The Edge of Everything (Untitled #1)(28)

Zoe took the bowl from X’s lap and set it angrily on the coffee table, where it vibrated noisily.

“This was a bad idea,” she said. “We’re done.”

“No,” said X. “Your mother is correct: No one gets sent to the Lowlands without cause.”

He turned to Zoe’s mother now, and found her eyes.

“But, you see, I was not sent to the Lowlands,” he said. “I was born there.”

No one spoke as X’s words settled. The only sound was Spock and Uhura barking in the distance. X hated speaking the sentence, yet now that he had he felt freer somehow.

Zoe reached into the bowl.

“‘Is it weird to be three hundred years old, or whatever?’” she read.

X surprised them all by laughing.

“And whose query is this?” he said, glancing around the room.

“Mine,” said Zoe. “I mean, no offense, but you talk like Beowulf.”

Jonah giggled.

“Wolves can’t talk, Zoe,” he said. He turned to X uncertainly: “Can they?”

“I do not believe so,” said X. “As to my age, I was but a whelp when a woman we call Ripper began training me to be a bounty hunter. For years, hers was virtually the only voice I heard. I suppose I learned to speak as she does—and she was wrenched from your world nearly two hundred years ago.”

“So how old are you?” said Zoe.

X heard an urgency in her voice, as if this question mattered more than the others.

“Ripper tells me that I am twenty,” he said.

“Twenty?” said Zoe. “For real?”

“Yes,” said X. “The only reason I have to doubt her is that she is quite nearly insane.”

“Wow, twenty,” said Zoe. “If you want, I could help you apply to college.”

X recognized this as a “blurt” and let it pass.

Zoe unfolded another question.

“‘Where are the Lowlands? What are the Lowlands?’” she read.

“Those are mine,” said her mother.

“Good job, Mom,” said Jonah.

X sat motionless, trying to compose an answer in his head. Finally, he turned to Jonah and asked him to gather up all the little figures from his room—the soldiers, the animals, the wizards, the dinosaurs, the dwarves—and bring them outside in a basket.

“I am not certain I can explain the Lowlands,” he said. “But perhaps I can build them for you.”





six


They stood in the backyard, looking at X as if he’d gone mad. He was rolling a mammoth snowball, circling them faster and faster as he did so, the tail of his shimmering blue overcoat taking flight behind him. Uhura chased him ecstatically, as if a game was afoot. Spock lay nearby, eating snow.

“I believe the first query was, ‘Where are the Lowlands?’” X said.

The snowball was about four feet tall now, and he had at last come to a stop.

“Yes,” said Zoe’s mother.

X gestured to his creation.

“This is the earth,” he said. “Or as good a likeness as I can produce.”

He was warming to his task. The dread he’d felt had been beaten back—replaced by the desire to give a true and clear accounting of himself. They deserved that much, and more, for taking him in when they had every reason to fear him.

“The Lowlands,” he continued, “are here.”

He thrust his left fist deep into the heart of the globe, breaking it open with such force that Jonah stepped backward and exclaimed, “Holy shit.”

X had never heard the phrase—the words didn’t seem to belong together—but Zoe’s mother found it unacceptable, and told Jonah so.

X had begun to perspire. He removed his coat—the left arm was encrusted with snow all the way up to the shoulder—and draped it over the low branch of a tree. Jonah and his mother, who’d crossed their arms and were shuffling their feet to stay warm, once again looked at him as if he were a lunatic. Zoe merely smiled. It pleased X to think that his ways were becoming familiar to her.

“The query that followed was, ‘What are the Lowlands?’” he said.

Zoe’s mother nodded.

X knelt beside the ruins of what had, until recently, been the earth, and gestured for Jonah to join him. Together, they used the snow to sculpt a tall, curving wall that ran along the edge of a plain.

Zoe’s mother stopped X as he was piling the plain with rocks, and drew him aside to say something only he could hear.

“I’m not sure I want Jonah to see this,” she said.

“I shall make it a game,” said X. “And I shall endeavor to hide from him what I say to you now: the Lowlands are an abomination.”



X told Jonah to imagine that the snow was black rock, porous and damp. He instructed him to carve a grid of holes into the wall—he called them “the rooms where we sleep” rather than “cells”—and to tuck a figurine into each of them.

“Guys or girls?” Jonah said.

“Either,” said X. “Both.”

“Civil War guys or World War II guys—or knights, maybe?” said Jonah.

“You may use any of them,” said X. “There are souls of every kind in the Lowlands, all of them in the clothes they died in. I myself reside here, among the bounty hunters”—he pointed to a cell in a row midway up the wall—“and have two neighbors. To my left lives a man I call Banger. I brought him to the Lowlands in 2012. To my right lives Ripper, whom I spoke of earlier. She drew her last mortal breath in 1832.”