“I still don’t really get what it is you do.”
She almost said something, but I cut back in.
“And you say you missed me. But you don’t even know me.” I sat up in the bed so I could stare at her.
“We could become acquainted,” she said in a small sort of voice.
“And why would I do that?”
“Because I’m your mother.” She tried to sound stern about it, but she was just straight begging.
I made her wait. I watched her silver hair fall ragged across her face.
“I could build for you,” I said, surprising her. And that’s the best sort of lie. I watched her eyes go wide and her lips tremble. “And you could show me your work. Help me decide if I’m hopping the next boat out of here or not.”
“I could keep you here. If I wanted.”
“But you won’t. Not unless I want to stay. Zee probably thinks you’re as much of a mother as she could hope to have left. But I ain’t Zee. And you’re gonna have to earn me wanting to stick around.”
“So you want to build trees for me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Soon as I’ve seen my old man.”
“You can’t see him. Not now.” She stumbled on her words for a moment. “He’s busy.”
“Busy being locked up?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Sounds pretty simple to me. You had him locked up when he tried to stop your experiments.”
“It’s only because of me he’s still alive at all.”
I just shook my head, like I was weary as all hell just talking to her.
“Tomorrow night,” she said. “I can take you to him then.”
I didn’t say anything for a bit. It was just one more day, and I had to work this just right. So what choice did I have?
“First thing in the morning, I’ll start harvesting scrap,” I said. “The island’s full of metal. I can dig out the pieces I need.”
“And where will you build?”
“Right in the middle of your forest.”
“Where we’ve harvested?”
“Yeah. I’ll fill the gap you made.”
“And I can show you the progress we’ve been making.”
“I just want to see Pop.”
“You’ll see him.”
“There’s something else, though. My friend. The one who’s here resting. I need you to fix him for me.”
She leaned in and kissed my forehead, and I faked a quick smile before jerking away.
“I’ll try my best,” the Creator said, getting up off the bed. And I tell you, that grin didn’t look natural on her. Didn’t look like it had seen much use.
“My whole life I’ve been trying to fix things,” she said, heading for the door. “It’s the only thing I really know how to do.”
Then she left, and I lay wondering if through my memories or through my father, or through Hina or Zee, if somehow some part of me did know this woman. If some part of what she was and all that she knew was lodged inside me. But I thought about what Hina had told me when we’d been stuck on that transport, my gun leveled at the Harvester’s head.
They can copy the body, she’d said. But not the mind.
And so it seemed to me that flesh and blood can give birth to another. But that’s where the giving is ended. And that’s where the debt stops as well.
When I finally slept, I fell into a dream about Alpha. Her skin felt real and her eyes blazed, and she was sweating as she raced across the plains to find me, her spiked hair silhouetted against a giant yellow moon.
You’ve forgotten, she kept telling me with her eyes. Because her lips weren’t moving. A patch of pink bark had been sewn over her mouth, and I couldn’t hear her beyond moaning, and I couldn’t find her teeth or her tongue. So I just kissed her shoulders and legs and the back of her head and the bark on her belly and finally the place where her lips should have been. And it began snowing and I was caught outside and naked, dragging Alpha’s body up over the hill to show her the trees.
Look, I kept saying, pointing at the white forest. Told you we’d make it.
But when I glanced back at Alpha, she was gone. And in her place stood a metal field of corn a hundred miles high, and inside the corn was the apple tree. And no one wanted the tree.
They just wanted the apples.
“What are you doing?” Zee asked when she found me in the middle of the forest, hacking away at the frozen ground.
“Mining,” I said. “There’s enough old tin and piping down here you could build trees a mile high.”
“Build trees?” Zee tugged off her hood so I could see the expression on her face. “What would you do that for?” She pointed up at the forest. “We’ve got all the trees we need right there.”
“Well, Zee. I reckon I’m a tree builder. Always will be. I reckon you either are something or you’re not.”
“That simple, huh?”
“Sure. Nice and easy.”
“You want to show what you can do,” she said, coming closer to where I’d been digging. “You want to show her, don’t you?”
“Way I see it, I show her something, and she’ll show me something.”
“What do you want to see?”
“My father,” I said. “Man I came here to find.”
“And you’re sure you want to see him?”
“Why? Can you take me to him?”
“Only the Creator can do that.”
I studied Zee. That beautiful face. And it seemed like it was the third time the world had seen it. The original had grown old but the next one hadn’t. And soon it’d be Zee’s turn to sparkle and shine.
Long as her lungs kept working, anyway.
She was my family. My flesh and blood. But I didn’t reckon I could trust her a damn bit. She was acting like she wanted us to have always been close. But back in the Tripnotyst’s tent, she’d either been trying to save me or was just switching her allies around, and I never had figured out which. And regardless, she seemed pretty cozy with what was going on here on Promise Island. It made sense, I guess. I mean the lass had done well for herself on this pile of junk. I remembered that night when I’d found her asleep in Frost’s house and her body had been bruised and battered, and how long had she had to live like that? How long had she suffered with Frost because our father had left Hina behind?
I’d take her with us. That’s what I decided. But she couldn’t know that. Not yet.
“Stick close, sister,” I said, busting my shovel at the snowy dirt again. “You might learn something.”
“Sister?” She gave me a funny kind of smile. “Well, if you’re really gonna do this, how about I round us up some help?”
Zee brought me agents. Whole dozen of the suckers. They arrived all buried inside hoods and purple fuzz, but they sure shed some layers once I put them to working.
Outside of the uniform, the agents were just people. Just no one. Just anyone. Men and women. Old and young. They didn’t share the same face, so why’d they all dress the same? Why’d they sell themselves short to be part of someone else’s plan?
Because they were weak, that’s what I reckoned. Most of them had hardly done a real day of work in their lives. Too used to marching folk around from behind the trigger of a gun. Not at all used to creating, to the hard slog of building, the strength it takes to transform one thing into something else.
Their smooth skin blistered on the fiberglass shovels, and they wanted to jackhammer the dirt, blast my scrap right out of there. I told them that’d just blow the salvage to bits. Told them they’d better do less talking and do more digging.
By evening, I had a stack of aluminum tubes and some hubcaps, a load of old bottles and cans, a reel of thick cable, plastic piping, a metal drum. And one good, big old rusty sheet of iron.