9

 

ASHLEY JUNE

ASHLEY JUNE PILLAGED the village all night. For the first hour, it was sheer delirium: a rampage through heper-ladled streets, a frenzied romp of a hunt with hundreds of other duskers. The hepers—almost all girls—tried to flee, but their strides were oddly plodding and ungraceful. The duskers picked them off as easily as dandelions in a field. Some heper girls tried to hide, just as futilely, under beds and inside wardrobes. They were eaten right where they cowered in an explosion of splintering wood. For hours, the snap of jaws and the rattle of teeth cracked the night skies. Afterward, when there were no more hepers to eat, the duskers licked up dots of blood splattered on walls, wooden floors, the cobblestone paths.

They ran their tongues over the village like a ravenous pack of wolves licking a bone clean.

Still, the night was not without its disappointments. A large number of hepers slipped through their clutches, escaping on a train. More than a few dozen duskers made a dash for that runaway train, ramming through the bottleneck at the bridge, and managed to cling on to the ribbed cages of the train. The smarter ones U-turned, headed right back into the heper village. They knew the train was picking up speed and that the hepers were, in any case, unreachable behind impenetrable steel bars. There were more hepers in the village ripe for the picking.

Afterward, the duskers’ bodies sated, their tongues licking bloodstained lips, they dozed upside down from street lamps and rooftops. Or they ranged toward the fortress wall, drinking from whisky bottles discovered in the dining hall, where narrow slit windows served as near-perfect, almost custom-made sleepholds. They stared into the night sky, and their bloated, engorged bodies quivered with satisfaction. They knew for a fact that no matter how many years lay ahead of them, they had experienced the apex of their lives. Nothing could ever top this. Perhaps that is why they were so careless—they had nothing ahead of them anymore. Filled and satiated, they drifted into a deep, bottomless sleep, forgetful that they were outside, that they were facing east.

But Ashley June did not sleep. She was haunted by her encounter with Gene. She had hoped to meet him in the mountains, but in her most honest moments she had suspected him dead already. A victim at the hands and fangs of a hunter, or perhaps of the Nede River. And yet there he was, standing in the middle of an empty street in the village square. As if by mutual arrangement, a midnight tryst.

She had felt two emotions. Most keen was an urge to protect him, to shield, to embrace. She approached him slowly, and how her lungs wanted to scream out. She had expected, with the turning, some dilution or diminishment in her feelings for him. But they rumbled deep as ever, amplifying along her jaw and collarbone and spine.

But she felt something else, too. She wanted to devour him. To taste his flesh on her tongue, the warmth of his blood filling her, his body broken down and digested and fused seamlessly with hers, merging with her muscles and bones and eyes and hair and molecules and atoms. To feel him saturate her as he passed through her and, in passing into death, into her very being.

The inherent conflict between these two feelings overwhelmed her, stopping her in her tracks. Until a third feeling plowed right through her, dismantling everything. Jealousy. She saw the girl standing next to Gene and noted all too easily the intimate, natural bond between them. Jealousy raged in Ashley June, springing her into action. She found a target and it was not Gene.

Ashley June sucked down the girl’s blood. Virginal and hot and pure, it flowed down Ashley June’s throat like lava. For a short spell, she forgot Gene. But only for a few seconds. Another hunter moved in, eyeing him. A surge of protectiveness swept over Ashley June, and she made quick work of the interloper. But then Gene was gone. She chased after him as he fled down the meadows, toward the train station. She ran not to hunt but to protect him. She raced to the front of the pack, broadsided many hunters, sent them tumbling away. But there were too many and she was quickly overwhelmed.

But Gene got away. She saw him crouched inside the train as the distance stretched between them. And then the train was across the bridge, gaining speed. But no matter. She stared at the train tracks disappearing into the folds of the mountain. They would lead her to him. She would find him again.

Resolve energized her, rendering sleep impossible. While everyone else—after every heper had been devoured, every spot of blood licked up, every bone chewed and sucked on—fell into a sedated slumber, she roamed the streets, the buildings, the fortress wall. The night was hers alone. She was a solitary pale dot moving under a canopy of a billion stars.

*   *   *

Stars. She remembered the night (it was not so long ago, yet how far away it seemed) when it was her with whom he held hands, the skin of their palms touching. They lay (so bizarre a body contortion to her now) on the rooftop of the Heper Institute under the sprinkling of those bright, celestial dots, unaffected by the moon’s full brightness. The muted sounds of the Gala beneath them lifted harmlessly into the night. Gene had whispered to her, and a weird slip of laughter escaped his lips as she scratched her wrists.

Gene was careless that way, less disciplined than her. Or was it because his heperness was more native than hers, a life force that could be tamped down only with vigilant, deliberate effort? Either way, it was she who succumbed first, and that fact still surprised her.

*   *   *

Through the hours of the night, she roamed alone the streets of the village. She walked aimlessly, but at one point she caught a scent. Only a whiff, but it froze her.

It smelled of Gene.

Not quite. Even with the scent so faint, she knew immediately it was a few degrees off. The way the scent of family members could be so similar yet slightly different along the edges. Between siblings. Mothers and daughters. Fathers and sons.

She followed the wispy trail, losing it when a breeze blew. She waited; she was patient—she had time. And after the breeze died, she found the scent again. The frailest tendril. It led her away from the center of the village and toward an outcast building that sat alone at the lip of the forest. The building resembled a cinder block for its lack of windows and aesthetics. She stood before the closed door, sniffing. The door, like the building itself, had been spared from violence. No heper had taken refuge in this outcast building during the night, and so no hunter had pillaged and gutted the inside.

It was a laboratory. The almost-Gene scent bloomed thicker inside, months of accumulated smells. They pulsed off test tubes and vials and flasks and goggles, off the workbench tops and stools and the hammock in the corner. She closed her eyes in concentration, her nostrils flaring. The almost-Gene scent had the pungency of someone related to Gene, older, male. Gene’s father, perhaps?

Since turning, her enhanced olfactory senses never ceased to amaze her; but she was about to be marveled all the more. Because this scent—it now ruptured a distant memory. She had smelled this odor long ago, when she was only a child, when she was a heper, when she wasn’t even conscious of smelling it, much less storing it in her memory. The scent had burrowed into the irretrievable depths of her brain and only now, with her empowered sense of smell, did she recall it.

This almost-Gene smell was the smell of the doctor.

The one who had performed that awful surgery on her a decade ago. Her body tensed at the memory.

She moved away from the workbenches and ambled toward the back of the laboratory. In the farthest corner, the almost-Gene odor dropped off and she was about to turn around when she sniffed something curious. Actually, it wasn’t the smell itself that was unusual—it was the same almost-Gene smell—so much as its placement. It was coming from the floor. She sniffed. No, it was coming from under the floor.

She cocked her head, stared down.

A second later, she was ramming her arm through the floorboards. Her fingers touched the metal top of a small trunk. She tore out a few more floorboards and lifted the trunk out.

She ripped open the lid. There were stacks of paper inside. Ancient papers, musty, yellowed, and frayed at the edges, they harkened back to an era not decades but centuries ago.

It was not the content of these papers that immediately drew her attention—the ancient typeface was utterly indecipherable. Instead, her eyes lit on the insignia of the crescent moon in the top corner of each sheet:

There were other papers, as well, modern and crisp with relative newness, covered in the almost-Gene scent. She flipped through them, glancing at the handwritten notes. These were apparent transcriptions of the ancient documents. She read hurriedly at first, thinking there would be little to hold her interest. But soon she was taking in every sentence, swallowing every word. Blinking at the truth they revealed. A half hour later, she had read enough. To understand. Everything.

She took out a sheet of paper, a crumpled letter, from her pocket. She’d been carrying it for many nights since finding it in the Pit, and she now placed it next to the handwritten notes. It was the same handwriting.

She felt nothing but a deep pity for Gene.

She gazed through the opened doorway to the outside. The black of night was shading gray now as it had done millions of times before. But it felt as if the world, the universe, had irretrievably changed.

Sunrise caught everyone by surprise. Dawn light radiated into the streets, breaching the walls like a flood of acid. Many never woke at all—their inebriated bodies melted without so much as a twitch and their liquefied flesh dribbled between the stones of the fortress wall and into the dewed grass of the meadows. Others awoke screaming and scrambled into nearby cottages, seeking a refuge that was to be—like the remainder of their lives—short-lived. Within minutes, the strengthening sunlight slipped into the interior of the cottages through windows, smashed doors, breaks in the walls. It was a slow, agonizing disintegration for those inside, and some soon preferred the quicker death of full-on sunlight exposure. They ran outside into the onslaught of sun rays, dashing along streets and racing down meadows, as far and as fast as their disintegrating legs could take them. Those who had not melted away by the time they reached the ledge of the cliff threw themselves dramatically into the ravine and were seen no more.

Only Ashley June, ensconced safely in the darkness of the laboratory, survived. When dusk finally arrived, she opened the tightly sealed laboratory door and walked out. She found the village empty, its streets polka-dotted with yellow crusty stains, like vomit baked into the ground. She did not stop to genuflect or to mourn, nor did she even step around the crusty puddles. She walked right through them, the soles of her feet stepping on the sticky, slightly crunchy texture of what was once teeth and eyes and skin and bones.

She was crossing the bridge when she stopped. The train tracks would indubitably be the straightest path to Gene’s destination, but they were also the riskiest. The mountain foliage would initially offer her partial reprieve from the sun, but once the terrain leveled out and the tracks fell across the spare barren desert of the Vast she’d be fully, and fatally, exposed.

No, she would use a different route. For she’d already figured out the train’s destination. It had to be the Ruler’s Palace. Rumor had long circulated of a secret stash of hepers kept in underground pens, a rumor now corroborated by what she’d read in the laboratory. She would head to the Palace via a circuitous but safer route: return to the caves beneath the mountain, then backtrack along the Nede River the way she’d come. Several of the sun-proofed dome boats were docked at various points along the river with mechanical issues, and if she timed it right she could run at night and find shelter in these boats during the daytime. And in so doing, skipping like a rock across the surface of a river, she would make it back to the metropolis. And from there, to the Palace.

To Gene.

Wherever he was, she would journey there. No matter how far, how many miles and suns and days stood in her way, she would find him. And if she could not go to him, she would somehow lure him to her. For she had something to tell him: a truth that was both a curse and a miracle, the truth of the crimson moons.