Lucy doesn’t know how she managed to ride her bike all the way down to the parking lot at Nantasket Beach, she was so scared. The wind whipped frigid spray onto her cheeks, and she huddled in the lee of the boarded-up refreshment stand, waiting for ages. She expected a sleek black limo, a guy in a shiny suit and dark glasses. Instead, a rented Corolla pulled up, and a middle-aged guy with a briefcase stepped out, gazing around like he’d just landed in Timbuktu. Her chest hurt awfully now that he was here, and she stood there panting with her fists pushing her ribs.
You really are clueless, huh, he said. You shouldn’t be drawing attention like that. Straighten up. Get your hands down.
It hurts, she stammered.
Damn right it does. But it’s how we know each other. Otherwise, how could we tell? We look just like them.
Them: meaning her ma and da. Sean. Everyone at school. It still sounded nuts to her, but deep inside, she was starting to understand it was all true.
He told her to get in the car, to get out of the wind. Lucy felt awkward, like they were up to something wrong, but she obeyed so he wouldn’t kill her. All he did was ask for whatever details she knew, which were meager at best: she’d been found in the parking lot at Children’s Hospital on December 2, 1983, assessed to be no more than a week old. The date helped narrow things down. He dug through a huge binder, opening file after file, his annoyance visible—how overseers coped in the pre-computer era, Lucy has no idea.
Finally, he concluded she’d never been officially logged. He explained there actually weren’t baby servs anymore; in fact, the last on record was the year prior to her own arrival. Lucy had been a mistake, and most likely, no one had wanted to deal with her.
She blinked and tears blobbed down her cheeks.
No reason to cry, he admonished. It’s a miracle you were dropped off at a hospital like that. The way things used to be, babies were usually, well—he paused to look at her sideways from under his brows. Let’s just say, you’re a very lucky little serv.
Lucy saw in her mind her small dark house, the air thick with her ma’s grieving and shame, the rooms empty of her da’s bluster and projects. She didn’t feel lucky at all.
There might be a record at the Gate, the overseer continued, but it’s not likely to be found. No one would bother. There’s always the next one to process.
What’s the Gate?
It’s where the Nafikh come through. All the places in this world that the Nafikh like to visit, there’s a Gate.
Lucy pictured a gate with a door swinging open onto the heavens. She couldn’t fathom how records were kept there.
It doesn’t matter, he waved away her questions. You don’t need to know about all that. I’ve made my decision: you just stay here and have a normal life.
She was aghast. She’d wanted him to say, Come on, we’re going to your real home. Instead, he listed rules she had to follow. The number one rule was: never divulge. She couldn’t ever, ever tell anyone what she was. She could be hurt, experimented on. There were stories of people hunting down and killing servs, thinking they were ridding the world of demons. Did she want to bring that on herself and the rest of her kind? No. So she had best keep her mouth shut, at all costs.
Also, she couldn’t complain about her Source, so as not to draw attention. And she had to stay away from Boston, in case she ran into other servs. If you do come across one of us, he warned, you just keep right on walking. Don’t talk, don’t engage, or you’ll get hauled in and tagged, and trust me, you don’t want that. Don’t ever forget how lucky you are.
Then he let her out and drove away.
Even after all these years, even knowing what a gift he made her that day, she can still call up the desolation she felt watching his car go off in the distance.
Drunk Pete didn’t take this development well. He couldn’t bear her getting off scott free, just like that. She deserved to suffer, he said. Still, no matter how mean he was, she sought him out: he was all she had.
Tell me about the Gate, she begged. How does it work?
Who the fuck knows? Ain’t no regular serv knows anything about the Gates.
But how do people not see them?
They’re inside buildings, stupid.
The closest Gate was in a Chelsea warehouse, as it so happened, nondescript, no attention drawn, which was the way the serv world liked it. Every Gate was protected by two servs called Qadir who were made just for that, and who ran the show. Only a special class of servs, the sentries, got to interact with the Qadir: Ain’t no regular serv ever met one that came back to tell the tale, Drunk Pete said, but in her fantasies, she was brought to the Gate and the Qadir were kind and took care of her. They waved magic wands and the hurt in her chest vanished.
Drunk Pete found this hilarious. You are one dumb skinner, he mocked.
Skinner was what servs called each other. It was because they were fake, their skins a disguise. She wasn’t a person like her ma or Sean or any of the kids in school. She wasn’t even really a serv, because she was here, living among people. She was nothing, a dumb skinner that everyone teased, and she’d never fit in, not ever. She didn’t even have God to talk to anymore. She was made by the Nafikh, and Drunk Pete told her servs didn’t have no god other than Them, and They would smite a whining little skinner like her dead.
One day when she was ten, she incised cuts into her chest, to try and let out the hurting, just scratches really, but enough to send Eva into a panic. Things progressed from there into years of ambulance calls, shrinks, pills of all shapes and sizes. By the time Lucy turned fourteen, she refused to go to school; most days she wouldn’t get out of bed. Even Sean couldn’t coax her out of her dark room. She curled up in a ball under the sheet, hands over her eyes.
The state stepped in, alerted by her truancy. Eva was unfit, they said. Lucy needed special care. Eva should give her up, for everyone’s sake.
You never let yourself be ours, Eva blubbered in a shocking display of emotion, snot pouring out her nose. You never let us love you.
They were in a conference room in the courthouse, with social workers and a cop. Lucy looked across at this woman who had dressed her and fed her and, she now realized, tried so hard, and she felt a huge sadness engulf her. She tried to speak. She tried to say no, she’d be good, that she wanted to go back to the ramshackle house on the bay, to the shed with all the ratty old lobster traps and the boat growing barnacles because there was no money to fix it. She wanted to beg them all, Let me go home.
Instead, she built up all her courage and said what was truer than all that: I don’t belong with you.
Eva shook her head in sorrow. She kissed Lucy on the forehead, gathered up her stuff, and went out the door.
Lucy spent her teenage years in a string of foster homes, with spells at McLean Hospital for her tendency to self-harm. Maybe what sorted her out was living with so many kids who were fundamentally more fucked up than she ever could be—sure, she was a serv stranded in the human world with a boiling hurt inside her chest, but she was used to that. She’d never been beaten unconscious, or abused by an uncle, or been forced to live on the street. She’d grown up poor, but always had enough clothes and food and toys, and she was smart, could read and write no problem. Above all, she had a ma who stayed in touch. All the other kids envied that. Eva sent pretty cards with a few dollars tucked inside and news about the cats and what she’d cooked for dinner. Sometimes she called. During those calls, Lucy stayed mostly quiet. Eva’s persistence weighed heavy, sucked the breath out of her so she couldn’t speak. She wasn’t supposed to have a ma or be loved, just like Drunk Pete had said. She’d never be able to live up to Eva’s faith in her.
She kept trying, though. At seventeen she was placed in a group home where she buckled down and passed her GED. Eva was over the moon: she sent a whopping twenty-dollar bill tucked into a pink, gushing card: You’re a one-of-a-kind daughter. The card both pleased and embarrassed her, and made her housemates jealous. She slipped it i
nto the rubber-banded pile she kept in the back of her drawer. She filled out an application to Bunker Hill Community College, put in for loans, took a job as a barista. She visited Eva in Hull, bringing specialty coffees in fancy tins. Eva kept the tins in a row on the mantelpiece, like trophies.
In those days she hardly ever ran into her kind, the home being in Quincy, far outside the radius of serv activity. But she had some run-ins in town. One time going across the park headed for the T, she felt the slow hot creep of pain radiating from her chest. Before she knew it, the other serv was on her. Hey, you, when did you get here? she demanded. What bunk you in?
I’m not, Lucy said without thinking.
What do you mean, you’re not? The serv edged in close, her grip hard as a rock. Bloodshot eyes, swollen bruised cheek. I haven’t seen you around. Who’s your boss?
Lucy wrenched her arm free. Fuck off, she snapped. She ducked the furious serv’s grasping hands and ran. For days she replayed the incident in her head, her adrenaline pumping anew. She wondered what a bunk was, if it was a boss that had socked that lunatic bitch. The few other times she ran into servs, they were always like that, pissed off and run-down, hungry for trouble.
That overseer had been right, she had to stay away.
So that’s what she did. She rented a cupboard-sized room near the college, sharing with three other students. To her barista job she added regular stints as a Kelly girl, stuffing envelopes and filing. Eva insisted on taking out a home equity loan to help with college tuition and all her expenses: My Lucy Belle is a freshman in college! she announced to anyone who would listen, per Sean’s reports from home. Lucy was proud of herself, too. She relished the crisp new notebooks and sets of pens in blue, black, and red; the textbooks so carefully selected from the second-hand section in the bookstore; the reading assignments, the schedule, the grades. She sat in the front row taking notes and asking questions, brimming with the thrill of all her plans for the future.
And then, along came Julian.
He walked through the coffee shop doors and the Source burst its pain, sending fiery tendrils through her flesh. Panic flared: she couldn’t just duck out, she had to work. She zeroed in on the serv, a guy in jeans and a button-down approaching the counter. He looked different from the others she’d run into: clean-cut, at ease. He smiled crookedly with all kinds of knowing in his eyes as she tried to remain aloof, parked behind the espresso machine. He gestured that she meet him at the end of the counter. She pretended not to see, but he just stood there with no shame, waiting for her to comply. Her workmate giggled, elbowed her. Lucy had no choice.
Well, well, well, he leaned on the counter, looking her up and down. She felt herself blushing like an idiot. He asked, When did you arrive?
She was so used to dodging questions and taking off at a run, she had no ready answer. A few years ago, she fumbled.
He raised an eyebrow, bemused. You don’t sound too sure.
I really have to get back to work.
What is there to hide? What bunk are you in?
I’m not, O.K.? she blurted.
Not in a bunk, he marveled, sliding a little closer on his elbows, gazing at her as if she were the most fascinating creature he’d ever seen. I wonder how you’re pulling that off, you sly, pretty thing.
In the pause, any number of meanings tumbled out of this remark, all of them ugly. I’m not—I don’t—get out of here, O.K.?
She never stood a chance. He had her sussed out right away, like he’d reached in and closed his fist around the lonely girl who used to pedal down to the shore in tears, stare at the Boston skyline because she yearned so badly to live among her kind. How she’d longed for this, exactly this: him waiting outside when she got off her shift, falling in step, dogged in his pursuit. The first time he came over to her place, she gazed in mute anguish at his cruelly scarred chest, where he must have tried to stab out the Source when he arrived, she knew without having to be told. They did not speak. She was acutely aware of their silence. Of their profound communion, impossible in the real-people world. He reached out and slipped his wiry, powerful fingers into her hair and dragged her close. When he discovered she’d never been tagged, she told her story, all the years of confusion and loneliness tumbling out.
You won’t turn me in, will you? she whispered.
I will not, he said. His thumb stroked the razor scars on her wrist. He kissed one. But you’ll never be one of them, he told her. Do you understand? No one suffers like us, even you. You can’t run away from it.
I don’t want to run away, she whispered.
Lucy heard his breaths and her own, and felt the Source throbbing hurt, but now she craved it, because it meant he was near. He mesmerized her. The sharp slant of his cheekbones, his broken nose. His scarred hands spanning the taut, pale width of her stomach. Her housemates thought he was hot. Little did they know how much he disdained them. They’ve got no idea there are gods right in front of them, he sneered.
It’s greatly embarrassing now, but Lucy enjoyed thinking of herself as a fallen immortal, her true identity hidden from oblivious passersby. It became a thrill just to walk down the street. They tromped through the apartment, smug with their secret, and closed the door on her silly housemates. After making love, they lay on her bed, sweat drying on their bare bodies. He lit a cigarette, dragged a book off her bedside table, flipped through the pages, saying, All this reading you do, it’s of no use to us. It’s a complete waste of time.
Until the instant Julian disparaged them, Lucy had been so proud of her books, evidence of her status as a bona fide college student. She shrugged and said, It’s required.
You need to get out of here.
Why would I go? she teased. I like my pad.
You really think you belong here, palling around with people, going to classes?
Yeah, maybe I’ll go to law school, too.
Law school, he chuckled. You are too much.
She bristled at his mockery, but he said she was missing the point. The laws she fancied herself studying had no meaning. Servs inhabited a whole other world she couldn’t begin to grasp, with a whole other set of rules. She was the one who complained that no matter what, she couldn’t shake the deep-down feeling of not belonging. And yet here she was, still trying to stuff the square peg of herself into the round hole of life among people.
You just don’t get it, he concluded, which infuriated her.
So show me! All you do is tell me I don’t get this and I don’t get that!
What, you wanna get tagged? He barked a laugh. Don’t even go there. You really don’t get it.
She could have socked him in the face, she was so pissed. First he goaded her for being so stupid about serv existence, then balked at bringing her into it. Not that she should be so eager to go. He had cigarette burns up and down his arms, and his left hand was crooked from an encounter with a steel-toed boot, as he joked. Those injuries were just from the time after arrival, when he ended up in a really bad bunk. The broken nose, the faded scars, the slight blindness in his left eye, that was all from Service to the Nafikh.
About Them, she had a curiosity she couldn’t settle. What are They like? she asked. Why are They so cruel?
You can’t see it that way. You have to think of Them as gods. They can do whatever They want. They come and go, They make us, They break us.
But there has to be a reason. Everything has a reason.
Not with Them. A Nafikh would just as soon break your arm as have an ice cream and watch the traffic go by.
Then how does anyone get through, if it’s so unpredictable?
He tapped his forehead. It takes brains, and guts. You figure out, eventually, how to work Them. Most of the time. The rest, anything could happen.
He told her about the Faithful, who ran towards Service like lemmings. They were crazy as shit, they believed if they just did their best, like trained dogs, they would one day all be Returned, meaning the Nafikh might take them back to the home world.
How they carried on believing when there was zero evidence it would ever happen just proved how loony they were.
Lucy, though, could kind of understand. There wasn’t much difference between that and hoping to be swept up to heaven by Jesus, which she’d always assumed would one day happen, right up until Drunk Pete told her she wasn’t God’s child.
Julian made it through several seasons, then he met Theo, which changed his life. He’d been with him going on five years now. Talk about brains, he said admiringly. Theo had arrived in St. Petersburg. He started out on the bottom in a drug bunk, and within a handful of years, he’d stuck a knife in the bunk boss’s neck and taken over. Then he made a fortune in the arms trade, bought himself out, and set sail for America. Theo Elander wasn’t his slave name, as he called it: that would never be uttered again. Theo was a visionary, a rebel. He’d bought Julian out from Service, given him his freedom. Those who worked for Theo, that was just one of the perks. He’d created a world within a world, Julian said, a space where servs could live free and strong, and no one could take that away. The lowliest grunts in his bunks might not get bought out or even duped up, but they were paid for their work, and every one of them got three square meals and a roof over his head.
Lucy wanted to meet Theo, but Julian said she had to be patient. Theo knew about her, and now she’d just have to wait for an invitation.
It got under her skin, to be treated like that. He kept going off to meet Theo, but she had to stay behind. He’d cancel dates at the last minute, because Theo needed him. And then one morning, he told her to wait at the bottom of a hill on the Common and trudged up towards a lone figure standing in the sun. It was spring, the air heavy with the smells of wet bark and earth and grass, and children’s cries carried across the open spaces. Lucy grew increasingly furious at being left standing there. Her anger boiled into her legs and before she knew it, she was marching up the hill, hands jammed in her pockets, chin up in defiance.
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