“At the expense of everyone else?” Lucy nodded a reply to her own rhetorical question.
“But you want to save Grant,” Scott answered and he raised his eyebrows. “What would you risk to accomplish that goal? What sacrifice would you make?”
The tense was not lost on her. “Want to? As in, I still can?”
He shook his head, “Lost on semantics. You’re missing the point. We do everything in our power to protect the people we love. The line between good and evil is not as black and white as you may think.” He raised his finger, but he looked defeated. “Especially when it comes to family. There are no rules.”
That assertion defied everything she had been taught by her parents. They instructed her to be a good citizen and a good friend; to live according to the laws of the land. That there was a wrong thing to do and a right thing to do—things that hurt people were wrong things to do. Moral relativism was never part of their family creed and guidelines. While her father was a self-proclaimed atheist and her mother agnostic, she had been raised in one of the most moral, ethical, and responsible households: what’s wrong was always wrong, no matter what.
She rubbed her cheek.
“Dad—” she started, but she didn’t know what to say to him. There were no words. No greeting card canned sayings that helped her navigate these murky waters of their tenuous relationship.
Scott looked up and his eyes were red. “Perhaps it’s time we go see Huck. You’ve missed it all. The explanations, the comfort. Huck will help you see…you are safe here.”
“I never guessed you to be such a lemming, Dad.”
Scott looked straight at her. “I’ve told you before that blind social behavior is not an actual trait of lemmings. It was manufactured, by a studio, for Hollywood effect. They flung those lemmings off the cliff to make it appear that they followed the first one. It’s false. A charade. There is an entire phrase, imbedded into the lexicon of our language that is a scientific lie. Perpetuating that belief by attributing my behavior to that animal is incorrect.” He tried to smile; tried to pass off his mini-lecture like a joke.
Lucy wasn’t buying it.
She raised her arms in disbelief. “Are you serious right now?”
“Yes,” Scott answered quickly. “You see…think about the make-up of an animal whose instincts would instruct it to rather die than seek self-preservation…”
With a sigh, Lucy hit her hand against her forehead. “Oh, Dad. How did you do this? You couldn’t have possibly known I was going to use the word lemming…but you’ve turned it around, to prove your point? You’re a mind ninja.”
Under different circumstances, that might have been a compliment.
This time Scott didn’t smile. “I’m serious. Monkeys, lemmings, ants. It doesn’t matter. All of our evolutionary instincts are to survive. And when humans are threatened we also naturally digress to that innate foundation as well…”
“Dad—” Lucy couldn’t handle it anymore.
“I’ve always taught my kids how to be critical thinkers.”
“And yet we’re living in an underground apartment building,” she exploded. “With blind allegiance to some crazy old dude? Dad! You and Mom told me once that you didn’t want me to attend church with Salem because their religion was based upon a crazy, narrow belief system.” She paused and searched her father’s face for clues that he knew what she was going to say next. “And here we are.” She motioned around the room.
“Huck could answer some of these things. He’s—”
“If you tell me you did this because you thought it would save our lives, fine. But if you tell me you believe him, this…everything?” Lucy couldn’t even finish her thought; the idea that her father could get caught up in some cultish organization was so unbelievable she was afraid that hearing him admit it would cause her to shrivel up and no longer exist. More than anything she had seen or heard, that fact, alone, would unravel everything she had ever believed. It was too much.
“There’s so much more to this than you could possibly understand,” Scott finally answered—it was a lazy move by a cowardly parent: expressing that she couldn’t understand and so therefore didn’t deserve answers. He had always been better than that. Always.
“I want to see Grant,” Lucy stated and put her hands on her hips. “Please?”
With a deep sigh, Scott looked at his oldest daughter and then scratched at the stubble on his chin. “You can’t.”
“I have to.”
“No.”
“His letter says he’s dead. Is he dead?”
“I can’t answer that—”
She took a defiant step closer. “You owe me an answer. You owe me that much.”
“Lucy…” Scott closed his eyes. “Grant is gone. Grant is gone and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
She hadn’t moved in over an hour. Her mother put away the food items—collections of grains and fruits that Maxine planned to use for a special family dinner—in the small cupboards and stepped over Lucy’s body on her way to make beds in the two bedrooms. It was like Lucy didn’t exist. She didn’t have any energy to cry or fight; instead she just stayed on the floor and hoped someone would kill her.
Maybe someone would step on her head on accident. Maybe someone would come and tank her anyway.
Lucy hugged Grant’s letter to her chest.
Maxine wandered over and stood above Lucy, with her arms over her chest.
“Get up,” she instructed.
Without reacting, Lucy stayed where she was.
“I’m taking you to the Center. It’s not healthy to stay cooped up in this apartment.”
“You think so?” Lucy stated, dripping with all the facetiousness she could muster, and then she rolled on her side, away from her mother.
For her entire life, Lucy had loved and adored her parents. While the rest of her teen friends wallowed in angst about over-protectiveness and fought ad nauseam about cell phones, grades, dating, and privacy, Lucy thought of her mother as one of her closest friends and looked up to her father as a wise leader. The strangest part was how quickly the facade tumbled, and how instantaneously her disillusionment took over. When she felt a tug of remorse for judging them too harshly, her mind pulled her back into the grim reality of the System. Housed inside these walls, walking freely and comfortably were people who, at the very least, were complicit in the release of a virus that killed billions of people. Billions.
With the loss so staggering, it was difficult to comprehend.
She had no answers, no understanding of why. She only had a face of eviclass="underline" Huck. And her own father. And now, she realized, her mother too.
“I’m serious,” Maxine stated. She reached down to lift Lucy off of the ground, but Lucy yanked her arm back and tucked herself into a ball.
“The Center. The System. The Sky Room.”
Maxine stood directly over her daughter, both legs on either side, and peered down with her hands on her hips. She was seething, her chest rising and falling in rapid bursts, her eyes narrowed. “Why are you acting like this?”
“Because I’m a teenager,” Lucy replied with a flippant eye-roll. She was unafraid of being slapped again.
“I want to help. But you have to let me in,” Maxine replied. Lucy looked at her mother and felt a twinge of remorse for her flippancy. Her mother was worried. She’d never catered to Lucy before.
There was a knock on the door. Lucy knew that the doors in the pods were unlocked, so a knock was strange—someone from outside their family was waiting to be let inside. Feigning disinterest, Lucy kept her eyes on the door as her mother, with a sigh, left her post to answer it.
As Maxine opened the door wide, Lucy, from her vantage point on the floor, saw the girl from her first day standing outside in the hall. The one who had peered at her and closed the door.