Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  And silent as a cat, Antoine makes his way towards the truck.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 49

  Beams of flashlights criss-cross in the distance, a tangled spider’s web of light.

  Heart racing, ­Dany counts primes, eighty-three, eighty-nine, one hundred and one, but something is off, something is wrong. Her mind tries to skip along that well-worn path, but the numbers aren’t lighting up for her the way they once did.

  Crouching, in her little patch of darkness, ­Dany tells herself that it won’t be so bad. There will be pain – change always means pain – but, after scraping out a few of her cells, they’ll probably even let her go.

  They’ll have bits of her in a lab somewhere.

  They’ll have her blood, her cells, her tissue, her variant of the virus. They won’t need her. But she’s breathing too fast. And ­Dany knows it; she’s on the edge of something bad.

  She tries the Fibonacci sequence. Because it’s easier. A matter of simple sums. Zero, one, one, she begins, her eyes on the beams of light. Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four.

  ­Dany stops counting and frowns.

  Because no, something isn’t right. She can hear men yelling, and though it’s hard to pick out, she thinks she hears ­Antoine call out a warning – “Run,” he screams – and then the first of the flashlights catch her and a beat later, she is blind – blinking up at a dozen beams of bright white light.

  “Eighty-nine,” she whispers, shutting her eyes. “One hundred and forty-four.”

  | Chapter 0 = X + 50

  She hears the pounding of boots on the wooden dock, and before she can explain – before she can tell them that she is the one who called – someone slips an ­evac hood over her head, but backwards, and she is blind.

  ­Dany screams, kicks, scratches – but it’s too late.

  She feels the prick of a needle, and time is a suitcase that opens in her mind. Time is a suitcase brimming with soft silk scarves and she is standing alone in a room filled with light, and holding one scarf and then another up in her hand as the wind catches the soft fabric, blowing softly, a world of light and water.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 51

  Time is a cottony and fibrous thing.

  An itch at the edge of her mind, slipping.

  Sometimes, she hears voices, but time pours cool water and the voices blur like watercolour paints.

  And even pain, she realizes, can be soft at the edges.

  A forgetting, half-forgotten thing.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 52

  She opens her eyes, opens them wide, and finds herself alone inside of a concrete cell. One side of the room is a mirror, and there’s a girl inside the looking glass.

  She calls out to the girl, but her voice is a whisper and in her mouth there is the taste of stale blood. She knows, somehow, that they’ve taken some little unnameable piece of her. ­Dany’s fingers trace her neck, feeling stitches, in the place where a lymph node should be.

  ­Dany takes a deep breath and stands on uncertain legs, but when she tries to cross over to the girl who lives in the glass, it’s like her spine has fossilized. Like time has gotten into her, somehow, and rusted all of her joints.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 53

  ­Dany knows that she is deep underground, knows that her cell is a large version of the kind of BSL-4 laboratory box that her Wistar rats once lived in.

  In here, ­Dany has nothing but time. She doesn’t even have herself anymore. Because the moment that stolen quarter was dropped into the slot, ­Dany wasn’t ­Dany.

  She was a collection of cells.

  Something to be collected, taken, harvested. To be drawn up in a needle bit by bit.

  Only, it’s not just a few of her cells. No, they want ­Dany whole, like she’s some kind of hairless ­macaque. An oversize Wistar rat.

  Because they don’t want a bit of finite tissue.

  They want the source.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 54

  Sometimes, she can almost see it. The gas leaking in through the vents.

  And then time passes – an unknown measure – and when she opens her eyes once more, her eyelids are made of lead.

  Her head is a dull and drugged ache.

  When she wakes, she knows that they’ve done something to her, taken something from her and, in place of whatever it is they’ve stolen, they’ve left another little gap – not just a few cc’s of blood – but time. They have put a needle in her vein and drawn out a little more of her time.

  Gone, vanished, never to be seen again.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 55

  Sometimes, time moves forward in a predictable line, from a to b to c. But every now and again, a little bit of it disappears into a bloody gap, never to be seen again.

  Time and again, they knock her out cold. And when she wakes up, drugged and disoriented, some small piece of her is gone.

  Sometimes, the pieces they take are nothing. How can she miss an ounce of blood? A few strands of hair plucked out by the roots? A tiny patch of skin carefully sliced from the inside of her cheek? But yes, there are gaps in her timeline – and most of these gaps can be tied to a hole in her.

  Sometimes, when she opens her eyes, the changes they’ve made are obvious. But at other times, she doesn’t know what it is they’ve done.

  Making a tent of her bedsheet, she looks over every inch of her body. She wants to know what they’ve taken from her. But sometimes, there aren’t obvious signs. Sometimes, they have to have done something to the inside of her.

  The kind of thing that doesn’t leave marks.

  But there are limits to how close they are willing to get.

  They refuse to breath the same air.

  ­Dany isn’t stupid. She knows what that means. Fear. Their fear is something she holds onto. A consolation prize.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 56

  When ­Dany next wakes, a cold white sun has dawned in her world. The bulb shines so bright that her eyes water and, at first, she doesn’t even see the typewriter.

  The thing is ancient. A sky-blue Underwood, legs bolted to the metal table. The sort of thing that belongs in a museum. Next to it, a tidy stack of forms, waiting to be filled out. ­Dany glances at the mirror-wall, but the girl who looks back at her is just as bewildered.

  So, they don’t trust her with a computer.

  Suspect she’ll open a vein if given a pen.

  She knows it isn’t pain her captors object to, but escape. By any means. Over the last week, they’ve left dozens of puncture marks, long blood-bruised lines on the back of each hand. And now, they’ve done something to the small of her back, to a vertebra. They’ve put a toothache in her spine, and when she turns her back to the mirror, there is a bloodstain the size of one thin dime on the bandage.

  And in exchange, they’re giving her a typewriter?

  Overhead, the speakers play instrumental versions of soft rock. It’s almost enough to make her wish for the good old days of straight-up torture.

  Almost.

  ­Dany is shuffling to the typewriter when she hears the screams.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 57

  There are moments in a person’s life that are like a dividing line, a line that neatly separates all of everything into pictures of before and after.

  There is the night that her mother puts her and her sister into the window well.

  There is Darling-­Holmes itself, a great black dividing line that wipes out close to a year of her life.

  And then there are the kind of lines that take a while to settle in, the slow kind, that form in your life over minutes and hours and days …

  | Chapter 0 = X + 58

  When the alarm comes screaming, ­Dany’s body tightens up like a fist. She knows, right away she knows, whatever’s triggered the alarm, whatever’s gone wrong – it’s got to be a lot bigger than her.

 
­Dany looks at the mirror.

  When the emergency lights flash, the mirror turns to glass, and for a second she can see the other side. A theatre. Two rows of seats. She can see her captors, too. Not two men, but four. They’re clustered at the back of the theatre, fear written all over them. While she watches, they pull on heavy respirator masks. A black filter covers each mouth – like the baleen plates of a foraging whale.

  In the flashing lights, her world becomes a stop-motion film.

  A long moment passes before ­Dany understands – and by the time she does the last of her captors has stepped out of the small theatre and is gone.

  ­Dany bangs on the glass, but there is no one left to hear.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 59

  In the flashing lights, the mirror dissolves into glass and blinks back again, so that ­Dany is one and then zero, here and then gone. Only now does it occur to her that there might be something worse than being locked up in a tiny cell. Something a lot worse.

  There is what happens when all of that stops.

  Her captors, in leaving her here, might as well have sealed her up in a concrete box and dropped it at the bottom of the ocean. Because Danielle-Jean Munday is going to die in this box, alone.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 60

  Over the next few days, Dany comes to know every inch of the two adjoining rooms. In the sleeping area, a metal slab for a bed, covered by a thin foam mattress. A small stainless steel sink – the size of two cupped hands. A metal toilet. So it probably won’t be thirst that kills her.

  Dany ticks off the other obvious possibilities. Hunger. The virus.

  But then she hears the walls.

  The walls in her box should be as silent as gravestones. But leaning her head against one, she feels a quiet thrum. A generator. And if the generator’s fuel runs out – when the fuel runs out – the vents will shut down. Then the room she’s in? It will become a vault.

  In science class, they learned about the sealed jars used to kill butterflies. That way, there’s no damage to the delicate wings. But when the darkness cocoons her – here, in this room – Dany will be the butterfly.

  Still, for now, the generators have fuel, and fuel means time.

  Time during which her body will turn on itself. Time during which her appetite will turn inwards. Dany doesn’t have much fat to spare, so her body will turn to muscle for fuel. The heart is a muscle. For a moment, a sliver of a second, Dany pictures Mac. She sees her sister’s tiny hands and her big eyes. Anguish hits her so hard that she has to pinch a finger’s worth of flesh, has to twist the flesh, has to make her nails bite into the skin.

  Finally it comes. Hours later, days later, she can’t be sure. But it comes.

  A silence so small, so slight, she’s all but chalked it up to her imagination. A tiny gap in the nearly inaudible thrum, a small blip in the pulse of the engine that runs through the place. A hesitation in the machine.

  A hiccup.

  When that tiny hiccup comes again time flashes into existence – and she realizes that each life has a length. That days can be counted. Heartbeats, numbered.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 61

  Dany has never been big on writing before. But the letter is her final say. She addresses her words to her kid sister, Mac. But the letter is for all of them really. For those who tried to save her, for those she tried to save. The words are for a little girl who can’t talk, and a little boy who can’t breathe. The words are for Aunt Norah and Mister Faraday and Jasper and Bea and Liz. The words are for Eva, and her mom and dad.

  The last earthly words of Danielle-Jean Munday.

  I probably won’t be around by the time you get this, she types. If you get this. They don’t exactly have postal service where they’ve got me. I guess if you’re reading this, you’ll be a lot older than five.

  Old enough, I hope, to understand.

  So, yeah, I made mistakes. I screwed up. I might have even screwed up the world.

  Jasper told me about the virus. That it’s old. Older than most species. For hundreds of thousands of years, fragments of the virus lay dormant in DNA. Who knows? Maybe two hundred and fifty million years ago, a caddis fly sneezed on a prehistoric chicken – and from that moment on, I was completely and totally screwed.

  But then, the truth is, we were always screwed.

  Before the window well, before the virus made the leap, before Jasper’s brain was eaten up with fire – you and me were already in trouble. So, if this is the end of the world, and I’m pretty sure it is, then for us, the end of the world began earlier than it did for other people, with our own private apocalypse …

  | Chapter 0 = X + 62

  In the letter, she tells Mac all of it.

  How, throughout her childhood, there was a thin impermeable film between Dany and the rest of the world. How, before Mac, Dany lived life in a tiny bubble, one that only had room for her and Mom, but kept her a little bit apart from everyone and everything.

  How all of that began to change with Mac.

  When her baby sister was put into her arms – it was like a loose tumbler finally fell into place. Mac opened her tiny, ­silver-bright eyes, looked up at Dany, and in that moment, ­everything changed. Dany’s love for Mac made it necessary to love Norah. Made it possible to love Eva. And weirdly, it made room for Faraday and Antoine, too.

  Dany tells Mac everything. She even tells her about Darling-­Holmes, about how that place slowly replaced her – the living, breathing girl – with a swath of terry cloth pegged to a wire frame.

  And then the lights flicker and Dany looks up.

  She suddenly knows that she’s left it too late, waited too long. She should have said goodbye to Mac a long time ago. She should have said it at the dock. Before that, even.

  But goodbye is very hard to say.

  Still, she does it. She makes herself do it.

  The fuel is running low, she writes. So I guess this is it.

  The end. Sayonara. Do svidaniya. Shalom.

  The lights are sputtering and the generator fuel is down to fumes … Soon, I’ll be typing in the dark. In my own personal butterfly jar. But look, I’ve got no regrets. If I have to die in a stupid shoebox – it’s not so bad if I’m doing it for you.

  Love your sister, Dany

  | Chapter 0 = X + 63

  When the letter is done, ­Dany holds up the typewritten pages. But looking at the letter, she can’t help but do the math. All of the words she’s struggled over, in the end, they add up to just one word, really. And in a game of Scrabble, goodbye will only net you so much.

  Fourteen stinking points. That’s it.

  Then, all at once, ­Dany looks past the letter and sees it for the first time. Really sees it.

  The typewriter.

  She sees the whole of it, sky blue and solid, and then she sees the whole of it broken down into parts, the parts as tools.

  ­Dany goes at the thing.

  Using the weight of her body, she breaks the first lever off by sheer will – holds up the key – it’s marked with the letter g. And then she gets to work on the next one.

  So what if the dark comes, what of it?

  The dark never hurt anybody.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 64

  With the lights out, ­Dany does what she has to do to survive.

  By feel, ­Dany strips the typewriter down to its last lever, setting each metal piece on the table in front of her. It takes time, to work the tip of the lever under the edge of the emergency panel. But eventually, the cover clatters to the floor at her feet.

  Inside the hole, she finds an illegible jumble of parts.

  Her fingers trace wires and metal parts, finds something that almost feels like the fail-secure of an electric strike.

  Her eyes shift back and forth in darkness, trying to picture what her fingers touch. But all she can call up are fracture
d bits of mental schematics, ones she tried to memorize, back when she was planning to rescue her aunt. But the pictures are broken, and in the end, she just takes the electric strike to pieces with her typewriter key, turning first one and then a second screw.

  And with that, somehow, the doors to her cell echo, click open and spring wide.

  Still, even hearing that, it takes her a moment to understand that she’s done it. That she’s free.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 65

  For a long time, ­Dany wanders the lower hallways of what must be the Ministry of Disease Control.

  Her right hand trails the wall, and her fingers seek doorways. She tries room after room, looking for the set of stairs she knows has to exist. Finally, she stumbles on a cell phone and uses it as a flashlight. With her eyes, the phone’s dim light is more than enough for her to see clearly. And soon, she finds her way out.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 66

  ­Dany isn’t stupid.

  Day after day, she’s sat in a small concrete cell facing a mirror. So she’s known, all along, about her eyes. After all, this last week, locked up in a box, she’s had nowhere else to look.

  Squinting at her own reflection, for long and empty hours, she’s wondered what those kids feel, the ones they send out into the streets as living bombs. It’s always a girl she pictures, a girl sent into a roadside market, an explosive vest wrapped around her little chest.