by Maggie Ray
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen again.” My voice sounds as tired as I feel.
He frowns. “Are you okay?”
“No. Not tonight. Tomorrow, maybe.”
I’m not sure why, but he doesn’t ask any more questions. He helps me into bed, flattens down the covers. Taking care of me, like he has been, because it’s his job.
He turns off the light.
I sit up. “Alexei?”
He stops, looks at me.
George’s words from earlier are still swirling around my head, punctuating every thought. “Can I ask you something? Will you tell me the truth?”
He waits for me to continue.
“Is there a reason I was one of the first citizens to be cured?”
He doesn't say what I expect him to. “How much do you know about your father?”
“Almost nothing,” I admit. “Mother died with that secret.”
“Then I won't tell you.”
It’s not what I wanted to hear. “You won't?”
“It's my job to look after you, remember?”
“I remember,” I say.
He stands there a moment, unsure of something. Then he approaches again, sits next to me on the bed, his back to the headboard and his legs stretched out. It doesn’t escape my notice he’s positioned himself perfectly between me and the door.
Has he placed himself there on purpose? Is he making a statement, making sure I don’t sneak out again?
“Go to sleep,” he says, and he reaches out to touch my hair, tucking a strand behind my ear.
The gesture might be intimate, with someone else, but it’s alright because Alexei is cured, and everything is good and safe with a cured person. They would never do anything wrong.
Except neglect to turn you in to the authorities when they should.
That thought bounces around in my head for a bit, but I drift off to sleep before anything else can follow.
∆∆∆
By morning, everything seems normal. I go to work. Alexei drives me there and back. We don’t say a word to each other. I don’t know what to talk about, after last night. I want to convince myself it was all just a terrible dream.
But then Alexei leaves in the late afternoon to pick up my stepfather from the library, and I hear a knock at the back door. It’s very faint, and yet it seems to echo through the whole house.
They must have been watching the house again, waiting for me to be alone. It’s George. I know it is.
He’s probably here to ask why I haven’t activated the tracker pen yet.
I don’t answer the door. I sit in the living room, rigid on the couch, looking out at the road, waiting for the car to return and make everything safe again.
I hear the knocking once more, a little harder this time, but it stops after that. He must have given up.
In my bedroom, under the mattress where I put it, the tracker pen waits in silence. A promise the rebels will be back, knocking again, demanding things from me. Outside, the sun is setting, painting everything in shades of gold. Like the world is on fire.
Somewhere in the distance, sirens are screaming, as if they know.
∆∆∆
My stepfather stays up late working on some documents at the kitchen counter. After he goes to bed, it doesn’t take long before Alexei’s footsteps come down the hall, soft and careful, all the way to my door. He doesn’t knock. He just walks in, and I’ve got the light on, a book in my lap, as though I’ve been waiting.
He looks relieved, like he wanted to make sure I hadn't snuck out. He shuts the door, and I wonder if he intends to stay and watch over me like he did last night.
“I told you,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”
He crosses the room to sit by me on the mattress, sticking his fingers under his collar to loosen the buttons. He looks like my very own guardian, sitting there, the body of a man encased in that uniform, so it hardly looks human anymore. When I catch a glimpse of it, my eyes instinctively trace the scar on his forehead, this tiniest of proofs that he was uncured once.
I consider telling him everything. George was here again this afternoon; the rebels must want me to be part of their plans. They’re watching the house, and they’re being patient for now, but who knows for how long? I can’t ignore them forever. They might find a way to put their plans into action without my help.
But how can I tell Alexei any of this? They said they expect complete silence, I can still hear George’s threat in the back of my mind. They’ll know if I talked, and then who knows what might happen to either of us?
I’m trapped in a game of lies and secrets.
“Be careful,” is all I decide to say.
Alexei looks at me. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”
“Maybe we both need to be careful.”
He sighs and stretches out at my side, a mirror image of last night. He looks tired. Sometimes I forget we’re the same species. He doesn’t always seem like it. At least, not all the way. He looks like only half a person, dressed and decorated like a machine. That ominous black coat which hangs in the entryway like a flag of death.
It’s in rare moments like these, when he closes his eyes and I can see the deep lines marking his face, that he looks like he's carried too many burdens.
I study his features, the straight line of the nose, the strength he holds in his chin. “You work too hard.”
“You make my job difficult.”
“Sorry. I’ll try not to, from now on.”
His mouth twitches, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say he wants to laugh. Cured people don’t laugh outright, but they do this, they smile halfway.
I flip the pages of my book and listen to him breathing, and suddenly my bedroom feels like another world—a place separate from the society in which we live.
17
Mornings are strange. Alexei rises early, long before me, to slip out of my room and back to his own, so my stepfather never catches us.
When I see Alexei again at breakfast, he’s dressed in a clean uniform, his face freshly shaved, and he won’t meet my eye. It makes me feel guilty of something, even though we haven’t done anything wrong. We've only broken some small rules, and I've been trying not to think too much about what that means. It could mean nothing, after all.
“I’m working a half day,” my stepfather tells me that morning. “We can have supper together. I was thinking chicken.”
It’s a rare occurrence these days, having supper together. All he does is work. I suppose that’s what they want. They’re making machines of us, wiping away our emotions, so we can work ourselves to the bone.
At least it’s Friday. I’m looking forward to a weekend of rest. Your soul gets weary, after so many hours of pretending to be cured.
After driving my stepfather in for his early shift, Alexei returns within a half hour, and I say nothing during my ride to work. There’s a silence between us. In the night we can talk, but we’re quiet during the day. The daylight exposes our imperfections—our sins. It reminds us to be careful.
The second the car pulls up to the curb, I feel like I’m being watched. I’m not sure what it is that alerts me, something in the air that day. Stepping out, I glance back at Alexei sitting in the front seat, as though he can somehow offer me reassurance.
He smiles a little. Halfway.
I force myself to keep walking, quickly mounting the stairs of the Onyx building, while the others around me are oblivious to my panic.
There aren’t as many black coats around today. One by one, the peacekeepers seem to be vanishing. Not all at once, but a slow trickle, barely noticeable but still there. Now that most people have been cured, we don’t need so many of them.
It should be a source of relief, but today it makes me nervous. I feel exposed, without as many peacekeepers around to protect us.
Someone bumps into me from behind, mumbles an apology. I feel out of place, walking in a crowd of cured people like this, b
ut today is worse somehow. My skin prickles under the cool sun of the morning and my eyes dart everywhere, trying to find the source. Who is watching?
The question is stupid, because of course I know. Someone from the other night—Markai? Cee?
I search the faces around me, looking for those grey eyes or the long locks of Markai, but I don’t spot anyone I recognize.
It doesn’t matter. Someone. One of them.
There’s relief once I make it through the revolving doors into the air-conditioned building. I’ve done this march so many times, it’s easy to move through the crowd of workers, my body on autopilot. This place is always packed in the mornings, everyone coming in all at once, overloading the elevators. I feel better once I’m at my desk, staring at my workload for the day. The routine is familiar, comforting.
I get started on a task right away, eager to shed my paranoia.
It isn’t until lunch rolls around that things start to fall into place. There’s a familiar face in the lunchroom, seated at one of the far tables. My heart stops. She’s a tall girl with a short black bob and an upturned nose, as though she’s always looking down on you with her big Bambi eyes.
Was she there this morning? Did my subconscious pick up on it?
She was definitely there the other night, at the meeting, although I’ve never seen her in this building before.
I grab a tray from the conveyor belt and immediately cross the room to her table. I slam the tray down, scrape the chair back. Her big eyes harden, like she doesn’t appreciate my imprudence.
“What do you want?” I ask in a low voice, since there’s no one seated close enough to hear.
“It’s my first day,” she says, and she sounds calm. She’s perfected her act of being cured.
I’m too frustrated to be careful. “I don’t want a part in this.”
“It’s going to happen either way.” Her expression never matches her words. “Your stepfather is working a half day.”
I frown at this. Why does that matter?
It takes me too long to catch on. My mind clicks slowly, going over her words one by one, as though trying to decipher a foreign language. She blinks at me dully, but there's an undercurrent. Like she knows something I don't, like she finds it funny.
Then the horror sets in: they’re done waiting. They didn’t need me to plant the tracker pen, after all.
The realization hits me in jolts, my mind and body uncooperative with each other. My pulse spikes, but my thoughts scatter, jumping between denial and panic. I search the wall for the clock.
Her words still hang there between us: Your stepfather is working a half day.
Alexei will be leaving the house any minute.
I don’t think. I jerk out of my seat, and the girl looks shocked for a second, before she has the chance to smother her reaction. A quick flash of humanity.
I don’t care if they arrest me. In a matter of seconds, I’m out the room and down the hall, headed towards the elevators. I don’t stop to explain myself to anyone, I just go, my shoes padding the floors as fast as possible.
I press the elevator button a dozen times, willing it to hurry. I can hear voices coming around the corner, getting closer, ready to catch me in the act.
The elevator doors slide open with a ding, just in time, and I throw myself in.
Downstairs, the security gates won’t budge when I pass my access card over the reader. I’m leaving at the wrong time, the system knows I’m not supposed to. It beeps at me, as though frustrated, flashing red.
I don’t have time to lose. I cut towards the emergency exit and push straight through. The alarm blares, but I don’t let that stop me. I take off at a dead run across the expanse of white concrete, burning hot from the midday sun beneath my shoes.
The roads are eerily deserted outside. They’ve got the whole collective on a strict schedule, like clockwork, easy for them to monitor and control. The people going in and out of work like machines on a timer.
I knew this already, of course, but it's different seeing it during midday. A ghost town.
Perfect. No one around to witness what I'm about to do.
I aim myself for home and run with everything I have. I’m expecting to get caught—expecting a peacekeeper to materialize and tackle me to the ground at any moment, like that day I’d seen Toma trying to escape—the day I’d seen Alexei shoot him with the paralyzer.
I can already imagine what a paralyzer would feel like, biting into my nerves and frying my senses into nothing, until I’m flopping like a dying fish on the side of the road.
But there’s no peacekeeper in sight. They’re not patrolling the area like they used to, in the beginning.
Instead, of all things, it's a slab in the sidewalk that sends me crashing to the asphalt, my hands getting smashed against rocks when I reach out to catch myself. The breath is momentarily knocked from my lungs, and my pulse thunders in my ears, like distant echoes of the emergency alarm, chasing me.
Disbelief smashes into my thoughts. What am I doing?
I come face to face with my decisions, all of them lining up in my head, amounting to this moment. I can't believe I’m really doing this. This has to be the scariest thing I’ve ever done, risking everything for a peacekeeper, as though someone small and helpless like me could actually make a difference.
The afternoon breeze wafts over me, smelling of oranges and lemons. Just like school, just like the curing clinic. It doesn’t make sense here, though.
Until I realize: Am I remembering something? Has the impact of my fall knocked something loose inside—a memory dredged up from deep within?
Jagged images flash before my eyes. It takes me a moment to recognize they’re from the day of my curing, then I see it all clearly: The thin layer of cloud overhead, the dusty light. And there's that same memory I'd glimpsed once before, blurry around the edges. It slips into focus this time, and suddenly I can recall exiting the procedure room and being left to wait by myself.
Someone had come in, hadn't they? They’d put their hand on the side of my face, trying to get me to look at them.
How are you feeling?
The voice was Alexei’s.
Did he ask those words?
He did. I know he did.
Scared, I'd said. It was the only word I could think of, and yet it was also the only one appropriate. Somehow, through the thick fog wrapping around my brain, I had been able to say the right thing for once in my life.
I feel so scared.
Don't worry, he'd said. As long as I'm here, I'll keep you safe.
With skinned knees and bloody palms, I push up from the sidewalk in a blur of determination and adrenaline, ignoring the way my knees throb, the way my ankles and lungs ache from running.
I launch myself back into motion. I have to make it in time.
When my house finally comes into view, rising in the near distance—a white square, a finish line—the garage door is shut tight, so there’s no way of knowing if Alexei is home.
I’m panting hard, nearly breathless, when I make it through the front door. I check the entryway for his coat and boots, but neither of them are here, and the hope drains from me all at once—like I've just plummeted from a great height and been pulled to a sudden stop by a harness.
That quick snap against gravity, the body shuddering at the end of the wire.
Denial clings to me, a refusal to accept defeat. Or maybe it's just the shock. I really thought he'd be here. I'm not even sure why I was so certain he would be—so certain I could save him. I try not to picture his body, lifeless in a ditch, as I float through the house, my feet mindlessly carrying me.
I check the living room, the kitchen.
“Alexei?” I ask each of the rooms, as though calling his name will somehow conjure him into the empty spaces I find.
He could have left a long time ago; he could be anywhere else in the collective. I don’t even know what the peacekeepers do during the day, and I wish I’d thought to ask,
just once. My mind tries to fill in the blanks, to imagine what a peacekeeper's life must be like, but I can't even think of anything.
“Alex—”
“What are you doing here?”
The voice is so unexpected, I'm momentarily frozen. It came from behind me, soft and neutral, but it moves through the space between us and lands on me like a shout.
I turn. Alexei is standing in the hallway, already encased in his black coat and boots. His gaze catches on the blood trickling down my legs and lingers there a moment, before cutting back to my face.
When I open my mouth to explain, no words come out, my mind stalled between panic and relief.
“You can’t be here right now.” He’s mad, I think. I’ve never seen him mad, but that’s what it looks like. He immediately moves towards the front door, closer to it than I am at this point. “I have to pick up your stepfather. If I’m late, they’ll suspect—”
I watch his hand land on the doorknob, and horror shoots through me. I know I have to stop this, but it's happening too fast. Either that, or I'm moving extra slowly.
The fear is instant and it blocks out everything else. I move without thinking, crossing the distance between us in a few fast strides. I touch him, and he’s like stone beneath my hands, but I don’t let go—I can’t let him walk out that door.
What I do next, I tell myself I do to distract him—to make him stay. I tell myself that’s the only reason.
But the truth is, maybe I do it because I want to.
I act quickly. There isn’t time for anything else. I hold him in place, my fist tight around the front of his coat, and stand on tiptoes. The doing it part is strangely easy—strangely simple. As though I might have done this many times before. Alexei doesn’t try to stop me. Perhaps he doesn’t understand, a momentary confusion. I take advantage of it.
How far would someone go to save another’s life? This hardly seems extravagant.
I kiss him like George kissed Rory, like I’m asking a question. A question only he knows the answer to.
I kiss him, and that’s all.
He doesn’t move, he just lets me, and there's a brief breath of stillness where I'm just kissing him and nothing else exists.