“You spend a lot of time out in the woods?”
“Yeah, actually, I do.” My sharp voice cut through any progress we had made. “Ilana and I were out in the woods all the time. We have our own place and know what we can eat and what we can’t. Plus, we all took this wilderness course and went night camping and stuff. So, yeah, I know my way around the woods.” But even as I spoke more and more, I wasn’t sure if I believed myself. Maybe I was wrong. I bit my lip and told my heart to slow down.
“A wilderness course? Whoop-de-doo. Did they tell you how to destroy the forest on the first day or the second day? That’s how you manage things, isn’t it?”
My face turned as hot as fire embers. She didn’t know what she was talking about. But then, even worse, maybe she was right? They wanted to manage Ilana by destroying her, didn’t they? “That’s not what it was like,” I said. “That’s not what we’re like. Not all of us.”
“Enough of you,” she said. “Come on. This way.”
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“We’re lost. When you’re lost the best thing is to stay where you are and let other people find you. That’s one of the things they taught us.” My voice caught an edge. I wanted to hide it, but it was no use. My whole body tensed and shook like the leaves on the trees before a rain.
“I’m not waiting around to be rescued. No way.” She started walking, dragging the branches behind her.
“We could be walking farther away from them,” I called. She didn’t stop. I hurried to keep up. “You’re being foolish. And stubborn. We just need to stop and at least get our bearings.”
Her foot hit some small loose rocks and sent them tumbling forward, cracking together in the quiet night. Their call was answered by a deep hoot.
We both froze.
My heart thudded as I raised my eyes and saw the biggest creature I had ever seen in real life. It was in an oak tree not ten feet away, but maybe twenty feet up in the air. Still, its size was undeniable. The barrel chest covered over with tawny feathers, the regal head with the thoughtful, hooded eyes.
“Great horned owl,” Amnah whispered.
All I could do was nod. The feathers that looked like ears were the giveaway. My grandmother had told me they used to be called cat owls because those little tufts reminded people of a cat’s pointed ears.
The breeze lifted up its feathers and it shifted its head from side to side before giving the low hoot again. Its yellow eyes never stopped watching us.
I leaned forward and my shoulder brushed against Amnah’s. I heard her breathing, and maybe her heart rat-a-tatting in her chest as quickly as my own. She leaned forward, too, as if we could both push toward the owl and the owl would somehow know we were friendly, know we just wanted a closer look.
Instead the owl spread its wings wide and lifted off from the tree. I never realized how loud wings could be until they beat the air above me. For a moment it felt like the owl was going to swoop down, talons out, and snatch us up like we were a couple of field mice. Instead, it soared above us in a flap of wings that bristled the air around us. One single feather fell.
Neither of us moved.
Then we both let out our breath at the same time. “I’ve never seen—” I began to whisper.
At the same time, Amnah said, “That was the closest I’ve ever been—”
“I’ve read and seen pictures, but—”
“I never expected it to be so big—”
“So strong—”
“So wonderful.”
Amnah took two steps forward, then bent over and picked up the feather. It looked fairly plain at first, and if we showed it to our friends they would have no way of knowing—of understanding—the feeling of having that owl look right at us, to contemplate us, and to fly away.
“I wish Mouse had seen that,” Amnah said.
“Me too,” I said. “All of them.”
“She doesn’t like animals as much as I do, but still.” She shrugged, and I knew what she meant. No one could be anything but awed.
“I felt the wind from its wings,” I said.
“It was warm,” she agreed.
I wiped at my forehead and willed my heart to slow down. “I know it won’t come back, but I still kind of want to wait for it. Like if we hold real still, maybe it will come back. Like a butterfly.”
“It won’t, though,” Amnah said. “You’re right about that. It probably doesn’t get to see too many people around these parts.”
“It did look curious,” I said. “Like it didn’t quite believe we were real either.”
Amnah smiled at that, and spun the feather in her fingers. “I guess I figured none of you folks up the hill cared very much about the creatures out here. I didn’t expect to find another naturalist.”
“I didn’t fully expect to find nature,” I confessed.
“You have forests in there?”
“You saw them on your maps, right?” But I knew that wasn’t the whole truth, so I said, “Some of them are like this, all wild. But most of them are newly planted, so it’s straight rows of trees all the same size.”
“They clear cut for the developments?”
“I guess so. They had to do it fast once the city started flooding all the time and the measles outbreak and—”
Amnah grew still, so I stopped, too, and closed my mouth. Her face was pinched again, but I didn’t know why. “Is everything okay?”
She just shook her head.
“I thought you wanted to hear about it, is all.”
“Who cares about Old Harmonie?”
“Tommy sure seems to,” I replied.
Amnah sighed.
Little green plants shot up between the dead leaves and pine needles. “I’m not so sure what you’re so angry about with Old Harmonie, and why you don’t like any of us that are from there—”
“It’s not that I don’t like you,” she said. “I just don’t trust you.”
“Why?” No one had ever said they mistrusted me before.
“You take what you want and think that paying a so-called decent price makes it okay.”
“Are you talking about the trees? They did replant them. Some people think it was actually the more environmentally sustainable thing to do because then you’re building all the homes at once and there’s less construction waste and—”
“We didn’t always live in South Concord,” she interrupted. “We used to live in this town called Acton. I was two when we left, so I only remember a little bit of it. But it was a great town.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Tommy’s family, they came from South Boston maybe twenty-five years ago. It got to be too much with the flooding all the time and people cramped so close together that illnesses hopped around from person to person and back again. A lot of families in Concord came from South Boston or Chelsea—the lower parts of the city. They’ve been here more than a generation, but it’s like they’re still there, still back in their old neighborhoods.”
“They’re holding on to it?” I asked.
“They’re re-creating it,” she said. “The same street names, the same parks, even the same pubs. One guy brought each stool over from the old place.”
“I guess that makes sense. So it feels familiar.”
“We don’t have anything to bring over,” Amnah said to me. “It’s all gone. We moved out and they burned it to the ground.”
“Who?” I demanded.
Amnah looked up at the moon, her jaw set.
But I knew. The reservoir. Amnah had lived in that underwater town. “I saw it,” I whispered. “I saw that. Underwater, there were buildings and statues, right?”
“There was a statue garden,” she said. “One of them was this giant man, he reached right up to the sky. Looking up to the future. That’s what they said when it was built. It wasn’t even there five years before the whole town was gone. Some future.”
I sat down hard on the ground. “Now it’s the reservoir
.”
Amnah looked down at the owl feather that she still had between her fingers. As it spun, it looked like it was ready to take flight after the owl that had left it behind. “It was supposed to be for everyone, that’s what they said. It’s been done before. They said that, too. For the good of many.” She shook her head. “Now we don’t get any of that water and we don’t have our house and I have to live in the middle floor of a triple decker and never have any quiet unless I slip out into the woods.”
I put my head in my hands. “We’re not all like that,” I said, shaking my head. “My great-grandmother was one of the founders and she—she never would’ve wanted it to be like that. Taking things …” My voice trailed off. How could I apologize for something so big with the small words we had?
The forest grew noisier and noisier around us as we grew more still. Night creatures rustled and the wind picked up, shaking the leaves even more. But none of it could drown out the truth.
16
We sat in silence. After the owl and the truth about the reservoir, we’d both stopped moving or talking. Neither one of us said out loud that we were lost. Hopelessly lost. Somehow it was all so strange that the terror ebbed and there was weird peace like that moment just before the sun rises and nothing seems to move. I don’t know how long we waited. Long enough for the moon to move. Amnah crouched on the ground next to a boulder that I leaned against. Its roughness felt good against my back.
I pictured Theo pacing by the fire. I’d been stupid, that was true. I’d taken that wilderness class. I knew we should have left blazes, maybe some little piles of rocks to mark the way we had come so we could find our way back. I could’ve taken Theo’s compass, not that I really remembered how to use it. Amnah probably did, though. If I had taken a minute to think instead of stomping off after Amnah, we wouldn’t be lost, and I wouldn’t have to hear about it from Theo once he found me and got me out of trouble yet again.
Maybe Tommy would try to calm him down. And Ilana. She’d be worried, too. Amnah was right about that: they did worry about me. I scratched at a bug bite on my leg the way I wished I could scratch at the idea that bubbled in my brain. What if …? My head would try to form the idea and then I would squash it down. Finally, it bubbled out of me: “Can I ask you something?” I braced myself for her response. Even if she said yes, it wouldn’t be a nice yes.
“Shoot,” she replied. Not so bad.
I rearranged the guaze on my hand and took a deep breath. “Is it really obvious that Ilana and Theo look out for me? Like on a scale of one to ten?”
“Nine,” she said. “To me. I’m pretty observant. Maybe a seven and a half to other people. Why?”
“They’re probably real worried back at the fire.”
Amnah wiped her chin on her shoulder. “Unless you’re right about Mouse thinking I baby her. Maybe she’s happy to have me gone.”
“I didn’t mean that. I was actually thinking about Theo and what you said about him worrying about me. It’s just that, sometimes I wonder if it was something they did to him. To make him watch out for me and Benji.”
“The boy who stayed back in South Concord?”
I nodded.
“Because you’re smaller?”
I nodded again. “In Old Harmonie, some kids are natural, and some are designed.” I picked up a dried oak leaf and held it in the palm of my hands. “It’s not supposed to matter. They tell us all the time that it doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters,” she said.
She was right. “We don’t even find out for sure until we’re thirteen. That’s when we get our genetic code. I always thought I was designed. I thought it was human error that made me so small and gave me this rotten retina.” I pointed to my glasses.
“That kind of makes sense,” she said.
“Theo got his code. He’s a mix. He’s designed from some DNA that he would have gotten from his mom anyway, and genetically engineered DNA, and maybe some cloned stuff, too.”
“Wait, we’re not just talking genetic therapy here? We’re talking pick and choose?”
“Yeah. And so I’ve pretty much come to terms with the fact that I’m a natural. Benji, too. And I noticed how Julia and Theo were always looking out for us. After his—after his birthday, Theo even had dreams about having to save me and Benji. And I guess I’ve been wondering if somewhere in that mix, they put it into him that he should look out for those of us who are natural.” I hadn’t put all these thoughts together before. I hadn’t let myself. I’d noticed things, sure, but it wasn’t until we were sitting in those woods and I had nothing to do but talk to Amnah that I let myself connect the ideas and say them out loud. They made a frightening kind of sense.
“You keep talking about Theo and Julia, but what about Ilana? I mean, honestly—”
“She’s different,” was all I could say.
Amnah tilted her head back and looked at the sky, searching for the owl, I guessed. “We will get back to them,” she said. “If they don’t find us tonight, we will find them in the morning.”
“Or maybe we’ll all circle around and around the woods forever.”
She tilted her head back down toward me. “We can’t stay out here forever.”
It was the truest thing anyone had ever said to me.
We heard them before we saw them: crashing, snapping, fumbling their way through the woods. We heard their footsteps and then their voices. Amnah stood up. “It’s them,” she whispered.
“I know,” I whispered back.
“There you are!” Tommy’s voice rang up the hollow, and the animals we’d been hearing fell into silence. Tommy clomped up the hill. “This one thought that you’d gone and kidnapped her, Amnah.” Tommy hooked his thumb back toward Theo. “Cooler heads prevailed, though. Mouse and Ilana and I told him he was crazy. And see, look, here she is, right as salt.”
“She wouldn’t kidnap me,” I said. “I don’t have anything she wants.”
Mouse frowned, confused, and Tommy shook his head.
Far in the distance, the owl hooted.
Theo said, “I didn’t say she kidnapped you. I said she’d gotten you lost. Which she did.”
“Maybe I got her lost,” I replied. “I’m perfectly capable of doing that.”
Tommy laughed and said, “Sure you are. Though it’s not something I’d brag about.”
What I’d meant was that Amnah hadn’t necessarily been in charge. I’d been as much of the leader as she had. And maybe I had gotten us lost or maybe she had, but at least Amnah hadn’t treated me like a child. At least she’d been honest.
“Anyway, we found some wood,” I said. “We’re going to have to find a way to break it into smaller pieces.”
“No problem,” Ilana told me. She smiled her warm smile. She was probably programmed to look out for me, too. I guess I’d known that already. They’d turned up that protective instinct too high and that’s when she’d grabbed my arm to keep me from going into number 9. Was there even one part of our lives that wasn’t planned and programmed for us? Maybe my parents dampening my bravery was just the tip of the iceberg of what they had done to me.
Ilana bent over and picked up both of the limbs. “Tommy’s beef jerky soup is almost finished stewing.” She started walking down the hill dragging the limbs behind her. Tommy followed, then Mouse.
Amnah hesitated. She glanced over at me and I thought she was going to say something, but she just shrugged before heading off after her sister.
She disappeared into the dark, leaving me alone with Theo. “You okay?” he asked.
“What if I said no?”
“What?”
I tugged the hood of Julia’s sweatshirt more tightly around my face. “I mean, what if I said no. That I’d fallen and hurt myself.”
“I’d get you help. What kind of a question is that?”
I shook my head. “What if I started running down this hill. Backward? With my eyes closed?”
“If you’re running backw
ard, what does it matter if your eyes are closed?” he said. But I noticed he was squeezing his hands so tightly that the muscles in his forearms were rigid.
“You’d be scared, right?”
“Confused, mostly.”
I started marching down the hill—forward, with my eyes open.
Theo was right beside me. Ready to catch me, probably. I quickened my pace.
“What’s this all about?” he asked. “Did something happen out here?”
I stepped around a protruding root. The last thing I wanted was for Theo to have to save me. Again. “I’m not a baby. You all treat me like I am, but I’m not. Just because I’m smaller and a natural, it doesn’t mean I’m going to break.”
“Did she tell you that? Did she tell you that you were weak?”
“No,” I said. My foot fell hard on a pinecone, crushing it. “I’m starting to see things for what they are.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“About you and me.”
He pushed his bangs out of his face. He did have nice eyes. But would I ever be able to trust them?
“You didn’t have a choice,” I told him. “As soon as I said I was going, you had to come. That’s what it felt like, right? Like you were being pulled?”
“I guess.”
“Like when you were solving puzzles after your latency and your brain got pulled?”
Theo frowned and it was like I could see his brain working out the puzzle of me: putting together the pieces of what I was saying, trying to make sense of it.
“Remember when Ilana hurt me?”
“How could I forget?”
“And it was because of her programming. She was trying to protect me and—”
“That’s one theory.”
“That’s what happened. And it happens with you, too. And Julia. They put it in you. I don’t know why. Maybe part of the whole community thing. Like we all need to look out for one another and they wanted to make sure it happened. And naturals are more fragile. But it’s not really you thinking it. It’s what they did to you—amping up your concern for the meek. Amping up your concern for me.”
The Daybreak Bond Page 11