We Speak Through the Mountain, page 6
This is about muscle memory, although the species are new. I put myself in the centre of our group, and we move up the north slope of the tiny stream, pacing out one-metre grids. Without even hearing their accents you can tell at once who came to this place from somewhere else. A boy cries out in a panic as a whiskeyjack flutters towards his head, then straightens up and laughs self-consciously. On the other slope, a girl squeals as she gets too close to the stream and squelches into a wet spot; another girl hauls her out, smiling. Some of us are looking down, cataloguing plants and insects on our tablets; some of us are looking up nervously, only reassured by a glimpse of Karina. For subsistence living to work you need rules and regulations; I had thought there would be none here. But they don’t need rules. They have this fear of the outside that works just as well. Or better.
Every time I hear No one leaves here after they graduate, I open my tablet, open the document I have named “1” to keep it at the top, and enter a tick-mark.
We are spreading out, and with that delicate, electrical-storm feeling of being in the right place at the right time, the sense of the hunter, I detach myself from the others and begin to climb, moving in silence on the needle-cushioned stone. I rehearse my answer for when I am eventually found: Saw a rare orchid. Had to go look. Saw a rare orchid, didn’t think they grew up here; wasn’t on the species list. Didn’t realize I’d left the others behind. Sorry. Saw a rare orchid.
There is no path here. I glance behind myself occasionally to see if I am leaving a trail in the needles, seeing nothing, only my shadow black as ink in the strong sun hovering over me, stealthy and sure. When they find me I have to remember not to say I did nothing wrong. I must say only that I made a mistake. I did do something wrong, is what I must say.
As I climb, the voices below me fall away, and soon I am in true silence once more. The air is even getting cooler up here, though the sun is still full and bright, and stings my exposed face below my hat whenever I lift my head to check my bearings. The view is stupefying; it knocks you flat. And it reminds me again that there is no sign of human activity around this place, none at all, no roads, no buildings, no access of any kind. It is so perfectly isolated that there is not a chance that anybody could simply stumble across it by accident, and I imagine you can barely find it even if you do know what you’re looking for.
As if on cue, I spot the barrier, with a light, full-body shock that plants me in place. It is like something from a recurring dream, half-remembered until it is before you, and then every detail from the depths of sleep clicks into place at once so that you cannot deny it any more. The old domes had their geometric slabs of transparent solids. But here, and only in full sunlight, I see the new one: a shimmer like heat haze, except with colours: blue and pink but both very faint, extending from near the ground to not quite the tops of the trees. I suspect that it goes up though, that it is a true dome, and I can only not see it because there is no contrast against the blue of the sky.
It should be humming. I can hear a hum from every device in my room. I can even hear my tablet hum. But it is silent. I stare and it seems to accept my stare like a statue of a deity, taking it as its due. Go on and stare, it says. You can do nothing to me. Maybe I’m imagining it.
Can I do nothing to it? What will it do to me?
There are no animals on campus bigger than a bird or a squirrel. For safety, they said. The orientation video. They tell you it’s meant to keep out the dangerous wildlife, like bears and cougars — that it’s essentially a type of electric fence. They don’t need to say that, like any other electric fence, it works from either side. In theory students should have no trouble avoiding it, especially the 99 percent that never leave the built parts of campus. But I don’t want to avoid it. I want to look.
I hear the footsteps long before their owner comes into view, and I’m already turning, skidding down the slope, almost colliding with St. Martin as he steps out from behind a tree, his hands out on either side as if he is trying to keep his balance on a sheet of ice. For a split second we are so close that I can see the hot blue ring around his dark irises, bright as a flame against the white sclera, and then we both take a large step backwards.
“Don’t,” he gasps first. “Don’t touch it.”
“In orientation they said it was meant to deter wildlife,” I say. “It’s set to give a little shock, right? It’s not really dangerous.”
“I . . . just don’t touch it.”
“Did they lie about it? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
He holds up a hand for a pause, and catches his breath. He must have run up here, I realize. To get ahead of the others, or away from the others. “I’m not saying they lied. I’m saying it’s . . . it’s not safe for us to touch. Why on earth would anyone even want to?”
“You’ve never tested it?”
“Of course not!”
“So you just believe what they tell you?”
“Yes!”
“Bullshit this is for bears,” I tell him. “It’s for people. It’s the last line in the defense of making sure people don’t know where this place is. I bet it’s set so high it’ll kill any human who touches it.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know what kind of people you think we . . .” He trails off, seeing my face, and chooses his next words more carefully. “Why do you think we don’t want outsiders to know exactly where we are?”
“Because you’re all cowards.”
“That’s not it. Think.”
“Yes it is.” I close the distance between us again. I’m trying not to yell at him, not to even raise my voice, because we’ll get caught. “Any other answer you could give me is a variation on ‘you’re cowards.’ You’re all afraid of people. Afraid of everyone outside this place — because there’s more of them than there are of you, and that is the only reason. That’s what you’re afraid of: being mobbed. That’s why you only allow a handful of us to enroll every year. You think you’ll be swarmed. And for what? Because you won’t open your doors and share. Because you never have.”
“Reid. Don’t you think admin has tried it? In the past? What do you think happened?”
“What did they tell you happened?”
We glare at each other, panting in the thin and airless air, for far too long. His face is wretched with worry beneath its thin film of sweat. I don’t care if I am asking too much of him. I don’t care if this ends our friendship. I am standing upslope from him and this makes us almost the same height and if I threw a punch, a really good one, from my shoulder, it would hit him in a great spot, right in the philtrum. I used to win fights that way when I was a kid. Fighting for Henryk, usually, because he would just curl up instead of fighting back. St. Martin wouldn’t fight back either.
Something inside me wavers and collapses, and it is so obvious that relief washes over his face. “Let’s go back,” he says.
“Is everyone looking for me?”
“No. Karina’s over with the other group. Tanner was trying to catch fish in the stream and fell in.”
I laugh despite myself, and clamp a hand over my mouth. On the way back down, I can’t help it and ask, “Are you going to say anything? About me going up to look . . .”
“I . . . no. I mean technically you didn’t break any rules.” I can’t see his face, as he’s ahead of me, but I hear the reluctance in his voice. He wants to say something; his issue, I suspect, is that he cannot think of who to say anything to or what to say. I have plausible deniability on my side. Do we also have friendship? Are we friends? I don’t know. He was the only one who noticed I was missing.
“Wait a minute,” he says, “where are you going? This isn’t the way we came.”
“No, I can hear people just over there. It’ll be quicker this way.” The words are not even fully out of my mouth when I feel something shift under my feet. Not needles. Stone.
My body moves while my mind goes somewhere else. Already it is mourning something that hasn’t happened yet. Or has happened in the past. A long, long time ago and someone’s powerful hands pulling me from a mudslide. Looking up through the thick air to a face I knew, a face like mine, curls like mine. Hands lifting me into the safety of air.
I get one arm around a tree and the other on St. Martin, his flailing wrist, and though I feel bone and tendon twist under my hand, I’m not letting go, and nothing breaks. You would have to do worse than that for the bones of these people. Not like mine, breaking at a single bite. Life over limb, anyway. Isn’t that what we teach the kids? Among other things?
Shouts of alarm downslope. A flurry of stone, dust, broken wood, an evergreen branch slapping me across the cheek so hard it leaves a perceptible residue of resin. They say when it gets hot enough here the trees go up like candles all on their own. Because of this accelerant they produce. Their own destruction coursing through their cells. Amazing.
It’s over in a moment, and our tree has held, and the ground between me and St. Martin is at quite a drastic angle now, but he is so tall that my grip hasn’t broken. Still it is a long time before I can let go, cautiously, leaving a visible dent around his wrist, and climb down, shaking with adrenaline, feeling it pour into my veins like the blood of trees, ready to catch fire.
His mouth is moving; I cannot hear him past the ringing in my ears. Even when I pitch forward from my tree and catch myself on the edge of the new cliff between us before I fly head over heels over it, our faces an inch apart, I cannot hear him. He grabs me under the armpits and pulls once, firmly, and sets me on my feet. Despite my jacket I can feel how cold his hands are.
Blood is pattering onto our shoes and pants, onto the needles below our feet, sudden as rain. “Jesus,” I begin, “are you —” but he’s closing his long fingers around my wrist, shouting over my head.
I’ve sliced my hand open on a stone, and for just a second before the pain hits I’m impressed at how clean the cut is — as if somewhere, a hundred millennia ago, some ancient ancestor is nodding at the performance of the flint knife he’s chipped.
It’s opened a doorway in my palm where I must have caught my full weight on the edge, and through the oozing blood I see the lines of muscle like a butchered rabbit, and something else: purple and blue and green and black, the trees, the spiraling arms of them, still in me, of course they are still in me, I knew they were not gone, only sleeping, but now exposed, breathing the thin wild air just like the rest of us, still there, still inside me, still in me — it’s you it’s you it’s you it’s you you’re awake it’s you no don’t wake up don’t don’t it’s moving I can see it moving
I don’t black out but it’s a fight, my knees buckling, not at the pain, not at the blood, just at this reminder that I still live with the adversary, that the killer is still in the house, the silent companion who will never leave me.
Then the darkness lifts and in the day’s ordinary brightness restored Karina is at my side, gasping, clucking, and I’m fending off St. Martin’s praise at how my quick thinking saved his life. He wasn’t going to die, it was just a little rockslide. Clean white bandages with a tiny HU logo in blue go around and around, hiding the monster from view, and not a word is said about where I was or where I was supposed to be.
Is this what you were so afraid of that you glassed yourself off from the world? You were afraid of this? Me, us?
6.
I left everyone behind and I said I’d come back. I said, No one else has ever come back, but I’ll come back. Maybe I didn’t say it out loud. I wrote my best and oldest friend a letter — my best and oldest friend who survived. It feels like forever ago. In it I meant to say to him, It should have been her here, Nadiya. It should have been her and it both galls me that that’s the case, and it hurts me that she isn’t alive and here instead of me. Not only out of the three of us but out of all of us that we knew, it should have been her in this place. She should have been the one person who achieved escape velocity and flew as good as to the stars — to a place as remote and inescapable as any space station or Mars colony. In the letter I said none of it. I said other things.
Behind me, Clementine says, “I want a big mad giant breakfast, you know? Like two breakfasts in one, but different breakfasts. How do we get that? What are you writing?”
“It’s in one of the sub-menus under Preferences. Letter to my mom.”
She hovers over my shoulder, then heads for the kitchen. “You got nice writing. I think I’m one of the last kids back home that still knows cursive. We had the one lady — Mrs. Petruzzi. Only one still insisting on teaching it. Then she died. Five years and nobody else stepped up. You want anything?”
“Coffee? Lots of sugar?”
“Sure you don’t wanna come with?” she coaxes as she sets down the mug. “Everyone’s gonna be there. It’s kinda the big thing before the big thing. Because it’s semifinals. Spartans versus Spirit.”
“I’ll catch up with you guys. Just got a few things to finish.”
“St. Martin will be there!”
“Yeah, he goes to all these things. Wait. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing!” She holds her hands up defensively, making me laugh, then adds, “It’ll be completely dead here. What’re you gonna do instead?”
“I . . . nothing. Just walk around.”
I shouldn’t have hesitated. She watches me closely for several seconds, lightly suspicious, unsure. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
“I know that, Clementine, honestly. I just need to stretch my legs. That’s all!”
When she is gone, I put my watch in my desk, admiring the tan line it leaves behind, and my tracker necklace too — darkened, no blinking light, but a lot of us still wear it under our clothes like a good-luck talisman. The watch almost certainly tracks our locations (no one talks about it — it is one of those assumed things, I think, like the single rooms), and I have little faith that the tracker in the necklace has truly been disabled.
The tablet I debate for a while, then I put that in my desk too. I would like to have the camera on it, but it’s fragile, probably the most valuable thing I could now call mine.
I dress in my old clothes, the ones I wore here. They seem impossibly shabby and shameful now, aside from being spattered in blood and less savoury things, and I hold them in my hands for a long time, because you have to feel the size and shape and heft of something before it becomes known to you, before you can understand it and how to carry it. The trousers spun from plastic yarn, the undershirt and overshirt, the ancient hand-me-down wool coat with its remade buttons, the plastic-soled rabbit-skin boots. I tighten the straps of my rucksack, and step out into the cool autumn light.
For what I have in mind the easiest way through campus is north, down the smaller avenues where the grey stone walls crowd so closely you can stretch out your arms on either side and touch them. I pass the spires of the water treatment plant, gurgling and humming like a contented baby, and a dozen vat centres, some of them warming the surrounding air to a damp, tropical heat, like the inside of the botanical gardens. No faces track me from the windows. It is Sunday morning, and there are no classes, and there is a big game, and everyone not at the game is sleeping in.
Even to myself I am not sure what I want to do, except see if it’s possible to pass through that barrier. This time I also don’t know what excuses I might give when I get caught, because I expect to be caught. There seem to be no rules written against it, but you can break unwritten ones no problem. Last night when we were all sitting in the quad watching for meteors, I thought about telling St. Martin the story of my coming here — not the steamcart, not the mountains, but before that. Because we were sitting apart from the others, because they were not listening. Because every time he spoke he turned towards me, instead of, like me, speaking while facing the same way and not moving. Are we really friends? Can we be friends if I feel so certain that he would turn me in for doing this? Clementine wouldn’t.
Behind the last building, as they quite sensibly designed it, there’s a drastic slope — nearly vertical. No path in the stone, no steps. Only stubborn scrub, slippery lichen and moss, and a faint mist drifting from a concealed waterfall nearby. I am unsurprised and undismayed, and I climb, carefully, my dirty clothes camouflaged against the stone.
Yesterday afternoon I got another shot against my Cad, the sixth since I came here. Dr. Gibson watched me closely, taking notes as I chattered away, as always. The other students, I have slowly come to realize, get a nurse; I always get Gibson himself. This is routine now. I have questions for him. He expects them. But I will not ask, because there are things I would prefer he not know that I’m thinking about. Sometimes I worry my evasion is telling him anyway: the absence of certain words crafted from the shape of those words I do say, their negative image making a perfect shape of what I’m trying to hide. He always seems to be on the verge of saying something anyway — maybe answering one of those questions I haven’t asked — but he stops himself too. We talk about other things; we speak in parallel to one another’s conversations, not perpendicular.
I climb. My ears are ringing from nerves, adrenaline, only. Dr. Gibson says I’m not anemic any more. He says I’m doing very well. Healthy as a horse. I’ve never seen a horse. They all died. We still say it. We still say as good as gold, when none of us have held gold or know its goodness. I climb and I don’t mind the thin air. The mountain still rears above me, infinite, no summit visible from here. Sometimes I even have to pause and press my face to the stone, feel the thrumming in it.
