by Kat Zhang
“Not if the doctors can help it,” Ryan said.
This brought our head back up so fast it was dizzying. “You think I don’t know?”
“Then maybe . . .” Ryan hesitated. “Maybe you shouldn’t do things like what you did today.”
Addie bristled. “They were practically torturing him.”
“You couldn’t have helped,” he said. He flipped his chip over and over in his hand, his shoulders still squared and tight. “And now they’re going to pay more attention to you.”
Addie said nothing, but I could feel her seething, feel her emotions boiling helplessly inside us.
“Just be careful, okay?” Ryan said. “Please.”
He looked us in the eye until Addie nodded.
Eli still hadn’t returned to the group by lunch the next day. The nurse served one fewer yellow trays than usual and didn’t offer any sort of explanation. When Hally wondered aloud where he might be, no one replied—or even looked at her for the remainder of the meal.
As the hours passed and Eli didn’t show up, my mind kept returning to another boy. The one we’d seen stretched out on the gurney. The one with the stark white bandages and the staring, vacant eyes and the before and after pictures.
At least no one told us that Eli had gone home. I took what comfort I could in that.
“Is this how it started?” Addie whispered to Lissa as we left our evening study session. Over the past three and a half days, I’d gotten a general sense of this wing of Nornand; we were definitely heading back to the waiting room we’d been in yesterday. “For Jaime. When they took him—was it all sudden like this? He just disappeared?”
Addie and I were last in line, Lissa just ahead of us. She had to turn slightly to answer, and even then she spoke so quietly we all but read her answer from her lips. “With Jaime, they called him . . .” The nurse looked over her shoulder, and though there was no way she could hear us back here, Lissa paused until the woman turned back around. “They called him out of the Study room one morning . . . and he never came back.”
The line stopped moving as we reached the waiting room. But the door was shut, and the nurse didn’t try to enter, just sighed and checked her watch. Devon had been sitting with Kitty near the door in the Study room, and now both of them were stuck up front, right next to the nurse.
We all stood in the corridor, a straight blue line on a sheet of paper. The tag on the back of our uniform’s blouse scratched against our neck. There were goose bumps on our arms, a testament to Nornand’s permanent chill.
If we were home right now, we would be getting dinner ready with Mom and Lyle. The microwave would be humming with last night’s leftovers. We’d all be sweating from the heat of the stove and the smallness of the kitchen. Lyle would be telling us every last thing that had happened to him that day and, if he ran out of things, throwing in a couple things that had happened the day before, or the day before that.
I could almost see him at the counter, standing on a three-legged stool as he cut carrots with surgical precision, his fingers bent under as Addie had taught him.
We’d—
Addie started as the door we stood in front of swung open.
Dr. Lyanne stepped out, a pile of manila folders under one arm, a chipped red mug in the opposite hand. She just barely seemed to notice us and Lissa in her way.
“Excuse me,” she muttered and moved to close the door behind her, then paused and looked at the mug in her hand as if just realizing it was there. She sighed and turned, disappearing back into her office. When she reappeared, the folders and mug were both gone and her eyes looked somewhat clearer.
“Excuse me, girls,” she said louder, and this time Lissa and Addie moved out of the way.
“Dr. Lyanne,” the nurse called, prompting a twitch in the doctor’s jaw. “Could you come here, please? It’s already half past seven. Mr. Conivent said—”
“I’ll see if they’re almost done,” Dr. Lyanne said. She tugged at her lab coat and moved toward the nurse, every step a sharp click of heels against the tiled floor. Addie, along with almost everyone else in the line, watched her go. She disappeared into the waiting room.
I was afraid I’d have to waste precious time explaining, but Addie didn’t ask any questions, just cast a swift look around, met eyes with Lissa, and slipped into Dr. Lyanne’s office. We’d recognized those folders, the tabs marked with blue labels.
The office was small and trapezoidal, with a slightly slanting ceiling and a large window at one end. The last rays of sunlight filtered in, bouncing off the tiles on the roof outside. Dr. Lyanne’s desk was pushed against the far wall, next to a filing cabinet and a low bookshelf. The pile of files sat at the edge of her desk.
“Addie,” Lissa hissed. She’d followed us into the office, her eyes wide. “What are you doing?”
“Figuring out what they’re doing to Eli and Cal,” Addie said.
Would he be the next child on the operating table? The next body on the gurney, moved in haste while the others sat penned in the Study room or eating quietly from their yellow trays?
And perhaps—perhaps, if we could find Jaime Cortae’s folder, or Sallie’s folder—we’d figure out where they were now. What was happening to them now that Nornand claimed they’d gone home.
Addie crossed the office. “Let me know if anyone’s coming.”
“But—” Lissa said.
Our hands shook as she flipped through the manila folders. Bridget Conrade—the blond girl with the long, neat braids. Hanson Drummond—the boy who’d spoken up about Eli that first day. Katherine Holynd—Kitty? Arnold Renk . . .
Addie Tamsyn.
Addie hesitated, but I reeled her back on task.
She glanced up. Lissa stood just beyond the doorway, facing away from us. She’d eased the door almost all the way closed; we could just see her hands fidgeting behind her back through the remaining inches of space.
Addie pawed through the rest of the files.
Addie bent down and jerked it open. She leafed through the files, pulling them out to check the labels. Our hands trembled so hard she could barely stuff the files back in.
Her aggravation spiked, pressing daggers against me, but she did as I said, glancing at each folder before cramming it back into its slot.
Addie froze. We reread the label.
Refcon.
The night we were taken. The scene in the dining room, Dad’s helpless gaze, Mom’s knuckles white on the back of our chair. Mr. Conivent’s words rang through our mind: It’s what we call a suppression drug, a highly controlled substance. It affects the neural system. Suppresses the dominant mind.
Addie rocked back on our heels and pulled the file all the way out of the cabinet. Checking the doorway had become a nervous twitch. But Lissa hadn’t moved from her spot or said a word, and our eyes jerked back to the file. It was worn, the edges soft and rolled from handling. Addie flipped it open.
So why did the sheet of paper also say Vaccinations?
Addie leafed through the file. The papers inside were stacked a good half-inch thick, some printed on official-looking paper with fancy letterheads, others scribbled handwritten notes on notebook paper, one edge tattered. Addie shifted, then
cursed as the movement caused half the papers to slip off our lap and onto the ground. She continued swearing under our breath as she grabbed the sheets and stuffed them back into the folder. I prayed Dr. Lyanne didn’t have some special order we were breaking.
It was with a sense of déjà vu that our hand landed on a sheet of paper with a small picture clipped to the top corner.
BRONS, ELI
HYBRID
We skipped his basic information for the longer report below. Someone had scrawled notes in the margins and above the printed text. There was already a sourness in our stomach—it had been there since we’d stepped foot in Dr. Lyanne’s office. But now a new revulsion crept through me—half nausea and half pain. Our hand pressed against our lips, then against our teeth. We bit down. I didn’t know if our tears came from that or the pain inked into Eli’s report. The secret connecting Refcon and the vaccinations and all the children here, at Nornand. All the children in the country.
A sound cut her off. A stifled cry. Then the squeak of shoes against tile. Our head jerked up.
The crack of space between the door and the doorway was empty.
Lissa was gone.
Every nerve—every nerve and muscle and sinew in our body—slacked and then snapped rubber-band tight.
We threw the file back into the cabinet and slid it shut. Scoured the room for somewhere, anywhere, to hide. There was none. We didn’t need more than one glance to know that—we’d known that since the moment we entered the office. The desk wasn’t solid but built like a table, with no backing. The window lacked curtains. The best we could do was crouch on the other side of the filing cabinet, and we didn’t even have time to do that.
The door opened.
The board officer—the man who’d grabbed us in the waiting room, whose fingerprint bruises still bloomed on our wrist—stepped inside.
Twenty-three
For a fraction of a second, a millisecond, we didn’t move. The man didn’t move. He didn’t leave the doorway. We didn’t scream.
Scream. A laugh bubbled at the back of our throat. As if that could do anything. As if that could help.
The man beckoned behind him without taking his eyes off us. “Bring the other girl in here and get the rest of the patients out of the hall, along with that nurse.” He spoke in the same low, even tone we’d heard yesterday.
There was a rush of footsteps against tile. Devon shouting. Then Lissa was in the room with us, yanked in by the female board official. We could see her nails digging into Lissa’s shoulder. The door slammed behind them.
“Get Conivent,” the man said. The woman nodded, released Lissa, and left. Then it was just us and Lissa and that man in Dr. Lyanne’s office.
He watched us, his eyes shifting from Addie and me to Lissa. He wasn’t any taller than Mr. Conivent. Wasn’t any broader in the shoulders, any bigger. He wore clothes like he was going to the symphony—shirt with cuff links, a dark waistcoat, pants with pressed creases, black shoes. Our wrist throbbed from the memory of his touch. And our chest hurt from the look on his face, the look that said, quite plainly, that whatever this situation was, whatever it was we’d done, whatever it was we thought we could do, we’d never, ever, ever win against him. We could fight until we were bloody, and he’d still win.
And he’d come out of the fight looking as perfectly put- together as he did now.
“Jenson?” Mr. Conivent said, opening the door. It allowed us a glimpse of the now empty hall.
The man, Mr. Jenson, didn’t turn to look at him. “You said this building was secure, Conivent—that the patients were secure, that no one could ever go missing from this hospital.” Even when he inflected his words, his tone hardly changed. His expression never so much as flickered. “But apparently, this one was unaccounted for long enough to get in here.” Jenson didn’t wait for a response. “Whose office is this?”
There was the briefest of pauses before Mr. Conivent opened his mouth to answer, but another voice spoke for him.
“It’s mine.”
Dr. Lyanne came to the doorway. She looked at Mr. Conivent. He looked at her. Then, with a jerk of his arm, he gestured her inside. The office, never large, now seemed crushed to the brim though no one so much as touched.
“Close the door,” Jenson said, and it was done. Mr. Conivent stayed on the other side.
We pulled each breath like a saw from our lungs.
“It’s not policy here to lock your office when you leave?” Jenson said.
“I was only gone a moment,” Dr. Lyanne said. Her voice was quiet but cool. “I’d planned on returning immediately.”
“The nurse on duty does share a portion of the blame,” Jenson said. And finally, his gaze flickered from us to Dr. Lyanne. It was like being released from some crushing weight, like surfacing from the bottom of the ocean. “What I’d like to know is why these patients wanted to access your office.”
Dr. Lyanne studied us. “Perhaps we should ask them.”
“They would lie,” said Jenson. “And it would waste time.”
Now Dr. Lyanne’s eyes moved toward the pile of manila folders on her desk. I realized with a flip of the stomach that we’d left them in a messy pile instead of stacked. She scrutinized us next, and by extension, the filing cabinet. Wordlessly, she walked over and began pulling the drawers open. There were only two. When she got to the bottom one, she saw the file lying on top, the one we hadn’t had time to shove back.
I was still trying to come up with something to say. Or someplace to run—we could just push Dr. Lyanne aside, grab Lissa’s hand, and run.
Dr. Lyanne looked up at us.
“Give it here,” Jenson said. She picked the file up and handed it over. He flipped it open, and we had to stand there, Addie and I and Lissa, as he read through the pages, and every moment I just wished for death because the fear and the unknowing were making us so sick we couldn’t breathe.
Finally, the man looked up again and examined our face. Eli’s report had been on top, and he held it up now, watching us carefully, and we tried, tried to keep our expression neutral, but we couldn’t. The room blurred slightly. Our skin pricked with heat.
“Interesting case,” he said.
“It’s in the vaccinations,” Addie blurted, and the room blurred more. We struggled to keep from blinking, because if we blinked, we might cry—really start crying—and that would just be another sign of weakness before this man, who showed absolutely none.
Dr. Lyanne straightened. Lissa was still by the door, so still and quiet she might have been furniture. But her gaze was pinned on us. Not the board official. Not Dr. Lyanne. Us.
We released the edge of the filing cabinet. “Those vaccinations everybody has to get as babies . . . you put something in it to—” Our breaths stuck in our throat. We had to pause for air. A tear fell. “To kill off one of the souls. To keep people from being hybrid—”
Hybridity was genetic. Everybody knew that.
But the rest of the world—the rest of the world was so predominantly hybrid, and there were so, so few hybrids here, and we’d always thought—we’d always thought it was just a matter of genetics, a matter of like begets like, the way they’d taught us in biology, but it wasn’t that way at all—
“It’s not like that,” Dr. Lyanne said. “Most people in this country would lose their recessive soul anyway. The vaccines just . . . they help it along—”
“They’re sick,” Addie cried. “They’re poison. You’re poisoning us. All of us.” We stared at Jenson through blurry but steady eyes. “And when it doesn’t work—when there’s someone like Eli, or Cal, or us—then you go and round us up and you try again. And sometimes, you even get to choose who you’d like to die.”
There were dominant souls and there were recessive souls. Chosen before birth. Written into our DNA. A natural process, our guidance counselor had stressed during all those sessions. Unchangeable. Irrefutable.
Cert
ainly not something to be decided by doctors, here in the cold halls, under the blinding white lights.
“Who was the one who decided Eli wasn’t fit for society?” Addie asked Dr. Lyanne. “Who decided he wasn’t good enough? Who told Cal he’d have to take his place and answer to a false name for the rest of his life? You?”
I thought I saw Dr. Lyanne flinch. Addie must have seen it too, because she straightened a little.
“Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Jenson asked, and his expression was so carefully composed it was almost bored.
“Who knows about this?” Addie said softly. “My parents didn’t—I know they didn’t. Nobody but you kind of people know, do they?”
We stared at Jenson, and he stared back at us.
He called for security guards after that.
They locked us in our room first, so we didn’t see what happened farther down the hall. We just heard Lissa scream and a door slam—and Lissa never stopped screaming.
“Lissa?” Addie said. We pounded against the door, then the wall that separated us from her. “Lissa? Lissa?”
She didn’t reply. She sobbed and we could hear her through the wall, but she didn’t reply and we didn’t know what had happened, we didn’t know what was wrong.
“Lissa?”
The doorknob rattled in our hands but didn’t turn.
“Open the door,” Addie screamed. “What did you do? What did you do to her?”
No one came. Lissa kept crying. We stalked from one end of the room to the other and back again and back again and there was nothing, there was no way out. No way to get to her.
Addie didn’t hesitate. She didn’t pause. She picked up the small, wooden nightstand beside our bed and smashed the window to pieces. Glass flew everywhere, clattering to the courtyard below. We stretched out, and we could just reach Lissa’s window, so we smashed that one, too, with a wild swing that almost jolted the nightstand right out of our hand. There were no bug screens. These windows were not meant to be opened.
