Dwindle

  Chapter Thirteen: The Map of the World

  I heard the entire conversation from the back room, and with every new development in their discourse did I feel more and more ill. I only had to lean a little to see her from where I laid, and I saw her begin to cry.

  Then, I saw him take her hands, kneeling before her to comfort her in her tears. He begged for her favor, and it shook me. He, a human, wanted the favor of a Deviant. She was a lesser species, and still he ached for her. I heard it in his voice, in the way he breathed. Any man would know the signs anywhere.

  And then he kissed her.

  I thought about it for days. Going to sleep thinking about it was not as bad as dreaming about it, which was also much better than waking up thinking about it. Something about it made me want to cover my face. I wanted to hide.

  But not for all the most obvious reasons.

  Something about it woke me up to a realization I’d never considered.

  If he could kiss her, I could kiss her. And if I could kiss her, I would kiss her. In all the ways I’d begun to dream about since that night.

  I felt as if I was breaking all the rules of the game. My Master would be disgusted with me.

  Paige had come in to speak with me one evening. Fisher had remained pointedly out of sight since that encounter – at least, one on one. Maybe she was embarrassed of it. I knew that I was embarrassed to have been privy to it. The conversation – and all that had transpired after it – were private things. Not meant for me or Probe or anybody else but the two of them.

  I didn’t want to lead, suddenly. I didn’t want to think of Probe or decisions or the High Council or my Master. I wanted there to be Fisher’s face, and that was all.

  “I have to tell you what happened,” I said abruptly, closing my eyes.

  I was happy that my words still worked. I was surprised (and a little relieved) when she only asked,

  “What?”

  “A man kissed her,” I whispered to her, as if it were a great a terrible secret.

  Paige laughed.

  “Are you surprised?”

  I blinked.

  “Aren’t you?” I asked.

  “No, of course not, Myth is a beautiful girl. She’s everything a man should want right now.”

  I didn’t dare make a comment for fear that I would give away how adamantly I could attest to this fact.

  “Can a Deviant and human be together?” I asked out loud.

  “It seems so,” Paige said, nodding grimly. She sighed forlornly. “Dammit, this is a disaster. Can you imagine what they’ll do to this place now?”

  I felt discomfort at the fact that “they” was me. I felt nauseas for what felt like the millionth time that day. Fumbling with my words, I tried to speak, saying,

  “This is all so…”

  I couldn’t finish. I didn’t know what it was.

  “Yeah,” she whispered quietly.

  “She could kill us all,” I whispered.

  But now, after thinking it and hearing it and saying it so often, the sentence sounded rehearsed and not genuine.

  “Do you really think so?” Paige asked.

  I could tell she didn’t.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  It was the first time those words had ever escaped my lips. This was the beginning of a long and painful end.

  “I think,” Paige said carefully, “that someone has lied to us all.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  The implications of the answered frightened me.

  “I don’t know,” Paige said honestly. “The High Council for telling us they couldn’t reproduce? The Masters for sending us here when they very likely knew at least one Deviant was here? And even if they didn’t, we have to remember that we have survived this long. We weren’t supposed to. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen now.”

  They did know. But I wasn’t about to tell her that. She couldn’t know that I’d reported in to My Master.

  “I don’t like that,” I said carefully after a while. “Not knowing all the angles. It’s hard.”

  “Welcome to real life, Ollie,” she said to me, a hint of a smile on her face.

  “I wish there was a way to know if she would react,” I said, almost to myself. “I wish we could tell if there was a trigger somewhere. This…this isn’t how it was supposed to happen.”

  “You mean that she isn’t the way the Exteriors have taught you that Deviants are?” Paige asked, amused.

  I answered by pursing my lips.

  “I am amazed that certain Exteriors who may or may not be in our little party have spent a life time around Deviants and that this same Exterior, who may or may not be with us now, knows so little about them.”

  I said nothing. I was afraid that if I did it would confirm or deny her clever words.

  “You learn what you’re told to learn,” I said finally. “Everybody is like that. If your father teaches you that putting your hand on a stove is bad, you don’t do it. If you try it, you get burned. That’s how people learn. That’s how I learned too.”

  Paige nodded.

  “And now what happens if the stove doesn’t burn your hand anymore?”

  “The father punishes you until you learn your lesson again,” I said back quickly.

  Paige sighed.

  “Suppose you’re right,” she said back. “Suppose you get better and we’re ready to go. What then?”

  “We’re supposed to kill her,” I said automatically.

  “But what if we don’t? What then?”

  “The place will be leveled, no questions asked,” was my next reply.

  “Even with human beings?”

  “Some must be sacrificed so that others might live.”

  “Really?” Paige asked, raising her eyebrows. “Tell me, who would benefit? Who would be saved? This was a reconnaissance mission. Are you saying they’ll turn it into a slaughter just like that?”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying. What if there are more Deviants?”

  “I’ve checked at least ten of them today,” Paige said back to me, shaking her head. “I’ve asked them about marks, and the healer I asked said only the ‘Bad People’ have marks on them. None of them knew that she had a mark on her neck. I asked, and they said they thought nobody here did. There was suggestion, maybe, that her mom might have, but never Myth herself.”

  “That brings up the question of her family,” I said back quickly. “Rhyme is her uncle. She also has a cousin named Skate, apparently, but I’ve never met him.”

  “I’ve checked Rhyme,” Paige said. “Took some convincing, but I told him I was a doctor. He let me look at his skin. He’s human, Ollie.”

  I swallowed at those implications as well.

  “So that means…”

  “That means a human being and a Deviant paired together and were capable of procreation,” Paige said, nodding.

  I couldn’t tell if I was repulsed or just mildly nauseas.

  “Anything is possible,” Paige whispered. “A half-ling child would…” She exhaled. “Ollie, it would change the world.”

  “She’s still a Great Deviant,” I said. “If there is a part of her, however small, that was Deviant, Probe and everything in it, including the Masters and the High Council, will want to destroy it.”

  “Even if she’s a half-ling?”

  “She can’t be.”

  “She’s got no family, you said, and besides Skate, the rest are human. Their mating relations must have been very closely knit if there required two Deviants for the making. Honestly, how many Deviants can hide among humans? Maybe, this whole time it was just a farce. Maybe, they were killing mothers and fathers and – my God – children, Dark. The Exteriors were killing babies!”

  The squirm emerged again. I was killing mothers and fathers. I was intensely and outlandishly crestfallen.

  “Maybe…” I began, but I didn’t know how to finish. Finally, I settled for, “Maybe, we can just pretend we couldn’t kil
l her, pretend…she wanted to negotiate. Have someone else decide.”

  She said nothing.

  “What do you think?” I found myself asking a second time.

  “She likes you the best,” Paige said, “and you’re sitting in here all day. Why don’t you wait a little until you’re healed to make a better decision?”

  I shrugged, feeling uncomfortable around Paige for the first time in my memory. I wanted to tell her that I couldn’t take my eyes off of Fisher, but I knew that if I said that that I would pay for it later. I paid for everything later. I supposed that meeting a Great Deviant was my punishment from God for being what I was. An assassin. It was so ironic, being so deeply invested in the very thing I’d sworn to loathe.

  “Do you want my honest opinion, though?” she asked me after a while.

  I nodded.

  “You said it yourself,” Paige said. “They don’t care about us. They don’t care about people, and especially not about her. I thought they’d have jumped at an opportunity to kill her. Why would they keep her alive? Any of them? Us? We came here to die. How do you know we’re not just waiting to get the crap bombed out of us?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  To be honest, it didn’t make sense. If they’d expected us to die, why did they have reservations about killing us?

  Because they needed us until Fisher was dead.

  I sat back, exhaling heavily.

  Probe was about extreme efficiency. They were thorough to a fault, controlling to the extreme. Of course, they needed reassurance from a ground team that the job was done.

  Someone who could never report it to anybody else until the job was finished.

  I repeated this realization to Paige.

  “As long as she lives…” Paige repeated. “We all survive.”

  “And as soon as she dies…”

  Paige looked up at the flap to the front room, almost as if she were expecting our deaths to come walking through it. She looked paler – and sad.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. “I know.”