What's Left of Me (26 page)
Authors: Kat Zhang
T
he silence was eerie. Echoes of the siren still rang in our ears. I almost missed it. At the very least, it would have covered up the noise of our footsteps as we hurried down the corridor. It would have masked the sound of our breathing. We felt naked and exposed as we moved through the hall, caught under the bright lights.
I walked as quickly and quietly as I could, but our school shoes hadn’t been made for sneaking around. They clicked softly against the floor. Finally, I slipped them off and held them in our hand.
Maybe if I hadn’t, it would have all happened very differently.
Addie and I had almost reached the end of the hall when we saw her—fairy girl in her Nornand blue. And Mr. Conivent, gripping her arm.
Neither noticed us.
Addie pressed our back against the wall next to an abandoned cart, just peeking around the corner. Mr. Conivent was only three or four feet away, but he had his back to us.
“Where are the others?” he said. Kitty closed her eyes when he shook her. “If you ever want to go home, Kitty, you’ll
tell
me.”
I struggled against Addie.
“I don’t know,” Kitty said. “With Dr. Lyanne and the security guards. Bridget—Bridget wouldn’t go and the nurse came and then she called the guards and—”
He shook her again, snapping her mouth shut. “I don’t mean
them
, Kitty. Where are Devon and Addie?”
“I don’t know—”
The cart next to us was empty but for one of those metal pans, the kind Dr. Lyanne and Dr. Wendle had used to carry their medical instruments. Slowly, Addie bent down, setting our shoes on the ground. She reached over and grasped the tray in both hands.
“I
swear
,” Kitty said. “I swear I don’t know. I—”
I couldn’t stand it another second.
I whirled around the corner and smashed the tray into Mr. Conivent’s back. He roared. Kitty screamed. Her eyes were huge, her face ashen. But she didn’t freeze up. She wrenched herself free and careened toward us. I grabbed her and pushed her behind us, scrabbling backward. Mr. Conivent regained his balance and twisted around, the veins in his neck harsh against his skin.
His eyes were ice. His face frozen. Gone was the sleekness, the smoothness. He was all jagged, fractured edges.
But when he spoke, his voice was still silk.
“Addie, there you are.” He smiled. Then, slowly, he reached for the walkie-talkie in his pocket and murmured, “Third floor. East wing. Now.”
Our heart galloped.
It was a stalemate now. Kitty stood behind us, and there was a good three or four yards between us and Mr. Conivent. If he lunged forward, I’d have time to leap back, and then he’d be off balance for me to attack. If Kitty and I turned to run, we’d be vulnerable to being tackled from behind.
Stalemate.
“We’re leaving,” I said. Our throat was so dry the words barely scraped through. I took a cautious step backward. “We’re leaving, Mr. Conivent.”
Mr. Conivent barked into his walkie-talkie again, “Did you hear me? I want you here
now
.” Then, to us: “Addie—”
“I’m not Addie,” I said. I stopped creeping backward. “I’m Eva.”
My name bubbled up my throat, sweet and clear.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mr. Conivent said.
I laughed. “Ridiculous?”
“You’re sick,” he said. “You’re a sick, destructive child, and you don’t understand—”
“I’m not sick,” I said. He made to speak again, but I cut him off. “I’m not sick. Or broken. I don’t need to be fixed or cured or whatever it is you want to do.” I took a long, deep breath. I seemed to be the only one in the hall still breathing.
“Addie,” Mr. Conivent said, louder. The velvet had gone from his voice.
“I’m
not Addie,”
I shouted.
The lights went out.
I flew forward, swinging and feeling the metal tray connect against Mr. Conivent’s skull so hard our bones vibrated with the blow.
I backed away. He hadn’t cried out. Mr. Conivent hadn’t cried out when I struck him and now—
The emergency lights flickered on, bathing everything in the same sallow light as the basement.
Mr. Conivent lay crumpled on the ground. A doll. Nothing but a rag doll.
Oh God.
Oh God.
I dropped the tray. It smashed to the ground, the crash ringing and ringing and ringing through the halls.
Oh God.
A small, cold hand slipped into ours. Kitty. She pulled us away from the crumpled body. One step. Two. Three. We had to go. We had to go. Peter was waiting.
I nearly crushed Kitty’s hand in ours but she didn’t complain. We ran back in the direction Addie and I had come, heading for the stairs.
Ryan met us on the landing, almost crashing into us. “Did you find them? Were they there? Did they get out?”
Then he saw Kitty. She barely seemed to be holding herself together. Her hair was stuck against her cheeks, in her mouth. She clutched our hand. We felt her shaking.
She shook her head. “Bridget—Bridget wouldn’t go . . .” Her voice broke, but she pieced it back together before going on. “We ran into a nurse, and Dr. Lyanne said she was taking us somewhere, but Bridget said she was lying. She said something suspicious was going on, and—” Our hand ached from her grip. From the strength of it. “Everybody ran, but the nurse, she called the guards. She pulled the alarm, and—I was with Cal, but he got caught and—there were so many people. I hid until they all went away.” She took a quick, sharp breath. “I want to get
out
of here, Addie. I—”
“You are,” I said. “You are. Right now.”
I looked at Ryan. I thought of Cal and the other kids, even Bridget, but I looked at Ryan and I knew there wasn’t time. Not if we wanted to get Kitty and Nina to safety.
“Another time,” he said softly. “We’ll find them, Eva. All of them.”
But for now, we had to go.
Ryan’s manipulations had killed the lights in the lobby, too, but the emergency lights still glowed and security guards’ flashlights crisscrossed the air. They shouted to one another,
No one here. This area’s clean—
We crouched in the doorway of the stairwell, masked by the semi-darkness, staring out into the mayhem. Hoping, praying, that Lissa and Jaime had already made it to the safety of Jackson’s promised vans.
Ryan touched our shoulder, pulling us from our thoughts.
On three
, he mouthed. I took Kitty’s hand and squeezed it.
One.
Two.
Three.
We were almost,
almost
across the lobby when one of the guards shouted after us. We didn’t slow down. I tightened our hold on Kitty’s hand.
We ran. Straight ahead. Dead end. Turn left. And there. There—the exit sign glowing red at the end of the long hall. The security guard shouting for us to
stop, stop right now—
And Jackson. Jackson materializing out of the dimness, a man behind him. He reached for me, beckoning us faster. The man lifted Kitty right off her feet. And then we were outside, we were in moonlight. We were tumbling into a black van, nearly falling on top of Lissa, who threw her arms around us, and there was Jaime in the back and Ryan jumping in after us, Jackson slamming the door before scrambling into the passenger-side seat.
We pulled away, tires screeching, just as the security guard burst into the parking lot.
E
verything happened so fast.
The drive, the airport, the flash of identification that bore our picture but neither of our names. All passed in a blur of color and engine noise. Before we knew it, we were back on an airplane, Jaime murmuring in the seat next to ours.
Kitty stared out the tiny window, her palm pressed against the plastic pane. Lissa slept. Devon—he was Devon now—stared down at his hands until he, too, fell asleep.
Odd, to think this was only our second time up in the air. We felt no excitement. Only weariness.
Before the airport, there had been a tiny motel room where we’d changed out of our Nornand blue and into clothes that barely matched and didn’t fit. We’d combed our hair, washed our face, stared at our reflection, our hollow eyes.
The man, we learned, was Peter. He was even taller than Jackson—sturdier—and we could see Dr. Lyanne in the set of his face, the ash brown of his hair. He’d smiled at us, but we’d been too exhausted to really smile back, though we tried. He was the one who removed the bandage from our forehead as we bit down on our lip and tried not to wince, then replaced it with a smaller, square Band-Aid. The bandages on our legs were easier to cover up with pants, our hands with too-long sleeves. There was a worn baseball cap for Jaime, to hide his incision mark and the staples in his skull. But there wasn’t anything that could be done about the cut on Lissa’s cheek, the bruises and Band-Aid on our forehead. I let our hair fall over our face, curtaining it as best I could.
Peter and Jackson came with us onto the plane but sat a few rows down. There had been another man, but he’d taken a different flight. He’d been the one driving the second black van. The empty one that should have held the rest of the kids. The ones we didn’t save.
We landed in a city by the ocean. Everything was a noisy, overcrowded dream. We had no luggage. There was no one waiting for us at the airport. Everyone piled into a huge van, and the ride was spent in silence, the stars cold and sharp where they poked through the black swaths of clouds.
We reached the apartment a little after dawn. Two women waited at the side of the road, one in her mid-twenties, the other about our mother’s age. They laughed and chattered until our van pulled to a stop.
Peter and Jackson climbed out. Jaime leaned against the window, whispering stories to himself, his hands twisting in his lap. Devon sat beside him, silent. I wished for Ryan, who would have smiled at me, who wouldn’t have closed himself off to the rest of us. But Ryan wasn’t there, and so I looked away, trying to focus on the world outside the window.
The road was empty. A gentle pink-and-yellow haze hung in the streets, illuminating and obscuring them at intervals. I let our eyes wander over the apartment building, tall and cast from red brick with a great metal fire escape winding up the side. Peter, Jackson, and the women spoke quietly in the shadow of a street lamp.
Suddenly, I realized what they were discussing.
“No,” I pushed the car door open. Lissa jerked from her daze. Peter’s last sentence faded on his lips.
“No,” I repeated. “You’re not separating us.”
A bubble of silence grew, round and hard.
The younger woman gave us a hesitant smile. Her cappuccino-colored hair curled like steam around her face. It would be too suspicious to keep all us kids together, she said. We’d all be close, she promised.
We refused.
In the end, they gave in and all five of us kids crammed into Peter’s small apartment. It only had two bedrooms, so all of us girls shared one room while the boys took the other. Kitty hardly woke as Peter carried her up the stairs and into the room, laying her on the bed. Jackson went in search of extra blankets and pillows so Lissa and I could construct makeshift beds on the floor. No one changed. There was nothing to change into but the uniforms, and no one ever wanted to touch those again. We were all too tired anyway, collapsing into tangles of weary limbs.
I just barely kept Addie from screaming aloud when we woke, hours and hours later, from nightmares of Cal on the operating table, scalpels tracing bloody lines across his face. Lissa murmured next to us but didn’t awaken.
Slowly, I lay back down, reaching under our pillow and extracting our chip. We were so used to having it there, now, after all our nights at Nornand. The softly pulsing light was comforting. Our heartbeat slowed until the two rhythms matched, beating in sync.
Then the red flashes began to quicken.
I’d pushed our blankets off and sat up before I realized what I was doing. I was moving so much easier now, a far cry from the painful steps I used to take. Maybe it was a side effect of the Refcon that had made things so difficult before.
Addie was quiet as I stepped carefully over Lissa and darted for the door.
Ryan waited for us in the hallway. For me.
“Eva,” he said, and then my arms were around his neck, my head on his shoulder.
“Are you okay?” I said.
He laughed. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice muffled against him. We sank down together, neither of us letting go, his back against the wall. He was quiet. I finally let go, leaning back so I could see his face.
“What?” he said, at first solemn and then grinning hesitantly when I started to smile. “What’s so funny?”
“I know it’s you,” I said, laughing, and then laughing harder because it was all so absurd. It hurt to laugh, but it hurt more not to. Ryan tried to shush me, but he was laughing, too. Our laughter was tight, breathless, wild. We held our breaths, covering each other’s mouths until we could get back under control. “It’s dark, Ryan. I can hardly see your face. But I know it’s you.”
He smiled. That much I could tell, even in the blackness. His hands were still on our shoulders, his face little more than a foot away from mine.
“And you know it’s me,” I said. He nodded. “How do you know it’s me?” I swallowed, suddenly shy. Suddenly aware of how close we were, how I was practically in his lap, how I’d never been this close to anyone before in my life. A dark, uneasy feeling snuck into me. I stiffened and looked away. But the uneasiness wasn’t mine. It didn’t belong to me, and I tried to shove it aside.
“Eva?” Ryan said. His hand moved down my arm, his fingers curling around my wrist. “Eva?” he said again, softer. He leaned toward me, trying to meet my eyes. I forgot everything else.
There was a moment like a hiccup in time. Inexplicable. And then his mouth was against mine, his lips soft and urgent. It lasted a second. A blink. A beat of the heart. He pulled away and said nothing. I grabbed his arm. This time, I kissed him and was so light-headed I would have fallen if we weren’t already on the ground.
But something twisted inside me. Something flinched, sharp and brittle. Something cried out, and before I knew what I was doing I’d jerked away, gasping for air—“
Addie
. Addie, Addie—”
She said nothing, but I heard her cry, and I started to shake. I moved away and Ryan didn’t try to stop me, just looked at me, just watched me, and I thought he understood. He didn’t get up, but he touched my hand right before I turned around, and for just one more moment, there was just me and there was just him, and no one else in the world.
But it lasted only a second. Because I was never alone, and neither was he.
I fled to the bathroom. I could already feel my control slipping as Addie’s emotions swirled stronger and stronger. By the time we shut the door, we were crying.
She covered our face with our hands, trying to muffle her tears.
Never thought she’d have to watch, feel, as we kissed someone she didn’t want to. That had been my private fear. My burden.
I didn’t know what to say.
By the time we ventured back out into the hallway, Ryan was gone.
The days dripped by. One. Then two. Then a week. Peter wasn’t often home, though when he was he brought his friends with him—the young woman with the cappuccino hair, the older one with the horn-rimmed glasses, a man with skin the color of nutmeg, a girl with ballerina poise. Jackson, who never arrived without a smile for Addie and me. They’d gather at the dining room table, conversing in hushed tones for hours. Once, on our way to the kitchen, we heard the other man ask how we were doing.
They’re recovering
, Peter replied.
Recovering?
I guess we were.
Ryan and I didn’t avoid each other, exactly. We were just never there. I told Addie I was too tired to take control, and whenever we looked at or spoke to or even passed the boy with the dark curly hair and the darker eyes, I knew it was Devon, not Ryan. He and Addie didn’t say much to each other. If Hally or Lissa noticed, they didn’t comment. They were quieter than they’d ever been, spending a lot of time alone, or with Jaime. But as the days passed, they started smiling again, just a little. Then more and more.
There were always groceries in the fridge: milk, eggs, apples. We found peanut butter and bread in the pantry, and for a while, we all lived off sandwiches. No one complained. Jaime’s tremor never went away, but he smiled and helped us make lunch, laughing when we caught him licking the peanut butter off the butter knives. Sometimes we found him murmuring to himself, shuffling his fragmented sentences around as if he hoped to piece together the twin soul he’d lost. But other times he was bright and happy, and I could see how he’d captured Dr. Lyanne’s heart like no other Nornand patient had.
Then came the day when the doorbell rang and it wasn’t the young woman with the cappuccino curls or the man with the dark skin. It was a tired woman with ash-brown hair in a loose ponytail, carrying a single suitcase and wearing uncomfortable-looking shoes.
She and Peter looked at each other for a moment, their faces so similar and so different, all at once. Then she looked at us and Hally sitting at the table, eating breakfast. The others hadn’t woken up yet.
Dr. Lyanne gripped her suitcase and stepped inside, pausing just beyond the threshold. There was a tremor in her mouth that she quickly quashed. She said nothing, as if daring someone to judge, someone to say she couldn’t go any farther, that she had to leave. But Peter just moved out of her way, a smile brushing his lips.
We sat on the fire escape. Over the last dozen days, we’d started spending more and more time there. It was the only way to get real, direct sunlight without leaving the apartment, which we weren’t allowed to do yet. Of course, it was almost sunset now, so we wouldn’t be getting a tan, but the air was still warm.
We used to spend a lot of time on the fire escape when we still lived in the city. The air had been chillier there, the streets busier, but the fire escape had allowed the same sense of peace and freedom it did now. We’d forbidden Lyle from following us, had claimed it as our own spot, and whenever he’d thrown a fit about it, Dad had nearly always taken our side. Maybe he’d understood our need for space, or maybe he’d wanted to keep Lyle away from us, or maybe he’d just thought the fire escape was too dangerous for a little boy—I’d never know. But right now, I’d have given anything to have our little brother here, flinging himself about the small space with his usual lack of abandon, calling us to look at this or that.
I’d have given anything to know Mom was just beyond the window, checking from time to time to make sure we hadn’t managed to hurt ourself somehow. I’d have given anything to know I’d be seeing Dad tonight, that our family would take us back and we’d all somehow run away and be safe somewhere. Except, even then, there would be Ryan. There would be Ryan and his family, and there would be all the other hybrid kids in all the other hospitals, all the other institutions, to think about.
The window slid open behind us, screeching a bit as it always did, the hinges whining for oil.
“The others are calling you for dinner,” Dr. Lyanne said, and I nodded.
She lingered at the window, looking out at the red sky like we were. Before I realized what I was doing I said, “Haven’t you come out here yet?”
She hesitated, then edged her way onto the fire escape. Her heels made her wobble, and I hid a smile.
“It’s pretty,” I said, turning back to the busy streets far below, the cars zooming by in clouds of exhaust, the people crossing this way and that. Addie preferred portraits to landscapes, but maybe one day she’d humor me and paint the scene beneath us. There wasn’t any point in hiding that part of her anymore.
“It is pretty,” said Dr. Lyanne.
A moment of silence stretched and stretched. Finally, I said, “What happened at the hospital?”
Dr. Lyanne leaned against the railing next to us, her hair loose around her shoulders. It hid some of her face’s sharper lines. “Nothing really,” she said. “The children are gone.”
“Gone?” I stared at her. “Gone where?”
“To institutions.”