by Kat Zhang
Or so I—
A siren sliced through my thoughts. Our eyes snapped open.
A light on the ceiling flashed red—red—red—
My mind went blank, then overloaded.
A fire? A gas leak?
Our breathing caught.
Something was wrong.
Nothing. Nothing but that wild, keening siren and the flashing red light.
Maybe someone would come. Yes—yes, definitely. Someone had brought us here. They would know. They would come. They would save us.
Because Addie was asleep, and I could not move.
Our eyes flickered frantically to the door, but the crack of light stayed clear and uninterrupted. No one stood in the doorway. No one was here.
But they would come. They had to.
I thought I heard a stampede of feet—distant voices calling, yelling. People evacuating. People running. Running away from us. It was the Bessimir museum all over again; the day of the raid all over again.
But she didn’t wake. And we just lay there.
More voices, right by our door this time. Murmurs, then footsteps moving quickly on.
I’d spoken before. I could do it now. If only I could concentrate.
Our mouth stayed shut, our tongue still. Not a sound. On and on the siren wailed. On and on the light flashed. Red-white-red-white-red-white-red—
A noise gurgled from our throat, followed by a word—a weak, whispered word:
. . . Help.
“Please. Please—help!”
Our body trembled. I sucked in breath after noisy breath, crying as loudly as I could, “Somebody! In here! I can’t get out!”
Someone should have heard. Someone should have come. But nobody did.
Only a few minutes had passed since the alarm started. Not long enough for everyone to leave. Not long enough for us to be here alone.
Right?
I screamed, forgetting words. Our throat stretched at the unfamiliar sound—Addie never screamed like this. No one was coming. No one was going to come.
She wasn’t there. She wasn’t going to move us. And I couldn’t.
But I would have to.
I focused as hard as I could on our fingers. On curling them. On bending our elbows to prop up our body. In the darkness, with our head immobile, I couldn’t tell if I was really moving or just imagining it.
I didn’t realize what was happening until our nail snagged in the bedcovers.
No time to think about it. No time to stop. Our heart pounded so hard it couldn’t possibly stay in our chest for long. Either it would burst or I would burst—and neither option was promising.
I flexed our fingers, searching for a way to push ourself up. Our arms wouldn’t work properly. They twitched on either side of us, bent like chicken wings, jerking as my control waxed and waned. With a silent scream, I lurched forward and sat up.
The world spun. I wanted to shout or laugh or cry. There wasn’t time for any of it. The siren wailed; the light flashed.
I had to get out.
Standing was no less awkward. Our muscles were strong—I just couldn’t control them. I swayed, then fell back onto the bed and had to start over again. The second time was a bit easier than the first.
Finally, sweat running down the back of our neck, I took my first step.
My first step in almost three years.
No time to celebrate.
Second step.
Third.
Fourth.
I wobbled. Cried out. Fell.
I grabbed the side of the bed and pulled ourself back up. Balancing was the worst part. How far apart was I supposed to put our feet?
I fell twice more before reaching the door.
Our hand gripped the doorknob. I pressed our cheek against the cool wood and closed our eyes. The door. I’d made it to the door.
Now what?
Would someone find me in the hallway? Or would I have to walk all the way outside?
I shuddered. Actually shuddered, our body reacting to my disbelief.
No way I could make it outside.
Just go into the hall. Just go into the hall and call for help again. Someone will hear you. Someone will come.
Our hand slipped slightly, then tightened again around the doorknob. I twisted it. For a second, the door didn’t move. Fear weakened already shaky legs. Was it locked? But no, no—I twisted the knob a little farther, and the door swung open. We swung with it, riding the momentum outward into the hall, clinging on for dear life.
And then someone was there. Someone was holding us up. Someone was pushing us, pulling us, dragging us back to the bed. Back to the bed? No, no—that was the wrong direction!
“We have to leave,” I said. “The siren. The fire—the—”
“Shh,” he said. “Shh . . .”
“Ryan,” I cried. I almost smiled, though he obviously didn’t understand. “Ryan, it’s me! Me! Eva.”
“Shh,” he urged, over and over again. We were back by the bed now. He half pushed, half set us onto the mattress. His movements were stiff, his jaw tight.
“I moved, Ryan,” I said, laughing. Laughing. Gasping. “But we have to go. The alarm—”
“There’s no fire.” He held me down when I tried to stand.
“Then the gas leak, or whatever—we have to go. The alarm—”
“Is a trick,” he said. “They tricked you.”
Tricked me?
I laughed again, louder. “What?”
“To make you move. To bring you out.”
A rubber stopper slammed into our windpipe, stopping my breathing so sharply I saw starbursts.
To make me move? To bring me out?
The laughter started up again, a weak, incessant giggling. I couldn’t hold it back. “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
Ryan looked at me, the light still flashing above his head, casting red and white shadows on his face. He wasn’t laughing. He didn’t even smile.
I laughed for him, laughed until I could barely breathe. “I moved, Ryan. I walked. I walked!”
“Yes,” he said, and he sounded so grim.
A strange, giggling headiness clouded up my mind. If Ryan hadn’t been gripping our shoulders, I might have fallen down.
“I moved,” I said again, just to make sure he’d heard correctly. I laughed and laughed. I felt full of bubbles, full of clouds.
And then I grabbed the collar of Ryan’s shirt—grabbed him and pulled him closer and felt his arms tighten around me. The laughter went putrid in my throat. “I won’t let them cut me out,” I said breathlessly. “I won’t. I won’t.”
Addie and I sat with the light on.
The brightness was enough to alert someone in the hall, but neither of us suggested turning it off. We’d had enough darkness for one day.
They’d let us call our parents, but only for a few minutes, and a nurse watched us the entire time. She’d pretended to dust and tidy the already impeccably clean room, but we knew she was listening. Even if the nurse hadn’t been there, we couldn’t have told them about the forced drugging, about how they’d tricked us. If we told them, we’d have to explain how I’d moved. We’d have to say that yes, their fears were true, that Mr. Conivent had been right. That we were still defective.
Not that they wouldn’t learn soon enough anyway. The doctors would tell them. They would have to if they wanted to keep us here.
But they didn’t seem to have said anything yet. First Mom, then Dad had come on the phone. How are you? How was the flight? Was it exciting? Is the food okay? Did they find you a nice room?
Just before the nurse began coughing meaningfully and looking at us, Dad said,
“I suppose it doesn’t matter so much, right? It’s only one night.”
“Yeah,” Addie whispered. She’d been whispering since she woke up. “That’s right.”
The nurse came over and murmured that the hospital had rather busy lines. They couldn’t afford to have one taken up so long. Which seemed silly, but what could we say?
“We’ll call again tomorrow,” Dad promised.
They didn’t let us go back to the other kids, claiming we were Overstrung and Exhausted and Too Nervous.
You need rest, they told us, walking us through the halls. Your room’s all ready for you now. We’ll bring you dinner.
And they’d all but locked us in our room.
Silently, Addie unlaced our shoes and climbed into bed. There was a wall around her half of our mind, a shield that had started forming as soon as she’d woken hours earlier and felt Ryan’s arms wrapped warm around us. A nurse had dashed in the door a second later, her face livid, her dark eyes huge. She’d pulled Ryan away, yelling about staying with the group and listening to directions. He hadn’t fought her. But his eyes had never left our face.
I stirred.
A pause. Then: <. . . What’s it like?>
At first I thought I’d somehow missed part of her sentence.
It took her another moment to answer.
Being alone?
She sighed softly, our eyes still tracing the bumps in the ceiling.
She fell quiet, then said
I stopped.
She squeezed our eyes shut. Our fingers clenched the edge of a pillow. She took a long, deep breath.
When I didn’t immediately answer, she rushed on.
I didn’t say the obvious—that for most of that time I hadn’t been able to string together enough words to make a sentence.
For one wild, ridiculous moment, I thought she sounded jealous.
Addie. Jealous of me!
Laughter bubbled up and spilled over, too bright and sickly sweet. Silent laughter, because without the medicine, Addie was in firm control of our lips, our tongue, our lungs. But she heard the laughter just as she heard my silent voice.
What’s so funny? Did she really have to ask?
She flinched. Our eyes popped open.
She flipped onto our side.
She was quiet.
A storm cloud rolled between us, boiling with thunder, icy with rain.
We stared at the wall. Slowly, Addie turned so our face was flat against the pillow.
Our breathing grew tight.
A wall slammed down between us. White. Trembling. A cry pushed through our lips. Addie buried our face into the pillow, muffling the sobs until there was no sound. Just tears.
I shrank into myself, folding up as small as I could. I tucked myself away in the corner of our mind, hiding from Addie’s tears. But I couldn’t hide from what she’d said.
I wanted to disappear, to slip into that nothingness I’d found the winter of our thirteenth year, where there was nothing sharp, nothing that hurt, just a stream of dreams that swirled me around and around until I was a part of them.
But I couldn’t. I had too much, now, to lose.
Nineteen
The next morning, they dressed us in blue. Sky-blue button-up blouse. Navy-blue skirt that fell to our knees. They were starched stiffer than Mom had ever managed to do, the collar crisp and snow white. Unlike our school uniform, this one had no emblem or decoration. We were allowed no pockets.
“Come along,” the nurse said once Addie tied our shoes. They’d let us keep those, at the very least, along with our long, black school socks. I wished I knew what would happen to the rest of our clothes.
Addie had snuck Ryan’s chip from our pocket. Now it pressed snugly into the hollow beneath our ankle bone, our sock tucking it against our skin.
“Where are we going?” Addie said, our voice dull.
We’d both woken silently this morning. My name had not formed on her tongue as the last veils of sleep slipped away. Or perhaps it had, but she’d swallowed it bitterly down, as I had hers.
The nurse smiled. “To meet your new roommate. All the other children live in their own special little ward. You’ll be moving in today.”
“Moving in?” Addie said. The nurse didn’t reply, just continued giving us that small, bland smile.
Addie reached for our duffel bag, but the nurse touched our hand. “Someone will bring it to you later.”
It couldn’t have been past eight in the morning. Without a watch, we couldn’t tell exactly, but once we entered the hall, we could see the sun hanging golden in the sky through Nornand’s great windows. We seemed to be the only one looking beyond the glass. The woman leading us through the halls stared only straight ahead of her, and the other nurses or doctors who passed by all seemed to have more important things to do than gaze out past Nornand’s walls.
Finally, the nurse stopped before a plain-looking door. She produced a ring of keys from her pocket, selected one, and stuck it into the lock.
“Welcome to the Ward, Addie,” she said.
Inside, it was still dark. A nightlight cast a fuzzy glow in the far corner of the room, but it wasn’t enough to see by, especially not after the brilliance of Nornand’s halls. Addie blinked, trying to acclimate our eyes.
It was wasted effort, though, since the nurse flicked on the lights a second later. Now we could see everything.
The Ward and the Study room were similar in many ways. The carpet was made of the same tightly woven fiber, the walls painted a pale blue, interrupted only twice—once by a gray door and once by a small alcove that seemed to lead to a pair of bathrooms. A broad-leafed plant stood in one corner, fairly bursting from its tiny pot. There were two round, medium-sized tables, a few chairs, and one small cabinet. But no kids.
“Everyone’s still in
their rooms,” the nurse said, as if she’d read my mind. She gestured at the gray door. “Let’s get you to yours, shall we?”
The door led to another hallway, this one narrower and shorter than any of the others we’d seen. A faint glow lit the far end, but the nurse quickly overwhelmed it by turning on the overhead lights.
I managed to count eight doors before the nurse opened one and hustled us inside.
“Kitty?” she said as she stepped in behind us and flicked on the lights. “Wake up and shine, sweetheart. You’re finally getting a new roommate.”
The girl in bed flew upright so fast she kicked her blankets onto the floor. The fairy girl. Her long dark hair was tangled and frizzy from sleep, making it seem even larger in comparison to the rest of her body. Her eyes were huge, her lips parted.
“This is Addie,” the nurse said. Her voice was relentlessly cheerful, like that of a kindergarten teacher on the first day of class.
Kitty stared at us but said nothing. The long silence hung heavily on our shoulders. Finally, the nurse clapped her hands. “All right, then, girls. I’ll go wake up the other kids. You get dressed, Kitty, and tell Addie about our morning routine.”
Kitty climbed out of bed, stealing a glance at our face as she hurried for her clothes. They were already waiting for her on her nightstand, stacked in a small blue pile. The nurse closed the door on her way out.
Addie stood absolutely still, our hands clasped in front of us.
“Hi,” Kitty said quietly, and didn’t speak again as she dressed.
She’d barely finished when a voice rang out in the corridor: “Everybody into the hallway, please.”
Kitty hurried to the door. Addie took one last look at the room—the white walls, the tiled floor, the metal-framed beds and thin pillows. The solitary window was obviously not meant to be opened, ever. I tried to imagine sleeping here. Waking here. How long would it take to grow accustomed to cool white hospital sheets?
No, the nurse was wrong. We hadn’t spoken with our parents properly yet. Dad had promised to come for us.
This wasn’t our room.
“Aren’t you coming, Addie?” Kitty said, lingering in the doorway.
For a second—just a split second—I felt a crack in the wall between Addie and me. Then it was gone. But brief as the lapse had been, it was enough for me to catch a whisper of Addie’s emotions.