Nine

by Zach Hines

  He wanted to pull the grates off. He wanted to run and scream and fight those nurses and grab his things and set fire to the house they thought was theirs now.

  But Rocky was crying, his face bright red, the tears flowing down his cheeks.

  Julian pressed Rocky’s face to his chest.

  “We’ll get through this,” he said. “I promise you, we will get through this.”

  The group home was a long gray building in Retro Row, reminiscent of an army barracks. It was ringed by a brown yard of dead scrub that extended to the river, bordered by a fence at least twenty feet tall.

  Dr. Tazia led Julian and Rocky to a concrete room containing two beds divided by a small table. She made it sound like she was doing them a favor by arranging a double room for them.

  Julian sat with Rocky under his arm, looking at the floor, as Dr. Tazia explained what was going to happen next: since their home was owned by the bank, which was owned by the Lake, and since they were both under eighteen and both of their parents were assumed permadeceased, they would become the legal wards of the Lake. They could live here in this home until Julian turned eighteen, at which time he could apply for custody of Rocky if—and she arched her eyebrows to emphasize the hypothetical nature of this if—he could prove financial security, and, of course, an exemplary life score went a long way when figuring such things. She gave them a menacing smile and added, “I’m sure you can work it out if you set your mind to it.

  “Regarding your vehicle and your personal effects,” she added. “They’re being held at our evidence collection center. Once our censors have cleared them, they will be returned to you. School will resume for you once we have checked your life score records and paperwork. We have buses that will take you there.”

  She stood.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “Leave us alone,” Julian said.

  Dr. Tazia released a condescending puff of air from her nose. “I’m sorry about all this, but we’re not your enemy.”

  “Yes, you are,” Julian growled. “You work for the Lake.”

  The doctor frowned, as if she had bitten into something bitter. “The Department of the Lake ensures the smooth operation of the rebirth process. We serve the entire community.”

  Julian didn’t answer this, wary that perhaps she was baiting him into saying something that would come back to haunt him.

  The rest of the day was a blur.

  The doctor had them taken to an examination, which checked their numbers and their chips. She also gave them a tour of the facilities: the cafeteria, a study hall, a library, and the yard pockmarked with steel picnic tables and playground equipment that stood, stoic and untouched, like dead vegetation on a dying tundra. They were fed three meals—a soy porridge at midmorning, fried tofu squares for lunch, and some kind of stew at dinner. The other kids in the home looked like they ranged in age from younger than Rocky to Julian’s age; in terms of numbers, they ran from Ones to Fours. But there were also a Five and a Six. They all watched Julian and Rocky with wary, judging eyes—sizing up the new kids. Julian refused to engage with any of them. He refused to engage with the nurses, either. He only talked to Rocky. He was not going to see these people for long, he had decided. He was getting out of here with Rocky one way or the other.

  Lights were out at 10:00 p.m. Rocky, exhausted from the stress of the day, fell into a deep sleep under Julian’s arm. But Julian couldn’t sleep—his mind was racing. How could he get them out of this?

  He got up, being careful not to disturb Rocky, and sneaked into the hall—he didn’t care if it was allowed or not. He walked outside into the cold night air, past the steel picnic tables and the brutal-looking playground. He walked to the edge of the fence and looked out to the river beyond it. The buzz of cicadas was thick in the air.

  Something had drawn him from his bed. Drawn him out here.

  And, on the other side of the fence, there it sat.

  The cat with the white eye patch.

  The dead cat.

  Its ninth body buried on Callum’s ranch, now in possession of the Lakes.

  And yet, here it was, alive.

  The cat stared at Julian, the tip of its tail ticking in the wind like a wicked metronome.

  “What are you?” Julian asked.

  The cat, of course, said nothing.

  “What are you?!” Julian shouted.

  The cat’s mouth opened. It let out a horrible screeching cry.

  The cicada drone seemed to swell in response, to rise in a horrific cacophony of buzzing that rattled his head and forced him to cover his ears. From the horizon, over the river, a massive swarm of cicadas filled the night sky, barreling toward him with terrifying force.

  Julian ran as the cicadas began to crash around him, exploding into the picnic tables, into the slides. The swing set seats were blown back, as if in a hurricane-force gale, but actually, it was a dire wind of pestilence.

  Julian ran back inside as the horrific plinkplinkplink of cicadas exploding against concrete echoed down the hall. The lights were flicking on. Dr. Tazia was shouting commands. Security guards were rushing to secure the windows.

  Plink, plink, plink, plink!

  The awful explosions of cicadas smacking into the building rang out like the ricochet of gunfire.

  Julian burst into their room. Rocky was sitting up in bed, and Julian gathered him in his arms. That awful buzzing, the horrible scraping of wings echoed throughout the home, pinging off the concrete walls.

  “What’s going on?” Rocky asked, terrified.

  “It’ll pass,” Julian said, holding Rocky close as the bugs exploded against their window.

  Chapter 35

  THE SUNLIGHT STUNG. IT ALWAYS STUNG THE FIRST THING IN the morning.

  Molly rubbed her eyes and crawled out of her sleeping bag.

  Her eyes would get used to the light, and the vague headache that was scratching around in her skull would fade.

  Robbie was already getting dressed, pulling on a flannel shirt, a vague form in the shafts of light bleeding in through the smudged-up windows of the old gas station. He reached into the crate beside the counter and pulled out a yellow propane tank—last night’s score—and hooked it up to the two-burner stove. He grinned at Molly, his face briefly lit in the glow of the flame as it flared up.

  “Morning, Cass,” he said, and winked. “Ready for some huevos Robbieneros?”

  He pulled a carton of real, honest-to-god chicken eggs from the minifridge. It was a good score last night.

  Molly couldn’t remember her real name. Nor could she remember where she came from. In fact, she couldn’t remember much of anything from earlier than four or five weeks ago. But she did remember that real eggs were few and far between.

  Robbie fried them up and served two plates on the old Formica table in the corner. Cass, as she allowed herself to be called even though it didn’t exactly feel right, sat across from Robbie. They drank mugs of insta-coffee and, for today at least, they ate like kings.

  Four or five weeks ago—the exact date was still hazy in her mind—Molly got off a bus down by the river. “Got off” isn’t exactly the right term—she was dragged off by nurses. They wore dark black coats over their blue robes. They pulled her out, along with four other rebirths. The fifth one—a young kid about her age with dark bangs that obscured his eyes—refused to budge. So the biggest nurse whipped a baton out of his bag. Bangs ended up getting off the bus just like the rest of them, but with a stream of blood trickling down from the top of his head and spreading across his chest like the mouth of a river opening to the sea.

  The bus rumbled away and the six rebirths were left shivering in the cold. The nurses called them retros. Molly knew what retrogression was. She knew that sometimes minds wasted away with rebirth, and retros were often afflicted not just with amnesia, but with other mental defects and syndromes as well.

  But she felt perfectly fine. She felt like who she was. The only weird thing was that when s
he tried to think back and remember where she came from, there was nothing there. It was just a blank sense of time and place that made her think of the billions of years that passed well before she was born—a whole lot of time and space that had nothing to do with her.

  Three women retros—one of them probably in her thirties, and the other two looking like they were early twenties—stuck with Molly for the rest of the day. They found a place under a bridge where two men already had a fire going and huddled around it for warmth. The men offered them blankets and jackets, which they gladly accepted. Molly kept looking down to the riverbank, where the bangs kid just sat on his knees, in the freezing cold, the stream of blood hardening on his neck.

  They ate scavenged algae bars with the men and kept warm, trying to figure out who they were, where they came from. But, unlike the other two women, Molly had no nostalgia for what she was missing. All she was focused on was the moment, and then the moment after that one.

  The next morning, the three other women woke her up. They had gotten up early and pieced together that they were both from Lakeshore, and were going to go back to the town. Molly wasn’t interested. The women tried to take her, but she pulled out of their grip. The women left without her.

  Later that morning, she saw Bangs was still down by the river. She went down to him. His body was cold. Dead. She checked his number: a Five. That’s when she remembered to look for her number, too. She stood over the edge of the river, in the flea-infested jacket given to her by the strangers at the campfire, and looked at her reflection. She pulled her hair back—she was a Three.

  A few days passed, and the two men from the campfire became possessive of her. One by one, they tried to coerce her to sleep with them in their bag, but she always refused. Eventually, a fight broke out between them over who she belonged to, and that’s when Molly grabbed the hot metal rod they were using to stoke the fire and turned it on both of them. The men stopped fighting among themselves long enough to grab weapons of their own—shovels with the spade-ends filed into sharp edges. Maybe they could share her, they joked.

  That’s when Robbie arrived. He came up from the river, and he kicked over their pot of water into the fire. As the cloud of steam hissed into the air, scalding the men, who scrambled away from it, he turned to Molly and said, “Follow me.”

  She did.

  Robbie never forced her to do anything.

  For a week or so, they roamed the Row in search of somewhere to squat. Eventually, they found the abandoned gas station, which was tucked far enough off the Row and had a small hot plate. They shooed away the big, mangy cats that had made a home there and cleaned it up.

  Robbie was strange—he talked all the time, mostly about his theories on the world and philosophy of life (he was a big believer in living only in the present moment), and sometimes he would ramble at length about somewhere he used to live once, a house up on a hill in the elm forest where no one had life numbers, but he had lost the way to get there—it had vanished from his memory except for the vaguest of images. As with most things Robbie said, Molly didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

  Every day with him was a unique kind of struggle—looking for food or clothes or propane—but they were always stocked at least one day ahead and Molly soon discovered an odd kind of serenity she could appreciate in the duller moments. She would find herself idly watching the swirls of the river where it pooled and eddied around the rocks of the shore. Once, she spent maybe an hour watching a cicada warm itself on a stone, its body remarkably iridescent—a shiny rainbow in its wings, in the right light.

  One day, on one of their longer journeys that took them down the river to where it met the Lake fence, she noticed the big houses far in the distance up on the hillside. Something lurched inside her—a faint outline of a memory. She knew those houses had far more resources than they would ever need, and she knew that you could get to them from the woods and probably only have to scale a single fence. She knew too that they would probably be lightly populated, and so they would have a good chance of getting what they wanted and getting out unnoticed.

  That’s when things really clicked with Robbie.

  They worked together well as a team, hitting the rich, lightly guarded estates on the hillside for food from the guest houses and propane tanks left out at barbecues. Soon, they had stuffed their gas station with all kinds of staples. Stuff she knew, instinctively, that she had lacked in her previous life. Whatever that life was, she knew that it did not contain eggs or honey or bananas.

  Once, when they were breaking into an exceptionally large home with a breathtaking view of the Lake, she saw something on a chair that caught her eye—a white blazer, a crest emblazoned on the shoulder: Lakeshore Academy.

  It stirred something inside her, but she couldn’t place it.

  There was a name, though, that the sight of that crest brought back to her: Julian.

  But that’s all it was—a name. She thought long and hard about it that night, trying to see if that name could stir other memories back up.

  The only thing it brought to mind was burning and life numbers . . .

  Which led to thoughts of the nurses, and the nurses gave her nightmares.

  They gave everyone on the Row nightmares.

  One thing she learned quickly among the retros was that everyone—everyone—feared and hated the nurses with all the energy they could summon. The sight of a Lake bus was a reason to flee as far and as fast as you could.

  Sometimes, the nurses picked people from the Row and put them back on the buses. No one knew where they went because anyone who returned after this was far too jacked-up to say anything coherent.

  The prospect of being spotted by the nurses was the reason she and Robbie had to be careful to kill all lights and fires after dark, so that they wouldn’t be rooted out. There was a jump-bag always ready by the door.

  But Julian . . .

  The name didn’t have a direct attachment to the nurses.

  Instead, the more she pondered it, the more it brought back a different kind of feeling: a sense that the name might, somehow, lead her away from the nurses, if they ever came for her. It might, in some weird unexplainable way, be a kind of protective talisman for her. At least, that’s how she accepted it eventually.

  Julian, the name, a talisman.

  But then there was also Robbie. He would disappear, sometimes for days, leaving her alone to hunt for food and to hide from the nurses.

  Julian, her talisman, never did that to her.

  It was morning. The sunlight, grainy through the smeared gas station windows, was the start of another day. Robbie zipped up a heavy winter coat he had pinched last night and tossed her one.

  Another day was about to begin out on the Row, keeping to the shadows, and doing whatever it took to stay the hell away from the nurses.

  Chapter 36

  BREAKFAST HAD ENDED, AND THE SERVICE STAFF WERE gathered in the kitchen on a morning break, chatting. Gossiping, probably, about the poor state of the Hawksley family.

  David Hawksley—the esteemed director of the Lake of Lakeshore—had been away for most of the year on an administrative tour of the Lake facilities of America. The mother, too, was barely home—there was always a charitable function downtown that needed her, or a dinner party in the Federal District that required the urgent presence of the softer side of the intimidating director. And, if she was home, she was more often than not tied up in the parlor room, where she was hosting the wives of the Councilmen of the Awakened who were in town. As for their only son, Nicholas—no need to worry about him. Lakeshore Academy was keeping him plenty busy, no doubt.

  As Nicholas walked through the kitchen, he gave the staff a curt nod by way of acknowledgment and then proceeded into the dark, cavernous hallway that led to his father’s study. The director was home for only a few days before taking off to visit the Lakes of the West Coast—and Nicholas had been summoned.

  Nicholas had always hated the tile in this ha
ll, polished every weekend with large machines that scared him when he was a little child. He remembered being that child now, sneaking down the hallway, his bare feet stepping gingerly on the cold marble like he was walking on ice. He recalled the thick wooden door, and the awful, scratching creak it made, like in the horrordocs he obsessively watched despite his parents’ proclamations that it wasn’t a proper thing to do and didn’t behoove someone of Nicholas’s standing. Too bad there were lots of rooms—and lots of televisions.

  He remembered crawling up onto his father’s leather chair, cold in the morning stillness, and going through his father’s drawers, pretending to be him, to wield these implements of power—pens, documents, disk drives—pretending they were his and that he, too, was very important. And then the harsh reprimand he received afterward: five days and nights locked in his room upstairs.

  “Control,” his father had said. “You need to learn to control yourself. Otherwise, you’ll never learn to become a leader.”

  Control.

  Boy, he thought. Really cocked that one up, didn’t you?

  Director David Hawksley—or “Dad”—nodded to Nicholas as he entered. He was standing by the table in the back of the room, near the big windows that framed the Lake down below.

  “I’m back home for only a few precious days, and this is not how I want to spend it, on the phone with your headmaster.”

  Nicholas cringed, his teeth grinding—here we go.

  “Your test results are flat-out terrible, Nicholas,” his father said. “I’m not sure there are favors I can pull to get you into Azura with results like that. There is a bare minimum standard.”

  Nicholas turned away. “I’ve been really occupied,” he said, sheepish.

  “It would be one thing,” his father continued, “for you to say that you’ve been so busy with that ritualistic club, but look where that got you.”

  He shook his head gloomily. “I heard from the headmaster how you are no longer part of the Burners Society. On bad terms, no less.”