The Unquiet (5 page)

W
e are always waiting our turn. Waking up in the morning and then lining up to use the single bathroom. Some of us go outside to brush our teeth because the line is so long. Some of us sneak out a piece of toast when no one is looking, just so we do not have to wait for breakfast also. This morning I fill up the kettle and set it on the stove.

I practiced my knife skills until I was exhausted last night, and now I pick up my book and keep reading from where I left off to tune out the noise. One girl is running around the living room half naked, iron in her hand. Another
polishes her shoes while the radio plays. Everyone's suitcases are starting to pile up by the door. These suitcases will be rifled through by Madame when we are gone, and sorted, their contents passed on to the next cottage children. The next generation of us.

Toothbrush still in my mouth, I walk outside barefoot, toward the chicken coop for eggs. There are just two. It's getting too cold for laying, and soon enough Madame will cook these chickens and get more chicks after winter has passed. And whoever replaces us in the cottages, the children downstairs who are ready, will pluck feathers until their hands hurt. I put the eggs in each one of my pockets, but I've barely gone two meters before the book is snatched from my hand. This is my fault. If I'd been paying attention to anything but reading, I might have noticed that I had company.

“You know,” Davis says loudly, voice filled with equal parts cheer and amusement, “most of us threw our hands up in the air last night and left it all up to fate. Nothing we can do about the examination now, but not Harrison. Harrison has to study right up until the last moment. And what's this book going to do for you anyway when you've got a target to shoot and no loaded gun?”

I try to snatch the book back, but he's too quick. I don't
think about it; I spit as much toothpaste as I can manage on his clean leather shoes. He's still exclaiming about this when I take the book back. I say, “Harrison passed her final math exam with the highest grade this year. What number were you again, Davis? And what was it Madame said about the size of your brain? Was it the size of a pea or not even that big?” Because I am just as good at this game as he is.

But even as I am speaking, I cannot help thinking that he's acting like Alex. That cocky tease-the-girls/make-everyone-laugh Alex routine. As if someone has to take his place now that he is gone, and maybe he does. Maybe that's the only way this day will work for the boys, for the girls. Maybe it is all of our jobs to play along.

The examination tests everything from the capabilities of our minds to our bodies with only one question: Can we live perfectly as our alternates? And there is only one right answer.

By the end of today I might be dead.

I think about that,
dying today
, and feel the latest, deepest twinge of fright. So far I have done my best not to count time, but it has run out on me anyway.

Davis might be lying in the ground right next to me in a few hours.

We don't want to know this. No. We don't even want the chance to think it.

“See, this is why the young 'uns shouldn't be graduating so soon,” Davis says, throwing his hands in the air dramatically. “Now they think they can talk back to their superiors.”

A small smile flickers on my lips. “I heard Madame say that half the kids in the bunkers will be ready before you ever are.”

He looks quickly behind him before lowering his voice, his eyes nearly panicking. It won't do to have the other boys hearing these things about him. “She was joking,” he says out the corner of his mouth.

“I've never heard Madame tell a joke in my life,” I say out the corner of my own mouth. “Have you?”

He presses a hand to his chest and groans. “Oh, you wound me, Lira.” But his pain must be gone pretty quickly because he's back to his normal self shortly after. This time he leans forward. I lean back, but that doesn't stop him. “So, listen,” he says underneath his breath, and even though I can already tell that I shouldn't, I do. “We all know that you're pretty innocent around these parts. But pretty much every guy here has made a bet that he's going to be your first kiss, and I was thinking that maybe you could do me a small favor.”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?” he asks. “Do you think Julia would go for it?”

“Why do you have to be so immature?” I say, shaking my head.

He offers me a dimpled smile and straightens. “It's in my alternate's personality. It's
your
alternate's family I'm concerned about. They might try to return you.” Before I can form a retort, he and his friends are ambling off to find someone else to pester. “Don't forget to take your pills, Lira,” he calls after me, and wriggles one brow. I wave back, and in a way I am sad. That was our best attempt at a good-bye.

I turn back toward the cottage.

Carriers never forget their pills, not from the moment Madame explained that they are the most important rule we must keep. A carrier without her pills is like a gun without any bullets in it. If we are not stronger and smarter than our alternates, how can we expect to defeat them? In our eight years as cottage children, most of us have fallen sick only once or twice. It's because of the pills, we are so healthy. But that is not their only use.

I remember sitting on the floor in the bunkers when I was six, along with the other children. We'd been there only
a few days. “It goes against the nature of things that we are here in their world,” Madame said, pacing in front of us. She'd brought some of the older carriers downstairs with her to help control us. We were only half listening when she held up two pills—a blue and a white one—and said, “Without these, you will die soon enough in this world.”

That got our attention, and the noise died down a little.

“Every planet has its own set of rules,” Madame said. She told us that we could not expect to leave our planet and enter an alternate one without some kind of reckoning. She explained the gruesome outcome of not taking our pills, sparing no details. “Without the pills, you will begin to feel disoriented. Then your bodies will shut down, but only after you have begun to bleed from the inside out.”

After she was done, my entire body shook from fear.

Needless to say that now taking our pills is the first thing we do when we wake up every morning.

When I reach the cottage, Jenny is in the kitchen. “I have to go get ready,” I tell her, retrieving the eggs from my pockets. She can afford to fry them while I get ready, but although we both hold out our hands, the two eggs hit the ground with a soft splat.

Jenny and I lock eyes, but only for a moment. Jenny bends to wipe up the mess, but I step away.

Neither of us knows whose hands the eggs fell out of.

Afraid, afraid.
The words echo around us.

Her, not me,
I tell myself.

I am not afraid.

I am not going to die today.

The boys are first for their examinations this morning, and by sunrise they are dressed in their best suits and ties. It is so uncharacteristic of them to do
anything
before us, much less be ready, but they are. Edith is the only one who goes outside to say good-bye, the only one to hug a boy, the only one to wish him good luck. The rest of us stand at the window and watch them disappear one by one into the woods, suitcases in their hands, backs rod straight, as if they are marching to death.

There is a brown cottage there, deeper into the woods, that we have never been allowed to go to. We used to like walking past it on our way to the river, but not lately. Now we pretend it's not there at all.

The morning flies away from us like this, with us watching. Finally it is our turn. Madame looks her best today: tall and severe, but in a suit, not just a dress, with shoes that click when she walks. She's smoking like a chimney each time she comes to collect one of the girls.

I look around the room. Everything in the cottage has been put back into place, every bed made, every spoon washed and dried so that it is as if we were never here. We haven't even left yet, but we are already blending into the wallpaper like ghosts. I close my eyes and think of the ocean, the great vastness of it. That blue place where the two worlds connect, and I still don't understand how they, our government and scientists, found it. I don't know how it is possible to know that somewhere, somehow, if you jump into the water at exactly the right spot, a secret spot, you will not drown. The water will pull you down, down, crushing your lungs until you realize that you are actually being sucked upward, toward a new sky. And what was here is there, and what was there is here.

I remember being so small, so afraid.

It happened the same then, too, with the waiting, and then they dropped us small children into the water one by one, asking, “Can you swim?” It didn't matter the answer; they dropped us anyway, and then Madame was waiting in a boat on the other side, younger but with a cigarette in her mouth like today. “Welcome home, carriers,” she said, and pulled us out. “Breathe.”

T
his is what the other Lirael Harrison is not doing right now: she is not sitting on the floor of a dark room with her hands tied behind her back. But imagine that she is. Imagine that she is being asked a hundred questions about herself, about her life, questions like: What is your favorite food, and what is your favorite time of the day? What do you think of your family? What do you want to be when you grow up? What are you most ashamed of about yourself? Which parts of your body do you hate? What makes you most insecure? What makes you angry? Show me what you look like when you are
angry. When you are happy. When you are frightened. When you are confused. The knowledge test. A check to make sure that the facts are there, embedded inside her mind. This is the nearest thing to being stripped naked without ever taking her clothes off, and a single wrong answer could have immeasurable consequences. She does not know what those consequences might be, but every now and then the stale smell of blood drifts up from the ground around her. From today or from a year ago or even the year before that, as if this were a place meant only for death.

There are two men and two women, interviewers apart from Madame, whom I have never seen before. In fact, Madame does not stay, although she returns silently every little while with cups of tea and biscuits that we did not know yesterday we were baking for our examiners. The two men and two women sit in front of a long table across the room, near the curtains, their shadows contrasting the lightness of the wall. They take turns with their questions and listen attentively. There must be other rooms in the cottage with other examiners because my exam alone lasts nearly two hours, and in all that time I am wondering whether this is it, whether the hype over the examination was just that. Two hours that make my head spin, not just because of the questions but also
because I am working the rope from my hands. Because even though I haven't been told to, I don't like the idea of being tied up, of being held in one place like a lamb, waiting for the wolf. Despite myself, I start to relax at the two-hour mark. I tell myself that this
is
it. That the hype over the examination
was
just that. Then the light flickers fully on, and I realize how wrong I am.

There is a woman sitting across from me. A young woman, beautiful, who cannot be much older than her mid-twenties. All this time we have been sitting right across from each other, so close, and yet unable to touch because the woman's hands were tied also and her mouth is taped. All this time, never knowing she was there. I stare at her. I have not been given any orders, yet the people sitting behind the desk stare at me, as if they are waiting for me to do something. That is when I see it: the gun lying in the space between us. It is only a matter of which one of us can get our hands free quickly enough, and then, I suppose, it is a question of morality versus self-preservation. I cannot stop staring at the girl. I ask myself questions I immediately wish I could take back. Who is she? What has she done wrong? Why did she wind up here like this?

It is as if the examiners have read my mind. “Her name
is Harriet Cummings,” an older woman says, her voice raspy as she lifts a cup of tea to her lips. “She was a girl just like you once, living in the cottages some years ago.”

If the woman is at least twenty-five, then she left the cottages just before I arrived. If I'd been here even just a year earlier, I might have known her.

But that is all the information they offer up, and it is even worse. To know a name but not know a reason. To watch a girl try desperately to free herself in front of you, tears streaming down her cheeks. She has been given some kind of toxin that makes her hands shake, that makes it hard for her to move properly; that is why she is so slow. But her eyes have the same fire as mine, that same intense desire to live; it is almost as if I am staring at some future version of myself, just a few years from now. My hands are almost out. Just a single tug and I am free. When one of the examiners stands from her chair and ambles over and frees the other girl, everything changes.

Now there are two free girls and one gun.

We both are frozen. Surprised or afraid, and I don't know which is worse.

I think again of the ocean.

The smell of cigarettes and whiskey, the pain of broken arms and dead friends come back to me unbidden. This is
how any future Madames will be born. Just like this, in this room, with this gun, with this choice.

We react at the exact same moment. She lunges for the gun, but I lunge for her because my body is stronger, faster. There is a horrible crunch when my fist connects with her face. Once and then again and again. When I am sure she is weaker than I am, I inch forward on all fours toward the gun and wrap my hands around it.

This is only test number two.