The Unquiet (18 page)

As we walk around the room, I cannot help the feeling
that crawls out of my throat and down my neck, down my spine. I shake my head, trying to clear it, but I cannot stop thinking about my life as a sleeper. Is this it? Is this all we get from them, after everything we will give to this war? We fight for them, and then they pay for our coffins?

It is not enough. To be a sleeper and then to die with nothing, no one. I want more than this.

And that frightens me.

The look on my face must linger long after we leave because Jack snaps his fingers in front of my eyes suddenly, and I realize that somehow we have caught the bus back to the café. I don't know how long we have been here. Jack is squinting at me with concern as we get off. “I asked whether you wanted to go with me to a party.”

“Party?” I ask.

“Oh, I promise,” he says. “This one is going to cheer you up. It'll be the most interesting thing about me you'll ever learn.”

I call Gigi at a pay phone to tell her that an imaginary Julia and I are going to see a movie and that I'll be home a little later. Then Jack and I get on another bus. I do not want to go to a party, neither of us is really dressed for it, but curiosity gets the better of me. It's the twinkle in Jack's eyes. It's not
often that he forgets his pain. During the ride I reach for his hand when his teeth grit together. He takes his pills, and then when the bus has stopped he says, “Are you ready?”

And before I can change my mind, I follow him down the street and into a tall office building. We ride the elevator to a floor where nearly every inch of the carpet is filled with cubicles, but in the center of it all, there is music playing and snacks being passed around. There are hundreds of computers, but people maneuver around them. Pale-skinned, pimply people who look like they never leave this room. We are at a technology company. “I used to work here,” Jack says under his breath. “As one of them. I quit just before we met. I figured I couldn't die sitting behind a damn computer, not writing program codes at least. Where's the fun in that?”

A man walks past us with the strangest head of broccoli hair I have ever seen. Jack laughs. “I used to look exactly like that. Aren't you glad you know me now, not before?”

I shudder. “I can understand why you quit.”

“Being an artist sounds so much better, doesn't it?”

He introduces me to his friends. “She's thinking about going into the tech business,” he says. “I figured I'd bring her here and show her what she's missing out on.”

They don't understand that he is kidding. Two of his
coworkers actually give me a tour of the place. “These are what our cubicles look like. And these are our telephones and computers.” They are so enthusiastic that I wonder whether there's gold hidden underneath the shabby carpet.

I nod, pretending to be interested and trying not to laugh.

Jack must have been the life of the party when he worked here. Everyone likes him, fights to share all the latest gossip with him. He tells me that they have this party just once a year. It's supposed to happen at a bar, but very few are willing to leave their work behind, so they bring the party here. It's not much of a party at all, but this is as good as it gets for these people. I understand what he is telling me without the words: at the end it is not only sleepers who are dissatisfied with their lives, who feel as though nothing was ever enough. It is never enough.

“Shit, Jack.” A woman walks over and hugs him. “I can't believe you quit. And who is this you've brought with you?”

I hold out my hand and smile. “Lirael,” I say. Even though she is Jack's age, she is eyeing me as competition. I want to laugh because I cannot imagine Jack, the one I know, being competed over by a group of women in ill-fitted suits. As everyone chats, they treat me like one of them. They think I am older, eighteen or nineteen. I accept the bottle of beer
offered to me, and when everyone starts dancing—some strange strangled sort of dance—I kick off my shoes and join them. And then, when Jack finds me, we form a circle with everyone in the office and do a strange dance that makes me giggle. This is what I have learned about myself: that I giggle when I am drunk. “Maybe this is who I'll be when I grow up, after the war,” I tell Jack, standing on my tiptoes to reach his ear afterward. “It's nice. It's simple, to wake up every day and know what is expected of us, to be predictable.”

“Some people in this world are too good for simple.”

I sigh, knowing he's right. We cannot go back to being simple after the life we have led.

“What?” Jack says, seeing the way I am looking at him.

“It's just,” I say, grinning, “absolutely nobody in this room knows how to dance.”

Neither of us is surprised the next time we meet when Jack says, somberly, that he has been chastened by his handler for our appearance at the party. “We're probably going to have to tone it down,” he says, eyes twinkling over his mug of coffee. “We're apparently giving people the wrong idea about us. They think I want to date you.”

I laugh so hard that I choke on my coffee, and Jack has to
lean over and pat my back, but then he makes a show of taking his hand away. “No touching,” he says in a high-pitched voice. “Absolutely no touching.”

I wipe my eyes and lean back on my chair. My lips are still twitching. We did not wind up together because of the cottages; we chose each other, and if I had to, I might even admit that I am a little in love with the idea of that. Of someone who likes me for me, who knew me with my eyes black as night, with my shaky morals and questioning character and chose me anyway.

“What are you thinking about?” Jack asks.

“That you're too young to be my father. Too annoying to be my neighbor. Too tall to be my friend. I don't know how to classify you.”

He pretends to consider this. “Brother,” he says finally.

I nod. “We can come up with a story about our lives.”

We decide that there was a secret affair somewhere along the line within our families, and he is an illegitimate child, cast out because he would have inherited the family fortune and Da would not have stood for it. He wanted those orchards all to himself.

“Your grandfather is a very scary man.”

“Very,” I agree. “You're lucky. He wanted to have you
killed, but my grandmother talked him out of it. Even when you took the DNA test, he had you tested three more times just to be sure. And your real name is Lucien, not Jack.”

He wrinkles his nose. “I was thinking Christopher.”

“Stanford,” I say.

“Ernest?”

“Nathaniel.”

“It's Augustus for sure,” he tells me.

“Hmm.” I cock my head to the side and study his face carefully, the shape of his eyes, the curve of his lips. “I suppose you could be my brother. Lucien Stanford Augustus the Third.”

“Christ, and does it come with a crown, too?”

I start laughing again.

This was one week ago.

I did not know yet that it would be the last time I would be that way with Jack.

T
oday, when I think of an omen, it might be the blackbird that flew by my window this morning. I have not seen a blackbird since the cottages. But I have not been this optimistic since the cottages, so I ignore it. Even when I wake Cecily and she grumbles, “Today's gonna be a bad day,” which she always manages to say just before it starts to rain, as if she knew it was coming.

It doesn't rain.

I stuff myself full of zucchini bread until Gigi smiles and pinches my cheeks, as she used to when the real Lirael was younger.

If it did not visibly cost her so much, I would pretend to hate it. Instead I smile with pieces of food poking out of my teeth. Da comes home early from the orchards, irritated. He feels he is being followed, he says. “Those damn thieves, stealing the apples from my trees, laughing at me behind my back. I've had enough. I'm calling the police this afternoon.”

He does, and they promise to come tomorrow. But in the evening, when darkness has fallen and we are getting ready for bed, Cecily spots an orange flame somewhere in the trees. Looters brazen enough to start a fire infuriate Da. He picks up his gun before any of us can stop him. “Stay inside,” he growls, “and lock the doors. Enough is enough.”

I do not know what he intends to do. But the moment he leaves, I find my coat and boots and follow him, leaving Cecily with the same warning: “Lock the doors and keep Gigi company. I'll be right back.”

Cecily makes a face, but I stop her at the door. “This isn't one of the times when you get to be like me,” I tell her, and kiss her forehead. “This is important, Ceilie.”

“Okay,” she says with a sigh.

I grab a flashlight before I leave, but I don't turn it on. I walk slowly through the trees, so Da won't know I am there. It makes no sense. We have so much space in our orchards,
so many trees to hide behind. Why would looters start a fire this close to our house? Why not deep inside the orchards? Something about this doesn't feel right.

“Hey,” Da yells somewhere ahead of me. I want to tell him that's a really bad idea, even with his gun, but he is too angry. “Come out of there, nice and slow,” he says.

I pick up my pace. But before I reach them, the fire flickers out and everything is pitch black. I cannot see my hand in front of me.

“Da?” I whisper.

I hear him scrambling around. “Lirael? What are you doing here?”

He starts to say something else, probably ordering me to go home, but he lets out a yell instead. Too late, I remember my flashlight and turn it on. I bend for the blade in my boot and move toward the sound of fighting. Of grunts, and bones breaking. But they seem to be moving farther away from me. The looters that steal from us are usually pretty harmless. Da's shouting is usually enough to scare them away, at least for a few weeks. But not tonight.

“Da?” I call again, but this time there is no answer.

It is the single gunshot that finally snaps my thoughts into place. If I had been thinking like a sleeper, I would have
figured this out much sooner. I would have walked much faster.

The fire was not an accident.

They
wanted
us to see. Whoever started it wanted to lure Da out here.

Because we are not dealing with a looter.

My heart stops. I run in the direction of noise, but as I get closer, I slow down. Even before I see, before I know, my body goes cold, as if a winter wind has blown in. It is too quiet. It's far, far too quiet, and I know exactly what I will find. When I finally reach the place, they both are there, exactly as I expected. My head begins to spin; my vision blurs.

I don't know how long I stand there or if I am even standing. Nothing feels real. There are two bodies on the ground, not just one. They both are lying there unmoving, eyes staring blankly up at the sky. Da and his alternate. I am still holding my blade in my hand, uselessly. A low, guttural moan pushes me toward my grandfather, and I shake him, start to beg him to wake up, to hurry, before I realize that the sound is coming from me. Me, not Da.

I cover my mouth with both hands, but it doesn't stop. Doesn't lessen. Continues like an animal dying inside me.

And then I find myself crawling over to the alternate's
side, trying to wake him instead. Because I do not know which one of them is which. I do not recognize Da, not the way that I am supposed to. Not the way that his true granddaughter would have.

Either of these men could have been Da, to me.

The gun lies on the ground between them. I sit there shaking for a long moment, my hands covered in their blood. Our cleaners, the ones who get rid of alternate bodies, will arrive here in just a few minutes to hide the mess. When I hear the rumble of tires, I force myself to stand on shaky feet. To step away from the bodies. I cannot be caught here, not with their blood all over me. Not with the way I cannot stop shaking.

Sleepers do not cry over people they don't love.

My body moves on automatic. The closer the noise gets, the farther back I step into the trees until I am a part of them. A black van stops in front of the mess. The cleaners wear gray suits and carry small silver suitcases. One man says, “I'll take care of this. You search the area.”

The remaining cleaners spread out. I gauge my distance from the house. No. They'll see me before I can reach it. I head toward the lake instead, my feet moving as fast as they can, and I don't have time to think, don't have time to be afraid.
I lower myself into the water until only my head is exposed.

One of the sleepers walks past the lake. I hold my breath and dunk my head for nearly a minute. I keep my eyes closed.
I am somewhere else,
I tell myself, but it doesn't help. When they are gone, I climb out of the water. I have lost my knife somewhere in the lake, but I leave it behind.

As I reach the house, a policeman is climbing out of his car. Gigi called him as soon as she heard the gunshot. She takes one look at me and begins to cry. I am wearing my blank face, but Da's death must have poked holes in it. Or perhaps it is simply because he isn't right behind me. Gigi wants to go find Da, but the officer tells her to stay with me. He disappears in the direction of the orchards.

While he's gone, Gigi pulls me into her arms, holds me there. She's crying so hard my body rocks with her every breath.

“Where's Da?” Cecily asks, frightened.

Gigi lets go of me and hugs Cecily instead. I stand there, watching them, with nothing to say. No idea of what my job is right now.

When he returns, the officer stares at me carefully. He is one of us. A sleeper. He pulls out a chair for me at the dining table, and I sit in it. He takes out his pencil and notebook.
“Can you please tell us what happened, Miss Harrison,” he says, a false kindness in his voice.

I nod. Gigi sits at the table as well. “Lira?” she whispers.

My stomach begins to turn. With only a few seconds to spare I bolt from my seat and into the bathroom. I throw up my dinner and clutch my belly. Everything hurts and feels numb at exactly the same time. Foggily, the sound of Cecily's voice echoes as she tries to help me hold my head up over the toilet.

Afterward I let her put her arms around me. My own arms are heavy at my sides, but that doesn't seem to matter to her. She's crying as she whispers, “Don't leave me, Lirael. Please don't leave me, too
.
” As if she can see something in me, something I cannot.

But I start to think that it is my imagination, that the words never leave her small watery eyes. Seven, I have to remind myself. She is only seven.

“Go stay with Gigi,” I tell her after a few minutes. “Tell the officer I'll be right out.”

After she is gone, I look into the mirror. Will myself to be calm.

Gigi wants answers. The officer wants answers.

But they are not the only ones.

Why did they send me a new grandfather?
The question bites
into my skin. All my life all I have been told is that the young are better than the old. We were the ones who were made for this. Few cottages even house carriers older than eighteen. What use is an old man to the cause?

Why didn't Miss Odette tell me he was going to be replaced tonight?

Perhaps protocol changed because the Silence is over, or perhaps this is something else.

I think about the farmhouse. About my friendship with Jack and the kinds of things he talks about. The way the war no longer matters to him. If they knew, any one of those things would be enough.

Am I no longer a Safe?

I want to tell myself that I am. But my teeth chatter violently as I stumble over to the loose brick underneath the bathroom sink. It is a hiding place no one but me knows about. I remove the brick and reach inside the hole in the wall for the small blade I keep there. I drop it inside the pocket of my dress, and then I stand.

If the officer is here to take me, he will have to do it by force. He will have to kill me here, in front of my family. I will not make it easy. It will cost him something—his right eye or his left ear or all the meat inside his belly. I stare at my
reflection in the mirror and promise: Before I die, I will make it cost them
something.

When I come back out, I have composed my story. I say it perfectly. Pause at the right moments. “There was a man. I didn't see his face. He attacked Da, and I was afraid. I ran, hid.”

The officer nods. “You have no idea what he looked like? What he was wearing? How tall he was, perhaps?”

I shake my head.

“Thank you, Miss Harrison,” the officer says when he has finished writing. “Will you walk me to the door?”

I fight the urge to hesitate.

I follow him outside. That is where I tell him my other story. Again I am a good actress. I am able to turn off my emotions when I speak. As if I don't care. As if the truth is that Da meant nothing to me.

“He killed the sleeper before I reached them,” I say. “But the sleeper had already injured Da before he died.”

“You got there just before your grandfather died?”

“Yes,” I say. “I watched him die.”

The officer nods, as if he believes me. “I'll report this to your handler,” he says, “but you should be fine. Carry on as before.”

I stare at him. I don't know whether he is lying.

He must be. People like us will always lie. Even when we
are telling the truth. I drop my hand inside my pocket, wrap my fingers around the cold steel, but he doesn't try to take me. No sleepers are waiting in the shadows.

“Good night, Miss Harrison,” he says, and turns to leave.

I don't answer. Even if I am still a Safe, the fact that my replacement grandfather did not make it, and I was there, will reflect badly on me somewhere, on some page, in some file.

Lirael Harrison. Status: two dead grandfathers.

My fingers press against the blade in my pocket until there is blood.

The officer gets into his car and drives away, Da's body following in the ambulance behind him, but maybe not Da's body. Maybe it is Da the cleaners got rid of and some other man we will put in the ground. I lean against the wall and throw up again.

It is over this quickly. The life that I had. The family that I had. Miss Odette will tell me at our next session that although it is very uncommon, some sleepers cannot manage to take over their alternates' lives. That sometimes, alternates are stronger than anticipated. Sometimes they fight harder to live, to be with the ones they love. They never make it, regardless, but they don't know that, and a person who has hope will do anything to win. She will not answer any of my questions.
She will not tell me why they sent a new Da.

I go back into the house. Gigi is in her room crying, Cecily crying with her. I should go comfort them, but I shrug into my coat before I can think about what I am doing and how bad an idea it is. I leave the house, find my bicycle in the shed, and ride blindly into the city with only one destination in mind. I have never been there before, but I have the address because Jack said once, “I want you to know where I live,” and “Aren't you going to write it down?” And I said, “I'll remember.” But I was hoping I wouldn't have to remember. That he would die in his sleep one night and Miss Odette would tell me and I would never have to come here. He opens his door on my third knock.

“Lira?” he asks in surprise, and then, when he sees my tears, he holds his arms open, and I go into them. He asks me what has happened, but I cannot get the words out. Everything I try to say comes out muffled. While I was riding, I did not realize the rain had started. But I am soaked through, my hair matted to my forehead, and now Jack is wet, too. He shuts the door, and we sit on the floor. We sit there until I have run out of tears, until I can breathe again. “Tell me,” Jack says softly. “What happened?”

I open my mouth, but even to my ears the words sound garbled, like I am underwater. “I'm . . . I was . . . ,” I say. What I want to ask is:
How do I get over this?
Because I need to. It's one
thing to pretend to care, but this is not what that feels like, and I don't know how that happened. When it could have happened. How do I stop feeling like this? How do I become a sleeper again?

“Did something happen at home?” Jack asks, and I meet his eyes. I'm not sure of why I am surprised by how worried he looks, but I am suddenly afraid for him. What have I done? Coming here has put us both in danger. But he's not even thinking about that. He's not worried that he could die because of me.

“I should go,” I say, staring down at my hands. “I'm not supposed to be here.”

“We can talk first,” he says, and it's the wrong answer. I was hoping he would say something else. Be someone else for a moment. Say, “You have to go, Lira. This is too dangerous. You can't be this careless
.
” But he didn't. Our friendship means more to Jack than our lives as sleepers.