Origin (16 page)

“You did it.”

“Of course I did,” she returns, looking a bit indignant. “I went to a damn all-girls private school. I
had
to learn every trick in the book when it comes to sneaking out, or else die of social deprivation.”

Somehow, I can see her doing just that. “Well, thanks, anyway.”

“You’re welcome. Now are you going to scoot inside or will I have to kill the next person that comes along and sees you on the wrong side of the fence?”

“Kill them?” My mouth drops open. “But—”

“Not literally, Pia!” She throws her hands up in exasperation.

I go through the gate, hardly believing my good luck. After seeing everyone gathered around my secret exit and being so sure I wouldn’t be able to sneak back in, I have no idea what to do now. They won’t accept a simple explanation for my absence. To say that I was reading in the research library or
working out in the gym will never satisfy Uncle Paolo, and having known me all my life, he’d see right through me in a heartbeat. And besides, I’m a terrible liar thanks to the fact that I never
do
lie. Until now, I’ve never had anything to lie about.

But there
is
someone apparently quite skilled at lying.…Though I hate having to go to her for yet another favor. Still, she’s all I’ve got.

“Um, Aunt Harriet?”

“Yes?” She has a look in her eyes like she already knows what I’m going to ask, and it gives her no end of amusement.

Oh, come on, Pia. Swallow your pride and get it over with
. “What, uh, should I say when they come in and find me?”

“Hmm. You need a story, and a good one. Several hours and no word or sign, and, let’s face it, Little Cam isn’t that big. They searched everywhere for you.” She nibbles her lip and stares at me thoughtfully. “All right. I’ve got it. Come with me.”

She takes off at a jog across the circular drive, and I follow and hope she knows what she’s doing. I’ve no idea if I can trust her, but under the circumstances, it seems there’s no choice. Aunt Harriet knows my secret, so for now, I’m at her mercy.

Once we’re out of sight of the fence and anyone who might be patrolling it, she slows and walks beside me. “In situations like this, the best lie is the one that incites sympathy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you were to say you fell asleep in a corner somewhere or were hiding on purpose, that would only make them angrier—and believe me, they’re plenty angry already.”

I nod, remembering the conversation I overheard between Uncle Paolo and Uncle Antonio.

“So,” Aunt Harriet continues, “it’s much better to think up a situation that, when discovered, will make
them
feel guilty. For example, a piano fell on top of you, and you couldn’t move.”

“What!” I stop and stare at her in horror.

“Oh, good grief, Pia, I was only kidding! But you get the idea?”

“I guess,” I say, moving again, albeit with much more distance between us, just in case she does decide to drop a piano on me.

“The trick is to get them to feel sorry for you. Sympathy is the best replacement for anger. So,” she stops and waves a hand at the building we’ve stopped at. B Labs, the smaller of the two main research buildings in Little Cam, situated by the northeastern line of the fence. “In we go.”

“Why? What’s the plan?”

She doesn’t answer, but leads me through the white, polished hallways without once looking back. Everyone must be out looking for me; the place is eerily quiet. Our footsteps strike off the floor to echo down the walls, and the tiles beneath my feet are so pristinely clean that when I look down it’s as if I’m looking in a mirror. The white doors we pass are all simply marked
LAB 114, LAB 115, LAB 116,
and they’re punctuated with smaller, windowless supply and janitorial closets. Above us, the florescent lights burn as steadily and relentlessly as the sun. Uncle Paolo hates nothing so much as a faulty lightbulb, and whenever one shows the first sign of giving out, he has Clarence change it.

Finally she stops and puts her hands on her hips, staring around with a perplexed look. “Where’s that refrigerator room…”

“Lab 112?” I say. “It’s that way—”

“What’s in here?” she interrupts, heading for a door at the end of the hallway.

“Don’t go in there,” I say.

“Why?” Her hand hovers over the doorknob.

“That’s the old wing. It burned years ago. No one uses it; it’s just a husk.”

“Really?” She studies the door curiously. “Strange. There’s no fire damage to the outside of the building.”

I shrug. “No one’s allowed in there. It’s dangerous.”

She tries the knob, but it doesn’t turn. “Locked.”

“Aunt Harriet—”

Before I can stop her, she’s slipped her cardkey through the door and the frame, and the door swings open. I almost warn her again not to go in, but my curiosity overwhelms me. I follow her slowly.

The hall beyond is dark and dusty and lined with doors that have little windows in them. Aunt Harriet tries the first one; it opens easily. The room is small and dim, and we can just make out a bench against the far wall. There is no evidence of fire anywhere, but the room looks old and certainly abandoned. It’s too small to be a lab or a dorm room and too large to be a supply closet. The wood floor has at least an inch of dust coating it.

Aunt Harriet points wordlessly at the bench. Iron chains, rusty with age, hang over its sides like old bones. Long grooves run down the length of the wood, like marks left by fingernails.

A chill runs down my spine as if it is being raked by those same nails. This room is like none I know in Little Cam. It is
too cold and dark and lonely, and there are secrets here I don’t want to learn.

“Let’s keep looking.” Aunt Harriet goes back to the hallway, and reluctantly I follow. The next room is nearly identical to the first. The one after that has no bench, but it does have more scratches—these ones on the wall, starting at head height and streaking downward. The next room has dark stains on the wood floor and a faint metallic scent in the air.

Every hair on my head seems to be standing on end by now, and when Aunt Harriet starts for the next door, I shake my head. “No more.”

Aunt Harriet simply nods. We tiptoe back into the lit hall as if afraid of waking some sleeping monster.

Back in the light, with the door shut securely against the shadows, we stand and stare at each other.

After a minute, I whisper, “I didn’t like how it felt. It made me feel…cold.”

She nods, her face white. “I’ve seen rooms like those before.”

“Where?”

She shakes her head and seems unwilling to speak more of it. “Pia, do you have any idea what that wing was used for?”

“No. They said it was labs and storage, all lost in the…”
The fire that never was.
“Why would they lie?” I whisper.

Aunt Harriet doesn’t reply, just watches me with a strange, distant gaze. “We need to hide you.”

“Oh, yeah.” I try to shake off the dark mood that clamped onto me, leechlike, when we entered the hall on the other side of the door. We find Lab 112 and the row of walk-in
refrigerators inside—refrigerators that cannot be opened from within. I see Aunt Harriet’s plan immediately. It’s a good one, but it won’t be any fun for me.

With a sigh, I slip into one of them, wishing I could think of a better idea. Aunt Harriet pauses before closing the door.

“Pia…”

“Yes?”

“You know, I’ve been given a small lab near the front gate to do my research in.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well,” she lifts her eyebrows meaningfully. “I
could
ask for a certain someone to join me once in a while…for educational purposes, of course. Several hours a day, when everyone thinks you’re safe and sound with me…”

I meet her gaze and understand what she’s offering. She can’t possibly know what I was up to in the jungle, but she’s extending a way for me to go back to it, if I want. But I’m not sure
what
I want right now. So I just give a little, noncommittal nod. She returns the nod and says nothing more on it. “I’ll wait an hour or so, then casually ask if anyone thought to check in here. You’d better be prepared with an explanation for getting yourself in such a stupid situation by then, okay?”

I nod.

“Aunt Harriet,” I say “Why are you helping me like this?”

She pauses and starts to say something, then covers it in a grim smile. “See you in an hour, Pia.”

And she shuts the door.

There’s a small window in the door, but it’s too frosty to reveal much more than the opening and closing of the lab
door as Aunt Harriet leaves. Resigned now to my hour of torture, I turn and survey the little room.

There are two sets of metal shelves on either side of me, filled with plastic containers labeled with complex codes of letters and numbers and even colorful stickers. I chose this refrigerator for a reason, and that reason sits on the second shelf about three feet down from my left arm. It’s a container of samples of
Anopholese darlingi
—mosquitoes—which I’ve been using in my studies of malaria with Uncle Haruto and my father. One of our sessions was scheduled for today; I’ll say I wanted to get an early start and accidentally shut the door behind me.

As I sit and shiver on the floor of the refrigerator, I can think only of the intense heat of the Ai’oan fires, so much stronger, wilder, and more dangerous than the electric heaters we use in Little Cam. I’d start a fire in here now, but there’s nothing to burn except tissue samples, and they’d hardly last ten minutes.

I wish we had more open fires in Little Cam, just like I wish we had children. No one talks about them here. If any of the workers or scientists here have them, they never mention them. I guess they probably never had any, or maybe they all grew up and moved away; why else would their parents leave them? I already feel like the world is a little darker without their laughter and nonsense games around me. I envy Eio and his life with the children and wonder how my own life would be different if I had had other kids my age to play with as I grew up.

But Little Cam is not a place for children. There is
nowhere for them to run and play, and anyway, Uncle Paolo says anything that doesn’t contribute to research here is extraneous and unnecessary. He would say that children only get in the way and break things and distract you from your real work. When I was little, I had Uncle Antonio following me everywhere, keeping me out of everyone’s way and making sure I didn’t interrupt important experiments. We spent our time in the social center, mostly. He taught me how to swim, read, add, subtract. I imagine all of the Ai’oan children trying to sit for as long as I did with Uncle Antonio, finding square roots and doing long division. It would be a nightmare. They have more wild energy than I ever had—or maybe I did have it, but without other kids, I never learned how to express it. All I knew was how to be an adult, and not just any adult, but a scientist. Even as young as four I was being trained to take my place on the Immortis team.

I tell myself that Uncle Paolo must be right. My enchantment with the littlest of the Ai’oans is only me letting my emotions get out of control. And
there is nothing so dangerous as the loss of control
, Uncle Paolo’s voice echoes in my thoughts, repeating one of his favorite sayings.

Deep inside, I know I’m really only thinking about all of this in order to keep a different thought at bay: the thought of that dark hallway and the little rooms, the odd chains and scratch marks on the wooden bench.
What about the fire? Why would they lie to me?

And one question chills me more than even the refrigerator I’m trapped in:
What are they hiding?

To stop myself from thinking so much, I start pounding on the door as if I’d been doing so all day. I beat so long and
hard against the relentless metal, laced as it is with frost, that I almost begin to believe my own lie. I’m certainly cold enough to be fooled.

When the door opens, I’m half-frozen and so desperate to get out that my fists keep pumping for several seconds after they’ve wrapped me in blankets. Once I realize that I’m well and truly out and that Uncle Antonio and Mother and Uncle Paolo and Aunt Harriet are all there raining concern down on me, I calm down enough to stammer out my explanation for having been there in the first place. The fake one, of course.

I’m relieved when they don’t interrogate me further, and I tell myself that the look Uncle Paolo and Mother exchange is nothing more than coincidence. And that the fierceness of Mother’s grip on my shoulder as she escorts me from the room is nothing more than maternal concern for her half-frozen daughter.

Aunt Harriet never so much as blinks.

T
wo days pass. I remain terrified that someone will realize it was all a cover-up, and Aunt Harriet and I will be hauled into Uncle Paolo’s office. But nothing happens outside of the usual routine—excepting the box of matches that I steal from the kitchen when Jacques isn’t looking.

In the privacy of my room, with my door securely shut, I stand in front of the mirror, pull a match from the box, and strike it. I’m not sure what I’ll see, or if I’ll see anything at all, but since Ai’oa, I can’t get Eio’s words out of my head:
“The mark is only seen by fire.”

I hold the match a few inches from my nose and watch for something to happen.

Nothing does.

So I lean closer, until I’m almost nose to nose with my own face, and lift the match higher.

And I see it, just as the match burns to my fingers. I wouldn’t have noticed the flame on my skin if it hadn’t finally
snuffed out. The tips of my fingers are warm, but unmarked by the fire. I strike another match—one, two, three times before it lights—and nearly stick it in my eye, I’m so shaken by what I saw.

It almost looks like firelight reflecting in my eyes. Almost. But the small flame of the match is still and steady, unlike the shifting bursts of gold and violet in my irises. I’ve never seen them before. Never even suspected. And I’m sure no one else in Little Cam has either. Uncle Paolo has certainly never mentioned the swirling flames. But there they are, tiny lights eddying and blooming against the blue-green of my irises. When I hold the match away, they disappear, but as soon as I bring it back, they’re there again. The colors of elysia, trapped in my eyes, blossoming and circling and fading like fire, like water, like smoke.