As I Wake (12 page)

Read As I Wake Online

Authors: Elizabeth Scott

Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Psychology, #Love & Romance, #Cognitive Psychology, #Law & Crime

BOOK: As I Wake
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“Oh,” he says, and his voice is quiet. Horror-filled. “But the crèche isn’t—it’s real?”
I nod. “I was—I was born in it. Lived there until I got lucky and got out, got sent to training.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and touches the letter on my skin, gently, so gently.
No one has ever done that. No one has ever touched the scar. No one has ever said they were sorry.
When he picks up one of the bowls of noodles and offers it to me again, I take it. We eat in silence, watching each other the whole time.
I do not write anything about what happened—the food, what he said, what I let him see about me.
I keep it all to myself. A secret, when I know there are supposed to be none. When I know what they can cost.
I can’t sleep that night but I don’t go out. I lie in the dark, and when the sun comes up, faint yellow breaking open into the watery gray of day, I get up and eat breakfast, then go for a walk in the park.
I do this every morning, but on my way to the park I can hardly think, I am so tired and frightened. I am scared of what might happen.
I am scared of myself, and what I am hoping.
I sit down on a bench and look at the grass. It is dying. The grass is always dying. It is brought in to the park in long strips from the country, and rolled out and watered. I have heard people bet on how long it will last. Something in the soil here kills it.
The morning watch team comes by, stopping to tie their shoes when they see me. I rub my nose to let them know I’ve seen nothing and they move on.
Morgan shows up as they leave. I am not surprised when he sits down next to me.
“Are you all right?” he says, and that surprises me.
I fold my hands together so he won’t see them shaking and say, “You and I, we shouldn’t—”
“Ava,” he says, and gives me a tiny, lopsided grin. “You’ve said that before, you know.”
I do. I don’t know how, but I do. But I have to say it again.
And I do. “No, I mean you shouldn’t—you shouldn’t want to talk to me.” I look at him. “You know why I’m there, you’ve always known that. And now you know what I am. Where I come from.”
“I wasn’t going to talk to you,” he says. “At least, that was my plan. I was going to say hello, then grab your equipment and toss it into the street.”
I stare at him, horrified. He would die for that and I—well, death would have been a sweet dream for me. “You—”
“I hate what this—” He moves one hand out slightly, just slightly, indicating everything, the park, the whole world. “I hate what all this is. But then—” He shrugs.
“But then what?”
“You said hello back,” he says. “I didn’t think you would do that.” He looks away and then looks back at me, his grin showing again, but slightly bigger this time. “I don’t mind you watching me.”
I feel my face heat. “I’m not—I don’t see you. I’m just listen.”
“Is anyone . . .” He trails off, and circles an index finger around slowly.
“No,” I say. “No one is listening now.”
“So if I asked you to tell me your real name, would you do it?”
“No,” I say, and look straight ahead, at the shriveled grass.
“What if I asked you if you like oranges? Could you tell me that?”
“Yes.”
He grins again. “So there’s one thing I can ask you, then.”
I stand up, and he does too.
“I don’t have a name,” I say. “I’ve always been Ava.”
“And if there’s more than one Ava in the room?”
“There never is,” I say. “Ava is a crèche name. As soon as you are given permission to change it, you do.”
“You didn’t.”
“No,” I say, “I didn’t.”
When I walk away, he does not follow me, but when I look back he is still there, looking after me.
The next time I go to the attic—to work, I remind myself on the way there, to work—he is silent for a long time after I get there. I think he is reading, although I am not sure. I report that he is anyway.
“You never asked for permission to change your name, did you?” he says, breaking the silence, and hearing his voice in my ears is a surprise. He almost sounds like he is here, with me.
As if he is talking to me, and I know that he is.
I do not write anything down, and I rewind the last few moments of the recording, noting a glitch, and replace that question with silence.
Later, the attic door opens, and I turn toward it.
“I never asked,” I say. “Ava is my crèche name, but it’s also my real name. My mother must have—I guess she knew I’d end up there, and so she called me that. It’s all . . . it’s all I have of her.”
He walks toward me, not looking at the equipment, or the papers. He is looking just at me and when he reaches me he sits on the floor, and holds out both hands, curled into fists and facing down.
“Pick one,” he says, and as if we are playing a child’s game, I do.
He turns the hand I tap over, and opens it. Inside is an orange, small and slightly shriveled, but still bright even in the attic gloom. My vision blurs, eyes burning, and I see Morgan waiting for me, sitting on top of a wall, wearing some strange pants that end at the knees, an orange in hand, a smile on his face. I see him handing me one in the desert, his face gleaming in the sun.
“I—I saw . . . I don’t know how to explain it.”
“The weird pants? And the desert, with all the sun?”
I nod. “What—what is that?”
“I don’t know.” But I think we both do and there is a deep, charged silence for a moment. For how we are. For how we see each other and it—we see each other all the way through . . . I don’t know.
He clears his throat. “Anyway, I hoped the yes meant yes, you like them,” he says, and that’s when I know nothing will ever be the same again.
And that I don’t care.
30.
 
WAKE UP.
Everything is gone; the room, the orange, Morgan, and a moment I know. That I remember.
That changed me.
Greer is leaning over me, frowning.
“Wake up,” she says and Sophy says, “Her eyes are open, Greer. I don’t think you have to keep saying it.”
“You fainted again,” Greer says, ignoring Sophy and looking at me. “That’s twice in something like twenty seconds, Ava. No, wait, maybe you shouldn’t sit up.”
I do anyway, head spinning, and press my hands to my face to block out the world, to try and figure out what’s real and what isn’t. What I know and what I don’t.
My hands smell like orange.
I start to shake.
Morgan.
I pull my hands away from my face, and Greer and Olivia and Sophy are watching me, Olivia looking worried, Greer looking worried and a little annoyed. I can’t read the expression on Sophy’s face at all.
Ethan is standing a little farther away, a blank, almost angry but more resigned light in his eyes that goes softer, kinder as he sees me looking at him. He knows what it’s like to be—to be hurt. I know that.
I stand up, shivering, and they all reach for me, all of their hands are reaching for me, and I take a step back and then another and another.
And then I turn around and run.
Once I’m away from school—away from them—I slow down, trying to think as I walk along the road Jane uses to drive me to school. It takes me through neighborhoods full of houses that look just like the one she lives in, a whole tiny universe of sameness, and although I keep expecting to see someone, I don’t see anyone.
There’s just me.
I take a deep breath, startled to realize I’m still shaking. Whatever happened to me just now has gotten to me, broken past the fragile shell I’ve built. More than my memory is gone. My soul has wings that beat to a heart I don’t understand and I see things, feel things that I know aren’t from here, but that are so real.
That are more real than Jane and the life she has made for me.
I turn onto Homeway Lane, onto Ava’s street, my street, and see two people standing by Jane’s driveway, talking.
One of them is Clementine.
The other is Morgan.
31.
 
I MOVE WITHOUT THOUGHT
, my body dropping to the ground silently as if I’ve done it a thousand times before, and I roll into the narrow ditch that lines either side of Homeway Lane, ignoring the damp earth smell all around me.
“What did you think I would do, throw you a welcome party?” Clementine says. “You shouldn’t be here, Morgan—there’s no you here, and I know you know that. I’ve told you what will happen if you don’t leave now. Why won’t you listen?”
“What did you do to Ava?” Morgan says.
Silence, and then Clementine sighs. “There was room for her here,” she says. “Jane wanted her, and there was space, so—”
“So you just sent her here? Did you even think—?”
“I’ve thought more than you have, that’s for certain,” Clementine says. “She fits here, Morgan. She fits, and I made sure that she’d forget before.
Forget you
. Do you understand me? She doesn’t know you, and you can’t be here. There’s no you here. You can’t be here, and you’ll disappear from everywhere if you stay long enough.”
“But you won’t?”
“I have someone here,” Clementine says. “She’s—well, she’s not who she could be, but she fits my needs.”
“And you’ve killed her.”
“So quick to assume the worst of me,” Clementine says, her voice thick with anger and something that sounds almost like sadness. “I wouldn’t hurt—”
“Another you? But anyone else, well, that’s okay?”
“Ava isn’t dead,” Clementine snaps. “She’s here, isn’t she? She’s got a new life, a good one. And look, I can’t explain everything to you—there isn’t enough time—but Morgan, if you go someplace where there is no room for you, where there isn’t a you that was or will be, what happens isn’t pretty. The universe recognizes wrongness and fixes it. You can feel it, can’t you? I know you can. You have to go back.”
“Why did you do it?”
“There isn’t time for this,” Clementine says. “Let me send you home. We’ll forget this ever happened. I won’t even ask how you figured out how to get here or anything, I swear. And you know I should ask you that. I should tell the SAT you figured it out. Or go to the head of security for the PDM.”
“I don’t care what you swear or what you want—I want to know why you did it.”
“You know why,” Clementine says. “It’s my job. I take care of problems. And more than that, I would do anything—”
“Send her back.”
“She has a life here,” Clementine says. “She doesn’t know you.”
“She does.”
“No,” Clementine says, her voice weary-sounding. “She doesn’t. Go home, Morgan. Go before it’s too late.”
I hear the sounds of someone walking away, and push myself deeper into the ditch, half expecting to see Clementine peering into it any second.
“You can come out now,” Morgan says, and I look up.
The smile on his face makes something deep inside me, something beyond memory, ache.
“You knew I was here?” I say, sitting up, and he nods.
Morgan does look strange, his skin so pale it’s almost transparent in the sunlight. But his eyes, when they meet mine, are as dark as memories I didn’t think were real until now.
But they were. They are.
I remember another place because that’s where I was. Where I’m from.
I remember Morgan because I—the Ava I really am—knows him.
“I—here, I can feel everything you do,” he says. “It’s how I found you. And I know—I know you’re in there, Ava, and I know this—” He points at Jane’s house, at the road he’s standing on. “I know this doesn’t feel right to you.”
“No,” I say, and it comes out easily, so easily.
So true.
“I knew you’d remember me,” Morgan says, and reaches one hand up slowly, carefully, and cups my face, fingers rubbing gently over my jaw. “Clementine thought she’d make you forget but she doesn’t know you. You’re so strong. So—”

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