“How many GlowBurns do you have?” she asks.
“Only one left,” I say. “Why?”
She shakes her head.
“Sissy. What is it?”
“Nothing. Just difficult to fall asleep without some kind of weapon on hand. ”
“No one’s coming tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or for several nights after that. We’re safe tonight. ” I put my hand on her back to reassure her. Her body is tense.
“I know,” she says. “But still. ”
“We’ll go get some GlowBurns tomorrow. From the lab, okay? There’s plenty of them in there. Let’s just go to sleep now. We’re safe. ”
She doesn’t say anything, only stares out the window.
Less than ten seconds later, I plunge helplessly into a deep sleep.
I awaken. Perhaps hours have passed. My body stiff and sore. The room so cold, my frosty breath plumes above me. Next to me, the bedding is now empty. I touch the slight indentation in the sheets. Cold. Not a hint of heat.
Outside, it’s freezing. My ears start to ache, and I pull the blanket tighter around my head like a shawl.
“Sissy?” I say into the still air. Not loudly, although there is no one else around. Although there is no reason to be afraid. Although we are alone up here in the mountains for miles and miles.
“Sissy?”
The only answer is the crack of cold in the night air. I snap into operation the last remaining GlowBurn and hold it in front of me. Along the cobblestone streets, empty cottages flank me, dark and silent. When I reach the edge of the village, I see, gashing across the meadows, her trail in a thin layer of snow. It leads away from the village toward the darkened forest. To the laboratory where, on edge and unable to sleep, Sissy must have gone to get some GlowBurns.
I hurry along even as the light from the GlowBurn starts to fade, my boots crunching on the frozen grass and light powdering of snow. I am fifty meters from the laboratory, ten meters, one meter from the opened door, and now as the GlowBurn blinks out I am looking into the laboratory, now I am walking through the doorway, now I am inside the dark, windowless building.
Sissy is slouched over a workbench. All energy drained from her body. A weak, diffused green light pools about her, silhouetting her form. She is trembling with—is it sadness, is it shock or fear?—I do not know. The only thing I know is that something has ruptured inside her, and that she is changed, irretrievably.
“Sissy. ”
She doesn’t startle at the sound of my voice. She’d heard my approach on the meadows. But she doesn’t turn to me, only continues to shiver. Even when I reach her from behind, touching her on the shoulder, she doesn’t move. Her skin is ice-cold to the touch.
On the workbench in front of her is an opened trunk. I did not see it the last time we were here, when we’d turned this laboratory inside out for a clue we hoped my father had left for us. Someone else had entered this laboratory in the interim, someone who’d somehow been able to find this hidden trunk, and who had gone through its contents.
Which now lie spilled onto this bench, hundreds of sheets of paper. They are mildewed and musty, only one crinkle from disintegrating into a fine powder. At the top of each page is a silver-tinted insignia. Of a crescent moon.
I skim through these sheets, not understanding the formulas, the official memorandums, the maps, the equations, the diagrams, the correspondence. The typescript on these pages archaic and indecipherable. A heavy musk of age wafts up from these pages, sour with the passing of countless centuries.
“Sissy? What are these papers? Where did this trunk come from?”
She points to the corner of the laboratory. I can just make out a cratered bowl of darkness in the floor. Where boards have been dug up, flung aside with the strength of five humans. Or one dusker.
She puts her hand on another stack of papers immediately before her. These are Mission paperwork, administrative forms, bookkeeping riffraff. At first, I don’t understand. But then she turns them over and on the backside of each sheet is my father’s handwriting. I rifle through a few pages. And quickly realize what I’m reading: my father’s transcriptions of the ancient documents. It was his attempt to make legible the illegible. But he’d only transcribed the incomprehensible into the unimaginable.
Sissy turns to me now. The glowing green light marbles her face. I will forever remember the look in her eyes as she settles them on mine, how they seem saturated with brokenness, how a single trail of tears falls from each eye.
“I know the truth now,” she whispers, her voice freighted with horror.
———
Transcription of Documents labeled 369–384
Excerpts of official correspondence between the Ruler and the Commander Scientist. Year of correspondence: unknown.
From: the Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: October 18
Subject: HEPER development
Your Highness,
The HEPER project (Hush-hush Exploration for Provisional Energy Resources) progresses well. Thus far, all preliminary tests performed on mice corpses have produced the desired results. Injection of the HEPER virus into dead mice has turned their dead flesh into edible, palatable food for living mice. Said dead mice have been consumed by live mice within the expected time frame.
———
From: the Commander Scientist
To: His Most Eminent Highness, the Ruler
Date: January 5
Subject: Please reconsider