Refugia
“DON’T GO,” TREY said.
Looking into his eyes, Kait didn’t reply. He’d made the same request, the same plea, many times, and she’d never replied.
Don’t go. When Malcolm finishes building that ship, and it finally sails away from here, don’t be on it.
No. It wasn’t true. Sometimes she had answered the request. With a question.
“Why not?”
And then it had been his turn to be silent.
It was maddening.
This time, as usual, she planned not to answer, not even with a question. Nor did she intend to allow any expression to cross her face.
Yet even though she was the best she knew at remaining expressionless—she’d been good at that forever—she could tell from the glint in his eyes that he was seeing her frustration, her annoyance, anyway.
And that, on some level, her reaction amused him.
The longtime pattern between Trey Gilliard and Kaitlin Finneran Gilliard.
Father and daughter. Kind of. By temperament and paperwork and love, if not by blood.
So, without intending to, because he was her father, because he was ill, she found herself saying, “All right. I won’t.”
For a moment, his eyes went wide. He tilted his head and looked at her more closely, his large dark eyes prominent in his gaunt face.
Then, without saying anything, he turned away and looked out over the savanna again. After a moment, she did the same, and they sat side by side, but in silence.
* * *
KAIT AND TREY came often to this spot, the watchtower that stood where Refugia’s northern wall met its eastern one. The sturdy walls, made of kapok and other local hardwoods, and the towers at each corner were designed to withstand an unnamed, unidentified danger. An onslaught that, once the terrible early months after the Fall had passed, seemed less and less likely ever to occur.
In the nearly twenty years since the colony had been established, there’d never been a warning given from any of the towers. No, that wasn’t true: Twice the colonists—Malcolm had dubbed them “Fugians” early on, and the name had stuck—had been alerted to a monsoon rolling inland from the Atlantic Ocean three miles away.
But the kind of threats they’d guessed might be coming? The kind of invasion they couldn’t even put into words, but feared anyway? No. Of course not.
Still, even now, someone was stationed in each of the watchtowers twenty-four hours a day. Because you never knew. Because people still had nightmares.
In those early weeks and months, some had feared a human invasion: desperate, starving people fleeing Dakar or Banjul or one of the other fallen cities to the north.
Clare Shapiro, Refugia’s resident skeptic, had scoffed at the idea. “You all have read too many pulp novels and seen too many movies,” she’d said. “Invading hordes? I think not.”
And she’d been right. No one had come. Not once. Not ever.
Shapiro hadn’t been done, though. “You know as well as I do,” she’d said. “The attackers that will bring our walls tumbling down won’t be anything we’ll see coming. And a wall sure won’t stop them.”
Yes, they had known. But the logic of it didn’t much matter. Kait had long since learned that humans did all sorts of things for no reason other than reassurance. Growing up in this vulnerable colony, seemingly the last human population on earth, she’d come to understand the value of being reassured.
So as soon as she’d been deemed old enough—fourteen—she’d taken her turn in the watch. It had been no burden, an eight-hour shift every ten days or so. She’d always been a solitary soul, so she enjoyed the chance to be alone, looking out over the savannas to the north or the rain forests that flanked Refugia’s other three walls.
The forests, regenerating year by year, always a shocking, intense green, and the grasslands, ever-changing depending on the season and the time of day. Sometimes gray, sometimes a reddish brown, and sometimes the palest jade, as fragile as an eggshell.
Brown now as she and Trey looked out at them. Yet even so, in the midst of the dry season, the savanna was still beautiful, in its own subtle way. The green of the thorn trees, flat and jagged against the horizon. The warm gold of the grazing antelope, the bushbucks and kob. The enormous billowing clouds, white and slate gray, that built up on the horizon every afternoon, harbingers of the approaching rainy season.
Kait knew that Trey loved the diverse landscapes around Refugia. The rain forests, the mossy streams, the coastline with its endless miles of empty white-sand beaches.
He’d spent most of his life before the Fall escaping civilization and lighting out for the most remote and unpopulated territories he could find on a shrinking planet. Seeking out swamps and thorn forests and icy mountain páramos—all the places that people in their right mind avoided. With those as far from his reach as the moon, Kait thought he’d been most at peace when they sat together and looked out over the savanna.
At the water hole that lay across what had once been the red-dirt Massou-Djibo Road but was now just a grassy stripe a little lighter than the savanna beyond, six elephants were bathing. The elephants had returned just months before, yet another sign—and there were many—of an earth recovering from the contagion that had been the human species.
Anyone who had been part of the Last World, and had been paying even the slightest bit of attention, had known that elephants had been on their way out during those final, unstable years. The worldwide demand for ivory had become so insatiable that extinction was certain. When poachers were machine-gunning elephants from helicopters and poisoning water holes with cyanide, what possible other future did the species face?
There was just a single hope: that Homo sapiens would exit before the last elephants did the same. And, amazingly, that was what had happened.
Watching them, Trey smiled. But when he spoke, it wasn’t about the elephants or anything else out on the savanna. It was the same old topic, the one that always made Kait feel like a child, as she’d been when they first met.
“I used to play poker with this guy,” he said.
Poker was one of the games that had been carried over to the Next World, poker for money, even though the money itself was meaningless. They even had real playing cards, packs hoarded by the hundred, some before the Fall and others retrieved by Malcolm on his forays away from Refugia in the first months after.
Kait played sometimes, though she’d never seen Trey at a game.
“Guy named Greg,” he went on. “You’d bluff him, and he’d always know. Always. If you had a real hand, he’d fold. But if you were bluffing, he’d stay in and beat you. Every damn time.”
Kait stayed quiet and let him get to the point.
Trey shook his head at the memory. “He said it was easy to spot a bluff. He could always tell. ‘Take you, for example,’ he said to me. ‘If you’re planning to bluff, you always take a deep breath before you bet.’
“‘I do?’ I said. And he nodded. ‘But don’t feel bad. Everybody has something, or three things. Their pupils dilate. They get a little sweaty on the temples. They drum their fingers a certain way. Always something.’”
Trey turned his head to look at her, and Kait thought she might be blushing. “So it’s that obvious?” she said. “That I’ll be on board the ship?”
“Sure.” He smiled at her expression. “I’ve never understood most people that well. But you? You I know.”
Kait knew this was true. That didn’t make it any less exasperating.
“But I don’t understand—” The words were out before she even knew she was saying them.
He looked interested. “Don’t understand what?”
She felt her chin lift. “Back before, you would have been the first one on that boat.”
Kait saw him draw in a breath, like they were playing poker. But this time it was no bluff, and all at once his illness, that relentless, unstoppable thing, showed starkly in his pale skin, taut over his cheekbones.
When he spoke, his voice was quieter. “It’s true,” he said. “But the world was a different place back then.”
“More dangerous, not less,” she said.
Trey was silent.
She stared at him. “Dad, it was more dangerous, wasn’t it?”
Still Trey did not speak.
* * *
HOW COULD IT not have been?
In the chaotic weeks and months that preceded the end of the Last World, the parasitic wasps they called thieves had both explosively extended their range and expanded the variety of species they used as hosts for their young. Though monkeys had been their preferred targets in the remote forests where they’d evolved, they’d soon found humans fertile territory as well.
The thieves were far from the first insects to parasitize Homo sapiens. Some species of botfly, for example, depended entirely on human flesh to raise their larvae. These flies still sometimes afflicted the Fugians, even the hardiest of whom didn’t relish extracting a wiggling white worm from their scalps or the palms of their hands.
But the thieves were far more sophisticated than the primitive botflies. Both wasp adults and larvae poured drugs, toxins, into the hosts, to control their behavior—at first to make them forget they’d been infected and later to make them fiercely protective of the alien life growing inside them.
And, lastly, to guarantee that the host died if the larva was removed before hatching, and in any event died upon the emergence of the adult wasp.
Before the end, this all had been widely known. But Trey had understood far better than most what it meant because he’d been one of the earliest thief victims. He’d been infected, parasitized, had a thief larva growing inside him and pumping its poisons into his blood.
He’d barely survived the surgery to remove the larva from his belly, but although he had lived, he’d been condemned by the thieves. Destined for a long, slow, irreversible slide into weakness, decrepitude, early death.
Condemned in another way as well because of something else the thieves had done to him. The larva growing inside him had connected him to the wasps’ hive mind. And not just Trey: others who’d been host to a thief larva but had somehow survived.
But what did that mean? Her whole life, Kait had been desperate to learn what it was like.
And now, sitting beside him on the edge of Refugia, the home she was ready to leave as soon as she could, she understood that something about Trey’s condition—his curse—was the cause of his warning to her. His plea, because it was a plea, to stay behind when the ship left. To stay home. To stay safe.
“Dad,” she said.
His eyes had been closed, but when he opened them to look at her, they were clear.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t go,” she said, “and maybe I’ll understand.”
Trey was silent.
Kait didn’t relent. “When you close your eyes,” she asked him, “what do you see?”
But still he would not say.