by Nick Courage
And she’d be here if it wasn’t for the Charter, I tell Freckles. They’re protective of me, my parents, and definitely wouldn’t be gone if they didn’t have to be. It’s just . . .
An opposite kind of protectiveness. Like they’re protective of any experiences I might miss out on if they decided to be overprotective. Or, at least, that’s what I heard them telling Grammy one night. Which is why Dad didn’t mind riding through the Grey with me, to the Other Side, when we got so depressed listening to records from Before.
It’s not their fault they’re not here. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just a thing that happened: I was born with a heart that didn’t work, and they need to sign the Charter.
Still, I wish they were here.
It’s a long walk to Grammy’s house.
We keep to the middle of the freshly paved street, kicking the occasional chunk of sweating black asphalt, but otherwise keeping our heads down. I’m still moving at three-quarter speed, recovering from fainting and inclined to be sluggish anyway because of the suffocating heat. Freckles, Alice, Conor, and Scott are also feeling the sun, at unhappy equilibrium with the syrupy midday air.
Our conversation tapered off into a thoughtful silence a long time ago. And after a few blocks, that thoughtful silence had turned into a thoughtless, plodding silence—a quiet discomfort that left us slow-witted and heavy-lidded.
Ready for a nap.
That is, until we reach Grammy’s house.
From a block away, a colloquy of slamming doors perk us up. I jerk my head up and see a glossy black jeep peeling out of Grammy’s driveway into a too-wide arc, screeching over the sidewalk, veering wildly in our direction. Someone yells, “Car!” and I’m instantly awake, thrumming with adrenalin as the jeep continues to swerve down the street, straightening out but not slowing down. I look around, getting my bearings: Conor and Alice are running toward the sidewalk, and Scott is tugging my arm almost out of its socket.
“Come on,” he’s yelling. “Come on!”
I look at Freckles and freeze. “Henry,” she yells, pulling my other arm so hard my elbow pops. “Come on!”
But I can’t. I know I should, I know I have to, but my legs feel rooted to the street. Freckles tries to pull me one more time and then scampers out of the road with Scott, who looks at me like I’ve completely lost my mind. I turn my attention back to the street and the accelerating black jeep. To my horror, it doesn’t seem like the driver’s lost control at all.
In fact . . . she seems to be aiming for me.
I close my eyes, willing my legs into action, but everything’s happening so fast, and the continued shouts of Conor and Freckles have the opposite effect on me as I stare down the bug-eyed headlights of the approaching jeep, paralyzed with fear.
Waiting for my life to pass before my eyes.
At the last moment, the jeep slows—just barely—and veers back onto the curb. I feel it pass me, its hot wake ruffling my hair as the driver holds down the horn. Jump-starting me back into the world of the living. She’s skinny with blonde hair and a black suit, wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses. I only see her for a split second as she passes, but I try to imprint her face into my memory—her cruel smile and angular chin. I try to scan the faces of her passengers, too, but they don’t even bother to look at me as I stand helpless in the middle of the street, less than a foot away from death at their hands. From what I can see of them, though, it seems like they’re carbon copies of the driver.
Anonymous suits; escaping silhouettes.
Between them, though—
In between the two suits in the backseat is a very unhappy-looking Mouse, sweaty blonde hair hanging limply, sticking to her frowning, red-splotched face as she stares disconsolately out the wide rearview window.
“Mouse!” I shout, sprinting after her on my newfound legs as the jeep swerves back onto the road. “Mouse!” It’s no use, though. Even though I can still hear them screeching and revving through the Zone, they’re long gone.
And Mouse with them.
I stand rooted again in the street, shocked, until Conor catches my attention by nodding toward Grammy’s still open door. We look at each other tautly, our summer malaise replaced with adrenalin and apprehension. And I run, for the second time in as many days, toward Grammy’s house with a cringing fear in my chest.
The blue hydrangeas are still brightly blooming in her front yard, softly catching the light as if there was nothing to worry about. As if the door to Grammy’s wasn’t fully open, letting a sickly light into the shadows of her well-kept house.
I stop at the door, holding Conor back with an arm across his chest.
“Grammy,” I yell, hoping for—but not expecting—an answer. “Grammy!”
Conor pushes through my arm just as Freckles catches up with us on the doorstep. “Let me,” he says, looking me in the eye and stepping sideways across the threshold.
Thirty long seconds later, Conor calls my name from the back of the house, and, expecting the worst, I walk slowly toward the kitchen. Stopping in the airy front room, I’m suddenly overtaken with a desperate urge to run back out into the sunshine and track down the jeep. To rescue Mouse. To do anything but follow Conor back into the dreaded kitchen.
But he calls again, and Freckles squeezes my hand hard . . . and continues to squeeze as we make our way back, her cold fingers wrapped strongly around my hot ones. It’s funny, I think, distracted by her touch. I’m not buzzing her now—after playing chicken with Mouse’s kidnappers—when all it took was a late night and a nice walk to school to zap Mouse.
And the dam, I grimly remind myself.
Meanwhile, Conor is at the kitchen table with Grammy, who’s staring out the window above the sink with blank eyes, not registering us or anything else around her. On the ornately detailed tablecloth in front of her is an unmarked manila envelope, which stands out against the white lace.
“Grammy,” I say, voice shaking. “What . . . what happened?”
She doesn’t look up, and it’s not clear that she even heard me. I rush over to her, shaking my hand free from Freckles. “Grammy,” I whisper, squeezing her arm. “Grammy!”
I feel tears start to leak out of my eyes, and seeing Freckles and Conor walk back toward the living room, wipe them off with the back of my hand. “Grammy,” I say again, shaking her. “What happened?” My voice must be especially keening, because she finally notices me, annoyed—and then her face softens.
“Your parents,” she says. “There’s been a problem.”
“What?” I go cold. “Who were those people?”
Grammy sighs, looking older than usual, and goes back to staring out of the kitchen window. I follow her gaze. The world looks pretty, framed by the glossy white woodwork; there are more blue hydrangeas out there, and beyond them, two sparrows chasing each other around a stunted avocado tree. I squeeze Grammy’s shoulder, massaging her back into conversation.
“Your parents are being held for treason against the federale government,” she says, loudly and in a matter-of-fact monotone. And then she looks at me, her eyes watering, and sweetens her voice. “Things are . . . bad on the Outside, Henry.”
“Treason?” I ask, flinching a little at my voice’s rising pitch. I feel completely smashed, as if the jeep had run me over instead of swerving, and all I can think about is my parents wedged between two suits, like Mouse. Heading for trouble as I lay broken on the ground.
“Secession,” Grammy says, holding eye contact.
“What?”
“They knew what the Charter meant . . .” she says, looking away, her voice low and tired. “And they took your parents.”
They took my parents.
I run the phrase through my head a few times until I can’t stand to hear it anymore. I want to feel my stomach go cold, to cry and beat my fists on the floor. But I just feel hollow, disassociated from myself.
“And Julia?” I hear myself ask in a too-level voice.
“The girl?” Grammy say
s, holding up her hands helplessly. “She came while they were here.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath from the doorway behind me, and I turn around to see Freckles biting her pale lips white. “Where are they taking her?” she asks, voice shaking. Grammy just looks back out the window, and Freckles turns to me imploringly. But there’s nothing I can do. They took my parents, and they took Mouse. I sit down next to Grammy and gently pry her clenched fist open so I can hold her hand.
After a moment, she turns to me again. Muted voices in urgent conversation carry over from the other room: Freckles and Conor and Scott. I try to block them out and focus on Grammy. I’m still not buzzing any more than usual, but her rings vibrate slightly in my hands.
“I fainted again today,” I say, and feel her start to sob. She hugs me tightly and whispers, “I’m so sorry, Henry. I am so sorry.” Her accent is thicker than she usually allows it to be, syllables pulling out like clover honey. Sitting in the kitchen of her meticulously decorated house, surrounded by scavenged heirlooms and salvaged finery, it occurs to me how terrible all this must be for her.
She didn’t ask for any of it—for treasonous children and a grandson without a heart, for hard knocks and Powerdowns. You could find Grammy in the society page of the newspaper almost every Sunday Before, dripping in pearls with a pageant smile. I squeeze her tighter.
“I’m so sorry, Grammy.”
She holds my head to her neck and runs her fingers through my hair. “It’s okay, baby,” she says. And then, “They’re taking back the Zone.”
“The men in the black cars?”
I feel her nod. “They know about the dam, about everything.” She’s talking quickly now, the floodgates finally open. “I woke up to a threatening letter. I looked for you at School, and then at the house . . . they were waiting for me when I got back.”
I squeeze her tighter, feel her flinch.
Oh, no . . .
“Did they . . . ?”
“They made sure I told them everything I know,” she says, not meeting my eyes. They hurt her, is what she’s saying. Right before they stole Mouse and tried to run me over. Spasms of anger course through my body and I tense, looking toward the fruitless avocado tree in the backyard and trying to keep my emotions in check. Grammy holds my chin firmly in her hand and turns my head so I’m facing her again.
Now it’s my turn to look away.
“We all knew something was coming, Henry.” I shake my head—I didn’t know anything was coming. “Your mom knew it too, we just hoped for the best. The threat . . .” She gestures limply toward the manila envelope in front of her, hand-delivered by the enemy. “That was here, on the kitchen table, when I woke up. I knew it was over then.”
Seething, I finally meet her crinkled eyes.
“The country’s gone wrong, Henry. It’s everyone for themselves . . . the federale government is doing everything they can to stop another Civil War.”
“Are they?” I ask, still angry. “Are they stopping another Civil War?”
Grammy searches my face. “No, Hank.” Her voice is soft and warm again, caring. “You know we just want to live. The way things were . . . Before.”
In the living room, the conversation has fermented into a fully-fledged argument, with Freckles pushing to rush out and find Mouse right away, and Conor wanting to wait it out and see what we can learn about the kidnappers.
“Besides,” Conor says, on the ragged edge of shouting. “Hank needs us here!” Freckles says something I can’t make out; after that it’s just angry whispers. Grammy glances at me with a pained look, squeezes my arm, and gets up with just a little difficulty.
“Children,” she intones, suddenly an attention-demanding grande dame again. As she heads for the living room, I catch a glimpse of the darkening bruises beneath the sleeves of her blouse and cringe, unable to imagine the kind of monster that would be capable of hurting Grammy.
And now those monsters have Mouse.
I follow Grammy to the other room, where she’s pacing before an anxious but quiet audience. “The agents who took your friend,” she begins, “consider everyone in the Zone a traitor to the federale government, and are prepared to treat us all accordingly.”
That shuts everyone down, except for Alice, who starts to sob quietly. “They have my parents,” I say, breaking the unbearable silence with a crack in my voice. “They’re prisoners, in the City.”
“Furthermore,” Grammy says, slowly, looking us each in the eye. “We’re also prisoners. Those people you saw, the ones who took your friend . . . they’re just the beginning.” The air in the room is stifling as this sinks in—the idea that we’re all in danger, that everything we know is about to end. Grammy holds up the manila envelope from the kitchen table and waves it at us. “These,” she says, “are our walking papers. They want us out, and they’re sending their thugs to get us.” Alice, still crying, calls wetly for her mom and runs for the front door, which she leaves slapping on rusty hinges in her wake.
Grammy nods seriously at the rest of us. “But,” she says, “We don’t have to take it.”
“You’re saying that that jeep is just the start,” says Conor, a little dubious. “But how do we know that?” Construction noises in the distance support Conor’s doubt—outside, it’s business as usual. Streets are still being restored, houses being rebuilt.
Grammy opens the envelope and hands it to Conor, who hesitantly pulls out a handful of eight by ten photographs. I can’t see what they’re pictures of, but Scott and Conor’s face turn ashen looking at them, and after a minute or so Conor drops the photographs on the worn Persian rug.
“What can we do?”
“Get out,” she says, her voice brittle as ice and just as chilling. “We have to get out.”
I pick the photographs off the floor.
They don’t make sense at first—they’re just shot after shot of abstract shapes. I flip through with a creeping familiarity until I recognize that they’re aerial views of the Zone, schematics with our major occupations—the Library, the dam, the Avenue . . . even my house—marked with bold red Xs. Which would be sickening enough if it weren’t for the last photo, which shows the whole Zone underwater, the same Xs superimposed over an aerial photo of the Zone during the Tragedies; totally flooded.
“Library, nightfall,” I say, looking at Conor and Scott with as much bravery as I can muster. “Get everyone.”
Freckles gives me a sideways glance; I was laid out on the ground, incapacitated, a little more than an hour ago, and she clearly hasn’t forgotten it. “What about your heart?” I pat my chest, looking blankly around the room, then rush with purpose to Grammy’s spotless kitchen. In the cabinet above the sink, next to a jumble of cords and bright white appliances, is what I’m looking for: a roll of aluminum foil, charred brown in places and crumpled from reuse. I realize the ridiculousness of what I’m about to do, but it can’t be helped. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s the best I have. I unroll the foil and give it an exploratory sniff, silently thanking Grammy for keeping such a fastidious house. Despite how it looks, it’s been washed clean of cooking grease and smells faintly of lemon soap.
That settled, I go about wrapping my chest.
It’s not perfect: the foil is loose and crinkly over my shirt, cold on my bare arms. But it doesn’t take long, and I’m skinny enough that I’m able to wrap myself a few times for extra protection. Feeling a little bit like a dollar-store Tin Man, I take a deep breath and walk hesitantly back into the living room, which is quiet as the Grey, everyone lost in their own dark thoughts.
“Hey,” I say, eight eyes instantly on my aluminum wrap. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t the emotionless scrutiny I’m getting. I squeeze my arms into my sides, pushing myself into the cold and scratchy foil. After an uneasy moment, Conor asks, “Is that really going to work?”
I shrug, and he breaks out into a smile. Which catches, working its way around the decreasingly depressing living room until ev
en Grammy has a reluctant twitch at the corners of her pursed mouth. I’d want to let this moment stretch out forever, if it weren’t for Mouse and my parents. But that’s the whole problem: Mouse and my parents.
“So . . .”
Everyone looks at me expectantly and I bite my cheeks, trying to hide my nervousness. “The most important thing,” I start, voice cracking at the memory of the photos from the manila envelope, “is the dam.” I look at Freckles, and she meets my eyes and nods encouragingly. “The people who have Mouse and—” I clench my teeth for a moment and Grammy cringes sympathetically. I start over. “The people who have Mouse and my parents are there.”
Conor looks at me questioningly and opens his mouth to object, but I answer him without even having to hear his question. “If they’re planning on messing with the river, that’s the place to do it.”
“Then why do we want to go there?” Conor yelps, his cheeks flushing with frustration.
Scott nods in agreement. “No point in ending up like Mouse.” Freckles shoots a fierce look at Scott and then at me, waiting to hear how I’ll respond. It’s true that I’m not excited about going into the thick of things, but I don’t see any other option. I sigh, and the expansion of my chest rips the aluminum foil down my side.
“And what about your heart,” Conor says, pointing at the obvious. “The dam’s making you sick; you can’t go there.”
I have to concede that he has a point.
The room settles back into a muffled anxiety while I try to think of what we can possibly do to fix the situation, to get Mouse and my parents back. But it’s so much to process, and I get stuck on thinking about how overwhelming everything suddenly is instead of coming up with actual solutions.
“Then it’s settled,” Freckles says, looking determinedly around the room, her entire aspect brimming with the confidence I was trying to embody earlier. Everyone looks at her, surprised into silence. After a beat or so, I hesitantly take the bait.