How We Became Wicked

by Alexander Yates

  “He said that if I didn’t keep quiet, he’d do something worse,” Hank said. “He threatened Amblin. And he threatened you.”

  That knocked Astrid back for a moment, but she shook it off. “Come on. You know he wouldn’t do anything. Your dad might be an asshole, but he’s—”

  As Astrid spoke, Hank lifted his gaze up from the kitchen table. Half of the veil that hung from his bonnet was caved inward. Beneath it, his face was a swollen, bloody mess. Hank’s left eye was sealed shut, the eyelid puffy and almost entirely black. Astrid could even see the pattern that the mesh veil had left when it had been smashed between Hank’s cheekbone and his father’s fist. The steel threads had broken his skin, leaving behind a checkerboard of square cuts and gashes. Astrid held back a gasp.

  Hank’s dad hadn’t hit him in years. And never, ever like this before.

  “He’s what?” Hank said.

  Astrid just stared. The next voice was her mother’s. She walked into the kitchen carrying a tackle box filled with first-aid supplies, her plaid shirt rolled up to her elbows. She wore a pair of rubber gloves.

  “Honey,” Ria said. “I could hear you being a brat from all the way up in the attic.”

  “I’m sor—” Astrid started.

  Hank cut her off. “Don’t say sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, yes,” Ria said, banging the tackle box down. “Everybody is sorry and everybody is friends again. Scoot over.” She hipped Astrid away from the table, sat down next to Hank, and began to root through her supplies. She pulled out a little bottle of peroxide and a packet of gauze.

  “There’s a fresh block of ice in the icebox.” Ria directed her words to Astrid without looking at her. “Break me off some.”

  Astrid did as she was told. She took up a screwdriver affixed by a magnet to the icebox door, opened the tray, and chiseled off a few shards. These she wrapped in a tea towel. Meanwhile, her mother unfastened Hank’s veil and lifted his bonnet. She took his chin lightly in her fingers, inspecting his face in the fading daylight.

  “Your dad hit you more than just once,” she said, eyebrows raised.

  Hank hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ria shook her head as she unscrewed the peroxide, pouring it liberally into the folded gauze. She also doused her own gloves in some of the stuff before patting the gauze on Hank’s bruise. He winced. The gauze loosened up the dried blood, coming away red.

  “Tell me . . . ,” Ria asked, “did it happen before or after he moved the wicked lady?”

  “Before,” Hank said. “Because I wouldn’t help.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “If your father got anything on his gloves before he hit you . . . well. You can’t be too careful about that kind of stuff.”

  Obviously Hank had filled her in on what had happened. But if Astrid’s mom was shocked by the return of the wicked, or by the little coup that Mr. Bushkirk had orchestrated, she was hiding it well.

  “And your father?” Ria said, turning to Astrid and extending her hand to take the ice chips. “How’s he holding up?”

  “Dad seems . . . all right,” Astrid said. “I think he’s trying to stay positive.”

  “That’s my Amblin,” Ria said in a voice that sounded neither the least bit affectionate nor particularly annoyed. She finished cleaning Hank’s face and pressed the ice-filled towel against it. Again he winced.

  “And this wicked woman,” Ria went on. “Eliza. Was she what you expected?”

  Astrid and Hank looked at each other. Nobody had yet thought to ask them this question. Hell—the woman hadn’t been dead for a full three hours, and in that time so much else had happened. Astrid hadn’t had time to think about it.

  “No,” Hank said.

  “Not at all,” Astrid agreed.

  “She seemed like . . . I don’t know.”

  “Like a child,” Ria finished for them. “Like a little kid crushing flies. If you ever meet one again, you shouldn’t forget how dangerous they can be. But they’re not . . .” Ria trailed off. She handed the ice pack to Hank and peeled off her gloves. “They’re not bad. To be really bad, you have to understand that what you’re doing is wrong. And you have to do it anyway.”

  A silence settled over them, filled only by the bubbling pot on the stove. Through the screened-in kitchen window, they saw smoke from Eliza’s body, still rising.

  “Did you know her too?” Astrid asked.

  Ria’s answer was only to tilt her head back and throw Astrid some side-eye.

  “It’s all right,” Astrid said. “Dad already told me that he knew Eliza from years ago. From the world before.”

  “I don’t know what your father did or didn’t tell you,” Ria said. “But if you want to dig, do it somewhere else. That isn’t my secret to tell. So I’m not going to tell it.”

  Astrid and Hank briefly made eye contact. “But you’re admitting that there is a secret, then?” she pressed.

  “Of course there’s a secret,” Ria said. “Don’t play dumb. You’ve known that there was for a long time. You both have.”

  With that she pushed herself up from the kitchen table and headed over to the stove to see to the soup. Some of it had burned to the bottom of the pot, and Ria began to scrape at it with a wooden spoon. “It’s probably a good idea if Hank sleeps here for a few nights,” she went on. “At least until everybody cools down. But I don’t want you two thinking you’ll be staying together. You can flip a coin to see who takes the couch downstairs.”

  Hank blushed, though you could tell only from the side of his face that wasn’t all banged up.

  “Mom,” Astrid said. “Obviously.”

  “Don’t give me ‘obviously,’ ” Ria said, pausing to take a big gulp from her red wine. She studied what remained in the glass for a moment before upending it into the soup. “I know you two are just friends these days. But, honey, you’re sixteen. He’s sixteen. You’re a girl who likes boys. He’s a boy who likes girls. I’m sleeping with my door open tonight. Anybody who tries to go up or down those stairs after dark”—she turned here to point at them with the dripping wooden spoon—“will get themselves sent right back to the greenway.”

  Then Ria brought the spoon up to her nose and sniffed it. Her sudden bout of mothering was over as quickly as it had begun. “I don’t think this’ll be very good,” she said. “But let’s see.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Archives

  A FEW DAYS PASSED BEFORE Astrid and Hank could bring themselves to return to the greenway. Even when they did head back, they were careful to go early in the morning, sneaking in through the seldom-used harbor hatch. Astrid wanted to reduce their chances of bumping into anybody. She’d calmed down a little, but she still didn’t trust herself not to say anything horrible. As for Hank, he just wanted to avoid his dad.

  The search for clues about Eliza and Port Emory had hit a dead end. Ria remained steadfast in her refusal to talk about it. The bee-suited guards wouldn’t let Astrid get close enough to the quarantine house to have a real conversation with her dad. And, of course, interrogating the investors was out of the question on account of all of those mean things Astrid was convinced she’d shout in their faces. So the only thing left for them to do was search the Goldsport archives.

  The archives. It was a rather grand name for the dark, rickety old building that sat at the far end of the south shore—the closest thing that Goldsport had to a town library. Back in the world before the wickedness, it had been a church. But the investors had no need for one of those, so they’d hauled out the pews and the pulpit, turning the space into a storehouse for old papers and documents. If you peered out through the stained-glass windows, you could still make out the shapes of the old church furniture, rotting at the rim of the forest.

  “Where should we start?” Hank asked as they stepped across the threshold, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  “I don’t know,” Astrid said. “Isn’t there supposed to be a map somewhere?”

  “I
think so,” Hank said.

  The old building was crammed with bookshelves and filing cabinets, making the open space into a sort of labyrinth. Together they threaded the narrow, improvised hallways. At the back of the archives they found what they were looking for—an enormous canvas map hanging across the metal ribs of the old organ. WELCOME TO NEW ENGLAND was written across the top of the map. The map itself covered everything from Boston to Halifax, with the entire state of Maine looming large in between.

  “Well,” Astrid said. “If Port Emory is a real place, it’s got to be on there somewhere.”

  As they got closer, Astrid and Hank could see that there were strange marks all over the map. The entire thing was covered in a constellation of stickers, pushpins, and paint. A hand-drawn key helped them decipher what these symbols meant. Their village of Goldsport was marked with a solid yellow oval—YOU ARE HERE. Other safe areas were also dabbed with the same hue of yellow paint. Red pushpins indicated the locations of potentially useful equipment, such as abandoned trucks or salvageable boats sitting in dry dock. Black pushpins, on the other hand, indicated encounters with the wicked. These were scattered in thick handfuls in the woods beyond Goldsport. Once you got as far as the city of Bangor, the pins were replaced by a single stroke of black paint. This must have meant, more or less: too many wicked to count.

  “I wonder how long it’s been since they updated this?” Astrid asked. It had been ages since anyone from the sanctuary had gone out on a scouting trip.

  Hank flicked the map with his index finger, and dust showered down from the top of the frame. “A while,” he said.

  Astrid found a little bench beneath the organ, pulling it out so that they could climb up and get a better look.

  “Any idea where it might be?” Hank asked.

  Astrid just stared for a moment. The level of detail was as fine as a pinhead, and the map stretched high above their heads. Somehow, the difficulty of this task was only just sinking in.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Somewhere on the bay, I guess?”

  Hank raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Port Emory,” she said.

  “Oh. Right.”

  They started with the coastline around Goldsport, scanning every cove and inlet. When that turned up nothing, they moved the bench and searched farther afield. Astrid ran her fingers over droplets of purple paint—breeding grounds for singers—and through little forests of pushpins. She lingered over Puffin Island, no bigger than her pinky nail, before crossing the bay to search the western coast of old Nova Scotia. At one point Hank got the bright idea that a place called Port Emory might not necessarily even be on the ocean—it could also be on a lake or a river. And so, with sighs, they set about investigating those as well.

  As they were working, Astrid snuck glances at Hank. His bruise had settled into itself over the last few days, shrinking and deepening. His cuts had scabbed over, and his eyelid had finally opened—though the eye beneath was still cloudy and red, laced with burst veins.

  “Your dad doesn’t . . . ?” Astrid trailed off, giving Hank a chance to stop her if he wanted to. They’d spoken very little about what Mr. Bushkirk had done. “He doesn’t hit you often, does he?”

  “No,” Hank said. “Not anymore.”

  “He used to,” Astrid said.

  Hank nodded. “But not for a while. Not since I was ten or so.”

  “I remember.”

  “I do too.” He made a go at a grim chuckle but couldn’t manage it. “He wouldn’t actually punch me. As least not back then. He’d use stuff around the house. Leather gloves. A coat hanger—one of the plastic ones. Now, those—those hurt. But they’d break easy too.” Hank fell silent. Astrid felt as though she might tumble off of the organist’s bench. It was so awful.

  “I’m sorry that happened—happens—to you,” she corrected herself. “I wish I could have—”

  Hank cut her off. “Thanks. But don’t be stupid. Of course you couldn’t. Nobody can. It’s just who my dad is. The only way to fix it is to not be around him.”

  “Did you ever think about leaving?”

  “I didn’t think there was anywhere to go,” he said. “And also, you know. He’s still my father. Even if there weren’t any singers, or wicked people . . . Even if there weren’t a wall or a greenway. I still wouldn’t have known that leaving was a thing I could do.”

  With that Hank stepped up onto the organ so he could search higher on the map. The keys depressed beneath his boots, but no sound came out of the pipes. All of his attention seemed focused on finding Port Emory. But just as Astrid began to think that their conversation was over, he spoke again.

  “You’ve always known it, though. You’ve always known you could leave this place. And you’ve always wanted to.”

  Astrid wasn’t sure how to respond, but it didn’t matter. Hank went on without giving her a chance.

  “At first it was to go to Puffin Island,” he said. “But then later, once you got older, it seemed like it was just . . . just anywhere, I guess. Anywhere that wasn’t here. I never really understood that. I used to ask myself: What’s she got to run away from? I mean, yeah, your parents were split up. But they both loved you. Neither of them would ever lay a finger on you. For a while I started to worry that it was me. Maybe there was something wrong with me. But that was before we . . . well, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Astrid kept her eyes locked on the map.

  Hank did too.

  “But anyway. I think I understand you better these days. I realize—”

  “I think you do too,” Astrid cut in. She didn’t know that this was true necessarily. But she hoped so.

  “Astrid.” Hank sounded suddenly exasperated. “I’m not going to snap in half or anything. You don’t have to be so nice all the time. I mean . . . it’s starting to weird me out. Anyway, what I was about to say is that I realize now that you weren’t trying to escape. You weren’t running away from anything. You were just running ahead. It might have been Puffin Island. Or it might have been just anywhere outside of the greenway. But the point is that you were looking forward. You always have been.”

  Again, there was a long pause.

  “Anyway,” Hank said. “I think that’s pretty cool.”

  “Thanks.” Astrid stepped up onto the organ as well, grabbing at the base of the pipes for balance. “But listen,” she said, “if that’s your way of subtly flirting with me, you should know that it’s not going to work. I mean, I don’t feel that sorry for you.”

  Hank laughed. “That’s better,” he said. “That I can deal with.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The Monster Inside

  IT WAS EVENING BY THE time they finally finished searching the map and could say for sure that there was no place called Port Emory anywhere on it. But Astrid and Hank were undaunted—they returned to the archives the very next morning and set about examining the maze of bookshelves. These were stacked with dusty newspapers and magazines, as well as printouts from old websites.

  Astrid rifled through them, lingering over an article about the first outbreak of the wickedness. She knew the story well. It was legendary in Goldsport. Back then the scientists had called it the Western Cape Virus, because the first known case was an American tourist in South Africa. He’d come down with something that looked like a bad cold and had gone on to kill eight other patients in his hospital wing by strangling them with a stethoscope. It caused a global panic. All travel to South Africa was banned, even for doctors and scientists who wanted to study the virus. No one had known then that the disease didn’t even come from South Africa. No one had understood that the tourist hadn’t caught it on vacation, but rather had brought it there with him. And so the wickedness spread, slowly but surely, behind a world of turned backs. By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late to stop it.

  All it takes is one crack. That was the moral Astrid was supposed to take from this story, just like every other story told in Goldsport. But even when
she was a little kid, she figured that the investors had it wrong. America and the other rich countries of the world had locked their doors and barricaded them. They’d shut their windows, turned off all the lights, and pretended not to be home when people outside called for help. But their walls and locks didn’t save them. The monster they were hiding from was already inside. Maybe, if there had been a few more cracks, they’d have gotten out.

  The bookshelves were a treasure trove of interesting relics like that article. Astrid paged through arguments about whether or not the United States and Europe should have closed their borders, instructions for how to irrigate a home garden, and a hilariously useless recipe for all-organic mosquito repellent. Hank found a box of records from the year Goldsport was founded, including old incident reports and inventory receipts. There was even an original blueprint for the greenway. But the one thing they didn’t find was any mention of a place called Port Emory. Not a single clue pointing them in the direction of Eliza.

  They had just finished when a voice rang out from the atrium behind them. “There you two are!”

  Astrid and Hank shot to their feet. Two figures stood on the opposite side of a bookshelf. The first was Abigail Lee, the vice chairwoman—they could just make her out through the gaps. The second, rather surprisingly, was Klara Bushkirk. Both women wore beautiful summer dresses and brightly patterned silk scarves. A chunky pair of bejeweled sunglasses sat atop Mrs. Lee’s head, shining even in the dim light of the archives. Klara wore a wide-brimmed sun hat. These were picnic clothes. Astrid had completely forgotten that it was Sunday.

  “We missed the two of you this morning,” Mrs. Lee said, cheerful as could be. As though there hadn’t just been a coup, exiling Amblin to a shitty little dungeon on the north shore. As though Astrid would actually consent to attend the picnic and watch Mr. Bushkirk, the man who’d exiled him, play chairman in front of everybody. Watch him preen and strut like he didn’t have a heart made of garbage and mud.