The Unquiet (10 page)

And this is not his fault.

She
cared about him. I cannot. If this continues much
longer, if I have to marry this boy one day, he will probably be the husband I pretend to smile at, pretend to want to kiss. That life is a good ten years away, I hope, but that does not keep me from wanting to yell, “Go away.” He deserves better, but to tell him so would be to break protocol. I am not allowed to break protocol. I am not allowed to set him free.

Da and Philip switch boats, with Da going to sit next to Pierre. Even from our boat I can tell that he is not happy when Pierre wants to talk about the other Earth instead of fishing. Pierre says that when the Silence first started, he went out and bought as many guns as he could find. Filled his basement with them. “Gotta protect my family, you know? I said, ‘Let those bastards come and see what we are made of.'”

I do not catch Da's response, but I see the way he flinches. My grandfather is the kind of man who wants to believe only in things he can see. The idea that the war has already arrived, that it is right on his doorstep, would be incomprehensible to him. Worst of all, any interactions he might restart with his alternate once communication is reestablished will only remind him that Gigi is sick. And if Gigi is perfectly healthy on the other Earth, then he would rather not know it.

We haven't talked about what the end of the Silence could
mean for our family, but I am sure that if there were an opt-out plan, Da would never speak to his alternate again.

Even Cecily isn't all that interested in meeting her alternate.

“That is exactly why your family was chosen,” my handler, Miss Odette, told me when we met. “Your grandfather has no interest in starting any trouble. It is the perfect place for a sleeper to hide.”

I wonder. If Da were a little more like Pierre, obsessing over the other Earth and stashing dozens of guns in some basement, would I even be here?

We row past a man in a small boat. He is wearing a suit. Looks too serious to be a fisherman. My immediate thought is that he is a sleeper, and he is here for me. Perhaps it is time, for Da, for Cecily and Gigi, and Philip. Am I supposed to kill them now? But we row right by him, and he says nothing, barely even looks at me.

I have to remind myself: I am a Safe.

They trust me.

I am so tired of forgetting.

They have not told me what will happen next. It could be anything. It could be today or tomorrow that the war begins.

I have to be ready.

The water rocks the boat ever so gently to remind us that it was here all along. That it is doing us a favor by leaving us where we are, that it is bigger and more powerful than we can imagine. It is nearly noon when Da and I go home, and he's in a good mood. Philip caught nearly all our fish and convinced his father to give us even more. Da makes up a song as we go, truck bumping down the road, and by the time we reach home I am singing along. Cecily greets us at the door with a look of fury in her brown eyes and pummels her fists into my thighs until Da promises her a fishing day of her own, soon. Gigi sits by the window, knitting a sweater she keeps saying she has to finish, a small smile on her soft face despite the pain.

I watch them. I watch us. And I do not once think,
One day you all are going to die.
And I do not think,
Soon.
No. And I definitely do not think,
Because you're not my real family at all.

When I have a mission to complete at night, I drug them, especially Da. Nothing powerful, just enough to make them think they are sleeping soundly through the night on their own. On those nights I ride my bicycle back to the city. I deliver names, deliver weapons whose use does not concern me. How the man in the flower shop comes upon them, I do not know. I suspect he does not know either. He is only
another piece in a very large puzzle. He plays his part.

Look,
the old man from my dreams says, sitting beside my bed now. And in my sleep I see the memory of a tree, of four children standing at the very top of it. It's me, Alex, Gray, and Edith, laughing. The birds swoop down over our heads in a dramatic dance. Madame yells at us from the bottom of the tree in a fury, in a panic. “The trees are meant to hide us,” she shouts. “You foolish children, come down at once,” but our laughter drowns her out. We hold hands, the four of us, best friends. We promise never to let go.

This is your last good moment.

And I agree.

We have those eyes. Those eyes that would disappear the first time we fell.

I
s it today?

Are they going to die today?

Am I going to kill them today?

Fall asleep and wake to the same questions. Always the same questions.

And the same answer:
I am ready
.

Some nights when I sneak into the city for a mission, I am afraid that I will not make it back. Since the Silence ended, our missions have become more dangerous. The people of
this world have let their guard down, and that is exactly what we wanted, but I am also summoned to the flower shop more often than before. “This is our opportunity,” Miss Odette told me. “To erase as many threats to our cause as possible. You may be needed for more missions than you were before. Be ready.”

Some jobs require a different type of look. A wig or a hat, a different set of clothes. Some jobs require an entire team of us. On those days the flower shop man will give me the address of an empty office building, and when I reach it, other people will be waiting for me. There will be a costume to wear, and I will have a part to play. Sometimes I am the only young one there; sometimes there are no adults at all. Today a mix of us are carrying out the plan. A city official must be killed, and it must be made to look as though he has had a heart attack. No questions, no answers.

Normally these jobs are quick. We never introduce ourselves; we get right to work. And when it is finished, we disappear as if we never met.

There are five of us. A college kid, in his early twenties, who still wears braces and a pair of round glasses. An older man with a greasy-looking ponytail, and a woman who looks to be in her forties. Those two come from a time just before they started training children like me. The rules are different
for them, the ones who came before us, who came before our world realized just how ruthless sleepers had to be. There is a girl no older than thirteen, who is supposedly the woman's sleeper daughter. And me. We're such an odd bunch that under any other circumstances it would be funny. But I can sense the fissures in our team right from the moment we meet, and I know enough to worry. Our best-case scenario, we have been told, is to catch the man while he is out on his evening jog. The young girl is supposed to act as a distraction, while her mother injects the syringe that I brought. As the rest of us get ready, the man unpacks his sniper rifle, which he will set up in case things go badly for some reason, in case we need to be protected. He assures the rest of us that he is a very good shot, a comment that is rebutted by the woman underneath her breath. The college boy and I exchange a look.

This is only the beginning of how badly things will go.

I wear a long red wig over my hair, a baseball cap, and clothes that make me look homeless. I color my face with dirt, and the sneakers I have been given have holes in them. We have no qualms about taking off our clothes, about changing in front of one another. That's supposed to be strange, but it's just the way we are. Each of us wears a communication device inside our ears so that we can stay in touch. My job tonight
is just to sit in the park and keep my eyes open for civilians. If there is even the slightest chance that our presence will be noticed, we are to fall back on one of several backup plans.

Everything is all set, and we're all in place.

Then our target changes his jogging route.

Not just that, but we find out that our information is wrong, and he has invited a jogging partner tonight. When we realize this, the man and woman begin to argue about what we should do next. Wrong information means that any other backup plans we had could be compromised as well. Should we take the chance? For about a minute I'm listening to them arguing over my earpiece. The college boy keeps coughing nervously, and I understand the way he feels. I'm sure these two are usually very professional and we've just caught them on a really bad day, but this is the difference between them and us, the adults and the children. We are much more malleable. We have been taught, right from when we were in the cottages, not to let our egos get in the way of our missions. The older sleepers have not learned their lessons quite as well.

There is something much more stoic about us children. Like soldiers, we leave our emotions out of it. Even the little girl watches her mother with an almost eerie calm.

Finally the new plan is decided, and it is much riskier. It
involves disabling an alarm system and entering his house, killing him in his bed right next to his sleeping wife. So we follow our target home. The woman and her daughter stand outside, keeping watch, and the man holds his syringe in one hand, his gun in the other, as we enter the house. It is a simple plan, and normally, when it is done by sleeper children, only one of us is needed. But the man insists that both the boy and I follow him inside, so there we are like idiots.

It goes badly because the man wakes up just before the syringe can enter his thigh. He wakes up and has the time to exclaim. That wakes up his wife, who in turn screams, and so that is that. Both their fates are set. The woman tries to run, and even though I catch up to her, we both stumble down the stairs. Then the gunman retrieves her and carries her, fighting, back to the bed. Tomorrow they will call it a murder-suicide, a dispute gone bad between a man and his wife.

After we are finished, it is the college boy who sweeps the scene to remove any evidence of us, while the man stumbles outside, nursing his broken nose. I tuck the unused syringe back inside the pocket of my coat and limp toward the back door, but before I can reach it, the sleeper woman outside hisses into her communication device. “Don't use the back exit,” she says. “Someone is coming.”

My heart slams inside my chest. Sirens blare closer and closer.

Someone called the police.

We have erased all signs of a struggle. The man and his wife are lying in their bed, and I make a point of not looking at them. The college boy and I make our way to the bathroom, where there is a tree leaning against the window. My foot throbs as I climb, and I have to grit my teeth to keep from crying out. I limp into the darkness as fast as I can.

We change in silence when we're back at our rendezvous spot, some of us livid, some of us chagrined. The man is swearing underneath his breath. He's holding his nose, and he keeps saying, “I'm screwed. There will be repercussions for this.”

After the man and woman and girl are gone, it's just me and the college boy. He runs his fingers through his hair. “The next time they want to give us a mission,” he says to me, “they should probably avoid giving us an actual married couple. What the hell was that?”

“You think they're married?” I say, pulling my shirt over my head.

“If they're not married, they certainly want to sleep together.”

I say nothing, and he shakes his head. “I don't normally do this stuff. They just sent me because the target's kid is about to be replaced and they needed someone watching. I'm the one gathering intelligence for the cottages, and we're lucky that kid was at a sleepover tonight. I mean, what the
hell
was that?”

I am only interested in the first thing he said. “You gather surveillance?” I ask. “You're the one who sends information about our families?”

“I know,” he says, at the look on my face. “You're never supposed to meet us. But this is what we look like. Just like you. Less heavy on the fighting stuff, though.”

I am surprised that he is so young. I want to ask how he got the job, but he reads my mind. “They pick you out right from the cottages. You've got to be able to notice things that nobody else does. And you've got to be able to do it while staying invisible. Stealing, for example.”

“Stealing?”

He grins, and his teeth glimmer in the light. “I'm really good at taking things that don't belong to me. And putting them back.”

He walks slowly with me as we're leaving the building, muttering to himself, as if he's still trying to process tonight. He's wearing a backpack, and I can see an economics book
sticking out of it. Somehow this seems to fit him better than his job as a sleeper. “I'm putting in a complaint with my handler,” he says. “The adults need to go, man. They're becoming obsolete. They're embarrassing themselves.”

“That's funny,” I say. “I'm pretty sure the adults are going to put in a complaint about us. It's always our fault, remember?”

“Oh, hell, no. Not tonight, it isn't. I mean, I know we're trying to do as many missions as we can while everyone's guard is down, but I swear I could have done this one better on my own, with my eyes closed. You're gonna put in a complaint, too, right? You're gonna tell them how stupid this whole thing was?” I nod, and he gives me an absentminded smile, and as he walks away, I stare after him. “This was fun,” he says. “Nice not meeting you.”

“Nice not meeting you,” I echo softly.

There are police cars driving around as I retrieve my bike from someone's backyard. I use the back alleys until I am out of the city. I go home and open the fridge, find a frozen bag of peas. I hold it against my ankle until the swelling goes down. In the morning I will pretend that I fell.

I
run into Edith one afternoon. I am not expecting it, even though her life is only a train ride away in Paris. And it is not that rare that Paris dwellers visit our quaint town for things they cannot get in their big city. I am walking from the bakery with Cecily one afternoon, grimacing because every puddle she finds she insists we jump in. Aunt Imogen is exploring some store, and we're supposed to meet her in an hour. It's the first time she's shown any interest in us or the outside world since she got here.

“Remember when the orchards were wet last summer?”
Cecily says. “Remember we used to do this?” She doesn't wait for my response before she jumps.

I jump, too, right into the puddles. And whenever a passerby yells a string of expletives, I am the one who apologizes. Cecily shakes her head. “Old people just don't know how to have fun. Mathieu says that it starts to happen around your age actually.” She pats my hand. “And that explains a lot.”

“Hey,” I protest, but she cuts me off by squeezing my hand.

“Jump,” she shrieks, and this time after we do, Edith is standing there covered in mud, eyes round and horrified.

She is wearing a pale pink dress that looks like it might have been expensive, and shoes that are definitely expensive, and they all are ruined. My mouth flutters while Cecily frowns between us, and then, before I can say anything, Edith is squeezing the water out of her dress. “The only way you can make this up to me,” she says with a small smile, “is to buy me a cup of coffee.”

And Cecily, whose latest obsession revolves around coffee, mostly because she's not allowed to drink it and Aunt Imogen fed her some last week, immediately snaps to attention. “Yes,” she says, grabbing my hand and dragging me along. “I saw a café over here.”

We've already had an argument about this at least twice this week. “You're not addicted to coffee; you just think you are,” I said. “But I need it to survive
,
” she said, throwing her arms in the air dramatically. If she notices my reluctance, or even the way I stand between her and Edith, or the fact that Edith and I both veto the suggestion of sitting outside where everyone can see us, she doesn't show it. “I say we sit there,” she says, choosing a spot right in the center of the room.

“You can go save our seats. We'll order,” Edith says in front of the counter.

Cecily makes a face, looks Edith up and down before finally narrowing her eyes. “You're not supposed to order here. That's the waitress's job.”

“Go save us a spot, and I'll bring you a croissant,” I tell her. I don't mention that Edith will not be joining us.

Once she is gone, Edith and I stand next to each other, pretending to look at the range of bakery goods, shuffling from side to side. A woman looks over at me from her table and smiles, but then she turns back to cuddle her crying baby. I am wary. I do not know what it means to be standing next to someone from the cottages and to have no reason for it. Sleepers who were in the same cottages might run into one another from time to time. It's the stopping to have a
conversation that is a problem. We're not supposed to have anything to say to each other. My hands tingle from fear. I have not seen Edith or Gray since the night that never happened. We both keep looking over our shoulders, guiltily, as if we're about to be caught. A permanent state of paranoia. I press my hands against my sides so my nervousness does not show. What I really want to do is wrap my arms around myself, though. What I really want to do is turn around, grab Cecily's hand, and leave.

Muddy water drips down my boots and onto the ground, but I pretend not to notice.

Edith is my opposite. Her legs are long and shapely underneath her dress; her fingers, adorned with all kinds of rings. She is wearing lipstick, which glistens in the dimly lit room, reminding me that we are supposed to be “real adults” now, or at least becoming adults, whatever
that
means. Growing up involves rewriting our faces, our hair, in ways that are still foreign to me. My own hair, I know, is matted to my head underneath my knitted hat. My fingernails are too short, some chewed as far down as I could chew. For once I wish I'd worn the dress Aunt Imogen gave me when she arrived, which is pretty and feminine.

Edith meets my eyes when she is finally ready to speak.
She smiles at me, a shy little thing, as if we were still children, and leans in close until we're touching and there is no space between us. Instantly I feel myself age down a year. It is our last night with Madame all over again, and Edith and I are sitting behind the shed with her best bottle of wine, reveling not in the drink itself but in the idea that we have it. Our f-you in a way that we could never have said out loud. “Gray sent me,” she tells me, her voice barely more than a whisper, and I snap back to reality. “He said you looked terrible when he saw you, but I can't really see it now. I'm sure it's there when you're much drier. He's never wrong about people.”

“Oh,” I say.

I go hot with embarrassment. Gray has seen me? I haven't seen him. I can imagine what they think:
After what we did for her, this is all she is?
I regret ever stopping, ever coming here. I regret this coat, this hat, these boots. An unwelcome nakedness creeps over me despite my being fully clothed. I am not as round, not as tall as Lirael Harrison was projected to become. I am tinier. My breasts are small, my bones slight, my hips nearly nonexistent. I might have her face and her potential, but I am not living up to it. Today I feel stupid for it. Inadequate. This is the first time I have ever felt this way around Edith. I almost can't forgive her for it.

I frown. “He sent you to do what, exactly?”

“Save you,” she says cheerily, clutching her purse in front of her dress.

“How?” I try to sound as neutral as I possibly can.

For her it's as if we're having a conversation about the weather. “I'm going to be your friend again,” she says. “Never mind the fact that you hate us. We've decided to take you on as our latest charity case, the others and I have, and as Gray likes to say, may the gods have mercy on you.” She smiles, but it fades quickly. “They don't tell us how lonely this job can be. Maybe the ones who know choose differently. That's Gray's favorite saying.

“Here.” She reaches inside her purse, finds something, and before I can speak, she has dropped it inside my coat pocket. I only catch the smallest glimpse of something silver. “A gift for you, and you're not allowed to refuse.”

I open my mouth to say the usual things: that I don't need help, that I don't need trouble, that I don't want her gift. I used to believe that if you stayed out of trouble's way, everything would be fine. Now I believe that if you stay out of trouble, trouble will come and find you, and that trouble is Edith. But what comes out of my mouth instead is: “When did I hate you? I never hated you.” And my voice is baffled, defensive.

I look around quickly, to make sure our conversation hasn't drawn attention.

Edith stares at me for a moment before she shrugs. “Maybe you're right,” she says quietly, and then she looks away, speaks to the ground, but not before I see the hurt in her eyes. “I suppose after a while it's okay to forget those things about ourselves—things that make us seem like less than who we think we are.”

I repeat myself more vehemently, “I never hated anyone,” but even as I speak, I suddenly remember saying those very words years ago: “I hate you, leave me alone
.
” This is one of the visions the old man does not show me in my dreams, does not remind me of. I only ever remember up until the moment I fall from the tree. I only ever remember the way Madame makes me tear up my drawing. I don't remember what I said to my friends, or all four of us crying in the infirmary after Madame had left. Edith grabbing my good arm and begging me. Begging me to remember our promise just hours earlier in the tree: to be best friends forever. Me shrugging her away because I had realized what they had not and had started to turn a different way.

I was the one who ended our friendship. Now I even remember sparring with Edith once and beating her until Madame had to pull me off
.
“Good job, Lirael
,
” Madame said.
“You fight with purpose.” Edith limped around the cottage for a month.

I don't think that . . . I am a good person.

I am not a good person.

The proof of it is emerging more every day.

Edith is waiting for me to say something. I don't know what. Finally I ask, “Do you remember a kid named Solomon, who was with us at the beginning?” I can tell I have disappointed her.

“There were plenty of kids that were with us at the beginning,” she says. “I can't say that I remember too many of them now.”

But I remember Solomon, mostly because he never stopped crying. He cried when we trained, cried in front of the screens, cried during dinner. “Solomon, shut up” was our favorite phrase. None of us were particularly kind to him because he did not try. Because he still held on to whatever he'd lost, as if it were his lifeline.

This was no later than our first month there. That is a long time for a little boy to be crying. His face was permanently puffy; his lips were chapped. He would stop only when he ate but then throw up the food and start again. There were others like him, but Solomon was the worst. Once I tried to bring
him into our group, tried to convince the others that he was just sad and that sadness would fade if we were kinder to him. But I remember he was impossible. He looked at us as though we meant nothing to him, and after that I was angry.

I did not try again.

The night Madame came for him he was sobbing mostly silently. We'd grown used to the sound and could sleep around it. I was a light sleeper, though. I heard Madame tiptoe into the room. “Come with me,” she whispered to Solomon in his bunk bed. “Let's have a talk and see what we can do about sending you back.” And they left together.

I followed them outside, thinking they were walking toward the shed, but they went farther than that. Farther and farther into the woods until I couldn't see the cottages behind me anymore and realized they were heading for the river. I remember wishing I'd worn my coat. They sat on the bank, and Solomon howled until Madame told him to tell her exactly how he was feeling.

“Heavy,” he said, “like I can't breathe. I keep thinking about Lola. I keep thinking about Mom. She was screaming when they took me away. I know you say she wanted me to go, but she was screaming. Why would she be screaming if she wanted me to go?”

Madame did not answer any of his questions, though she asked her own. “Do you think it might get better? Do you think you can try, just for a little while?”

“No, no, no,” he said resolutely. “I'm sorry, but I wanna go home. I just wanna go home.” He dissolved into incoherence again.

Madame sighed heavily. “All right, then,” she said, “come here.” She hugged him, ran her hand down his back like a mother soothing her babies, and a wave of jealousy washed over me. As it was, most of us were clamoring for Madame's attention and barely got any, not in the right ways at least. “But we're going to miss you, little Solomon,” she said, and then she said something else about this river's being special at a certain point and how it could carry a little boy like him back home. “It's like before,” she said. “You just swim and swim until you reach the point where the darkness turns into moonlight again, and then you're on the other side.” And Solomon entered the water.

Madame had strong arms.

And she never changed her mind about anything, even if the little boy did.

It was only a dream. Purely a figment of my imagination. I told myself that afterward, even as I ran back to the bunkers,
even as I pulled the blanket over my head and shook and cried and was afraid. All nothing. Because when you lived in the cottages, there were some things you should tell yourself you didn't see—like a woman digging a small grave among the trees in the dark.

When the tree incident happened years later, Madame threatened me with those words: “Lirael, 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.”

But that's not true. Sometimes three simple words—
I hate you
—work just as hard and just as well on the right people. Friends, real friends, the kind that shape your bones and claim little pieces of your soul, are liabilities, even if only for the fact that you are constantly worrying about them. Because when Madame said those words to me that night, I knew she could just as easily walk over to Edith's bed, Gray's bed, Alex's bed the following night and ask them to come with her. She would say, “Do you think you can stop being friends with one another, the four of you?” Edith would probably shake her head like Solomon. I wasn't sure, but it was a possibility, and I was afraid of it. That we might end up dying for one another.

I was ten years old then.

I blink out of that haze now and find Edith staring at me oddly. I want to say:
Do you remember what I told you that night? The night you told me Gray was suspicious of the way Alex and Margot died?
I know she does. I clutched her arm until she winced with pain and leaned in close and whispered urgently in her ear: “Tell him never to tell anyone. Never to let them know he knows. Tell him to always follow protocol
.
” I made her promise to tell him this. I never once suggested that he might be wrong; the thought did not occur to me. I knew we lived with a woman who was capable of anything.

But I don't ask.

Instead I say, “We? Who is we?” She doesn't understand, so I add, “You said ‘we'. You said ‘I and the others.' Who are the others?” She doesn't answer; she just blinks at me, but it's too late. I already understand what she isn't yet sure she wants me to know. Here we are, paranoid and afraid we are being followed or watched. “You're all still friends,” I whisper. The shock of it makes my voice hoarse.