Long as her lungs kept working, anyway.

She was my family. My flesh and blood. But I didn’t reckon I could trust her a damn bit. She was acting like she wanted us to have always been close. But back in the Tripnotyst’s tent, she’d either been trying to save me or was just switching her allies around, and I never had figured out which. And regardless, she seemed pretty cozy with what was going on here on Promise Island. It made sense, I guess. I mean the lass had done well for herself on this pile of junk. I remembered that night when I’d found her asleep in Frost’s house and her body had been bruised and battered, and how long had she had to live like that? How long had she suffered with Frost because our father had left Hina behind?

I’d take her with us. That’s what I decided. But she couldn’t know that. Not yet.

“Stick close, sister,” I said, busting my shovel at the snowy dirt again. “You might learn something.”

“Sister?” She gave me a funny kind of smile. “Well, if you’re really gonna do this, how about I round us up some help?”

Zee brought me agents. Whole dozen of the suckers. They arrived all buried inside hoods and purple fuzz, but they sure shed some layers once I put them to working.

Outside of the uniform, the agents were just people. Just no one. Just anyone. Men and women. Old and young. They didn’t share the same face, so why’d they all dress the same? Why’d they sell themselves short to be part of someone else’s plan?

Because they were weak, that’s what I reckoned. Most of them had hardly done a real day of work in their lives. Too used to marching folk around from behind the trigger of a gun. Not at all used to creating, to the hard slog of building, the strength it takes to transform one thing into something else.

Their smooth skin blistered on the fiberglass shovels, and they wanted to jackhammer the dirt, blast my scrap right out of there. I told them that’d just blow the salvage to bits. Told them they’d better do less talking and do more digging.

By evening, I had a stack of aluminum tubes and some hubcaps, a load of old bottles and cans, a reel of thick cable, plastic piping, a metal drum. And one good, big old rusty sheet of iron.

Perfect.

“I’ll build tomorrow,” I told Zee as we headed back through the forest.

“Are you gonna make it light up?”

“Sure, if you get me a generator. Some LEDs. But I’ll need juice,” I told her. “Lots of juice.”

I got back to the compound just as it was getting dark, and the Creator was waiting on me outside Crow’s room.

“Success,” she said, her gray eyes tired but bright. “At least I think so. Usually we can repair someone with a small graft if they need it. But I’ve never tried to replace whole limbs before.”

I wondered for a moment what it would take for this woman to be someone who just fixed folk with her science. I mean, this here patching up people proved useful. It had saved Alpha. And maybe it had saved that old Rasta once, before Pop had set the dude free.

“So it worked?” I said.

“It appears so. We’ll know when your friend comes back around. I stimulated propagation, and the cells worked their magic. But whether or not his nervous system agrees with the plan, well, we’ll find out when he wakes up again.”

“How long?”

“He’ll sleep until morning. But what about you, Banyan? How did it go today?”

“You’ll see,” I said. “Tomorrow. When I get done. But tonight I get to see my old man. Right?”

She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder, giving me an awkward sort of squeeze. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you some of my work.”

The Creator led me across the snow, past the dome, and up to the large bunker. “This is our main staging area,” she said, as we shuffled through the snow. “Where we conduct dormancy, and where we’ll begin fusion.”

She swiped a plastic tag that caused two sets of steel doors to peel open. Then she led me inside a giant chamber of bright lights and bodies.

Human bodies.

They were all stretched out together, head to toe and side by side. Their eyes were sealed shut, faces beyond sleeping. And all of them were naked. Limbs pale and floppy. Arms wired up with cables that ran to a giant purple vat that hung from the ceiling.

I scanned the bodies, far as I could see, looking for a face that could be Alpha’s, knowing she was in there somewhere.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the Creator, raising her voice above the drone of machinery. “But we’re not killing anyone. We’re transforming them. In fact, we’re providing them with everlasting life.”

“How do you reckon?” I said, buying for time while I kept checking for Alpha.

“We’re going to make them magnificent, Banyan. They’ll be the first of a whole new species. A locust-proof species. And they’ll self-propagate, just as the white trees on this island have done for centuries. Reproducing asexually. New plants off the same shared root system. Once we start planting on the mainland, the organism will keep on growing. Don’t you see? We’re granting these single bodies the chance to multiply. To be eternal. Part of a forest without end.”

I gazed across the field of human skin that’d soon be made of leaves and wood. I thought about the fire pit back in the factory, pictured Sal being cast into the flames because his DNA didn’t match up with what GenTech needed. No eternal life for him, then. Not unless you could live inside ashes.

“Can’t you just copy the bodies you want?”

“The gene pool needs diversity. We’ve had to match a core protein set, but the more variants we mix in now, the better off we’ll be.”

I kept scanning the faces. “So what keeps them sleeping?”

“Up there.” She pointed to the purple vat on the ceiling. “It’s a feeder. Keeps them under and gives them everything they need to get their bodies strong, get their cells ready. This time tomorrow, we’ll add a solution that prepares them for fusion. Soon after that, they’ll no longer be simply human.”

I just stared at her, and she beamed with pride.

“The first crop of a brand new species. Trees made ready for the mainland. Regenerating like the white tree but growing fruit like our apple tree. And now,” she said, taking my arm, “it’s time I showed you the source.”

She called the dome the Orchard, and it was smaller and much quieter than the bunker full of bodies. The Creator opened up the steel door with her plastic key. And once inside, I saw a glimpse of something from a broke-down dream.

I staggered and the Creator caught me. I would have pushed her away, pulled myself free. But I felt upside down, as dizzy as when I’d been sick back in the mud pit. All full of a fever that stretched out my mind.

I heard the Creator. She was speaking to me. Trying to explain what was going on. But she didn’t refer to the man as my father. Or Pop. Or anything like that.

She just called him the Producer.

Locked up, Zee had said. My dad was somewhere on the island. Locked up. But no one had really told me anything. Because no one had said one damn thing about this.

Pop didn’t need to be locked up.

He didn’t need to be wrapped up in chains.

He’d left me out near the cornfields. Down in the dirt. But now, seeing him again, it was like he was leaving me all over. And it was like I was just watching, turning to stone as he floated away.

They had him inside a big old tank of water. A tank glowed up with golden lights. There ain’t a way I can really tell what they’d done to him. There’s not words built for what they had going on.

I swayed forward. Part of me wanted to run up and press my face at the glass. But I just waited, watching as the Creator strolled up to the tank and checked the gadgets that were wired against it.