Once We Were
Page 12
“Addie!”
Sabine and the others had already gone downstairs. Devon turned along with Addie at the sound of Vince’s voice, but Devon’s eyes met ours, and whatever he saw there convinced him to keep going down the attic steps, leaving Addie and Vince alone in the attic.
“What, Jackson?” Addie stepped away from the trapdoor and leaned against the wall. A nail dug into our back.
She must have been right, though, because the boy didn’t correct her. He ran his hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. He seemed like he didn’t know how to proceed. “What’s wrong, Addie?”
What’s wrong? He—Vince—had just dropped the fact that they were planning to blow up a government building, and now he was asking us what was wrong?
Aloud, she said, “Look, Jackson . . . I’ve just got—I’ve got to think about things.”
He approached us, gently tugging our hands from our face. His hands felt rougher than I’d expected, his palms callused. “Come on, what’s there to think about?”
Addie laughed. “Blowing things up? Yeah, that takes a little considering, Jackson.”
“Not just random things.” His eyes were wide, earnest. His hands still grasped ours, left me feeling pinned against the wall. I waited for Addie to push him away, but she didn’t. “Addie, we’re not planting explosives in playgrounds. It’s an institution. A hybrid institution with nobody in it. And we’re making sure nobody’s ever going to be in it.”
Addie stared past him, at the fairy lights on the far wall.
“Those people at Lankster Square . . .” she murmured. Too softly, maybe, because Jackson frowned in confusion. Addie bit our lip and raised our voice a little. “I know what you and the others want, Jackson. I do. And I want the same thing, but—”
“But what, Addie?” Jackson said. When Addie hesitated, he sighed and looked away. “Powatt isn’t going to be anything like Lankster Square. The building’s going to be deserted. No people. No crowds. Just a building full of empty beds, waiting for its prisoners. It’s an institution, Addie—”
“I know.” Our voice sharpened. “Eva and I were in one. We get it.”
Jackson’s smile held no warmth. “No, Addie, you kind of don’t. Nornand wasn’t an institution; it was a hospital. And it was terrible, I know. I’m not saying you spent a week at a five-star hotel. But Addie, you were there a week, and they fed you properly, and clothed you properly, and . . .” He hesitated, his grip on our hands loosening. “And there were windows.”
Addie drew our hands tight against our sides, but his hands, entwined around ours, came with them. “There was also Jaime locked up in the basement and kids dying on those surgery tables—”
“Which is exactly what’s going to happen in Powatt.” Jackson’s voice was a half-hoarse whisper. “This new institution’s twice as big as Nornand, Addie. And it’s all for hybrids, every inch of it. How many kids do you think they’ll be able to stuff inside? Can you picture them?”
Our breathing went ragged. Did my trapped feeling come from being cornered by Jackson? Or cornered by the images he threw into my mind?
“The ones who get picked for the surgeries will be the lucky ones, Addie. The others will just—” His voice cut off. He swallowed, his throat jumping. “Do you know how many kids die in hybrid holding tanks? That’s what those are, those institutions. Holding tanks. They hold us until we die, and they do everything short of putting a bullet through our heads to speed up the process. They lock us up—stuff us into these rooms, as many as can fit. These places in the middle of nowhere. And there’s nobody. Nobody but the kid dying in the bed next to yours of God knows what, and the caretakers who really don’t give a damn.”
Addie had been looking at Jackson’s mouth as he spoke, or at his nose, or his chin or just to the left of his ear. But she met his eyes now.
“I went into an institution at twelve,” said Jackson quietly. “And for three years, I never left the building.”
He was quiet—quiet in a way Jackson was never quiet.
Keep hope, he’d said to us at Nornand. Had he kept hope for three years? How was that even possible?
Addie was gripping his hands now, not the other way around. But it only lasted a moment. Then she disentangled our fingers from his and pushed his gently away. He stepped back, let us slide away.
“I’ve got to think about it, Jackson,” Addie said softly. She waited, and he nodded once. She glanced over our shoulder as she walked down the stairs, like she couldn’t take her gaze from this lanky boy with the pale eyes, couldn’t take her thoughts from the child he’d once been, who’d lain in a tiny metal bed and dreamt of sunlight.
EIGHTEEN
We did think about it.
We thought about it at dinner while Nina and Emalia ate and laughed, blinking from our reverie only when Nina tapped us on the arm to ask, “Don’t you like it?”
It took us a moment to realize she meant the food in our Styrofoam box. Some kind of fish. We’d barely touched it, but managed to nod and smile anyway. If either Nina or Emalia noticed anything off, they didn’t mention it.
We thought about it while brushing our teeth. While in the shower. While we dressed for bed. After we clicked off our lamp. After we told Nina good night.
I flipped onto our side and buried our face into the pillow.
My voice went sharper than I meant it to.
I shifted again, turning to watch Nina’s slumbering form in the other bed. She, at least, was sleeping peacefully tonight.
The next morning, Emalia was still brewing her coffee when I went in search of Ryan, taking the stairs two at a time. For years, I hadn’t been able to communicate with anyone but Addie. Ryan was one of the first people I spoke with after learning to talk again. He would listen until I tamed my jumbled thoughts into words.
I also needed to know his thoughts. Had Devon’s words been his as well? Or had Devon’s will simply overridden Ryan’s? Maybe he just hadn’t been sure. Maybe he’d needed time to think things over, too.
Henri, not Ryan, answered my knock. “They’re still asleep,” he said quietly once I’d stepped inside. Henri never spoke unless it was behind closed doors. His accent meant it was safer that way. He tilted his head toward the couch, where the boy I’d been looking for lay stretched out beneath a blanket, one arm curved by his head. His blanket trailed along the carpet.
The light above the dining table was on, but the rest of the apartment remained dim. Still,
we could see the shape of his face, the curve of his mouth, the shadow cast by his eyelashes. Why was it always boys who got the ridiculously long eyelashes?
It sounded silly when she put it like that, but my conviction didn’t waver.
“Eva?” Henri smiled when I startled.
“Sorry,” I said. I was already moving back toward the door. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, wait.” Henri ran a hand against his dark, close-cropped hair, then motioned to the table. “Talk with me? We’ll speak softly.”
I hesitated, then nodded. When Addie and I had first met Henri, we’d been too nervous to talk with him. He’d come visit Peter, and we’d sneak looks at him from across the room, flushing when he caught us. Other than Peter, we’d never met anyone who’d traveled beyond American borders. And Henri hadn’t just traveled. He’d lived his whole life overseas. He had the answers to so many questions we’d never dreamed we’d have the opportunity to ask. How did the hybrids live? Did any of them really go crazy, like the pamphlets at the hospitals claimed? What was it like, the hybrids and the single-souled mingling everywhere? Could people really be happy like that?
Henri had taken the time to tell us stories about his home, a small country in central Africa. He’d traced for us the journeys he’d taken to the Middle East and to Europe, where he now worked for a newspaper. He’d always loved to travel, he said. He’d always wanted to see the world, know its people. And with everywhere he’d gone, he’d come to learn that people are able to accept all kinds of normal.
The rest of Henri’s apartment was spartan, but his table was always strewn with papers, haphazard legal pads, and manila folders that reminded me of the ones we’d seen at Nornand. The ones reducing us patients to photographs, test results, and hastily scribbled notes. To progress or failure. To experiments.
“Peter tells me the city has calmed down about what happened at Lankster Square,” Henri said. “But they still don’t know who did it.”
I met his eyes. “Do you think they will? Find out, I mean?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. He must have misread my concern, because he continued with, “You don’t need to worry about it, Eva.”
What had Josie said? That the government wouldn’t just frame somebody, because getting it wrong would make them look stupid. It made sense. But never finding out would make them look stupid, too. Their only solution was to find the true perpetrators.
To find us.
They wouldn’t find us. The possibility was too terrifying to think about.
“Overseas,” I said, “they’ve found a way to get to the moon. Have they found a way to cure hybridity? One that doesn’t end up killing the majority of its patients?”
Henri hesitated. He took a moment to think, carefully rolling down his shirtsleeves from his elbows. It was so early in the morning Ryan hadn’t even woken yet, but Henri looked as put together as if he were heading out to a nice dinner. He always dressed like that; no matter that he hardly left the building. “Not yet. There aren’t many people researching it now. Some think we should research it more. Some think we should stop. Some think we shouldn’t focus on the hybrids at all, but the people who aren’t hybrid. Find a way to save all the little children who die before they reach double digits.”
All the recessive souls. The ones who hadn’t been lucky, like me.
“Maybe it’s better not knowing,” I said. “Maybe all the intricacies of who survives and who doesn’t . . . why some people are hybrids and some aren’t . . . maybe it’s just not something we’re supposed to know.”
Henri paused, watching me carefully. I struggled not to fidget. “Why do you say that?” he asked.
I thought about Eli and Cal. About Jaime with his broken sentences and lost half.
“Too much knowledge can do terrible things,” I said.
For a long moment, Henri didn’t reply. His eyes didn’t leave our face. Our lips pressed together.
“People do terrible things,” Henri murmured. “Knowledge is only knowledge.” He hesitated. “What if they could find a true cure? Not just killing one of the souls, but . . . transferring it?”
I frowned. “You mean like taking me out of my body and just sticking me into another one? That’s impossible. Where would you even get a—an empty body?”
“I’m only speculating,” Henri said. “But bodies can be built.”
“Built?”
“Yes. Cloned. It’s been done with animals already. It makes sense that it would be possible with humans.”
I could only stare and stare.
Addie didn’t reply. Dimly, I was aware that she was shielding her emotions from me. But my own feelings—my own thoughts—were in too much disarray for me to focus on hers.
To build a body from nothing . . . could you do that? Could you create a fully functioning human being, minus whatever it was that sparked it? That thought, and felt, and dreamed?
And how could you transfer me? My thoughts? My memories? What if something got lost on the way over? Could I still be me if I were in another body? Would they make the second body just like my old one? Would I still have the scars on my hands from the coffee I’d spilled as a child?
Lyle with a new kidney was still Lyle. Lyle would be Lyle even if they had to replace all his organs—I felt that with unbreakable certainty.
But was this different? Would I still be me?
Would I still be me without Addie sharing my heart?
“You know this—this kind of thing is not possible now, right?” Henri said quickly. “It will not be possible in five years or ten or, I imagine, twenty or thirty years, either. I am not a scientist. But I only wonder. If there were the possibility of finding this kind of cure, would you wish them to do the research? Even with the harm some people might do with the knowledge?”
I just stared at him. I didn’t know how to answer.
Addie was the one, in the end, who whispered
And she was, of course, right. These procedures Henri was talking about—they wouldn’t fix us, wouldn’t make us right. They would just make us different than we were now. They would change us.
Would I want that sort of change? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I would. It would be nice, perhaps, to have the choice, even if Addie and I decided in the end that it wasn’t for us. Even if we didn’t want to change, perhaps some other hybrid would.
Henri forced a smile that wasn’t really a smile, just a tightening of the lips. “Don’t worry about it. This isn’t what I meant to talk with you about, Eva, when I asked you to stay. I wanted you to tell me: Is something wrong?”
My mind still whirled with the idea of building bodies. From what? The dead? Or grown from cells? More and more, I realized just how little Addie and I knew. How little we’d been content with knowing.
We’d had no reason to doubt the truth of what our teachers taught us: that the Great Wars had swept across the rest of the world, bringing it to its knees. That the Americas were a haven of peace and prosperity. That this peace and prosperity was contingent on keeping the country hybrid-free.
Why would we have believed differently? These were the things written in our history books and our newspapers, the things our parents told us. It was what our classmates and our classmates’ parents believed. It was what the president said, and he’d been in office for over two decades. His uncle had guided the country through the start of the Great Wars and the invasions that had occurred on American soil. He should know.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“They try to hide it, but I hear Lissa and Ryan arguing. About something bigger, I think, than the things they usually fight about.”
She was right. I could think about Henri’s ideas later. “I don’t know what they’re arguing about.”
Henri studied our expression. I turned away, letting our hair fall into our face, and stared at the other papers on the table. Buried beneath two of the legal pads was a world map identical to the one he’d given us.
I ran our fingers across the glossy surface. “Why don’t they help us? They know about us, don’t they? About the hybrids? How we’re treated?”
Henri hesitated. “They have more pressing concerns. The Americas are large, but you are . . . what’s the word? You keep to yourselves. And you are not as advanced with technology. You are not a threat. The world has already seen too much war these past decades. There is little to gain from provoking the Americas when so far they have been peaceful.”
“They haven’t been peaceful to us,” I snapped. I took a deep breath through our nose. “They trade, though. Dr. Lyanne told us. There are countries out there trading with the Americas, helping them hurt us.”
When Henri spoke again, his voice was even quieter. Contained. “Almost everyone was hurt by the wars. Some countries more than others. Some are very desperate now. Some would try to trade with the Americas in hope they might receive aid from them, if war came again.” His expression showed how unlikely he imagined that help would be. “Others trade because the Americas can provide supplies they are unable to produce themselves and cannot manage to obtain elsewhere.”
In the end, though, whatever their reasoning, the important thing was easy to understand.
We’d have to help ourselves.
NINETEEN
Ryan woke up soon after, saving me from more of Henri’s questions.
“Eva?” His voice was rough with sleep. I perched on the edge of the couch, smiling automatically as his eyes met mine. If I bent down, just a little, I could kiss away the last of his dreams, my hair curtaining us from the rest of the world. “You’re here early.”