The Unquiet (4 page)

As voices drew nearer in the corridor, the man picked the
little girl up. They rushed for the door, but at the last moment he turned to look at me. “You can come with us if you want,” he said.

I don't remember agreeing, but suddenly the three of us were running. We made it out of the building and across the yard. We reached the gate. We were almost free when several security guards appeared, their guns drawn. The man was carrying the other girl in one shaky arm and holding his rifle in the other. It wasn't even pointed straight. “Stay with me,” he told me, his voice low so nobody else could hear. “Just stick with me, and I'll get us all out of here.”

I remember the cold. I was wearing my nightgown and no shoes.

When he let his rifle fall to the ground and reached for my neck instead, that was the last thing I expected. “Let us go or she dies,” he said. His hand was not tight around my neck, not enough for me to believe now that he really would have snapped it. But my minders believed him. I did not fully understand the look of fear on their faces then, but now I do. They did not like to waste their potential carrier, especially when there was already a good chance I would disappear. Every orphan counted.

We inched backward, out of the gate. The man started
to say something to me, but he only managed a syllable. The single shot went right through his head. That it hit Elsa, too, was an accident. They both collapsed on top of me, and when I was rescued, I was covered in their blood.

I never thought about escaping again.

I learned later that he had gotten the job as a janitor in order to save Elsa. Every once in a while our minders would talk about it, thinking we were not listening.

It is one of those things I have been trying to let go of ever since.

On the day before the testing, the day before we are supposed to leave this place, I am using one of the punching bags in the training room when we hear a scream. It is early morning, the sun just risen, and usually we are either doing chores or about to start our training. Those of us already in the training room rush outside and find some of the girls huddled together by the cottage. “What happened?” I ask, but they are so shaken I can barely get them to speak.

Finally someone tells us.

Alex and Margot were found hanging from a tree near the river.

One of the boys, Alex's best friend, found them a few
minutes ago, already surrounded by blackbirds. My head shakes automatically in disbelief. I think of Alex as I knew him, trying to kiss me at the river, Margot, trying to get out of basement duty.
Why would Alex and Margot be hanging from a tree?
I want to ask, but I cannot form the words. I move past the shaken girls instead and walk until I can see what they have seen.

I stand there next to Madame in shock.

On the tree they are nothing but broken necks and pale bodies speckled with blood where the birds have pecked. Their eyes are wide, their hair falling over their faces, and I cannot reconcile any of it. I cannot tell myself that it is them I am seeing. My mind spins backward and makes my body retch. Madame wears a grim look and orders all of us back to the cottages, back to our training, as if nothing has happened, as if they were never even here. We follow her orders silently, but we're all shaking. It's not supposed to affect us like this.

The note says that they wanted at least to leave on their own terms, together. Not in a testing room, not because they did not meet the necessary standards. Their hands are tied together by the gray ribbon from Margot's hair, the same type we all wear in ours.

I know a boy and a girl who love each other. Who say they can't help it.

What heavy lies we must tell to keep the truth from floating away from us.

W
hat happens next is that I cannot breathe. I lie on the hard floor, held there by a weight pressed against my neck. Nothing I do changes it: no movement, no fight. I imagine that I am turning a terrible color, that all the important events of my life will begin to flash before my eyes as they leak away. The tree from today. I climbed it with Alex and the others one afternoon and broke my arm when a branch snapped. It was possibly the most definitive moment of my childhood.

I remember Madame shaking her head over me, a half smile, half grimace on her face. I was an example that day, lying
there, howling. “Why should I help you?” she said for everyone to hear, her voice cold and angry. “Why should I make you feel any better for disobeying me? Do you think the rules are for my amusement, you foolish girl?” But eventually she picked me up and carried me to the room we use as an infirmary. There she cleaned and wrapped my arm, and in my delirious state, I told myself she loved me. That she loved us all in spite of herself. She had to; we'd been with her since we were six or seven years old, all of us. Madame was the only mother most of us remembered. But she made me tear up the drawing I'd made her earlier that afternoon; with her watching, the pieces of charcoal-patterned paper scattered over my infirmary bed.

Then she removed her glasses and stood at the edge of my pillows. “Look at me,” she said, and I couldn't. I focused on the mark beneath her chin instead. I could tell I had done something wrong. As it was, I was already trying not to cry, trying not to look at the drawing I'd etched so painstakingly, now nothing.

“Lirael,” Madame said, eyes boring into my skin, “never again. Do you understand me? The things you think you know, the things you think you should do, always ask yourself: Am I following protocol? At the end of the day it is the only thing that will save your life.”

I could not tell whether she meant the drawing or the tree I'd climbed. And then she leaned in close so I could smell the cigarettes on her breath, could see the hairs and wrinkles on her upper lip. “And if you ever disobey me again,” she whispered against my ear, “I will kill you myself.”

That threat must have been issued to every single one of us at some point because over time other backs became as straight as mine, other faces less enamored with the idea of mothers and love. I stopped climbing trees. I stopped talking to Alex with anything other than contempt, stopped talking to the boys in general. We girls became allies. Allies, but never friends. Like a person you can share a toothbrush with if necessary but whose eye color you might never know.

I cannot erase the image of Alex. Alex, in our tree. Alex, dead.

I have always followed protocol. Until tonight, when I cannot breathe. When the boy leaning over me is killing me. Protocol means always finding a way to win, but I'm not looking. I'm not even trying to save myself.

“Come on,” Ezra says, but he doesn't budge an inch.

His fists press harder against my windpipe. He smiles.

He is drunk with the power of it. Power to make me want to beg. Power to determine my fate.

No one else in the training room asks him to stop. Everyone is engaged in some kind of violent sparring of their own, with their hands and their training knives and sticks. There is another room full of treadmills, another for target practice, another where you have to assemble your gun with your eyes blindfolded while knives dart out at you. Every room is full tonight.

Perhaps we feel like we need to be punished.

None of us are really speaking to one another right now. Some mutter about how selfish it was of them, Alex and Margot. To kill themselves on the day before testing, as if they had wanted to take us down with them. Others see it as part of the test: to fall apart now would be to fail, and so they fight harder.

Margot and Alex were sparring partners. From what I could see they did not even get along. That is what I am thinking, lying there, when someone says, “Get off her,” and Ezra is suddenly ripped off me by Gray.

The two of them fight until they bleed.

Training sessions started light when we were younger, but there is no mercy in these rooms now. If you are worrying about how best not to break someone else's leg, you might just find yourself paralyzed before you can do anything about
it. We are feral, almost heartless, when we fight. I wrap my arms around my chest. My breath comes in huge, painful gulps, and still, not nearly enough enters my lungs. Finally I scramble out of the way and lean against the wall.

Ezra has always been my sparring partner. Short and stocky but with arms of steel, a brick wall when he wants to be. Gray is taller, and one and a half years older than us, with his tie loose around his neck, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up his arms as they've been since I first knew him. I can tell that he is looking for a fight tonight. He is the one who discovered Alex and Margot, the one who saw the worst of it. For that, it is probably smart to stay out of his way, and Ezra knows that. He scuttles away with a bleeding nose. Gray has plenty of vulnerabilities, from my vantage point, but tonight even the other boys cannot look at him.

When I am strong enough to stand, I glare at him. “Why did you do that?”

For a moment I regret it because he flinches. I am afraid he will say he didn't want to see me hurt, but he doesn't. He blinks at me as if he has no idea who I am, where we are, and then finally he shrugs, swipes at his brow with a severely cut-up hand. “Why not? I need someone who will not make this easy for me.”

He looks me over, up and down, appraising my state. Perhaps it is easy for him to see that though I stand tall, my ribs hurt and my left knee aches. But perhaps he cannot see anything at all.

“Come on then.” His eyes challenge, his lips pull up in a slight sneer. “Whoever wins does all the dishes in both the boys' and girls' cottages for a week.”

“It doesn't count when there is no week,” I say, but even to my ears this sounds like an excuse. To his credit, Gray does not call me out on it. I try not to hobble over to the knife stand. I choose this because those kinds of fights are over quickly. Sometimes a winner is declared over a little spilled blood. It's a gamble, a game of luck, and tonight, with my aching body and wandering mind, that is the only game I am willing to play.

Gray is good with knives. I have not sparred with him in at least two years, but we have all seen him train. I pretend not to notice the overconfidence spreading over his bruised face, pretend not to care. And when he lunges at me the first time, I even let his knife graze my side. But with the next swipe, I twist his arm as my knee connects with his chin and then his belly. It's almost too easy to make him fall, to watch him snap in two. I stand over him, my bare foot pressed to his neck. I
hate the look in his eyes, the one that says, “Alex?” and wears his grief. I hate him for showing it to me, to all of us. As if any of us still mean anything to one another. He is pathetic, lying there, and that only makes it easier for me to find the words. “The thing is,” I say, my voice low and empty, “you're making it easy for us. We all feel sorry for you. Look around you, Gray. Nobody wants to fight someone they feel sorry for.”

He pushes me away and stands. He opens his mouth to say something, something to everyone watching him silently now. “I . . . ,” he begins, but he changes his mind. We watch him leave instead, the door clicking softly behind him.

Once, when we were younger, one of the girls swore she saw him sneaking away from the cottages every morning and, when she followed him, found him tending to a bird with a broken wing. Those old tales, old stories of the people we used to be.

But even that doesn't make me regret hurting him.

Madame enters the training room moments later, her arms loaded. She ignores the tension hanging over us. “Their things,” she says, dropping books, clothes, old radios and toys and filled diaries on the floor. She does not have to tell us who
they
are. “If you want anything, take it now. The rest goes downstairs.”

Lying at the top of the pile, that damn gray ribbon they used to tie their hands together.

I think there's even a little bit of blood on it.

At first none of us move. And then one by one, we slowly approach the pile. I don't want anything, but we all have to show that we are fine. That we are ready for our exam. That Alex and Margot mean nothing.

I touch the ribbon in my braid and wonder what story about it, about the girl who passed it on to me, I will never know.

W
e each own a suitcase, and all of our lives can fit into them. I own one pair of shoes, brown, worn leather that is repatched each time it tears. Two drawing books, a set of paints, my pills, a nightgown, and an old children's book. Every girl's suitcase is different. A girl named Leah, who sleeps in the bunk below me, has a suitcase filled almost entirely with her animal-shaped origami, a different one from every week of her cottage life. She is actually a better potter, but clay is too heavy, hard to pack. These things no longer belong to us; we cannot take them with us, but we
pack as if we can. As if we were only going on a trip that we will soon return from. Our pills: they are the only things that we will have with us in the end. We are healthier than our alternates because of them, less prone to falling ill. If we pass our exams and become sleepers, vulnerability is not a risk we will be able to afford.

Now that night has fallen, a sense of sentimentality in the air threatens to tear us open, spill us out onto the carpet. For just this night, we smile shyly at one another again as we pack.
Tomorrow
. Tomorrow everything changes, but not today, not yet. And so we regress. Hover on the verge of being children again. Watch a film crowded on the living room floor together, braiding one another's hair.

It becomes too claustrophobic for me, and I wrap a scarf around my neck, follow the scent of cigarettes to the old toolshed near the vegetable garden. On the other side of it, Gray leans against the wall and stares up at the sky, and I suddenly don't know what to do. I do not know how the boys are commemorating tonight in their cottages, not to mention the fact that I humiliated this one just hours ago. He doesn't turn to look at me, but he knows I am here. I take a step forward and then a step back.

“It's much cooler out here,” I say, but he ignores me still.

I am not Alex, after all. I turn around to leave and walk into Edith. “Oh,” she says.

I do not know whether she followed me or she was here before, but she offers me a guilty smile just the same. “I've stolen Madame's best bottle of wine,” she says, holding it up to the light. “Not to get drunk, of course, but just to know. The way she hides it, you would think it was worth her weight in gold.” She laughs shortly. “Actually, it probably is.”

She sits down, and after a moment I join her. My uniform will be dirty from the rusted nails poking out from the shed, but I pretend it does not matter. Edith fiddles with the bottle, one eye on me and the other on Gray, where he stands ignoring us. This is the single thing that reminds me that he is her brother. Like us, Edith has been good about ignoring the boys; perhaps in a way tonight she hopes to make amends for that. Or, I think suddenly, maybe this is something they do all the time, sneaking out to stare up at the moon together. Maybe they've been close all this time, and we've just never seen it. Like Margot and Alex. Secrets make everything else so unsure.

I cross my legs and pull my skirt down over them. “Won't you know after tomorrow anyway?” I say, gesturing to the bottle. “I mean, surely your alternate drinks.”

“Yes,” Edith says, popping the cork out, “but it will be a different type of knowing. And besides, you won't be around to drink with then, will you?”

I stare at her until she adds, “Not that it matters.” She sighs. “It's not supposed to matter.”

“No,” I agree, looking down at my arm. At the scar from breaking it. My memory of our friendship, of our time in the trees won't leave me tonight. It's Alex's fault. I see a tree and automatically associate it with laughter, with all of us, and then suddenly before I know it, the memory turns gory. I see the boy and girl hanging from that tree. And my arm hurts, as if it were snapping in two again. As if I have weighted our whole history on a single fleshy branch. And when Madame cut it off as she removed their bodies, she cut off a piece of me, too.

I ignore my arm. I look at Edith instead.

In this one moment of weakness I can admit that it is still strange to me. How we'll never be friends again. The four of us. I used to feel as though we were meant to know one another forever.

Tonight I shake my head to clear it, to end the looking, and smile at Edith. Her ponytail is loose, the top two buttons of her shirt are undone, and her socks rolled down low, as
close to her shoes as possible, as if she meant to hide them altogether. It is fashionable, I suppose, the reason why the boys flock around her and why we are so different for it.

I retie the scarf tighter around my neck. The fact that I am fourteen and Edith is nearly sixteen doesn't matter to her. I like that. I barely remember it myself, even though I am the youngest carrier taking the examination this year.

Edith swirls the bottle around a bit. She takes a swig before handing it to me.

“This is probably a bad idea,” I say, but I take a sip, too. Some evenings, when we've been very good, Madame will open a bottle of wine for us to share around the table. But it's the cheap kind, the kind that she herself rarely drinks. Somehow you grow used to the taste, the tanginess of sour grapes. In comparison this expensive wine is too sweet, too rich, as it swirls around in my mouth. I take another sip and whisper to Edith, “I'm pretty sure Gray wants to kill me.”

She frowns at him and then whispers back, “No, not you.”

I say nothing.

Crickets are chirping, and the leaves of the forest rustle. A pair of owl eyes glower down at me from a tree, a group of fireflies sidle past, and the wind starts to sing an eerie song. Now that darkness has fallen, all the things of the night are awake,
aware. We should go inside, but I am afraid that I belong here more, to this wind, to this song, than I do to the sound of voices, of people. I always have, even before we left home.

“I'm going to bed,” Gray says quietly after a while. Am I imagining the way he looks at me? He straightens from the shed and inhales what must be his third or fourth cigarette by now.

Edith startles. “Oh, okay,” she says too cheerily, but I can read the disappointment in her voice. “You want some wine?” He doesn't answer, so she hands me the bottle, and then she stands. “I'll be right back, okay?” she says. She walks over to her brother, and though they whisper, I understand that Edith is trying to coax him out of whatever depression he has fallen into. She touches his cheek, but he flinches, as if her touch burned. She wraps her arms around him, but he stands there stiffly, blinking past her at me. Her shoulders are sagging, too, by the time she lets go.

I leave Edith where she is standing desolately and follow him, and I don't even know why I do it. “You're going to be okay tomorrow, right?” I hear myself asking.

He stops, waits for me to catch up. “Do you care?” he asks, the toe of his shoe scuffing the ground. That question seems like a test. A small test masking a larger one.

I tell him the truth. “Not really. I don't think I've even really thought of you before tonight. Not since we were kids. But . . . now I can't stop thinking about all sorts of weird things.”

“Like what?” he asks, curiosity stirring his expression for the first time tonight. His eyes burn mine in an old familiar way. They've always been so serious. A cricket hops right onto my left shoe and sits there.

“Do you care?” I say, in the same tone of voice.

For a moment, silence. Then he shakes his head at me as if he is disappointed, hands me his cigarette, and walks on. Alex is dead. Gray is angry. Edith wants to drink herself to sleep. So much for our lucky group. We haven't even started our missions, our lives yet, and we are already this small. This tired of ourselves.

When I come back, Edith is sitting at our spot, still drinking. “Are you afraid you won't pass the exams tomorrow, Lira?” she asks me.

Of course I am afraid. I am
terrified
. And I wish we wouldn't talk about it now. It will be bad enough trying to fall asleep tonight. My heart is racing, and there is a heaviness that has clawed its way into my stomach. But I refuse to let it show, not even to Edith.

“I saw Jenny throw up three days ago,” I confess instead. “I don't know whether that was fear.”

Edith nods. “Jenny has been having little panic attacks all week. She thinks nobody notices.”

“Everybody is afraid,” I say. I am surprised to find myself defending Jenny.

“See, but that's not a good enough reason. The exam is the scariest thing that has ever happened to us. It's fine to be scared, but then we're supposed to get over it. We're supposed to think that after training with one another for eight years, there's a reasonable chance we'll make it. Panicking isn't going to solve anything.”

“Is that why you've chewed your fingernails raw?” I ask her.

She tucks her hands into the pockets of her coat. “Is that why you were going to let Ezra choke you to death before Gray rescued you?” she asks me.

I don't answer.

Alex is gone.
This is what we really want to say. Want to talk about. But we can't.

I know she is thinking the same thing I am. Alex's being gone somehow makes the possibility of our death tomorrow that much realer.

Edith sighs and shakes her head as if she's trying to clear it. Her voice is lighter when she speaks. “We're rich, you know?” she says. “In this other life we're going to. On our Earth we were living on the streets when they found us. Our parents were gone, and Gray was good at figuring out who we could steal from without getting caught. We lived beside garbage cans, slept in alleys, that sort of thing. We had to roast rats once for breakfast, and now we're here. And apparently we're going to be rich with two parents in some giant house in the city.”

“Is that good?” I ask.

“I don't know,” she says. “I guess we'll find out.”

My own family consists of two grandparents and a sister and orchards in the countryside near Paris. We have no parents, my alternate and I. I suppose we have this one thing in common: that we were not meant to be loved in that way by those people.

I say nothing. Edith moves on.

“On the radio they're saying
alternate
is a vulgar term now. That we're duplicates, not alternates. Like what a thing is called is more dangerous than what that thing can do to you.”

I suck on Gray's cigarette and wait for the real thing I
know she wants to say. The thing I was waiting for Gray to say. The reason I am out here to begin with, because I could read it on him when we were fighting earlier in the training room. We might not be close anymore, but I can read it on Edith now. After a while I do not think it is coming, and I have almost decided to go back to the training room and practice for tomorrow, to forget them, all of them, completely. Then Edith puts the bottle down and runs her fingers through her hair. She does not look at me.

“He doesn't think they did it,” she says after a moment, staring down at the ground. I don't ask what she means, I am too frightened to, but she elaborates anyway. “He doesn't think they killed themselves, not like that. He says they had ideas of how to be, outside of here. That they might even have made it.”

I rub my hands together because they're suddenly too cold. Because the wind is singing a crueler song than even I can bear. And then she makes it worse. Presses her lips right against my ear, where there is no risk of being overheard. “He thinks Madame did it to them because she found out,” she says.