Your One & Only(57)

As they moved together, his muscles eased and warmed around her. She breathed in, smelling the stale dusty air of the room but also his skin, like bamboo wood and rain. She lifted her eyes to him. This close, she had to look up to see his face, which was bent over hers. There were no bars between them, nothing keeping them apart. She hesitated. She wouldn’t kiss him again, not after he’d given back her ribbon in the barn. If he rejected her a second time, she didn’t think she could stand it.

Unexpectedly, however, something flickered in his eyes, and his hand slid down her back, past her hair cascading down, and he drew her close. The edge of his cast dug into her spine. And then, as if he could read her mind, he tipped his head down and his lips pressed to hers, not practiced and ceremonial like all the other boys, not bruising and forced like Jonah, but like a storm breaking in the jungle—sudden and torrential, walls of rain closing them in until they were the only two left in the world.

Jack pulled back from the kiss before she was ready for it to end, before she could focus enough to realize his lips were no longer on hers. His forehead touched hers, and her eyes remained closed, though she didn’t remember closing them. The last notes from the music box slowed and petered out.

“I . . .” Her tongue couldn’t find words.

“We have to keep looking,” he said softly. He hadn’t yet let go of her.

She breathed, and wondered if he could hear the shakiness in her breath. This was what Nyla had tried to tell her about being with him. Had it been like this with Nyla? The thought of them together broke Althea from her stupor. She stepped from his arms.

“Right,” she said.

He tilted his head at her. “You okay?”

“Like you said, we have to keep looking.”

Althea tried to collect herself. She skimmed through a box before realizing she’d already looked through it an hour ago. They were finding nothing, and didn’t even know what it was they were looking for. In the corner of her eye, she noticed Jack wasn’t moving, hadn’t opened another box. She looked over at him. His mouth was turned up in an amused smile.

“What’s funny?” she said.

He shook his head, still with that smile playing on his lips. “Nothing.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you.” He leaned toward her and touched her hand. His eyes held hers in a deliberate gaze. “I like kissing you. But there’s no hurry, Althea. We have time.”

She tried not to smile back at him, or let him know what a jumble her thoughts were from the lightest touch of his hand. She cleared her throat.

“There are so many boxes left. We’ll never get through them all.”

“We don’t have to. I found this.” Jack showed her a damp, dented cardboard box. Inside were two books. One was blank, but written on the other, in peeling gold letters, were the words The Ark Project.

“Is this what Jonah is looking for?”

“I don’t know. But if we know what the Ark Project is, then we’ll know what the Ark is.”

When Althea picked up the book, a paper fell out. It was a color photograph, faded yellow and soft in the crease from having been folded into the pages of the book for what appeared to be a very long time.

It was a picture of the Original Nine, the same representation displayed everywhere in Vispera. She’d seen it a million times. The figures were lined up in the same order, held the same stance, wore the same clothes. The difference was that this was a photograph, not a reproduction. Althea could scarcely believe her eyes.

It was so strange to see their faces unaltered by the lines of a brush. Changes had been made in the countless renderings. The faces were all familiar, of course, like those she’d seen her whole life. But the men were more broad-chested, like Jack, and some had the stubble of hair on their faces. Many of them wore glasses over their eyes, but those had been left out of the paintings. The women were mostly shorter than the men in the photo, so that had changed too. The Original Althea wore her hair short, like a boy, and the color was almost black, not the deep brown of Althea and her sisters. As in the painting, Althea recognized the hope in their eyes, as if they were looking toward a bright, promising future. The photo would have been taken in the early days of the Plague, when Vispera was new. The Original scientists were brilliant, forward thinkers, planning a beautiful new world. Someone had written, in a spidery script, in the white border, The Originals.

“I’ve never seen this before,” Althea said. “I didn’t know it existed. What’s it doing folded away in a book?”

Jack bent over her, studying the photograph. He was so close she thought he was going to rest a hand on her shoulder, or stroke her hair. Instead, he pointed to the picture.

“Who’s that?” he said.

Althea’s gaze followed to where his finger touched the image. The difference she’d missed, the one Jack pointed to, was another face behind the Original Samuel and Original Kate, a tenth face among the Nine, one she’d never seen before.

The face of a man, hidden behind the others and in slight shadow, looked back at Althea.

A chill ran down her back.

Now that she saw this new person, it seemed absurd that she’d missed him, but the painting was so familiar, so much a part of her everyday life, that she’d been blind to the glaring change. Her hand was shaking, so Jack took the picture from her and peered at it intently. The man was pale-haired, like Jack, but otherwise they looked nothing alike. He was slender, with a pointed chin and close-set eyes. His tie was askew, and his hair was mussed, as if he’d just run his fingers through it in quick preparation for the photo. His smile was cheerfully crooked, like he was laughing at something one of the others had said right before the picture was taken.