62

 

WE WALK ALONG the fortress wall, scanning the landscape. Nightfall has begun, and the bleeding dusk skies sag under the weight of fresh darkness.

“How long,” Sissy asks, “before they come?”

We stare down the steep mountain slope, past the rocky outcropping, and into the dense forest canopy. The Vast stretches beneath us in the far distance, a threadbare, endless carpet.

“A lot of them perished in the desert,” I say. “Maybe over a million. But there are millions more. And they will come. Give them three consecutive days of heavy rain and cloud cover and they’ll make it here more or less intact. It depends on the weather.” I stare somberly at the darkening horizon. “And even if it doesn’t rain for weeks, if we have sunshine every day, still they will come. They’ll build more dome boats, or repair the broken ones. Or they’ll build a dome train. Whatever the case, we don’t have more than a fortnight.”

We walk down the length of the fortress wall, our minds preoccupied. “We find two working hang gliders,” Sissy says after a while. “Clair mentioned there might be some operable ones. Then we fly east.” She stares a long time, her face turned away from me, eastward. When she speaks, her voice is filled with self-recrimination. “You were right, Gene. We should have all listened. Back when we had a chance. We should have all kept heading east with you. If I hadn’t been so obtuse, we’d all still be alive.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But it’s true.”

“Maybe it’s not.”

She turns to look at me. “What do you mean, Gene?”

“We don’t know what’s east, do we?” I say. “We don’t know anything.”

“We know enough. We know your father wanted us to go there.”

I stuff my hands into my coat pockets. “And what do we really know about him?” And now it’s my turn to look east, into the gaping black nothingness. “We don’t know why he abandoned the Origin plan. We don’t know why he left here mere weeks before we were to arrive.” I shake my head. “What caused him to abandon his dream? And desert me for good this time?”

Sissy stares at the cottages across the meadows, crouched in the shadows. “It was something here. Had to be. Something spooked him. Something changed him.” Her eyes light on the isolated shadow of a building set close to the forest edge. The laboratory where he spent all his time. When we were last here, we searched it from top to bottom, but it never gave up any of its secrets.

But she only keeps staring at it, her eyebrows knit together in deep thought.

“What happened to him?” I ask. “How could he change so drastically?”

The questions unfurl above us like rising smoke, unanswered.

*   *   *

It doesn’t take much time to find the operable hang gliders. Sissy comes up with a methodology that is as efficient as it is effective: inspect the hang gliders for dust. Any hang glider relatively free of dust must have been used fairly recently by Clair. Using a few GlowBurns we find scattered about, we work up and down the corridor, inspecting the hang gliders—virtually all covered in thick layers of dust—hung on the walls. After less than half an hour, we find two hang gliders relatively free of dust. We leave them by the door where tomorrow we’ll give them a closer inspection under sunlight.

Blackness blots the night sky. An abrasive wind sweeps across the mountain face, freezing the evening dew on the meadows to glitters of ice. We squint our eyes against the bitter gust, staring despondently at the distance between us and the cottages.

“Let’s go to Krugman’s office,” I suggest. “We can bunk down there. Use the fireplace.”

The office is unrecognizable. A constant wind blows through the smashed windows. The upturned furniture is pressed up against the wall, as if pushed there by the wind. We know that is not the case. It was the rush of duskers into this office that destroyed everything—and everyone—in it. Even the heavy oak desk is flipped upside down, three of its four legs snapped off like twigs.

Sissy walks to the desk. She stares at the deep claw marks gashed into the oak, at the white, splintered wood poking out at all angles like broken bones breaking skin. A semi-encrusted yellow substance is puddled in one of the smashed drawers. The remains of a melted dusker. Sissy grabs her arms as if to ward off a sudden cold.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

She only shakes her head. But something is clearly bothering her. Her shoulders are too bunched, her face too shaded gray.

“No, really. What is it?”

She draws a deep breath. “When are we going to talk about it?”

I sweep my eyes over her, trying to understand. “What is ‘it’?”

She looks at me uncertainly. “We should have talked earlier. But … the moment never seemed right. Not on the train, not with David…” Her voice trails off, and the sentence hangs unfinished, as if waiting for me to complete it.

“What are you talking about?”

A silence descends between us. Her eyes are on mine, and when I look up our gazes meet and hold. And then I know. What she’s trying, reluctantly, to bring up. A topic conveniently pushed aside the past few days by fight, flight, and fatigue, but which is now no longer avoidable.

“You know what, don’t you?” she says, her eyes almost pleading for this to be true.

I nod slowly, reluctantly. My next words, softer than a whisper, uttered like a forced confession. “Why it felt so natural. When we turned, why it felt so natural—so much better, actually—to be a dusker.”

She walks over to me, arms snaked across her chest. “Why, Gene?”

I pull her gently into me.

“I don’t know,” I say.