“So, what did Nevada talk with you about?” I ask, as we help clean up from lunch. It’s our turn. The others have wandered to the parlor and are busy playing some card game.
“She spoke about Dr. Varik.” Armonk puts a dried food pack on the shelf. “How she met him a long time ago and helped save him. He’d crashed through a rock formation—a mimetolith shaped like a cup—and was almost dead. He …” Armonk stops there and lowers his head until his black bangs curtain his face. I guess he’s not sure how much he wants to tell me.
I need to break through Armonk’s hesitation. He’s the only friendly one around, so as soon as he looks up I send him a winning smile. That’s always worked before. “What happened after she rescued him?” I ask. “And did you ever meet his father, the professor?”
Armonk looks surprised that I don’t know the story. He explains that Varik’s father was murdered up north by terrorists who wanted access to his research on Fireseed. He tells me how Varik found the Fireseed plants inside the cup-shaped rock formation, all those years ago where he crashed in the desert, and that he dug a few of them up north to breed with the last known agar seeds. He says that the last three Fireseed plants died when he got them up north, but a few days before they withered, they bred like crazy with the last agar seedlings.
And that’s how Varik saved the world with the new hybrid, Fireagar.
My jaw hangs open. This is such a different story than the elders told us. They said Varik was a false prophet, a good-for-nothing who didn’t deserve to be called a Teitur. And no word was ever uttered about the Professor being murdered, or how Fireagar came into being. We still worship by that cup mimetolith! And all of that time, Fireseed was hiding inside it? The world as I know is becoming a weak, faded fabric that first the teachers, and now Armonk are shredding into irreparable rags. It makes me shake with anger.
“But Fireseed is here, at The Greening!” I exclaim. “How did it get here then?”
Armonk peers around to see if anyone else has come in.
I check outside the door to make sure no one’s in the adjoining room. “Coast is clear, come on, you can tell me,” I wheedle.
He looks unconvinced, but continues in a hushed voice. “Nevada went back to the cup mimetolith and dug up the rest of those plants. Kept them hidden. No one knew.”
“That’s impossible!” I hiss. “That rock face is near our compound. Our elders would’ve known it. They would’ve gone down inside and dug up every last plant.” I pause. “Besides, Fireseed would’ve told us.”
Armonk studies me with that sad pity as before. I don’t need to hear him say it. It’s clear that he doesn’t believe in a Fireseed god. No one does around here, except for Thorn and me.
I don’t want Armonk’s pity. I want information. I offer another melting smile that shrouds my anger and confusion. It’s the only reliable way I know to keep a guy talking. “But why would Varik want to come down here again, when he has everything he needs up north?”
Armonk doesn’t return the smile, yet he goes on. “He doesn’t have everything he needs up north. He needs us.”
“Why?”
“He wants to be a doctor down here. Help the desert people.”
“Is that what you were talking about with Nevada?”
“Partly.” He reaches down and touches his alien leg. “He made this for me when he stayed with us in Black Hills Sector, on his way south.”
I nod wistfully. “I never spoke to him but I waved to him, at our compound.” I slowly raise my right hand with its three missing fingers. “He saw this. Maybe he can fix me too.”
“What happened to you?” Armonk’s voice shows his alarm.
Now it’s my turn to be silent. It happened soon after Stiles first picked me. I was little then, but I already hated his burning eyes, his smelly breath, the way he’d come up to me at mealtimes and tell me that I was his special girl. The second or third time he said this, my mother told me that I spat a wad of my chewed up food on his boot. That he lost his temper and took his knife to me, catching my three middle fingers and slicing them half off. I ran to my mother, screaming, and she hurried me to the nurse. The nurse sewed them on, but infection set in, and they had to be removed. My father pleaded with the elders to have me paired with someone, anyone else. But things like that are set—set from way back. The elders threatened to put my father out. My parents had seen others put out. Found their curled up corpses in the shadow of the mimetoliths, like newborns exposed to the sun’s wrath. But I can’t tell Armonk this. The words catch in my throat and my eyes glaze over. I yearn for a lengthy draw of Oblivion Powder to deaden the humiliation my father must’ve felt. I’ve never thought about that much before but I feel its rawness now—a father unable to defend his own daughter.
“S’okay,” says Armonk, and I focus again on his dark, understanding eyes. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.” Something in his voice makes my arms erupt in gooseflesh so I hug them to my chest. He says, “I’m sure Dr. Varik could fix them.”