by Leah Thomas
When I was released from the hospital, Father helped me gather my things. My clothes. He slipped the letters from my nightstand into my satchel.
My breath caught. “Toss the one from the doctor.”
Father tucked it in all the same. “No.”
He must have read it, Ollie. He shut my bag and hefted it onto his shoulder. I picked up my cane and followed him into the hallway. I had not asked, but I’d been told Max and Owen’s inexplicable collapse had only put them in the hospital overnight. Strange that I looked for them. Knowing they weren’t there. Knowing I could not explain myself.
“Moritz,” Father said, “you know that I am not a man of many words.”
I nodded.
“But this letter. Perhaps you will want to share it with others.”
Father uses words sparingly. But each one is a thoughtful thing. I have missed that.
Your copies of Bridget’s writing waited in the postbox. Ollie, do you know what I took from it? Bridget has tried to die, but mostly tried to live.
Here’s a victory for you. Damned, beautiful you: I went to that dreaded website. You know which one. The one I had ignored. Your words, Father’s, Bridget’s: the new buzz in me.
I logged into the forum you helped inflict on the world, Ollie.
There are, inexplicably, more than three hundred players. Three hundred strangers intrigued by the fiction of my sad reality! Honestly, Oliver, I could weep.
Threads about love triangles. Children who fly, shoot lasers from their fingertips, and at first I did nothing more than convince myself that this is a farce. But there was one thread, Oliver.
My computer dictating, my ears pinned by all-encompassing headphones. Nothing but me and the words of strangers.
From username thorfinn: My name is Jon. I live in Reykjavik. I am here to say this is no game. I was raised in this lab. I have scars. I remember white walls, reception desks, smiling doctors. And I remember her. A word to remember me by is “owl.” If you know me, PM me.
I sent him a private message: Are you the boy who turned his head backward?
The answer came swiftly (the time in Iceland is only an hour behind the time in Kreiszig):
“Who is this?”
The eyeless monster.
“Prince Moritz. I remember you. I remember your mother.”
I don’t have words, Oliver, for the Blunderkinder. I can only begin with this: I am eternally sorry for what my mother—
“I am glad to hear from you. It is good to know I am not alone!”
I gaped at my desk. Words from you, and words from children like us.
Oliver, I’ve been such a fool.
I don’t have control over what I feel. I only have control over how I react to those feelings. How I write my own story.
Enough festering.
Enough of secrets. I am attaching the letter Auburn-Stache sent me. Please forgive me for withholding. Forgive me for hiding.
I called Klaus. “When can we see Molly?”
“End of the week.”
“Not today?”
“Dummkopf. I have school. You have to rest.”
Phone down, laptop open: Jon.
‘‘Yes?’’
Can you tell me how to set up a profile?
“D!”
chapter twenty-six
THE BONES
Moritz,
I am writing you because I can’t bring myself to write Ollie, but I am (as ever) concerned about him. Jess Arana, an invested RN, has been keeping me informed of his well-being, because I worry speaking to him directly will encourage him to do something reckless. You and I both know that Ollie is prone to recklessness, especially when he feels his world is threatened, and the truth is my reason for leaving him so cruelly is threatening indeed!
Of the two of you, Moritz, I don’t think you’ll disagree when I say you are more mature. You may feel crippled with doubt, but you have a self-awareness Ollie lacks. There’s a grit to you. You call it a lack of creativity, but I’d call it wisdom if I knew what wisdom looked like.
Please don’t relay what I write to you here to our mutual friend. You’ll understand this request, Moritz, when you read the remainder of this letter.
I was obligated to leave Ollie alone in Ohio. If only he could understand that the last thing I ever wished to do was abandon him. I’ve always hated leaving him, whether it was alone with his mother in the woods or alone in the hospital.
When it comes to honesty, I’m guilty of years of malpractice.
Many of my hopes were thwarted by his mother’s caution. Meredith wished Ollie would find contentment within isolation. But then, it was also only at her urging that I agreed he should start writing you. We reasoned he could never leave the woods for your electric heart. I assumed you would not tempt him with the real world; you loathed it so much. It was manipulative of me. Has any scheme ever backfired so thoroughly?
After speaking with you, all Ollie dreamed of was leaving home.
You may need some context.
Beau Takahiro was a professor of mine in university. After the unexpected death of her daughter, I asked if she’d consider being a foster mother to one of the initiative children. She agreed, with one reservation: she wanted to be his grandmother rather than his mother. “Skip the drama and get right to the wisdom” were her words.
I’m not sure if you remember this boy, or whether Ollie’s written about him as of this letter—Arthur passes for normal, despite fragile bones and regenerative capabilities. Time was he could break his kneecaps on sidewalks and minutes later play hopscotch again. I’ve watched that boy crack teeth on lollipops, hold those teeth back in place for a moment, and bite down again.
Arthur is miraculous and of course Arthur is doomed. You know better than most that there is always a cost to your mother’s children—our children. From birth, Arthur has suffered accordingly.
When Beau called me less than a day after we left Chicago, I assumed he’d broken a limb. But Beau insisted that the illness afflicting Arthur was unlike anything she’d seen. She described bouts of vomiting, sudden hair loss, and burns on his skin.
She put Arthur on the phone. Immediately, I could tell something was amiss. His voice sounded unusually raw when he greeted me. When I asked whether Beau was merely overreacting again, instead of his usual chortle, I heard a horror story.
Apparently, Arthur gripped a screwdriver so hard that his fingers broke. Apparently, he couldn’t even remember picking it up. And then couldn’t remember what a screwdriver was. Repeatedly, he asked Beau where his desk was.
She told me he was sitting at his desk the whole time.
Arthur’s memory is usually impeccable, Moritz.
Over the phone, he said something I won’t forget: “I know my brain’s not a bone, but it’s breaking. I’m like a screen that laughs and cries. Am I real?”
I reassured him not only that he was real, but that he was loved, and when he asked me whether I was coming, I told him of course. He requested I bring Ollie. Evidently, Ollie made Arthur feel “chill.”
Everyone is “chill” compared to Oliver Paulot, Moritz.
I looked at my charge, tucked in his sleeping bag. Most people look more innocent while they sleep, but with Ollie it’s just the opposite: he can’t pretend to smile while sleeping. His hair wasn’t falling out, Moritz; it was only that I had just cut it. Already I suspected an epidemic; perhaps I’ve always expected that some grievous illness might await the children whose cells we flippantly toyed with. Or perhaps an epidemic was preferable to the alternative.
The following morning, I received another call from Beau and looked back to find the car empty in Bridget’s driveway.
Ollie was about to crash a school bus and put himself in the hospital, Moritz.
Thank god he didn’t kill anyone. That is my profession, not his. So I hope, Moritz. The secrets I keep are only intended to protect him, Moritz. I stopper his dreams of befriending the world to spare him.
/> As for how I came to leave him—I’ll let him tell that story.
Winter had encroached on Chicago overnight. I entered the home and discovered Arthur upstairs in his room. He’d become dozy-eyed and pale. He wore more than one cast now. He sat in his wheelchair by the window. He told me he’d shake my hand, if only his hands would stop shaking on their own. Evidently, Beau went out for groceries, though Arthur theorized she was “starting a shitstorm” in the dairy aisle.
He couldn’t focus his eyes, and his hands trembled with something like palsy; he winced when I took his blood pressure. Most noticeably his skin was inflamed from head to toe, as if severely sunburnt.
The burned skin itself was not unusual. What Arthur often neglects to mention, Moritz, is how his remarkable condition has left him with unique weaknesses. Yes, his chondroblast cells heal his bones with speed unmatched. And his red blood cells replicate broken tissue instantaneously. But this, combined with his fragility, works against him on occasion. Arthur’s body is in a constant state of flux, making and unmaking itself, breaking and repairing with every step he takes. All of his cells are extremely malleable.
For this reason, he is abnormally susceptible to radiation—UV particles, for instance, pierce his constantly transforming cells with ease. Those damaged cells replicate and proliferate his body with daunting speed. When I met him, I assumed he would be cancerous within weeks, but his case is so unusual. His healing has always been a cancer, in a sense, but one that works to his benefit—replicating the exact cells he needs the moment he loses them, going no further.
Even so, when Arthur had his first and only X-ray, his skin peeled from head to toe and the healing process took months. Arthur has been forbidden from approaching microwaves since childhood. (At age six, he wept for the loss of pizza pockets.) For years, Beau only let him outside after dark. Now he wears a skin of zinc oxide.
On an overcast autumn day, how had he sustained burns this severe?
I removed his brace and completed the rest of my examination as delicately as possible, biopsying skin and drawing blood samples, unloading all the equipment I travel with. His temperature remained high even after an ice bath.
Again I thought of Ollie’s father, Moritz. The ultimate source of their pain was the same. The lab and the experiments within it. I try and fail to remember who I was before my days in the laboratory. The devastation we wrought there is all that my life is made of now, redeemed only by the children who persist despite it all. But if those children fail . . .
“Who’s there?” Arthur asked, again and again.
“Doc,” I reassured him, again and again.
Arthur asked me how long this would take, and I told him I should have results very soon. But that was not what Arthur meant by that question, and we both knew it. Finally, he asked me where Ollie was. I didn’t answer.
I sat on Arthur’s bed, encouraging him to do the same, but I dare not risk touching him. Chalk crumbles so easily. Arthur stayed beside the window, squeezed his eyes shut and braced his hands against the glass. And in an instant, I knew he intended to hurt himself and I ran forward, fearing he might leap through the glass and shatter with it.
Arthur withdrew, sat down beside me on the bedspread, and wept until he vomited on the floor between his feet.
I tell you all this in detail not to pain you, but because I want you to understand how dire this is. I want you to understand why I’ve left Oliver behind.
I wanted him to see the world, not the demise of it.
Moritz, these past weeks I have committed my every waking moment to visiting the children of the initiative. I’ve traveled across America and flown to Taipei; from Taipei, Osaka; from Osaka, Hong Kong and Saint Petersburg. Next comes Reykjavik.
I’ve taken dozens of vials of blood. I cut skin from so many kids who deserve better. I subjected them to the memory of what some had managed to forget. I hurt them on purpose. And I awaited inevitable results: signs of imminent demise and markers in the anatomy that might imply your mother programmed her subjects to die young.
Moritz, I tell you now:
So far, I’ve found nothing to support this, beyond Arthur’s decay.
This doesn’t mean I should stop searching.
There is another factor I’ve found impossible to ignore. One I dare not consider because of personal biases, but must consider as a medical professional. I will not address that here. I can’t bear to, until I can speak with certainty. There are more of you to examine first.
One of those includes you, and your friend Molly, of course. And think of that! Your father has told me that you and Molly are on friendly terms! I remember the day she tried to drown you; I know you do, too. I remember how that changed you both. When we sent her to the orphanage, she was quiet as a mouse and angry as a cat. Her face betrayed nothing, but how her second mouth hissed. To think that you are close gives me not strictly hope, but something close to it. We couldn’t ruin you children entirely, could we?
Expect me soon. Until then, my plea is twofold, Moritz.
If anyone can say for certain what ails Arthur, it isn’t me. Your mother was involved in the cellular manipulation of the children to an extent I never was. If this degeneration becomes an epidemic, and if there are ways to immunize you all, only she might know the remedy. (And if such is not the case and I need to face the alternatives, she might know that as well.)
Moritz, I’m asking, unfairly, for you to help me find her. I am trying, but I won’t stray far from bedsides. I have no addresses. No proof she’s even alive. This plea is certainly a desperate, unjust one. I’d never want you to reunite with your abuser—but if you can only locate her. If you have any ideas, any memories or maps or pictures that may point me her way, I would be eternally indebted to you. I know this is a terrible thing to ask.
Finally, please look after the boy we love. Do inform me posthaste if you’ve reason to believe his care is lapsing. As always, comfort him when I can’t. Don’t tell him of my worries, but let him live to the fullest while he can.
We’ve encouraged him to seek this world. You mustn’t abandon him in it.
Don’t become the coward I am, Moritz.
Gregory Auburn-Stache
chapter twenty-seven
THE DAZE
I read your letter and then Auburn-Stache’s letter in the bathroom yesterday evening, mostly because the bathroom is the only room in this house without cats lurking in it. And after I read it, I just sat there for a while on the carpeted toilet seat cover and took some breaths and tried not to freak the hell out. I wonder if this is how Bridget feels when she puts her heart back in. I almost hit the ceiling when a cat meowed at me from between the shower curtains.
I wished I could flush it away: the whole stinking idea that we really have been doomed since birth! That stupid powerless ache again! And he couldn’t tell me this? He couldn’t let me out sooner? He’s trying to do what Mom did. Shield me, or something. But that ship’s sailed and sunk! We’re already out here, trying to be human.
Poor fluffing Arthur. He never answered my letters. I had already decided not to be annoyed, because he really did seem almost too cool for letters. Now I just hope he’s doing better. I hope Auburn-Stache figured out whatever this is. I don’t even want to think about the alternatives. Arthur’s kind of my idol.
And poor Molly, Moritz. Do you think she’s sick like Arthur’s sick, or do you think she’s sick the way you and me get sick: falling-down-over-ourselves sick? Sick of the world? There’s almost definitely a hyperspecific word for that sickness in German, right?
Poor you, too. I get why you didn’t tell me. I’ve never had any patience for being reck-full. Literally no one will ever call me Lord of Handling Bad News with Grace.
I know you probably feel like it’s your duty to find your mom, and I think some of your crazy festering had to do with that pressure, too. But that’s not your shit to clean up. No matter what happens, getting involved has to be your choice, not Auburn-St
ache’s. You get me? He doesn’t get to tell you to take your heart out.
I never had a right to do that, either.
Just so you know, Moritz, my hair is growing back, not falling out. My hands are steady. My fingernails are grubby with pet grime, but they haven’t fallen off. And I’m the antithesis of sunburned.
Screw worrying about what we can’t change. I’m going to be responsible for me. I’m going to focus on not exploding my new school. I’m not telling anyone how to live. And who’s gonna care what mistakes a potentially dying kid makes? There are three hundred kids on our forum because people think we could be characters worth reading about. Let’s earn that, Moritz.
I want to tell you about my first weeks of high school, but I lost words again. I don’t know how to be linear, even, because one thing about school is that there’s a routine and the routine makes it hard to tell one day from the next.
Things are pretty mundane: homeroom! Public restrooms! Computer labs (I dare not enter)! Cafeterias! Rancid locker rooms! A football field and a band room with a glock and people shoving and kissing each other in hallways, and glorious air conditioners and overhead projectors and phones hidden on just about everybody (teachers included!) and a library and drinking fountains and, get this, vending machines and a science lab with an anatomical model that is pretty accurate by non-Blunderkid standards, but not as pretty as the one I left back home.
All my dreams in one place. All these things I could break.
The first day I was crazy nervous, but Ms. Arana gave me some great advice: “Fake it till you make it, honey.”
Maybe every school is a little like acting school, Mo.
I decided not to go anywhere near school buses and generators. But her words kind of worked. I smiled a lot and said “Hi!” to just about everyone I saw. I went to my first class with my gray hat on and told a classroom full of kids my own age—kids who spooked me because supposedly they were normal but I couldn’t tell you how, because maybe normalcy really is imaginary—that I have a crippling disease.