The Prey Read Free Page B

as it slides down my body. But I’m too late. The tablet slides down my legs, bounces off my left shin, and fades into the murky depths.
    Lungs bursting, I spin around until I’m crouched upside down, feet planted on the underside of the boat. It’s now or never. One chance to make a dive for the tablet before it descends past the point of retrieval. I kick off the bottom of the boat. My body missiles downward, into darkness, into the cold.
    A fraction of a second before the rope looped around me pulls taut, my fingertips touch stone. I grab it. Then I’m bounced up as if on a bungee cord, the force of it almost dislodging the tablet from my hands. I cradle the tablet against my bare chest, feel grooved lettering engraved into it.
    I surface out of the water in a spray of white, my body reduced to one gigantic mouth gasping for air. Epap and David see the tablet and pry it from my tired arms. They leave me in the water, clinging to the side, barely able to hang on.
    By the time I heave myself onboard, my body flopping wet and heavy, they’ve all huddled around the tablet. Heads pressed together and angled, they’re reading the words chiseled into stone:
    STAY ON THE RIVER.
    —The Scientist
    Their mouths are cracking open. A chorus of giggles and laughter leaks, then bays out. They are all smiles and astonishment and delirium.
    “I told you! I told you! I told you!” Ben is shouting, slapping everyone on the back. “He’d planned this all along!”
    Sissy is standing, hands clasped to her mouth, her eyebrows arched high, tears brimming in her eyes.
    “I knew he’d come through for us!” Jacob shouts. “The Promised Land! He’s leading us to the Promised Land. Of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine!”
    Sissy’s face breaks into a smile that almost feels like physical warmth. Her eyes close in relief. “How did you know the tablet was under us, Gene?” she asks.
    I pause before speaking. My father would often play treasure-hunt games when I was a toddler, leaving me clues around the house. I remember how flustered I’d become, unable to find the clues I knew were there. He’d force me to slow down, take deep breaths, survey the scene with equanimity. He’d say: You’re looking but not seeing. The answer is right under your nose . And almost inevitably, once I calmed down, I’d find the clue wedged between cracks in the floor, laid between the pages of a book I’d been holding the whole time, or placed in my very own pocket.
    But I don’t tell them any of this. “I was just lucky, I guess,” I answer. I start to shiver, the wind gusting blades of ice into my body. I’m only wearing underwear, having taken off my clothes before diving in.
    One of the hepers says something; a burst of communal laughter follows. Sissy rejoins them, clapping her hands. So much emotion gushing off of them.
    I walk into the cabin where I’ve left my clothes in a pile. I strip off my underwear, wring it with shivering hands and arms. I can still hear them guffawing, their eruptions of laughter hee-hawing back and forth. I don’t understand why they have to so demonstrably display what they’re feeling. Can’t they simply feel their emotions without needing to project them? Maybe captivity has stunted them, rendered them incapable of intuiting another’s emotions unless it’s spelled out for them in a vomit of colors.
    They start giggling now, talking about the Scientist this, the Scientist that. This is the confirmation they’ve been looking for. The sign that the Scientist never left them, or betrayed them, that he is in fact waiting for them at the end of this path. For them .
    And not for me.
    Me, he abandoned in a metropolis of monsters. To fend for myself. A boy who cried himself to sleep and wet himself in bed for months afterward. But for them he created an elaborate escape plan involving a journal (clearly meant for them to find), and a boat to lead them to the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine.
    I