Promised (34 page)

“What are you thinking?” Leon asked.

Her gaze had stilled on the warm gap between his collar and his neck, but now she looked up again to meet his eyes.

“I told you I was loyal,” she said simply.

Leon smiled. “I never doubted you. I just thought you'd miss him.”

“I do. And I will. He was a great guy.”

A lilting, merry chortle of laughter came from beyond the shade, and Gaia glanced over as an old woman walked past with a friend.

“How's Will doing?” Leon asked.

“All right. Sad, you know, but all right.”

Something had changed there. She didn't know why or how, but the fine, spinning thread of Will's longing for her had snapped. She felt it as a release, a new easiness between them, while, she also knew, they'd always be bound by their common grief for Peter.

Leon slid a hand along her arm to her red bracelet, and kissed her once more. “Let's go see Myrna's new place.”

Gaia glanced toward the new blood bank in a storefront opposite the Tvaltar. A new beige awning was outfitted over the window, and a pot of colorful flowers stood by the door. Gaia had heard that electricity had been extended to the blood bank so that Myrna could refrigerate an emergency supply of blood, and she was curious to see it all. At that moment, however, Myrna came out the door, paused a moment on the threshold, and began ambling toward Peg's Tavern.

“I think we missed our chance,” Gaia said.

Leon passed over her hat, donned his own, and picked up the pot of herbs. “What do you say we leave these for her, and come back another time for a tour?”

“Sounds good.”

They stepped out of the shade. October sunlight slanted brightly on the Tvaltar steps, and more people had gathered at Peg's. Their animated voices created a jovial patter in the square, underscored by the lively notes of the piano. Jack had Maya on his lap now, and she was knocking a couple of chess knights together. It was easy to anticipate how happy everyone would be about the wedding, and Gaia smiled. Norris would make a cake, no doubt. She'd have to find something to wear.

Leon lowered the pot to the side of the door, then straightened, pushing his sleeve up his splint again.

“Let me help you,” Gaia said. She reached to do his sleeve for him. Then she folded up the sleeve on his left arm, too, smoothing the fabric neatly just below his elbow. She let her fingers linger on his forearm. When Gaia looked up, Leon's blue eyes were alive with a warm, private smile.

“You are irresistible,” he said softly.

She shook her head, smiling. “No.”

“Yes.”

He leaned near for another kiss, and she touched her hat from behind to keep it steady.

When they finally righted themselves and started across the quad toward the tavern, Gaia was filled with a contagious, generous happiness that encompassed everyone and everything, from the piano melody and Maya with her knights, to the bright angles of the shade umbrellas. Behind her, a wall was crumbling, and down the hill, beyond the swallows that dove and banked, the expanse of the unlake shimmered with distant blue.

 

acknowledgments

I would like to thank the team at Roaring Brook for their unfailing kindness and for their delight in the details: Nan Mercado, Simon Boughton, Anne Diebel, Kathryn Bhirud, April Ward, Jill Freshney, Suzette Costello, Karen Frangipane, John Nora, Alexander Garkusha, Gina Gagliano, Angus Killick, Allison Verost, Jennifer Doerr, and Rachael Stein. I'm thankful to my agent, the scrupulous Kirby Kim. I'm grateful to Nancy O'Brien Wagner for insights on the messiest draft. Thanks to my children, Michael, Emily, and William LoTurco, for continued understanding of my proclivity for the couch. I can never thank them enough for their inspiration and humor during this four-year adventure of writing Gaia's story. As always, again, I thank my husband, Joseph LoTurco, for everything.

Caragh M. O'Brien
October, 2012

 

 

From the author of the Birthmarked trilogy comes a fast-paced, psychologically thrilling novel about what happens when your dreams are not your own.

 

 

Keep reading for a sneak peek of Caragh O'Brien's

 

 

1

NIGHT

I MISSED NIGHT.
I had other reasons to disobey, too, like wanting to escape the cameras, but most of all, I missed the deep, vacant darkness of night.

We lined up as usual, shivering in our bare feet and nightgowns. Rain streamed down the windows, obscuring the gray view of the prairie, and the patter sounded gently on the vaulted roof overhead. Orly passed out the pills, starting at the far end, and I watched as each girl obediently swallowed, climbed into her sleep shell, and slid her lid closed with a soft swoosh.

When Orly reached me, I took my pill like the others but faked tossing it back. Instead, I lodged the disk up alongside my gums before I took a sip of water and opened my mouth for her inspection.

She turned and went on to the next girl.

I'd won. I climbed in my sleep shell, spit the pill into my hand, and wedged it under my pillow.

“Close your lid,” Orly told me.

“Do I have to?” I asked. “I like the sound of the rain.”

“You can open it again after your brink lesson if you want,” she said. “Sleep well.”

When Orly switched off the lights, the room went the soft, gray color of childhood naps. I pulled my lid closed to watch the brink lesson cast across the glass: a scene of a woman laying bricks, tucking them evenly in a row. What I was supposed to learn from it, even subconsciously, I couldn't tell. Afterward, I slid open my lid again and rolled over on my pillow. Across from me, the next girl fell asleep easily and completely, and from the uninterrupted sound of the rain, I knew forty-eight other girls fell asleep on schedule, too.

Myself, I was secretly, deliciously awake. As the hour brought the darkness closer, I lay fidgety with hope and relished how it felt to be alone, stealing back the real me. The windows darkened like a gift until I could see the faint, blue reflections of our domed lids in the glass. A nearly invisible glow fell over the dormant faces, making the girls' skin gleam with faint phosphorescence, as if they had been chalked and scanned under a black light. I slowly waved my fingers before my face, testing. The glow gave my fingers a staggered trail of black shadows, like cartoon lines of motion, tracks in the air.

Deep night came at last, bringing me more awake than ever. After nine nights of drugged sleep, my nerves seemed to have lost the trick of falling asleep naturally on their own, and now they worked in reverse, lighting me up within. To watch the night out my window was not enough. I wanted more.

It was a risk, breaking the rules, but following them hadn't done me much good, either. I had to face facts. With the fifty cuts happening the next day, this could well be my last night at Forge. I didn't want to waste it sleeping. From outside, the bells of the clock tower tolled midnight, until the twelfth bong resonated away to nothing.

Slowly, I sat up to look around the room.

No alarm went off. No warning lights. Orly did not come running. Our fifty sleep shells, with their paneling below and full-length glass lids on top, were lined up in two rows as straight and motionless as so many coffins. Cameras had to be picking up my movements, but either no one cared that I was breaking the rules, or the night techies didn't watch carefully. A third possibility didn't then occur to me: someone cared very much, was watching very closely, and still let me continue.

Clutching my nightie close, I tiptoed the length of the room, past the other girls, and peeked through the doorway to where the hall was dark, empty, and cool. Barefoot, I crept across the smooth floor to the stairwell and touched a hand to the banister. Downward, a wide, dark staircase led to the floors for the older students, but upward, an old, narrow staircase led around a corner I'd never noticed. I took the old steps up to an attic, where the roof was close and alive with the rain's pattering.

I breathed deep. The aged, still air was faintly sweet, as if the missionaries who had raised the roof long before had also left behind a trace of incense in the wooden beams. I had just barely enough light to see, which also made me trust that the attic was too dark for the cameras to find me. I was effectively offstage for the first time since I'd arrived on the show, and the privacy was so palpable, it made me smile.

Two large, old skylights glowed in the slanted roof, setting edges to my blindness, and I wound my way gingerly past a number of storage bins. Rivulets of rain were slanting down the glass. With a hand on a rafter, I leaned close to the first skylight and peered out. To the left, the dean's tower was dark except for lights on the top floor, where I'd heard the dean lived in his penthouse. The techies who worked in the building must be gone for the night. It made sense, I realized. They couldn't have much to do in the twelve hours of night while
The Forge Show
was on the repeat cycle, rebroadcasting the feeds of the previous day.

With a shove, I pushed the heavy skylight upward on its hinge and propped its bar in the opening. The rain dropped in a perfect curtain just beyond my touch, releasing a rush of noise and tropical mist. The drenched roof tiles smelled unexpectedly like the metal of the boxcars back home, or maybe I was smelling the wet grid of a catwalk I spied running below the skylight.

I ached to go out and feel the soft blindness of the night touching my skin with the rain. It would make me strong. When I rolled up my sleeve and reached a hand out, clean, colorless droplets fell upon my skin. They were warm and irresistibly inviting.

Using a bin for a step, I hitched my nightie around me and crawled gingerly through the skylight to the catwalk. I gasped. The rain drenched me instantly, and I hunched against the downpour. It was so wonderful, so surprisingly not cold, that I had to laugh aloud. After nine days of guarding myself, trying fruitlessly to please the teachers and cameras, I was free.

I grasped the railing of the catwalk with one hand and pushed my wet curls out of my eyes. This was good. Light from the dean's tower cast outlines on the sloped roof of the film building next door and beyond that, I could see the sharp roof of the clock tower. A row of lamps illuminated the edge of the campus and separated us from the darkness of the plains beyond. Except for the faintest flickers, the lights of Forgetown were lost in the rain to the east, and my home, to the southwest, was impossibly distant.

I looked, anyway, employing my filmmaker trick. I imagined my gaze forward, high speed between the drops, to the boxcar where my kid sister was sleeping in the top bunk. I zoomed in large to picture her rosy cheeks and her eyelashes. Then I scanned past the curtain to the living room and put my stepfather in a stupor on the orange plaid couch. My mother I bent over a calculator, with some paperwork from the cafeteria, while the lamplight limned her profile. Home. In the next instant, I released them all to dissolve in the rain, and I was back at Forge.

My homesickness wasn't truly for home, I realized. It was for something more elusive. A silent, low-grade, unnamed yearning persisted inside me. It was always there, a reaching feeling that grew stronger when I was alone and listened for it. The rain understood what it was.

I spread my arms wide and tilted my head back to let the night splash into my mouth. Too little of it fell in to actually quench my thirst, but the few drops that passed my lips tasted sweeter than anything from a glass. This moment was real, at least. This was worth remembering. If they cut me the next day and I left Forge as a failure, ashamed, I could always recall my invisibility on the roof in the rain this night, and I would know this moment was my own.

“You like that?” I said, facing the sky. “Is that good enough?”

It was for me.

And the next second, it wasn't. The truth was, I would do anything to stay on the show.

A gust of wind blew me into the railing of the catwalk. This was a mistake. My stupidity astounded me. Why did I think, at any level, that doing something at night when the viewers weren't even watching could possibly help my blip rank?

I turned back to the skylight. Getting in was harder than getting out. I had to grab my drenched nightie up around my waist, and then I crawled backward into the skylight, reaching with my toes for the bin below. As I carefully reclosed the skylight, the chilly air clung to my nightie and set my skin prickling. I wrung out the fabric as best as I could and flicked drops off my legs with my fingertips. Then, quietly, I descended the stairs again.

Wet and chilled, I raced silently along the length of the dorm. I hung my drenched nightie on a hook in my wardrobe and swiftly pulled on a dry one. Soon I was back in my sleep shell, burrowing into my quilt, and I waited, in dread, for someone to come for me.

It took a long time. The rain made it hard to listen for footsteps, but finally, a quiet voice came from farther down the room. I tried to calm my heart and breathe normally. Another voice answered, just distant and soft enough that I couldn't grasp the words. I waited as long as I could, listening, and then I turned toward the voices and slit my eyes open to see.