Theo was silent. I thought he was figuring out how to tell me I was wrong. But he didn’t. Instead he put both hands on his head and tilted his head back to the moonlight. “When you said you were leaving Old Harmonie, my first instinct was to grab you and drag you back to your parents. Like, I had to stop myself. And then that’s when I decided I’d go with you.”
“To keep me safe. Not because of Ilana.”
“I felt worried for Ilana, too.”
“But that could be from them. I mean, of course they’d want us to look out for her, so long as that meant keeping her inside Old Harmonie. She’s valuable to them.” I stopped myself. “So why am I valuable to them? Me and Benji? If we’re the weak and imperfect ones, why are we valuable?”
“We’re all valuable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a natural or designed.”
But that didn’t sound right to me anymore. “No, there has to be something more. I don’t feel that way about you guys. I mean, I don’t think I do.”
“When Julia was hurt, you ran to her even though the dogs were still there.”
“That was different. When you guys said you would come, I didn’t feel like I needed to stop you. I felt safer. I think it only goes one way.”
“Well, maybe that’s because we are stronger. If we’re going to be stronger, then that comes with the responsibility of taking care of people who are—people who aren’t as strong.” He chewed on his lower lip, still processing.
“That’s not the whole of it,” I said. “What if—what if everyone was designed? What if everyone started from that same few sets of cloned genes, recombined and manipulated and copied over and over again?”
“There’d be no natural evolution. It would be accelerated.”
“And there could be mistakes,” I said. “We’re the safety measure. Naturals. We’re what you all can go back to if something goes wrong. If you have our genes, you can get a clean slate. That’s why we’re valuable.”
“Mori, that’s a big leap, don’t you think?” He tilted his head back down away from the sky and looked right at me, and it was like he was looking at me for the first time and wasn’t quite sure how I’d gotten in front of him. “I mean, I know I like you, Mori. That’s me, right?”
I shook my head. “I can’t trust you, Theo,” I told him. “I can’t trust you because I don’t know what’s you and what’s them.”
“What do you think I’m going to do?”
“Leave,” I said. “Bring us back to Old Harmonie.”
“Why would I do that?” he asked. But something flickered on his face, a little twitch that told me I was hitting close to the truth.
“To protect me,” I told him. “Not because you want to, but because you have to. I can see it in your face. I bet you’ve thought of going back a hundred times.”
“We’ve all thought of going back a hundred times,” he said. The wind picked up and shook pinecones loose from the trees. They fell around us like tiny bombs.
I pivoted to go down the hill. “I’m sorry, Theo. Maybe tomorrow morning you should go back.”
Theo grabbed my shoulder, his fingers tight over my bones. “You’re losing it!” he cried. We both looked down at his hand on my body. He yanked back like I was on fire. Then he rubbed his eyes hard. “I would never do anything like that. I would never betray you.”
“Maybe it’s not even your choice,” I said.
“It is my choice! It is!” Tears sprang into his eyes. “It doesn’t matter what they do to us, I still get to make choices. I get to choose who I care for, and you get to choose to be brave, and Ilana gets to choose what she really is.”
“But if we can’t control our own thoughts and emotions, then it isn’t really a choice.”
“Even if they put it into us, it doesn’t make it any less real,” Theo said. “So maybe they did put some little program in me—some feeling or memory or notion that I needed to watch out for you and for Benji. So what? It doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
“But it does!” I yelled. “If the only reason you like someone is because of a program in your brain—”
“That’s the only reason anyone does anything, Mori! Our brains are programmed by genes and experience and our communities. This is just one more thing. You can’t separate it from the other parts of who we are.”
“But they can manipulate it. And that’s what they’ve done to you. To all of us! It isn’t real and it isn’t fair!” My voice grew louder and faster as I spoke, and by the end I almost couldn’t breathe. Theo’s face was red and he kept blinking away tears. I suppose mine looked the same.
“Mori?” Ilana’s voice came up the hill. “You guys okay?”
“Coming,” I replied. My feet crunched the leaves as I trotted down to her. I almost stumbled at the bottom of the hill, but righted myself before she had to catch me.
“I heard yelling,” she said.
I rubbed my eyes. “I’m really tired, Ilana. Can we go to sleep?”
She led me back to the campfire and scooped out some beef jerky soup. It tasted salty and the jerky was tough and slimy, but I ate it all.
They’d found some blankets in the car. “There’s one for us to share,” Ilana said. It was made of itchy wool and had a musty smell, but curled up next to Ilana, it didn’t seem to matter so much. The fire was down to embers that burned red and sparked yellow. Next to mine, Ilana’s body stilled as she fell asleep.
Theo’s silhouette appeared on the other side of the fire. He grabbed a blanket and wrapped it over his shoulders, then sat down. He picked up a long stick and poked at the fire, sending sparks up into the night sky to join the stars.
17
In the morning, Theo was gone. Where he, Amnah, and Mouse had slept, there were rumpled blankets. His pack was gone and the fire was dead. I stared at the charred remains and felt the blackness come over me.
Ilana was next to me with her back against mine, still sleeping. Her breath came even and sure as a metronome. I should wake her, I thought, but I didn’t.
In the brush behind us, something scampered. Some forest creature that was baffled by this sudden apparition of three children lying on the ground it had considered its own. It made a screeching, scratching noise, but then moved along to find some better, safer place.
The trees spread out over us, but in between the leaves the morning sky was visible. Satellites spun up above us, collecting information, beaming it back down to earth. I couldn’t see them, but perhaps they could see us. Anyway, so many drones had flown overhead, surely one of them had sent some imagery back to Old Harmonie.
This thought made my stomach turn even more. Maybe they knew we were out here, lost, and they weren’t coming for us. I had thought being found was the worst possible outcome, but as I lay there in the cold under a scratchy blanket, I realized there could be something even worse: they weren’t going to save us. They weren’t going to save us because they didn’t want us anymore. Theo could get out, find a town, make a call home, and it wouldn’t do any good. We were stuck out here.
“Ilana!” I whispered. “Ilana, wake up!”
She kind of moaned, then blinked her eyes three times. Her face was still and cold, but then she blinked once more and there was the Ilana I knew so well. “What time is it?” she grumbled. “Are we really still in the woods? I thought maybe that was a dream or a—an experiment, I guess, something they ran through me.”
“Ilana, Theo’s gone! Theo and Amnah and Mouse, they’re all gone!”
Tommy sat up and stretched his arms above his head. When he did, his shirt went up and revealed his pale paunch, like a deepwater fish’s belly. “Gone?” he asked.
“Gone! All of them. You don’t think they went together, do you?” But maybe that made sense. Amnah was done with our escapades. And Theo was done with me. So they’d left together while we slept.
“No worries,” Tommy said. “They’ll be back any minute, I bet. They wouldn’t leave without telling me.”
I wanted t
o believe him, but I still had a cold pit in my stomach. Ilana stood up and put her arm over my shoulder. “Theo would never leave you here.”
“I told him to go last night,” I said.
“You told him to go before, too, and he stayed,” Ilana replied as she zipped her sweatshirt up closer to her chin. Her breath made small puffs.
“Exactly. I keep telling him I don’t need him, and now he’s finally listened to me.” With Amnah and Mouse. That was the strangest part. Was it just a matter of convenience, or was something else going on?
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I think Theo and the others are going back to Old Harmonie. Or they’re contacting Old Harmonie somehow.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s like number nine all over again! When you wouldn’t let me in. They programmed you for that—to watch out for me and to keep us out of there. Right? Right? And it’s been coded in Theo all this time, too. Amnah even noticed it, the way he watches out for me.”
“It’s not exactly hidden,” Tommy interjected.
“And he slept and that was like a reset maybe.”
“He’s not like that,” Ilana said, and I knew she meant not like her.
“I told him! I told him I couldn’t trust him because I didn’t know if he really cared about me or if the stupid Krita people made him care about me. And he said no, but he had time to think on it and his brain, it pulled him and told him he had to protect us, he had to get us home.”
Ilana rubbed her nose. “I guess all of that is possible,” she said.
“It is?” Tommy asked. “What do you mean it’s coded in him?”
I shook my head. “It’s really, really complicated.”
“It’s not all that complicated,” Ilana said. “The adults in Old Harmonie, they have a certain degree of control over the kids.”
“Their emotions?” Tommy asked, eyes wide.
“Their behaviors, and I guess, sure, their emotions.”
Tommy wrapped his arms around himself. “Like with a remote control?”
Ilana smiled. “Not exactly. It starts with genetics. Then there’s some targeted brain stimulation techniques to get some behaviors in line.”
“Whoa,” he replied.
Above us, a chickadee called out and another answered. Chickadee-dee-dee. Chickadee-dee-dee.
Tommy took out a laser flick and held it to some dry leaves. I could practically see his brain working as he built the small fire. The flames cast an orange glow over his skin. “It’s all about synapses and connections and hormones and memory—” he said.
“That’s part of it,” Ilana said.
“But what do they do?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe nothing.” Or, I thought, maybe something that makes your friends abandon you in the middle of the night because they think they’re helping you. “We should get going.”
“Going? To Cambridge?” Tommy asked.
“We can’t sit around waiting for them,” I replied, a little sharply.
“I just got this fire going,” Tommy said. “Don’t you want to warm up? Have some breakfast?”
“Do we have any breakfast? Theo had the protein bars. I have half a sandwich left. That’s it.”
“I have an apple,” Ilana said.
We used Tommy’s knife to slice the apple and we tore the sandwich into three equal parts. That was breakfast.
“I really thought they’d be back,” Tommy said as he stomped out the fire with his heavy boots. “Well, at least you’re left with me.” He put on a smile as he re-strapped his pack around his waist. “And traveling with three is easier. We might even be able to get on some public transit. Save time that way.”
“You don’t have to be fake-jolly for us,” I told him, scratching at my palm through the bandage. The wound itched now as it started to heal.
“Fake-jolly? My jolliness is one-hundred-percent grade-A-certified real and true, I’ll have you know.” His smile grew a little warmer. “Come on. Miles to go and all that.”
He set off through the woods, and Ilana and I followed him. We’d just gone up a slight rise and were headed over the top when we heard the yelling.
“Hey! Hey! Where are you going?”
Amnah. It was Amnah!
I turned around and when I saw Theo rolling a tire—a tire!—through the woods, it was all I could do not to run and hug him.
“Mouse had an idea in the middle of the night,” Amnah explained.
“A dump,” Theo said. “It’s where they keep all the stuff they throw away. And they throw away a lot. Perfectly good things just piled up.”
“Most of it comes from you guys,” Amnah told him. “You send us your castoffs and then we have to deal with them.”
“Anyway, Mouse says it’s the right type of tire for the car.”
“Hot dang!” Tommy exclaimed. “I knew I loved you, Mouse. We’ll be rolling again in no time!”
I looked at Theo, but he looked away. The night hadn’t smoothed things over. If anything, something in him had hardened. I stayed by Ilana’s side as we walked back toward where we’d left the car. It was still there, dull as chalk in the morning sun. Tommy took a seat in the shade while Amnah opened up the trunk. She handed what looked like a folded metal arm to Theo. He held it for a second, confused, but then he squatted down next to the car.
“Quick learner,” Tommy said.
“You’re not helping with the tire?” I asked.
“Division of labor,” he replied. “In other words, not my department.”
Mouse walked in front of him and sniffed the air, but didn’t say anything.
“You should sit down, too, Mori,” he said. “I get the feeling you aren’t exactly a tire expert either.”
I held up my good hand to shield my eyes so I could see him in the glare. His skinny legs poked out of his shorts, and his bright blond hair stuck up in all directions.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“So take a load off. Save your energy for later. That’s the smart thing to do.” As if he could sense me looking at his hair, he pulled out a ball cap, one with a red B on it, and put it on his head. “I know exactly where we are now. Let it never be said that Tommy McPhee is a man without a plan.”
“I didn’t see you at the dump getting a tire,” Amnah said. “Anyway, we never said you didn’t have a plan. We said that you didn’t have a good plan.”
Amnah situated the tire jack under the car and Theo started cranking a handle. His forearm tensed with each turn, but it was nothing compared to the harsh set of his jawline.
“But what is a plan really?” Tommy went on as if nothing was going on around him and we were all rapt with attention. I liked that about him. “If it goes off course a bit, but works out in the end, that’s not a problem with the plan itself. I mean, it’s still a good plan, just one made better by improvisation.”
“Clearly no dampening ego out here,” I joked.
Theo looked at me, finally, but only for a second, and his eyes were dark.
“Dampen?” Mouse asked. Her back was to me and she watched as the car was lifted up.
I glanced at Ilana. “It’s just a thing we do,” I said.
Mouse turned so she was in profile, not looking at me, but not looking away, either. “Does it hurt?” she asked. Her voice was so small, I felt myself leaning in to hear her.
Ilana shoved her hands into her pockets. “I’m not sure,” she replied.
“I’ve only had it done once, I think. And I was already sick. But I don’t think it hurt much.”
“What did they change?” Mouse asked.
A clang came from over by the car. Theo rubbed his knee. “Sorry,” he mumbled as he restarted the crank. His hair was all mussed but, for once, was out of his eyes. He stared right past Mouse and at me, but I wasn’t sure what message he was trying to send, whether he wanted me to tell her or not. Maybe he wanted to hear for himself.
Amna
h and Tommy were still now, too. Tommy had lifted himself up so he was sitting on a log. He pushed his ball cap back from his face.
I said, “I used to be braver. Maybe a little too brave. My parents worried I might do something foolish and hurt myself, so …” I took a deep breath. Even the birds listened to me. “So they dampened my bravery a little bit and made me more cautious.”
Amnah blew the air out between her teeth, but she didn’t say anything. Theo kept looking at me.
“It was to keep me safe,” I said. I believed that. I was still angry, but I really did believe that my parents had made the choice to keep me safe, and it felt important that these people from outside of Old Harmonie knew that. Our parents were making all these choices because they thought it was what was best for us.
“Well,” Tommy said with a laugh. “I guess that procedure didn’t work very well.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Here you are, aren’t you?”
Ilana threw her arm around my shoulder. “You’re right about that. Mori’s the bravest person I know.”
18
Mouse and Amnah took the front passenger seat. Mouse spread the map out over her lap.
“We figured we’d better have a navigator, and Mouse is the best,” Amnah explained. Ilana climbed in back first, then Theo, which meant I had to sit next to him. I tried to scooch so our bodies didn’t touch. There wasn’t quite enough room to avoid touching, though, so I turned away from him and looked out the window as Tommy started driving.
Almost immediately, we entered a town. White clapboard houses with black shutters lined the streets. They reminded me of number 9, and I was glad when we passed through the downtown area. We passed a huge store with pictures of bread and fruit and fish in the windows, blown up to ten or twenty times their actual size.
“This is Lexington. Like as in the Battle of, way back in the Revolutionary War. It’s real posh. You’ve got to have clams galore to live here. They say their school is even better than StepUp, maybe even better than the Kritopia schools, but I don’t believe it.”
It was a little strange to be driving through this town that reminded me of home. It was like we were on a Möbius strip going round and round and upside down and never quite getting anywhere, but never leaving anywhere either. And all the things we’d been taught about the outside world—dirty, scary, dangerous—those things were wrong and they were right. It’s like everything contained its opposite, and that made me dizzier than anything else. And all the while, Theo kept his stony face tipped up and away from me.
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