AND NOW SHE would never find out. Not from Trey, at least.
Because that conversation had been years ago, of course. The two of them had been sitting side by side, watching the elephants bathe and spar.
Year Six, it had been, or Seven. Back when Kait was young, a child still, and filled with a child’s questions.
And Trey was still alive.
But he was long dead by now. And Kait was nearly thirty, not that much younger than he’d been when they first met. These days, she sometimes found it hard to remember what his face looked like, or the tone and timbre of his voice.
But not his words. Those she would never forget even as she prepared to ignore them.
Don’t go.
* * *
KAIT STOOD AT the edge of the beach that lay three miles west of Refugia. The gleaming white-sand beach, largely free twenty years after the Fall even from plastic garbage spat up by the surf, that bordered the Atlantic Ocean.
Just offshore, the Trey Gilliard, the ship Trey had warned her against—and had been named for him, in honor and irony—was preparing for departure. The next day, it was going to set off on the first great scientific exploration of the Next World, and Kait, as both she and Trey had always known, was going to be on board.
The first great scientific exploration. At least, that was the reason everyone gave, and it was true that Refugia’s chief biologist, Ross McKay, would be part of the crew of twenty-eight. Ross, who’d been a primatologist in the Last World, Clare Shapiro, and other scientists would be keeping journals, collecting specimens, and doing everything that the great scientific explorers of the nineteenth century, the last before aviation, had done.
But that was not the only reason, or even the main one.
The main reason was to discover if, in fact, Refugia was it: the last human colony on earth.
Another human trait that had carried over from the Last World to this one. The desire, need, obsession, to find out if you are alone.
* * *
DOWN THE BEACH, a caravan of rowboats was bringing the last shipments to the Trey Gilliard. Food: salted meat, fruits and vegetables, both fresh and pickled. Freshwater for the tanks belowdecks.
And medicines, including precious supplies of antibiotics. Kait thought that Shapiro was going on the expedition partly to keep a close eye on the pharmacy, which she’d done so much to develop and stock.
Including the vaccine, derived from the fruit and seeds of the n’te vine, which—when taken weekly—kept the people of Refugia safe from the thieves.
Kait recognized everyone hauling supplies. There was Fatou Konte, born not thirty miles from here, who would be ship physician. Brett and Darby Callahan, the odd twins, just a little older than Kait, who’d worked nearly as tirelessly as Malcolm had to make the Trey Gilliard seaworthy. Shapiro, supervising. Malcolm himself.
Of course she recognized all of them: When you lived in an isolated community of just 281 souls, you came to know every face—and every quirk, every fear, every strain of kindness and cruelty—as if they were your own.
You knew too much.
Kait had thought about that often, what it had been like to live in a world where you could know thousands—or millions—of others without much effort. Though she understood now that this had been an aberration, a sign of the sickness possessing the world in the century or so before the Fall.
Such a vast human population, so mobile and interconnected, was a blip that could never have endured. It had gone against Nature. Humans could build airplanes, satellites, computers, bombs, but they were still primates, and throughout million of years of evolution, no primates had ever lived in hordes of thousands, much less millions.
In fact, Refugia’s structure and size, an isolated society with no interaction with any other, but a society nonetheless, was a lot more in line with the way primate societies had always existed than the cities of the Last World had ever been.
The problem, Kait thought, was that the colony’s older residents sometimes missed the old ways too much. Life would be easier in a generation or two, when no one could remember the way things had once been.
She turned away from the beach. She’d go down to join them soon, but not quite yet. There was something she had to do first.
* * *
SHE’D TAKEN ONLY a few steps along the trail that led among the palm trees and scrubby beachside undergrowth when she stopped and tilted her head, waiting.
There it was: the familiar migrainous shimmering movement at the corner of her vision.
She’d known she’d find it somewhere around here. There was always a little thief colony near the beach. The sandy soil suited the wasps, and so did the distance from Refugia. Close enough to keep an eye on the humans there, far enough away to stay alive.
Maybe stay alive. Whenever Fugians came upon one of the colonies, they destroyed it. But no one worried much about the thieves’ presence. For now, at least, the wasps posed no threat.
A thief rose on bloodred wings from the black hole of its burrow and hovered in front of her face. Its triangular head tilted this way and that as it stared at her with its bulbous, multifaceted green eyes.
That’s what thieves did. They looked you in the eyes.
Kait stood unmoving. The big wasp, three inches long at least, flew closer, its wings beating so rapidly they were invisible save for the characteristic bloody smear they left in the air. Kait saw its thin, black body arch. Its abdomen pulsed and extruded the stinger, a needle as white as ivory. A drop of black liquid—its deadly venom—danced on the needle’s end.
Her heart thudded. Maybe this was the time. The time when her immunity would fail her. The moment when the thieves would first demonstrate that they’d evolved the ability to overcome the vaccine, as Shapiro had long predicted they eventually would.
If this was the case, Kait knew what would happen. The thief would rise, then stoop like a hawk toward her, too fast for even the sharpest eyes to follow. Its stinger would plunge like a hypodermic into the flesh of her neck. The injected venom would flood through her, and the thief would pull back and hover once again at a safe distance, watching as she fell to the ground in agony.
And then it, and any others in the vicinity—and there were always others—would attack her eyes. That was what the thieves always did: destroyed their victims’ eyes.
Or at least, that’s what they used to do.
The thief shifted position in midair. But in that moment’s hesitation—a pause that she knew as well as her own breath—Kait thrust her right hand out and snatched the wasp from the air.
This was something she’d been doing for nearly two decades though everyone told her not to. In a place like Refugia, most people didn’t believe in taking any unnecessary risks. Not when you were one of 281.
Kait understood that, but even so, she could never stop herself. She was always compelled to look closer, to see once again what had brought the Last World to ruin and killed so many people she’d loved.
She held the wasp between her thumb and forefinger, in that spot on its thorax that rendered it helpless. Where she was out of range of both its mandibles and its lethal stinger.
Not that it didn’t try to reach her, twisting its head around, curving its abdomen up over its back like a scorpion, the black poison dripping from the stinger’s end. The thieves’ characteristic bitter smell rose more strongly from it, making her nose prickle.
She always wondered after she caught one: If she let it go, would this be the time it overcame the vaccine’s prohibition and stung her?
All she knew was that it hadn’t happened yet.
She looked at the wasp more closely. It was a female, and gravid. Pregnant. Kait could tell by the tumorous swelling of its abdomen.
But this was no surprise. Adult female thieves were always gravid. They were one of the creatures—there were many—that carried their eggs around with them for as long as they needed to, until they found a host. They could delay the implantation almost indefinitely.
Kait straightened. She wanted to do nothing more than to twist her fingers and pop the thief’s head off.
But she knew that would be the most dangerous thing to do. A beheaded thief could live for days or even weeks in that condition, until it starved to death. And all that time, it would use specialized heat receptors on its abdomen to seek out warm-blooded prey. Prey that included humans, vaccinated or not.
Clare Shapiro’s theory was that by beheading an individual thief, or severely wounding it, you severed it from the hive mind. Without the guidance of the mind, the warning to stay away from vaccinated humans, its only goal was to kill you or to lay its egg in your flesh. In the colony’s early years, two vaccinated Fugians—both children—had been killed and one adult, Emily Russo, had been infected by wounded thieves.
The vaccine hadn’t kept the dying thief from laying its egg, but it had stunted the growth of the larva and delayed its attempted emergence for days, maybe even weeks. And, at the very end, the emerging wasp had been so small and weak that it had died while hatching out.
Too weak to emerge successfully, yet strong enough to kill Emily during the process.
Of course, converting a thief to pulp with the bottom of your sandal took care of all potential risks. But instead, Kait reached into her pocket with her left hand and withdrew the small brown bottle she’d brought for this purpose. She popped the top off and, in one fluid move, dropped the wasp into the bottle.
She got the cap back on just as it leaped to escape. For a few seconds it battered itself against the glass, but then—as captive thieves always did—it seemed to give up, settling back to the bottom of the small space.
As Kait replaced the bottle in her pocket, three more thieves rose from somewhere nearby and flew off, heading south. In just a few moments, they were tiny dots against the sky; and then they were gone.
* * *
KAIT LIFTED HER right hand to her face and breathed in the thief odor that clung to her fingers. Then she raised her head, drew in a deeper breath of fresh salt air, and turned back toward the beach to go help load the ship.
Remembering, as she did, the last words Trey had spoken to her on that far-off day when they’d sat atop the wall and watched the elephants. The closest he’d ever come to describing what he saw inside his head, the curse the hive mind had bestowed on him.
Don’t go.
Why not?
“Because if you stay here,” he had finally said, “you’ll stay—”
He’d paused, searching for the right word. She hadn’t hurried him.
“Ignorant,” he’d said. Then, always precise in his language, he’d grimaced and shaken his head. “No. Innocent.”
She’d stayed quiet and, just for a moment, his haunted gaze had met hers.
“Alive,” he’d said.