The Crossing

I did not plan the crossing. That is the truth, and I have held onto it through everything that came after, because the crossing was the one thing on that island I did not choose. It was chosen for me, by the woman with the muzzle, and I have spent years trying to decide whether what she did was mercy or something I have no word for.

The night after the Brindle, the village did not sing the Code. I lay in the mess hall with the lights on and listened to the silence the way you listen to a held breath, and at some hour past midnight I heard the softest sound on the island: a hand on the mess hall door, and a voice, barely a scrape of breath, saying my name.

The woman with the muzzle stood in the doorway. She had come through the outer gate, which was the thing the Kindred did not do at night, and she was shaking, and her eyes were the cougar's eyes, and they were full of something that had finally found a word.

"New man," she whispered. "The Warden knows you watched. He is coming for you in the morning. The boat will not take you. The boat is for the ones he is finished with, and you are not finished. You are a witness, and he does not keep witnesses. He sends them to the inner side."

I stood up. The room did a slow turn.

"Where is the inner side?"

"Where the ones who cannot keep the Code go," she said. "Where the Warden sends the witnesses and the unfinished and the ones who have seen what he makes. You must go before dawn. You must go to the village, and the Shambler will take you past the inner gate, and you must not come back to this side until the boat has come and gone, and then you must find your way to the far cliffs, and you must not be found."

"Come with me," I said.

She looked at me, and the look was the longest look I had seen on any face on that island, longer than the Shambler's look at the inner fence, and she said, "I cannot go to the inner side. I have a daughter among the Kindred. She is the one who was made from a deer, and she is small, and she cannot keep the Code for more than a day at a time, and I stay to keep it for her. Go."

I argued. I have gone back to that doorway a hundred times and argued it again, and every time she shakes her head the same way. She gave me a cloth with bread in it and a canteen of water, and she told me the way to the village, and she went back out into the dark, and I stood in the mess hall with the bread in my hand and understood that I had been given a way out of the Warden's world by the only person in it who could not take it. Corbett had promised me the boat in three days, and the woman had promised me the inner side, and I did not know which promise was true, and I was going to have to find out alone.

I went through the outer gate before first light. The village was awake, which it was not supposed to be, and the Shambler was waiting in the yard, and beside him stood the Whistle, the low fast thing I had seen at his feet. The Whistle was the size of a large dog, made from a dog, with a muzzle that had been shortened and a brow that had been raised, and he looked at me with eyes that were entirely dog, and he made a sound that was half a whine and half a question, and the Shambler said, "He will go with you to the inner gate. He cannot go past it. The inner side does not bring things back."

I looked at the inner fence, black against the gray sky, and I looked at the village, and I understood that I was doing the thing the woman had told me to do, and that the doing of it was the loneliest thing I had ever done.

"Go," the Shambler said. "And if you come to the far cliffs, and you find a way off this island, do not tell them your name. Names are how the Warden keeps his world small. Carry no name past the inner gate, and nothing on the inner side will have a name to hold you with."

I walked to the inner gate with the Whistle at my heels, and the gate stood open, the way the Shambler had said it would, and I went through it, and the Whistle stopped at the line and watched me go, and I have never stopped seeing him there, a dog-shaped thing at the edge of a boundary, doing the one thing he had been made not to do, letting me cross.

The inner side of the island was the same island and not the same. The scrub was denser. The paths were animal paths. The air was older, darker, full of the smell of standing water and things that had died and fed other things. I walked until the sun was high and the eucalyptus closed over me, and I did not know where I was going, and I was crossing the line the Warden had drawn in himself, the line between the world where he was a maker and the world where he was only a man, and the fence was on both sides of him, and I had been walking toward the far side of him since the night on the road outside the shed.