Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  I fold my legs, turning in my seat so that I face him. “I’m sorry that you never got to meet him,” I say.

  “It’s a fact,” Linden says, “that if my brother hadn’t died, I would never have been born. My father wanted to have me so that he could have something to save.”

  I’m very quiet. I try to make my breathing inaudible. I know that what he’s saying is important, and I don’t dare disturb him; I think maybe he’s never said these words out loud, and that he’ll never say them again.

  “Sometimes it makes me feel less than human,” he says. “I don’t tell my father that. He tells me that I’m the most privileged boy in the world because I’ll be the one who lives. He tells me that everyone else is brought into this world because of the birth control ban, or because other wealthy families are naïve enough to believe they’ll be the ones to produce the cure. He doesn’t even understand that he’s just like them. He doesn’t understand that he has not only wasted his time, he’s wasted mine. I’m just a wasted effort, and he won’t accept that until I’m dead, until I’ve paid the price for his mistake.”

  “Don’t say that,” I tell him softly. “You aren’t a waste.”

  “Your parents were scientists too, right?” His voice is so placid, I’m not sure if I’ve just imagined that slight tremble in it. “Didn’t you ever want to resent them, even a little, for putting you here?”

  “A little,” I admit. “But we aren’t asked into this world, Linden. We’re here whether we like it or not. I can’t let myself think it’s for nothing.”

  “If you had been asked,” he says, eyes always straight on the road, “would you have wanted to be born?”

  I don’t know what my answer will be until I’ve said it: “Yes.” Soap bubbles between my fingers and words I wrote in window fog and my mother’s fluttery good night kisses when she thought I was asleep, and my heart pounding when Gabriel and I first kissed, the warm buzzing going through my body when I had too much champagne and Linden unbuckled my shoe and told me I was beautiful. “Absolutely yes.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” he says.

  “What about you?” I say.

  “I don’t know anymore,” he says. “I hear Cecily singing the words of that poem sometimes—‘And Spring herself when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone’—and I think it had the right idea. I think it’s wrong of us to keep trying for something that will never come. I think it was cruel of me to try to have children. There’s nothing out there, Rhine. There’s no world. Only water that’s full of dead things. Why keep trying to fill the empty space?”

  Children. He’s had three, and two of them are gone. I saw his eyes when Cecily had the stillbirth. He carried on as though the only thing that concerned him was her health, but I know losing that child devastated him. Our fake marriage taught me to read him very well.

  “Try not to think about why so much,” I say. “That poem was written more than three hundred years ago, you know. I bet that back when people lived to be a hundred and the earth was lush and the buildings were clean and new, people still questioned why they were here. I don’t think that started after the virus.”

  I think that’s a smile that comes to his lips, or maybe just a wry grin. “I can see why your brother said those things about hope,” he says. “You have a way of looking at things. You make it seem as though everything’s going to be okay. I can’t imagine a more dangerous thing to have than hope like yours.”

  In the backseat Cecily coughs and stirs. Linden glances into the rearview mirror. “Are you awake, love?” he asks.

  She shuffles around for a while more before she sits up. “Your talking woke me,” she complains. “Are we stopping here for the night?”

  “No,” Linden says. “We’re going to try to make it to Charleston before stopping.” I’m mystified by the tenderness of his words. For me he is openly bitter about the truths and troubles of the world, but he still adores Cecily.

  “I want to sleep up front with you, then,” she says. I can tell by her slur and stumbles that she’s not entirely awake, but still she manages to climb over the seat and wedge her way between us, trailing a blanket after her.

  She settles perfectly to Linden’s side. “You don’t mind getting in back, do you?” she says to me. “There’s not enough room for the three of us.”

  THE MUSIC makes my heart leap onto my tongue before I’m even awake. I’m pushing for consciousness through rainbow scarves and pale limbs and that music, that brass music that every nerve of me remembers.

  Cecily is kneeling in the front seat, climbing over Linden to see out his window. “What is it?” she’s asking.

  It’s dark. My eyes try to adjust. The car slows to a stop, and Linden says, “It’s a carnival.”

  “Drive,” I say. “Don’t stop the car.”

  “What’s a carnival?” Cecily asks.

  “Drive!”

  My tone startles Linden into accelerating. The tires squeal as we go forward, and I’m telling him to go faster, go a hundred-forty like the speedometer says we can, and he’s saying “What, what’s wrong?” as I turn in my seat and watch the shadows through the back window. Shadows that are full of Madame’s guards, and broken girls, and Lilac, whose real name is Grace, who turned herself in so her daughter could be free.

  It feels as though we’re going in slow motion. I think we’ll never get away. But eventually the Ferris wheel is far enough away that it could be a moving constellation.

  I fall into my seat, breathing hard. “That place,” I get out.

  “What?” Linden says.

  “Is anyone going to tell me what a carnival is?” Cecily says. “I didn’t even get a good look. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

  “You don’t want to,” I tell her.

  Linden pulls the car off the road and stops. “We shouldn’t stop here,” I say.

  “This is Charleston,” Linden says.

  My heart sinks. So Madame’s carnival is in the same town as my brother. I don’t know why I should be surprised. I try to quell the dizziness that comes from this wave of adrenaline.

  “I’m not moving this car until you tell me what that was all about,” Linden says.

  Cecily turns on the overhead light, filling the car with a weak orange glow, and she spins in her seat to face me. Her eyes are wide. “What was that thing?” she asks excitedly. “It was beautiful.”

  Suddenly the air in here smells overwhelmingly like plastic.

  I know that the air outside is like salt water and garbage. I know because I’ve been here before.

  “It’s a Ferris wheel, okay?” I snap. “It spins around and people ride on it, and it used to make people happy, I guess, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s broken like everything else. It doesn’t matter what happens there now. It’s nothing good.”

  The engine is purring loudly under our feet. And Linden’s voice is so soft that I barely hear him say, “You’ve been there, haven’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Please, let’s just keep going.”

  “I just want to understand,” he says.

  I’m angry with him all of a sudden for being so oblivious. For all the awful things that happen in the world, all the effort that goes into day-to-day survival, and for having to explain it to him.

  “There’s a woman who lives there,” I say. “She collects girls. It’s a scarlet district.”

  “ ‘Collects girls’?” Linden blinks. I doubt he’s ever even heard of a scarlet district.

  “For sex?” Cecily asks simply. She hasn’t forgotten what the outside world was like before she became a bride.

  “She turns them into prostitutes and makes it so they can’t leave. And if the girls have babies, that’s a good thing for her because she can use them like slaves.”

  I’m sorry for my brashness as soon as I’ve finished speaking. None of this is Linden’s fault. And the Ferris wheel isn’t the sole source of my misery; it’s
only a symbol of it. It’s a pretty thing that used to be good, but none of that matters now. We’re all living in a parallel universe of what the world used to be.

  Without looking, I can tell that Linden has gone pale. “And you were there?” he says. “You—” He can’t finish the thought.

  “No,” I say. “I escaped. The girl helping me wasn’t so lucky, and I’m really in no hurry to go back there, or to talk about it, so please just drive?”

  He puts the Jeep in drive and eases back onto the main road. “We can’t waste fuel,” he says. “But I’ll go a bit farther and we’ll stop for the night.” He turns off the light.

  Cecily reaches over the seat and squeezes my hand.

  The radio is always on, low and warning like thunder before a storm. I keep expecting a broadcast to interrupt the song and tell us of another explosion. But nothing comes. I stare out the window at the shadows blurring by.

  “I’m sorry,” Linden says. The words come out firm and practiced, like he’s been rehearsing them in his head this whole time. “It’s just that Rose used to talk about a Ferris wheel. I know that can’t be the same one, but it made me think of her, that’s all.”

  “It’s not the same one,” I assure him. “Not unless the one she told you about was a nightmare.” Madame’s was the first and only Ferris wheel I ever saw, but they’re big things, and probably too expensive and difficult to demolish. There could be several of them peppered across the country, just rotting for lack of purpose.

  “No,” he says. “The one she talked about was nice. Most things she told me about were.”

  Poor Linden. No one has ever thought he could handle hearing about the dark things; not even Rose, apparently.

  “Her parents traveled a lot,” he says. “I think she saw every state, which is a lot, if you think about it. Forty-eight states before she turned eleven.” He’s not counting Alaska and Hawaii, which were destroyed more than a century ago.

  He thought it strange when I told him I was a twin, but I don’t think his marriage to Rose was entirely different. There’s this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.

  In death Rose became Linden’s parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs. I see the way his memory of her darkens his eyes when he glances at me and then abruptly looks away.

  We agree to sleep in shifts. Because Cecily and I napped on the way to Charleston, we’re wide awake. Linden stretches out across the front seat, and eventually I can tell by his breathing that he’s asleep. If he’s given any thought to his father finding us through Cecily’s tracking device, it doesn’t seem to be among his concerns. He has a better understanding of Vaughn’s tactics than I do.

  Cecily is beside me in the backseat, and she stares through her vinyl window at the darkness for a while before she says, “That’s the first time he’s talked about Rose in front of me. That story about the Ferris wheel and her parents traveling.”

  “It’s painful for him,” I say.

  She shakes her head, still looking away. “That’s not it. He knows that I get jealous sometimes.”

  “Jealous of what?” I say.

  “It isn’t easy competing with three other women for my husband’s heart,” Cecily says.

  “There’s no competition,” I say. “You’re the only wife he has now.”

  “I know Linden,” she says. “He’ll always love Rose. And Jenna was the beautiful one—I’ll never be able to compare.” She turns her head and looks at me, and there’s so much pain in her eyes.

  Softly she says, “And then there’s you.”

  “Son, if you’re listening to this, I’d like you to know that I won’t stop until I find you.”

  Vaughn’s voice emerges from the static, and at first I think I’m dreaming, but then I open my eyes. Linden and Cecily are in the front seat, listening intently to the radio as Vaughn tells the person interviewing him that his only son and his son’s wife have disappeared, believed to be in immediate danger. He says there have been no demands for ransom, but he says he doesn’t believe the pair left of their own free will. He says they were missing from their beds this morning. He says he’ll offer a reward for their return.

  “Why is he lying about everything?” Cecily asks. She’s gnawing worriedly on the knuckle of her thumb.

  “He knows I ran away,” Linden says. “He just wants to put out a description of us so that we’ll be found.”

  My stomach is twisting. Linden looks at me in the rearview mirror. “My father didn’t mention you,” he says. “But I bet he knows you’re with us.”

  “What about Bowen?” Cecily says. “Linden, if your father has him—”

  “Uncle Reed wouldn’t let that happen,” Linden says.

  She doesn’t look convinced. She’s pale, and her arms are shaking.

  There’s a burst of static on the radio, and then some generic music starts to play.

  It’s early morning now, the sky a threatening shade of gray, the tides getting heavy along the littered shoreline. I know that beach. This isn’t exactly where Gabriel and I arrived—we were closer to the carnival—but I recognize this dismal atmosphere. I’ve never seen it in the daylight.

  Several yards away there’s a brick factory building that looks abandoned except for the plumes billowing out of its smokestack. Something is being produced, which means there is civilization here other than Madame’s carnival.

  There’s a cluster of buildings that could be an apartment complex, or they could be abandoned. It’s hard to tell. There’s no sign of any electricity. But I know from makeshift houses like the fortune-teller’s that people live in this vicinity.

  Linden shakes open the map and says, “We’re about three miles from the research lab your brother—the lab that was destroyed. It’s back in the direction of the carnival.” He looks over his shoulder at me. “We should go to the site to ask if anyone knows where he went. Are you ready for that?”

  I don’t see how we have any other option. “Just as long as we stay away from the carnival,” I say.

  I don’t allow myself to think that Rowan has seen Madame’s Ferris wheel, that he may have ever spoken to that woman. That she’s seen his eyes and made the connection that his dead twin sister isn’t really dead but is the only girl who ever managed to leave her exquisite and demented prison. The first generations are good at making prisons. I suppose it’s because they remember a time when things were as beautiful as the illusions they use to construct their cages.

  I don’t want illusions. I’m tired of feeling like I’m in a dream from which I can never awaken.

  Cecily is trying frantically to get in touch with Reed through the cell phone, but there are no towers. Reed said there would still be some out there, though, particularly in places with strong radio signals, as that’s the best sign of technology being nearby.

  “I promise you, Bowen is all right,” Linden tells her, putting his hand on her knee. “I wouldn’t have left Uncle Reed in charge of him if I didn’t have complete faith in him.”

  “It’s your father I don’t trust.” Cecily’s voice is tight. She’s trying not to cry.

  “I trust Reed,” I say. “I bet he’s not even in his house now. He has so many friends who are off the grid. I bet that as soon as we left, he took Elle and Bowen someplace where Vaughn can’t even find him.”

  Cecily sniffles. “He better not be smoking around my son. I don’t care that he says it won’t make him sick, it’s still vile,” she says, but she has calmed down a little. She watches the world move by he
r window in ugly hues and crumbling pieces, and she glances occasionally at the cell phone’s screen.

  I can see the Ferris wheel again, purplish and faded against the sky. Madame’s girls must all be sleeping now, as the children tend the laundry and patch tears and harvest crops. Jared is no doubt working on another invention.

  I glance at Cecily. Times like these, when she’s very worried, she looks about ten years older. She looks like a woman who has given birth, been married, witnessed death, and now carries the world on her shoulders.

  Linden drives slowly, like we’ll find clues on the side of the road. He asks me if I’m okay, if I need air. I shake my head and watch the world warped through the plastic.

  Then I see the ashes. Far down a road that’s barricaded by steel barrels and makeshift wooden fences, there’s still the rubble from the explosion my brother caused. I see distant figures moving about it, a yellow crane hauling bits of wall into a dump truck.

  This charred monstrosity will be a part of the scenery for months or years to come. And they probably won’t build another lab. They didn’t in Manhattan.

  My brother won’t be here. He’s smart enough to stay moving; he’ll stay just long enough to make his mark, maybe incite a riot, but not long enough to be caught by someone seeking revenge. He knows exactly how long it takes for shock to turn to anger.

  I yank my door open, and Linden slams on the brakes a split second before I take off running. I wedge myself between the makeshift fence pieces, untangle my sleeve from a rusty nail, and run for the ashes of the laboratory my brother destroyed, only vaguely aware of the voices calling after me.

  The road feels miles long. It feels like I could run it forever. But I’m hardly out of breath by the time I reach the heap of walls and broken windows that was once a laboratory. There are people working through it, all of them in plainclothes, probably just citizens trying to clean up the mess. Everyone knows the president won’t offer any help, though maybe he’ll make a speech or something if the explosions gain enough attention.