Page 59 of The Infinite Glade
“Yes, keep going.” She nodded.
“. . . Para el Senado de los Secuenciadores . . .” He tried to say that last squiggly word again, “Secuenciadores?”
She repeated the same word back but made a rolling sound with her throat at the end. “Secuenciadores . . .”
“So what’s that mean?”
She lowered her head. “Last chance for the Sequencers, or last chance for the Senate of Sequencers . . .”
“Oh . . . so, what Cian and Erros were saying is true? About the Sequencers?”
“It’s bullshit.” Ximena got to her feet in a huff.
“Buttruebullshit,” he said as she paced the bank of the island. “Right?” Dark water softly swished in small waves against the dirt leading up to where he sat.
“If it’s all true, then my Village got wiped out, my mother killed, all for some separate under-earth society that may or may not want to rejoin the world? And you . . .” Isaac prepared himself for her to snap at him about being a naive islander. “How does that makeyoufeel? Knowing you came here for some fake Cure and your friends are all dying for nothing?”
He peered down at Kletter’s notebook. There weren’t words for how he felt, at least not in his language. He looked back to the Villa where Jackie, Miyoko, and Frypan were all still alive inside, and he planned to keep it that way.
“I don’t know how to honor my friends’ lives and make their deaths have meaning, other than to try to find the truth.” He paged through Kletter’s journal. “Maybe we were lied to about the Cure, and yeah, maybe we came out here and it’s not what we thought.” He looked over to the still-burning remnants of theMaze Cutter.“But maybe . . .” He took a deep breath of cold Alaskan air. “Maybe we’re the only ones who can unearth this.”
Ximena dropped her shoulders and softened. “I do want the truth. The world deserves the truth.” She held out her hand for the book from Isaac, and he was happy to give it to her. “I guess no one’s been naive enough to think they could find it until now,” she teased.
“Or crazy enough,” he teased right back. “But after eighty years or so, it’s been long enough.” He slowly stood up. Ximena helped him balance. The cut in his right calf was starting to make his whole leg stiff. Isaac looked up at the sky. The stars looked the same as the ones on his island, but the auroras made everything so different, so ethereal. The greens and purples shone bright through the clouds of smoke that traveled overhead. “You ever see these colors in the sky before?” he asked, but she was staring at the water.
“Isaac . . .” Ximena slowly moved backward. “There’s something out there.” She pointed, but the water was too dark for Isaac to see anything, and the moonlight was shielded behind the clouds of smoke from the war.
“It’s probably just debris from theMaze Cutter. The whole thing looks like it’s falling apart. It’ll be driftwood, washing up on the shore somewhere.” He had a sudden pang in his gut, thinking about the driftwood necklace he’d helped Sadina make for Trish.
“It’s not . . .” Ximena looked absolutely terrified. “It’s not driftwood, Isaac. But I do think it might be from theMaze Cutter.”
He looked out to the ocean waters again. Nothing on theMaze Cutterwas important enough to have her make this face she was making.
But then he saw it.
Splashing against the current, a body floated and moved back and forth near the bank.
“Oh.” Isaac took a step back. The other dead bodies he’d walked over weren’t moving, but this one did just that, shifting with the current, and it creeped him out. “It looks like a young soldier. An Orphan probably.” He glanced back at the others behind him, dead on the cold snow. They all appeared to be around his age or even younger.
Ximena was shaking her head adamantly. “But the wrist . . .” She rubbed her own wrist.
Isaac stepped closer to the body, floating face down, and the arm at its side. His brain couldn’t process what he was seeing. A braided palm bracelet wrapped around the floating wrist, just like the one Trish had made Jackie.
It couldn’t be.
Letting out a sound, somewhere between a whimper and a scream, he tried to pull the body ashore. It was heavy, water-logged, slimy. Ximena came to help, pulling on the body. They finally succeeded in flipping it over, only to see the driftwood necklace that Isaac had helped Sadina make for her precious, loving, kind, funny, wonderful girlfriend.
The face removed all doubt. Swollen and purple, it was still all too familiar.
Trish.
Isaac released a wail from deep inside of him, a noise that pierced the night and shattered his heart.
Más remedio tiene un muerto.
The dead have no choice, but Abuela said that even the dead had something to hope for.
Frypan stabbed the sharpened end of his walking stick into the wet dirt next to the dead girl’s bloated body. Isaac helped console Jackie and Miyoko as best he could, though he seemed to need it more than they did. Ximena stepped back and let the islanders mourn their friend, knowing the grief they held wasn’t just for Trish but for their entire world as they knew it. Maybe they’d finally understand Ximena’s anger now that every death the islanders experienced could be blamed on one person: Annie Kletter.
