17

 

“YOU NEED MY help?” I say, certain I must have misheard.

His fingers continue to scratch air, only faster now. “Do you mind,” he asks, “if I have the lights dimmed down? It’s rather painful.… Why, yes, thank you. Lights down, please.” Within seconds the tank lights dim. The glass partition loses its mirror quality, and the group of staffers emerges from behind the glass. Only now, the group has doubled in number. And standing in front, with a look of mild panic that is evident even with shades covering half his face, is the chief advisor.

“I like you,” the Ruler says with gentleness. “Can I just say that first off, before we get down to business? And if I ever do eat you one day, know it’s nothing personal, because I really do like you. You’ve got ingenuity and pluck, loads of it. Would we all shared your qualities.” Shadows pool into his eye sockets, hiding his deep-set eyes.

“What do you want with me?”

“What I want with you and what I need from you are, unfortunately, two very different things. What I want is your flesh, to devour it. What I need from you, however, is quite entirely different.”

I nervously glance at the crowd of staffers, at the tanks that are now thankfully too dim to reveal their interior. “Go ahead.”

He pauses. It is a pause tinged with embarrassment. “Quite simply,” the Ruler says, “we have a situation.”

“What kind of situation?”

His face remains bland, but his chest expands, pressing against the metal constraint. “First some background. During the Heper Hunt, we know you got away by boat. We know you were followed down the Nede River by the HiSS organization. You are familiar with the HiSS organization, yes?”

I nod. HiSS stands for the Heper Search Society, an underground grassroots organization that seeks to root out hepers rumored to have infiltrated society. Despite the Ruler’s best efforts to snuff out this group (its very existence was an affront to the Palace’s position that hepers were extinct), it had in recent years not only survived but also thrived. I remember Ashley June telling me she had joined the HiSS in order to both escape suspicion and keep tabs on suspected heper activity.

Seeing me nod, the Ruler continues. “Now, judging from the fact that you were forced to beat a quick escape by train, we can safely assume that the HiSSers hunted you down in the mountains, yes?”

The girl’s body inside the tank rotates slowly toward me again. Her face, her eyes, turning round as if to look at me. I turn my gaze from her.

“Those damn HiSSers,” the Ruler says, his lips curling. “Took us by surprise. The depth of their organization, their membership numbers, their ability to secretly build a fleet of sun-proofed boats. Must have decimated the heper farm.” His voice is bland, but the words come out as if marinated in acid.

“But having our farm raided is the least of our problems,” he continues. “It’s the train tracks that concern us the most. Any nincompoop would realize they lead to the Palace, and that the Ruler must have been hiding a secret stash of hepers for generations. News like that gets back to the metropolis and … it’d be all over for the Palace. And for me.”

The Ruler banks his eyeballs to his right, stares at the crowd assembled behind the glass. He’s staring in particular at the chief advisor. “But, as my chief advisor has informed me, there’s reason to be optimistic. A sufficient number of sunny days have passed since that raid to lead us to believe that all HiSSers have perished in the sunlit mountains. And with all the HiSSers dead, the gentle citizens of the metropolis shall never learn of the heper farm or the train track or the catacombs filled with hepers below.”

“I’m happy for you,” I say, not bothering to hide my sarcasm. “Congratulations. But you still haven’t told me why I’m here.”

He’s quiet for a moment.

“Turns out,” he says, “our optimism may have been a little premature.” His eyes swivel left and look to the far wall. “Would you do me a favor? Would you turn on that TV monitor over there? Hanging on that wall?”

Everyone stares—I feel their wet eyeballs on me—as I walk in front of the glass wall to the TV monitor. I push a button on the side of the screen. Immediately it blinks on.

“This is a recording of a live television report,” the Ruler says. “Breaking news that came through the airwaves only a few hours ago.”

I hear sounds before the images blur in. Of mass pandemonium, people shouting. With breathless excitement. Then images sharpen into focus onscreen. I see people rushing along one of the main avenues in the metropolis. Streets overrun with mobs, horses and carriages forced to come to a standstill, passengers leaping out of them. More images from different locations, likely from security cams, nonsensical and fragmented, as if the broadcasting producers were having a hard time piecing it all together. For no more than a couple of seconds I see a shot of the Domain Building where my father used to work. A shot of the Metropolis Hospital. A shot of the Convention Center, capturing the water show from the large fountain out front.

I don’t know what’s happening, but goose bumps nevertheless break out all over my skin. Voices whisper in my head, excited, frantic, overlapping one another, growing louder until I realize they’re not in my head but coming from the TV monitor.

“… incredible news that has shocked the citizenry of the metropolis…”

“… nobody believed anyone could survive so long out in the Vast…”

“—a face familiar to all as one of the selected hunters—”

And then the TV image suddenly shifts and we’re inside a studio; no, the décor is too bland, too clinical. It’s the inside of the Metropolis Hospital. Uniformed nurses and doctors line up against the walls. The curved, fish-eye quality of the footage tells me the shot is likely from a convex hallway security camera. A medical team is hurrying down the hallway. A trio of doctors in the lead, their arms swinging wildly, frantically waving aside reporters. They’re pulling a wheeled hospital stretcher. As the stretcher—a horizontal beam supported by two vertical poles on wheels—passes the camera, at first I can’t see the person hanging upside down on it. There’re too many reporters blocking the view, too many nurses and doctors surrounding the patient. I see only the patient’s feet secured in the footholds of the stretcher.

And then there’s a clearing, a millisecond of a second when a crack in the wall of bodies allows me to catch the briefest glimpse. But it’s all I need. I know who it is. The stretcher is pulled away, down the hall.

I close my eyes in disbelief. I still see her hair secured into a bun, a few loose, dangling strands dragging along the tiled floor. A fervent ripe redness glosses them, like arteries filled with blood. I see the high bridge of her nose, the soft protrusions of cheekbones, the stark line of jawbone pale against the dark tiles of the hospital floor.

Ashley June.