The Brokenhearted (10 page)

Maybe I’m more than just healthy
, I realize as I speed past a couple of ragged street kids on skateboards. They stop to watch me, their mouths hanging open.

Concentrating on my newfound speed allows me to temporarily shove all the horrors of my back-alley operation into a tiny corner of my brain, slamming a door on the whole mess of it and locking it tight. The operation, I can block out. But Gavin—held in some dark room somewhere, suffering, at their mercy—fills my thoughts.

After I run twenty more blocks in the empty dawn-saturated streets, I start focusing less about running away from the lab and more about running toward home. I have maybe forty-two hours to get the kidnappers their money. I know they won’t think twice about killing him if I don’t meet their demands.

I turn right, then left, then right again, marking a zigzag course. When the skyscrapers of North Bedlam loom into view, I begin to run even faster. My arms pump through the cool air, my legs lunge higher and harder with every step—until I see a flash of blue in the street just behind me, keeping pace.

I skid to a stop and instantly fold over, putting my hands on my knees and pretending to breathe harder than I really am, for the police cruiser’s benefit. It pulls up alongside me, and a bitter laugh escapes my lips. Now—when I don’t need them—they show up.

My laughter dies as I catch my reflection in the smoked glass window. A rectangular swatch of gauze is stuck to my forehead, a blood spot the size of a grape seeping through it at my hairline. The gash from the birdman, I realize, shivering slightly. My hair is a wild red rat’s nest tumbling around my shoulders, but my cheeks are rosy and flushed.

The window lowers halfway down, and the cop smiles at me. “Running from someone?”

“Just out for a jog, officer.”

“In this neighborhood. At 5:45 in the morning. Kind of risky, don’t you think?”

“Well . . .” I start, not sure what I can say to make myself look like a reasonably sane person. The cop has two deep laugh lines on either side of his mouth and intelligent blue-gray eyes.

“You’re right, it’s probably not the best idea,” I admit, my hands wandering nervously up to my bandage.

“How about letting me drive you home,” the cop says. I look out at the sky over the Midland, now blazing orange and red as the sun rises behind the glass towers of Upper Bedlam. The tightness in my chest morphs into an ache.

“Okay, officer.” I smile and open the door to the backseat, slipping inside the car.

The bulletproof glass separating the front and back seats has a small door in it, which he opens so we can talk. “I’m Detective Marlowe.” Our eyes meet in the rearview, and he flashes me a professional, polite smile.

“Thanks for the lift,” I say, craning my neck to get a glimpse of Fleet Tower in the near distance.

“You’re the Fleet girl, aren’t you?” he asks casually. “A lot of people have been looking for you.”

I stare into the rearview and take a breath before I answer, careful to keep my words and expressions as light and straightforward as his. “That’s me, yes.”

“Mind telling me what happened?” His eyes flick from the road to the rearview, maintaining their neutral, patient gaze.

I stare at the back of his neck for a minute, his light brown hair buzzed close to the skin, neat and tidy under his blue police hat.

“I’d love to, officer,” I say, pasting the bewildered, dazed expression of an amnesiac onto my face as I allow my eyes to meet his again in the rearview. “But the truth is, I can’t remember a thing.”

Half an hour later, I’m seated alone at the kitchen table, my stomach in knots. I’ve already hugged my parents tightly while Detective Marlowe looked on. They finally sent him on his way, but before he left, he instructed them to take me in for questioning once I’ve had some rest.
Once she’s got her memory back
, he added, winking at me as if we both knew the truth about my amnesia.

As my mother and father move toward the kitchen, I pull the sleeve of my too-big sweatshirt over my bandaged hand and hide it under the table. When they sit down on either side of me, the silence in the room is thick enough to slice.

“We thought you were dead,” my mother says finally. I can tell she’s heavily sedated by the way she’s slurring her words. A single tear travels down each of her pallid cheeks. “This was our worst nightmare come true, Anthem. We’ve already lost—” Her voice breaks, and a sputtering cry of grief breaks through her narcotic haze. My father moves his chair next to hers and hugs her against his chest as she buries her face in his shirt, her body shaking with muffled sobs.

“Since you’ve already lost one child,” I finish for her, an irrational swell of anger rising in my throat. Normally when my mother brings up Regina, all I can feel is guilt. But right now, I feel indignant. Even now, after all I’ve been through, I have to compete with my dead sister for center stage. It’s a competition I can never really win.

“I’m sorry,” I say tightly.
Sorry I’ve disappointed you. Sorry I’m not as perfect as I’ve led you to believe.
I look away from her, not wanting to meet her blank sedated face. The clock on the oven says 6:21. Time is inexorably ticking by, the kidnappers’ deadline getting closer. I have to get them their money by midnight tomorrow. My father is keeping it together, his eyes red but dry, his voice steely. “What happened out there? I don’t believe for a second that you’ve got amnesia.”

I swallow hard, trying to buy some time and collect my thoughts. If I open up the floodgates, I risk letting everything out. Not just the kidnapping but the attack, my deathly swim in the river, the operation. The best thing, I decide, is to tell them as little as possible and focus on the money.

My mother pulls her head away from my father’s chest, her blond ponytail lumpy and askew on the side of her head. She looks so fragile and frayed, worse than I’ve seen her in years. Too fragile to find out her only living daughter is a medical experiment. I take a breath and cautiously try to explain what I can. “It sort of started the night of the Orphans’ Ball. Will and I—”

“We’ve spoken with the Hansens and the Turks,” she interrupts. “We know Will broke up with you. And we know from Zahra that you’ve been seeing a boy from the South Side.”

I sit back in my chair, stunned. It didn’t occur to me that they’d already know about Gavin. “
I
ended things with Will, actually, not that any of it matters now,” I say, my voice thick. The kidnapper’s bloody footprint on Gavin’s floor flashes through my mind, and I shudder in my chair.

“We just don’t understand,” my mother starts. “Will was perfect for you—”

“Enough, Leenie,” my father stops her. “We need to know what happened, and whatever it was has nothing to do with the Hansen boy.”

“It was all my fault,” I begin, shaking off my mother’s comment about Will. “And I will never forgive myself for putting you both through this.” I take a deep breath and tell them about meeting Gavin. About sneaking out to his place, about the kidnappers in their horrible masks, about their demands. I leave out everything that happened after the criminals left, saying instead that they knocked me out and that a neighbor found me a day later, bandaged me, and helped me get back on my feet.

My parents sit back, stunned and horrified. Their eyes meet and exchange a look of raw fury, then turn back at me.

“I don’t know where to begin,” my mother says, tears welling up in her eyes once more. “You come home in a stranger’s clothes, half dead, having been God knows where. It’s like I don’t even know who you are.”

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “Everything with Gavin happened really fast. I couldn’t tell you because I knew you’d never approve—”

“How could you be so stupid?” my father interrupts me, his booming voice making me jump. I’ve never seen him this angry.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I whisper, stung by his words. My father is usually the parent I can rely on to be level-headed and calm no matter what.

“They knew who you were,” he seethes, his elegant hands balled into fists. “They knew—they
know
—that you come from a family of means. . . . They
tracked
you.”

I nod, afraid to say anything because the vein on my father’s forehead is pulsing with rage. I shiver when I remember what Miss Roach called me.
Walking bank account.

“You’re right. I brought this on him,” I say, my voice strangled and desperate. “If I don’t give them the money tomorrow, they’ll kill him. And it will be my fault.”

My father stands up abruptly, his chair clattering behind him as it falls onto the heated stone floor. His hair, usually arranged more precisely than a Japanese rock garden, is wild. His nostrils flare with anger. “Your
circumstances
brought this on him. We’ve worked so hard your whole life to protect you, Anthem, and then you just threw it all away for a boy you barely know. You’re lucky you’re alive.”

He stalks out of the room, and a moment later, I hear the clink of the crystal decanter at the bar. My father hardly ever drinks anything but wine, and never in the morning. I look at my mother through fresh tears. She puts her hand over mine and squeezes. Her touch is warm, if not comforting.

“He’s right,” she says. Her ashen face has a look of mourning, not for what’s already happened but for what will. For the mistakes I’m sure to make in the future, the ways I will disappoint her. “Promise me you’ll never do anything this foolish again. I don’t want to lock you in your room, but I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it if you ever—”

“I promise,” I say. “Never again.” And in that moment, I mean it with all my heart.

Then again, my heart is in a jar somewhere in Jax’s lab.

My mother wields her sadness like a weapon sometimes. It controls our family and has for as long as I can remember. I think of the time four years ago when I found her passed out in bed, a vial of MemErase scattered across the silk sheets. She checked into Weepee Valley Psychiatric for a full month that time.

My father comes back in, holding a tumbler filled with two inches of scotch. The smell of the alcohol reminds me of the sterilizer that filled the air at Jax’s lab.

“Please,” I whisper, looking up at my father. “I’m sorry. I really screwed up, and I let you guys down. I know I don’t deserve your pity or your help, but you have to give them the money.”

My mother slumps in her seat like a wilted lily and shakes her head. “No. We need to go to the police.”

“Mom, you don’t know what they’re capable of,” I start, my heart whirring so violently I’m afraid my parents will hear it. “If they see the police coming, Gavin will die.”

“But, darling—” my mother protests.

“
No.
” The violence in my voice startles even me. “You might as well pull the trigger yourself.”

My mother pulls back, surprised and a little scared. She looks at my father, who nods, before turning back to me. “Okay, sweetie. If that’s what you want. The police can go on thinking you don’t remember anything.”

My father gulps down an inch of scotch and sits down heavily on one of the barstools at the kitchen counter. “Anthem, you have to understand. Even if we do give them this money, what will stop them from asking for more? They knew who you were, they know who your father is. If we give in now, it will never stop.”

At the words
It will never stop
, I lose my thin layer of self-control. I’m sobbing again, my head in my arms, crumpled over the table like a used napkin.

I feel my father’s heavy hand on my back, then stroking my tangled hair. “Shhh. Don’t cry,” he whispers. It’s the worn-sounding plea of someone who has spent the last seventeen years telling his wife the same thing.

“Please. They’ll kill him, don’t you understand?” I say through my tears as I look up at him, at his stubbly chin, his worried eyes.

He shakes his head, and my eyes focus on his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallows. “I know it seems scary now, but there’s a very good chance they’re bluffing and that they’ll release him once they realize there’s nothing in it for them.” The conviction in his face is hard and unbending, a brick wall my fragile hopes have smashed against, shattering into dust. “We will not negotiate with terrorists, Anthem.”

“Please,” I repeat over and over, my whole body shaking now, a mix of hysteria and rage hot in my chest.

“Someday you’ll understand,” Harris says gruffly, his eyes avoiding mine. I know now that there is nothing I can say to change his mind.

“Anthem.” My mother lays a hand on my head, gently smoothing my hair. Her red-rimmed gray eyes bore into mine insistently. “You’ve got to see we’re only trying to protect you.”

I slow my sobbing enough to stare back at her, my mouth trembling defiantly, while inside any lingering threads of hope have all snapped, leaving a sour, burning disgust in their wake.

“I understand,” I lie.

I turn to look out the window at early morning Bedlam. A fog has rolled in now, blanketing the city in a deceptively serene layer of white. I stare out at the city wrapped in its veil, wondering where they’ve taken him, my monstrous heart itching in my chest, whirring blindly in my ears.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

CHAPTER 13

It takes a half hour to refuse all my mother’s exhortations: to let a doctor visit the house and examine me, to start memorizing our cover story for the media, to eat something. This last request I give in to, demolishing a plate of eggs and three bowls of Lily’s bread pudding without tasting any of it. After that, I convince her that all I need right now is sleep.

I finally escape to my room with a box of cookies and two Brawn Bars tucked under my sweatshirt. I yank down the shades on my glass wall to block out the brightening day and collapse into bed. Hot tears begin to flow, faster than before. I press my face into my silk pillowcase to muffle the jagged wails emerging from my throat. When the fabric is soaked through, I grab my noise-cancelling headphones from the bedside table and crank up the score of
Giselle
as loud as it can go. I pull my thick white comforter tight around me like a straightjacket and start to weep again, this time silently, my body shaking with the force of raw grief.