We used to have little confessionals. “They took me while I was shopping with my mother,” one boy would say. “They killed my mother, and then they took me,” someone else would say. Alex, of course. It was a game to see who had the worst story. I still don’t know if any of Alex’s stories were true, but they were always the worst, sometimes so bad I would even cover my ears, and he loved that, frightening me.
Madame hated us those first few months when we were stubborn and angry. When we would not eat or sleep when she ordered us to. “Why us?” we kept asking. “We don’t want to be here. We want to go back through the portal. We want to go home.”
I don’t remember her reply. I don’t know if she even had one.
I am the youngest of all the carrier girls. Most are at least a year older than me. But Madame says we already have the minds and the maturity of adults, and so that is how she treats us. She says our eyes are the window to our souls. When she looks, she sees only blackness there. That’s how it’s meant to be. That’s what it means to be the stronger version of a person, the version that survives. Genetically, physiologically, we are the same as our alternates. Same brains, same DNA, except somehow for the darkness.
I remember one of the boys crying one night and the sound of it echoing through the room. It kept us all awake. Finally some of us climbed out of our bunks and surrounded his. His older sister, he said, had been sick and dying of cancer. He knew that he would never see her again. He could not stop crying. Someone hugged him, I think. Someone whose face I cannot remember because it is no longer here, because it has evolved into a face like mine, detached over time. I think back to that night often, how we comforted him, and I do not know whether we were better people then, but I know we were more like them. The people who live here in this world. The people who are not sure that they want our lives to end when we have already decided on theirs.
I linger a little when it’s time to get up today. New children have replaced us in the bunkers, and I am supposed to be downstairs with them. It is the job I hate most of all, chasing after them, making sure they don’t injure themselves. It is not time for them to know yet. They have not realized who and what they are.
When the time comes, they are the ones who will break their own spirits.
There are still so many of them. They are as angry as we were, and I wonder whose heart they intend to cut out. Which way they plan to run once they’re free: to the left or to the right?
There is nothing I won’t trade with the other girls not to be on the schedule. Unfortunately all the others in my group feel the same. Still, I spend most of my chore time begging whenever Madame has her back turned. I am very good at popping up when I am least expected—on the other side of a fridge or out from a cupboard just before it’s open. It’s easier to beg someone you’ve just made laugh. It’s the one time I intentionally make a fool of myself; I am desperate enough.
Finally I run into Margot, a tall, big-boned girl with her fluffy hair in ringlets. She’s coming out of my room even though hers is the one across. “What are you doing?” I ask her, narrowing my eyes.
“Well, what’s that in your hand?” she asks, one hand on her hip.
“Nothing,” we say at exactly the same time, dropping our best attempts at bribery inside our pockets. What other options do we have? How do we get out of this?
“I’ve hurt my leg,” Margot says, gesturing down. “I think maybe you should go downstairs without me.”
I let out a horrible cough. I say, “If you abandon me, I’m going to die of pneumonia right here on this floor. Do you want to see?”
She sighs, and her hair bounces on her head. “I swear those kids are worse than we ever were. Let’s just go in there and present a united front. That always works for Jenny, and she’s like a midget. The kids love her.”
“It’s probably not smart to say that to her face, though,” Julia calls from her bed, with the air of someone who has all the knowledge in the world. Margot and I poke our heads back into the room and see her sitting with a book. “She might try to kill you in your sleep or poison you at dinner.”
“Are you speaking from experience?” Margot asks solemnly, even though I can tell she wants to laugh.
Julia lies back on her bed and mutters to herself. We’re leaving, but I think I hear her say, “Even if I was, no one would do anything about it.”
Margot and I both look away. We cannot dispute it. Julia knows she is less valuable to us and to Madame than Jenny.
The chance that Julia will be alive after our examinations is slim.
I follow Margot down the stairs. On the other side of the door there is yelling. I yank it open, and Edith looks grateful. She swears underneath her breath and stumbles past us, half dazed, as if she has been starved of fresh air. Inside the room there are several fights going on, and the kids are yelling at one another. Margot and I stay standing at the door. “So,” I hear myself say unenthusiastically, “I guess I’ll take that corner and you can take the other side.”
“We were much better than them as kids, right?” Margot says.
“God, I hope so.”
She holds the door open, and I’m stupid enough to walk through it first. Naturally it shuts again behind me.
“I just need some time,” she says from the other side. “I just need one minute,” but I think she’s really hoping that I’ll settle the kids before she has to deal with them. Some of the other carriers are tougher than us, and meaner. They are the ones the children are afraid of. They are the ones who command fear and perfect silence, but I have not mastered the art of such cruelty. It is too fresh in my mind: the memory of living in the bunkers, myself; the memory of how the older kids would punish us with their fists when we did not obey them. Alex is a firm believer in this method. “It’s common sense,” he said once. “You show them what you’re capable of a few times, without Madame ever knowing, of course, and then they learn to fear you.”
I’m a disappointment to Margot when she finally enters fifteen minutes later. She wrangles two angry seven-year-old boys apart and then howls in pain as they converge on her hair. Her voice is high and scratchy. “No,” she says. “Sit down. Don’t do that. What is wrong with you people?”
A spitball lands on my neck. When I turn around, four dozen straight faces stare back at me, but the moment I look away again they’re giggling, hands over their mouths. I run my hands through my hair, and more wads of paper stick to my fingers.
“Okay, who did that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.
Nobody answers.
I shake my head. I am trying to seem angry, but the truth is that I envy them this. I think both Margot and I do. This camaraderie will not last forever, will not even last much longer than today.
“Everyone, please sit at your information desks and put on your headphones,” I say, gesturing to the cubicles with small white screens protruding from them.
“I don’t feel like it,” one of the boys, a notorious troublemaker, says.
I ignore him. He changes his mind when I reach for a box of biscuits on the shelf and pass it around. “Only if you are sitting at your cubicle,” I say, and I breathe a sigh of relief when he reluctantly obeys. Bribery is my only friend downstairs. When they are finally seated, I flick the switch that turns the screens on and watch their eyes glaze over as they are given information, each of them something different, some history that will help them take over their alternates’ lives when they are older. This is how it begins: hours of surveillance, of learning about the way your alternate walks, talks, sleeps, laughs until it enters you and you cannot breathe anything else, until you become that person, and then the real training sessions begin. By the time these children are eleven years old, they too will know how to kill.
There are sleepers whose sole task is to collect the information needed for training. To plant cameras and compile it all into data that play on these small screens. We don’t know much about them, and I suppose we never will since they are litt
le more than background noise to our lives.
While the children watch the screens, Margot and I sit by the door, flicking through books and magazines. I have two more to read before I am ready for my literacy test, before I know exactly the same amount of information that she does. I cross my legs and work with a highlighter. For a while the room is unnaturally quiet. There are no sounds from upstairs, no smells, no voices. Down here the younger carriers are not even sure whether it is day or night; they only know what we tell them: that when they have proved that they are willing to learn, to train, they will be allowed upstairs. But they are not all ready yet, I think, looking around the room at the rebellious ones, the angry ones.
Some are almost ready, though.
A girl named Lillian-Grace smiles at me whenever I look her way. She is much too old for the teddy bear she clutches in her hand, the thumb she sticks in her mouth, yet I think she could have been me. She has the same look of terror, of uncertainty in her eyes, although it grows dimmer every day. It is as though we understand each other. I would not be surprised to learn that she also does not know who her parents are, that for her this bunker is infinitely better than the orphanage they took her from back on the other Earth. I wink at her, and she flashes her missing teeth at me before turning back to her screen.
Margot and I have five days left; less than that. Five days before our time here is over, and we are torn between the things we want to do and the things we should be doing. Margot flinches when I lean over to see her book. The one she shouldn’t be reading falls out from between the pages. But when I smile, she smiles embarrassedly back at me. “Do you think we’ll be any good at this?” she asks quietly, and I notice for the first time that her eyes are blue with flecks of green in them. How is it possible that in eight years I have never noticed such an obvious thing? Why am I noticing now?
I shrug. “If we’re not, the testing will kill us.”
She plays with her hair. I can tell that she is not satisfied with this answer. “Do you think we’ll miss this place after we’ve left?” And then before I can answer, she blurts, “I know a boy and a girl who love each other. Who say they can’t help it.” Her cheeks are bright red, and she does not look at me when she says this.
My mouth falls open. “Did you tell Madame?”
She plays with the corner of her book. “I was going to. I don’t want any trouble.”
We fall silent. We both know she should have told. I realize suddenly that she is fighting the urge to cry, and I don’t know what to say, how to comfort her.
Love each other? Why would anyone be so stupid? Even the ones who sneak into each other’s beds, who kiss and secretly hold hands, live under no delusions of some happily ever after. We are not here to love. I stare at Margot until she gets herself back under control, and then she shakes her head. “Dumbasses,” she mutters viciously. “Let them get what is coming to them.”
I nod my agreement. This boy and this girl Margot knows, I am sure there have been countless others like them before us, and there will be more after. Perhaps even now in this room, with these children, two of them will lock eyes and decide on each other in irrevocable ways and choose their emotions over their world, their lives. It happens. They are sheep who fall out of the flock, who do not have what it takes to survive this world like we are meant to.
They won’t pass the testing. It is the most excruciating examination any of us will go through, designed to weed out our mistakes and to eliminate those who are not up to par. They do not have even the slightest hope of passing it.
Margot and I refocus our eyes on our books, both of us shaking our heads in disgust, both of us silent.
Love is what they have. The people of this Earth. Not us. Look how weak it has made them.
I am afraid that my ability to dream will make me weak, too.
I cannot figure out why this particular man is stuck in my head. I remember his face from the orphanage. I was four or five years old, and he was a janitor. I tripped over his mop one day, and when he helped me up, I heard him say under his breath, “You poor, poor children.”
I froze. It was the way he’d said it. Before that moment it had not occurred to me. That I was something to be pitied, but after that I never forgot it.
A few nights later the alarms in the orphanage went off. The man ran into our room with a rifle in his hand. He ran right up to the girl in the bed next to mine. “My name is Emilio Dupuy,” he told her. “Your name is Elsa Dupuy, and I am your grandfather. Your parents do not want you, but I do. I am here to take you home with me.”
He did not have to say much more than that. She went into his arms willingly. Not because she believed him—she probably didn’t—but she was like any orphan there. We all wanted to belong to someone, and we didn’t even really care who that person might be. Nothing could be worse, we thought, than the orphanage.
As voices drew nearer in the corridor, the man picked the little girl up. They rushed for the door, but at the last moment he turned to look at me. “You can come with us if you want,” he said.
I don’t remember agreeing, but suddenly the three of us were running. We made it out of the building and across the yard. We reached the gate. We were almost free when several security guards appeared, their guns drawn. The man was carrying the other girl in one shaky arm and holding his rifle in the other. It wasn’t even pointed straight. “Stay with me,” he told me, his voice low so nobody else could hear. “Just stick with me, and I’ll get us all out of here.”
I remember the cold. I was wearing my nightgown and no shoes.
When he let his rifle fall to the ground and reached for my neck instead, that was the last thing I expected. “Let us go or she dies,” he said. His hand was not tight around my neck, not enough for me to believe now that he really would have snapped it. But my minders believed him. I did not fully understand the look of fear on their faces then, but now I do. They did not like to waste their potential carrier, especially when there was already a good chance I would disappear. Every orphan counted.
We inched backward, out of the gate. The man started to say something to me, but he only managed a syllable. The single shot went right through his head. That it hit Elsa, too, was an accident. They both collapsed on top of me, and when I was rescued, I was covered in their blood.
I never thought about escaping again.
I learned later that he had gotten the job as a janitor in order to save Elsa. Every once in a while our minders would talk about it, thinking we were not listening.
It is one of those things I have been trying to let go of ever since.
On the day before the testing, the day before we are supposed to leave this place, I am using one of the punching bags in the training room when we hear a scream. It is early morning, the sun just risen, and usually we are either doing chores or about to start our training. Those of us already in the training room rush outside and find some of the girls huddled together by the cottage. “What happened?” I ask, but they are so shaken I can barely get them to speak.
Finally someone tells us.
Alex and Margot were found hanging from a tree near the river.
One of the boys, Alex’s best friend, found them a few minutes ago, already surrounded by blackbirds. My head shakes automatically in disbelief. I think of Alex as I knew him, trying to kiss me at the river, Margot, trying to get out of basement duty. Why would Alex and Margot be hanging from a tree? I want to ask, but I cannot form the words. I move past the shaken girls instead and walk until I can see what they have seen.
I stand there next to Madame in shock.
On the tree they are nothing but broken necks and pale bodies speckled with blood where the birds have pecked. Their eyes are wide, their hair falling over their faces, and I cannot reconcile any of it. I cannot tell myself that it is them I am seeing. My mind spins backward and makes my body retch. Madame wears a grim look and orders all of us back to the cottages, back to our training, as if nothing has happened,
as if they were never even here. We follow her orders silently, but we’re all shaking. It’s not supposed to affect us like this.
The note says that they wanted at least to leave on their own terms, together. Not in a testing room, not because they did not meet the necessary standards. Their hands are tied together by the gray ribbon from Margot’s hair, the same type we all wear in ours.
I know a boy and a girl who love each other. Who say they can’t help it.
What heavy lies we must tell to keep the truth from floating away from us.
Chapter 6
What happens next is that I cannot breathe. I lie on the hard floor, held there by a weight pressed against my neck. Nothing I do changes it: no movement, no fight. I imagine that I am turning a terrible color, that all the important events of my life will begin to flash before my eyes as they leak away. The tree from today. I climbed it with Alex and the others one afternoon and broke my arm when a branch snapped. It was possibly the most definitive moment of my childhood.
I remember Madame shaking her head over me, a half smile, half grimace on her face. I was an example that day, lying there, howling. “Why should I help you?” she said for everyone to hear, her voice cold and angry. “Why should I make you feel any better for disobeying me? Do you think the rules are for my amusement, you foolish girl?” But eventually she picked me up and carried me to the room we use as an infirmary. There she cleaned and wrapped my arm, and in my delirious state, I told myself she loved me. That she loved us all in spite of herself. She had to; we’d been with her since we were six or seven years old, all of us. Madame was the only mother most of us remembered. But she made me tear up the drawing I’d made her earlier that afternoon; with her watching, the pieces of charcoal-patterned paper scattered over my infirmary bed.
Then she removed her glasses and stood at the edge of my pillows. “Look at me,” she said, and I couldn’t. I focused on the mark beneath her chin instead. I could tell I had done something wrong. As it was, I was already trying not to cry, trying not to look at the drawing I’d etched so painstakingly, now nothing.
The Unquiet Page 3