Authors: Kat Zhang
What's Left of Me (20 page)
So why did the sheet of paper also say
Vaccinations
?
Addie leafed through the file. The papers inside were stacked a good half-inch thick, some printed on official-looking paper with fancy letterheads, others scribbled handwritten notes on notebook paper, one edge tattered. Addie shifted, then cursed as the movement caused half the papers to slip off our lap and onto the ground. She continued swearing under our breath as she grabbed the sheets and stuffed them back into the folder. I prayed Dr. Lyanne didn’t have some special order we were breaking.
It was with a sense of déjà vu that our hand landed on a sheet of paper with a small picture clipped to the top corner.
BRONS, ELI
HYBRID
We skipped his basic information for the longer report below. Someone had scrawled notes in the margins and above the printed text. There was already a sourness in our stomach—it had been there since we’d stepped foot in Dr. Lyanne’s office. But now a new revulsion crept through me—half nausea and half pain. Our hand pressed against our lips, then against our teeth. We bit down. I didn’t know if our tears came from that or the pain inked into Eli’s report. The secret connecting Refcon and the vaccinations and all the children here, at Nornand. All the children in the country.
A sound cut her off. A stifled cry. Then the squeak of shoes against tile. Our head jerked up.
The crack of space between the door and the doorway was empty.
Lissa was gone.
Every nerve—every nerve and muscle and sinew in our body—slacked and then snapped rubber-band tight.
We threw the file back into the cabinet and slid it shut. Scoured the room for somewhere,
anywhere
, to hide. There was none. We didn’t need more than one glance to know that—we’d known that since the moment we entered the office. The desk wasn’t solid but built like a table, with no backing. The window lacked curtains. The best we could do was crouch on the other side of the filing cabinet, and we didn’t even have time to do that.
The door opened.
The board officer—the man who’d grabbed us in the waiting room, whose fingerprint bruises still bloomed on our wrist—stepped inside.
F
or a fraction of a second, a millisecond, we didn’t move. The man didn’t move. He didn’t leave the doorway. We didn’t scream.
Scream. A laugh bubbled at the back of our throat. As if that could do anything. As if that could help.
The man beckoned behind him without taking his eyes off us. “Bring the other girl in here and get the rest of the patients out of the hall, along with that nurse.” He spoke in the same low, even tone we’d heard yesterday.
There was a rush of footsteps against tile. Devon shouting. Then Lissa was in the room with us, yanked in by the female board official. We could see her nails digging into Lissa’s shoulder. The door slammed behind them.
“Get Conivent,” the man said. The woman nodded, released Lissa, and left. Then it was just us and Lissa and that man in Dr. Lyanne’s office.
He watched us, his eyes shifting from Addie and me to Lissa. He wasn’t any taller than Mr. Conivent. Wasn’t any broader in the shoulders, any bigger. He wore clothes like he was going to the symphony—shirt with cuff links, a dark waistcoat, pants with pressed creases, black shoes. Our wrist throbbed from the memory of his touch. And our chest hurt from the look on his face, the look that said, quite plainly, that whatever this situation was, whatever it was we’d done, whatever it was we
thought
we could do, we’d never, ever, ever win against him. We could fight until we were bloody, and he’d still win.
And he’d come out of the fight looking as perfectly put- together as he did now.
“Jenson?” Mr. Conivent said, opening the door. It allowed us a glimpse of the now empty hall.
The man, Mr. Jenson, didn’t turn to look at him. “You said this building was secure, Conivent—that the
patients
were secure, that no one could ever go missing from
this
hospital.” Even when he inflected his words, his tone hardly changed. His expression never so much as flickered. “But apparently, this one was unaccounted for long enough to get in here.” Jenson didn’t wait for a response. “Whose office is this?”
There was the briefest of pauses before Mr. Conivent opened his mouth to answer, but another voice spoke for him.
“It’s mine.”
Dr. Lyanne came to the doorway. She looked at Mr. Conivent. He looked at her. Then, with a jerk of his arm, he gestured her inside. The office, never large, now seemed crushed to the brim though no one so much as touched.
“Close the door,” Jenson said, and it was done. Mr. Conivent stayed on the other side.
We pulled each breath like a saw from our lungs.
“It’s not policy here to lock your office when you leave?” Jenson said.
“I was only gone a moment,” Dr. Lyanne said. Her voice was quiet but cool. “I’d planned on returning immediately.”
“The nurse on duty does share a portion of the blame,” Jenson said. And finally, his gaze flickered from us to Dr. Lyanne. It was like being released from some crushing weight, like surfacing from the bottom of the ocean. “What I’d like to know is why these patients wanted to access your office.”
Dr. Lyanne studied us. “Perhaps we should ask them.”
“They would lie,” said Jenson. “And it would waste time.”
Now Dr. Lyanne’s eyes moved toward the pile of manila folders on her desk. I realized with a flip of the stomach that we’d left them in a messy pile instead of stacked. She scrutinized us next, and by extension, the filing cabinet. Wordlessly, she walked over and began pulling the drawers open. There were only two. When she got to the bottom one, she saw the file lying on top, the one we hadn’t had time to shove back.
I was still trying to come up with something to say. Or someplace to run—we could just push Dr. Lyanne aside, grab Lissa’s hand, and
run
.
Dr. Lyanne looked up at us.
“Give it here,” Jenson said. She picked the file up and handed it over. He flipped it open, and we had to stand there, Addie and I and Lissa, as he read through the pages, and every moment I just wished for death because the fear and the unknowing were making us so sick we couldn’t breathe.
Finally, the man looked up again and examined our face. Eli’s report had been on top, and he held it up now, watching us carefully, and we tried,
tried
to keep our expression neutral, but we couldn’t. The room blurred slightly. Our skin pricked with heat.
“Interesting case,” he said.
“It’s in the
vaccinations
,” Addie blurted, and the room blurred more. We struggled to keep from blinking, because if we blinked, we might cry—really start crying—and that would just be another sign of weakness before this man, who showed absolutely none.
Dr. Lyanne straightened. Lissa was still by the door, so still and quiet she might have been furniture. But her gaze was pinned on us. Not the board official. Not Dr. Lyanne. Us.
We released the edge of the filing cabinet. “Those vaccinations everybody has to get as babies . . . you put something in it to—” Our breaths stuck in our throat. We had to pause for air. A tear fell. “To kill off one of the souls. To keep people from being hybrid—”
Hybridity was genetic. Everybody knew that.
But the rest of the world—the rest of the world was so predominantly hybrid, and there were so, so few hybrids here, and we’d always thought—we’d always thought it was just a matter of genetics, a matter of like begets like, the way they’d taught us in biology, but it wasn’t that way at
all
—
“It’s not like that,” Dr. Lyanne said. “Most people in this country would lose their recessive soul anyway. The vaccines just . . . they help it along—”
“They’re
sick
,” Addie cried. “They’re poison. You’re poisoning us. All of us.” We stared at Jenson through blurry but steady eyes. “And when it doesn’t work—when there’s someone like Eli, or Cal, or us—then you go and round us up and you try again. And sometimes, you even get to choose who you’d like to die.”
There were dominant souls and there were recessive souls. Chosen before birth. Written into our DNA. A
natural process
, our guidance counselor had stressed during all those sessions. Unchangeable. Irrefutable.
Certainly not something to be decided by doctors, here in the cold halls, under the blinding white lights.
“Who was the one who decided Eli wasn’t fit for society?” Addie asked Dr. Lyanne. “Who decided he wasn’t good enough? Who told Cal he’d have to take his place and answer to a false name for the rest of his life? You?”
I thought I saw Dr. Lyanne flinch. Addie must have seen it too, because she straightened a little.
“Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Jenson asked, and his expression was so carefully composed it was almost bored.
“Who knows about this?” Addie said softly. “My parents didn’t—I know they didn’t. Nobody but you kind of people know, do they?”
We stared at Jenson, and he stared back at us.
He called for security guards after that.
They locked us in our room first, so we didn’t see what happened farther down the hall. We just heard Lissa scream and a door slam—and Lissa never stopped screaming.
“Lissa?” Addie said. We pounded against the door, then the wall that separated us from her. “Lissa?
Lissa?
”
She didn’t reply. She sobbed and we could hear her through the wall, but she
didn’t reply
and we didn’t know what had happened, we didn’t know what was wrong.
“Lissa?”
The doorknob rattled in our hands but didn’t turn.
“Open the door,”
Addie screamed.
“What did you do? What did you do to her?”
No one came. Lissa kept crying. We stalked from one end of the room to the other and back again and back again and there was
nothing
, there was no way out. No way to get to her.
Addie didn’t hesitate. She didn’t pause. She picked up the small, wooden nightstand beside our bed and smashed the window to pieces. Glass flew everywhere, clattering to the courtyard below. We stretched out, and we could just reach Lissa’s window, so we smashed that one, too, with a wild swing that almost jolted the nightstand right out of our hand. There were no bug screens. These windows were not meant to be opened.
There were no alarms, either, though I didn’t think of that until we were already climbing out the window. The wind whipped at our hair. We’d gotten rid of most of the glass on the sides and bottom, but our legs and hands were bleeding by the time we found a place to put our foot on the outside of the building.
The sky was all peaches and cream, marred only by a giant, lazy swirl of bloody raspberry right through the center.
We didn’t look down. We were three stories up, and a part of me laughed hysterically. This was ripped right out of Lyle’s adventure books. But in adventure books, no one ever died falling off a window ledge trying to sneak into a room three feet away. We had no such security.
We held our breath and let go of the sill with one hand to grab the edge of Lissa’s window. We hadn’t cleared the glass enough, and a shard bit into our skin, but we didn’t let go. We swung one foot up to the edge of the window and pushed hard, hard with the other and tumbled into Lissa’s room, cut up and bleeding but more or less intact.
Lissa gasped. She had tears on her cheeks and a mouth falling open and her glasses askew. She stared as we said, hoarsely, “Are you okay? Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
L
issa had red marks on her arms from where the security guard had grabbed her and a cut on her hand from I didn’t know what, but otherwise she seemed okay, and we couldn’t imagine what had happened to make her struggle like that, to make her scream like that, until she flew into our arms and cried,
“They’re going to do it to me next. They’re going to cut into me next.”
“What?” Addie grabbed her shoulders.
Lissa was shaking. “The man from the review board. He said—Oh my God, Addie, you’re
bleeding.
The
window.
”
“Forget the window,” Addie said. I’d never heard our voice sound so hard and fierce and cold. Never in our life. “What did he say? Exactly.”
“He said we would be a good candidate for surgery,” Lissa said.
Our hands and legs throbbed where the glass had cut, but other than the gash on our hand, nothing seemed too deep. Addie collapsed onto one of the beds, staining the sheets with our blood. “They can’t,” she said, two words on a breath. “Why you? Why not us? We were—I was the one who actually—”
Lissa hadn’t sat down. Her tears were disappearing now, replaced by a sort of heat that burned through her eyes and her voice as she said, “Addie, Addie,
look
at me
.
”
We did. We looked at her and saw her wide-framed black glasses with the artsy white rhinestones, her thick, curly hair, her long hands and small feet and sharp nose.
“Addie,” Lissa said, and now she sounded tired, so tired. “My father can’t find a decent job because no one will hire him. My mother’s parents send money because they’ve got enough of it to throw around, and their conscience is at least that strong, but I’ve never met anyone on that side of the family. They’ve never wanted to meet us.” She came and sat beside us on the edge of the bed, bunching up the sheet and pressing it against our hand to stanch the bleeding. Addie flinched but didn’t draw away. “Addie,” Lissa said. “Don’t you see? They think our lives are all worthless because we’re hybrids, but for us, it’s worse than that. If they operated on you, someone might still care. If your parents complained and kicked up a fuss, there’s a tiny chance someone might listen.” She took a shuddery breath. “But us? Or Devon and Ryan? No one would care about us.”
No one would care about a half-foreign, hybrid child. The government could do whatever it wanted, and no one would say a thing. They could destroy the Mullans, rip them out of their house, take away every last cent, throw them into jail on a technicality, and no one would blink, no one would question it. It would almost be expected. I could hear the whispers that would arise, the relief.
I’d always known they were up to something,
they’d say.
Didn’t I keep telling you? A family like that . . . They had to be up to something.
“Well, it’s wrong,” Addie said. “It’s all wrong.”
I couldn’t remember the last time Addie had hugged someone other than our parents or Lyle. Not willingly. Not on purpose. But she put our arms around Lissa now. “I shouldn’t have gotten you involved,” she said into her shoulder.
“Hey,” Lissa said softly. “I’m the one who got
you
involved.”
It was at that moment, our chin resting on Lissa’s shoulder, that we looked through the ruined window and saw a nurse on the other side of the building, across the courtyard. Staring back at us. We couldn’t see her clearly enough to make out her expression, but there was no mistaking the flash of her wrist, the black walkie-talkie. The obvious call for help.
Addie jerked backward.
Lissa started, then spun around, following our gaze. “You’ve got to get back to your room,” she said, then laughed at the ridiculousness of her own suggestion. As if that would help, considering the state of the windows, the state of our hands and legs.
“Help me move this.” Addie grabbed one end of the bed and attempted to ignore the new stab of pain. “Hurry.”
The steel frame was heavier than it looked and screeched every foot of the way across the floor. We were barely strong enough to shove the bed against the door, and by the time it was jammed against the wood, Addie was breathing hard. She let go of the bed frame to brush our hair out of our face, and I tried not to pay attention to the bloody handprint we left on the metal.
“Now the other,” Addie said, and soon the second bed was jammed against the first.
“What now?” Lissa said.
What now? The beds were against the door, but that only kept
them
from getting in—and only for so long. Addie ran to the window. Going back to our room wouldn’t do any good. That door was locked, too. Below us was a three-story drop and hot, hard concrete. We could maybe break the window on the
other
side of Lissa’s room and try getting out through there, but just as Addie went to grab one of the nightstands, we heard the unmistakable sound of someone starting to unlock Lissa’s door.
Down was impossible. Sideways was useless.
A half-formed memory swam in my mind, something I’d seen—we’d seen—that I had to remember. Something important.
“Addie—” Lissa said as the pounding started, the shouting,
Open up! Get away from the door!
“Addie!”
Then it came to me. The first day. Before we’d ever stepped foot in Nornand’s sanitized halls. We’d seen someone on the roof.
Addie stuck our head out the window and craned our neck. Yes—yes, we could, maybe. There was a small overhang not far above the window, and if we were careful, if we were very, very careful, we could reach it and, from there, get onto the roof.
This was ten times crazier than what we’d just done getting to Lissa’s room from ours, but now that we knew what they were planning to do to Lissa, how could we stay and wait for them to take her away?
“Come on.” Addie darted over and grabbed Lissa’s hand. “We’re going up.”
“Up?” she cried.
“To the roof,” Addie said grimly as the pounding got louder, more rhythmic, like some sort of battering ram. The beds screeched toward us, bit by bit.
“And what do we do once we’re on the roof?” Lissa said, staring at us. “We’ll just be stuck there.”
Addie explained about the men we’d seen our first day, speaking as quickly as she could. “They got up there somehow, and it certainly wasn’t through breaking windows. So there’s got to be another way down to the ground.”
“What if they had a ladder?” Lissa said. “What if they block all the ways down? And we can’t just leave my brother—”
The door was open half a foot now.
“There’s no other way,” Addie said. “I’ll go first. Then I’ll pull you up. Lissa—
Lissa
, listen to me.”
“But Devon and Ryan—”
“
Lissa,”
Addie shouted. “Lissa, they would want you to go. You can only help them if you go.”
Lissa threw one last look toward the door, her lips thin, then nodded. Addie took a deep breath.
We prayed that the last thing we saw on this green earth wouldn’t be the side of the Nornand Clinic of Psychiatric Health as we plummeted to the ground.
“Careful,” Lissa whispered as Addie eased out of the window. We’d never been athletic. We’d never played sports or run track or even danced. What we had done a lot, as a kid, was climb trees. I’d loved it, loved the shade of the leaves, the feel of the bark, the smell of sap and dirt and sunlight in the park.
I pretended we were climbing a tree as Addie grabbed hold of the overhang far above our head and gritted our teeth as our wounded palm scraped against the concrete. We’d have to rely mostly on arm strength to pull ourself up. Us, who’d never been able to do a single pull-up in gym. But we’d never had a team of security guards breaking down a door to motivate us, and as I whispered encouragement and prayed and hoped, Addie reached up with our other hand, held on as tightly as we could, and then launched upward with our feet.
There was a terrible moment of weightlessness. Of hanging in the air. Of not knowing, of scrambling with our arms, our elbows, our fingers, for purchase against tiles. Of blind panic and the thought that this was it; it was all over. And then we stopped sliding. Addie grabbed on. And with a wrench that made our muscles scream, she hauled us up and over and onto the overhang.
The sky was awash with color. Violet. Red. There wasn’t time to drink it in. There wasn’t even time to catch our breath.
“Lissa!” Addie shouted and reached down. “Grab my hand!”
We yanked Lissa up beside us just as the bedroom door shattered.
The wind battered our faces as we tore across the roof, whisking the sweat from our forehead, our brow, our neck. Every step clanged. Every breath hurt. But we couldn’t stop. We had to find a way down. Any way down.
The roof seemed enormous, and it wasn’t all flat. Nornand was a building of odd angles, of strange protrusions that hid parts of the roof from sight. We didn’t like looking over the edge of the building, but we had to, searching for some kind of fire escape or built-in ladder or
something.
Something.
Something flashed in the dwindling sunlight. Something metal. Addie darted toward it, but Lissa was faster. It was a hatch. A metal hatch that led back into the building.
And just as Lissa reached down to grab the handle, the hatch flew open and a security guard climbed out.
Lissa lurched away, spinning around and running full tilt back toward us, but she wasn’t fast enough. The guard grabbed her around the waist. She screamed. We launched forward and smashed into the security guard’s side. The man grunted but didn’t seem particularly hurt.
“Let go!” Lissa said. Her legs flailed—kicking, thrashing.
“Some help?” the guard shouted. The roof rang with flying footsteps. Another second and two more men surrounded us. Black-clothed. Hard-faced.
“
Stop
,” Lissa said. “Let
go
!”
“Calm down,” one of the new men said. “No one wants to hurt you.”
He eyed Addie and me as he spoke, moving closer and closer. We backed away. One step. Two.
“Let her go,” I said, our eyes flickering to Lissa. “He’s hurting her.”
“He’s not,” the man said. Another inch forward. Another. Another.
Lissa screamed. I flinched, scrambling back two or three feet.
And discovered with a sudden weightless, breathless shock that there was nothing there.
Our head jerked around. I flailed for balance.
“Addie!” Lissa shouted.
The sky was deep, deep purple.
I swallowed one last breath.
And felt the security guard’s fingers just slip through ours as we tumbled backward off the roof.