Epap comes at me, his finger pointing like a talon. “Why you—”
Sissy pulls his arm down. “Enough, Epap!”
“There you go again,” he cries. “Why are you always so quick to side with him? Enough Epap, stop Epap. What is he to you? Why do you … oh, forget it!” He tears his arm away from her. “You want to go hungry together, go ahead. But if we get sick, if we starve, it’s on you, don’t you forget that.”
“Quit with the melodrama, Epap.” Her chest heaves up and down.
He casts his eyes away, doesn’t say anything. Then suddenly leaps at me, his momentum catching me and sending our bodies crashing hard against the deck. The wooden boards drum hollow on our impact.
A curious, deep thump rumbles beneath me. As if I’ve jarred something loose under the boat.
Epap is cursing and swinging on top of me, and it’s all I can do to deflect his blows. Then Sissy is prying him off me, her face a furious red.
“We’ve got enough to deal with!” she shouts. “We need to focus on fighting them, not each other!”
Epap spins around, stares at the riverbank. He runs a hand through his hair, his breathing ragged. But I’m not paying attention to him. All my focus is on the deck under me. I knock on it. The same hollow thump reverberates back. I knock the deck a yard away, and a thump of a different timbre sounds back.
“What is it?” David asks. Now they’re all turning to look at me.
I thump the deck with all my might. And I hear it again, the sound of dislodgment. Of something secreted under the boat, hidden from unwanted eyes. A lump suddenly forms in my throat as I realize something.
“Gene?” Sissy says. “What’s going on?”
I look at her with dazed eyes.
“Gene?”
“I think something is under this boat,” I say. And now everyone’s staring at me. “It’s been under our noses this whole time.”
Ben studies the deck, confused. “Where? I don’t see anything.”
“The only place a hunter wouldn’t think—wouldn’t dare—look,” I say. “Underwater.”
* * *
Diving into the river is like cracking through the face of a mirror. And as welcoming; it’s all shards of cold that slash and cut my bare skin. My lungs contract to the size of marbles. I surface, gasping for air. The current is a beast. Although a rope is looped around my chest in the off chance—not so off, I now realize—that I might get swept away, it offers little comfort. I immediately grab the side of the boat. I allow myself a few seconds to get used to the cold, then duck under.
For grip, I wedge my fingers between the wooden planks of the deck. My legs go flying with the current, pulling me parallel with the boat. I’m like a flag flailing in high wind. Sunlight pours between the planks, thin slats of light cutting downward in the murky waters. It’s eerily quiet down here, just a deep mournful humming broken up by the occasional swishing sound. My eyes dart around, trying to find something, anything, out of the ordinary.
There. A boxed compartment, jutting from the boat’s dead center. Carefully, I allow my body to drift toward it until I’m wrapping my arms around it, thankful for the support. A metal latch, rusted over, hangs on the underside. It doesn’t give on my initial pull. I yank it and the whole underside swings open.
A large slab of stone tumbles out, hitting me on the back of the head. The pain is numbing and disorienting. I make a quick, blind grab for the tablet as it slides down my body. But I’m too late. The tablet slides down my legs, bounces off my left shin, and fades into the murky depths.
Lungs bursting, I spin around until I’m crouched upside down, feet planted on the underside of the boat. It’s now or never. One chance to make a dive for the tablet before it descends past the point of retrieval. I kick off the bottom of the boat. My body missiles downward, into darkness, into the cold.
A fraction of a second before the rope looped around me pulls taut, my fingertips touch stone. I grab it. Then I’m bounced up as if on a bungee cord, the force of it almost dislodging the tablet from my hands. I cradle the tablet against my bare chest, feel grooved lettering engraved into it.
I surface out of the water in a spray of white, my body reduced to one gigantic mouth gasping for air. Epap and David see the tablet and pry it from my tired arms. They leave me in the water, clinging to the side, barely able to hang on.
By the time I heave myself onboard, my body flopping wet and heavy, they’ve all huddled around the tablet. Heads pressed together and angled, they’re reading the words chiseled into stone:
STAY ON THE RIVER.
—The Scientist
Their mouths are cracking open. A chorus of giggles and laughter leaks, then bays out. They are all smiles and astonishment and delirium.
“I told you! I told you! I told you!” Ben is shouting, slapping everyone on the back. “He’d planned this all along!”
Sissy is standing, hands clasped to her mouth, her eyebrows arched high, tears brimming in her eyes.
“I knew he’d come through for us!” Jacob shouts. “The Promised Land! He’s leading us to the Promised Land. Of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine!”
Sissy’s face breaks into a smile that almost feels like physical warmth. Her eyes close in relief. “How did you know the tablet was under us, Gene?” she asks.
I pause before speaking. My father would often play treasure-hunt games when I was a toddler, leaving me clues around the house. I remember how flustered I’d become, unable to find the clues I knew were there. He’d force me to slow down, take deep breaths, survey the scene with equanimity. He’d say: You’re looking but not seeing. The answer is right under your nose. And almost inevitably, once I calmed down, I’d find the clue wedged between cracks in the floor, laid between the pages of a book I’d been holding the whole time, or placed in my very own pocket.
But I don’t tell them any of this. “I was just lucky, I guess,” I answer. I start to shiver, the wind gusting blades of ice into my body. I’m only wearing underwear, having taken off my clothes before diving in.
One of the hepers says something; a burst of communal laughter follows. Sissy rejoins them, clapping her hands. So much emotion gushing off of them.
I walk into the cabin where I’ve left my clothes in a pile. I strip off my underwear, wring it with shivering hands and arms. I can still hear them guffawing, their eruptions of laughter hee-hawing back and forth. I don’t understand why they have to so demonstrably display what they’re feeling. Can’t they simply feel their emotions without needing to project them? Maybe captivity has stunted them, rendered them incapable of intuiting another’s emotions unless it’s spelled out for them in a vomit of colors.
They start giggling now, talking about the Scientist this, the Scientist that. This is the confirmation they’ve been looking for. The sign that the Scientist never left them, or betrayed them, that he is in fact waiting for them at the end of this path. For them.
And not for me.
Me, he abandoned in a metropolis of monsters. To fend for myself. A boy who cried himself to sleep and wet himself in bed for months afterward. But for them he created an elaborate escape plan involving a journal (clearly meant for them to find), and a boat to lead them to the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine.
I hear another giggle, then another, their laughter like taunting jabs. I am about to tell them to shut up when I realize they have, in fact, fallen into a silence that is as sudden as it is eerie. I glance through the cracks in the cabin wall. I can’t make out very much, just David and Jacob raising up the stone tablet. Quickly, I slip into my dry clothes and walk out of the cabin.
They’ve stood the tablet up on its base and gathered behind it. Water is still dripping out of the grooved letters and down the face of the tablet, forming a puddle on the deck. I read the words again.
STAY ON THE RIVER.
—The Scientist
But the Dome hepers are looking not at the front of the tablet but the back. Their eyes, seeing something I cannot, are wide with shock as they travel up the tablet, past the top rim, and fall on mine.
“What?” I say.
Slowly, they turn the tablet around for me to read.
Four words. Four words that will become as indelibly etched in my mind as they are permanently chiseled into the stone tablet.
DON’T LET GENE DIE.
The first words in years from my father for me, about me. A whisper from the past, growing into a breeze, then gusting into a blaze. A skein of electricity jolts through my body and I feel the crackling of ice thawing in my marrow. And though it is a surge of light and hope and strength that flows through me, all I can do is collapse to my knees.
Jacob and David are the first to reach me, and they’re picking me up. I feel their hands clapping me on my back, their voices loud but no longer jarring, their bodies pressing against me but somehow no longer intrusive. Their arms sling over my back as they hold me up, wonderment spreading across their faces. Smiles break out, and their eyes are warm with welcome. Sissy’s eyes clench shut as she presses her balled hands to her lips in excitement. When she opens her eyes to look at me, they are hot and tender.
“I knew it,” she says. “It’s no accident that you’re here, Gene. You were always meant to be with us. To be a part of us.”
I don’t say anything, only feel river water dripping down my body. A wind picks up and my body shivers. She wraps her arms around me and gives me a hug. I’m still wet but she doesn’t mind.
“Don’t be a stranger anymore,” she whispers into my ear, so softly, the words can only be meant for me, and she pulls me in closer one last time before we separate. Her face and the front of her chest are damp as she throws the blanket Ben has just brought over across my shoulders. Sunshine pours down on the boat, on the river, on the land, on us.
3
WHEN I WAS in second grade, on the night I was almost eaten alive, I sat alone in the corner of the cafeteria. It was early for lunch, and the relative emptiness of the cafeteria would be a large reason for my survival that night. In commemoration of the Ruler’s Birthday, special synthetic steaks that were particularly bloody and flesh-textured were served up for lunch. Everyone ate with zest, teeth ripping into the steaks, blood oozing down chins and into dripping cups.