With twitchy fingers she typed Carbajal’s directions into her phone. They were absurdly simple, involving none of the sorcery of Lee Fleming’s blind plunges into the forest. Take this county road to that state highway, turn right at that crossroads, hang a left down this dirt road. She didn’t wait to make the trip. She couldn’t. She’d inferred from Doug that he’d intended to euthanize A, but when she thought back on what he’d said while carrying A away, she couldn’t recall one solid piece of evidence. She’d only wanted it to be true. If she could find physical evidence of Carbajal’s story, she could find Doug and shove it in his face. He wouldn’t torture a human being, no matter how far gone he was.
Liv couldn’t forget that, in addition to A, Doug had nearly every weapon in Lee’s armory.
She steered as if through wet cement. Every car in her rearview mirror was a plainclothes cop ready to arrest her for what she knew and what she’d done. Every pedestrian in her peripheral vision pointed an accusatory finger. Her station wagon exhaust pipe leaked blood, and the engine emitted not asthmatic thwacks but A’s high-pitched, pleading cheeps.
It was only because she arrived at the site from a new direction that Liv didn’t recognize it sooner. She parked the station wagon in the dirt driveway, a cloud of road dust erasing the real world behind her. Here was where the Biatalik Program had been centered. Of course it was. How could it have been anywhere else? She exited the car and stared up at the house.
It was like any century-old two-story country abode except that the roof was scraped of shingle and sagging, the windows broken, the paint peeled from wood. No one had lived here in ages, but it wasn’t the house that was important. Liv drifted to the left, beneath the cracking knuckles of a leafless oak, and traced fossilized wheelbarrow ruts as they wound past stooped barns, weed-strangled grain bins, a collapsed chicken house, and twin rusted silos. Beyond all that, rippling along the horizon, were the thunderbird wings of Black Glade.
This was the farm where her father had forced her to take Resurrection Update before hopping the electric fence with Lizardpoint. Before running, he’d glanced at the sky and said to her, Anything can happen under a sky like this. He’d been right: She had returned to the last place she’d ever wanted to see again, not creeping from the woods this time but pulling up like she wasn’t afraid of anything. Sweat began dripping down her face. She’d never been more scared in her life.
Liv opened the car’s rear door and took out Mist.
This is where Carbajal’s instructions got specific. Liv wobbled across lumpy terrain. Weeds swayed as critters dashed. She passed a pen that might have once housed slobbering cows but was now a mud pit cordoned off by slouching wire. She passed an outhouse in the process of being sucked into the earth. Above the outhouse, the skies darkened. Black Glade snagged hold of the sun like Hangman’s Noose. Turn back, she begged herself. Drive away.
The silos were behemoths as inscrutable as Giza pyramids. Liv felt woozy and had to look down; she walked to the base of the second silo as Carbajal had directed. A treacherous ladder clotted by vines was bolted onto the exterior, and just thinking of such a suicidal climb sickened Liv. But she wasn’t headed up. She ducked beneath some sort of chute and skirted the concrete base until she found a small access hatch. It was fringed in yellow decay, its handle so corroded Liv thought it might crumble in her hand.
The hatch stuck when she tried to open it. Good, she thought. Get out of here. Instead, she decided to kick it open, then changed her mind. All that noise in these swaths of silence? It might rip the screams from her tensed body. She propped a running shoe up against the silo. With leverage now, she pulled the handle. Metal squealed, the sound of her fraying nerves. On the fourth tug, the hatch popped. Liv dodged clear of it. It was as if she’d cut a neat rectangle through reality. Beyond the hatch, nothing, an absolute void.
Liv climbed through it, straight into unknowable horror. Inside, the hot air was stiff straw against her exposed skin. There was a light source ninety feet straight up, gray daylight pinholing through ventilation slats. Light smeared down the inside of the silo like drool. Liv stared back at the ground, where Carbajal had told her to look. The fear of blundering into a bladed farm instrument limited her to small steps, but she stomped those steps, listening for a hollow thud, praying not to hear one. But there was a sound. She cocked her head. The hatch squeaked in the breeze. Wind rattled the siding of melting sheds. Liv reached out, pulled the hatch shut. It was darker now, but quieter. She closed her eyes, held her breath.
Music: It hummed from a hidden place.
Her first thought was a car radio, someone who’d followed her, maybe Carbajal, so he could murder her where no one would see.
Except this music came from inside the silo. On this scar of a property, nothing could be more unexpected. Liv crouched, her knees knocking, both to hear it better and to prevent her own collapse. She shuffled on all fours, pushing Mist along the ground, scattering mouse droppings, feeling the sharp, ancient corn on her palms. The music continued. It was tremulous but had a rhythm, a sleepy swing like a slowly plucked guitar.
There, she felt it. A seam in the concrete. She dug her fingers into it, then slid those fingers until the seam made a right-angle bend. Another hatch, just as Carbajal had promised, and she felt for a notch, a knob, a lever. Near her knees she found a heavy ring. She slid her body clear of the hatch and took the ring in both hands. And there she paused, her head bowed in prayer posture, hair dangling in dirt, the lackadaisical lope of the song vibrating her bones. Her fright approached paralysis. There was no closing this hatch once it was opened.
Hinges yowled like a cat. From below came a different variety of light, electric sources of varied wattage, bulbs, and shades. Silhouetted was the shape of a ladder, six rungs, and before Liv could arrange her body to take the first step, a new verse of the song began, and now she could hear it, the nodding pace of the guitar, the mournful twang of the singer. Country-western, Liv thought. Dolly Parton? Liv remembered a drive with her family, this same song coming on the radio, Dad wanting to change the dial, Mom deflecting his hand so she could sing along.
Liv picked up Mist, the weapon profane alongside this gush of warm memories. She dropped one foot on the ladder with a dull clang. Then the other: clang. She climbed down, her trembling legs brightening with orange light, the music growing louder, perhaps the safest, softest sounds that could have possibly greeted her in this underworld. Her heart pounded regardless, big fleshy smacks against her lungs. Her body would give out any second now, any second.
The first thing she saw was a needlepoint. She blinked, and shivered, and wanted to climb away. Its cheer was ghastly, unspeakable. God Bless Our Home, it read, in the aslant lettering of either a novice or someone too old to guide a needle. The phrase was bordered by crude likenesses of flowers. In the center was a clumsy depiction of a house with a peaked roof and red chimney, the Xs of the stitches so loose it was nearly abstract. It could be the house on this property, Liv thought, and the idea was appalling. There were no peaked roofs or brick chimneys, not down here.
She followed both light and music around a drywall elbow and like that, she was no longer alone. To her left was a living room. To her right, a kitchen. The rooms began abruptly, like one of her father’s theater sets viewed from a backstage wing. The living room was carpeted with incongruous strips, some colorful and shaggy, others drab and crewcut. There were two chairs, both of them wood, though augmented with misshapen, home-sewn cushions. A low, chipped wooden table was between the chairs. On it, a checkerboard, red destroying black.
Both chairs were occupied. Liv choked down her gasp. The chair backs prohibited her from getting a full view of the checkers players, but they had turned in their seats and were getting a full look at her. The closer pair of eyes looked normal, though the head in which they were set was oddly noduled, as if the skull were burled with bone. The second pair of eyes wasn’t normal. One rolled like a marble like A’s eyes; the other was focused but so bloodshot Liv expected actual blood to dribble. There were floor lamps, but they were dead, leaving the room to be lit by a single source of flickering blue light. Television light, Liv recognized, though when she edged closer, what she saw instead was a wooden crate from which a rectangle had been sawed. Sitting inside, a wad of blinking blue Christmas lights.
It was a fake TV.
All of it was fake, a flimsy copy of a dimly remembered domestic world. A fake living room. A fake carpet. The cross-stitch had a fake picture frame made of masking tape. Liv stared at the checkers players, unable to breathe. No one else breathed, either. No one moved. Slowly, as if on a swivel, Liv turned to face the kitchen.
It was brighter, four mismatched table lamps and a bulb over the sink. From where she stood, Liv had a partial view of a shelf, upon which rested the kind of knickknacks found in any rustic Midwestern kitchen. Each item was just wrong enough to be repugnant. The porcelain child holding a teddy bear had been broken, then glued back together, its face an abomination. A wooden rooster had been exactingly repainted, but by someone whose eyes didn’t work; the tail feathers were army green, the breast neon orange, the comb black. There was a jolly gnome, too, but only the top half of it, grafted to the tail of a rubber shark. Liv didn’t feel that any of it was meant to disturb, which only made it more disturbing.
On the counter was a record player. Propped beside it was an album cover, Dolly Parton stretching inside a tight red sweater alongside the words Greatest Hits. Dolly was still singing, the record still turning.
Another step toward the kitchen and Liv found the worst thing: more people. One man had been washing dishes; only the ripple of sudsy water proved he wasn’t a cardboard cutout. Two others sat at a folding table, each holding a hand of cards, the cribbage board between them forgotten. Slowly the man with his back to her lowered his face until his cards covered it like a hand fan. He was ashamed, Liv realized. The overalls he wore did little to hide the soft blisters that covered his long arms and gorilla back like Bubble Wrap. His cribbage opponent had no opportunity to hide. He was dressed in an old dress shirt tucked into baggy, belted slacks, and wore a broken watch. So humdrum was his attire that Liv had to force herself to accept the shape of his head. It was oblong and curved with doughy bulges at the chin and forehead. He set down his cards, and a strange shiver ran through his sleeves, as if there weren’t two arms inside but rather two braids of tentacles.
Liv’s whole body quaked. Why was she here? She could not recall. Right, yes, to find evidence to force Doug to stop, but this was so much more than she’d expected, and she was so much less—a single girl, down here all alone.
The man at the sink suddenly shielded his face and ran off into darker areas. Liv couldn’t see lower than his waist, but his footsteps sounded like a team of horses, a manifold clopping that made her wonder how many legs he had. Liv’s dry, blinkless eyes trailed back to the sink. Over the soapy dishes was a half-open window bedecked with summery yellow curtains. It looked out directly onto a cement wall.
A door creaked, same as any door in any house. Liv peered into the farthest reaches. Distant light gleamed off a floor. Bathroom tile, she thought. These men, whatever had happened to them, had to eat, hence the dishes. They had to use a toilet, hence a bathroom. She took a step forward and saw a man’s shape, unlike the others as straight and sharp as a razor. Behind the slim man huddled others, jostling for his protection, and only then did Liv notice that the two TV watchers had snuck away, their checkers forgotten, their disfigurements remembered.
From across the bunker, the slim man looked right at Liv. A sob emitted from her throat. The slim man straightened his sleeves. Liv shook her head, wishing him away. He began to approach. He did not move like the others; there was no fugitive scurry, no abnormal lope. He strode past a potted fern (plastic), past a bowl of fresh fruit (ceramic), past a rotary telephone (connected to nothing). This dwelling, Liv thought through a fearful haze, had everything necessary to make one feel right at home. No, that wasn’t right. She had yet to see a single mirror.
She’d wielded Mist a hundred times but never used it. Now it rose, sliding up her hip, behind her back, slippery in her spasming hand. The slim man wore dark clothes that made his face look paper white. When he was ten feet away, Liv recognized that his face was white—he wore a mask. She whimpered. The mask was a novelty from a dollar-store Halloween aisle, molded plastic and an elastic strap. At some point, it had been covered in white paint, and detailed with black-dot eyes and a smiley-face mouth.
Smiley Face stopped at handshake distance. Liv felt the sting of scared tears.
“You’ve come,” he stated simply, “to set them free.”
Liv drew a cold, quaking breath. Hearing intelligible English down here was this nightmare’s wildest detail. Though muffled behind plastic, the man’s voice had a musical quality. Liv regripped Mist and moved her head, intending to indicate that, no, he was wrong. But she felt the skin of her neck crimp: She was nodding. Despite the stifling fear, she’d try to get every one of them up the ladder no matter how many legs they had, through the silo hatch no matter the sensitivity of their strange eyeballs. To make up for how little she’d done to help A, she’d try.
“I can’t think of any other reason you would find us,” Smiley Face said. “And I thank you for the thought. Can I fix you a cup of tea?”
Liv wiped sweat from her eyes and stared into the indifferent black dots of the mask’s eyes. Did tea mean sitting down? In this ghoulish farce of a kitchen? She shook her head, and that shook her shoulder, which shook her arm, and she felt one of Mist’s points jab her in the backside. The pain emboldened her, and she spoke, her voice breaking over Dolly Parton.
“You’re keeping them down here,” she rasped. “You can’t do that.”
He gestured with long, delicate fingers.
“I don’t lock doors,” he said. “You saw yourself.”
“Then they don’t know,” Liv said. “They’re confused. They’re scared.”
Smiley Face folded his hands in front of him.
“Are you sure,” he asked gently, “it’s not you who’s confused and scared?”
He drifted to the right, under the kitchen light. Liv hissed at the motion and revealed Mist as a warning. Smiley Face either didn’t see the weapon through the mask or didn’t care; he stepped over helixes of warped linoleum and settled a hand upon the giant’s bubbled neck. He stroked, each blister fattening under the pressure of his hand before rimpling back into place. Smiley Face wore dark blue hospital scrubs with short sleeves. His bare arms, from what Liv could see, were normal.
“You’ve made an easy mistake. Freedom—it’s not to be found up there. Have you ever felt free?” He leaned onto the back of the vacated chair opposite the giant. “Think of all the things you ever wished you could say.”
Liv credited the masked man’s sedate tone for being able to understand his instruction. She thought of the things she could have been brave enough to tell her mother, about her drinking, about Doug, about A. Liv hadn’t needed to go through all of this alone, if only she could have made herself open her mouth.
“Think of all the things,” Smiley Face continued, “you ever wished you could do.”
This list was even longer. Helping her father in a way that might have prevented all of this. Trying to understand A instead of being afraid to relinquish her rage. Being there for Doug in the years he’d needed her most.
“Down here, true freedom is possible,” Smiley Face said. “I know that’s not the reason this program was founded. But you can’t control life’s gorgeous, ungainly sprawl. You can’t curtail evolution. I believe this, what you see, is what Biatalik was destined to be. Everyone here is a truly unique being, one of a kind—I’ve seen to it. Isn’t that what everyone up there fights so hard to be? One of a kind?”
Liv thought of her dad, his dogged campaign to get incurious teenagers to care about poetry. She thought of Doug, striving to formulate corn mazes of legend. She scanned this cellar world and did, for an instant, feel a startling current of dozy warmth. All the struggles of the bright, noisy, overcrowded overground, what was the point of any of it?
“My orphans,” Smiley Face sighed. “I love them so much.”
Carbajal had said the Biatalik subjects were life-sentence prisoners, but under the wing of this masked man, they displayed no antisocial tendencies. They behaved, in fact, like model citizens, like her own dad during off-hours, relaxing on cushioned furniture to while away time with television and games.
“Who are you?” Liv whispered.
Smiley Face touched his white mask with the same delicacy as he’d touched the giant’s blisters.
“It’s been so long since we’ve had a visitor. There was a man, a military man, he used to come and leave crates of food in the silo. I don’t know if it was under orders or if he just wished to help. Fourteen months ago, he stopped coming. I don’t know why. Since then, it has been difficult. Our supplies are getting low. We’ve had to begin rationing. We could use a new friend. Perhaps that friend could be you? What do you think, Olivia?”
Hearing her name spoken aloud delivered no particular blow. Instead it burned like a sliver starting to fester with infection. Her shock peeled back just enough to recognize that everything about this situation felt inevitable. From the day she’d seen this farm from behind an electric fence, she’d never really left it.
“I’m Dr. Faddon.” He gestured at the wrist compass Liv wore. “And you’re Olivia Fleming. I’ve heard so much about you.”
His next gesture was at the knickknack shelf, and Liv sidestepped onto gummy linoleum so that she could see the rest of it. On the far left was an object she recognized, an object that, for two years, she’d only known by its chalk outline. It was Lizardpoint, the turn-of-the-century Ghanaian fighting pick, its barbed point, hyena-hide fitting, and lizard-skin grip transformed, via its placement, into something as innocent as a figurine.
“We’ve been so worried about him,” Faddon said.
Liv’s eyes sandpapered against tender sockets.
“He’s the only one of my orphans to ever leave,” Faddon continued. “Not long ago, off he ran. We, of course, had no means to go after him. That compass you’re wearing, he never took it off. It reminded him of his family, he said. While he could still talk, that is.”
Liv thought of A, clutching her dad’s compass.
Her veins went cold even as her body melted.
“No,” Liv said. “No, no. No, no, no, no.”
There was no hope of pushing the truth away, not anymore, not ever again. The being known as A hadn’t kidnapped or killed her father.
The being known as A was her father.