Requiem

Page 43

What happened to Grace?
In the distance, the foghorn bellows, sounding like a funeral song. I start, and recall suddenly where I am: in a foreign, hostile city. It is no longer my place; I am not welcome here. The foghorn blows a second, and then a third time. The signal means that all three bombs have been successfully dropped; that gives us an hour until they blow and all hell breaks loose.
That gives me only an hour to find her—and I have no idea where to begin.
A window bangs shut behind me. I turn just in time to see a white-moon worried face—looks like Mrs. Hendrickson—disappear from view. One thing is obvious: I need to move.
I duck my head and continue hurriedly down the road, turning as soon as I see a narrow alley between buildings. I’m moving blindly now, hoping that my feet will carry me in the right direction. Grace, Grace, Grace. I pray that she might somehow hear me.
Blindly: across Mellen, toward yet another alley, a black gaping mouth, a place of sideways shadows to conceal me. Grace, where are you? In my head, I’m screaming it—screaming so loudly it swallows up everything else and whites out the sound of the approaching car.
And then, out of nowhere, it’s there: the engine ticking and panting, the window reflecting light in my eyes, blinding me, the squealing wheels as the driver tries to stop. Then pain, and a sensation of tumbling—I think I’m going to die; I see the sky revolving above me, I see Alex’s face, smiling—and then I feel the hard bite of pavement underneath me. The air gets knocked out of me and I roll over onto my back, my lungs stuttering, fighting for air.
For a confused moment, watching the blue sky above me, strung taut and high between the roofs of the buildings, I forget where I am. I feel like I’m floating, drifting across a surface of blue water. All I know is I’m not dead. My body is still mine: I twitch my hands and flex my feet just to be sure. Miraculously, I managed to avoid hitting my head.
Doors slam. Voices are shouting. I remember that I need to move—I need to get to my feet. Grace. But before I can do anything, hands grab me roughly by the arms, haul me to my feet. Everything is coming to me in flashes. Dark black suits. Guns. Mean faces.
Very bad.
Instinct takes over, and I begin twisting and kicking. I bite down on the hand of the guard who is gripping me, but he doesn’t release me, and another guard steps forward and slaps me in the face. The blow stings and sends a fiery explosion across my vision. I spit blindly at him. Another guard—there are three of them—aims his gun at my head. His eyes are as black and cold as cut stone, full of not hatred—cureds don’t hate, cureds don’t hate and they don’t care, either—but disgust, as though I am a particularly disgusting brand of insect, and I know then that I will die.
I’m sorry, Alex. And Julian, too. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, Grace.
I close my eyes.
“Wait!”
I open my eyes. A girl is emerging from the backseat.
She is dressed in the white muslin of a new bride. Her hair is elaborately knotted and curled around her head, and her procedural scar has been highlighted with makeup, so it looks like a little colored star just beneath her left ear. She is beautiful; she looks just like the paintings of angels we used to see in church.
Then her eyes land on me, and my stomach wrenches. The ground opens underneath me. I can hardly trust myself to stand.
“Lena,” she says calmly. It is more of an announcement than a greeting.
I can’t bring myself to speak. I can’t say her name, even though it screams, echoing, through my head.
Hana.
“Where are we going?”
Hana turns toward me. These are the first words I have managed to say to her. For a second she registers surprise, and something else, too. Pleasure? It’s hard to tell. Her expressions are different, and I can’t read her face anymore.
“My house,” she says after a brief pause.
I could laugh out loud. She’s so ridiculously calm; she could be inviting me over to surf LAMM for music, or curl up on her couch and watch a movie.
“You’re not going to turn me in?” My voice is sarcastic. I know she’s going to turn me in; I knew it the moment I saw the scar, saw the flatness behind her eyes, like a pool that has lost all its depth.
Either she doesn’t detect the challenge or she chooses to ignore it. “I will,” she says simply. “But not yet.” An expression flickers across her face—a momentary uncertainty—and she seems about to say something else. Instead she turns back to the window, chewing her lower lip.
That bothers me, the lip-chewing. It is a break in her surface of calm, a ripple I didn’t expect. It’s the old Hana peeking out of this shiny new version, and it makes my stomach cramp again. I’m overwhelmed by the momentary urge to throw my arms around her, to inhale her smell—two dabs of vanilla at the elbows, and jasmine on her neck—to tell her how much I’ve missed her.
Just in time, she catches me staring at her and presses her mouth firmly into a line. And I remind myself that the old Hana is gone. She probably doesn’t even smell the same. She hasn’t asked me a single question about what has happened to me, where I’ve been, how I came to be in Portland, streaked with blood and wearing dirt-encrusted clothing. She has barely looked at me at all, and when she does, it is with a vague, detached curiosity, as though I’m a strange animal species in a zoo.
I’m expecting us to turn toward West End, but instead we head off-peninsula. Hana must have moved. The houses here are even larger and statelier than in her old neighborhood. I don’t know why I’m surprised. That is one thing I have learned during my time with the resistance. The cure is about control. It’s about structure. And the rich get richer and richer, while the poor get squeezed into narrow alleys and cramped apartments, and told they are being protected, and promised they will be rewarded in heaven for obedience. Servitude is called safety.
We turn onto a street lined with ancient-looking maple trees, whose branches embrace overhead to form a canopy. A street sign flashes by: Essex Street. My stomach gives another violent twist. 88 Essex Street is where Pippa has planted the bomb. How long has it been since the foghorn blew? Ten minutes? Fifteen?
Sweat is pooling under my arms. I scan the mailboxes as we pass. One of these homes—one of these glorious white houses, crowned like cakes with latticework and cupolas, ringed with wide white porches and set back from the street on vivid green lawns—is going to blow in less than an hour.
The car slows to a stop in front of ornate iron gates. The driver leans out his window to punch a code into a keypad, and the gates whir smoothly open. It reminds me of Julian’s old house in New York City, and amazes me still: all this power, all this energy flowing and pumping to a handful of people.
Hana is still staring impassively out the window, and I have the sudden urge to reach out and drive my fist through her image as it is reflected there. She has no idea what the rest of the world is like. She has never seen hardship or been without food, without heat or comfort. I’m amazed that she could ever have been my best friend. We were always living in two separate worlds; I was just stupid enough to believe it didn’t matter.
Towering hedges surround the car on both sides, flanking a short drive that leads to another monstrous house. It is larger than any we have seen thus far. An iron number is nailed above the front door.
88.
For an instant, my vision goes black. I blink. But the number is still there.
88 Essex Street. The bomb is here. Sweat tickles my lower back. It doesn’t make any sense; the other bombs are planted downtown, in municipal buildings, like they were last year.
“You live here?” I say to Hana. She is getting out of the car, still with that same infuriating calm, as though we’re on a social visit.
Once again, she hesitates. “It’s Fred’s house,” she says. “I guess we share it now.” When I stare at her, she amends, “Fred Hargrove. He’s mayor.”
I had completely forgotten that Hana was paired with Fred Hargrove. We’d heard rumors through the resistance that Hargrove senior had been killed during the Incidents. Fred must have taken his father’s place. Now it begins to make sense that a bomb was planted in his home; nothing is more symbolic than striking the leader directly. But we’ve miscalculated—it isn’t Fred who will be at home. It’s Hana.
My mouth feels dry and itchy. One of her goons tries to grab me and force me out of the car, and I wrench away from him.
“I’m not going to run,” I practically spit, and slide out of the car on my own. I know I wouldn’t get more than three feet before they opened fire. I’ll have to watch carefully, and think, and look for an opportunity to escape. No way am I going to be within three blocks of this place when it blows.
Hana has preceded us up the porch steps. She waits, her back to me, until one of the guards steps forward and opens the door. I feel a rush of hatred for this brittle, spoiled girl, with her spotless white linens and her vast rooms.
Inside, it’s surprisingly dark, full of lots of polished, dark oak and leather. Most of the windows are half-obscured by elaborate drapery and velvet curtains. Hana starts to lead me into the living room, and then thinks better of it. She continues down the hall without bothering to switch on the light, turning back only once to look at me with an expression I can’t decipher, and finally leads me through two swinging doors and into the kitchen.
This room, in contrast with the rest of the house, is very bright. Large windows face out over an enormous backyard. The wood here is shaved pine or ash, soft and nearly white, and the counters are spotless white marble.
The guards follow us into the room. Hana turns to them.
“Leave us,” she says. Illuminated by the slanted sunlight, which makes it appear as if she is glowing slightly, she once again looks like an angel. I’m struck by her stillness, and by the quietness of the house, its cleanliness and beauty.
And somewhere in its underbelly, buried deep, a tumor is growing, ticking toward its eventual explosion.
The guard who was driving—the one who had me in a headlock earlier—makes noises of protest, but Hana silences him quickly.
“I said, leave us.” For a second, the old Hana resurges; I see the defiance in her eyes, the imperial tilt of her chin. “And close the doors behind you.”
The guards file out reluctantly. I can feel the weight of their stares, and I know that if Hana were not here, I would already be dead. But I refuse to feel grateful to her. I won’t.
When they are gone, Hana stares at me for a minute in silence. Her expression is unreadable. Finally she says, “You’re too skinny.”
I could almost laugh. “Yeah, well. The restaurants in the Wilds are mostly closed. They’re mostly bombed, actually.” I don’t bother keeping the edge out of my voice.
She doesn’t react. She just keeps watching me. Another beat of silence passes. Then she gestures to the table. “Sit down.”
“I’d rather stand, thanks.”
Hana frowns. “You can treat that as an order.”
I don’t really think that she’ll call the guards back if I refuse to sit, but there’s no point in risking it. I slide into a chair, glaring at her the whole time. But I can’t get comfortable. It has been twenty minutes at least since the foghorn blew. That means I have less than forty minutes to get out of here.