“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“The answer’s out there somewhere. In the village. Not in our heads.” I push my hands into my parka pockets. “You told me once my father would play this hide-and-seek game with you. He played that game with me, too. All the time. He’d hide a prize but leave little clues around to help me find it.”
Her eyes sparkle with the memories. “The answer is right in front of you. Right under your nose.”
I nod. “I can’t shake this feeling that somewhere in this village is a clue he’s left for me. Right in front of me. Right under my nose. And I just need to find it.” I turn to her. “There are answers out there. Waiting to be found.”
She takes my hand gently. “I think I know where we should look.”
30
WE MOVE SWIFTLY through the moonlit streets. Deep puddles on the ground are transformed under the bright moonlight into gleaming pools of mercury. Full strength has returned to Sissy, and she walks easily beside me, her boots split-splatting on the wet path alongside mine. Cottages flank us on the narrow streets and we do not speak until we veer off the main street and onto a dirt path.
“This way,” Sissy says when we’re halfway between the village and the farmlands.
I wrap my parka tighter around me against the cold and follow her to an outcast building a hundred meters out, on the edge of the woods, rectangular and boxy. And drab. No windows and only a single metal door breaking up the bland concrete surface. Half of the building is awash in moonlight. The other half is hidden in the shadows of overhanging trees. “The Scientist’s lab,” she says as we draw closer to it. “I’ve already searched inside countless times when you were still sick. I knew the elders would have scoured every inch of the place, looking for the Origin. But I wanted to see for myself what the Scientist had been working on.”
The air inside is musty, dank with the odor of mold. Sissy flips a switch and overhanging fluorescent lights flicker on. The lab is composed of about five large workstations, all of which are littered with test tubes, small experiment burners, cylinders, and beakers. Scattered on benches and even on the dirt-packed floor are open textbooks and notepads filled with scrawled handwriting I’d recognize anywhere. My father’s.
“He must have slept here,” Sissy says, pointing at a hammock hanging in the corner. “A lab rat, researching, investigating, studying around the clock.”
I pick up a notebook. It’s filled from front to back, top to bottom with nonsensical chemical equations and formulas. If there’s any meaning to them, it’s lost on me. They have no more meaning to me than the mad, delusional workings and scribbles of a man pushed over the edge.
“I went through all the notebooks,” Sissy says. “And they’re all the same. Filled with those equations. Do they mean anything to you?”
I shake my head. I walk along the wall, eyes searching. In a tall glass cabinet, endless rows of vials sit in racks, many half-filled with a translucent liquid. “What was he doing in here? What was he working on?”
Sissy’s voice from the other end of the lab is echoic and distant. “I think he came up with the glowing green liquid inside the GlowBurns.” She walks over to me, opens the glass cabinet, and removes two vials. She pours the contents of one vial onto the surface of a work bench, splattering the liquid into a small pool. Then she opens the other vial, pours its liquid content atop the pool. Instantly, the intermixed liquid begins to glow green.
“From what I’ve been able to gather from the notebooks,” she says, “he was working on this liquid for a few years. It’s an alternative-energy light source of some kind.” She picks up a notebook and taps it on her thigh. “I’ve wondered if there was more to it. A hidden agenda.”
I pick up another notebook. More equations, chemical formulas, nary a single sentence with subject, verb, object. Not an iota of a personal pronoun. “That’s it? That’s all he did in here? Worked on some stupid glowing liquid?” I pick up another notebook, flip through it, let it fall to the ground. “There’s got to be more.”
“I’ve been through all the notebooks, Gene. There’s nothing but formulas and equations related to the glowing liquid.”
I move between workbenches, eyes swiveling around, searching. Open a few drawers containing dirty beakers, flasks, grimy plastic goggles, metal rulers beginning to rust. “A sign, a clue, something. It’s somewhere in here.”
“Maybe,” Sissy says. “It’s a long shot, but if I missed something, I thought you might pick up on it.”
I open glass cabinets, pushing aside cylinders and beakers, searching for an etching in the wood benches, a hole in the wall through which a sunbeam might form. But after an hour of searching, there’s nothing but smoothness, blandness, emptiness. An empty shout of silence.
“Gene. We’ve looked through everything.” She bites her lower lip. “There’s nothing here.”
And now I start shoving racks of test tubes off the benches, not caring when they break on the ground, not caring that they shatter into shards on the ground, and now I’m knocking over stools, kicking them out of my way. I’m pulling dusty parkas and scarves off wooden pegs. I’m looking for my name, written, etched, chiseled, on wood, on plastic, on glass, I’m looking for the letter G, the letter E, the letter N. I’m looking for my father.
“Gene.”
I’m grabbing more notebooks, riffling through them, and they offer up nothing but more nonsensical equations and clouds of kicked-up dust that get into my eyes, making me blink, and the backs of my eyelids grate against my eyeballs, drawing wetness. So much time spent to write, so many letters penned. But never once the letters G and E and N used in combination.
“Gene.”
And then I’m grabbing the covers of his notebooks, ripping them into two, the spines cracking as if filled with cartilage, throwing the torn halves at the glass cabinets. And then I’m switching off the light, scanning the dark, hoping for letters and words glowing in the dark, a secret message left for me. But there is nothing but a blank slab of darkness. And then I’m flinging open the door, needing air, eyes shut tighter than my own fists punching the metal frame, my racked body shuddering with an anger that feels like grief and despair both.
“Gene.” And Sissy is next to me, stepping into the small column of bright clear moonlight beaming down on me. It is like a silver tent, and her hair is lit with a sepia haze.
She touches my face. Eyes fixed on mine, fingers lightly tracing my jawline. I feel every pore of her fingertip, feel the softness of her skin turn to the sharp edge of her fingernail as she grazes along my chin, down my neck, over my Adam’s apple.
I press my face against the cold metal door frame. A clean hush falls on us. “There was this night, when I was seven. My father had to go look for a tooth I’d lost at school and he was gone for hours but it felt like forever. I was just a boy and I thought he’d been devoured for sure. But just when I’d given up hope, he came back and I made him promise that he would never leave me. And he told me he never would, he told me that even when it seemed like he was gone for the longest time, he would always come back. He promised he would never leave me.”
I shake my head, let out a pent-up breath.
“Why did he promise only to later abandon me?” I say. “And why bring me here, only to desert me again? Not a single note. Not a single damn word. How difficult could it have been for him to write Dear Gene?”
Her hand strokes the side of my head, her fingers gliding through my hair, her skin grazing across the top of my ear.
“If it’s true that I am the Origin, was I nothing more to him than a science project?”
“Gene,” she whispers, her thumb brushing my cheekbones, spreading a dampness. She leans forward, slowly. Our lips touch, silently and softly, like two clouds touching in the sky, coalescing into the softest spot in the universe. I close my eyes.
And then the ground begins to rumble. Ever so slightly, a mere vibration.
We open our eyes, and it is as if my whole vision—and all that matters in the world—is her brown iris with radiating spokes of green. Her pupils, dilated and dark, enlarging, drawing me in. I feel her hands slip down my back.
And then I am grabbing her, drawing her toward me, and our bodies collide and our arms at last find their way around each other. We pull each other in tightly, and the rightness and wrongness of this pelts me until I don’t know what to do but hold her even more forcefully. Our temples, pressed against each other, pound-pound-pound-pound in synchrony. The pulse at her temple is as light as a feather, and the strands of her hair touching my skin feel like soft fingers undoing knots within me.
And then the rumbling becomes more obvious, rattling even the glass beakers around us. She pulls her head away, and I feel landscapes of emptiness whoosh between us.
We pull apart. “What’s going on?” she says.
We step outside. Beneath our feet, the ground hums ever so slightly. But it’s the sound that is drawing our interest: a metallic rattling, the expulsion of a loud hiss. From the other side of the woods.
“The train,” Sissy says.
Something else catches our attention. In the distance, groups of farm girls are shuffling toward what must be the train station. Like black ants, emerging out of their holes, marching dutifully and silently through a meadow dotted with a million glistening raindrops.
31
SISSY AND I steal along the periphery of the woods where we won’t be so easily seen. On the other side of the forested peninsula, we come upon a large clearing. Sitting in the middle is what looks to be a train station. Dozens of girls are already standing on the two platforms, busy at their tasks. Sissy and I crouch behind a large black spruce at the lip of the forest. Moonlight through the branches falls dappled on the ground.
A train sits between two platforms. Steam pours off the lead engine car still hot from the long journey; it hisses, clicking and clacking as it winds down. At least a dozen cars are strung behind the lead car like black links of a metal chain. Ribbed with arched steel bars, each car has the appearance of a large, hideous birdcage. The bars, too closely set for even a skinny child to squeeze through, still leave the interior fully exposed to the outside elements: rain, snow, wind. And, most crucially, sunlight. In other words, these train cars are built dusker-proof. Even the flooring is meshed steel. Any stowaway dusker catching a ride on this train would find little shelter from sunlight. Within minutes, it would be reduced to a sloppy puddle, dripping through the mesh floor, trailing along for miles between the train tracks.