The Unquiet (28 page)

I
was born in a house. I was born to a man and a woman who both were very poor. They worked in the circus, but that year half their staff and circus animals vanished into thin air just like that. They were not worried because the woman was about to give birth, and with my birth came all the money they would ever need. The day I was born, my father held me for about a minute. My mother did not hold me at all. “Give her to them,” she said to her husband tiredly.

She was one of few women willing to have children
for the cause. For the sole purpose of populating a strange orphanage that had popped up in Paris.

My parents made many choices Lirael Harrison's parents never had to make.

And this one was one of them.

They called me Katy first at the orphanage. Before they knew what my name in this world would be. Before they started to shape me into a cottage girl. Before, when I thought I could be a dancer and a teacher and an astronaut all at once. When I thought I could touch the world. I was Katy until they broke her and swept away the pieces.

At the surface of the water, boats bob. Hundreds and thousands of boats people jumped from stretch out over the ocean. Boats that, when we hop from one to the other, eventually take us to land.

And there are other sleepers like us. A couple of handfuls who had the same idea. We pick out houses amidst the rubble and live there. Some want to live in mansions and penthouses, but Gray and I are satisfied by a small blue house with a mustard-colored roof. It has a tree behind it and two dogs that come begging for scraps every day.

Our Earth is quiet. Our Earth is peaceful. When we
arrive, a girl walks out onto the street and smiles at us. “The good news is this,” she says, after introducing herself as Sibel. “Since we don't have alternates anymore, we won't disappear. We'll die the old-fashioned way. Although there is probably something you should see.”

She leads us to one of the abandoned houses where all the furniture has been cleared out. “We found this,” she says. The walls and the ground are covered in papers, notes, and calculations that I am not sure I understand. Mathematical equations, graphs, and charts. We stand there for so long, staring at the walls, that my legs begin to shake.

“Scientists were collecting all this information for years,” Sibel says, “and nobody told us.”

I run my fingers across one of the maps. Beside it is a picture of three Earths right next to one another. “What is it supposed to mean?” I ask.

Sibel points to the first one. It looks like a satellite photo, taken from space. “This is us. This other one is the planet that we just invaded,” she says. “And this is the one that doesn't exist yet.”

“Doesn't exist yet?” Gray says, frowning. We stare at the charts again, with new eyes.

A new planet is forming behind our dying one. Another
planet that will have people who look like us, that will have a portal in its ocean like ours. At some point there will be two planets again, fully formed. The notes scribbled on the charts say that this has happened twice before, and each time only one world was left. The first time there were no sleepers. The other Earth simply disappeared. The next time they carried out what they called their Replacement Initiative with sleepers. This is only the second time it has happened.

Gray's eyes are just as startled as I feel.

The world we just left behind will become like us.

It is a cycle. There is no escaping it.

There are always two worlds. One world destroys the other, and yet somehow there will be two again. An eternity of sleepers, portals, more orphanages and cottages.

Always.

Gray takes my hand.

“I love you,” I tell him later, when we are alone.

He kisses my neck. “I'm happy whenever I'm with you,” he says. “That's all I know. The world is terrible, and we both have done terrible things, but you, Katy, make me happy right here, right now.”

I like being Katy again. I do not remember her, but I think one day I might.

Believing that there is more than blackness behind my eyes is the most important choice I will ever make for myself.

The future is coming, but this is what we are for now. A girl, a boy—and countless others, who just wanted to live. Perhaps we both die today. Perhaps only one of us, and we become nothing but ghosts, reminiscing about the past inside someone's dreams. Perhaps there is a cure, the end will slow down, and we will live until we are seventy.

Either way.

We will be here until there is nothing.

They say the world doesn't actually end with darkness.

MIKAELA EVERETT
has lived all over the world, from Africa to Australia, and now lives in Alberta, Canada. She graduated from university in 2011, with a degree in biological sciences. This is her first book.

www.mikaelaeverett.com

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The Unquiet

Cover art © 2015 by Kylli Sparre

Cover design by Sylvie Le Floc'h

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

THE UNQUIET
. Copyright © 2015 by Mikaela Everett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

EPub Edition © September 2015 ISBN 9780062381293

ISBN 978-0-06-238127-9 (hardback)

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