“Hidden?”
“Until last winter.”
“Right,” I said, and my body trembled as the very reason I’d come all this way carved through the confusion inside. “Last winter. When he got taken.”
“No,” Zee said, her voice soft. Her face like an apology. “He wasn’t taken.”
I went to speak, but I couldn’t. I just seized up. Like an engine run dry.
“He traveled to Vega,” Zee said. “He turned himself in.”
“To GenTech?” The words crawled out my mouth and then crept down my spine.
“It was the only way he could get back here. Through the Rift. Across the water.”
“To the trees,” I whispered.
“Right.” Zee almost smiled. “To the trees.”
Don’t know how long it lasted. Once I’d let it all sink in. Zee did her best to try and comfort me, but I didn’t want Zee. All I wanted was my old man, and I shouted for him in the darkness and then I rammed my fists at the wall.
Eventually my voice gave out. I tried breathing but it felt exactly like drowning in that yellow river all those years before. Only this time there was no one to pull me back out. And that’s what made it all hurt so damn much. Because Pop had been my only friend in the whole world. And he hadn’t been taken at all. He’d just upped and left.
But why?
I started for the door but Zee grabbed me, pulled me back.
“You have to stay, Banyan. With me.”
“No.” I tried to force past her, but I was still too weak. “I gotta see him.”
“You can’t. The agents won’t let you.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“No one can.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ve got him locked up.”
Locked up? I shouldn’t give a damn, I told myself. So what if they’d tossed him in a cell and thrown away the key? Pop had left me. Ditched me. Made up some shit about hearing voices and he just snuck out the wagon and he probably never once looked back. Just ran through the dust storm. Headed for Vega. Headed for GenTech and this island of trash. Left me with nothing but things that were hollow. He’d lied to me. Always. And I’d believed in him.
Right from the start.
I curled up in the corner with my guts like concrete. My skin was hot. But I was shivering. Silent. Trying not to let myself crack. Zee gave up talking after a bit. And once she’d slipped into a twitchy sleep, I peeled myself off the floor.
I shuffled back inside the laboratory and sat watching the lights and screens as they bubbled and flashed. It was almost like I was dreaming. Everything inside me was numb. I fell down in a chair and tried to be empty. But I kept seeing my old man’s face. I kept looping over our life together, trying to figure out how he’d been able to walk away from me.
I tried to remember every little thing, searching for clues. But my father seemed a whole different person than the bag of memories I’d been carting around. He was like someone I’d never even known. A stranger.
I started turning over the steps it had taken to get to this place. I started to think about Alpha. And Crow. I worked myself up in a right state. And by the time the Creator came in, brushing snow off her shoulders, I felt I’d lost more than I ever knew I had.
“Why’d he do it?” I said, watching the woman shrug off her coat. I’d surprised her, but she tried to look relaxed about me sitting there. “Why’d he come back here? For you?”
The woman sank into a chair across from me and she made that same sad smile that Hina had used and Zee had perfected.
“He’d have never come for me,” she said. “He came because of the experiments. Told me he’d waited till he’d raised you. He said you were free.”
“What experiments?” I pictured Alpha, shorn and shriveled and covered in plastic. And I pictured Crow, his chopped-off body being carried away. “Where are the others?” I said, panic welling up inside me. “The others from the boat?”
“Don’t worry,” the woman said. “They’re sleeping.”
“Sleeping?”
“They’re special, Banyan. And they’re safe.”
“Not like the ones you burned in Vega.” I saw Sal’s face like a ghost in my mind, remembered how the kid hadn’t even screamed when he sizzled and smoked.
“Vega’s nothing to do with me,” the woman said. “That’s the Executive Chief and the number crunchers. The bottom line. It’s not something anyone enjoys. It’s just something we have to tolerate.”
I glared at her, trying to bend my mind around what was happening. This couldn’t be my mother. I wouldn’t let it be. My brain was getting spun up and caught on itself, but I needed answers and the need cut through like a knife.
“Tolerate for what?”
“Come closer,” she said. “Please. I’ll show you.”
I stood behind her as she flicked her fingers at a control pad, bringing an empty black screen to life. Our faces were reflected in the monitor and I could see the woman had turned and was staring up at me, but then the screen turned purple and our faces disappeared. I watched as tiny white lines floated across the screen and met in the middle, small blocks getting bolted together, growing taller. Stitched like sections of scaffold.
“We’re creating life,” the woman said, her voice little more than a whisper. “And your father was very good at it.”
“What is it?” My eyes were glued to the staircases growing in spiraled patterns on the screen.
“It’s DNA. Nucleotide sequences. The building blocks behind every living thing.”
“Science.”
“It’s nature. Your father was very bright, Banyan. He had a gift. He saw how things could fit together, the pieces that were missing.” She shifted in her seat so she was closer to me, almost touching. Her whole body so near I could smell her. Sour and soapy. Cold and damp with snow. “For almost five years, I taught him, showed him my work. I trained him in DNA geometry, helical modeling. But eventually he could see through complexities that had blinded me. He never built the monument GenTech hired him for. He worked in the lab. Making trees. With me.”
“Don’t look like much of a tree,” I said, and I felt her smile so hard beside me that her skinny shoulders bounced.
“Break something into small enough pieces,” she said. “And you get a code.”
“Like a map?”
“Exactly. A map you can change. Rebuild. We’re building trees, Banyan. Replicating the trees we found on this island, altering them to bring them back to the mainland.” I felt her hand on my arm. “We’ve been trying for decades. To modify the trees into something the locusts can’t consume.”
“Like the corn.”
“But what worked for the corn wouldn’t work for the trees. We’ve had to change their cellular structure into something more malleable. We’ve had to hybridize the tree DNA with that of another, more abundant species.”
I stepped back from the woman. Turned from the screen. I pictured the old Rasta and that chunk of wood I’d knifed out of him. I pictured Alpha’s skin, all plugged up with bark.
“Humans,” I said, staggering backward. “You’re using humans.”
It made me sick the way she frowned, the lines on her face all scrunched up like there was poison on her tongue. I lost feeling and swayed, caught myself on the back of a chair. This was Project Zion. GenTech was taking folk and twisting them and god knows how many and this woman right here was at the heart of it all.
“Only the hybrid cells can be modified,” she said. “And there’s nothing else to use. The corn’s too synthetic. We’d have used animals, but there’s nothing left. Nothing but people.”