I
Today is my eighteenth birthday. Tomorrow I swear off love.
It’s absurd. I’ve never kissed a girl, never asked anyone out. I’ve never slipped my arm around a waist, hoping for encouragement to let it stay. I’ve never danced entangled in another’s limbs, never flirted in a hallway or teased someone and walked away.
And yet tomorrow, when I give up love, everything will change. I’ll still be Ander—blond and pale, immune to illness, able to blend into any background—but I won’t be me anymore. I won’t be what I am today.
Because for as long as I have known Eureka, my love for her has defined me. And though she knows nothing of my existence, I’ve known her all my life. My secret dies in the woods tonight, along with a thousand smaller passions. The Passage is what matters, not the life I’ll lose.
A knock on my door startles me. My uncle doesn’t wait, enters my dark room.
“Are you packed?” Albion closes the blinds above my bed, erasing the knife made of moonlight that was splitting my chest in two.
Albion makes a room feel cold. Like all my relatives, his movements make no sound. He has no scent. His voice is clear but somehow never disturbs the silence. Only his shape and his effect on the temperature tell me that I’m not dreaming. I pull my blanket higher.
In the twin bed across the room, my uncle Critias stretches stiffly and sits up. His naked body is muscular, strong. He looks younger than Albion, though both of them are thousands of years old.
Albion looks at him. “He isn’t packed yet, is he?”
“Are you packed?” Critias asks me.
“I’m packed.” I glance at the backpack I’ve been filling slowly for months. It’s only one night in the woods, but I will take my entire childhood with me. Then I will leave it there.
“Get up, then. Get going,” Albion says.
On a slanted plank between his bed and the wall, Critias begins his hundred push-ups.
“Happy birthday,” he tells me, lifting into number thirteen.
The Passage is a walk in the woods. You go in a boy; you come out a man. Every member of my family goes through this ritual on the night we turn eighteen. When I complete the Passage I’ll be a Seedbearer, like the aunts and uncles who raised me. I’ll know the secrets that have always swirled around me, vapors I’ve been forbidden to inhale. I’ll begin to live forever.
My dog, Shiloh, sleeps at the foot of my bed. When I rise he nudges me with his damp nose. I rub the spotted crown of his head. “I’ll miss you, too.”
“Shiloh’s going with you,” Critias says, his voice slightly muffled as he drags a sweater down his torso in the dark.
For a moment, I’m elated. Then I remember the rules. “Why is he coming with me?”
Critias slides a broken silver watch onto his arm. “You know why.”
I close my eyes in pain.
“Stop it,” Critias snaps. And he’s my kindest relative. “I’ll be waiting in the car.”
I enter the darkened kitchen, where my aunts Starling and Chora are debating which brand of rattrap is best. Starling is willowy and frail. Chora is shorter, stout. Their faces, like my uncles’, are easy to forget.
We never turn on the lights. We keep the blinds drawn all the time. We live on the northwest corner of Lafayette in an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of an overgrown wheat field. You can’t see our house from the road. No one knows we live here.
“I made the cake.” Starling points to a foil-capped clump on the table. Someone’s taped a box of candles to it.
“Are you hungry?” Chora asks. Alligator sausage hisses in a frying pan behind her.
“No.” I don’t want to have to put down and pick back up my heavy backpack. It feels like it’s cutting lashes into my shoulders.
“Best to get on the road.” Starling stuffs a canvas satchel into my backpack, adding to my load. “Sleeping bag. Sandwiches. Insect repellent. Fire starter.”
“And the cake.” Chora hands it to me like a quarterback.
As they eye me I wonder if they’re thinking of their own Passages, centuries ago. What private agonies did they forsake? What passions did they know when they were on the other side?
“See you tomorrow,” they say in unison.
The car has been running for half an hour. Exhaust blossoms in the inky air as Critias waits in the driver’s seat. I know from his serene expression that he is listening to screaming AM talk radio. Shiloh sticks close beside me through the front door, thrilled to be included. I drop my backpack and my cake into the trunk.
Inside the car it’s close and warm. Shiloh licks the window. A gray sun edges over the cypresses behind our house, and I think of the time I ran away from home. I was eight and Albion had just told me the reason I was being forced to watch Eureka.