The Unquiet

  Two boys tug at my clothes, ripping the fabric until it doesn’t cover me, while their friends watch and laugh. They promise that it’s only a little fun, they won’t hurt me. Only a little fun, and they surprise me all over again.

  Why do the biggest mistakes of our lives always look so small before they are made? Why isn’t a poisoned road lined with dead bodies or the stench of corpses until you’re standing right at the place that will kill you?

  The rain starts to fall. It is quiet. My head must have hit the ground hard because a fourteen-year-old girl who looks just like me drops to the ground next to me. I can see right through her like she is layers of nothing but water. She’s dead. She’s inside my head, but she watches me outside, too. The old man is also here, standing over me, and he says, Fight. Fight, dammit, but he is softer in the real world.

  “Pretty little thing, ain’t ya?” a large boy rasps, and then he sits right on my chest, heavy enough that it’s hard to breathe. Everything is spinning. Come on, come on, I think. Get up, Lira. All I need is for my head to stop spinning, my body to start functioning again. But the boy sits heavily on me as his friends cheer him on, and I cannot move. Can barely breathe.

  This might be what I deserve, I think tiredly. For who I am. For what I have done. For all the things I will still do.

  Get up, Lira. I must speak the words out loud because for a moment the boy glances at me. His eyes are blacker than any I have ever seen in this world, their world. The other boys even seem a little afraid of him. He’s holding me down, looking me over and smiling as if he has a terrible plan. Then he leans away to put out his cigarette and reach for his zipper, and the pressure on my chest eases. My lungs fill with air, my head clears, and I am me. I am a soldier again.

  If I were anyone else, this would be an unfair game. An unfair fight.

  But here is the thing:

  For all his darkness, my eyes hold no light, none at all.

  The feeling returns to my hands, my feet, as if I willed it so. I push the boy, and he tumbles off me in surprise. I am on my feet. We stare at each other, one monster to another. I have lost my green dress, but I know that I will win this.

  I am going to kill him.

  He must see something of this in my face because he lunges first. I don’t have time to think. My hands scramble around for the first weapon I can find. I pick up the rock and throw it hard without hesitating. The boy howls. There is a gash leaking blood down his forehead.

  He stumbles to his feet again and charges at me. He is furious now, and he uses his weight to throw me back down on the ground, but I am ready. When he’s close enough, my knees lock around his neck and squeeze until his face is first red, then purple, until he is lying there soundless, and then I stand, ready for the rest of them. Wearing only my underclothes.

  For a long moment everyone is silent. And then they make the mistake of thinking that my ability to kill is a fluke. Of thinking that every evil thing in the world looks like them: burly and mean and drunk.

  There’re more of them than me. But I do the best I can to be quick about it, to keep them from drawing any attention to us. I am strategic about positioning myself in the dark so that there will be no memory of me. The ones who remember this will remember only the shadow of a girl.

  All this lasts less than a minute. It feels longer. It would be longer, but Edith’s brother, Gray, turns up and twists their hands and knees until they scream. As he does this, I put the pieces together inside my head. He is meant to be the receiver of whatever is delivered to the warehouse today, and I am late. Very late. He must have been waiting. And now he’s going to be in trouble because of me.

  Afterward he says something, but my ears have stopped working. The words sounds something like “You’re usually here on time,” which makes me think that he knows what days I deliver and has been looking out for me. He does a quick sweep of our surroundings, to make sure no one saw us. I am still in my underwear.

  “I can, um, carry you so you don’t have to—” he says, gesturing with his hands to the wet ground and looking embarrassed.

  The look on my face stops him from finishing. “Right,” he says, still not looking at me, and starts walking. “This way.”

  I follow him into his truck, where he turns up the heat and rummages around inside the back until he finds something. An oversize sweatshirt, a pair of jeans. “I sleep in here sometimes,” he says, answering a question I did not ask. I pull the clothes on over my frozen body while I stare out the window, not even embarrassed, just numb. My own green dress is lying in tatters somewhere back there by the garbage bin, by the bodies that are no longer moving.

  “Are you okay?” he asks. “Are you hurt?”

  I shake my head.

  He stares at me. “Are you sure? Do you want to talk about it?”

  I shake my head again.

  He gestures down, and when I look, I notice that there is blood seeping through his shirt, just a drop, so close to my breast.

  “Lira,” he says.

  “Don’t,” I whisper without finishing. Don’t be this person. I don’t want you to be.

  He understands somehow.

  Gray and I sit in silence. “I think we missed one,” he says after a moment, his hands fisted on the steering wheel. My head whirls back to the bin, and I see it. A dark lump, crawling across the ground, possibly going for help. Before Gray can say or do anything, I am out of the car. I walk toward the boy without any feeling or sentiment inside me. I am all monster now, and I do not know whether my fist connecting with the boy’s face twice will kill him. But at the very least I owe him a concussion.

  When I am finished, I see the watch Edith gave me lying on the ground. I pick it up, hold it tight inside my hand as I walk away.

  I climb back into the truck. I know that I should say this is my fault, say I will take full responsibility, say that everything will be all right, but instead I say, “The food. The kids at your cottage will starve.” My voice is barely more than an empty whisper, and Gray looks startled that I spoke at all. He clenches his jaw and leaves the truck again, starts picking up the food. A smashed loaf of bread here. A dented bottle of milk there. But with each thing he picks up he seems to be getting angrier. “Fuck it,” I hear him say eventually. “We’ll go buy more tomorrow.”

  But I come out and help him put the food together again. The ones that are still good, that are not broken or spoiled. I remember the days we starved. I remember the days Madame would say, “It’s not safe for me to go into the city,” and all we would have was a cup of flour. We would sit at the river all day, drinking water until our bellies hurt, pretending that our mouths tasted of apple pie instead. Character building, Madame called it. When we were young, those days—when our characters were still in their infancy—were the worst of our lives.

  We do not speak as we load up the truck, but it is understood that we must take the food. There will be no character building, not tonight, not if we can stop it.

  We step over the bodies and all the blood. We step over the ones who look like they’re only sleeping and the ones who might never wake again. Once I trip over myself in his clothes, which are bigger than I am, but eventually we’re back in the truck. And in my hand, covered in dirt and blood, I hold on to the watch Edith gave me more tightly than ever. I know that tonight is supposed to turn me the other way. Make me think that staying out of trouble is the smartest thing, that sticking to routines and protocols are the only things that keep us from breaking. And maybe I will think so tomorrow. But tonight, when Gray asks quietly, “Do you want to turn on the watch?” I know it means I can disappear from this city, from this world for tonight, and so in response I open my hand. I turn on the watch.

  And then he puts the truck into gear.

  We do not speak to each other. I do not ask where we’re going. We drive out of the city and toward the trees. It is always toward the trees. Somewhere deep inside a forest Gray stops the truck. “Do you want to come in?” he asks,
gathering the food in his arms.

  “I’ll wait here,” I say, and wrap my arms around myself. Somewhere in the distance a light flickers on and I hear children squealing. I imagine how excited they are about the smallest things—the bags of tea, the biscuits, the bread rolls that are just as important to inhale as to eat.

  Some of them, a few boys who want to pretend to drive Gray’s truck while he is not looking, wander this way. I think about cowering and pretending not to be here, but in the end we’re all just staring at one another through Gray’s open door. “Oh,” one boy says eventually, backing away, disappointment written all over his face. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  I force myself to smile and wave them inside. “Hurry up. I won’t say a word about this to anyone,” I say. “Not even him.” I’m sure he knows already.

  They give me Cecily’s grin and climb inside. A tubby boy with red hair and freckles flashes his gapped teeth at me. He stutters when he talks. “Do you know how to play ISA, miss?”

  His friends nudge him. “Don’t be stupid, Frederich. Of course she doesn’t know how to play ISA. It’s for boys.” And then they talk over one another, trying to teach me the game. ISA stands for International Space Adventure. Another boy named Gavin, who isn’t here, came up with it.

  That is all I hear.

  The steering wheel turns to the left and to the right. I cannot picture all the places we’re going to. From imaginary adventures in London to the forests of Brazil, driving against the wind. The good guys chasing the bad guys turn into the bad guys chasing the good. I must fall asleep in the middle of their game, because when I wake up, three faces are peering over me and they do not belong to children. Edith’s is one of them, but Gray’s isn’t.

  “He dropped you off. Said you fell and bumped your head,” Edith says. I can tell from her voice that she does not believe it. I stand up and pretend that my head does not hurt, that I am swaying because I want to.

  We are still on the edge of the city. In a small lonely house on a dark road that has all its windows barred. It is their weekly film night, and there are seven of us altogether. Gray (who isn’t here), Edith, a boy and a girl both named Robbie. The girl explains that her name is Roberta, but everyone calls her Robbie. Better that, she says, than Robin, and makes a face. I am surprised to see Julia, though she feels like a stranger to me now, as though we never really knew each other. I didn’t realize Edith was her friend. Her skin is still pale, her face still soft and shy, and there is almost something frailer about her blue-green eyes. Because of this, everyone bet against her ever making it onto the yellow bus, but she did. I remember Davis, too, who steps forward and holds out his hand for mine. “Oh, you,” I say in a voice that makes everyone laugh.

  He clutches his chest and sighs. “Thirty seconds into this, and you’ve already hurt my feelings. If it’s your math victories you’re thinking of, don’t worry. I haven’t even learned to spell properly yet. Madame would be horrified if she knew the kind of life I was leading, grammatically, that is.”

  “I doubt she’d be impressed if she knew anything about your life, Davis,” Edith says.

  He shrugs. And then he does the strangest thing. He hugs me. This is so unlike Davis that I don’t know what to do with it. Especially because before I opened my eyes, I heard him ask Edith, “So, this is who you meant? Are you sure we can trust her?”

  “Yes,” Edith said.

  The group disperses back to a small couch in front of the television. I stare at them. We assumed as children that we were the only cottage in this region. That there was one Madame, one set of examinations. But the world must be peppered with cottages like ours and with others who trained at the same time as we did—perhaps even in the very same woods as we did—and were released into our world, too. It is strange to be standing in the same room as them—the two Robbies.

  I clutch my side until I see Edith watching me. “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing,” I tell her, and drop my hand.

  I look around. It’s not a very nice house. A small heater blasts at full force, but even then it is freezing cold. There are things that need fixing and smells that have no real origin; they just make up the air. Dirty cups fill the kitchen sink; food brims over in the fridge; even the toilet croaks. There are two bedrooms, the kitchen, and the living room. Outside, I find a garden that grows tall and appears untended except for a vegetable patch in the corner. We are on a large farm, and somewhere in the near distance there is a chicken coop and somewhere else, a cow. Edith points everything out proudly and holds my hand. Everyone’s even wearing varying shades of gray—gray shirts and shorts, jeans, some of the girls even with their hair in ponytails. It is like a regression to the things that made us feel safe, the old things of comfort. But even so there is fear here. I hear it in the things that are not said and in the things that are. Fear of being found and all kinds of attempts to disguise that fear. The cherry red curtains hung up against the boarded windows that will never see sunlight. A vase of fresh flowers on the table. A pile of magazines in a corner of the room. A radio underneath the couch. A large collection of books, of games and even a small typewriter. But there is no telephone, and it is dark, and they only ever come here at night or early in the morning when no one will notice.

  We’re safe here for now, but eventually there will be another house or farm, another secret meeting place.

  I sit down in front of the television.

  Edith passes me the bowl of popcorn. She smiles at the look on my face and whispers, “We only do normal things here. No sleeper stuff.” I grab a handful of the food, cross my legs, and lean back against the couch, thinking, We have never done normal things in our lives. We are not normal. We could die for this, this small, small moment, and that’s not normal. We are supposed to be soldiers. All seven of us.

  I eye the door. I count the steps it would take to reach it. Six, maybe seven. Seven steps to walk away.

  “Okay, girls,” Davis says, pushing his hair back over his forehead, “I need your honest opinion here.” He tilts his head toward the television. “If I got a perm exactly like his, would you date me?”

  I laugh.

  Chapter 23

  I go back to the farmhouse three more times before I manage to convince Edith to tell me exactly how their technology works. I am mastering the art of sneaking over after completing a mission. Tonight there was no mission; I just snuck out. My family is already asleep from the concoction I gave them. “It’s not enough to tell me that this is safe,” I tell Edith. “I need to know why I’m safe. How do we know nothing bad is going to happen to us?”

  She hesitates, as if she has to choose her words carefully. We are washing pots and dishes in a bucket outside, pretending that we are at the river again. That we are younger and it is the old days. The pots are the results of Edith’s latest cookbook recipe. It looked good on paper, but when we actually tried to make it, bad things happened. As if to prove the point, Davis leans out the window, holding a chicken leg that is so black it looks painted. He tries to bite into it, but the thing is rock hard. “Mmm, so good,” Davis says, still trying to bite into it. “So, so good.”

  “Geez, Davis, we get it,” I say. “You do the cooking next time, okay?”

  His eyebrows go up. “You’re getting feisty, Lira. I like it.” And then he quickly shuts the window before I can spray him with water.

  I can see that Edith is hoping I have forgotten about my question, but I haven’t. “I need to know,” I say.

  “Okay. There are two types of watches,” she says. She nods toward my wrist. “The one you’re wearing is basic. It just scrambles the signal of your tracker so they can’t figure out exactly where you are.”

  “What’s the other type?” I ask.

  She reaches inside her pocket and pulls out a small black button. “Put this underneath your mattress when you get home,” she says. “Whenever it’s on, the tracker will always say that you are home, no matter where you are. But remember
to turn it off whenever you’re actually somewhere you should be. You don’t want to overuse it.”

  I take the black button. It feels cool against my fingers, like some kind of metal. There is a switch at the back. I drop it gently inside the pocket of my sweater. “I’m supposed to trust that tiny thing with my life?” I ask her, not sure that I am convinced. “What if I forget to turn on the watch? Or the black button stops working?”

  She hesitates again.

  I frown. “Edith.”

  “Lira,” she says, and then she meets my eyes with a reassuring smile. “We have thought of everything. We wouldn’t be here, doing this, if we hadn’t. Honestly the watches are just our backup method in case things go wrong. We have more secure ways, but they’re complicated. And I would tell you everything right now, but the others want to be able to trust you first. So I can’t tell you. First you have to trust us.”

  I turn back to the dishes, trying to decide whether to leave or not. Does Edith understand what she is asking me to do? Trust goes against everything we believe in.

  “What?” I ask when I notice the look she is giving me. “Why are you smiling like that?”

  “Do you still have those dreams?” she asks.

  I know exactly what she is talking about, but I stare at her as blankly as I can. I don’t like how quickly she wants to change the subject. Makes me wonder what she is keeping from me.

  “That was how we became friends, remember? You told us you thought you were sick because you could dream when the rest of us couldn’t. And you were going to tell Madame in case there was a cure.”

  I remember.

  Edith talked me out of it.

  It was as if all the carriers had arrived in this world and stopped dreaming exactly when I started. They dreamed about nothing but blackness. The old man holding my memories is all I have ever dreamed about.