Iggy stroked his chin, blinked, then ran to catch up with her.
At the top of the ladder, Amare stood with his hand pressed over his heart to greet Baine formally. He was geared head to toe in his black uniform and strapped with one of the three assault rifles available to the community.
"Sir, I received your message," he confirmed. Baine stepped around him and watched over the ledge at Emi and Iggy climbing up behind him. "House 55 has an old man, 82 years old, whose prognosis is very poor, and house 61 has an old woman, 90 years old, whose family cannot care for her any longer. Here-" he slipped a small folded piece of paper into Baine's hand.
Baine glanced down at it and crumpled it into his pocket. "Is that it? I need at least three people to make this right."
Amare's expression didn't falter, even when he glanced down at Iggy. "I sure hope he's worth the hassle," he commented. "He stole feed. I assume he has a punishment in store, just like anyone else who has ever stolen more than their share?"
Baine stared back at Amare in shock. "How dare you make such a comment?"
Iggy and Emi crawled over the top ledge, and as they came over, they could feel the tension between the two. "Hi, Amare," Emi smiled, attempting to cut through it.
Iggy opened his mouth to greet him, too, but Amare glanced at him with a wrinkled face, rich with disgust, and he turned his cheek and looked straight at Baine expectantly. Now, Iggy didn't know what to think of the rejection, but Baine did.
Wordlessly, Baine turned his back and headed to the watchtower ladder. Emi and Iggy raced behind him, side by side like two little puppies, easily lost and hard to entertain for long. Emi was first to venture up and Iggy followed closely behind her. While climbing, he peered back down. The ladders reached such great, dangerous heights, and he found his fingers itching to let go. Not to just let go, but to accidentally slip, or perhaps fall head first? He chuckled to himself under his breath. He wasn't even sure if the fall would kill him now anyways, yet somehow imagining it tickled his ego.
At the top of the ladder there was a round room domed and lined with open windows. It was harder to breath and much windier than down on the ground. All of the scents were washed away by a musty mold smell coming from the tower walls. Scoping through the nearest window, Iggy watched Amare resume his watch over the dark green forest on the outer side of the wall.
From there, he finally saw that the size of their land, New Eden, was amazingly huge. The massive outer wall ran long past where the eyes could see and rounded back into itself in a huge circle. The village houses were large in numbers, filling miles worth of land in between the two walls. That strip of land surrounded the whole inner forest, which was a buffer between the two worlds. He spotted the vague light shining from their home in the very center, but he couldn't see the actual house or the walls. Only the faint light emanating from the front gate.
He turned around to the other side of the watchtower and stood next to Emi. They touched shoulder to shoulder, yet pretended that they both felt nothing. Her eyes were lost against the night sky. It seemed to be all that there was on the outside, until the mountain ridges revealed themselves in the distance. They surrounded everything. Between the walls and the mountains it was seemingly uninhabited land. Overgrown and wild.
"Is there anything out there?" Iggy whispered, squinting and trying to see as far as possible. The road that they had traveled on continued past the outer wall, but his eyes could scarcely trace it into the woods.
Emi glanced at him and smirked. "Of course there is. I'm from out there." She gazed at the stars, then pointed to a large mountain far away in the distance. "I came from the other side of that mountain." Her hand lowered. "I lived with my Mom…" Her throat tightened and her fingers interlaced before her. "My dad. My sister. We were happy…" Her throat clicked as she swallowed. "It's hard to look at it from this side."
"Who attacked your family?" Iggy asked. "What did you do to them?"
She turned and glared at him in only a way that a scornful woman could. "Are you asking that because you think we did something to deserve it?"
Iggy shrugged.
Seconds before fire erupted inside of Emi at Iggy's unempathetic reply, Baine stepped in between them. His body pushed them far off to the sides of the window and separated them. "Soldiers," he butted in. "That's who they are. They work for the military, FUSARMIID. The infected and uninfected might have some problems with one another, but as a whole, we've been fighting these soldiers for the right to live freely for more than twenty years."
Iggy narrowed his focus on him, searching for something that he could be hiding. "What do they want?"
"They attack us, collect us like animals, and kill us. All while we're just struggling to keep the virus alive."
"But, what are they gaining by doing this?" Iggy pried.
Baine released his arms into his pockets. "Many things," he sighed. "They want us to stop killing them. They want our people, our discoveries, and our land. Especially here, on the New Continent. They want to make us all lab rats again, so that they can make our physiology work for their benefit."
Emi studied his eyes for credibility, but Iggy watched his body. This man was his caretaker for many years, and he knew that not a speck of true emotion would be shown on his face. His body hadn't changed. He was planted, his hands tucked deep into his pockets, and his eyes stared straight forward into the night.
Iggy still searched, "what else is there?" Baine broke his stance. He loosened his arms down to his sides and dropped his chin and shoulders. Iggy braced himself. The truth was coming.
"They want the two of you," he said.
Emi stepped away from the window and squared herself to him. "Why us? We don't have anything to do with this."
Baine winked. "You don't have to do anything to be a part of this war. You're a larger part of it than you'd think, because of who your parents are; The Silgrias, and ours, The Fendersons. Let me explain..." He paused, sorting the information in his head to make it as child friendly as he could. Then, he continued. "There is an order of our kind. We have positions and stations, duties and responsibilities, ranks. If a position of high rank opens it needs to be filled as quickly as possible in order to maintain the order.
"The New Generation is a person born and raised as the future heir to the family in preparation for such a shortcoming. You two are still The New Generation, until you accept your positions and begin your own New Generation." He stood straight and stepped away from the open window. "The reason why you are sought out, is because you have the original virus in your blood as well as the necessary evolutionary genes that made it all happen in the first place. If a person outside of the family is given our version of the virus, that alone is not enough. One needs both. And so, it is up to you two to survive this time and then start a New Generation of your own. Only then the virus will continue to grow."