by Anna North
Darcy felt a grudging sympathy. She thought of the cold hotel room she’d conjured up for Armin; it was still easy for her to put herself in Marie’s place. It was easy to imagine herself starving in a crowded building, cursing the person who happened to have control over her life. But for her, she reminded herself, that person was Marie herself. Her sympathy withered.
“Where’s my mom?” she asked.
Marie sighed.
“The truth is,” she said, “I don’t know where your mother is. I can find out for you, but it’s going to take time.”
“Why is it going to take time? You have her, don’t you? You kidnapped all of us.”
Marie looked up and out the little window with an expression like sadness.
“Look,” she said, “why don’t you eat your breakfast, and then I’ll take you to see Tyson. That’ll explain some things.”
Darcy was about to demand that they see Tyson immediately, but she remembered the hamburger from the day before, and she decided not to turn down another chance at real meat. She bit into a strip of bacon and let its meaty, greasy crunch—so unlike jelly bacon it almost made her laugh—reverberate in her head. She thought of Snow Rosen, who could eat this way every day but instead let a whole rib roast languish on her counter. People were so stupid.
“Why are you giving me this stuff?” Darcy asked.
“We have it,” Marie said. “Why not share?”
The offhandedness of the statement made her angry—why hadn’t they shared with her all the nights when she went hungry? But Marie was watching her eat—she seemed to be genuinely enjoying Darcy’s enjoyment. Darcy wondered if Armin had been disarmed this way, if Marie had made her face warm and loving when she took her braids down for him at night.
When Darcy finished the eggs, Marie helped her stand, lodge the crutch under her arm, and hobble out the door. The room opened out into a corridor, and the corridor opened onto a square courtyard. The air there was almost cool. In the center a pond lay still and smooth amid bright grass—she’d never seen standing water so clean before, so blue. All around the pond were unfamiliar trees, thick trunked and scaly, with spines instead of fronds. Pines, Darcy realized. Beneath each tree was a bench, but all the benches were empty, and the whole place looked eerie, like it had been recently evacuated.
“What’s this place for?” Darcy asked.
Something swift and screaming flew by her head. She crouched behind Marie.
“Relax, it’s a marsh hawk. Look.”
Darcy followed Marie’s finger to the gray shape above the pond. She saw its wings, its pale breast. She heard its mournful, hollow call, like air blown through bone. Then she saw it dive, and scatter the water in shimmering flumes, and come shooting up with a fish writhing in its armored hand.
“The nature preserve was Tyson’s idea,” Marie explained. “Originally he wanted to repopulate the island with mainland species. We even used to have a breeding pair of elk, but they got heat stroke a few years ago. Now the whole project’s on hold.”
Marie led Darcy past the courtyard and up a grassy hill with more trees and a weakly flowing stream. They followed a brick path to a house, a real freestanding house like in the prairie flyers. The house had a front yard with pink and yellow roses; it had curtains on its windows and a wooden door. As Marie selected a key and turned it in the lock, Darcy looked out at the view. At the bottom of the hill was a high wall with guard towers all along its length. Just beyond it were the red roofs of the University buildings—they were ten miles north of Little Los Angeles, and Darcy had seen them only a handful of times before, most memorably on an ill-advised eighth-grade trip when one of her classmates strayed too far from the group and got arrested for loitering. South of the University were the Manhattanville high-rises—the GreenValley Headquarters Tower with its ludicrously hopeful strawberry cutout sticking up out of the roof; the Pacifica Flyers building, ten stories tall, its dome brass-plated, its shiny bravado a relic of the more ambitious time. South of those, through the haze, she could barely make out Upper Chicagoland, its one skyscraper just a Seaboard facade, its real buildings lower and squatter, slumped as though beginning to give in. South of that, the air went black with heaped-up smog, but she knew that Little Los Angeles teemed behind it, full of shouting and cheese food and the smoke of seaweed cigarettes and the messy, reckless freedom of hopes discarded. Darcy felt a twinge of pride—she was behind the wall, at Tyson’s headquarters, and no one from her building, no one from her high school, perhaps no one from Little Los Angeles, had ever seen this view.
The front door of the house opened onto a dim hallway. The air smelled like flowers grown old but not rotten. Paintings hung on the walls—a woodland cottage with a snow-covered roof, some sort of red mainland bird. On one side of the hallway was a living room with overstuffed couches and a coffee table made of dark wood. On the other side was a white-tiled bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Ahead of them was another door, this one with a child’s drawing taped to it. The drawing was badly foxed and faded and crinkled at its corners. In it a boy was lifting a car. Marie turned to Darcy.
“Keep your voice down.” Then she looked toward the closed door and shook her head, smiling ruefully to herself. “Actually, whatever. Yell all you want.”
Darcy didn’t want to yell. The room behind the door made her stiff with apprehension. She followed Marie inside, into a pinkish gray half light like the inside of a shell, and she saw an animal in the bed, a wolf or dog with a long, grim, wasted snout and a pair of pointed ears. Her breath came unstuck in her chest when her eyes adjusted: lying in the bed was an old man, his hands withered, his shoulders slender as a girl’s. What looked like ears were only shadows clinging to his head on the pillow, a head grown long and lupine as though age had stretched and whittled it, but a head that was recognizably Tyson’s. The smell of old flowers still hung in the air.
“Go ahead,” Marie said, “ask him your questions. Ask him anything you want.”
Darcy moved toward him. His face was trapped in a rigid clench; his jaw muscles bulged; even his open eyes seemed locked up against something they didn’t want to see. It was obvious that he was beyond hearing or speaking, but he was not slack, not dead. Something vital sparked beneath his frozen skin, tortured, baffled, and afraid. Darcy backed away again.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“A stroke,” Marie said. “His third.”
Darcy looked again at his clenched jaw. Where she had been afraid now she was angry. By lying here mute and incapacitated, he was evading her.
“How long has he been like that?” Darcy asked.
“Like that? A few weeks. It happened just a few days after the Hawaiian attack.”
“So you’ve been in charge since then?”
Marie sat on Tyson’s bed. She took a cotton handkerchief from the nightstand and wiped his mouth with it. Next to the handkerchief was something metal with a small lens, like a little telescope—Darcy recognized the sextant from Tyson’s papers.
“He gave the order to find the orphans,” Marie said. “I let the guards carry it out. But now it’s time to stop.”
Darcy had been pinning all the pain of the last month on the vague form of Tyson, on his picture in the morning flyers, on the amorphous fact of his power. Now Marie was before her—a real woman, growing old, smaller than Darcy—a physical, fallible being responsible for ruining Darcy’s life. Her body told her to attack Marie, to stick her thumbnails in her eyes. Her mind had to remind her that if she did that, she might never find her mother.
“What,” she said, “you decided you’re tired of kidnapping people? Ready to try something new?”
Marie seemed to grow slightly taller then, to shore up her spine with some emergency reserve of pride.
“Come with me,” she said. “Let’s let him rest.”
She bent over the bed and pulled the comforter up farther over Tyson’s chest. He made a strangled sound. Marie seemed to understand—she folded the comfo
rter back again, and then led Darcy from the room.
They sat together on a flowered sofa in Tyson’s living room. Darcy moved so she was as far from Marie as possible. An antique cuckoo clock ticked on the wall. The lamp shade had cutouts of cowboy boots on it—when Marie turned the light on, the boots danced across the floor. The rug was heavy and soft-looking and printed with mainland flowers.
“When I came here,” she said, “I had no money. I didn’t know anyone except Armin, and I wasn’t going back to him. Luckily Chicagoland Hospital still needed nurses, and they gave me a job. That’s how I met Tyson. He was visiting a construction site in Manhattanville and a chunk of Seaboard fell on his head. I did a good job sewing him up, but if you look closely you can still see the scar.”
Marie seemed to be in a kind of bitter reverie, but still there was something watchful in her face, something careful.
“The thing about Tyson,” Marie went on, “is he’s not a natural leader. He’s not even likable. When I sewed him up, I was repulsed by him. He sweats when he’s nervous—his palms and armpits are always sweaty. He has a whiny voice. And most of all, being with him is uncomfortable at first in a way that’s hard to describe. When I met him I thought, Why does anyone listen to this guy? And then he started telling me how all the factions on the Board wanted him gone, how they were planning a takeover. He said he was just getting started with all these projects, like the bus system, the jellyfish processing plant. He said the Board wouldn’t know how to handle them. I was polite, but I didn’t really care much. Then he started listing the people on the Board, saying what was wrong with all of them. I wasn’t even listening, until he got to Armin. I made him repeat the name. He said Armin was the front-runner, a lot of people wanted him to take power. And right then, even though I didn’t really know him or like him, I told him I’d help in any way I could.”
“Don’t you think he might have known about you and Armin somehow?” Darcy asked. “He might have used that to get your sympathy.”
“Oh,” Marie said, “I’m sure he did. But that’s not the point. I was just a nurse then, I was living in a shitty apartment in Lower Chicagoland, back when the streets there were still dirt. I had no influence and I was nobody. But Tyson didn’t laugh me off. He just asked when I could start.
“I was the one who started publishing the morning flyers. I drew that picture of Tyson. I was the one who invented Founder’s Day. I knew that people were confused, and they wanted someone to love, and if they loved Tyson, the Board couldn’t just put someone else in power.”
“And you did all that just so Armin wouldn’t be in charge?”
Marie smiled.
“At first. After a while I got to know Tyson, and I understood why he had to be our leader. See, back on the mainland we were in chaos. We were regressing, we were worse than animals. I saw fathers steal food from children. I saw a woman lock her sister out in the snow so she could take her boat passage. Sometimes someone would try to unite us, get us to share our food or sleep in shifts so we’d have enough blankets. Those people would always fail—once, twenty kids beat a woman to death for suggesting we cut our vitamins in half. They failed because they tried to appeal to the goodness in us, and that goodness was all frozen out. But Tyson knew how to find the bad in people and use it for good. That’s how he knew I’d be useful to him, and that’s how he always succeeded, even though looking at him you’d think he’d always fail.”
“So it’s a success when you shoot down a boat full of innocent people and then kidnap more people to cover it up?”
“That was his flaw,” Marie said. “He got scared. He’d been a weirdo and an outcast for a long time before he got any power, and he was always afraid it would happen again. Money we should’ve spent on welfare, public works, he spent on the Seaguards. He had us build that nursery, and then this whole house, for him, so he could hide away in some kind of childhood he never had. He stopped coming out for Founder’s Day. And after the attack, I tried to tell him not to go after the orphans, that it was wrong, that it would get out, but he wouldn’t listen. He gave his personal guards their orders. It took me a long time to get them to stop, to gain their trust. I’m still not sure I have it.”
“But you kidnapped me,” Darcy said.
“I needed to talk to you. I need your help.”
A high-pitched, sublinguistic whine came from Tyson’s bedroom, and Marie jumped to answer it. All the wariness went out of her face, pushed away by what looked like real concern. She really loved Tyson, Darcy thought. And, shrewd as she was, she had believed in him.
“Help with what?” Darcy said when she came back.
“I’m going to get the guards to tell me where they’re holding all those people. I’m going to release them.”
Darcy tried to look into her face and see if she was telling the truth. She remembered what it had felt like to play Marie for Armin, to cast herself back into Marie’s freezing history. What would the woman who had let her hair down in the decaying hotel rooms of the soon-to-be-abandoned world do now, with a comatose leader and a stash of prisoners? Would she show mercy? But Darcy had not known Marie when she played her part in Armin’s medicine-smelling bedroom. And when she looked at her now, she saw only steeliness—Marie’s face gave nothing back. It was a private face, a face that communicated only what it wanted to communicate. Darcy thought of Tyson lying in the bedroom, of how quickly Marie had shot up to tend to him. She wondered if this was what your face looked like when you lost the only person you were close to. She wondered if it was what her own face looked like.
“Then what?” Darcy asked.
“I’m going to pick up where Tyson left off. I’m going to do it right. I lived through the refugee camp, and it takes a lot to make me afraid. I think you’re the same way. That’s why I want you to help me.”
“Why me?”
“I’ve been watching you for a while, ever since the guards took your mother.”
Darcy wondered if she’d led them to Yuka and Nathaniel. They might be living peaceful lives now if not for her. Maybe all she’d accomplished was helping the guards clean up loose ends.
“I think you’re like me,” Marie went on. “People like us get what we want, even if we have nothing to start out with. I’d rather have someone like that with me than against me.”
For most of Darcy’s life, people had noticed her only to rebuke her. To everyone but her mother, she had been interchangeable with every other Little Los Angeles girl—getting bad grades, dropping out of school, turning one kind of product into another, collecting a paycheck and handing it over to the landlord. Now people kept telling her she was different, and it was becoming hard not to believe it. The kids who did well in school were meant for one kind of greatness, for getting jobs at GreenValley or on the Board and having nice apartments and getting interviewed in the flyers. What if she was meant for setting the bent world straight? The thought filled her with a strange kind of pride, a lightness, a feeling like surprise.
“Let my mom go first,” Darcy said. “I want to talk to her. Then I’ll consider it.”
“I’ll talk to the guards,” Marie said. “I should have an answer for you by tomorrow.”
Darcy still didn’t trust Marie—she might easily be lying about her role in the kidnapping. Still, it gave Darcy pleasure to ask for something—not to beg and scrape and sell herself out for it—and to have her request treated like an order.
The next day a man came to see Darcy. He was wearing the gray uniform of Tyson’s personal guards.
“I’m Marcus,” he said. “I’m here to talk to you about your mother.”
Darcy leapt out of bed too fast to think about her leg, and she landed so hard on her cast that the pain took her breath away. But even as she gasped and trembled and blinked away the white hurt-haze, her mind was filling up with sweet disorganized excitement. She thought of her mother’s long feet, of the times she would sing to herself so softly that her lips moved but no sound came out, of
the private drawings she made with her index finger on the dust of the windowsill, and of how much she had missed these things, and of how every day for the last month had been encircled and underpinned and tainted with fear, and of how that fear was about to be relieved. Then she looked up and saw the guard’s face. His skin was ashen.
“First I should tell you,” he began, “that she—”
And he paused, and in that pause she heard that he had only bad news for her, news he was afraid to tell, news he knew would fill her with despair or rage, and before he could put the news into words, before she could give words to it in her mind, she let the rage take their place, let it spurt forth before it was called for, hardening her fingers into claws and propelling herself forward with such force that she raked her nails down both his cheeks and left strawberry stripes before he was able to catch her by the wrists, and subdue her, and look down at the floor while still holding her fast, and tell her, “Your mother is dead.”
The rage bled away, and Darcy’s brain was a box with a slot in it. Words went out the slot; words came back in. The box was tiny. There was nothing else in the box.
“Did you kill her?” Darcy asked.
“No.”
“How did she die?”
“We had her in a nice room with a bedside lamp. She took apart the lamp and used a wire to pick the lock. Then she made a run for it. Elvin was guarding her. She was so quiet and well behaved, we never thought she’d try to escape. He didn’t know what to do, so he shot her.”
“And then?”
“It wasn’t in our orders to shoot any of them. We took her to our barracks. We didn’t tell anyone. The wound was in her side. We tried to stop the bleeding, and at first we thought it worked, because she stopped crying. Then she said, ‘Tell her I’m okay,’ and we said we would, even though we didn’t know who she was talking about, but she kept saying it over and over, and then the words sort of blended together until she was just making this one long sound like an animal sound, and then she died.”