Falls the Shadow

by Stefanie Gaither

  “Only if you get caught,” he says, ducking inside and dropping my bag behind the seat. His shoulder brushes mine, and he lingers just long enough for me to breathe in a hint of some sort of spicy-scented cologne. While he walks to the driver’s side, I close my eyes and hold my breath. Absorbing that scent, that moment. Part of me wishes I could bottle this all up somehow, keep it for later—a little piece of real that I could unleash whenever I get tired of hiding behind my mask, or whenever this stone casing I’m in starts to suffocate.

  That’s stupid, though. You can’t bottle moments any more than you can stop them from happening. And I’m still not convinced he’s completely real, anyway. Who says he’s not hiding behind a mask of his own?

  I don’t say much on the way home. The car doesn’t have any sort of autodrive—which isn’t surprising, given how old it is—and so Jaxon has to keep his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel the whole time. It’s a little nerve-wracking to watch, and even though he seems comfortable with it, I don’t want to do anything that might break his concentration. I can’t imagine what it was like when everybody was manually driving cars like this around, especially since there were probably five times as many of them on the roads back then. Our car has a manual-control mode, yes, but I could count on one hand the number of times our driver has actually used it; mostly he just inputs the navigation commands, and the car’s computer does the rest. It even parks itself. One of my father’s favorite things to complain about is how having a driver—as pleasant as he is—is really a waste of money. But Mother likes the appearance he gives, and at this point, she probably doesn’t even remember how to open a door for herself. So his job is secure for now.

  We’re about halfway to my house when the comcenter in the middle of the dashboard lights up and starts to beep. Jaxon glances down at the ID flashing on the screen, and the smile in his eyes disappears for a split second. But it’s back so fast, I wonder if I didn’t imagine it.

  “Deny,” he tells the computer, and the car goes silent again.

  Something else has joined our silence, though—something uncomfortable and uncertain. It’s shedding off him, twisting into an almost tangible thing that sits on the armrest between us.

  The comcenter lights up again a minute later.

  “Deny,” he repeats firmly, without even glancing at the screen this time.

  I stare out the window, at glass building after glass building gleaming in the sunlight as we blur past. Some of the light refracts off the sunglasses in my hand, throwing a rainbow of colors across the dash. I move my hand in circles, up and down, forward and back, to create my own personal kaleidoscope. The curiosity is burning inside me, along with the uneasiness from earlier. Who is he avoiding? And why? Is it because I’m here, and he doesn’t want to talk to them in front of me? Should I ask him who was calling? It would just be making conversation, right?

  “Sorry about that,” he says before I can get up the courage to speak. And just like earlier, he answers the questions I haven’t even asked. “It’s my mom. She can be a little . . . overbearing. This car has a tracer on it, so she’s probably noticed I’m not at school anymore and is wondering if I’m heading straight home.”

  I don’t miss the way his fingers clench a little more tightly around the steering wheel as he speaks, or the subtle change in his voice. He sounds less confident. He sounds like he’s lying.

  Or maybe you’re just being paranoid again?

  Probably.

  “You should meet my mother,” I say drily, thinking I might be able to shake off this paranoia if I can focus on making conversation. “Talk about overbearing.”

  He glances over at me with a mischievous smile. “Are you inviting me to meet your parents?”

  “I—”

  “Shouldn’t we go on a date or something first? It feels like we’re moving too fast.”

  I’m blushing again. I can feel it. The heat doesn’t stay on my cheeks this time either; it spreads all over my body, rushes down my neck, tingles the tips of my toes and fingers. “I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. Then I apparently go crazy, because in a voice that doesn’t even sound like mine I ask, “But are you asking me on a date?”

  “Maybe,” he says, almost coyly. “It all depends.”

  “On?”

  “On whether or not you’d say yes. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  “I see.” My head is on the verge of spinning again. “So, you’re only asking if I’m going to say yes.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t handle rejection well.” And I laugh, because the thought of anybody rejecting a date with Jaxon Cross seems really absurd to me.

  And yet the thought of agreeing to it myself somehow petrifies me straight to the bone. I have to say something, though. I can’t stop now. That seems to be happening a lot today; it’s like throwing that punch earlier swung my whole life into motion, and now I just keep stumbling forward. “Well, hypothetically speaking,” I say, my eyes still on the blurs of shape and color outside, “I would probably say yes.”

  “Probably?” he repeats. “I don’t know if I like those odds . . .”

  “Okay yes,” I say, laughing again in spite of myself. “Yes, I would go out with you.” I can’t believe I just agreed to that. I can’t believe he even asked me—well, sort of asked me—in the first place.

  “It’s a date, then,” he says, and I officially give my head permission to start spinning. “We can . . .”

  I don’t have to ask why he trailed off. Because just then I turn and look out the front window, where I know my house will be looming straight ahead at the distant end of the street. And there it is, with its old-fashioned bricks and tall white columns and its perfectly landscaped yard that’s always been my father’s pride and joy.

  He’s not going to be happy about all the vehicles parked on the grass.

  Reporters. Everywhere. And at least a half-dozen police cars too. Even worse—far, far worse—are the gray trucks with the CCA logo on the side. What are they all doing here? Surely this isn’t about what happened at school. It wasn’t that big of a deal, was it? And how can they already know? How can they already be waiting for me?

  “You probably don’t want to get too close,” I mutter to Jaxon. “If they get a picture of us together, then your face is going to end up on the pages right next to mine. They’ll probably call you my accomplice or something. Invent some ridiculous personality for you, give you a tragic back-story and everything.”

  He ignores my warning and pulls right up to the curb, as close as he can; our driveway’s blocked by a line of camera crews that the police are trying to force back into the street. Before the car rolls completely to a stop, my door’s already open. Jaxon catches me by the sleeve when I try to jump out. I twist back around. His mouth opens, then closes soundlessly. I don’t have time to wait for him to find words.

  “Thank you for the ride,” I say, jerking free. I see my parents on our front porch, surrounded by officers trying to form some sort of barrier between them and the deluge of people pushing in, shouting questions. I don’t look back.

  I just run.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Storm

  When I reach the porch, all attention shifts to me. A man with stringy brown hair and a computer in his hand grabs my arm and tries to pull me back down the steps. My father intervenes, shoves the man so hard that he tumbles back onto the lawn. His computer goes flying; it lands upside down, and I catch a glimpse of the CCA logo on it before I turn back to my father.

  “What’s going on?” I demand.

  Before he can answer, someone thrusts a small silver recorder in front of my face. “Catelyn, can you tell us the last time you actually saw your sister? Actually talked to her?”

  “My sister . . . ?”

  So this isn’t about me. It’s about Violet.

  She just has to out-storm me, doesn’t she?

  “What happened?” I ask my father, ignoring the reporter. “What did
she do this time?”

  “Nothing. There was an accident with the oldest Voss girl—” my father tries to say under his breath.

  They still hear him.

  “An accident, he says! No proof yet, Mayor Benson, but are you saying you know something that we don’t about the young Miss Voss’s tragic death? Something that might suggest it was, in fact, only an accident?”

  “My understanding is that there is no proof either way,” my father says. His eyes are locked straight ahead, his shoulders stiff. He’s in press conference mode.

  “We have eyewitness accounts stating your daughter ran from the police who arrived on the scene.”

  My father says nothing.

  “And she was down by the old railroad station late last night, correct? You can confirm this much?”

  Violet? They think Violet had something to do with Samantha’s death? Is that seriously what’s going on here?

  And why do their questions sound so much like accusations?

  Samantha was her friend. She had been, for as long as I can remember. And when Violet’s replacement happened, Samantha was one of the few “normal humans” who didn’t join the crowd and turn against my sister’s clone. And though Samantha and I never got along fantastically, I’d always given her credit for that—even while so many others detested her for the exact same thing. Others including her parents. Violet’s clone had always been like a weed to them, I think, a bad influence they were constantly, unsuccessfully trying to pull from their daughter’s life. I say unsuccessfully because for the past two years, Samantha had been sneaking out at night and on the weekends, playing the role of loyal accomplice whenever my sister wanted to stir up trouble.

  Most people don’t know all that, though, since they basically ignored each other at school and anywhere else they deemed too public to be seen together. The only reason I know they were still close is that Violet usually tried to get me to go along with their exploits. Or to help cover them up, at least.

  Maybe I should tell all of these people that. Tell them they’ve got it all wrong. If Violet is nowhere to be found, it’s probably only because she’s out looking for whoever really hurt Samantha. If she ran from the cops like that supposed witness claims, then the most obvious explanation is that she doesn’t trust them to figure out the truth.

  Right?

  I can think of a million reasons why my sister is innocent.

  So why can’t I find the voice to say a single one?

  I grab my father’s arm to steady myself as the shouting around us gets louder and louder, the voices all garbling together into one giant wall of noise. Between that and the heat and all of the bodies pressing in around us, I start to feel faint. The world blurs. In the distance I see a smudge of blue—Jaxon’s car, still parked along the curb. And he’s more clear than anything, standing beside it, watching me. There are so many people between us now that I couldn’t fight my way back to him if I tried.

  “I will not confirm or deny anything at the moment,” my father is saying as I move behind him, trying to hide from Jaxon and everyone else. But one of the reporters sees me trying to shrink out of sight, and for some reason he decides that means I have something to say.

  “Cate, don’t you have anything to—”

  “Don’t speak to them, Catelyn. Don’t even look at them. Come here. . . .” My father puts an arm around me, blocking my face from the flashing cameras, and shepherds me toward the front door. “We were trying to get this over with before you got home,” he says under his breath. Then to the crowd behind us he announces, “This conference is over. Any other questions you have may be directed to my secretary and staff, who I believe most of you are intimately acquainted with. Natalie!”

  My mother turns at the sound of her name, and the three of us retreat silently into the sanctuary of our house.

  * * *

  Hours and hours of police questioning later, Mother is still attempting to act like everything is fine.

  She’s cooked a full dinner, turned the television off, shut the blinds, and set four places at the table. She moves with an unyielding precision that reminds me of the fancy pocket watch my grandfather showed me once, gears turning, hands ticktocking from one place setting to the next without hesitation.

  Time never stops, and neither does my mother. At least not until she starts to scoop vegetables onto the plate in front of Violet’s empty chair, and then my father reaches out and stops her himself. He guides her to her own seat and makes her sit down, while I stare at my plate and divide my mixed vegetables into little piles that I count silently to myself. Seven carrots. Eight pieces of broccoli. A bunch of green beans—I’ve gotten tired of counting by the time I get to those. And then I get tired of looking at the piles, so I swirl my fork through and mix them up again.

  I’ve never been less hungry in my life.

  “You had better not waste that food,” my mother says, as if I’d just thought that out loud. “You know how expensive fresh vegetables are these days.”

  I stab at a particularly leafy-looking piece of broccoli and glance up at my father for help. But he just mirrors my mother’s stern look.

  Once upon a time, my father was the one who would always come to my rescue. Even long after my mother had perfected the art of smiling for the cameras, of holding her head up high, of turning to granite at a moment’s notice—even for years after that, my father stayed soft. When the reporters weren’t looking, he kept laughing. When my mother wasn’t around to stop us with disapproving glances, we made up ridiculous songs and danced silly dances, and whatever was going on in the world outside, whatever people were saying about us, it didn’t matter.

  Not to me.

  But I suppose it must have mattered more to him than I realized, because eventually Mother managed to convince him that it was easier not to feel, not to show any sort weakness that the press could get hold of and twist. There’s nothing soft left in his eyes now. I’m not even sure I remember what his laughter sounds like.

  “Catelyn.” She hasn’t touched her food either, but my mother is still glancing from me to my plate, expectant.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  From the look on her face, you’d think I’d just cursed her name and threatened her life all in the same sentence. She doesn’t say anything, though. Not at first. At least a full minute passes before her expression twists into something I don’t recognize, and then to my amazement she says, “You don’t have to eat, then.”

  And that’s the moment, I think, that I realize how serious this all is.

  So serious that even my mother doesn’t know how to handle it. And if she can’t handle it, then what are the rest of us supposed to do? It doesn’t feel like the normal weathering the storm anymore. Nothing makes sense now. My thoughts are all twisted up, darting around, quick and impossible to keep track of. Which is maybe why I can’t stop the question that rises to my lips, that cuts its way out through the heavy air before I can swallow it.

  “What if Violet had died and never come back?”

  I know instantly that I’ve said the wrong thing. The most terrible, most impossibly wrong thing. My father’s expression turns from stern to disappointed instead.

  God, I hate it when he looks at me like that.

  My mother doesn’t look at me. She just does what she usually does when I start asking questions about all of this and she isn’t in the mood to scold me for it herself: She goes into the living room, creaks open the cabinet in the corner, and takes the video disc from it. Then she comes back, grabs my father’s work tablet that’s on the nearby counter, and situates it in front of me.

  If I were more like my sister, maybe I would have the guts to do what she always does when Mother tries to punish her with this: simply get up and walk away. Maybe laugh on my way out the door. Because I’ve seen the awful video that’s loading now more times than I care to count, and I hate it more with every viewing.

  But I’m not my sister. So I just sink farther in
to my chair and try to become the polished oak until this is over with.

  Even if I don’t listen, though, and even if I let my eyes glaze over, I can still picture what’s playing perfectly in my mind on the tablet’s screen. It’s a video produced by Huxley. It starts with a brief history of the war, of the overpopulation and climate change that led up to a crisis of resources and then to tension, tension, and more tension until some countries grew weary of searching for solutions and instead started searching for someone to blame. And then it talks about how much of the Western world—particularly the United States, with its massive population and less-than-conservative lifestyles—was a natural target.

  There were no explosions. That’s why, while the rest of the world usually refers to it as the States War, most of the ones who lived it—like my parents—refer to it as the Silent War. Silent and deadly, with no flashy show of weapons or outward flexing of military muscles for Huxley’s video to re-create. Instead, the screen shows dramatic reenactments of a sickness slowly overtaking the population, of streets growing less and less crowded, of poisoned water supplies and infected, withering crops.

  The drone of a man’s voice follows, reading out death and destruction statistics. Almost one hundred million dead. those who were exposed to infected water or food but who still managed to survive ended up developing the strange marks on their bodies like the ones on my mother’s arms.

  Aside from those marks and occasional odd stomach pains, though, she’s healthy enough. And my father was even luckier. He waited out the worst of the hostilities overseas, spending several years living with my great-grandparents in Germany. When they came back to the rural North Carolina town he was born in, they found it more or less untouched.

  But others weren’t so fortunate, and the video doesn’t spare any details about all of the horrible, lingering effects most of the country has faced; the war summary ends with a series of graphs and maps and charts, depicting new political and economic divides and the instability of what was once supposedly one of the greatest countries on earth. They talk about the infected, like my mother. About the way they were treated almost like lepers in the immediate postwar world, when people weren’t sure what they were dealing with, or whether they were contagious or not. No one could be sure.