The Variables (2 page)

“Please,” Huck interrupted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Leave before you embarrass yourself.”

“You always knew that was on the table—”

“Stop.”

“Where’s Josephine, Huck?” Harris asked, and Huck narrowed his eyes, his hands remaining fixed on the open door. When no one answered, Harris took a step back toward the middle of the condo. “Let me just talk to Josephine before I go, okay?”

Gordy stretched his legs out in front of himself and yawned with an exaggerated flair.

“She’s on the roof. With a bottle of wine. And that’s where she wants to be right now...so leave her be,” Huck replied.

“Oh, now.” Harris ran his fingers through his hair, his arm made a shadow on the wall. “Huck, now...”

“Have a good night, dear old friend.”

“Come on. Don’t kick me out. Today’s been dreadful, for all of us.”

“No,” Huck said with an eerie calm. “Not for all of us. But really, what could be worse than the day I found out she was gone? There’s no pain that measures up to that moment...so, this? Today? Your epic botching of a case giftwrapped for you?” Huck brought his free hand to his mouth and mimed blowing dust off of his palm. Then he wiped his hands together, tucking the single piece of paper under his arm. “That’s all you are to me...and I’d appreciate it if you got out of my house.”

“Huck—”

“Leave,” he instructed. And after a moment of hesitation, Harris rolled his shoulders back, waved goodbye to Gordon, and disappeared into the well-lit hallway; his shoes hit the tiled floor with deliberate thuds as he traveled back the way he came, carrying himself away from them.

“Was he right?” Gordon asked after Huck shut the door and the condo settled back into shadow.

“He wasn’t right about anything,” Huck said as he turned with a methodical slowness and walked toward his son. He held out the paper and gave it a little shake. “You mean, will I let Harris intervene? Will I take that killer’s life like he took everything from me?”

Gordon cringed.
 

Huck lowered his eyes.

“No,” he answered to the floor. “What’s the point?”

“Revenge,” Gordon seethed. He hit his fist against the floor.

“Revenge will eat you alive,” Huck said and crouched to the ground and put his hands on Gordy’s head. “That’s the thing you’ll learn when you become a man, my son, about the things that could kill you, devour your humanity...the part of you that still wants goodness and justice.”

“I’m already a man, Dad.” Gordy pulled his head back from under his father’s touch. “I’ll be a senior in college. How is that not enough of a man for you?”

“I won’t let this consume our family,” Huck said without answering his son.

“You should go to her.” Gordy looked up at the ceiling and Huck nodded once. Then Gordy sighed a sleepy sigh and rested back against the couch. He placed a hand on his sister’s back and felt her tiny body rise and fall. “This one...she’ll never understand...not really. It will be like a dream. The sister she never knew, the long days at the courthouse, our loss. She’ll grow up and never know...”

“She’ll know,” Huck corrected as he rose from the floor and walked toward the door. “She’ll feel it in her bones.”

The roof of the building of luxury condominiums was a communal gathering place. Outdoor lights glimmered around the perimeter and a small fire pit had burned down to coals. It was spring, too cold for parties, and Josephine shivered, curled up in a wooden chair, her wine glass dipping precariously toward the cement.

Huck watched her from the stairwell before making his entrance. Clearing his throat, he jogged her attention and she shifted, pulling her glass upright, the red liquid sloshing against the sides.

“Harris came by,” Huck announced, and he pulled up a chair beside his wife.

“It’s not his fault,” Josephine replied and she took a drink. Her words slurred and her eyes drooped. “No one’s fault. No one’s fault.” She repeated the phrase and then snickered at it without a hint of mirth.

“Blair needs to be put to bed.”

“You do it.” She raised her eyebrows.

He stared at her. “Look at this. I found her paper.” He held up his prized white sheet with excitement. Josephine made a grab for it, but Huck pulled it way. “No, no. Not yet.”

“It’s just a stupid school paper, Huck. You’ve put so much into it...like it matters. Like any of this,” she waved her hand, the side of it hit the chair, but she didn’t flinch, “matters.”

“What makes today different?” he asked her. He folded the paper and held it in his lap.

His wife looked at him and then hiccupped a lone, reluctant sob. Straightening her back, she tilted her head toward the sky. “Because it’s over.” Then he turned to him, her eyes wet and glistening.

“In one sense...”

“In every…single…sense.”

“Kymberlin believed. She believed in greatness and she had her own ideas! She was going to be a great engineer someday.”

Josephine laughed. “Oh...to be
dead
. Everyone remembers you how they wanted you to be.”

Huck recoiled from the statement. “But—”

“She was perfect. But she was lost. Amazing. Brilliant. Kind. But flighty. You hold that paper like it’s a key to our daughter...but it was just a fantasy, Huck. She wrote that paper to impress
you
. You think if our daughter was still alive, she’d want you throwing everything into her hippy-dippy ideas of communal living? Abandoning your business, your friends...because you thought that you could save the world?”

“We are at war.”

Josephine brought the glass to her lips and threw back the rest of the wine. Then she took the glass and held it out over the chair and let it drop, the stem cracking and the bowl shattering into tiny pieces.
 

“We will always be at war,” came her reply.

And Huck ran his fingers over the crease in the paper again and again.

“Give it to me,” she commanded, and he handed the paper over. She examined it, shaking her head. “It’s kid stuff. Science fiction. There is nothing even remotely possible about building this utopia of hers. You are so blinded by what you wanted her to become. She was a child when she wrote this. A child!”

“She was still a child!” Huck replied. “Maybe, just maybe, if we listen to children—”

Josephine raised a finger and cautioned him with one look. Then she stood up and brushed herself off and stepped over the shards of glass with delicate tiptoes.

“At least say goodnight to Blair before you pass out,” Huck whispered to her back. “At least pretend like you give a damn about her.”

“I have nothing to give that child,” she replied, and she waltzed to the edge of the building, putting her hand on the protective lattice.

“You fought for that child,” he snapped. He rose to his feet. “You can’t give her back because she isn’t Kymberlin! You can’t punish her because she wasn’t the clone you hoped for.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he hung his head, his chin resting against his chest. “I’m sorry—” he looked up, but Josephine hadn’t turned. “That was wrong.”

“You are right,” she said to the wind. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Blair would be better off if she had never have been born.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he pleaded, practically begging. “We wanted joy...we wanted happiness...peace.”

She turned and exhaled, the edges of her mouth rising in a snarl. “Go find it.”

Huck paused. He stepped forward. He felt the glass under his feet. “Jo—”

She took a step onto the cement wall and brought her legs up under her. She tottered for a second and then kicked the lattice swiftly to the street, where it fell with a distant crash. “You have my blessing to find happiness. Peace.” She balled up the paper he had taken so much time to locate; crushed it in her hand and tossed it out to the night air. Huck watched the paper disappear and he spun to the rooftop door, taking several steps before turning and then taking a step back toward Josephine.

She stepped up and over the cement barrier and to the ledge below. Then she turned and reached her hands up above her head, her dress rippling like waves.

“Josephine!” he called and he imagined himself running after her, arms flailing, reaching, reaching for her hand and grabbing her bony wrists. He closed his eyes tight and called her name again, his voice echoing and bouncing off the other buildings—the other condos and apartments, their curtains wide with people milling about, going through the motions of their day, oblivious to all facets of their tragedy.
 

When he opened his eyes, his wife was gone. The space she had occupied consumed by darkness.
 

And his feet remained rooted against the cement roof, planted over the remnants of the wine glass, crunching the pieces as he shifted this way and that—searching the void and hoping for her shape to materialize. After a long minute, a gust of wind shook him into a startled inhale. He turned and walked back to the stairwell, his hands clenched into fists by his side. When he looked one last time, silent tears stung his cheeks, and Huck wondered if he would be able to find Kymberlin’s school paper drifting on the street. He noted the wind trajectory and tried to remember which way she had dropped it. Closing his eyes, he watched her ball up the white paper and he imagined being the paper, sliding past the eastside windows, maybe landing outside the pizza parlor or the nail shop. It had to be down there; the paper was waiting for him to find it. He would find it.

Huck must have stood there with his eyes closed for minutes.

It was the sirens that jolted him back to reality.
 

CHAPTER ONE

Scott King nodded to the guard on Floor E and ran his finger across the scanner to enter Pod 4. He smoothed down his blue button-down shirt and tried to walk with confidence toward the boardroom. He didn’t know why Huck Truman, leader of the System and the new world, was calling the powerful and elusive Elektos Board together, but the air underground was tense, and the prolonged time without natural sun or freedom was wearing on the System’s inhabitants. Even Scott felt antsy, his armpits wet, his stomach churning as if he were on the brink of gastrointestinal distress.

He wiped his forehead, and a droplet of sweat gathered on his index finger. He did not feel like facing the Board today. He did not know why Huck had asked him to bring three vials of his new virus or what he intended to do with them, but he knew that their appearance at this meeting wasn’t arbitrary. Or optional.

Since their arrival in The System, Huck had called together the Elektos Board on two other occasions: the week they arrived to their new underground home and the day before Lucy and Grant appeared among the survivors. The first meeting, the entire Board was there in person. The master tech had not yet been able to secure remote communication. Huck had assembled his fleet of pilots and airplanes and shipped in each of his most trusted followers.

The Elektos Board had fourteen members: two representatives from every Elektos Underground System, Gordy as vice-president and Huck as president. Huck’s daughter Blair was not a member of the Board, but had imposed herself as the meeting secretary. She sat in the corner of the room—away from the view of the other members—and kept elaborate notes that Scott was certain no one ever read or looked at again.

At the second meeting, the only members there in the flesh were Scott, Huck, Gordy, and Claude Salvant (architect of the Systems); everyone else communicated via video chat from their distant locations across the earth. That meeting had been lively and jovial—with reports of their successes documented and inarguable.
 

Huck had accomplished the first two steps of his plan without resistance.

Step one: annihilate the earth. Step two: relocate survivors to their temporary underground homes in the Elektos Underground Systems scattered across the globe. Each System contained a cell of people dedicated to the cause. For decades, Huck had built a secret army of bright and incomparable minds. As the date closed in for their attack, he sought out others invaluable to the cause.

Doctors, nurses, computer scientists, physicists, chemists; the best electricians and pilots, craftsmen and construction workers. Trade skills and academic minds were of equal value in Huck’s mind. He had recruited the best and the brightest and left the rest to suffer the fate of the Release.

Scott, engineer of the virus that killed the world’s population, wasn’t sure how he landed such a coveted role at Huck’s table—there had been more deserving men among the saved—but he took pride in his role as one of the elite. For this meeting, though, his fear outweighed pride. It wasn’t a secret that Huck was uncomfortable with the new arrivals—Lucy and Grant, then Ethan and Teddy—and Scott knew he was responsible. Interactions became tense, and Huck had seemed withdrawn, distrusting.

Scott put his hand on the boardroom door, but he paused when heard the hallway pod slide open. Claude entered and smiled, walking toward Scott with purpose and confidence, his head held high.

“A beautiful day for a meeting, don’t you believe?” Claude asked. His thick Haitian accent gave Scott pause for a second. While he had become more accustomed to Salvant’s dialect, sometimes he needed an extra moment to process. Claude’s daughter Cass had a smooth drawl, a silky mesmerizing way of speaking; Claude seemed more clipped and perfunctory.

“Is there any possible way to tell if it’s a beautiful day?” Scott replied with a weary smile. Claude blinked. And Scott looked to the ground. “Because, you know. We don’t have windows.” He raised his eyebrows and assessed Claude’s stoic expression. “Unless, of course, you know something I don’t? Secret periscope?”

“It’s an expression, not a declaration,” Claude said matter-of-factly. “No periscope. No, this meeting is no doubt about the Islands. At least I can assume, since I was asked to bring our latest plans.”

“How are they coming?” Scott asked, his hand still on the door.

Claude smiled. “They’re beautiful.” He opened his mouth to say more, but the boardroom door opened wide, with Gordy on the other side.