They were neither too thin nor too thick, just the perfect dimensions with perfect ridges that exuded both assurance and grace. Even the light freckles that sprinkle her arm, exploding in a splattering of dots as they disappear into her shirt, are more seductive than imperfect.
Slowly, I edge closer to Ashley June, positioning myself behind a smal pil ar. I peer around the pil ar; she's moved even closer to him. Above them, images from security cameras shine with a dul blur. At least a good half of them center on the Dome.
“Can't believe they're running all the time.”
“Twenty- four/seven,” he answers proudly.
“And is there always someone watching these monitors?”
“Wel , we used to station a staffer here. But, wel , it became . . .
there was a policy change.”
“A policy change?”
There is a long pause.
“Oh, c'mon, you can tel me,” Ashley June says.
“Don't tel anyone,” the staffer warns, his voice hushed.
“Okay. Our secret.”
“Some staffers became so lost in these images of the hepers that they'd . . .”
“Yes?”
“They lost their senses, they were driven mad with desire.
They'd rush out at the heper vil age.”
“But it's enclosed by the Dome.”
“No, you don't understand. They'd rush out in the daytime.”
“What?”
“Right from this very seat. One moment they're staring at the monitors, and the next they're rushing down the stairs and out the exit doors.”
“Even with the sun burning?”
“It's like they forgot. Or it just didn't matter to them anymore.”
Another pause. “So that's why there was a policy change.
First, no more recordings— il egal bootleg copies were somehow winding up on the streets. And second, now everyone leaves this fl oor before dawn.”
“It's completely unstationed during the day?”
“Not only is it unstationed, but look, the windows have no shutters. They were taken down. So now, the sun pours in during the daytime. The best security system. Nobody's coming in here after dawn. Nobody.”
There is a pause, and I think that's the end of the conversation when Ashley June speaks again. “And what's that big blue oval button over there?”
“I'm not really supposed to say.”
“Oh, c'mon, it's safe with me.”
Another pause.
“Like everything else you've told me, all the stuff you could get fi red for disclosing, it's all safe with me,” says Ashley June, this time with a hint of a threat in her voice.
“It's the lockdown control,” he says tersely after a moment.
“What's that?”
“It shuts the building down, locks all entrances, shutters al windows. There's no leaving the building once lockdown has been deployed. Push it to set the system, push again to cancel—”
His voice gets drowned out by the approaching tour group, which has moved away from the windows and is now mumbling its way toward the back of the fl oor, toward the monitors. I slink back into the mix. Nobody's noticed my absence. I don't think.
By the time the group reaches the monitors, the staffer is back in his seat, his head swiveling back and forth, up and down. One of the escorts is speaking in a monotone voice, talking about the function of the monitors, how every square inch of the Institute is covered by a camera. But nobody is listening, they're all staring at images of the Dome in the monitors. They're still looking for hepers.
Except me. I'm watching Ashley June.
She's slinked away again and is wandering around. Or at least pretending to. Something about her bearing— maybe the way she turns her head just so to read documents on desks or bends over as she passes by a control panel fi l ed with switches and buttons— seems purposeful and deliberate. And she's trying to go about un-noticed, but it's near impossible. She's a heper hunter, she's female, she's beautiful. She's sizzling hot oil on your brains. Before long every male staffer around her has taken notice. She realizes this, too, and before long, gives up. She rejoins us at the monitors, tilting her head up.
She stands very still , immovable, unreadable.
I stare from behind, the line of hair streaming down over the nape of her neck, dark with a dul gleam. She's up to something here in the Control Center; I can't shake that feeling. Digging for information. Looking for something.
Seeking confi rmation. I'm not sure. But what I am sure of: She's playing a game the rest of us don't even realize has begun.
Lunch is late that night; it's wel past midnight before we are taken down to a large hal on the ground fl oor and seated at a circular table. None of the escorts sit with us; instead, they retreat to their own table in the peripheral darkness.
Without their hovering presence, the hunters are set at ease: our backs relax, we become more talkative. Lunch offers the fi rst time I'm really able to meet the other hunters.
It's the food we talk about initial y. These are meats we've never tasted before, only read about. Jackrabbit, hyena, meerkat, kanga-roo rat. Fresh kil s from the Vast. Or so they say. The fl agship dish is a special treat: cheetah, typical y eaten only by high- ranking offi cials at weddings.
Cheetahs are diffi cult to catch, not because of their speed — even the slowest person can outsprint a fl eeing cheetah — but because of their rarity.
Each dish, of course, comes wet and bloody. We comment on the texture of the different meats on our tongue, the superior taste to the synthetic meats we usual y eat. Blood oozes down our chins, col ecting in the drip cups placed below. We will drink it all up at the end of the meal, a soupy col ection of cold animal blood.
What I most need is absent from the dinner table: water. It's been over a night since my last drink at home, and I can feel my body desiccating. My tongue, dry and thick, feels like a wad of cotton wool stuffed in my mouth. The past hour or so, spel s of dizzi-ness have whirled in my mind. My drip cup gradual y fi l s with mixed blood. I will drink it because it is liquidy and watery enough.
Kind of.
“I heard they stuck you in the library.” It's a man in his forties, sitting next to me, beefy with broad shoulders; he's the president of SPHTH (Society for the Protection and Humane Treatment of Horses). His generous potbel y protrudes just above table level.
My designation for him: Beefy.
“Yup,” I say. “Sucks the big one, having to walk outside. You guys are probably partying up in here all day while I'm cooped up all by my lonesome, bored as anything.”
“It's the sunrise curfew that would get me,” Beefy says, his mouth ful of fl esh. “Having to leave everyone and everything, drop of the hat, forced to leave. And all alone out there, surrounded by desert and sunlight in the day hours.”
“You got all those books,” Ashley June says next to me.
“What's there to complain about? You can study up on hunting techniques, get a leg up on us.”
I see the el der ly, gaunt man I'd met in the lab earlier scratch his wrist ever so slightly. He jams a piece of hyena liver into his mouth.
His designation: Gaunt Man.
“I heard,” says another hunter, “that the library belonged to a fringe scientist with some pretty loony theories on hepers.”
The woman, who looks fi t for her age— I place her in her mid- thirties, a dangerous age, equal parts fi t and savvy— sits across from me; she barely looks up from her plate as she speaks. Jet black hair, greased up, accentuating her angular pale chin. Her lips are luscious and ful , crimson with the dripping of fl esh blood, as if her own lips were bleeding profusely down her chin. When she speaks, her lips part across her teeth at an angle, as if only one side of her lips can be bothered to move. Like a lazy snarl. I think: Crimson Lips.
“Where did you hear that?” I ask.
Crimson Lips looks up from her bloody plate and holds my gaze, mea sur ing me. “What, the library? Because I've been asking about you,” she says, her voice cool and diffi cult to read, “and why you were put there. My escort knows everything. Quite chatty, once you get him started, actual y. Told me, too, lest we start feeling too sorry for you, of the great view you have.”
“Same view you guys get. Except I'm out in the boondocks.”
“But you're closer, though!” Beefy says, blood spraying out of his mouth and speckling down his chin. A wad of half- chewed rabbit liver fl ies out, landing near Crimson Lips' plate. Before Beefy can move, she snaps up the chunk and puts it into her mouth. He glares at her briefl y before turning his attention back to us. “You're closer to the Dome. To the hepers.”
At that, it's as if every head turns to look at me.
I quickly bite off a large chunk of meat; I chew it slowly, deliberately, buying time. I scratch my wrist rapidly. “With about a mile of daylight between me and them. And at night, an impenetrable glass dome insulating them from me. They might as wel be on a different planet.”
“It's cursed, that place,” says Crimson Lips. “The library, I mean.
Eventual y, it gets to you, drives you batty. It's the proximity.
Being so tantalizingly close, being able to smel them but not get to them.
Every person who's stayed there has lost it, sooner or later.
Usual y sooner.”
“I heard that's what happened to the Scientist,” says Beefy.
“He got the itch one night. A few months ago. At dusk, he ventured out, went right up to the Dome. Was pressing his face against the glass like a kid outside a candy store. He simply forgot the time and then . . . well, hello, sunrise! ” He shrugs. “At least that's the theory.
Nobody saw it happen. They found a pile of his clothes halfway between the library and the Dome.”
“Good riddance, is what I hear,” Crimson Lips says. “He was absolutely useless. They looked at his research after he disappeared.
