The Gift (24 page)

Whit snorts. I don’t expect him to get it anyway, given his fondness for curvy chicks with flowing locks. With my prison-pale
skin—two shades lighter than its normal “freckled and fair”—and my raw scalp and dirty baggy jumpsuit, I’m so totally the
opposite of his type.

But Emmet might like it. I bet he would. I miss him—and everyone else in Freeland—
so
much right now.

“Are we there yet?” I quip as we make our way through a portion of the woods parallel to the highway in the outskirts of a
small city. I can hear raucous cheering in the distance.

“We’re still a few miles off. The border of Freeland is constantly receding,” Whit explains. “I wonder if that’s a New Order
rally we’re hearing or a Resistance rally. Hard to tell in these parts.”

“Should we check it out?”

“Let’s,” he says. “Carefully.”

We turn away from the highway and head up a side street that leads into town. After a few blocks, we spot the fringes of the
mob, swarming in a park situated in front of a large stone building. We can’t make out their chanting yet.

“It’s all adults. Clearly not Resistance,” observes Whit. “We can’t get any closer without being noticed. We’re the poster
kids of the week around here.”

“Well, then,” I muse, “maybe we shouldn’t be kids anymore.”

Whit whistles as he figures out what I mean. “You think you can do it?”

“Maybe together we can,” I say, and take his hand. “I’ve got no plans to enter my geezer years alone.”

I remember a tidbit from a poem Dad used to read to us, and I make Whit recite it with me:

When I was young! ah woeful When!

Ah for the Change twixt now and then!

And then… it’s the strangest morphing experience I’ve had by far. Usually it’s swift and smooth, as if I’m as soft and moldable
as a chunk of cookie dough being squeezed through some higher power’s fingers. This time, it’s slow and… painful. Creaky.
As if my spine is being crunched down, and the rest of me aches in response, right down to the soles of my feet.

Whit groans, equally unexcited about his new body. “Don’t tell me this is how years of playing contact sports is going to
wreck me in old age.” He moans. “My back is killing me. And both my knees. Ouch, ouch,
ouch.
”

I try taking a deep breath, and it’s just not the same. “My lungs feel… weird… smaller. Cramped up or something.”
Suddenly all of Mom’s griping about me not standing up straight enough somehow seems to make sense.

The odd sensation of something tickling my neck makes me jump, and I smack what I think must be a spider but what turns out
to be—hair! I take a coarse strand in my newly veiny hand and check it out. It’s whiter than an ash heap!

“Bye-bye, Resistance chic!” I sing woefully.

“Well, I guess you don’t need to worry about growing your hair back,” Whit comments.

“And I guess you
do,
” I retort, eyeing his very oblong balding head.

“Or else I’m just going to have to shave my head like you.” My brother strokes his shiny scalp and patchy hair with a knuckly,
liver-spotted hand.

“I highly recommend waxing instead,” I joke. Whit responds with a chuckle that morphs into a more penetrating look of alarm.

“Wisty, I will
so
kill you if you can’t change us back.”

“Lighten up. We’ve always been able to revert, right? Not always at the most convenient moment, of course, but the spells
never last forever.”

At least I hope not.

Whit

WISTY AND I ARE CLOSE enough now to hear what these citizens are chanting about, and it’s pretty vile.

“Books equal chaos! We want order! Books equal chaos!”

We wander/hobble into the crowd and gradually nudge our way forward to a spot where we can see what’s going on.

“Books equal chaos! We want order! Books equal chaos!”

Who
are
these people who’ve been utterly convinced that books lead only to chaos, fear, evil?

The scary thing is, they look normal. I suppose they
are
normal. At least, in their own minds. They probably wake up and have a cup of coffee and feed their whiny kids and hug their
families. I spot a couple of the grown-ups here with a toddler on their shoulders; there with a baby in a backpack.

But there’s something different and creepy about them, too. There’s something missing from their eyes. They’re
alive, they’re living, but there’s not much
spark of life
or real passion.

The imposing stone building behind the park has a set of stairs leading up to its colonnaded entryway and is flanked on either
side by two stone lions. The inscribed name over the enormous filigreed doors has been blasted away, but it’s plain that this
was at some point a big city library.

Judging from the pile of books out front, it’s currently empty enough for a soccer match or a mega–rock concert. The pile
is taller than the top of a goalpost.

And right now it’s being doused with kerosene by a bunch of jackbooted New Order officials. A boiler-bellied man at the top
of the steps is speaking into a megaphone and holding a torch above his head.

I don’t know what it is about the New Order and their policy of hiring the most obscene-looking adults they can find, but
they don’t seem to be at risk of being understaffed. Take the meanest vice principal you’ve ever met, cross him with a praying
mantis, and add in a tendency to bark like a German shepherd, and maybe you’ll start to get close to what this N.O. guy is
like.

“In the name of The One Who Is The One!” he yells. The crowd goes wild at this gibberish.

“In reparation for all those who have been lost forever to the wandering of the imagination! Lost to the obscene lust for
dreams… and to knowledge for knowledge’s sake!”

My “elderly” ears are about ready to shatter with the roar of the crowd, and I have to plug them.

“As punishment against those who have squandered their duty to Order and Society by indulging in the wastefulness, inefficiency,
and lack of productivity that these cursed volumes engender!”

Wisty can’t take it either. She slips up and gives me a look of complete disgust.

“And as a warning to all who stand here today as
imposters
”—I swear he’s looking straight at us now—“those of you pretenders who do not
truly
believe in everything that the Order has done to transform us and provide for the stability of our future,
you shall burn, too.
We will
find
you, and you will
burn!
”

The crowd noise is earsplitting now. “Burn! Burn! Burn!” they chant. I think one of my half-deaf eardrums actually pops.

Wisty tries to make up for her slip and chants along with them. “Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn those crummy old books!”

I say a prayer that my sister doesn’t
accidentally
make herself light up.

“Let us begin our ritual to cleanse our town, our community, our lives, of these germs and aberrations. We shall count down
from five, and then we shall be free!
Five!
”

The crowd joins in.
“Four! Three! Two!”
The ground trembles underneath their foot-stomping.
“One!”

And now the torch is arcing, end over end, through the air toward the kerosene-doused stack of books, thousands of books,
many of which I recognize by their covers.

I tense up and dispatch all of my concentration and energy toward the torch. It takes more effort than I would have thought.
But then the torch stops in midair, hovers, and then zooms straight back at the potbellied official. To my utter delight,
his hair catches fire.

The crowd quickly goes silent, but we’re not done yet. I see Wisty staring at the book pile. And she closes her eyes and mutters
something—I get only a brief snippet of it: something about
kissing joy as it flies
—and then the books’ pages start heaving up and down. Almost as if they’re breathing… alive.

The covers start flapping… like wings.

They’re flying! The books are
flying!

They cascade up into the sky with a glorious rustling sound, like a thousand birds singing with new energy and life. They
drift into the form of an enormous V, as you would see geese or swans doing, only of course there are tens of thousands of
book-birds in this flock. And then these escaped prisoners—having narrowly dodged execution—start winging toward the setting
sun, to the west. Just like us.

“They’re a protected species in Freeland,” says Wisty.

A GEYSER OF FLUTTERING shapes erupts out of the city ahead of Byron Swain and momentarily casts a shadow over him and his team of N.O. killers.
Though calling them a “team” is being too kind, or at the least is imprecise.

They had certainly been brainwashed to kill the person they had smelled on the broken drumstick that had been thrust into
their cages. They were definitely powerful and fast. They had teeth designed for tearing through raw flesh, and they had long,
untrimmed fingernails that looked and sliced like claws.

And they were just kids.
Once
human
kids. Byron isn’t quite sure what they are now. Only that they are the best of the best at one thing: killing other kids.

He is certain that any one of them could take apart a full-grown adult in a single pounce. A whole pack of them set loose
on one victim is utterly gratuitous, and The One
knows it.
It is as if he wants Wisty to be brought back in as many pieces as possible,
Byron thinks bitterly.

His feral soldiers are always hungry and easily distracted by anything that moves—i.e., potential food. So when the strange
flock of boxlike birds sweeps toward the horizon, the little freaks take off running.

“What the…?” Byron wonders, trying to make sense of the enormous cloud forming over the city.

Not birds, but… books?
Flapping books?

There is only one explanation for such an outrageous sight. The One has the power to do it, but he would never set an entire
library free.

Only Wisteria Allgood can. And she would, too.

“They’re close,” he whispers. At first his heart leaps at the thought. He can save her—it’s what he is meant to do.

And then it crashes again. There is no
point
in saving Wisty, really.

“They’re close!” he yells, this time to his crew, pointing ahead toward the majestic plume in the sky.
“Find her!”

There is no hope for him or for this world, he knows—indeed, he knows so much more than the rest of the innocents in Freeland.
So he will proceed with his plan.

Byron Swain and Wisteria Allgood will both die—together—at the hands and teeth of his own feral soldiers.

Byron hangs back a bit farther than usual. The young killers probably aren’t intelligent or experienced enough to notice,
but he doesn’t want them to see him cry.

It’s just that… his heart aches so much.

Whit

ONE THING WISTY AND I learn about looking and feeling old is that it’s not only inconvenient but really problematic for prison escapees like
us.