“What do you do to them?” I whispered, as if the words had snuck out.
“We call it fusion.”
“You kill them?”
“I don’t kill anyone. It’s a sacrifice, that’s all.”
“A sacrifice? For what?”
“So we can regrow the world, clean the air and the water. Wood and paper. Shelter. And fruit trees, Banyan. Real fruit trees.”
“Right,” I said, yelling now. “Regrow the world and stamp GenTech on every damn part of it.”
She shot me a look like I’d punched her.
“And my dad helped do this?”
“He left when we realized what had to be done.”
“Didn’t want blood on his hands, that it?”
“He was afraid.”
“Sure he was. Shit. Maybe he was afraid of you.”
She stood and struck me, the back of her bony hand stinging my cheek. But somehow it was like I’d beaten her at something. Her eyes filled up and the breath shuddered out of her. And then she just turned her face to the machines.
“You still want to see him?” she said, like it was all she had left she could offer.
But I told myself it wasn’t just Pop I’d come looking for. Hell, I reckoned I’d come looking for a thing that don’t go leaving. And some damn thing that you can’t leave behind.
“You can keep him,” I said. “All I want to see is the trees.”
Zee wrapped me up in GenTech purple and tugged my head inside a bulky hood. I couldn’t say anything to her. I just let her dress me, my thoughts spinning slow like wheels getting stuck.
“Come on,” she whispered into the hood as she cinched up my jacket. “You’ll feel better when you see them.”
My head had drooped and I couldn’t see Zee’s face, but I figured she was smiling. And I tried to let the thought of that smile warm me, because all I felt now was lost and alone.
Don’t go believing in fairy tales, Pop had told me. Don’t go kidding yourself. No trees, he used to say. Nothing left.
But Pop had been lying to me. All of my life.
Zee led me down corridors and up steps, and finally we pushed outside, the freezing air trickling inside my coat.
I stared around at the patches of ice and the gray sky and the concrete buildings. Then Zee took my hand and guided me through the snow.
“She might’ve been a copy,” I said as we began to scale one of the powdery slopes, “but I liked your momma a whole lot more than the real thing.”
“Hina was real.”
“Real enough, I guess.”
“She was supposed to be a sign,” Zee said. “I don’t think I was even supposed to happen.”
“A sign? A sign of what?”
“The Creator said that once they could produce people the same way the trees here reproduce themselves, she knew they’d be able to splice the two species together. So they sent Hina south. To find our father. To show him they’d done it.”
“She went south, all right. Got herself to the South Wall.”
“Our father had joined up with rebels. People that used to fight against GenTech.”
“Yeah. I seen what was left of them,” I said, and I remembered what Jawbone had told me about the pirates. I remembered their flag. The Army of the Fallen Sun.
“Hina was the breakthrough,” Zee went on, sounding sort of proud about it. “Your mom thought our dad might come back and help, when he’d seen what was possible. When he’d seen they could make a perfect human copy. Your mom thought he might change his mind.”
“You need to stop calling her that.”
“The Creator, then. The Creator thought he’d come back.”
“To do what? Make fake people?”
“Copying people was the first step. But only certain people’s cells can be fused with the trees. The tattoo.” Zee ran her hand across her belly. “It was coded with these numbers. Protein numbers. They’d figured out which combinations worked with the tree cells. So now they knew they had to find the people with the right DNA.”
So the numbers weren’t coordinates at all. Just more science. The science that determined whether you lived or died in that factory. The science that had killed Sal.
“Same kind of shit they pulled on the corn,” I said. “Same shit. Just people this time.”
“They’re trying to fix things.”
“Well, I reckon they should give it a damn rest.”
“They grew my mom here,” said Zee, her voice quiet.
“They just used her.”
“I know.”
“And this Creator woman, she’s just using you, too.”
“I don’t care.” Zee pointed at her chest as she breathed the cold clean air. She tugged at her fuzzy GenTech coat. “I’ve been used my whole life, I’ll take this any day.”
“Take what?”
“Being on the side that’s winning.”
“So you found Zion and you got what you wanted.”
“I can breathe, can’t I? And I don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
We were halfway up the slope and I was worn out from it. I stopped and stared back down at the compound. Just three buildings covered in snow — the one we’d emerged out of, a much larger bunker, and between the two of them was a small steel dome. There was not a single window on any one of the buildings. Agents were stationed at every door.
And according to Zee, my old man had once stolen me away from this place. So this was where I’d been born, then. This was where I was from.
I watched the smoking bio vat on the ridge across from me, pumping out juice like a giant metal heart. And here and there I could see bits of old junk poking out of the frozen landscape.
“Do you think he loved her?” Zee said.
“Who?”
“Hina.”
“Sure,” I said. “Least she weren’t running around killing folk.”
“But he still left her.”
“He was good at ditching people. It’s a skill, maybe.”
“You want so bad to hate him. So should I hate him more? Hina always told me my real dad had no idea I existed. He must have left her before he even knew I was gonna be born.”
I thought about the statue down in Old Orleans. And I wondered if it had really been built for Hina. Or had what Pop loved in the replicant been something he’d loved a whole lot longer?
And I must have been there, I realized. Back then. In Old Orleans. If everything Zee had said was true. I’d have been tiny. Just barely been born, perhaps. But I’d have been there. On my old man’s back, buried in a blanket. Holding on as he built the statue that years later I came to finish. The statue he’d left with the face still missing.
“She was like a reflection,” I said. “Your momma.”
“I think in the end she reminded him of what he’d done. The experiments. This.” She pointed down at the compound. “You were the only thing he didn’t tie to this place. And when he gave you up, it was only so he could try and stop it all.”
I pulled off my hood so I could stare at her, but Zee was all bundled and hidden away.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The agents talk about it. Last winter. Everyone thought he’d come back to help finish the project. But he staged an uprising. Freed people, got them back to the mainland. People like that crazy old Rasta we found.”
I thought about what the Creator had said. About Pop raising me and me being free.
Is that why he’d never told me?
Had he just waited till I was old enough so I could keep on with the building? And then he’d gone off to risk everything, to try to put all this right?
“Uprising,” I whispered.
“Yeah. Until he got caught.”