"No one ever told you who your parents were?" she said finally.
"They never even told Ripper," said X. "I suppose they feared I would look for them. And, in that, they are correct. When I was young, I used to console myself by inventing a love story about my mother and father. I told myself that my mother wept and my father tore his hair when the lords wrenched me away." He paused. "You did not expect such a dreary monologue," he said. "Shall I end it there?"
"Please don't," said Zoe, then quoted something he'd told her himself: "Perhaps telling the story will take away some of its power."
"I suspect my father was unaware of my existence and my mother was glad to be quit of me," X said. "After all, they were almost certainly prisoners-and of rough character. I have scant memories of my first decade. It was an oddity for a child to be growing up among the damned. I have never met another. Only I needed to eat because only I needed to grow. Only I was aging at all."
"It's why you can't read," said Zoe softly. "Because no one bothered to teach you."
"Many of the prisoners hated me when I was a child," X continued. "Many still do. Perhaps I remind them of their own lost innocence. Perhaps they're jealous because they think that, unlike them, I will grow old and one day die and escape the Lowlands."
"Will you die?" said Zoe. "Can you?"
"I do not even know," said X. "There is not another like me to ask. Maybe I will rot little by little but never actually perish. I see that my words pain you, Zoe, but you should know what sort of creature you have befriended." He stopped, before returning to his story. "As a child in the Lowlands, I was kicked and punched by other prisoners. I was beaten even by some of the guards, who resented having to bring me water and meat. I was given nicknames, but they were forgotten, one after the other, because no one cared enough about me to remember them. Then, when I was ten, one of the lords simply shoved me at Ripper and told her to train me to hunt souls. 'Let's see if he's worth keeping alive,' he said."
"Ripper," said Zoe. "You like her."
"I owe her everything," said X. "I learned to hunt quickly. Banger was my first soul. I took him when I was just sixteen. I found him in a tavern. He looked at me like I was a child, a nuisance-so I struck him in the throat. Ripper seemed astonished when I brought him back to the Lowlands and threw him at the lords' feet. She told me I was special. I swear to you, her praise kept me alive. She couldn't teach me to read, for she had no books, no paper, no pens. She didn't even have fingernails to scratch letters into the rock, because she had ripped them all out. But she taught me to be quick and strong and hard-just as your mother has taught you."
"I wish I could meet Ripper," said Zoe.
X laughed quietly.
"Arranging such an interview might be complicated," he said.
"Right?" said Zoe.
She was laughing now, too.
"Yet Ripper would adore you," said X.
Zoe blushed at this. X did not know why.
"You haven't explained the ice on the lake," she said. "Why did you turn it orange?"
X looked pained.
"Am I to have no secrets at all?" he said.
"I showed you mine," she said playfully.
X stood, and drew closer to her. He saw her smile and roll her eyes at the sight of his bare feet on the ice. Something about this girl loosened the ever-present knot in his chest. Just the sight of her unclenched every part of him.
Zoe handed him his shirt. She turned away, but just slightly, as he tugged it on. The closer they came to each other, the more the air itself seemed to want to pull them together.
"I set the lake afire because I knew you were there," he said. "It was not a necessity."
Zoe arched an eyebrow.
"You were showing off for me?" she said, grinning.
"I shall leave you to your conjecture," he said. "I have no more to say on the subject."
Zoe leaned toward him.
She pushed the wet hair from his eyes, her face just inches from his.
X jerked away in surprise. Zoe cast her eyes down, mortified.
Immediately, self-loathing flooded through X. She'd meant to kiss him, and he had flinched! He had ruined the moment.
But, no, he would not let the moment go.
Now he moved toward her.
He could feel himself shaking. He hardly knew what he was doing. So little in either world frightened him-and yet this did.
Zoe saw that he was nervous, and leaned in to meet him. At the last possible moment, she turned her lips from his and kissed the bruises beneath his eyes, one after the other.
The knot in his chest fell to pieces.
He knew then that he loved her.
Zoe took a pen from her pocket, and drew a wide black symbol on the back of his hand.
"That's an X," she said.
She drew two smaller letters above it, but only smiled when he asked what they meant.
He took her arm, and they turned toward the house. She leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
She never saw, as he did, that her mother was watching from a window.
eight
X woke in the morning to an empty house. He smoothed the sheets of the ladybug as he had seen Jonah do. Then, for an hour, he rambled around, trying to think of something other than Zoe and the feeling of her lips on his cheek. He took some food from the buzzing metal box in the kitchen, the cool air brushing pleasantly against his face. He stood at the front door waving to the dogs as they charged around the yard. He tossed a stick to Spock, as Jonah had taught him to. Spock ran after it, but seemed not to know he was supposed to pick it up and return it-the dog seemed to think the point of the game was simply to prove that the stick still existed.
Later, X sat in the living room studying family portraits, and was struck by how Zoe's essential Zoe-ness-the bright, wide eyes that promised something but demanded something, too-had remained constant even as the years passed and her hair lengthened and shortened and curled and flattened and was briefly blue for some reason, and even when her teeth were temporarily decorated with miniature railroad tracks.
X was so taken by her face. Everything he knew about loveliness began and ended with her.
He could still feel Zoe's lips on his skin. He replayed the moment so often in his head that he began to think he'd never have another thought. In truth, he didn't want another.
Perhaps Zoe's mother would recognize that he and Zoe had forged a true connection. Perhaps he could stay. Perhaps the lords of the Lowlands had forgotten him. Perhaps he could stay. He was but one soul in an infinite sea of bodies, and-though he'd never had the audacity to remind them-he'd done nothing to deserve damnation.
X heard the Bissells' car in the drive. He went to the porch and stood waiting, eager as a dog. A cold rain had begun to fall. It did not concern him. He was too happy for that. He looked at the sculpture that Rufus had made for the Bissells: a bear standing, waving, smiling ridiculously. He felt a kinship with it.
But Zoe and her family got out of the car in a dark mood, slamming their doors.
"You'd better tell him," Zoe's mother told Zoe as they climbed the stairs toward X.
Zoe lingered on the porch, but did not speak.
X could not bear the silence.
"She requires that I leave this instant?" he said. He cast his eyes downward. "I cannot fault her, though I have made myself drunk on delusions that I might stay."
"It's not just that," said Zoe. "We were in town, and we saw a cop we know named Brian." She hesitated a moment. "The police can't find Stan-and he's killed somebody else. He could be in Canada now, he could be in Mexico, they don't know. They may have lost him for good."
The news struck X like a blow. Every bit of hopefulness and joy fled his body. He'd been a fool to think he deserved anything at all in this world. His rage-at Stan's evil, at his own weakness-produced a sharp pain in his head. It was as if someone had released a bee into his skull. He stood outside until long after Zoe had gone in, only half-aware that he was being drenched by the rain. He felt the Trembling reawaken in his blood.
Eventually, Zoe returned and insisted he come inside. She put a blanket around him, and placed a hand consolingly on his shoulder.
"Stan's gone," she said. "You couldn't go after him if you wanted to."
X couldn't bear to be touched. The bee in his skull had been joined by a dozen others. He pushed Zoe away-more roughly than he intended.
"It is my duty to hunt him down, even if he flees to the end of the earth," he said. "It is all I am made for."
Zoe backed away.
"You can't go," she said.
"And yet I can't stay here-pretending I am something other than I am," he said.
He saw how his words wounded her. He tried to explain, but she waved him off and sank onto the couch, refusing to look at him. Outside, the rain fell harder. It froze the instant it landed, encasing the driveway, the trees, the world in ice.
Soon the power failed with a spooky sighing sound they all felt in their stomachs. The house went black. Candles were lit and distributed. They flickered and glowed, but were in no way comforting. The Bissells huddled on the couch, growing colder and listening to the rain as it entombed them bit by bit. X slumped against a wall, his head in his hands. The storm had grown so intense that it worried even him.