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Jacob nods, wipes the tears off his face.
“You’re such a dunderhead, you know that?” Sissy says, ruffling his hair.
29
THEY SETTLE IN for the night, the three younger boys sharing the bed, Sissy on the sofa, Epap on the rug. I take a tall wooden stool out into the hallway, position it next to the window. I want to keep watch, I tell them, just in case.
I hear their voices murmuring in the room, their banter somber and low-key. Eventually, their voices turn to silence, then to light snores, their breathing synchronized even in the unconsciousness of sleep. I think to walk into the room, lie down on the bed. They will make room for me as they always have. But I stay rooted on the stool and gaze out the window. I need to be alone.
The rain, falling with the intensity of forty days and nights, comes to a sudden stop. After an hour, when even the runoff dripping off the eaves ceases, a clean silence overtakes the night. The clouds break but imperfectly; moonlight pours through the shredded skies in a fragmented, haphazard splash across the range of mountains.
Gene.
Gene.
Did he ever tell you why he named you Gene?
My thoughts are interrupted by the creak of floorboards. Sissy—pale and ashen like a ghost—floats down the dark stretch of the hallway. The duvet is wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.
“Why don’t you come back to the room?” she says quietly. She walks over when I don’t answer. Our shoulders almost touch as she looks out the window. Her sleeve is rolled up; dark shadows cover her forearm.
I place my hands tenderly on her arm, draw her into the moonlight. The branding wound looks even worse now, the puckered skin oozing with discharge. “Oh, Sissy.”
Her eyes harden, but they’re different this time. With the boys, to veil her pain, her eyes were set like reflecting shields. But now I can see past the flinty hardness where lie pools of deep hurt and anger.
She tells me she does not remember very much. She only recalls the wooziness that beset her after drinking the soup, the sensation of being carried away, then nothing until she was back in my room. Where she found herself branded. “I’m sure they must have also searched me,” she says, and even in her whisper I can hear the rage. “I don’t know what’s worse—knowing they did it, or not being able to remember it ever happened.”
“I’m sorry. I tried to find you—we did, Epap and I. But…”
“We can’t let this get to us,” she says, quietly, but again I see the flash of rage in her eyes. “I mean, don’t get me wrong: I want to kick the living hell out of them. But we can’t afford to get sidetracked. Our number one priority,” she says, turning to meet my gaze, “is to find out about that train. Running around with my own personal vendetta will only get in the way.”
Beads of her condensed breath glimmer on the window. Her arm trembles slightly in my hands.
“You sure you’re okay, Sissy?” I reach up to brush aside the hair covering her eyes. “Hey, maybe we should all just take off. Pack our bags and leave. Venture into the woods.”
“No,” she says. Very quietly. “Where would we go? How would we survive? Winter’s coming. Besides, Jacob’s right. Maybe the train really does take us to the Promised Land. We can’t ditch that possibility too soon—it might be the best option we have.”
We fall quiet. The clouds stretch thin then split apart, allowing more moonlight to illuminate the village. Gradually, Sissy’s posture begins to relax, the expression on her face softens. She leans against me, our shoulders slightly touching. I’m suddenly all too aware of the give of her flesh against mine. I’ve been holding her arm this whole time; slowly, I pull my hands back. Her arm drifts down to her side.
“What is it?” she says.
I swallow. “Nothing.” We gaze outside again. The sound of snoring drifts down the hallway.
“C’mon,” she says, “we should get some rest. Come back to the room, there’s plenty of space, it’s warm.” She puts her hand on my elbow. “Sleep will clear our heads. In the morning maybe we’ll think of something.”
I shake my head.
She stares intently at me. “So much the lone wolf, Gene.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“The answer’s out there somewhere. In the village. Not in our heads.” I push my hands into my parka pockets. “You told me once my father would play this hide-and-seek game with you. He played that game with me, too. All the time. He’d hide a prize but leave little clues around to help me find it.”
Her eyes sparkle with the memories. “The answer is right in front of you. Right under your nose.”
I nod. “I can’t shake this feeling that somewhere in this village is a clue he’s left for me. Right in front of me. Right under my nose. And I just need to find it.” I turn to her. “There are answers out there. Waiting to be found.”
She takes my hand gently. “I think I know where we should look.”
30
WE MOVE SWIFTLY through the moonlit streets. Deep puddles on the ground are transformed under the bright moonlight into gleaming pools of mercury. Full strength has returned to Sissy, and she walks easily beside me, her boots split-splatting on the wet path alongside mine. Cottages flank us on the narrow streets and we do not speak until we veer off the main street and onto a dirt path.
“This way,” Sissy says when we’re halfway between the village and the farmlands.
I wrap my parka tighter around me against the cold and follow her to an outcast building a hundred meters out, on the edge of the woods, rectangular and boxy. And drab. No windows and only a single metal door breaking up the bland concrete surface. Half of the building is awash in moonlight. The other half is hidden in the shadows of overhanging trees. “The Scientist’s lab,” she says as we draw closer to it. “I’ve already searched inside countless times when you were still sick. I knew the elders would have scoured every inch of the place, looking for the Origin. But I wanted to see for myself what the Scientist had been working on.”
* * *
The air inside is musty, dank with the odor of mold. Sissy flips a switch and overhanging fluorescent lights flicker on. The lab is composed of about five large workstations, all of which are littered with test tubes, small experiment burners, cylinders, and beakers. Scattered on benches and even on the dirt-packed floor are open textbooks and notepads filled with scrawled handwriting I’d recognize anywhere. My father’s.
“He must have slept here,” Sissy says, pointing at a hammock hanging in the corner. “A lab rat, researching, investigating, studying around the clock.”
I pick up a notebook. It’s filled from front to back, top to bottom with nonsensical chemical equations and formulas. If there’s any meaning to them, it’s lost on me. They have no more meaning to me than the mad, delusional workings and scribbles of a man pushed over the edge.
“I went through all the notebooks,” Sissy says. “And they’re all the same. Filled with those equations. Do they mean anything to you?”
I shake my head. I walk along the wall, eyes searching. In a tall glass cabinet, endless rows of vials sit in racks, many half-filled with a translucent liquid. “What was he doing in here? What was he working on?”
Sissy’s voice from the other end of the lab is echoic and distant. “I think he came up with the glowing green liquid inside the GlowBurns.” She walks over to me, opens the glass cabinet, and removes two vials. She pours the contents of one vial onto the surface of a work bench, splattering the liquid into a small pool. Then she opens the other vial, pours its liquid content atop the pool. Instantly, the intermixed liquid begins to glow green.
“From what I’ve been able to gather from the notebooks,” she says, “he was working on this liquid for a few years. It’s an alternative-energy light source of some kind.” She picks up a notebook and taps it on her thigh. “I’ve wondered if there was more to it. A hidden agenda.”
I pick up another notebook. More equations, chemical formu
las, nary a single sentence with subject, verb, object. Not an iota of a personal pronoun. “That’s it? That’s all he did in here? Worked on some stupid glowing liquid?” I pick up another notebook, flip through it, let it fall to the ground. “There’s got to be more.”
