“See, brain bits work okay, but they don’t work great,” CyFi explains. “It’s like puttin’ spackle over a hole in a wall. No matter how well you do it, that wall ain’t never gonna be as good. So my dads made sure I got an entire temporal lobe from a single donor. But that kid wasn’t as smart as me. He wasn’t no dummy, but he didn’t have the 155. The last brain scan put me at 130. That’s in the top 5 percent of the population, and still considered genius. Just not with a capital G. What’s your IQ?” he asks Lev. “Are you a dim bulb or high-wattage?”
Lev sighs. “I don’t know. My parents don’t believe in intelligence scans. It’s kind of a religious thing. Everyone’s equal in God’s eyes and all that.”
“Oh—you come from one of those families.” CyFi takes a good look at him.
“So if they all high and mighty, why they unwinding you?”
Although Lev doesn’t want to get into it, he figures CyFi is the only friend he’s got. Might as well tell him the truth. “I’m a tithe.”
CyFi looks at him with eyes all wide, like Lev just told him he was God himself.
“Damn! So you all holy and stuff?”
“Not anymore.”
CyFi nods and purses his lips, saying nothing for a while. They walk along the tracks. The railroad ties change from wood to stone, and the gravel on the side of the tracks now seems better maintained.
“We just crossed the state line,” CyFi says.
Lev would ask him which state they’ve crossed into, but he doesn’t want to sound stupid.
Any spot where multiple tracks merge or diverge, there’s a little two-story shack standing there like a displaced lighthouse. A railroad switch house. There are plenty of them along this stretch of the line, and these are the places Lev and CyFi find shelter each night.
“Aren’t you afraid someone from the railroads’ll find us here?” Lev asks as they approach one of the sorry-looking structures.
“Nah—they ain’t used anymore,” CyFi tells him. “The whole system’s automated—been that way for years, but it costs too much to tear all those switch houses down. Guess they figure nature will eventually tear them down for free.”
The switch house is padlocked, but a padlock is only as strong as the door it’s on—and this door had been routed by termites. A single kick rips the padlock hasp from the wood, and the door flies inward to a shower of dust and dead spiders.
Upstairs is an eight-by-eight room, windows on all four sides. It’s freezing.
CyFi has an expensive-looking winter coat that keeps him warm at night. Lev only has a puffy fiberfill jacket that he stole from a chair at the mall the other day.
CyFi had turned his nose up when he saw Lev take that jacket, just before they left the mall. “Stealing’s for lowlifes,” Cy had said. “If you got class, you don’t steal what you need, you get other people to give it to you of their own free will—just like I did back at that Chinese place. It’s all about being smart, and being smooth. You’ll learn.”
Lev’s stolen jacket is white, and he hates it. All his life he’d worn white—a pristine absence of color that defined him—but now there was no comfort in wearing it.
They eat well that night—thanks to Lev, who finally had his own survivalist brainstorm. It involved small animals killed by passing trains.
“I ain’t eatin’ no track-kill!” CyFi insisted when Lev had suggested it. “Those things coulda been rottin’ out here for weeks, for all we know.”
“No,” Lev told him. “Here’s what we do: We walk a few miles down the tracks, marking each dead critter with a stick. Then, when the next train comes through, we backtrack. Anything we find that’s not marked is fresh.” Granted, it was a fairly disgusting idea on the surface, but it was really no different from hunting—if your weapon were a diesel engine.
They build a small fire beside the switch house and dine on roast rabbit and armadillo—which doesn’t taste as bad as Lev thought it would. In the end, meat is meat, and barbecue does for armadillo exactly what it does for steak.
“Smorgas-bash!!” CyFi decides to call this hunting method as they eat. “That’s what I call creative problem solving. Maybe you’re a genius after all, Fry.”
It feels good to have Cy’s approval.
“Hey, is today Thursday?” says Lev, just realizing. “I think it’s Thanksgiving!”
“Well, Fry, we’re alive. That’s plenty to be thankful for.”
That night, up in the small room of the switch house, CyFi asks the big question. “Why’d your parents tithe you, Fry?”
One of the good things about being with CyFi is that he talks about himself a lot. It keeps Lev from having to think about his own life. Except, of course, when Cy asks. Lev answers him with silence, pretending to be asleep—and if there’s one thing he knows CyFi can’t stand, it’s silence, so he fills it himself.
“Were you a storked baby? Is that it? They didn’t want you in the first place, and couldn’t wait to get rid of you?”
Lev keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t move.
“Well, I was storked,” Cy says. “My dads got me on the doorstep the first day of summer. No big deal—they were ready to have a family anyway. In fact, they were so pleased, they finally made it official and got themselves mmarried.”
Lev opens his eyes, curious enough to admit he’s still awake. “But . . . after the Heartland War, didn’t they make it illegal for men to get married?”
“They didn’t get married, they got mmarried.”
“What’s the difference?”
CyFi looks at him like he’s a moron. “The letter m. Anyway, in case you’re wondering, I’m not like my dads—my compass points to girls, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Yeah, mine does too.” What he doesn’t tell CyFi is that the closest he’s ever been to a date or even kissing a girl was the slow dancing at his tithing party.
The thought of the party brings a sudden and sharp jolt of anxiety that makes him want to scream, so he squeezes his eyes tight and forces that explosive feeling to go away.
Everything from Lev’s old life is like that now—a ticking time bomb in his head. Forget that life, he tells himself. You’re not that boy anymore.
“What are your parents like?” CyFi asks.
“I hate them,” Lev says, surprised that he’s said it. Surprised that he means it.
“That’s not what I asked.”
This time Cy isn’t taking silence for an answer, so Lev tells him as best he can. “My parents,” he begins, “do everything they’re supposed to. They pay their taxes. They go to church. They vote the way their friends expect them to vote, and think what they’re supposed to think, and they send us to schools that raise us to think exactly like they do.”
“Doesn’t sound too terrible to me.”
“It wasn’t,” says Lev, his discomfort building. “But they loved God more than they loved me, and I hate them for it. So I guess that means I’m going to Hell.”
“Hmm. Tell you what. When you get there, save a room for me, okay?”
“Why? What makes you think you’re going there?”
“I don’t, but just in case. Gotta plan your contingencies, right?”
Two days later they find themselves in the town of Scottsburg, Indiana.
Well, at least Lev finally knows what state they’re in. He wonders if maybe this is CyFi’s destination, but Cy hasn’t said anything either way. They’ve left the railroad tracks, and CyFi tells Lev they have to go south on county roads until they can find tracks heading in that direction.