CHAPTER 24

WHILE NOAH MAKES THE CALL, Julia leaves the lab for the tunnel, vodka bottle in hand, closing the hatch behind her so that Agnes can’t hear.

Agnes has dropped the rope and switched to hopscotch. She’s scratched the court in the paint with a rock and is using a small package of crackers for a marker. She jumps to a square marked with the number three.

Agnes turns to her. “Do you play?”

“I used to, when I was little. But I think I’m too tired to play right now, Agnes.”

Agnes nods. “Irene got tired too. She got so tired that she stopped moving altogether. It was sad. She used to read me books. Oh, I found one here.”

Agnes drops her package of crackers and heads for the shelf, pulls something dusty from under a disintegrating binder, a book.

Julia leans against the wall. It’s strange—she’d spent so much time thinking about ending her own life, and now that it truly is the end, she feels wistful, even for the insufferable days in the Los Angeles apartment—the hunger, the despair, the hopelessness. In hindsight, it all seems like the machinations of a child. One who was oblivious to how truly horrific her life could become.

Agnes offers a shy smile, pads over to Julia, and wipes the grime from the cover. Holds it out to her. “I’m so happy you came. I was asleep, but I woke up because we knew you were coming. Have you ever been so sad, or so mad, that you just wanted to sleep and not wake up?”

“Oh yes. Many times,” Julia says. No need to disabuse her of her happiness. No need to be cruel, and tell her it will all be over soon. She puts the bottle of vodka on the floor and takes the book. Its dust jacket is faded, yellowed, and torn. A cartoon girl on the cover, with neat braids and a pleated skirt. Boat, Goat, Moat. Hat, Bat, Mat. Learning Words by Rhyming.

Something inside Julia tears a little. Her soul maybe.

Agnes examines her face. “Your eyes look like hers. But your nose . . . it’s his nose. He was mean, that Alfred.”

“I imagine he was.”

“And his breath was stinky.” Agnes wrinkles her nose.

How long do they have now? Minutes? Seconds?

“Well, that’s all over now, isn’t it?” Julia hands the book back, and Agnes takes it, holds it to her chest.

Noah opens the door then, and Agnes’s face clouds with an obvious jealousy. She grips the book more firmly. But then she sees the GPS phone in his hand.

“Is that the map?” the girl asks eagerly. “Can I see the island the way a bird sees it?”

Julia and Noah exchange a glance—what harm could there be? He hands it to Julia, and she presses the app for the GPS map. A digital image of the island appears.

Agnes leans her face over the screen, sucks in her breath. “It’s shaped like a bean.” She tucks the book under her arm and takes the phone in wonder, walks off a few paces, utterly captivated.

“Did you get through?” Julia says quietly.

Noah nods, his face grim.

“How long?”

“Not long. Mind if I take a swig?”

She nods, and he reaches down for the bottle, raises it up and takes a long one—she watches his Adam’s apple bob. Suddenly she doesn’t know what to do with her arms. She crosses them across her chest, uncrosses them, crosses them again. All the different ways she’d imagine she’d die, but this was certainly never one of them.

Noah hands her the bottle, and she takes a couple of gulps. Wipes a tear away with the back of her hand, and utters a laugh that’s not a laugh.

“Well,” she says. “Well.”

Noah digs around in his pocket. “I found this, too, when I was searching for . . .” He pulls out a small aluminum package with a white pill encased in plastic. A black skull and crossbones on it. He turns the pack over: SODIUM CYANIDE: POISON. “Should be good, only a month old and they last about a year. You crush it between your teeth.”

“Great,” says Julia. “Better than burning alive, I guess.”

Noah cracks a wan smile. “We can wait until the first bomb hits and see how it goes. You should hang onto it for now.” He holds out the pack. “Maybe later we can flip for it.”

He’s giving Julia the quickest way out. The gesture isn’t lost on her. “Thanks, Noah. I mean that.” She takes the package from him, slips it into her back pocket.

“In the meantime,” he says, “we should crack open another case of the good stuff. No reason to be sober for what comes next.”

“Look!” says Agnes. She drops the book and holds up the satellite phone, her face alight. She points to a small cove, not too far from where a red pin marks their location. “This is where the boat is. The woman’s boat.”

Noah looks confused.

“She’s talking about Beth,” Julia says.

“She should have been long gone by now.”

Agnes goes still, her head cocked to one side, as if she’s listening to music, a sound, that they can’t hear. “No . . . she’s not on the boat. She doesn’t move anymore.”

Noah and Julia exchange a look. His is, Should we?

Julia downs the last of the vodka, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Hell yeah.

“Agnes . . . we need to get to the boat, and we need to hurry, as fast as we can. Can you lead us there?”

A darkness clouds her face. “You said you would never leave.”

“I said I would never leave you. You’re coming with us.”

Noah’s face goes pale. Like, You can’t mean that.

Julia doesn’t know what she means. All she knows is that she needs to get on the boat. The rest, she’ll work out later.

And even Agnes looks uncertain. It must be hard for her to contemplate, leaving everyone and everything she’s ever known behind.

“You have to come,” Julia says. “You won’t be safe here anymore.”

Agnes nods, solemn and slightly mournful. Like she’s saying goodbye to more than just her home. “It must be time then.”

They run. Through the hatch, out the tunnel, into the waiting jungle. It’s a different experience, knowing that a thousand eyes are watching, analyzing, thinking.

Will it even let them leave?

Nothing and no one tries to stop them, and Julia’s sure the nightmarchers would be hot on their trail, if it—if Kapu—wanted them to be.

She believes Isaac. That it’s acting as one organism. Does it know it’s about to be annihilated? Or is this, their exodus, part of its plan?

She’s slightly buzzed; she can feel the vodka at work, tripping through her veins, giving everything that’s already surreal an extra dreamlike quality. The air is so thick with moisture it may as well be raining, the earth beneath her feet muddy, porous, like she might just slip into the bowels of the island with one misplaced step. She thinks of hell, and of Hades, and of the dark first nights when Evie was gone and the house felt like an empty tomb. They climb up a hill—is it just her imagination, or do the leaves, and vines, and branches seem to part before them?—and reach the top of the rise. The land drops away, revealing the cove, with slender, supine trees growing almost straight out of the rock face, bursting with corpse flowers. The sickly sweet scent of rotting flesh fills the air.

And in the cove, a small yacht tied with a rope to a thin palm tree. Lights on in the cabin. Hope. Goddamn, she wishes she could shake it, hope. It’s exhausting.

“Does anyone even know how to operate that thing?” Noah asks.

“Kapu does,” Agnes says. Without another word, she starts to head down the rocky slope, jumping from boulder to boulder, agile as a goat.

“Well, that makes no sense. I really wish I had another bottle of vodka,” Noah says.

“Or two,” says Julia.

Something shoots into the air at the far edge of the ocean’s dark horizon, a burst of red light. Too late, Julia thinks. We’re too late. But the light just arcs through the air, momentarily illuminating the sky, the massive carrier, before plummeting to the water and disappearing altogether.

“A flare,” Noah says.

“Why?”

“To warn that it’s time to evacuate.”

They both start to hurry down the slope—jagged rock beneath Julia’s feet; she has to use the trees and their branches to keep from falling. Sometimes she crushes a corpse flower in the process, releasing a stench that causes her stomach to roil. So much pollen in the air that her eyes cloud with it, making it even harder to see.

“Come on!” shouts Agnes, perched on a lava boulder nearly twice her height.

Julia trips over a thick root, but Noah catches her around her waist. She glances down—it’s not a root, it’s an arm. An arm that leads to Beth’s body—she’s suffered a massive head wound, her neck twisted awkwardly, like she’d tripped, fallen down the rocky slope. A computer hard drive is gripped in her left palm. Her skin is covered with a fine layer of white fungus; her eyes are open, staring blankly, blood trickling out of her mouth and staining her chin and teeth red. A single, delicate root has pierced her left eye, straight through the pupil.

“Oh God, we can’t just leave her body here,” says Julia. “We should—”

Noah grips her arm. “There’s no time.”

“Come on!” Agnes shouts again, this time from the pebbly beach.

Right. Julia starts scrambling down the hill again, Noah following close behind. Her ankle twists, sending a wave of searing pain up her leg, but she just clenches her teeth, keeps going. Six yards. Five yards. Four. She slides down the final three, breaks her fall by catching the last tree and wrapping an arm around its trunk.

A strange knot protrudes from it, at almost exactly eye level. It almost looks like . . . a face. Julia reaches up, runs her hand lightly over its contours. Yes, two concave sockets, two high cheekbones, two small ridges that look like lips, and . . . something metallic embedded in the bark.

The waves lap gently against the shore; a bird calls out from the jungle they left behind.

A locket. A heart-shaped locket, and a gold chain, the trunk growing around it, almost covering it, but not quite. And a thin piece of cloth, almost buried in the wood. Lace, frayed by the wind and sun.

Julia feels Agnes beside her, but she can’t tear her eyes from Irene’s face immortalized in a tree trunk. Agnes raises her fingers to her lips, kisses them, and then presses her fingers to two small ridges.

“I was sad when she stopped moving. Eventually they all stop moving. It’s nice, mostly, because then they’re Kapu and always together, never alone. But I missed her arms around me. It hurt my heart.”

Yes, Julia thinks. A good way of putting it. The lingering anguish of that last moment, hugging Evie close to her before she went off into the car with Ethan. She wonders if this might be better, to be frozen in wood, to watch time from the sidelines.

Well, she’s supposed to bring back Irene’s remains. This is it. She reaches an arm up, tugs on a withering branch that’s dry, cracked. Breaks it off. Thin white filaments inside, like the strange thin thread Noah had pulled out of her belly where the leech bit her.

A shiver races along her spine. What could it possibly mean?

Agnes slips her hand in Julia’s, tugs it. “We should go now.”

It could mean everything. Nothing. Julia turns to the boat, and sees Noah already wading to the ladder along the boat’s side.

“Come, Julia,” says Agnes. “It’s time to make all the world Kapu.”

The salt water is warm, even at this time of night, and Julia wades to the boat’s ladder, climbs aboard to the deck, Agnes following close behind her. It’s not a big boat—it looks vintage, something ’30s-ish about the brass and the fixtures—but it will take them away from Kapu, from the church, from the nightmarchers. She feels a pang—they don’t deserve to die—but there’s no choice, and they’re practically dead already. Nothing can be done to save them.

She’s not even convinced yet she should save herself.

Agnes nimbly climbs along the outer edges of the boat to where the rope moors it to the palm tree. She must be incredibly strong, because she makes short work of the knot, untying it and then letting it slip off into the ocean.

Umbilical cord, Julia thinks. But what, exactly, is about to be born? She still doesn’t know.

There’s a wooden cabin below, and a cockpit above, where she catches some movement—Noah must be in there, trying to figure out how to start the engine.

As if she can read her mind, which maybe she can, Agnes says, “I will go help him. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry. Right. She watches Agnes walk across the deck to the cockpit stairs. Climb them and open the door.

The island knows how to pilot a boat. Or not the island, but the strange sentience that burrowed its way into every creature, transformed them, absorbed them. A place where the evolutionary tree was strangled by a rogue banyan. Her great-aunt was right about one thing: it’s a discovery that would put her on par with Darwin, for sure.

Her body aches for rest. Maybe there’s food in the cabin. It would help to have something solid in her stomach to offset the vodka, which is making it hard for her to stand upright as the boat gently sways.

She hears the rumble of the engine start, the rush of seawater being pushed out behind, and the boat lurches forward before it starts to turn. Will they make it in time, before the bombs start falling? There’s a part of her that should care more, but she feels distant, outside herself. She can only think about now. And now she stands on a wooden deck with a light breeze lifting her hair, smoky clouds hanging around a Polynesian moon rising right above the tall, jagged peak of Kapu. She leans on the rails; the brass is cold against her skin.

She closes her eyes, feels the engine’s vibration in the railing, the water dripping off her clothes.

There’s a click of a door being shut, and then she hears Agnes’s footsteps coming down the stairs, the slip-slap of her bare feet on the deck. Julia opens her eyes and finds Agnes standing next to her, excited, jittery. As the boat rides a low wave, Agnes clutches at the railing. A child, not-a-child.

“I’ve never really been on a big boat,” she says. “I was on a small one once, a long time ago.”

The boat chugs along, out of the cove, into the broader waters. Slowly, the island recedes, and Julia sees movement in the trees, figures emerging from the dense jungle at the top of the ridge.

The nightmarchers.

They climb down the steep slope, but with what intention? The boat’s too far away for them to reach.

“They’re saying goodbye,” says Agnes. “In a way.”

And there is something like a farewell in the way they all watch, each taking a spot almost equidistant from the next, new trees in the forest. They don’t wave, or speak, or seem to see anything in particular. But she can feel their minds intent on them, on the boat, on the distance growing between them. Fred, so confident, so in love with Heather; and the other college boys, boys no longer; and the trio of women—what were their names? She feels bad that she can’t remember their names—and Roger and Lois, who thought their wealth mattered here; and the churchwomen, whose names she never knew. A grove where people used to be.

All of a sudden there’s an eruption of ghostly pollen from the flowers, particles that catch the glimmering moonlight, looking like mist. It seems to set off another eruption on the island, a mushroom cloud that rises up into the clouds, picked up by the breeze.

“Don’t be sad,” Agnes says.

Julia hadn’t realized she was, but in fact, a tear drips from her right eye. Strange.

“Aren’t you sad to leave them?” Julia asks. “To leave the island?”

“It’s time,” says Agnes. “We were happy in Kapu. We thought it was the entire world. But your family came, and gave us the apple. We ate the apple, and now we know. And because we know, we must go forth, multiply. It’s all in your book.”

Julia doesn’t know what she means, but then she does. Adam. Eve. Genesis.

“I like your fairy tales better, though,” Agnes says. “They have happier endings.”

“They do,” says Julia. “Yeah, they do.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? You learned our secrets, and we learned yours.”

It is funny, but not. She should push the girl who’s not a girl off the boat; she should strangle her to death; she should take the machete and hack her to pieces. She thinks about these things, but instead she reaches out for Agnes’s hand, which is cold.

They’re farther out now. Already she can’t make out the faces of the nightmarchers. The beach is invisible; the tall cliff looks like something that could fit in the palm of her hand. She wonders in a loose kind of way where the Reverend is, if he’s sitting in the church, knees on the wooden floor, praying. Preparing for the final journey.

Agnes turns her face up, smiles. “It’s going to be all right. Everyone is going to live happily ever after, you know.”

A decision has to be made. Agnes sits at the very edge of the stern, dangling her legs over the water, propping her chin on the railing, a hand hanging on each side, like the rails are a set of monkey bars. The island is now barely visible in the distance, just a low, hulking shadow faintly illuminated by the moon.

Julia feels the weight of everything that’s happened finally, physically land. She can’t believe she’s still standing, and just that thought makes her knees feel weak, so she stumbles toward one of the deck chairs. Her legs ache; the salt water has found all the myriad cuts and pricks, and now they sting like hell. Her ankle is a ball of fiery pain; her hair smells like smoke. She lets her sagging, muddy, nearly destroyed backpack slide off her shoulders. Gingerly settles into one of the deck chairs. She can understand never moving again.

And somewhere out there, the ship. What will the mysterious “we” do to her, Agnes? Nothing good she imagines.

The package of cyanide rests in her back right pocket, the medication in her left back pocket. One pill will clear her mind, one will end it.

She knows what poor Samantha would advise her to do. End it. Finish it.

And Samantha would probably be right. Whatever the hell Agnes is, what all this is, should never reach another living human being, let alone a land that’s densely populated. Because she can still sense them. Not just on the island, but inside her, too. Coiled somewhere in her belly, in a place Noah with his tweezers could never reach, a nest of fine threads that contain all the island’s secrets. She knows them now, not like things she learned, but like things that come naturally, like the instant love for Evie the moment she first saw the sonogram, the fierce protectiveness that was beyond thought.

Such a long time ago, when there was snow, when all the earth seemed like a hard, frozen ball, she sees what Agnes once was, a girl in a roughly woven dress, with her arms tied behind her back, forced into a hand-carved boat made of a dark wood. Alone. There wasn’t much left of her when she washed ashore, mostly skin and bone, but Kapu took her. Kept her close. So close they became the same thing. And when the others came, she was the interlocutor, the translator between worlds, until the man with the crooked nose came, and there was a war, and after the war there was a wall, and the girl disappeared into the jungle and became a ghost story, something to scare small children with on moonless nights.

There’s an explosive sound of something like a jet taking off in the distance, and a rocket lights up the night sky. Julia looks up—it’s like a shooting star, a comet, arcing across the stars, leaving a plume of white, hazy smoke in its wake.

The missile strikes the island. There’s a massive explosion, a thunderous roar, and a huge red ball of fire radiates up and out of the island’s center. More missiles follow. It’s hard to think she was just there; it feels too much like news footage, something she can turn off when the commercials start.

But there are real people on that island. Or they were, once.

Is she still a real person herself? Or is she now something else entirely?

Of course, there’s only one person to ask.

Julia reaches into her pack and grabs the GPS phone. Dials a number.

It only rings three times before Aunt Liddy answers.