Chapter 19
19
A couple of days later, I’m in the library car of the Atlas, exploring the stacks. Michael sits stiffly, his right knee bobbing up and down faster than a heartbeat.
This is the first time we’ve been alone together since our fight, and I’m awkward and unsure how I’m supposed to feel. I stay focused on combing through the bookshelves instead of having to face him, but the sound of his constant fidgeting is making me nervous.
“Why are you so anxious?” I ask him.
“What? Oh. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Hilde.” He sighs. “Seeing her can be… emotionally draining.”
“How so?”
“She’s very intense and has a way of making you question your decisions. Also, well, we used to…”
“Oh.”
“It was a long time ago.”
The awkwardest of pauses.
“Do you still have feelings for her?”
“Yes, but it’s not… like that.” His gaze is far away. “You’ll see what I mean. You’ll love her too.”
Who said anything about love ?
Soon, the Atlas arrives in Morocco, where we catch an airplane that takes us somewhere very sandy. Michael has arranged for a jeep, and he drives us through stretches of desert and in and out of poverty-stricken towns. The areas we pass look completely foreign, and for the first time I think about the fact that most of the provincial world is just as much a mystery to me as the world of the Makers.
After a lot more desert, the jeep stops when a small camp comes into view. As I climb out, hot, dry air engulfs me, and I’m instantly thirsty and itchy.
A girl in dirty cargo pants trudges over from the camp.
“Let me guess,” she says to Michael. “You’re here to present me as a cautionary tale?”
She looks incredibly familiar, though I’m sure I’ve never met her before. I try to puzzle out where I could have seen her. She has a unique kind of loveliness, a blending of varied ancestries that I’ve noticed in many Makers. Sun-bleached loose brown curls frame a russet face with a liberal sprinkling of freckles.
“Hills.” Michael walks to her and wraps her in an embrace. She doesn’t reciprocate, but she doesn’t draw away, either.
Once he releases her, he holds her at arm’s length and examines her. “Are you well?”
“Of course not.”
Michael sighs and drops his arms. He waves me over. “Hilde, this is Ada. She’s a recent Sire recruit.”
Hilde nods curtly to me, then moves on without missing a beat. “Listen, Michael, I need you to speak to Ari and tell her to stop her games.”
“What?” Michael asks, clearly perplexed.
In a swift motion that has Michael sucking in his breath and me freezing in place, Hilde lifts her shirt.
There’s a tattoo on her abdomen, words scrawled in a spindly script. The skin around each letter is pink and sensitive. The words are flipped in mirror image, so it takes me a moment to decipher what it says.
Hildegard, go home!
“I’d recognize Ari’s handwriting anywhere. We exchanged pigeons during class all our years as apprentices,” Hilde says. “This hurts to perdition, mind you.”
But Michael isn’t looking at the tattoo. A sour feeling churns in my gut as his gaze roams over her exposed figure. However, it’s only concern that fills his eyes.
“You’re not eating enough,” he says tenderly. “What happened to the nutrition loaves I sent you?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she snaps. “I’m fine. There are others who need that nutrition more than I do.” She points petulantly at her tattoo. “Hello, Michael? Your sister is writing on my body from oceans away, and it gravdamn hurts.”
“I didn’t know she could do that,” he admits.
“Some weird Mystic thing, I’m sure. It probably involves a Ha’i stone or Kabbalah or something.”
“I’ll talk to her,” he sighs, “though she’s not wrong. You should come home.”
Hilde pulls down her shirt and rolls her eyes. “I have dying children to see to. Are you here to help, or just to nag me?” She trudges back to the camp, and we follow after her, each holding a bag of the supplies Kaylie sent.
Nothing could have prepared me for the horrors of the refugee camp. Hilde explains that it’s relatively new, so I’m surprised by the sheer size. The number of displaced people living in such appalling conditions. They had to leave their village because of a war only a few months before, and the disease swiftly followed due to a lack of clean water. The nearest medical professionals are aid workers at a larger camp about a two-day walk away.
Hilde sends Michael off to help with the healthy children and gives a young teenage girl, Asha, instructions in a language I don’t understand about what to do with all the supplies we brought. Then she leads me to another part of the camp.
“Did they tell you I went crazy?” she asks me over her shoulder. My silence is her answer. “People like to call women crazy when they don’t understand us. We feel things too strongly, we’re hormonal, we overreact. Well, if getting a glimpse of the truth of the world makes us crazy—maybe the world is the problem, not us.”
Behind one of the tents is a small green garden that stands out against the endless sand.
“How do these plants live in this environment?” I ask.
“They don’t. Despite the fact that they’re all tough breeds—mostly weeds that will grow anywhere—I still have to revive them daily using my Sire abilities. But they’re invaluable for medicine and nutrition.”
“I’m good with plants.”
“Excellent. Then you can help me grow what I need. It takes some finesse in these harsh conditions, but I’ll show you what works for me.”
After we tend and harvest the garden, Hilde brings me along to check on her ill patients. Many of them are quite sick, and I have to suppress horror, disgust, and fear.
She also has me help draw her blood.
“I have universal blood. Comes in handy here.” Thankfully, she does all the sticking of needles herself, but even just helping with the process has me dizzy and nauseated. “Maybe don’t mention this part back at Genesis,” she cautions. “They can be weird about blood stuff.”
As I watch Hilde arrange a fridge full of her own blood, I can’t help but think that she doesn’t seem “foolish and reckless” or “crazy” to me. In fact, she might be the sanest person I’ve ever met.
“We should test your blood. Sires can donate frequently, but if you’re universal too, it would be nice to have extra on hand to give myself a break.”
As she draws some of my blood, she says, “So, Michael recruited you from the provincial world?”
“Yes.”
“He’s weirdly obsessed with provincials. We used to tease him that he’d end up recruiting himself a lover.”
Heat rushes to my cheeks. “It’s not like that,” I say.
“It’s always like that with Michelangelo Loew.” She looks me up and down. “And I’ve been there before. I know the signs.”
The desert might swallow me whole.
The sound of yelling has us rushing out of the tent. Asha is running toward Hilde, her eyes swimming with panicked tears.
Hilde jumps into action. “Follow me!” she instructs.
“What is it?”
“Her baby brother.”
We arrive at a tent with a dirt floor and mattresses taking up most of the space. A crying woman holds out a toddler in our direction.
Hilde grasps the boy and swears under her breath as she takes his temperature and listens to his heartbeat.
She extends him out to me and says, “You need to use your Ha’i to shock his heart while I administer fluids.”
I refuse to take the boy, terrified. “You do it. I don’t—I’m not good at conducting.”
“No. I have overactive Ha’i and a tendency to burn people when I get emotional. He’s very small, so you’re safer.”
My heart pounding, I take him in my arms. He seems so frail.
“Here, make shiin on his chest,” she encourages. I do so, my hand trembling. I feel the child’s erratic heartbeat beneath my fingers. “Just a light pulse.”
“I can’t do it.” I’m too scared, too riled up; I have no control.
“Yes, you can,” Hilde instructs calmly. “I saw you make chickweed bloom in a desert; you can help this child. Tell me what you’re thinking, how you’re trying to access your Ha’i.” She speaks so calmly while at the same time inserting an IV into the boy’s tiny hand.
“I… I’m trying to pull it up from the well within me.” Like Master Liu had taught me. I taste salt on my lips and realize that I’m crying.
“Okay. The problem is that a well draws water from a preexisting source, so if your source is dry, you are left with nothing. As a Sire, you are the source. You’re making something from nothing. Don’t think of yourself as pulling the Ha’i. Imagine bringing it into being.”
Holding my breath, I close my eyes and imagine my belly as a black void, and then I envision a mini burst of light exploding into golden rays. I pull those rays through my hands and feel the warmth of Ha’i spread into the baby’s body.
“There you go,” Hilde encourages. “Now one more time.”
I conduct, and with the pulse of Ha’i, I feel the boy’s heartbeat stop, then start again in a more natural rhythm.
Only then do I breathe.
As soon as the baby is stable, Hilde has me pass him back to his mother, who can’t stop crying and kissing me.
And then we move on because there’s more to be done and no time for rest.
I help Hilde for hours. Crushing plants into mixtures. Distributing food. Purifying water. Administering medicine.
Digging graves.
I’m working on autopilot, like a golem, overcome by feeling so much that I can’t feel anything at all.
“You’re holding up well,” Hilde says to me at one point. “I’m impressed. I thought you’d run crying after an hour.”
“If this is their daily life, what right do I have to run from one day?”
Hilde nods approvingly.
I say, “I just don’t understand how the world allows this to happen… how they can neglect all these people.” There’s plenty of wealth in the world, plenty of food, water, medicine going to waste daily.
“This is not just a result of neglect,” Hilde explains. “The people responsible for this? For so many other humanitarian crises? They’re allied with the leaders of powerful countries and multinational corporations. You’re from the United States? They fund the corrupt governments who should be taking care of these people, and they don’t demand this treatment stops. It’s too easy to let tragedy happen far away when you’re not the one suffering and when interference would directly affect the affordability of the resources and products you rely on for daily life.”
There’s a part of me that wants to close my eyes and stop seeing, that wishes I could go back to not knowing. “Why would anyone at Genesis think that showing me this would make me understand why they don’t do more to help?”
“They want you to see that your world can’t be helped by easy fixes. The solutions that these people need—access to clean water, minimal food rations, humane living conditions, basic health care? Your world has all those things already, and yet these people still suffer. There are a small few that can be helped by people like you and me and the aid workers, but there will always be more.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I can’t not be,” she says simply. “But I know that not everyone can be here. Genesis is solving new problems, and that’s needed too.”
“But you think they should do things differently?”
“Some things.” She shrugs. “No society and no individual is perfect.”
When I lived in New York, this horrifying reality was so foreign. Why worry about catastrophes so far away when there were homeless people on my own doorstep—sometimes literally. But now that I’ve been living among the Makers on Arcadia, coming here feels like coming back to my people. They may not speak my language or look anything like me, but this is my world crumbling to ruins.
Perhaps coming here has made me realize no solution is simple, but it has not convinced me that the Makers couldn’t make things better if they shared their knowledge. Not just of medicine and technology, but of philosophy and structures of government that could lead to widespread change.
Hilde has me sanitize before I leave, but I feel like I’ll never wash away the smell of death. The reek of a whole world’s apathy.
Before he ushers me back to the jeep, Michael takes Hilde’s hands in his. “I know you’ve received our messages. You know Sires are being hunted. If you still refuse to come home, you need to hide better.”
“I’m hidden fine.”
“I found you easily.”
“Maybe that’s because I wanted you to find me.”
“Hills, I’m serious. Sires are being kidnapped all over the world. You need to move on from here and disappear. Even from me. Tell me you understand.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “What are you planning?”
“I’m not planning anything. I’m just doing what has to be done.”
She stares at him for a long moment, their hands still gripping each other. “You think you’re so different from me, Michelangelo Loew, but you’re wrong.”
I agree with her. He would be doing what she’s doing if he weren’t so set on trusting his precious council. I wonder if that’s what broke them up. That question ties my feelings into a complicated knot of disappointment and relief.
On the ride back to Arcadia, I can’t stop thinking of the faces of the children, of the bodies.
“Do you understand now?” Michael asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
I understand, all right. But I definitely haven’t changed my mind. The opposite, in fact. More than ever, I blame the Makers for letting my world destroy itself.