CHAPTER 25

“I UNDERSTAND YOU’VE HAD QUITE the adventure,” says Aunt Liddy from half a world away. “It’s good to finally hear from you. For a bit there, I thought you were dead or, worse yet, had changed allegiances.”

Another missile strikes the island. Julia can see the carrier when it’s lit by the brief flashes of the ordnance being fired; it’s far away, but they must be aware of the nearby small radar blip of her boat.

Maybe they’ll decide her future for her. “Yeah, I’ve been busy.”

“Indeed. And I hear our paranoid government at work there in the background. I thought the whisper of controlling masses of people would get their attention, but apparently they’re afraid it could be used against them. On the one hand, it’s a shame, but on the other, I’ll have quite the monopoly when your boat comes to port.”

“Why would they let us ashore?”

“Oh, they don’t see you, my dear, if that’s what you’re worried about. There are a few crew members on board who will be taking an early retirement in exchange for installing a virus that gives us control over their radar systems.”

Agnes drops her hands from the railing, pushes herself backward, and stands up, heads over to where Julia is sitting. She climbs onto Julia’s deck chair, settles into the nook of Julia’s arm, rests her head on her chest.

Her skin is cold. Too cold. Julia absently strokes her hair. There’s no point worrying about what she’ll overhear. They’re connected now. She’ll know anyway.

“Well, that’s comforting,” says Julia. “I’m surprised you’re not more upset, though, at the loss.”

“It’s not a loss—it’s a transition. I thought you would know by now that I always have a plan within a plan within a plan. But we can talk more when you get back.”

God, she just wants to sleep. She just wants to lie down in a warm bed and go to sleep. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“If what is a good idea?”

“Coming back.” A soft breeze drifts across the boat, and she can almost smell them, the corpse flowers burning. “What have you done to me?”

There’s a pause. Julia can see the reflection of the next missile in Agnes’s eyes. A burst of red light illuminates her dark irises.

“Now that’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” says Aunt Liddy. “The answer is, I’m not sure. Whether Isaac intentionally kept me in the dark or whether he just didn’t know is unclear. But it appears that the subject of our family’s long-term experiment had its own designs.”

Julia gets a vision then, of cities overgrown with vegetation, buildings crumbling into dust, broken highways, rusting, empty buses, an abandoned school with a tree growing through the center of it, red corpse flowers blooming.

It’s peaceful. So peaceful and quiet. An end to a world of human-manufactured ills.

“And what were your designs?” Julia asks.

Aunt Liddy laughs. “Why, reinventing the world, of course. You can’t be a proper god until you make a race in your own image. One you yourself have created. That’s what Father always said.”

It’s a Mobius strip of a conversation, one that twists in and on itself, leading nowhere. Julia thinks about throwing the phone in the ocean. But she doesn’t.

“Well then, your father was a real piece of shit.”

“He was a scientist,” Aunt Liddy says, ignoring the slight. “Nothing in the material world is sacrosanct. Even Irene was an opportunity to unlock God’s secrets. Father didn’t believe her letters, thought it was just her way of running off. In all honesty, he probably didn’t care too much. But the locket of hair . . . now that was intriguing. For a good month after we received it, the follicles continued to grow, so of course he made the journey.”

Julia gets a glimpse of Alfred approaching a tent, the exact one that Irene had sketched. He holds a Panama hat in his hand; she hears music coming out from the tent, laughter, Agnes’s voice saying, “I spy with my little eye . . .”

“Eventually, he got it down to a theory—a spore that caused people to submit to the will of invisible chemical signals, but which also promised cellular regeneration. The trick was how to separate one from the other. Because the problem with eugenics wasn’t just the ambition to create a master race; it was what to do with the chaff. Large quantities of unnecessary people can get quite ornery, if you let them. And Lord knows genocide makes for some bad publicity. But here, here was an opportunity to endow one’s progeny with special advantages and keep the masses calm and obedient, content with their lot. Make a profit on the antidote, so much the better. But Father was never able to move beyond theory. All the specimens taken off the island died. He took the failure as a personal affront, almost. The best he could do was run experiments with what he had. He’d always had a keen interest regarding in vitro fertilization. At the time, no one thought that prepubescent eggs could be harvested, fertilized, and implanted. Let alone frozen afterward for safekeeping.”

Agnes reaches out, clasps her hand in Julia’s, entwining their fingers. Julia gets flashes of images—Alfred in surgical scrubs; a bloody scalpel in his hand pressing against soft flesh; Agnes screaming, bound by straps to a stainless steel table, naked, a gash in her belly.

“My God. He used his sperm to fertilize Agnes’s eggs.”

“Of course he did. Although the initial pregnancies were quite disappointing.”

Julia sees one of the churchwomen stumbling through the jungle, clutching an engorged stomach. She grabs the trunk of a tree, trying to hold herself upright, but starts to shudder instead, violently. Tiny, snakelike tendrils burst from her eyes, flail in the air. Alfred approaches, holding a shotgun. He takes a moment to pull off his glasses, wipe them clean with a white handkerchief, fold the handkerchief, tuck it back in his pocket, before he raises the weapon and coolly shoots the woman in the head.

“Then Father realized what he needed was a host that was similar enough, genetically, that the body wouldn’t see it as an invasion. Irene’s uterus was the perfect solution, although she wasn’t keen on the idea. Neither was Agnes, who, he suspected, was somehow subverting the experiment. But he used her love of Irene, and vice versa, to move the project along. Until they escaped, somehow, never to be seen again.”

Agnes yawns. Dark circles under her eyes, and her skin seems paler—it practically glows in the moonlight.

Agnes is dying. Julia doesn’t know how she knows, but she does, even as the impact of what Aunt Liddy is saying hits her.

“Oh . . . oh my God. You can’t be serious. What a monstrous thing to do,” says Julia.

“I agreed. Which is why, when he returned with the baby, I promptly euthanized it. God knows what he would have done to the poor creature. For a few months after, he eyed me strangely, but I think he knew I was too good with a scalpel to chance using me as subject number two. After he died, I briefly considered destroying the fertilized eggs, but that was just around when your mother came to me for financial assistance because she couldn’t conceive, and, well . . . we had plenty of perfectly good eggs just frozen and waiting. It would be my discovery, and mine alone. I couldn’t resist. Your mother never knew, not until I tried to explain it to her. I somewhat naively thought she would be pleased to be a part of such important research, but as usual, that was just my severe lack of empathy at work.”

Her mother’s face when she exited the library that day at Aunt Liddy’s. Stricken. Despairing. She’d nearly gotten into an accident on the way home, had run straight through a red light and almost hit a van. Julia remembers the blaring horn, her heart racing like that of a scared rabbit.

You have your father’s nose, Aunt Liddy had said, back when they first met. She’d thought it was an anti-Semitic slight. It wasn’t.

“But look how wonderfully you turned out, Julia, crooked nose and all. And you have no idea how important you are—you really don’t. You must be naturally immune now. You survived the infection. Our medication has never been more than a coarse, short-term solution. Even Father could only stay on the island three weeks at a time. I dare say you’re the Lucy in the next step of human evolution. I’m confident we can create a vaccine, and then, Julia, then . . . it’s all right there in front of us. Our own race of people—the master class, served by peaceful, obedient, happy slaves. Why the hell God didn’t set it out that way in the first place is the only true mystery of theology.”

Julia laughs bitterly. “Huh. When you put it that way, sign me up.”

“Don’t be glib, Julia. There are too many people on the planet, and not everyone is going to get to live in a house with running water and have a smartphone. War, revolution, famine—it’s all going to happen regardless. This is a controlled burn.”

“Thank you,” says Julia. “I was having a hard time deciding what to do, and I think you just made my mind up for me.”

“I had a feeling that you might be . . . recalcitrant. Which is why Ethan unexpectedly received an offer for a free excursion to Kapu two months ago, some kind of credit-card reward sweepstakes—Bailey did an exceptional job with the graphic design. And strangely, he didn’t come back. It was easy enough to buy off his lawyers—I gave them a very large check and the tiniest of fig leaves. I’m a family member concerned that reverting custody would endanger Evie due to your mental instability, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Couldn’t they continue the façade, at least until we found out what happened to Ethan? Let the girl summer with her great-great-aunt? I will give them this—they were hard negotiators. But money really does solve so many problems.”

Julia’s throat tightens.

“She looks so much like you, that girl. And if you don’t work out, then I have a backup plan. Like always.”

It’s as though the very air around Julia has disappeared entirely, as if she just stepped through the airlock into outer space. Julia can’t breathe. She can’t even imagine breathing.

And is that sound, in the background, is that the faintest echoing laughter of a child playing outside?

Evie. Oh my God, Evie.

“I look forward to getting your full report, Julia,” says Aunt Liddy. “Have a pleasant journey back.”

And with that the line goes dead.

What world is this, that she so inadvertently stumbled into? Julia can’t bring her mind to make sense of it, any of it. There are too many thoughts in her head, and none shed light on what to do next.

“The witch,” mumbles Agnes. “She wants to put you in the oven and eat you.”

Agnes’s skin is dry, has the rough texture of paper. Julia shifts her position. Her move jostles Agnes slightly in the process, and small flakes of something that looks like ash fall from her.

“Why can’t she ever just be happy in a house made of candy? Why does she want to eat the things that shouldn’t be eaten?”

“I don’t know,” says Julia. “Maybe no matter how much she eats, she’s always hungry.”

Agnes blinks. Something vacant about her stare—a gradual diminishing. “Your kind is always hungry. One day, you’ll eat the whole world.” She places a hand lightly on Julia’s stomach. “It’s better to be Kapu.”

“But Kapu is gone.”

Agnes shakes her head. “We were on an island in the middle of the ocean. And now we’re on an island in the middle of the ocean.”

“I don’t understand.”

Agnes smiles. Her cheeks are sunken. “Irene wanted to understand. But it’s not for you to understand. It’s secret.”

Another missile is launched, but they’re so far away now it’s just a faint flash in the sky.

Julia thinks about the cyanide in her back pocket. She thinks about Evie, playing in the sunlit garden, surrounded by that looming wall, now left with nothing but a brittle woman to turn to for love. She thinks about her own, foreign self, this other Julia that is bubbling beneath her skin. In time, she knows the new Julia will, like anything else, seek self-preservation, propagation. She doesn’t trust it. Yes, the cyanide is her best, truest option.

But Evie. Evie.

“Maybe she’ll come find you,” says Agnes. “Maybe she’ll put the witch in the oven, like Gretel, and follow the bread crumbs home.”

There’s a fine mist of ocean spray in the air. The wooden planks on the deck gleam with it.

“Maybe,” says Julia, stroking Agnes’s fine hair. “But where’s home?”

Agnes uncurls herself, places her feet on the deck, wriggling her toes like they’re new. “Home is where you are.” She stands, grabs one of Julia’s arms, pulls. “Can we go look at the cabin?”

Why not? Maybe there will be something in there to chase the cyanide down with.

“I’m not scared, you know,” Agnes says. “I’m not scared of witches. You know why?”

Every muscle in Julia’s body resists, but she conquers the fatigue and manages to stand. “No, why?”

Agnes slips an arm around Julia’s waist. “Because I’m not scared to die.”

The next moments happen so fast. No warning. There’s a slight pressure in Julia’s back pocket, then Agnes is running across the stern, gripping the cyanide package, which sparkles in the moonlight, and as Agnes runs, she leaves a cloud of dust in her wake, like she’s disintegrating in real time, and then she’s leaping up to the railing, and then she’s climbed to the top, balancing her arms out to each side, and then she jumps, and Julia hears the splash, and by the time she gets her legs to move, by the time she reaches the railing, all she sees in the dark water is a small white dress floating like flotsam on the surface of a dark wave, and then another wave takes it, lifts it high for a split second before it’s pulled down into the boat’s wake, and disappears.

“Wake, bake, cake,” says Julia. She feels something surge in her belly, like the press of Evie’s foot against her uterus before she was born. And she hears them, distant whisperings, a cacophony of souls, thoughts, memories—a fish slithering through her hands; a gecko crouching under a broad green leaf; the back of a woman’s head, long hair reaching over the brown pew—for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable.

She raises her hand, the one that was burned and blistering.

The skin is smooth. Pristine.

And a part of her knows that she didn’t survive the infection. A part of her knows that she now is the infection. A contagion that she’d only pass along to Evie. To the world. The monstrosity is growing inside her.

Noah. She has to find Noah. They can’t go back. Samantha was right all along.

Julia climbs the stairs to the cockpit, thinking about ways to scuttle the boat—there has to be something on board with which to bash a hole in the hull, or maybe even create a small explosion—although it’s a shame they won’t be able to flip a coin for the cyanide pill. Only two more steps, then a wooden door, and a brass handle, which she reaches for, turns, and then steps into the cockpit where she sees . . .

Reverend Palmer standing next to Noah, who’s behind the brass wheel, steering.

The Reverend looks at her, smiles. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Julia feels her heart implode. “Noah? Noah, what are you . . . ?”

But she knows. She can tell by the rigidity of his body, the way he doesn’t even register her entrance, and more than that too, she can sense the vacuous space in his body where his mind used to be.

Oh, Noah. Slowly she approaches him, pauses by his side and tentatively reaches out a hand to touch his arm—nothing. His skin is cool beneath her fingers, slightly clammy.

“What . . . what did you do to him?” she asks in a hollow voice.

“Nothing. She told me to come to the boat, make myself hidden in the cockpit until her arrival. Then she blessed him with the last of her Spirit.”

“Oh dear God,” whispers Julia.

“We’ve been preparing for this journey, well, since my father’s time. We have everything we need to begin again. Seeds from each and every native species on Kapu. An ark, so to speak.”

She remembers Isaac roughly pulling and tearing the husk off the coconut. The boat is the husk carrying the coconut to a new land. Or maybe Julia is.

She’d packed the machete in her bag. Could she kill someone in cold blood?

Now, yes.

As if he can read her mind, the Reverend says, “Go ahead and try.”

Her hands shaking, Julia unzips her pack, grabs the machete, charges over to the Reverend, quickly raises her arm—and freezes. She can’t bring it down on the back of his neck. In fact, her hand opens and the machete falls to the wooden floor with a clatter.

The new Julia won’t let her. The Julia underneath her skin.

“You should go down to the cabin, get some rest,” says the Reverend. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

She knows this is true. It will never let her hurt him, kill herself, or destroy the boat. It has a fierce will already, which, she also realizes, will only grow stronger over time. But she can’t let it loose on the rest of the world.

She needs to find a place that’s uninhabited, a place no one would ever want to go. A place to bury Kapu’s secrets. But in order to do that, she has to convince the Reverend. And the Julia under her skin.

All that’s available, at the moment, is the truth.

“So what’s your plan?” she asks, keeping her voice neutral, as if it doesn’t make much difference to her one way or another. “Sail into a city somehow? Without identification? Money?”

The Reverend looks out at the darkened glass. The boat rocks, ever so slightly. And beyond the windshield glass, beyond the bow, the black ocean meets the black night sky, no discernible horizon line separating them.

“God will provide.”

“I don’t think God has met Aunt Liddy,” says Julia. She stoops down and picks the machete up from the floor, slips it back into her sodden pack. Tries to zip the bag shut, but it jams. “My great-aunt has a plan, she always does. And a backup plan, and a backup backup plan.”

“You don’t share the same faith. You wouldn’t understand.”

“True, I don’t share your faith. Maybe that’s why, after all, I was chosen. Maybe that’s my purpose.” She slides the pack’s one good strap over her shoulder. “Because let’s say, by some miracle, you do make it to the mainland. How long before Aunt Liddy finds you, me? What’s on this boat? Her resources are unimaginable, her nature diabolical. She’s like Alfred, only worse if that’s possible.”

He’s quiet. She can sense all the voices inside her become quiet. Listening. Good.

“Trust me, I want to go back,” she continues. “There’s nothing in the world I want more. Because the only thing that means anything to me is my daughter, and that bitch has her.”

The Reverend glances at her with the faintest hint of sympathy. “Well then, I am sorry for that, I am.”

Julia takes a step closer to him. Her fingers tighten on the strap. “But to give Aunt Liddy what she wants puts the whole world at risk. The world all of us will live in. My daughter included.”

“The world will be made anew.”

“It will. But it will be Aunt Liddy’s world. Not yours. Not Kapu.”

And then she thinks about the video she watched, replays it in her mind—Agnes under the scalpel, Irene walking numbly to the operating table with stumps where her hands should be—and she hears the whispers of thoughts, conversations running over each other, too fast to understand, but she knows it’s a conference of sorts.

“She’s old,” Julia continues softly. “She doesn’t have that much longer to live, I’m sure. It would be wiser to wait. A good ten years should do it.”

The internal whisperings grow louder—a debate. So then she thinks about that trip she took into her great-aunt’s basement, holding the broom like a sword. She thinks about all the dusty moths pinned to decaying velvet, the stiff figures of taxidermied birds, claws wrapped around old twigs, bound with wire. Some from Kapu.

The whisperings turn into a cacophony.

She can see herself even, a small, waiflike figure, slowly creeping toward the sheet that covered some kind of lumpen figure under the stairs. The thing that frightened her out of her mind. What did she do next? That’s right, she used the handle of the broomstick to lift the corner of the sheet from a safe distance away, her heart thudding loud as a drum.

There was an old, rusting wheelbarrow under the sheet.

Noah takes his hands off the wheel, cocks his head like he hears music, an inaudible tune.

“What are you doing?” the Reverend asks. He turns to her, grabs her by the arm. “What have you done?”

Julia smiles a crooked smile. “The Lord’s will.”

On top of the wheelbarrow was a large jar filled with a yellow liquid. She kept lifting the sheet until she saw something that stunned her. Shocked her so completely that she’d hidden it away and out of sight in her mind, until now, this moment.

The feet of a baby, translucent and pale, floating in the yellow liquid, and then short, stubby legs . . .

The boat lists hard into a wave. “Stop it!” the Reverend shouts. “Stop it right now!”

She’d dropped the sheet, turned and bolted for the stairs, catching the broom in the staircase railing, breaking it. Imagined it chasing her, snatching at her feet as she fled. And maybe it was chasing her, because here it is now, within her.

The child. Irene and Alfred’s child.

The whisperings continue to churn, and she can even pull out the odd word—abomination, madness, protect—but after a few moments they die down, as though a consensus has been reached.

Noah puts his hands back on the wheel, turns it.

The Reverend drops his hand from Julia’s arm, confused. “I don’t understand.”

“Maybe it’s a test of your faith,” Julia says.

The Reverend gives her a sideways glance, not trusting, not yet.

So she burrows into all the thoughts, memories inside her, all that remains of Kapu. Trying to find the one strand that will convince him.

“Your father told you once that a light would come to guide you, a sinner who would be redeemed by the Lord,” Julia says. “In her was life; and the life was the light of men.”

Now she has his attention. She can see both their reflections in the dark glass of the cockpit.

“He’d want you to make sure that life was safe, wouldn’t he?”

But he still seems hesitant, so Julia tries to find one more thing, and she does—a single word, the one that had been out of her reach for so long, that she had sensed the existence of but could never define. It’s the word she was trying to find in her dream, a word she never would have been able to comprehend without the creature growing in her belly.

She leans over and whispers this word in his ear. “Behold.” Takes his hand, and places it gently on her belly, which already has a small bump. The thing inside her kicks.

He looks startled, quietly amazed. And then he drops to his knees, tears beading his eyes, gazing up at her, rapt. “Blessed are thee among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”

And it might just be her last act as the old Julia, although at the moment she doesn’t know if she’s saved the world, or just delayed the inevitable.