Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  I already know how to drive. My brother taught me on the delivery trucks he used for work. But now’s not the time to add another thing to the list of what Linden doesn’t know about me, so all I can offer is my most sincere, “Thank you.”

  Linden sees the hope this has brought me. “It’ll mean postponing your trip a bit longer, but it’ll still be faster in the long run, and I’d feel much better about your traveling this way, for what it’s worth.” He reaches to touch my shoulder but then changes his mind, and I get the sense that he’s in too much of a hurry to get away from me. But when he looks at me, he smiles wearily as he stands. “Eat, and get washed up if you want to. I think my uncle needs your help out in the shed. I offered to help, but he said I should stick to designing things, not repairing them. I don’t think he’s quite forgiven me for the homemade radio I broke when I was a child.”

  “Linden?”

  He turns in the doorway to face me.

  “I didn’t. I realize you didn’t come right out and ask, but Gabriel and I—we didn’t.”

  His expression doesn’t change but for the flush of color to his cheeks. “I’ll see you downstairs,” he says.

  Once he’s gone, I force myself to eat everything in the bowl. I have no desire to, but I know my body is craving it. I can feel the emptiness in my stomach gnawing at my bones. After I’ve eaten, I shower under the rusty tap. I ignore the want to collapse under the blankets and sleep away the next three years. If Linden and Cecily can make an effort to go through the motions and be strong, after all that they’ve lost, so can I.

  After a week of rain, the days return twice as bright. Blades of grass rise from the heaviness of raindrops in defiance. The sunlight breaks through the gaps in the shed, swimming with bits of dust. Everything smells like flowers and dirt.

  Cecily’s domestic arrived the other day. I’m not sure what Linden told his father that made him relinquish control of her and let her stay with us, but she seemed unharmed, if quiet, when she stepped out of the limo.

  Cecily comes outside sometimes, barefoot. For most of our marriage she’s been partial to skirts and elaborate sundresses to impress our husband, but now she wears jeans rolled up to her knees. She lays Bowen on his stomach and tries to coax him to crawl, though all he does is grab at the earth and hold it up to the sun in offering. She decides he must be worshipping his secret god.

  “There are so many colors in his eyes,” she tells me one afternoon when I come to sit next to her in the dirt. “Sometimes I wonder where he gets that.” She grabs a fistful of grass and sprinkles it over her son, who is bobbling on his hands and trying to push himself forward.

  “Do you look like your parents?” she asks.

  I draw my knees to my chest. “A little like my mother,” I say. “She had blue eyes.”

  “I wonder how far down the line genes go,” she says. “Your mother had blue eyes, and maybe her mother, and her mother. It could be this one gene that’s gone on for thousands of years just to get to you. You could be the last one to ever have that exact shade of blue.”

  I don’t tell her that my brother has the same shade of blue, and that he’ll live longer than I will. Although, the way things are going with the explosions and everything, I wonder if he’ll even live long enough for me to get to him.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask her. “Are you chilly? I could get you a sweater.”

  “No,” she says. “I feel pretty good right now.”

  It’s been nearly a week since she’s been discharged from the hospital, and she’s more self-sufficient than ever. She’s insisted on having her meals with us at the table, politely declining Linden’s offers to bring a tray to her in bed. She’s even been cleaning the house, though nobody asked her to and I’ve never known Cecily to be at all domestic. I found her polishing the mason jars, scrubbing the grit from the countertops, kicking a damp rag across the linoleum. She wrapped tinfoil around the radio antenna until the scratchy white noise turned to music. She’s memorized the songs, and she sings in low voices as she moves through the rooms. Sometimes I think I hear her singing in her sleep.

  “You should get going soon,” she says to me now. “You’re not getting any younger.”

  She knows that I’ve been dawdling. Trapped in the mansion, I could think of nothing but home. But now my home is gone. I’m frightened of what I might find when I’m reunited with Rowan. I’m frightened of not finding him at all. And perhaps what frightens me the most is accepting that once I leave Cecily and Linden, I’ll never see them again.

  Time almost seems to stop here on Reed’s middle-of-nowhere piece of land. It’s oddly comforting.

  I shield my eyes and squint to see Linden in the distance. He’s got one of the cars uncovered, and he and his uncle are gesturing to it as they talk.

  “So that’s my ride,” I say.

  “It’s like looking at an old picture,” she says, squinting.

  “I didn’t know Linden could drive,” I say.

  “Me either,” she says. “But I think he’s been practicing.”

  She scoops Bowen into her lap. His eyes are full of clouds and sky. He reaches for my hair, and I hold up a lock of it for him to grab.

  “I used to daydream how nice it’d be if you had one of your own,” Cecily says. “A baby, I mean. And Jenna, too.” She watches Reed lower himself under the car while Linden toys with things under the hood. “This isn’t where I thought we’d all be a year into our marriage. I thought we’d all be happy. Stupid, huh?”

  Bowen tugs at my hair, his skin so soft that it sticks to the strands. “No, it isn’t,” I say. “Nobody could have predicted it would turn out like this.”

  “What have I done, Rhine?” she says. “I brought a child into this world because Housemaster Vaughn convinced me he could save us. But Bowen is just as doomed as you and me.” Bowen clutches her shirt and throws his head back into the sunlight, utterly without a care. I heard once that humans are the only species aware of their own mortality, but I wonder if that’s true for babies. Would it even matter to Bowen that his life will end? Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination. “Who’s going to take care of him when Linden and I are gone?” Cecily says.

  I don’t know how to answer her. Bowen is the child of a failed plan, just like all of us. “You and Linden will figure something out,” I say. “Things didn’t turn out how you’d have liked, but nothing ever does. You’ve found a way to manage so far, haven’t you? You’re still going.”

  She shakes her head. “I hate that man,” she says. “He ruined everything.” Something dangerous and ugly flashes in her eyes. It’s only there for a moment, but she doesn’t look quite the same after that. And now I know: The winged bride that fluttered ahead of me is gone. She’s been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she’s not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.

  “Even if Vaughn had meant to save us, our marriage couldn’t have gone on like that forever,” I say.

  Cecily watches the daylight shift in Bowen’s hair.

  “I never wanted to live forever,” she says. “I just wanted enough time.”

  “EAT UP,” Reed says, plopping a pot of some type of gravy in the middle of the table.

  Cecily peers into the murky gray liquid and frowns at a cube of meat that’s floating against the rim. “What was this in a past life?” she asks.

  “Pigeons and a field rabbit,” Reed says. “Hunted them down myself.”

  “He’s an excellent shot,” Linden says.

  “Can you eat pigeons, though?” Cecily falls back into her chair, looking a mix of disgusted and curious.

  “You can eat just about anything,” Reed says, dumping a ladleful into her bowl. Like me, Cecily has been sticking to the mealy apples and the most recognizable of the canned fruits and pickled vegetables. We haven’t been quite as brave as Linden, who swears his uncle’s ventures “aren’t so bad.”


  I can tell that Cecily has more she wants to say, but she doesn’t, because this is the last meal we’ll all have together. In the morning I’m leaving. I’ve decided to return to New York to find Gabriel first. I can only hope he’s still with Claire. And I miss him. I miss him every time Linden and Cecily look at each other, or whisper behind a closed door, because it all reminds me that I’m not a part of what they have. I don’t belong here.

  The pieces of my life can never seem to stay in one place.

  Nobody talks. Reed has brought his work to the dinner table. It’s some kind of small electronic device that hisses and spits sparks at him.

  Linden eats the gray liquid with quiet sips. I swirl my spoon around the inside of the bowl.

  Cecily leaves the table and returns moments later with the radio, which roars with static interrupted by high squeals and the occasional muffled voice.

  “Do you have to bring that to the table?” Linden says.

  “Well, your uncle has that . . . thing.” She gestures to Reed’s project. “I just want a little dinner music, that’s all.”

  Linden frowns, but he says nothing more. He knows how to choose his battles with Cecily, and he’s been much more forgiving since her brush with death. He endures the grating noise.

  Finally she finds a station that comes through. There’s no music, though. It’s some kind of news report. Long before I was born, there used to be whole stations dedicated to music, but there haven’t been new songs for years, and the only music that plays is the filler between news broadcasts. Old cheerful songs about frivolous things that mean nothing to me. Cecily likes them, though; anything she can sing along to.

  She waves the antenna back and forth until the voices come through more clearly. “Maybe they’ll play something soon,” she says.

  “Doubt it, kid,” Reed says. “I’ve heard this guy. He runs his own broadcasts out of his home.”

  She frowns and reaches for the knob again, but Linden says, “Wait. Did you hear that?”

  “What?” she says. The sound has gone to static again, and she repositions the tinfoil wrapped around the antenna.

  Voices cut through, trying to reach us. At first when the words come, they mean nothing. I’ve heard them all my life. “Genetics.” “Virus.” “Hope.” It’s become like white noise, especially having parents who spent their evenings listening to such broadcasts.

  I take a spoonful of the gray liquid, purposefully avoiding the cubes of meat. The taste isn’t terrible.

  “There,” Linden says. Cecily moves her hands away from the antenna, and the static has subsided to make way for the voices.

  She looks disappointed. “It’s only that same guy again.”

  Linden’s listening intently, though.

  “So-called doctors have been at it for years,” the voice on the radio says.

  Another voice responds, “The Ellerys’ work has developed a cult following among doctors and extremists alike in the wake of these recent terrorist bombings. Their research, which as we all know was cut short by an act of terrorism that killed them, had faded into the grain with all the rest.”

  The small bit I’ve eaten immediately feels like it’s gone to stone in my stomach. My body goes cold, a sort of numbness clouds my judgment, and I think: Not the Ellerys I know. How could these strange voices possibly know anything about my parents, who have been dead for several years? They were scientists and doctors, and their life’s work was to pursue a cure, but they were small-time compared to nationally recognized doctors like Vaughn.

  Oh, but the broadcasters know about Vaughn as well. “Even revered experts like this Dr. Ashby have cited the Ellerys’ study of twins. Dr. Ashby theorizes that the Ellerys’ children, twins themselves supposedly, were a part of their research.”

  “If they even existed,” the other voice says. “They may have been metaphors.”

  Cecily is pulling at a lock of her hair that’s come free of her ponytail, and I swear her eyes are getting wider as she stares at me and the words on the radio get stranger.

  “Dr. Ashby is essentially revamping the Ellerys’ theory that the virus can be duplicated in a way similar to vaccinations. Given in small doses, it can build up the immune system to make its victims resistant.”

  The men are having such an impassioned discussion, and the static keeps interfering, and Linden adjusts and readjusts the tinfoil trying to make the voices stay. But it doesn’t matter, because I can’t hear them anymore. There’s static in my head, making it impossible to concentrate. The room feels twice as hot, and the lightbulb dangling from the ceiling makes so many shadows. How have I never noticed all these shadows?

  “What about these claims by one of the terrorists heading these attacks that he’s the Ellerys’ only surviving twin? He very well could be who he claims to be.”

  “How many extremists have claimed to be products of some research project or other? That’s if the Ellerys’ research isn’t an urban legend,” the other voice counters. “The Ellerys ran these nurseries as part of their supposed Chemical Garden project, nurseries that also served as research labs. If their children existed, they were probably killed along with the other subjects. The only reason the Ellerys are getting attention now is because of this terrorist claiming to be their son.”

  The static overtakes the voices until they’re gone.

  Everyone is watching me. Their eyes bore into me, but I can’t face them.

  The heavy feeling in my stomach has moved to my chest, and it’s hard to breathe. I need to get outside, where there are breezes and stars and no walls. I’m moving even before I realize I’ve stood up.

  I stagger out to the porch. Dizzy, I sit on the top step and try to catch my breath. There are so many thoughts whirling through my head that I can latch on to none of them. I never thought I’d hear my parents mentioned again, much less in a discussion that involves my ex-father-in-law. It’s true they all have genetic research in common, but Vaughn is the madman. My parents only wanted to make things right. Didn’t they?

  How did those men on the radio know about my brother and me?

  Rowan said that he was the only surviving member of our family?

  What theory that the virus could be duplicated? What are Chemical Gardens?

  The questions are bits of blackness, arranging like puzzle pieces until I can hardly see, can hardly think.

  And for what? What answers do I hold? My brother and I—the apparently famous Ellery twins—aren’t an urban legend. We exist. But we hold no keys, can’t offer even a vague promise of a cure.

  The screen door slams behind me, making me flinch.

  Reed’s heavy footsteps make the planks in the porch creak. He’s never without his boots, even at night, as though he’s always prepared to run at a moment’s notice. He’s not so different from the people I knew back home, before the sheltered life I led in the mansion. He’s not so different from my brother and me.

  He sits beside me, reeking of cigar smoke, although he hasn’t had a cigar in hours. Cecily throws a fit if the smoke comes anywhere near the oxygen Bowen breathes. It only enrages her more when Reed counters that the smoke is totally harmless. It used to cause ailments that no longer exist, and a little coughing won’t kill the kid, he says.

  “You’re in some real trouble, aren’t you, doll?” Reed says.

  I draw my knees to my chest, and my voice comes out broken and small. “I don’t know what any of it means.” I can hear the static in the kitchen as Linden and Cecily try to bring the station back.

  “Does my brother know the Ellerys were your parents?” Reed’s expression is unsettlingly grave.

  The notion is overwhelming. It’s terrible enough that I was ripped from my home, but to have been a specific target rather than a random victim of Gathering? It puts Vaughn’s madness into a whole new light. He could have been looking for me all my life.

  No. No, it couldn’t have been that. Like the men on the radio were saying, there are plenty of scientists
, plenty of theories. My parents hadn’t broken any new ground. Vaughn wouldn’t have heard of them until my brother said what he did, about being their only surviving twin.

  My brother, with his unmistakable resemblance to me. With his eyes that are heterochromatic just like mine. All Vaughn would have to do is look at him to know we’re related.

  “I don’t know,” I whisper. “If Vaughn does know, he’ll come after my brother, too.”

  I’m too stunned to process any of this. Too stunned even to cry, though my eyes are starting to ache. My legs are trembling.

  “No matter what, you’re safe here,” Reed says.

  “Am I?” I say. “Or is your brother just letting me think that while he plans his next move?”

  “He’ll never get through my door,” Reed says. I want to believe that. Just as Reed never goes without his boots, he never goes without the handgun that’s holstered to his belt. But Vaughn has his ways. He comes peacefully, never raises his voice, never draws a weapon, and he wins virtually every time.

  Strange new voices from the radio are coming toward me. Cecily carries the thing out onto the porch. Her face is solemn and sympathetic. “We couldn’t get that station to come in again, but there’s a news broadcast. There was another bombing yesterday; that’s what those men were talking about.”

  Linden comes after her, frowning. “Why don’t you take that back inside, love? Leave her alone now.”

  “She needs to hear this,” Cecily insists. She holds the radio in her hands like an offering. The news is telling a horrible story.

  “Fourteen are confirmed dead and at least five wounded following yesterday’s bombing in Charleston, South Carolina.” The same state where Madame’s deranged carnival is. This of course would mean nothing to the newscaster, who goes on, “The trio of bombers has made no secret about their activities, and though they haven’t disclosed their next target, they have spurred public rallies and spoken openly on camera about their actions.”