The Prey (30 page)

“Do you see a dusker?” Ben asks, his voice rising hysterically.

I maneuver the focus with a trembling finger. Yet more boats come into focus, a whole fleet of them stretching down the length of the river. The current is pushing them toward the mountain cave. Toward us. I lower the binoculars.

Ben is staring at me. “It is, isn’t it? It’s a party of hunters,” he says, his voice whittling the air.

I shake my head. “Not just a party. There’s a whole army of them.”

Sissy bends over, hands on knees, as if punched in the gut. “Remember when we were attacked on the river? With the grappling hooks? I said they were getting shrewder and stronger.” She shakes her head. “I had no idea.”

“How is this even possible?” Epap asks. “How did they build these boats so quickly?” He turns to me as if I should know.

“Maybe they … I don’t know,” I say.

“A fleet of so many boats … you don’t build them in a few days,” Epap says. “It takes months, years. You’re the one who lived with them. Didn’t you hear anything about the construction of a fleet of boats?”

“No, nothing.”

“Let’s focus on what we do know,” Sissy says. Her voice grapples for steadiness. “We know the duskers are a couple of hours from entering the cave. The waterfall will kill a fair number of them, I should think, but many will survive. And it’s dark in the cave; those that survive will hunker down in it until nightfall.”

“And then what?” Ben asks.

“And then they come for us,” David says. He looks so small, his thin arms trembling against his sides.

“No,” I say. “They won’t.”

They all turn to look at me.

“Look at this wind. It’s gusting west-east.”

“Meaning?” Ben asks.

“Meaning they’ll smell the Mission first. So long as we keep heading east, staying downwind. The Mission population numbers in the hundreds. We’re only six. The Mission is a volcanic eruption of odors while we’re barely a wisp. So long as we put quick distance between us and the Mission, so long as we stay downwind, we’ll be fine. We keep running. We keep surviving. To the Promised Land.”

“They’ll follow us.”

I shake my head. “They’ll be so gorged on human flesh at the Mission, so inundated with human odors swirling around them, they won’t smell the faint riff of us dozens of miles away.” I look at the river. Even without the binoculars I can now see the black specks that are the boats. “But we have to move. This is the make-or-break time when we have to make speed.”

I grab my bag, swing it onto my back. I’m the first to the cable ladder, the boys right behind me. Epap volunteers to head down first, and straps Ben’s bag around him. “Don’t look down,” I tell the younger boys. “Keep your eyes focused on the rungs in front of you. Slow and steady, all right?”

Epap is grabbing hold of the post, planting his foot on the top rung when he stops. “Sissy?” he says.

She hasn’t moved. She’s still standing in the same spot, her face wrought with conflict.

“C’mon, Sissy!” I yell. “We have to hurry.”

Then her face becomes smooth, her inner battle resolved. She looks at me with eyes that are steady but moist.

“Hey!” I shout. “Let’s go!”

“It’s not that simple,” she says.

“What’s not that simple?” I say.

“Running away.”

“What?”

“We have to go back.”

“To the Mission? Are you out of your mind?”

“We need to warn them about the dusker boats.”

I walk back to her. “We go back, we die. We leave now, we live,” I say. “It is
that
simple. If we leave now, we make it to the Promised Land. We see my father again. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.”

“I’m going back to the Mission.”

I stare at her. “To what end, Sissy? They’re dead anyway. Even if we do warn them, how far do you think they’re going to get with those feet?”

“I can’t do this, Gene. I can’t just leave them to be ravaged.”

I turn to Epap. “You talk some sense into her, will you?”

But he only looks at Sissy with wavering, uncertain eyes.

“Oh, c’mon, not you, too, Epap!”

Sissy stares out to the river. “The Scientist told us we never leave our own. If we simply walk away knowing what we know, we’d be betraying everything he’s taught us.”

I point east with an angry finger. “The Scientist wants us to head east. The Scientist wants us to go to the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine. The Scientist is waiting for us there. We go east. That’s what the Scientist wants! So don’t go telling me about what you
think
the Scientist wants!”

Sissy’s voice is quiet next to my berating tone. “If we leave, it’s their blood on our hands. The village girls, the babies. Hundreds of them. I won’t be able to live with that.”

“Oh, c’mon Sissy, they brought it on themselves.”

“No!” she says, her voice rising. “We brought it to them! Don’t you get that?” Her eyes search mine. “It’s because of
us
they’re now in danger. If we never came, the boats would never have come out this far. But for us, the duskers would never have discovered the Mission.”

The wind whistles across the granite domes. Long strands of hair blow across her face, but she does not pull them away. “I’m going back,” she says. “It’s the only thing I know to do. I will tell them about the duskers. I will convince them all to get on the train, to leave immediately. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we’ll manage.”

“Are you out of your mind? Sissy, we don’t know where the train leads! That’s why we left the Mission in the first place.”

“And that’s exactly why we’ll get on. Because we don’t know. It
might
lead to deliverance. But if they don’t get on the train, it’s
certain
death.” Her voice is steeled and resolute. “Their lives have been hard enough. I can’t leave them to be torn apart by duskers if I can help it. I won’t be able to live with myself knowing I abandoned them.”

I glare at her. “Sissy, don’t do this.”

She ignores me, turns to the others. “You all go with Gene. Help him find the Scientist. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

“No.” Epap blinks hard, his face pale. He steps toward Sissy. “I’m with you, Sissy. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Me, too,” David says, brushing tears from his eyes. “Let’s go back to the Mission.”

“And me,” Jacob joins in, his voice shaking, a small, brave smile breaking out on his lips. “I’m with you, too.”

And then Ben is running to Sissy, hugging her tightly around the waist. She ruffles the hair tufting out from the bottom of his winter hat. She looks at me.

I break my eyes away. The wind blows, and though it is no stronger than the previous gusts, it cuts through me as if I’ve been emptied out, all substance sucked out of me. I kick a rock over the edge.

“This is what you want then?” I say. “To be chased, to be hunted? To be their prey your whole life? Born prey, die prey?” I look at them in turn. “This is our chance to be more than prey. To escape all this. But instead you’re choosing to go back to it, like an escaped animal right back into the cage.”

Nobody answers. In the distance, the clot of dots on the river thickens.

“We can be free!” My voice cracks. I thrust my arms toward the eastern horizon. “That’s where we need to go. East. Where my father is.”

I’m suddenly dizzy and light-headed, the ground insubstantial beneath me. I bend over, wait for the world to stop spinning. “Don’t do this, guys,” I say, and my voice, whittled by the wind, has lost all strength. It is barely a whisper. “Don’t leave me by myself.”

For a moment, they don’t speak. They stand perfectly stationary. Only their hair, blown by the wind, ripples in this tapestry of stillness. Then David moves toward me, and though it is but a single step, it seems as if he’s closed the whole distance between us.

“Come with us, Gene,” he says. “Please?” And it is that last word that breaks me a little inside.

I turn my head, gaze at the eastern horizon. The wide expanse, empty and barren.

“Gene,” and now it is Jacob who is speaking. “Come with us. You’re part of us now. You’re with us. I really feel that. You fit so perfectly. We’re family. We won’t let you leave!”

Nobody has ever begged or pleaded for me. For a few moments, I don’t say anything, only feel a strange molten warmth fill pockets inside me where I’ve only ever felt emptiness. I turn to face them again. Ben gazes at me with eyes wide with hope and expectation. He sees written on my face the decision I’m barely aware of making, and he breaks into a wide smile. He tugs on Sissy’s arm with excitement. “He’s coming! He’s coming with us!”

Epap nods at me, his eyes warm. “We should get a move on,” he says. “It’s a ways back to the Mission. You take the lead, Gene. I’ll take the rear, what do you say?”

I see myself stepping forward, into their midst. I can almost feel their hands patting me on the back, the light dancing in their eyes, the surge of energy in my legs as I lead them back to the Mission.

But I haven’t moved. I’m rooted to the spot. Once again, I stare at the eastern horizon. I feel the pull of a million hands tugging me in two different directions.

“I get to walk behind Gene!” Jacob says, picking up his backpack.

And yet still, I have not moved.

And then Sissy, quiet for so long, speaks. But unlike the others, there is no excitement in her voice. “Gene.” That is all she says, just my name, quietly. Her voice is filled with an unbearable sadness that devastates me. She shakes her head as she looks at me, and in that small movement a thousand hidden words of realization and understanding pass between us.

The boys turn to her, confusion etched into their faces.

“Sissy?” Ben asks. “What’s the matter—”

“Gene won’t be coming with us,” Sissy says, her eyes never leaving mine.

“What? What do you mean?”

Her voice is calm. “East is his destination. It’s the path the Scientist determined for him.”

“No,” David says, his voice thick with emotion. “He’s one of us, he stays with us—”

“He’s the Origin,” she says. “His path is different from ours.”

“Sissy,” Ben says, “he wants to come with us and—”

“
Don’t let Gene die,
” she says. “Gene is the Origin. He is the cure. He needs to stay alive. He needs to head east. Nothing is more important.”

The boys’ faces turn pale. But their wide eyes and silent quivering lips betray the unwanted acknowledgment that Sissy is right.

“He needs to find the Scientist,” she continues with a determined calmness. “It’s what the Scientist wants, it’s what he designed from the very beginning. We can’t let our personal feelings”—her face hardens like flint—“get in the way.” She gazes at me from the corners of her eyes, and for the first time her voice trembles with conflict and anguish. “And deep down it’s what Gene also wants.”

The boys look at me. And Ben now sees something else on my face, a different expression that causes his lower lip to wobble, his eyes to tear up. “Gene?” he asks, and his question hangs in the air, dangling in the wind.

Sissy moves toward me, her face rigid. “He wants his father. Nothing—and nobody—matters more to him. We can’t deny him that. We have to let him go.” And now she is standing right in front of me, so close I see the cracks in her hardened expression, the soft crevices of ache. “You’d walk to the ends of the earth to find him, right, Gene?”

Behind her, the boys are gazing at me. The sky is a vivid deep blue above them, not a cloud in sight. Ben starts to sob and Epap puts a comforting arm around his shoulders.

“I won’t leave you,” I say.

“You must,” Sissy says. “I won’t let you stay.”

“I’m done with deserting—”

She places her finger on my lips, quieting me.

The sunlight reflecting off the granite dome draws out the deep pools of her irises. I remember the first time I saw those brown eyes, on my deskscreen at school. It was when she picked out the lottery numbers for the Heper Hunt. So many days ago, yet I still remember the qualities those eyes held, even through the digitalized pixels of the screen, of strength and softness both.

And that is how her hand feels on my face. Strength and softness.

“Gene,” she whispers, and her voice at last betrays her. She swallows hard. “Go.” For a moment, her resolute eyes break into shards of hesitation. She pauses, as if to give me a chance to speak. But I say nothing. She closes her eyes and turns back to the boys.

I don’t move. Then, in a movement that seems to take hours, I step toward the cable ladder. Nothing has substance, not the granite beneath me, not my legs, not my body. It feels as if I might get swept up in the next gust of wind, not so much blown away as quickly whittled, bone by bone, into nothingness. I plant my boot on the first rung.

“Gene!” David shouts. “We’ll see you again. One day, okay?”

I nod. He smiles back and I feel my owns lips naturally curl and part in a smile. I did not know this, that smiles could be fashioned out of sorrow. Then I do something my father always cautioned me not to do. I lift up my hand and wave it slowly. They wave back, all of them, with damp eyes.

As if pulled down by the weight of my heavy heart, I step down to the next rung and the next. The sight of Sissy and the boys is replaced by the hard granite wall rushing up before me as I descend down the cable ladder. My foot finds the next rung down and the next and the next, and then I am all alone in the world again.

39

I
HIKE HARD
and fast. It is better this way, to keep my heart pumping with vigor, lungs sucking for air, mind focused on what lies ahead and not what I’ve left behind. I am a tiny dot gliding across an immense, forgotten land emptied of memory, stuck in a stasis that will never shift.

As the sun begins to descend, my boots strike not hard granite but the soft floor of the forest. It’s colder in the woods, and darker, as if dusk has stolen prematurely into its midst. I keep up the brisk pace, eager to put miles under me.

But the densely spaced trees, and their similarities in appearance, disorient me, spin me around. I look to the sky for guidance, but the tall redwood trees, packed tightly together, reveal only splintered patches of sky and obscure the position of the sun. I don’t even know which way is east. The hue of the sky worries me, its tone no longer blue, but spilled with the bloodred tint of dusk.