Once We Were (3 page)

He’d visited Addie and me frequently since our escape, playing tour guide to our new life. It was through him that we’d learned about Emalia’s past, and Peter’s, and Henri’s.

“Hey, Jackson,” I said, and was rewarded with a grin.

Jackson and Vince were familiar and safe. The girl who entered next was a stranger.

She was just a little older than Jackson—perhaps nineteen—with dark eyes, thick, brown hair, and long, blunt bangs. A faded denim jacket sat bulkily on narrow shoulders, dwarfing her dancerlike frame. Jackson opened his mouth like he was going to introduce her, but she beat him to it.

“I’m Sabine.” She stuck out her hand. Her smile softened some of the gesture’s formality, but not all of it. Her grip was cool and firm, stronger than I’d expected from someone barely taller than we were.

It had been weeks since we’d met anyone new. I couldn’t help staring at her, studying everything from the missing gold button on her jacket to the scuffs on her turquoise ballet flats. Her nails were cut almost to the quick, but smooth, not like she’d bitten them.

Addie said.

I looked away, but too late. Sabine’s eyes caught ours, and she smiled. Not disparagingly, though. Gently, like she understood.

“Josie and I have seen you around before,” she said. “When you guys were still staying at Peter’s place.”

Josie and I. Josie and Sabine, then—the two souls who shared this body. I still wasn’t used to the easy way hybrids here referred to themselves. Of course, they only did it in private, among other members of Underground, but it seemed like such a risk to even speak the names aloud.

“It’s Eva and Addie, right?” Sabine said. “And Ryan and Devon?” She turned to him. “We were just up at your place, but no one answered the door. Jackson’s been talking about these inventions you make. They sound amazing. Which was the one you were telling me about yesterday, Jackson? The clock—”

Ryan cut Sabine off with a harried smile. “I’m just messing around. It’s something to do.”

“I figured you guys were bored.” She looked around the apartment, as if she could flip through the days we’d spent cooped up here as easily as I flipped through Addie’s sketchbook. “Everyone goes through this when they first escape. It’s like quarantine. But you guys are planning to stay, right?”

“Stay?” Ryan asked.

Sabine nodded. “In Anchoit, I mean. You’re not going to let Peter ship you off somewhere?”

“No,” I said quickly. I looked toward Ryan. “Not if it would mean getting separated.”

“It probably would,” Jackson said. “Peter and them, they’ve got connections with sympathetic families across a pretty wide net, but they’re spread out. I doubt they’d be able to place you all in the same area. Especially since . . .” He looked at Ryan, then shrugged awkwardly. “Well, you know.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I know.”

Placing Ryan and Hally would mean finding a family that looked like them. They were only half-foreign, on their father’s side—and their father wasn’t even
really
foreign; he’d been born in the Americas—but it still came through in the olive complexion of their skin, the shape of their brows, the large, deep-set look of their eyes, the curve of their chins. At least one member of any foster family would have to look like them. A nonforeign family adopting a foreign child would draw more attention than it was worth.

“We’re staying,” I said.

Addie said.

We had three more years before we were eighteen. Of course, couldn’t Emalia forge us papers saying whatever she wanted? We could be eighteen in a few months, if need be. We could be eighteen right now.

“You guys can always come stay with us,” Sabine said. I looked at her in surprise. We’d only just met, and she was offering us a place to live? “I share an apartment with a friend of ours. There isn’t an extra room, but there’s a couch someone can use, and we could fit mattresses if we rearranged some furniture.”

“I’d offer my place, too,” Jackson said, “but it’s smaller. And between my roommate and me—”

“Between his roommate and him, they keep the place a complete dump,” Sabine said, laughing.

Jackson spread his hands and shrugged. “We’re busy people.”

Jackson and Vince worked part-time jobs all around the city. To date, we’d heard him refer to waiting tables, walking dogs, manning food stands at the park, and working in grocery stores. He seemed to lose jobs as quickly as he gained them.

He had to keep working. No one else was supporting him. But watching him smile now, he looked like any other eighteen-year-old boy on summer vacation. Never mind that he and Vince no longer attended school. They didn’t see the point. Neither, I supposed, did they have the time.

The phone rang before I could thank Sabine for her offer. Emalia had instructed us to take calls. Most of the time, it was just a telemarketer. The chance of someone recognizing our voice was small—smaller than the chance of Emalia or Peter needing to get in contact.

I smiled apologetically at the others as I answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Hey.” A boy’s voice, gruff and urgent. “Are you Eva? Addie? One of them?”

Our eyes flew to Ryan, who was halfway across the room before I managed to say, “What? Sorry, who is this?”

Addie said, but couldn’t finish her sentence. Even my name had been little more than a tremor.

Who is it?
Ryan mouthed. Behind him, Sabine and Jackson had gone still, both staring at us.

Our heart pounded. Should I hang up?

No. No, that was stupid.

“It’s Christoph,” the boy said. “Is Sabine there? Can you put her on?”

Slowly, I took the phone from our ear and covered the speaker. Our voice was halting. I forced it steadier. “Do you know someone named Christoph?”

Sabine sighed and nodded. I found myself relaxing slightly as I handed her the phone. “Hey, Christoph. Next time, you could try not scaring everyone to death, you know?” She paused as he said something. Her exasperation melted away. “Which station? Okay, thanks.” She closed her eyes. Just for a second. Then she took a sharp breath, opened them again, and hung up. “Mind if we turn on the television?”

I shook our head. At her touch, the TV flickered on with its usual grainy quality.

On the screen was Jenson.

O
ur muscles, bones, organs liquified.

Jenson.

Jenson of the review board. Jenson of the dark suits and creased pants and never-ruffled voice.

Jenson, who had chosen Hally and Lissa for surgery. Whose cool, steel voice frightened us more than Mr. Conivent’s silk. A man who didn’t need Mr. Conivent’s slick smiles or ready excuses. Who had watched us like he owned us.

He looked just as I remembered. Dark hair. Light eyes. Suit jacket. Not young and not old, and brutal in the way a panther was brutal—claws retracted inside soft paws. He stood before a podium, his expression crafted from a block of marble. A band of text ran across the bottom of the screen:
Mark Jenson, Director of the Administration for Hybrid Affairs for Sector Two. Nationwide address.

Director for all of Sector Two? The Americas were divided into states, which were grouped into four sectors: two in the northern continent, and two in the southern. The president presided over us all, but lesser government heads watched over each sector. I’d known Jenson was part of the review board that had come to examine Nornand—I’d seen the importance the clinic had put on his visit—but I hadn’t realized just how powerful he was.

“Our country was formed as a haven for the single-souled,” Jenson said. “Since the first rise of civilization, the hybrids have thought themselves better—smarter, more able. For thousands of years, our ancestors were subjugated to slave labor and then near–slave labor, to monstrous and inhuman treatment. Finally, they took a stand. They fought for their right—our right—to be free of hybrid rule.” He paused. “The Americas were truly a new world—colonized, perhaps, by hybrids, but built on the backs of the single-souled. We fought for and won this land during the Revolution. It is our haven in a world gone mad. And as such, it must be protected.”

Addie said softly.

Our initial sickness hadn’t faded, only soured and curdled.

“In past times, when the world was a more barbaric place, the hybrids were able to maintain their power through sheer brutality and superior numbers. But today, we can see them for what they truly are: mercurial in mood, unstable in action. That is, if they do not simply succumb to insanity. Who but the insane could so savagely treat their fellow human beings for thousands of years? Who but the unstable would continue to fight endless wars, until they’d all but driven themselves into the ground?”

Ryan had come to stand beside us, slipping his fingers through ours. We felt the heat of his arm through his sleeve. It wasn’t until he gently squeezed back that I realized I was crushing his fingers.

Jenson stared out from the television screen. It felt like he was talking specifically to us. To me. “We’ve long closed our borders to the hybrids overseas. But unfortunately, that didn’t solve the problem of the ones being born into our midst. For a long time, the institutions were our best solution to the hybrid condition. Institutionalization allowed hybrids to be secured and cared for away from those they might harm. It allowed them to be protected from themselves. But times are changing. As a country, we improve and move forward, discovering better ways to resolve our problems. And that is what I wish to introduce to you today—the next step in our answer to the hybrid issue: not containment, but a cure.”

A cure.

A cure was what they’d been looking for at Nornand. Child after child had died on the operating table in search of a cure. Jaime Cortae—thirteen years old, funny, brilliant—had gone under the knife and lost a part of himself he would never get back. All because they’d been searching for a cure.

Addie said.

Surely, they hadn’t changed their minds so quickly. Surely, Dr. Lyanne had been right. But Dr. Lyanne’s hand in our escape had been discovered soon after the breakout, and she’d had to flee. Since then, she’d been in hiding just as much as the rest of us.

What if she’d heard wrong? My voice was quiet.

The last word was a twist in our gut.

If they succeed, then all those children who died were just collateral damage.

On-screen, Jenson explained that a cure for hybridity wasn’t yet available for widespread use, but research was being conducted. They hoped to implement it in certain areas before beginning the program nationwide.

“Security levels will be increased across the country,” he continued. “This will stay in effect for the immediate future as a preemptive measure against the possibility of hybrid backlash. Safety, as always, is our primary concern. In this case, there is a second reason.”

Something hardened in Jenson’s face. For a second, things became personal, not professional. Then it passed, and he was just a government official again, just a guy at a podium giving a speech someone else had probably written for him.

“We are searching,” said Jenson into the microphone, “for a child.”

There existed nothing, nothing in the world except for his words.

“A thirteen-year-old boy named Jaime Cortae was stolen from a hospital after being successfully treated for hybridity. Investigations have been launched, and it is believed that he was kidnapped by a small group of hybrid insurgents.”

He was talking about our Jaime.

“Eva?” a small voice floated out behind us.

Kitty stood in the hallway, dressed in pajama pants and a soft blue T-shirt, her long hair plaited down her back. Outside of Nornand, Kitty and Nina never wore skirts. They almost never wore their hair down. They never wore blue. Their big, dark eyes were the same, their almost luminous skin, their matchstick limbs. But here in Emalia’s apartment, a flush in their cheeks, they’d lost a bit of that fairy look.

Until she saw the screen, saw Jenson, and her face went white. “What’s he saying?”

Just as she spoke, the video feed of Jenson cut away, replaced by a shot of a dark-haired couple.

Mr. and Mrs. Cortae
, read the caption.

They stood outside, their hands twined together, looking themselves like lost children. The woman wore a long, heavy skirt, though it was summer. Her husband’s eyes stayed fixed on the ground, but hers kept moving—around and around, in all directions, searching. Searching for what? For Jaime? For answers? For justice? Or for a way out? An escape route from the camera jutting into her private grief.

“He was healthy,” she cried. “He was healthy, and they took him. They—”

Then she and her husband were gone. Jenson once again dominated the screen.

No. No, go back. Let her speak. Let us hear her.
I needed to know what she had to say. What did she know about Jaime and her other, lost son? Was she fighting for him? Did she want him back, no matter what? Had she been coerced into giving up her child, like our parents? Did she regret it, every day?

“His family is, of course, devastated to have come so close to having a healthy child back home,” Jenson said. “We are likewise highly concerned for Jaime’s well-being and are working diligently to secure his safe return.”