The Shimmers in the Night

by Lydia Millet

  Jaye released her breath in a sigh.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Is this really the normal world again?”

  But without waiting for an answer, she climbed onto the bed and under the covers. She closed her eyes.

  “I’m wiped,” murmured Hayley.

  Cara moved onto the other bed, though it was hard to move at all; her body just wanted to stay put. They were all collapsing without even changing into their pajamas—Cara and Jax in the second bed, Hayley tucked in next to Jaye on the first. There was a bedside lamp on, but Cara was too tired to get up and turn it off.

  Nine

  It seemed like only moments later that Cara heard the sound of the lock on their door clicking, and before she could even move the door opened.

  There was Hayley’s mom in all her big-hair glory, sporting a hot-pink jumpsuit that made her look like some kind of high-fashion paratrooper.

  Cara rubbed her eyes and sat up in bed. Morning light leaked in along the edges of the heavy hotel drapes.

  “Rise and shine, girls!” said Mrs. M brightly, and then saw Cara. “Cara! Jackson! Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better, Jax. I’m glad to see the staff at the Institute brought you two back last night instead of this morning. Though of course—this goes without saying, Cara—you should have checked in with me the very minute you arrived!”

  “I’m really sorry, Mrs. M,” murmured Cara.

  “It’s only because your father trusts those people so much, and the lady on the phone seemed so on top of things, that I didn’t have a coronary. But that doesn’t change the fact that you snuck off behind my back, and we’ll have to have a little talk later about your escapade. And with your daddy, too. What you did is serious, girl. You could have been real badly hurt. Or lost. Heaven knows what.”

  She shot Cara a stern look, the kind that promised a future campaign to convince Cara’s dad to ground her. Cara nodded, penitent. Mrs. M, who Cara suspected didn’t like to be tough but felt she had to, cleared her throat then and reached up to fiddle with one of the beads on her necklace.

  Despite the stern look, Cara felt she was getting off easy—way easier than Hayley would if her mom found out what she had done.

  “Anyhow, it’s a relief you two are back,” said Mrs. M, in a more normal tone. “I worried that if they waited to drop you off at the meet, Cara might miss her race. Of course, your older brother’s girlfriend has also gone off-campus, Cara, as you may have heard. Quite a handful, that one, is what I hear. We’re still working on it.”

  She strode over and tugged on Hayley’s blankets.

  “Come on. Up and at ’em, little mermaids!”

  “Mom, please,” groaned Hayley. “I’m not even competing today. And Jaye’s an alternate. Why can’t we just hang here and sleep in?”

  “This is a team effort, Hayley. You’re not going to abandon the team just because you stayed up late chit-chatting. Now up! The continental breakfast is almost over. They have those Danishes you like. Cherry!”

  Hayley groaned again, and Jaye pulled the coverlet up closer to her chin.

  It struck Cara that Mrs. M shouldn’t see that Hayley and Jaye had gone to bed in their street clothes—which were dirty, torn, and probably smelled like smoke. So she threw back her own blankets and moved to get up, to try to keep Hayley’s mom’s attention on herself.

  But touching the covers made her palms smart, and she jerked them back again.

  “My Lord, what happened to your hands?” burst out Mrs. M, apparently not noticing her clothes.

  “Oh,” said Cara. There again, she hadn’t thought up a story yet.

  “It was so hot…,” began Hayley

  Cara glanced at her, alarmed.

  “It was so hot in here. We couldn’t sleep,” she went on, sounding more sure of herself. “From the heater—that one. On the wall under the window? So she got up in the middle of the night to turn it down, but it was dark, and I guess the metal on that thing gets really hot.”

  “My Lord!” said Mrs. M again, and bent down to touch Cara’s wrists delicately, turning them so that her hands were palms up. “That’s criminal! That’s just negligent! And a fire hazard, too! My goodness, you poor thing! We should sue the pants off them!”

  “No, it’s OK,” said Cara. “It’s not that bad. Really. We iced it. Hayley and Jaye helped me. With—er, ice from the ice machine.”

  Fleetingly, she was proud of herself for coming up with that.

  “But how will you swim?” asked Mrs. M, indignant. “You can’t swim with those hands! There’s no way,” and she shook her head. “I can’t allow it. Your father would have my head on a platter. Nosirree. Nuh-uh. Jaye, honeypie, this is your lucky day. You’re going to sub in for Cara on the relay team. And Cara, I’ll get you some medicated lotion at the CVS or what have you. There’s one next door. You will sit tight today with your hands wrapped or my name is not Delilah Moore.”

  “I didn’t know your name was Delilah,” piped up Jax. “Like with Samson!”

  “Yes, dear. Well, now you do,” said Mrs. M, and groped around in her handbag till she found her cell phone, which she flipped open. “Old Testament names were very popular in my neck of the woods. I mean it, Cara. No way are you swimming with those hands. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

  In fact, Cara was relieved. At the moment she felt way too exhausted to swim. She shot a look at Jaye, still wearing covers up to her neck, and could tell she wasn’t psyched to be taking Cara’s place.

  “Girls, get dressed while I talk to Coach about this injury situation. Come on. Jackson, you too. You stay close to me today. I want to be able to tell your daddy I took good care of you. Don’t dawdle, Hayley. And brush your teeth, everyone. No morning breath on my watch! I’ll step into the hallway right here and make a call or two. Y’all be ready to go down for Danishes in five.”

  As it turned out, Hayley took fifteen minutes to get dressed, or five to get dressed and ten to apply lip gloss and eyeliner and do her hair, and they completely missed the free breakfast, which irritated Cara since she was starving. As they surged through the hotel lobby to get on the bus, they converged with the rest of the team, who were talking and joking loudly, their knapsacks slung over their shoulders. She’d given Jaye the windowleaf to store in her big duffel—the only bag they had that the book would fit inside—and Jaye was carrying the bag awkwardly, bouncing at her hip.

  At the meet Cara, Jax, and Hayley headed for the bleachers with Mrs. M while Jaye went off with the rest of the girls to change in the locker rooms. Mrs. M didn’t waste time; she made Cara hold out her hands and smoothed on some medical-smelling cream. She was so good at it that she seemed to Cara less like a hairdresser than a nurse. And right away her hands felt so much better that Cara was surprised.

  The gun went off for the first relay heat, and swimmers hit the water. Cara’s cell rang—it was Max calling; she knew from the ringtone—and Jax answered because she couldn’t, with her hands slathered in greasy lotion. Mrs. M was sitting right beside them, so Jax couldn’t tell Max what had really happened; Cara had to listen to him giving Max the made-up homesickness story. Just as their school’s team, including Jaye, assembled behind the starting block for their heat, Jax changed the subject.

  “Hey. But with Zee,” said Jax, and met Cara’s eyes. “You know she left the meet, right? I mean, she’s going to be in trouble. Um, do you know where she is?”

  Mrs. M turned and looked at him, waiting for Max’s answer, but after a moment Jax shrugged and shook his head, like Max wasn’t saying anything important.

  “Why don’t you just text Max?” said Cara, and nudged Jax’s foot with the side of her own. “It’s so loud in here.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, and hung up.

  The heat was ending—it looked like the team wasn’t out in front, so Cara stopped paying close attention, but the other teams vying for first and second place cheered louder. When the swimmers touched the wall, their
team had placed fourth, which meant they hadn’t made the final. The cheers trailed off, and the last swimmer hauled herself out of the pool; she and Jaye, who stood dripping nearby with red circles from her goggles around her eyes, shook their heads ruefully as they slipped off their swimming caps.

  “I think,” said Mrs. M suddenly, pronouncing it Ah thank as usual, “that since none of you have any more races—and since we have Jackson to get home and your hands are injured, Cara—that we should go ahead and take the ferry back this afternoon. We can swing by the hotel first to pick up our things. There are plenty of chaperones; Mr. Abboud has already taken over the other kids on my list. So we’ll just scoot to the ferry dock on the T. It goes right there. And I bet your daddy can pick us up in P-town. We can squeeze into y’all’s Subi if someone sits in the way-back. OK?”

  “That’d be good,” said Jax, nodding.

  At home we’ll have more room to breathe, he thought at Cara. We need some privacy. I texted part of it to Max but not all and so he’s kind of freaking out.

  “Exactly, privacy,” she blurted out.

  “What’s that, sweetie?” asked Mrs. M.

  “Oh, nothing. That sounds great, going home early.”

  Although she had to admit, her hands felt so much better it was almost as though they hadn’t been burned in the first place.

  “What was that lotion, Mrs. M?” she asked. “It made my hands feel completely better.”

  “Just cooling gel!” said Mrs. M, and turned away to beckon to Hayley, whose attention she was having trouble attracting. She stood up on the bleacher to wave her over.

  Hayley wouldn’t be happy about leaving Boston early, Cara realized. Jaye would; there was a rehearsal for the school play tonight, which she’d complained about having to miss in order to make the trip. Now she wouldn’t have to miss it. But Hayley would be mad; she’d been looking forward to tonight, when the team was scheduled to have a social hour in the hotel restaurant with the teams from the other schools. Hayley lived for things like that.

  “Should I break it to her?” Cara asked Mrs. M. “Or should you?”

  Sure enough, Hayley sulked on the ferry. While the others went out on deck, she sat hunched up with a shut-down frown, texting rapidly on her phone.

  With Jax on one side and Jaye on the other, Cara stood at the rail and smelled the salty spray.

  “So?” asked Cara. “What did Max tell you about Zee?”

  “He didn’t know anything,” said Jax. “He sounded pretty worried.”

  “It really looked like her!” burst out Cara. “I saw her again when we were stepping into the book, off that oil rig—I could have sworn it was her. Seriously.”

  “So we think Zee is mixed up in all this, too?” asked Jaye.

  “It has to be because of us,” said Jax solemnly.

  “Like they could have taken her because she knew us, you mean? Like, say she’s a hollow. Like you were. And I was, too. So then, maybe they picked her because she knows us. Maybe you’re the target they want to aim her at! Or Mom is!” said Cara.

  “I guess that wouldn’t be such a stretch,” said Jax. “If it really was Zee you saw…”

  “We have to find out,” said Cara. “We have to go and get her! And bring her out of it, like you brought me. Right? You stopped me from being a hollow—you brought me back. If we could find her, you could you do that to her, too, right?”

  “But I don’t know her that well,” he said. “I know you. It works through accessing a memory. Remember?”

  “But you do know her,” said Cara, though she felt uncertain.

  When they’d sent her to find her mother, the teachers at the Institute had assumed that even Cara’s memory of Jax, her little brother, wouldn’t be enough. So what were the chances her or Jax’s memories of Zee would be?

  They all stared off the rail at the gray ocean. The mainland was too far behind to see anymore.

  “Is that the only way to help them?” asked Jaye, after a minute. “The memory thing?”

  “It’s the official way the dissenters have,” said Jax, thoughtful. “For curing the hollows. I mean the hollows have only existed for a few years. Most of the dissenters’ methods are way older than that. I don’t even know how old. But my point is, they may not have figured out the best way to fight the hollows yet. So…maybe I could try something else. It’s possible. But it could be risky.”

  “What could you try?”

  “I think maybe I could go there. Go to where they are. The Rift Valley. The Rift Valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.”

  “Go there?” echoed Jaye.

  Her nose was red and running in the cold wind off the water, Cara noticed, but she wasn’t complaining.

  Unlike Hayley, who was warm and comfortable inside the boat and in a worse mood than anyone. Because of Cara, she and Jaye had both had to go through this—but in fact, she’d had a way easier time of it than Jaye. No one had tried to strangle her.

  Still, here was Jaye, cheerful and friendly, and there was Hayley, the prima donna.

  “With my mind, I mean,” explained Jax. “And if she’s there, I think I could find Zee’s mind, too, in with the other hollows. Because when I was a hollow and went there, I could read them all around me.”

  “I wondered about that,” said Cara, and felt almost sad. Unlike Jax, she’d been alone.

  “I think any hollow in our neck of the woods would be at that source, instead of one farther away. Just like we were. The Cold is systematic. And maybe, if I had someone to help pull me back…. We’d have to be in the same place, Zee and I. So I mean, first we’d have to find her physically. And then, assuming she was a hollow, we’d have to get her in a room and someone would have to guard us, her and my body, while I was out basically, you know…looking for the rest of her.”

  Jaye shook her head, half disbelieving.

  “Say it didn’t work,” said Cara. “What could go wrong? Could you get hurt?”

  They should take a risk to get Zee back. Because what had Roger said? If she was a hollow, she was just waiting to be a so-called channel for the Burners’ fire, or something. She was in danger right this minute. And always, from here on out.

  But what about Jax—should they really risk him again? She couldn’t forget those black eyes, expanding in his face like pools of spilled liquid. It made her scalp creep thinking of it; she could hardly believe it had been just hours ago.

  “I think the worst-case scenario would be failing—that I couldn’t get her back. I don’t think they can make me a hollow again. Or you. If you get pulled back before the Burners use you, I’m pretty sure you’re immune. The Burners use this one connection in the brain, this one pathway, that kind of gets destroyed in the process. Like a short circuit, basically. So they can’t use it to get in again.”

  “But they brought the hollows back, didn’t they? Roger and them? When we were on the oil rig? They brought them back to consciousness so they could give them their instructions. Remember?”

  “Not really. It’s like hypnosis, where there are different levels of sleep—they can bring the hollows up from the deepest level, where they have those black eyes and are open for the Burners, without waking them up all the way. When they’re in lighter states, they don’t have the black eyes; I think they might look like regular people. They’re practically robots when their eyes are like that, they only understand basic commands. Nothing complex.”

  “We should talk to Max,” said Cara. “Let’s ask him what he thinks as soon as we get home. Let’s ask him if he’ll help us look for Zee.”

  “Kids?” called Mrs. M, standing at the door to the ferry’s cabin. “Come back inside! You’ll catch pneumonia out there for so long!”

  They followed her back in, holding on to posts and the backs of benches as they walked down the aisle and the boat bucked and dipped. When they got to their row of seats, Jaye sat down next to Hayley and nudged her softly.

  “What’s so urgent you have to go all sixty-words-
a-minute on us, Hay?” she asked.

  “Maybe I had a chance to actually bond with people, and now it’s totally wrecked. And maybe standing out there with you guys, getting drenched by polluted water and freezing to death’s not my idea of fun.”

  “Don’t be rude, Hayley,” chided Mrs. M. “You’re not a holy martyr suffering on a cross. You’re just a girl who had to leave her swim meet a weency bit early.”

  “You don’t know anything,” said Hayley churlishly, half under her breath.

  “Oh no?” asked Mrs. M. “Well, you should feel free as a bird to share with me.”

  Hayley shot Cara a dark look. Cara knew that look: this was one of Hayley’s moods. Now that the excitement was over, she was blaming Cara for ruining her social plans. Hayley had many social plans. Some were so minute they were invisible to the untrained eye. But she was always planning.

  Cara tried not to feel irritated by Hayley. Back in August, true, her oldest friend had asked to be included; but now school was on and she wanted to do regular things. She hadn’t asked to be chased by cloned, inhuman-seeming men, to put out fires or watch one of her best friends get burned and the other get throttled.

  Her mother wasn’t missing, after all.

  Cara wondered what her own mother was up to. What, and where, and whether she was still fighting. (Hayley had said, with admiration, supernatural kung fu….)

  She should be more generous. Hayley was basically an innocent bystander in all this.

  “I’m sorry, Hay,” she said softly. “I’m sorry I messed up the trip for you.”

  “Nonsense,” said Mrs. M stoutly. “You did do wrong to run off without permission, I admit that, but us going home early isn’t your fault. We have Jackson to return, and your hands—well, that was purely an accident.”

  “I’m sorry anyway,” she said, and tried to catch Hayley’s eye. Hayley knew what she meant, even if Mrs. M couldn’t.