She’d wielded Mist a hundred times but never used it. Now it rose, sliding up her hip, behind her back, slippery in her spasming hand. The slim man wore dark clothes that made his face look paper white. When he was ten feet away, Liv recognized that his face was white—he wore a mask. She whimpered. The mask was a novelty from a dollar-store Halloween aisle, molded plastic and an elastic strap. At some point, it had been covered in white paint, and detailed with black-dot eyes and a smiley-face mouth.
Smiley Face stopped at handshake distance. Liv felt the sting of scared tears.
“You’ve come,” he stated simply, “to set them free.”
Liv drew a cold, quaking breath. Hearing intelligible English down here was this nightmare’s wildest detail. Though muffled behind plastic, the man’s voice had a musical quality. Liv regripped Mist and moved her head, intending to indicate that, no, he was wrong. But she felt the skin of her neck crimp: She was nodding. Despite the stifling fear, she’d try to get every one of them up the ladder no matter how many legs they had, through the silo hatch no matter the sensitivity of their strange eyeballs. To make up for how little she’d done to help A, she’d try.
“I can’t think of any other reason you would find us,” Smiley Face said. “And I thank you for the thought. Can I fix you a cup of tea?”
Liv wiped sweat from her eyes and stared into the indifferent black dots of the mask’s eyes. Did tea mean sitting down? In this ghoulish farce of a kitchen? She shook her head, and that shook her shoulder, which shook her arm, and she felt one of Mist’s points jab her in the backside. The pain emboldened her, and she spoke, her voice breaking over Dolly Parton.
“You’re keeping them down here,” she rasped. “You can’t do that.”
He gestured with long, delicate fingers.
“I don’t lock doors,” he said. “You saw yourself.”
“Then they don’t know,” Liv said. “They’re confused. They’re scared.”
Smiley Face folded his hands in front of him.
“Are you sure,” he asked gently, “it’s not you who’s confused and scared?”
He drifted to the right, under the kitchen light. Liv hissed at the motion and revealed Mist as a warning. Smiley Face either didn’t see the weapon through the mask or didn’t care; he stepped over helixes of warped linoleum and settled a hand upon the giant’s bubbled neck. He stroked, each blister fattening under the pressure of his hand before rimpling back into place. Smiley Face wore dark blue hospital scrubs with short sleeves. His bare arms, from what Liv could see, were normal.
“You’ve made an easy mistake. Freedom—it’s not to be found up there. Have you ever felt free?” He leaned onto the back of the vacated chair opposite the giant. “Think of all the things you ever wished you could say.”
Liv credited the masked man’s sedate tone for being able to understand his instruction. She thought of the things she could have been brave enough to tell her mother, about her drinking, about Doug, about A. Liv hadn’t needed to go through all of this alone, if only she could have made herself open her mouth.
“Think of all the things,” Smiley Face continued, “you ever wished you could do.”
This list was even longer. Helping her father in a way that might have prevented all of this. Trying to understand A instead of being afraid to relinquish her rage. Being there for Doug in the years he’d needed her most.
“Down here, true freedom is possible,” Smiley Face said. “I know that’s not the reason this program was founded. But you can’t control life’s gorgeous, ungainly sprawl. You can’t curtail evolution. I believe this, what you see, is what Biatalik was destined to be. Everyone here is a truly unique being, one of a kind—I’ve seen to it. Isn’t that what everyone up there fights so hard to be? One of a kind?”
Liv thought of her dad, his dogged campaign to get incurious teenagers to care about poetry. She thought of Doug, striving to formulate corn mazes of legend. She scanned this cellar world and did, for an instant, feel a startling current of dozy warmth. All the struggles of the bright, noisy, overcrowded overground, what was the point of any of it?
“My orphans,” Smiley Face sighed. “I love them so much.”
Carbajal had said the Biatalik subjects were life-sentence prisoners, but under the wing of this masked man, they displayed no antisocial tendencies. They behaved, in fact, like model citizens, like her own dad during off-hours, relaxing on cushioned furniture to while away time with television and games.
“Who are you?” Liv whispered.
Smiley Face touched his white mask with the same delicacy as he’d touched the giant’s blisters.
“It’s been so long since we’ve had a visitor. There was a man, a military man, he used to come and leave crates of food in the silo. I don’t know if it was under orders or if he just wished to help. Fourteen months ago, he stopped coming. I don’t know why. Since then, it has been difficult. Our supplies are getting low. We’ve had to begin rationing. We could use a new friend. Perhaps that friend could be you? What do you think, Olivia?”
Hearing her name spoken aloud delivered no particular blow. Instead it burned like a sliver starting to fester with infection. Her shock peeled back just enough to recognize that everything about this situation felt inevitable. From the day she’d seen this farm from behind an electric fence, she’d never really left it.
“I’m Dr. Faddon.” He gestured at the wrist compass Liv wore. “And you’re Olivia Fleming. I’ve heard so much about you.”
His next gesture was at the knickknack shelf, and Liv sidestepped onto gummy linoleum so that she could see the rest of it. On the far left was an object she recognized, an object that, for two years, she’d only known by its chalk outline. It was Lizardpoint, the turn-of-the-century Ghanaian fighting pick, its barbed point, hyena-hide fitting, and lizard-skin grip transformed, via its placement, into something as innocent as a figurine.
“We’ve been so worried about him,” Faddon said.
Liv’s eyes sandpapered against tender sockets.
“He’s the only one of my orphans to ever leave,” Faddon continued. “Not long ago, off he ran. We, of course, had no means to go after him. That compass you’re wearing, he never took it off. It reminded him of his family, he said. While he could still talk, that is.”
Liv thought of A, clutching her dad’s compass.
Her veins went cold even as her body melted.
“No,” Liv said. “No, no. No, no, no, no.”
There was no hope of pushing the truth away, not anymore, not ever again. The being known as A hadn’t kidnapped or killed her father.
The being known as A was her father.
30.
Her silly first thought: That’s why John wouldn’t attack him.
Liv pushed off of a refrigerator covered with crayon drawings, her sweaty palms squeaking. Fear of death strangled her, but so did fear of living, and she needed to help the people down here as much as she needed to know the awful truth. She stumbled, twirled, and was beyond the kitchen and into the living room, oriented toward the deeper compound rather than the ladder offering escape into the civilized world, or the world she’d always considered civilized until this instant of understanding the atrocities she, Liv Fleming, had committed.