by Kat Zhang
For a long moment, no one spoke. No one made to open the door.
The doorbell rang again.
Then the knocking started. Sharp raps against the door.
A woman’s voice rang out.
“Excuse me,” she said. “My name is Marion Prytt, and I would like to speak with Addie Tamsyn.”
TWO
Dr. Lyanne gestured for us to clear out, and we retreated to our bedroom with the others, our heart thudding. I sank onto a bed, hands fisting around the worn patchwork quilt.
Hally was the last one in. “Who do you think it is?” she whispered as she shut the door. Ryan stood beside us, his body tense with confused worry.
Of course, no one had any idea. With our pictures circulating, anybody might know about us now. Keep calm, I told myself fiercely. I focused on our breathing. Don’t freak out.
Addie and I were no strangers to panic attacks—hadn’t been since we were seven years old and learned the fear of small spaces. But in the weeks since Powatt, other things had begun to set us off—sudden noises; flashes of heat.
Sometimes, just the thought of the darkness, pain, and fear of oblivion under a fallen chunk of wall, our remains eaten through by flames.
Hally set her hands on the windowsill.
“She’s got a nice car.” She squinted, brushing her black curls away from her face. “Can’t see the license plate—oh, there’s a girl in the backseat—”
Ryan hurried to the window with us. As we watched, the girl opened the car door and climbed out. She looked maybe twelve, a little older than Kitty and Nina. Her overcoat flapped in the wind as she hurried toward the house, her shoulders hunched against the cold.
“Do you think they’re hybrid?” Hally said. Before everything had gone to pieces at Anchoit, people had often come to Peter for help. They’d hear about him from a friend of a friend—whispers of a man at the head of a network of hybrids and hybrid sympathizers who might be able to steal a child away to safety, or even break him out of an institution. Who was proof that there was hope out there, somewhere.
The girl outside the window looked straight up at us.
There was something familiar about her face.
She, certainly, recognized ours. Her eyes went big, and her mouth dropped open. The wind had whipped a blush to her cheeks.
Ryan twined his fingers through ours. “What is it?”
“I’ve seen her before, I think.” Automatically, I squeezed his hand. “I—I can’t remember where.”
Peter walked into view, beckoning the girl toward him. Then his gaze followed hers, focusing on us before turning back to the child. She kept trying to steal glances upward, but he ushered her inside.
I flipped frantically through my memory.
“From Anchoit?” Ryan asked, but he sounded doubtful, and I shook our head. The memory hovered at the edge of my mind—
“She wasn’t at Nornand.” There was a certainty in Hally’s voice, and no one argued with it. I remembered the face of every patient we’d known at Nornand, even if the finer details had blurred after so many months. This girl hadn’t worn a blue uniform with us.
A quiet knock sounded on the bedroom door.
“It’s me,” Peter said, and only waited a second before coming inside.
He looked much as he always looked now. Like he was trying to hold the world together in his fists. Sometimes I wished I could still see him the way I had the night he’d rescued us from Nornand. When he and Jackson had materialized in the darkness of the clinic hallway like heroes in a fairy tale, guiding us toward moonlight and freedom.
I knew him better now. He was only one man—who wanted so much, but could only do so much.
“Eva,” Peter said. “Can I speak with you?”
Ryan was reluctant to release our hand. I gave him a reassuring look as I followed Peter. We only went across the hall, to the room he shared with Emalia. Like much of the house, it bore the smell of sawdust and wood varnish.
“I’ve seen that girl before,” I said as soon as Peter shut the door. “I can’t remember where, but—”
“Her name is Wendy Howard,” Peter said, and I frowned. The name rang no bells in our memory. “I don’t think you’ve met her before.”
“I have,” I insisted. “I recognize her face—”
Peter reached into his pocket and drew out a folded sheet of paper. He smoothed it open on his desk. “You’re sure you’re not just remembering this?”
I stiffened. Addie’s reaction was more visceral, but she wasn’t the one in control, and it didn’t show. But I felt it—icy knife-edge sharp—against me.
The paper was a flyer. That’s what we’d called them when we were making them. When we cast them over the edge of the buildings around Lankster Square.
Peter was right. We’d never met Wendy Howard. Just drawn a likeness that was so similar it sent a chill dancing down our spine.
“Wendy brought it with her,” Peter said. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I was still staring at the flyer, at the drawing of the girl our hands had painstakingly sketched.
“We made them for . . . for Lankster Square,” I said quietly. We’d already told Peter and the others about it. How Sabine had recruited us to help her create a distraction during the rally so she and Devon could sneak into Metro Council Hall and uncover the government’s plans for the Powatt institution. “All the flyers had hybrid kids on them . . .”
I ran our fingers over the words printed across the face of Anna H., 15.
HOW MANY CHILDREN HAVE DIED FOR THIS CURE?
It was strange to remember how hopeful we’d been then. How desperately relieved and happy I’d been to be a part of something. To be a force of change.
Addie shuddered.
Anna H. was dead.
We’d only chosen dead children for our flyers.
Peter folded the flyer back up. Maybe he’d caught the way I was staring at it—knew that as long as it was splayed out on the desk, I could think of nothing but the hours Addie and I had spent in that attic above Sabine and Cordelia’s photography shop. The day we’d snuck from Emalia’s apartment and took, with such a dizzying sense of responsibility, a sheaf of these flyers and a homemade firework to a rooftop overlooking the Square.
How had one of those flyers made it into Wendy Howard’s hands? Had she been there that morning? Or had the flyer passed from hand to hand, until it reached hers?
“Wendy claims she’s Anna’s sister,” Peter said.
“Hybrid?”
He shook his head. I struggled to shed the memories of Lankster Square. The thunder of the fireworks when they went off. The terrified roar of the crowd. There wasn’t time for sad stories. Not even in my own mind. “The woman with her? Marion?”
“A reporter,” Peter said. “She says she wants to do a human-interest story about Anna and Wendy. About hybrids in general. She wants to help our cause.”
A human-interest story. The words lost meaning in my mind, shattering into fragments that didn’t collect into a comprehensible whole. Human interest. Did that mean she thought our story would be interesting? Or did she mean it was a story about the human interest? Our int
erests? Our need for the gifts of freedom and safety that for so many others were not just interests but rights?
“Why did she come to us?” I asked.
“Because she knows the risks she’s taking.” Peter stared at the musty shelves lining the bedroom walls. His palms were flat against the desk, his muscles tensed. “If she’s discovered, the government’s going to be after her. She’s going to need people to hide her, and protect her.”
“You think she really wants to help us?”
He hesitated. “Perhaps. Or she just wants to help herself. If things . . . if things end well for us, she’ll have the story of a lifetime.”
“Can we trust them? I mean, Wendy . . . Wendy might really be Anna’s sister, but . . .”
“But that doesn’t mean much,” Peter said. “Just because Wendy’s sister was hybrid doesn’t mean she’s beyond using that fact to help persecute other hybrids.”
He said it so blandly, so simply. Wendy Howard barely looked old enough to be a teenager, but perhaps that just meant she could be easier to manipulate.
“Why’re they still here, then?” I said wearily.
Peter laughed. Quietly, tiredly, but laughter all the same. “Marion came prepared. She has something we want, and she knows it.”
There was something off in the way Peter looked at us. Something that sent warning bells thundering in our chest, knocking against our heart.
“What?” I said.
He paused. As if he needed a moment to convince himself that Addie and I could handle whatever it was he had to say.
“What is it, Peter?” I demanded.
“It’s Jackson,” he said. “She says she knows how to rescue Jackson.”
THREE
Jackson’s full name was Jackson Montgomery. But Addie and I didn’t learn that until months after we met him. Our first day at Nornand Clinic, he’d been nothing but a delivery boy who stared at us with too much curiosity. We’d been the new hybrid in a psychiatric ward; there was plenty to wonder about.
We didn’t discover Jackson’s real purpose until he pulled us into a janitor’s closet and whispered the truth: he and Peter were going to rescue us. Later, after the escape, we learned about Vince, the other soul sharing his body. We learned, through them, how to temporarily disappear from our body. They introduced us to Sabine and her group. Gave us a purpose. Delivered us from the suffocation of our own safety net.
In the midst of all that, Addie fell in love with the boy with the pale blue eyes and the too-long hair and the match-strike smile. Then he betrayed us both, and while she was still figuring out the pieces of her broken heart, officers arrested him brutally in the streets.
We still had the footage Kitty accidentally recorded of Jackson’s arrest. We hadn’t watched it—hadn’t even taken it anywhere to be developed. But the cartridge sat buried at the bottom of our suitcase.
“Jackson?” Addie said. The rush of her emotions manifested themselves in the cramp of our stomach, the aching in our chest.
Peter had caught the switch in control. It wasn’t always visible, especially to someone who wasn’t looking for it. But Peter was hybrid. He knew the signs.
“That’s what she’s claiming,” he said.
“Does she have proof he’s alive?”
“She says she does.” Peter studied us. Weighed us. “She says she’s met with him. She says she has a message from him. And she’ll only give it to you.”
Addie and I found Marion Prytt in the kitchen, standing at the counter with Dr. Lyanne and Wendy. The three of them nursed mismatched mugs. No one actually drank.
Marion was about Dr. Lyanne’s age—late twenties. There was a starkness about her narrow face, a lack of color. But her eyes lit up at the sight of us.
“You must be Addie.” Her voice was oddly breathy, with a rasp to it. When she moved toward us, Dr. Lyanne twitched as if she wanted to intercept her. She didn’t, and Marion smiled as we shook hands. “I’m Marion Prytt. It’s lovely to finally meet you.”
“Finally?” Addie said. Our eyes flickered to Dr. Lyanne. “You’ve heard a lot about us?”
From what we’d heard about ourself on the news, it seemed impossible anyone would think it lovely to meet us. But if Marion really was a reporter with the government connections it took to know of Jackson’s whereabouts, perhaps she knew more about Addie and me than what the television broadcasted.
“Well, not a lot, of course.” Marion’s delicate features flexed with every expression she put on and shed. “But enough. Some from the information that the government’s released about you. Some from Jackson.”
Peter wedged himself in beside us in the small kitchen. “You said you had a message from him.”
I hesitated.
Addie was nothing but a wire of nerves, stretched to breaking.
Marion spoke as if there were no one in the kitchen but her and us. “He wanted to tell you to keep hope. And to remember when you went sailing.”
she whispered.
The phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Dr. Lyanne said, and slipped past us, out the door.
“Does that sound like Jackson, Addie?” Peter’s expression was gentle. As far as I knew, no one had told him about Addie and Jackson. But close quarters and high tensions weren’t conducive to secrets. They shuddered through cracks, seeping from one person to the other.
Our teeth ground into our bottom lip. But Addie nodded.
I didn’t say anything, not even in the shared privacy between our minds. I understood the message to keep hope. It was what Jackson had told us at Nornand. It was something I’d said back to him during our mission to save the officials at Powatt from Sabine’s bomb.
But in all the months we’d known each other, we’d never gone sailing.
I’d never gone sailing. Apparently, Addie had.
“Peter.” Dr. Lyanne stood in the doorway. There was a brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks were strangely flushed.
Peter took one look at her and left our side, motioning for us to stay put. He and Dr. Lyanne disappeared into the living room.
Something was always feeling wrong, nowadays. The sensation itched like a woolen cloak against bare skin. I couldn’t throw it off.
“Has he told you?” Marion said.
Addie looked back toward her. “Sorry?”
“Peter.” Marion spoke too softly for her voice to carry beyond the kitchen. “About Darcie Grey. About the footage.”
Our expression must have been answer enough. Marion took a small step toward us, like we were some wild animal she might startle into fleeing. “There’s a fourteen-year-old hybrid girl named Darcie Grey. She lives a few hours east of here, near Bramfolk. She’s just been discovered.”
I almost laughed at her choice of words. Back in Lupside, there had been a girl in our class who wanted to model. In eighth grade, she was chosen for some fashion show in Bessimir City, and came to school beaming about how she’d been discovered.
She’d moved away the next year, so I didn’t know how things turned out for her. Probably a hell of a lot better than they would for Darcie Grey.
“I think your people could help her,” Marion said.
“My people?”
Marion shifted her weight. Her crisp, seafoam blouse wrinkled as she shrugged. “It’s what Peter does, isn’t it? And I’m sure he has a lot of help.
He can’t possibly be doing all this on his own.”
Addie frowned. “All what?”
“All, you know . . .” Marion made some vague hand gesture at the house around us. “This—”
“He saves kids,” Wendy said. It was the first words Addie and I had heard her say, and they sent a shock through our body. Wendy fiddled with her short, dark hair, tucking it behind her ears. “He saved you, didn’t he?” she said.
When Addie didn’t immediately answer, Wendy set down her mug. It clinked against the counter. “You never met my sister?”
The question had a practiced air to it, like it was something she’d rehearsed asking.
“No,” Addie said tightly. We’d used Anna as a symbol, but Anna had been a flesh-and-blood girl with flesh-and-blood family. A member of it stood in this kitchen in an oversized winter coat and a dark purple sweater.
“But you knew someone who did,” Wendy said.
Maybe we should have denied it. Probably, it would have been safer to deny it. But staring at this girl, we couldn’t.
“Yeah,” Addie whispered. “I did.”
Wendy’s entire body stiffened. Then she smiled. Just a tiny bit. This was all it took for her to have a little happiness: to know a girl who knew a girl who knew her sister after she was taken away.
It was better than nothing at all.
“I’m sorry,” Addie said, looking from Wendy to Marion, “but I don’t understand what this all has to do with me. Or Darcie Grey.”
Marion drew a small envelope from her purse and held it out to us.
“Wendy wants to help people like her sister.” Marion sounded earnest enough. A little too earnest. There was something overly shiny about it. “So do I. Maybe you can’t tell, stuck in this house in the middle of nowhere, but the country is getting riled up. People are questioning things they haven’t had to doubt in decades. They’re searching for answers. Things could go very badly for hybrids. But they could also go very well, if the right cards are played.”
Inside the envelope was a photograph. We could only see the white backside, where someone had written, in neat cursive: Darcie. Soccer championships.