I glance over his shoulder at the door. I wonder what Nathan would do if he was here with me, if Moreau hadn’t shooed him off. I can't decide if being alone, naked, with Moreau, is better or worse than having Nathan by my side.
"Don't be difficult," Moreau says. When I still don't move, he shakes his head. "Brant's a fool," he says. There's a tedium about his tone, like he's had these same sentiments too many times over. "He sedates his patients to protect them. From what? From nothing. A few pokes and palpations. You would think it was normal if you knew how he's examined you every year."
He puts a hand on my knee. I don't like it there, but I don't think I can push him away. There's something formidable about him that keeps me still.
"It's a rude awakening, my dear," he says. "I can appreciate that. Truly, I can. But you must believe me, or you'll wear my nerve. These examinations are nothing to fret about. Now then." He slaps my thigh. “Let’s get on with it, eh? Would you rather I call you Cassidy, by the way?”
I shake my head, no. Miss Hartinger sounds too grown up, but Cassidy sounds worse, coming out of his mouth.
“Very well, then. If you would.” He waves a hand at my clothes, like I'm making a big fuss over nothing. Like I'm being difficult. That's what Nathan would say, too, I think.
I strap my arms over my chest. Something like dread creeps up from my stomach. It slides into my throat like bile. “Miss Hartinger,” Moreau says, too articulate for me to mistake him. His smile wavers, but he keeps it plastered on. I think I would prefer it if he would yell at me, if he would frown.
"Could you turn around?" I say.
"Nonsense," he says. "I'm a doctor. Your body is nothing but anatomy to me. Chop chop, my dear." I think his patience is wearing thin.
I take off my shirt first. It's too big for me anyway; it slips right over my head. If I felt small before, it's nothing compared to how I feel now, like I'm shrinking, getting smaller and smaller with every article of clothing I shed, till I'm sure Moreau is taller than me instead of the other way around, till there's nothing hard or assured about me anymore.
When I'm completely naked, I start to shiver. I'm not cold, but my body is making great jolts, like hiccoughs. I grind my molars together to keep them from chattering. I clench up my toes.
Moreau puts on a pair of white latex gloves. They slap against his wrist and the sound makes me jump. I lurch forward, throwing my forearms over my breasts, cupping my elbows in my hands. "Just remember," Moreau says, "you've been examined before. There's nothing to be embarrassed of or nervous about. This is all very routine."
I think I'll slap him if he says the word routine one more time. “Remove your hands, please,” he says.
I uncover my breasts. I latch my hands together in my lap and squeeze till my puss-filled, swollen palms are in agony.
I think about the pain in my hands while Moreau palpates my lymph nodes, my shoulders and then my chest. I tip my chin up to the ceiling and pretend to feel nothing.
He touches me in places I've never been touched, places I hardly have any reason to touch myself. A darkness billows up around the edges of my eyes, swarming like a black, blurry cluster of bees.
I think of Brant, of those little white tabs, of how many times he must have touched me this way, and it makes me feel sick. What else might have happened to me while I was in a stupor? What else don't I know about myself?
All of a sudden, I think I've had more than I can stand. The room is too bright, too compact. I feel like all of my bravery might abandon me soon.
“How much longer?” I say.
“Hold your horses,” Moreau says. He uncaps a syringe and places it, bevel up, against the soft, sunburnt skin on the underside of my forearm. “Brace yourself for a little pinch,” he says. He pricks my vein and draws up a steady, crimson stream.
My stomach flops. I look away, adhering my eyes to the wall, but I can’t cure my nausea.
Moreau recaps his needle. He sops up a dribble of residual blood with a cotton ball.
“You’ve got a cracked rib,” he says. He unwinds a roll of flesh-colored gauze around my abdomen. He makes a half-dozen rotations, brushing the underside of my breasts with his knuckles as he goes.
I think my cheeks must be white. I gulp, but there’s nothing in my stomach, nothing in my throat. The air that I swallow is stagnant and dry. Moreau’s gauze makes a hissing sound when he tears it off. He smooths his thumb over the seam. “There we are,” he says. His hands fall away from my body and I breathe a sigh of relief.
"I'll order up a course of antibiotics for that infection," Moreau says. He makes a quick series of notations in my file, listing off items as if I'm not sitting here in the buff, as if I haven't just done cartwheels through a fiery hoop. “You can get dressed now,” he says. “That wasn’t so terrible, eh?”
My clothes feel threadbare when I put them back on. They swallow me up, at least two sizes two large, but I don't know what good they are now that Moreau knows what's underneath them.
When I step outside, I'm startled to find Nathan there waiting for me. I realize I'm hugging my chest, tugging the baggy folds of my clothing tight, as if I can hide behind the fabric.
I drop my arms, but they’re still stiff, as hard as lumber, as straight as pins. I feel like I'm still naked, like I'll always be naked now when Moreau sees me.
“All set?” Nathan says. I stare up at him and my eyes are wide. He knew, I think. He knew from the moment we met that he would deliver me to Moreau, that I would wind up in that chair with my clothes and my dignity in a heap on the floor. That Moreau would put his hands on me, that his fingers would squirm into the narrow space between my thighs. “How could you?” I say.
“It was just a physical, Cass,” he says.
I shake my head. “You shouldn’t have let him...” But I’m too embarrassed to say the words. “Nars would’ve stopped him,” I say.
“I’m not Nars,” Nathan says. “There is no Nars anymore. You won’t see him again.”
“That’s your fault,” I say.
“Nope,” he says.
“Nope?” My voice is too loud. It rises up without my consent until I think I might start to scream if nobody stops me. “You took me away from my best friends,” I say. “You took me away from my home. Since I’ve met you, I’ve lost everything. And now…”
“And now, what?” he says. “What’ve you lost now?”
He’s mocking me. “I don’t know,” I say. “Something.” Whatever it is, I don’t think I can define it. There’s a hollow space inside of me that was full and safe an hour ago.
My eyes are hot. I’m so angry all of a sudden. I feel like I’ve been angry for weeks, for years even, but I know that isn’t true. I feel like Nathan owes me something, although I can’t say what it is, or why. But maybe that’s not true either.
Nathan presses his lips together. "What?" I say. I shake my hands at him. I stand on my tip toes and try to be as tall as he is. "You clearly have something to say."
He shoves his hands into his pockets. "You hungry?" he says.
I think my face must be as purple as my palms. "Nope," I say. I push past him. I’m not sure if I'm heading towards the dormitory or not. I can hardly remember the pass code to get back inside. But I don’t care. The hard brush of my arm against Nathan’s makes me shrink into myself, makes my shoulders pinch together. I tuck my chin into my collarbone. I've never moved like this before. I've never tried to make myself so small.
Nathan doesn't follow me. He waited all that time behind Moreau's door, but he won't follow me now.
I tell myself that I'm happy to be alone, but when I get to the dormitories, I'm hoping there's someone inside. No one's there. I let my bunk swallow me up like my clothes. Every time the floor creaks or the walls groan, I think it's Moreau, just for a split second, and my heart starts to race.
I tuck my toes beneath the sheets and put a pillow over my head and try to sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
"Everyone cries, their first night in the bunker."
"Not me."
I'm six years old, standing three rungs over Brant's head on the ladder beneath Sister Nanette's bedroom closet. He's trying to coax me down, but he doesn't have me pegged yet. I'm not scared, I'm big. I like how tall I feel, like a bird in a nest fifteen feet above the ground. I don't want to finish climbing down. I don't want to be little again.
"I'll come down when I'm ready," I say.
"You'll come down now, young lady." That's Sister Nanette. I haven't met her yet, but she makes a severe impression.
"I'm a big girl," I tell her. That's what my father calls me whenever I throw a fit, whenever I get caught in a lie; those are childish things, he says, and I'm a big girl.
"Not big enough," Sister Nanette says. I haven't heard that before.
I climb down. Dr. Brant is taller than me again. Sister Nanette is even taller than him. "I won't cry," I say, shoving the toe of my sneaker into the cold, concrete floor.
And I don't.
Chapter Nineteen
Where is everyone? I wonder. I've been wandering the halls of the launch station for several minutes now and I haven't run into a single body. Surely there are dozens of people, maybe even hundreds of people, tucked away somewhere. I keep moving forward, making new turns, peeking through peep holes, but I don’t encounter a single soul.
This place is too expansive to be so empty. Every time I think a hall will dead end, it just turns into another hallway, branching off in a new direction till I think I'll never come to the end of this floor.
Where is Nathan? I wonder. Where are all those uniformed men from the garage? Where's Moreau? I bite my lip. If Moreau isn't here, I sure as hell won't go looking for him.
I check the buttons at the neck of my shirt. I keep checking them without meaning to, to make sure they haven't slipped out of their button holes. My fingers dart to my collar over and over again. At least Nathan isn’t around to see me do that.
I’ve torn off a strip of gauze from my torso and wrapped it around my injured palms, to keep people like Mya from staring at me. I keep a hand perched just above my hip, stabilizing my left side. My rib hurts more, somehow, now that I know it should hurt. I feel the painful way it expands and contracts with every breath I take, so that I almost wish I didn't have to breath at all.
Moreau says he'll take an x-ray if my screen comes back positive, if I am who I think I am, who the Order wants me to be. I wonder what will happen to me if I'm not. I wonder how well a cracked rib can heal without treatment.
Up ahead, I hear a murmur. People talking, lots of people talking all at once. There's a set of swinging doors with a window where the peep hole should be. There's no keypad, but I don't try the handles. I stand on my tip-toes and peek through the glass.
It's a cafeteria, I realize, even though it looks nothing like our cafeteria beneath the convent. There, the tables are made of thick, irregular blocks of wood. The nuns bring us our dinner, divvying up everything evenly, watching us while we eat so that none of us can share.
Here, the tables are all made of steel, with long benches on either side of them instead of chairs. There's a buffet that winds around two walls and people lined up in front of it, taking more of one thing and less of something else, choosing exactly how much they will eat. Laughing and carrying on. Everyone wears brown fatigues, and nobody is as skinny as me.
I never thought I was skinny before. I'm certainly not thinner than those people I saw in the city, those people sleeping on pews in the church, sleeping in the middle of the street. In the bunker, I was just as thin as everyone else, so I never thought I was strange.
The bodies I see now are broad and soft, swaddled by rosy skin. I pull up my sleeves and inspect the sharp, brittle angles of bone underneath, the flat slope of my forearm, the gnarled construction of my wrist. No one else’s bones protrude like mine. I wonder if Nathan sees someone fragile whenever he looks at me.
I find myself searching for Adrienne and Nars. Instead, I spot Nathan. I don't know why I think he should be alone, at a table all by himself or in a dark corner somewhere. Maybe I want him to sulk, maybe I'm hoping he's ashamed of himself for leaving me with Moreau, for not apologizing about it.
He's not alone. He's huddled into a narrow space between two men who look a lot like him. Everyone here looks the same to me, especially the guys with their short haircuts. The cafeteria is just a sea of muscles and fatigues.
I wonder if anyone here has alien blood. Nathan said he worked for the Order,
and the hybrids were the first ones to get government jobs. I scan the crowd, but nobody stands out. On second glance, it's hard to know if I've seen the same person twice.
Maybe there are no hybrids at the launch station. Or maybe the hybrids look as human as any one of us. If having alien DNA means standing out in this crowd, then I’m the closest thing to an alien here.
My stomach growls, but I don’t think I can muster the nerve to push through the cafeteria doors. I’m a sore thumb, and I don’t want to draw attention to myself.
I look for Nathan again, but he’s not as easy to find this time. I think I spot him, but it’s hard to be certain until he catches my gaze through the glass, and then I’m sure that it’s him.
I wonder if Nathan can tell it's me from so far away. I duck down, just to be safe, even though the glass cutout is small and besides, he would've only seen me for a second. I bow my head and continue up the hall, moving a little bit faster than I was before.
The doors are spaced closer together, the farther I walk. After a while, every one of them is equipped with a keypad. Some doors aren't even labeled, and none of them have peep holes.
There’s something eerie about this part of the bunker. It feels emptier than the other empty hallways, somehow. More desolate. The echoing of my boots is a booming sound. It reverberates against the walls. My heartbeat matches its rhythm, chopping along at a rapid pace.
I hear someone else’s footsteps, heavy on the concrete floor, and I freeze. Maybe I shouldn’t have wandered this far. I pinch my mouth shut. I try not to make a noise. I bite my bottom lip and hold my breath.
Will I get in trouble if somebody sees me out here while everyone else is eating dinner? Maybe I'm not supposed to be in this part of the bunker. Maybe I should backtrack to the cafeteria or the dormitory before I'm caught.
I peek around the corner. I'm surprised to see a boy standing there, about my age, maybe even a few years younger, wearing a uniform like Moreau's with special pins and stripes on the sleeve.
He's got a stack of manila folders under his arm. I wonder if my file is among them. He dials into the keypad and I watch his finger. 3-5-8-8, or maybe it was 3-5-8-0. The door sighs as its bolts come unstuck and the boy pushes through.
There's nothing distinguishable about the doors in this hall. They look just alike, so I count up from the corner.
I want to know what's written in my file. I've spent eleven whole years trusting Brant, counting down the days till his next visit and running out to greet him, having no idea that he would take off my clothes, that he would touch me the way Moreau touched me.
What else might've happened to me after I swallowed those little white tabs? Are there things that people know about me, things I don't know about myself? Are they written down in my file, recorded for somebody else’s eyes?
I have just as much of a right as anyone to know all the details of my life up until now. It’s not fair, that I might be kept out of a secret about me.
The results of my screening will be back in tomorrow. That's what Moreau said, and if Nathan did make a mistake, if I'm not the right Cassidy Hartinger, then what? They'll throw me out into the desert? I might die out there never knowing who I really am, what's really happened to me. I have to get my hands on that file today.
The boy appears again, too quickly. He sees me before I have a chance to dash off.
"You lost?" he says. His voice sounds young, too. He s
miles. It's a friendlier smile than Moreau's.
He's got freckles like Nars. I wish he had long hair like Nars, too. His hair is buzzed short just like every other boy I've seen here.
He’s shorter than I am. His cheeks are round and his eyes are blue. He's wearing glasses with thick, black frames. They sit low on the bridge of his nose, like they might be a secondhand pair.
"I…I was just stopping to tie my shoe," I say. Embarrassment floods my cheeks. I've never been very good at lying. Adrienne usually cuts in and lies for the both of us whenever need be.
Adrienne’s not here to save me this time. There is no Adrienne anymore; that’s what Nathan would say. I’ll either have to get better at lying, or stick to the truth from now on.
"They're not untied," the boy says. I don't think he's mad at me. In fact, I'm sure he won't tell on me, even if he's supposed to. There's not a single unfriendly thing about his face, about his posture.
He's laughing at me, but I don't mind. I laugh, too. "Busted," he says. "You must be new."
"I'm...yes," I say. I'm not sure I should introduce myself. What if I'm not who I say I am?
"Welcome," he says. "And congratulations."
"Don't congratulate me," I say. I don't want to be here, of that much I'm sure. But I'm beginning to wonder where I would go if I could leave. Would I really try to return to the bunker now, knowing what Brant would do to me there, knowing what he's been doing to me all these years?
"Hey, lighten up," the boy says. "Transport's a real specialty nowadays. They don't make nearly as many mistakes as they used to. I should know. I'm supervisory."
He puts a hand on my shoulder. I fight the impulse to jerk away. There's nothing about him that should alarm me. I force a smile.
Cargo (The Reservation Trilogy Book 1) Page 11