The Trap (38 page)

We will take what we have learned from them and make it ours. We will incorporate their technologies into our civilization time line, catalysts to our own human progress. Architecture,
computers, weaponry, science, all inserted at the right junctures in our advance, seamlessly and organically woven into our history like it was our invention all along. We will take their
vocabulary, their language, make it our own, make it subservient to us. To mock them, we will use the very same names of the nations and continents and seas on which they fashioned their lies about
us.

And when, centuries later, millennia later, we have conquered every land and every continent and even the seas that flow between, when our population is great, we will come for them. We will
come for them. We will find them, and they will be nothing to us. Nothing. They, with their vulnerability to sunlight and aversion to long-distance travel, will still be penned in by the same
provincial Vast. And we will pummel them. We will
pummel
them, they will wilt like candles in a blaze. We will drive them into the ground, scattering them into isolated pockets of the
world where they will be holed in dark caves, forced to retreat into dark closets in shuttered rooms by day. Forced to retreat into mountain castles where they will learn what it is to be alone, to
be isolated, to be an aberration. Until they are reduced to insignificant footnotes in the annals of not even history, but of folklore. All memory of them erased, they will be mocked in the pages
of fiction, reduced to mere stock stereotypes, caricatured as pale and effete loners.

In front, flying smoothly, Sissy turns her head around, gives me a quick wave. I wave back. The dawn light is splashing all around us now, flaring off our hang gliders into overlapping
kaleidoscopes of color. So many hues and tints, as if we have flown right into a firestorm of intersecting rainbows.

I unzip my jacket and take out a stack of papers. I release the pages one at a time, then all at once. They flutter in the wind like the manic flapping wings of an injured bird, the multitudes
of silver crescent moons blinking and flickering. They drift downward, silently, almost peacefully, into the Nede River, where they will sink and disappear forever.

I think of the land we will make our home. We will not call it the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine. That was my father’s land, but this new land shall be mine and Sissy’s.
It will be a reversal of the world we now know. I gaze at the Nede beneath us, thin as a silver arrow pointing the way forward. It will be the last thing we see of this land.

The name of our new home will be the reversal of the Nede.

We shall call it Eden.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt gratitude to Rose Hilliard, my editor, for her wisdom and guidance in shaping each book of The Hunt trilogy. I am also indebted to Catherine Drayton, my agent, for
her continued advocacy and counsel.

I would also like to thank my parents, for their support, and my two brothers, who inspire me to reach higher and farther. My sons, John and Chris, continue to surprise and astonish and bless
me, and I am thankful and humbled to be their father. And most of all, my deepest thanks and love to Ching-Lee.