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“Hi.” Her voice is tentative but friendly, like shy arms extended, hopeful for but uncertain of an embrace.
We look at each other. I try not to stare, but my eyes keep snapping back towards her. “You found the beam.”
“Hard to miss. But what’s it all about?”
“You don’t know the half of it. So much more than meets the eye.” I walk over to where she’s standing. “At just the right time of day, the beam shines at the far wall” – I walk her over – “then reflects off this small mirror, creating a second beam that shoots off to another mirror over there. It then hits this spot right around here, on this bookshelf right at this journal—”
It’s gone.
“Oh, you mean this journal?” she asks, holding it up in her hands.
“How did you—”
“It was the only book not shelved, just lying here on this table. It’s been here for a while, even back to when the Director met us here. So I put two and two together. You must have forgotten to put it back.”
“Have you looked inside it? The Scientist guy, he wrote a whole bunch of stuff in it. Pretty out there.” I look at her. “He was just like us, you know.”
“How so?”
“You know.” My eyes look down.
“Oh,” she says quietly. “No way.”
I nod. “But he was really strange. Must have spent months just writing up that journal, copying excerpts into it. Everything from textbooks to scientific treatises to ancient religious texts. And then there’s this really weird blank page—”
“You mean this one,” she says, opening the book to the blank page. And before I can say anything, she continues, “The page that reveals a map when you hold it up to the sunbeam?”
I pause. A map? “Exactly,” I say in a low voice. “That’s exactly the page I was talking about.”
She stares at me, a smile cracking through her face. “Liar,” she says. “You so didn’t know about the map.”
“OK, you’re right,” I say to her broadening smile. “I didn’t know about the map. But give me a look-see. Hold up that page to the beam. Sun’s going down, we don’t have much time.”
Sure enough, once she holds it up to the sunbeam, a map bleeds out of the page. But more: not just the outline of a map, but a tapestry of rich colours splashing across the page like a painting.
“You should have seen this map five minutes ago when the sunbeam was stronger. The colours were flying off the page, they burned into your eyes.”
The vista depicted on the map is detailed and comprehensive. In the bottom left corner, I see the grey slab building of the Heper Institute. Right next to it is the Dome disproportionately large and sparkling. The rest of the map captures the land to the north and east, the stale brown of the Vast transforming into the lush green of the eastern mountains. Most curious of all is a large river flowing south to north, painted in a verdant deep blue. My finger trails along it.
“The Nede River,” Ashley June says.
“Thought it was just a myth.”
“Not according to this map.”
My finger pauses. “Hello, what’s this?”
Where the Nede River slants towards the eastern mountains, a brown raft-like boat is drawn. It’s anchored beside a small dock. Also noticeable is a thick arrow drawn from the boat and up along the river channel, towards the eastern mountains.
“I know, I was confused when I saw that, too. It’s as if it’s saying that the boat is meant to journey down the Nede River. Towards the eastern mountains.”
“Doesn’t make sense. Rivers flow from mountains, never up them.”
“Do you think” – her voice lights up – “it was his escape route? The Scientist’s?” She sees my confusion. “Everyone says he got burned up by the sun. But if he really was a heper like you say, there has to be another explanation for his disappearance. Maybe he got away. By boat. This boat.”
Possibly, I think. But then I shake my head. “Why would he leave a record of his escape route? Doesn’t make sense.”
“I suppose. But one thing’s for sure.”
“What is?”
“This map is for only hepers to see. Nobody else would be able to see this, even accidentally. Not as long as you need sunlight to view it.”
I bend over to study the map more closely. The amount of detail is astonishing the closer you get. Fauna and flora reveal themselves with surprising specificity. “What does this all mean?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I say.
She’s quiet, and when I look up, her eyes are shiny with wetness. She’s smiling. “I like it,” she says, “when you say we.”
My eyes linger on the small creases at the ends of her lips. I want to extend my hand, trace those small creases with my fingertips. I look into her eyes and smile in return.
She peers at my face as if it were a page, like a toddler learning how to read, enunciating in her mind the syllables of emotion on my face.
I’m unsure of what to do or say next; uncertainty floods the moment. So I turn my stare down, pretend to study the map. “Where do you think they’ll be sending the hepers?”
“Could be anywhere. It really doesn’t matter, they could practically place an X anywhere on the map as long as it’s eight hours out. Not west, is my guess. They wouldn’t want the hepers getting too close to the Palace. On a windy day, their scent might be picked up by the Palace staff. They wouldn’t want to run the risk of Palace staffers sabotaging the Hunt.”
She’s doesn’t say anything for a long time. When I look up, she’s rubbing her bare arms.
“The other night,” she says quietly. “When the Director was here. Do you remember how he went on about the heper farms at the Palace?” She shakes her head. “He was just kidding, right? The whole thing about heper farms, the hundreds of hepers? That was just a figment of his sick fantasy, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I couldn’t get a read on him.”
She keeps rubbing her arms. “It’s so freaky, just thinking about it. I’ve got goose pimples all over my arms.” She looks at me. “Do you get goose pimples, too?”
I walk over and stand close, looking at the tiny bumps on her arms. “I do get them. But I call them ‘goose bumps’, not ‘goose pimples’.”
“ ‘Goose bumps’.” she repeats. “I like that better. Doesn’t sound as nasty as ‘goose pimples’.”
Before I can stop myself, I reach out and touch her arm. With my fingertips. Her skin, so soft, shivers under my touch. She draws back.
“I’m sorry,” we both say simultaneously.
“No, I am, I shouldn’t have,” I start apologising.
“No, I – I – it wasn’t a flinch. Like, I wasn’t drawing back in disgust or anything like that . . . it’s hard to explain.” And then she suddenly grabs my hand and places it, open palmed, on her forearm.
A jolt shoots up my arm, a skein of heat and electricity. I draw back my hand, but her eyes are filled with invitation and longing.
“I just . . .” she starts.
The goose bumps on her arms pop up even more. This time, when the palm of my hand sinks into the soft give of her arm, she doesn’t flinch back and I don’t remove my hand. We look at each other, the tears in her eyes a reflection of the wetness in my own.
A short time later, she falls asleep on the sofa. It’s a total collapse. Her body folds up like a failed origami piece, her head twisted to the side against the top of the sofa. Her mouth is slightly open, small puffs of breath pulsing out. The way her body’s torqued, she’s going to wake up with a sore neck. I reach out to centre her head on the armrest. In her slumber she complies, shifting her head at the gentle urging of my hands. So strange to be touching someone else.
I sit on the other end of the sofa, my body heavy but relaxed. Above us, the sleep-holds hover on the ceiling, two unblinking ovals staring down like all-knowing eyes, leering at me with mocking accusation. They have taunted me all m
y life, those sleep-holds. There was a time when I harboured a fantasy. In that fantasy, I live the normal life of a normal person. Every night, I take to the sleep-holds, my baby twins – in my mind, always girls – asleep in the next room, their cherubic faces made chubbier as they hang upside down. And my wife sleeps, hanging next to me, her face pale yet luminescent in the mercuric night light, her long hair spilling down to just touch the floor, her feet graceful even in the straps of the sleep-holds. And in my fantasy, there is no pulsating push-push of blood into my upside-down face; no pain from the sleep-holds tearing into the skin of my feet; no drip of tears falling to the ground beneath me. Only calm and coldness and stillness. All is normal. Including me.
