"What should we do till then?" Adrienne says. We all stare at each other. "I'm done crying," she adds, as if she can help it. A tear slides down her cheek and she slaps it away.
We wind up playing board games. Nars keeps his hand on my knee. Now and again, he strokes my hair and I let him. He and Adrienne bicker, the way they always do, which is nice to hear in my last hours with them. I'm glad none of us are putting on airs.
Sister Nanette interrupts us and we all stare at Nars. He rolls his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, women's quarters," he says.
"Out," Sister Nanette says. "The both of you." Adrienne scrunches up her nose. "Out, I said, and give her a hug. I want a few minutes with Cassidy before she goes."
"You know I'm leaving?" I say.
"Of course I know," she says, like she might know everything. "Out, now," she says to Adrienne and Nars. "She's brought that transporter back three times. She's wearing his patience thin, same as she wears the Lord's and mine. Now scoot."
Adrienne squeezes me. I have to push her back a little bit to breath. "I love you," she says. She latches onto my shoulders and stares at me straight in the eyes. "You are my sister," she says, and she gives me a little shake.
Nars kisses my forehead. "I wish Sister Nanette wasn't standing right there," he says.
"Ah, but I am," Sister Nanette says. "So get on with it."
"Sure." He heaves a sigh.
"Hey," I say. "I'll miss you."
He opens his mouth like he's got something on the tip of his tongue, but then he just says, "Yeah, me too. Put in a good word for me with the Order, eh? Maybe I'll get a ticket too."
"You got it."
Adrienne is standing just outside of the door, waiting for him. They both look at me, and I can hardly believe I won't ever see Nars wink again, or mop the sweat off of Adrienne's brow in the midst of one of her nightmares.
Adrienne holds out a hand and Nars takes it. They leave. Sister Nanette closes the door. "Go on, then," she says, and I crumble, hitting my knees hard against the floor and sobbing into my hands, crying with every violent ounce of myself while Sister Nanette looks on like a wolf protecting its den.
When I'm finished, she brings me a glass of water. She pulls up the hem of her habit to dry my face.
"You be a good girl, Cassidy," she says in English.
"Yes, ma'am," I say in French.
When she opens the door again, Nars and Adrienne are gone. Nathan is standing there instead.
Chapter Nine
I feel like I've lived in the bunker forever, like my life before this place - the shouts and curses of my father, the narrow eyes of my mother, the mists and the bombs that terrorized the outside - like all of it was just a bad dream, one I've almost forgotten about.
Adrienne remembers the outside, at least when she's asleep. A part of her clings to it. That's why she has so many nightmares.
Nars calls the outside freedom, but I don't really care about being free. I have friends in the bunker. I have everything I could ever need. I have more happiness here than I ever had on the outside. The outside is lonely and broken. The bunker is safe.
Now that I'm leaving, I feel a terrible sadness. Despair swells in my throat, tight around my neck like a starched collar. A knot rises up from my collarbone like yeast in an oven. I swallow it down. If Nathan knows I've been crying, he hasn't let on. I won't let him look at me like I'm a child, not again.
I keep a stiff upper lip as we move through the hall. Nostalgia douses my bones. It makes my feet heavy. It makes the air around my ankles dense. Every step puts more of the bunker behind me. I’m not ready to say goodbye. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready.
I was six when I said goodbye to my parents. Six. It seems like such a long time ago now, like I might have only imagined those first six years, like I might have always lived in the bunker with Sister Nanette, with Adrienne and Nars.
I don't remember much about my journey here from the North. The month in between my father's house and the convent is a blur, a wisp of time as indistinct as the days between one season and the next.
I know the distance that Brant and I traveled was wide, but for me, the crossing into Nouvelle France was quick. Brant carried me most of the way. He gave me little white tabs to swallow, the same sort he gives us all once a year before our physicals, so I spent most of my days and nights sound asleep.
I remember some things, small, unimportant things. Tucked away in my mind, there are fragments of our trek, memories that await discovery without urgency, like rogue socks buried in a pile of laundry.
I have snippets of rain, of waking up wet with my chest draped over Brant's shoulder, my body as limp and as soggy as a newspaper left out on the drive in the middle of a storm.
I recall those brief, glorious moments of consciousness, how elated I was to be awake, how desperately I'd pretend to still be asleep. I wanted to see the outside world, even if it meant sneaking peeks at the passing scenery through one eye.
I could never fool Brant for more than a few seconds. He could always tell when wakefulness was upon me. He'd give me another white tab to eat and the darkness of slumber would unravel again, stealing my groggy vision with the swiftness of a hawk snatching up its prey.
I hated those little white tabs. I hate them still. I have nightmares when I take them. I wake up strangled by my bed sheets with a raw throat and a thundering heartbeat. It’s the only thing about me that hasn’t changed in eleven years.
The childhood version of myself missed the sun and the moon and the stars. She recalled the smell of grass and the taste of fresh air with a crushing, covetous despair. I'm someone else now. I haven't spent a single moment pining for the outside, not since the day I arrived at the convent.
I remember that day. There was no white tab on my tongue, nothing to make my eyes gritty and sore. Brant and I walked through an empty city in the middle of the afternoon. The air was as dry as sawdust. The sun put blisters on the back of my neck and sweat underneath my arms.
Brant said it was the best sort of weather, the sort that would drive city dwellers into the shadows and make the outside safe. He told me about the bunker, three stories, underground, filled with children just like me. A place where I would have showers and coloring books and dessert. A place where I would have friends.
I remember how I kept my hands still inside my pockets, how I commanded myself not to dance in the shadow of the steeple overhead. Brant told me to say goodbye to the outside world, but I already knew I wouldn't miss it. The outside might have sunrises and rain clouds, it might have dew in the morning and stars like dogwood blossoms at night, but all of it was chopped liver if there were children beneath my feet.
I met Adrienne and Nars in the bunker and I never once longed to be anywhere else. Nars might give me up for a chance to live on the outside, but I wouldn't give him or Adrienne up. Not for anything in the world. Not if I had any choice in the matter.
Why me? The question knocks against my skull like a hammer. It makes my head ache. There are bunker kids who pray for a ticket to the Reservation. There's people like Nars who throw their fists against the walls, who talk about tunneling through steel, who talk about escape. Why should I have to leave, ahead of everyone who disparages the bunker, when all I want in the world is to stay?
Nathan takes me through the bunker at a quick pace. I don't want to walk so fast. I want to look into every nook and cranny one last time. But I can't do it without falling behind.
There's empty shelves aligning the walls of the hall, and just a few stores of dry goods left in the cafeteria. It's the end of the month. A shipment from the Reservation will be arriving any day now. I like unloading the big, burlap sacks of flour and oats, sifting through the enrichment trunk to see what new books and games the government has sent us. I think of Nars and Adrienne unpacking the shipment without me and sadness surges up into my throat, coming from the tips of my toes and touching every part of me in between.
The bunker cat scurries betw
een my feet and I stumble. I duck down to stroke her plain, brown coat, to be sure I haven’t startled her. Nathan latches onto my elbow and drags me along.
"I was just giving her a pat," I say. "Can't I have a second to pet her? I'll never see her again."
"You'll never see any of this again," Nathan says. "And we're already a day behind. We'll have to walk through the night to make up for it."
We're in the cafeteria now. There's a tube and ladder here that I've only ever been through once, eleven years ago. It leads up into Sister Nanette's closet, the fortified entrance into the bunker from the outside.
I pause, but Nathan is zipping along. He heaves himself up, rung by rung. The skin on the back of his neck is taut as he hoists himself to the top.
I'm quick behind him. I don't want him to think that I'm afraid. I straighten my spine the way Adrienne would. She wouldn't tremble, not with someone as handsome as Nathan looking on.
I hope Nathan hasn't noticed my swollen eyelids or the tear stains on my cheeks. Nars wouldn't cry, if it was him with a ticket instead of me. He'd probably shove Nathan aside in his haste to return to the outside.
I'm spry on the rungs. I don't have as much weight to carry, and I'm used to scaling ladders.
At the top of the tube, there's a steel cover, like the one that caps off the green house tube. It’s got a keypad adhered to it and a spindle at the center. Nathan punches in a code. Then he gives the spindle a few clean tugs. He shoves the iron cap aside.
He climbs out and reaches down into the tube to help me up. I ignore him. I anchor onto the top rungs with my hands and swing my feet up and out, the way I've done a thousand times before. Only this time, when I right myself, I'm not surrounded by leaves and vines. I'm encased in a narrow hull, a black scrap of space saturated by mothballs. Cobwebs cling to the molding overhead. They flutter when Nathan and I disturb the air. Dust puffs up from beneath our boot soles like powder out of a compact case.
Nathan recaps the tube, sealing off all of the light from down below. We can't even see each other's shadows now. I feel him move against me so I try to step out of the way, but the closet is small. Nathan’s chest is almost flush with my cheek. I can smell all the sweat-soaked, cotton fibers of his t-shirt.
I remember coming into this closet with Brant when I was six. The space felt bigger back then. But I was smaller, too. Now I’m tall; not quite as tall as Nathan, and not nearly as wide, but substantial enough to make our elbowroom inadequate.
Sister Nanette’s habits are strung up on a bar in front of our faces. I wonder why she needs so many. Each one is exactly like the next, a long, black shift without embellishment, a bib of starchy white around the neck. They wear a heavy coat of dust, like drapes in an abandoned theatre house. Their iron hangers make an ear-splitting shriek when Nathan shoves the lot of them aside.
There's a false door on the other side of the bar. Nathan dismantles it. A slab of solid oak stands in front of us now; another door, more conspicuous, with shallow groves in the panels, the sort a fingernail might make.
Nathan bears down on the handle. He opens the door up by degrees. He keeps a finger on his lip, anticipating something unpleasant, I think.
A dim light filters in, restoring my sight. It dilutes the darkness and makes everything gray. I can hardly believe it, but there are more habits here, black shafts of cotton with mildew sewn into the seams.
Nathan pilfers through them with a perfunctory hand and withdraws one. He holds it against me to see how well it will fit. "Put this on," he says.
"What? Why?"
"Listen," he says. "I come from the outside, you don't."
I want to correct him. I haven’t always lived in the bunker, after all. But I don't think that it's a good time to do it.
I fold my arms across my chest. I should take heed, I think. He works for the Order and I’m his charge. But I can’t quite help myself. I’ve never liked a snob, and that’s exactly what he’s acting like.
“Do as I say,” Nathan says.
"Don't boss me around," I say.
"I'm your transporter," he says, like that should mean something to me.
"So?" I know I should hold my tongue, but he's so patronizing. His tone makes me twitch.
"So, I give orders, you obey them," he says.
"I only take orders from nuns,” I say.
"Look." I see that dimple in his cheek again. "If you want to get to the Reservation, you'll stop being so difficult."
"I don't want to get to the Reservation," I say. "I don't want to leave the bunker."
I realize, suddenly, that I've never uttered anything more truthful than this, that could live happily forever with Adrienne and Nars underground.
"It's the Reservation or die, sweetheart," Nathan says. No one's ever called me sweetheart before. I don't like the way it sounds, coming out of Nathan's mouth.
He shoves on a robe, a moth-eaten, purple affair I hadn't noticed was hidden there among the habits. He crouches down, then, rifling through items in a black corner. I try to see what he’s looking for, but he’s so broad; the sheer size of him blocks my view.
He comes up with a satchel and drapes it over his chest. He clasps his robe shut around it, effectively concealing it from view. Then he shakes the habit at me again.
"Cute accent, by the way," he says. I purse my lips. I'm so annoyed, I've forgotten to speak in French. "What part of the North do you hail from, anyway?"
That shuts me up. I wonder if that was his intention. I snatch the habit out of his hands and shove it on. "I'll guess it," he says. "I've got an ear for accents." He's speaking English now, too. He tugs his hood up and I follow suit.
We walk through Sister Nanette's bed chambers. She has three windows with real, clear glass set inside of them, not the yellowish glass that the walls of the green house are made of. Moonlight shines through, broken up by narrowly-spaced, wrought iron bars. But it's moonlight, white moonlight, making big, white puddles on the floor.
I stare out at it, paralyzed, until I hear Nathan clear his throat. Impatience rises off of him like steam rising up in a hot washroom.
"Sorry," I mumble. First please and now sorry. Add that to the quiver in my stomach yesterday, and I don't quite recognize myself since Nathan arrived.
"You'll see it better when we get outside," Nathan says.
Outside.
My stomach rolls over. It's not a good feeling.
I remember seeing the convent for the first time when I was six, the only time I've ever seen it from the outside. I remember the sheer size of it, how small I felt, dwarfed by its sweeping arcs and gothic columns, the heaviness of the architecture, the blocks of granite only giants could have possibly stacked.
I remember how I bit my lip to keep from shouting out, how I curled my toes under inside of my shoes to keep myself from doing cartwheels in the middle of the street. I was simmering with excitement, so sure I would have friends in the bunker.
I'm not certain I'll have friends again, now that I'm leaving it. How will anyone ever compare to Adrienne and Nars? I haven't spent a single day apart from them in eleven years.
Nathan selects a holy text from Sister Nanette's bookshelf. He shoves it under his arm. He sets his hand on the bedroom door and then he pauses, seeming to think better of himself. "There's going to be people out here, Cassidy," he says. "Dangerous people."
Outsiders, I think, and it carries a whole new weight now that I am outside, too.
"Walk next to me," Nathan says. "On the right side. Keep your eyes on your feet."
I straighten up and meet his gaze head on. "Hey," he says. He snaps a finger in front of my face. I drop my jaw, utterly indignant. "Right side. Eyes on your feet. You see me scratch my ankle, you run. I don't care where you go. Just run. I'll catch up to you."
"You're being a little dramatic," I say. Not all outsiders are dangerous. My parents are outsiders. Adrienne's pen pals are all outsiders, and the nuns let them visit her sometimes.
Na
than puts a hand on top of my head and shoves it down like he's baptizing me. "Right side," he says.
"Yeah, yeah," I say. Inside, I'm seething. "Eyes on my feet."
We move into a broad hall made of pock-marked marble slabs. Out of the corner of my eye I can see that the walls are lined with wooden benches and broad, concrete pedestals, most of which are stacked with sleeping bodies. Some people have blankets. Some people are laying on absolutely nothing in the middle of the hall so that we have to step around them.
Someone reaches out from beneath me and grabs onto the hem of my habit. I let out a little cry and tug it out of his grasp. Nathan jabs me in the back and says, "Eyes down," underneath his breath.
He opens up the text he took from Sister Nanette's room. It's hollowed out. There's crackers inside of it. He hands a thin wafer to anyone who reaches out for him.
"Body of Christ," he says.
Some people repeat his words or recite scripture back to him. Other people just mutter. Everyone is dirty. The whole hall smells awful, like spoiled onions or old soup.
The hall leads into the church. Every inch of pew is taken up by more bodies. Most people are asleep in here. The upholstery is frayed. It was a vibrant shade of red once, but it’s humbler now, the color of rust, as if it’s carried the weight of too many patrons.
I feel awash with nostalgia. I reach out for Nathan's hand the way I did when I was six, when Brant was walking me through in the other direction. He slaps it away.
I see the grand doors of the church in front of us. I want to stop dead in my tracks, but Nathan keeps moving forward so I do, too. We're only steps from the outside world, the real outside, the real moon and sky, a real breath of fresh air. I'm excited and scared and gut-wrenchingly sad all at once.
Someone touches my shoulder. I turn to see who it is. I don't even think twice.
"Sister Nanette." A man is standing there. He has almost more hair than face, eyebrows that meet in the middle and a beard like a scarf. "Oh," he says when he sees me. I feel Nathan stiffen up at my side.
"Body of Christ," Nathan says. He puts a stack of wafers, three-high, in front of the man's face, the way I do sometimes when I'm trying to lure the cat away from my dinner with a treat.
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