But Gabriel and I will be sleeping on the second floor, on a thick down comforter that doubles for a mattress. We’re welcome to stay here as long as we help out. She assumes we’re married, glancing at my wedding band, and that we’ll want to be kept together, though she strongly implies that any marital activities would be a bad idea, as there’s no such thing as privacy with so many kids running around. Plus, we’ll be in Silas’s bedroom. Maddie is welcome to share a bed with anyone she likes; there are more children than beds, and they’re used to squishing together. But I have a feeling that if Maddie doesn’t find a corner all her own, she’ll end up sleeping with us.
Silas’s bedroom is really more of a closet that was just big enough to hold a bed. When we spread the comforter out, it covers every bit of the floor. Silas seems less than enthused when he crosses the threshold and sees that Gabriel and I have taken over his space, but all he says is “Dinner is in a few minutes. After that, feel free to wash up.” He wrinkles his nose, like we’re the most offensive creatures on the planet. “Then it’s lights-out.”
I’m not hungry for dinner, but I feel a little better after I’ve taken a quick shower. I’m wearing pajamas that are threadbare, but well-fitting and comfortable. I’m trying not to think of the white sweater Deirdre made for me on Madame’s hunched, wrinkled body.
Gabriel climbs onto the blanket beside me, his hair still damp, and for a while we lie in the darkness, staring up, saying nothing. The house is full of noise as Silas—who is the oldest orphan here, at roughly my age—and Claire get the orphans into bed. This apparently involves a group song at the piano. When I last saw Maddie, she’d made friends with another malformed girl with clear green eyes and no left hand, and she didn’t try to follow me to bed, so I left her to whatever game they were playing, which involved crawling under the couch.
“I’m sorry,” I say. My voice is tight. My eyes are sore with the threat of tears.
Gabriel rustles beside me. “Sorry for what?”
For what? I don’t know, exactly. I can’t say that I’m sorry for bringing him out of the mansion with me, because the thought of being alone right now is crushing. And I’d only be worrying for his safety, all alone in Vaughn’s basement of horrors, among the corpses of my dead sister wives.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I say.
Gabriel is quiet for a while, and then he says, sounding surprised, “Did you have a plan for how it would be?”
“No,” I admit. “I thought we’d make it home, and my brother would be waiting for me. I thought, maybe—I don’t know. I thought we’d be happy. Now I realize how stupid I must have sounded, after every possible thing has gone wrong.”
“Wanting to be happy is not stupid,” Gabriel says.
It’s quiet for so long that I think he must have fallen asleep. But then he asks, “So what now?”
“I find my brother,” I say. “I’ll start looking near home.” The word hurts in a way I never imagined it would. “Check the factories first, see what kind of jobs he might have had while I was gone, and if he let anyone know he was leaving.” It doesn’t sound like something my brother would do. Outside of me, there was no one he trusted with the details of his life. But it’s all I’ve got to go on.
“Okay,” Gabriel says. “I’ll go with you. But for now try to get some sleep, okay? You’re starting to worry me.”
And because he does me the courtesy of playing along, letting me hope for something that is clearly futile, I pretend to sleep.
After the rest of the house has gone silent, I hear the floorboards creaking as Claire moves about upstairs. Silas stumbles into his bedroom, and in the darkness he manages to step around the bodies of the strangers who have taken over his floor. Water from his freshly showered hair drips onto my face as he passes.
Gabriel has moved onto his side, facing away from me, his breaths even and clear now that the drug has left his system.
The coils of Silas’s mattress creak, go silent awhile, creak again. I hear his blankets rustling. And clearly my fake sleeping isn’t fooling him, because eventually he whispers to me, “Is Grace really alive, or were you saying that for Claire’s sake?”
“It was true,” I whisper back. “We were climbing down the other side of the fence, and she fell behind. But she was friends with one of the guards there, and I don’t think he’d let anything happen to her.”
Silas is quiet, taking this all in. Then, “How was she?”
“Brave,” I say. “Smart.” I decide not to mention the angel’s blood.
He hesitates. “Did she mention me?”
“She didn’t mention anyone. I didn’t even know her name was Grace.”
I know I should be kinder, but it’s the truth. Lilac—or, Grace—is not the twelve-year-old girl that was Gathered away seven years ago. Time may have let her retain some of her old traits, and her pretty face, but it has changed her. If only one year away was able to turn my life upside down, seven could obliterate a girl entirely.
I inch toward Gabriel, close enough to smell the still-damp hair that is almost, just a little, like the ocean. I tell myself that if I ever get to sleep tonight, I’ll dream of the North Atlantic. I’ll dream of catching rainbow trout while coasting on a ferry that takes me toward Liberty Island at high noon, my skin warm with the sun.
But instead my dreams are of nothing but blackness, and the smell of burned wallpaper.
I wake earlier than the rest of the house, and I reach over my pillow and into Lilac’s bag. My hand fumbles around until it finds the page with my brother’s notes. By the green glow of Silas’s bedside clock, I hold the page over my face and try to read it. I can’t make the words out too well, but it doesn’t matter. They still wouldn’t make sense.
“Have you been up all night?” Gabriel murmurs. I look over and realize his eyes are trained on me in the darkness.
“No,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”
But he doesn’t close his eyes until I’ve returned the note and settled down again.
I listen as Claire’s footsteps ease down the creaking staircase, and then I hear her moving about in the kitchen. I wonder if she’s slept at all either. What must be going through her mind, to know the fate of her missing daughter? Seven years is a long time. Long enough to presume a person dead. Long enough for the shock and the hurt to scab over. I still miss my parents, every day, but I’ve stopped seeing their faces in crowds. I’ve stopped expecting them to come back to me somehow. How must it feel to discover a loved one presumed dead has been alive the whole time?
Probably the way my brother will feel when he sees me again. If he ever does.
I close my eyes, try for sleep. I know I’ll need the rest if I’m going to spend the day searching Manhattan for traces of my brother. To deal with the shock of how the tables have turned.
But sleep doesn’t come. I lie there for what feels like hours, until the light makes the insides of my eyelids bright beige and a toddler starts wailing in his crib, setting off a chorus.
Breakfast smells delicious, but the food is like paste in my mouth. Those bright spots of light are swimming in my vision again. But I know that Gabriel is watching me, and so I smear extra jam on my toast and force it all down.
Maddie and her new friend, Nina, have become inseparable. I last saw them spinning circles around the piano as though they could hear a song the rest of us couldn’t.
The news is on the small TV that Claire keeps on the kitchen counter. More about the outrage at the president’s idea to rebuild the labs. There are some supporters, of course, but the news favors the angry opposition. For instance, the first generation woman who has buried all six of her children, having conceived them with the hope that there would be a cure in time.
Silas mutters about the stupidity of trying, and I glare across the table at him. “Have something to say, princess?” he coos.
I gather the plates from the table, taking his just as he was reaching for the last bit of waffle drowning in syrup, and bring them to the sink.
The news story changes to a segment about President Guiltree’s lineage, how more than a century ago, citizens could vote for their president. It worked for a while, so the story goes, until opposing sides began battling among each other. Now the presidency is inherited. The shortened life spans of the new generations threaten this tradition, but Guiltree seems to think he can solve this by having as many children as possible. The fact that all of his children are sons is also suspect. Many have speculated that he is running his own private genetic lab to manipulate the gender of his children. Some speculate that he already has the cure, though I don’t see why he’d keep that a secret.
There’s a crash in the living room, followed by the hiccup and wail of a child, and Claire dashes to the rescue.
Once she’s gone, Silas says, “They should leave well enough alone,” to no one in particular.
I spin around to face him. “You call a death sentence ‘well enough’? There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a cure.”
Silas snorts, turning up his nose at me as he crosses to the fridge, takes out a carton of milk, and drinks straight from it. “Rebuilding that lab will create jobs, and that’s all the good it’ll do. After that it’ll do nothing but give people hope.”
“Hope is a bad thing?” I say.
“When it’s false hope.”
Gabriel starts to say something, but I cut him off. “Who’s to say? There are talented scientists, talented doctors, and maybe hope isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it’s what keeps us together.”
There’s rage stirring in me like paint spilled into water, making everything red. But just a few weeks ago, I was lying beside Cecily on Jenna’s trampoline, telling her there was no cure and to get that through her head. I wish I could undo that; I’d been so stricken by grief that for a while I’d forgotten myself. It goes against everything my parents fought for. Everything they died for.
Silas laughs without any humor. His eyes are languid like the eyes of Madame’s girls. There’s a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire. And I can see that he’s given up. “You’re so naïve, princess,” he says.
I have been called so many things this past year. Sweetheart, Goldenrod, Empress, Princess. I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.
“I know more than you think,” I say.
He comes close, his nose inches above mine, and I can hear his lips parting when he says, “Then, you know that you are going to die.” His eyes are searching my face, challenging me. I can’t argue, and he knows it.
