“Help yourself,” the heper girl says.
My thirst urges me along. I kneel by the edge of the pond and drink with cupped hands, keeping them all, especially the heper girl, in my vision. Then I fill the bottles with water, cap them off. I hesitate.
“Are you going to undress again?” it asks. This seems to relax the group behind it; they smile, look knowingly at one another. “If so, don’t forget to take your undies with you this time.”
Over the years, I trained myself not to blush. But there’s no stopping this one. A surge of heat hits my face, heat humming off it in droves.
The hepers see it, and they suddenly become quiet. Then the heper girl steps forward, and the group follows closely behind. It steps right up to me, an arm’s length away, close enough for me to see the faint freckles sprinkled across the bridge of its nose. Its hand touches my face, pressing down on my cheek; even the tips of its fingers are callused. It nods and beckons the others to approach. They do, slowly, encircling me. I don’t move. They reach out to me, their hands extending towards my face, then touch my cheek, my neck, poking, probing. I let them.
Then they step back. The heper girl is still standing in front of me, the knife no longer in hand. And for the first time, I see something that is not fear or curiosity in its expression. I don’t know what it is. Not exactly. But the small fires burning in her eyes are gentle and warm, like embers of a fireplace.
“My name’s Sissy. What’s yours?”
I look at her blankly. “What’s a ‘name’?” I ask.
“You don’t know what your name is?” a heper at the back asks. It’s the youngest of the lot, a short boy, maybe ten years old, puckish. “My name’s Ben. How can you not have a name?”
“He didn’t say he doesn’t know his name. He said he doesn’t know what a name is.” The heper who says this stands off to the side alone. Its mouth is skewed at a slant on one side, as if inadvertently caught by a fishhook. It towers above the others, as skinny as it is tall, as if, in the aging process, its limbs were merely stretched without addition of muscle or fat.
The short heper boy turns to me. “What do people call you?”
“Call me? It depends.”
“Depends?”
“Depends on where I am. Teachers call me one thing, my coach calls me another. Depends.”
The girl heper grabs the nearest heper by the arm, brings him forward. “This is Jacob.” It strides over to the next. “This one next to him is David, the one who saw you first this morning. Standing off on his own there is Epaphroditus. We call him ‘Epap’.”
I run those sounds in my head: David, Jacob, Epap. Odd sounds, foreign. David and Jacob look young, maybe eleven or twelve years old. Epap is older, maybe seventeen.
“You mean designation. What’s my designation?”
“No,” the heper girls says, shaking her head. “What does your family call you?”
I’m about to tell her that I don’t have a family, that they never called me by any “name” . . . when I stop. A memory suddenly surfaces, faint and crackly in my mind. The voice of my mother, singing, in broken, eclipsed fragments: just a melody at first, the exact words indecipherable. But then a surfacing takes place, her words taking shape, a phrase here and there, still obscure, but—
Gene.
“My name is Gene,” I say, and it is as much a revelation to me as an introduction to them.
They show me around the village. They’ve made the best of their lot. A small vegetable farm round the back, fruit trees dotted around the grounds. Laundry lines hung by a training ground, spears and knives and daggers littered about the sandy lot. Inside the mud huts, I’m surprised by the amount of sunlight pouring in. The roofs are punctured by large holes like a sieve. So strange, the absence of a barrier between them and the sky. A cool breeze blows through the huts.
“We only get the breeze in the daytime,” the heper girl says, noticing my enjoyment. “Once the Dome goes up, the air goes still.”
Each of the mud huts is only sparsely decorated, drawings and paintings tacked on to walls, a few bookshelves lined with a collection of threadbare books. But it’s what sits in the middle of each of the huts that is most startling, almost brazen in its derring-do. A “bed”. Not just some blankets tossed to the ground, but a solid wooden structure with legs and a foundation. Not a sleep-hold in sight.
Outside, beyond the perimeter of the Dome, sits a box structure made of metal, about the size of a small carriage. A green light is blinking from a small lamp sitting atop it. “What’s that?” I ask, indicating.
“The Umbilical,” David says.
“The what?”
“C’mon, might as well head over. Looks like something’s arrived.”
“What?” I ask.
“Come. You’ll see.”
On the side of the Umbilical is a wide slot door with hinges on the bottom that pulls open and flat. Jacob peers in, takes out a large Tupperware container that I recognise. I smell the potatoes and noodles.
“Breakfast,” says David.
The green light stops blinking, turns to red.
I bend down, curious, sticking my head through the opening. A long, narrow tunnel – no wider than my head – runs underground, leading towards the Institute. This is the other end of the tunnel – the Umbilical, I guess – I saw in the kitchen.
“That’s how we get our food,” Jacob says. “After we finish eating, we send all the dirty dishes right back. Every so often, they’ll send us clothes. Sometimes, on one of our birthdays, they’ll send us a treat. Birthday cake, paper and crayons, books, board games.”
“Why is it so far away from everything else?” I guesstimate the distance. “It’s outside the perimeter of the Dome, isn’t it? When the Dome comes up, the Umbilical is outside the glass wall, right?”
They nod. “That was intentional. They were afraid that someone small would attempt to squeeze his way down the tunnel to get to us. At night, obviously. So they placed the Umbilical opening outside the Dome perimeter. That way, even if the small person was able to burrow his way through at night, he’d still end up outside the walls.”
“And nobody would ever do it during the day,” says Ben. “For obvious reasons.”
“Recently, they’ve been
sending us textbooks,” the heper named David adds. “Books on self-defence, the art of war. We don’t get it. And then one night a few months ago, they left spears and daggers and knives right outside the Dome for us to collect in the morning. We’ve been messing around with them – Sissy’s really good with the flying daggers – but we’re not really sure why we have them. I mean, it’s not as if there’s game to hunt around here.”
“And then yesterday, we get these metallic cases,” Ben jumps in excitedly. “Five of them, one for each of us. But the letter instructs us not to open them until further notification. So Sissy won’t let us even touch them.”
I look at Sissy.
“I don’t know what they’re for,” Sissy says. “Do you?”
I glance down. “No idea.”
“But anyway,” Ben goes on, thankfully, “we have all these weapons. We’ve been practising with them, the spears and axes and daggers, anyway. Sissy’s the best, but we’ve run out of targets.”
“Until you came along.”
I don’t need to turn around to know the heper named Epap said that.
“In fact, why did you come here?” it continues. I turn around. The expression on its face is unmistakably hostile and cagey. They’re like open books, these hepers, with naked emotions swimming off their faces.
“He came here for water,” Sissy says before I can answer. “Leave him alone, OK?”
The Epap heper circles around until it’s standing directly in front of me. Up close, it seems even more gangly. “Before we start giving out food to him,” it says, “before we start showing him around like he’s nothing more than a cute stray puppy, he’s got some answering to do.”
Nobody says anything.
“Like how he’s survived out there for so long. Like how he’s survived living with them for so long. And what exactly is it that’s he’s doing here. He’s got some talking to do.”
I look at the heper girl. “What’s its problem?” I ask, pointing at Epap.
The heper girl stares intently at me. “What did you say?”
“What’s its problem? Why is it so worked up over—”