And she did join her sisters. Wild-eyed and impossibly on edge, she was swallowed by the crowd of them, gathered by the entrance to the Body Hall. Some of the girls were crying, and the staff (in their pajamas, all of them, still night) consoled them. Crazily, K thought they must be crying for J.
V was the first to see her, the first to wipe tears from her eyes as her face contorted from concerned to confused.
“K?” she asked, her voice buried (J’s buried, too) beneath the clamor of the others, chaos in the hall. “Are you okay?”
K nodded and smiled, but her smile did not work and the face she made hurt her. V’s eyebrows came together. She was asking her something, something else, but K was moving past her, having heard the reason for the commotion, having heard enough scattered words to piece the moment together, to understand why everyone was awake, why everyone was so scared and crying.
“B is being sent to the Corner.”
Who said that?
“B might be sent to the Corner. M.O.M. is deciding.”
Who said that? B to the Corner? Everyone was asking why. Why oh why?
“She told M.O.M. she saw something she shouldn’t have in the pines.”
The other words didn’t matter. K heard them all as if she’d drawn each one, one upon the other, until the color on the paper was black.
“Rotts.”
“Vees.”
“Placasores.”
Confessed, confessed, confessed…
“B may be sent to the Corner! We’ll know soon.”
“M.O.M. is deciding.”
“Tomorrow.”
“The next day.”
“Soon.”
K tried to speak, but nothing, no part of her, worked. She only shook, a trembling centerpiece to the circle of Letter Girls in the hall.
Then K made to run for M.O.M.’s office. She needed to speak to the staff. She needed to tell them B did nothing wrong. She needed to do something now.
But a last vestige of rationality, sanity’s fingertips, turned her around.
You’ll be sent, too. Don’t do it alone. You need an army. YOU’LL BE SENT, TOO.
Before she could decide to do it, K was walking through the Body Hall unnoticed, through the kitchen doors and out the garbage door to the Yard. She was not dressed for this. She was not in the right state of mind for this.
But the name J spurred her on. The name J and the second tower, where twenty-four more twelve-year-olds kept in the dark might help, might be able to do something.
Might make an army.
Eye Contact
Rushing through the pines, the backpack tight to her body, K knocked a shoulder against a tree. Then another. She fell once. She fell again. And with each strike, with each fall, she cried out, then reached for the sound of her own agonized voice, as if she might silence it, silence the agony within her.
She thought of B, she tried not to think of B. She moved, she went, she ran.
She had a hard time believing her own thoughts. Couldn’t trust them. Couldn’t believe her life had come to this moment, that all her drawings and studies, her laughter and worries, all the times M.O.M. and the Parenthood had picked her up when she felt scared or sad, all of it had led to her running toward a second tower, hoping for help there, needing it.
K came to a sliding halt at the boys’ Yard’s icy edge. The lights were off in their tower. Twenty-four ice sculptures stood between herself and the back door. Snow fell in fat flakes. Her black clothes were dotted with it. Her face and hands were as red as the gloves and jacket she’d seen on the desk of the man they called D.A.D. J’s room (his new room, third floor now, K knew this) looked particularly dark. As if he’d moved out or been buried in a room in the basement.
Ahead, the big Inspector she’d first seen appeared in the hall. He spent some time looking through the glass, more time than K was used to.
Had they heard about B? Of course they had.
M.O.M. told D.A.D.
It was all so close to being impossible to believe. Yet K had seen enough tonight alone to alter her understanding of the world. Her world. Any world. And while something like madness lurked inside her young mind, she ultimately resisted it. Instinctually she understood that there had to be a way out, a solution to what was happening around her. Perhaps that was the great mistake the Parenthood had made, she thought. Teaching the Letter Girls that there was a solution, a way out of everything.
Even the Parenthood.
The Inspector took two steps, wiped frost from the window, put his nose to it.
A second Inspector appeared at the far end of the hall. He, too, looked through the glass.
K looked to the upper windows. No lights. Did the boys know?
No longer in motion, she got colder. Started to feel like a part of the Effigy Meet herself.
Back on the first floor, neither man made to move. A first-floor window lit up. D.A.D.? Another Inspector?
K imagined the Corner in the basement of this tower. She imagined two rulers stuck in the dirt. One marked A. The other Z.
She suddenly wished she hadn’t come. The boys’ tower was crawling with staff. Her own tower was in chaos at the news of B’s confession. Wouldn’t M.O.M. give an emergency speech? Wouldn’t the staff count the Letter Girls? Wouldn’t they know she was missing back home while she was useless to her sisters all the way over here?
K fell to her knees in the snow. She shook her head no. It was too much. Too loud. Too big.
When she looked up, a third Inspector was crossing the glass hall. All of them so much larger than Krantz back home. All of them with some variety of hair on their faces. All of them staring through the glass. Studying the Yard. On guard.
K sank deeper into the shadows of the pines and eyed the sculptures in the Yard.
A room, a cart beyond it, a statue of D.A.D. himself.
She looked to the hall. Yes, infested with Inspectors. Back to the Yard.
A large book. The name LUXLEY in big blocks of ice. A chair.
K silently cried for the life she’d led before accidentally spotting the spire in the pines. Back when her greatest concern was getting details on paper. Drawing in the Yard. Drawing in her bedroom. Her bedroom, where the walls were covered in portraits of her sisters. Where even J once hung, until M.O.M. asked that she take the drawing down, too sad, she’d said, as if J might grow younger there, as the other Letter Girls grew up around her, as if J was stuck in
(dirt)
ice.
K saw J as she was now. Imagined herself drawing the translucent skin that barely covered the bones of her face. She could easily recall the exact dimensions of the dirt that framed her face and neck, as her body seemed to melt into the ground, like when a candle burned to its finale, the wick jutting out of the wax. She shuddered at the thought of J’s chest. Her feet, her hands, her fingers. With this last thought, she recalled Q’s joke about the spire being one long finger sticking up from a grave in the pines.
K made to fight back tears but in the end didn’t need to. A harsh wind crossed the Yard, and beyond the frozen cart that would no doubt provide cover, the rungs of a ladder were revealed.
One of the Alphabet Boys had built a ladder.
K eyed the glass hall. Three Inspectors still. All staring out.
She thought of the pages in her backpack. The details. The Parenthood revealed.
She broke for the room made of ice, slipped through the small doorway on her belly, crouched inside. She was breathing hard and her bones felt cold. The turtleneck and slacks weren’t close to enough in this weather. Would it kill her?
Across the room was a second small opening. She knelt by it. Looked to the cart.
Crawling to the cart was hard. More space than she’d accounted for. Was she casting a shadow? She paused, out in the open, o
n her stomach in the frozen Yard. Her shadow was tight to her body. No, they couldn’t see it. But did they sense her? People did that. The Letter Girls did that. K had done it her whole life. The feeling of someone at the door. Turn to the door. There’s B.
B
K made it to the cart and sat with her back to the big wheel. She stretched her fingers out, moved them, tried to find more feeling in them.
The ladder was off to the side of the cart. How far? The Inspectors would be able to see her if she went for it. Could they see the ladder? She didn’t think so. She looked.
What she saw was enough to freeze her already chilled bones. Six adult men in the glass hall. Three Inspectors. Three in different dress. Clothes she hadn’t seen before. She hid quick behind the cart again. What to do? Go home? Yes, she should go home.
K breathed deep the winter air. She looked again.
They still faced the glass. The Inspectors. The others were talking. One of them wrote things down on a pad. K imagined the warmth of that hall. She imagined the warmth, too, of being buried under so much dirt in a basement.
Above her, jutting from the body of the cart, she saw the fringed end of a blanket. Upon it, more ice.
K rose carefully, sure to keep her head down. So scared. She heard alarms that hadn’t gone off. Saw large men running from the boys’ tower door, men that weren’t there.
In the cart…ice apples. Upon a blanket. Removable.
K reached for the cluster of apples, all stuck together. Would the men see her taking the apples? Could they? They squinted through the glass the way people do when they can’t see the whole picture. Was the cluster of apples part of the whole picture?
Was it?
K’s fingers and palms nearly froze as she slid the apples from the blanket down along the side of the cart beside her. It was big enough. Yes. Tall enough. Yes. And there were spaces to hold on to, places to grip.
Crouching, using the cluster like a shield, holding it in front of her, K inched out from the side of the cart. She waited. The wind howled against the apples and against her body on this side of them, too. She inched another step. Another.
No alarms. No sudden muffled voices. She wouldn’t peek around the ice, wouldn’t look to see if they’d spotted her. Instead, she advanced. Advanced again. Some more.
More.
By the time she reached the ladder, she knew she was out of their range of sight. She couldn’t see them anymore. She wrapped the ends of her black sleeves around her hands and dug her hands under the ladder. She could do it. She could move it.
She moved it.
Lifting the thing above her head, she was easily able to place it against the third-floor window. J’s new quarters.
With images of a sister decayed, another sister in the hands of the Parenthood, K planted a foot on the bottom rung and almost screamed when it snapped in half.
The other rungs didn’t look any stronger, but K had no choice. She lifted her leg high to reach the second one. She pulled herself up onto it.
It held. Good enough. From there she moved fast, up the rungs, past a dark second-floor window (M’s room, she knew), until she reached the height of the ladder, reached the third-floor window.
Through the glass she saw a light come on. A bathroom light? Was J awake?
She knocked on the glass.
She waited.
She knocked on the glass.
J entered the living room, shirtless, pajama pants, messy hair. He looked warm. So warm.
He saw her.
He hid.
The eye contact they made was the first contact K had made with any boy or man in the second tower. The thrill of it briefly superseded the horrors of the moment. The horrors back home. The urgency. Despite the overwhelming fear, K grasped the power of the moment.
Contact.
J still hid in the hall.
She spoke to him. As the harsh wind tore at her face and hands, as even the parts of her body that were covered felt dangerously, threateningly cold, she told J she needed to be let in. She needed his help.
At a grueling pace, J emerged from the hall, ducked back into it, then finally approached the window.
Frozen tears on her face, knowing that numbers were needed, she asked for help. The Letter Girls needed the Alphabet Boys. And the boys needed to know.
What happened was what she thought would happen. What she needed to happen. Rather than running to tell D.A.D. there was something monstrous at his window, rather than pulling the drapes closed, J acted, in the end, in the moment, how K believed he would.
Oh, K knew there had been such a slim margin for error. But didn’t everything exist now in a slim margin? And wasn’t the space between information and misinformation only wide enough to fit one who knew the difference?
J opened the window. J let her in.
Frozen Truth
Snow and icy wind poured into his room, and with it, the thing at his window. First a black boot, then a black pant leg. Whatever it was, it wore clothes.
J thought of the Luxley book It Came from the Land of Snow. How could he not? In the book, a creature rose from the Yard, six arms and six legs. Just stood up as if J had carved it himself. Ran around the snow howling, clawing at the bricks of the Turret. Some of the Alphabet Boys couldn’t finish reading it. Some, like L, had nightmares.
“My hands,” the thing said. And its voice was different than J’s own.
It waved a hand and J understood it was telling him that it couldn’t use it. Too cold. He reached out and touched it. Touched the hand of the thing crawling through his window into his room.
A second pant leg. A black turtleneck. Just like his own.
“Help me shove the ladder,” it said.
J stared at it dumbly. Fixed with fear.
“If the Inspectors on the first floor see the ladder, they’ll know someone came to your window. Help me shove it back down. I can barely move my fingers.”
Its face was red from the wind and cold. Its long hair wet with snow. It carried a backpack.
What was inside it?
“Now!” it said. The voice much higher than his own. Like when he was younger. Before he started questioning the Parenthood.
Side by side with it, J gripped the top of the ladder and they shoved it from his window together. They watched it thud to the white ground below. The thing placed a freezing hand over J’s mouth. They watched the Yard together, eyes wide.
“Okay,” it finally said. “Close the window.”
As J did what it said, he thought again of the words from Warren Bratt’s incredible book. Her. She.
Woman.
He had no way of knowing what the character’s voice sounded like, the long-haired character on the stool who Robert wanted so badly to confess to.
“Who—” J began. But the thing from outside cut him off.
“My name is K,” it said. “I’m a Letter Girl.”
J made to speak again but couldn’t.
“I’m a girl,” it repeated. “You’re a boy. The Parenthood has been lying to us.”
The Parenthood has been lying to us. Even then, despite all recent events, J felt a rush of anger. Had he ever heard someone say those words before? Had anybody ever said them? Yet here this impossible person was verifying what he’d been suspicious of.
J thought, This is what Warren Bratt was trying to tell you.
“We live in a second tower. Three miles through the pines. There are twenty-five of us. We lost J. Our J. To the Corner. And tonight B confessed that she’d seen your tower. I don’t think she said I was with her. But this isn’t good. I saw inside the Corner. I saw J’s grave.”
J’s grave. The Corner.
“Hey,” J finally said, stepping away from her. “I don’t know why you’re saying all this, but you�
�re scaring me.”
Tears welled in K’s eyes. Her face scrunched as she tried to stop them from coming.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I get it. But I didn’t know where else to go. M.O.M. might send B to the Corner, too.” Then, “We have to act now. Tomorrow.”
“M.O.M.,” J echoed. He felt like he was going to faint. K stepped to him, placed her cold hands on his shoulders. He wanted to shrink from her, but he didn’t.
“You’re going to feel betrayed, lost, confused,” she said. “Feel it all. I’ve been watching you for a year.”
Now J did step from her. He looked out the window. “You’ve been hiding behind Mister Tree. I saw you!”
K looked out the window.
“Mister Tree?”
J pointed. “That one. Where the Orchard begins!”
K shook her head. “No. I’ve never hidden behind that tree. I mean it. You saw someone there?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “We need to tell the rest of the boys and the rest of the girls what we know.”
“I don’t know what I know!”
K grabbed his arm. “The Parenthood has been lying to us. You must believe this. Now. We don’t have time for me to convince you.”
J understood that, whatever she was, she was not threatening.
“I read those words,” J said. “She and her. In a book.”
Now K looked confused.
“Where? What book?”
“A book by a man named Warren Bratt. The Parenthood took them from us.”
K considered this. “That’s your leisure writer? Warren Bratt?”
“No. Lawrence Luxley. I don’t know who Warren Bratt is. None of us do. But we woke up to a book in our rooms. It described…Are you a woman?”
“No. Yes. Not yet.”
“I still don’t—”
“And you won’t. Neither will I. We learned that in psychology. That it takes a long time for certain things, new things, to sink in. Things that you didn’t think were true but are. But who knows…maybe that was all a lie, too.”
Inspection Page 28