by Adriana Ryan
I nod and refrain from asking questions because I can see she’s busy. “I would appreciate anything you can tell me.”
She leads me back outside the tent and points north. “That way. Good luck, dear.”
And with that, she goes back to Jasper.
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
I walk down a small sand dune encrusted with rocks and scraggly plants and up another before I come to a cluster of children wearing Toronto’s Asylum-yellow coveralls, the same ones I’d seen in the likenesses Shale had of the children. My heart is in my throat as I walk slowly toward them, my eyes roving over each of their faces. When I see a male, I quickly skip over him until I see another one who could be Ceres. I look for thin faces, petite builds, long black hair—everything I remember about her picture.
I go up to one young woman who looks like she might be around Ceres’s age.
“Excuse me,” I say, but she pays me no attention. Her fingers are combing through the air, as if she is sorting through sheets of paper only she can see.
I turn to another girl, who is glaring at me through the fringe of her hair.
“Do you know Ceres?” I ask. “Ceres Cannon?”
The girl glares at me. I’m about to turn away when she points behind me. I wheel around, expecting to find Ceres running toward me, her arms outstretched. But the patch of land behind me is empty.
“Where?” I ask, still scanning. “Where is she?”
And then I see her.
In the distance, a hill rises about a hundred feet into the air. On the top of that hill, at the very edge of nothing, stands a willowy girl with long black hair. Her stick-like arms are raised to either side as she looks down at the drop. The pants of her yellow coveralls flap around her legs in the wind, and her hair blows straight behind her like black streamers at a macabre party.
“Ceres!” Her name leaves my mouth before I can register that it is really her. On some level, my mind has recognized her. I run toward the hill, my feet bleeding afresh and screaming in agony. My heart throws itself against my chest over and over again. “Ceres, no!”
But she does not hear me. She stands there, suspended like a wraith, staring death in the face. Why can’t she hear me? What is she doing, all by herself? I get to the base of the sandy hill and begin to climb, doubling over as a stitch clamps onto my side. I keep running, the wind whipping my hair into my eyes.
“Ceres!” I keep calling her name, hoping that she will hear me, that she will know it’s not too late. That I am here. I am shamefully late, but I am here, and I will never leave her again.
Seeing my sister on the edge of the mountain, her arms outstretched like an angel in yellow, is a surreal experience. I lose count of how many times since Shale has come into my life I’ve questioned reality, or my tenuous grasp on it. I try to shake myself free of the stupor.
“Ceres.” I keep my voice soft so I don’t startle her over the edge. “Ceres, please turn around.”
At first I think she didn’t hear me, but then she begins to turn, very slowly. It’s painful—she reminds me of cancer-riddled Défectueux, one leg limping under her weight.
I am not sure what she will do when she recognizes me, but I should’ve given more thought to what I would do when I saw her. When her face comes into full view, I want to weep. There is a cloud-shaped scar on her cheek that could only have been caused by acid, and the inside of her right arm is branded with the alphanumeric code for her name.
I wait as her eyes run over me, wait for a smile or tears or cursing, but nothing comes. She remains staring at me blankly, as if I am a rock or a tree in her path.
“Ceres…could you come toward me? Away from the edge?” I hold out a hand.
My sister stares at it, as if confused about the gesture. Then, slowly, she limps toward me, making her way to safety inch by painful inch. When she is close, I take her hand, lace my fingers through it. Her face is blurry as I smooth her knotted, unwashed hair behind her ears and look into her face for the first time in my adult life.
The thought that echoes through my mind is, She is not Ceres at all. There is not a trace of my cheeky, adoring, playful sister in this young girl’s battered face. She is thirteen, but her eyes belong to someone generations older. I pull her into my arms and cry softly into her bony shoulder as she stands there with her hands by her side.
I finally step back and smile at her. “It’s me, Ceres. Vika. Your sister.”
“Sister.” She says the word wonderingly, turning the vowels and consonants over like sweets in her mouth.
My heart soars with pleasure at hearing the word from her mouth.
I nod. “That’s right.”
“Sister,” she says again. “Blister. Twister.”
I stare at her as her eyes flutter away from me, her gaze perching on everything around us. She is not there. They have taken my sister and done something with her spirit, ground it up under their dirty boots.
I put my arm through hers and guide her back down the hill to where the other children from the Asylum are gathered.
The entire time we’re walking toward the group, Ceres mutters under her breath. At first, I strain to hear her, but she’s only repeating strings of rhyming words. After I spend minutes trying to discern some meaning in the words she picks, I give up. There is no meaning. She is like a computer, simply spitting out a pattern her brain thinks up.
“Bird. Word. Heard. Curd.” Her voice carries on the slight breeze, and several children turn to look at us as we approach.
One of the boys smirks when he sees Ceres on my arm and pokes another boy next to him. They are younger than Ceres, probably no more than ten or eleven years old. The taller boy whispers something to the other one, and they burst out laughing. But I do not feel anger or indignation. I feel only a deep sense of loss. These boys are broken, too. Broken in a different way than Ceres, but still broken, their inner arms branded, their minds bent and twisted a million ways until they just gave. As they hoot like animals, I turn away and take Ceres to sit by a thin, small girl with black hair to her shoulders.
Ceres continues her litany. “Hill. Bill. Drill.”
The girl glances at her shyly. “Ceres is good with words,” she says.
I smile at her. “Thank you. I think so, too. I’m her sister, Vika. What’s your name?”
“Lynx.” The girl pulls her knees up and rests her chin on them. “It’s a constellation. Do you know it?”
I shake my head. “But it’s a pretty name.”
Ceres glances at me. “Pretty. Witty. City. Gritty.”
“Ceres is good with words,” Lynx repeats.
I don’t know what to say this time, so I simply smile.
“I’m not good at anything. I’m a waste of space and resources.” Lynx says this matter-of-factly, as if she’s telling me it’s hot today.
I stare at her, horrified. “No, you’re not. Whoever told you that is wrong.”
“We’re Défectueux,” Lynx continues, as if she hasn’t heard me. “Defective. That means we shouldn’t have been born. We’re mistakes.”
My skin ripples with gooseflesh, in spite of the sun bearing down on us. Is this what Ceres listened to for the past eight years? If her mind was pelted with hate and vitriol, it’s no wonder this is all her brain is capable of conceiving any more. My chest surges with a flood of anger as I remember my mother talking about the Asylum. “She’s helping humanity. They’ll treat her well there, give her food and shelter in exchange for participation in a few minor experiments. She’s helping generations to come, Vika.”
I look at Ceres, her blank eyes. There is no soul there.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
Just when I feel like I can’t take anymore, the nurse’s voice rings out from somewhere behind us.
“Lunch time, everyone! Come gather outside the tent! Lunch time!”
The Asylum kids are obviously used to this routine. They lurch to their feet; those who are already standing shuffle, limp, or walk to t
he big tent where I’d seen Jasper. Ceres gets up and starts to walk off without me, but Lynx threads her fingers through Ceres’s hand. She pulls on her till my sister stops walking and then we all walk together.
I find myself hoping she’d been able to do this for Ceres inside the Asylum, too. Seeing someone actually looking at her like a human being makes this horror seem slightly less horrific than it is, somehow. Perhaps I’m only looking to console myself.
I’m quiet as I walk with them, watching the river of children swarm around us and part like water around a boulder in the riverbed. They gather around the nurse who seems to have a limitless supply of patience. When they tug at her, reaching for the strips of dried meat and handful of fruit she’s handing out of the canteen, she simply pushes their hands away gently and resumes doling out the food. When everyone has a plate, she reaches into a large pot and ladles out a light brown soupy drink into their glasses.
“It’s a high-energy drink,” she explains to me. “Would you like some?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine with water.”
She smiles, and after fixing a small plate for herself and me, joins Ceres, Lynx, and me on the grass.
“How do you do it?” I ask. “Fix them meals, sing to them? Doesn’t it distress you?”
She shrugs, looking into the distance as she chews. “I had a Nukehead sister. She ran away into the streets when I was a young girl. When I heard of the bottleneck and the brutality at the Asylums, I left my work as a medical nurse and fell in with the Nukeheads. They wanted to establish a refuge for all those vulnerable to the government’s atrocities, and they needed someone with medical knowledge.
Taking care of these kids, it’s my way of apologizing to my sister, if she’s alive. We’ve torn them down, anyone who’s not like us. How do you ever pay for taking away someone’s life, their dignity?” She shakes her head. “You don’t. You just do the right thing, whatever that happens to mean to you. For me, being here for them when they want their mothers feels right. So I do it.”
I consider this as I eat. Penance. I suppose I can understand her need for it. I look at Lynx and Ceres, a few feet away. Lynx is chattering to my sister, while Ceres is having a conversation all her own. She isn’t rhyming words anymore, but I can’t really tell what she’s saying.
“What happened, in the Asylums?” I ask softly. “All I know is that the Rads were revolting strongly because of especially poor treatment.”
“I don’t know all the details,” the nurse says. “But I dressed their wounds when they first arrived. Electrocution marks to the groin, the buttocks. Weeping sores that hadn’t been treated for so long, I had to sedate the child with alcohol and cut off a finger.” She bites her lip, takes a deep breath. “Whatever it was, it was hell on earth. These children are survivors of a magnitude we can’t even begin to understand.”
I swallow my mouthful, nauseated. A picture tries to wrestle itself into my mind, a picture with Ceres and a woman with an electric prod, but I push it out. I cannot begin to think that way or I might curl into a ball and cry for weeks. “Do you know much about how they first arrived? How did they escape?”
“All I know is it’s the work of Rad groups along Eastern New Amana. We don’t get much other information here.” The nurse shakes her head. “Those are brave men and women.” Glancing at me, she asks, “What about you? You must have quite a story. You’re wearing that Guard uniform, but you’re here, in a refugee camp, and you told me you were part of a Rad group.”
“That’s right. I was with the Ursa Rads,” I reply. “We were on our way to the Toronto Asylum to free the children, but we got ambushed on the bus. I escaped, but…I don’t know what happened to the rest.”
The nurse frowns. “Yes, I heard whisperings about your group. It was the other part of your group that went ahead with your plan anyway, or so the rumor goes. You likely have a hand in the kids sitting here.” She smiles and squeezes my arm. “You should be proud.”
“Yes, but the other Rads on the bus…do you know anything of what’s happened to them?”
Already she is shaking her head. “I’m sorry, dear, but from what little word we got, all the people in that shootout perished.”
I nod and look away.
Perished. Shale, perished. It’s that simple, that easy to decimate someone. In spite of myself, I think back to Shale pushing me off the bus, telling me to run. The weapon in his hand. The crack of gunfire. I close my eyes, dam the tears.
“…ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” Ceres’s singsong voice floats toward me on the gentle breeze. She’s singing an age-old nursery rhyme about people who died in the plague. I set my plate down and begin to walk.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
The children float around in their own universes. After I’ve been there a day, I broach the question I have tried to resist, because knowing might be worse than not knowing. But after seeing Ceres, after realizing I will never know exactly what happened to her, I decide I can’t tolerate any more darkness.
After lunch, Nurse Carina comes to sit with Ceres and me. Her face is irrefutably kind. As I watch her watching the kids, the sun’s weak rays light up the dusting of wrinkles on her face and across her throat. She is much older than I’d initially realized.
“What’s the plan for all these kids?” I ask. “You can’t sustain them immeasurably. Where will they go when resources run out?”
Nurse Carina sighs, lies back in the sand. “The idea is to get them out of here. Now, this is all information the Nukeheads get through their contacts, so make of it what you will. But I’ve been told there are more sympathetic people in this country than you would think. And some of them are quite high up in the ranks. The last I heard, the Sympathetics and the Rads were speaking with China about sending stowaways on the ships going East. But there’s been no movement on that front as far as I know. Then again, everything is highly secretive, so we might not know till the day we leave. It’s safer for us all that way.”
I sit back and look at the children. There are thousands of them, without counting the Nukeheads, who keep to themselves in another part of the compound. There are dozens, scores of them, too. How will we get everyone on one ship? If we get them on several ships, won’t the government catch on to what we’re doing?
Ceres looks over at me, her eyes roaming my face as she studies it. My heart stutters for a moment, captured in that gesture.
“If I wanted to stow away on a ship, what resources would I need to tap into?” I continue to watch Ceres. My voice is casual, as if this is an everyday question.
Nurse Carina is silent for a moment, and when she replies her voice, too, is nonchalant. “Well, you’d need transportation to Toronto Harbor, for one. Ships usually arrive at the Harbor on the second Tuesday of every month. From this camp, the only way to get to the Harbor is to get a Nukehead to take you. They have a reliable system of taxis, but as you might imagine, they’re fairly reluctant to help us Flockers. Then you’d have to find a way to get on board; usually the middle of the night is the safest time. You’d need someone on board who was bribed or sympathetic to your situation.” Another pause. “It’s not easy, and you’re likelier to end up dead than free, Vika.”
I nod at her warning, but I’m already turning over her words in my mind. The second Tuesday of every month—that’s only twelve days from now. If we miss that opportunity, we’d have to wait another month for the next ship. Ceres needs help now. I wonder how I can talk the Nukeheads into giving us a ride. We can’t afford to wait around for a Rad ship that may or may not come. My sister has been through enough.
Days drift by like ash settling on concrete. It’s not easy to see as it happens, except for the odd piece of grit in your eye. Then one day you look around and everything is black, covered in grime, unsalvageable. You yourself will never be clean again.
I try to approach the Nukeheads on the few occasions when they’re in our part of the compound, but I am pointedly ignored. They only communicate wi
th Nurse Carina, and then only about supplies she needs or illnesses with which they’d like help. My mind shrieks at me that our time is dwindling; we have to be on that ship soon. There are less than ten days left. But I know forcing myself on the Nukeheads will only make them pull further back. And so I continue to bide my time.
I watch Ceres, too, hoping arrogantly that my presence will trigger something in her. I wait for a glimmer of the past to seep through, for a chink of light to cut through the haze in her eyes. But there’s been nothing.
Today we’re sitting in the grass at the base of the big hill where I first saw her. She’s picking wildflowers, the weedy kind that have somehow survived in spite of the radiation and drought.
“Do you remember how we used to pick those flowers behind our house when you were very small?” I know there is little chance of this, even if Ceres was not emotionally scarred from the Asylum. She was only about three when we did it.
She continues to pick the yellow flowers, muttering to herself.
“You’d name them all because I told you they were alive. And then, when they died, you’d scream and cry and insist on giving them a proper burial.” I laugh even as tears spill over my bottom lashes and cascade down my cheeks. “I’d tell you to stop naming them, but you wouldn’t listen. And they were so beautiful that you couldn’t stop picking them either.” I laugh so hard, I begin to hiccup. “You always were a lost cause.” I watch her jerky motions as she pulls on the flowers, destroying them with her clumsy touch. “But I guess so was I.”
I stand up and stretch in the watery gray light of the late afternoon, the sun obstructed by concrete-colored clouds. There is no distinction between horizon, sky, and sand.
“I’m going to take a walk. Is that okay, Ceres?”
She doesn’t look up at me.
“Will you miss me while I’m gone?” I ask quietly.