He who loves not the light. “Like me,” Joan whispers to her near corpse of a brother. His body shudders under her speech.
Like the little worm devils, Joan also found what scientists had left behind when the Earth’s population was subjected to survival of the fittest: fungi. Amoebas. Multicellular life-forms adapting and evolving at fantastic rates—all of it underground. Blind fish and transparent lizards and bone-white long-legged spiders. Spectral bats. Electric freshwater eels. Sound. Light. Energy. And not just in cave-dwelling animals. In plants, too. Living energy. Without photosynthesis.
Like me, she thinks.
But now her hands tingle. Leone. Next to her.
“Are you going to do it?”
Joan raises her head from her squatting position and speaks to Leone’s pubis. Before she can stop her own imagination, she pictures the barren cave of Leone’s reproductive system. “I don’t know.”
“He’s your brother.” Leone sighs.
“He’s dying.” Joan looks up. “That’s what the dead do. They die. We’re meant to die. From the moment we are born.”
“Bullshit.” Leone shifts her weight to one boot and crosses her arms over her breasts. “No one will ever know. It’s just you, me, and him.” Leone puts her hand on the top of Joan’s head. “And if he knows anything about . . . anything, we need to hear from him.”
What do we owe the dying? Joan closes her eyes and thinks of burying her face between Leone’s legs. Her whole chest cavity aches, as if her ribs are caving in. Leone, of course, is right. Not because any familial loyalty or love exists between Joan and her brother—too much has happened since. They share DNA, but only in the way the stars and planets and ocean flotsam do. But he’s traveled all this way to find her, and she doesn’t even know what “all this way” really means. Where did he come from? What does he have to tell? How has he survived? Are there others?
There was only one way to find out, and that was one way she’d vowed never to repeat.
When Joan learned she could raise the dead, she was fifteen. CIEL was barely in control, engineers still building it ever upward and away from the dying masses. Jean de Men conjured himself as leader. The water wars had ravaged all the continents, laying waste to what vegetation remained under the gray orange glow of the dying sun. People had become territorial animals, Darwinian cartoons. Cannibalism was rampant except among clusters of well-armed cells, people brought together by desperate familiarity. But cannibalism wasn’t the worst of it. Wars were not the worst of it. A blotted sun, starvation, radiation, violence, terror, were not the worst of it. All the dire fears of a population’s mighty history had been proven petty.
The worst of it were the radical changes in the human body.
After every human lost its hair, after fingernails and toenails began peeling away, humanity itself flashed backward.
Penises atrophying, curling up and in, like baked snails.
Vaginas suturing themselves shut, using the very secretions that once lubricated the reproductive system. Without fully understanding why, Joan was the only one spared.
Children born with unformed genitals, without ears, with barely there translucent lids on their eyes, with unformed fingers. Webbed toes. Little protuberances at the base of the tailbone.
Devolution.
When she was fifteen, Joan became responsible for a small cadre of orphaned children. Forty or so of them, in various states of fear and animal longing. Though her parents were long dead, she still had claim to the family home and land; she had fire on her side, which she could raise from the earth by placing her hands on the ground long enough to pull telluric currents alive in hellish swirls. She’d learned to control it. Napalm from the ground up.
When threatened, burn.
She kept the children fed. She kept them sheltered and together. But when they were attacked, the danger was always mass death. CIEL militants who came for them didn’t want just one of them, they wanted all of them, for food or slave labor or both. And so, she’d constructed a plan for hiding a field of children.
She dug forty-one children’s graves on the land where her father had once grown vegetables, carefully lining the graves with mud-green industrial plastic left over from farming, with enough plastic up and outside of the grave to hold the dirt. She designed forty-one rubber tubes leading to an underground airshaft—a vast tubular cave with an underground river—and placed the tubes down in the graves, at head level, for breathing. And when they faced attack, the forty-one children ran to their forty-one gravebeds and dove into them and pulled the plastic sheets over them, forcefully enough to cover themselves with dirt, and breathed life under death through the rubber tubes.
All anyone who arrived saw was the evidence of a mass burial. A mass murder. Little mounds of dirt clearly meant for children. There, she thought, they would be safe.
But she underestimated the power of evil. Or, perhaps, the power of power. One night, there came the familiar crack and thunder in the sky of a CIEL probe entering the atmosphere. The children went into action, burying themselves alive with great precision and speed. All night Joan watched over them, waiting for a glimpse of a Skyline. What she did not know was that CIEL had attained the technology to hide the elevators, to render them invisible. And that they could detect the heat of the little bodies still alive beneath all that dirt. They pumped methane gas into the tiny graves, displacing enough oxygen to make the children cough and sputter against their breathing tubes, asphyxiating them all in their false sleep. Like killing moles or rats.
Joan herself noted the hint of a chemical scent for a moment, but then chemical smells weren’t uncommon in this place.
In the morning, no one woke.