by Kat Zhang
“Hello?” she whispered.
Inside the little room, the boy looked up.
And immediately, immediately, we recognized the boy from the gurney. Jaime Cortae. Age, thirteen. Jaime. Before and after.
Surgery.
Jaime, who stood and limped toward the door. Every step rocked so badly he listed from side to side like a sinking ship. But his eyes were bright, and there was a grin on his face when he stepped up onto something and pressed his forehead against the glass.
And oh, God—oh God, the long, curved incision line. The half-shaved head. The staples in his skull, holding it together.
Our stomach rebelled, acid rising in our throat.
Jaime’s mouth worked even more furiously now, opening and closing. When he saw us staring at him, he flapped his right arm and jerked his head to the side.
But when she pressed the receive button, there was nothing but more gibberish: “I—always, I—and, um—uh . . . please . . . I, I need—”
His feverish words reverberated in the corridor.
Jaime started laughing—or crying—or both. He turned his face away from the window and the speaker, so it was hard to tell. All we could see were his shoulders trembling. Jerking. He was always jerking.
Then he put his mouth against the speaker again. He whispered. “Gone . . . gone . . . they—they cut him out. Out. He . . .” He moaned. “He’s gone.”
Addie slammed the window shut.
A terrible, crippling nausea sucked the breath from our lungs. We pushed past it, gagging as we tore down the hallway. Jaime’s quiet, stuttering voice rang in our ears, pounded in our veins, vibrated in our bones.
We ran until we smashed into someone barreling down the hall in the opposite direction.
Dr. Lyanne cried out, but her arms wrapped around us—entangling us. I screamed.
Everything was cold sweat and hot fear and the inability to breathe.
He’s gone.
He’s gone. He’s gone.
His fellow soul, born with ghost fingers clutching his. They’d cut him out. The surgery had succeeded—if this could be called success. Success!
Dr. Lyanne held our limbs still, yelling at us to Calm down. Calm down. Calm down.
Someone was crying, and it wasn’t until the haze cleared a little, until the pain receded a little, until we could breathe, breathe, breathe again, that we realized it wasn’t us.
We’d forgotten to switch off the speaker to Jaime’s room.
Dr. Lyanne’s hand was a shackle around our wrist as she led us back to Jaime. We didn’t want to go, held back by fear and shame. Shame for being afraid. For having run. For having left this boy who was already more alone than he’d ever been in his life.
“Jaime,” Dr. Lyanne said. “Jaime, shh. It’s all right.” She released us in her haste to enter a code into the keypad, unlocking Jaime’s door. We hung back, pressing against the wall, trying to shove away the throbbing headache and the dizziness. Run, I thought, but it didn’t transfer to our limbs. “Shh, Jaime. Sweetheart, it’s all right. It’s all right.”
Slowly, we pushed ourself from the wall. We held the side of the doorway for support as we turned and looked into the room.
The little blue sailboat night-light shed a soft glow. Together with the yellow emergency lights, it was enough to show us Dr. Lyanne on the bed, her arms around Jaime, rocking softly, softly, softly.
“Shh, sweetheart. Shh . . .”
Dr. Lyanne shone a penlight in our eyes. Addie squinted and turned away, our fingers curling around the examination table. Jaime had quieted, and Dr. Lyanne had locked him in his room again before pulling Addie and me back to the surgery room where we’d woken up.
“Do you feel dizzy?” Dr. Lyanne said. Her voice was missing some of its normal authoritative edge, like a knife that had gone dull. “Nausea?”
Addie shrugged, though our head pounded and our stomach rebelled. “Where are we?”
“The basement,” Dr. Lyanne said.
“Where’s Li—Hally?”
Dr. Lyanne turned away from us, fiddling with a tray of medical equipment. She dropped something and had to bend down to pick it back up. Her movements were jerky, her usual mantle of composure ragged at the edges. “In bed, probably. It’s late.”
Was she lying?
Addie swallowed, then cleared our throat softly. “Is she okay?”
Dr. Lyanne didn’t turn around. “She didn’t fall off any roofs, so I’d have to say she’s doing better than you are. You and she are both lucky not to have ground any glass shards into your skin.”
“But she’s okay?” Addie said. “She’s in her room? They haven’t cut into her? They haven’t operated on her?”
The woman looked at us sharply. Maybe we shouldn’t have revealed how much we knew, but at the moment, neither of us cared.
“She’s fine,” Dr. Lyanne said.
Addie looked down at our lap, at the smooth blue cloth of our skirt, the dull faux leather of our school shoes. The black socks. Our chip was still tucked against our right ankle. Ryan’s chip. Our fingers slid down, tracing the outline of it. No light at all.
But the feel of it, the solidity of it, gave her the strength to say, “Jaime.” Dr. Lyanne stilled. “That was Jaime. He didn’t go home. He was the one we saw the first day. He—” Addie looked up. Caught Dr. Lyanne’s eyes. Whispered, voice hoarse. “You cut into him. You—”
Dr. Lyanne grabbed our collar and jerked us toward her. “No.” Her voice shook. “I never laid a finger on Jaime Cortae. Understand me? I never laid a finger on any of those children. I didn’t do this to any of you—didn’t prescribe the vaccinations, didn’t hold the scalpel, didn’t—”
Addie twisted away. “Then help us. Don’t let them do it to Lissa—you can’t let them do it to Lissa—”
The anger in Dr. Lyanne’s eyes dimmed, replaced by something quieter. “I am helping. You know what they do to kids like you—throw them in some middle-of-nowhere holding bin and forget they exist. I work here because we’re trying to make things better, Addie. We’re figuring out ways to fix you. Why can’t you see that?”
“Like how they fixed Jaime?” Addie said.
Dr. Lyanne’s cheeks were splotches of red, stark against the rest of her pale skin. Her eyes were huge and dark and fierce. “We’re getting better. We’ve come a long way already. Someday—”
“Someday,” Addie spat. “What about now? What about Lissa?”
“It’s not about Lissa or you or me,” she said. “It’s about what’s best for everyone. For the country as a whole.”
She stared at us and we stared at her, both of us breathing hard.
“What was she like?” we whispered. Dr. Lyanne stared at us silently, her face tightening into something bland and expressionless. “Your other soul. The one you lost. Do you even remember her name?”
She didn’t answer.
“Help us,” we said, grabbing her arm—squeezing tighter and tighter and tighter. “Please.”
Twenty-six
We spent the night down in that basement, lying curled in the room across from Jaime’s, listening to our own breathing in the dark. Slowly, the sickness receded and we slept. But every time we started to dream, Dr. Lyanne would come and wake us back up. Something about a concussion. Something about making sure we hadn’t suffered any brain damage.
Brain damage. We laughed, and she turned away.
We slept and woke and slept and woke, dreams weaving into reality and reality melting into dreams. I don’t know if it was a dream or reality when we slipped out of bed and saw, through our door’s tiny window, the door on the other side of the hall standing wide open. The sailboat night-light. The shadowed figure sitting at the edge of the bed, arms around a boy who murmured endlessly to himself about someone who no longer existed.
It might have been real. Or it might have been my wishes manifesting themselves into d
reams. Our memories of Mom at Lyle’s bed whenever he got sick. At our bed when we had a fever.
We were too confused to know.
The night passed, though there was no way of telling down so deep in the ground. No windows. No sun. Not even the rush of doctors and nurses that signaled the start of a Nornand day on the hospital’s upper levels. No, down here the only way we knew it was time to get up for real was Dr. Lyanne’s voice telling us so.
We were exhausted from the cycle of sleep, wake, sleep, wake, but she looked like she hadn’t slept at all. She told us we seemed fine and would return to the other kids at breakfast.
The nurse stopped us when Addie tried to sit next to Ryan. “I’ve been asked to keep you two separated,” she said without emotion. “Choose another seat, dear.” Ryan’s mouth thinned, but he didn’t protest, just watched as Addie slowly walked to the opposite end of the table.
Even then, the nurse kept eagle eyes on us throughout breakfast. Addie kept our gaze on our industrial yellow food tray and our mouth shut. And when the nurse called us into line, Addie didn’t even try to find a place next to Ryan. In the Study room, she joined one of the younger girls, across the table from Bridget. Neither met our eyes. We were like Cal now. A danger.
This morning marked our fifth day at Nornand. I had to count back the days to even remember which day of the week it was—Wednesday. All the days melded together. What did it matter if it was Monday or Tuesday or Sunday? There was no more walking to school, no more laughing in the halls between bells, no more running across the street to the café for lunch. Just a quiet, somber Study room and the fourteen of us in Nornand blue. The thirteen of us. Because Lissa and Hally were gone.
I found myself wondering all these stupid little things. What sort of clothes had Kitty worn before coming here? Had she liked dresses, or, with all those brothers, had she insisted on pants? Did Bridget only wear black hair ribbons because she liked them, or because that was the only color she’d thought to bring when she left home?
We stared at these kids bent over their meaningless work sheets and essays. I still didn’t know most of their names, hadn’t even spoken a word to some of them, and a guilt like a physical pain knotted inside me. Most of them weren’t much older than Kitty. I tried to look at each and every one of them, picking out details in their faces, their hair, the way they sat or slumped in their chairs. One girl had a cloud of light brown curls. The boy next to her was covered in freckles and had bitten his nails to the quick. Many of the other kids wore sneakers, but a few wore school shoes, like we did. One girl was in white sandals, another in black dress-shoes, as if she’d been abducted from a party and taken straight here.
But with every tiny thing I noticed about the other hybrids around us, a nauseating thought grew and festered. How many of them would end up like Jaime? How many of them would submit to the knife, two souls whispering good-byes as anesthesia robbed the strength from their limbs?
We broke our pencil point, and Mr. Conivent came to give us another pencil. He was dressed in the same crisp, white shirt he’d worn the day he’d come to steal us from our family. The shirt that was like snow and ice—cuffs folded back, collar stark against his skin. He walked up beside us, bending down so he could whisper, could say so, so quietly in our ear, “It’s supposed to be a beautiful day today.” The pencil jabbed, point first, into our hand. “Perfect day for a surgery.”
It was a beautiful day. We got a look at it firsthand when a nurse led us down three flights of stairs and out the back door. A tremor had run through the kids as soon as we stepped foot in the stairwell after study time, an almost physical hum of excitement.
“She’s taking us outside,” Kitty whispered. It was the first thing she’d said to us since our return, and though she didn’t look at us when she said it, she did say it, and that meant something.
What had the nurses told the other kids, if anything? Had they told them to leave us alone, or had that come naturally? Avoid the ones that cause trouble, like Cal, like Eli, for fear of bringing that same trouble onto yourself.
The courtyard was much bigger than it had looked from the third-floor window. The chain-link fence stretched a good three or four feet above our head and didn’t contain so much as a gate. We’d been released from one cage only to be caught in another. But while the hospital’s insides were sanitized and cold, someone had at least attempted to make the courtyard homier. They’d filled it with random childhood objects, anyway: a basketball hoop on a rickety stand, a toddler’s plastic play set that even Cal would have had trouble using. Half-erased hopscotch squares littered the ground. A garish pink-and-red playhouse sat nestled in one corner, plastic doors yawning open. And that was just what we could see from the stairwell; the building’s irregular side made it so that certain parts of the courtyard were half blocked from view.
The nurse started distributing plastic-handled jump ropes and rubber balls. They were snatched from her hands as soon as she pulled them from her bag. Then, with screeches of laughter that sounded almost crazed, everybody scattered. Kitty threw a look at us over her shoulder, hesitated, then followed the others.
Our mind still rang with Mr. Conivent’s words. Where were Lissa and Hally now? Dr. Lyanne had lied when she’d said they were okay—how could they be okay if they were hidden away like this? Taken away from the group like this?
We caught sight of Ryan at the far end of the courtyard, half hidden by the side of the building, pressed into a small space between the rough wall and the chain-link fence. The nurse was mediating a fight between two kids over a four-square ball. Addie took the opportunity to slip by her and head for the hidden enclave.
“Addie,” Ryan said as we darted into the building’s shadow. His back had been pressed against the wall, but he came toward us as he spoke. “Thank God—What happened? Are you okay? Where is she? Where’s my sister?” His eyes kept catching on the bandage on our forehead, our hand, our legs. “What happened?”
“I don’t know where Lissa is,” Addie said.
He froze. The look on his face made the nausea come back, made something in me twist harder and harder until I thought I would break. “How can you not know? She was with you. Wasn’t she?”
Addie told him about breaking our windows to reach Lissa’s room. About fleeing to the roof. About falling and waking up in the darkness. About what—who—we’d seen there.
She told him about the horrible information that had set this all off. What we’d discovered in Dr. Lyanne’s office—about the vaccinations, about Eli and Cal. What the man on the review board had said as they locked Lissa in her room.
Ryan didn’t speak when Addie paused to breathe, just stared at us, unmoving. The day was blistering hot, even in Nornand’s shadow. Sweat made our blouse stick to our skin. Addie repeated, just loudly enough to be heard, what Mr. Conivent had whispered in our ear that morning.
For a long moment—for a long, long, unbearable moment—no one said anything and the whole world was still.
Then Ryan spoke again. “Did you give her your chip?”
Automatically, Addie looked toward our sock. No, no we hadn’t. We hadn’t thought of it, and her silence was answer enough.
“Why didn’t you give it to her?” Ryan said. Now he didn’t seem able to keep still—he made little half movements with his hands, his feet, like he wanted to pace or rub his temples or something but cut each motion off before he could begin. He looked up, then down, his mouth pulled to the side, his lips pressed together. “That’
s what these things are for, Addie. So we can keep track of one another. So we don’t lose anyone—”
Our jaw hurt from being clenched so tight. “I just didn’t think of it, okay?”
Ryan pressed his fist to his mouth. “I thought she was with you. She could be anywhere. They could be—”
“I was falling off the roof,” Addie snapped. “I was a little busy—”
He couldn’t shout. He didn’t shout—he had enough control to keep his voice low, but it shook. “Too busy to think about saving my sister?”
“Ryan, that’s not fair,” I said, and nearly bit our tongue.
Because I had said it.
There wasn’t time to figure out what I was doing or how I had done it or what this meant or anything at all because Ryan was being unfair and Addie was roiling beside me and I was just barely, just barely, able to hang on to my control.
I shook from the tension of keeping upright, of standing and speaking and thinking and watching and reacting and moving. I said, “You’re not helping, Ryan. This isn’t helping. We didn’t give her our chip. I’m sorry. But what now? What now?”
He stared at us. He said, in a tone I didn’t understand and couldn’t try to understand because I was working too hard just to hold everything together—“Eva?”
There was a funny feeling, like swimming through molasses. Our limbs were heavy—thick. I couldn’t move, but neither, it seemed, could Addie. We were stuck in between. Our heart thumped feverishly in our chest, the only part of us still moving. We were frozen, sweating in the heat, our uninjured hand pressed against the side of the building, the rough grain digging into our palm.
Then Ryan took our bandaged hand in his. If someone—either of us—had been fully in control, we might have flinched as his fingers pressed just a little too hard against our wound. But Addie and I were stuck in this in-between, this terrible in-between—and the pain was muted by the struggle going on in our mind. Ryan’s fingers were familiar against ours, the same grip I’d felt the first time I’d been alone in our body, blind and feeling like there was nothing else anchoring me to the world. I fought to hang on, to close my hand around his, because he had to calm down. He had to concentrate. We had to save Lissa and Hally.