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She bites her lip, nods.
“I can’t believe they separated you from the boys. Put you out here in the boondocks.”
“It’s in their bylaws.”
“Their precious bylaws! Didn’t the boys want you to stay with them?”
“Of course. And they were insistent.”
“Then why—”
“The elders were more insistent. And I didn’t want to cause a stir or get on their bad side. Remember, this all happened mere hours after we first got here, and I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with. I thought it was better to play along at the time. So I told Epap and the boys that it was okay.”
“I can’t believe Epap didn’t—”
“No, I made it happen. I insisted.”
“Still, he could have fought harder for you.”
She shakes her head slightly. “Go easy on him. On all the boys. After spending their entire lives in a dome, a little losing of their heads is to be expected.” She smiles. “They’ve been plied with food, drink, entertainment. And Epap’s been surrounded by more female attention than he can handle. They’re all completely besotted with this place.”
“I’m not buying it, Sissy. After everything you’ve done for them, after you single-handedly brought them here without so much as a paper cut, you’d think they’d show a little more loyalty to you.”
She squeezes my hand. “Hardly single-handedly,” she says.
“Well,” I say, flicking my eyes downward as the heat of a blush rises to my cheeks. “I only pitched in, you did the brunt of the work.”
She frowns. “I was referring to your father. Everything he did: the map, the boat, the tablet.”
“Ah, yes, my father,” I say. “Of course.”
She giggles. A strange sound, like a slippage, a spill. Her hand reaches up and brushes my hair. “Did you think I was talking about you?” Her mouth widens into a smile.
“No, of course I knew you were talking about my father.”
And then the mood changes. Maybe it’s the sadness that enters my eyes, or the sudden sag of my shoulders, but her smile disappears. She strokes my hair, but softer, slower now.
“I’m sorry about your father,” she says.
“It’s tough for both of us.”
“But doubly so for you. He was your father.” Her breath clouds between us. “They said they found him in the log cabin. No suicide letter.” She shakes her head slightly. “I didn’t believe it at first. Couldn’t. That’s totally not like him at all.”
“What would drive my father to do such a thing?” I gaze at the distant lights of the village. “What is it about this place?”
She grips my hand tighter. “Gene, there’s so much that’s off here.”
I nod slowly. “I’ve noticed. I mean, what’s with those dainty feet, all the pregnant girls? The elders walking around like peacocks? All those bylaws and precepts. And where are all the teenage boys, the adult women?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she says excitedly. “You’ve been mostly unconscious, blissfully unaware. There were times I wanted to slap you awake, just to have someone to talk to.”
“How about Epap, the boys? Haven’t they noticed anything?”
She shakes her head with frustration. “The boys—including, no, especially, Epap—have been useless. Useless. They’re too taken in by this place, completely oblivious.” She grits her teeth. “And when I brought this up to Epap, he accused me of being paranoid.”
I nod, remembering she’d mentioned this earlier today. “I can’t believe he accused you of being paranoid. You’re like the most levelheaded person I know.”
She lets out a laugh, and I can hear her insides unknotting with relief. “Oh Gene,” she says, “sometimes they even had me second-guessing myself. Honestly, I spent a lot of time wondering if all this really is weird, or just a normal I’m not accustomed to. I mean, I’ve spent my whole life in a glass dome, what do I know of the real world?” She shakes her head, then starts thumping me on the chest. “Don’t ever get sick again! Don’t ever leave me alone like that!”
The sound of wind flutes through the woods, shifting the branches. A drop of water, collected in the cup of a leaf, falls from above. It lands on Sissy’s temple, slides down along her jawline. I wipe at it, my fingers brushing wet against her soft skin.
She is still thumping my chest, but her hand moves slower now, distracted. Until it halts halfway, left hanging in the air between us. I gaze into her eyes. They were once merely brown; but now they seem to burst with the color of the woods about us, the color of chestnut and orchard and cypress.
I move my hand from the side of her face, and gently cup her fist. She is about to say something.
And then I am averting my eyes, releasing her hand.
After a moment, she lowers her arm. We stand without moving, without speaking.
“You said I don’t know the half of it,” I finally say.
“What?”
“About this village. What else have you seen?”
She looks about. “Oh, right.” She laughs, not with humor but as if she’s clearing her throat or changing the conversation topic. “Come this way. I stumbled on something really weird the other night. I’m not sure what to make of it.”
She leads me through the trees, occasionally bending low to duck under low-hanging branches. We stop when we come upon a sudden clearing. Before us is a steep embankment that serrates the forest cleanly into two.
“Up here,” she says, climbing the embankment.
We crest the embankment, our boots dislodging and rattling loose pebbles and small stones. Two narrow metal rails lie stretched on top of the embankment, running perfectly parallel to one another about a child’s body length apart. They seem endless, running the entire length of the embankment and disappearing into twin bookends of darkness. Wooden planks lie perpendicular to and between the metal rails, connecting them like rungs of a downed ladder.
Something colder than ice freezes in me.
I stoop, grab hold of one of the rails. Cold knifes into my skin as I stare down the rail’s length, my eyes trailing its gradual fade into the darkness.
“Do you know what it is?” Sissy asks. “Is it a track for some weird sport?”
I stand up, gaze down the length of the rails in the opposite direction until they disappear. My neck stiffens with dawning fear. “It’s something called a ‘train track.’ I read about them as a kid. In fairy-tale picture books.”
“‘Train track’?” She stares at the tracks. “What’s a train?”
“Something big,” I say quietly. “A locomotive used for travel. Over vast, unimaginable distances, hundreds of miles, even. On these metal beams. With incredible speed.” I am trying to hide my emotion, but my shaking voice is giving my fear away.
“Hundreds of miles?” Sissy takes a step toward me, her face paling. “What’s a train track doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
She looks at the distant cottages of the Mission.
“Gene,” she whispers, her eyes wide. “What is this place? Where are we?”
20
DESPITE BEING UP most of the night, I’m up at the crack of dawn. I’m in my own room, but not in my bed. Sissy lies there, adrift in slumber, her face lax on my pillow. But her body seems tense, even in sleep, as if the memory of the last few hours—and probably, for her, the last few days—has seeped into her restive mind.
She wanted to stay with me, she’d told me last night at the train tracks. I asked if that might get us in trouble. Wouldn’t her absence at the farm be noted, wasn’t it against the bylaws—
“Screw the bylaws,” she’d replied. Truth is, I didn’t want to be alone, either. Back in my cottage, by the time I got the fire going—we were chilled to the bone—she’d fallen asleep. Quickly, as if for the first time in days.
Not wanting to wake her, I sit up quietly on the sofa and stare at the dead embers in the fireplace. The windows to my left face east,
and the curtain is rimmed with a burnt orange. There’s no sluggishness in my mind or body, only adrenaline. Within a minute, I’m flinging on my jacket and stepping outside.
Warm sunshine butters down, gaining in strength as I make my way along the still-empty streets. The mountain peak, rising up behind the village, is largely stripped of snow, only the uppermost tip covered in white. I take in a lungful of clean air.
The path winds around the village in a horseshoe manner that doesn’t quite make a full circle. As I come to the end of the path, my attention is diverted to a brook gurgling on my left. A well-trod path leads down to the bank where sits a large wooden deck crossed with laundry lines. Scrubbing boards and buckets are stacked neatly underneath a sitting bench. I could use a drink of water. I head down.
The water is cool, clear, cold. After drinking enough to slake my thirst, I douse my face and hair. Drops of water line down my back, stinging and energizing. I feel my thoughts crystallize, alertness sharpen.
Across the river, someone is standing. Watching me.
“Hey, Clair,” I say, startled. “Clair like the air.”
She doesn’t answer, only continues to stare at me. “You shouldn’t be out here,” she finally says. Her voice cuts crisply through the still air. “It’s against the bylaws.”
“Nor should you,” I say. “Come over here,” I urge her, motioning with my hand.
For a second, she pauses. Then she relents, leaping from rock to rock across the brook, her boots hardly getting wet.
“Hey,” I say, realizing something after she’s crossed over, “how did you do that?”
