The bathroom, where I’d hoped to find the cleaning agents and shavers, is in even worse shape. Mirrors cracked, floor tiles ripped out, the secret tank of water cracked like broken pottery. The cabinet of cleansing supplies gone. Every tile, crack, line of grout, licked by hungry tongues hoping for a strand of heper DNA.
“Gene. We should go.” Sissy’s hand on my shoulder, gentle, offering solace. “There’s nothing here for us.”
I wipe at my cheeks, nod.
Before we walk out, I take one final look at the husked carcass of my home. The last few years here, all alone, were not happy years. They were not. After my father was gone—after he faked his turning and misled me into thinking he perished by sunlight—I had missed him terribly. With a physical aching. The daytimes were the worst, all alone in the house. Its empty spaces were painful reminders of my father’s absence.
In those days, to dull the ache, I had imagined him still alive. It was the only way my seven-year-old mind and heart could cope. I imagined he had somehow, miraculously, escaped to some place far away. Perhaps he had fled east, all the way across the Vast, to where the eastern mountains rose on the distant horizon. He had once flown a remote-controlled plane toward those mountains and had told me to remember that. Wasn’t it possible, my seven-year-old mind reasoned, that he had escaped there? I held on to this lie because it was a footbridge—rickety and frail though it was—across the chasm of my loneliness.
On days when the pain could not be managed (and there were many), I left the house and walked the streets. Walking for hours at a time, I would remember the way my father would walk next to me, how he would warn me to stay out of the sunlight or to hug close to the buildings. That is what I remembered most: his voice, his words. And what I had wanted was quite simple: I wanted to hear from him. I would not be demanding nor even require an explanation—a simple message would suffice, sent to me all the way from the eastern mountains on one of those remote-controlled planes. I’m alive. I’m okay. A sentence or two. That’s all.
And so, as I walked the streets, I would—despite knowing better—occasionally gaze upward. I wanted to see a tiny dot growing bigger and bigger as it sailed over the Vast, hear the small whirring buzz of its motor, see it fly between the maze of skyscrapers. Watch its descent toward me, its landing on the street as it taxied slowly toward me, to finally bump softly against my feet.
But I never saw a plane. No matter how many times I set out, how many miles I walked, how many shoes I wore out, how many times I looked up, I never saw a thing. And so I changed my expectations; I did not need a message. I would accept the mere sight of a plane; it did not even need to land. If it merely sailed in the skies above, never descending, and passed over my head, that would be consolation enough.
But I never saw a thing. I never knew what it felt like to fall under the cool, comforting shadow of a passing plane.
Twenty-three
SISSY ANXIOUSLY GAZES at the sky. A pale outline of a full moon is already etched into the blue but darkening canvas. “I’d say we have a couple of hours before sundown. And we still stink.” She glances at the neighborhood houses, her brow furrowing. She’s imagining the doors and shutters opening at dusk, the houses’ occupants—toddlers, teenagers, parents, the elderly—racing out onto the street, hunting us down.
“Follow me,” I say. “I know where to go.”
We walk with quick, nervous strides. The houses around us are casting longer shadows now, and the sky’s saturated blue is now brushed with a hint of crimson.
“Check the TextTrans,” Sissy says.
Nothing. I type out another quick message:
Epap, you there?
After I hit SEND, we wait for a minute, staring at the blank screen, hoping for the best. I put it back into my pocket. “C’mon, let’s go.”
A short while later, we arrive. The house is at the corner of the street, exactly as I remember it.
“What is this place?” Sissy asks.
“Ashley June’s home.”
“Oh.” Sissy tucks her hair behind her ear. “What are we doing here?”
“Ashley June didn’t survive all these years without her own supply of cleansing agents. We can use hers.”
She stares at the house, intact and shuttered, the walls unmarked. Ashley June was never suspected of being a heper, especially after she emerged from the Introduction turned into a dusker. There’s been no looting or vandalism here. “How do we get in?” Sissy asks. “All entryways are shuttered.”
“It’s not what it looks like.” Bending down, I grab the bottom of the door shutter and hoist up. It grates up along the rails. “These shutters are meant to keep sunshine out, not people. You don’t need to lock them in the daytime.”
Sissy nods, understanding. She reaches for the doorknob, turns it. The door swings opens. She pauses.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Ashley June lived alone and she’s at the hospital now. Nobody’s home.”
The gauzy slab of late-afternoon sunlight filters into the interior, festooning it with strips of red and orange haze. I walk in, Sissy right behind me. Inside, I find something unexpected.
Ashley June did not live scared. That much is evident. In the safety of her home, she did not live as if she had anything to hide. Hung and taped on every wall, from ceiling to floor, are colorful paintings and pictures. Of imaginary places described by her parents, probably: Green hills dotted with colorful flowers where blue streams rush into mythic seas. Places where the sun always splashed down in torrents of yolky yellow. Where it was always day, never night.
And photos. Of her mother, her brother. These surprise me the most. My father had burned all our family photos and drawings, but Ashley June did not seem afflicted with the same level of cautiousness. She was brazen in her own home.
“Look,” Sissy says from across the room. “There’s a photo of you.”
She’s pointing at a class photograph. From years ago, when I was only nine. I remember that night clearly. The night of the lightning storm. It had caught the whole school by surprise. We had assembled on the school steps outside when the skies suddenly coagulated with dense clouds. The lightning, forking across the skies, flashed hard and fierce. It sent everyone into a frenzy, eyes clenched shut against the pain searing through their eyeballs. Pandemonium broke out. Children cried out in terror. Teachers screamed. The photographer’s camera was knocked over, and the impact on the ground somehow triggered the continuous auto-shoot mode.
Those shots, uploaded online later that day, revealed something stunning. A small girl, standing in the middle of the storm, her face seemingly unaffected by the bright light while every other face around her was twisted in pain. But she was staring right at the lightning with uplifted face, smiling at the falling raindrops. A few hours later, she was eaten. At the crack of dusk, hordes of neighbors who’d viewed the photos online during the day hours stormed her home. Too late (it is always too late, it is never in time) I found out there lived another just like me.
“Is that really you?” Sissy says, smiling, oblivious to my ashen face. “You were a cute little runt, weren’t you? You had cheeks like Ben!” Her eyes water with laughter. She rests her hand on my shoulder.
This whole wall is covered with school photographs. Some of the students I recognize, some I don’t, some group shots, others capturing only a single person. There’s no rhyme or reason to this random assortment of photos. Perhaps they were students Ashley June once suspected were human. Perhaps she got lonely at night, and wanted to see the company of faces on this wall, no matter their lack of expression or warmth. No matter their inherent difference from her.
“Oh, look, there’s you again,” Sissy says. Then her voice trails away. “Oh . . . weird.” It’s another class portrait, one I instantly recognize. It was taken last year. I see the faces of my classmates, our bodies standing formal and erect, arms stiff by our sides. There I am, standing in the second row, eyes plain as cardboard. All our eyes depthless, emotionless. But none of this is what grabs my attention.
It’s what Ashley June’s done to the photograph. Marked it up. Not only in one place, but on every face. A chill slides down my back.
Over every mouth in the photograph, she’s glued on a small cutout of another mouth—a smiling mouth, lips drawn back, exposing fangless rows of pearly white teeth. Instead of a class of duskers, we’ve been transformed into a group of smiling humans. She placed the identical smiling mouth over the teacher’s mouth, over my mouth, over every mouth but one—her own. Over her face, she’s instead glued on a different shot of her, and in this one she is radiant. I have never seen her look this way—a wide incandescent smile, the sunlight glinting in her auburn hair, her eyes moist with happiness, her whole face cracking free with abandon. I lean closer and stare at her smiling mouth. It’s the same smiling mouth that she photocopied and glued over everyone else’s mouth.
Exuberant, smiling mouths set under dead eyes. Grotesquely, eerily at odds with one another. But perhaps in the semi-dark and from the other side of the room, you could convince yourself otherwise.
“She was so lonely, wasn’t she?” Sissy whispers.
I stare at Ashley June’s image. “All of us were.”
Twenty-four
ASHLEY JUNE
WHEN ASHLEY JUNE was almost eight years old, her mother began looking at her in a funny way. At dusk, as her mother scrubbed her down and checked her body for any visible scratches before sending her off to school, she would pause in a way she never had before. As Ashley June dressed, her mother’s eyes would examine her naked chest with a seriousness that made her feel self-conscious.
“Hold on,” her mother said one such evening. It was getting late. Fifteen minutes had passed since the shutters had automatically opened. Stars glimmered outside. The moon was brightening.
“Mama?”
“Just turn sideways.” Her mother’s eyes flicked back and forth. Ashley June wanted her mother to meet her eyes, but she didn’t. Her mother’s eyes scanned her chest, as if reading tiny letters on her bare skin, and never once rose to meet Ashley June’s gaze.
