by Tahereh Mafi
Nazeera breaks a leaf off a nearby branch and folds it between her fingers. She shrugs. “It’s a small, incestuous circle we move in. I’ve known Lena forever. She and I were never close, exactly, but we move in the same world.” Another shrug. “She was really messed up over him. It’s all she ever wanted to talk about. And she’d talk to anyone about it.”
“How long were they together?”
“Two years.”
Two years.
The answer is so unexpectedly painful it spears through my new defenses.
Two years? Two years with another girl and he never said a word about it. Two years with someone else. And how many others? A shock of pain tries to reach me, to circumvent my new, cold heart, and I manage to fight the worst of it. Even so, a brick of something hot and horrible buries itself in my chest.
Not jealousy, no.
Inferiority. Inexperience. Naïveté.
How much more will I learn about him? How much more has he kept from me? How will I ever be able to trust him again?
I close my eyes and feel the weight of loss and resignation settle deep, deep within me. My bones shift, rearranging to make room for these new hurts.
This wave of fresh anger.
“When did they break up?” I ask.
“Like . . . eight months ago?”
Now I stop asking questions.
I want to become a tree. A blade of grass. I want to become dirt or air or nothing. Nothing. Yes. I want to become nothing.
I feel like such a fool.
“I don’t understand why he never told you,” Nazeera is saying to me now, but I can hardly hear her. “That’s crazy. It was pretty big news in our world.”
“Why have you been following me?” I change the subject with zero finesse. My eyes are half lidded. My fists are clenched. I don’t want to talk about Warner anymore. Ever again. I want to rip my heart out of my chest and throw it in our piss-filled ocean for all the good its ever done me.
I don’t want to feel anything anymore.
Nazeera sits back, surprised. “There’s a lot going on right now,” she says. “There’s so much you don’t know, so much crap you’re just beginning to wade into. I mean—hell, someone tried to kill you yesterday.” She shakes her head. “I’m just worried about you.”
“You don’t even know me. Why bother worrying about me?”
This time, she doesn’t respond. She just looks at me. Slowly, she unwraps another candy. Pops it in her mouth and looks away.
“My dad forced me to come here,” she says quietly. “I didn’t want to have any part in any of this. I never have. I hate everything The Reestablishment stands for. But I told myself that if I had to be here, I would look out for you. So that’s what I’m doing now. I’m looking out for you.”
“Well, don’t waste your time,” I say to her, feeling callous. “I don’t need your pity or your protection.”
Nazeera goes quiet. Finally, she sighs. “Listen—I’m really sorry,” she says. “I honestly thought you knew about Lena.”
“I don’t care about Lena,” I lie. “I have more important things to worry about.”
“Right,” she says. She clears her throat. “I know. Still, I’m sorry.”
I say nothing.
“Hey,” Nazeera says. “Really. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just want you to know that I’m not here to hurt you. I’m trying to look out for you.”
“I don’t need you to look out for me. I’m doing fine.”
Now she rolls her eyes. “Didn’t I just save your life?”
I mumble something dumb under my breath.
Nazeera shakes her head. “You have to get it together, girl, or you’re not going to get through this alive,” she says to me. “You have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes or what the other commanders have in store for you.” When I don’t respond she says, “Lena won’t be the last of us to arrive here, you know. And no one is coming here to play nice.”
I look up at her. My eyes are dead of emotion. “Good,” I say. “Let them come.”
She laughs, but there’s no life in it. “So you and Warner have some drama and now you just don’t care about anything? That’s real mature.”
Fire flashes through me. My eyes sharpen. “If I’m upset right now, it’s because I’ve just discovered that everyone closest to me has been lying to me. Using me. Manipulating me for their own needs. My parents,” I say angrily, “are still alive, and apparently they’re no better than the abusive monsters who adopted me. I have a sister being actively tortured by The Reestablishment—and I never even knew she existed. I’m trying to come to terms with the fact that nothing is going to be the same for me, not ever again, and I have no idea who to trust or how to move forward. So yeah,” I say, nearly shouting the words, “right now I don’t care about anything. Because I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore. And I don’t know who my friends are. Right now,” I say, “everyone is my enemy, including you.”
Nazeera is unmoved. “You could fight for your sister,” she says.
“I don’t even know who she is.”
Nazeera shoots me a sidelong look, heavy with disbelief. “Isn’t it enough that she’s an innocent girl being tortured? I thought there was some greater good you were fighting for.”
I shrug. Look away.
“You know what? You don’t have to care,” she says. “But I do. I care about what The Reestablishment has done to innocent people. I care that our parents are all a bunch of psychopaths. I care a great deal about what The Reestablishment has done, in particular, to those of us with abilities.
“And to answer your earlier question: I never told anyone about my powers because I saw what they did to people like me. How they locked them up. Tortured and abused them.” She looks me in the eye. “And I don’t want to be the next experiment.”
Something inside me hollows. Mellows out. I feel suddenly empty and sad. “I do care,” I finally say to her. “I care too much, probably.”
And Nazeera’s anger subsides. She sighs.
“Warner said The Reestablishment wants to take me back,” I say.
She nods. “Seems about right.”
“Where do they want to take me?”
“I’m not sure,” she says. Shrugs. “They might just kill you.”
“Thanks for the pep talk.”
“Or,” she says, smiling a little, “they’ll send you to another continent, maybe. New alias. New facility.”
“Another continent?” I say, curious despite myself. “I’ve never even been on a plane before.”
Somehow, I’ve said the wrong thing.
Nazeera looks almost stricken for a second. Pain flashes in and out of her eyes and she looks away. Clears her throat. But when she looks back her face is neutral once more. “Yeah. Well. You’re not missing much.”
“Do you travel a lot?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“Where are you from?”
“Sector 2. Asian continent.” And then, at the look at my face: “But I was born in Baghdad.”
“Baghdad,” I say, almost to myself. It sounds so familiar, and I’m trying to remember, trying to place it on the map, when she says
“Iraq.”
“Oh,” I say. “Wow.”
“A lot to take in, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. And then—hating myself even as I say the words—I can’t help but ask, “Where’s Lena from?”
Nazeera laughs. “I thought you said you didn’t care about Lena.”
I close my eyes. Shake my head, mortified.
“She was born in Peterhof, a suburb of Saint Petersburg.”
“Russia,” I say, relieved to finally recognize one of these cities. “War and Peace.”
“Great book,” Nazeera says with a nod. “Too bad it’s still on the burn list.”
“Burn list?”
“To be destroyed,” she says. “The Reestablishment has big plans to reset language, literature, and culture. They
want to create a new kind of, I don’t know,” she says, making a random gesture with one hand, “universal humanity.”
I nod, quietly horrified. I already know this. I’d first heard about this from Adam right after he was assigned to become my cellmate in the asylum. And the idea of destroying art—culture—everything that makes human beings diverse and beautiful—
It makes me feel sick to my stomach.
“Anyway,” she says, “it’s obviously a garbage, grotesque experiment, but we have to go through the motions. We were given lists of books to sort through, and we have to read them, write reports, decide what to keep and what to get rid of.” She exhales. “I finally finished reading most of the classics a couple of months ago—but early last year they forced all of us to read War and Peace in five languages, because they wanted us to analyze how culture plays a role in manipulating the translation of the same text.” She hesitates, remembering. “It was definitely the most fun to read in French. But I think, ultimately, it’s best in Russian. All other translations—especially the English ones—are missing that necessary . . . toska. You know what I mean?”
My mouth drops open a little.
It’s the way she says it—like it’s no big deal, like she’s just said something perfectly normal, like anyone could read Tolstoy in five different languages and polish off the books in an afternoon. It’s her easy, effortless self-assuredness that makes my heart deflate. It took me a month to read War and Peace. In English.
“Right,” I say, and look away. “Yeah. That’s, um, interesting.”
It’s becoming too familiar, this feeling of inferiority. Too powerful. Every time I think I’ve made progress in my life I seem to be reminded of how much further I still have to go. Though I guess it’s not Nazeera’s fault that she and the rest of these kids were bred to be violent geniuses.
“So,” she says, clapping her hands together. “Is there anything else you want to know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What’s the deal with your brother?”
She looks surprised. “Haider?” She hesitates. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, like”—I frown—“is he loyal to your dad? To The Reestablishment? Is he trustworthy?”
“I don’t know if I’d call him trustworthy,” she says, looking thoughtful. “But I think all of us have complicated relationships with The Reestablishment. Haider doesn’t want to be here any more than I do.”
“Really?”
She nods. “Warner probably doesn’t consider any of us his friends, but Haider does. And Haider went through a really dark time last year.” She pauses. Breaks another leaf off a nearby branch. Folds and refolds it between her fingers as she says, “My dad was putting a lot of pressure on him, forcing him through some really intense training—the details of which Haider still won’t share with me—and a few weeks later he just started spiraling. He was exhibiting suicidal tendencies. Self-harming. And I got really scared. I called Warner because I knew Haider would listen to him.” She shakes her head. “Warner didn’t say a word. He just got on a plane. And he stayed with us for a couple of weeks. I don’t know what he said to Haider,” she says. “I don’t know what he did or how he got him through it, but”—she looks off into the distance, shrugs—“it’s hard to forget something like that. Even though our parents keep trying to pit us against each other. They’re trying to keep us from getting too soft.” She laughs. “But it’s so much bullshit.”
And I’m reeling, stunned.
There’s so much to unpack here I don’t even know where to begin. I’m not sure if I want to. All of Nazeera’s comments about Warner just seem to spear me in the heart. They make me miss him.
They make me want to forgive him.
But I can’t let my emotions control me. Not now. Not ever. So I force the feelings down, out of my head, and instead, I say, “Wow. And I just thought Haider was kind of a jerk.”
Nazeera smiles. Waves an absent hand. “He’s working on it.”
“Does he have any . . . supernatural abilities?”
“None that I know of.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“But you can fly,” I say.
She nods.
“That’s interesting.”
She smiles, wide, and turns to face me. Her eyes are big and beautifully lit from the dappled light breaking through the branches, and her excitement is so pure that it makes something inside of me shrivel up and die.
“It’s so much more than interesting,” she says, and it’s then that I feel a pang of something new:
Jealousy.
Envy.
Resentment.
My abilities have always been a curse—a source of endless pain and conflict. Everything about me is designed to kill and destroy and it’s a reality I’ve never been able to fully accept. “Must be nice,” I say.
She turns away again, smiling into the wind. “The best part?” she says. “Is that I can also do this—”
Nazeera goes suddenly invisible.
I jerk back sharply.
And then she’s back, beaming. “Isn’t it great?” she says, eyes glittering with excitement. “I’ve never been able to share this with anyone before.”
“Uh . . . yeah.” I laugh but it sounds fake, too high. “Very cool.” And then, more quietly, “Kenji is going to be pissed.”
Nazeera stops smiling. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“Well—” I nod in her general direction. “I mean, what you just did? That’s Kenji’s thing. And he’s not good at sharing the spotlight, generally.”
“I didn’t know there could be someone else with the same power,” she says, visibly heartbroken. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and I feel a sudden urge to laugh. She’s so determined to dislike Kenji that I’m starting to wonder why. And then I’m reminded, all at once, of today’s horrible revelations, and the smile is wiped off my face. “So,” I say quickly, “should we get back to base? I still have a ton of things to figure out, including how I’m going to deal with this stupid symposium tomorrow. I don’t know if I should bail or just—”
“Don’t bail.” Nazeera cuts me off. “If you bail they might think you know something. Don’t show your hand,” she says. “Not yet. Just go through the motions until you get your own plan together.”
I stare at her. Study her. Finally, I say, “Okay.”
“And once you decide what you want to do, let me know. I can always help evacuate people. Hold down the fort. Fight. Whatever. Just say the word.”
“What—?” I frown. “Evacuate people? What are you talking about?”
She smiles as she shakes her head. “Girl, you still don’t get it, do you? Why do you think we’re here? The Reestablishment is planning on destroying Sector 45.” She stares at me. “And that includes everyone in it.”
Warner
I never make it downstairs.
I’ve hardly had a second to put my shirt on straight when I hear someone banging on my door.
“I’m really sorry, bro,” I hear Kenji shout, “she wouldn’t listen to me—”
And then,
“Open the door, Warner. I promise this will only hurt a little.”
Her voice is the same as it’s always been. Smooth. Deceptively soft. Always a little rough around the edges.
“Lena,” I say. “How nice to hear from you again.”
“Open the door, asshole.”
“You never did hold back with the flattery.”
“I said open the door—”
Very carefully, I do.
And then I close my eyes.
Lena slaps me across the face so hard I feel it ring in my ears. Kenji screams, but only briefly, and I take a steadying breath. I look up at her without lifting my head. “Are you done?”
Her eyes go wide, enraged and offended, and I realize I’ve already pushed her too far. She swings without thinking, and even so, it’s a punch perfectly executed
. On impact she’d break, at the very least, my nose, but I can no longer entertain her daydreams of causing me physical harm. My reflexes are faster than hers—they always have been—and I catch her wrist just moments before impact. Her arm vibrates from the intensity of the unspent energy and she jerks back, shrieking as she breaks free.
“You son of a bitch,” she says, breathing hard.
“I can’t let you punch me in the face, Lena.”
“I would do worse to you.”
“And yet you wonder why things didn’t work out between us.”
“Always so cold,” she says, and something in her voice breaks as she says it. “Always so cruel.”
I rub the back of my head and smile, unhappily, at the wall. “Why have you come up to my room? Why engage me privately? You know I have little left to say to you.”
“You never said anything to me,” she suddenly screams. “Two years,” she says, her chest heaving, “two years and you left a message with my mother telling her to let me know our relationship was over—”
“You weren’t home,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut. “I thought it more efficient—”
“You are a monster—”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am. I wish you’d forget about me.”
Her eyes go glassy in an instant, heavy with unspent tears. I feel guilty for feeling nothing. I can only stare back at her, too tired to fight. Too busy nursing my own wounds.
Her voice is both angry and sad when she says, “Where’s your new girlfriend? I’m dying to meet her.”
At this, I look away again, my own heart breaking in my chest. “You should go get settled,” I say. “Nazeera and Haider are here, too, somewhere. I’m sure you’ll all have plenty to talk about.”
“Warner—”
“Please, Lena,” I say, feeling truly exhausted now. “You’re upset, I understand. But it’s not my fault you feel this way. I don’t love you. I never have. And I never led you to believe I did.”
She’s quiet for so long I finally face her, realizing too late that somehow, again, I’ve managed to make things worse. She looks paralyzed, her eyes round, her lips parted, her hands trembling slightly at her sides.
