Harbinger

by Sara Etienne

  The waves swirled around the picture on the floor, leaving the drawing untouched. I waded over to the island of dry linoleum in the center of the turquoise water. I’d seen this shape before. I knew I had, but I couldn’t remember where.

  Beneath the roar of the incoming waves, I heard the eerie music again. I traced the person and the symbol with my finger, and there was familiarity in the movement. This picture was in my style. These were my lines. I’m in control.

  An edge of excitement gilded my fear. I’d lived so long with these nightmares and visions. And now, for the first time, I dared to think there might be a reason. I’m in control.

  The music rumbled through my bones and my heart pounded with it. Fear is an illusion.

  When I looked back down, the water was gone. My jumpsuit was dry. I was kneeling bloody handed on the floor, but now the arcane symbols were a puzzle to be solved.

  “Another one?” Maya was awake now, looking at me.

  How does she know about the visions? Did she see the water too?

  She pointed at the floor. “But this one’s different.”

  Maya was talking about the drawing. Of course she didn’t see the water—it was a hallucination. My excitement drained away. Maybe the symbols were nothing more than my next stop on the crazy-train.

  Keeping the disappointment off of my face, I nodded at Maya and she crawled over, inspecting the figure and symbol drawn on the linoleum. In the dawn half-light, Maya was a study in shadows, darkening her eyes, outlining her jutting collarbones, hiding her face behind her hair.

  “You know what it means. Don’t you?” She stared at me, her look tinged with suspicion. By now, I recognized her distrust for what it was. The haze through which she viewed the entire world.

  I went to the bathroom, grabbing a wad of the scratchy toilet paper. Buying time. Scrubbing at the floor with the flimsy square sheets. But Maya waited for me to answer.

  Finally, I forced myself to meet her gaze and she looked back. Her pain infested me, and for the first time, it wasn’t just emotions. Or words. Vague shapes played out scene after scene, like hideous shadow puppets cast against the wall of my subconscious.

  A man pinning Maya’s hands behind her, his fingers crushing her wrists.

  A boy who promised to protect her, but lied.

  Maya hiding under her bed, a skinny cat clutched in her arms.

  Suddenly, our first conversation replayed in my head.

  “Why do you even care?” I’d asked her.

  “Because someone has to.”

  But who had cared about Maya? As the twisted shadows acted out the nightmare of her childhood, we both shuddered. I kept my eyes on Maya, even though I didn’t want to, witnessing her torment. Because someone had to.

  Finally, the memories cleared, and on the other side of all that violence was the same steely-eyed Maya. It seemed unbelievable that she was unfazed by the shared vision. Was it possible that those scenes were always unfolding in her mind? That because she lived in that eternal hell, she hadn’t noticed that, this time, I’d seen it too? Or maybe it hadn’t happened at all.

  Either way, Maya sat there looking at me. Still waiting for my answer.

  What could I tell her about the drawings on the floor or our red hands? I keep having these hallucinations, but it’s no big deal?

  Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure I didn’t kill anyone?

  “Come on, Faye. I saw you looking at that column yesterday with the same mark on it. What’s going on?”

  A warm breeze trickled in through the open window, whispering of ancient forests and murky seas. I felt the contradictions of this place. This patch of forest surrounded by wasteland. A Family bound together but without trust. And I made a decision.

  “Maya, I really don’t know what’s going on.” Nausea rolled in my belly and I was still dizzy from the torrent of Maya’s shadow scenes. Her pain had been so vivid, like the terror I’d felt through Dr. Mordoch in Solitary. But that vision of the beach had been my memory too. Only it’d felt like I was remembering something backward. Or maybe inside out.

  With Maya, each memory had been ripe with new horror. That’d never happened before. And I hoped it never happened again. I pushed the images away, filling the space with a stream of words. “I didn’t want to say anything yesterday, ’cause Damion was kinda . . . intense about what’d happened to us. But I think that flying-bird-V-thing is some kind of symbol. It’s like something from a dream. But I have no idea what it means. If I did, I would tell you.”

  She squinted at me, crossing her arms. Years of betrayal binding them across her chest.

  “I promise.” I willed her to believe me.

  The overhead light flicked on and Maya made a decision too. She nodded at me and went to get more toilet paper.

  As Nurse’s voice screeched through the speakers, I closed the window for the second morning in a row. A flicker of green streaked across the rooftop of the other wing of the dorm. Then it was gone. And like with everything else that’d happened since I came to Holbrook, I was left with one more question.

  Kel wasn’t at breakfast. Damion and Zach just shrugged when I looked pointedly at the empty seat. A cold knot of fear formed in my belly as I remembered how gray Kel had gone yesterday in Socialization.

  Today there were grits and greasy sausages on our plates, the first meat we’d had since the meat loaf, and I saw the outrage on Maya’s face. Damion must have seen it too, because he shot her a threatening look, showing her his red-stained hands. Reminding her why we couldn’t risk getting into any more trouble. A war waged across Maya’s face as she stared from the sausages to her own hands. Trying to decide where her loyalties lay.

  Nami ended the stalemate. She unfolded her paper napkin and, keeping her hands low, placed her sausages at the center. Then she removed the offending sausages from Maya’s plate too, and handed the napkin to Zach. He glanced quickly around the room, hesitating. But Nami gave him a nudge and he followed suit.

  I added my sausages to the collection, but when I offered the oily napkin to Damion, he wouldn’t take it. He and Maya locked eyes, a silent standoff. This time, Maya showed Damion her red-stained hands, and gave him a bitter smile. Turning the warning back on him. Nami added a little eyelash batting to the mix and Damion shoved his sausages into the napkin. Crisis averted.

  I glanced around the room. Had anyone else noticed our little drama? But the other tables were busy with their own power struggles. Here and there, scattered around the cafeteria, were tiny marks of individuality. A pair of earrings. A baseball cap. Pink lip gloss. All the students with accessories had two things in common. Each of them had a smug smile and an aptitude for berating us at lunch yesterday.

  A big guy, with a gold chain around his neck, grabbed the last sausage off a runty kid’s plate and stuffed it in his mouth. There was no protest, no reprisal. A new hierarchy was emerging at Holbrook, and I guess I had my answer about Kel’s hoodie and gloves. And a hundred more questions. Was he spying on our group? On me? Was this why he wasn’t at breakfast? What secrets is Kel trading for his freedom?

  I pushed away the suspicion. Instead, as the Takers led us out of the cafeteria toward class, I focused on the winding hallways of the Compass Rose, searching for another flying-bird symbol anywhere. But there was nothing.

  We didn’t go back to the Knowledge Annex for classes. Instead an “Uncle” with a trim beard and a paunch met us outside the Compass Rose.

  “Welcome to Art and Life. The essential lesson you must learn is that art is first and foremost about truth. Before you call yourself an artist, you must be able to accurately perceive reality and reproduce it faithfully. Only then can we see the truth of ourselves within this reality.” Art Uncle counted us and frowned, looking as if he didn’t like the reality that he saw in front of him.

  There was still no sign of Kel when Dragon showed up with a note and a nasty look on her face. And I regretted the ugly assumptions I’d had about Kel at breakfast.

/>   Worry settled in, nesting in my mind. It whispered nagging thoughts to me. Maybe he’s sick. Maybe he’s locked up again. Maybe he’s been sent away.

  Art Uncle read the note and started down a trail. “Okay, let’s go, then.”

  Damion, always the good soldier, was right on his heels. Nami sidled into line in front of me, giving me a wink and a little eyebrow waggle in Damion’s direction.

  Art Uncle led us into the woods, and as the trees closed in around me, I could feel their branches reaching down for me. Their roots snaking up through the earth toward my feet. As I climbed up the hill on the far side of campus, the wind picked up. It hissed through the branches like it was calling to me.

  I tried to shake off the sensation, but my legs were stiff and my brain was sluggish. A blur of white caught the corner of my eye. Rita, her blond braid glowing in the sun, wandered through the trees, heading toward the ocean. With everything that’d happened in the last two days, I’d forgotten about her. But here she was again, free and alone, without any Takers.

  As she disappeared into the woods, I longed to run after her. To beg her to show me how to get out of here. But I remembered Damion’s warning to us. Fall in line.

  So I did just that. Forcing my feet to march one in front of the other on the well-worn path, I watched the mix of boot and sneaker treads imprinted in the dirt. And then I noticed the footprints.

  I stopped dead. Zach ran into my back and Maya into him.

  “What is it?” Maya demanded in a harsh whisper.

  Hoping to stop her questions, I said, “Tell you later.”

  Then I hurried to catch back up with Nami and the rest of the line. Now that I was watching, there were footprints everywhere. Toe and heel marks where bare feet had walked this path. Recently.

  Art Uncle stopped at the top of the hill near a stack of easels. But the path went on, toward the Screamers. The bronze statues lurked in the distance, almost hidden by the trees. I shivered, thinking about their terrorized faces.

  “Everybody gets one.” Art Uncle handed me a set of watercolor paints and my mind went blank. All I could see were twelve bright circles of color nestled in the plastic box.

  It reminded me of my first watercolor set I’d gotten right before I started elementary school. It must have been just after we moved to Pennsylvania, but before oil levels had peaked and fallen. My mom had taken me grocery shopping. Thinking back now, it seemed impossible that there were ever shelves and shelves of food. A whole aisle of cereal. Twenty different kinds of toilet paper. Now, even with mandatory paper recycling, there was still just the government-issued kind.

  But back then, the grocery store had everything. They’d set up a little back-to-school display with markers, boxes of waxy-smelling crayons, and paints. I’d flipped open the lid of the plastic box, and suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted those colors so badly.

  “We don’t have time for your wandering.” Mom grabbed the paints out of my hands, shoving the box onto a shelf with crayons and colored pencils. “The Samsons are expecting me at their house in twenty minutes.”

  She’d loved being a realtor back then, when there was still plenty of money to be made in the housing market. When people didn’t have to go through a whole application process to be accepted into a Cooperative.

  In the checkout line, Mom chatted with the cashier, practicing her client smile while she rummaged for her wallet. I could see the back-to-school display from there, the pristine, white box of paints sitting crookedly in the wrong part of the display. My mom was focusing too hard on being charming to notice me.

  So I ran over. When I reached out my hand, I swear I was only going to return the paints to their right place. But as soon as I touched them, I knew they belonged to me. I knew I needed them.

  “Faye!” Mom called over her shoulder in her realtor voice. “Get your patootie over here.”

  In the car, I was terrified. I shoved the paints down into the crack in the seat and sat on the edge that was sticking out. I didn’t dare touch them while Mom gave her tour of the house. Or while she pumped more gas into our SUV. I didn’t let myself open the box until I’d sneaked them up to my room and locked the door.

  And there they were. Those bright colors were all mine. Standing on this hillside now, years later, I ran my finger along the stubby paintbrush, and the same greedy need growled in the pit of my stomach.

  “Grab an easel, a board, and a dish of water. Then set up looking at something you want to paint.” Art Uncle pointed to a stack of splattered particleboard and the banged-up aluminum easels. Damion, standing closest, reached for one, but Nami snatched it first.

  “Thanks.” Nami tossed the word over her shoulder.

  Damion’s eyes followed Nami as she sauntered off toward the cliff. His feet stayed put, but his body leaned forward ever so slightly, as if trying to stay closer to her. Nami planted her stolen easel so it looked out over the water toward three small, barren islands sticking up into the smoggy sky. Tankers sounded their low horns as they crossed the oily, rainbowed water, eternally questing to make up for the lack of foreign oil.

  Damion frowned at Nami and shook his head, but then set up his easel right next to her anyway. He went through the motions of pretending to be interested in the same ocean vista. And Nami let him keep his facade.

  Maya took an easel and walked to the edge of the clearing, facing the distant Screamers. Zach hung back, finally choosing to paint the dense forest behind us.

  “Pick just one thing and try to portray it accurately,” Art Uncle admonished us. “A single tree . . . a pinecone . . .”

  “A scenic oil rig . . . a trash-covered beach . . . ,” Maya sniped. “A clear-cut viewed through razor wire—”

  “That’s enough.” Art Uncle shot her a warning glance, then went on. “The goal isn’t to make it scenic or pretty, but to make it authentic.”

  Picking up my supplies, I ran my finger across the paper already taped to the board. It was thin and cheap, but I didn’t care. I was just glad to get a chance to paint again. Tasting the anticipation in my mouth, I looked over the cliff. It was always a delicious moment, trying to choose just what part of the world to paint. And I already felt stronger with the watercolors in my hand.

  Far below us, Rita reemerged on the fenced-off beach. Clearly she did know a few secrets about how to get around Holbrook. What had she said that first morning? “The path is hard to follow”?

  Is that the path she was talking about?

  Down on the beach, waves shimmered white and blue as they crawled over the generator buoys and up onto the exposed shore. I placed my easel a little ways off from Damion’s and Nami’s. Where I could keep an eye on Rita.

  It was low tide, and seagulls swarmed the wide beach, sorting through remnants of plastic lids, shreds of fishing nets, and thick ropes of seaweed. It was disgusting, but also glorious. Sun flashed off the underwings of scavenging birds. Waves crawled up the stony beach again and again, fighting the moon’s pull.

  A sudden attachment to this barren landscape ambushed me. Forgetting about Rita, I angled my easel so I had a better view of the trashed shoreline. I felt the tenuous current of vitality under the grime. Yes. This was the right place.

  I dipped my brush into the water and started with blue. The first streak was pale and watery. I remembered how disappointing it’d been for me, using that first set of paints. All those rich circles of red, orange, blue, and brown were so bold and solid in their box, but on paper they were only ghosts of themselves. Inadequate to portray the scenes in my imagination. I’d experimented, using the barest drop of water or pushing just the edge of the brush against the paper. Finally, the colors had popped off the page, like they did inside my mind.

  Now, my brush danced across the page in a staccato of blue, leaving room for cresting waves. Anxiety jittered through me as I remembered the water from this morning. The same music drifted through my mind, but this time, the steady beat soothed me. My chest loosened, letting my
breath flow in and out easily. It was just me and the colors and the beach below.

  The blue water morphed into a black sky, crowded with stars. The beach lay silvery and pristine. And there were people there. Two dark figures standing knee-deep in the water. The smaller one singing up at a blood-red moon. The larger one reaching out her arms.

  Even though the figures were vague shapes, I knew it was Dr. Mordoch and me on the beach. I was painting the very beach from my vision.

  As I put in the details, the music crept into the painting, syncing with the rhythm of my strokes. And the yearning I’d felt that night so long ago struck me with such force that I almost dropped my brush.

  I’d been looking for something. Someplace. I’d needed to do something. I painted Dr. Mordoch’s shadow stretching huge across the beach. Her hand clamped on mine. Keeping me from it.

  Dr. Mordoch scooping me up and carrying me to the beach. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Then there was another voice speaking from the shadows. “You should’ve let her go.”

  The memory rushed at me and I filled in the white space. Painting the speaker into the picture. A hand. An arm. The shape taking form in the darkness.

  “That’s quite an imagination you have.”

  I jumped at the sudden voice behind me, sending a black smear across the emerging figure. The Uncle was leaning over my shoulder, an amused look on his face. “It’s obvious that you have talent. Too bad you’re spending it on this nonsense.”

  I looked at my painting, full of shadows and stars, then down at the gaudy real-life beach. Where I’d painted cool blues and silvers, heat waves rippled above tar-covered pebbles.

  “Everyone gather around. See what this student’s done.” I cringed as my Family crowded behind me.

  “Nice.” Zach sounded impressed.

  Maya joined in, in her brusque way. “So much for my tree.”

  She held up a picture of a brown stick with a green blob on top.