The Unquiet (6 page)

T
he picture slides into a small crack in the mirror and hangs there. Not a picture of me but of
her
, and in a way she is more beautiful than me. I remember thinking that even when I was five, watching her on satellite, though we looked exactly the same. But she had rosier cheeks and eyes that glistened whenever she smiled. I had my hair in pigtails, per orphanage regulations, and when I smiled, it was this difficult practiced thing that really depended on my muscles' level of cooperation that day. I was wearing a yellow dress that did not belong to me, that the orphanage
minders would put on whichever girl was going to talk to her alternate next, pretending that they were caring for us better than they were. A canary yellow dress with beading down the front, a large black bow at the neck. I remember loving the feeling of wearing that dress yet thinking that it could never really be mine because two dozen other girls loved it, too. I remember the bruises underneath my dress and the way my ribs still hurt from the fisted hand that had punched me there earlier and wondering whether instead of smiling, if I frowned, if I burst into tears, would my alternate care enough to try to save me. If I said the words out loud despite the minder sitting next to me, told her about what really went on at the orphanage, would it matter to her?

Please . . .

I turn the water off and straighten. I am remembering those things because somehow I have to let go of them now, along with the tears that do not have my permission to fall, along with the bile that bitters the back of my throat. My hands are shaking over a pair of scissors; my hair is wet over my shoulders. The last drops of blood, soap, and water swirl down the sink, purged from underneath my fingernails, my hands, my arms. I am wearing a piece of wire wound around
my wrist that signifies everything that has happened. My success. My strength. My courage. I stay where I am, blinking at it, until someone knocks on the door.

“Fifteen minutes,” a male examiner says.

I nod my head, then realize he cannot see me. “I'm almost finished,” I say, to my reflection in the mirror. I am almost finished cleaning up. Almost finished getting ready. Almost somebody else.

Then I begin to cut my hair to match
hers.
Shoulder-length brown hair, blunt bangs in front.

Please
, she begged, staring at me. There was blood running down the side of her face.

The more I cut, the more my hands tremble, the more my eyes well up. I let the tears fall. I am crying, but I can still see myself clearly through my tears. I can still cut my hair exactly the way the picture demands. These are not the kinds of tears where you lose yourself for a moment and then have to search, have to refocus. I know who I am and what I have done, and I am crying right through that. And when I am finished, I will still be me, the girl from the cottage, and I will still have done all the terrible things I have just done.

“C
ome closer, Lirael,” Madame barks, and makes me sit in a chair. I am inside another room in the brown cottage, and she is talking with somebody she keeps calling Agnes. Agnes, who dries and perfects my hair and then applies a thin rim of kohl to my eyes, a glossy lipstick to my lips. Agnes, who pierces my ears because they have to be, and holds the tattoo gun to my rib cage and writes the excruciating words that will stay with me forever.

I do not want the permanence of her words, the weight of what they mean to her.

It's funny that I can get this far in the training, this far past the examinations, and then suddenly my mind snaps, and I am mad. That is what Madame keeps saying while she pins me down: “You're mad, you're mad, you foolish girl. Do you want to fail? After all these years do you want to lose everything over a few words on the side of your ribs? You think life comes at no cost, eh? You think this is supposed to be easy?” She glares at me as if I am the stupidest girl in the world, but she doesn't let me go, even when she can. Even when she should. Even when, because of this one small thing, I can be considered a failure. Perhaps for Madame this is as much as the eight years between us can ever mean. But afterward I do not hug her. I do not thank her. I just shrug into the dress I am offered, the boots and scarf, and stumble toward the door, knowing that after today I will never see either of them—Madame or Agnes—again.

A bus waits to take us away from the woods, and standing by it already are most of the boys and the girls from the cottages. I look around, trying to figure out who is missing. Emma with the fiery red hair is gone, but she was no surprise; she had a bad memory and could never hit a target. Jason with the deep voice. I can't see Rebecca Matheson, who played the piano almost every evening, anywhere. And no Greta.
Where is Greta?

And then I realize Edith is shaking next to me.

Gray isn't here.

I am so shocked I cannot move. How can her brother not have made it? I scan the group again and again, and Edith's teeth are chattering together so loudly I can hear them.

“Maybe he . . . ,” I begin, trying to offer her some explanation.

Edith watches me hopefully. But I cannot think of anything else to say.

She looks away.

We line up in front of the bus. I try not to think about her as I hold my hand to my chest and sing. Our sleeper anthem. We sing like we have every assembly morning for the last eight years. We sing for the last time. We pledge our allegiance to the other Earth. Halfway into the anthem, when Edith is biting her lip so hard she has drawn blood, her brother finally turns up. Shirt buttoned wrong, hair a mess, and dried blood on one hand, slinking into the line, as if he had never been gone. “I see you both made it,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. He doubles over when Edith slams her elbow into his side.

“You idiot,” she says, but she breathes a sigh of relief.

There is an eerie silence afterward as we board the bus,
different from any that has ever been, and everyone either looks down or stares out a window. All of us are now in on the secret. We have spent the last eight years here reprogramming our bodies, our memories, but this last day is proof that somehow along the way, we reprogrammed our morals also. What is right and wrong. What we can and cannot do for our country. For ourselves. The examination was never truly about what we remembered; it was our final lesson: that we are capable of anything.

It is strange that we are supposedly ready for this, for our new lives. I do not feel as though I am truly any different today from yesterday. But we will begin our new missions. We will live as our alternates and wait for the day when the war really truly begins.

Handlers will keep track of us once we are away from these woods. A routine check-in once a month when we must give account of everything that has happened, when health checks are performed and our pills are refilled. My handler, they tell me, will be a person named Odette.

At the very last moment before I board the bus, I turn to Madame, who suddenly looks so old and pathetic. My voice is soft but not kind. “You didn't pass the examination, did you?” I say, because I understand now that it is not us she hates.
“That's why you're here. If you'd passed, you would be in the city. You would have claimed your alternate's life.”

Her eyes widen for a moment, and I cannot tell whether she is surprised at my frankness or my daring. Normally her girls and boys are supposed to be meek, obedient. Then the look is gone. A silk scarf billows up around her neck. “There is no such thing as failing the exam for some
special
people,” she says, breathing smoke onto my face. “If they cannot pass in the usual way, they pass in other ways.” She gestures back to the cottage, to Agnes, and I suddenly imagine myself as a hairdresser, a tattoo artist, even the person who collects surveillance on alternates until we're ready. It is not such a bad life. It is only a punishment because you had the chance to be someone else, someone better, someone more important. Because you, out of everyone, will be the person never to get on the yellow bus that comes.

Madame runs her fingers alongside my left cheek and smiles. Her teeth are yellowed, rotted, and despite myself, I smile back. I even hold still when she leans forward suddenly and hugs me. My chest warms in an old childish way, as if even now I am only a marionette in her game, still waiting for her to piece together my drawing and to tell me it was beautiful. Waiting, like a bird at the mouth of a rifle.
Why do we always want the things that will hurt us the most? Madame's hand is rough where my tattoo aches, and her voice is full of malice when she whispers,
“Vous êtes faibles, mon enfant.”
Weak, weak, little girl. “Don't worry, it will be our little secret.” I pull away, as if I have been slapped. I stumble on board and sit at the back, press my face to the glass, and watch the cottages disappear, swallowed up by the trees.

I will never call them home again.

T
he road is long and straight; it seems to go on forever. The hours that pass feel like days, but it's the minutes that are worst. You breathe and breathe forever, waiting for it to end, and then find that only two minutes have passed. That time is moving like winter on a day when everything is frozen.

We hold on to our seats with white hands and pursed lips and hearts that beat horribly out of sync. With every slow-passing minute the sky dies a little more, the day peeled back by night, until, finally a murmur of excitement buzzes from those who can see the city lights. They already feel the energy
of our new world, and it is different, better, yet exactly the same as they had imagined. Everything we learned in the cottages to survive—how to hunt, to cook, to be self-sufficient—must now be hidden in the real world. We are not supposed to be able to take care of ourselves. Kids our age are not even supposed to want to. There are high fives and hurrahs. I hear someone in front say that our real test isn't our ability to kill; it's our ability to make friends, to pretend to care about our clothes, our homework, learning how to drive cars, and thinking about colleges.

“Here's to our pretend futures,” Davis says, raising an imaginary glass in his hand.

“To our pretend futures,” everyone echoes.

The bus roars with laughter.

This is it.
This is everything
, and I make myself smile with them, press my face to the window. I want to be as happy as all the other sleepers. I don't want to sit here missing the familiarity of the past.

When we first found out we would be sleepers, I used to imagine a horror story. It was always the same one, which left only one version of me alive, but it was the wrong one. There would be a battle of good and evil, and the good one of us would prevail. She, and never me. I was always dead, but that
was not the worst part. In my story no one would ever know. She would go on living, and I would be the one forgotten, lost, because there was never enough of me to begin with. I had not left enough of an impression in the world. I would think these things and then shake my head quickly mid-thought. “My name is Lirael Harrison,” I would say, snapping my fingers. “I am fourteen years old.” My name is Lirael Harrison.

I think that sometimes we walk toward the stories we have already written for ourselves, or perhaps they are forewarnings of the things that are coming. Perhaps, deep down inside, we already know how our whole lives will play out, everything has been decided, and I am already dead somewhere.

I jolt awake when Gray says, “Lira,” softly on the bus. I open my eyes, see him turned around in the seat in front of me, concern making his eyebrows furrow. My look must be the same as the one he gave me in the training room because for the longest flicker of a moment I do not understand who he is, and then I do. I get the impression that this is not the first time he has called me either. He looks tired, but he leans in closer, as if he has forgotten all about yesterday, as if I am in a bad enough state for this moment alone to matter. Edith is staring at me, too, and that is when I notice how cold I am. That I am shaking. The hand wearing the wire shudders the
most, as if it might be trying to remove itself because it already knows that it will kill another girl today. It might as well be screaming: “You are afraid.” I've been twirling the wire on my wrist so hard and for so long that there is a bruise forming.

“What should we do?” Edith asks. They're talking about me as if I am not here.

“She's fine,” her brother says, but he doesn't turn back to the front, just watches me. “Think about something else, Lira.”

Except that there's nothing else to think about.

I sit on both my hands. I stare straight ahead and pretend that that is all there is: the road and the journey without any destination. About five kids are left on the bus when it finally stops for me, and this is what I want to be able to say: that I found her in a tree, in a green dress and black rain boots. She did not see me coming. She did not notice the way I slid the wire from my wrist and unwound it until it was long and strong enough to wrap around her neck. I want to say that there was murder in my eyes. I want to say that I did not feel fourteen for the first time in my life. But I did. I did, and I do.

My training never presented the possibility that my alternate would see my face before I saw hers. That is what threw me. She was not supposed to be in the barn; she preferred the trees. She stood there, frozen, but a friendliness crept across
her face when she recognized me. It stopped me for too long, and by the time I recovered I had already forgotten how to be a good sleeper.

I say all this as though it were past, yet I say it inside a moment when I have lunged for her, but she is steadier than I am, and stronger. Blood is running down my arms and down the side of my face where the rock hit me. I am lying on the ground, and her hands are around my neck.

I cannot breathe.

I am going to die.

I want to beg her, tell somebody, please don't forget the history of me, that I was here. That I tried. That I failed.

It will happen quickly, and this is how it will go: I die and she lives, but the moment I am dead, our people come to silence her before she can reveal what she has found out. If I am still alive somehow, they will kill me, too, and then we both will have ended.

But then suddenly the blackness around my eyes begins to fade, and Edith is pulling me up. “It's okay,” she keeps saying. “You're going to be okay.”

Gray does all the work. He removes the evidence. I don't even hear her scream. I gasp for air until my eyes clear up and my throat stops hurting. They wipe the blood from my
forehead, from the corners of my mouth, and I am ashamed of the way I feel, like a little child needing to be cared for. I am crying and shaking, and I don't know where one stops and the other starts. How did they get off the bus? When? Why are they here?

“Don't say anything,” they tell me when I open my mouth and shut it for the third time. “Don't say anything. Just go and be a sleeper. This part doesn't matter.”

They don't wait for my response. They blend into the dark as they hurry away.

My enemies, my friends.

Over time I turn this night into a dream, a myth, a false memory. It never happened, and I have begun the rest of my life with more secrets. They heap themselves on one another until there are nearly more than enough to bury me, but I will wear this face. I swear. From now on I will wear it well.