Читать книгу Once We Were - Kat Zhang - Страница 14

“That was a brilliant play by all involved,” Cordelia said as we hurried through the streets.

“That was a close call,” Jackson corrected, but there wasn’t any real warning in his tone, only an amused sort of exhilaration.

“Not really.” Cordelia skipped ahead of us, then turned to face Addie and me, walking backward. She grinned. “He was just worried we were corrupting your sweet fifteen-year-old mind. Gang initiation, maybe.”

“It’s not really your birthday, is it?” Sabine asked. Addie shook our head. “Good going, then. Nearly fooled me.”

“It’s my birthday,” Cordelia said in a surprisingly good imitation of our voice—only higher and breathier. Addie blushed, and Cordelia laughed. “You sounded like an angel, my darling. Nobody in a thousand years would ever suspect you of anything.”

The photography shop was marked by nothing more than a plain door and a wooden sign declaring Still Life in elegant, black script. A long display window stretched along the wall, but I only got a glimpse of picture frames and black-and-white photos before Cordelia moved to unlock the door.

A bell jingled as we entered. Photographs crowded the small shop’s limited wall space. Inside one silver frame, a little boy pressed his face against a set of slender, white stair railings. An enormous, broad-shouldered man with an equally enormous pumpkin-colored cat sat within the frame beside it.

Cordelia led us to a storage room at the back of the store, everyone crowding inside among the array of empty frames and dusty cardboard boxes. The ceiling here was surprisingly high. Even Jackson, tall as he was, needed a stool to get a good grip on the string hanging from a hatch door.

“The string used to be longer,” he explained. “It snapped about half a year back, so we have to use the stool.”

“Tie another string,” Devon said.

Jackson smiled as he pulled the trapdoor creakily open. “But the stool is more interesting. A longer string would also make the door more noticeable.” He stepped off the stool, still pulling on the door. A series of steps unfolded, groaning and creaking. “And this,” he said, yanking the steps so they clicked into place, “is a secret.”

Automatically, Addie took a step backward.

Once, when Addie and I were little and still lived in the city, our family was invited to a party thrown by one of Mom’s old friends. They’d moved to the suburbs, had a big house and a pool and a barbecue. It had been summer. Hot. The adults milled about outside, our parents busy as they mingled and looked after Lyle and Nathaniel, who’d been only two.

I don’t remember how many people were present. To seven-year-old me, it had seemed like a hundred or more. There were at least ten kids. That much I remember. We played hide-and-seek. A girl in a yellow dress was It.

I’d told Addie to follow the others into the house. Two boys had headed for the attic, one pausing halfway up the stairs to beckon us up with them. Addie had hesitated, but I’d said Go.

Because he’d beckoned. Because he’d picked us to go with him, and I’d been hopeful.

It had been sweltering inside the attic. A dead sort of heat, the kind that sucks all the air from a room. There had been an ornate, old-fashioned trunk. There had been more than one, probably. And I vaguely remembered boxes, too. But more than anything, I remembered the biggest trunk, because that boy, he’d said, No one will look in there.

So Addie and I crawled inside, curled up to fit in the darkness.

He’d lowered the heavy lid, his friend watching behind him.

He locked it so quietly we didn’t hear.

“Go on,” Jackson said, gesturing up the stairs. “You guys first. Guest courtesies and all.”

Having a panic attack here, in front of everyone, would be devastating.

<It’ll be fine.> I’d said as much back at Nornand, when we’d been forced to climb into a torturously small machine for testing. I’d been lying then. But an attic we could handle, especially if it had windows and wasn’t too cramped. We just had to relax.

Addie pressed our lips together and moved forward. The stairs—more ladder than stairs, really—shuddered and creaked with each step.

We emerged in that familiar attic warmth. The ceiling here was a dark, bare wood, sloped until it almost touched the equally bare wooden floors. Someone had pounded a series of heavy-duty nails all around the room, then tangled a string of fairy lights around them. The end of their cord lay near the top of the stairs, and Addie bent to plug it in.

The entire attic lit up with a soft glow. Two lumpy, faded couches slumped at angles to each other. The dark green one leaked yellow stuffing. At first I wondered how on earth anyone had managed to get them up here. Then I noticed the screws where the couch frames could be taken apart. A tall lamp stood in the corner, opposite a small window that looked out onto the street. We couldn’t see clearly through the curtain.

One by one, everyone climbed up to join us. Cordelia turned on the lamp, which brightened the attic further. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. There was only one room, but it was large enough to fit many more than our six bodies. The heat-heavy air was cloying, but bearable.

“So,” Sabine said once we’d all settled down. She sat cross-legged on the green couch, looking more dancerlike than ever in a pair of dark gray leggings and a faded T-shirt. Her gaze fell on Devon, then Addie and me. “One of you, go first. Tell us about yourself.”

Of course, Devon said nothing. Addie cradled our milk-shake in our hands. “We’re both from Lupside. I—”

“Lupside?” Cordelia was half sitting, half curled against Sabine, her smile lazy but her eyes sharp. “Didn’t you live there for a while, Christoph?”

Christoph nodded. “For two years, back in elementary school.”

Before Addie and I moved there, then. We’d have still been living in our old apartment, just starting to realize how utterly strange it was—how truly awful—that we hadn’t settled.

“Did you ever go to the history museum?” Addie asked.

Christoph had a sweet face when he wasn’t scowling. He looked younger, with his slight frame and pale freckles. He had stopped twitching around so much, like a bomb that might go off any minute.

“Every year. Do they still have that god-awful poster? That supposedly authentic one from nineteen-whatever with the twisted-looking hybrids on them?” He screwed up his face and raised his hands like claws, making Cordelia laugh.

I remembered that poster. Christoph’s impression of it wasn’t terribly exaggerated. The entire museum was dedicated to the struggle between the hybrids and the non-hybrids. It covered everything from the servitude forced upon the single-souled when they were first shipped to the Americas, to the great Revolution that had followed, and the years of fighting on American soil at the start of the Great Wars.

Addie told the others about the flood and fire damage that had ruined portions of the museum during our last visit. She hesitated, then explained how everything had been blamed on a hybrid man. Described the mob that had gathered around his arrest, crushing and trampling and screaming like spectators at a blood fight.

“I’ve always wanted to visit the East Coast,” Cordelia said. “See the water there, you know?”

Sabine rolled her eyes, but indulgently. “I’m sure the ocean looks the same.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Cordelia said. “Does it, Addie?”

“I don’t know,” Addie admitted. “Lupside isn’t on the coast, and I never went.”

“Someday, I’ll go. Once I’ve got enough money to fly.” She looked to Jackson. “Maybe I’ll get Peter to send me. He flew you over to Nornand, after all.”

“He flew me to Nornand to work,” Jackson said.

Cordelia shrugged languorously. “Yes, well, I’m sure there are institutions on the East Coast. One day, however I get there, I’ll go.”

“Don’t you want to see the … I don’t know, the Indian Ocean instead?” Jackson asked. “Or the Adriatic?” He smiled at Cordelia’s raised eyebrow. “Adriatic Sea. I saw it on one of Henri’s maps. It’s in Europe. I liked the name.”

Cordelia shrugged. “As if I’ll ever get to leave the country.”

There was a storm cloud over Devon’s face that he didn’t bother to hide. I could guess what was running through his mind.

<They’re being awfully flippant about the whole thing> Addie said.

I remembered Jackson pulling us into the janitor’s closet at Nornand, babbling about Peter and secret plans. Telling us to keep hope. We’d been shocked and irritated by his smiles then, his almost lackadaisical air. But he hadn’t been flippant. Not truly.

I thought about the meeting we’d attended last night. The room silent with grief after Peter explained what had happened at Hahns. Christoph’s barely contained anger, and how Jackson had tried to keep him in check.

Sabine and Christoph had been in Anchoit for half a decade. What about Cordelia and Jackson?

<Maybe after years and years, this is how you deal with it all> I said quietly. <By pretending to be indifferent.>

“When’s Peter’s next meeting?” Christoph sat the farthest from the standing lamp, and the fairy lights softened his features.

Sabine shrugged. “He’s talking with some people one-on-one. I don’t think he’ll be having a general meeting anytime soon, though. Not unless something big happens.”

Christoph snorted and looked up at the ceiling. “Something big has already happened.”

“And we had a meeting when it did,” Sabine said. “We’ll have another when—”

Christoph’s voice turned rough. “When the earth slows, and the seas rise, and Peter finishes making his plans and remaking his plans and—”

“And remaking those plans,” Sabine finished for him. She smiled, and he didn’t quite smile back, but he quieted. Sabine’s gaze flickered to Addie and me, then to Devon. “It isn’t that we don’t appreciate everything Peter’s done. We do. We’re here because his plans worked. But no one can deny that Peter’s slow. Meticulous, yes. Careful, yes. And that’s all good, but slow. He believes in taking his time, and sometimes—”

“Sometimes there isn’t any time,” Addie said.

Sabine nodded.

“That institution you mentioned at the meeting,” Devon said slowly. “Powatt. How long has it been open?”

There was a hiccup of silence. Sabine shifted in her seat. “It hasn’t opened yet. They’re still setting things up, I think. Powatt’s going to be one of the institutions spearheading the new hybrid-cure initiative. They’re going to be testing some kind of—some kind of new machine that’s supposed to make the surgeries more precise.”

The word surgeries flashed us back to Nornand’s basement. To the feeling of cold metal, to Jaime’s voice babbling through the door, and sallow-lit hallways.

“There’s this guy,” Sabine said, “Hogan Nalles—he’s lower-level government. He’ll be downtown next Friday at Lankster Square, going on about how proud we should be, and all that. A pep rally of sorts. Stage and balloons and a couple hundred people, most likely.”

“A big, screaming crowd,” Christoph said. “Cheering on the systematic, government-supported lobotomization of children.”

Sabine grinned wryly. “I don’t think lobotomization is quite the same thing. And if we don’t do anything … if we just sit here and let Powatt open in a couple months, are we really that much better than they are?”

“Say what you mean to say, Sabine,” Cordelia intoned in what was obviously supposed to be a mockery of Peter’s voice. She giggled quietly into Sabine’s shoulder, and the other girl wrapped an obliging arm around her.

When Sabine spoke, though, her voice was utterly serious. “We’re going to stop Powatt from ever opening.”