The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

Cave, pt. 2

IT DIDN’T TAKE US QUITE AN HOUR TO GET TO KALISPELL, BUT IT WAS CLOSE. We absolutely could have run faster, but I wanted to drive. The highway to the airport was clear enough for me to drive my CL 63, which I had missed, having been forced to drive one of the modified (or “tricked out,” as I was coached to say) Toyota Land Cruisers in the snow for the last three months. Mark had commissioned the tricking-out of these when we were in Moscow, and the pair of them had become quite useful in getting us all around. But now I was transitioning to human Sadie. CL-63-AMG-driving, McQueen-heel-wearing Sadie. And I did want to look nice to see Corrina. Everett wanted to drive, having found a spot in his heart for the AMG engine and perhaps feeling a deep pang of separation from his Maserati from his experiences with the Land Cruisers too, but I refused. My car. My drive.

On the plane, Everett held my hand while he read a book at a human pace, a method he practiced to enjoy the literature and also to look inconspicuous. I closed my eyes and tried to focus. Having spent a good deal of time with my family over the last three weeks, my sensing abilities were growing. I was now able to sense minds from a distance with better accuracy, even read the thoughts of minds I knew from great distances. This was turning into a very useful talent, albeit disconcert- ing to quite literally hear voices in my head all the time.

But despite the increase in my powers, I had been unable to do the one thing I was trying to do lately: find the missing members of my family. It was mid-October when Everett and the rest of the Winter family followed me to a hillside in Romania to help fight the nosferatu shape-shifters I’d met there. And it was then that everything changed for me. That’s when Anthony told me of his vision of a war between supernatural creatures — in fact, a war between Survivors. He’d seen the rogue members of my family bounding over the city walls, attacking the Survivors they’d left behind. The Winters believed that nothing could prevent what Anthony saw in a vision once he had it, but they thought we should find the dangerous rogues anyway. In early November, Andrew had asked me to track down the twenty-eight Survivors who had gone AWOL. Andrew just wanted to find his family, but my motives ran deeper. I believed that if we could find them, then we could stop the war before it began — even if it meant killing them to protect the rest of the family.

But this was proving to be difficult. Being a skilled tracker with unique senses, it should have been easy for me. I could find almost anyone, anywhere, but these twenty-eight were off my radar entirely.

It was now the last days of January, and I was frustrated I had made so little progress. In the air, in a quiet first class cabin with Everett’s presence to soothe me, I centered my mind and filtered through all the humming and buzzing and voices in my head, scanning every mind I came across on the ground below. I did this for the entire plane ride from Kalispell to Seattle, then for the first two hours of our flight from Seattle to Dallas. Frustrated, I found nothing.

Abandoning this, I began flipping through books on my electronic reader. In addition to my foray into supernatural literature, I had also bought many classics. Plato’s The Republic. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Machiavelli’s The Prince. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Histories of the early American colonies, and philosophies from Hobbes, Locke, Payne, Calvin, Rousseau. Every one of Shakespeare’s histories. Any works on world mythology I could find.

In my life, there were always questions I was researching. I wanted to know where we came from, and I wanted to know how and why the Survivors were the way they were. And, however shamefully, I searched because I wanted to learn how we could die. But my desire for my own mortality could no longer be at the forefront of my quest. Now that 28 of my siblings had evolved into violent vieczy versions of themselves who were undoubtedly roaming the earth murdering humans at an alarming rate, I needed to know — we all needed to know — how to kill a Survivor. We were simultaneously searching for them and searching for a way to kill them. Everett hated this. He knew that if we found a way to kill one of them, I’d have a way to kill myself, too — if I wanted to. And for 128 years of my life, I’d wanted to. I just wanted one, normal life. That would be enough for me.

I settled on Plato’s The Republic. His famous depiction of Utopia scarily mirrored the Survivors’ society, right down to a description of how the community could be stronger if loyalty was to the Republic as a whole instead of to the individual family. Clearly, the fourteen original Survivors believed this to be a necessity: They pointed to it as the reason that none of us knew who our parents were. It made me feel less like a freak that there had already been theories of cultures like my family’s in place for thousands of years, but it angered me that Plato would call our world a Utopia. But the Survivors, too, had always called paradise what I had called a prison.

I reread the Allegory of the Cave. It had happened to me just the way Plato said it would. I had first broken free of the chains my family placed on me. I ventured into the world outside and saw the enlightened existence. And then I had come back to my family, who had lived in such isolation, who had spent their existence in the proverbial cave, and tried to show them the virtue of the outside world.

But they resisted. They couldn’t see the outside world the way I had. They had never known it, and so how could they understand it?

Plato had no rhetoric for what to do when you finally got the Unenlightened to turn their heads long enough to see the outside world at precisely the moment it proved itself unworthy, but that’s just what happened here. My family knew now that Survivors who left our world and ventured into the unknown turned into something terrible, something evil — even though I had been able to escape this evil for reasons unknown to us all. So the other Survivors could remain forever inside these walls, condemning all those who tried to show them the light outside as heretics.

And so they hated me, their conduit to the outside. There was merit to their hatred, though. They blamed me for the 28 rogue Survivors leaving. They were, after all, only following my example. They hated that I threatened that world, that the Winters, too, threatened their world because we had each experienced a world they pretended never existed. Until I came back. They could live on, satisfied that their world was better than the world outside. But it wasn’t better. It just seemed safer. They could never understand the distinction. (What’s the old parable? Ignorance is bliss?)

And then in the twist of all twists, going against everything Plato wrote, I, the enlightened one, wandered back into the cave and resumed my spot in the darkness, lined up among those in chains. And I’d hated every minute of it. The closer I got to Corrina — and to my nearly human life — the lighter I began to feel.

But it didn’t change anything. I let the book reader fall on my chest. My throat felt tight and the bridge of my nose stung. My breathing was ragged and hiccuppy. Though no tears fell, I was crying.

“Princess?” Everett asked, having sensed my tension.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“What...”

“Why did we come back?” I sobbed. “They hate me so much!”

He sighed heavily, as if he’d known this conversation would come.

“They’ll never understand the sacrifices you’ve made to go back. They’ll never understand what it means for you to give up your freedom, to risk your life for your family. They’re taking you for granted, but you know you’re doing the right thing,” he said.

“I wish none of this had happened. Just last year I was existing as a human. Living in that world. Doing stupid human things like being a bridesmaid. When did this happen, Everett? When did I give it all up?” I asked.

“You didn’t,” he said. “It’s just on hold right now. We’ll get back to normal some day.” He pulled me close to him. I didn’t want it to be on hold. I didn’t want any of this.

Everett took The Republic out of my lap. “Rereading this will not help,” he said.

“I didn’t think it would,” I admitted, unable to look him in the eye. Instantly, I was uneasy. I rose to my feet quickly, startling him. “I’m going to go touch up. We’ll be landing soon, I’m sure,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. He looked worried. Really, I just needed to be alone.

I fumbled down the aisle and into the tiny airplane lavatory, and looked at my inhumanly perfect espresso hair and that glowing isabelline skin with resentment. I stared into those violet eyes, more tired now than they’d looked in 145 years.

I’d ruined my life.