Chapter Text
~
I drove quickly through the I-10 junction as the sun fell behind me. I didn’t see much besides the white and yellow lines on the pavement, and the occasional big green sign pointing me farther east. I was in a hurry now.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I was in a hurry for, though. To be out of this, I supposed. Out of pain, out of sadness, out of aching for lost and hopeless loves. Did that mean out of this body? I couldn’t think of any other answer. I would still ask my questions of the Healer, but it felt as though the decision was made. Skipper. Quitter. I tested the words in my head, trying to come to terms with them.
If I could find a way, I would keep Paul out of the Seeker’s hands. It would be very hard. No, it would be impossible.
I would try.
I promised him this, but he wasn’t listening. He was still dreaming. Giving up, I thought, now that it was too late for giving up to help.
I tried to stay clear of the red canyon in his head, but I was there, too. No matter how hard I tried to see the cars zooming beside me, the shuttles gliding in toward the port, the few, fine clouds drifting overhead, I couldn’t pull completely free of his dreams. I memorized John’s face from a thousand different angles. I watched Mike shoot up in a sudden growth spurt, always skin and bones. My arms ached for them both – no, the feeling was sharper than an ache, blade-edged and violent. It was intolerable. I had to get out.
I drove almost blindly along the narrow two-lane freeway. The desert was, if anything, more monotonous and dead than before. Flatter, more colorless. I would make it to Tucson long before dinnertime. Dinner. I hadn’t eaten yet today, and my stomach rumbled as I realized that.
The Seeker would be waiting for me there. My stomach rolled then, hunger momentarily replaced with nausea. Automatically, my foot eased off the gas.
I checked the map on the passenger seat. Soon I would reach a little pit stop at a place called Picacho Peak. Maybe I would stop to eat something there. Put off seeing the Seeker a few precious moments.
As I thought of this unfamiliar name – Picacho Peak – there was a strange, stifled reaction from Paul. I couldn’t make it out. Had he been here before? I searched for a memory, a sight or a smell that corresponded, but found nothing. Picacho Peak. Again, there was that spike of interest that Paul repressed. What did the words mean to him? He retreated into faraway memories, avoiding me.
This made me curious. I drove a little faster, wondering if the sight of the place would trigger something.
A solitary mountain peak – not massive by normal standards, but towering above the low, rough hills closer to me – was beginning to take shape on the horizon. It had an unusual, distinctive shape. Paul watched it grow as we traveled, pretending indifference to it.
Why did he pretend not to care when he so obviously did? I was disturbed by his strength when I tried to find out. I couldn’t see any way around the old blank wall. It felt thicker than usual, though I’d thought it was almost gone.
I tried to ignore him, not wanting to think about that – that he was growing stronger. I watched the peak instead, tracing its shape against the pale, hot sky. There was something familiar about it. Something I was sure I recognized, even as I was positive that neither of us had been here before.
Almost as if he was trying to distract me, Paul plunged into a vivid memory of John, catching me by surprise.
I shiver in my jacket, straining my eyes to see the muted glare of the sun dying behind the thick, bristly trees. I tell myself that it is not as cold as I think it is. My body just isn’t used to this.
The hands that are suddenly there on my shoulders do not startle me, though I am afraid of this unfamiliar place and I did not hear his silent approach. Their weight is too familiar.
“You’re easy to sneak up on.”
Even now, there is a smile in his voice.
“I saw you coming before you took the first step,” I say without turning. “I have eyes in the back of my head.”
Warm fingers stroke my face from my temple to my chin, dragging fire along my skin.
“You look like a dryad hidden here in the trees,” he whispers in my ear. “One of them. So beautiful that you must be fictional.”
“We should plant more trees around the cabin.”
He chuckles, and the sound makes my eyes close and my lips stretch into a grin.
“Not necessary,” he says. “You always look that way.”
“Say the last men on Earth to each other, on the eve of their separation.”
My smile fades as I speak. Smiles cannot last today.
He sighs. His breath on my cheek is warm compared to the chill forest air.
“Mike might resent that implication.”
“Mike’s still a boy. Please, please keep him safe.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” John offers. “You keep yourself safe, and I’ll do my best. Otherwise, no deal.”
Just a joke, but I can’t take it lightly. Once we are apart, there are no guarantees. “No matter what happens,” I insist.
“Nothing’s going to happen. Don’t worry.” The words are nearly meaningless. A waste of effort. But his voice is worth hearing, no matter the message.
“Okay.”
He pulls me around to face him, and I lean my head against his shoulder. I don’t know what to compare his scent to. It is his own, as unique as the smell of juniper or the desert rain.
“You and I won’t lose each other,” he promises. “I will always find you again.” There’s something lighter entering his voice, something teasing. “No matter how well you hide. I’m unstoppable at hide-and-seek.”
“Will you give me to the count of ten?”
“Without peeking.”
“You’re on,” I mumble, trying to disguise the fact that my throat is thick with tears.
“Don’t be afraid. You’ll be fine. You’re strong, you’re fast, and you’re smart.” He’s trying to convince himself, too.
Why am I leaving him? It’s such a long shot that Bett is still human.
But when I saw her face on the news, I was so sure.
It was just a normal raid, one of a thousand. As usual when we felt isolated enough, safe enough, we had the TV on as we cleaned out the pantry and fridge. Just to get the weather forecast; there isn’t much entertainment in the dead-boring everything-is-perfect reports that pass for news among the parasites. It was the hair that caught my eye – the flash of deep, almost pink red that I’d only ever seen on one person.
I can still see the look on her face as she peeked at the camera from the corner of one eye. The look that said, I’m trying to be invisible; don’t see me. She walked not quite slowly enough, working too hard at keeping a casual pace. Trying desperately to blend in.
No body snatcher would feel that need.
What is Bett doing walking around human in a huge city like Chicago? Are there others? Trying to find her doesn’t even seem like a choice, really. If there is a chance there are more humans out there, we have to locate them.
And I have to go alone. Bett will run from anyone but me – well, she will run from me, too, but maybe she will pause long enough for me to explain. I am sure I know her secret place.
“And you?” I ask him in a thick voice. I’m not sure I can physically bear this looming goodbye. “Will you be safe?”
“Neither heaven nor hell can keep me apart from you, Paul.”
Without giving me a chance to catch my breath or wipe away the fresh tears, Paul threw another memory at me.
Mike curls up under my arm – he doesn’t fit the way he used to. He has to fold in on himself, his long, gangly limbs poking out in sharp angles. He’s almost fourteen now and his arms are starting to turn hard and sinewy, but in this moment he’s a child, shaking, cowering almost. John is loading the car. Mike would not show this fear if he were here. Mike wants to be brave, to be like John.
“I’m scared,” he whispers.
I kiss his night-dark hair. Even here among the sharp, resinous trees, it smells like dust and sun. It feels like he is part of me, that to separate us will tear the skin where we are joined.
“You’ll be fine with John.” I have to sound brave, whether I feel that way or not.
“I know that. I’m scared for you. I’m scared you won’t come back. Like Dad.”
I flinch. When Dad didn’t come back – though his body did eventually, trying to lead the Seekers to us – it was the most horror and the most fear and the most pain I’d ever felt. What if I do that to Mike again?
“I’ll come back. I always come back.”
“I’m scared,” he says again.
I have to be brave.
“I promise everything will be fine. I’m coming back. I promise. You know I won’t break a promise, Mike. Not to you.”
The shaking slows. He believes me. He trusts me.
And another:
I can hear them on the floor below. They will find me in minutes, or seconds. I scrawl the words on a dirty shred of newsprint. They are nearly illegible, but if he finds them, he will understand:
Not fast enough. Love you, love Mike. Don’t go home.
Not only do I break their hearts, I steal their refuge, too. I picture our little canyon home abandoned, as it must be forever now. Or if not abandoned, a tomb. I see my body leading the Seekers to it. My face smiling as we catch them there . . .
“Enough,” I said out loud, cringing away from the whiplash of pain. “Enough! You’ve made your point! I can’t live without them either now. Does that make you happy? Because it doesn’t leave me many choices, does it? Just one – to get rid of you. Do you want the Seeker inside you? Ugh!” I recoiled from the thought as if I would be the one to house her.
There is another choice, Paul thought softly.
“Really?” I demanded with heavy sarcasm. “Show me one.”
Look and see.
I was still staring at the mountain peak. It dominated the landscape, a sudden upthrust of rock surrounded by flat scrubland. His interest pulled my eyes over the outline, tracing the uneven two-pronged crest.
A slow, rough curve, then a sharp turn north, another sudden turn back the other way, twisting back to the north for a longer stretch, and then the abrupt southern decline that flattened out into another shallow curve.
Not north and south, the way I’d always seen the lines in his piecemeal memories; it was up and down.
The profile of a mountain peak.
The lines that led to John and Mike. This was the first line, the starting point.
I could find them.
We could find them, he corrected me. You don’t know all the directions. Just like with the cabin, I never gave you everything.
“I don’t understand. Where does it lead? How does a mountain lead us?” My pulse beat faster as I thought of it: John was close.
Paul showed me the answer.
“They’re just lines. And Uncle Jem is just an old lunatic. A nut job, like the rest of my dad’s family.” I try to tug the book out of John’s hands, but he barely seems to notice my effort.
“A nut job, like Bett’s mom?” he counters, still studying the dark pencil marks that deface the back cover of the old photo album. It’s the one thing I haven’t lost in all the running. Even the graffiti loony Uncle Jem left on it during his last visit has sentimental value now.
“Point taken.” If Bett is still alive, it will be because her mother, loony Aunt Annie, could give loony Uncle Jem a run for the title of the craziest of my father’s siblings. He hadn’t been touched by their madness – he didn’t have a secret bunker in the backyard or anything. The rest of them though, his sister and brothers, Aunt Annie, Uncle Jem, and Uncle Owen, were the most devoted of conspiracy theorists. Uncle Owen had died before the others disappeared during the invasion, in a car accident so commonplace that even Annie and Jem had struggled to make an intrigue out of it.
My father always affectionately referred to them as the Crazies. “I think it’s time we visited the Crazies,” Dad would announce, and then Mom would groan – which is why such announcements had happened so seldom.
On one of those rare visits to Chicago, Bett had snuck me into her mother’s hidey-hole. We got caught – the woman had booby traps everywhere. Bett was scolded soundly, and though I was sworn to secrecy, I’d had a sense Aunt Annie might build a new sanctuary.
But I remember where the first is. I picture Bett there now, living the life of Anne Frank in the middle of an enemy city. We have to find her and bring her home.
John interrupts my reminiscing. “Nut jobs are exactly the kind of people who will have survived. People who saw Big Brother when he wasn’t there. People who suspected the rest of humanity before the rest of humanity turned dangerous. People with hiding places ready.” John grins, still studying the lines. And then his voice is heavier. “People like my father. If he and my uncle had hidden rather than fought. . . Well, they’d still be here.”
My tone is softer, hearing the pain in his. “Okay, I agree with the theory. But these lines don’t mean anything.”
“Tell me again what he said when he drew them.”
I sigh. “They were arguing – Uncle Jem and my dad. Uncle Jem was trying to convince him that something was wrong, telling him not to trust anyone. Dad laughed it off. Jem grabbed the photo album from the end table and started . . . almost carving the lines into the back cover with a pencil. Dad got mad, said my mom would be angry. Jem said, ‘Mary’s mom asked you all to come up for a visit, right? Kind of strange, out of the blue? Got a little upset when only Mary would come? Tell you the truth, Jim, I don’t think Mary will be minding anything much when she gets back. Oh, she might act like it, but you’ll be able to see the difference in her eyes.’
“It didn’t make sense at the time, but what he said really upset my dad. He ordered Uncle Jem out of the house. Jem wouldn’t leave at first. Kept warning us not to wait until it was too late. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into his side. ‘Don’t let ’em get you, love,’ he whispered. ‘Follow the lines. Start at the beginning and follow the lines. Uncle Jem’ll keep a safe place for you.’ That’s when Dad shoved him out the door.”
John nods absently, still studying. “The beginning . . . the beginning . . . It has to mean something.”
“Does it? They’re just squiggles, John. It’s not like a map – they don’t even connect.”
“There’s something about the first one, though. Something familiar. I could swear I’ve seen it somewhere before.”
I sigh. “Maybe he told Aunt Annie. Maybe she got better directions.”
“Maybe,” he says, and continues to stare at Uncle Jem’s squiggles.
Paul dragged me back in time, to a much, much older memory – a memory that had escaped him for a long while. I was surprised to realize that he had only put these memories, the old and the fresh, together recently. After I was here. That was why the lines had slipped through his careful control despite the fact that they were one of the most precious of his secrets – because of the urgency of his discovery.
In this blurry early memory, Paul sat in his mother’s lap with the same album – not so tattered then – open in his hands. Paul’s hands were tiny, cute, his fingers stubby. It was very strange to remember being a child in this body.
They were on the first page.
“Do you remember where this is?” Dad asks from across them, pointing to the old gray picture at the top of the page. The paper looks thinner than the other photographs, as if it has worn down – flatter and flatter and flatter – since some great-great-grandpa took it.
“It’s where we come from,” I answer, repeating what I’ve been taught.
“Right. That’s the old McCartney ranch. You went there once, but I bet you don’t remember it. I think you were eighteen months old.” Dad laughs. “It’s been our land since the very beginning. . .”
And then the memory of the picture itself. A picture he’d looked at a thousand times without ever seeing it. It was black and white, faded to grays. A small rustic wooden house, far away on the other side of a desert field; in the foreground, a split-rail fence; a few equine shapes between the fence and the house. And then, behind it all, the sharp, familiar profile . . .
There were words, a label, scrawled in pencil across the top white border:
McCartney Ranch, 1904, in the morning shadow of . . .
“Picacho Peak,” I said quietly.
He’ll have figured it out, too, even if they never found Bett. I know John will have put it together. He’s smarter than me, and he has the picture; he probably saw the answer before I did. He could be so close. . .
The thought had Paul so filled with yearning and excitement that the blank wall in my head slipped entirely.
I saw the whole journey now, saw him and John’s and Mike’s careful trek across the country, always by night in their inconspicuous stolen vehicle. It took weeks. I saw where he’d left them in a wooded preserve outside the city, so different from the empty desert they were used to. The cold forest where John and Mike would hide and wait had felt safer in some ways – because the branches were thick and concealing, unlike the spindly desert foliage that hid little – but also more dangerous in its unfamiliar smells and sounds.
Then the separation, a memory so painful we skipped through it, flinching. Next came the abandoned building Paul had hidden in, watching the house across the street for his chance. There, concealed within the walls or in the secret basement, he hoped to find Bett.
I shouldn’t have let you see that, Paul thought. The faintness of his silent voice gave away his fatigue. The assault of memories, the persuasion and coercion, had tired him. You’ll tell them where to find her. You’ll kill her, too.
“Yes,” I mused aloud. “I have to do my duty.”
Why?, he murmured, almost sleepily. What happiness will it bring you?
I didn’t want to argue with him, so I said nothing.
The mountain loomed larger ahead of us. In moments, we would be beneath it. I could see a little rest stop with a convenience store and a fast food restaurant bordered on one side by a flat, concrete space – a place for mobile homes. There were only a few in residence now, with the heat of the coming summer making things uncomfortable.
What now? I wondered. Stop for a late lunch or an early dinner? Fill my gas tank and then continue on to Tucson in order to reveal my fresh discoveries to the Seeker?
The thought was so repellent that my jaw locked against the sudden heave of my empty stomach. I slammed on the brake reflexively, screeching to a stop in the middle of the lane. I was lucky; there were no cars to hit me from behind. There were also no drivers to stop and offer their help and concern. For this moment, the highway was empty. The sun beat down on the pavement, making it shimmer, disappear in places.
This shouldn’t have felt like a betrayal, the idea of continuing on my right and proper course. My first language, the true language of the soul that was spoken only on our planet of origin, had no word for betrayal or traitor. Or even loyalty – because without the existence of an opposite, the concept had no meaning.
And yet I felt a deep well of guilt at the very idea of the Seeker. It would be wrong to tell her what I knew. Wrong, how? I countered my own thought viciously. If I stopped here and listened to the seductive suggestions of my host, I would truly be a traitor. That was impossible. I was a soul.
And yet I knew what I wanted, more powerfully and vividly than anything I had ever wanted in all the eight lives I’d lived. The image of John’s face danced behind my eyelids when I blinked against the sun – not Paul’s memory this time, but my memory of his. He forced nothing on me now. I could barely feel him in my head as he waited – I imagined him holding his breath, as if that were possible – for me to make my decision.
I could not separate myself from this body’s wants. It was me, more than I’d ever intended it to be. Did I want or did it want? Did that distinction even matter now?
In my rearview mirror, the glint of the sun off a distant car caught my eye.
I moved my foot to the accelerator, starting slowly toward the little store in the shadow of the peak. There was really only one thing to do.
~