The Unquiet (2 page)

I
have been a cottage girl for eight years now. Any cottage girl will tell you that eight years are long enough to set her bones in stone. “I fought it in the beginning,” she might say. “I fought hard, but I am older now, and I am more this than anything else in the world.”

We arrive at the cottages in the woods as prisoners. We are six and seven years old and do not know any better than to be afraid of them. So they lock us up inside bunkers underground and train us there until we have learned to like the gray of our uniforms, the brown leather of our shoes. Until we are
obedient, compliant. Even the boys, rowdy as they were in the beginning.

Down there in that dark place with no windows we fantasized about the one thing we would do once we were allowed up. It became a movement, passionate and angry, our morbid revolution. Some boy would carry the knife, we said. A butter knife we'd hidden after dinner once and no one had noticed. He would not be afraid to use it.

“Where will the knife go?” someone asked.

“The heart right here, maybe the neck.”

It was hard to know who spoke what words in the dark. It was our bedtime, but none of us were sleeping.

“And then we'll tie her up?”

“Yes, we'll tie her up and go left. We came from the left.”

We could hear our hearts beating faster. Thump, thumping a song. There was murder in it, blood and guts spilled, the price of our freedom.

Then someone else whispered: “I thought it was right?”

We knew that when we'd arrived, the woods were filled with trees and that we would have to find the river again if we ever wanted to escape. In the end we agreed to listen for it. In the end we decided that if we did make it out of the bunkers, it did not matter what direction we went.
Eventually there had to be a road somewhere.

Nobody asked the biggest question; we were not ready to tackle that part yet. Nobody could say the words, but I knew we all were thinking it: Once we escaped the bunkers, how would we get home? How do you climb back into the sky when you have already fallen from it? Because that was where we had come from.

They had stolen us from the other Earth.

It was Alex's knife, now that I think about it. All I remember his saying back then was: “We'll go home. We'll find our parents.” And everyone hooted and cheered and thumped him on the back. That was how he gained his popularity, I suppose, and it was not that we actually expected him to save us. Perhaps we knew even then that he couldn't, but there is something about a person who says that he wants to protect you. Regardless of who that person is, and what promises he can keep, you start to want him around.

On our first night outside the bunkers, the cottages were soundless. We looked at one another. I think we were waiting for someone to say the words, to initiate the actions. What had happened to all those plans to run? To find the river? To press that cold blunt knife into the delicate wall of our housemistress's artery? Not one word. Somehow, without
any of us really noticing, they'd become nothing more than memories—those children with their blood-hungry eyes. We were ten, eleven, twelve by then, and we'd already started becoming the people we would be for the rest of our lives. No one even remembered where we'd hidden the knife. When we were finally released from the bunkers, it was because we understood the world enough. We took our blue and white pills. We knew that we must never go beyond the wired fence of the garden, that we must always be quiet, always be good. Our lives depended on it. But it was also because we had learned to use the guns in the training rooms and learned to use them well.

The problem with the system of raising children like us, I've decided, is that everything hinges on some dramatic effect. We are not told what we are; we realize it for ourselves. I want to say that finally understanding what we were and what we were for brought us some semblance of peace or made us ready. I want to say that we became brave little children then, inside those bunkers. I want to tell all the lies in the world.

About a hundred of us were in the bunkers in the beginning, so many that it was like maggots wriggling around a festering wound. Sometimes we were five to a single bunk with hardly
any room to breathe. We would fall asleep at night and wake up gasping for stale air, pinned by somebody's heavy arm or leg. We fought over who got to sleep in the bed that night and under it, and sometimes a particular corner of the floor would be marked for the biggest, meanest kid who'd learned to get what he wanted with his fists. Nearly all of what I remember involves fighting, scratching at one another's eyes until the lights flickered out.

And then the first of us started to disappear.

Because that is how it was. You could be talking to someone or lying in a bunk next to someone who suddenly wasn't there anymore. This, we learned, was what it meant to be from the other Earth. This was how our people died. They call it the dominance theory. If two copies of the same thing exist and only one is necessary, then the other one will eventually disappear. It applies to people, to planets, even to the rocks. So we were fewer and fewer, even though we were once many.

“There's a high chance that we're going to lose one another soon,” Edith said one night in the dark. It was Edith, Gray, Alex, and me. The four of us—the difficult four, as we were dubbed—were best friends by then. I was the youngest at eight; Alex was nine; Edith and her twin brother, Gray, were
about to turn ten. “We're too many,” agreed Gray, wiping the crumbs from his bruised face. We all were covered black and blue with bruises, the only visible evidence of the things we were learning to do with our fists and with weapons.

They'd snuck into my bunk bed, and we were eating all of our shortbread, all of our chocolate, everything edible we'd so painstakingly preserved until now. We got like this sometimes, finishing everything off because we were suddenly more uncertain of tomorrows than we'd been during yesterdays, because Edith had had a thought or a bad feeling, or because Alex had seen a boy disappear right next to him and once a boy was gone, we could never remember his name. Malcolm? Freddie? Emerson? We got this way because of the guilt, of being here, being alive. Each night we fell asleep together, and when we were still there in the morning, it meant that we'd lived through another day.

Now it has been six years since that night on my bunk bed, and there are fewer than a third of us left. Plus one Madame and one Sir. The boys have moved out of our dorms and in with their Sir. The four of us are no longer friends. Edith is tall and beautiful now at almost sixteen. She sits with the girls who whisper secrets into one another's ears and laugh a lot. We barely speak anymore. Sometimes she offers me a quick
smile, and sometimes I offer her one back, but perhaps even that is only a memory. I don't know. I've almost completely let go of everything about myself from back then. I don't think children realize that any moment of their childhood is worth something while they're living it. It's only later when you're older and reach back to find dark spaces.

The empty beds remain, as does the wooden table at which we usually sit clustered together, ignoring the other giant end as if it does not exist. Our voices travel around a room that was never meant to be this bare. On occasion there is a lost sock found and no one it belongs to, but we are good at pretending that those things don't happen. The ones who are here today but gone tomorrow, we tell ourselves, were never really here. We have come a long way in eight years, those of us that made it this far. We carry that perpetual twinge inside us. It is not emptiness, exactly, just something close.

This morning Madame gathers all of us in the dining room for an announcement. First we stand at the table and sing our sleeper anthem. Then she tells us to sit down. “I am pleased to say that your final examination is in one week,” she says, in her no-nonsense sort of way. “I believe you are as ready as you will ever be. Congratulations.” And then she leaves the room.

Not one month or one year, one week.

We look at one another in silence for a long time. I don't know why; we have known since we arrived that there would be an examination. Still. “I thought we would have more time,” one of the girls whispers, her voice a croak. “More warning.”

We tell ourselves that eight years of training cannot be in vain.

If Madame says we are ready, then we must be.

We are not what we were at the beginning; those children are now history.

My own history is shaped like a little girl, with her big gray eyes and her angry smile. Madame had so much trouble whipping her into shape I wonder now that she ever made it. I was careless with her. I was ruthless, and now that little girl inside me, the one from the ocean, from the sky, is dead. I cast her out, and I buried her in the woods. Sometimes I spy the color of the dirt and how her tears and her bones look underneath it, an old red dress covered in worms, and I wonder, as I step over her hump of earth, how I could ever have been her.

I
t is early evening, and we do our washing by the river with buckets and bars of soap. We use our generators sparingly, for our training and for electricity during the evenings but not for much else. We don't have washers, and we fetch whatever water we need from the river. We live off the grid and on natural resources as much as possible because anything else would lead to unwanted questions from the authorities of Earth I.

The river swishes back and forth beside us in the wind. Madame, our housemistress, does not understand why
we enjoy the outdoors so much. She does not know how spending so many years underground makes our lungs burn constantly for the fresh air. Yet here we are outside, sniffling, pretending that we are not terrified of the river and that the wind that pushes past the trees is not also biting into our skins. I suppose this is as close to defiance, to a desire for freedom, as we will ever get.

I was six years old when we arrived. I did not have anything, not even a suitcase to my name. Since the portal that connects the two versions of France sits right in the middle of the ocean, we were soaked to our bones when we were pulled out from that one ocean into the other. Madame cut the wet clothes right off my shivering body, as she did with the other little girls and boys. They had not given any of us shoes; they were afraid that it would make us sink right to the bottom of either ocean or perhaps in between somewhere, watery ghosts floating between two worlds if such a thing were possible. They'd stolen us from one world and brought us to another; we could tell, even then, it was imperative we lived.

I am only fourteen now; that isn't nearly long enough to have grown old, though I feel it. But my mind is sound, the best it can be. I have not lost anything. I did not drown my
stories in the ocean, did not, I confess, give up enough pieces of myself to do so.

Edith tugs on my shoulder, jolting me from my thoughts. “Your shirt sailed away. See?” She points out something white bobbing down the river. And then the other girls laugh when I start to chase after it, one hand trying to keep my sweater on my body, the other holding on to the woolen hat that keeps blowing off my head. I mutter a curse and run faster. It is not my favorite shirt, but it is the only white one I have without stains on it. Madame is already unimpressed with me enough and the mess I make with paints. “You have to be considerate
,
” she often says, as if my attempts at re-creating the hills and valleys around where we live are somehow an affront to her.

I stop running.

A memory floats shyly on this part of the river like ice at the first hint of winter. I will not go near that spot, and so I watch while my shirt lingers there. A story used to run around the dorms when we were younger that once someone looked into the water at this exact spot and, instead of seeing his own reflection, saw someone else's—a person who was already dead. He'd apparently looked a lot like Solomon, a little boy who had arrived with us as children but did not live long. They say that he is living in the water now, either haunting us or keeping us safe.

I wait and wait until the shirt has passed that spot, and then I pick up a stick and lie at the edge of the river, as far from the water as I can. That is where I am, trying to coax the shirt back over to my side, when some of the boys turn up, boots stomping loudly on dead leaves as they move. One of them whistles. “Looking great down there, Harrison.”

“Leave me alone, Alex,” I say without turning around. I can smell all the things they have hunted. The blood of rabbits and deer on their bodies, their sweat and dirt.

We are proud to say that we cottage children have never been anything less than self-sufficient, right from when we were young. The cottages are well outside the limits of any major cities, hidden deep inside the woods, and when we are old enough, we begin to train with knives, with bows and arrows, with rifles. First we test these things out on the natural world, hunting for food, but eventually we turn our weapons on one another. Humans are far less predictable. We are now good at more than staying alive. By the time I was eleven, I knew how to murder a grown man with nothing but my bare hands. It has become our second nature, this art of killing. But we are safe enough in these woods, whether because of our skills or because of the trackers we wear inside our wrists that allow Madame to always know where we are.

The river pulls my stick away, and just as I'm about to pick another, my hat flies off my head. Then Alex jumps into the water for me. It's a stupid thing to do, especially on a day like this, when the wind is blowing and the river is starting to churn. If he is afraid of the water, like we all are, he does not let it show on his face. Brave, brave, Alex. “For a kiss, of course,” he says when he reaches the bank, grinning, blond hair floppy on his head. His voice is deeper now, his body built like the strong trunk of a tree, but he has the same hair and impish eyes he did when we were children. Gray stands on the bank, watching us, and Edith is still talking with the girls.

“Of course,” I say, and take the shirt from Alex.

I lean forward, lips puckered, eyes half closed, but when he gets close enough, I push him back into the water and leave him there. I wouldn't say that I run away exactly, shirt clutched in my hand, but I don't wait around to find out what the other boys want to do to me as revenge. I meet Gray's eyes as I walk past, and he forgets himself long enough to offer me a shocked smile.

The water takes Alex upriver a little, and I hear him splashing against it. He yells, “You're going to pay for this, Harrison.” His friends laugh.

The girls are already leaving, and I grab my remaining clothes, dripping wet, and drop them inside my bucket. I wring the water out of the shirt. It is hopelessly brown with dirt, but I am only interested in the fact that Alex does not come after me. These are the small things to look for among the four of us, the few threads that are left. Alex will tease almost all the girls mercilessly but rarely me or Edith. And since Gray is always working, chopping wood somewhere, hunting, training, he never causes anyone any trouble. You might walk past Gray twenty times in a day, but the occasional nod of his head is the only indication that he sees you. I worry sometimes, in moments of weakness, that because he is never here, one day we will lose him without ever noticing. Then we will become a triangle, not a square, then a straight line, then a dot, and the world will be smaller somehow. It shouldn't matter, of course. I don't even really remember how I felt the day Madame made sure that the four of us would not be friends anymore.

“Wait for me,” a voice rasps. I turn around to find one of the girls hurrying to catch up—Julia, with her eyes watering, her nose red as a tomato. I slow down until we're side by side.

My skin is covered in goose bumps, my hands are like prunes, but Julia looks worse as she stumbles to keep up with me. The paleness of her skin, the fevered yellow of her
eyes make her seem like some otherworldly creature. Well, I suppose she is. We all are, but each time she coughs, the other girls look at one another, wondering whether this is how she will disappear. After everything, will she be lost to a cold? I can tell they write her off because of it, and I am the only one who ever washes my shirt next to her, the only one who has to listen to her talk.

Julia is a frail sort of girl, with spindly legs and hair so pale and long it falls to her back. She is probably beautiful, because when the other girls whisper about her at night, I can hear their underlying jealousy. “At fifteen she has no breasts,” Jenny hissed just last night, as if it were the worst crime in the world. Which is strange because if she looked down, Jenny herself might be surprised to find herself somewhat breastless, too. A year after we moved out of the bunkers, Julia came here from another cottage in another country. Her target family had moved to these parts, and so she had to as well. For years she did everything in her power to fit in, but we were already set, and there was no place for her. Her accent and overeagerness did not help.

“I've got some shortbread,” she says now, out of breath. She is clutching at her chest with one hand, her bucket swinging in the other.

I know she wants to exchange the shortbread for an hour braiding her hair. I start to tell her that I am planning on reading a book tonight, but Jenny speaks over me, saying, “We haven't made shortbread for weeks. Where did you find it?”

Jenny doesn't wait for an answer before turning back to the others. Julia blushes and stares down at her feet. The thing about Jenny is this: she does a pretty spectacular impression of anything she hears, and if she doesn't like you, she speaks to you in exactly the same voice you speak to her, like a parrot. In Julia's case it's a nasal/throaty combination that's hard on the ears.

“You've got to stop doing that,” I say quietly. Julia gives me a confused look. “Our accent. You don't want Madame to hear it. You're not supposed to go against your training.”

She shrugs, but her face turns redder. Perhaps she thought that she was finally starting to sound like us in a good way. She runs her fingers through her hair and sighs. “I'll cut it all off if you don't help me. I don't know how anyone can walk around with hair like this.”

I say nothing.

“It's the kind you like,” she whispers hopefully, “the one with the raisins in it.”

“Poor Julia,” says Jenny, smirking. “Did you save your stale
shortbread for her all these months? Do you want her to be your best friend?”

Julia mutters something in another language, which I'm pretty sure is an insult. Jenny, who is actually this tiny human being that contradicts her personality, nudges Julia hard with her bucket. “What did you say to me? What did you
just
say to me?”

“Jenny, leave her alone,” I say tiredly.

The surprising thing is that she listens. She doesn't exactly stop glaring at Julia, but she does move her bucket away. I suppose Edith and I are what Alex is with the boys: the unofficial leaders of the girls in our dorm rooms. I think it's because we survived, our whole group intact, while theirs did not. They lost their friends every day, yet here we are, I and the others.

When we were children, there were rumors about which of us had good luck and which did not. It was agreed that you wanted to be around those who did not seem to be disappearing. It's not true, of course; we cannot choose whether we stay or not, yet that silly sentiment still lingers. Now, though my influence is still there, only Edith wants to be that with the girls—their compass, their good-luck charm. I've learned to function better when the spotlight is not on me, while Edith thrives on it. Julia gives me a grateful smile, but I ignore her. I go back to putting one foot in front of the other.

As for the shortbread, I know it's not stale. I know the place behind Madame's cabinets where she hides all her sweets.

The truth is that I can stand Julia because she is like me.

They say there is something about us, the children they find in orphanages on Earth II. There aren't very many of us at this cottage, two or three. Nobody wants their old stories from before the cottages to stand out from the rest, so if we can help it, we never mention it. They say we orphans are emptier than all the rest, colder behind our eyes. We were broken long before we got here. We fitted in just right. We already bore the knowledge that all cottage children must have: that nobody loves us but ourselves.