Origin (19 page)

“Bypass the five generations of sitting around waiting, yes, yes. Exactly.”

“Is it possible?”

She spreads her hands. “That’s what I’m here to find out. Of course, my job would be much simpler if someone would just tell me the whole truth behind this place.”

“You mean the old wing in B Labs?” I ask.

“That,” she replies with a twitch of her brow, “among
other things. For example, what is this ‘catalyst’ everyone talks about but never produces? If I knew what it was that makes elysia safe to drink, I could progress in my research by absolute bounds.”

“They haven’t told me, either,” I confess. “It’s one of the reasons I want to be on the Immortis team so badly. They’ll
have
to tell me.”

“Well, until old Harriet’s likewise proven herself, looks like I’m also to be in the dark. Oh, here, give me that.” She crosses the room and takes the lizard skull out of my hands, then perches on the edge of her table—the only place clear enough for sitting in the room—and turns the skull over in her palm. “Don’t you find it strange how mysterious all of this is? First this catalyst, then that hallway.”

I nod, wishing I could disagree instead. “I’m sure…I’m sure it’s all for a good reason, though. The secrets and the lies. There must be a reason or Uncle Paolo would tell us both the truth.”

She studies me closely, as if curious what
my
skull looks like. “You really think so?”

“I…of course.” I don’t miss the moment of hesitation, and I can see that she doesn’t either. But Aunt Harriet just pushes back stray frizz from her eyes and sighs.

“I guess all will be revealed in time, eh? Likely it’s all some kind of dramatic display to make them feel important and mysterious. Don’t be fooled by all the rigidity and sterilization, Pia. Scientists are showmen at heart—only more boring and with bad eyesight.”

I nod uncertainly. “So…how exactly am I supposed to get out of here?”

“Oh, yes!” She jumps up, tossing the skull into a half-unpacked box of safety goggles. “I nearly forgot, caught up in all that cloak-and-dagger tripe. Come on, let’s see if the coast is clear!”

The gate is only a stone’s throw from Harriet’s lab, and the stand of trees in the middle of the drive provides an excellent screen between it and the rest of Little Cam. The drive is empty, and the gate is attended by one lonely guard. He sits outside the fence, with his back to us. We stand in the doorway of the little lab, leaning against the frame and trying to look nonchalant.

“What about him?” I ask. “And how will you open the gate?”

“It’ll be opened for us,” is her confident reply. “Come on.”

I follow her across the drive to the spacious tin-roofed carport under which the Jeeps are parked. She walks down the line of vehicles until she reaches the last one, which she taps on the hood. “Here it is. Every day, at lunchtime, one hulking guard will drive out to Falk’s Glen to change shifts with another hulking guard. Same thing happens at dusk. Simply be on the Jeep heading out and come back with the afternoon shift, and you’re golden. Of course, we can’t use this method every time or you’re bound to get caught. We’ll just have to play it day by day. There’s more than one way to skin a tapir.” She laughs.

“There’s nothing to hide under,” I point out. “Do you have some canvas or blankets?”

“Psh! Use your head, Pia. Of course there’s something to hide under.” She pats the hood of the Jeep again.

Her meaning dawns in a flash. “Oh…”

“Oh, come now, it’s even better than my refrigerator idea!”

I kneel and peer at the undercarriage of the Jeep. There are certainly plenty of ways I could wedge myself in.

“It’ll get pretty hot under there, which would be a problem for most of us. But you shouldn’t have any trouble with that.” Harriet glances around. “Better hurry. He’ll be along soon.”

“Just because I can’t get burned doesn’t mean I can’t feel heat!”

She turns a withering look on me. “Do you want to get out of here or don’t you?”

With a sigh, I scoot under the Jeep and work my way into the undercarriage, trying to avoid touching more pipes and bars than necessary.

“This is the worst idea you’ve had yet,” I tell Aunt Harriet.

“They’re all busy getting ready for Corpus’s visit, but it doesn’t mean they’re blind. Be back by dark. No later, or it will be both our heads on the chopping block. And my neck isn’t quite so impermeable as yours.”

“I promise.”

“And don’t get lost. Honestly, I swear, if you do, I’ll find a way to chop your head off, immortality or not. He’s coming! Got to go. Good luck!” She sticks her hand, thumb extended cheerily, under the Jeep, then dashes off. After a minute, I hear footsteps, see thick black boots, and feel the Jeep sink several inches when the guard climbs in. There’s still nearly a foot of space between the ground and me, but it feels much, much closer. The engine starts, and my various handholds begin to rattle, but I grit my teeth and hang on tighter. At the last minute I grab my hair, which was hanging to the ground, and tuck it in my shirt.

I keep my eyes pressed shut so I can focus on holding on, but I can still hear the groan of the gate opening, then closing, and the rev of the engine as the guard driving the Jeep stomps the gas. It’s all I can do not to drop to the ground, but then I’d have to explain why there are tire tracks across my stomach.
Better just wait.

Finally the Jeep skids to a halt and the guard jumps down. After I’m sure he’s well into the jungle, I lower myself to the ground and exhale long and slow. I don’t think I took a single breath since leaving the compound.

The jungle looms over me as I rub dirt and rust from my hands. It takes me a moment to orient myself. Eyes shut, I mentally retrace the path I walked from Little Cam to Ai’oa and compare the distances and angles to the route the guard took in the Jeep.

“So it must be…” I face the direction opposite to the one the guard went. “That way.”

I’m not hiking for long when Eio materializes from the leaves. He looks part jungle himself, with leaves tied around his neck, head, and arms. His khaki cargo shorts look as out of place as ever, especially with his face paint and jaguar necklace.

When I see him, a weight I never knew existed lifts from my chest, and I feel, for the first time in the past three days, that I can breathe again. I realize I’m grinning like an idiot, but I can’t help it. “Eio!”

“Pia bird. You came.” He stands a foot in front of me, staring at me as if he can’t believe I’m here. “Burako said I should forget about you. That you’d probably forgotten me.”

“Forget you? I couldn’t forget you if I tried.”
And not just
because my memory is infallible.
With my fingers feeling as clumsy and awkward as if they were Alai’s paws, I reach out and take his hand. Once I have it, his grasp feels as natural as putting on a glove, and I never want to let go. His touch is fire, sending sparks tingling up my arm. “Of course I came. I told you I would.”

He looks at our entwined fingers and smiles. “So you found a way.”

“With Aunt Harriet’s help, yes.”

“The crazy-haired one.” He nods knowingly. “She helped you sneak back in.”

“Oh, you saw that?” What has he been doing? Sitting in a tree outside Little Cam and taking notes all day?

“I knew you would come. Every day I came here and waited, but you took a long time. Kapukiri said you would come too.”

This is the first time I’ve really been in the jungle during daylight. When I overslept in Ai’oa and had to run home, I didn’t take even a moment to look around. Now, however, I stop dead and turn slowly in a full circle, eyes wide and thirsty to drink it all in.

Between mighty kapoks and slender cecropias, narrow vines swoop and drop and tangle over enormous leaves of palulus and anthuriums. The air is thick and damp, even more so than in Little Cam. It’s almost like being underwater. Pale, vaporous mist haunts the darkness between low leaves and the forest floor like the ghosts Aunt Nénine fears. Orange and yellow lichen lays claim to anything that’s dead and rotting, and where the lichen stops, the moss begins. There are probably a dozen different species of it right here in this spot.

Looking up, the sky is just a speckle of blue here and there, a realm so high above and so obscured by the jungle that it might as well be outer space. In the rainforest, the sky is made of leaves and branches, and instead of stars you have screeching monkeys and birds of every color. It is a living sky.

Most of all—and this is what I missed most during my nighttime wanderings—is the color. The rainforest is green on green on green; the color must have been invented here, and in a thousand different forms. Against the green wash, a shot of purple orchids or orange mushrooms stands out vibrantly, demanding attention. The only thing missing is Alai at my side, but it would have been impossible to sneak him out too.

Despite all the beauty around me, my eyes keep wandering back to Eio. He pushes every branch out of my path, careful not to let them swing back and hit me. Every time he does, water droplets rain down on his shoulders, beading his collarbone and the back of his neck. His dark hair is so damp it hangs in his eyes. My fingers itch to brush it aside.

We reach Ai’oa in less than an hour, thanks to Eio. I could have found it on my own, but it would have taken longer since I’d never been this way before.

The villagers don’t flock to greet me this time. Some call out or wave, but there are no garlands of flowers or dances to welcome me into Ai’oa. I wonder if I’m welcome at all. Eio must see my hesitation, because he tells me that once a person’s been given their welcome feast, they are forever a part of the village and are treated like one of the villagers.

“They think of me as Ai’oan?”

“In this sense, yes.”

“Does every visitor get a welcome feast?”

He meets my eyes steadily. “No. Only you, because you have the mark, and my father, because he loved my mother and proved himself a friend to the village.”

I’m not sure whether I should feel honored or frightened. If they think of me as one of their own, what must they expect from me?
Why did I come back here at all? Did I think we’d be dancing and laughing all day long, every time I came? What do
I
expect from
them
?

“Eio,” I whisper, “I don’t know what to do.”

He gives me a funny look, as if I’d asked him what blue smells like. “Just be yourself.”

A little girl no higher than my hip runs up to Eio and leaps onto his back. He laughs and tries to tickle her, but she yanks his hair, and he stops. I recognize her from my last visit to Ai’oa; she was the one who hovered by my elbow for hours, watching everything I did with huge, curious eyes.

“Eio!” she squeals. “You brought her back! Like you said you would!” I smile at her. Her English is very good, and her Ai’oan accent softens the consonants and adds a sweet richness to the vowels that I’d never hear in Little Cam.

“If I say I’m going to the river to catch a fish,” Eio replies, “I will always bring back a fish. Did you doubt me, Ami?”

“Not for a minute, but Pichira and Akue said you wouldn’t, that the lightning fence would stop you.” She peers at me over his shoulder. “Hello, Pia bird. Where’s your jaguar?”

“Hello,” I reply shyly. “Alai couldn’t come today. Your name is Ami? It’s very pretty.”

“It means wicked,” says Eio.

“It means perfect child.” She looks from Eio to me with a
sly grin. “Eio says
you’re
perfect, Pia bird. He says you’re the most perfect girl he ever saw!”

Eio turns red and shakes her from his back, roaring that he’ll feed her to an anaconda. She runs behind me, screaming and laughing, and, laughing with her, I shield her from him.

“He does?” I ask. “And what else does he say?”

She screws her lips up to her nose, thinking. “That your eyes are like bits of sky seen through the leaves. And that, like the rain washes the mud from the leaves, you…how did he say it? Oh, yes. That you wash the darkness from the world.”

“He…he said that?” Now
I’m
the one turning red.

Eio grabs our hands. “Come on, you awful child. Let’s show Pia where we swim.”

“H
ere it is!” Ami announces.

I can already tell I’ll never be able to enjoy my pool again, not after this. A crystalline waterfall about twenty feet high drops into a deep, still, turquoise stream. Orchids and heliconias hang over the water as if they’re drinking from it, heavy with pink and red and purple blooms.

With a whoop, Eio climbs to the top of the waterfall and throws himself from it. The splash he makes drenches Ami and me.

“He is so dumb,” says Ami. “Come on, Pia bird! It’s no fun swimming with Eio; he only tries to splash me.”

She grabs my hand and leads me downstream, about fifty yards from the waterfall, where the water is shallow and wide, racing over a pebbly bed. The stream sparkles golden in the sunlight filtering through the trees.

“This is our most secret place,” she whispers as she kneels on the bank.

“What’s so secret about it?” I ask.

“Look in the water.”

I kneel beside her and lean over the stream, and I see it. It’s not sunlight turning the water gold. It
is
gold. The pebbles at the bottom are flaked with glittering freckles; there must be several handfuls’ worth of it.

“Is it real gold?” I ask.

She nods. “We can’t tell anyone from the outside. The sight of gold turns
karaíba
into monsters, and they will destroy everything to get to it. That’s what Achiri says. So we never tell the
karaíba
about it.”

“I’m a karaíba,” I point out, the Ai’oan word for
foreigner
already filed in my memory.

“Kapukiri says you have the tears of Miua in you, and that makes you one of us.”

“But I live in Little Cam.”

“You don’t have to. You could live with us.”

“I can’t. Little Cam is my home.”

“Then why do you come to Ai’oa?”

I turn away so that she can’t see the conflict in my eyes. How do I explain to a seven-year-old that she represents everything I’ve been denied in Little Cam?
Because you are young and free and one with the jungle. You are mortal, but instead of clinging to the hope of immortality, you embrace each day, one at a time, and never worry about tomorrow.