The Dead Lands (23 page)

T
HIS IS SIMON'S
chance to prove himself to Ella. She thinks of him as her ward, a clumsy child. He will show her what he is capable of, his guts and prowess, by breaking into the Dome to deliver the letter and search for whatever Lewis wanted them to find.

He will go there at night, when only a few guards haunt the halls and he can whisper in and out without any trouble. He will fold the letter into Danica's panties, they decide. Not her pillow. There it might be discovered by a servant or her husband. And not a gown hanging in the closet. There it might wait undiscovered for a month or more. “No,” Ella says, “only her panties will do. A good everyday pair. Faded, worn, maybe even holey.”

“Woman like that would never wear a pair of holey panties.”

“Every woman has a pair of holey panties. They're her favorite panties.”

Simon is disturbed by the two letters, the very different realities they present. Lewis talks of water and Reed talks of death. When he brings this up to Ella, she dismisses the question. “Lewis doesn't lie. And he loves to complain. So let's trust in his version of things. There's water out there. There's hope. And one day, we're going to leave this place and join him.”

We
. She uses the word so often these days, as if they are one. He likes the way it sounds.

In the museum, in their room, the windows are dark and a candle burns on the bureau. The flame flutters and sends furtive shadows dancing when Simon holds out his arms and turns in a circle and asks, “Am I ready?”

He wears all brown, except for his cast, which earlier she painted black, so that he might better merge with the shadows. She scans his body, then buttons his back pocket so it won't scrape or catch on anything. She tells him to jump up and down, and when he does, his pockets rattle with some coins and a small ivory carving of a heart he hands over to her. “That's from one of the exhibits,” she says, and he says, “Sorry. I just wanted to keep it for a little while.”

He jumps again, this time without any noise except the patter of his bare feet.

Ella moves to give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder but it feels more like a punch. “Ready.”

First the letter, then whatever Lewis alluded to, some
thing
they might use to their advantage. He has no plan except to sneak room to room, to inventory every drawer and closet. Whatever he seeks, he will hopefully know it when he sees it.

The night is wrapped in many sheets of silence. There is the silence of the night sky—flecked with stars, a glossy granite black—an imposing, powerful silence that makes him feel like eyes might very well be watching his every move. There is the silence of the streets, where by day brooms scrape and people walk and cats scamper and carts rattle, a place so often bustling that its barrenness feels like a skull once wild with hair, like branches stripped of leaves by a winter wind, like death. And then there is the silence inside him—the calm he feels whenever he readies to sneak his hand into a pocket or scramble through an open window—every fiber in his body under his control, awaiting his command.

An iron fence, with bales of barbed wire along the top, surrounds the Dome. Simon patrols its perimeter and finds one deputy on watch. He smokes at the front gate, and when he breathes, a bright red eye seems to throb in the dark. Simon slips off his backpack and holds it in one hand. He has been here before and knows he is just thin enough, if he turns his head, to mash his body through the bars. It takes a little more effort this time, maybe because Ella's cooking has rounded him out.

Once through, he pads to the edge of the building, scraping through the bushes that grow along it. The windowsills are spiked with metal and glass, to keep birds from nesting and people from climbing. He removes from his backpack a pair of leather gloves, one of them slit along the wrist to accommodate his cast. Though it is past midnight, the metal still throbs with the heat of the day. He can feel it when he curls his hands around the spikes and hoists himself up. He does so crookedly, his left arm mostly useless except to stabilize his body as he draws it upward.

The first floor is barred with iron, but not the next level, the living quarters, where the windows remain open through the day and night to accommodate a breeze. Over the years, he has studied these enough to know where there is movement, where there is light, where he needs to worry about running into someone once inside.

The window above him, he knows, will deposit him directly into a hallway nook with a wingback chair and a round-topped pedestal on which rests a vase of dried flowers. He must climb to get there, nearly ten feet, and the stone is impossibly sleek, with no place to grip a toe or finger. While he balances on the ledge—his toes on, his heels off, his knees pinched around a bar—he removes his backpack and slips out a telescoping antenna that he salvaged from an electronics store. Once extended, it locks in place. He has welded to its tip a V of metal that serves as a kind of claw. At the bottom of his backpack he has stored a coil of climbing rope, each end of it threaded into a hook. He fits one of these hooks into the claw at the antenna's tip.

The bottom windows are divided by three vertical bars and two horizontal. He steps onto the first and then the second bar and stretches until his calves bunch painfully and his vertebrae feel like they might pop, finally reaching the rope to the sill above, the hook gripping one of the pigeon spikes on the sill. To climb, he uses his feet as much as his hands. The rope is knotted every twelve inches or so to accommodate his grip. He dangles beneath the second sill, shrugging off his backpack and tossing it over the spikes, shielding his belly when he drags himself over.

He allows himself only a moment's rest before retrieving the rope and coiling it neatly into the bottom of the backpack. He is tempted to leave the pack here, hidden behind the chair in the hallway, but he has learned not to trust the way in as the way out, depending on what trouble he might encounter—maybe nothing but maybe something.

The hallway is socked with darkness broken by blue beams of moonlight. He keeps his feet flat and brings them down softly, so that he makes no more noise than a cat gliding across a rug, when he sneaks his way three doors down, Danica's.

The knob is made from decorative brass. Maybe a minute passes before he turns it completely, and maybe a minute more before he opens enough of a crack to slip through. Her room smells spicy with perfumes. The bed is hers alone; her husband sleeps down the hall.

She is so thin, he cannot make out her body beneath the sheets, but her hair gives her away, as white-blond as thistledown, whiter even than her bed linens. He tries to detect her breathing but cannot, with the window open and the thrum of the city in the room. She has not drawn her curtains and the air is silvered with moonlight. He takes in his surroundings—its desk and dresser, its paintings of wildflower meadows, of lily-padded ponds, of women in white lace twirling sun umbrellas at garden parties—before starting forward.

His hand reaches first for the top left drawer of her dresser and he finds there the skins of stockings and many slips as thin as paper. In the next drawer he finds her panties, so many of them the drawer catches when he slides it out. He digs around, but every pair seems fresh off the sewing table—not a filthy, holey pair of panties in sight. He can't wait to tell Ella.

He has the letter folded in his pocket. He slips it now into the topmost pair of panties. His fingers tease the fabric. Heat spikes inside him. He felt calm until now, his heartbeat fluttering up to the burning tips of his ears.

There is something about stealing he misses. With Ella, his life has grown comfortable, and the other side of comfort is boredom. He feels more alive now than he has in weeks. When you have no home, you find pleasure in taking from others who do. It is about the money, the value, yes, but it is also about energy. Harvesting from them some object that might be worthless—a photo, a trinket—that must matter to them: that seems somehow electrical, and making it his own, energizing himself.

That is how the panties feel to him. Charged. He cannot help himself. He slips a pair from the drawer and bunches it into his pocket—just as he feels a dagger at his spine and breath on his neck.

“Those are mine,” the voice says.

G
AWEA SHARES A
blanket with Lewis, the two of them bundled together for warmth. She watches him scribble in his journal. The rest of them stare at the campfire and at each other. They gather at the leeward base of a hill as tall as four men stacked upon each other's shoulders. It appears to have been cut by a great knife, its side is so steep. The sky is black, with the moon and stars forever bundled in clouds. Everyone huddles close to the fire. A column of heat and smoke twists upward and the snow vanishes into it, extinguished in little wisps of steam.

Lewis brought the journal with him to chronicle, author the new world. Map the landscape. Sketch whatever flora and fauna he observed. Such as this plant, with its thin-jointed, odd-angled stalks topped by purple flowers in the summer, now wilted to a bony brown and bristling with frost. He lifts his pen and the ink freezes and he blows on the tip to warm it.

Every day, he has another set of questions for Gawea, and though she once found him pestering, she now feels a kinship in their secret sharing. He tells her he has come to understand that knowledge is not enough. Observation is not enough. He no longer wishes to be a scholar, a gatherer, a chronicler, but a creator, too. The same impulse that drove him to tinker with inventions now compels him to tinker with the world.

“What are you writing?” Clark says.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just playing around with some theories.” Then he notices all their eyes on him. They want to know. They want something from him in the same way he wants something from Gawea. He looks to her, as if for permission, and she says, “Go ahead. You're the teacher now.”

The wood pops and the wind hushes and Lewis licks his lips several times before he finds the words he wants. “Did you know that humans used to bite like other primates? Their incisors clipped, edge to edge, the bottom and the top coming together to tear and gnash. Then, somewhere around the late eighteenth century, two things happened. People began to braise and pound and cook their meat. And to slice up their food to pop into their mouths with forks. Almost immediately the European population developed an overbite, their incisors now coming together like scissor blades.”

Clark says, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“The body changes. People adapt, sometimes in an instant.”

He holds his journal upright for them to see. Next to the sketch of the plant he has written down its common designation—skeleton weed—and then its scientific identity—
Lygodesmia texana
—and then its chemical and cellular structure, and then he
knows
it in a way he never has before, like a lover undressed and drawn to bed, a name whispered in an ear, an accommodating body, submissive to his wants. “Gawea taught me this.”

He looks at her and smiles and she smiles back.

“When you know something, really know it, its chemicals, its strings and charges, its clustered atoms, in essence you know its secrets, and when you know someone's secrets, they answer when called.”

Clark says, “You ask, they answer.”

“Pretty much.”

Gawea says, “They don't always answer.”

Everyone huddles down into their blankets and no one looks particularly convinced.

“Show them,” Gawea says. “Show them with the weed.”

In a five-foot ring around the fire, the snow has mostly melted. He holds out a hand to the skeleton weed, as if in offering, his fingertips spotted with ink. He looks at Gawea questioningly and she says, “You can do it.”

He closes his eyes. The arm shivers from the cold or the effort. After what feels like many minutes it listens. Greening. Blistering with a lavender bud.

York's eyes seem to grow wider. The doctor shakes her head and sucks her teeth. Clark's face is impassive, her head crowned by a red nimbus of hair. Colter might be grinning, but it's difficult to tell with his torn cheek. Reed has his head in his hands, lost in some private darkness.

The fire snaps and hisses, the wood wet. The wind rises, scuttling leaves, curling snakes of snow around them. “It's magic,” York says.

“No,” Gawea says. “Magic is just a word people use for what they can't understand. You should know that better than anyone. You and your tricks.”

York flinches, hurt.

Lewis tucks his journal and ink and pen away. “My mother once said that she knew when I was in trouble. If I fell and scraped a knee, or if the other boys picked on me”—here he looks at Clark meaningfully—“or girls. If something happened to me, she always knew. She found me once, you know. That time you hog-tied me and hung me from a balcony? She found me and she cut me down. She didn't carry knives but she had a knife in her pocket that day. As if she knew she would need it. Every parent has a story like this, and I suppose it makes sense. We are them. We are made from them. In this same way, everything is born of something else, everything twinned.”

Gawea doesn't know why she's being so generous. Maybe it's the enormity of the night, the way it seems to crush them together, make them one instead of many. She says, “You've heard the saying? We're all made of stardust? We're all made of stardust. We're all made of the same thing.”

A few of them look up, as if to consult the sky for an answer, but the night and the clouds muddle whatever they might hope to find.

“In a way it's true,” Lewis says. “And once Gawea helped me recognize that, to see how everything is connected, it was a little like growing another eye. Or another hand, another nose. Another level of sense. And with that sense comes the ability to manipulate.”

Gawea can't help it. She likes it—she does—when he talks about her admiringly. It makes her feel like she matters inside of someone instead of outside, more than a mere guide leading them through a maze.

For a while there is only the fire snapping; then York says, “I hear you, but it's just a bunch of words.”

Everyone is staring at the skeleton weed, now unfurling into a purple bloom, a small shoot of life in the season of dying. The wind is ceaseless, whistling around the edges of the hill and whipping up snow. The fire bends and flattens, struggling to right itself against the gusts.

It is then that the body falls.

There is a crack—as the logs break beneath its weight—followed by a concussion of air filled with embers that sting their exposed faces. They cry out and roll away and try to calm their minds, not knowing at first what has happened, not even knowing where they are, still caught up in the unreality of Lewis's demonstration.

It is a deer, they discover. A buck with a sizable rack of antlers. At first they think it might have, in confusion, in the whirling snow, wandered off the edge of the ledge. Then they hold a flaming log closer and examine its body and see its throat torn away.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Gawea wished them all dead, considered them an annoyance, an impediment. Now she is the first one to reach for a gun, eager to defend them. She remembers what Burr said about how she might discover camaraderie, something to fight her perpetual loneliness, and how resistant she was to that suggestion. They need her—that is clear—but now she feels, with some reluctance, she might need them too. Could she call them friends? Was that the right word? It implied a valued closeness at odds with where and why she led them. If only they could remain everlastingly in motion, if only their journey would never end. Because when it ended, this would end, the fond nervous connection she feels to a huddle of bodies shivering in the night.

She does not sleep and nothing comes out of the snowy dark. But she knows the danger is out there. And she knows if it does not find them, she will eventually lead them to it.