Staring through the bars, I could see Paulo pushing a pram with a crying baby in it, rocking it back and forth violently. I yelled out at him to stop, he was frightening the child, and when he turned to face me, I was staring into the face of a man I could barely remember, except for those eyes, my eyes.
I woke up tied in a knot of sheets, Joseph nursing a welt across his eye.
“What happened?” I asked, though I knew.
“You had another nightmare.” Another? He looked at me through half-open eyes, his hair sticking up on one side from being squished into the pillow. I stared at his impossible face for a moment before pain shot through me.
“Ugh! My head.” I fumbled around on the nightstand, searching for the painkillers. As I swallowed them, I thought of my dream and shuddered.
Joseph collapsed back into bed and mumbled, “C’mere,” opening his strong arms and folding me into them. He was soon asleep but my eyes were wide open. How was I going to get through this?
Joseph didn’t want to leave but I pushed him out of the bed.
“Go. I’ll be fine,” I said as convincingly as I could. “I want things to go back to normal. You go to the hospital and I will look after Orry at home.”
He left grudgingly but promised to come home early. I made sure I knew exactly what time.
I’d barely slept last night. I pulled Orry close, sleep wrapping its warm arms around me. It was dreamless. The lull of Orry’s snoring brought to me an uneasy peace, until I heard an impatient rapping at the door. The sharps taps felt like they were rattling inside my head. Would my brain ever return to normal and not feel like everything was inside out?
Unwelcome noises intruded on my space. Glancing at the clock, it was nearly midday. I slid out of bed carefully and placed pillows on either side of Orry so he wouldn’t roll off the bed.
The rapping continued.
“Coming,” I yelled to the closed door.
As I slipped on my jeans and buttoned my shirt, I could hear more than one voice on the other side, two men complaining to each other. I ran to the door and put my hand on the doorknob. Gripping it tightly, I took a deep breath and threatened myself to relax.
Gus stood right up against the screen door, his small gut pushing through the wires, with Careen and a young man I didn’t recognize flanking him. But they faded into nothing as I looked at Gus and he frowned back at me.
I’d always remarked they were similar but now I could really see it. I could see the truth of what Matthew had told me standing, disgruntled and awkward, at my front door. They were the same person, separated only by age. They had the same hair, although Gus’s was cropped close and he had a short, greying beard. It was the eyes that had my feet pushing me to turn and run. They had the same amber hue, the same long, black lashes framing such cruelty in Cal’s case. I kept telling myself over and over, He’s not Cal. He’s not Cal. But my body was shuddering and trying to hold me in. And keep him out.
Gus tried to pull the screen open but I was gripping it tightly and it sprang back to the frame.
Careen stepped forward and smiled. “Are you going to let us in?”
I nodded and stood back from the door, feeling like I was edging away from a wild animal.
They marched in and the younger man gave me a sideways glance, a mixture of surprise and disdain in his eyes.
Gus’s face had been worried down to a weary point. He looked tired and impatient. His sat in my chair with a thump without asking and looked up at me, plumes of dust motes swirling in the afternoon sun. A sharp pain ran through me again and I found myself strategically moving behind the armchair, putting a physical barrier between the two of us.
It was silent. The words that no one wanted to say hung in the air like small balls of lightning, sizzling and spitting little twirls of electric tendrils to the floor. I decided to strike first.
I opened my mouth to speak, but sound petered out into vapor and Gus cut me off.
“Matthew informed me of your request and it is out of the question. I am very sorry for what my son has done but you are not trained for this kind of mission. I won’t allow it,” Gus said bluntly.
I was flattened, but anger pulled at my restraint, lifting the pancaked edges of my confidence away from the floor. All my carefully selected arguments flew out my head. He wasn’t going to listen to them anyway. Who was he to tell me what I could and couldn’t do?
I razed my eyes across the room. Careen was smiling absently. The other man was watching, interested, like a spectator. “You’re sorry?” I moved around the armchair and placed myself directly in front of him. “I’m sorry too. You will take me. Or I will bring this matter to the leaders. If you want me trained, I’ll train. I have a couple of weeks. You owe me this.” I looked up at the sky, as if pleading to the heavens. “At least this. I’m going. You saying ‘no’ means absolutely nothing to me.”
I turned my back to him and waited. One, two, three. Don’t punch him. Let him think.
I heard a resigned sigh and the creaking of an old man easing himself out of the chair, all cracks and grunts.
“Fine. You have your wish. You will start training today,” Gus conceded, rubbing his bearded chin distractedly.
I thought of Cal tucking his hair behind his ears and tried to stop my eyes from widening and my breath quickening.
“Are you serious?” The young man argued, snapping his head back and forth between Gus and me. “She’s a child. She’ll only get in the way.”
Gus eyed the protestor. “Pietre, you’ve just volunteered to be her instructor.” His face held a self-satisfied look that at least he could punish someone for this inconvenience.
“I’ll help!” Careen was jumping up and down like she was being asked to hand out candy to children.
“Oh, and she will need to be healed before you start.” Gus threw the words over his disappearing shoulder.
He left us standing there.
A triangle of very different people, eyeing each other with varying levels of suspicion and excitement.
I woke Orry and put him inside the capsule. Lifting it with his weight proved difficult, as I was still weak and my broken arm made everything awkward. After a few attempts, Pietre’s patience ran short. He snatched the child from me and slung the capsule over his shoulder.
“Um, thanks,” I said.
“Don’t thank me yet. You have no idea what you’re in for,” he sneered.
I spoke over his shoulder to Orry’s plump, little face, “Guess what, bub? I’m getting healed today; you’ll get to see what happened to your father when he was fixed.”
Pietre shook his head. “Oh no. We’re not adding another child to the situation; find somewhere to drop it on the way to the labs.”
I snarled at him. “My child is not an ‘it’.”
“Whatever,” he said with an infuriating shrug.
After leaving Orry begrudgingly with Odval, I was escorted to the science labs like a criminal. Pietre and Careen walked next to me shoulder to shoulder. I wanted to clip them both. Well, actually I wanted to elbow him in the groin and throw a stick for Careen to fetch. She was so much like a bounding puppy. I swear I heard her panting with her tongue hanging out. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if she had barked. But I kept my cool. I needed their help. So I breathed deeply and imagined I did those things, which gave me some level of comfort. Eyes front, we traipsed towards the town, hopped on a spinner, and rode in silence until we reached the labs.
The science labs were connected to the hospital by a rickety, covered walkway, encapsulated with bent pieces of corrugated tin shaped into a crude arch. We had to walk through the hospital and up some stairs to get to it because the original entrance to the labs themselves was sealed from an old explosion. The door was folded in on itself and rubble reached the ceiling. It looked as if someone had thrown a bomb directly at the entrance.
Looking around anxiously, I worried I would bump in to Joseph, but thankfully he was not near th
e entrance at that time. As we walked through the doors to the hospital, I looked down the long corridor and wondered if Cal lay there still. I trembled and shut my mind to it, following my minders up the stairs.
As we climbed, Careen separated from me and jumped up the stairs, turning to look at us while she talked. Her excitement was not at all infectious—it was unfitting.
“Rosa, this is Pietre. I told you about him before,” she said, none too subtly. I was surprised she didn’t wink. He didn’t even flinch at the mention of is name.
“Uh huh,” I managed to mutter.
Pietre observed her bounding, his eyes stalking her breasts bouncing up and down, tracking her long legs with a sly gaze. I felt sick to my stomach.
When we got to the walkway, we took it one at a time. It couldn’t take much weight, though Pietre commented that I could probably jump up and down on it and it wouldn’t make any difference. I ignored him but he was trying my patience.
I stepped on; it creaked and swayed like a spring breeze would send it flying out into the atmosphere. The Survivors were a strange people. Why not fix it? They seemed to have the attitude of waste not, want not. If it was broken, they would fix it but they were unlikely to tear it down and build a new one. It brought my thoughts to my mother and her similar attitude, a shiver of nervousness shooting up my spine.
We descended a dark stairwell lined with small squares of light. Pushing open the doors at the bottom, we found ourselves in a shiny, silver room. There were bits of machinery laying on every available work surface. Robots whirred and lasers shone in blues and purples. Everything was new and foreign. Except for a dark face focused intently on a computer screen. Deshi.
I snuck up quietly behind him and shouted, “Hi Desh!” He jumped in his chair. When he recovered, he glared at me and chastised me like a child.
“You know, you really are so immature sometimes. I’m working on something very important,” he said.
“I bet you are,” I said sincerely. “What exactly?”
“I’m working on a computer bug that will open all the Ring gates simultaneously and then latch them again.”
“Ooh!” I said mockingly.
He looked at me with tired impatience. A look I was so familiar with, I barely noticed it anymore.
“What are you doing here anyway?” he asked, raising his dark brows.
“I’m getting fixed up,” I said, overly chirpy, swinging my elbows.
Deshi looked unimpressed. If he was interested or curious, he didn’t show it. He waved us around his table without looking up from his screen. “Healing room is in there,” he said, pointing to a worn, wooden door in the far corner of the room.
When I was nine, my mother broke her wrist. She said she tripped, braced herself awkwardly, and fell on it. I never believed her. She had a ringed bruise around it, which looked far too much like someone had grasped her strongly and wouldn’t let go. Someone like my stepfather Paulo. Mother had always been steady on her feet. She walked with purpose but never hurried. I’d always suspected there may have been a physical side to her abuse but if she didn’t report it herself, there wasn’t much I could do.
Luckily, because she was a seamstress, her hands were considered her livelihood and the Superiors granted her treatment. We were sent to the hospital for an x-ray. I sat on a chair inside the room but behind a low screen and glass window while they did it. The noises were loud and cracked like lightning. I pulled her handbag up to my chin and peeked over the edge, scared she was going to be electrocuted. It was one of the only times I ever heard her use an annoyed tone. The man stretched her arm out over a table and she snapped at him for being too rough.
This room was very similar.
There was a metal table in the center and plastic chairs lined one wall behind a glass screening window that rose to the ceiling. Hovering above the table was a glass cabinet with at least twenty pipes coming out of it in different positions. Surrounding the table were six long-armed metal contraptions connected to the pipes.
I was too scared to ask.
A woman with short, blonde hair came in behind us. Her glasses were attached to a chain around her neck. She held a clipboard and was studying it intently. Without looking up, she said, “Pietre, what are you doing here? You’ve used your quota for the month.”
For the first time, he seemed ruffled. He ran a hand through his light brown hair and spoke to his feet. “Er… umm, sorry, Doctor Yashin. It’s not for me, it’s for her.” He pointed in my direction with a surly look on his face. Suddenly he seemed younger, closer to our age than he pretended to be. The woman peered up from her clipboard and assessed me critically. She held up my arm in the cast and asked me to remove my hat, making ahs and hms as she wrote things down in a sharp, break-the-pencil kind of way.
“Very well,” she said curtly. “On whose directive?”
“Vereshchagin.”
Vereshi… what? I smothered a giggle at Gus’s mouthful of a last name, receiving a nasty look from Pietre.
“Right, I’ll confirm. Get her undressed and on the table for me for when I return.”
I gave them both an incredulous look. There was no way I was undressing in front of either of them. As if reading my mind, Pietre smiled darkly and said, “I have no interest in seeing you naked but if you want to train, we have to do this first.”
“No,” I said plainly.
“Well, you’ll need help getting into position on the table. You don’t know which hoses go where or which way to lie. And with the cast…”
I thought about it. Careen would stand there and point out all my imperfections. Pietre seeing me was a horror I couldn’t envisage.
“Get Deshi. Does he know what to do?”
They both paused and exchanged glances. Pietre nodded and left the room, returning with a disgruntled Deshi dangling off his flexed arm. And when it was explained what he needed to do, his dark face went a funny shade of green.
“No. No way. Get Careen to do it,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m not that disgusting. Please Desh. This is embarrassing enough as it is.”
Deshi’s shoulders slumped and I knew I’d gotten my way. “Man, Joseph will kill me if he finds out about this.”
Careen smiled at me innocently and flicked my shoulder. “We’ll leave you two alone.”
God, she was clueless. I think she actually thought I wanted Deshi in there for a romantic reason. I snorted at the idea.
Deshi helped me undress and kindly wrapped me in a sheet, saying he would remove it when the doctor returned. He showed me how to put my arms into the metal cradles on either side of the table and my feet in similar ones at the base of the table. Lying on the icy metal with a glass coffin hanging over me, I was completely exposed. I stared up at it wondering what was going to happen, when Deshi’s face appeared above me.
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about or is it better I don’t know?” I gave him a look. “Right, better I don’t know,” he said sullenly.
The door clanged and a gust of air threatened to blow the sheet off my bony body. Deshi looked at me one last time. “It will hurt,” he whispered as he shuffled behind the low wall and sat down on a plastic chair, his legs crossed elegantly.
The doctor shouted out, “Right, Rosa. Try and relax, I’m going to restrain you properly now.” I heard a long beep and then the metal cradles clamped shut with a loud snap, around my wrists and ankles. I tried not to struggle but I could feel my heart thumping loudly in my chest and my breathing increasing as I started to panic. Deshi called out, “It’s all right, Rosa, try to breathe normally.”
I tried to think of something else, “So, what’s with the glass coffin?” I asked. “Is an enchanted poison apple part of the treatment?” It reminded me of one of the ‘fairy tales’ I had read, Snow White. I grimaced at the thought of Deshi as Prince Charming, leaning to kiss me awake.
Deshi grunted and muttered, “Truly woeful, Rosa.” I felt a pang of missing for
Rash, my friend from the Classes whose bad humor and constant pranking made him the male version of myself. He would understand the need to make light of this frightening situation.
Dr. Yashin answered in a measured tone but I sensed she was amused by my attempt at humor. “We don’t know exactly why they use the glass box, only that when we tried without it, two staff members were badly burned and the recipient died.”
“Oh,” I sighed. Humor evaporated and fear returned.
I sucked in a long breath but it hurt. Distraction was inadequate when a glass box was descending on you. I didn’t want to do this. Out. I wanted to get out. My eyes were dancing crazily in my head, darting around the room, looking for the door. I felt a cool hand on arm.
Her eyes were calm, a green-hazel color. “I’m going to attach you to the machine. Just remember, we are doing this to help you. It will speed up your healing. You will feel much better when we’re done.” Stop trying to convince me, I thought, it only makes it harder to believe you.
She paused and looked at me with those mixed eyes, “Have you eaten breakfast?”
I didn’t speak, just nodded. I knew if I opened my mouth the words ‘let me go’ would fly out and I would be back to square one. She pursed her lips at my response and then continued.
Painfully and methodically, Doctor Yashin reached up and drew down two of the hoses that were attached to the glass coffin. She pulled them through the glass and attached them to a catheter needle. She pushed one needle into my arm, which was not too bad. But the other one, she inserted under my scalp and it hurt like hell. I scrunched up my eyes and dug my fingernails into my palms until she was done. I felt like a pincushion science experiment, a potato battery.
“Ok. I’m going to step back now and the box will be lowered. Don’t worry. In your case, it should only take five minutes. I warn you, it will hurt a great deal.” She moved my chin so I was facing the ceiling. “Keep your head straight.” She patted my arm gently, and pulled away the sheet, disappearing from view.
The Wall (The Woodlands) Page 21