The Unquiet (21 page)

S
ometimes my body goes numb
, I tell the old man in my dreams, one night when we are sitting in the tree surrounded by water. My feet are small and they dangle from a branch, and somewhere underneath the water is orange like the sun. A flaming river, but its burn never reaches our tree.
I don't know why; it just happens. My mind keeps spinning, worse than ever, but my body holds still. I know what I have to do. I try to move, but I can't.

He nods, stares down at our reflections in the water: a little girl barely five and an old man sitting in a water tree.

I dream less frequently now, ever since Da's death. What will I do if the dreams eventually go away? What will I be without them?

They are my comfort. The only sure thing I have ever had.

I can't keep saving your life,
he says, a sadness in his voice. He holds my hand.
I mean, I want to, but I'm not always going to be there when you freeze. I can't hold you up forever.

I shake my head and promise:
I'm not asking you to. But only leave me when you have to.

A
fter walking Cecily to school, I go back to the apartment. I have no interest in the flower shop man and his missions today. Instead I search my room for the watch Edith gave me. I'll need it if Gray and I are going to look for her. I find it underneath my dresser, in a box that I did not unpack when we moved into the apartment. It feels heavy in my hand, but I hold on to it as I march out of the apartment again and down the street. I meet Gray at the same spot in the park as the last time. I can tell from the look on his face that he doesn't want my help. This whole thing is awkward. He is the one doing
me a favor by letting me tag along. I force myself to smile, knowing it looks unnatural on me. That seems to make him feel better, and he stuffs his hands inside his pockets and says, “Follow me. Do you still have your watch?”

I nod and put my hand inside my pocket, turn it on.

We walk to the train station in silence. We wait separately, and when the train comes, we do not sit together. We do not even acknowledge each other. Still, I stand in a place where I can always see him. In a way he has not changed much at all since the cottages. Taller, much stronger, yes, but with the same short brown hair and brown eyes. Those eyes watch everything happening around them without ever seeming to. By the time you figure out how dangerous a boy like Gray is, it's too late for you. That is what I am supposed to be, too, but I will never be as good at being invisible as he is.

I am afraid that he will change his mind and leave me. That I will go back home and Edith will freeze to death somewhere. I do not take my eyes off him the entire train ride. I watch him move to his door as the train nears the station.

When the train stops, Gray gets off. I get off, too. I follow him out of the train station at a distance down some streets until we're standing outside an apartment building. It is one of those forgettable places with redbrick walls that seem to
blend right into the scenery, nothing terrible and nothing extraordinary. Now Gray waits for me as he fishes his keys out of his pocket.

“Don't worry, the cameras around here are taken care of,” he says.

I follow him onto an elevator and then down a hallway.
This is a bad idea.
The thought hits me suddenly. Edith managed to fool me once, and this is her brother. What if he is worse? What if this whole thing is a test and wherever he is taking me is where I will die? I left Cecily alone. Unprotected. Every step forward becomes harder, and I slow down. Gray must notice, but he does not stop. Does not even look at me. I could turn around, walk away right now, and he would let me go.

“Wouldn't they tell you what is happening?” I ask him. “I mean, about your sister being missing, wouldn't someone tell you, especially since you work for them like you do?”

He stops in front of an apartment door and holds it open. When I don't move, he enters ahead of me, but he doesn't close the door. It is not courage that eventually draws me inside. It is the mess of papers, of image drives and television screens that I can see from the threshold. I enter the apartment quickly and lock the door behind me.

“Gray?” I whisper.

He's sitting at a table and flicks a switch. A black-and-white image flickers on a large screen. “My handler says that he knows nothing about it and that he's looking into it, but it's been two weeks since I asked,” he tells me without turning around. “He's lying. Take a seat.”

“Oh, okay,” I say, but there is nothing to sit on. This whole apartment is worse than the basement in the farmhouse. There are many more screens with people on them, and there are photographs that I do not recognize. In the strangest nooks there are dirty dishes, dirty clothes, muddy boots. I get the impression that Gray spends all his time here. Watching these cameras obsessively. I sidle closer to him, frown at the screen that he is frowning at, seeing nothing important. Only people going in and out of places, living normal lives.

“There are more monitors,” he says, “and more footage to watch. We used to record everything at the farmhouse. All these are the ones I haven't watched yet. If you can't find anything that explains her disappearance, find something that explains how they could have known. I thought I kept her safe. But obviously I . . .” He doesn't finish. He crosses his arms and focuses on his screen.

This is not what I was expecting. I was expecting to scour
the streets. To yell Edith's name out in the woods. Instead I pick up a handful of image drives that I am standing in front of. I sit in one corner of the room and pretend not to notice the cockroaches. For hours I stare at my screen until my neck starts to hurt. There isn't much to see. I don't know what I am looking for. I glance at Gray, and I'm not sure he knows what he is searching for either. But we keep going in silence.

There are images of Edith working at a restaurant. She is tall and elegant, and the men stare at her, and sometimes she seems to notice. Sometimes she pushes her hair behind her ear and laughs at their jokes. A man hands her his phone number, and she smiles. Almost all the time she dumps it in the bin right after he is gone.

I come across footage from inside their house. I lean in. Neither Edith nor her brother ever talked about their family. The only thing I know is that they have money. But neither of them lives as though that money defines them. I am fascinated by the tall ceilings and large windows in their house. Their lives as sleepers are so different from mine.

One of the recordings is dated a month ago. I watch Edith, Gray, and two adults who must be their parents sit down for dinner. Servants appear with trays of food, and after they've been served, the family is left alone. The footage has no
sound, but it doesn't look as if any of them are talking. Then I see their father stand, and he's pointing at Gray. Edith stands, too, but her mother pulls her away. They leave the room. Gray sits there with his father. He doesn't look up from his food. He doesn't ever look up, and that's probably why he doesn't see the first blow coming. I punch the stop button on that recording. I try another one, but it's more. It's worse.

I look over at Gray, who is oblivious. I can't tell, but his nose has probably been broken before. And his ribs . . .

I can't breathe.

Suddenly I'm looking through the image drives for just this one thing. Fast-forwarding until I'm there and then staring in horror, hand clutched to my throat, begging the bile to stay back.

There's an old one from before we took our alternates' lives. The real Gray is younger. Much younger, and he is lying on the floor, curled up in a fetal position. His father yells something and kicks him. Keeps kicking until Gray isn't moving anymore. The real Edith runs into the room. She sits with him until he wakes up, and then they just sit there, hugging each other and crying.

I blink at the screen.

“Wait,” Gray says suddenly. He jumps up, realizing too
late and turns my screen toward him. “You're not watching—you—these ones.” He hands me new image drives. “Watch these ones instead.”

I say nothing. I don't move.

He is watching me, and I am staring at the blank screen.

“It's fine,” he says dismissively. “It's old news. Focus on the important stuff.”

But I can't. Every blow hurts, as if I were the one lying there. Bleeding, crying. That day in the truck when Edith talked about Gray. “You have no idea what they make him do.” I thought she was talking about his missions as a Safe. I was wrong. “She was trying to save you,” I say. “All that bullshit about wanting babies being why she was mad at the people who made us, mad enough to betray them. The whole time she was just trying to save you.”

“She was trying to save us all.” He won't meet my eyes. “Watch these, okay?”

I push a new image drive into the television. It shows the outside of the farmhouse, but I can't concentrate. All that time in the cottages that I was training to be an orchardist's granddaughter, he was training for this. Training to become the son of a monster. How do you train for something like that? And what about Edith?

“You knew, didn't you?” I croak.

Gray sighs and looks away from his screen. He studies my face before deciding I can handle the truth. “He thanked me,” he says. “The old Gray. Right before I killed him, he thanked me. That's when I really knew I was in trouble. I'm older now; don't worry about it. I'm still here, and I'm stronger. It never happens anymore.”

We stare at each other in silence.

I think about the date on one of the image drives. I think about the bruises I saw that one time when we were at the farmhouse. “Take off your jacket,” I say. Because I want to believe him. Because I don't.

Gray doesn't move. Doesn't blink. Finally he looks away.

He could kill his father if he truly wanted to. He could, but he won't. As sleepers we blend in with our families; we don't destroy them.

“Where's the bathroom?” I ask after a few minutes of trying to concentrate. I walk in the direction he points. I sit in the bathtub and blink up at the ceiling. There are many cracks, a spiderweb of them. I sit in there, staring at the ceiling, until it's time to leave. Then I put on my coat. “See you tomorrow,” I say, barely able to walk.

I find Edith on a Friday morning two weeks later. I find her on a recording of the day the farmhouse burned down. She is wearing a large, floppy hat and grinning at something Davis is saying. They stand together outside, at a corner of the house, and they are nothing more than shadow people. You have to be looking for them. You have to recognize the hat Roberta lets Edith borrow sometimes. Davis must say something else because Edith laughs again. She looks happy. Then she glances around to make sure no one is looking before she stands on her tiptoes and gives Davis a kiss. They stay there for a while, and then Davis goes back inside the house. Edith sits on the ground, head bowed, doing something until she finally gets up and leaves.

Every moment after that is fast and shocking.

Edith is there one moment and then gone. A flare comes from the exploding farmhouse. The aftermath.

I find it. But now that I have I don't know what to do. For hours I just sit on this information. If Gray asks, I'll tell him, but for the whole day I do nothing, just sit there. I set the television to replay and think about what Gigi said. Sometimes it's better to let people have their hope for as long as possible.
I am doing something kind,
I tell myself as I reach to turn off the screen. My hands are shaking.

“Are you all right?” Gray asks, frowning over at me suddenly.

“I'm fine,” I lie, but my voice is too high. He gets a strange look on his face as he walks toward me. I back away automatically. For once he isn't wearing his jacket. Bruises are fading on his arms. Last week, when he got here, he was limping, but we didn't talk about it.

“That's the fire. I've seen this recording about a hundred times,” he says, crouching down next to me.

I say nothing.

“Lirael?” And then he is grabbing my shoulders and gently shaking me. “Lirael,” he says carefully, “show me. Tell me. Show me.” He can't decide which he wants. “What am I not seeing?”

I meet his eyes, but I can't really see them. “You said Julia was at work,” I say, and my throat hurts.

Gray frowns at the screen and then back at me again. “Okay.” He looks like he's going to shake me again.

“Does she know about this apartment?” I ask. When he doesn't answer, I repeat myself: “It's important. Gray, does she know about this place?”

He shakes his head. He looks afraid. I show him the recording again. The image is grainy and hard to miss, but it is there. Just before the farmhouse explodes, there is a shadow, on the very edge of the screen. Edith is walking casually
toward it. “She's talking to someone,” I say, pressing my finger to the television. “Someone she knows. Someone who isn't in the farmhouse when it explodes.”

I stop that recording and play one from the following day, except this one is of a tree a little ways from the farmhouse. Without seeing the shadow, there is no reason Gray would have looked for it. “This camera was turned off the day of the fire, but it was back on the day after. I couldn't figure out why. I thought it might be a typical maintenance thing but then—”

I hold up a shaky finger. “I remember this tree. But when I was there, there was no bump under—”

Gray doesn't even stay to the end; he's already running out of the apartment. I am running, too, but I never catch up. He has his truck today. He has his truck, and my bike cannot compete. Still, I try. I ride as fast as I can to the farmhouse, though my hands keep slipping off my handlebars. When I reach the tree, he is already digging. I find another shovel in his truck. We dig in silence.

As I stand there, I feel like somebody else. Somebody else watching Gray drop his shovel on the ground beside his sister's body. “No, no, no,” he keeps saying. “Edie, no, no, no.” And I keep throwing up. It's the moment when Edith gets up to leave and disappears off the recording that made me think.
She left because she was talking to someone. I couldn't see who, but it wasn't someone she was afraid of. And when the farmhouse exploded several minutes later, there was no sign of her coming back. If Edith was still somewhere close by, somewhere by this tree, then she would have seen the explosion. She would have run past the camera again, tried to save her friends, but she didn't. Because she didn't see the fire. She was dead already.

I just keep imagining Edith kissing Davis, then walking over to stand by Julia at the tree. I imagine that Julia says hello with that shy smile of hers. I imagine that Edith smiles back and does not see the exact moment when Julia wraps her arms around her friend's neck and snaps it. Except she wasn't anyone's friend, not really. Certainly not when she detonated the farmhouse.