Once We Were

by Kat Zhang

  I had a sudden, gut-wrenching thought.

  How long had Peter “gathered information” before he decided to launch a rescue plan? The first time we’d spoken with Jackson, when he’d pulled us into that storage closet at Nornand, he’d told us to keep hope because a rescue was coming, but it needed more time. We’d told him we didn’t have more time, that Hally and Lissa were due for the operation table.

  If Jackson hadn’t spoken to us that day, the rescue might have happened days or even weeks later. Hally and Lissa might be dead.

  Addie’s disquiet weighed heavy against me. She hesitated.

  There was no way to know.

  The rest of the meeting passed in a blur. By the time I managed to refocus on something other than my own tumbling thoughts, the room had broken up into more private conversations. I didn’t notice Sabine heading toward us until she’d almost reached our side.

  “Hi again,” she said to us and Devon. There was a casual warmth to her voice, as if we’d met more than once. “I’m glad you ended up making it.”

  “Yeah.” Addie didn’t bother making our voice sound anything but dull.

  The look in Sabine’s eyes said she understood. Hally broke the awkward silence that followed by smiling and introducing herself. As the two of them chatted, I snuck another glance at Peter. He was still seated at the dining table, deep in a conversation with Henri and Emalia.

  I said.

  How could I demand Peter rush into a rescue after what had happened at Hahns?

  Still, I couldn’t help my impatience. Every day we didn’t act was another day those kids had to suffer. We’d survived Nornand. We knew what it was like.

  Peter didn’t notice our furtive looks, but Henri, sitting across from him, met our eyes. He smiled and nodded in acknowledgment.

  Jackson had told us Henri’s story early on. Ryan and Hally only looked foreign, but Henri truly was foreign. He hadn’t been born here—hadn’t grown up in the Americas, hadn’t even learned English until he was in his twenties.

  He and Peter had met nearly five years ago, when Peter made his first trip overseas. Then a fledgling journalist, Henri got to hear firsthand about a locked-down country, one that few had entered or left in decades, since the first few years of the Great Wars. The two kept a clandestine correspondence even after Peter’s return to the Americas. And a few short months ago, Henri made the trip here himself.

  I couldn’t imagine the danger he’d put himself in, sneaking into a country that hated him, where the ebony-dark gleam of his skin and the strange lilt in his words could so easily give him away. The latter was the real problem. There were people who looked like Henri in the Americas—many more, in fact, than there were people who looked like Ryan and Lissa. But no one spoke like Henri did. He couldn’t open his mouth without ruining the ruse.

  Henri wasn’t even hybrid. And yet he’d come all the way across an ocean to try and help. Addie and I had seen the drafts of his articles, pages filled with strange sequences of letters, some with odd additions—extra marks where they didn’t belong. French, Henri had explained, and read us a little, the syllables sliding and flowing into one another.

  They’d spoken French once, in parts of the Americas, especially far to the north. But languages other than English had been officially stamped out before Addie and I were born.

  “How often do Peter’s plans fail like this?” Devon said abruptly. He was looking toward the dining table, too.

  Hally sighed. “Devon.”

  “Not often,” Sabine said. “He’s meticulous.”

  “Peter knows what he’s doing.” Hally looked to Sabine, as if for confirmation. “He’s been at it for years.”

  “Almost five, now.” Sabine smiled, just a little. “I was in the first group he ever rescued—me and Christoph.”

  “Long time,” Devon said.

  A long time to be free, and yet not really free.

  Sabine and Devon observed each other like careful statues. Devon was a couple inches taller, but somehow Sabine made it seem like they were exactly eye to eye.

  “Yeah,” she said finally. And listening to that one word, I could hear the long, trembling echoes of every one of those years.

  SIX

  Addie and I were still awake that night, thinking about Hahns, and Nornand, and dying children, when the nightmares came for Kitty.

  At first, it was just a restlessness in her limbs. An inability to keep still. Then she cried out—not a scream, but a whimper, as if even asleep she knew she had to hide.

  I hurried from our bed. It was too dark to see much, but Kitty had curled up into a ball beneath her covers, her breathing erratic.

  “Kitty?” I whispered. “Kitty, wake up.” I gripped her shoulders as she rocketed upward. Her eyes snapped open. “Shh . . . shh . . . It’s all right.”

  There were no tears. No screaming. Just two wide, brown eyes and five dull fingernails digging into our hand.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re okay.”

  She pressed her face against our shoulder, a blunt, animal need for warmth and safety. I wrapped our arms around her. For a long time, neither of us said anything. Sometimes, the sight of Kitty in the bed next to ours—or just the feel of her in our arms—shocked me back in time to another shared bedroom. One where the beds were made of metal, not wood. Where the floor was cold and nurses came at intervals to check on us in the night.

  Kitty spoke, her voice thick. “Eva, are Sallie and Val dead?”

  “What?” The word dropped, a startled, black stone from our mouth.

  Kitty’s hand tightened around our wrist until it hurt. “Our old roommate at Nornand. Sallie and Val. The one we had before you and Addie. The one—the one they said had gone home. Like Jaime.”

  I shifted, trying to see her face, but Kitty resisted. Our shirt muffled her words. “You rescued Jaime. And Hally. You would’ve rescued Sallie and Val if they’d been down there, right?”

  I couldn’t speak. I could only think Oh, God. Oh, God.

  Kitty and Nina having nightmares was nothing new. But neither had brought up their old roommate since leaving Nornand. Had the meeting earlier tonight sharpened old memories? Or had they been silently wondering all this time, too frightened to ask?

  I’d forgotten that they didn’t know Sallie and Val’s fate. I hadn’t stopped to imagine what it might be like for them, not knowing.

  Still, I didn’t want to answer.

  Go back to sleep, I wanted to say.

  It was only a dream, I wanted to say.

  But sleep wouldn’t solve anything, and this—this horror that had happened at Nornand—was not a dream.

  How were we supposed to tell an eleven-year-old girl that her friend was dead?

  That she had been, for all intents and purposes, murdered?

  That no justice had been exacted?

  But Kitty and Nina were waiting.

  Addie whispered.

  I crushed Kitty against us, not knowing if we were doing the right thing, if we were doing it the right way. “Yes, they are.”

  She didn’t reply. Her hands tangled in our shirt.

  I said helplessly.

  But she hadn’t been all right, any more than we’d been all right, or Ryan, or Hally, or Jaime. We’d been out of Nornand for six weeks, and sometimes, I wasn’t sure what all right really meant anymore.

  Kitty and Nina weren’t the only one with nightmares.

  “You’re safe,” I whispered fiercely in Kitty’s ear. “Nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

  I stayed with her for nearly an hour in the darkness, until she drifted back to sleep.

  Henri had given us a world map three weeks ago, when Addie and I first arrived at Emalia’s apart
ment. Since you love it so much, he’d said in his lilting, accented voice, and laughed when Addie fixed it above our bed with sticky tack. He’d brought the map from overseas, so it was like no map Addie and I had ever seen. We’d been fascinated since we first found it rolled up in a corner of his apartment.

  Now, as dawn broke, sunlight seeped through the yellow curtains and crawled across the ceiling. Bit by bit, the map came into view. Our eyes took in the neatly labeled countries, each stained a different color. Russia, with its bulk, its eastern mountain ranges and great, thick, blue river veins. Australia, lonely in the southeast, a country and a continent. I thought of Australia most often. Despite the distance between us, there was a comforting familiarity to its loneliness.

  The Americas were alone, too. Almost all the other countries of the world shared continents. A few were nearly the size of our northern half, but most were hardly a hundredth our size. How strange it must be to live in a country so small, surrounded so claustrophobically by other nations. The Americas dominated the entire western half of the map, two continents attached by a thread.

  A familiar whirring and clicking came from Nina’s side of the room, and I shifted to face her.

  “Nina Holynd.” I kept my tone light even as I examined her, searching her expression for signs of the pain she and Kitty had crumpled beneath last night. Nina had always been better than Kitty at hiding pain. The mornings after the girls had a particularly bad dream, it was almost always Nina who took control. Who got out of bed smiling like the nightmares had never happened. “You have got to find somebody else to film.”

  “There’s nobody else to film.” Nina directed her video camera right at our face, giggling. I groaned and pulled our covers over our head. “You move a lot in your sleep, you know that?”

  “No.” The blankets muffled my words. “And I don’t need cinematographic proof, thank you very much.”

  Nina’s camcorder really belonged to Emalia, who had accidentally broken it years back. Nina had unearthed it in a cabinet, and Ryan had fixed it. Since then, Addie and I woke far too often to a camera lens hovering above our bed, filming the apparently fascinating movie of Addie & Eva Asleep.

  The video camera was enormous and heavy, but that didn’t seem to dissuade Nina. She and Kitty had gone through two Super 8 film cartridges already, keeping them in our dresser drawer in hopes Emalia might go through with her promise to develop them. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Emalia would probably wait months before deeming it safe enough—if she ever did.

  “Eee-va.” Nina drew out my name on a two-toned pitch. “Come on. Get up.” When I didn’t move, she sighed. “Fine. I’ll just look through Addie’s sketchbook, then.”

  This jerked Addie into control. “Nina—”

  Nina pulled the sketchbook from the nightstand drawer and flipped it open with stubborn glee. After years of hiding her drawings, Addie still disliked people looking through her sketches.

  “Who’s this?” The sketchbook had fallen open to a picture of a young boy, light-haired and eager-eyed.

  “Lyle.” Addie slipped from our bed and crossed to Nina’s. The younger girl leaned against us, like it was automatic.

  “Why’s he dressed like that?”

  Our lips crooked in a smile. Addie had drawn him in a soldier’s uniform right out of one of his spy-and-adventure novels. “Because he always wanted to have adventures. For a while, he was convinced he was going to be a soldier when he grew up. He taught himself Morse code and everything. By the time he moved on to the next thing, I’d practically memorized it, too.”

  “Do you still remember it?”

  Addie nodded. Nodding was easier than speaking around the sudden lump in our throat. She picked up the pencil and reached for her sketchbook, drawing a line and a dot; then two dots; another line and dot; and finally a dot followed by a line.

  “N-I-N-A,” she said, and tapped the letters out with the pencil.

  Nina stared down at the pattern, her own fingers moving slowly. “Can you teach us the whole alphabet?”

  Addie grinned wryly. “Sure. Numbers, too.”

  Nina tapped out her name again, a little faster. “What’s Kitty?”

  Addie wrote and tapped it for her. Funny how we remembered it even better than I thought we would. Mom and Dad had learned a few words, too, but we were the ones Lyle tapped messages to after we went to bed, rapping on the wall between our rooms long after he was supposed to be asleep. He never stopped until Addie tapped something back.

  Addie shut her sketchbook and slipped off the bed, pulling Nina after us. “Come on, have you eaten breakfast?”

  “Nope. I was waiting for you. I’ll make you pancakes, if you want.”

  “That would be great.” Addie smiled as Nina grabbed her camcorder and headed for the kitchen.

  We glanced, one last time, at the map stuck to the ceiling.

  The world maps we’d studied in school had always come with the disclaimer that they were old, made before or shortly after the Great Wars began. World War I and World War II, as Henri called them.

  The Great Wars had always smashed through our history classes like a giant’s fist, leaving the rest of the world fragmented, unworthy of mapping. We’d been told country lines were muddled, contested to the point of being barely existent. They shifted constantly, as some desperate people attacked another and were assaulted in turn.

  Lies. So much of it lies.

  World War I and World War II seemed so neat in comparison.

  Wars can destroy a country completely, Henri told us. But they can also shape it, push it forward. Some of the world was destroyed. Some was shaped. And some was pushed forward.

  What do they have that we don’t? I’d asked. Flying cars?

  Henri laughed. No, no flying cars. But faster cars. And cell phones. Internet.

  We’d never heard of them. He told us about tiny, cordless phones everyone carried around in their pockets, so widespread that pay phones were all but extinct. He tried to describe some sort of information network that connected computers, allowing one to instantaneously send data to another. He kept running into words he didn’t know how to translate, and the entire concept baffled Addie and me, who could count the number of times we’d even sat down in front of a computer.

  He told us mankind had been to the moon.

  I laughed. You’re kidding.

  But he wasn’t.

  He said it had only happened once, a few decades ago, but after the end of the Second World War. It was a show of power by one of the countries that had emerged least scathed from the years of combat. The project had proven too financially costly to attempt again, though there were other countries still eager to try.

  There were also satellites floating out there in the blackness, orbiting our planet. Henri showed us one of his devices, a satphone that seemed more miniature computer than phone. Using these satellites, the phone allowed him to both send information and make calls to his headquarters overseas.

  There were satellites beaming information around in outer space. There had been men on the moon. I had never known the world beyond the Americas’ borders, but there were people out there who’d experienced life beyond our very planet.

  How terribly insignificant we must all seem from the moon. Our battles. Our wars.

  Addie sighed and pulled our blankets straight, tucking in the edges. The map was a comforting reminder of the rest of the world. One that included countries where hybrids like us weren’t vilified, weren’t feared or hated or locked away.

  But sometimes, those bright, colorful countries seemed to mock us with their distance.

  The phone shrilled, and Addie hurried into the living room to answer it. “Hello?”

  “Hey,” a voice said. “This is Sabine. Did I wake you up?”

  “I was awake,” Addie said. Nina watched us with obvious curiosity, arms cradling a mixing bowl.

  “Good. I would’ve called later, but I’m about to leave for work. Do you
want to meet up with me and a couple friends tonight?”

  Addie frowned in confusion. “Sorry?”

  “I wanted to introduce you to some people.” Sabine’s voice dropped a little. “You can sneak out, right? We can meet you right at the end of your block. There’s a fast-food place that’s open until two a.m. Can you be there at one thirty? There’ll be five of us; six if you get Ryan to come.”

  Would Ryan go? He hadn’t been the warmest to Sabine and Jackson yesterday. But I thought about all the weeks of boredom crushing down on him, hour after hour, and I said

 

  Six weeks of barely stepping foot outside the building, and now we were thinking about sneaking out twice in as many days, not to mention the Emalia-sanctioned trip last night.

  I said.

 

 

  Addie reminded me.

 

  Still, Addie hesitated.

 

 

  But when Sabine asked, “You still there? Can you guys come?” Addie sighed and said, “Yeah. We can.”

  I said.

  “Great,” Sabine said before Addie could bring them up. “I’ll see you and Ryan at one thirty, then. I’ve got to run.”

  “Who was that?” Nina asked as soon as Addie hung up. She stood barefoot in the kitchen, on the other side of the counter.

  “Just Sabine.” Addie swung around to the kitchen doorway. “It was nothing. Come on, weren’t you going to make pancakes?”

  Nina frowned. For a moment, I thought she might press harder. But then her expression cleared, though her eyes didn’t leave ours. “Yeah. I can’t find the baking soda.”