Lyle put a hand on Cynthia’s doorknob, cold and rough from ancient use. He turned it, slowly, warily, using just enough pressure to test the lock. It was open. He turned it farther, hearing the mechanism slide, hearing the bolt scrape across the rim of its housing, an inaudible whisper that seemed to scream in his ears like a freight train. He turned it farther, felt it open, pushed the door gently and held his breath, waiting for the squeak of rusty hinges. The door opened smoothly, silently, not alerting a soul to his plans. He looked inside.
The room was empty.
Lyle frowned. He slipped in, looking behind the door, searching the closet, and his spirits plunged as he realized Cynthia was gone—she had left, or someone had taken her. Lyle raced back to the hall and looked around wildly, his heart racing. Someone had come for her! One faction or another had already made its move, and the lotion was gone. He ran to the front room and looked outside. All the vehicles were still there. He looked in the storage room, in the bathroom, in the empty bedrooms. He looked in the kitchen and saw a slim, skeletal shadow in the corner, sitting at the cracked kitchen table.
“Lyle,” said Cynthia. “I never guessed you would be the first.”
“The first?”
She clicked on the light, and Lyle blinked his eyes against the sudden glare. As they adjusted he saw the vial on the table, a tiny glass monolith a few inches from Cynthia’s hand. Lying next to it was her handgun, black and gleaming.
“The first to make a play for the lotion,” said Cynthia. “I knew someone would try it, maybe several someones. You won’t be the last tonight, I assure you, but it surprises me that you’re the first.”
Lyle found a second light switch and turned the lights back off. “Lower your voice,” he whispered, “they’re probably all still awake.”
“How very noble of you,” said Cynthia. Lyle heard the gun slide across the worn Formica. “Protecting me from the others’ schemes. What’s your own scheme, Lyle? Is it equally noble?”
She already knew, so Lyle saw no sense in waiting. He walked toward her slowly, wary of the gun. “I want to save Lilly.”
“Disappointing,” said Cynthia. “I was hoping for something original, but I suppose you only have two settings: ‘Don’t use ReBirth ever, for any reason,’ and ‘Use ReBirth to save the girl I’m currently lusting after.’ That didn’t work out so well for Susan, did it?”
“This is a selfish motivation, and I admit that,” said Lyle. “I’m going to live forever, and I want Lilly with me. All I need is a drop—nobody else has to know.” He shook the water bottle, hearing the liquid slosh. “I have her saliva, it’s as good as a mouth swab.”
“And by then we can concoct some other plausible scenario,” said Cynthia, as if she’d known the plan all along. “We can pretend it happened before the fall, in the UN, perhaps, or we could feign ignorance altogether.” Lyle saw the outline of her grim smile in the darkness, and felt a chill. Somehow, no matter what he said or did, he always felt like he was following her script.
How had she gone so quickly from surprise to control? Was it all an act? Was she really that smart?
Or was she just evil?
“She’ll still have celiac sprue,” said Cynthia.
“Celiac causes the body to damage itself in the presence of gluten,” said Lyle. “ReBirth will undo the damage. She’ll destroy herself and heal herself at the same time—she’ll still get sick when she eats it, but she won’t die from it.” He cleared his throat. “And you and I keep the secret, and nobody ever knows. If she doesn’t get injured, Lilly won’t even know.”
“Wait,” said Cynthia. “Lilly doesn’t know?”
“I … thought that was obvious.”
“Of course it wasn’t obvious,” Cynthia sneered. “But.” She nodded. “I can see why you thought it was. Because you’re the great Lyle Fontanelle.”
“I’m not great.”
“You were always the smart one—always the self-righteous one. That’s all you ever wanted, isn’t it? To make other people’s decisions for them. You didn’t just tell us how to use your products, you told us the morally correct way to use them. The correct way to run the company. To use ReBirth. To save the world. Even in the UN you treated everyone like foolish children, because you were always right, and if only the whole world would stop arguing and listen to you, then all our problems would be solved.”
She stared at him, and he stared back in silence.
“You were always spineless, Lyle, but that was never your biggest problem, and now that you’ve learned to stand up for yourself your biggest problem is bigger than ever: you want to make the choices for everyone else. The only difference now is that you’re brave enough to go through with it.”
“I’m trying to save her life,” said Lyle.
“And what will she think of you when she figures that out? When Lilly cuts her finger or breaks her leg or never ages—what will she think of you when the secret is finally out? The others will lose their trust in you, but Lilly—oh my. Lilly will hate you. You’ll be the monster who corrupted her, who made the biggest decision of her life without even asking her permission. Knowing exactly what she wanted for herself, and denying it to her forever.”
“Maybe she’ll come around,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as her. “Forever is a long time.”
“Then why not wait until she does?”
“Because it has to be—”
He stopped himself, but it was too late.
“It has to be what?” The sneer was gone from her voice, and that ice-cold analysis was back in its place. She was putting together the pieces.
Lyle didn’t dare to answer.
Cynthia’s words slithered out like a snake. “You’re leaving.”
“No.”
“You’re leaving,” she said again. “It has to be tonight, because you won’t be here anymore.”
“Just give me the lotion,” Lyle growled.
“Never.”
He stared at her, and at her gun. There was nothing he could do.
Cynthia stared back, and after a moment she smiled at him, cruel and cold. “Do you see what I mean about power? Do what I tell you to, support me in our meetings, and someday I’ll give you what you want. Oppose me, and I tell everyone what you tried to do here tonight. I tell Lilly.” She spread her arms wide, as if embracing the entire island. “I have ReBirth, which means I have ev—”
Lyle lunged forward, and she couldn’t bring the gun back to bear on him in time; he caught her arm mid-swing, and when she pulled the trigger the shot went wide. He shoved her backward, knocking her off her chair, and as she fell she grabbed the edge of the table. It fell with her, and Lyle’s heart leaped into his throat as he watched the glass vial of ReBirth arc through the air in a terrifying parabola, up and over and down to the hard floor.
The sound of it shattering rang louder in his ears than the gunshot.
Cynthia screamed.
Lyle unscrewed the cap on the water bottle in one frenzied twist, and dipped the lip of it in the pale white smear on the floor. Some of the water spilled out, mixing with the lotion, but he ignored it and slammed the cap back on. Cynthia fired her gun again, and he ran.
“Help!” Cynthia shouted. Her voice echoed down the hall. “Lyle attacked me! He’s stealing the lotion!” The doors that flew immediately open proved that very few people were actually asleep. The general stepped halfway into the hall, frowning at the noise, and Lyle shouted as he dodged around him.
“Cynthia’s gone crazy. I went for a drink and she started shooting.” He didn’t wait to see how the general would react, for now Lilly’s door was open, too, and she stood wide-eyed in the doorway. “Grab your coat,” he shouted. “We’re going!”
“Going where?”
“Away!” He bolted past her into the room, shoved her coat into her hands, and found her shoes. “You can put these on in the car.”
She stood in the room uncertainly, but another gunshot from the k
itchen made her flinch in fear, and after a moment’s hesitation she started pulling on her shoes. “What’s going on?”
“They’ve gone crazy,” said Lyle, “we’re going to take the boat and go.”
“Where?”
“We’ll figure that out when we’re safe, let’s go!”
Another gunshot. Lyle didn’t know if the others had tried to calm Cynthia and she was defending herself, or if they were fighting over the ReBirth on the floor. He stepped back toward the hall door, then thought better of it and simply went to the window, unlocking it and shoving it open. The air outside was bitter cold, and he shivered as he leaped through. Lilly threw her room’s wool blanket out after him, which he wrapped around his shoulders while she crawled out behind him. They ran to the trucks, praying that the keys were still in them; the gunshots had turned now to shouting, and Lyle ran from vehicle to vehicle. The front door flew open. Lyle found keys in the fourth vehicle, a fat white van, and yelled for Lilly. He turned the key—the engine revved once, twice, three times in the cold before finally turning over—and then Lilly was in and he peeled out, ignoring the shouts behind them.
“What’s going on?” Lilly demanded.
“Do you trust me?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“I tried to get a drink of water from the kitchen,” he said, using the same lie he’d given the general. “Cynthia was in there, and she thought I’d come to steal the ReBirth, and she shot me.”
“Did she hit you?”
Lyle shook his head. The drive to the docks was short, barely a mile on the tiny island, and he screeched to a halt. There were already headlights behind them. Lyle and Lilly ran to the sailboat—Mummer’s Hoard, with a dark green Yggdrasil painted on the bow—and a soldier stepped out of the guardhouse, confused.
“Is everything okay?”
“There’s been an outbreak!” Lyle shouted, pointing wildly at the headlights. “Don’t let them get close!”
The soldier’s eyes went wide with terror, and he turned toward the approaching trucks with his assault rifle leveled, spraying a short burst of bullets as a warning. The trucks swerved at the unexpected attack, the beams of their headlights dancing wildly through the darkness. Lilly fired up the onboard motor while Lyle untied the boat. The trucks were stopped, the people in them crouching low and shouting at the guard to stop. The soldier backed toward the boat, firing another burst every time their pursuers poked their heads up, keeping them expertly pinned down.
“What do they have?” he asked. “Can we catch it from here?” He turned toward Lyle, but the boat was already fifteen feet from the dock, now twenty, now thirty. The soldier screamed in fear and fury, raising his rifle as if to fire on them, but turned back toward the trucks. He looked back and forth a few times, unsure what to do.
“We couldn’t stay,” Lyle whispered. “You have to believe me—there was nothing left for us but madness. You heard the plans they were coming up with: raiding the coasts for food and women. They were ready to kill each other over hand lotion.”
“You have to believe me,” said Lilly. “I’m glad to be rid of them.” She steered south, around the tip of the island toward Block Island Sound. “Will they chase us?”
“Can you really sail this?” asked Lyle. “Without the motor, I mean?”
“Through good weather, yes.”
“Then they don’t have anyone with the skills to chase us.” He looked behind them, but saw nothing. “I say we head south, and find an empty island in the Caribbean. We can hug the coast—at a safe distance, of course—and follow the GPS. We won’t even have to stop: we don’t need gas, and we can’t trust the food on the mainland anyway.”
“That’s a long trip,” said Lilly. “There’s supplies belowdecks, but I wish we’d brought more water.”
“I got one bottle,” said Lyle, holding it up. He held it toward her with a trembling hand. “It was the best I could do.”
She drank it, and Lyle threw the empty bottle in the sea.
* * *
The coast was on fire.
Lyle and Lilly sailed past in silence, watching from a distance as smoke rose from the husk of America, now in billows, now in slow, smoldering fingers. At dawn they saw movement on the shore, but they simply turned farther out and passed by on the open ocean. They saw no other boats or airplanes. They heard nothing on the radio—no broadcasts, no warnings, no pleas for help. They dined on the champagne and canned caviar from Cynthia’s luxury hold, toasting the night in case it was their last.
The weather grew warmer as they fled to the south. They almost stopped in Florida, but a creature on the shore scared them off—tall and simian, with tusks and human breasts and arms that hung well past its knees. They tried again in the Abacos, but a group of twenty identical women watched them with silent, somber eyes, and they steered away again.
The next day a black storm rumbled on the horizon.
“Can ReBirth get into the rain?” asked Lilly.
“Maybe,” he whispered. “Nothing we can do about it now.”
64
Day
Dawn
The Island
10 DAYS SINCE THE WAKING OF THE PEOPLE
Ket had been watching the white thing all morning, trying to decide if it was growing bigger or simply getting closer. None of the People had ever seen anything like it, and they were scared, but Ket was not scared, and he was not surprised. None of the People had ever seen anything before, for there had never been anything to see. They awoke at the birth of the world, granted a wisdom beyond the other animals on the island, and everything was new. They had food and water; they had tunnels to nest in, and a sky full of lights. They had everything they needed. There was nothing else.
But now there was a white thing on the water.
Ket tapped his spear against the ground. His sister Chirt had begun to make the spears on the eighth day of the world, and now on the tenth nearly everyone had them. They made it easy to catch the insects and mice the People lived on, far easier than catching them with teeth and claws. New things like this were happening almost every day, and Ket had to wonder if the world was offering them new ideas, or if their own capacity to have ideas was expanding. He wondered, for a moment, if his own ability to wonder was a new development, as well. The People were becoming smarter by the day, growing larger, and there were other changes, as well. He looked at his paw. He did not remember having these fingers in this shape when he awoke ten days ago. The mice and other rodents didn’t have them. Only the People. He wondered, and not for the first time, if the People had once been like the mice, and if their transition into something else was still happening.
What, he pondered, will we turn into?
The white thing was definitely closer to the shore now. It was enormous, the biggest thing he’d ever seen beside the island itself. He peered closer and saw with shock that there were creatures on it. Was it another island, floating up to theirs? More of the People clustered around him now, Chirt his sister and Tsit his brother, a dozen or more. They watched the white thing slide close to the shore, and the two creatures who rode it jumped down in the shallow water.
“They have arms like us,” said Tsit. “Arms and legs and hands.”
“It almost sounds like they’re laughing,” said Chirt. “Are they People?”
“They’re too big to be People,” said Tsit. “They’re as tall as the trees. And they have no hair on their bodies, only a tiny tuft on the tops of their heads.” He cocked his head to the side, watching closely. “Like leaves.”
“I do not think they are trees,” said Chirt.
“Look what they carry,” said Ket, and the People grew silent. The creatures in the water were pulling objects out of the white thing now, miraculous things that none of the People had ever seen before, and yet Ket could not help but compare them to the spear in his hands. We built this, he thought. Did they build that? And that? Their objects made a massive pile on the sand. Who ar
e these creatures that build such great things?
“I think that they are Gods,” said Ket.
Chirt’s sharp eyes looked at him. “What are Gods?”
“Gods are People,” said Ket, “only bigger, and smarter. They have everything the People have, but they have more of it. Their size is greater, and their deeds are greater.” He looked at the Gods’ hands, saw their fingers in the same shape as his own. He wiggled his fifth finger, the one that gripped against the other four. The one the animals didn’t have. He looked back up. “We should approach them,” he said. “We should ask them for their gifts. Perhaps, with their gifts, we could become like them.” He paused. “Perhaps that is why they are here.”
“We will give them our gifts, as well,” said Chirt, and the People picked up their spears and their broad leaf platters of meat, both mouse and insect. They crept out of the bushes, out of the tall grass, and onto the sand—dozens now, nearly a hundred. The full group of the People. The Gods were touching each other, in what Ket was almost convinced was a kiss, and they didn’t see the People until they were only a few short hops away.
The Gods screamed and moved back. They babbled, and their voices were loud, but Ket couldn’t understand them.
“They can’t speak,” said Tsit. “They can’t be smarter than us if they can’t even speak.”
“Maybe their language is greater,” said Ket, “like their objects are greater.” But he had his doubts. As confusing as the words were, the feeling seemed clear; he could hear it in their voices, and see it in their eyes.
They were afraid.
“A God should not be afraid,” said Chirt.
The larger God was clutching a giant spear, but a strange one; instead of tapering to a sharp point it flattened into a broad, flat leaf. Ket wondered what type of creature the Gods must hunt to need a spear so powerful. Tsit hopped closer, his eyes narrowed and suspicious, his spear held at the ready. The darker God—the female, he thought—hid behind the lighter one, and the male brought its spear down on Tsit with a great rush of wind. Wet sand flew. Ket had never seen such strength.