But what test had we passed?
I couldn’t see us being meant for working. Or eating. Not the state we were in.
I stared around for Alpha. For Crow. Scanning those shaved heads and plastic sheets for a face I knew. I wandered between the bodies that were sprawled and twisted on the floor, stepped past groping fingers and patches of flesh half-covered in plastic. Voices rose up. People whispering to one another, moaning and holding on to the person beside them.
I kept walking. Stumbling is what it was. I kept an eye on the agents along the walls. Watched for Crow’s melted skin or the stump his legs had left behind. And in my mind, Alpha didn’t fit in with anything I was seeing. Like two worlds that could not meet.
Fingers gripped cold around my ankle. They tugged at me, squeezed at me, and then went limp. I looked down. And no part of me was surprised I had walked right past her.
I remembered when I found Alpha on the wall in Old Orleans, with her arms above her head and her vest all matted with blood. I held that image close inside of me, really lodging it tight so I’d remember. So I couldn’t forget.
Because this time, Alpha wasn’t towering above me, legs spread and head thrown back. This time she was crumpled. The fuzzy pink vest with her name etched upon it had been replaced by the white of her shoulders and the crappy GenTech plastic. They’d shaved off her mohawk, and it changed her whole face. Made her look younger. And older.
I squatted down to her. My hands on her hands. My feet touching her feet. We’d been stripped of everything and painted gray, but it didn’t matter. Not in that moment. Not right then. I ran my hand over the stubble on top of her head, and she blinked at me like her eyes might work her mouth into a smile.
“I’m here,” I whispered. “Right here. And I won’t go nowhere. I promise.”
She pulled my hand to her cheek and touched her mouth to my fingers. And we sat that way for a bit, comfort enough to just keep on breathing. But finally I wanted to tell her about the lake outside we were floating over. And I wanted to know if she’d seen the things I’d seen. If she’d been awake when we’d been pulled into the city, if she’d seen the buildings grow tall and the lights explode. I wanted to know if she’d seen the fire at the factory, if she’d watched as people were torn from the rest of us and the bodies were cast into flames.
But I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. Not yet. And I had another question, one that somehow seemed more pressing.
“Your wound?” I said. “You were shot.” I pointed at my own belly. “Right here.”
“Sealed up,” she said, and her hands went to her stomach, clamping down on the plastic sheet.
“Let me see.”
She shook her head.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Show me.”
She let her hands fall beside her and I pulled apart the plastic. And there, where the wound had been, a chunk of her skin was missing. And where there used to be skin, now there was bark. Not the old piece of wood I’d shoved there to stem the bleeding. This was new. Grown fresh to patch her together. It was pink and green and knotted. I tapped on it. That unmistakable sound of wood.
Alpha yanked the plastic back across her and turned her eyes from me, as if ashamed.
“No,” I said. “It’s beautiful.” And I weren’t lying. All the beauty I’d seen before was just a dream with her in it. I tried to kiss her, but she spun her head away.
“Where are they taking us?” she muttered, tears streaming down her face.
“I don’t know,” I said. But truth was, I was starting to think I did know. It was the same place the old Rasta had been taken. The place where he’d seen my father.
The place where he’d seen the trees.
We found Crow and carried him out to the deck so he could see the water. I didn’t ask how they’d stitched him back together, because I already had a pretty good idea.
But why? That’s what I wanted to know. What were they keeping us alive for? And what was so important that we’d been taken so far?
“You worked for them,” I said to Crow as the three of us huddled together near the railing, shivering and watching the spray off the water. “You worked for GenTech. So what the hell do you think they’re doing?”
Crow moved his head so he was staring away from me, as if any one direction held something the others didn’t show.
“I worked for them,” he said, first words I’d heard out the mouth of his new body. “I was security. The lower ranks started asking too many questions. I was supposed to shut them up.”
“Too many questions? About what?”
“About what was happening.”
I just stared at him. Blank.
“This.” Crow pointed with his chin. “All this.”
“What is this?”
“It’s what happens to those that get taken. Project Zion, GenTech calls it.”
“And what the hell’s that?”
“I don’t know.” Crow shrugged. “I was supposed to stop the questions. Not find the answers. But I heard GenTech was desperate to find them some trees. And I uncovered a legend about a forest and a woman that could point its direction. So I started digging. GenTech tried to shut me down. They captured me, drugged me. But I escaped. Kept on digging, following clues. Till I tracked the woman down. Till I found that tattoo.”
“And you think the trees are across the water?” I said. “I mean, what if they are? What if they’re out here?”
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then I think GenTech should’ve charged me a ticket. Instead of slicing me to pieces.”
“Think about it,” I said. “Project Zion.”
“Zion. Trees. You’re talking about heaven, boy. We be heading to hell.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Could be one’s really just the same as the other.”
I watched clumps of ice appear on the water. And I pictured my father, chained to a tree trunk, captured in a forest beneath a clear blue sky.
This was the boat. It had to be.
“My old man’s out here somewhere,” I said, and I turned to Alpha. “Your mother might be, too. Harvest was part of this whole operation.”
Alpha just looked at Crow and then looked back out at the water.
“What?” I said.
“She probably thinks you should give it a rest.”
“Well, it ain’t spring yet. And I ain’t giving in now.”
The chunks of ice got bigger and began to stick up real high. The boat wound between the frozen mounds, the jagged white peaks, and it crushed right through the small stuff.
We were wrapped tight in our plastic sheets and bundled together, watching the future drift into view. But the ice clustered up, thicker and thicker.
And at first we almost didn’t see the island.
The island was wide and tall, and just past the brown shore were hills covered in snow. As we got nearer, a siren rose up off the boat and kept wailing so loud we had to plug up our ears.
“I’m too cold,” mouthed Alpha, standing to shuffle back inside. The wind had picked up and the air was sleety. But I couldn’t turn away from the island.
This was it, I reckoned. End of the line.
Got close and I could see that the island was floating. It had grown right out of a giant wad of trash. Plastic and metal and salvage, all wound up and mashed together in the water. A mile of scrap. A mountain of it. Bits of junk sticking up on the shoreline and jutting out of the snowy hills.
But on the beaches, you could see the trash had begun dissolving into earth again. So I reckoned that meant the island was ancient. Old enough to turn back into dirt.
Got closer still and I could see people on the ridgeline, climbing up toward us from the other side of the hills. They stood there, waiting on us. And as the boat drifted to the shore, I could see they were all dressed in purple, leaving no doubt as to whose island this was.