roof, a loner, and she didn't even look up when Miss Nale introduced me. Everyone else said, “Nice
to meet you, Aventine,” in a tone Miss Nale would approve of. But Renny just stayed where she was, staring off. Nale didn't make her do anything—Ren was a lifer at the orphanage, there since before she could make memories. Other kids said she was mean, but I knew different. It was because she was afraid. People came and went, or people came and died. I wanted to make her less afraid. I wanted to be her One. I knew I could do it too.

I knew she'd like me.

As soon as she agreed to be friends that night before the races, it's like we made a secret pact to never die on each other. I was the first to almost break it, getting sick with the Blight. Never in a million years did I think . . . did I think—

Folding into myself, face slick with salt water, I clutch at my penny necklace. She's wearing hers now, I bet. I gave it to her because it was lucky, but she said she didn't want luck. So I told her “Good skill” instead, and she liked that.

I liked it too, because Ren never needed luck.

Maybe, this time, she did.

I force my head up, hair unsticking from my cheeks.
I can't believe it, I won't.
Leaning my head against the rail, I pretend to sleep so that the others leave me alone. Really, I'm feeling the wind against my eyelids, hoping it freezes the tears underneath.

I wonder if it's cold where she is too.

T
he closed fist of the universe isn't done with me.

It takes off, wheeling through every moment of the rest of my short life.

Benny—he called me “kiddo” during my first race and I wanted to smack him. . . . The night I was nabbed, Aven hiding behind a corner, watching. Later, when it wasn't so sad anymore, she said it was like watching me be carried off by the worst stork ever. . . . The day I enlisted with the Blues as a mole—I was already hated, and the pay was decent. . . . Returning to the Ward. I hunted Aven for weeks, found her nearly dead in a sickhouse. It was the most terrible feeling I'd ever known. . . . Becoming a dragster, officially. . . . Meeting my very own bookie, a guy named Derek. . . . Crushing impossibly on said bookie . . . Race after race after
race . . . Callum . . . The spring . . . Delivering the serum . . . The raid . . . Aven, kidnapped . . . Our escape . . .
Bellum pestilentia
. . . My mother, my father . . .

My choice.

I'm seconds away from my second death—

The cave . . . Derek speaking to me in words I don't understand now—only dying me could understand those words. Him holding me to his chest, while water soaked up every ounce of my blood.

I empty away, a destroyer.

For a third time, the absence folds itself around me. I'm back in the universe that is between others, cast in nothing. I'm in its very eye, watching all that is Earthbound go on without me.

Which is, I guess, why I did what I did.

Earth's history unfolds like a spherical holo right before my eyes. It happens in the closest thing I have to real time, because here in the nothing, time is also nothing. It's watery. It travels in whichever direction I push.

The view is panoramic. Every thought, every wish, I hear them spoken in my mind, part of some core I can't begin to understand.

Curious, I roll the ball of Time back toward my body—toward Derek.

I watch as he swims fast from the dying cave. From the fresh memories of me dying and of me dead. My limp body floats behind him like a comet's tail, knees banging against the walls. I'm not there to feel it.

Now, seeing Derek like this, thinking his thoughts—I
understand. He needed me more than I ever needed him. I
wanted
him—a different thing. Distantly, I call myself cruel. I begged for us to begin, and we did. Then, I ended us.

My everywhere eyes pull back—Aven's voice cracks dimensions. I travel the Ping-Pong globe of Earth thirty miles north, where armies converge—and there she is, the axis balancing two heavily weighted scales.

I deny that there is no center of the universe: my chosen sister is living proof.

Vision shifts again—

The DI unit breaks into the airlock. A man in a wet suit swims to the last location saved in my GPS tracker and finds shriveled, dead caps hovering on the water's surface. He did not find what he was looking for—

He finds something else.

Fresh
.

In the stairwell, Derek carries me up three flights of stairs. Then he carries me to the dock where, with his eyes closed, he pulls the knife from my body. He doesn't want the others to see it. I'm slack in his arms as he lays me in one of the Tètai's Omnis. Underwater, he finds two black, battered, sunken mobiles—one belonging to Lucas and one to Kitaneh. In both pits, gray-haired skeletal frames. Time caught up.

Then . . . the Bone Vault.

My body arrives like a rainstorm no one sees coming. One minute the sky is fine. The next, everything's changed. Under a vertebrae chandelier, Derek lowers my body down onto the stone. If I could feel, it would be cold.

There, he waits.

I watch as the Cloud pulls up to the dock, solemn. Aven hangs back in the boat with Benny, telling the others to go without her.

There is a part of me that rejects the in-between universe—that still thinks of life as mine—and hates myself for making Aven come here. It's the part that still calls myself “I,” even when I don't exist.

She wonders if she wants to see me at all.

Ter's first through the canopy of clavicles.
Oh, Ter
. Still a teddy bear, even rocking those Blue fatigues. For some reason, I never thought of him as a brother. Maybe it's because I had Aven. I just didn't consider adding more to the list. Not until now, hearing him call me “sister,” do I realize how blind I'd been. Afraid.

Callum follows. His eyes are shiny from tears he's not allowing himself. When he looks at my body, I hear every word he never said—his wishing that he'd tried to kiss me, just once, to see if I'd kiss back. In the void, I realize I would have, but then I'd wish I hadn't.

My blood was too angry for his. Too volatile. I needed a mistake-maker. Someone who'd understand what selfish felt like. He stands over my body, with all his wishing, very still. He knows why he never tried.

Benny's back in the Cloud, too weak to make it into the Bone Vault. He lays on the gurney and in his mind, calls me his child—an answer to a question I'd never been brave enough to think. In a dark corner of my heart, it existed only
as a hope . . . that I could choose my father, same as I chose my sister.

Aven is last to cross the threshold. She's trying not to imagine stepping inside a beast that eats other beasts, then swallows their bones whole. She stands in the shadow of a candlelit gaping jaw. It flickers against the wall. Ter tries to take her hand, but she's limp, unable to hold him back.

She thinks I've betrayed her by leaving. She doesn't want to feel that way; it doesn't seem right. But she feels it nonetheless. In a whirlwind of white hair, she rushes for my body. Falls to the stone. The cry she makes must come from someplace else—it can't be from her. It's too wild, too monstrous and hurting. She's only fourteen. She shouldn't know how to make that sound.

Holding my hand to her cheek, I hear her yell, “She's cold—” It shakes me even here in the nothing. “She needs a blanket!”

If my mother's tears were my first rainfall, Aven's are my last.

“How could you leave me?” she cries into my palm, kissing it over and over. Folding my slack arm around her shoulders, she lays on the stone beside me. Her voice is a whisper I hear through the universe's ears, and not my own. “Come back? Please?”

I don't have a beating heart to break.

Patient, the absence watches as I reach for the closed fist of this universe. Moments ago—days . . . years—I was given a choice. Wrestling with the fist, I howl, “I want my choice back! I'm cashing in now; you have no say!”

I wait for its answer, but the language of the universe is silence.

“Do you hear?” I shout again, and then I wonder . . .
Maybe it doesn't.
Maybe it isn't even listening.

Maybe its eyes are still closed—

Its equal, yet opposite, reaction hasn't been met.

Without a heart to break, I break the void instead. I claw toward the spectrum, scraping off the tunnel's black like it's a bad paint job. The absence doesn't fight me, but my body does. Without the universe's help—its eyes still closed to me—I have to do its work.

I have to put myself together, alone.

I crawl inside my body and find no blood. None but what's left in the chamber of my unmoving heart. Still in this between place, this megacosmic corridor, I use its eyes, which are everywhere.

I look only for one thing: a single molecule.

I find it where the blade is no longer lodged. One droplet of springwater in my stomach's viscera, waiting. I call it up through my veins, sailing it into muscle.
Right vena cava, right atrium, right ventricle. Artery.
I bathe the watery molecule in a pool of blue blood.
Lungs, veins. Left atrium, ventricle.

Aorta
.

Like a mother singing to a child, I sing to my own heart.

Rules unbreak.

The equal, yet opposite, reaction reacts. Black gives way to color, and the gravity of bodies and hearts and hands greets
me. Absence and its tunneling vortex of nothing whorls away. It leaves me and my body for another time.

The Earthbound universe opens its eyes.

It does, and so do I.

B
lue and gold fireworks burst, splashing over the Milky Way and a clear, moonless night. In the Cloud, they arc over the strait from both coastlines—the Ward and the West Isle. Sparks fall over our heads like a wedding veil made of stars. No tricks, no tests. Just thousands of people and their wild rooftop rumpus.

Tomorrow, we'll begin repairing the pipes in preparation for a five-year supply of Falls' fresh. And next year, we'll be piping off the Minetta Brook, so it'll be ready before the contract with Harcourt runs out. Chief Dunn sent my recording to his own comm, in case the magistrate ever has second thoughts about the deal.

I poke Ren with my entire finger—almost. The fingernails never grew back, but I don't mind. Their absence reminds me
how much I nearly lost. “You want to watch?” I ask, but she's dead asleep, curled in my lap.

I've been poking her every so often to make sure she's not
dead
dead. Each time, she swats me away, and each time, immediately after, she grabs my finger. She falls back asleep just like that, without letting go. I've had to alternate poking hands.

A spray of brack fans over the Cloud, wetting everyone—Callum and Derek cover their heads. Not Ter at the helm, and certainly not me or Ren. We don't even feel it. It could be snowing and I don't think we'd care.

“You have arrived at your destination: 40°46'42.46"N, 74° 0'11.37"W” the Voice Nav announces. It's a mouthful, even for a robot. Green froth churns against the Cloud's hull as Ter slows the engine.

“We're here,” Callum says, but he doesn't look ready. “Derek, did Sipu comm you anything else?”

Derek shakes his head.

“We're here,” I echo, tickling Ren's ear. “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

Ren mumbles something not even I can translate. When she opens her eyes, the first thing she does is close them again. “We're here?” she says, nestling closer.

“Here we are,” I answer, and I smush her nose. Ter cuts the engine. In the rough water, the Cloud bobs up and down.

Ren sits up like a bullet, remembering what we've come to do. Across the Cloud, she exchanges a nervous look with Derek. He's in his all-black wet suit, rubber flippers on his feet. New silver streaks already shine in his copper hair.
Kneeling, he pulls a vial from his backpack and drinks a sip. After this, he has only one more vial left.

“We'll find the second bag,” Ren says. “She must've tossed it before the crash. Sipu wouldn't have commed you otherwise.”

Derek nods, fixing his mask. He throws an oxygen tank over his back, and like a penguin in his awkward flippers, steps over the rail. Callum gives a hopeful pat on the shoulder as Derek drops into the strait.

Water splashes around him in an O—the underwater light strapped to his tank looks like a sinking sun as he swims through bright turquoise. We watch until we can't see him anymore, when Terrence turns to Ren.

He reaches into his pocket. “For you,” he says, handing her a crumpled envelope. “Miss Nale caught me at Benny's as I was picking up the Cloud.”

The paper is old, stained brown with time. It reads:
Renata
in handwritten cursive letters. She tenses up, holding the letter and staring at it. I touch her elbow.

Shaking herself, she glances south down the strait.

The mourning barge is still burning.

Ren was awake to see Governor Dunn push it from the DI dock. She watched until her mother and father were no more than a hot blaze smoking up the stars.

“Tell me if it's worth it,” she says, pulling soft, clothlike paper from the envelope and handing it to me.

It wilts in my hands like a dead plant. Holding it stiff, I read. By the time I reach the signature,
Ever your loving mother, Emilce Voss
, I'm crying.

“Good or bad?”

I nod, sniffing, and I wipe my nose.

“Jeez,” Ren says, rolling her eyes as she swipes the letter. “If you're blubbering and it's from
my
dead mom, I'm gonna be a train wreck. Who here has steel tear ducts they'd care to loan?”

Callum holds out his hand. She gives him a weak smile before passing the letter. “Thank you.”

“‘For you, Ren,'” he reads, softly looking at her once before continuing. “‘This story begins long before I was born.

“‘Hundreds of years ago, my husband's ancestor wrote of a spring with miraculous properties. Hundreds of years later, my husband found that same spring. He left with enough water to prolong his life for decades, thinking he'd be able to return.

“‘But the Wash Out destroyed any trace of this spring.

“‘Many years later, I met this man, Harlan Voss. Young and in love, he shared his water with me. Knowing the spring flowed from an underground river, he believed he would find it again.

“‘Then came the assassination attempts. He was on the right track. The spring still existed, somewhere—but it was being protected. Harlan dreamed of eradicating death—he thought it was a disease. He wanted to “revolutionize life.”

“‘I became pregnant.

“‘My child, a baby girl, was born dead. The umbilical cord had wrapped around her neck, denying her air for twenty minutes.

“‘But her death was not permanent. . . .

“‘Screaming into life, she was returned to me. The water
had changed her—that was the only explanation.

“‘I couldn't keep my girl. . . . I didn't trust my husband. Harlan Voss had become Governor Voss, a man who sought greatness for the UMI, power and immortality for himself, and me. But his supply of water was dwindling, and he was growing desperate. I didn't like the things I heard him say—horrifying plans to force the Tètai's hand and provide him with the spring's location.

“‘I was afraid he'd keep my girl hidden away in a lab, unlocking the mystery of her rebirth. So I asked my stepsister, Ann—you know her as Miss Nale—to care for you. In your name lies the secret of your birth:

“‘Renata.

“‘“Reborn.”

“‘How cruel that I knew you'd be safer without us.

“‘As your mother, perhaps it's selfish that this comes to you so late, but you must hear me: I have been in love with you from the moment you were a hope to the moment you were a truth. From the day you died to the day you came back, and every day thereafter.

“‘Ann tells me of your friend Aventine—how she keeps you grounded, and you raise her up. She worries because the girl has begun to look sick, and you've grown so protective.

“Renata, know this: death is not the end. You will meet your soul mates, and they will be with you even when the day comes that they are gone. That is how soul mates work.

“‘Do not fear Aven's death.

“‘Do not fear your own either.

“‘Life is both a give and a take. The sweet and the bitter.
Without either, the other cannot exist. I have learned that living forever is not as important as living well. So let life be the wondrous thing it is, with all its fullness and frailty, and yes, its horrors. Without those things, it is not life.

“‘I am sorry for everything that I know to be sorry for, and I am also sorry for the many things I don't.

“‘I love you.

“‘Ever your loving mother, Emilce Voss.'”

When Callum stops reading, Ren's eyes glisten but her face is tough. She takes the letter back and carefully, she stuffs it into its envelope.

“Good or bad?” I ask.

“Good enough.”

Again she looks south. Now the horizon is dark. The barge has sunk.

A circle of light rises from underwater. Derek's head breaks the surface, brack rippling against the boat. He hoots, holding up a large, clear, waterproof sack.

He climbs the ladder back into the boat and lowers our buried treasure. It rolls a few times before coming to a complete stop. We circle around, frozen.

“She really did it,” Ter says softly. For a moment, we're all quiet.

Sipu is gone, under the water, and we're not. We can't even say thank you. They're homeless words.

Callum kneels. He undoes the clasp at the top of the bag and it folds open. Peering inside, he laughs. “It's all here,” he says, awed, pulling out the smaller, individually wrapped sacks. “Rocks, algae, fungus, water.”

“Now you can make more?” I ask.

“I can.”

“So . . . what are you guys gonna do with it?” Ter lowers down, taking a look at the piecemeal ecosystem before Callum stuffs it back into the bag.

“We,”
Ren corrects. She's thinking something. “What if . . . we gave it away?”

Of course the others gawk at her. They don't know what she means.

I do. Our eyes meet, brains firing off in exactly the same places, arriving at exactly the same conclusions.

“Callum, you'd have to get rid of the immortality phyto-things,” I say. “But you could make more medicine—lots of medicine . . . for viruses and for tumors. Or for people who lost limbs.”

Ren nods. She bites back a smile. “We'll travel . . . not just to the UMI. We'll go to the Mainland, Upstate. And we won't ask for money.”

Derek laughs as he sits down, his wet suit pooling around him. “A new sort of Tètai . . . ,” he muses.

“We'll come in the night,” Ren says theatrically, pretending to hold a sword.

I jump forward and I point to the sky. “Wearing masks!”

With a heavy gust of wind, Ren lowers her fake sword. “Naturally,” she says, glancing up. She loses herself, absorbed by the night.

“Whatcha looking at?” I ask, leaning against her shoulder.

She shrugs. “Just the black.”

Another gust sweeps the purple clouds from the sky,
freeing Orion and a dozen more immortal warriors. They can stalk the night now. They're watching us. Maybe Athena's even there.

Stepping away from the rail, Ren curls her arms around me. We press foreheads. The old president on my copper penny meets the old president on hers—head to head, luck to luck, skill to skill.

“Can we really do this?” I whisper into her ear. “Can we keep it safe?”

Something growls in the sky. Millions of light years away, stellar dust shivers. Immortal beasts bare their teeth, protecting immortal things.

“The universe did
not
see this coming,” Ren says, grinning, but I'm not sure what she means.

The night wind shouldn't taste like promise if it did.