The Unquiet (26 page)

Then we enter his house and kill his parents, too. His
other siblings. People who do a double take when they see me and whisper, “Lirael?” Just before they die.

Later, in the bathroom, when I am covered in blood and I cry, I still see through my tears like I am supposed to. I still remember whom I am fighting for. They have trained me well. There is a softer part of me, of course, that remembers whom I am fighting against. That remembers that these people did nothing wrong. This world rightfully belongs to them, not us. But I do what I am supposed to. I sometimes have to whisper to myself in the mornings, as I get dressed, “Don't you dare fall apart now. Don't you dare.” And sometimes, when we are receiving fresh orders at the flower shop, I stand close enough to Gray so our hands brush without anyone seeing, and that little bit of heat is almost enough.

Every moment of our lives is a domino piece. One slight action brings about a greater one. At first the world falls quietly. We move in the night like shadows, through houses and among people who once thought we were their friends. A waitress at a café. A teacher. A boyfriend. Sleepers do all the work. The people we bring from our Earth unpack their bags and move into the houses only after we've declared a town safe. We move on. As we travel, we sleep wherever we find room, in empty houses and on garage floors, and we raid
whatever cupboards and fridges we come across. At the end of the day it is not the fact that we are at war that we remember but the smaller moments. The blood that won't wash from a stained shirt. The screams that keep us awake at night: You think they belong to the sleeper on the floor next to you, and then you think it is only a memory, only to find that it is you. You are screaming, but can anyone else hear?

For months and months and months.

If there are two versions of one person, which one deserves to live? Which one deserves to die?

Gray and I found two people who mattered. We saved them. Is that enough?

I don't see Cecily or Aunt Imogen anywhere as we replace their world with ours, person by person. I tell myself they made it to the well.

Somehow that has to be enough.

My mind rewinds to our last night in the apartment, when I whisper these words to Gray in the dark: “Did I make it easier for you?” He doesn't ask what I am talking about. He knows I am asking about what happened after he killed my alternate three years ago. After he completed my assignment for me. All the people he's had to kill since. Did killing a fourteen-year-old girl who meant nothing to him, who wasn't
even his responsibility, make it easy to kill all the people he's had to after that?

He shakes his head.

He asks: “Did I make it harder for you?”

I shake my own head, but we both know that's a lie. I am suddenly so tired of all these lies. I want there to be only truths between us. I want to tear down anything else that is contrary, so I take a deep breath. “I lied,” I say. “My grandfather was not a fighter.” The horrible words echo in the moonlit bedroom, and my eyes blink at nothingness, at someplace beyond here where the memories float. “He did not kill his alternate. I did.”

I look at Gray, frightened to have said the words out loud, but he only leans in and kisses me.

“When I got there and they were fighting,” I say, “I knew the smart thing to do was stand to the side and wait. I could see that he had his hands around Da's neck. I even thought it would be better if Da was dead. But then I—I . . .” My voice trails off for a moment. “But it was too late. By the time I got back to Da, he'd lost too much blood. He was just—he was looking at me with these eyes, and then I realized that he wasn't looking at me at all, that he was dead.”

“You regret it?”

I swallow.

I close my eyes.

In the end it is Lirael, the real Lirael, I consider brave. She was thirteen when she got her tattoo. It was the same week her father died of a heart attack, and she convinced some dirty-looking boy from the floor below their apartment to sneak her into his father's tattoo shop. To mark her skin before her grandparents came to collect her and her sister the next day. She lived in the city then. She'd seen the words graffitied on a wall somewhere, saying, “Let me be weak and know my flaws. Let me love and be afraid. Let me be foolish and sad, so that I can say that I was strong. I was beautiful. I was a fighter. I was fearless.”

I watched her grit her teeth on the screen in the basement of the cottages. The boy called her an idiot, but he had a look of respect in his eye as he worked. She was thirteen, but she didn't give him a choice. “You have to save whatever you know right now
,
” Lirael told him when he asked why, “in case you lose it. My father used to say that.” Her eyes filled with tears. She terrified me. We were too young to be able to know and say things like that. How could I possibly become her?

“One day,” she said sadly when he'd finished, “I am going to forget everything I've written here. And then maybe I'll look in the mirror and remember.”

She didn't, though. She didn't ever forget. At the moment when it counted the most, I was the one who forgot. She fought me like hell. She was the strong one.

On this last night at the apartment I am supposed to be reading a book. Charles Dickens's
Oliver Twist
, but the words haven't stuck. Right from page one, they haven't stuck. I sit cross-legged on Gray's bed, trying to figure out what is wrong. And I am not thinking about my grandfather and how I shook him afterward and how I begged him to please, please, oh, God, please, open his eyes. As if begging can make a person undie. But we are only part of a cycle. I know that now.

Why do we ever think we can be infinite?

“If I can get us out of here, will you come with me?” Gray whispers. I open my eyes again. He's not looking at me, I'm not looking at him, but I hear the words anyway. The sudden desperation in them, as if he knows something I have not yet understood. “If I can find a place where no one will bother us ever again. Will you come with me?”

I don't answer. I look away.

But we both know.

We have broken our rule.

We have broken every rule.

T
he first time I catch a sleeper girl crying in the bathroom of the diner we have just taken over, she hurries away ashamed, and I think nothing of it. Another time a sleeper boy misses a simple shot and almost gets us all killed. “What the hell?” I ask, but when he turns around, I see that his hands are shaking violently and his nose is bleeding.

Then it happens again, with another sleeper.

And again.

More and more of us falling apart. More and more and more.

By the time I understand what is happening, we have been rewriting the world for over four months. My commanding officer has put me in charge of a small town named Bayard, an hour away from Paris. She assigns fifteen younger sleepers to me, and together we form a team. For weeks we sweep through Bayard and surrounding areas with our guns, making sure no one is still hiding. We set up camp in an old diner on the outskirts of the town.

We are getting ready for bed one night when the phone rings. It's my commanding officer. After I give her our status report, she says, “All sleepers are expected to return to the city this Friday for a celebratory dinner. Lagrange Hotel, five p.m.”

She hangs up the phone without waiting for my response.

I pass the message on to the others. “Great,” one of them mutters underneath her breath. We all dread Friday, but it comes anyway. A bus arrives and takes my team ahead of me. I have been provided with my own car; one of the perks of being a leader. I leave, reluctantly, a few minutes after their bus disappears down the road.

We all have heard about these celebratory dinners. They are held in honor of the war's success. In honor of us.

The thought does not make me drive any faster.

I am fiddling with the radio when it happens. One minute
I feel perfectly fine, and then the next a steady flow of blood streams from my nose. The bus has disappeared, far ahead of me. I stop the car and climb out. I pinch my nose. When the bleeding doesn't end, I lie on the grass by the side of the road and wait, staring up at the blackbirds in the sky.

It starts to rain.

I have learned to love the rain. Sometimes I hold my head underwater in the bath and stare up at the ceiling, which appears vague and fluttery like a dream. I have a new theory about tears, whether in the bathtub or in the rain. They don't count because you cannot tell whether you are truly crying. We are 70 percent water, and water comes and water goes, and at the end there is no difference. Those are not tears you see. Those are not stories or feelings or anger, red-hot anger, leaking out of me.

Our war has been too successful too quickly. There are too many sleepers and not enough for us to do; that is why we have the time for frivolous dinners. We should be out there, fighting, but instead we are shipped off to places like Bayard. And I have not seen Gray in more than two weeks. I have no idea where he is stationed. I have heard that some of the very best sleepers have been shipped off to other parts of the world, to help in places that have had lower success rates. The rest of
us are of very little use. I am afraid to return to the city and discover that Gray is one of the ones who have been shipped off. And I am afraid that Julia is not.

I only get up again because the raindrops hit me hard, make me splutter. In the car I take another dose of my pills. I have never taken them twice in one day before, but then again, my nose has never bled before. Since the pills have kept me healthy so far, maybe they can fix whatever is wrong.

I am soaked and covered in mud when I finally reach the city.

Madame meets me at the door of the hotel, and I am so shocked to see her that I trip up the last step. She looks exactly the same, not one gray hair more or less. “I've just arrived,” she says, a small suitcase in her hand that I know I have to carry for her as a show of respect. “I understand you're stationed an hour away.”

I nod, then think better of it. I pull my coat tighter around my body and croak, “Yes, ma'am.”

We deposit her things at the front desk, and then, as I walk away, toward the floor I share with the other sleeper girls whenever I am in the city, I catch her amused stare directed at me. I see her eyes and know I have not disappointed her. This is how she likes to see me—tired and dirty, not looking my best.
I want immediately to change. Of course I want to change, but she ushers me back to her side. “Come,” she says. “We're already late enough as it is.” I have no choice but to obey her.

The closer we get to the hotel's banquet hall, the louder the noise and the more I shrink. But Madame's hand is firm on my arm. We are standing just outside the doors when she hesitates. I brace myself for more insults, but she is staring intently at my face, searching for something. Finally she leans back, satisfied. “You're sick,” she announces, and I flinch. How can she know?

I yank my arm from hers. We stand there, sizing each other up, and I don't know what it means that I am suddenly no longer afraid of her. Since I left the cottages, I have known many people who were stronger, wiser, kinder, braver.
In the end,
I tell myself,
she is just a sad old woman. Why did I ever let her mean so much?

I am proud of myself. Jack would have been proud of me, too. I square my shoulders, and I am about to walk past her when she speaks again, softly. She bends toward my ear, but I lean away from her. “We lied about what the pills do,” she says, her words hanging between us, her eyes cold but not as empty as I remember. “The very last thing they have ever made any of you is healthy.”

“What?”

I hear myself whisper the word, but she pretends she didn't say anything at all. Whatever she has just told me was not supposed to be said. She has broken protocol. But she quickly becomes the Madame I know, and she takes my arm again, pushes the door open. She makes me walk into the room with her. Makes me the laughingstock, because everyone else looks his or her best.

There are parties like these happening all over the world. Small gatherings of thank-yous for the sleepers, for the Madames, where we drink wine and toast one another. Already there has been a message from the president. There is money, and nice houses for those of us who still have families from our original homes. The world is whisper quiet, dark, just as we like it, and we pat one another on the back and say, “Well done.”

We lied about what the pills do.

Those words are ringing in my ears.

Madame steps up onto the platform next to the others. She is the oldest one of them and perhaps the toughest looking. Though she smiles, she looks as though she does not recognize us, not really. We are simply her job well done. “Thank you, each and every one of you, for your service,” she says. I
am numb when I join the lines that form all the way to the door. When it is our turn, each of us steps forward. We kiss her cheek.

She offers the same words to each one of us. “You have done a spectacular job. This was impossible without you. This isn't their world. It's ours. And we have taken it.”

I stumble away from her in a haze. My chest is heavy, and I don't remember how to breathe.

I stand at the back of the room, as far back as I possibly can. It's just as well that I look like a wet dog because everyone else leaves me alone. “You look—” Gray says, and I turn around, find him smiling as he looks me over. A sigh of relief escapes me. He is here. He is alive. “Give me a second,” he says. “I'm thinking of it.” He is even farther back in the shadows than I am. And his eyes have aged. There are only glimpses now of the boy from the cottages. I suspect I look the same.

I don't know how to function properly. I make my body face the party again. I stare straight ahead, clap my hands when I am supposed to, but when I can't hold it in any longer, I say: “Gray, the pills. The ones that are supposed to keep us well. The ones you had your person look into.”
The ones I just took two more of, less than an hour ago.

Gray freezes, hands in mid-clap, and then he slowly lets
them fall to his sides. “I wasn't trying to keep it from you. I just found out yesterday, and there was no way to reach you. I was waiting to see you face-to-face.”

“Madame,” I say, nudging my head toward her. I tell him what she said.

His jaw clenches almost immediately. “She said that to you?” he asks. “Why would she do that? Is she trying to flaunt it in our faces?” He looks like he wants to walk up to Madame and get himself killed, right here and now. But she wasn't smiling when she told me, the way she would have taunted us at the cottages. I don't know why she did it, but she wasn't smiling.

I don't tell him that. I take his arm. “Gray,” I say, “what is in them?”

He is still looking over at Madame. “They didn't lie about the white pills,” he says, through gritted teeth. “They've kept us healthy all these years. It's the blue ones that are the problem. They are just a bunch of poison capsules.”

“Poison,” I whisper, letting go of his arm.

He finally faces me, and his eyes are blazing. “They've been dormant in our bodies all these years. But now that the war is almost over and there are too many of us . . .” His voice trails off, but I can figure out the rest of that sentence on my own.

“How?” I ask, and my voice is pathetic with hope. I know the answer, but I ask anyway. “If the poison is dormant in our bodies, then it cannot kill us. Right?”

Gray stares at me for a long moment before he answers. He holds up his tracker hand. “When we were kids,” he says quietly, “Alex and I used to talk about cutting off our arms so that if we ran away, they wouldn't be able to find us. Now it turns out that that's the only thing that would have saved us.”

“Our trackers?”

“When they decide that a sleeper has served his purpose, they trigger his tracker remotely. It sends some kind of signal, and the blue pills are activated.”

My head spins as I turn around again.

“The pills keep you healthy. Keep you alive.” That's what they said.

I never once saw Madame take the pills, not in eight years.

That's all I can think now.

Even if she had taken them in private, I should have found them when I discovered where she hid her stash of shortbread, or Edith should have when she went looking for Madame's best wine. To spend so much time rummaging through her things as cottage children and never once see her bottle of pills. She wasn't taking them. And when the
nonsleepers arrive in this world, I have never seen them given the pills either. Yet they all are fine. It's possible that they are taking the pills and I haven't noticed, but I doubt it.

Those graphs Miss Odette printed every month. I thought they were studying my health. But they were only making sure the poison they put in our blood was contained.

“We've been killing ourselves,” I say, my voice calm, my eyes still looking straight ahead.

Gray says nothing for a long time. Then, eventually: “Yes.”

“So,” I say, “this is really our farewell party. We just don't know it yet.”

My mind goes numb. I do not know whether I am surprised that these few months of war are all they ever really wanted from us. There are thousands of us, and we were meant to be effective. Now they won't have to deal with the consequences of what we have become, what they have made us capable of. We won't be here much longer, and we are too weak to do anything about it. Some of us can barely stay standing. In the end there won't even be a story to tell. A woman will give birth to her baby, and she will whisper, “Look. Look at our world. Isn't it beautiful?”

And we will be their ghosts.

I cannot sleep after the celebration. I lie in my hotel bed, but the war is still not over behind my eyes. The dead die over and over again. In my mind, in my dreams. Everyone I have ever cared about. Alex, Edith, Da, Gigi, Jack. Every time I close my eyes, they are there.

I don't want to watch anybody else die. I can't.

There is only one death left. When it comes, I will not be strong enough to handle it.

In the morning Gray is waiting for me in front of my car. I don't know how long he has been out here or how he knew I would try to leave before everyone woke up. I unlock my car and stand with the door between us, the wind blowing my hair into my face.

“I think we should finish this,” I tell him. “Before it gets . . . complicated.” It already hurts. But I wear my mask. I don't want him to see how scared I am of whatever comes next. I don't want him to know that I always fail. At being there at the end. For everybody but myself.

I'll fail us both. I know it.

He just stands there, studying my face. He does not even look shocked. Perhaps he has also thought the same thing. “Is that what you want?” he asks finally, and there is only the slightest emotion in his voice.

I want to shake my head at the exact same moment I want to say yes.

“It was always going to end this way, remember?” I tell him. “We said we would know when it was time.” I take a deep breath. “I've never thanked you for being my friend. For saving my life that night at the orchard. For helping me with Cecily.”

He swallows. He looks down at his boots. “Lira,” he says, but there's nothing else to add, and my name hangs in the air between us.

I steel my shoulders and stand taller. I climb into my car.

And when I leave the city, he lets me go. His team is assigned to a place hours away from Bayard, and I don't see him again for weeks. I tell myself it is better this way. To let us both down now.

I have already begun the process of becoming a ghost.