Once We Were (16 page)

Read Once We Were Online

Authors: Kat Zhang

Tags: #sf_history

BOOK: Once We Were
12.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

I flipped onto our side and buried our face into the pillow.


But I knew Addie felt, as I felt, that we were already inextricably linked to Sabine and the others. Saying no now would be backing out.

My voice went sharper than I meant it to.

Addie didn’t respond, and I continued, more softly,


Addie said. She didn’t say anything else.
I shifted again, turning to watch Nina’s slumbering form in the other bed. She, at least, was sleeping peacefully tonight.

 

The next morning, Emalia was still brewing her coffee when I went in search of Ryan, taking the stairs two at a time. For years, I hadn’t been able to communicate with anyone but Addie. Ryan was one of the first people I spoke with after learning to talk again. He would listen until I tamed my jumbled thoughts into words.
I also needed to know
his
thoughts. Had Devon’s words been his as well? Or had Devon’s will simply overridden Ryan’s? Maybe he just hadn’t been sure. Maybe he’d needed time to think things over, too.
Henri, not Ryan, answered my knock. “They’re still asleep,” he said quietly once I’d stepped inside. Henri never spoke unless it was behind closed doors. His accent meant it was safer that way. He tilted his head toward the couch, where the boy I’d been looking for lay stretched out beneath a blanket, one arm curved by his head. His blanket trailed along the carpet.
The light above the dining table was on, but the rest of the apartment remained dim. Still, we could see the shape of his face, the curve of his mouth, the shadow cast by his eyelashes. Why was it always boys who got the ridiculously long eyelashes?

Addie asked.

I said without thinking. I never had to think about it anymore.

It sounded silly when she put it like that, but my conviction didn’t waver.


she said after a moment.

“Eva?” Henri smiled when I startled.
“Sorry,” I said. I was already moving back toward the door. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, wait.” Henri ran a hand against his dark, close-cropped hair, then motioned to the table. “Talk with me? We’ll speak softly.”
I hesitated, then nodded. When Addie and I had first met Henri, we’d been too nervous to talk with him. He’d come visit Peter, and we’d sneak looks at him from across the room, flushing when he caught us. Other than Peter, we’d never met anyone who’d traveled beyond American borders. And Henri hadn’t just traveled. He’d lived his whole life overseas. He had the answers to so many questions we’d never dreamed we’d have the opportunity to ask. How did the hybrids live? Did any of them really go crazy, like the pamphlets at the hospitals claimed? What was it like, the hybrids and the single-souled mingling everywhere? Could people really be happy like that?
Henri had taken the time to tell us stories about his home, a small country in central Africa. He’d traced for us the journeys he’d taken to the Middle East and to Europe, where he now worked for a newspaper. He’d always loved to travel, he said. He’d always wanted to see the world, know its people. And with everywhere he’d gone, he’d come to learn that people are able to accept all kinds of
normal.
The rest of Henri’s apartment was spartan, but his table was always strewn with papers, haphazard legal pads, and manila folders that reminded me of the ones we’d seen at Nornand. The ones reducing us patients to photographs, test results, and hastily scribbled notes. To
progress
or
failure
. To experiments.
“Peter tells me the city has calmed down about what happened at Lankster Square,” Henri said. “But they still don’t know who did it.”
I met his eyes. “Do you think they will? Find out, I mean?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. He must have misread my concern, because he continued with, “You don’t need to worry about it, Eva.”
What had Josie said? That the government wouldn’t just frame somebody, because getting it wrong would make them look stupid. It made sense. But never finding out would make them look stupid, too. Their only solution was to find the true perpetrators.
To find us.
They wouldn’t find us. The possibility was too terrifying to think about.
“Overseas,” I said, “they’ve found a way to get to the moon. Have they found a way to cure hybridity? One that doesn’t end up killing the majority of its patients?”
Henri hesitated. He took a moment to think, carefully rolling down his shirtsleeves from his elbows. It was so early in the morning Ryan hadn’t even woken yet, but Henri looked as put together as if he were heading out to a nice dinner. He always dressed like that; no matter that he hardly left the building. “Not yet. There aren’t many people researching it now. Some think we should research it more. Some think we should stop. Some think we shouldn’t focus on the hybrids at all, but the people who aren’t hybrid. Find a way to save all the little children who die before they reach double digits.”
All the recessive souls. The ones who hadn’t been
lucky
, like me.
“Maybe it’s better not knowing,” I said. “Maybe all the intricacies of who survives and who doesn’t . . . why some people are hybrids and some aren’t . . . maybe it’s just not something we’re supposed to know.”
Henri paused, watching me carefully. I struggled not to fidget. “Why do you say that?” he asked.
I thought about Eli and Cal. About Jaime with his broken sentences and lost half.
“Too much knowledge can do terrible things,” I said.
For a long moment, Henri didn’t reply. His eyes didn’t leave our face. Our lips pressed together.
“People do terrible things,” Henri murmured. “Knowledge is only knowledge.” He hesitated. “What if they could find a
true
cure? Not just killing one of the souls, but . . . transferring it?”

Addie echoed.
I frowned. “You mean like taking me out of my body and just sticking me into another one? That’s impossible. Where would you even get a—an empty body?”
“I’m only speculating,” Henri said. “But bodies can be built.”
“Built?”
“Yes. Cloned. It’s been done with animals already. It makes sense that it would be possible with humans.”
I could only stare and stare.

I echoed.
Addie didn’t reply. Dimly, I was aware that she was shielding her emotions from me. But my own feelings—my own thoughts—were in too much disarray for me to focus on hers.
To build a body from nothing . . . could you do that? Could you create a fully functioning human being, minus whatever it was that sparked it? That thought, and felt, and dreamed?
And how could you transfer me? My thoughts? My memories? What if something got lost on the way over? Could I still be me if I were in another body? Would they make the second body just like my old one? Would I still have the scars on my hands from the coffee I’d spilled as a child?
Lyle with a new kidney was still Lyle. Lyle would be Lyle even if they had to replace
all
his organs—I felt that with unbreakable certainty.
But was this different? Would I still be me?
Would I still be
me
without Addie sharing my heart?
“You know this—this kind of thing is not possible now, right?” Henri said quickly. “It will not be possible in five years or ten or, I imagine, twenty or thirty years, either. I am not a scientist. But I only wonder. If there were the possibility of finding this kind of
cure
, would you wish them to do the research? Even with the harm some people might do with the knowledge?”
I just stared at him. I didn’t know how to answer.
Addie was the one, in the end, who whispered

And she was, of course, right. These procedures Henri was talking about—they wouldn’t
fix
us, wouldn’t make us
right
. They would just make us
different
than we were now. They would change us.
Would I want that sort of change? I wasn’t sure. Maybe I would. It would be nice, perhaps, to have the choice, even if Addie and I decided in the end that it wasn’t for us. Even if we didn’t want to change, perhaps some other hybrid would.
Henri forced a smile that wasn’t really a smile, just a tightening of the lips. “Don’t worry about it. This isn’t what I meant to talk with you about, Eva, when I asked you to stay. I wanted you to tell me: Is something wrong?”
My mind still whirled with the idea of building bodies. From what? The dead? Or grown from cells? More and more, I realized just how little Addie and I knew. How little we’d been content with knowing.
We’d had no reason to doubt the truth of what our teachers taught us: that the Great Wars had swept across the rest of the world, bringing it to its knees. That the Americas were a haven of peace and prosperity. That this peace and prosperity was contingent on keeping the country hybrid-free.
Why would we have believed differently? These were the things written in our history books and our newspapers, the things our parents told us. It was what our classmates and our classmates’ parents believed. It was what the president said, and he’d been in office for over two decades. His uncle had guided the country through the start of the Great Wars and the invasions that had occurred on American soil. He should know.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“They try to hide it, but I hear Lissa and Ryan arguing. About something bigger, I think, than the things they usually fight about.”

Addie said.
She was right. I could think about Henri’s ideas later. “I don’t know what they’re arguing about.”
Henri studied our expression. I turned away, letting our hair fall into our face, and stared at the other papers on the table. Buried beneath two of the legal pads was a world map identical to the one he’d given us.
I ran our fingers across the glossy surface. “Why don’t they help us? They know about us, don’t they? About the hybrids? How we’re treated?”
Henri hesitated. “They have more pressing concerns. The Americas are large, but you are . . . what’s the word? You keep to yourselves. And you are not as advanced with technology. You are not a threat. The world has already seen too much war these past decades. There is little to gain from provoking the Americas when so far they have been peaceful.”
“They haven’t been peaceful to
us
,” I snapped. I took a deep breath through our nose. “They trade, though. Dr. Lyanne told us. There are countries out there trading with the Americas, helping them hurt us.”
When Henri spoke again, his voice was even quieter. Contained. “Almost everyone was hurt by the wars. Some countries more than others. Some are very desperate now. Some would try to trade with the Americas in hope they might receive aid from them, if war came again.” His expression showed how unlikely he imagined that help would be. “Others trade because the Americas can provide supplies they are unable to produce themselves and cannot manage to obtain elsewhere.”
In the end, though, whatever their reasoning, the important thing was easy to understand.

I said.

We’d have to help ourselves.
NINETEEN
R
yan woke up soon after, saving me from more of Henri’s questions.
“Eva?” His voice was rough with sleep. I perched on the edge of the couch, smiling automatically as his eyes met mine. If I bent down, just a little, I could kiss away the last of his dreams, my hair curtaining us from the rest of the world. “You’re here early.”
I shrugged, conscious of Henri at the dining table behind me. “I wanted to talk.”
Ryan nodded and pushed himself upright. He knew what I’d come to talk about. I guess it wasn’t hard to figure out. “I’ll get dressed.”
I sat awkwardly in the living room while Ryan went to get ready. We couldn’t really talk, of course, with Henri listening in, so as soon as Ryan reemerged, I mumbled something about not wanting to leave Kitty alone and pulled him out of the apartment.
But when we reached Emalia’s door, I hesitated. “Let’s keep going.” I took a step back toward the stairwell. “Let’s go outside. We do it all the time to go to the photography shop, and nothing’s ever happened. Nothing’s ever even come
close
to happening.”

Addie said.
But Ryan smiled. “Where do you want to go?”
To the last place we’d felt, just for a moment, happy, unburdened, and full of hope.
“The beach,” I said.

 

I’d sought out Ryan so we could talk about Sabine’s plan, but as the two of us wandered through the congested city streets, I didn’t bring it up. The warm, sunny morning filled me with a happiness I was in no hurry to destroy.
We had no money for the bus, let alone a taxi, so we ducked into a tiny grocery store to look at a map and write down directions, then set out on foot. Emalia didn’t usually get home until evening; we had plenty of time.

Other books

A Bad Bride's Tale by Polly Williams
One Good Hustle by Billie Livingston
The Rock of Ivanore by Laurisa White Reyes
Betrayed by Your Kiss by Laura Landon
Por qué fracasan los países by Acemoglu, Daron | Robinson, James A.
A Royal Bennet by Melanie Schertz