Page 63 of The Infinite Glade
Really, Ximena.What a terrible thing to think.
At least she hadn’t shared the thought out loud.
“How long will it take to get there?” Jackie asked.The islanders had no patience.
Cian had punched the coordinates into a fancy device on the dashboard of the Berg and now looked up, surprised. “Not long at all.” He rubbed his forehead with the red scarf then turned his attention to his brother. “Makes sense it’d be close to the site of the first Mazes. Lots of giant caves and caverns around there.”
“WICKED was nothing if not efficient.” Erros fastened his seat belt, and Ximena braced for takeoff.
She sat near Isaac and Old Man Frypan, and after the launch, she opened Kletter’s logbook. Most of the pages had unimportant notes, scribbled about the weather or wind speed. Some of the pages in the back held questions about the Cure. Questions Annie Kletter didn’t have answers to. Ximena half-expected to find some big confession about all the worst things Annie did, but she hadn’t found any pages like that yet. And by not finding anything remotely honest from Annie, it confirmed to Ximena that her Village’s hero really was the absent-minded person she and her Abuela always thought she was. Ximena had sympathy for any Sequencers who thought Annie Kletter was their only hope.
“Why even bring the Sequencers back to the surface,” she asked. “It sounds like they have everything for a perfect utopia. No Flare. No WICKED. No Experiments . . . forthem.” She scanned more pages with the wordsecuenciadores.
“Perfectis a perspective,” Cian said.
That may be true, Ximena thought, but she couldn’t stretch to imagine their lives being any tougher than the outside world she’d lived in her whole life.
Erros expounded on the matter. “They have their own hurdles, things that’ll make them take one look at you and thinkyourlife is perfect.” He acted as if he could read her frequency of confusion. “Your lungs for example.” He paused. “Sequencers can’t go even a few hours without smoking a coltsfoot cigar to help their respiratory system.”
“I thought they had perfect genetics?” Isaac asked, his eyes still sad, filled with grief.
“A hundred years ago—they did.” Cian looked over at Erros and shrugged. “What’s your plan?”
Erros didn’t look back. “No plan.”
“That confident?” Cian scoffed.
Old Man Frypan and Ximena both noticed the exchange.
“Something’s cooking, isn’t it?” he whispered to her, and for a moment she felt as seen and as safe as she did with her Abuela.
“So what happened to their genes, then?” Isaac leaned forward but stayed seated—as promised to avoid Cian throwing him out like garbage.
“Mold spores. Ventilation systems failing. Humidity—plus the colder air makes breathing harder to begin with. Human genetics can adjust, and the Sequencers’ lungs have grown larger to accommodate, but failing infrastructure puts a clock on things. They were never meant to live under-earth for this many generations.”
“So why did they?” Ximena asked. “If they were the smartest people, the top scientists and everything, then wouldn’t they realize they’d screwed up?”
Cian chuckled, either annoyed with all the questions or at the Sequencers themselves. “The Senate of Sequencers held on to the experiments of living within the earth that showed promise. The Senate only understood the negative effects of the solar storms. The damage. But that’s like removing water from the surface of the Earth because of a flood that happened once.”
Ximena looked at Frypan. His hands sat poised in his lap, his face relaxed. How could he not feel completely betrayed by his family, by WICKED, by the entire world?
He raised his eyebrows at her. “They should’ve had some of that second-sight you’ve got.”
“You’re so calm about this. How?” She wasn’t sure what to think about the Sequencers, but if she were Frypan she’d probably feel pretty upset. “You have no righteous anger? It’s kind of like a double whammy to you—your family hidden away, yourself sent to the Maze and the Trials.”
“When you’ve lived long enough like me, and through enough bad stuff . . . you learn what’s needed to survive.” He held his hands up, palms open. Empty. Through the window, a beautiful sunrise grew on the horizon, just past his shoulder. Ximena didn’t really understand what he might have been referring to.
“Peace,” he answered her.
Peace?Sitting back and folding her hands wasn’t going to save her Village or anyone else. “You’re just accepting all of this?”
“Observing,” he stressed. “I don’t have the energy, inside or out, to fight against people and ideas like I used to. Peace is my only resistance to chaos now.” Frypan stretched out his arm to Isaac. “But you kids . . . you’re going to shake this up. I know you will.”
Isaac didn’t look sure of anything. “It’s just been one big struggle after another. I can’t imagine it ever ending. At least not in a good way.”
Donde hay lucha, hay esperanza.Ximena always hated hearing Abuela say that when she grew angry at the way things were. It seemed like such a silly answer to the Village’s biggest problems.Where there is struggle, there is hope.But Ximena hoped her anger in destroying the Villa, taking the Cure, and finding the Sequencers might actually lead to something important. It wasn’t what she’d envisioned her actions leading to, but she owed it to everyone in her Village, the living and the dead, to unearth the long-hidden truth.
She would accomplish this task, she told herself, and Death itself would just have to be patient and wait for her to finish.
