“What did he say?” My voice, loud in this room.
“What?”
“About me, what did he say about me?” My words tumble out of my mouth, over each other, like unwieldy wooden blocks tumbling down a staircase.
“That you would come here someday. He was certain of it.”
I shift on my feet. “Anything else?”
She throws her hands up in exasperation. “Stop interrupting! I need to say everything in sequence lest I forget some important detail—”
“No. Just get to it now. Tell me what else he said about me.”
She draws in a lungful of air. “Very well.”
From outside, the sound of voices, still distant, but drawing closer.
“He said you were a boy born with a mission. With a certain destiny.”
“Me?”
“That you have a purpose, a calling. That your life has a significance greater than you could ever imagine.” She pulls down her hood. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. My father never said anything about this. What mission?”
“I’m supposed to ease you into this gradually.”
“Lately, nothing’s been gradual or easy. Just tell me.”
She steps toward me, her eyes locked on mine. “Do not be surprised, do not be afraid of what I’m about to tell you.”
“What’s my mission, Clair?”
“You’re not to get on that train, Gene.” Her eyes pinion mine. “Not tomorrow or the day after. Not ever. You are to go somewhere else.”
I search her face for understanding. “What? Where?”
“To your father, Gene. He’s still alive.”
34
HER WORDS SLAP me with a palpable force. My knees buckle under me.
“He’s alive? Where is he?” I hear myself uttering. My words, a thousand miles away, lost in the swirl of thoughts churning through my mind.
She’s about to say something, then shakes her head. “No time,” she says quietly, as if to herself. “Come here.” She walks to the other side of the room, moves aside a few empty cartons and boxes until a small door is revealed.
“No way,” I stammer. “Tell me he’s not in there.”
“Of course not,” she says. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She opens the door and walks in. I follow. A second later, I hear the snap of plastic, and then the room lights up with a green glow.
It’s actually a long hallway, its length disappearing into the far shadows. Along the walls, like large pinned butterflies, hang several large contraptions, each resembling enormous kites with large wingspans.
“We’re inside the fortress wall now,” Clair says.
“What are these?”
“They’re called ‘hang gliders.’”
I touch the fabric of the nearest one. A synthetic plastic material.
“In the early days,” Clair says, “when the Mission took its outpost duty seriously, people used to fly out on hang gliders to scout the land. Always under the cover of daylight. To keep an eye on the duskers. To make sure the duskers were staying in the city, that they weren’t exploring or traveling across the desert.”
I look at the dozens of hang gliders, shadowed along the wall from top to bottom. “Why did they stop?”
“The elders got too big and heavy to operate them. And they forbade further flying after a few girls, it’s rumored, flew away and never returned. Now no one can operate them: the elders are too fat, the girls can’t run for takeoff because of their feet. Not that anyone cares. Everyone’s forgotten they ever existed.”
I walk the length of the hallway with a GlowBurn, the rectangle of green light touching the walls around me, exposing more dust-coated hang gliders. “Are they still operable?”
She smirks. “You wouldn’t get very far. They’re almost all in disrepair. The operable ones are mostly gone—burnt to a crisp many years ago.” She sees my frown. “They were burned in one huge pyre by order of the elders. This hallway—I think it was the repair room. They forgot about these ones.”
Backtracking, I touch the large hang glider nearest the door. It has an especially long wingspan, its synthetic material brightly colored.
“This one looks new,” I say.
Clair nods. “Relatively. It’s the only one that I’m sure flies.”
“My father?”
She runs her finger fondly across its span. “He constructed it. It was the training model. Two can fly at a time. We’d fly out together, your father and I. He taught me how to fly it.”
“Did he fly a lot?”
“Yes. Secretly, of course, at night. The elders would never have permitted it. After he was banished to the cabin, he was free from their watchful eyes, and freer to fly. He kept another hang glider at the cabin.”
I nod, remembering the hang glider on the cabin wall. “Where would he go?”
“Everywhere. Somewhere. I don’t know.”
I slide my finger over a hang glider. A thought occurs to me. “My father used a hang glider to escape,” I say, excitement thrumming in me. “The elders couldn’t allow his escape to be made known to the villagers. So they concocted a story about his suicide. I’ve nailed it, haven’t I?”
Clair nods.
“So where did he go?”
But she shakes her head. “I can’t tell you unless you do something.”
“What do you mean?”
She folds her arms. “I can’t tell you where he is or how to get to him unless you first show me the Origin.”
“Are you kidding me? I have nothing for you. Only idle speculation, wild theories. Now tell me where my father is!”
“He made me swear not to tell you until you first produced the Origin. Because that’s your mission, Gene. To take the Origin to your father.”
I exhale loudly with frustration. “Okay, whatever then. You’re looking at the Origin.”
She’s confused for a few seconds, glancing up and down my body. “Where…” Her voice drifts. She shakes her head, starts putting on her wool hat. “You’re wasting my time. If all you’re going to do is joke about this then—”
“No! I’m being serious.”
“There’s no way—”
“Clair! I’m telling you what I know,” I say, waving my arms pleadingly. “Look here, I bet my father hinted that the Origin had to do with lettering or typography or something like that. He did, didn’t he?”
She looks at me warily.
“Gene,” I say. “It’s so obvious, but everyone sees right through it. It’s exactly the kind of clue my father would dangle in front of people. Obvious yet invisible at the same time.”
“Stop it!”
“No. I’m serious. It’s in my genes. It’s me. I’m the Origin!”
She stares intently at me, my neck, my chest, my arms. I see her mouth the Origin, and her pale face whitens even more.
“Now tell me,” I say. “Where’s my father?”
A flare of annoyance fills her eyes. “I’m only supposed to tell you if I’m absolutely certain you have the Origin. And I’m not. But there’s no time left for certainty.”
“Understood. Now tell me where he is.”
“East.”
“East? There’s nothing east of here.” I glance around at the silent audience of hang gliders, at this odd, elfin girl with bleach-white hair standing before me. “You know what? Why should I believe you? Nothing you say makes sense. How do I know you’re not making this up?”
“Your father said you might not believe. So he told me to show you something.” She goes to a small wooden chest hidden in the shadows of the corner, lifts open the lid. When she turns around, she has a small model airplane in her hand.
My rib cage contracts, squeezing my lungs. I recognize the plane. It’s the remote-controlled airplane my father flew from the rooftop of his workplace, the tallest skyscraper in the dusker metropolis. The plane is smaller than I remember, its faded chrome surface dented and pinged, but when I look closer, it’s undeniable. It’s the very same one.
“He told me that he’d programmed it to fly to a specific spot,” she says. “He knew exactly where it would land. And years later, after he returned to the Mission, sure enough, he found this plane. Dented, smashed up, rusted over, entangled in treetops, but not a hundred meters from where it was supposed to land.”
I turn the plane over in my hands. It’s been repaired and spruced up, coated with varnish. And there’s some writing. Across the underside of the two wings, the same unmistakable cursive handwriting I’ve come to know from reading my father’s journals. Only four words.
“Follow the river east,” I whisper.
“You need to go east,” Clair says softly. “We will go east. By hang gliding. I will fly us there on this hang glider for two.” Her eyes dart down with a curious guilty expression on her face. “We’ll follow the river. It comes out the mountain on the other side. Then east the whole way.”
“There’s nothing there. It’s all barren, empty land.”
“Your father is there. In a place he described as the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine.”
All I can do is turn the plane over in my hands, touch the cool metal plates.
“It’s your very purpose in life, Gene. That is what your father told me. Your whole life has come down to this: going east with the Origin. Nothing else matters. It’s what you were born to do. Your mission.”
Voices shout from outside. Closer to us, perhaps almost at the fortress wall.
She speaks at a hurried clip. “We need to leave tonight. But not now. Not with the elders right on top of us. Besides, I need to go back to my room, get the supply bag I’ve hidden. The journey will take a few days. We meet back here in an hour.”