by Kat Zhang
But I couldn’t—I couldn’t squeeze his hand, because Addie was fighting to go in the opposite direction.
“Let her, Addie, please,” Ryan said. His voice was low; everything we said had to be spoken in a whisper. But the words were clear. “Let her take control, Addie. Just for a moment—just give her one moment—”
Addie started to cry. But she no longer controlled enough of our body to produce actual tears. Her crying was silent and invisible. To everyone but me. Like mine had been to everyone but her all those days and weeks and months after we first settled. After I was shunted aside and locked up in my own body, my skin a straitjacket, my bones prison bars.
I let go.
“Let go,” Addie hissed. Our face burned. Our whole body burned. She twisted away from Ryan, who released our hand before she could rip it away.
Addie turned toward the chain-link fence, our breathing rough, our arms tense at our sides. Her emotions grated against me, so entangled I couldn’t begin to sort them out. She stared out at the parking lot. The warm metal pressed against our face. Our fingers clenched the fence so tightly the links bit into our skin.
The fire was dying, replaced by a deep, cold sickness. In the background, we could hear the other kids screeching and laughing all across the courtyard.
“Go away,” Addie said. She closed our eyes, lost for a moment in the whirl of our own head.
When she opened them again, Ryan lingered a few feet away, watching us.
“I’m not her,” Addie said. Our face crumpled. “I’m not Eva. So just—stop it. Stop it—”
Her tears were real now, tangible on our cheeks. Ryan hesitated, but Addie glared at him, and finally, he slipped around the corner.
I could feel Addie quarantining herself into an empty, barren place. A safe place, silent and unfeeling and cold. Our chest hurt. Our breathing was ragged. A rare wind kicked up the dust along the bottom of the fence, swirling it against our shoes and socks.
If Addie lost control, I’d be her and she’d be me—stuck in our head. Watching, listening, paralyzed.
I understood.
Addie said nothing, just stared blankly through the fence. There were a few odd cars parked near the building and a black van a bit farther away, but that was all. Nornand’s backyard was not the neat green jewel the front was. A delivery guy unloaded boxes from the back of a van, a cap jammed low on his head to protect him from the unforgiving sun. He rolled his shoulders, stretching out his arms and flexing his fingers before making his way to a side door with a bulky box cradled in his arms. His trip took him within a few feet of us. We watched him silently. Focusing on him meant we didn’t need to focus so hard on each other, could speak without scrutinizing each other’s souls.
Something clattered against the fence, jarring us from the recesses of our mind. We snapped back to the world around us: the courtyard, the hot, dry air, the metal links beneath our fingers. The fence. Something was caught against the fence—a square of something—cardboard, blown by the wind. We bent and tried to grab it. Our hand was just small enough to fit through the fence. We winced as we pulled it back, the rough metal scratching our skin.
Addie’s unfinished sentence still hung between us, gossamer and smoke: And I—And I—
But it would hang forever unfinished. We read the message scribbled in black felt-tip marker on the piece of cardboard in our hands.
Addie. Eva.
We want to help you get out.
Addie looked up, but there was nobody. Nothing. Nothing there but the cars and the pavement and the—the delivery boy, almost to the building by now.
He saw us staring at him, and he smiled.
Twenty-seven
Devon didn’t sit next to us at lunch, and I wasn’t sure if it was to appease the nurses or to appease us. No. Appease Addie. Because Addie wasn’t me and I wasn’t her, and that was good—but right now, we felt so separate I was afraid we’d rip right apart.
We no longer had the piece of cardboard. It was too dangerous. Addie had hidden it under our shirt until we got indoors, then stuffed it to the bottom of the trash can in the bathroom after smudging the writing with water. She would have flushed it, but it might have clogged up the pipes.
Addie. Eva.
We want to help you get out.
The nurse clapped her hands, calling everyone out of their seats to line up at the door. I saw Devon glance at us, just once, but his expression betrayed nothing. Then he looked away and there wasn’t anything I could do to catch his attention again. We still felt dizzy from time to time, the world tilting when we stood up too quickly. Our limbs hurt. Bruises had materialized overnight, purple and red on our legs, our arms, around the bandage on our forehead.
Devon was near the front of the line, so we edged in toward the back. The other kids were still ignoring us. We must have looked such a mess—almost frighteningly so. In a way, I was glad to be left alone. We had too much to think about already.
The delivery boy. The one we’d seen our first day, our first few minutes in Nornand. He’d stared at us then, and we’d assumed it was because we were hybrid and he’d been morbidly interested. But what if it had been because we were hybrid and—
We want to help you get out.
But not just us, surely. He meant everyone. All the kids. So why contact us, and why now?
And what did he meant by We?
Did it matter? If they were going to help us get out, did it matter who they were?
We closed our eyes and I saw a flash of Jaime crying in the basement.
He’s gone. They cut him out. He’s gone. He’s gone.
Mr. Conivent in the Study room, the pencil jabbing into our hand.
Perfect day for a surgery.
We would leave this place for anywhere. More importantly, we had to get Lissa and Hally away before it was too late.
We ran into the little girl in front of us when she stopped walking. She turned around just long enough to frown at us and gesture pointedly at the nurse, who’d paused to chat with one of the orderlies. The girl had the palest blond hair we’d ever seen and was perhaps eleven, Kitty’s age. Pretty, I would have thought at any other time. Now I just fought to keep from imagining her locked down in the basement next to Jaime, sobbing and pounding on the door. Or laid out on the surgery table, her feather-light hair half shaved, baring her scalp to the knife.
Addie nearly cried out when someone grabbed our wrist. But thank God we swallowed it down, because when we twisted around to see who it was, we caught a glimpse of the delivery boy’s face—pale blue eyes, a long nose, ragged bangs—as he put his finger to his lips and pulled us a couple of yards down the hall, then pushed us through a half-open door.
We stood in some sort of storage closet, surrounded by shelves of cleaning solutions, cramped between a mop in one corner and a broom in the other. Everything smelled funny.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” the delivery boy whispered. He leaned toward us and didn’t seem to notice when Addie shifted away, nearly knocking over a bottle of window cleaner. The only light came from a penlight he’d clicked on after shutting the door. “Addie?”
“I’m listening,” Addie said. She squinted in the light beaming toward our face; the boy jerked the penlight aside. “But I—who are you?”
Despite everything—the cra
mped quarters, the looming threat of getting caught—the boy grinned. We could just barely see his teeth in the dimness.
“Jackson,” he said. “And I shouldn’t be talking with you. I really shouldn’t—Peter would kill me if he knew. But Sabine agreed that you ought to know.”
“Know what?” Addie said. It was so, so hot in the storage closet. It took everything in us to keep from pushing past the boy blocking the door to cooler air. He was skinny enough and the closet was big enough to keep us from touching, but his height made him loom. Addie had to tilt our head up to meet his eyes, and that only reminded us constantly of how low the ceiling was.
“To keep hope,” he—Jackson—said. “You’ve got to keep hope.”
Keep hope. Such a strange way of phrasing things.
Keep hope.
“What?” Addie said.
Jackson took a quick, sharp breath. This seemed to bolster him. “We’ve been watching Nornand. For a while now. And we’re going to get you out.”
“Who’s we?” Addie said.
“Emalia calls us the Underground,” Jackson said, and dared to smile, as if there was time for jokes. “I think—”
“I don’t care about your group name,” Addie said.
“Hybrids,” he said, and something jolted in our stomach. “Like you. Like us.”
Us. He was hybrid? The boy who we’d imagined judging us a freak was one of us?
“Peter—he’s sort of the leader, you know. He’s done this kind of thing before. Breaking kids out. He had a plan for Nornand, but it fell through. Someone he thought would help”—his expression darkened—“well, she fell through.”
Breaking kids out. Plans. Peter.
Before we could digest even this much, Jackson was hitting us with more. “He’s planning again. He’s got to change the plan now, and he wants to keep a low profile until then, so I’m not supposed to talk with you at all. But I know—I know what it’s like.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. Not a bit, and it made him seem much older. “So I’m telling you we’re coming. You’ve just got to wait a little longer. And you’ve got to keep hope.”
We were woozy again, whether from the tight quarters or yesterday’s fall or the stream of information the delivery boy kept dumping over our head, I didn’t know. Maybe all three.
“They’re cutting kids open,” Addie said finally. It was the most important thing we knew right now, and in the face of so much confusion, we had to get this piece of information out. She looked away. “And the vaccines they give everyone . . . those vaccines for babies—they make it so most people lose one of their souls. And . . . and with some of the kids, they’re deciding who’s dominant and who’s not. They’re choosing who lives—”
Jackson put his hand on our shoulder, and Addie met his eyes again. “I know,” he said.
“Are you people going to stop those things?” Addie shifted away from his touch. “Is this Underground going to make it all better?” She inflected the name as he had, mocking him.
“We’re trying,” Jackson said, and suddenly, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough at all. “Addie,” he said quietly. “Trust me, okay? I—”
“I don’t even know you,” Addie said, and he threw up his hands, urging her to keep our voice down, his eyes wide.
“You will,” he said, as if that was any sort of legitimate argument.
Jackson smiled that exasperating smile again. “There’s so much you don’t know yet—but you will. You’ve just got to get out of here first.”
Addie gave him a narrow look. We were sick and tired of learning things we didn’t know. So far, none of it had been good. “Like what?”
“Like—” He hesitated, but Addie stared at him until he went on. “Like how the Americas isn’t as isolated from the rest of the world as the government would like you to think.” He hurried on before Addie could interrupt. “We don’t have time to go into it now. But I swear, one day we’ll talk as much as you want. You just have to wait a little longer.”
I could feel Addie about to insist he explain himself, but Jackson was right—we didn’t have time.
Our lips thinned, but Addie bit back her questions. Instead, she said, “We don’t have time to wait. This girl—my friend—she’s scheduled to go into surgery. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Why can’t we leave now? Tonight?”
“All the side doors are alarmed and locked at night,” Jackson said. “You can’t even open them from the inside, so no one can get in or out. The only way is through the main door, and that’s always guarded by a night shift.”
There was a breath of silence. It might have stretched, but there wasn’t time. Any moment now, the nurse would finish her conversation or one of the other kids would realize we were gone.
“What if we disabled the alarms?” Addie said. “Would that unlock the doors, too?”
Jackson grinned. “No, but it would give us time to break in without calling out the cavalry. Why? You an electrical genius?”
“No,” Addie said. “But I know someone who is.”
We stepped out from the closet slightly dizzy, Jackson behind us. The nurse was still a little ways down the hall, talking to the orderly. The other kids stood in a vague approximation of a line, some chatting quietly among themselves, some just leaning listlessly against the wall.
How long had we been hidden away? Three minutes? Four? Had no one—
No, someone had noticed. Devon had noticed us missing. He frowned at us, and it wasn’t until Addie put our finger to our lips that he jerked his eyes away, pretending he hadn’t seen.
We looked behind us, at Jackson. He grinned, and Addie stretched our lips in a shoddy semblance of a smile. What plans we’d made had been hastily stitched together, built from on-the-spot decisions and not a few guesses. But the basic structure was in place. We’d have to fill in the rest as we went. We didn’t have time for anything else. Lissa and Hally didn’t have time.
Addie turned and hurried back to the group.
Twenty-eight
Mr. Conivent quarantined Addie and me at a table close to his desk during study time. Every few minutes, he would look up and stare over at us, checking to make sure we were doing our assignment. Whenever more than a minute or two passed without us writing something down, he’d clear his throat. Maybe he assumed we were safer when doing math problems. Maybe he thought they were keeping us occupied, that if our head was a jumble of matrices and obtuse triangles and long division, we wouldn’t have room for things like escape plans.
It might have been a safe assumption, if we weren’t hybrid. Between the two of us, Addie and I solved math problems and had all the space in the world to figure out the important things.
Jackson had run through the plan during our last moments in the janitors’ closet. The Underground had vans and plane tickets and fake identifications for fifteen kids. They had everything we’d need once we escaped the hospital. But we had to escape first.
We didn’t steal a glance at Devon over our shoulder—Mr. Conivent was sure to catch it—but we’d seen him sit down when we first entered, and I could feel his presence in the room as solidly as I could feel the coin-sized chip tucked below our ankle. It would be glowing an uninterrupted red right now, but it was pressed under the side of our shoe and our black sock. No one could see.
Mr. Conivent shifted at his desk, filling out some sort of paperwork. The review board hadn’t shown up today, and I wondered if they’d left for good.
The Study room door opened. Heels clicked, then quieted as they left the tiled hallways and sank into the carpeting. Our eyes rose and m
et Dr. Lyanne’s. She stood framed by the doorway in her black pumps and her perfect, wrinkle-free skirt and blouse, her white doctor’s coat. Pretty, almost beautiful. A woman full of angles. She headed for Mr. Conivent’s desk.
Addie and I finished our work sheet as we watched them speak out of the corner of our eyes. They whispered, but Mr. Conivent sat only six or seven feet away, and though we couldn’t pick out words, we could hear the tension in their voices, growing stronger and stronger and stronger until Mr. Conivent set down his pen with all the power of a judge pounding his gavel. He looked straight at us.
We forgot ourself and stared back.
“Addie,” he said. His voice retained an echo of danger. “You missed getting your blood tested yesterday. Dr. Lyanne will take you to get it done now.” Addie didn’t immediately stand, and he said, “Now, Addie.”
We stood, leaving behind our pencil and math problems. We followed Dr. Lyanne out the door. There was something we needed from her now, specific information she had to give us, and our mind whirled with plans.
“Hello,” Addie said quietly as we sat down in the small examination room. It was our first word to Dr. Lyanne since this morning. Here in this room, almost everything was white. The walls. The floor. The small table that separated us from Dr. Lyanne. And we were a spot of blue, perched on a chair. The machine between us was gray, a contraption the size of a typewriter with glass vials contained inside, visible through some silver meshing. They were connected to plastic tubing that snaked out onto the table.
The room appeared even smaller once Dr. Lyanne closed the door. After being shut up in that closet with Jackson, it was nothing, of course, but both we and Dr. Lyanne seemed to take up so much space, though she was such a thin woman and we’d never been tall.
“Give me your arm,” she said. Her voice was still authoritative for all the paleness of her cheeks. Addie complied.
