Taken (7 page)

I take the book cautiously, and as my eyes fall on the words, I suddenly understand Emma’s uncertainty. Scribbled between two other house visits, is a note of a visit to my mother. Even I cannot understand the words before me:

Year 29, June 23: gives birth to twin boys

(Blaine and Gray Weathersby), both healthy

I pause. Shake my head. This must be a mistake. I reread the line again and then sit with the book in my lap. I’m not sure if I’m furious or pleasantly surprised. If anything, at least for the moment, I am blank. Shocked.

I suppose this explains a lot of things. Why we looked so identical. Why I felt half of me had been ripped from my chest when he was Heisted. Why we could read each other so well, know what the other would say before the words even escaped our lips. It explains a lot of things and I can almost accept it. Almost. Except for one small, tiny detail.

“Gray, if this is true, you shouldn’t be here,” Emma says. “If you’re really Blaine’s twin, if you’re actually eighteen, you would have been Heisted weeks ago. With him.”

“I know.” It’s the piece that doesn’t make sense, the element I cannot fathom.

“Maybe the journal’s wrong,” she says.

“Why would it be wrong? Would your mother write down something that didn’t really happen?”

“No,” she agrees. “But why would she record one thing in her notebook only to return to the Clinic and record something completely different in Sara’s scroll?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you think this is what your mother was about to tell Blaine in the letter? That you are twins?”

I think of the last few words of the letter, which, from reading over and over, I have practically memorized.
And so I share this with you now, my son: You and your brother are not as I’ve raised you to believe. Gray is, in fact—

Gray is, in fact, your twin. This must be it. It fits so perfectly. This is the answer I have been looking for, the secret that’s been kept from me. I accept it as if it were fact. The idea takes hold of me, drills itself deep beneath my skin and penetrates marrow. I am a twin, still here—the only boy over eighteen to ever beat the Heist. But why? Because it was kept secret?

“We have to ask your mother,” I say finally. “She wrote that note in the journal, and I want to know why she changed it when she copied things into the scrolls.”

Emma shakes her head frantically. “No, we can’t do that. She’ll know we were snooping around in her personal records.”

“Emma, this is so much bigger than that. I might actually be eighteen, and if I am, I think everyone here deserves to know that I wasn’t Heisted.” I can feel my pulse gaining velocity in my chest.

“But that’s just it, Gray,” Emma says sadly. “If you are really eighteen, you
would
have been Heisted. The journal is wrong.”

“If we ask your mother, we’ll know for sure.”

“Ask me what?” Carter is standing in the doorway of the Clinic, her gear bag in hand.

“Nothing,” Emma says quickly. “Gray and I were just stopping by to get out of the sun.” And then she grabs my arm and pulls me toward the exit, dropping the book on Carter’s desk while her back is turned.

NINE

I SPEND THE MAJORITY OF
the next two days in the woods, alone with my thoughts. I hike to the northernmost points simply to stare at the Wall. I imagine the answers sitting on the other side, waiting. They tug at something in my core, urging me to climb, telling me that everything I want to know lies just beyond that towering structure. The idea of the truth, the fact that there could be more to this place than any of us know, begins to drive me mad. What if the Heist really isn’t as straightforward as we believe, as consistent and unavoidable as death from old age? Aren’t I proof that there is something greater at work?

When not in the woods, I pore over parchment. I reread my mother’s letter time and time again. I visit the library and study every historical scroll in the place. I replay my conversation with Emma that day in the fields and I keep thinking of Blaine, how he had winked at me when we’d said our good-byes. Was he trying to tell me something?

The longer I sit with my thoughts, the more I am convinced that something is not right. It’s Claysoot. Everything about it now feels wrong: the Wall, the Heist, the original children. How did people living in an enclosed space have no memory of how they got there? How did they arrive when the thing enclosing them cannot be crossed? And why does the Heist, which steals every boy at eighteen, steal every boy but me? I spend hours wondering why no one else is questioning these things, and then realize I only just started questioning them myself.

On a still, windless morning, without Emma’s knowledge, I visit Carter in search of answers. I sit at her desk in the Clinic and ask her, outright, if I am Blaine’s twin. She looks at me with calm eyes and simply asks, “Where on earth would you get an idea like that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I miss him so much. And we looked so much alike. Maybe I’m just going crazy with loneliness.”

“Well, if you ever need to talk, our doors are always open,” she says reassuringly. She then explains that I am a year to the day younger than Blaine but certainly not his twin. It is infuriating, because I’m positive she knows otherwise. She’s aware of the truth, had scrawled it in that small journal. Why is she not racing through town and proclaiming that a boy over eighteen has beaten the Heist? Why has she chosen to keep such a miracle secret? Fearful that the reason lies upon the second page of the letter I will likely never find, I leave the Clinic not with answers but more questions.

That afternoon, as Emma and I sit at my place playing checkers in the dreary lighting of a summer storm, I reach a breaking point.

“I have to do something, Emma,” I say. “I can’t sit around here anymore, hoping the answers will fall into my lap.”

“What’s there to do?”

“I don’t know. Find Blaine. Discover the truth.”

“What do you mean, find Blaine?”

“The last couple of times I’ve been in the woods, I’ve been
this
close to climbing over the Wall and searching for him.” I hold my hands up an inch apart.

“Searching for him? What’s to search? It’s not like he took off to enjoy a stroll beyond the Wall. He was Heisted.”

“But that’s just it, Emma. When you climb over the Wall, something kills you, so there must be more on the other side. There has to be more than just Claysoot.”

“You’ll die, Gray, like they all do,” she says.

“Maybe not. I survived the Heist. Maybe I can survive the Wall, too.”

“Gray, promise me you won’t. Please. I understand what you mean, that feeling that there has to be more, some explanation. I get it every time I think about those original children. But it’s crazy, what you’re talking about. It’s suicide.”

“But what if there really is more, Emma? What if we just have to climb over that Wall to see it, and instead, we spend our whole lives in here because we are too afraid to try?”

She stands up and walks around the table. Before I realize what she’s doing, she’s wiggled her way onto my lap so that her back is to the game board and her face right before mine. She looks me over, brushing my hair away from my eyes. She doesn’t say anything, but I’m too focused on her hands to care. She is tracing the contours of my face, dragging her fingertips along my chin. And then she leans in ever so slowly and she kisses me. She knows exactly what to do to win me over, to bend me to her will. I lean into her and every inch of me livens.

Her lips are soft but dry, and her hair smells like soap from the market. I return her kiss, my hands finding the curve of her back. I’m about to pick her up and carry her into the bedroom when her palms push against my chest. I open my eyes to find her, inquisitive, before me.

“Promise me,” she demands. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

“Emma, you know I can’t make a promise like that. I do stupid things all the time. Blaine’s the one that thinks things through.”

“I’m not interested in Blaine. I’m interested in you.”

“Fine, I can promise you this much: If I am about to do anything stupid, you’ll be the first to know, before I actually do it.”

“Assuming you can even identify it as stupidity.”

“Yes, that.”

I kiss her again. My hands go to her back for a second time, but as I begin to lift her, she giggles and climbs from my lap. She puts the kettle on and looks back to me, smiling. I don’t know how she can be so calm. My chest is still heaving, my body electrified.

“You know, maybe you’re overdoing the whole thing,” she says. “Maybe your ma really did have twins back then, but the younger one died or something. And then a year later you came along and she named you in his memory. You could really be a year younger than Blaine.”

“But then a lost child would have been stated in my mother’s scroll. And I would have been listed as the third.”

“Or maybe the scrolls are incomplete,” she counters. “After all, that’s the excuse you gave me when we originally talked about Claysoot’s founding.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “That’s different.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. It just is.”

“Maybe you should go talk to Maude, Gray. If there are any more answers to be found, she has them.”

“And, what? Admit that we snooped around the Clinic and read private records and now I don’t understand why, at eighteen, I haven’t been Heisted?”

“At this point it seems a far safer option than climbing over the Wall.”

I catch myself staring at her wavy hair, the way it has grown wild in the damp evening, and decide she is the most beautiful being I have ever seen.

“You are so smart, Emma, you know that?”

She blushes and pours the tea.

Much later, after tossing in bed for hours, I give up on sleep entirely. I sit at the table and think about Emma’s suggestion. Maybe I can get information from Maude without admitting I snooped around at the Clinic. Maybe I can say I discovered I was a twin through Ma’s letter by pretending I have both pages. Before I can decide if this is a good idea or rather foolish, I am pulling on a hooded shirt and stepping into the rain.

I knock on Maude’s door several times, but she doesn’t answer. She’s probably asleep, but I pound again. This time, the door swings inward ever so slightly from the force. I nudge it cautiously with my foot. The kitchen is empty, but a faint, flickering light seeps from the bedroom, casting an eerie blue glow about the room.

“Hello?” I step inside, mostly to get out of the rain. “Maude?”

Still no answer.

I move cautiously through the kitchen, and that’s when I hear it, murmured voices, coming from the bedroom.

“Any other happenings to report?” It’s the voice of a male, so soft I can barely hear it.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Maude says.

I peer around the doorway and find Maude’s back to me, the rest of her facing an oddly illuminated section of her bedroom wall. I lean forward to better hear who she is talking to, but my foot steps on a squeaky floorboard that cries out under my weight.

Maude spins around and her eyes narrow as she sees me. She stands up quickly, far quicker than I’ve ever seen her move before and slams closed the cabinet housing the light. I step away from the room, ready to bolt for the door, but she marches right at me and I know it’s no use.

“What are you doing here?” she wheezes, leaning on her cane as she moves into the kitchen. She does not look angry but terrified.

“I came to talk to you. I had a question.” My eyes search the room behind her. “Who were you talking to?”

“No one,” she says. “I was preparing my notes for a meeting with the Council Heads tomorrow and sometimes I like to review them out loud.”

“But I heard a man’s voice.” Again I crane my head around her, searching the bedroom.

“You heard nothing of the sort,” she says bluntly.

But I did. I know what I saw, what I heard. Suddenly, I no longer trust her. Maude, who always seemed to guide our people, show us the way. She has become another element that feels unnatural, and so quickly.

“I’m leaving,” I tell her.

“Good. It does not do to enter others’ homes by force.”

“No, not just your house,” I explain. “Claysoot. I’m leaving.”

“Don’t be rash. You know there is nothing beyond the Wall.”

“I’m not being rash. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust this place. So much about it is wrong and if I can’t find answers to my questions here, I’ll find them elsewhere.” I back away from her, feeling my way toward the door, but she grabs my arm. Her grasp is surprisingly strong for such frail hands.

“Don’t be stupid, Gray,” she says slowly. “You won’t find any answers beyond the Wall because you’ll be dead.”

“But I’m eighteen! It might be different.”

Maude’s fingers tighten around my wrist. “Eighteen? What are you talking about? Have you lost your mind?”

“We were twins . . .
are
twins,” I say, twisting my arm free. “I can’t stay here anymore. I just can’t.”

I find the doorway and stumble into the rain.

“Wait!” she cries, but I don’t. As I tear through the waterlogged streets, she calls after me. I can’t quite make it out, but it sounds like “stay.” And “please.”

I run straight to Emma’s house and pound on the door. I promised to let her know if I came up with any stupid ideas, and while this doesn’t exactly feel stupid, I know it is risky. But I have no other options. My only hope for truth now lies beyond Claysoot.

“Gray,” Emma remarks when she opens the door. “It’s the middle of the night. Are you okay?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” she says, yawning. “Come in.”

“No, I need to
talk
to you.” I draw the words out, but she looks at me blankly. “Come here,” I grunt, grabbing Emma’s arm and pulling her outside so that our conversation will not wake Carter.

“Ow, Gray. What’s the matter with you?” she says, rubbing her wrist.

“I have to leave.”

She looks at me, bewildered. “Leave? Why do you have to leave? Where are you going?”