Judah’s father.
Noa tried to rush to the door, succeeding only in crashing over in her chair as the door shut. Her shoulder slammed into the marble floor, but at least her head hadn’t collided with the sharp corner of Ms. Jaycee’s desk.
Now on her side, her arms still lassoing her to the chair back, Noa bicycle-kicked her legs to slide herself, and the chair, backward toward Ms. Jaycee’s filing cabinet. She rocked her weight as much as she could toward the ceiling until she rocked herself onto her knees, chair now over her like some terrible tortoise shell. Noa shoved backward at the filing cabinet, trying to jam two of the chair legs under the lip between stubby legs and floor. She shoved once, twice, three times, sweat dripping down her face, shoulder still screaming with every contraction of every muscle, until she finally hit home and wedged two chair legs into the crevice. Then, with an almighty lurch, she tore her body forward, away from the trapped chair. The chair shuddered but stayed wedged as she dragged and twisted off it, the lasso of her arms finally ripping from the chair back.
Free of the chair, Noa collapsed forward on her stomach, her arms still bound behind her. She panted against the tape on her mouth, tasted the tang of sweat seeping through the tackiness. Her shoulder burned and pulsed so much she was sure she’d broken something, but there was no time to worry about that now, or to try to catch her breath—all that mattered was getting to that door where Annabelle had disappeared. Without hands, Noa slithered forward on her belly like a snake until her forehead hit the wall. She flipped herself onto her back, shoved the back of her head and neck into the wall, and slowly, painfully, pushed herself upward with her legs until she could stand.
Exhausted, Noa let herself lean against the wall for a moment, completely drenched and drained from the mere act of getting to her feet. But she couldn’t stop. Hands still pinned, she stumbled forward and ran clumsily to the secret door behind Ms. Jaycee’s still-open sliding screen. It was shut tight, of course, not that Noa could actually have turned a knob without her hands, but there was, in keeping with Harlow’s architectural style, a long sliver of a window in the door’s face.
Finally, Noa thought, a purpose to Harlow’s numbing uniformity.
Noa pressed her frantic eye against the transparent sliver, its narrow ribbon of visibility. She saw Annabelle’s back and shoulder, guided by Ms. Jaycee’s peachy nails, and the disembodied hand—gloved in white—of the Otec.
Noa shuddered as Ms. Jaycee’s profile leaned into visibility, her eyes gazing reverently out of frame, presumably at Judah’s father. She nodded, then began to position Annabelle in front of what looked something like an enormous, life-size picture frame. Noa could see only her friend’s left side, shoulder to foot, and the wisps of her side-ponytail, which Ms. Jaycee lined up perfectly inside the frame’s border.
Noa could only watch Annabelle’s left arm: it was trembling, then began to squirm violently. Ms. Jaycee’s face flashed across and back, obviously trying to soothe Annabelle’s panic, just as obviously to no avail. Then the white hands of Judah’s father appeared, reached to hold Annabelle down firmly by the shoulders—
—and a blinding, punishing green light exploded in the room. It was so bright, so sickening, that Noa fell backward, landing hard on her bound hands and tailbone. She wailed against the silencing tape, but any sound she made was lost to the harrowing, endless scream that came through the secret door. Annabelle’s scream, too strong for any tape, for any earthly thing, to block.
Noa scrabbled to her feet again, stumbled back against the window, forced herself to watch. Her tailbone and shoulder throbbed, and it was almost impossible to keep her eye open against the green explosion. She smashed her body into the door itself to remain upright, slid her eyelid against the window to pin it open.
Noa had never seen anything like this virulent, shattering green light before—at least she had no memory of it in her mind—but her body seemed to know it, fear it, a muscle memory, primal and deep. Noa fought her body, forced herself to stay. Whatever was happening to Annabelle, Noa did not want her to endure it alone.
Eye forcibly peeled, Noa forced herself to watch, her scar exploding in pain like wildfire. Inside the vortex, Annabelle’s entire body flashed—and then, in a shattering blast that threw Noa backward like a bomb, the body that was Annabelle completely disintegrated, skeleton to stars, a spray of a million shards of light.
Noa heard and felt bones crack—her own bones, she knew—but she half-crawled, half-lurched herself back to the door, to the bottom of the window. Her cheekbone crashed against it, tears blurring her eyes, but Annabelle’s legs and feet were gone. The bottom of the picture frame was empty, the light extinguished. Noa forced herself to her feet, pressed her face up and down the window—
But Annabelle was gone.
• • •
Noa stumbled backward, numb, fell against Ms. Jaycee’s desk. Before she could think, process, regroup, the door—that horrible door—opened, and Ms. Jaycee appeared, smiling her toothpaste smile, which faltered only slightly as she took in the scene.
“Oh, dear, you do like to make things harder.” She leaned over Noa, and Noa felt the sharp pinch of a needle in her shoulder.
“A calming serum, just to keep you from being … difficult,” Ms. Jaycee explained kindly.
Noa breathed out harshly through her nose as any last physical energy hissed away like air from a dying balloon. Her heart and head remained frantic, alert, but physically she could not move, much less struggle.
Ms. Jaycee looked at her sympathetically. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m sure it seemed a little scary. But Annabelle had been here almost the longest, Noa. There just wasn’t enough left after Review for the Otec to send back to school. Now, I don’t think we need this anymore.”
Ms. Jaycee leaned over and pulled the tape from Noa’s mouth. Noa gulped in air, but even that was painful, difficult with the serum; she knew immediately it would be impossible to scream.
But Noa would not allow herself to die in silence.
“You killed her,” she whispered thickly, voice hoarse and sluggish, every word a giant boulder to expel.
“Heavens, no!” Ms. Jaycee replied sunnily. “She’s simply done her duty. The Otec cannot keep us safe alone, after all; we all must contribute in turn.”
“What … does that…,” Noa gasped. It was too hard to speak; the serum had grown too strong.
“Now, now, Noa, don’t exhaust yourself. Besides, there’s no point in burdening anyone with too much knowledge, is there? Better to keep things running smoothly.”
Ms. Jaycee lifted her toward the terrible door. Noa’s mind spun wildly, but she couldn’t move or protest. She resolved at least to keep her eyes open, no matter what it took—if she had to face Judah’s father, she would face him with open eyes. A warrior. A girl-beast.
Ms. Jaycee opened the door, and Noa looked fully into the room. It was white, immaculate white, the only furniture a metal table and the empty picture frame; it smelled and felt hospital-sterile but worse, the kind of sterile of cleaning up after terrible, terrible things. Noa’s body constricted of its own accord, fueled by a fear too bone-deep for serum. Hospitals, every sinew screamed. Hospitals; run far!
Before she could think to try, serum or no serum, he came in, and her body froze.
The Otec.
Tall, so tall. White hands gloved. Head crowned with Judah’s curls, body drawn with Judah’s lines.
But he wasn’t Judah’s father.
He was Judah’s brother.
• • •
Noa knew him instantly from Judah’s drawings: slightly taller, broader, older than the boy she knew so well. In the flesh, Noa now saw that he was lighter too—his hair and eyes a shade less dark, his body traced in fuller, softer lines. It was strange, actually: this boy looked the more angelic, the more ethereal of the two. But how could that b
e, given who he was and what he’d done?
The Boy with the White Hands—for Judah’s brother was a boy, not really a man at all—looked at her oddly for a moment, searching every feature of her face. He looked lost, confused, then shook his head minutely, pushed some question away. He walked to her—graceful, liquid—and gently took Noa from Ms. Jaycee’s hands.
Noa shivered—this was the time to try to fight—but she couldn’t make her body obey. Even through white gloves, his touch felt warm, even safe; her muscles instinctively relaxed, tingling. As if her body trusted him.
He guided her to the metal examination table, and she did not protest.
The serum, Noa rationalized, as she sat on the table bolted to the wall. It must be the effect of the serum. But then why was breathing suddenly easier now, not harder? Why, from the moment she had seen him, felt him, had she felt herself come back into her body, reconnect to every tissue, as if he’d reconnected what had been displaced? And why, when he now brushed a wayward strand of blond hair from her eyes, tucked it behind her ear, did heat spiral in her cheeks—not the heat of fear, but something else?
Their eyes met. He seemed as unnerved as she.
The boy, the Otec, Judah’s brother with White Hands, spoke to Ms. Jaycee without looking away from Noa: “You may go.” Ms. Jaycee murmured something, but Noa heard her footsteps obey, retreat; she heard the door click shut.
Noa and the boy stared at each other, brown eyes on gray, until he finally tore away. Noa felt herself exhale—relieved but also, somehow, bereft. The boy steadied himself on the wall. “So, you’ve caused a little stir,” he said, clearing his throat when his voice began to waver. He turned back to her but filled hands, his gaze, with a clipboard: “Noa Sullivan.” His brow furrowed as he read her name—then again, he shook it off.
She watched his shoulders draw themselves erect. When he turned to her again, his face was grim, set, though his soft brown eyes betrayed him. “Well, Noa,” he said, clearing his throat over her name again, “I hear you’ve been having a hard time.” He said it kindly, sadly, and Noa was struck by how his sympathy was so different from Ms. Jaycee’s. It felt true, sincere. Noa could feel the truth of his regret, beating inside her own heart.
It scared her.
“I only wrote poems,” Noa whispered.
“Which is dangerous,” he told her painfully. “For everyone.”
“But … why?” Noa knew she shouldn’t ask, or wasn’t supposed to. But somehow she also knew she had to.
The boy stayed quiet at first, studying her with those gentle eyes. “Not knowing is easier, better—”
“I want to know.” On impulse, she touched his shoulder. His body jumped a little; he looked at her warily—but then he began to answer:
“There are things in the world. Messy, dark things. Questions without answers, feelings that don’t fit and never will….” He was grappling to explain, to find just the right words. “They bring pain. And loss. Confusion with no remedy.” He met her eyes.
“And poetry, and art,” Noa murmured, beginning to understand.
He nodded. “Tap into that. Bring up what needs to be left buried. Confuse what can be clear.”
Noa thought of the Girl, of how writing the Girl’s poem had made her cry; she thought of Judah, how his drawings had tormented him with figments, questions, losses he couldn’t grasp or fully see—
“My job,” the boy continued, standing taller as he spoke, “my privilege, is to keep that messiness away from here, keep you, all of you, safe and clean. I handle that—the murk, the dark—so you don’t have to. I keep it pacified, and away, to protect you. Do you see?”
The thing was, Noa did see, or wanted to. She had expected the Man with White Hands to be so many things: a tyrant, an oppressor, a worse version of Ms. Jaycee. But this boy was earnestness and softness, honesty and compassion, a kind of sadness and deep, heart-deep, care. She knew, instinctively, that he believed in what he did: made them safe, spared them pain, decided when they could not. He handled what they didn’t need to see, kept out that which might hurt them, harm them.
Then Noa remembered Annabelle.
She grasped her hand from his shoulder, drawing back. “And if we do have questions, if we sense the mess, you just kill us like Annabelle?”
He looked stung, even betrayed. Noa bit her lip, fought the pang of guilt that rose inside her. She kept Annabelle in her mind, the terror she’d seen of Annabelle exploding.
“The world is not a safe place, Noa, don’t you see?” the boy insisted, growing urgent. “It’s dangerous, and ugly, and requires ugly things. I make those choices, do those things, so you don’t have to. It’s my duty; I save you all—” He breathed hard through his nose, eyes fervent, volume rising. “You are safe here, content here, because I keep this place protected! I alone take on that burden, even if it means, if it means—” He broke off, eyes wild around the room, as if the right words might be written there. Finally he met her eyes again, his aflame: “There is a price to stay here. We all must give.”
Noa swallowed, throat dry with fear. “What price? What do we give?”
“I call it Light.”
“Light…”
Her echo made him hopeful, his words tumbling quickly now: “We all give it, like breathing, simply taking refuge here. But when someone gets infected by what’s outside, the dark and murk…” His hands pulled through his curls—Judah’s brother— “At first I thought I’d have to kill the infected to keep us safe”—Noa gasped, and he spoke more quickly, urgently—“but then I discovered a way to heal them! If I bled their Light, fed it to the Dark, oftentimes I could reset, repurify them, help them stay—”
“Jeremy?” Noa whispered. “That’s what Review is?”
“I saved him, like I saved others. That frame”—he gestured at the empty picture frame, the one in which Annabelle had exploded—“I can bleed more Light, leech out the infected parts, a kind of rehabilitation.”
Noa recoiled. “Jeremy came back a zombie, like his soul was gone! And what about Annabelle? Or Dr. Chandler? The others who never came back?”
She expected him to deny it, but he didn’t; he just squared his shoulders like a soldier. “They’d been here giving Light too long. The Review process took what was left and then…” He clenched his jaw. “We all make the sacrifice eventually. None of us is more important than the safety of the whole. Not you, not me.”
“And your brother?” Noa asked.
She didn’t know how she expected him to react, what she had hoped to arouse in him, but it was certainly not the utter bafflement, the pained confusion that seemed to knock his whole body off balance.
“I have no family. I yearn for it, wish … but I am alone. It is part of my sacrifice, my burden—”
Something inside Noa flared. This wasn’t right. The boy’s compassion, his regret, his sense of duty—those felt real to Noa, like they were truly parts of him. But this—the denial of Judah, his confusion—it didn’t fit. It jangled wrong, reverberated out of tune, just like the walls of Harlow flickering, like the Girl appearing and disappearing, like finding classmates with no faces—
Noa suddenly knew: this boy was going to kill her.
He was not her enemy; oh, no—an enemy she could have defeated, convinced, won over, even tricked. He was something worse. A fellow victim. A pawn of something darker, larger. The same dark thing that had somehow captured them all, wound its tentacles into their minds. She’d snapped hers with words and poems, questions and fears—and this place, for its own survival, would kill her for it.
This place would kill her using him.
The boy sensed the change in her immediately, but before he could do anything, Noa sprang at him, teeth and nails bared: part girl, part beast, all fight. Heat spiraled from her scar; a feral growl ripped from deep inside her throat. The boy stumbled back, caught her spit
ting, fighting form—and she lashed out with her only weapon, teeth, biting savagely into his neck.
The boy cried out as she tasted blood. Noa ripped her teeth free, spun toward the door, but he caught her hands, still bound behind her, and pulled her back. She slashed her bound arms up and down to shake his grip, to land a punch, and he released her, tried to regrip higher on her wrists—but the momentum of her moving arms sliced down across his palms, and her bracelet’s charm ripped through in his glove, exposing skin. When he finally caught her arm, they touched skin to skin, palm against wrist, silver bracelet in between—
—and the world exploded into rapid, spinning images: Noa and the boy, meeting in the Harlow office; Noa and the boy, kayaking in the sea; Noa kissing him, he kissing her, beneath the giant spreading oak; Noa crying to him as he sat invisible, freeing him from unseen bonds—
The images were too much, too vibrant and too strong. Noa was blasted backward, wrists freed of their ties. She slammed into the examination table, leg contorting in pain beneath her, and she saw the boy also sprawled across the room. He struggled up, turned her way, and she met his eyes—
Eyes she knew by heart.
“Callum.”
• • •
Nothing made sense. Noa knew his name, the Otec’s name. He was Callum, and he was the Otec, she knew him but she’d never met him until now. Her body remembered kissing him, his hands had been tangled in her hair, but now his hands were White Hands that had murdered Annabelle, would murder her as well—
“You know my name,” the boy, who was the Otec, who was Callum, panted, stumbling to his feet.
“I don’t understand,” Noa whispered. “You’re here … but you’re not here. We’re here but we’re not here! Callum. Why do I know your name?”
He looked frantic, terrified. “It’s you! Your poems! All your questions! You’re infecting me!”
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