Origin Read online

  “I guess you’re right.” I open the door and step outside, Dr. Klutz behind me. Just before I reach the door of the menagerie, I pause.

  “About Uncle Antonio…” I start.

  “Yes?” She looks genuinely intrigued. “Do tell.”

  “He’s my favorite uncle, you know,” I finish clumsily. “I just…he—”

  “Don’t worry, kid,” she says gently. “I’m not going to break any hearts.”

  “Right. Yeah.” I shuffle a bit, wondering what to add, then give it up and flee.

  Hours later, after the party finally ends, I stop by the menagerie on the pretense of bringing Alai with me to my room, where he often sleeps. Dr. Klutz’s mysterious paper, which I slipped down the front of my dress, seems to burn through my skin, and I can’t wait to open it. Back in my room, I turn on a small lamp by my bed and kneel on the floor, pulling the paper from my dress. Alai pads softly to the chair in the corner, where he usually sleeps, and loses all interest in me and my contraband.

  As I start unfolding the paper, my heart begins to race. Could it be…?

  It is.

  I gasp and rise to my feet, staring wide-eyed at the paper. It’s so large it covers most of my bed. With trembling hands, I turn and shove a chair against the door, since there’s no lock. This could get me—and Dr. Klutz—in more than just trouble. I don’t know what Uncle Paolo would do if he found out, but I know it would be awful. As if sensing my agitation, a bristling Alai ghosts to my side.

  “It’s all right, boy,” I whisper.

  Still hardly believing my eyes, I force myself to kneel again and spread my hands over the paper, smoothing the creases.

  “It’s a map of the world, Alai.” He’s already lost interest, but I’m completely enthralled.

  I’ve never seen one before. There’s not a single map in all of Little Cam that isn’t locked away from view, except for the one hanging in plastic in the maintenance building, but it just shows the area inside the fence.

  This map shows continents and oceans and countries and mountains, an entire world. The world. My world.

  My fingers trace the outline of the land masses. Europe. Africa. Australia. Asia. Beautiful names, mysterious names. I know there must be millions of other words behind those names—people, places, stories.

  I’m overwhelmed by a strange new thirst, as if I’ve been dehydrated my whole life and am only now starting to realize it. With all my heart and soul I long to know the words and names and stories, to know everything. I want to leave right now, this very minute, and scour every inch of this map with my own eyes, to feel the soil and trees with my own hands and taste the air of every corner of the planet.

  I wonder where I am right now. Little Cam wouldn’t be marked; Uncle Paolo would never allow that. My eyes sift through the names that are there: New Guinea. Sudan. India. Alaska. More oceans and seas than I can count. There are dozens, no, scores of areas outlined in black. Cities? Countries? I want to run through Little Cam screaming for Dr. Klutz to come and teach me.

  Looking at the map, I’m struck by how little I know. Which is alarming, because I feel like I’ve learned so much. I can quote the periodic table backward. Show me an animal and I can tell you its kingdom, its species, and everything in between. I know the name of every plant in the rainforest and how they can be used. Give me a disease, I’ll tell you how to treat it.

  But ask me to name five countries, and I draw a blank. Ask me where the supplies Uncle Timothy brings are manufactured, and I couldn’t tell you. I can point to the west, but I don’t know what ocean lies in that direction or how far away it is. I know what lions and kangaroos and grizzly bears are, but I don’t know where they live.

  The more I learn about the world, the less I seem to know.

  I raise my left hand to see what it’s covering, and my eye catches some words that I can tell were drawn with a pen. I bend closer, squinting to read the tiny handwriting. Little Cambridge, Amazon.

  My stomach twists; it feels like a flock of butterflies are trying to flutter up my throat and out my mouth. Little Cam. My Little Cam.

  It’s little. Very little. Dr. Fields didn’t outline a large area. She didn’t even make a fat dot. Instead, she drew a tiny, tiny little speck of red. I blink at it. Surely that’s not Little Cam. Maybe the speck was an accident, a brief brush of the pen to paper without meaning.

  Surely Little Cam is not that small.

  I circle the little speck with my finger, then start making bigger circles. My finger spirals outward from Little Cam, and it’s only three loops before I reach other dots. These ones have names. Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia. A network of blue lines spiderweb across all of these, and each of them is connected to one main squiggle. River, my mind tells me. I have to squint again to read the words printed above it. Amazon Rainforest. South America.

  “Amazon,” I say very softly. Then, a little louder, making Alai flick his ears at me, “Amazon.”

  I realize I’ve heard this word before. I realize it in the way you might realize there is a spot on your shirt: you see it every time you pass a mirror, but until you really look, it doesn’t register in your brain. I’ve heard of this Amazon in the whispers of the maintenance men at dinner. I’ve heard it slip from the tongue of a careless scientist. I’ve seen it scratched on different research documents, field notes, and labels on jars of specimens. Amazon.

  “The Amazon rainforest,” I whisper, looking up to see it for my own eyes. This part of the world, at least, is mine. Outside, the dark jungle looks as it always has, but I am struck by the difference I feel when I see it. A name is a powerful thing. It sets one apart and gives significance. The rainforest has always been the whole of my world, but the Amazon—while it makes the trees and the lianas and the animals lurking behind its leaves seem special to be part of a place with a name, it also makes it feel smaller. Which is strange. After all, I’ve never seen the edge of the rainforest. If truth be told, I’ve never really been in the rainforest.

  “If I’ve never been in it,” I ask Alai, “and I’ve never been out of it…where have I been all this time?”

  In reply, I hear a knock on the door.

  My heart leaps into my mouth like a monkey up a tree. I crumple up the map, not bothering to refold it in any way. Alai paces to and fro at the door and growls softly.

  “Pia? Are you in there?” It’s Mother.

  I hurriedly stuff the map under the bed, drag the chair aside, open the door, and try to look innocent. “Yes?”

  She glances around the room. “Can I come in?”

  “Oh.” My heart beats faster. “Okay.”

  She brushes past me and sits on the bed. When I turn to face her, I see a corner of the map sticking out, right between her feet. I swallow and try not to stare at it. “What do you want?”

  “To give you your present.” She hands me a small envelope.

  Well. She is full of surprises tonight. Trying not to look too stunned, I take the envelope and open it. Inside is an old photograph of three children, two boys and a girl. I look up at her. “You and Uncle Will and Uncle Antonio?”

  She nods. “It was before…”

  Before the Accident. I look closer at the picture. The three of them are no older than ten, arms around each other’s shoulders and smiling. I’ve never seen a picture of them when they were young. And I’ve never seen such a smile on my mother’s face. The girl in the picture looks carefree and happy, words I would never use for my mother. I’ve always known her to be aloof and objective, the kind of scientist Uncle Paolo so prizes, which is why he has her assist on most of his experiments.

  “Who’s that?” I ask, squinting at a blurry form in the background.

  She takes the photo and studies it, then turns pale. “That—it’s no one.”

  “What do you mean, no one?”

  “It’s…your grandfather. I didn’t realize he was in the shot, or I wouldn’t have…”

  I grab the photo back and stare. “My gr
andfather.” When I look up, I see her face is strained. “You told me he and the others of his generation left Little Cam to start lives in the outside world.”

  “I did. Yes, I did.” She stands and runs her hand through her hair. “This must have been before that.”

  She goes to the door, then turns back. I step sideways so my foot covers the exposed corner of the map. Mother holds out her hand. “Give it back.”

  Shocked, I automatically jerk the picture away. “What?”

  “Give it back. It was a stupid gift. Emotional. Paolo wouldn’t approve. I didn’t know Fa—your grandfather was in the picture.”

  “It’s mine. You gave it to me. I’m keeping it.”

  “Give it to me, Pia!” Her voice is harsh and cold.

  Half disbelieving my ears, I slowly give her the photograph. Now this is the mother I know. Demanding. Stern. Though I admire her cool head in the laboratory, when we’re at home in the glass house, it can be grating. Sometimes I wish my father lived with me instead of my mother, but I’ve never told her that.

  She tears it into shreds. “This party, the dancing…it wasn’t a good idea. It made me lose my head for a while. I shouldn’t have shown you that.”

  I stay silent, my teeth clamped angrily shut.

  She tucks the pieces of the picture in her pocket. “Good night, Pia.”

  I shut the door behind her and stand there a moment, wondering what just happened and why I feel so upset. I wish she hadn’t shown me that picture. It was very unlike her to exhibit such sentimentality, and it’s true, Uncle Paolo wouldn’t have approved.

  Even so, I wish she’d let me keep the picture.

  I sink against the door, kneel on the carpet, and hug Alai around his furry neck. “Too close. Way too close.” In response, he licks my cheek, his tongue as rough as gravel.

  I crawl forward and tuck the corner of the map back under the bed, then change my mind and pull it out. Dr. Klutz wasn’t exaggerating. It takes me ten minutes to fold the thing back up.

  Looking around for a hiding place, I wonder if it might be better off under the bed. My room is pretty sparse. There’s the bed and a small table beside it on which sit my clock, lamp, and a botany book I’ve been working my way through. On the one plaster wall hangs my mirror above a dresser holding clothes and some of my research notebooks. They’re mostly all on biology, which is the subject Uncle Paolo has me studying the most. Alai’s chair in the corner of two glass walls. The shelf in the other corner with my orchids.

  My dressing room isn’t much better. The clothes are all hanging, and I briefly consider hiding it in one of my shoes, but then I think that if I were looking through this room for a hidden map, that would be the first place I would look.

  Nothing seems right. I even lift the back off the toilet, but it’s too wet to put anything in there, unless it were a frog, maybe. I remember doing something like that when I was around three.

  Finally I pry up the carpet in the corner of the room where Alai’s chair sits. Hauling the chair aside proves cumbersome; it’s huge and overstuffed, and unfortunately “extra strong” is not an added perk of being immortal. But the carpet comes up easily, and I’m able to slide the map under it. After I shove the chair back in place, I plop down in it and wait for my nerves to stop humming, while Alai stretches on the floor below me.

  That’s when I see the hole in the fence.

  SEVEN

  A medium-sized ceiba tree has fallen from its stand several yards outside the fence. It fell toward the rainforest, and I see where its roots were yanked out of the ground. The chain link was buried at least a foot into the earth, but where the roots have been pulled up, the fence has come with them. Beneath the mangled chain link is an opening about three feet wide and two feet tall. It is nearly invisible behind the bromeliads that grow along the fence, but from my vantage point I can just see it.

  Hardly believing my own movements, I rise to my feet and get my flashlight from the top drawer of the dresser. I keep it there for the times when a storm puts out the electricity until Clarence can get the generators running again.

  “Come, Alai.”

  What’s gotten into you? I ask myself as I tiptoe down the hallway of the glass house. My room is the only one with actual glass walls, and hence the reason for calling it the glass house, but there are windows everywhere. As I pass them, I can see the glow of the torches reflecting off the buildings toward the center of Little Cam, where a handful of late-nighters are still dancing. Only B Dormitory, its dark windows indicating that nearly everyone inside is asleep, stands between me and the remains of my birthday party, and it would only take a few steps to bring someone within view of the house.

  Holding my breath, not daring to stop and consider the consequences of this mad course of action, I open the front door and slip outside. The night is cool and the air so crisp it makes my senses as acute as Alai’s. As if encouraging my madness, shadows cling to us and cover our trail. I don’t need the flashlight yet. I know every inch of Little Cam as well as I know my own reflection.

  Stray notes of jazz escape the confines of the gardens and find their way to my ears. The music is lively, but beneath the airy melody is a steady, relentless drumbeat. These are the notes I hear best, perhaps because they seem more like an amplification of my own pounding heart. My palms are sweating, and I wipe them absently on the chiffon of my dress, passing the flashlight from hand to hand.

  It doesn’t take long to circle the glass house, though I go slowly, watching every shadow for sign of my mother or Uncle Paolo. Everything is quiet; I hear nothing but the wind in the trees and the constant humming of cicadas, which I am so used to that I only hear it when I think about it directly.

  Once behind the house, I kneel at the hole in the fence and push the heavy leaves of the bromeliads aside. The gap is still there; a part of me had hoped it was just a trick of my mind. But it’s there, and, as terrified as I am, I’m not stopping now. I’ve never wanted anything in my life as badly as I want to be on the other side of the fence. It shouldn’t be like this, I know. I lack nothing in Little Cam. In the jungle there’s only darkness; I don’t know what I think I’ll find in the trees and leaves.

  Hesitating, feeling the dampness of the ground through my dress, I fight the impulse. But it’s strong, stronger than it’s ever been before. Go! Go! Go! my heart screams at me, low and steady and irresistible. It is the drums pounding beneath the jazz. It is the thrashing of a wild, savage inner demon I never knew I had inside me. Uncle Paolo says there are no such things as demons or angels, so perhaps it is simply another Pia. The Pia who gets bored with her own birthday party and hides maps of the world under her carpet.

  As if spurning my hesitance, Alai suddenly darts forward and slips through the hole, not a single hair touching the fence. He stops on the other side and turns to watch me with moonlike eyes. I turn on the flashlight and inspect the gap. I can fit if I crawl on my belly. The dress will be ruined, but I’ll probably never wear it again anyway. The fence is tangled and bent, but nowhere have the wires been severed by the uprooted tree, which must be why the alarm in the guard house wasn’t triggered. Straggly roots hang down like hair from the larger tubers of the fallen tree, creating a tangled, dirty curtain. When I lean back, the hole disappears behind the plants around it. I wonder that I saw it at all.

  Alai paces back and forth, urging me with his yellow gaze to follow.

  Go now or lose your chance forever, Wild Pia’s voice whispers in my head. She frightens me with her fierceness, but I obey.

  I toss the flashlight through the gap. Its beam shines back at me, illuminating my way. Now I must hurry; if anyone wanders near this spot, they couldn’t miss the light if they tried, much less the girl in the teal gown clawing her way through the fence like a capybara grubbing for seeds.

  I’m careful not to let the fence snag my skin as I crawl. It won’t hurt me. Not me. But I don’t want to set off the alarm by brushing against the wires and triggering a
shock.

  Once I’m on the other side, I fluff the dirt with my hands and straighten the bromeliads I crushed in my escape. When I am satisfied that my exit has been well hidden, I pick up my flashlight and turn to face the jungle. Beside me, Alai roars.

  “Sh!” I clamp my hand over his muzzle, and he shakes his head irritably before bounding a few steps forward. With the jaguar to guide me, I start for the trees.

  I have only gone a dozen steps when Little Cam disappears behind me and a wave of dizziness and breathlessness drives me to my knees. I cling to the jaguar and fight the stars that dance tauntingly in my vision.

  What are you doing, oh, what have you done? They’ll find you, they’ll catch you, you stupid, stupid girl! I stand and turn around, ready to go back, finished with escape and madness and the dark. But I don’t take a step. I stand there, eyes wide, flashlight aimed at the ground, just breathing.

  After a few minutes, I feel my nerves calm. Turning again toward the trees, forcing my feet forward, I tell myself, Only an hour. No more. Back in one hour, and I’ll tell someone about the fence. They’ll fix it, and I’ll never be tempted again.

  Wild Pia whispers that she has no intention of doing so, but I ignore her as best I can. She’s brought me this far, and that is enough. I will explore the immediate area and no more. I doubt I will find much to interest me anyway. I’ve seen all the plants and animals of the jungle. They’ve all been brought into Little Cam for research. The scientists say there are hundreds of species not yet discovered` in this place I now know is called the Amazon, but if so, surely they won’t be lurking this close to Little Cam.

  My flashlight strikes off the trees. I see mighty kapoks rising to unfathomable heights. Lianas crisscross every level of the rainforest, creating a network of narrow roads traveled by all manner of monkeys, reptiles, and insects. Every now and then I see a pair of eyes glint in the darkness. I wonder what they belong to. The largest animal in the Amazon is the tapir, but the most dangerous is the anaconda, at least for me. The thought of the giant snake, capable of swallowing a man whole, is the only thing about the rainforest itself that terrifies me. The poisonous snakes can’t puncture my skin, so I don’t fear their venom. The diseases carried by mosquitoes have no effect on me. But anacondas…I have little desire to be strangled and swallowed alive. I can’t suffocate or starve, which would mean an eternity trapped in—I’ll stop that line of thought right there.