Half Lives

by Sara Grant

  She can’t imagine life without him. He is not only the air in her lungs but the reason she breathes. She will spend her whole life searching for him. ‘Beckett.’ She whispers his name like a Saying. She closes her eyes and, for the first time, she says to the Great I AM – it’s more bargain than worship –‘Please, Great I AM, return him to me. I will be your servant, your greatest Cheerleader, if only you keep him safe.’

  ‘Harper?’

  She stumbles away from the Crown. Is that the voice of the Great I AM?

  ‘Harper.’ The voice is human and makes her heart sing.

  ‘Beckett, where are you?’ She spins in a crazy circle.

  ‘I’m right here.’ Through the Crown he looks broken into a hundred pieces.

  ‘Beckett?’ She exhales her thanks to the Great I AM. ‘How?’ How has he crossed? How has he survived?

  ‘The Great I AM has spared me.’

  She tries to weave her hand through the brambles. If she can touch him, she’ll know he’s OK. But the thicket is too dense and wide.

  ‘But why? Why would you cross the Crown?’ she asks.

  ‘Finch tried to kill me,’ Beckett says.

  This is all her fault. She punches her fists through the Crown. She cries out as the thorns rake her skin away in fine red welts. She hooks her arms through the vines. She rattles the Crown like a cage. It crackles, almost groans, but doesn’t give. She needs to reach him. He will make everything all right. He always has. She can survive anything as long as she has Beckett. ‘I’m crossing too.’

  ‘Harper,’ Beckett says, softly, and waits for her to calm down. ‘Harper, I’m not sure it’s safe.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she says. ‘It’s not safe for me here. Please, Beckett, please let me in.’

  ‘OK,’ he says finally. He must know she wouldn’t accept any other answer.

  ‘If you go, I go, remember?’ Harper says, recalling what he’d said so long ago.

  ‘Harper, you’re going to have to climb over. Do you think you can do that?’

  ‘No problem,’ she says without hesitation.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. ‘I mean, I can’t guarantee . . .’

  Harper scans the hedge, looking for the best place to cross. ‘Move away. Give me some room.’ She strides back several paces. Beckett backs away from the Crown.

  Harper launches herself at the hedge. The Crown wobbles as she plants her foot half way up. The bramble bounces as she springs to the top. And then it’s as if she’s flying. Her arms sweep from her side and stretch over her head. Harper wishes she could take flight and fly them far, far away. She can’t protect him any more – not from Finch or Greta or herself. She lands with an oof.

  Harper stands and dusts herself off. She slicks back her hair and knots it at the base of her neck. She feels a twinge of fear. Will the Great I AM punish her for crossing the Crown, for lying about Terrorists, for betraying Beckett? She holds her breath.

  Nothing.

  She was desperate to reach him and now that he’s an arm’s length away she doesn’t know what to do.

  ‘The Great I AM has spared us for a reason,’ Beckett says.

  Is that true? There is another explanation, which means Beckett’s entire life is based on a lie. But Harper doesn’t mention it.

  Harper spots the black cat on the other side of the Crown. ‘Look, Beckett.’ She points.

  Lucky flattens her body and crawls under the Crown. Her ears are drawn back nearly flat on her head. Once inside the Crown, she carefully rises to all fours, contorting her body to fit a gap in the branches. She appears to tiptoe, lifting one foot slowly and testing a branch before she slips her paw into a triangle of space. When she pulls her body free of the Crown, she shakes from the tip of her black nose to the point of her tail.

  ‘She makes it looks easy.’ Beckett laughs and then grimaces.

  That’s when Harper notices the hundreds of scabs dotting Beckett’s body. ‘What happened?’ She moves to comfort him but he waves her away.

  ‘I wasn’t as graceful as you.’ He gingerly kneels to greet Lucky. She saunters over and nuzzles his side. He strokes her furry head and she purrs.

  Harper expected this forbidden land to be different than the land below. But it’s just dirt and rock with a sprinkling of green. She wanders up the Mountain. The moon is hiding behind clouds. The landscape is painted in shades of grey. She’s looking up ahead, searching for what makes this place so special. The ball of her foot feels the edge before her heel makes contact with the broken ground. She waves wildly to keep from falling headlong into the deep hole in front of her. ‘Beckett,’ she calls, and lands hard on her back.

  She flops over and finds herself looking into a pit. The clouds must have shifted, allowing more moonlight, because suddenly she can see clearly what’s below.

  Beckett dives next to her. ‘Are you OK?’

  Harper’s focus is fixed on the pit. Bone fragments, lots of them. She counts maybe a dozen of what might be skulls. She wonders if these are the remains of others who have defied the Great I AM and crossed the Crown. Maybe it was a mistake to cross, but what choice did they have? Half buried among the scrambled bone fragments are flashes of metal. She thinks she sees the broken blade of a knife. There’s a fragment of pink rubber and a big, square watch face that would barely fit in her closed fist. The glass is cracked, but its edges sparkle in the same way the Mountain spring does when the sun catches it just right.

  ‘What’s that?’ Harper points at the pink. Beckett doesn’t respond. He has a faraway look as if his body is here but his mind is somewhere else. ‘What’s wrong, Beckett?’

  ‘Crossing the Crown has brought me closer to the Great I AM,’ Beckett says. ‘I can feel it. The Great I AM is trying to tell me something, but it’s just out of reach.’

  She wishes they could be lost in this no-man’s land for ever, but she feels exposed in this sacred place. Part of her is still awaiting the Great I AM’s revenge for crossing the Crown. Another part of her expects an attack from Finch, and still another fears that Greta and her people will come after them and invade the Mountain. ‘What do we do now?’ Harper asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ Beckett says with a peace that feels incongruous to Harper in their current situation. ‘We will wait for a sign from the Great I AM.’

  The sky darkens again. Harper feels a wet drop on her head and another on her body. Raindrops dot Beckett’s upturned face. Rain pours from the sky. Maybe this is Harper’s sign. She will find peace with Beckett in this moment for as long as it lasts. Harper sticks out her tongue and closes her eyes. She whips her head from side to side, flicking the water into the air. She smoothes the water over her face and neck. The raindrops feel more like pebbles pelting from above.

  Harper points to a cluster of boulders that create a protective tepee. Lucky has already found the shelter. She swishes her tail as the pair joins her.

  Harper rests her head on Beckett’s shoulder, and he hides a kiss in her damp, ratty nest of hair.

  ‘We should thank the Great I AM for the rain,’ Beckett says.

  ‘And the rocks,’ Harper adds. And for saving you, she thinks. Maybe he can truly forgive her and they can forget about Finch and Greta and live up here in solitude. Maybe Beckett’s right. Harper is starting to feel something more, something bigger than the both of them.

  They repeat the Evening Tune softly into the howling wind.

  Tonight’s got promise

  (Promise)

  Tonight’s got faith

  (Faith)

  Tonight’s all we got

  (For sure)

  (For sure)

  Tonight I got you

  (And you got me)

  Tonight’s all I need

  They curl into each other and fall asleep.

  A shrill scream erupts all around them. Harper’s eyes spring open. It’s morning. It takes a second to remember where she is and what has happened. Beckett’s there and that’s all that matters.

&n
bsp; Another scream.

  Harper’s pulse rockets. Lucky leaps from her resting place on Beckett’s lap and runs off to hide. Another scream and Harper and Beckett draw closer together. This scream doesn’t stop. It feeds on itself and consumes the air around them. The sound tears at Harper’s flesh as if it has teeth.

  ‘Please. No.’ The words are repeated and jumbled among the screams.

  ‘Greta.’ Beckett whispers her name and Harper’s heart clenches. ‘We’ve got to help her.’

  Harper so wishes they could walk away. She was beginning to believe they could leave everything behind. But Greta’s screams will not be denied. Beckett and Harper are being sucked back into the conflict that’s based on hating what you don’t understand and fearing an enemy you’ve only imagined.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Midnight leapt from her favourite spot on my chest. There was someone in my room. My nerves jangled like they did when a telephone call came in the middle of the night. I held my breath so I could listen more intently. Every slasher movie I’d ever seen came flooding back. I imagined the flash of a knife, a wire pulled tight between fists, the sound of a gun cocked and ready to fire. But the strange thing was these thoughts didn’t increase my pulse rate. A thought that couldn’t possibly be mine sprang into my head. I tried not to think it, but it repeated over and over like a bazillion IM messages popping up all at once: I wasn’t scared of death. I was wishing for it.

  We’d been locked in here for thirty-three days according to Tate’s tally. I don’t know when I changed, but at some point I’d stopped thinking about each day as being one day closer to freedom. Each day had become one day closer to death.

  ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’ I asked. I sat up on my cot. I clutched the key in my fist. The key that I’d used to lock us in. Had one of them finally decided to come for it?

  The darkness seemed to speak: ‘Icie, it’s Chaske.’ I felt him bump my cot. ‘Can I sit down?’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. It sometimes felt like that was the only word in my brain. Nothing mattered.

  The cot bounced as he sat. I thought I could hear him biting his nails.

  ‘I don’t want to be alone any more.’ Chaske shifted so he was sitting right next to me. I slumped into him. He tilted so our heads touched. His long, silky hair fell like a curtain on my shoulder. He smoothed my dreadlocks and kissed me on the cheek.

  I closed my eyes, feeling a rush of warmth. He kissed my forehead and my skin tingled where his lips touched and the feeling flashed like a firework through my body. Like the night sky on the Fourth of July, the darkness inside me was washed in a breathtaking array of colour. And I started to live again.

  When the lights in the tunnel were switched on the next morning, I was wrapped around Chaske. We’d held each other all night. That was enough.

  This never would have happened out there. I’d lived my life in fast forward. Everything was rushed and programmed. In here, we lingered. We had time to think, which wasn’t always a good thing, but it meant that I could savour this moment with Chaske.

  If he had shown up at my high school, we probably wouldn’t have even talked to each other. Well, he wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the shallow, self-centred person I now realized I’d been. I’d like to think I would have given this quiet, mysterious guy a chance, but I probably would have cared too much about what other people thought.

  The even footfalls of Marissa on her morning run snapped me into the present.

  ‘Wake up, sleepyhead,’ she called and then she was standing in the doorway. ‘Oh, sorry.’ She turned away. She was wearing her hot-pink sports bra and ripped jeans. The jeans hung low on her thin hips. She’d lost weight, more than the rest of us with her insistence on exercise. We could see the electric-green elastic of her thong. Her skin seemed to have a greyish tint. Like always, she had her D&G bag slung over her shoulder.

  Chaske and I sprang apart. ‘I-i-it’s OK,’ I stammered. Marissa was barely holding onto sanity and I was scared that seeing us together might push her over the edge. ‘We were just . . . it wasn’t . . . is everything OK?’

  ‘Yeah, fine. No problem,’ Marissa said, still facing away from us. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot and I thought I’d start a morning prayer service . . . I thought . . . you might want to . . . but you’re . . . whatever.’ She rubbed her hand back and forth across her stubbly scalp. Chaske had helped her shave her head with his hunting knife, but it hadn’t worked so great. She looked like the love child of a guinea pig and a skinhead.

  ‘Marissa, it’s fine,’ Chaske said.

  ‘I’ll pray for you.’ She walked towards the entrance of the tunnel, then turned around and walked back the other way. When had Marissa found religion? The closest I’d ever seen her to spiritual was when she had demonstrated her cheer routine for us. She’d tacked on this plastic supermodel smile and struck the standard stiff cheerleader pose – fists on hips and legs spread in a sturdy A. ‘Ready! OK!’ she had yelled when she started every cheer. It was like a televangelist shouting ‘Amen!’

  ‘You’d better go after her,’ Chaske said.

  ‘Why?’ I didn’t want to leave him.

  ‘She’s getting worse.’

  We’d all noticed these weird changes in Marissa, not only in her appearance but in her behaviour. We’d never really talked about it. If we didn’t acknowledge it, then it wasn’t happening.

  ‘Yeah, this prayer thing is new.’ I drew my body into a ball and picked at a hole in my jeans.

  ‘Icie, it’s more than that,’ Chaske said, and scooted away from me. ‘You know what I mean. I don’t think the girl ever sleeps. Have you seen what she’s done to the entrance?’ I’d seen it for the first time yesterday. She’d taken a stone or something and drawn hundreds of faces, like emoticons, all over the walls. ‘She’s doing that at night. I haven’t seen her do it, but it’s got to be her. The rest of us sleep.’

  ‘Why can’t you talk to her?’ I asked. ‘You know she likes you best.’ I’d recently started to feel that she blamed me for everything, as if I’d somehow tricked her so I could lock her in this bunker with me. I sensed this core of animosity as if she were a milk chocolate Easter bunny filled with red-hot chillies.

  ‘I could but it’s . . .’ Chaske shifted on the cot.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s awkward. She keeps . . .’ His rosy cheeks said it all.

  ‘She’s coming on to you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ He moved to the other end of the cot and crossed his arms and legs.

  ‘So.’

  ‘It’s more than that. She sort of stalks me.’

  ‘There’s not much to do in here,’ I said, feeling guilty about my own pseudo-stalker behaviour. I’d basically stolen his To Kill a Mockingbird and hadn’t returned it yet. I thought about him non-stop. I was always listening out for him and secretly staring at him whenever the four of us were together. That was kind of stalker-ish.

  He stood up. ‘Just forget it.’

  ‘No, wait,’ I said. He’d come to me and we’d had this perfect night and I was so blowing it. I slowly lifted myself off the bed. My head always felt as if it were filled with cotton candy.

  ‘Icie,’ Chaske said, staring after Marissa. ‘I think she’s losing it. I mean seriously losing it. She keeps talking about me and her as if we are a couple. As if we’ve . . .’

  ‘Oh.’ My body went cold. Why wouldn’t Chaske and Marissa, you know? Out there they had been equally beautiful. They deserved to be on a movie poster in a mad passionate embrace.

  ‘No. God, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but she’s making me really uncomfortable.’

  ‘OK, I’ll talk to her.’

  He cupped my face in his hands. ‘Thanks,’ he said. Maybe I was going a bit crazy, too. We inched closer; our heads touched. I could feel an electricity between us. He kissed my forehead and walked away.

  ‘Hey, Marissa,’ I said as I entered the supply room with Midnight t
agging along. Marissa was tallying our dwindling supplies. Luckily we had a renewable supply of water. Chaske and Tate had rigged a funnel and the canteens to collect the water that leaked from two of the fissures we’d found in the tunnel. We’d agreed on what we could eat and drink each day and used the honour system. At first I was hungry all the time, but my stomach had grown used to my reduced calorific intake. Supplies were supposed to be my responsibility, but Marissa would double-check that we were all eating and drinking only our allotted amount. She kept precise track of what we had left. A few days ago I heard her screaming at Tate for eating a whole MRE by himself. She was also the vitamin police, making sure we each took a multi-vitamin every day.

  She gave an exasperated and exaggerated sigh and made a dramatic production of starting her counting all over again. I waited until she was finished.

  ‘Are you OK, Marissa?’ I asked as she busied herself with counting the MREs. Midnight weaved in and out of the food piles.

  Marissa huffed again. ‘Yeah. Fine. Fine. What’s he been saying? I’m fine.’ But she wasn’t fine. Well, none of us were. She was talking fast and her head twitched as if she were flicking phantom hair out of her eyes. My heart was breaking watching this once vivacious girl disintegrate before my eyes.

  ‘He didn’t say anything,’ I lied. ‘I thought we might do something together today. You could help me with a new exercise programme or maybe we could whip up something interesting for dinner. Did you ever watch those cooking shows where they had to make three courses with like squid ink, some pasta and chocolate sprinkles?’

  ‘We can’t use our resources that way. What are you thinking?’ Her head twitched, but this time it was more like she thought she saw something behind her. She bent over the six piles of power bars. ‘Who put a peanut butter in with the summer berries?’ she asked no one in particular.