Crow had stayed quiet mostly, but now he chimed in. “Just remember, Mister Sal, your daddy might be there, too.” Crow stared at me as he said it.
“That’s right,” Sal said, nodding at Crow. Then the kid turned his face so I couldn’t see it. I thought about the correction, the hidden tattoo.
And I thought about Zee.
Thinking about her made me solemn. Couldn’t help but picture her in the back of the wagon with us, celebrating something we’d not yet done. And it made me think about what was going to happen when the journey ended. Would I really find my father in that stand of trees? Alive? The old Rasta had said Pop had until spring. And winter had only just barely begun.
So if my old man was there, what would come next? Could we build us a house in those treetops? Or had the trees already been cut down and sold? Was that what it came down to? Selling the forest like a bucket of corn? Something for the pirates. Something for the Soljahs. Who else? The Salvage Guild?
Still, as long as GenTech didn’t get it. I thought about the endless rows of crops that surrounded us. Enough food you could feed every struggler. Or you could just get rich off your prices, and keep people low down and starved.
Soon we had eaten and talked enough to be sleepy. No damn air in the wagon that hadn’t been breathed a thousand times over. We were drowsy. All of us. Even the watcher.
“Been awake since Old Orleans,” Crow said, pulling my old man’s sombrero over his face. “Believe I earned me some shut eye.”
And one by one, our heads dropped till we were all passed out and sleeping. Reckon I was the last to go, pressed up against Alpha as her face twitched and her mouth hung open. I loved the smell of her, and I remember thinking that right before I fell asleep.
Before my eyes fell shut and everything changed again.
It was Hina that woke me. She was poking at my back, and I sat up and glanced around the wagon. Everyone was sleeping. Everyone but her and me.
She pointed at the hatch, gesturing that she wanted to go outside. The moon was up now, white on the cornstalks.
“We can’t,” I whispered. But she nodded. And I wondered if this meant she had something to tell me. About my father. About the trees.
I popped the hatch open, nice and quiet, and I breathed in the fresh smell of crops as I poked my head through.
Straining to listen, I climbed out of the wagon and held the hatch so Hina could come beside me. I stared around at the night, thinking about the locusts and that awful noise they made, thinking how Hina had better make this real quick. But she surprised me by clicking the hatch shut behind us.
“Come with me,” she whispered, taking my hand. And then she led me inside the corn.
Our footsteps made a dry, cracking sound. We squeezed past the stalks until we found a sort of clearing, just enough space that we could stand facing each other. All I could hear was the thump of my heart. It was stupid being out there. I knew it was dangerous. But if Hina had something to tell me, I reckoned it was something I needed to hear.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“I remembered where it came from,” she said, and as she spoke she lifted her shirt off her belly, showing me the leaves and branches of that beautiful tree. I could see her pulse through her stomach.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “When you climbed that machine and the swarms came. But you’re strong, like your father. And I remembered it. How they sent me to find him. To bring him back home.”
I went to speak, but she talked right over me, all the while stroking at the colors tattooed on her skin.
“He wanted to stop it,” she said. Her voice was like she’d just come awake. “All of it. And now I have to warn you.”
“What?” I said. “Warn me about what?”
But Hina just closed her eyes. Her fingers still caressing the tattoo tree but the rest of her like she was sleeping, standing on her feet but caught in a dream. And for a moment everything was silent. Everything was still. But then I heard the footsteps come crunching toward us. Closer and closer. Someone stepping through the corn.
The poacher’s face looked like it had once been broke open and then pieced back together wrong. He stood before us. An ugly shadow beneath the bright white of the moon.
“Get away from her,” the man said. But I was frozen, like I was tangled up in the plants. “Move,” he said, and this time he pointed a shotgun at my head.
I stepped aside, the gun following my every move, waving just inches from my face. I went to say something, but the man cut me off.
“Keep your mouth shut, boy.”
He shone his flashlight over Hina, top to bottom, his mouth hanging open and stringy with spit, his eyes bulging out of his head. He blinked as he jabbed the flashlight at her skin, like he was testing whether or not she was real. Then he stared at me again and pushed the shotgun under my jaw.
The man turned his head and waved his flashlight in a figure eight. He knocked four times at a cornstalk.
“How many are there?” he said.
“Ain’t no one else,” I told him, my voice as shaky as the rest of me.
“In the car?” He jabbed the shotgun deeper. “How many in the car?”
“It’s empty,” I said. “Broken.”
“You lie.” He sneered. “But it’ll do you no good.”
I heard more footsteps in the crops, and the poacher gestured for me to start walking. I pushed Hina in front of me, keeping my hands on her shoulders and trying to block her from the poacher as he stabbed his gun at my spine and shoved us back toward the wagon.
When we stepped onto the service road, about twenty poachers stepped onto it with us. They slid through the stems and appeared in the night, like they’d bled right out of the crops. Some of them didn’t even carry guns, just knives or hacksaws. They wore clothes made of corn husks, and all their feet were bare.
I studied the shriveled bodies and the faces in the moonlight. Dead eyes. More scars than teeth.
The poacher behind me prodded his gun at my head, pushing me against the wagon as he tried to peer inside it. Then he took the butt of the shotgun and pounded at the roof.
“Come on out,” he roared.
The rest of the poachers had circled the car now. Heads stooped and weapons raised. The man pounded on the wagon again.
“We don’t want you,” he yelled. “Just the car and what’s in it. So come on out. Or your friends here are gonna suffer.” He stared at Hina as he said it and I felt her tremble beside me.
The man hammered at the roof until the rear hatch lifted as if the pounding had popped it loose. Sal’s head stuck out and the poacher made a sound that was supposed to be laughter.
“Shit,” the man said, pulling Sal out of the car by his ear. “Look at the size of this one.”
It all happened so fast there was no time to think.
A gun fired out the back of the wagon, and the bullet sank into that brokeface poacher, launched him back about five feet. Then the rest of the poachers fell upon us. Some of them heading for Sal, but most of them cornering me and Hina and wrestling us into the corn.
It was chaos. A tumble of bodies charging through the crops, gunshots and voices screaming.
But then the world stood still. The night turned black.
And an ugly swarming sound filled up the air.
I’d never seen people disappear like that. Those poachers spread thin and then vanished, like they’d found holes in the world to stay hidden inside. They were gone. Just like that. And me and Hina were ten yards from the road.
I stumbled and thrashed through the crops, pulling Hina with me as locusts filled the air with a whining, desperate sound that filled your head and stopped you from thinking.