As Aliona knelt by the heart machine on empty nights without them, the knowledge of what she could do—if she really wanted to stop the pain and bring Katrin and Ray back to her—popped through her mind. She fondled the two metal wires wrapped in Katrin’s and Ray’s hair. Katrin and Ray had grown up with the heart machine, had learned to care for orphans and to love Victor with its power coursing through them. Had the government and Victor managed to hook them up to the slick new machines yet? Aliona had heard, in the Oasis, that the new heart machines required only a prick of the finger and a drop of blood pressed against a scanner to get going. But how long would the registration paperwork take? And what would Katrin and Ray do if they lost Aliona’s heart machine before they gained access to a new one?
Aliona lurched away from the cracked white basin, sick that she would even think of something like this. She clenched her eyes shut and pretended it was last month, last year, any other time in their life. She pretended Katrin was braiding her hair and Ray was recounting some gossip from the rich people in the Oasis.
It didn’t help one bit.
* * *
On a thunder-rumbling night, nine days after Ray abandoned her, Aliona left the Storefront. She locked the door and strode through the palm-whispering streets.
She would find Katrin. She would somehow sneak into the government flats. She would talk to her friend, the girl whose soothing voice had always managed to calm Aliona right down. Then the pain would leave her. It had to. She wouldn’t resort to that, that last solution that had clawed at her mind since she’d knelt by the heart machine and ran her fingers over their hair-encrusted wires...
She banged a right down the boulevard, blacked-out windows of other storefronts blurring as they churned by. A blank-eyed man leered at her from a stoop, and she shouted at him to leave her the fuck alone, flicking her pocketknife.
Finally the rows of storefronts fell away and she walked on weed-choked sidewalks past empty lots. Then, on the horizon before her, thousands of warm lights flickered from the row of cement highrises where Katrin lived now.
Aliona walked to the fence that hemmed in the highrises, wrapped her fingers around the wire. On the other side of the fence, a path of paver stones led off into the humid dark.
Katrin was somewhere in there, taking care of kids born on the street, getting ready to take their first Aptitude Test to determine whether they might be teachers or caregivers or servants in the Oasis, or whether they were good for nothing. The world in there, the world of the caregivers, smelled different, not like urine and sweat. Aliona’s throat constricted with the pain. Katrin, Katrin, Katrin, the name hammered inside her.
She didn’t know how to break into the government compound. The fence loomed over her, topped by spiky wires thrumming with electricity.
But she did know how to break into the Oasis. She would go see Ray instead, soothe her tight chest that way.
Aliona turned away from the highrises and hurried back down the highway. She wended her way through the boulevards, past some warehouse with the sounds and bright lights of a fête trailing out onto the street, and climbed the hill, where the sidewalks became unbroken, where magnolia trees dropped petals onto her head. She stopped by the stucco wall, her heart twinging as she remembered the dozens of times when she and Ray and Katrin had stopped by this very wall, sneaked into the Oasis together exactly the same way. Aliona shook away those memories, stuck her pocketknife into a thin crack in the stucco, then put her bare foot on the protruding handle and hauled herself up, wrapping her hands around the top of the wall below the barbed wire. A few years ago, she’d hacked and sawed at the wire with her old pocketknife, breaking the knife but making a hole in the wire big enough to shimmy through. Now, she pushed herself through—Ray had always needed help at this part—the barbed wire on either side of the hole scratching up her arms. She dropped through the dark and fell into the clump of bushes on the other side. She scrambled up, swiped away the blood bubbling on her arms from the wire—who cared, really, the pain from that was nothing compared to the throbbing in her stomach and chest—then set off down the path. Red-roofed mansions loomed through the trees, and the sound of laughter and a bubbling fountain trailed from somewhere. Aliona kept on towards the terrace where Victor and his friends always hung out, passing the swimming pool where she and Ray and Katrin used to swim when they first started sneaking into the Oasis, their arms and legs slicing through the chlorinated water under soft outdoor lights. Those first weeks sneaking in had been another kind of Aptitude Test, the sort of test Aliona might have passed if she had been shiny and pretty enough to the Oasis boys. But she had failed that one too.
The terrace appeared behind the trees, and Aliona climbed the steps, towards the sound of voices—bright voices, well-spoken voices, and then that voice, Ray’s voice, a high voice with sharp vowels, chimed in. Aliona peered around the white curtains fluttering at the edges of the terrace. Her breath caught at the sight of Ray, in a white wrap-around dress like a real lady, perched on a backless couch, her feet dangling in the small pool sunk in the middle of the terrace. Aliona didn’t care about the gold lamps, Victor and his white-suit-wearing friends swilling their glasses of gin, even the sleek silver box humming in a corner that must be the latest heart machine model; no, she only cared about Ray, her messy hair sleeked into a bun, her smile small, her head cocked.
It was going to be all right. Aliona could survive this. She could. She would come up here and see Ray every once in awhile, and that would give her something to look forward to.
It would be enough.
Aliona pushed out from behind the white curtains. “Ray.”
Ray jumped, splashing water onto the patterned tiles around her. “Allie?”
“Oh no. Oh, no, I don’t think so.” Victor set down his glass, swaggered forward. “How did you get in here?”
“Fuck off, Victor. I’m here to see Ray.”
“Yeah, no, you’re not. Get out of here.”
“Ray, I just came by to see you, just to see how you’re doing here. I wanted to make sure you’re okay, and I thought we could—”
“Take care of this.” Victor jerked his head at the two white suits on either side of him, boys who had flirted with Ray around the pool back in the day and ignored Aliona and Katrin. The suits started forward, jaws square and hands large.
Ray’s head swiveled between Victor and Aliona, her eyes big and moist.
“Ray.” Why wasn’t Ray telling Victor to leave her alone? Why wasn’t she standing up for Aliona?
“You should go, Allie.”
Ray mumbled it at her feet. The words closed around Aliona’s heart.
You should go.
You should go.
You’re not wanted here.
Aliona lunged away from the white suits looming over her. One of them reached towards her and she spit right in his eye. He howled, but she barely heard it through the ringing in her ears, as the pain from Ray’s words thrummed through her body, parched her throat, swam in her head. She fled the terrace, back through the silent garden. She scrambled up the wall, flopped over the other side, pulled her pocketknife out of the stucco.
She barely remembered the walk home: it all blurred into a headache pulsing behind her temples, and then she was back in the Storefront, locking the door with shaking hands. She stumbled to the heart machine. She tossed in her old shorts and lit a match.
You’ll never see Ray again.
They have better lives.
Because they’re better than you.
She balled up her spare tank top, tossed that in too. She sawed off her two braids with her pocketknife and tossed them in, and then she tossed her knife in too.
It didn’t help. Nothing would help. She couldn’t do it alone. She couldn’t forget them, and the ache in her head, the tightness in her chest, they wouldn’t go away, they wouldn’t stop...
She clenched her teeth and eyes against the pain and when she opened them again, they fell on
the three wires, wound up in hair and topped with brittle baby teeth.
She could pull out her own wire. She could do it, and become blank-eyed as those girls she had envied in the bread line.
But why should she give up the right to feel? It wasn’t fair of them to leave her. It was really fucking unfair. She had given them happiness and hope and tears and everything, and they had left her to fend for her own aching heart. And Ray had said, You should go. Go.
What gave them the right to do that? How dare they?
Her chest popped and black stars burst in her vision and her hands trembled and she screamed and a rat flickered in the shadows. Next thing she knew, she was tearing at the heart machine, ripping Ray’s metal wire off the basin, tossing it to the side, ripping at Katrin’s too. Then she collapsed at the side of the machine, burying her throbbing head in her hands.
All night, lighting flashed around the edges of the blacked-out Storefront windows. As the city sighed into dawn, the front door rattled, and shouts trickled into the room. Aliona leapt up, unlocked the door, flung it open.
They shoved inside. Katrin’s sleepless eyes were shadowed above purple bags and waxy cheeks. Ray’s hair hung matted and she wheezed, her white dress torn.
“What did you do?” Katrin gasped. “What...”
Aliona’s a monster. Aliona heard it between Katrin’s words. Maybe she was a monster, because now she couldn’t go back, couldn’t let them go. Just seeing them here, even choking on their pain without the heart machine, swelled her with strength. They still need you.
“Promise you won’t leave again,” she said, as the throbbing in her head, the pounding in her chest, receded, leaving only a dull ache, the ghost of pain.
“How could you do this?” Katrin leaned on her thighs, gasping. “How?”
“If you don’t swear, I won’t undo it.”
“You’re insane,” Ray said. “You have to let us go.”
She couldn’t. She couldn’t let them go. She couldn’t go >back to the way things were when she was alone.
“Fine, I swear,” Katrin shouted. “I swear, I swear. Just undo it.” “Me too,” choked Ray.
Aliona snatched Ray’s and Katrin’s wires from the ground. She shoved them back onto the heart machine, then lit another match and dropped it into the smoldering half-burned mess in the basin.
Color flooded into Ray’s and Katrin’s cheeks, and breath filled their chests. They glared at her, their eyes gleaming with hatred.
What have I done?
But she had made her choice. She would make it worthwhile for them. She would care for them and make them hers, forever.
Aliona pressed her hand against the chipped edge of the heart machine. “If you’d like,” she said, “I can cut you up some bread for breakfast.”
PURPLE LEMONS
When Detective O’Toole called me about the ride-along three weeks ago, I had no idea at first that we’d be dealing with keys and portals. All he said, in that harsh accent, was, “June, we’re doing Union Square surveillance tomorrow night, and we want you to come report on it.”
I sucked at the dregs of my iced coffee, tried not to get too excited. This probably wasn’t the story that would finally persuade Webster that good reporting is more important than slideshows and clickbait headlines. But still. You never know. I grabbed my pen, jotted down the details.
I mean, Lawrence, I know you’re pissed because I ruined our deal with the cops, because you heard O’Toole’s…theory about what happened to Olivia. But I went into this intending to get a great story for our paper. You have to believe that.
So anyway, the next night, I slid into O’Toole’s car outside the station.
“So what’s the deal here?” I wrapped my stiff fingers around my pen as he veered onto Washington Street and sped past that Holiday Inn where the prostitution busts always happen.
“We got a tip that some dealers are—”
“Is it just pot? Or opiates?”
O’Toole’s meaty hand tightened on the steering wheel. “It’s keys and portal coordinates. Bunch of them fell off a truck downtown. We think they’re being unloaded up here.”
I mean, Lawrence, my cheeks flushed hot when I heard that. You can imagine; you’ve seen the brand on my palm. Apparently O’Toole noticed it too, because he shot me the cop-look, that squint-eyed expression, under his silver hair.
“It’s not safe to mess around with portals,” he said. “Especially illegally.”
“I’m aware,” I replied, as he pulled the car over across the street from a block-long brick warehouse.
I took some set-the-scene notes: graffiti tagged the bricks, sidewalks glowed broken under sodium-vapor street lamps, a rat skittered along a pothole. As I scribbled, my thoughts thundered: Stupid, stupid, stupid, these children who think buying a key and going through a portal won’t turn the rest of their life gray.
“I hope this story’s worth it,” I said to O’Toole. “I held off on the story about the chief ’s predilection for driving drunk in exchange for something good.” Yes, Webster told us to drop the drunk driving story because he didn’t want to stir up trouble with our local advertisers, but O’Toole didn’t know that. I figured it didn’t hurt to try to leverage the information I had on the chief—the drunk driving charges, the fake license—into the kinds of stories that galvanize a city.
“Your paper’s not known for its in-depth coverage, anyway,” O’Toole said. I clenched my pen as a dinged-up metal door on the side of the warehouse opened. Two people emerged: one, a man with shoulder-length hair and drumsticks protruding from his parka pocket. O’Toole started mumbling descriptions of him into his walkie-talkie. But I stared at the other, a girl in a red wool coat. Her salt-stained boots were two years behind in fashion, and she wrung her hands together nervously.
This was the person who was going to buy the key, to go through the portal. She didn’t even look eighteen.
“That girl better be careful,” O’Toole was saying. “You never know what kind of world you’re gonna get with these illegal deals. And sometimes dealers who’ve already been through portals use young girls like this to open—oh, I think he’s about to hand over the key.” The dealer was rummaging in his pocket, but he only extracted a phone. The girl’s lips moved as he punched in a number.
“They must be meeting again later. They meet twice sometimes, to establish trust,” O’Toole said.
She was so young, so earnest, in those salt-stained boots.
It punched me in the gut: the desire to scream at her, No, don’t do it. But I shifted gears fast. If I could talk to her, get the human interest angle of the story before she was arrested…I could see the headline: LOCAL GIRL'S DESCENT INTO THE WORLD OF KEYS AND PORTALS.
I didn’t mean to fuck it up for us, Lawrence. You know how important this job is to me. Remember what I told you that one night we all got drunk at the office? I bury myself in work to forget the smell of purple lemons.
* * *
After the dealer and the girl parted ways, I asked O’Toole to drop me off down the block, by that bougie new Asian fusion restaurant. I leapt over a pile of filthy snow and followed the girl. “Hey, excuse me,” I called. “I like your boots.”
She turned around and raised her eyebrows. “Really? Oh wow, thanks. I saved up for them, freshman year.”
“They’re really cute. So.” I held up the notebook. “I’m June, a reporter for the local paper. I’m working on a series about local teenagers. Can I interview you? I’ll buy you coffee.”Her smile split her face. “You’re a reporter? That’s so cool. I write for the paper, you know, the school paper. I’m Olivia.”
I know it was unethical to lie to her, Lawrence. But good people do bad things. They do. You can do something bad and still be a good person. Or maybe there’s no such thing as a good person or a bad person. I mean, maybe we’re all just people with breaking points.
Anyway, I brought her to the Dunkin’ Donuts in Union Square, and she ordered a syru
py coffee with whipped cream on it. As we sat down in the sticky Halloween-colored seats, a song blared on the radio, one of those pseudo-pop diva ballads. Olivia rolled her eyes. “Ew, I hate this song.”
“Oh yeah?”
“They play it at dances at the high—”
“High school dances are the worst.” I sipped my iced coffee.
“Oh, I know, but you know how people talk about how much they love music, cause it’s so, like, soulful and expressive? Sometimes I don’t even like music that much. I’d rather get lost in a book than a song, you know? My dad doesn’t get it, but, whatever.” Another eye roll.
“Are you close with your dad?”
“Not really.” She fiddled with the straw in her coffee cup.
“My mom took off when I was a kid, and my dad…he doesn’t see me, I guess?”
“Why not?”
Olivia met my eyes. “I don’t…I don’t think he ever wanted kids, I guess.”
“It’s hard to grow up without a mom.”
Olivia fiddled with her coat-sleeve’s frayed hem.
“You’re planning to go to college?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“That’s good that you’re staying away from potential vices, then,” I said. “I mean, especially portals. You don’t want to mess around with those.”
“Um…why?”
Why? Because they’re dangerous. Because you’ll dream of purple lemons, every night, and remember every morning before you open your eyes that you’ll never see them again.
But I wasn’t supposed to talk this girl out of buying a key. That would destroy my story. “So you’re interested in portals?”
“They sound like the greatest thing ever,” Olivia said. “I know this girl at school who got a key and coordinates for her Sweet Sixteen and I heard her talking about it, about how she went into this place with giant red snapping flowers. It sounded great. I bet the inside of a portal tastes like this.” Olivia gestured at her syrupy coffee.
Speaking to Skull Kings Page 8