I get by.
I smile and get by. I’m all alone. Even if I were permitted to, I could never love them as much as they love me—I must be incapable of it, I think, must have lost the ability somehow, somewhere along the road—but we all get by. There is blood on my hands, but it doesn’t count if nobody else can see it.
And somehow I have reached Safe status.
Chapter 14
I was nervous to meet them, and then, once I did, I was afraid to know them, to really, truly know them beyond the things that a screen had taught me all those years. Not afraid exactly, but wary, like a girl who suspects her hand might be reaching out for a heap of hot coals. It was bound to burn me. I was bound to mess up. I already had, outside, just moments before with Edith and Gray. I had messed up in the worst way a sleeper could, and I was almost surprised to still find myself alive.
I still am, sometimes.
On My First Night:
My grandfather is an old man with white hair and a full beard. The suspenders make his pants too short, but he likes to see his socks. Likes to make sure that they’re the same color and that they match his shoes. There is a long line of stories scribbled on his face that I could trace with my fingers, and the first time I meet him I want to say, I know you, and I want to say, I have never seen you in my life. Instead I sit down to dinner and pretend because his lined face looks angry. Once the food is served, he doesn’t like to wait. He waited twenty minutes for me, yelling my name throughout the house and finally outside. “Where have you been?” he asks with gritted teeth, but I don’t answer. He says a prayer, and I dump some mashed potatoes onto my plate without any gravy. Everyone is quiet. I, too, sit in silence, fork at my mouth. When the old man leans forward, suddenly I jump. “All right, Lira,” he says, tenting his hands in front of his face, “I’m just going to say what everyone is thinking.”
I know I am about to be chastened for being late. But before he can begin, a large hairy creature jumps off the top of my head and scurries across the dinner table. Everyone screams. We scramble away from the table, as fast as we can, splashing food everywhere. No one ever really likes spiders, but nobody reacts like me. Nobody does my strange dance around the room, afraid that something else might fall from my clothes, half screaming, half crying.
I can’t even remember whether my alternate is supposed to be scared—of things, bugs, of giant spiders. I don’t even know whether it is about the spider or a residual effect of what happened outside with Edith and Gray. It’s like I am standing outside my own body, watching myself overreact, and I cannot do anything about it. Is that what a panic attack feels like? Where is my courage, my strength?
I am Lirael.
I am the cottage girl again and horrified. I didn’t even last five minutes.
The old man is looking for his glasses, but he is too slow. Eventually the little girl stomps on it with her boot. The hairy black thing that becomes a blob of goop because she doesn’t stop at fifteen stomps or even twenty. Twenty might not be enough for a thing that big and that hairy.
When it’s over, we reclaim our seats at the table. My face is hot and sweaty, my hair sticking to my temples. I clear my throat and pick up my fork. I try to tell myself that this is nothing. That it doesn’t matter, but I can feel everyone’s eyes on me as we eat. I force the food down my throat.
It is the old man who laughs first, and then the old woman. The little girl stares at me for a moment before she laughs, too.
They have not seen my failure. They have not recognized this moment for what it really was, with the girl who is not their granddaughter or sister. They think it was perfectly normal.
The old man clutches his belly, and his laughing voice is a loud boom, a contrast with when he talks. “I was going to ask why there were twigs in your hair,” he says. “Seems like you’ve answered my question. You keep climbing those trees and you’re going to break your neck one of these days.” But his chastisement is lost because he’s laughing so hard he can barely form words.
Say something, say something, I think.
“And I suppose you wouldn’t notice until dinnertime.”
“Twenty minutes past at the very latest,” he promises.
They spend the rest of the evening falling into fits of laughter. The whole time I am afraid they know, afraid that they can smell it on me, the fear, the blood, the death of their Lirael. She is right outside in the ground, the voice inside my head says. I was not climbing any trees.
I don’t want to laugh. But I do. And it sounds loud and sincere coming from my lips.
My heart thumps inside my chest, my hands sweat, and I realize that I am afraid of them. Her family. My family. I arrived scared and ugly, only half a person, and now I have to learn how to hide it. I have to get used to it. The strangeness. The fear. The unpredictability of living in the real world.
I wake up every day from Mondays to Fridays, from Saturdays to Sundays, and suddenly one month, two, three, ten months have passed. I am not used to it. The ripple of time. The sound of laughter. No Madame. No cottage children. No sleeper anthems. I am growing old faster behind my eyes. I am aging from the exhaustion of it all. Of pretending.
It was the old woman I met first, with the same shock of white hair as her husband. She was standing at the door, and she said, “Oh, hush,” to her yelling husband, “here she comes now,” and she smiled at me with her crooked teeth. “Dinner is ready, sweetheart,” she said, gesturing to the table, where her husband was glowering.
I met the little girl last and liked her first.
We were praying right after I rushed in, and I opened my eyes and saw her, and she ran her finger across her throat and then quickly closed her eyes again. You’re dead meat. I liked her because she expected nothing from me. Because it was enough that she was herself and all I had to do was close my eyes, too.
Months have passed since the beginning of my life. I am still thinking about the spider and how it seemed to say, “Welcome. We intend to make this difficult for you.” But time is passing, and the dead girl is still dead. For a whole year she has been dead. . . .
There are other things I am not proud of. Moments I want to peel off my skin. “I thought you liked banana bread?” someone will say, or, “I thought you were never going to wear those shoes again?” Worse moments: “What is wrong with you?” or, “Why are you suddenly like this?” or, “Sometimes I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” Or, “Go to your room.”
If there really is darkness in my eyes, then that explains why it is so hard, hard, hard to pretend to have a light shining there. The light can snuff itself out and become dark, but how does the dark become light? How do you start a fire with nothing? I have nothing.
Sometimes.
I wish I were never a cottage girl at all sometimes, in my weakest moments, when I am lying in the dark and there are no snoring voices in bunks all around mine, no schedules, when I wake up and find that this is the life I am in, this is the present that I was predestined to live.
Sometimes I write my words down; then I burn them or drown them or they never escape the confines of my skull.
And I tell myself that I don’t mean any of this.
I am not afraid. I am not weak.
I am not. These things were never said.
Chapter 15
“You’re going to leave me here again, aren’t you?” Cecily asks as I pocket the money from the boxes. But she is already shrugging out of her coat and into an apron that the baker’s wife hands her. We have an arrangement. The baker’s wife looks after Cecily while I run errands and buy Gigi’s medicine. She tells Cecily that today they are going to make croissants, which is an intricate process that only little hands can properly accomplish. “I’ll just turn the radio up a little,” she says with a wink, “and then we can start.”
She is a short, round woman with dark, wispy curls and reminds me of my grandmother when she was better.
I offer her a grateful smile as I turn to leave.
>
“It’s almost as if there’s nothing out there but emptiness right now,” a crackly voice is saying on the speakers as I reach for the door. “All the folks listening who have lived as long as I have will agree that it has never felt quite like this before. Like we are alone in the world . . .”
The topic of conversation on the radio is always the same: the Silence, the possibility of war, the waiting. Most people roll their eyes now. At school I once watched a film about the beginning of the Silence. That initial panic has ebbed away. And they roll their eyes a little more every day, stare up at the sky, and dare them, whoever is out there, to come with their bombs and their missiles. Beg them to come. Anything but this waiting. Anything.
They have no idea what they are asking for.
“Be good. I’ll be right back,” I say, and step out of the shop, pull my coat tighter around my body. Even though there is a pharmacy nearby, I make my way right across town, taking the paths least trodden, avoiding people and their familiar faces. All sleepers exist in a state of paranoia. Always afraid that we are being watched. That the people here suspect us.
I am always looking. Backward and forward and sideways.
A woman is sweeping the front of her shop. I walk right into her pile of dirt.
“Sorry,” I say quickly, but she swats at me with her broom anyway. It’s all done rather good-naturedly because to her she has known me for years and I go to school with her daughter.
I saw a girl from the cottages once, one afternoon when I was running errands for my grandfather in the city. She did not notice me; she was walking with her friends, laughing, hands waving in the air animatedly. She was older. I wondered for a moment whether I had just conjured her up because I had run out of people to imagine seeing. But then I realized that we all grew up together so that we would be dispersed into a world close together. Even now we are a unit, a team. Since then I have seen more of us from the cottages, some who offer me a quick, friendly smile, some who look right through me. I have to confess; I am a lot more enthusiastic to see them, eyes always flickering about, always hoping. I overheard my handler say that over the last year people are moving through the cottages faster. That per the instructions of our government, there are no longer eight- to ten-year learning curves. As if some sort of invisible deadline were pedaling up to meet us.
A small flower shop sits on a dirty, lonely side of town, lost among the older forgotten buildings. The walls are skewed; they intend to cave in slowly and hope no one notices. When I knock on the shop door, a short, bespectacled man peers out at me before opening it. He is thin, made up of sharp, angular edges, has a pointy mustache, and reminds me a bit of a praying mantis. He says nothing to me, just holds the door open. Inside his shop there are so many plants that it is nearly impossible to move. He glares at me when I knock a flowerpot over, and even though I straighten it before I reach the counter, his scowl does not go away. His radio is blaring in the background. The air inside the flower shop is musty, as if the plants are competing with us instead of helping us, and the blinds are drawn, too. I pretend not to mind.
The man bends, reaches underneath his counter, and retrieves something wrapped in a frayed cloth. I know even before I unwrap it what I will find. The piece of paper with the writing on it. The syringe. The phone. I know he is watching, so I force my hands not to shake as I pick up the paper and read it. The rest I tuck away inside my messenger bag. A year ago I knew nothing about Safe status. I thought it was this simple: you took over your alternate’s life after killing her, you lived exactly as she would have. Sometimes you would be given an older sleeper who was ill to look after until he was better, and that was it. But then I met my handler, Miss Odette. Now I know that you receive Safe status when you have been watched in your new life for long enough to determine that you are in an optimal location, optimal lifestyle to do more work for our people. More work does not always mean a syringe. Sometimes more work is a gun to deliver. A knife. A nail in the road to cause a car accident. Sometimes more work is carrying a bag of groceries to a seemingly abandoned building and leaving it there. Groceries like bread and milk, like medicine, for the ones still in the cottages, the ones like us. Sometimes work is good and work is bad, and I think that the consequence of failing either is to be sent back to the cottages to be a Madame, where little children and their bedtimes and burying bodies that hang from knotted trees become one’s job.
The good thing is that Safes are no longer watched, at least not as rigorously as those who are not Safes. When I first left the cottages, they were everywhere. People following me. People listening in on every conversation I had on the streets. People pretending to read newspapers whenever I walked by, even though they knew I could see them. They weren’t really trying to hide from me. They wanted me to know that they were there, that they were everywhere. But now it is quiet. I am mostly on my own. I have had a year to earn it.
I come to the flower shop once a week. I come in the mornings or afternoons to retrieve my missions, and then I fulfill them at night, when my family is asleep.
“Is there a problem?” the man says, breaking through my thoughts.
I blink back into the present, having read the string of numbers on the piece of paper. “Do I have a time frame for this?” I ask.
“By tonight, if possible,” he says. “Midnight.” He usually gives me a week.
I think of Cecily waiting for me, and my heart sinks. I can’t do it now. And it’ll be a few hours, at least, before I can sneak out of the house and ride back to the city. “I might be late.”
The man says nothing, and I sigh. I am supposed to be able to find a way to fulfill the mission without compromising myself. I take the lighter he offers me and burn the piece of paper right in front of him and then leave. But I trip over the same pot again, and this time it shatters. Soil pours everywhere, including on me. The man curses and runs to clean up the mess. I only catch little bits of what he is saying, “. . . clumsy people . . . stupid little girls . . . do not want any of your help . . .” He bends with a dustpan and brush. I shake my shoes free of clumps of soil.
I am not sure at what moment we both freeze and look at each other, at what moment the radio becomes more important than his precious pot, his precious flowers.
The announcer on the radio is speaking excitedly. Voice high, as if he just really wants to burst into tears.
“The Silence is over,” he says, “and has been for some time.”
The flower shop man lets go of his brush, and I straighten. We both stand there, frowning at each other as we listen.
Apparently a few months ago, the presidents from our planet reached out to the presidents here, and they have been having conferences—about relocations, about vaccinations, about science.
“There might be no war after all,” the man on the radio says, voice still shaken. “Everyone might be safe.”
After this announcement the radio goes silent. It is just me and the flower shop man again. But we say nothing to each other. I shake the remaining dirt from my clothes and shoes and leave the man to clean his shop. Outside, I hold the phone to my ear, dial the number that was written on the paper, and a voice answers. I used to think it was automated, but now I think that someone is on the other end and that his voice is muffled by some kind of computer. That voice gives me the name of the man the syringe belongs to, his location tonight, and how to reach him. When I hang up the phone, I destroy it. I catch a bus back to the bakery. It is faster than walking back. I ignore everyone on the bus, marveling at the joyous news, at the possibility that the Silence is finally over. The old talk about how they have missed their alternates. They tell their grandchildren how wonderful it is to know your other self, to know all the best and worst possibilities of yourself. Because one is always better than the other.
“Wait till you see, Annie,” a white-haired woman in front of me says, her voice loud and crackly. She squeezes her granddaughter’s hand, wipes a tear from her eye with the other. “Yo
u will love your other Grandma Josephine. And she will be so happy to finally meet you, but not nearly as excited as the other Annie.”
This Annie’s eyes are wide. Her little blond head bobs with either excitement or terror or both.
Everyone is telling stories like these. For them the end of the Silence means everything will go back to the way it once was.
I want to tell them all no.
Our people have come too far already; they don’t know what we have done to them. What we will continue to do.
We are the worst versions of them; we never truly believed in this idea of two worlds to begin with. Forty years ago our first star disappeared, and no one thought anything of it. Then people started to disappear, vanished into thin air right before our eyes as if they had never been. And then buildings and trees, and massive holes appearing in the ground, causing earthquakes. Some days the sun would come out, touch us, and on others it would hide away. There are cold patches on our planet now. Places where the ocean has frozen over. Places where it never stops snowing. These are not stories that we had to be told. I lived in that world for six years.
We didn’t agree to the Silence because we wanted to think about how to fix things. We agreed because we did not want them to know the truth: that our planet was collapsing on top of us. That the universe was literally choosing between every man and woman in the worlds, and ours was the one chosen to go, to die, to disappear.
The Unquiet Page 7