The Violet Hour (2 page)

SLEEPING SICKNESS

Dora’s voice sloshed around my abyss, swinging me layer by layer back into the kingdom of the conscious.

“Har-low … Haaaaaar-loooooooow … Wake up, little snoozy … heaven can wait, but Tokyo on your seventeenth birthday is a limited-time offer … ”

A hand shook my shoulder so hard I thought my head might come loose.

“Hrmmph … ” I slurred my way one layer higher, my tongue an uncooperative slab of stone.

I squeezed one eye open and fixed it on the two-headed blurry Dora hovering over me in my modern Park Hyatt hotel room. Japan was one of the few countries where VisionCrest didn’t have its own compound, so we’d taken over the top floors of the fanciest hotel they had.

A quick body-check revealed I was still in one piece. The flesh of my inner arms burned. Even though I knew the whole Harajuku thing had been a hallucination, I also knew, without looking, that there would be bloody rake-marks across my skin. Mercifully there was no voice, no squiggly worms. Only the low static buzz. And my best friend and only lifeline. For now.

“Signs of life! Sleeping Beauty opens her eyes at long last! Quick! Somebody get some toothpicks and prop those emerald lovelies open!”

“Very funny,” I managed, my voice hoarse. But it earned her a weak smile.

Dora was always Dora. She almost made me feel normal. I loved her.

“I just wanted to wake you up to say—wait for it—Brother Howard has a total crush on you.”

Dora got her desired effect. Both my eyes popped open and I screwed my face up into a sour cherry.

“Disgusting! You have serious mental issues.” I sat up, pushing her back onto the bed.

Brother Howard was most proud of the fact that he’d been teaching Chem since the year they invented the Bunsen burner. The only thing being crushed was his overexposed junk in the too-small blue polyester pants that he wore day after day.

“Did you see the way he handed you that beaker before the final and was all,
Here’s your HCl, Harlow
? I mean, hell-oo.”

“You’re a psychopath.”

Dora leaned in for a bear hug. She was the only one I would let get that close.

“Hold me closer, tiny dancer. You’ve been out for
days
and I’ve been
booored
.”

“Sorry,” I muffled into her shoulder.

She leaned back and examined me like a specimen under a microscope. “Tell Nurse Dora where it hurts. How’s our patient feeling?”

“Like I’m hoping you got the license plate of the truck that hit me. I need it to come back and run me over, so I can die of embarrassment.”

“His license plate, no. But I did get a good look at his incredibly attractive—”

“He? He who?” I panicked, knowing exactly he who.

“He who do you think? Adam found you in the park and brought you back.”

“Oh, god.”

Dread closed in.

“He noticed you were gone right away. We went to find you—he was pissed at me for letting you go. I’m pissed at me, too, actually,” she said.

“It’s not your fault,” I answered. “Leaving was my choice.”

I wanted to crawl under the hotel bed and never come out. Just live in there with some crackers and my shame for all eternity. Adam had found me in the park and carried me home. Adam, who for some reason had barely spoken to me since his miraculous return. Holy hell, my life was so screwed.

Dora put a hand on my shoulder, gripping almost tight enough to hurt. “Seriously, what happened?” she asked.

“It was just a really bad panic attack, like when we were little,” I lied.

Her mouth pressed into a thin line of concern. “It didn’t make the media, so you have that going for you,” she assured me.

I hadn’t even considered that. The meltdown wasn’t front-page news, but it was undoubtedly Ministry news. Mercy Mayer was probably dancing on my social grave. My eyes darted around the hotel room, taking in the Spartan lack of anything rehabilitative. No handcuffs, no straightjacket.

The Harajuku girl’s face popped into my head; the way I dismembered her with my mind. Even though I clearly hadn’t done any of the things I imagined, it felt absolutely real. I snuck a look at my scabbed-up arms. Nausea crashed over me.

I pushed Dora out of the way and dashed to the bathroom without a second to spare. I barely made it before the meager contents of my stomach splashed against the bowl.

“Hare Krishna, are you okay?” Dora’s voice was strained. I ached to tell her what was really wrong, but I couldn’t do it. Every secret exacts a price.

I came back to the bed and climbed in. “Never better. So what’d I miss?”

Dora gave me a pleading look, like she didn’t want me to pretend. But she played along. “A trip to the Tokyo fish market and about thirty-six hours of diplomatic meet-and-greets that was a total chafe. Lucky for you, Brother Howard brought along a care package of heavy duty tranquilizers in case we ran into a black bear in downtown Tokyo. He put you down harder than Seabiscuit.”

I groaned and she waggled her caterpillar brows at me.

Pound-pound-pound
.

The sound of a fist beating hard against the door made both of us jump. I looked at Dora with a sharp-edged question, but she shrugged her shoulders like she didn’t know who it could be.

Pound-pound-pound.

“Hello Kitty, keep your pants on! I’m coming, I’m coming!” she yelled toward the door, winking at me.

It was probably Brother Howard and the sedative express, under strict orders from VisionCrest headquarters to keep a lid on Harlow the Liability. But when Dora opened the door, she startled upright like a soldier to battle.

“Patriarch.” She dropped her knee to the floor and bowed her head as he entered. Dora was profoundly faithful to the Fellowship—her deviance, unlike mine, did not extend to disbelief. “May your Inner Eye bring Inner Peace.”

Right—it was my birthday. One of the only days of the year my father gave me the time of day would now be tainted. I was guessing he didn’t come bearing party hats and cake.

“You’re dismissed, Sister Elber.”

Dora scurried from the room without a backward glance. My stomach dropped.

My father lumbered into the room, slow and deliberate like a grizzly bear. His head swiveled on his massive neck and he all but sniffed the air. One of his eyes was covered by a black silk patch; the other slid up to my face and locked on. If ever there was a stare to turn flesh into salt, the General’s was it.

“Harlow, we have a brand to protect.”

“Yes, sir. I know, sir.”

I clutched the duvet tighter to my chest, trying to shield myself from the disappointment that rolled off my father in waves. Trying to hide the carnage on my arms.

The General wasn’t a bad man. The philosophy he preached came from the heart. He believed that there was a wellspring of immortal peace inside every human being that could be accessed through meditation and devotion
to the Fellowship. Ironically, he insisted on attributing VisionCrest’s development to me, someone who didn’t believe a word of it. I wished it was true; the only wellspring within me was oily and dark, covered in slippery
blackness. The General knew it; the way he looked at me said as much.
His expectations weighed a heavy crown on my head.
I wanted
to live up to them, but I was something dark. Maybe I
didn’t deserve to be loved.

He dropped into a mahogany chair across the room with a leaden sigh. It was the sound of exhaustion, from his non-stop trips around the world promoting VisionCrest while pretending everything was okay. And of exasperation. Bringing peace to mankind was difficult enough without your natural disaster of a daughter having conniptions in a public park.

The hard look in his eye softened to resignation. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of the father I used to have—the one who read me bedtime stories and told me I was his treasure. That father had been gone a long time.

“What happened?” he asked.

My eyes shifted to the swirly pattern on the comforter. I could feel his heavy stare even though I refused to meet it.

“I don’t—I got a migraine. A bad one. And I passed out, I guess.”

“And why is it, exactly, that you were off by yoursel
f
?”

“I was disoriented. There was a crowd.” It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“Harlow. Millions of people look to us for guidance, for strength. We cannot afford to show any weakness.”

I nodded. It didn’t escape my notice that he hadn’t asked if I was okay.

“I know, sir.”

He ran his hand through his hair and I noticed for the first time that I could see light shining through it in places. The wrinkles on his face seemed suddenly deeper, pressure chiseling pieces of him away right in front of me.

My heart twisted. He was my only family and I was his. That used to be enough. I looked up and met his eye. The hardness was back again. And behind it, a familiar fear—like he was afraid of me. Well, that made two of us.

“Harlow, you’re not stupid. There have been disappearances and you’re a high-value target.”

“A high-value target?” I repeated.

“Your need to assert independence is endangering the Fellowship,” he said.

His callous words cut deep, as if my life were nothing but a petty series of antics aimed at annoying him. Never mind that I might be putting myself at risk; my actions were bad for the Fellowship.

“I won’t do it again,” I lied.

“That sounds familiar. Brother Fitz convinced me to let you come with the rest of the Ministry kids. I knew it was a bad idea.”

“Adam convinced you? Why?” I asked.

“Because he’s worried about you, just like I am.”

I thought for a moment he was going to come sit on the edge of my bed. Hug me. Tell me that I wasn’t a bad person and everything was going to be okay. Instead, he rubbed his hand across his forehead and sighed. Then he stood up and walked to the end of my bed, fixing me with an authoritarian glare.

“I’m assigning a member of the Watch to keep a personal eye on you, make sure you stay in here until we leave.”

So I was going to be a prisoner in my own life—even more than I already was. I couldn’t stifle my protest. “You’re locking me in my room?”

Tears stung my eyes. I didn’t add what was weighing heaviest on my mind: that he hadn’t even bothered to acknowledge it was my birthday. Guess he didn’t consider it much cause for celebration.

He thrust his fist toward me. There was an orange prescription bottle in it.

“I ran your situation by my personal physician. He bumped up your Subdueral dosage. It’s for your protection. In case you have any other … emergencies.”

I took the bottle from his hand. It was packed so tight with the tiny tablets that it didn’t even rattle.

“Take two every six hours,” he said. “You’ll stay in your room until you’re well.”

I fell back on my pillow and let the tears flow free. What would happen, now that the medicine wasn’t working anymore? I could be stuck in isolation forever. The static buzz of Her presence began its low keening in my ears.

The General moved to leave the room, then looked back. He sighed. Then he continued out the door and let it slam behind him.

Screw him and his stupid Fellowship. I deserved love and I shouldn’t have to pop pills to get it. I threw the bottle of Subdueral across the room, and the robins-egg-blue pills spilled onto the floor.

There was one other person who’d loved me once. Adam. I needed to know why he’d convinced my father to bring me to Asia. Why he came looking for me in the park. Maybe he wanted to repair whatever was wrong between us. Deep inside, I’d always thought it was the power of Adam’s friendship, not the Subdueral, that had helped me conquer Her the first time. Maybe if I could regain it, I could fight Her again. At this point I had nothing to lose.

I slipped out of my room, and a minute later I was knocking on Dora’s door, two floors below. There was no time to waste. Even though I looked like I’d been six feet under, wrestling the hot mess fairy for the last thirty-six hours, I had to get out of my room before the Watcher showed up. And if I was going to see Adam, I needed the kind of resuscitation only Dora could provide. She was a fashion magician.

Dora’s eyebrows shot up when she opened the door and saw me. “My, my. Look at this special package.”

I moved past her, glancing over my shoulder. “Let me in. The General’s sicking a Watcher
on me. I had to split before they barricaded me in.”

Dora practically choked. “You are clinically incapable of following the rules. We’re both going to end up in a VisionCrest Sequestery scrubbing tile with toothbrushes for the rest of our lives.”

I flopped down on her bed. “Nah. That would mean our fathers admitting to their own imperfection. Their children running amok. Never happen.”

“Alrighty, Aphrodite. Now what?”

“Now I’m going to Adam’s room to thank him for saving me from public humiliation. And to invite him out. We need to go to Koenji tonight—it might be my only chance.”

“It’s about time you make your move! Like the famous king of punk, that Sid’s cruisin’ for a Nancy, and you”—Dora stabbed one black-chipped nail in my direction—“are just the Sex Pistol for the job.”

“You do realize that Sid knifed Nancy and then overdosed on heroin, right?”

“Exactly. Just like Romeo and Juliet.” Dora didn’t even blink.

“So, what are we waiting for? Make me punk rock.” I grinned.

She flicked the sole of my foot with her finger. “It’s on like Donkey Kong, sister.”

THE BLUE HOUSE

Fifteen minutes later I was standing in front of Adam’s door, in charcoal eyeliner and fishnet tights, nervously bouncing from one Converse to the other. Dora was hiding around the corner, hissing at me to just freaking knock already.

I was torn between fear of being discovered by the Watcher, who I could only hope was innocently stationed outside my room and not already scouring the hotel to find me, and being humiliated for a second time this week in front of the boy who made my heart do tilt-a-whirls in my chest.

I knocked.

Behind the door, Adam cleared his throat and a thousand-
volt heat wave radiated through my body. He cracked the door and peered out.

“Harlow?” His voice was raspy, his hair messy like I’d woken him from a nap.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt. My eyes traced his tattoos as they swirled down the side of his chest: a patchwork of blood red, moss green, and sea blue symbols carefully etched into his body. I followed the line of his hipbone under the waistband of his briefs.

“What is it?” He ran a hand over the back of his neck and squinted at me.

The gesture sent a thrill through me that started in the pit of my stomach and raced out to my fingertips. I couldn’t believe I was standing there with him—alone for the first time since he’d come back. It was my chance to settle whatever invisible awkwardness had come between us while he was away.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

His hand fell to his side and his body tensed with wariness. “Why?” His eyes flickered over my shoulder.

There it was again. That distrust I didn’t understand.

“I just wanted to thank you for helping me.”

He was stone still. Silent.

“And I was hoping there was something I could do to repay you.” I tried not to let him hear the hope straining my voice.

His face darkened. “You don’t owe me anything, Harlow.”

It was now or never. I went kamikaze and just blurted it out.

“There’s this punk club in Koenji I want to check out, and I was hoping you’d come with me. I mean, not just you, not alone, not like a date or anything. Dora’s coming, too. And also, it’s my birthday.”

Shut up, Harlow. Just shut up.

Adam closed his eyes for a second. Dark lashes against tanned skin. For a fleeting moment I was transported back to the carriage house behind my father’s megamansion. Adam and I listened to endless hours of contraband punk rock there; precious vinyl he’d stolen from the storage bunker beneath my house. VisionCrest’s home base was full of buried treasure.

Those secret hours were the most exquisite and excruciating of my life. Longing looks exchanged over spinning records—friends with benefits just waiting to be cashed in. Before he and his parents were taken.

It seemed like another lifetime.

“I thought you might like to see the birthplace of Tokyo punk. For old times’ sake. Just … please.” My voice melted to a whisper.

He opened his eyes and surprised me with a look that, just like in the train car, made it seem as if he were seeing me—really
seeing
me—for the first time since he’d been back. One side of his mouth turned up in a hint of appreciation. It was like my words fractured his shell, and a sliver of the real Adam escaped.

“Does the Patriarch know?”

I looked over my shoulder—the General’s minions might come barreling down the corridor at any moment. I shook my head no.

He looked at the floor and laughed quietly to himself, shaking his head a bit. Then he tilted his gaze up to me, fixing me with a stare that made the soles of my feet burn.

“There’s a service elevator that lets you off in the back of the lobby, by the bathrooms,” he offered. “I found a little side door there that the Watch doesn’t seem to be aware of. I’ve been using it to do a little sneaking out of my own.”

I was rooted to the spot by disbelief, unable to move for fear I’d shatter the moment.

“That sounds like fun.” A voice sliced through the intimacy of the moment, smashing it to pieces.

Mercy. Inside Adam’s room. While he was half-dressed and looking like he’d just rolled out of bed. It was like a roundhouse kick to the stomach. Her face appeared behind him, her chin settling itself into the curve of his shoulder in a way that made me want to smack her teeth crooked. Adam’s expression was unreadable.

“Oh.” The word escaped me and hung over my head like a cartoon thought bubble of humiliation.

Adam closed his eyes again and leaned against the doorframe like he was Atlas shouldering the world. Then he opened them and looked at me.

“Meet us downstairs, by the service elevator. And try to stay out of sight.”

Us.
Like he and Mercy were a club and I was not a member.

“Oh. Okay.”

Mercy reached out and swung the door shut in my face. Her singsong voice called out as it clicked shut, “Bye-bye, Harlow.”

It almost made me miss Her voice. Almost. I turned on my heel and staggered around the corner to where Dora was hiding. She was oblivious, doing the funky chicken down the hall toward me.

“Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Downstairs, by the service elevator, Adam wants you.”

I clamped my hand over her mouth.

“Shhh. Did you not catch the fact that
Mercy
was in his room and totally invited herself along?”

Dora froze mid-poultry-strut and her face got serious. I could see her doing the math.

“Mercy’s been psycho-stalking him since he got back. She probably conned her way in there two seconds before you arrived.”

It was possible, I supposed.

“He was acting all weird and intense.”

“Adam? Intense? Wow, what a surprise. Um, hi … have you met him before?”

“He only said yes because he feels sorry for me.”

Dora groaned. “Let’s just nail you to the cross right now, Moan of Arc. Are you gonna be this big of a drag the whole trip or just for your super-sweet seventeen? He agreed to go, didn’t he?”

She had a point. I was sneaking out. In Japan. To a kickass punk club. With Adam. On my birthday. Even if Mercy was going to be there, she didn’t know anything about punk rock. At least I had that on her.

“Everything is Swizzle Stick.” Dora had adopted the name of her favorite candy to mean anything that was good and pure and full of light. Swizzle Sticks were colored sugar inside a preservative paper tube—disgusting, I thought.

“Say it,” Dora commanded.

“Everything is Swizzle Stick.”

I should have been ecstatic. But the seismic rift that had developed between Adam and me was niggling at me, and Mercy’s constant presence at his side was the uncrossable moat that kept us from reconnecting. It had all started when he came back, and I didn’t know why or how to stop it.

Of all people to deliver the news, Mercy Mayer was the one who’d told me Adam was back. It happened three months prior to our trip, as I was leaving the All Knowing, the school we attended at our main compound in Twin Falls, Idaho. The All Knowing was shaped like an immense winged bird in flight, the smooth white wings of the roof capping massive, three-story black-glass walls. The sons and daughters of the Ministry were educated in the Bird’s Eye, sequestered from everyone else. Mercy had caught up with me as I took the winding staircase from the Bird’s Eye to our dedicated exit, lording the revelation over me like a trophy and savoring the moment my elation turned to hurt.

“He’s been back for a week. It’s my birthday next week—he’s going to be my second at my initiation into the first Rite. You didn’t know?” The smile that crept across her face told me the question was rhetorical.

“I don’t keep particularly close tabs on your social schedule,” I said, trying to conceal my shock.

Mercy sniffed. “I wouldn’t classify being inducted into the mysteries of the Inner Eye as a social event. That would apply more to the dates Adam and I have been on the past few weeks. Not that you care.” She snapped her gum.

Adam was back, and he hadn’t bothered to let me know. Of course, the only thing that mattered was that he was okay. I could nurse my petty disappointment in private, later. Not to mention how I felt about him taking an intimate role in my rival’s initiation into the Fellowship, which meant he had been initiated himself. Right then I just needed to see him, touch him, know that he was really there. It was like he’d come back from the dead.

Adam and his parents were the first Ministry members to disappear. Other members of the Fellowship had preceded them, but this was different. Adam’s father was the Eparch, the second in command. He was with the General when my father discovered me. Since there’s no religious allegory more classic than the abandoned baby, it was no shocker the General claimed to have found me as an infant, squalling on the steps of a forgotten temple. He said the structure appeared to him out of nowhere, deep in the Cambodian jungle. Somewhere in the exchange he lost his left eye, but no one ever spoke about it. I knew there was more to the story, but my father clammed up like an oyster whenever I asked. All he would say was,
You came to me in the Violet Hour, when stars succumb to fate and the world hangs suspended in between. Let us pray.

The Violet Hour, just before dawn, was therefore our religion’s most sacred time. It had an entire meditative devotion ascribed to it, and it was said to be the time we were most attuned to the power of our Inner Eye. Prophets are prone to hyperbole, and I concluded that my father was one for the record books; because of his talent, VisionCrest had gone from a cult to a multinational corporate religion in seventeen short years. It comprised high-ranking government officials from every country in the world and claimed a full quarter of the world’s population as its followers. What took most religions centuries to amass, my father accomplished practically overnight—almost as if some unseen force was driving his success. And I was at the heart of its symbolic center. Yippee.

The way the story went, my father had disappeared without a trace. The Eparch searched frantically around the temple all night, until the General re-emerged through the mists of dawn with me in his arms, missing an eye. The Eparch was my father’s first believer, though certainly not his last.

Given all this, the absence of the Eparch and his family was impossible for the Ministry to hide, especially as the abductions were growing bigger and bolder. The official claim was that they were on a mission in Africa. The tension in my father’s shoulders told me he was lying, and I’d heard enough of his whispered conversations to know the truth. Besides, Adam would never leave without telling me. At least I didn’t think he would.

The Fitzes were gone for nine months. I was like a coiled spring ready to snap the entire time. No VisionCrest follower had ever come back or been found, dead or alive, after a disappearance. It felt like my life was on pause—like I hadn’t slept, eaten, or even breathed since it happened. So Adam’s return was a miracle. There was no other way to put it.

“Where is he?” I demanded.

Mercy shrugged. “Probably at the Blue House. That’s usually where I see him.”

“
You
were at the Blue House?”

The Blue House was a beat-up squatter house that wept baby blue flakes of paint every time the wind blew. It housed the near-constant rotation of skate punks and castoffs that the town of Twin Falls collected like Cracker Jack prizes—most of them the severed children of VisionCrest believers. Severing was the process of being officially cast out of the Fellowship; it was like being sent to live on another planet. The house was infamous among VisionCrest kids—a real-life cautionary tale that most had never seen with their own eyes.

Adam and I used to make a habit of sneaking off the compound to hang out there, fully committed to the idea of anything that gave the middle finger to VisionCrest. But Mercy’s mother, Prelate Mayer, was one of the twenty Prelates around the world who comprised the Ministry layer below Eparch Fitz, and Mercy was a model follower. I couldn’t believe Adam would hang out with her at all, much less at the Blue House.

Mercy was looking at me with narrowed eyes. “There’s lots of things about me you don’t know, Harlow. In fact, there’s lots of things about lots of people you don’t know. Take Adam for instance. He’s a True Believer now.”

I pushed past her. There was no way that was true, and I was going to find out for myself. Adam and I had sworn to one another that we wouldn’t take the Rite when we turned seventeen. We wanted to be black sheep—different, difficult, out of step, and out of line. Just like our favorite punk rock songs preached. There must have been some other reason for him taking the Rite, or maybe Mercy was lying about it all.

“If he wanted to see you, he would have called!” Mercy yelled after me.

I headed toward the narrow gap in the perimeter posts of the VisionCrest compound; my secret escape hatch. An hour later, I was standing in front of the Blue House, desperate to see Adam but paralyzed by a gut-clenching fear that he didn’t want to see me. The citizens of Twin Falls ogled me as they drove by, too intimidated by the Fellowship to intervene. It was as if they were seeing a tiger who escaped from the zoo walking down the middle of the street—look but don’t touch.

Smooth clacking sounds, of wheels rolling over wooden seams, bounced off the river-rock lawn of the Blue House. This told me exactly where I could find Adam: the skate ramp around back. I stuck a leg through the gap-toothed fence, the weather-beaten slat scraping my bare skin. I turned sideways and squeezed my way through, then dusted off my skirt and squinted up at the skate ramp.

I spotted Adam among the rag-tag collection of grommets. He was taller and more filled-out than before. His shirt was off in the afternoon sun and my eyes lingered, transfixed. I followed the line of his shoulder and the ink that wound across it. The tattoos were like a billboard announcing that he had changed. They were strange and beautiful—and completely at odds with Mercy’s claim that he was now a buttoned-up believer. I felt a rush of relief. He was different, but he was still my Adam.