The Isle (5 page)

T
he governor walks back into my room like a knife. Behind him, the door closes automatically, and it sounds like a vacuum being released.

Since the last time he left, I haven't been here in this gray prison. I've been off in my head, doing other things. Things I'll never do again. I've been braiding my hair and painting my nails. I've been racing a speed mobile, like Ren always promised. She said she'd teach me.
How will I steer if I can't turn the wheel?

“Let's play science, Aventine,” the governor says. As though science is a game played on the playground. “What does a lizard have in common with a starfish?”

I shake my head. I have no idea what he's talking about, and I don't care. All I care about is what he took from me and
why. After he left, I cried. I did it for so long, I thought I was empty. But the moment he walks in, it's like I never cried at all. I'm completely filled up with tears again. I blink them back.

The governor ignores it, if he's even noticed. He crosses his arms behind his back and looks down at me.

“They both possess the unique ability to regenerate themselves. If a starfish loses one of its arms, that arm will grow back exactly the same as before.”

What is he saying? Does he think . . . ?

I push the possibility out of my head. I'm not a starfish; I'm not a lizard.

“You are a slow child, aren't you?” he murmurs, half to himself, half to me. His gray hair reminds me of sharp metal. He is a thing that cuts; that's all he knows how to do.

I hate this man. I don't know that I've ever said that about anyone before, but I'll say it about him:
I hate this man.

“Let's have a look.” He lifts my arm up from the elbow, and I don't resist. I have no bones in there. Bones are for fighting. I don't know that I have any of that left in me, if I ever had it to begin with.

Slowly, he unwraps the gauze. I'm a mummy. It takes forever. When the hair on my arms prickle against the air, that's how I know the bandage is off, but I don't dare look down. I haven't been able to look down since the moment I realized what he'd taken from me.

Governor Voss
hmm
s and
ahhh
s, then laughs to himself. “Don't you want to see?”

I force myself to open my eyes and peek in his direction.

“It seems you may in fact have something in common with the starfish and the lizard.” He points to my wrist, to a scar in the shape of a perfectly straight white line. “This is where the amputation began. And yet, here you are with a good inch extra of bone, muscle, veins, and skin.”

He's right. . . . The curve of where my thumb used to be is already starting to form.

“They're—they're—” I stammer, unable to choke out the possibility. “They're growing?”

“They are,” he tells me.

This time I don't blink away the tears. I can't tell if I'm happy or angry. I think I'm both, but the tears look the same either way.

“I wouldn't have hurt you unless I thought you'd fully recover. I'm not a bad person, Aventine.”

My cheeks are wet down to my chin. The thought of my hands growing back, that this might not be forever—it's too much.

“But you are—” Spit mixes with tears and I barely understand myself. “You are. How do you not see it?”

“They're growing back, my dear,” he says, cocking his head, confused. “No harm done.”

I don't know that I've heard such a loud, strange noise come from my mouth before. I don't recognize myself. Thrashing in my cot, “Get me out! I want my sister!” I bellow.

“Quiet!” The man drops my arm onto the bed as he stands. An arrow of pain tears through my shoulder. I bite my lip to keep from crying. The pain quiets me, not him. “Child, you have tried my patience long enough. Perhaps you'd like to
find out just how well the medicine you were given works?”

Opening the door, he calls into the hallway, “The patient is unstable. We need some Dilameth in here, right now.” Moments later, a team of nurses files into the room.

“After you have administered the Dilameth, you're to bring Miss Colatura over to Quarantine.”

No one understands. They're watching him. They're hesitating. They're not touching my bed; they're not touching me.

His face takes on that cutting look. Ants crawl up my spine, tunneling homes through the nerves along my vertebrae. “There is so much about the medicine we do not yet understand. It heals, but we do not yet know if it protects against future infections,” he explains. “Miss Colatura will remain in Quarantine for the next forty-eight hours to allow for potential inoculation of the virus.”

It's like I've been kicked into outer space without a spacesuit. The weight of everything crushes my lungs. “I don't want to be sick again,” I plead. “Please . . .”

Two women pin me against the cot, while a man with a syringe stabs my inner elbow. It happens the same as last time, only faster. “I hope there's enough of that medicine left in her system that she's protected,” I hear someone say. A foghorn sounds off in my head, barreling into the distance and disappearing with all my thoughts. The world becomes one giant sinkhole, and soon that falls away too. This time, I smell no flowers.

I
n my chest, the pressure unclenches. Salty brack spills over my face, sweet relief. I take gasps of the dank air, dog-paddling to stay afloat, blinking away the seawater. When I spit, I also make sure not to swallow. The brack'll only make me thirstier, and the canteen is out of reach.

“You made it,” Derek says, swimming closer. He pushes slick, reddish hair from his eyes. “What happened? You had me worried for a minute.”

Me too
, I don't answer. Derek's treading water, looking at me with those damned eyes of his. I don't know what to tell him. My fear spawned some monster I'm not so sure I'd care to look at just yet.

“There's our front door,” Derek says, thumbing toward
an algae-coated, rectangular metal chute. It drops into the water a few feet off. “I'll go first.” He ducks underwater, and moments later I hear his body bumping around inside.

I follow, swimming under the duct's mouth. When I come up for air, I'm hugged by Derek's chest on one side and metal on the other. Proper breathing is going to have to wait—the space is hardly big enough for us both. We're nose-to-nose, and that's putting it mildly.

Inside the duct, Derek shines his cuffcomm's light on two handlebars. “They're suctioned on—you can move them. I've got two more for myself. They should help the climb. You ready?” he says. I snort and shake water from my face.

He swims out of the duct so I have room to maneuver. Once he's gone, I grab for both handles, back pressed against metal. Bracing myself with my knees, I slowly make my way up. I yank the handles off and replace them as I go. Below, I hear Derek doing the same.

A few minutes in, the old, unused chute makes a T, where it connects with the newer one—a vast improvement as far as travel plans go. This one runs horizontally through the building's walls, so we no longer need to haul ourselves against gravity. I let Derek pass me, not knowing which way to go on my own. I store the turn in my mind.

We move in time with each other, sliding our knees simultaneously to cut down on the noise. I'm hoping against hope the neoprene of our wet suits sufficiently muffles our entry.

Soon, artificial light from whatever room we're passing cuts a dozen lines of shadow into the chute, and I know we're well inside the building. At the telltale gurgle of a toilet being flushed, Derek and I exchange glances. I stop breathing. Nothing like a little bathroom action to settle the nerves. A bit too much, actually.
Oh no
.

Laughter starts bouncing around in my gut. Like a Ping-Pong ball, it flies up into my chest. I can't give in. To be done in by toilet humor. Pathetic. I bite my lip and look at Derek. He just rolls his eyes.

I can't help it. It wants out. It needs to be released—I snort, I cover my mouth, I bite into my wrist, but it's already out there, wobbling around inside the metal duct, echoing like it came straight from the belly of a clown.

The shuffling in the bathroom stops.

Fear, acidic and sharp, washes over me, destroying every last ounce of funny. My laugh dies a quick, hard death, and we wait to see how bad the damage is.

A door swings open, a faucet runs. Footsteps. Another door shuts and the room quiets.

Whew
.

Once Derek is sure the coast is clear, he starts grappling with the grate. It pops out and he slides forward, feetfirst, through the opening. I follow suit, but I'm not ready for Derek's hands gripping the backs of my thighs, helping lower me down. I gasp, my body turning rigid and tight. His hands make my nerve endings dance, though the moment means nothing. He and I can't mean anything, not now. Not yet.

My feet touch ground; he lets go.

Quickly, I reach for my cuffcomm and type Callum a message:

           
Made it in. See you at the duct.

I push send as Derek hands me two of the three white lab coats he's pulled from his bag.

“One's for Aven,” he explains, throwing his on. Moments later, I emerge from a bathroom stall wearing the two coats, both many sizes too large. “Ain't no way I'm gonna pass for working here,” I mutter.

“It'll do.”

Now Derek reaches into his lab coat and pulls out a clear thimble, which he hands to me. “You'll need this to access the basement level. It's a—”

“A Print Mimic,”
I finish, ogling the thing. “Yeah, I know. DI banned these years ago. Pretty sweet score, I gotta say.”

“So you know how it works?”

“For the most part. Just lay it over someone's prints and the gelatin makes a mold.”

“Exactly. There's a scanner at the stairwell. You can pull the prints directly.” Derek glances at his cuffcomm. “It's time. Ready to split up?”

“I am.”

I've been ready since the night Voss took Aven.

“Be back in thirty minutes or I'll come looking. There's
another level below this—I'll head that way.”

It's 3:00 a.m.—I set my own countdown clock.

“Don't forget the mask.” Derek points to the rubber mesh cup thingy dangling, somewhat soggily, from my neck. Before I place it over my face, the two of us lock eyes.

I could write a book about what we say, and what we don't say, in those few seconds.

“This will work,” he assures me, placing his own mask over his head.

I lower mine too, and he cracks opens the bathroom door, poking his head into the corridor. Then he signals for me to follow.

Derek turns right and I turn left, a new worry hanging around me like a shadow. We continue to walk in opposite directions, but the nagging feeling won't go away.

I spin around in the middle of the hall, only to find he's done the same.

He's standing there looking back at me. Tall, broad-shouldered, mussed hair and bear-brown eyes. The way he's staring . . . I take a mental snapshot. He cares about me, he does. It's on his face. I don't want to ever forget the way he's looking at me right now. Everything I need to know—it's all here in this very moment.

“I'll come after you too,” I say in a husky whisper. “If you're the one who's late.”

He takes a few steps backward. I don't see the smile under the mask, just a subtle lift at his jawline. Then, he turns away. And though we lost the rope back in the tunnel, I can still
feel . . .
something
. It's tugging, pulling tighter and tighter—a line of connection immune to distance or time. Reality frays its edges but the line doesn't know how to break.

It doesn't want to.

I
f the other room was too bright, with a cold sun stuffed into the lightbulb, this room is its opposite. I come to again, hardly able to see. Round, yellow bulbs dangle from chains in the ceiling. I'm sprawled out across one of many mattresses that line both sides of the room. Some are empty. Shadows move in the background. They're people. They're also ghosts.

A woman wipes my forehead, telling me to relax. She whispers
“Shh . . .”
in my ear. Her voice reminds me of handmade lace, crocheted out of iron. “Gather your strength,” she says, but she doesn't understand.

I don't have strength. I'm piecemeal.

I refuse to look down at my arms.
What if the governor's wrong and I'm like this forever?

The only hope I have for getting out is Ren.
She
is my strength.

Just one time, I wish that weren't true. That I could do something strong for myself, without her help. But today's not that day. I have to hope she'll come. If I lose that . . . I lose everything.

As my eyes adjust to the dim light, I begin to make out the woman's features. If the moon had a skinny face, she'd be that moon. Her hair falls like chain metal, wiry and long past her shoulders. And for some reason, if I'm not imagining things, she feels familiar.

“I know you,” I say, squinting.

The moon pushes a few strands of hair behind my ear and continues wiping down my forehead. “Do you now?” she answers with a smirk. The lines in her face are deep. Deeper than when I knew her, I think.

“I do.”

“And how?”

Something about her brings me back to the 'Racks. I'm sipping on a bag of soup. I think it was this woman's goodwill that had brought it to the door of my one-room apartment with Ren.
Tomato, I think it might've been?
Cold, rehydrated, but oh-so-delicious.

“Mrs. Bedrosian?” I ask, wondering if Ren ever had enough extra green to leave her something nice in return. Probably not. We never had extra green.

“Yes, love.” She laughs and leans forward, planting a motherly kiss in the middle of my forehead.

This simple act of love . . . I want to cry. Maybe it's the
drugs—I've been half-awake since they brought me here—but I remember her now, my mama. She came back to me. The governor made me remember her. Her white lashes, the way she smelled when I was in her lap, and the way she sounded. And though I forgot her face as soon as I woke up, I remember the rest. I remember her, and I miss her.

I don't want to miss her. Missing Ren is bad enough.

Without meaning to, I shrink away from Mrs. Bedrosian.

“It feels like forever since I last saw you,” she says, and she brings a foggy plastic cup to my mouth. “Drink.”

I drink. The water tastes dank and metallic; it's been through roof pipes. I finish in two gulps. By the time she takes the cup back, I know when I heard her voice last—that night comes back to me like a boomerang.
The Blues raid.
Chief Dunn, Governor Voss's military right-hand man—he'd paid Ren a visit, but that wasn't why he was there. He was making a Transmission Arrest. He was there for Mrs. Bedrosian. Someone charged her with passing on the Blight and so they took her.

Here.
Quarantine
.

She still has the virus, then.

A ball of anxiety settles in my stomach. I don't want to look at Mrs. Bedrosian how the other lady looked at me—like she's not human, but . . .
what if the water can't keep me safe?

More of that night comes back, a jigsaw of screaming and begging. It fits together in a perfectly horrible picture.
Her husband—
he'd followed Chief Dunn into the hallway while Mrs. Bedrosian was being dragged off. He was pleading with
the chief not to take her, and then—

The sickening thump of a body falling to the floor.

He never got up.

Does she even know?

I nod. Yes, it feels like it's been forever. But it hasn't. Not according to minutes and hours and days. Time shouldn't be measured like that. Those units don't work unless you've got somewhere to be. Time should be measured in change.

I lick my lips. The water she gave me wasn't enough. It never is. My skin is so dry it flakes against my tongue. “Do you know what happened after they took you?” I ask, swallowing.

Mrs. Bedrosian watches me closely. “What do you mean?”

My heart, the thing that's supposedly a pump for blood, feels like it's pushing concrete. I don't want to be the one to the tell her. So badly, I don't want to be the one.

But if Ren had died and I was never going to see her again, I'd want someone to tell me.

Now Mrs. B's watching me like I'm something awful. A bomb, about to go off. It's too late to change my mind. “Your husband . . . ,” I begin, with no idea how to string together this hideous combination of words. “He was trying to . . . and Chief Dunn . . . he, he—”

I can't finish. I don't have to.

Mrs. Bedrosian covers her mouth, as if to keep something inside from escaping. “Don't say it,” she croaks. I nod the rest of the sentence. She shakes her head, breathing heavy. She wheezes into her palm. When she drops her hand, there's red
there, splatter painted against her skin. “No, no, no
. . . ,
” she repeats to infinity.

The shadows gather closer. Everyone here knows loss. Another prisoner gently offers Mrs. Bedrosian his hand. His frail eyelashes carry tears for her, like an offering. Behind him, an older woman with a straight, stiff back and a steel bun rests a bony hand on Mrs. Bedrosian's shoulder. She turns, stands. The two lock together. “He's dead,” she sobs. “He's dead.”

They rock in each other's arms until more people approach. Squeezing Mrs. Bedrosian one last time before separating, the older woman looks down at me.

I realize . . .
I know her too
—

“Miss Nale?” I whisper, standing.

“Aventine Colatura,” my old headmistress says, smiling—I think she looks proud, though I have no idea why that would be. She takes both my hands in hers.

“You're here too.” I glance around Quarantine and Miss Nale's smile falters.

“It was bound to happen. I've seen too many of you children take sick.” She pauses to cough into her shoulder. “Never thought I'd see you again after you ran off in the dead of night. Ren's idea, I'm sure.”

I smirk and shrug. She's not wrong. “I'd started to show symptoms. You were going to notice any day. Ren didn't want me to go to a sickhouse.”

I don't say that I ended up there anyway, after she got nabbed. Being at the sickhouse used to be my worst memory.
Now I have new worst memories.

“Are you two still friends? Excuse me,” she says, catching herself. “Sisters, I mean?”

I nod.

“I'm glad. She was there, at my home, for so many years. She never trusted me, though. I would have thought of her as my own if she'd let me. I very much hope to see her again.”

Me too.

Miss Nale squeezes my arms once more before returning to Mrs. Bedrosian's side.

Still parched from the drugs, I use my bandaged wrists to lift my cup from the floor, and I look for more water. On the other side of the room, three steel barrels with spigots sit on top of a table. I head for them, moving through bodies so skeletal that if it weren't for the tumors, I wouldn't know that they had skin. Misshapen lumps bulge out of necks, cheeks, kneecaps.

In the background, a radio is on. It's broadcasting some West Isle radio channel no one here cares about. It's just to distract us.

When I try to fill my cup, the barrels are empty.

“Orderly don't come until morning to replace them,” a teenage boy says to me. His greasy black hair falls over one eye, and I see no tumors. I wonder if he has them in the lungs, like Mrs. B.

I stare into my cup and close my eyes.

Outside, a cure is waiting.

In my head, a thought no bigger than a seed firmly takes root. I know from this second it will never go away on its
own—it needs to grow. Its roots are too deep. It wants to be something important.

We have to do something
, I realize.
Ren and me, together. For them.

The thought gives me fire.