It was happening.
“I could go with you,” I said. Julia tensed next to me. She knew. She was on board and she thought I was blowing it, but I was being careful. The grown-ups would think I was offering to go wherever they took her, like I was so naive to think they were just going to send her to another Kritopia or something. It fit perfectly with their idea of me.
“Not where I’m going,” she replied.
“I could,” I said. “I would.”
“No,” she said. “Wherever I’m going, it’s not for you. And Old Harmonie, it isn’t for me anymore.”
“That’s a very mature realization, Ilana,” Ms. Staarsgard told her. “I’m sure the other children will come to see how right you are in time.”
I couldn’t help but shake my head.
“Oh!” Mouse said again. And then Amnah, too. “Oh!” Both of them were doubled over.
No! I wanted to cry out. It was too soon, too fast. I needed more time with Ilana.
“Old Harmonie is your home. This is where you belong,” Ilana told me.
“I don’t want to belong here.”
“That’s one thing you don’t get to choose. Stay here. Grow up. Get smarter. I will, too. And one day, it will all work out.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“Because I have to be.”
“Holy cupcakes,” Tommy cried. “What did you feed us?”
Mouse fell to the floor, writhing in pain, or so it seemed. The adults crowded around her.
“I love you, Ilana,” I told her.
“I love you, too,” she said.
Then Amnah fell, too. She moaned.
Dr. Varden stepped into the room.
“What’s going on?” Tommy yelled. “Aren’t you going to help them?”
“Go,” I whispered.
Ilana shook her head.
Tommy yelled again, but this time, he was falling. Then, next to me, Julia coughed. She cried. She gripped her stomach. “Something’s wrong,” she yelled. She fell forward toward the cot. I pulled Ilana away, closer to the door.
Julia’s parents crashed into the room, others behind them. My own parents sprinted toward me.
Julia’s wails filled the room, and then she was joined by Benji, who cried out as he dropped to the floor. He crawled toward the cot, too. Deeper into the room.
“Go!” I said. I pushed her away from me. I had to. She wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Dr. Varden grabbed her hand.
My parents were nearly on top of me. I closed my eyes and let myself fall into their arms with a long, low moan. It wasn’t my body that hurt. It was my heart.
Theo dropped with a thud beside us.
It was the perfect trap. It was the one thing they couldn’t ignore: the children of Old Harmonie suffering. The children in pain.
Dr. Varden pushed the door shut behind them, locking us all in the room.
33
It hadn’t taken long for our families to realize we had tricked them, but by then we were stuck inside the room. Ms. Staarsgard had to call security to come and get us. Ilana and Dr. Varden were gone.
I had to believe they found that network of people to help. I had to believe they were safe. But it was hard to believe anything after all we’d been through.
Maybe the Krita people had found Ilana and hadn’t told us.
Still, at night I went alone and sat in Oakedge and waited. Just waited.
The nights grew cooler. One night I lay down in the moss and stared up at the sky through the leaves. There was a loud rustling and then an owl swooped overhead. I felt the beat of its wings. Tears welled up in my eyes.
Amnah, Mouse, and Tommy were sent home. Tommy promised he’d see us in a decade. Amnah just said good-bye. No one ever suspected that the escape plan had all been Mouse’s idea, and Ms. Staarsgard made good on her promise to send a doctor out to dampen Mouse’s anxiety. I wondered sometimes if I would even know Mouse anymore. She was brilliant, I knew that, and maybe that was the kind of thing the dampening was meant for: to help someone who couldn’t be her full self without it. I hoped Mouse was happier, and I hoped that someday I could find out in person.
Becoming one’s full self—I was pretty sure that’s what Baba had intended with the latency. I’d been spending more and more time with Mr. Quist, learning about the early days. We’d go to the archives and I was piecing together what Baba and Dr. Varden had wanted, gathering together their early plans. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it yet, but I wasn’t going to let it slip away. I wasn’t going to let the people in Old Harmonie forget what we were supposed to be.
Footsteps crashed through the underbrush toward me.
“Ilana?” I whispered. But there were too many footsteps, and too many voices.
“It’s us,” Theo said. Just like last time. He’d come to check on me again.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi.” Theo stepped into the clearing, followed by Julia and Benji. They sat down next to me on the moss. I rubbed my eyes.
“You wait for her here?” Julia asked.
“It’s like in that wilderness course we took. If you’re lost, stay in one place. If I stay here, she’ll always know where to find me.”
“I think she would find you wherever you are,” Julia said. “I know I would.”
“I’d find you, too,” I said. “All of you.”
Julia’s leg had healed and, just like they’d promised, it was even better than before. She’d started running with a group of elite athletes, and now they were even talking of sending her to a special school where she could train more intensively. That wasn’t for a year, at least.
Benji got a spot in the trial for the new latency program. He said in his initial testing, he showed numerous potential latencies. “Even some they’d never even considered before,” he’d told us when he’d come back. I think he was hoping I might change my mind about my own latency, but I didn’t.
“You used to come out here a lot?” Theo asked.
“Yeah, me and Ilana. We came here. We were going to make our own perfect world.”
“A new Old Harmonie?” Benji asked.
When he said it like that, it seemed sort of silly. We might start with good intentions, just like Dr. Varden and Baba had, but somewhere along the way, trying to make everything good, we’d surely mess up something else. I think that’s what Dr. Varden had been trying to show us when she took us to Boston: if you just pull out the beautiful, and leave behind what doesn’t work, nothing’s beautiful anymore. You need to have the complete picture.
I stood up and stretched my arms above my head. Off in the distance, the owl hooted. “Come on,” I said. We tramped through the woods, close to the same path we’d followed the night we left. If anyone was watching our locations via our watchus, they were probably going on high red alert. But we weren’t leaving.
The fence had been repaired. It stood taller and was made of shiny new metal laced through with the same wires we had found down near the reservoir. Theo glanced over at me. “To keep others out or to keep us in?” he asked.
“It doesn’t really matter in the end,” I said.
We all stood along the fence, shoulder to shoulder, watching the colors change and the light fade until we were in that in-between time: not night and not day. The gloaming, my dad had called it. In summer, it seemed to go on forever. So we didn’t move.
A breeze came up over the ridge. It tousled Julia’s hair and blew it into my face. That’s when I noticed the patch of wood sorrel. It grew right along the edge of the fence. And there, a few yards off, something twisted in the wind: a ribbon, new and bright, tied to the fence about a foot off the ground. I dropped down and felt it between my fingers. It was a gorgeous shade of aqua green: the precise shade of Ilana’s eyes. When I looked up, all my friends were looking down at me.
Safe.
She was safe. And we would remember that.
And then it was clear to me: the truth. It’s not the fences that keep us safe, or
the science, or the structured way of life. It’s us: the Firefly Five.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sometimes families share DNA. Sometimes they are made of something grander. Thank you to all of the families that made this book possible:
The Bloomsbury family, the best in the business: Cindy Loh, Cristina Gilbert, Lizzy Mason, Beth Eller, Emily Ritter, Linette Kim, Brittany Mitchell, Brett Wright, Erica Barmash, Manuel Sumberac, Oona Patrick, Regina Castillo, Donna Mark, and Melissa Kavonic. And most of all to Mary Kate Castellani who edits with grace and humor and more smarts than any author could hope for.
To the teacher, librarian, and bookseller families that embraced The Firefly Code and my other books. You bring the books to the readers, and for that I am truly grateful.
To my teaching families at Dyer and Kaler Elementary Schools in South Portland, Maine, and to those at Berwick Academy, Westbrook High School, and the Commonwealth School. To the students at these schools as well, who inspire me every day.
To the families that are related to me and support me by showing up at events, pushing my books onto friends and strangers, and giving me space and time to write: the Blakemores, Frazers, Tananbaums, Pikcilingises, and Faronis.
To the friends who aren’t related to me, but should be: Larissa Crocket, Jessie Forbes, Sarah Newkirk, Lindsay Oakes, and Jenn Swift-Morgan.
And to Sara Crowe, my agent right from the start.
Thank you all and thank you to the countless others who make my daybreaks brighter.
Copyright © 2017 by Megan Frazer Blakemore
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This electronic edition published in the United States of America in September 2017
by Bloomsbury Children’s Books
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
ISBN 978-1-68119-479-0 (hardcover) • ISBN 978-1-68119-481-3 (e-book)
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