“Take what?”

“Being on the side that’s winning.”

“So you found Zion and you got what you wanted.”

“I can breathe, can’t I? And I don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

We were halfway up the slope and I was worn out from it. I stopped and stared back down at the compound. Just three buildings covered in snow — the one we’d emerged out of, a much larger bunker, and between the two of them was a small steel dome. There was not a single window on any one of the buildings. Agents were stationed at every door.

And according to Zee, my old man had once stolen me away from this place. So this was where I’d been born, then. This was where I was from.

I watched the smoking bio vat on the ridge across from me, pumping out juice like a giant metal heart. And here and there I could see bits of old junk poking out of the frozen landscape.

“Do you think he loved her?” Zee said.

“Who?”

“Hina.”

“Sure,” I said. “Least she weren’t running around killing folk.”

“But he still left her.”

“He was good at ditching people. It’s a skill, maybe.”

“You want so bad to hate him. So should I hate him more? Hina always told me my real dad had no idea I existed. He must have left her before he even knew I was gonna be born.”

I thought about the statue down in Old Orleans. And I wondered if it had really been built for Hina. Or had what Pop loved in the replicant been something he’d loved a whole lot longer?

And I must have been there, I realized. Back then. In Old Orleans. If everything Zee had said was true. I’d have been tiny. Just barely been born, perhaps. But I’d have been there. On my old man’s back, buried in a blanket. Holding on as he built the statue that years later I came to finish. The statue he’d left with the face still missing.

“She was like a reflection,” I said. “Your momma.”

“I think in the end she reminded him of what he’d done. The experiments. This.” She pointed down at the compound. “You were the only thing he didn’t tie to this place. And when he gave you up, it was only so he could try and stop it all.”

I pulled off my hood so I could stare at her, but Zee was all bundled and hidden away.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The agents talk about it. Last winter. Everyone thought he’d come back to help finish the project. But he staged an uprising. Freed people, got them back to the mainland. People like that crazy old Rasta we found.”

I thought about what the Creator had said. About Pop raising me and me being free.

Is that why he’d never told me?

Had he just waited till I was old enough so I could keep on with the building? And then he’d gone off to risk everything, to try to put all this right?

“Uprising,” I whispered.

“Yeah. Until he got caught.”

I pictured that photograph of Pop chained to the tree. And then I remembered the bootlegger we’d buried — the woman beat to death for giving out corn. She’d been our last client. Our last job together. Before Pop hightailed us on the road to Vega.

My heart got fast and the world got slow.

“And now they’ve got him locked up,” I said.

“Right.”

I remembered the old Rasta, a lifetime ago, shaking his staff at the sunrise.

“And they’re gonna kill him,” I said, my voice getting louder. “In the spring?”

“Sooner than that. Used to be that’s when they’d do the experiments. But they’ve got it all figured out now. They’re ready to bring a forest back to the mainland.”

“They’re gonna use ’em.” I thought of Alpha. Crow. “The people from the boat?”

“Them and the rest they’ve gathered, the ones with the right DNA.”

“But that woman said they’re sleeping. Safe.”

“They are. Until fusion kicks in.” Zee pointed down at the main bunker. And somewhere down there, locked up, was my old man. Still bound in chains, perhaps. Still holding on. And Alpha was trapped down there, too. Was she sleeping? Was she dreaming her tree builder had drifted away?

“When does it start?” I said.

“Two more days.”

I glanced up the slope, the way we were heading.

“And what do they call this place?”

“Promise Island.”

I thought about that old Rasta again, his belly bubbled up with bark. I tried to remember the things he’d told me. And I thought about Pop as I slumped down hard on the snow.

Had he been protecting me?

He’d gone to fix something he had long kept secret, something he figured me too weak to know. But I’d made it here, anyway. Made it without him.

“Come on,” Zee said, taking my hand and squeezing my fingers through our thick gloves. “We’re almost there.”

Top of the hill and I could see all the way down the other side. All the way down to the tops of the trees.

I stood there, staring down at the leafless branches that reached up at me. And I thought at once how pale and flimsy the trees appeared. Nothing I’d ever built resembled their fragility.

My legs made fast work scrambling downhill, and the movement felt like I was jump-starting myself. It began snowing again as I reached the bottom of the crunchy slope, and I stood for a moment, just ten feet from the spindled branches, watching as they danced in the wind and the white flakes fell.

I took a step forward. A few more steps. Then I was close enough to touch the thin trunks. The papery bark. I pulled off my gloves and shoved my sleeves to my elbows. Then I reached my hands to the trees and ran my fingers slow and cold upon them.

The bark felt powdery, but beneath it was slippery and smooth. Greenish white in color, with black knots like eyeballs. I pushed at a tree and it pushed right back.

I got closer, yanked off my hood, and stuck my face against the wood, breathing its smell and tasting it with my tongue, snow melting on my lips.

I stepped from one tree to another, moving my hands so as to never let them go.

I dug at the snow with my boot heel and studied where the trees plunged into the earth. I found leaves beneath the ice, some gold, some yellow, most of them black. They were soggy and mashed together, but I squeezed the leaves in my fingers and separated them out to dry. I bit into one and its veins were chewy. And then I just sank to my knees and I broke down and cried.

Zee sat on the edge of the forest, watching me, and when I got done crying, she shuffled through the slush and sticks and knelt beside me.

“You should keep your hood up,” she said. “Or you’ll freeze over.”

My face was all snotty and wet and I wiped it with snow. “Don’t look like nothing I ever pictured,” I said.

“Me, neither.”

“How long you been here?”

“A week or so.”

“You used to it yet?”

“A little.”

“I don’t want to ever get used to it,” I said. “Not ever.”

“Imagine the spring, though. The leaves coming green. The seasons.”

“Yeah,” I said. The seasons. My specialty.

I stared into the forest, and there, in the middle of the stand, was an opening. A clearing. I stood and stumbled toward it.

“This is where they take them from,” Zee said, coming up behind me. “In here was the one they really want.”

“What is it?”

“Apples. An apple tree. It was right here.”

I thrashed around in the opening, but the only trees I could see were the thin limbs, the dirty white bark like old pearl in moonlight.

“It’s gone,” Zee said. “They got it all worked up. Ready for the fusion.”

“You seen one? An apple?”

“We’re too far north. The Creator says the growing season’s too short. They tried bringing a tree back to the mainland. Years ago. Grew it up in a glass building. But a swarm left their nest in the cornfields and migrated over. They covered the glass and blocked out the sun, made a hole and squeezed inside.” Zee shuddered. “But the locusts won’t eat these new trees they’re making. They can’t even burrow inside them like they do in the corn.”