by Nick Courage
And now it’s useless.
I try not to think about Mom and Dad, but that’s . . . impossible.
The federales have them, and they have Julia-the-girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have Grammy, too, by now. I try not to think about what the federales are doing to them, but it’s not easy. Dark thoughts about bloodied lips and dirty cells are like a red, rising tide, threatening to drown out all rational thought. Like a thick, white fist, dragging me into the backseat of a black jeep, stealing me from my home and family.
It’s not fear that grips me, though.
It’s a sudden, physical anger.
I take a deep, centering breath, trying to control myself . . . but my muscles are already so taut with rage that I actually feel fiery tendons pulling on cold, aching bones, yanking my exhausted body into reluctant action. They can pull my bones until they snap, I think, hating my body for fighting against itself at a time like this. I couldn’t get up if I wanted to, much less walk. Much less save anyone . . .
Instead, I lay tensely seething in Freckles lap, gritting my teeth and riding out the pain until I’m mobile enough to do something about it. Freckles sweeps my hair across my sweating forehead with the tips of her smooth, cool fingers, and I hold onto the feeling, focusing on it with all my shuddering concentration. It’s just me and Freckles now, me and . . .
“Ev . . . Evelyn,” I manage to say, whispering through hot, cracking lips.
“No one calls me that,” Freckles laughs, pulling her hand away from my forehead in mock irritation and then, thankfully, returning it.
“You really don’t even know my name, do you?” she says.
“Ava,” Freckles whispers, stroking my hair across my forehead one last time before extricating herself from beneath me. “Everyone except you and my mother calls me Ava.”
Her name rasps out of my chalky mouth, startling me into a rattling cough. She’s already somewhere behind me, though, shuffling around, so I’m not sure if she heard me or not. Propping myself up on my elbows, I take stock. The sofa I’m lying on is balding green velvet, soft and worn from use.
“Like, what if I was still calling you Girl Shirt,” she says. Even though the sofa was once plush, the floor tiles are cheap linoleum; swirls of institutional grey and brownish purple designed to hide a thousand stains. Before they can hypnotize me into a depressive spiral, I look away, head pounding, and sit upright, sinking a few inches into the battered old cushions.
“Glad . . . you’re not,” I croak, my bare shoulders tingling unpleasantly at the memory of matching all the girls with their rolled up sleeves . . . and the inevitable game of spin the bottle that followed. The soda that brought us together came from here, I think.
From Conor’s traitor brother.
But I’m too tired to be angry about Conor and the worthless scrap of paper I’d put so much stupid hope into. Better to focus on recovering from the attack; on coming up with a new plan of action. Or even just on how good the air feels in here, so clean and cool. Colder than I’ve felt in ages.
Air-conditioned.
“Maybe I am still calling you that,” she teases. “But stop talking, okay? You sound terrible.” Somewhere behind me I hear running water, and I swallow dryly in anticipation, ignoring the coppery taste of blood at the back of my throat.
“I can keep calling you Freckles, though, right?” I call over my shoulder, trying to sound fully recovered, but breaking out into a hacking cough instead. Julia-the-dog joins in, barking enthusiastically from her perch on the far end of the sofa. It’d be funny if I wasn’t doubled over, red-faced, unable to stop coughing.
“I told you to stop talking,” Ava calls over my hacking and Julia’s angry, cough-like barks. When I lift my head from my hands, her face softens. “Here, water,” she says, handing me a paper cone she must have found and filled at a water cooler in this room. I instinctively swivel my head, looking for it; I could drink a hundred of these, but all I see are racks of magazines and newspapers, some recent, some yellowing. Meanwhile, Ava collapses onto the sofa next to me, taking Julia’s head into her lap and stroking it like she’d stroked mine earlier.
“There, girl,” she whispers, scratching behind Julia’s ears as her tongue lolls onto the ancient velvet upholstery. “Hank’ll stop bothering you now. He just needed something to drink.”
I need more water. The paper cone was barely a trickle, and I might need something else, too. Like painkillers. A do-over. I shake my head, trying to clear it, and catch my smudged reflection in a wall of windows. I look tired and small.
I get up on wobbly legs and wind my way past the periodicals, toward where I think the bathrooms probably are; away from my pathetic reflection, from the still-dark world outside. The parts of my legs that aren’t numb are on pins and needles, so I drag my sneakers on the swirling purple linoleum, not wanting to raise a foot and risk losing my balance. By the time I start getting my land legs back, I’m adrift in a sea of bookshelves.
Back in a library, I think, smiling despite myself.
It’s all beige metal shelves and elaborately labeled science texts—not at all like Mr. Moonie’s polished wood and heavily-thumbed classics. But still, it feels good to be surrounded by books again—comforting, like Freckles and I were destined to end up here.
Ava, I mean.
Freckles is Evelyn is Ava.
It’s a lot of names for one person, and I realize that I don’t even know her middle or last names.
After I find and half-empty the water cooler, I start feeling a little bit more like myself. The library, on the other hand, seems increasingly strange. The fluorescent lights lining the ceiling are bright and cold, like the arctic air-conditioning, and there’s an overpowering smell of floral-scented disinfectant. The sweating, crowded city just outside the windows might as well be a fever-dream.
By the time I shuffle back to the couch, Ava has one of the City newspapers snapped open in front of her face. “So,” I ask the paper, “where’s Carel?”
“I dunno. They argued a little, him and his friends, when we got here, and then they left,” she answers, flipping to another section. “He told us to stay here until he got back, no matter what.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I say, falling back into the couch. “The no matter what.”
It’s funny . . . it feels like we’ve been with Carel forever, and before that, with Tom and Rachel, and even Grammy, and always in crisis. Except for the back steps of Tom and Rachel’s house, this is the first time Ava and I have really been alone. Even with everything, though—his radishes and his glowering, the long silences and the outbursts—I wish Carel was back here with us.
It just feels empty without him.
“There’s something else,” she says, folding the newspaper in half and trailing off. “I thought I’d see if there was anything about the Green or the Other Side in any of these papers.”
“Is there?”
Ava hands today’s halved paper to me in answer, nodding at a bold headline: “Final Survivors Relocated: Life Goes On In Spite of Looming Threats.” Beneath the headline is a grainy picture of at least fifty people standing in front of a nondescript black bus. They all seem to be happy—grateful, even—but I feel my face start to go numb as I scan the accompanying article.
It was bad enough that they’d been living in the ruins of a disaster area for the past fifteen years, abandoned by an increasingly threatened national government, it reads. But even worse: recent meteorological surveys indicate that the disaster area they called home is going to be hit again, and harder than it ever has before.
Swallowing a rising bile, I flash back to Grammy’s house in the Zone—the brightly blooming hydrangeas spilling over her sun-warmed porch and the manila envelope that she showed us, arthritic hands trembling with genuine anger. She said the federales left it with her as a warning, that the aerial photos of the Zone with red Xs superimposed over every place worth caring about were threats. That the accompanying projecti
on of the Zone underwater, the same red Xs drowning in a river gone wild, was a call to war.
I believed her, I think, my throat stinging with a sickeningly sharp acidity. Without thinking, I believed her.
“No,” I say, my voice shaking with disbelief. “This isn’t real. The federales were the ones who wanted to flood us out.” Ava doesn’t agree or disagree, she just sits quietly next to me, stroking Julia, while I flip manically through the rest of the paper, ripping the sections apart for more information. “They thought we were going to secede, so they broke in. They took my parents and Julia.”
There’s nothing else in the paper about the Green Zone, but there are plenty of pictures of tanks and war atrocities; headlines about last-minute actions in terrible global conflicts. Ava’s article isn’t even on the front page, or in the first section—it was buried almost on the very last page of a very troubled paper. Dropping it on the floor, I nervously rifle through the surrounding racks of magazines and newspapers, looking for answers, but it’s all more of the same: wars, riots.
Starvation.
Clammy-handed, my fingers smudge illegible streaks into the newsprint of pages and pages of disasters. All those years at School, bored in the attic, and I had no idea any of this was happening. That if anyone needed saving it was the rest of the world, not the Zone.
“Henry.” Ava taps on the first, slightly ripped newspaper article I’d abandoned—the one about how the federales saved us. “Did you see her here?”
I stop what I’m doing, let the newspaper fall in a crumpled pile at my feet. “See who?” I ask, barely whispering. I’d been more focused on the article than the photo, which was underexposed and hard to make out, but now, scanning it more closely, I spot Mrs. Wallace—no longer in her dirty wedding dress—and the husky engineer, his arm draped around her shoulder; next to them is Conor, looking stoically into the camera, and Scott, who looks slightly less stoic. Guv’s there, too, and even a scowling Mr. Moonie, a little more wrinkled than usual. He never wanted to leave the Zone, didn’t even want to leave the Library. And now, here he is, unhappily sitting in a federale newspaper: an old and unwilling participant in the history he only ever wanted to study from the comfort of his cracked leather chair. He doesn’t seem to be leaning on his secret-sword cane, so I can only hope he lost it after putting up a fight.
Tearing my eyes away from Mr. Moonie, I take a deep breath, trying to pull myself together. That’s when I see her, huddled in the far right of the picture. Her parents, the Staltons, hovering protectively around her, shrouding her in shadows . . . but there’s no mistaking her. Julia.
“Are you okay?” Ava asks, her voice soft and high. “You’re . . . you’re clutching your chest.”
“Huh?”
I look down, and only after a moment do I recognize the bone-white hand clenching at my shirt as mine. I want to let go, and try to, but . . . I don’t seem to be able to. Everything’s off; I don’t recognize half of the people in the photo, and I don’t see any Other Siders.
Or Grammy.
I run a finger across the grainy photo with my non-clenching hand, smudging it as I search for something I can’t quite place.
A clue.
My parents.
Quickly scanning the faces, I desperately check and double-check each row of “survivors.” It was easy to miss Julia-the-girl—she’s wedged in the corner of the frame, hidden between her long-suffering parents and folded in on herself—and I’m hoping Mom and Dad will similarly materialize, heads bobbing up from behind some too-tall-engineer’s shoulder. The more I look, though, the more it’s just lines of blurred eyes staring inscrutably back at me. Feeling smudged myself, I’m not sure who or what to believe anymore.
“Hank!” Ava shouts, her hands on my shoulders, shaking me, as the newspaper falls onto the floor for the second time. They’re dead, I think darkly. There’s no way they’re not. Ava’s still shouting, and I wish we lived in a world where I could snap to attention—to fight, to find my parents alive despite all odds and triumphantly save the Green. But I’m struggling just to keep my eyes focused, and I can barely hear Ava over the engulfing emptiness. How am I supposed to save anyone when I can’t even save myself? I think, six desperate words echoing at the back of my pounding head.
Henry Long doesn’t have a heart.
That’s when the shaking starts.
It’s an all-encompassing shiver—metal and wood creaking ominously, as if the building itself is straining at its federale foundations.
Escaping.
I feel it in my legs—which seem to be falling out from beneath me again—before the blast registers, and start angling for a wall to prop against. It’s only when the books start falling off their shelves that the splintering explosion outside finally resonates into the hush of the library. Julia-the-dog is gone at the first sign of trouble, disappearing into the heart of the building, her stub of a tail quivering behind her. When the lights go out, they quit without any ceremony—no popping bulbs or blackened filaments, just an instant blackness and the accompanying clunk of the central air-conditioning giving up on itself.
Sightless, I grab for Freckles’s hand and, gripping it, feel less afraid.
Strangely, as the building dies around us, I feel suddenly hyper-aware—my skin taut with pins and needles, a crackling power surging through my legs and arms and back inwards again, charging into my chest like a million roaring volts. I want to shout, to jump up and punch holes in the ceiling. To grab Ava by the shoulders and just make out with her.
Instead, I take a deep breath, remembering—as the adrenaline ebbs—the precariousness of our situation. Ava’s stopped yelling, and now that the lights and air-conditioning have given out, it’s eerily quiet . . . It’s not yet dawn, but since it’s dark both inside and out, the windows are no longer mirrored; instead of our own wobbling reflections, we’re faced with a cityscape illuminated only in patches by federale floodlights and the lanterns of first responders: sinister polka dots of briefly-illuminated smoke and gleaming military boots.
Completely powered down. Still holding hands, our vision slowly adapting to the night, we try to survey the damage. It’s hard to get our bearings at first, but it seems like we’re on at least the sixth floor—higher than the roof of the Library back home and most of the other buildings here. As federales start to converge on the streets below, we can see that the City’s frenzied in the aftermath of the explosion, shadows roiling in the red glow of flashing emergency lights. It’s impossible to tell what happened, though; the shaking only lasted a couple of seconds, and I can’t spot any source for the panic on the ground outside of the blackout.
“Holy . . .” Ava whispers next to me, trailing off. We can’t hear them or see their faces, but I can tell that people are yelling on the ground; I can feel it in the pulsing of the crowds. I rest my nose and forehead more fully against the soundproof glass, looking down. It’s almost peaceful, watching the chaos from above—I could almost lose myself in it if it weren’t for the finger poking insistently in my side.
“Henry,” Ava whispers, almost reverently. “Look to your right.”
Mesmerized, I don’t want to tear myself away from the madness below, but down the block, just barely in view, is the scorched crater of a building—smoking grey teeth thrown into terrible relief by the federales’ flashing reds. It’s surrounded by what look to be soldiers in full military regalia. They don’t seem to be doing much more than holding a line, although some are firing what I hope are warning shots with their oversized rifles.
It sounds like terrible, muted applause through the triple-ply glass.
We stand slumped against the windows, watching the curling, charred smoke disappear into the greasy, predawn light. We watch for so long, in fact, that I lose track of time almost completely. I don’t remember wrapping my arm around Ava’s shoulders, but it’s there, and my cheeks are cold from where hot tears have streaked them. Ava’s cheeks are wet, too. Glistening, even. I lean toward her,
tightening my grip on her shoulder in what I hope is a reassuring way. The scene outside blurs as our faces draw together.
“I feel like I’m going to puke,” Ava says, jerking her head to the side and spitting dryly. “I’m going to puke.”
“Okay,” I say, quickly letting go of her shoulder and slouching slightly backward against the window. “Do you want to . . . go to the bathroom or something?”
Ava shakes her head no. “I’m not actually going to, I don’t think. I just . . .” she gestures at the still-churning mass of people below. “What are we going to do now?”
“Carel said . . .” I start, wondering if the obvious plan is still to wait for him to get back. Even though the City’s in turmoil, we seem to be safe here—and anyway, I can’t think of anywhere else we would go. Even with the lights out, I can tell that Ava’s defiantly arching her brow, as if she’s two steps ahead of me.
“He said to wait, not to leave under any circumstances,” I say, holding my ground. The current that started coursing through my body after the explosion is still cycling through twitching muscles. Interestingly, the aching soreness from earlier is completely gone. For the first time I can remember, I feel like I can do anything. Still, even though I haven’t heard any guns for a while, I’m not anxious to abandon the cool and quiet of the library for the terrified crush of humanity outside. “Don’t you think this is, like, the best circumstance not to leave under?”
Leaning forward against the window, I peer down at the street below again. It’s barely dark anymore, but there’s a search light scanning the streets from a helicopter circling above, and some of the armed federales are still carrying their industrial-strength flashlights.
There’s no way I’m going down there, I think, wiping the fogging view clear with the heel of my hand. It’s insane to even think about.
“Henry,” Ava says, jabbing a finger emphatically at the glass outside. “You do know that Carel did this, right?” My chest twinges as Ava’s accusation registers, and it takes me a second to realize it’s not my heart this time.