Once We Were (32 page)

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Authors: Kat Zhang

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BOOK: Once We Were
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We left the attic after dawn. The streets were nearly empty. Saturday.
Everything’s less regulated on the weekends,
Sabine had said. Her excuse for bombing on a Friday. Now the Saturday-morning stillness was a strike against us—made us more conspicuous.
But we made it to Peter’s van. We made it through the grid of streets. And finally, when the sun was high and blinding, we made it to a small house at the edge of the city, with a scraggly, unkempt lawn and a dark red door.
I was in control then. Ryan and I were the first to walk up the porch steps, so I was the one who rang the doorbell. I leaned back against Ryan, and waited. I was patient. I knew it might take a while. That walking was hard for him, sometimes.
He opened the door slowly.
“Hi, Eva,” he said.
Jaime Cortae. Thirteen. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Lover of peanut butter. Sometime angel, sometime mischief maker. Always Jaime.
I threw our arms around him.
Everyone filed in. Jaime asked for Dr. Lyanne. There was a quiet moment. I’d been hoping against hope that she would be here. That she would just appear in the foyer, like she’d appeared in the smoke back at Powatt. Like she’d appeared at our door that last night at Nornand to set us free. Dr. Lyanne had, in so many ways, always appeared when I needed her most.
She wasn’t here now.
Because of me.
Peter started making calls. Everyone else just sat around until Henri drafted Lissa to the kitchen to help him prepare some sort of meal. None of us had eaten since . . . I couldn’t even remember when.
“You all right?” Ryan said, and I nodded. We sat on the couch, curled against each other. His fingers tightened around ours. “I still can’t believe you ran
into
a building with a bomb in it.”
“I had thirteen minutes,” I whispered. “Sabine told me.”
“What if they didn’t believe you and kept you from leaving? What if Sabine had been lying? What if the bomb had gone off early by accident?”
“I knew it wouldn’t,” I said. “You made it.”
He laughed hollowly.
Where was Sabine now? Had she and Christoph gotten away, in the end? What about Cordelia?
“I can’t believe I let it get that far,” I said softly, our head in the crook of Ryan’s arm. I looked at Jaime, who sat at the dining table, staring at the whorls in the wood. Guilt was acid in our veins. It corroded everything. Our heart. Our lungs. Our throat.
“Don’t,” Ryan said. “Eva, don’t. If we’re going to lay blame, I’ve got a hell of a lot more of it than you. I made the thing.”
Lissa emerged from the kitchen and saw us on the couch. She hesitated, then came over and sat down. Ryan pulled her close, brought her into our circle. Her hair whispered against our cheek. “We made food,” she said quietly.
We had to rearrange the meager furniture, pulling the table to the couches, so everyone could have a seat. Henri brought in a pot of something that piped steam into the air. We all sat. All except Peter, who didn’t join us until bowls had been rustled up, soup had been served.
It was then that we heard the car pulling into the driveway.
The room froze. A picture of fear. Peter, the only one standing, was the first to move again. He gestured for everyone to head toward the bedroom, where we’d be hidden from view. Silently, we obeyed. Ryan lingered back to help me walk, but I was the last to enter the hallway.
So I heard when Peter opened the door.
I saw who was standing on the front porch, face pale, eyes weary, lips pressed in a thin line.
“I’ve snapped one of my heels,” Dr. Lyanne said, holding out the offending shoe.
Peter shook his head and laughed. The sound was so foreign, so shocking, so strange. I couldn’t imagine laughing. Now, or ever again. Dr. Lyanne’s eyes met ours. But she didn’t say anything, and neither did I.
Later, when we were all seated again, she explained how she’d gotten away in the chaos. How she’d sedated Jenson once they were almost out of the building, so he couldn’t alert security as to who she was. In the confusion, they’d believed her when she said she was one of the officials who’d come to investigate Powatt. They’d taken her to a hospital, where she checked in under a false name. Eventually, she was able to sneak away. Hide. Then come back to us.
It seemed like Dr. Lyanne always came back to us, in the end.
She told us Jenson would live. Would make a full recovery, most likely. But she didn’t know what he would tell the police when he woke. She didn’t know who, if any, real hybrids had been rounded up in the raid following the bombing. Through his phone calls, Peter had ascertained that many of the ones living in the area were safe at home, still anonymous and hidden. But there were a number who hadn’t answered the phone. Who remained unaccounted for.
Sabine, Cordelia, and Christoph were among them.
Addie and I had run out of pain medication, and after eating, Dr. Lyanne ushered us into her bedroom so she could properly check us over. I sat as she examined our ankle again, then some of our deeper cuts. There was a dark bloom of bruises across our ribs, to say nothing of our legs.
“All in all, you’re extremely lucky,” she said. “I wish I could get that ankle x-rayed, but—”
“It feels better,” I lied dully. We were both seated on her bed, a bottle of disinfectant and a box of bandages between us.
“Eva,” Dr. Lyanne said. “Look at me.” When I didn’t, she put her fingers under our chin, tilted it upward. Her voice was low, raspy. “Months ago, I watched them cut into a healthy little boy. I watched them kill one soul and permanently injure the other. I see Jaime every day and I know—I know that I had a hand in it.”
“You didn’t do it,” I said quietly. “Maybe you couldn’t have stopped them.”
Her mouth twisted. “That’s not what you said back at Nornand. Sometimes we make mistakes, Eva. Sometimes we make mistakes and they’re so terrible the word
mistake
doesn’t seem big enough to encompass it. But it happens. And the only way to ever make up for it is by cleaning up the mess.”
Addie and I were silent. Dr. Lyanne’s eyes never left ours.
“I think we’ve ruined everything,” I whispered.
“You haven’t,” she said. “I won’t lie—you’ve caused an impressive amount of trouble for someone who’s barely old enough to drive. But you haven’t ruined everything. You think Peter and the others didn’t have plans for something like this? Well, not
this, exactly
,” she said, taking in the look on our face, “but similar situations. You know how Peter likes to be prepared.”
Somehow, I managed a wan smile. It didn’t feel right to smile. But I suppose it didn’t hurt anyone, either.
“Thank you,” I said.
She shrugged and stood, gathering the disinfectant and the bandages. “For what?” But she lingered at the bedroom door. “I’m serious, Eva, Addie—both of you—forget all this
I ruined everything
. Focus on cleaning up your mess.”
We nodded.
“Promise me,” she said.
“Promise,” we said.
And we meant it.
Dr. Lyanne came back with a wheelchair. Jaime didn’t need one, but it was easier, sometimes—especially on his bad days—to have one on reserve.
“I’ll see if I can get some crutches later,” she said as she helped Addie and me into the seat. “But in the meantime, keep weight off that ankle.” She shook her head. “You have no sense of self-preservation, you know that?”

Addie said quietly.

Was it bravery? Or stupidity? Or both?
“I just wanted things to change,” I said, running our fingers along the wheelchair’s padded armrests.
Dr. Lyanne gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Funny. I decided to be a doctor—to specialize in hybridity, to work at Nornand, because I wanted the same thing.”

 

Peter, Sophie, and Henri were gathered in the living room. Dr. Lyanne went to join them. Addie and I wheeled our way to the dining table. There, Jaime and Kitty sat alone, paging through a comic book. I could hear Devon and Hally murmuring in the kitchen, but their voices were just barely audible over the sound of running water and the clink of dishes.
“Hey, Jaime,” I said. He looked up, taking in the wheelchair. He grinned. “I know, I know. I’m just borrowing it for a little while.”
He made a face. “You . . . you c-can . . .
keep it
.”
“Do I get to push you around?” Kitty asked.
I rolled our eyes but couldn’t help a small smile. “We’ll see. Do me a favor first. Run and get me a pencil and a sheet of paper?”
“Why?” Kitty asked. “Is Addie going to draw something?”


she said softly.

Kitty scrambled from her chair. In a few moments, she came back bearing a legal notepad and a pencil. She handed them to us, then leaned over our shoulder.
“Me?” Jaime said as we turned to face him.
Addie was the one who nodded. She touched the pencil point against the paper. Made the first light mark to capture Jaime’s face; his short, curly hair; his smile.
We were so absorbed, we didn’t notice Hally and Devon watching us until Hally asked, several minutes later, “Another Addie masterpiece in the making?”
Addie looked up. “I just realized I’ve never drawn him before. I—oh, Devon, don’t—Jaime, if you
move,
then I can’t—”
Devon had sat down next to Jaime, nodding questioningly at the younger boy’s comic book. Jaime, ever eager, turned to show him the cover.
Addie rolled our eyes. Jaime muffled a laugh. Devon—Devon, for the briefest second—wore a small, smug smile. Then it was gone. He looked over at Peter and the others congregated on the sofas. They were too far away, and spoke too quietly, to hear.
“Planning again,” he said. “We’re going to need our own plans.”
Addie glanced down at her incomplete sketch. “Or we could work with them.”
“You think they’d listen to us?” Hally asked.
“We have to try.”
Because in the end, we all wanted the same thing. To be safe. To be free. To stop the pain, and the suffering, and the fear.
To
keep hope
, not just for our own sakes, but for those who relied on us to help them when they could not help themselves.
“Come on.” Addie set the legal pad on the table. “I’ll finish it later. There’s a meeting going on.”
We all moved to the living room, even Kitty. Peter was the one speaking. He paused when he saw us approaching. His eyes met ours. I didn’t look away.
Finally, he nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s what needs to be done.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
want to say an enormous thank you to all the book bloggers and reviewers who have taken the time to read and promote
What’s Left of Me
. You guys do so much. Every happy email, “Waiting on Wednesday,” “cover love,” or even just plain tweet of excitement really makes an author’s day. I never knew about this enormous community before entering the book-blogging world myself as an aspiring author, and I’m so glad to have discovered it.
Again, I have to shout out to the fabulous ladies of Pub(lishing) Crawl. All of you are incredibly dear to me. A great big thank you, too, to the creative writing department at Vanderbilt University. I had the best four years I could hope for learning under you guys.
A few special notes for the people who critiqued drafts of
Once We Were
: Savannah Foley, you’ve always been there for me, and I appreciate that so very much. Jodi Meadows, thank you for cute ferret pictures and for calming me down when the publishing craziness takes over my brain. Amie Kaufman, your notes make me feel like I’m a better writer than I actually am, and I love you for it. Cindy Wang, I can count on you to tell it like it is, and writing is no different—thank heavens for that! Biljana Likic, you are my three a.m. Skype buddy, my snarker-in-arms, and I swear your life
is
a YA novel sometimes, so that’s always cool. ;)
Kari Sutherland, editor extraordinaire, much of the time I spent writing and revising
Once We Were
was spent in a state of terror that this book was too big for me—that I was tackling something beyond my abilities. You helped me take the enormity of the story in my mind and get it pinned down on paper. Endless thanks.
Emmanuelle Morgen, I’m obviously not your only client, but you often make me feel like I am. I’m trying to come up with some metaphor about publishing being like a river and you being like my skipper, but I think that would make me a boat, so let’s not go in that direction. Thank you for being such a champion of the Hybrid Chronicles!
Huge thanks to everyone at HarperTeen who helped
Once We Were
make it onto shelves. Also to the Epic Reads girls—who are even more epic than their names might suggest: my publicist, Alison Lisnow, Whitney Lee, and all my other foreign agents.
Dechan, this book is dedicated to you. Thank you for fifteen years of friendship and many of the best parts of my childhood. You once referenced
Anne of Green Gables
to describe us, even though neither of us have actually read
Anne of Green Gables
(we need to get on that!). I looked up the quote. Here it is: “A bosom friend—an intimate friend, you know—a really kindred spirit to whom I can confide my inmost soul.” I think that nails it, don’t you?
And finally, hi, Mom and Dad. There isn’t much I can say in words. Thank you. Love you!
About the Author
KAT ZHANG
is an avid traveler, and after a childhood spent living in one book after another, she now builds stories for other people to visit, including
What’s Left of Me
, her first novel, and its sequel,
Once We Were
. You can read about her travels, literary and otherwise, online at www.katzhangwriter.com.

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