The Shattered Genesis

  ***

  The highlights of the previous day played on in my mind like a grimly educational slide-show in a class on the meaning of things. I saw James's handsome face. I felt that striking warmth that absorbed me every time he had kissed me. As a quick, crippling terror exploded inside of me at the sight of the earth burning, I clung to that warmth of him in order to be comforted. Then, the warmth fell to a frigidity that was my need to feel nothing when it came to James. He had lied to me. He had walked away. He was gone forever. Violet's secret was that James had left the campsite. Despite knowing most things, I could not see his path clearly. I could not see him scarcely at all. But I did not want to see him. I wanted no parts of James Maxwell.

  James Maxwell. James Maxwell.

  His voice saying his name when he introduced himself to me deepened whatever spell I had fallen under.

  I was repeating his first name as I emerged from the depths of that spell.

  “I must be just as stupid as you think I am. I thought that you had let him go. I thought you had been able to reason away whatever ridiculous, immature feelings you had for him.”

  It was my father talking. I opened my eyes to find that I was in a room lit only by one dim bulb hanging next to the iron door. He was sitting in front of me, tapping my pack of cigarettes on the table. Actually, it was not the pack that I had left in my tent. The one in his hands was unopened.

  “Yeah.” He replied as he held the pack up for me to see. “We knew people would have a fit if they had to quit smoking, so we brought a few hundred packs. Though, when we run out, you'll have no choice but to quit. I brought these specifically for you, Brynna. I know they're your brand. I thought it was the least I could do.”

  “The least you could have done was not hit me in the face, actually.” I replied after lifting my head delicately. “But you have already done that three times since we got here. Just like old times, is it not?”

  He chuckled softly and slid the pack towards me. When in doubt, smoke a cigarette. That had always been my motto and mantra. But when I reached for the pack on the table, I found that my hands were cuffed tightly behind the chair in which I was sitting. A jolt of panic went through me that I prayed had not flashed through my eyes. The only way to trump him was to show no weakness.

  “It appeared as though you hadn't realized that you were handcuffed, and I just wanted to make sure you were aware. That's only responsible.”

  “Are you going to kill me, Dad?”

  There was not even a slight tremor to my voice. I was not afraid of him. I did not call him “Dad” to soften him into sympathizing with me. I used the term in sarcasm and disdain to the shock of no one, including him.

  “I don't know, Brynna. I talked with several people. You never would have been able to do that. Most of them are just so stupid.” He stood up and started to pace around the room, “They're afraid of you. They don't want you in the camp anymore. After seeing what they saw you do, they think you're one of them. One of the natives, I mean. You'll probably be surprised by this, but I did try to reason with all of them. I tried to tell them that you are my daughter, and I know that you're not one of them. I don't know what's come over you, but I know you're not a native.”

  “This conversation is fascinating. Really, it is. But let me stop you right there. If they don't want me in the camp, then I'll pack my things and leave. I am not afraid of the natives. I can live in the woods.”

  “That was originally going to be my first course of action. Banishment, exile, whatever you want to call it.” He told me after sitting back down again.

  “Quarantine.” I added breezily in a play on his earlier theory regarding infection that I had so rudely heard while invading his mind. He ignored me.

  “But then, I realized that I could use you. Did you notice how...” He looked up, searching for the right word. I read into his mind to root out what exactly it was he was trying to say. I wanted the little powwow to be over as soon as possible. The sooner I was able to start my attempt at surviving independently, the better. I wanted to know immediately how apt I was to make my own way.

  “Did I notice how entranced the man was with me?”

  “Well, did you?”

  “I would not call it entrancement. I would not call it anything, because it did not exist. You are wrong.”

  I knew that he was right.

  “I'm not, though. We talked to the man that you attacked. He says that you're changing over. He says it's happening to a lot of us. Not all, just some. Special, is what he called you. Freaks, is what I call you.”

  “You would.” I nodded and smiled in quiet triumph. He was afraid of me, of us, whoever or whatever we were.

  “Now, the reason why I bring up the man from the first night is because he's their leader. There are so many of them, Brynna. There are too many. They'll overpower us. Do you remember what I said that day behind the ship? About trading you?”

  “Sure do.”

  My heart was beginning to hammer roughly against its cage of bone. He could hear it. He could feel my tension rising. I would not show it outwardly to him. I would never allow him to see such weakness when I knew of the sadistic delight it would bring him.

  “Well, I must have had a freakish moment of my own, because I predicted that would be what he wanted. He wants you.”

  I panicked internally. I had felt hunted before. I had felt preyed upon in my youth, though certainly not by my father. His best friend, my godfather... He had been so very bad. He was Maura's husband, too, I remembered... She had covered her ears when he dragged me downstairs...

  Now I was going to face the same awful horror. I was going to be the prey again, this time to a man whose origin I did not even know.

  My father saw the fear in my eyes. I did not look at him, but his thoughts betrayed an equal mix of satisfaction, justification, and surprisingly, regret. The three contrasts rolled together in a fight to the death. Regret won, a victory that stunned me into silence and enraptured attention.

  “Brynna, I should have been able to love you.” He said as he stared intently at me, “We both should have. But after what happened, after what it did to you...” He trailed off and looked away, “It turned you into such an awful person. At first, we both felt sorry for you. How could we not? Then your brother...”

  “I know that you hate me for what happened to Lucien.” I told him dryly. My eyes might have shown the sudden grip of sadness that had taken me, but my voice certainly would not.

  I did know that they all hated me for that. But I hated myself for it, too. I allowed their loathing to contaminate me, though a small, sensible part of my inner self understood that my little brother's death had not been my fault.

  I cannot speak about these things easily. I can barely put them into words. Still today, I feel great pain over them, despite living for years under the assumption that I could no longer feel or show strong emotional strife internally or externally, respectively.

  “Your mother... She was broken after that. And I didn't care about what had happened to you anymore. I'll admit that to you. Neither did she. You were supposed to be watching him. I don't care what happened. You were old enough to know that you had to pay close attention to him or else an accident could happen. Your mother, Maura, and I explained that to you time and time again. I don't care how traumatized you were. You shouldn't have looked away.”

  I was not going to make excuses. I was not going to pass the blame.

  To this day, I still do not know how long he floated face-down in the water before I came out of my stupor.

  I could not breathe when that thought crossed my mind. It always crept up on me like a knife-wielding thief in the night. It always gutted me and bled me dry.

  “I couldn't love you after that. I tried. She did, too. But...” He leaned forward, his eyes begging me to understand, to see things as he saw them, which in his opinion, was the only way, “We wanted it to be you, not him. That's terrible to say, I know. I’m almost
sorry that I’m saying it to you right now, that your mother and I said it so many times. A small part of me is sorry for saying such a horrible thing. But we're being honest now, aren't we?”

  “I have always known that.” I stared at him as he struggled with that “new,” honest revelation. They had said things like that before. But through their actions even more than their words, I became aware that I was not wanted anymore. They stopped buying me Christmas presents. They stopped celebrating my birthday. My father started to lose his temper, striking me when he found himself too angry to use words. My mother pretended I did not exist, even going so far as to throw my baby book away. At the time that the world ended, it had been thirteen years since the event that had taken my innocence. It had been twelve and a half since my brother's passing. In that time, she had spoken perhaps four words to me, and even that is a generous figure. I was well aware of their hatred and resentment.

  I accepted it. I could understand it. My moment of weakness had killed my brother. The moment I allowed myself to lapse into a fit of silence and ignorance to escape my raging, terrified thoughts, my little brother had slipped and fell, hitting his head on the side of our pool.

  I cannot imagine him drowning. My heart splits a little every time I see it, even today, over sixty years later.

  I had been so weak. I had been so irresponsible. That was why my brother had died.

  I had been too trusting. I had been too naïve. That was why my godfather was able to do what he did.

  I had tried to apologize, only to find that my words were as useless as the many baskets of fruit and flowers my parents' friends had sent the week after Lucien had died. I sat at the table, zoning off into a tormenting space of guilt, regret, disgust, fear, and loathing, staring at the fruit as it rotted and the flowers as they wilted away.

  I expected Maura to apologize, too. I expected her to be on my side. What a little fool I was... She felt no anger over what her husband had done to me. She felt no pity for me. She felt only rage at what had happened to Lucien. She felt only that I had seduced her husband.

  That I could not understand. I had been nine.

  None of this is meant to make you see me positively. After all these years, I could not care less. Their faces fade from my mind with each day of my eternal life. I cannot remember my mother's face at all. It was blocked out, erased completely from the portrait I had of her in my mind. Elijah, Violet, and even Penny report the same blank spot in their memories where her face once blossomed in comforting familiarity. Perhaps I inadvertently erased her in my mind and theirs, though this has caused more pain than it has remedied. My father's face has begun to drip, like when rain falls on a painted canvas. Maura's is clearest to me, but then, I had been seeing it since the day I was born. It is branded into my memory quite painfully.

  I have faith that one day, it will fade away, too.

  All of those thoughts in that moment with my father were the direct result of the fact that I had fallen into the same kind of stupor that had indirectly claimed my brother's life. My father's shouting voice, his hands around my throat, the way he shook me... Those were my jolts back to reality.

  “This is what it was! This is what killed him! You bitch! It should have been you!”

  Seeing for the first time in thirteen years the exact state I had been in while his youngest child was struggling for life was enough to tip him over the edge. He slapped me, backhanded me, slapped me, backhanded me. I refused to cry out, but I did spit my blood at him once enough had filled my mouth.

  “STOP IT!”

  Maura's desperate scream, barely powerful enough to break through her sobs...

  What in the world made her think that I needed her to save me?

  “Go! Get out!” She found whatever small amount of strength she had in her to pull him away from me and push him towards the door.

  “Don't you coddle her, Maura. If you do, we're done.” My father told her breathlessly before storming out of the room.

  Being knocked around so forcefully must have severely boggled my mind, because I swore that I could hear him sniffling and gasping as he walked up the hallway. But surely, he would not cry over what he had said or done to me. If he was crying, which he probably was not, it was more than likely because he had been talking about Lucien, whom he loved more than the rest of us combined.

  “Don't coddle me, Maura.” I said, loudly enough so he could hear, “If you do, you lose such a swell man.”

  Even in such agony, and through a swelling mouth, I could still find my inherent sarcasm. I would not succumb to vulnerability now.

  “Darling... my darling...”

  Tears were running down her cheeks as she came around to my side of the table. She knelt in front of me, put her hands on my face, and pulled me forward to kiss my forehead.

  I shook her off furiously. If my hands had been free, I would have slapped her. What made her think that I needed her? She had been kind to me in random spurts throughout the previous thirteen years. When she wasn't being kind, she was ignoring me. It took several alcoholic beverages coursing through her system for her to find the courage to be out-and-out cruel.

  “I'll help you, sweetheart. I will convince him that this is ridiculous. You're just sick. We'll find a way to make you better.”

  For the first time, I realized that I did not want to be better. If the new being that now dwelt inside of me was an illness, then I did not want to be cured. Part of that sudden acceptance was a realization that there was no stopping the change. But the larger part was a thrilled acknowledgment of the fact that Maura, my father, and so many others had not been “chosen,” we'll say, and as a result, were terrified of me. To put it in blunt, perhaps misleading words, I was suddenly gifted with a tremendous manipulative power, not just an enhanced physical strength.

  “I'll make my own way from now on, thank you so much.” I replied as a grin spread across my puffy lips. “I am used to doing just that, and you know how I hate change.”

  “I love you, Brynna.” She kissed my forehead again before pulling away to look at me. “I know things have been difficult, but I love you, and I'm sorry. I can make it up to you right now. I can make things right. I'll talk to him. I'm so sorry, Brynna!”

  As another fit of tears took her, she threw her shaking arms around my neck. I grimaced in disgust, fearing briefly that the awkwardness I felt at being in the same room with such an emotional wreck would kill me. Secondhand embarrassment always took hold of me when others allowed themselves to exhibit hysterical outpourings of emotion. That secondhand embarrassment was genuinely painful.

  I knew things that were impossible to know. Still, I did not know if she was genuinely remorseful, or if that was merely another moment of random, untrustworthy affection. Her mind yielded no clear answer. After she pulled away from me, I turned the blood over in my mouth, narrowing my eyes as I studied her appearance for some hint of her true motive.

  “Just let me help you, sweetheart. Let me talk to him for you.”

  I turned my head and spit the blood onto the concrete floor.

  “I do not need your help.” I told her bluntly. “I do not want it, either. I would very much appreciate it if you would just leave the room. I ask for the kindness of your abandonment. That is all.”

  “Please don't do that. Please don't start with that. You only do that when you're pushing someone away. Please don't push me away, Brynna.”

  Now that rage that made shocking, sudden appearances blasted towards her in a delightfully terrifying display.

  “You think you can push me away for years and that I should not be allowed to do the same to you!?” I bellowed as I lunged towards her. Even though I was handcuffed securely to the chair, she still jumped back. She had not been expecting the sudden change in my temperament.

  “I do not want or need your help! I have never forgiven you! I have never forgotten what you allowed your husband to do to me!”

  Her role in what Michael had done to me h
ad never been addressed openly, at least not by me. My words broke her. She buried her face in her hands, whispering something that even my newly heightened sense of hearing could not decipher.

  “Speak up, Maura, or I will just read your mind!” I ordered in a furious whisper.

  Blood was dribbling out of my mouth, and my cheek was swollen on one side. She pulled her hands away from her face, reached up, and tried to wipe the blood away, but I shook her off, lunging forward again, needing so desperately to hit her. She cried into her hands for another annoyingly over-emotional moment.

  “I said that I was afraid!” She whispered tremulously, “I said that I'm sorry, but I was so afraid of him...”

  I laughed somewhat maniacally, I'll admit.

  “I didn't help you then, but I can help you now, Brynna.” She implored me softly before reaching out to touch my face again.

  “Stop trying to touch me!”

  For a long moment, she stared at me, awaiting an answer that I refused to give to a question that I barely realized she had posed. What she wanted from me was a chance to make up for her cowardice and ignorance, both of which had allowed her husband to claim my innocence. I would never allow her to achieve that peace of mind so easily. I would never allow her to believe that all was forgiven. In fact, I firmly believed that what had occurred would never be completely erased between us.

  After that long, dreadful silence that stirred her very soul, she turned to leave the room.

  “Maura...” My voice was back to its normal volume. She turned back to me, a look of pathetically desperate hope in her eyes.

  I spat my blood at her. She covered her face, and the wad of blood and saliva splashed onto the backs of her hands before dripping down her arms. It was gloriously disgusting, I will admit.

  “That is for covering your damn ears. Now, get out.”

  Quinn

  The story of Brynna Olivier was twisted and contorted in a fashion that would rival the abilities of the press at home. Although, I sincerely doubted that even the most ridiculous of tabloids would believe that she was a Pangaean spy placed on Earth to gather our secrets.

  “It's ridiculous, Quinn! He's her father!” Alice told me in a rage that I couldn't quite match, “Do you know what I heard today?”

  She didn't wait for me to ask what it was exactly that she had heard.

  “I heard that he's going to turn her over to the natives as a peace offering. His own daughter!”

  “Maybe it's just a rumor. I doubt anyone could do something like that to their own kid.”

  By instinct, though, I knew that I was mistaken. If it meant that he and the people he wanted to survive would see many days, he would sell his entire family. I knew that Daniel Olivier was that evil, but I didn't want to scare Alice by relaying that belief to her.

  “It isn't a rumor! We can't sit by and let that happen!”

  “Whoa...” I held up my hands to stop her from continuing. “We can't get involved in this. The last thing we need is to get exiled and be on our own.”

  “We are on our own! He's starving people! Who is to say that tomorrow it's not our food that he's keeping!?”

  “You are really upset about this.”

  “And you're not? You're not upset that this man has pretty much appointed himself our leader and that he's cruel and evil? He's letting people die, Quinn, after we fought like hell to get here and live! She's not like him. She walked out of the ship first. She's brave.”

  “That doesn't mean that she's not like him. It just means that she's brave. We don't know anything else about her besides that.”

  “You're just saying all of this to make me change my mind about helping her. I know that you believe the same thing I believe. After last night...” Alice's voice was trembling now as the memory of the attack on us took over her. “I was right there when she attacked that guy. You should have seen the way she took him down.” She laughed slightly as she remembered it. “It was amazing. He was after her brother. I would pray for whatever came over her to come over me if it was you that was about to get eaten. They ripped people apart, Quinn. One of their people, a woman...” She grimaced slightly, “She ripped into this guy, and there was so much blood...”

  “Hey...” I stood up and embraced her, “Let's not think about this right now.”

  “They're going to come back. Someone at the top let it slip that they're going to take ten of us every night until we leave. We have nowhere to go, so they'll just keep coming back until there's no one left. They'll kill us all.”

  “So, what do you think we should do?”

  “I told you what I think we should do. We need to help Brynna! Don't ask me how I know that's what we're supposed to do. I just know. The same thing came over us when that thing broke into the house. We could see in the dark, we could communicate without words. Don't you see? We're mutating!”

  “Mutating?” I asked her, as though the word had been spoken in a language I had never learned.

  “I've told you this before. Our bodies are doing what they need to do in order for us to survive. We're getting faster, stronger, and smarter. We're learning to fight off threats, almost like how animals do. That's my theory, anyway. I think it's pretty reasonable.”

  “It is reasonable.” I sat down on my sleeping bag, pondering what she had just said only to realize that it made absolutely perfect sense. “That would explain everything!”

  “It has a magical element to it, though, doesn't it?” She sat down next to me. “It's not completely biological.” She paused and looked thoughtful for a minute, “There's something miraculous about it. It's not just science, you know?”

  “I guess.”

  “Daniel Olivier is afraid of her. He's not mutating the way that some of us are. We'll be next, once he realizes it's happening to more than just her. You know, I've heard his other kids are doing it, too.”

  “Yeah, I heard someone saying that the other day. So, what is he going to do? Hand them all over to the leader of the natives?”

  “I know he will. He thinks they're sick. He thinks they're infected with something. But you and I both know from what happened to us while we were still on Earth that it's not a sickness. It's a response to a threat, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Quinn, I know this is what we're supposed to do. We have to get her out. We have to help her escape. It has a significance to it that I don't really understand yet. But then, maybe I'm not supposed to understand right now. Maybe we're just supposed to take a leap of faith.”

  There was that word again: Faith. It was still a challenging idea for me, even after everything we had overcome since that psychic dream. However little I believed in the divine significance of our escape and continued survival, I did believe in Alice. I also knew that wherever she went, I was going to follow. So if she believed that we needed to save Brynna, then we were going to do it. We were going to fight together, for better or worse.

  “Alright,” I nodded and looked up at her, “Do you have a plan?”

  “I have the beginning of a plan. We need to get her brother alone. He's the closest to her, from what I've seen. So he'll be the one that will want to help her.”

  “How are we going to get him alone?”

  “We live in tents, Quinn,” She laughed, “Breaking and entering isn't exactly difficult, is it?”