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“Been here before?” Jan wheezes. I shake my head, and she shoots me a sidelong glance. “Thought not. We don’t get many visitors around here. What’s the point, I say. ”
“I just found out that my aunt—”
She cuts me off. “Gonna have to leave your bag outside the ward. ” Pant, pant, pant. “Even a nail file will do it in a pinch. And we’ll have to give you some clogs. Can’t have you wearin’ those laces in the ward. Last year one of our guys strung himself up to a pipe, quick as a flash, when he got hold of some laces. Dead as a doornail by the time we found him. Who’re you here for?”
She says all this so quickly, I can barely follow the thread of her conversation. An image flashes: someone swinging from the ceiling, laces knotted around the throat. In my mind, the person swings, revolving toward me. Weirdly, it’s Fred’s face I picture, huge and bulging and red.
“I’m here to see Melanea. ” I watch the nurse’s face, see the name means nothing to her. “Number 2225,” I add.
Apparently, people go solely by their numbers in the Crypts, because the nurse lets out a noise of recognition. “She won’t give you no trouble,” she says conspiratorially, as though she’s sharing a great secret. “She’s quiet as a church mouse. Well, not always. I remember the first few months, she was shouting and shouting. ‘I don’t belong here! I’m not crazy!’” The nurse laughs. “’Course, that’s what they all say. And then you start listening, and they’ll run your ear off talking little green men and spiders. ”
“She’s—she’s crazy then?” I say.
“Wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t, would she?” Jan says. She obviously doesn’t expect an answer. We’ve arrived at another set of double doors, this one marked with a sign that reads WARD B: PSYCHOSIS, NEUROSIS, HYSTERIA.
“Go on and grab yourself a pair of slippers,” she resumes cheerfully, pointing.
Outside the doors are a bench and a small wooden bookcase, on which several plastic-sheathed hospital slippers have been placed. The furniture is obviously old, and looks strange in the middle of all the gleaming whiteness. “Leave your shoes and your bag right here. Don’t worry; no one will take ’em. The criminals are in the old wards. ” She laughs again.
I sit on the bench and fumble with my shoelaces, wishing I’d thought to wear boots or flats instead. My fingers feel clumsy.
“So she screamed?” I prompt. “When she first came, I mean. ”
The nurse rolls her eyes. “Thought her husband was tryin’ to do her in. Shouted conspiracy to anyone who’d listen. ”
My whole body goes cold. I swallow. “‘Do her in’? What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry. ” Jan waves a hand. “She went quiet pretty soon. Most of ’em do. Takes her medicine regular-like, doesn’t give nobody no trouble. ” She pats my shoulder. “Ready?”
I can only nod, although ready is the last thing I feel. My body is filled with a need to turn, to run. But instead I stand up and follow Jan through the double doors into another hallway, as spotlessly white as the one we have just passed through, lined on both sides with white, windowless doors. Each step seems to be harder than the last. I can feel the chilly bite of the floor through the slippers, which are tissue-thin, and every time I put a heel down, a shiver runs all the way up my spine.
Too soon, we reach a door marked 2225. Jan raps twice on the door, hard, but doesn’t seem to expect a response. She removes her key card from around her neck, holds it up to the scanner to the left of the door—“We got all new systems after the Incidents; neat, huh?”—and, when the lock slides open with a click, pushes the door open firmly.
“Got a visitor,” she calls cheerfully as she passes into the room. This last step is the hardest. For a second I think I won’t be able to do it. I have to practically throw myself forward, over the threshold, into the cell. As I do, the air leaves my chest.
She is sitting in the corner, in a plastic chair with rounded corners, staring out of a small window fitted with heavy iron bars. She doesn’t turn when we enter, although I can make out her profile, which is just touched with the light filtering in from outside: the small, ski-jump nose, the exquisite little mouth, the long fringe of lashes, her seashell-pink ear and the neat procedural scar just beneath it. Her hair is long and blond, and hangs loose, nearly to her waist. I estimate that she’s about thirty.
She is beautiful.
She looks like me.
My stomach lurches.
“Morning,” Jan says loudly, as if Cassandra won’t hear us otherwise, even though the room is tiny. It’s too small to contain all of us comfortably, and even though the space is bare except for a cot, a chair, a sink, and a toilet, it feels overcrowded. “Brought somebody to see you. Nice surprise, isn’t it?”
Cassandra doesn’t speak. She doesn’t even acknowledge us.
Jan rolls her eyes expressively, mouths I’m sorry to me. Out loud, she says, “Come on, now. Don’t be rude. Turn around and say hello like a good girl. ”
Cassie does turn then, although her eyes pass over me completely and go directly to Jan. “May I have a tray, please? I missed breakfast this morning. ”
Jan puts her hands on her hips and says, in an exaggerated tone of reproach—as though she is speaking to a child—“Now that was silly of you, wasn’t it?”
“I wasn’t hungry,” Cassie says simply.
Jan sighs. “You’re lucky I’m feeling nice today,” she says with a wink. “You okay here for a minute?” This question is directed to me.
“I—”
“Don’t worry,” Jan says. “She’s harmless. ” She raises her voice and assumes the forced-cheerful tone. “Be right back. You be a good girl. Don’t make no trouble for your guest. ” She turns once again to me. “Any problems, just hit the emergency button next to the door. ”
Before I can respond, she bustles into the hallway again, closing the door behind her. I hear the lock slide into place. Fear stabs, sharp and clear, through the muffling effects of the cure.
For a moment there is silence as I try to remember what I came here to say. The fact that I have found her—the mysterious woman—is overwhelming, and I suddenly can’t think of what to ask her.
Her eyes click to mine. They are hazel, and very clear. Smart.
Not crazy.
“Who are you?” Now that Jan has left the room, her voice takes on an accusatory edge. “What are you doing here?”
“My name is Hana Tate,” I say. I suck in a deep breath. “I’m marrying Fred Hargrove next Saturday. ”
Silence stretches between us. I feel her eyes sweeping over me and force myself to stand still. “His taste hasn’t changed,” she says neutrally. Then she turns back to the window.
“Please. ” My voice cracks a little. I wish I had some water. “I’d like to know what happened. ”
Her hands are still in her lap. She must have perfected this art over the years: sitting motionless. “I’m crazy,” she says tonelessly. “Didn’t they tell you?”
“I don’t believe it,” I say, and it’s true, I don’t. Now that I’m speaking to her, I know for a fact that she is sane. “I want the truth. ”
“Why?” She turns back to me. “Why do you care?”
So it won’t happen to me; so I can stop it. That’s the true and selfish reason. But I can’t say that. She has no reason to help me. We are not made to care for strangers any longer.
Before I can think of anything to say, she laughs: a dry sound, as though her throat has been long in disuse. “You want to know what I did, don’t you? You want to be sure you don’t make the same mistake. ”
“No,” I say, although of course she’s right. “That’s not what I—”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I understand. ” A smile passes briefly across her face. She looks down at her hands. “I was paired with Fred when I was eighteen,” she says. “I didn’t go to university. He was older. They’d had trouble finding a match for hi
m. He was picky—he was allowed to be picky, because of who his father was. Everyone said I was lucky. ” She shrugs. “We were married for five years. ”
That makes her younger than I thought. “What went wrong?” I ask.
“He got tired of me. ” She states this firmly. Her eyes flick to mine momentarily. “And I was a liability. I knew too much. ”
“What do you mean?” I want to sit down on the cot; my head feels strangely light, and my legs feel impossibly far away. But I’m afraid to move. I’m afraid even to breathe. At any second, she can order me out. She owes me nothing.
She doesn’t answer me directly. “Do you know what he liked to do when he was a little kid? He used to lure the neighborhood cats into his yard—feed them milk, give them tuna fish, earn their trust. And then he would poison them. He liked to watch them die. ”
The room feels smaller than ever: stifling and airless.
She turns her gaze to me again. Her calm, steady stare disconcerts me. I will myself not to look away.
“He poisoned me, too,” she says. “I was sick for months and months. He told me, finally. Ricin in my coffee. Just enough to keep me sick, in bed, dependent. He told me so I would know what he was capable of. ” She pauses. “He killed his own father, you know. ”
For the first time I wonder if maybe, after all, she is crazy. Maybe the nurse was right—maybe she does belong here. The idea is a deliverance. “Fred’s father died during the Incidents,” I say. “He was killed by Invalids. ”
She looks at me pityingly. “I know that. ” As though she is reading my mind, she adds, “I have eyes and ears. The nurses talk. And of course I was in the old wing, when the bombs exploded. ” She looks down at her hands. “Three hundred prisoners escaped. Another dozen were killed. I wasn’t lucky enough to be in either group. ”
“But what has that got to do with Fred?” I ask. A whine has crept into my voice.
“Everything,” she says. Her tone turns sharp. “Fred wanted the Incidents to happen. He wanted the bombs to go off. He worked with the Invalids—he helped plan it. ”
It can’t be true; I can’t believe her. I won’t. “That doesn’t make any sense. ”
“It makes perfect sense. Fred must have planned it for years. He worked with the DFA; they had the same idea. Fred wanted his father proven wrong about the Invalids—and he wanted his father dead. That way, Fred would be right, and Fred would be mayor. ”
A shock runs up my spine when she mentions the DFA. In March, at an enormous rally of Deliria-Free America in New York City, Invalids attacked, killing thirty citizens and injuring countless more. Everyone compared it to the Incidents, and for weeks, security everywhere was tightened: IDs scanned, vehicles searched, homes raided, and patrols on the streets doubled.
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