The Only Ones (30 page)

George walked over to the interior door. He opened the machine’s heart, looked inside, and said, “I don’t know if I get it. So where did they all go on the Day?”

“No one escaped into space, or underground, or to an alternate universe,” Martin explained. “They came to the future. Some of them have made it here already. A whole lot more will be coming later. That’s why people don’t age between the Day and when they emerge next to that basin. Not a second has passed in their lives, while here … well, years have passed.”

“So they all disappeared at the same moment, but they end up in different times?”

Martin nodded. He understood that it might be a bit confusing. “It helps if you think of people like they’re a school of fish. On the Day, every fish in the school bit a hook and was pulled out of the water. But each hook brought each fish to a different moment in the future. The machine’s calendar is set to the Day. So every time we use the machine, we drop one of those hooks to that exact moment in the past, and we hook one of those fishes and bring them to the present.”

It was hard to say whether George fully understood what Martin was telling him. While they used to be peers, Martin was now the elder, someone for George to look up to. George closed the door to the machine’s heart and sat down next to the control panel. He sat cross-legged and stared at the jumble of knobs and levers and buttons in front of him.

“Why don’t you stop using the machine, then?” he asked politely.

Martin had thought of that, of course, but he knew it couldn’t happen. “I’ve read a lot,” he told George. “The thing is, you can read a book a bunch of times, and while the story may seem different, the words are always the same. Once the words are on the page, they don’t change. The Day happened. There’s no changing that. This will go on, for years and years, for as long as it takes, because everyone disappeared, which means everyone will be brought back. That’s the way the story was written.”

“But you’re talking about the future?”

“The future is written too, and it affects the past,” Martin said plainly. “People like me will think about old friends like you, and we’ll put objects like that piece of paper in machines like the one I built, and we’ll drop all those hooks, and we’ll hook all those fishes. It’s inevitable. We’ll keep causing the Day. We’ll keep making them all disappear.”

George was starting to grasp how monumental this was. He turned his attention to his own hand and traced the lines in his palm with an index finger. In a whisper, he asked, “Are you the only person who knows this?”

Martin shrugged. “For now. But then again, everyone just wants to be reunited with the people they love. That’s all that matters to them. And when they figure out what I’m telling you, they’ll also figure out that there’s only one way to see those loved ones again.”

Martin motioned with his head to the controls of the machine.

“There’s something that doesn’t fit, though,” George said, lifting his chin and finally looking Martin in the eyes.

“There is?”

“You didn’t disappear. Why were you and those other kids the only ones who were left?”

For a brief moment, a breeze of memory swept over Martin and his mind sailed back to his first lonely summer on the island, to those days sitting on the rock outcropping and waiting for the summer people to arrive. He remembered worrying that George, the only person besides his father he’d ever known, had simply forgotten about him. That worry had lived with Martin for a long time.

“Lane told me once it was because we’re awful,” Martin said. “I don’t think that exactly. I think it’s because we chose to live alone, secluded from the rest of the world. As the years go on, and more and more people are remembered and summoned, no one’s ever going to think to summon us. We’re the only ones who were forgotten. So in the long run, we’re the only ones who
will
be forgotten.”

Martin could tell from George’s squint that he wasn’t buying it. “They’re gonna make movies about you guys.
Write songs. Books. They’ll write more books than even you can read, Martin! They’ll keep on telling the story about how you kids got the world working again.”

“Really? You think so?”

George stood up and placed his hand on Martin’s shoulder. “You didn’t live alone. You were a bunch of amazing kids who created this crazy machine and put the world back together. People won’t think to summon you because they’ll know they won’t have to. Everyone will know that you were here all along. You’re the only ones who’ll always be remembered.”

It was true. The logic could go either way, but Martin had never considered that before. “It’s possible,” he said. “It’s a nice way of thinking of things, I guess.”

It was late. They were tired. So they left the machine and walked back to the library, and on the way George mused about all the stories that might be written about Martin and the other kids. Perhaps someone would tell the tale of Henry and his dad and their cowardly escape on the night of the luau. Maybe they would imagine the conversation between Darla and Nigel on the afternoon of Chet’s funeral. Felix’s arrival in Xibalba could surely be fodder for a chapter of a book. His strange sparks of genius deserved at least that much. And while Lane was unlikely ever to tell anyone besides Kelvin what past pain had given birth to her cynicism, plenty of wordsmiths were sure to speculate.

Of course, they’d all want to write about Martin’s father, about what kicked off this chain of events in the first place. Because everyone loved an origin story.

“Heck,” George said as the two paused outside the library. “I was never much of a reader, but I’d read all that stuff.”

“So what will my story be?” Martin asked.

“Yours? Yours will be a hero’s story,” George said.

“Hardly,” Martin said, guilt flavoring his voice. “I’m just a kid who convinced myself I knew what I was doing. When I didn’t. But that doesn’t matter, does it? ’Cause I’m also just a victim of inevitability.”

George wrinkled up his nose. “Do you know the future? I mean, you say that everyone is gonna be brought back, but do you know exactly how that’s gonna happen?”

“No,” Martin admitted.

“Have you ever known exactly how anything is gonna happen?”

“No.”

“Then who cares about inevita-whatever?” George said, his smile flattening out the nose wrinkles. “You just go out and try to make the best of things. And that’s what you’ve done, right? That’s all you can do, right?”

Now Martin’s thoughts drifted to the kids of Xibalba and how they’d always seemed so self-absorbed, so different from George. But were they really all that different? What if the entire world had been pulled out from under George’s feet? How would he have found comfort? How would he have survived? How would he have made the best of things?

Martin remembered the kids holding the lanterns and welcoming him into their odd little community. Not even a year had passed since then, but those kids weren’t kids anymore. They were out there in the world, beyond the lights of Ararat and the campfires and high beams Martin could see dotting the banks upriver and the roads through the mountains. He couldn’t speak for everyone, but he was pretty sure that despite all their mistakes and all the forces of fate they
were bound to find themselves up against, his former neighbors would always try to make the best of things.

Martin gave George a simple nod of agreement.

“I should make the best of things too,” George replied. “When I see my parents again, I’m gonna have ’em bring me to your father’s old address. See what I find.”

“There’s nothing for me there,” Martin replied. “Just a place my father and I once lived. It burned a long time back. Besides, I don’t even remember it.”

“But you wanted me to go. I haven’t forgotten that.”

The autumn came in, furious and orange. Wind and rain whipped Ararat, but the machine ran nonstop. Keeping busy put a mask on Martin’s loneliness, but it was still loneliness. George left soon after his family was summoned, and Martin was without a best friend once more. Other people swept through his life with barely a hello. He would summon them, and he would usher them to the door, and he would never see them after that. Then he’d do it all over again. The only difference was the weather when his guards walked him home every night.

It didn’t sit well with many adults that a boy could have so much power. People arrived confused and compliant, but men and women who had lingered in the vicinity of Ararat for months were beginning to band together and call for Martin’s removal.

The Council for a Blessed Kingdom, as one collection of overly zealous citizens named themselves, invited Martin to a secret meeting nearly a month after his fourteenth birthday and the third anniversary of the Day. It was a torrent outside, one of the nastiest storms in memory. With his cabal of
guards accompanying him, Martin arrived, cautious and drenched. He sat on a cold, hard wooden chair, below a stuffed moose head, in a hunting lodge a few miles up the river.

A man named Crawford Dixon presided over the meeting, and he was a no-nonsense type, even though his features were soft and small and his voice wasn’t much more than a gravelly whisper.

“We could have you … removed … if we wanted,” he told Martin, his patronizing gaze gliding over Martin’s guards.

“I’m sure you could,” Martin admitted.

“You are, however, a hard worker and a genius of some sort,” Crawford said. “So here is how we will proceed. The Council has chosen five people who will be your apprentices. You will teach them how to build the machine, and how to run the machine, and they will each teach five more. And things will go on like this until these machines are like post offices. Every town will have one.”

“I assumed that this would have to happen,” Martin said.

“So you comply?”

“Do I have a choice?” Martin asked.

Crawford answered the question by jotting down a quick note, looking up, and saying, “We start tomorrow.”

On the way back to Ararat, Martin made a decision, if it could be called that. He knew that his days running the machine were numbered, so he would do as instructed. He would teach them how to build new machines, but he would make one small change to the blueprints. All the Birthday Dials would be permanently set to the Day. Because if anyone other than Martin had the ability to conjure people
from times other than the Day, then there was too much potential for chaos. The future could become a place where the vindictive or the heartsick or the just plain curious could snatch people up with the push of a button, the flip of a switch, the simple turn of a dial. Martin wouldn’t let that happen.

When he finally arrived home at the library, the rain was so heavy that he didn’t notice the Jolly Roger flying on the flagpole. He bid his guards good night, and he ducked inside, already plotting out the revised blueprints in his head.

From his seat on the edge of the circulation desk, a smiling and soaked George greeted Martin with a wave.

“My goodness,” Martin said in shock. “Are you okay?”

“Never been this far north this time of year,” George replied as he wrung water from his sleeve.

“It can be dicey,” Martin told him.

George held an envelope in his hand. Somehow, he had kept it dry. “It used to be a farm,” he said with a smile. “It’s only a field now, down a dirt road, far away from anywhere. I think there was a house. There was concrete that my dad said was probably the foundation.”

“You really went?” Martin asked.

“Of course I did.”

“I appreciate it.”

George pushed the envelope at him. “There was a tree. A maple. It wasn’t too big. On the ground next to it, there was a plaque. You know, like for a statue or something. I did a rubbing, using a broken pencil.”

He pushed the envelope at Martin again. Martin took it and picked lightly at the corner until he had made a small
hole. Running his pinkie finger along the seam, he opened it. Inside, there was a message written in chalky, chunky gray.

Taped to the bottom of the page was a small maple leaf, no bigger than a boy’s hand.

The alarm clock Martin’s father had given him on his eighth birthday had told him he was born sometime shortly before 12:21 a.m. The exact moment of his birth wasn’t as important as the moment his father received the call about it. He turned the Birthday Dials. He set them accordingly.

He went through the rest of the procedure. When the sounds and the light and the laughs were finished, Martin opened the door to the machine’s heart.

Behind the door, the maple leaf sat in the basin. A woman lifted herself to her feet. Her eyelids wouldn’t open immediately, so Martin decided to wait. He wouldn’t speak until he saw her eyes.

The woman wasn’t much older than Martin. Eight years. Maybe ten. Her auburn hair was thick, but tangled. She pulled it away from her eyes with damp hands. Her face was similar to his, but it wasn’t like looking in a mirror for Martin. It was like opening a book he’d never read but somehow knew the story to by heart.

“Is this the bathroom?” she said, squinting.

“No. But you’re safe,” Martin told her.

“Are you an orderly?” she asked.

“My name is Martin,” he said. “Your name is Hope, right?”

She smiled as she ran her hands down the long, papery gown she wore. “It is. And my son’s name is Martin as well. But I haven’t met him yet. They had to put me under when he was born. He’s in the nursery now.”

“You’ll meet him,” Martin assured her. There was a shimmer to her, and even in the darkness, he could see what his father had meant when he’d equated her with a bubble. She was gorgeous, but she seemed destined to disappear in a blink.

“I have to get back to my room,” she said. “The doctor will be expecting me. And I don’t want to worry my husband. He’ll be on his way. Martin came a month early. He was a surprise.”

“Stay,” Martin pleaded. “I have some things I need to tell you.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “My husband is out of town on business. They’re calling and waking him and he’ll be on his way. I didn’t tell the nurses I was going to the bathroom. Nobody knows where I am.”