Julia is a frail sort of girl, with spindly legs and hair so pale and long it falls to her back. She is probably beautiful, because when the other girls whisper about her at night, I can hear their underlying jealousy. “At fifteen she has no breasts,” Jenny hissed just last night, as if it were the worst crime in the world. Which is strange because if she looked down, Jenny herself might be surprised to find herself somewhat breastless, too. A year after we moved out of the bunkers, Julia came here from another cottage in another country. Her target family had moved to these parts, and so she had to as well. For years she did everything in her power to fit in, but we were already set, and there was no place for her. Her accent and overeagerness did not help.
“I’ve got some shortbread,” she says now, out of breath. She is clutching at her chest with one hand, her bucket swinging in the other.
I know she wants to exchange the shortbread for an hour braiding her hair. I start to tell her that I am planning on reading a book tonight, but Jenny speaks over me, saying, “We haven’t made shortbread for weeks. Where did you find it?”
Jenny doesn’t wait for an answer before turning back to the others. Julia blushes and stares down at her feet. The thing about Jenny is this: she does a pretty spectacular impression of anything she hears, and if she doesn’t like you, she speaks to you in exactly the same voice you speak to her, like a parrot. In Julia’s case it’s a nasal/throaty combination that’s hard on the ears.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I say quietly. Julia gives me a confused look. “Our accent. You don’t want Madame to hear it. You’re not supposed to go against your training.”
She shrugs, but her face turns redder. Perhaps she thought that she was finally starting to sound like us in a good way. She runs her fingers through her hair and sighs. “I’ll cut it all off if you don’t help me. I don’t know how anyone can walk around with hair like this.”
I say nothing.
“It’s the kind you like,” she whispers hopefully, “the one with the raisins in it.”
“Poor Julia,” says Jenny, smirking. “Did you save your stale shortbread for her all these months? Do you want her to be your best friend?”
Julia mutters something in another language, which I’m pretty sure is an insult. Jenny, who is actually this tiny human being that contradicts her personality, nudges Julia hard with her bucket. “What did you say to me? What did you just say to me?”
“Jenny, leave her alone,” I say tiredly.
The surprising thing is that she listens. She doesn’t exactly stop glaring at Julia, but she does move her bucket away. I suppose Edith and I are what Alex is with the boys: the unofficial leaders of the girls in our dorm rooms. I think it’s because we survived, our whole group intact, while theirs did not. They lost their friends every day, yet here we are, I and the others.
When we were children, there were rumors about which of us had good luck and which did not. It was agreed that you wanted to be around those who did not seem to be disappearing. It’s not true, of course; we cannot choose whether we stay or not, yet that silly sentiment still lingers. Now, though my influence is still there, only Edith wants to be that with the girls—their compass, their good-luck charm. I’ve learned to function better when the spotlight is not on me, while Edith thrives on it. Julia gives me a grateful smile, but I ignore her. I go back to putting one foot in front of the other.
As for the shortbread, I know it’s not stale. I know the place behind Madame’s cabinets where she hides all her sweets.
The truth is that I can stand Julia because she is like me.
They say there is something about us, the children they find in orphanages on Earth II. There aren’t very many of us at this cottage, two or three. Nobody wants their old stories from before the cottages to stand out from the rest, so if we can help it, we never mention it. They say we orphans are emptier than all the rest, colder behind our eyes. We were broken long before we got here. We fitted in just right. We already bore the knowledge that all cottage children must have: that nobody loves us but ourselves.
Chapter 3
The boys have started an argument with us. They follow behind us at a small distance. Nelson tells Greta, loudly, that the mosquito bites on her chest don’t actually need a bra. (Somehow everyone always seems to be talking about breasts these days.) He asks why she bothers, wasting her time like that when she could go shirtless, and then we have to hold her back, to keep her from charging.
“What?” Nelson calls, laughing. “You’re not strong enough to come over here?”
Greta fights harder to free herself, but there is nothing she can do against all of us girls. She talks loudly about the size and shape of Nelson’s head. “Like a watermelon,” she says, which is true.
“Leave it alone,” we tell her. “He’s just trying to get you in trouble.”
Several more insults and curses pass between us. We are like this now. The girls against the boys, an only half-joking game. We have a saying: making friends with a boy is like dousing yourself in gasoline and then waiting in an empty field during a lightning storm. The older we get, the more we separate ourselves.
Something sits there between us all, you see. Something seductive and dangerous, certain boys giving certain girls looks that sometimes Madame catches.
We all lived in the same cottages, even the same rooms, until a few years ago, when the boys got their Sir. Now we are absolutely not permitted to frolic with members of the opposite sex. That is what Madame says in her shrill voice. But it happens anyway. It happens when she is not looking: a boy and a girl sneaking off, the sounds they make, the flushed looks they give each other in the morning. Some of the older girls, seventeen or eighteen, say, “I want to know what it feels like before they send us out there. I don’t want any surprises, and I don’t want to feel like I missed out on anything.” For some of them, kissing seems to consume all of their leisure time.
And then there are the rest of us: prudish and proper in our uniforms, white shirts always buttoned, gray skirts always at least an inch below our knees, socks pulled up as high as they go. If we are missing anything, chances are we will never know what it is.
We arrive at the cottages and immediately break up to do various tasks. Some sit at the piano, some read books, some are in charge of dinner tonight, while others have the leisure of sleeping off their busy day. “The fridge and cupboards have been restocked,” Madame announces, and we know it must have been at great risk to her. It always is whenever she goes into the city for the things we need.
We sound like little schoolchildren, our voices harmonious when we murmur our “Thank you, Madame.”
She nods.
For all we know she was chased by a wild bear just now, but you would never know it from the way she strides off into her office, her best dress devoid of a single wrinkle, her brown leather shoes still shined, her bun still severely secured atop her head. “Stand tall,” she likes to say. “The ones who live the longest are always the proper ones.”
Our Madame is not what you might think; anyone who imagines her small must adjust her size to at least three times bigger, and if in your mind an ogre appeared, then you must think of a smaller, softer sort of woman who could not hurt a fly even if she wanted to. Madame is neither small nor big, neither powerful nor weak, but she owns us. She owns us in a way that we did not understand as children, still do not understand now. We respect her, are afraid of her, are enamored with her, are disgusted with her, all at once. She has a shrewd face and a sharp nose and eyes that are piercing. She is good to you at the exact same moment that she is cold. As long as she is standing in front of me, she is solid, but the moment she is gone, she becomes undefined in my mind. I suppose what we’ve decided, collectively, including the boys, is that as far as Madame goes, we do not really know what she is.
The smell of sizzling onions perfumes the air. The radio is on, our only connection to the outside world, and some of the girls are swaying to the music
. We seem simple enough, yet we are not what we seem at all. A sort of violence sings in our bones, an unquietable hum just beneath the surface, like the fire of a volcano. Madame calls us carriers, for now. We only carry the ability to do what is required of us. When we pass all our exams, we will become sleepers.
We have been training for these exams since the moment we arrived; it is all we have lived for. When we have passed, when we are sleepers, we will leave this place. Until then we must remain hidden inside these woods. The problem, you see, with two versions of a person now existing in one world is this: someone might recognize us and mistake us for someone we are not, and then everything—coming here, hiding in their woods all these years—would have been for nothing. So we stay hidden until it is time to leave. That is the most important rule.
Tonight the conversation is easy. Jenny and Greta have just finished reading a book by Hemingway, and they are trying to recount the story to some other girl who has yet to finish it.
“Well, there is a man,” Jenny says.
“And there is the sea,” Greta says.
“And I swear to God, that’s pretty much all that happens,” Jenny says.
I tune them out. The sunset sneaks up on us, turns everything gold for a moment before stealing away again. I am watching from the window, marveling at how it never gets old. We did not miss the windows when we were in the bunkers; that sort of thing is not important until suddenly it is. We do not take anything for granted now.
You ask, What is one cottage girl to another? We stand one another well enough to live together. But we have learned that the only way to protect ourselves is to trust no one else. We have been taught to be selfish. We are very good at it.
The radio continues to play, someone hums, someone else sets up a board game, and I watch Edith wash the dishes. I am still sitting on the windowsill by the kitchen sink, only half awake, the echoes of old memories beating at my tired chest. I wonder sometimes what someone standing in the dark outside our window might think if he looked, really looked, at us. Are we punctuated by our secrets? The question marks of the future, and all the exclamation points from the past?
You wouldn’t know from our faces that the final examination is in a week. Afterward there might not be any of us left.
Chapter 4
For as long as anyone can remember, there have been two planets. It was as easy to take for granted as the idea that we need air to breathe. Earth I and II. The original planet and its alternate. Everything has a reflection. It is only a matter of whether you can see it or not. The funny thing is that back home, on our planet, we were the first Earth. We were original, and they were alternates. Now this is Earth I, which means that I am second. I am the alternate. Everything is a matter of perspectives.
The two worlds look exactly the same. The sky is just as blue; the cities are just as windy; the snow is just as white. Mirror images, yet two ways any single story can play out. When you were four years old, you were entered into the interplanetary registry. I was five the first time I spoke to my alternate via satellite. “Bonjour,” I said, to another girl named Lirael who lived in Paris, who looked like me, smiled like me. We were the same in almost every way and yet different in others. She giggled a lot. She never played with her hands, and no one had to remind her to look up or speak louder. The monthly satellite conversations were supposed to be a way for everyone to learn to be content with her lot in life. You start to think that if your life is so terrible here, maybe your fortune can be made elsewhere, and then you learn that your alternate took that route and her life is either better or worse for it. In the end, if you compare and contrast the two, their differences are either very few or very many. Most still live in the same look-alike cities, are still essentially the same person, but less commonly, some are so vastly different that they might be unrecognizable to each other. It didn’t always make everyone content with their lives, but at least we knew what the other roads looked like. It turned out that the knowledge itself was the most powerful thing.
I think I had just turned six when relations finally broke down. Six when it was no longer permitted for us to be in communication with our alternates. Interplanetary communications in general were cut off, and all there was of that other world was the dot in the sky. Suddenly I didn’t know anything about Lirael and her life, and she knew nothing about me. What had been normal became something to fear, to worry about. Many said they’d always suspected it. That it is impossible for two parallel worlds to coexist indefinitely. That at every moment our two planets, atmospheres, even our stars are fighting each other and have been for years. There might be two versions of everything, but only one can stay. Only one reflection is real.
We call this period now, when the two planets officially no longer communicate, the Silence. It is harder for some—those older men and women who have known their alternates for sixty years, who feel like they have lost their best friends, their other halves. But even they understand that the Silence is meant to be a period of introspection. Even our presidents stopped speaking two years ago.
Earth I also meant it to be a period of good faith. A standstill. So that the two planets could each search for a better plan, one that might mean our two worlds wouldn’t have to go up against each other. The Silence. That they even came up with a standstill proves one thing to us: that the people of this world, of this Earth, are the better, moral versions of us. Their mistake is not understanding this and assuming that if you lock two people up in a prison with only one glass of water and a knife, the knife will lie where it is on the floor, untouched whether the water is still there or not.
At the end of the Silence, one Earth will fall; there can be no two ways about it.
By the time they realize that our sleeper program is in effect, that we are coming to take over their world, it will be too late.
I spend an hour in the training room before bed. The examination is in a week, and I am afraid to fail. There is nowhere for failed carriers to go, and so they are killed. I am not the only one here. The training room is full despite the time. It’s hard to fall asleep when all you’re thinking about is that you could die in a week. For some of us, what we do with this final week in the cottages will determine the value of our lives. One week. I swallow hard as I turn on the screen and watch footage of my alternate’s life: her sitting for dinner with her family; her alone in her room. I watch the summarized footage of everything she has done today, doing my best to emulate her. To sit like she does and use the same hand gestures. I do this every night. By the time I am finished the cottages are quiet. I stumble into my bed.
I close my eyes and let myself fall into that space between sleeping and waking. Sometimes I see an old man in my dreams who speaks to me, who has been there since I was young. If he is not there, then I do not dream. The old man is waiting for me again tonight. He should not be there because the children of Earth II no longer dream. They say it was a sign no one noticed. Sometimes, when we were younger and still friends, Edith would shake me awake each time I got too loud, thrashing in my sleep, in case one of the other girls heard. Now I have learned to be frozen and to scream silently inside myself no matter what I dream about. Sometimes I feel as though it is only inside these dreams that I am myself, with all my fears and weaknesses exposed. It is the only way to know me.
One week, I think, and even in sleep I can feel my throat starting to close.
But I know who I am, I tell the old man.
Lirael.
My name, for as long as I have known it, is Lirael Harrison. I am fourteen years old, and I am from the other planet. I have spent the last eight years of my life in these woods, training to become someone else, learning not to love the things that I love, not to want the things that I want, not to walk the roads that I would have. In the end I will be the version of Lirael that only the people of this world recognize. In the end, without a second thought, we will kill our alternates so that we can take over their lives here. There is no other choice
. Some of the cities are already chock-full of sleepers. People who look and talk and act the same as they always did, who are not the same people at all, who are only pretending until all of this is over. People who trained where I have trained, who understand the importance of this mission and that many lives far greater than ours depend on our ability to stay secret, to never make mistakes, to always live two steps ahead. It is easier for the young ones like me, who did not grow up with their alternates, who can do the things that our parents cannot.
Madame likes to say, “Who says wars need to be fought with guns and bombs?”
Chapter 5
There are fourteen girls in my group and nineteen boys, and we have been very careful over the years not to love one another. It is a mistake to grow attached to someone you might never see again. A mistake to make friends you cannot keep. To form bonds that will have to break. We could not understand this when we were younger. We held hands in the dark and told stories about our families and how scared we were to suddenly be here, not there. They’d taken us when we’d least expected it, rounded us up like animals without telling us why we were chosen or where we were going until we were here in this world. It’s possible that some children were volunteered by their parents, and it’s possible that they were not. Who knows? Who has those insignificant memories anymore? It is the sort of thing that would be a burden to remember, a weight forever on your shoulders. All we could ever say for sure was that one moment we were in our houses, the next moment in dark vans, the next coming through the portal.
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