by Kat Zhang
I receded into myself. Clawed at the walls of my own mind. Left fingernail gashes in my thoughts.
Half a day, Emalia had said. But that was only what she’d heard about, right? There was a whole world out there she’d never seen before. Mankind had reached space. Henri’s satphone could transport information in seconds across the vastness of an ocean.
Perhaps Emalia had been wrong.
What frightened me most was how I couldn’t feel the space where Addie should have been. Parts of me had shut down. Disappeared.
A caretaker brought in more food.
“They just fed me,” I told him.
“That was hours ago,” he said.
I threw up in the toilet, acid burning all the way up our throat. He grabbed our shoulders. Asked me what was wrong. I hadn’t thought he’d care. But the Plum-blouse Lady wasn’t finished with me, so I guess they needed me alive.
Everything was wrong. How couldn’t he see that?
Addie was gone, and that meant—
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t pull enough air into our lungs. Our chest burned.
The man was yelling something. The food tray flipped over, splashing porridge all over the ground.
More people came. It was so loud.
So loud. And crowded, and—
Still so silent in my mind.
I can’t breathe, I tried to tell them.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe alone.
TWENTY-ONE
Once, when Addie and I were four years old, we saw the stars together on a grassy hill and tried to count them, one by one.
Once, when Addie and I were seven years old, a boy tricked us into climbing into a trunk, then locked us inside. We lay curled in the sweltering darkness for hours, and Addie repeated
Once, when Addie and I were ten years old, I lost control of our legs in the middle of the elementary-school hallway, and she dove into control, saving us before we crumpled to the ground. Saving me from the embarrassment of my own terrified, frustrated tears.
Once, when Addie and I were twelve years old, Addie whispered
Once, when Addie and I were fifteen years old, she risked everything—everything—so I could have a chance at being free.
I decided it could not be permanent.
It was impossible.
Addie was gone now, but she would be back.
It didn’t matter how many hours it had been. How many days.
The Plum-blouse Lady returned every day, asking the same questions: who had sent us here; how many people were involved; where were they now. How had I kept in contact with them.
I answered nothing. Sometimes, I laughed at her. I told her I looked forward to seeing her, and it was true. When she was there, I had something to focus on. Something to listen to, even if it was just questions I couldn’t allow myself to answer.
When she was gone, the silence crushed me like I was a hundred thousand miles under the ocean.
I started talking to Addie, even though she wasn’t there.
A splotchy bruise covered the back of our hand, where the IV had been. I pressed on it sometimes, just to feel the pain. A reminder that I was still there.
The door opened. The Plum-blouse Lady walked inside. I still hadn’t learned her name, and I supposed it didn’t matter. I’d figured out enough to know that she was at the head of Hahns, the way Mr. Conivent had run the hybrid wing of Nornand.
“Your shirt matches my bruise,” I told her. It did, too.
The woman ignored the comment. She situated a chair across from my bed and sat down, crossing her legs. I had a feeling she’d only managed to keep her temper in check these past days because she thought I was still half-delirious. Maybe I was.
“I like your shoes.” I wriggled our own feet at her. The longer she thought me crazy, the longer I could stall. “They took away my slippers, even. Do you still have my original shoes? My oxfords. I liked them.”
“There was another broadcast today.” She sounded tired. I could read it in her eyes, in the slope of her back. She’d passed frustration, passed anger, even. Now she was just weary.
“Oh?” I said. It came out sounding almost casual. I felt anything but casual.
The woman must have thought it sounded casual, too, because the weariness vanished, flooded by a rush of anger.
“I could report you,” she said. “However much Jenson is preoccupied with his own little plans right now, I’m sure he’d make time for the girl who supplied the footage that’s been causing so much trouble.”
Had it been causing trouble? I felt a stab of pride, and tried not to let it show.
But Addie wasn’t here, and I had to figure things out myself.
I looked up, studying this woman. There were traces of desperation on her face, bleeding through the cracks in her mask. Had she been in charge back in July? Probably. So the summer fiasco—the escaped and dead children—had happened under her watch. She wouldn’t want another mistake on her record. Especially with the experimental drugs she was testing on the hybrid children thrust under her care. Surely, that wasn’t government approved.
Though I supposed it wouldn’t matter in the end, if she truly made a breakthrough. The government would only be all too happy with another weapon to use against hybrids.
“I don’t want to involve Jenson,” the Plum-blouse Lady said quietly. “And I don’t think you do, either.” She smiled a safe, unassuming smile. “I could ask for your parents. Your mother, for example? I could get her. It wasn’t hard to find her number. I could fly her up here, if you wanted to see her.”
I opened our mouth, but our throat squeezed too tight for words.
I’d suddenly had a sickening thought.
If she could bribe me with my family, then she could also threaten me with them. Hadn’t Mr. Conivent done as much? No one would think anything of it if Lyle had a complication. If he ended up back in the hospital.
If he didn’t make it.
She knew what she was doing. I saw it in her face. In the satisfaction in her eyes.
“Tell me who’s behind the broadcasts, and I could have your family up here tomorrow,” she said.
Tell me who’s behind the broadcasts, or something could happen to your family tomorrow, and it’ll be entirely your fault.
“Jenson will be keeping tabs on my family. He’d know if anything happened.”
“What do you know about Jenson?” the woman said.
I didn’t tell her about the explosion at Powatt. The way we’d sat among the rubble, him and Addie and me. We were both alive because of each other. He’d borne us toward the door when we couldn’t walk. Maybe Addie and I would have escaped Powatt without Jenson’s help. Maybe he would have survived the bomb without our warning. But we’d never know.
“Addie—” the woman said.
“I’m not Addie,” I said with such fierceness that she silenced.
And finally, she understood.
“Eva,” she said, and I shuddered. She repeated my name, quieter. “Eva, tell me. You don’t have any other choice. Who sent you in here?”
It took everything i
n me to refuse to speak when my family was on the line. But nothing was sure. Last time, when I’d screwed up, I’d allowed devastation into not only my life, but that of so many people I cared about, who were innocent.
That couldn’t happen again.
If I didn’t speak, my parents and Lyle were in danger. If I did, everyone else was in danger—Ryan and Hally and Kitty and Dr. Lyanne. Not to mention Marion and Wendy. Probably even Jackson and Emalia and Henri, since their rescue might depend on the consequences of our plans.
Of course, they were all in danger anyway.
Eventually, the woman left. But she hadn’t given up. If anything, she’d brightened. And why not? It didn’t matter if I didn’t tell her today. She’d be back tomorrow. And she knew I couldn’t hold out forever.
I pulled the blanket tighter around us. I still hadn’t completely recovered from our days of delirium; I tired easily. Couldn’t always think clearly.
I closed our eyes.
Of course, buying time was only good if I could do something with it.
Sometime, possibly much later, I woke when the door creaked open. The lights had already dimmed. It must have been late.
“Finally,” someone huffed. “You’d think picking this lock would be easier than the window.”
A girl’s voice.
Bridget.
TWENTY-TWO
I tumbled out of bed, tangled in the sheets. Bridget ran to help me up again. Hissed in my ear, “Come on. We don’t have a lot of time.”
I didn’t ask questions. I took her hand and let her hustle me from the room. At the last minute, she darted back and grabbed my blanket to take with us.
We ran down the dimmed hall. I heard distant shouting. Not the keening of fear, or pain, but shouting—like people at a rally, children on a playground. And above it, the noise of adults fighting to restore order.
“What’s going on?” My words were more air than sound, but somehow, Bridget understood.
“What does it look like?” she demanded. “We’re breaking you out.”
“They came?” Our voice went high at the end, twisted to a point. Marion? Ryan?
Bridget frowned at me over her shoulder. “Nobody came, Addie.” Her name stabbed pain in my side. “We did it. Us. The girls. The patients.”
I stared at her. She jerked on our hand. Our lungs were on fire.
“Class Twelve?” I whispered.
She gave me a grim smile. “Class Twelve isn’t Class Twelve anymore. After they let me go, they put me back into the same ward, but they rotated everyone again the day after. Didn’t want me spreading stories, I guess. Only I already had. I told every girl in that ward all about you. How stupid you are, how utterly idealistic and naive.”
We were almost to the stairwell. Bridget hesitated. “By the time they rotated us, every single girl in that class thought you were a freaking martyr. I made sure of it. And I made sure they knew to tell their new classes the same thing. That today, we were going to rescue you.” The exit sign glowed green. Bridget pressed her ear against the door, then jerked it open and shoved me toward the stairs. “So come on.”
Bridget explained as we hurtled down the steps. They’d come up with a plan. During the next rotation, the first few classes allowed out of their wards would scatter, causing as much chaos as possible. The classes still locked inside would join in the commotion. They shoved beds against the door like battering rams. Swarmed the caretakers who dared crack the door open, unsure what to do. I guess their training—if there was training—didn’t involve anything like this.
“Don’t underestimate a mob of preteen girls,” Bridget told me wryly.
In the chaos, Bridget managed to slip away. She figured they’d keep me on the same floor they’d kept her.
“I didn’t think the next rotation would happen so soon—it’s barely been more than a week. But I guess they wanted to keep everyone off-balance. And it worked out in your favor.” She smiled hesitantly. Said, softly, “You’re still a little lucky.”
“It . . . seems so simple,” I said.
Bridget shrugged. “No one expected it. None of those girls are getting out of here tonight. They know it, and the caretakers know it. So they can’t understand why they’d all band together to do it anyway.”
She wavered when we reached the ground floor, and I realized she didn’t remember the way out. How could she, when it had been months since she first walked through the front door?
But I had memorized Hahns’s layout, and now Bridget followed me as we crept through the hallways, our footfalls hidden by the buzz of the generators, the hum of the air-conditioning.
There were only two ways into this institution: the front door, and a back door near the stairwell. I took us past it, but chances were, it was locked. There was a camera trained on it, so I didn’t dare check. We’d only have one chance at this. Better to check out the situation at the front door before making any decisions.
We could hear the shouting even on the first floor, coming muffled through the ceiling.
The lobby was only slightly better lit than the hallways. A single guard remained at his station, staring at a panel of monitors. On them, we saw the chaos upstairs. The masses of girls. Some had grabbed their pillows, using them to beat at the caretakers like it was all some sort of macabre pillow fight.
The security guard’s station was only a few yards from the door. Easy to catch anyone making a run for it. I tugged Bridget back down the hall until we were out of earshot, then whispered, “What’s going to happen here? When we’re gone?”
“Oh, don’t think so highly of yourself,” Bridget said. “We survived before. We’ll survive after.”
Not everyone survived, I thought. Then realized. “We? You said we.”
Bridget gave me the look only she could give. The one that said, so plainly, Are you insane? “What?”
I grabbed her hand. “You said, We survived before. We’ll survive after. We.”
Her shoulders drooped a little. But she didn’t look away.
“No,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”
I wasn’t leaving her behind again.
Bridget yanked her hand from ours. “Someone has to stay. To watch out for the girls still here. They’re mostly rather stupid. They agreed to this plan, didn’t they?” Her grin was cockeyed, then flickered. “Besides, someone has to distract that guard.”
I couldn’t manage words.
“You better not freeze.” Bridget looked me up and down, and shoved my blanket at me—her slippers, too, after she tugged them from her feet. Automatically, I took them. “I’m going to be mad as hell if I hear you froze in the snow, after all this trouble.”
“Bridget—”
“Oh, right,” she said. She lifted her left hand; I hadn’t been paying it any attention—not in the darkness, not in the midst of everything else. There, around her finger, was our ring. She slipped it off and pressed it in our palm. “You can’t forget this. One of the other girls took it after we’d gone. I got it back for you.”
I clutched the ring in our hand. Bent to put on the thin slippers.
“Do what you do,” Bridget said as she turned to go. “Make things change.”
It took me a second to find the words. But I called them after her, as loudly as I dared.
“I will,” I said. “I’m going to make the whole world change.”
She turned. Nodded. Just once.
She ran out, toward the security guard.
Screamed. Shouted.
Distracted him, while I slipped out the door and into the snow.
I slammed into a white world, and my first thought was, Oh, God, I’ve made such a mistake.
Bridget was right. There were piles of snowdrifts.
There was also
a blizzard.
There was no way I could survive out here. Not even with the blanket. The snow burned through our slippers, soaking them.
I kept running. Adrenaline was friend and enemy, angel and demon. It shoved me off the institution grounds. Into the woods, the copses of barren trees.
I ran, and it snowed. It snowed, and I ran.
I ran, ran, ran.
Until I collapsed.
I couldn’t breathe. The cold air knifed up our lungs, tearing them to ribbons. They couldn’t expand.
I struggled onto our knees, gasping.
I did.
Eventually, it stopped snowing. The wind stilled. The ground was clear in patches, here under the skeletal canopy of the trees. I tried to keep to the barer parts, hoping the snowfall earlier had buried our footprints.
It was so cold. Our palms and cheeks burned. Our feet went numb.
I pushed onward. Through the trees. Downhill. That was the only direction I knew to go.
The moon was half-full, egg-yolk yellow in a dark sky.
I walked until our legs gave out. There was no way to know how far I was from civilization. If I was even headed in the right direction. Down was down, but population was sparse here around Hahns.
I remembered the story Peter had told us about the attempted rescue in July. Diane and the six children she’d tried to save had crashed off the side of the road. Only four kids had made it to the town below, and it had taken them what, ten hours? Ten hours, and it had been summer.
I collapsed underneath a tree. Our eyes were closed before I could think anything about it. I forced them open again. I knew enough about hypothermia to know falling asleep didn’t help.
But I had to rest. At the very least, I had to wait until daylight. I’d been walking for hours already, moving on autopilot, which worked well enough when the only thing I had to do was run, run away. But now I needed to plot a course. I had to figure out which direction to go, where I could find the nearest town.
I needed sleep. But to sleep, I needed warmth. I couldn’t risk lying down and never getting up again.