The agony is a train. It’s slow to come, but I know it’s on its way. I can see its headlights ahead, but it’s far away, just creeping, creeping. All at once it pulls into the station and I’m bathed in the screeching of the wheels, in the smell of engine and grease.
I give a long drawn-out “Fuckkkkk.” I knew the moratorium on cursing wouldn’t last long. I jam my fist in my mouth, hard. One pain to take away the other.
“It’s your fault!” she screams.
I don’t answer her. I’m afraid I’ll pass out.
“Why don’t you just leave me alone!” she says.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” I say.
And then she’s kneeling beside me and she’s cupping my head in her hands like it’s a chalice and I’m saying foppish, melodramatic things like, “Shoot me,” and she’s saying, “No, no, no. Lie very still. Don’t leave, Thomas. Don’t leave.”
But I do.
FORTY-ONE
“THOMAS . . .”
When I come to, Alice, the Maker, is peering down at me. Pain undulates through me and I toss my head back like a horse and groan.
“Relax, Quicksilver.”
It’s Dash. I feel unduly happy at hearing his voice. This is what trauma does to a person.
“I’m going to Change you now,” Alice says.
I struggle to sit up. I want to puke. I’m going to be punished. She’s going to take back my face.
“No, your leg, not your face,” says Alice. I see my leg twisted beneath me at an unnatural angle and she presses her hand gently against my chest, lowering my torso back down to the ground. As soon as she touches me, the last hour begin to rewind. She doesn’t have to tell me to surrender this time, to let her in. I want her to take it all back. I thrust the previous sixty-two minutes at her like I’m pushing a coat into her arms.
She finds the exact moment when my tibia cracks and, like Helen Keller, blindly but with utter faith, fingers it down the middle. She’s a trafficker in possibility. It’s a seam she’s after, for every moment can go one of two ways, and now she must convince the moment to rethink itself, to move in a different direction. She massages the seam. She steams it open with her intention. And as she does this, slowly my pain begins to dissipate. It’s such a relief to feel it lift that I want to tell her I love her. And I do. I’m filled with gratitude. Luckily she’s a professional; she pretends she doesn’t hear me.
“You’re done,” she says.
Dash hauls me to my feet. I gingerly test the leg. I put my full weight on it. I bounce from foot to foot and give a triumphant cry.
“You’re such a loser,” says Dash.
I don’t disagree with him this time. I glance over at Phaidra. To get me help, she must have run to the Ministry and back without stopping. Her cheeks are punch red and I think she’s trembling. Or maybe that’s me. Everything appears to be quivering.
“Sorry to have disturbed you,” says Dash to Alice.
“It’s all right. I was just reading.” Alice gives me a searching look.
“Anything good?” I ask her.
She studies me solemnly for a moment. It’s hard to remember that we’re the same age. She has such poise.
“It’s a book about a woman who throws herself in front of a train,” she says.
Phaidra’s head shoots up.
“She does something wrong. She has to make amends; she has to unmake what she’s done,” continues Alice.
This sounds familiar. This sounds like Anna Karenina. Suddenly I remember the tiny library my mother brought me to the day before the fire, the one filled with books from Earth. I had pulled out Anna Karenina that day and now the Maker is talking about that very book. Earth books are forbidden in Isaura. Alice has no business reading them. What’s going on?
“Do you like it?” I ask cautiously.
“I can’t put it down,” Alice says. Then abruptly she leaves.
Dash turns to me. He’s no bookworm; no chance he recognizes Tolstoy’s masterpiece. “No work today, either of you. You go back to the house and rest. Phaidra, go back to the dorms.” He squints into the sun, watching Alice climb back up the hill. “I better make sure she gets back to the Ministry okay.” He jogs after her.
Once they’re out of sight, Phaidra turns to me and says with urgency, “She was trying to tell us something.”
In the aftermath of pain, I’m so tired I can barely speak. I don’t know how I’ll make it back to the house.
“Anna Karenina,” she says.
I nod. So Phaidra had figured it out too.
She walks across the clearing and dips down. She rustles through a pile of leaves and retrieves the book she was carrying. Anna Karenina—the title’s embossed in gold on the spine. “How did she know?” she demands.
“Where did you get this?” I ask.
Phaidra frowns. “Does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters,” I say.
“I found it,” she says.
“Where?”
“In the Refectory.”
She’s lying. I know she stole it from the library in the Ministry. But I don’t push her. Ah, my little Phaidra is a thief. This makes me like her even more. Admiration surges through me, making me feel drunk. I wobble and clutch at her arm. Even though Alice has fixed my leg, I’m still weak. Or maybe I just want an excuse to touch her.
She lets me put my arm around her shoulders and I lean into her. We walk slowly up the hill. I try not to sweat, but it’s nearly impossible. It’s electrifying being so near her.
“You’re not getting it, Quicksilver. She’s read it too. She’s breaking the rules by reading a book from Earth and she wants us to know about it.”
I do get it. This is what my mother did too. Reading the literature from Earth was the first step in my mother’s rebellion, in her realization that she might be missing out by living in a world where every moment was prescribed and predicted.
We finally make it to the crest of the hill and the Compound sprawls out before us. I can see the green; Dash’s tidy house is on the other side of it. I long for bed. I also long to extend this moment; I finally have Phaidra in my arms—or rather, I’m in her arms. It’s not how I imagined it, but here we are anyway.
Phaidra lets go of me suddenly. “I hate this place,” she cries.
“Me too,” I say weakly, wanting to align myself with her.
“Liar!” Phaidra wheels around to face me; her features are contorted with rage.
“What did I do?” I ask.
“Exactly! You’ve done nothing. How can you not have questioned all this? You think they gave you this face for free?” She pokes me hard in the chest. “Don’t you feel something leaking? Some essential part of you?”
I shrug.
“You’re so easy,” she says.
“I’m not easy!” I say. I’m tired of her insulting me.
“Then work! Don’t let them take the old you away. It was valuable. Maybe the thing that made you most alive. Look at Geld. That’s our future. Stay here long enough and you’ll become transparent. A ghost. Every day you lose a bit of yourself. Look at your fan club. They’re interchangeable, aren’t they? They’re beautiful, but so what? There’s nothing left inside. Nothing compelling. Nothing unique. Let me tell you something. The first one hundred days? The leaking has already begun, but you don’t know it yet. It’s happening somewhere deep inside you. Below the skin, below the muscle, behind the heart. But make no mistake. You’re bleeding out your life. Don’t tell me you can’t feel it.”
Hearing what I’ve already guessed makes me perversely angry at her. “So let me guess. You’ve got a solution,” I say.
She glares at me. “Yeah, I’ve got a solution. Resist!”
“Uh-huh. And how do you do that? By slicing yourself open?” I yank up her sleeve and she cries out. There’s a deep gash on the pale flesh of her forearm. It’s raw and ugly.
She wrenches her arm back. “Don’t! That’s private. That’s none of your business!�
��
“Then why don’t you make it my business?” I challenge her.
“Because you’re too busy with Trixie and Veronica and you like having the life sucked out of you. I can see that you do. You want to be all serene and tranquil.”
Suddenly I’m exhausted. “What’s wrong with tranquil?” I ask.
She glares at me. “You can’t be serious. You’re seventeen years old. You’re not supposed to be tranquil. You’re supposed to be lit all the time. A fire raging inside you.”
“I’ve been on fire. It’s overrated.”
“That’s so sad,” she says. “You can’t stop making jokes. I feel sorry for you.”
“Don’t pity me,” I snap.
“But I do. I saw what you looked like.”
I can’t stand that she saw me before I was Changed. “You saw nothing,” I whisper hoarsely.
“I see everything. And I’m fighting to retain it. And you have to too,” she cries.
I look down at my feet. Minutes pass. The silence engulfs us. I’m overwhelmed: seeing Phaidra’s arm sliced open, breaking my leg, my futile search for my mother’s Seerskin. I don’t want to cry in front of her. Not again. But she places her hands on my shoulders and I can’t help it; a moan escapes.
“Don’t you see, Thomas? Alice wanted us to know she’s on our side,” says Phaidra.
Just to hear her say my name—
“On the side of what?” I whisper.
“Of this.” She leans in and touches her lips lightly to mine.
I look at her in shock. “I thought you didn’t like me,” I say.
“I don’t like you, Quicksilver,” she says softly. “I haven’t liked you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.” She leans in and kisses me again.
There is a kiss. One kiss that is earmarked as yours the very moment you are born. It’s out there waiting for you and every day that passes, every week, every month, you inch closer to that kiss. And when it’s finally in sight after all those years, you run. You race toward it like it’s life itself.
PART THREE
FORTY-TWO
I’M STANDING AT THE TOP of a ladder outside the Ministry. I’m washing windows, but I don’t mind. Yesterday Phaidra kissed me and this morning I feel more clearheaded than ever. I will find my mother’s Seerskin. I’ve searched through fifteen rooms in the Ministry; only eleven left to go.
“Are you handy, boy?”
I swivel around. There’s that old woman again, the teacher, standing below me on the cobblestones. Her brown robes are now a familiar sight. Every day she appears in the city square with her charges, a long strand of girls extending behind her like a beaded necklace. She seems to have nothing better to do than watch us do our jobs.
“No,” I answer truthfully.
“Come down from there,” she says. This is the first time she’s spoken to me.
I climb down off the ladder. I can’t see her face. She always wears her hood, no matter what the weather.
She looks around carefully before speaking. There’s no reason for her to be consulting with me, never mind interrupting my work. “If you’re not handy, what are you?” she asks.
This is a strange question. It sounds disturbingly like a riddle.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I say blandly, in a tone that’s meant to both deflect attention and send her on her way.
The girls titter; they cup their mouths with their small hands so as not to make any sound. She dispatches them to the fountain in the middle of the plaza. They sit in a neat row, their backs to the water.
“What’s your name?” she whispers.
“Thomas.”
I hear a small gasp. She clears her throat.
“Thomas what?”
“Thomas 13.”
“I see. And why are you here, Thomas 13?”
Her eyes glimmer beneath the hood; they are a vivid, oceanic blue. I start to feel slightly dizzy, pulled into her orbit. Is she a Seer? Is this some sort of a test?
“I’m not supposed to say.”
“You must tell me,” she says.
“I can’t.”
“Then I’ll guess.”
I glance up at the window, wishing Phaidra or Brian would come rescue me from this bizarre old woman.
“Let’s see,” she says softly. “You were sitting in the sink. You were confused. You pulled the curtains down on top of yourself. When it burned, the fabric smelled sweet, like buttery pecans.” She tilts her head to the side like a wren, considering me.
I gaze at her in shock.
“You thought you heard the sound of a wagon. Horses. You thought somebody was coming to save you.” She slowly pulls back her hood. “Me.”
I’m staring into the creased face of my beloved Cook. She looks like she’s aged twenty years, but it’s her.
“You left without saying goodbye,” I gasp. Suddenly I’m eight years old.
“I didn’t leave—you did. That was your mother’s doing.” Cook snaps her hood back up. “People are watching, Thomas Gale. You must be very careful.”
I nod. Her charges are getting restless. She glances behind her and with one withering look reduces them to silence. They are en route to a puppet show. There will be no fighting, no scrambling around for seats, because it was already predetermined a week ago just exactly where each girl would sit.
“Twelve Dunny Road, do you remember? Tell them I’m in need of some new pantry shelves and I’ve requested you personally. Tomorrow morning. I’ll be waiting. You can use a hammer and nails, can’t you?” she asks.
“Not really,” I confess.
Cook sighs heavily. “I’ll build the shelves myself. Just what have you learned in America?”
Oh, there’s a list a mile long: how to ride a motorcycle, the best way to eat a burrito, E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. But in the presence of my old nanny, my playmate, my storyteller, and my nurse, I am mute. I can remember nothing.
FORTY-THREE
CHILDHOOD LIVES ON IN THE BODY, long after we have grown too old for sledding or pasting red hearts onto purple paper. But we can return if we want to. Trace the elephantine bark of a cedar with the tips of your fingers. Dip your face into a pot of marigolds. If you do this, you will resurrect your smallest self.
I’m sitting in Cook’s sun-soaked kitchen. She’s made me flan and I’ve eaten nearly half the dish. I’m voraciously hungry. I swirl my fingers into the burnt sugar syrup and lick them like a savage.
“I’m not here to stay,” I tell her. “My mother’s dying. She’s sent me to get her Seerskin and bring it back.”
There are violet smudges under Cook’s eyes. She hasn’t slept well the entire time I’ve been in Isaura. Ever since she saw me outside the Ministry eating my lunch twelve days ago.
“She can’t control her visions. She sees the future all the time. Without even touching people,” I say.
“But she’s got no Seerskin,” says Cook. “She can’t see the future anymore.”
“Yes, she can,” I tell her. “The magic works differently on Earth than it does here. Her visions came back. She can’t stop them.”
Cook shakes her head. “I told her,” she says.
“Told her what?”
She ignores my question. “Why does she want her skin back? What good will that do?”
“We think the magic works in reverse on Earth. So if without her skin she can see the future . . .” I begin.
“Then with her skin, she won’t see it anymore,” finishes Cook.
“Yes,” I say. “It’ll stop the visions from coming.”
Cook’s mouth is pulled into a thin line. “You’re going to give up that face?” she asks softly.
Cook always knew what I was feeling, even before I did.
“Do I look like him?” I ask.
“Who?” she says gently.
“My father,” I say, exhaling quickly. To talk about him, to bring him into a conversation is to unwind the days. To make it as if
he died yesterday.
Cook leans forward, astonished. “You can’t tell?”
I shake my head. “It’s hard for me to remember him. All I can think of is coming out into the kitchen, seeing him on the floor—” I break off.
Cook’s face hardens. “No child should have to go through that,” she says.
“My parents shouldn’t have had to go through that,” I remind her.
Cook’s jaw saws back and forth. “No, you don’t look like him.”
I nod, oddly relieved.
“So Serena sent you back to get her Seerskin?” Cook asks a moment later. It’s clear what she thinks of this.
“She had no choice: she’s gone nearly crazy with the visions. She foresaw her own death,” I say.
I defend my mother, but in this bright kitchen my voice sounds pathetic, as if it couldn’t make a dent in the room’s gleaming surface. Suddenly I feel ashamed for my mother and I’m not sure why. I stare down into the dish of custard.
Cook gets up abruptly and goes to the kitchen cupboard. The shelves are lined with canisters of herbs. “I’m going to make you a tea. You’ll need to drink this every day. At least once. Twice is better,” she says.
“Why?” I hate tea. Cook knows this.
“It’ll stop the Change,” she says.
“But I don’t want to stop the Change,” I say.
Cook looks at me steely eyed. “I’m not talking about your face. The other Change. The Change to your personality. Maybe it hasn’t affected you yet. Maybe you haven’t been here long enough,” she says.
Oh, that Change. The confirmation feels almost anti-climactic. “Doesn’t seem all that bad to me,” I say. “Besides, I’m leaving in a few days.” I fight to keep the misery from my voice.
“Just in case,” Cook says, digging through the cupboard.
Just in case you stay is what she means. There has never been one moment in my entire life that Cook has not been on my side.
Cook sprinkles a mixture of herbs into a mug filled with boiling water and brings it to the table. I take a cautious sip and groan; it tastes horrible.
“Never mind the taste—just drink it,” says Cook.
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