Whispery words, quiet and detached. Then they touch me. They push aside my arms, hands pressing against my chest, fingers poking between my ribs. Then they’re hoisting me out of the enclave. Cool air splashes against my skin, chilling me. I try to stand, but my legs are jellified. I collapse to the metallic floor. Immediately I start crawling away from these men, my legs scrabbling over the slippery tiled floor.

They don’t stop me, don’t utter a word to me. They only pace beside me, their feet mincing along with unnerving calm beside my frantic, crawling body. I bump up against the wall, spin around. The men—three of them, reedy and swaying slightly as if blown by a breeze—surround me. Their pale skin glows with a sour-milk complexion.

White cubicle curtains hang from tracks on the ceiling, sectioning us off from whatever lies on the other side. I squirm up into a sitting position. In the far corner stands someone tall, broad shouldered, his face blurry.

“Do not be afraid,” the man immediately in front of me says. Cold, detached, clinical.

“We mean you no harm.”

“You’re safe now,” the third man says. His thin upper lip slips up his row of teeth, exposing a pair of sharp incisors.

Instantly I’m leaping to my feet, my fist connecting with his soft, effeminate cheek. The man collapses to the ground, offering as much resistance as a daffodil. But the other two are on me in an instant, their speed compensating for their lack of strength.

One of the men is holding a hypodermic needle.

I smack it away. It shatters, its contents—a dark-green fluid—splattering on the wall. I need to escape through the part in the curtains, but before I can get my legs in motion I feel a sharp prick on the side of my neck. I grab the nearest man by the scruff of his neck, push him against the wall. His shades smack into the wall, crack into two, and fall to the floor.

I feel something dangling from my neck. I reach for it, pull it out. Another hypodermic needle, the syringe fully depressed, a dark-green droplet hanging off the tip of the needle. The man squirms, trying to escape.

“Where’s Sissy?” I shout, pressing him against the wall, keeping his fangs away from me. “The girl! What have you done with her?”

Face smushed against the wall, the man shakes his head vigorously from side to side, stammering.

“Take me to her!” I shout, my words slurred and thick.

The man begins to turn. He has found a surge of strength, his arms now able to break out of my hold. A wave of dizziness hits me. The man extricates himself from my grip, faces me. The room tilts, canting at a harsh angle. My legs wobble with sudden weakness. Leering, he shoves me, causing me to stumble and almost completely lose my balance. My vision swims. He hasn’t gotten stronger; I’ve gotten weaker. Whatever he injected into me, it is working quickly and powerfully.

Then a set of hands clamps down on me from behind. “Do not resist.” This voice is masculine, authoritative. His grip on my shoulders is strong and assured. I turn around, realize it is the man who just a moment ago was standing in the corner. My legs fail me, and I start falling. He catches me, lowers me to the ground. “We are not them. Do not resist. We are not them.” He speaks these words softly now, with tenderness.

“Father?” I murmur.

But it is not. It is the burly man I’d seen in the catacombs an hour ago, the one who’d spoken to me in the restroom weeks ago. He looks exactly the same as he did back at the Heper Institute, even wearing the same prissy pair of glasses. Except now he’s dressed not in a tight-fitting tuxedo but in the regal attire of the highly ranked.

“Do not be afraid,” he says gently. “Nothing is as it seems.”

And then I fade out.

Thirteen

GENE!”

I fling my mind upward trying to break through a dome of sedated darkness. The room tilts and spins; it takes a second before everything stills.

I’m in the same sectioned-off cubicle as before. I recognize the same curtains, even see the faint splotch of green on the wall where the hypodermic needle had shattered earlier. I’m in a bed. My ankles and wrists cuffed to the metal bed rails flanking me. How much time has passed it’s impossible to tell.

“Gene, wake up!” It’s Sissy, right next to me.

The restraints prevent me from sitting up completely. But Sissy’s cot is pushed up against mine, at an acute angle, the head corners touching. Her fingers reach out for mine through the bars of the railings. I maneuver my hand until my fingers are intertwined with hers.

That’s when I notice. A thin plastic tube is inserted into the crooks of our arms. The tubes lead into transfusion bags hanging on each side of our beds. They’re filled with blood. Our blood.

“How did you—”

“These cots have wheels on them. I was on the other side of that curtain in another area also sectioned off by curtains. It took me some time, but I was able to swing-push it over. Inch by inch.” Sweat beads dot her wan face. She looks exhausted.

“They’re draining you of your blood. We’ve got to get these tubes off.”

She shakes her head. “I tried earlier. It sets off an alarm. They came storming in within minutes. Don’t do it. Not yet. We need to talk.”

“Are you okay?”

Her fingers clasp mine tighter. “I think so. Do you think David and Epap are okay?”

“They’re fine,” I say, even though I don’t really know. I try to raise my head, but it feels bloated and heavy. “Who were those men?”

“They’re human. That much is obvious. Else we’d be eaten by now.” A bead of sweat glides down her face. She wants to wipe at it but can’t; her cuffs clang loudly against the railing. “They know everything about us, Gene. They know we’re the Origin. And they’re going to keep drawing our blood for who knows how long.”

“How many of them are there?”

“I think there’s only four of them. They call themselves the Originators. They’ve been working undercover here for years. One of them, the leader, is pretty high ranking, I think.”

“We need to reason with them, Sissy. If they’re really one of us, we need to tell them we can escape from here. Us, the kids in the catacombs, and them, the Originators. We can take the train back to the Mission, then head east from there.”

She shakes her head. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do for hours? But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Why not? Did you tell them—”

“I told them everything, Gene. Detail by detail. I left out nothing. I spoke of your father, his instructions, the hang gliders, the Nede River, everything. They just nodded and stared blankly at me. And continued to draw blood. When I raised my voice and got combative, they . . . shot me with another injection.”

I pull on the restraints, but they feel, in my vanquished state, even sturdier than before.

“You need to know something, Gene.” She turns to me. “When I was telling them everything about the past, the history of the duskers, there were a few things that didn’t add up.”

“Like what?”

Her jaw clenches in frustration. “I don’t know. If I wasn’t so exhausted and hungry all the time, if I wasn’t thrown into weirder and weirder environments before I can gather myself, maybe I could put my finger on it. But my head’s spinning, Gene. I can’t collect my thoughts for even a minute.”

Sissy’s suspicion echoes my own. Even back on the train when we were fleeing the Mission, similar questions had troubled me. “What do you think is going on here?”

She pauses. “I don’t know.” Her eyes focus on mine. “But I’m not about to simply lie here while David and Epap are still in the catacombs.” She curls to her side and with her teeth rips out the tube from one arm, then the other.

Two Originators charge in less than a minute later. They rush to Sissy’s side without speaking, attempt to reattach the needles into her arms.

“Stop moving your arms,” one says in a stern, clinical voice. They try to pin her arms down, but, even restrained, she’s able to break out of the grip of their spindly arms.

The men stare blankly at her. One of them goes to a phone on the wall. “We need you,” he says. Then he hangs up.

He rejoins the other. They stand solemnly at the feet of our beds, waiting in silence.

A minute later, we hear the door open, then locked. I instantly recognize the broad-shouldered man as he pushes through a part in the curtains. He does not look particularly upset or in a rush. More bemused, almost apologetic. He’s since put on a velvet frock coat decorated with Palace regalia. Judging from the number of crests and badges, Sissy’s right. He’s highly ranked.

“What’s the matter?” he begins to ask, then sees the ripped-out transfusion cords. “Oh. Oh, I see.” He strokes his left eyebrow with his right thumb, once, twice.

“Obviously,” he says, “by now you realize we’re your friends. We’re on the same side.”

I tug at the restraints, making them clang nosily. “You have a pretty low bar for friendship.”

The men scratch their wrists. “He has a sense of humor, this one,” one of them says, monotone and deadpan.

“Where are David and Epap?” Sissy demands.

The highly ranked man ignores Sissy’s question and places his hand on my shin. I try to pull away, but the restraints prevent movement. He strokes my leg, his palm sickly smooth and cold to the touch. Like chilled plastic. “Seventeen years you lived among them, yet how quickly you revert to heper ways. You’ve let your leg hair grow out. Stubs and prickles of hair everywhere,” he whispers with naked disdain. “On your arms, in your armpits, even a stubble on your face.”

The other men, fascinated and disgusted in equal parts, also touch my leg with their fingertips, probing, rubbing the short stubs of leg hair, trailing their fingers down my ankle.

“Stop touching me.”

Their fingers pause. They look at their leader. He nods, and they remove their hands. He regards me for a long time.