I pictured that photograph of Pop chained to the tree. And then I remembered the bootlegger we’d buried — the woman beat to death for giving out corn. She’d been our last client. Our last job together. Before Pop hightailed us on the road to Vega.
My heart got fast and the world got slow.
“And now they’ve got him locked up,” I said.
“Right.”
I remembered the old Rasta, a lifetime ago, shaking his staff at the sunrise.
“And they’re gonna kill him,” I said, my voice getting louder. “In the spring?”
“Sooner than that. Used to be that’s when they’d do the experiments. But they’ve got it all figured out now. They’re ready to bring a forest back to the mainland.”
“They’re gonna use ’em.” I thought of Alpha. Crow. “The people from the boat?”
“Them and the rest they’ve gathered, the ones with the right DNA.”
“But that woman said they’re sleeping. Safe.”
“They are. Until fusion kicks in.” Zee pointed down at the main bunker. And somewhere down there, locked up, was my old man. Still bound in chains, perhaps. Still holding on. And Alpha was trapped down there, too. Was she sleeping? Was she dreaming her tree builder had drifted away?
“When does it start?” I said.
“Two more days.”
I glanced up the slope, the way we were heading.
“And what do they call this place?”
“Promise Island.”
I thought about that old Rasta again, his belly bubbled up with bark. I tried to remember the things he’d told me. And I thought about Pop as I slumped down hard on the snow.
Had he been protecting me?
He’d gone to fix something he had long kept secret, something he figured me too weak to know. But I’d made it here, anyway. Made it without him.
“Come on,” Zee said, taking my hand and squeezing my fingers through our thick gloves. “We’re almost there.”
Top of the hill and I could see all the way down the other side. All the way down to the tops of the trees.
I stood there, staring down at the leafless branches that reached up at me. And I thought at once how pale and flimsy the trees appeared. Nothing I’d ever built resembled their fragility.
My legs made fast work scrambling downhill, and the movement felt like I was jump-starting myself. It began snowing again as I reached the bottom of the crunchy slope, and I stood for a moment, just ten feet from the spindled branches, watching as they danced in the wind and the white flakes fell.
I took a step forward. A few more steps. Then I was close enough to touch the thin trunks. The papery bark. I pulled off my gloves and shoved my sleeves to my elbows. Then I reached my hands to the trees and ran my fingers slow and cold upon them.
The bark felt powdery, but beneath it was slippery and smooth. Greenish white in color, with black knots like eyeballs. I pushed at a tree and it pushed right back.
I got closer, yanked off my hood, and stuck my face against the wood, breathing its smell and tasting it with my tongue, snow melting on my lips.
I stepped from one tree to another, moving my hands so as to never let them go.
I dug at the snow with my boot heel and studied where the trees plunged into the earth. I found leaves beneath the ice, some gold, some yellow, most of them black. They were soggy and mashed together, but I squeezed the leaves in my fingers and separated them out to dry. I bit into one and its veins were chewy. And then I just sank to my knees and I broke down and cried.
Zee sat on the edge of the forest, watching me, and when I got done crying, she shuffled through the slush and sticks and knelt beside me.
“You should keep your hood up,” she said. “Or you’ll freeze over.”
My face was all snotty and wet and I wiped it with snow. “Don’t look like nothing I ever pictured,” I said.
“Me, neither.”
“How long you been here?”
“A week or so.”
“You used to it yet?”
“A little.”
“I don’t want to ever get used to it,” I said. “Not ever.”
“Imagine the spring, though. The leaves coming green. The seasons.”
“Yeah,” I said. The seasons. My specialty.
I stared into the forest, and there, in the middle of the stand, was an opening. A clearing. I stood and stumbled toward it.
“This is where they take them from,” Zee said, coming up behind me. “In here was the one they really want.”
“What is it?”
“Apples. An apple tree. It was right here.”
I thrashed around in the opening, but the only trees I could see were the thin limbs, the dirty white bark like old pearl in moonlight.
“It’s gone,” Zee said. “They got it all worked up. Ready for the fusion.”
“You seen one? An apple?”
“We’re too far north. The Creator says the growing season’s too short. They tried bringing a tree back to the mainland. Years ago. Grew it up in a glass building. But a swarm left their nest in the cornfields and migrated over. They covered the glass and blocked out the sun, made a hole and squeezed inside.” Zee shuddered. “But the locusts won’t eat these new trees they’re making. They can’t even burrow inside them like they do in the corn.”
“So GenTech’s going to sell us apples now. And trees.”
“And everyone will buy them, too.” Zee shrugged. Then she saw the look on my face. “What? I don’t want it to be this way. It’s just the way it is.”
“Why should you care? You’re on the side that’s winning.”
“There were never any sides, Banyan. GenTech wasn’t even searching for Zion. They were just fooling everyone with stories while they built what they need.”
“Are there more trees on the island? Other things growing?”
Zee tugged the hood back onto my head, then pushed our hoods together, and I could feel her breath warm on my face as her lungs creaked and rattled.
“This is it,” she said. “The last stand.”
And this was it. One apple tree left, and they’d already gutted it. This was the GenTech Empire. This was where it got us. And I knew that the boat big enough was just big enough for all the bodies they needed. I knew this was cold blood killing on the most massive scale.
So my father hadn’t been taken. But how many had been? How many mothers and sisters and husbands and wives? Didn’t they all belong to someone? Didn’t they deserve some protection?
I pulled away from Zee, put my hand on a tree branch and held myself steady. I stared up in the branches and then closed my eyes.
I pictured that half-eaten man on the forty, trying to drive his dead family home. I saw the lost faces on the Harvester transport. The bodies burning in Vega, and Sal being thrown to the flames.
I remembered Jawbone splattered lifeless on a plastic console. Hina consumed by the ravenous swarm. I felt death’s fingers in the mud pit. And I felt the dead Rasta in my arms. Skin and bark, limp and knotted.
So much death.
So many hearts turned to stone and days that were stolen. The last things living and we were just ripping each other in pieces that could never again be put back whole.
It ends here, I swore to myself. It must end here. And I knew that Pop had been right to return, even if he thought it meant he had to leave me behind him. He’d been right to try and stop this hell he’d helped GenTech to start. Because being a builder can only get you so far, I reckon. Sometimes you got to be a fighter. Sometimes you got to fight.
“We have to get Crow out,” I said.
“Crow?” Zee’s voice pierced a hole in the air. “Crow’s here?”
“Yeah. You might not recognize him. But he’s here.”
“Are there others? People you know?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t tell her about Alpha, though the thought of her tripped me — the fear of losing that girl had worked its way too deep to ever work its way loose.