The Invisible (5 page)

Yet.
I think. Nobody died yet.

“Maybe you’re right,” I say, not wanting to argue the point. “After everything that happened, I guess I might be on edge.”

Z knows I had a relationship with a South Side boy who turned out to be a con artist. She knows we broke up. She even knows that he’s dead now. She just doesn’t know the crucial fact that I’m responsible for his death.

“Sorry,” Z says, laying her cool hand on my arm in a gesture of apology. “I should be more sensitive. You’re so strong about . . . everything . . . that sometimes I forget.”

“It’s okay.” As we head toward homeroom through the emptying halls, I realize all I want is to live the life Z thinks we live. I want to live in a boring city, a place where nothing all that interesting ever happens. So far, no such luck.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I wait until the hallway is quiet and slip out a side door during what is supposed to be my independent study period. I walk out the main security gate and wave at Meechum, one of the Cathedral Day School guards, who sits on a swivel chair in the security booth at the school’s entrance, a mini-TV playing muted footage from the Invisible video. Meech wears a BulletBlower 3000 slung across his belly, but the way he leans back in his chair with his feet up tells me he’s not on particularly high alert.

“Doctor’s appointment.” I force a smile I hope looks relaxed and wave a piece of paper in the air that I’ve ripped from my notebook, pretending it’s a pass from the school secretary. Then I keep walking, not giving him a second to stop me.

“See you soon, Anthem,” Meech calls after me. “Feel better.”

Well, that was easy.
I suppress a smile as I move from school cobblestone onto the city sidewalk. I walk with long strides, arms swinging, at a pace a regular person might think of as a fast walk.

But I’m not regular. It feels agonizingly slow.

The minute I round the corner of Church Avenue and head onto Thorne, I pull the black hood of my jacket up over my head and take off, knowing I have a big distance to cover and not a lot of time to do it if I want to be back in time for physics next period.

And in a heartbeat I’ve sped up to the pace that feels most comfortable for me. A pace that’s half run, half flight.

All I hear when I run like this is whirring of my internal hard drive, my regular breaths, and maybe two or three times in the space of a city block, the thud of my thin sneaker soles making contact with the sidewalk.

I favor streets in the North that are mostly residential, empty at this time of day. I’m always weighing my speed against getting caught. But every time I sense a pedestrian or even a car, I slow my run to something that feels like the sprint of a normal girl. By the time I reach Hemlock, near the river, I decide to experiment, first with two men sitting on a bench, both nodding on Droopies, soon to be chased by cops back to the South Side, most likely. I whiz past them on the other side of the street and sense no reaction, no swivel of their necks, their eyes not registering me at all.

I keep moving, pushing myself even faster, amazed.
Maybe when I move like this, people can’t see me at all
.

When I race over the Bridge of Peace, halfway to Jax’s lab in the space of five minutes, a record for me now that I’m not slowing down, there are two police officers in a cop car parked on one side of the bridge. And in front of me, an orange-and-white barricade.

I take a deep breath and speed up, leaping easily over the barricade, willing myself to move faster, faster than ever. Conscious all the time of the boys in blue sitting in their car. I stare straight at them.

There is no swiveling of their necks. No staring back. Not even a glance in my direction. They don’t notice a thing.

“Oh! It’s you.” When Jax lets me in, she looks like she’s seen a ghost. She sticks her head out the door and looks up and down the alley, then slams the door hard. Her thick glasses are crooked on her face, and her Bedlam University Medical Center sweatshirt is on inside out. But it’s her eyes that strike me most. She looks . . . confused. Jax is a lot of things—flighty, brilliant, and nervous, to name a few of them—but she has never seemed the least bit confused before.

“Did I come at a bad time?” I hesitate in the lab’s dim front room, one eye on Jax, who turns in a slow circle, the other on Mildred, Jax’s caged monkey, who is screeching and scratching her chest and eating a carrot all at once.

Jax stops turning and looks at me, the weird blank confusion in her eyes eventually focusing into something like recognition. “No, sorry. I—it’s just that I’ve received a bit of an odd letter.”

“What is it?” I say, my stomach clenching in anticipation. Maybe someone’s found out how I got to be what I am. Found out who made me that way, in this lab, three months ago.

Jax just keeps opening and closing her mouth. She has a plastic pipette lodged in the silver curls piled on her head. I wonder for a moment if she’s been threatened and is afraid to tell me. “Jax?”

“It’s nothing,” she sighs. “Forget I mentioned it. Just a prank, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

Jax can be secretive and moody. I would be too, I remind myself, if I’d been through what she has. I grab her hand, once again noticing the tattoo on her wrist. The tiny red heart. The name of her daughter. The one who died during the experimental surgery Jax performed to try to save her from a rare condition.
Noa.
When the police began investigating, her husband insisted Jax should be arrested. So she hid. And she’s been hiding ever since, grieving her daughter and deprived of anything close to a normal life.

“I’m very sure.” She turns to me, rolls her shoulders back, and smiles determinedly. “You have my full attention now.”

“Okay,” I say, letting her off the hook for now but reminding myself to ask about it again later. I tell her about Ford, how he’s not getting better. How he can barely hobble out of bed. “It’s been a while,” I say gently. “Shouldn’t he be healed by now?”

“He told me he was doing better,” Jax says. “I should have known it wasn’t true. If it were, he would come by and show me.”

I shake my head. “He’s so weak. If anything, I think he’s worse.” I ask Jax if there’s anything she could try, anything at all to make him well.

“I’ve been working on fortified blood. It’s at a very early stage, though . . .” She trails off.

“I don’t know how long he can continue like this,” I say honestly.

“His white blood count was very low, when we tested last,” Jax concedes. “I’ll bring him in. Maybe try him on a suboptimal dose, since I’m not done testing.”

“Thanks,” I say. I give her a tight hug. “And Jax, if you ever want to talk, I’m here.”

She smiles, too brightly. Hiding whatever it is, pushing it away for now. “Thanks Anthem. I love it when you come to visit. I think I’ll do some research on my own, then we’ll talk.”

I nod. For Jax, research is safety, normalcy, comfort. I tell her I’ll come back and check in soon. Then I leave and race back across town, my mind clinging to the hope—faint and half-formed—that Ford might finally get better.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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I move around the kitchen island at home that night, ravenous after ballet practice and feeling a little woozy from low blood sugar. I surreptitiously check my fingertips for signs of torpor, when my fingers turn blue from the slowing of my heart, something that happens to me sometimes if I don’t eat enough or if I spend too much time being still, but they look okay. Maybe a tad gray, but not the periwinkle they can get sometimes.

“I saw that,” Lily, our cook, says after I grab a sautéed Brussels sprout straight out of the pan she’s cooking them in.

“Sorry.” I grin. “Just one more.” I pop another one into my mouth, the hot oil slicking my lips. Just then I hear the elevator doors sliding open in the hall. They’re home.

Lily nudges me gently out of her way so she can reach the plates in the cupboard. “They’ll be here soon.”

Lily won’t hear them for another thirty seconds at least, not until they’re on the other side of the thick front door to the apartment. I just nod, chewing and preparing myself for another meal with my father rambling on about work while I look at him and wonder.

The curse of my sonic hearing is that I hear stuff even when I don’t want to. Like when my parents discuss my emotional well-being in their bedroom and they think I can’t hear them.

How is she doing these days?
my father will ask my mother.
After everything with that boy. Is she suppressing her feelings?

My mother’s touching if off-base reply:
She’s just much stronger than we give her credit for. I think she’s moved on.
She’s sort of right on both counts, even though they have no clue what really happened with Gavin. In many ways, I
have
moved on. Even though there’s a moment at least once a day where I flash on him falling, moving on is all I have. My only hope of staying sane.

But mostly when I bother to listen to their conversations, they talk shop. Today it’s no different. Inside the apartment at last, they’re discussing (as usual) some detail of the stadium project Fleet Industries is doing. They both sound irritated. Also pretty usual.

“I sent another letter. Why don’t you get Phillip to follow up about the stadium jobs proposal, take it to city council?”

“You’ve said this three times today, Leenie.” My dad sounds defensive. “I told you I’m handling it, and I’m handling it.”

“Fine. I just . . . Lyndie wants to move on another press release because of the protests, she said—”

“Next week it’ll be done. You have my word.” My father’s tone is sharp, designed to close the subject.

“Great,” my mother says tightly. When they come into the kitchen she gives me a kiss on the part in my bunned hair and heads straight for the wine cooler under the counter, to her chardonnay.

“Smells good in here,” my father says, brightening for me and Lily the same way he always does, wiggling his thick eyebrows and doing a little jokey shuffle-dance.

I used to like this little act. Now it just seems rehearsed.

“No hello for your pop today?” he says pointedly, a lock of his dark hair escaping its gelled formation and springing down across his forehead.

“Hi,” I say, ducking as he tries to grab my bun and twist it—another of our old games.

“Crab cakes.” Lily opens the oven and dons a silicone glove to pull out the metal tray warming inside it.

My stomach emits a loud burbling growl as the platter hits the counter. My mother pulls the cork out of a wine bottle with a pop—

But at the exact moment the cork is released, we are all plunged into darkness.

Out the window, one by one, the blocks sprawling out in all directions from where we are in Fleet Tower go dark. All the way to the Midland river, where the darkness bleeds into the inky black of the water.

And beyond the river, the normally muted South Side suddenly looks brighter, as if the power outage on this side of the river is because the South is getting more wattage somehow.

We haven’t blown a fuse. The whole neighborhood has.

“Uh oh,” my mother says. Even in the dark, she is pouring the wine. I hear it glugging from the bottle into her glass.

It’s a new moon, and the only light we have to see by is the faint glow coming from two miles away, the intermittent street lighting of the South Side.

“I’ll just go and get the candles in the pantry,” Lily says, and I move toward the sound of her voice to follow her.

When we return, our arms piled with boxes of candles and a big box of kitchen matches, the TV built into the wall of the kitchen—one we hardly ever use—is now on, displaying only black-and-white static, buzzing loudly.

“Why does that work?” I ask. “And not the lights, I mean?”

“It turned on by itself,” my father mutters. He rummages in the kitchen junk drawer under the counter. “Where’s the damned remote?” His voice is edged with panic.

“But why . . .” I start as Lily lines up votive candles on a piece of tinfoil on the counter and strikes a match. “Lily, have you ever seen . . .”

“Course not,” she whispers, her green eyes wide in the glow of the static from the TV. “Because it’s impossible.”

But then the static stops, replaced with that same drawing of the eye. Placid, unblinking, unfeeling, watching.
Invisible
. My skin begins to crawl as an assault of pictures moves across the screen, these more disturbing than the ones I saw this morning. Pictures from the Bedlam Riots—a rash of violent clashes that broke out in the city when I was a baby. By the time I was one, they’d been squelched by the police crackdown that’s continued until now. Doubling the amount of police in the force and giving the police more power ended what I’ve always been told were the scariest months the city has ever seen. The images are horrible, mesmerizing: A young woman lying on asphalt, the top of her head caved in, blackness seeping around her hair. A policeman with a baton raised, about to come down on a ten-year-old boy, the cop’s face twisted in anger, the boy’s scrawny arms covering his head. Feargas clouding around a group of what looks like thousands of people marching outside of city hall, their eyes wild and wide, mouths open as if screaming.

The images get faster and faster.

Dozens of black-and-white stills in quick succession, each of them depicting dead or collapsed people on city streets. Many of them young, younger than me.

A few shots of what look like twelve-year-olds getting Syndicate tattoos, their faces hard, their eyes fearful.

As I watch, I sink into a chair at the kitchen table next to my mother, who has poured her wine into a jelly jar and now holds it to her lips with two hands, drinking it the way a small child drinks juice.

“But how is it happening?” I hear my father ask wonderingly. “It’s on all the TVs. How have they switched the TVs on?”