The Wall (The Woodlands) (16 page)

Matthew cleared his throat and tapped the end of his stethoscope
. “How are you feeling?”

Joseph breathed in and out slowly as Matthew listened to his lungs and tapped his chest lightly
. “Stitches are itchy but apart from that I feel really good,” he answered, grinning at me. He did look really good. The hollows of his cheeks were already starting to fill out, his color was great, and if anything, he looked stronger and healthier than he did before he got sick. Which wasn’t right.

I
tightened my eyes at Matthew. He leaned back a bit and raised his eyebrows. I was so used to people reacting that way to me it didn’t give me pause anymore. “What exactly did you do to him?” I asked.

“
Rosa…” Joseph started to say.

“
It’s all right.” Matthew put his hands up. “She has a right to ask, so do you.”

“
Yeah, but she doesn’t have to glare at you like that.”

I turn
ed my eyes on Joseph. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” I snapped.

He chuckled
and ran his hand through his hair. He was so annoying and annoyingly adorable.

Matthew explained
that the operation they’d performed, the ‘broken heart’ procedure, was one of the borrowed technologies discovered when they started building the settlement. It involved removing the heart and placing it in a glass box. At this point, I snorted. It sounded stupid. I felt sure it was a lie. Matthew assured us it was true. They didn’t know how it worked but, coupled with a complicated machine, it could completely regenerate the damaged tissue. It could replicate any organ or body part. So if you were badly burned, it could generate new skin. It was like Joseph had been given a new heart. Joseph was fascinated. I was looking out the window. As long they hadn’t hurt him or changed him in some fundamental way, that was explanation enough.

When they had finished their doctor talk, Matthew asked Joseph to unbutton his shirt so he could look at his stitches.

“Would you turn around please?” Joseph said to me, making a circle with his finger, a wicked grin on his face.

I poked my tongue out at him
. “If you hadn’t just had surgery, I would punch you.”

The train started moving
. Matthew slammed into Joseph’s chest with his stethoscope and he winced. “Ha!” I laughed.

I could tell Matthew didn
’t quite understand our dynamic. But he ignored us, focusing on pressing around the edges of the scar as Joseph gritted his teeth.

“
All looks good,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“
Good. Really good. Thanks, Matt.”

“
How’s Apella?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

“
She’s fine,” Matthew said looking at me with his kind, blue eyes.

“
What? What’s wrong with Apella?” Joseph asked.

“
Umm…” I was never good at coming up with a lie on the spot.

Matthew took over.
“Apella had a miscarriage while you were in the coma. She’s very sad, but physically she’s doing well.”

Joseph shook his head sorrowfully,
“Oh no. That’s awful.” He went quiet, taking on her grief. It made me love him more, that he would be so affected by her loss. He wouldn’t make the connection between his miraculous recovery and her miscarriage unless we pointed him that way. I made eye contact with Matthew and he seemed to understand nothing more should be said.

The spinners were climbing now.
A labored electrical noise hummed in the background as they pushed upwards. We were like a strand of beads being pulled along and now we were heading uphill, I could hear a slight strain.

Matthew said we would be there soon.
He tapped his fingers on the table and glanced out the window absentmindedly. Trees sprouted out of the snow and I felt more at home with the green pressing into the tracks. With the sun so strong, the snow was melting, pulling the white back from the leaves, revealing the life underneath. It was there, just waiting, ready to grow and change the scene. I wanted to run out there, to shake and whip the branches and tell winter to hurry up and finish.

As we climbed
further, an alien noise punctured the silence. Matthew uttered, “Gwen.” He rolled his eyes and stared out the window more intently, like that could block out the noise. Tiny speakers in the four corners of our carriage emitted static and I thought they were going to make an announcement. It threw me back to the announcements in Pau. They were never good. I found myself unwittingly gripping the sides of the chair and grimacing. Then the sound came.

Joseph and I both jumped in our seats. Orry followed the noise around the room like he could see the
sounds floating around on the air. I could almost see them too.

It
fit into the scene like it was made for that exact purpose, an accompaniment. It slipped in and around the trees, hopping up and down on the leaves, sending sprays of melting snow running from their shiny fronds. It leapt into the clouds and burst through like rays of light. I found myself tapping my feet and swaying my head.

Then the singing started. A man
’s voice ebbed in between the springing, echoing noises of strings being plucked and wood being hit. His voice was sweet and soft; the painful bemoaning edge to it brought tears to my eyes. I thought of Clara. She understood music. In Pau, the only tuneful sound came from absent humming or whistling and that was usually swallowed pretty quickly for fear of being reported. This was the first time Joseph and I had ever heard anything like this, an organized, yet almost organic, melding of voice and instrument. It filled my ears, my head, with pleasure and aching and I wondered if that was the intention behind it. I couldn’t even hear the words. The sound was overwhelming enough. When it stopped, I wanted to reach out and tug it back through the speakers. But another song started and brought us through another journey of the singers making.

I was lost to it.

Matthew watched our reactions in a gentle but clinical manner. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if he had pulled out a notepad and started jotting things down. I guess it would be fascinating to see a person’s first reaction to real, recorded music.

When the collection of songs ended, I leaned into Matthew, my eyes wide.
“Is there more?”

He laughed
. “More than you can possibly imagine.”

I crossed my arms and
collapsed back into my chair, hugging my ribs. More. Any place that had more of that couldn’t be half bad. I glanced at Joseph’s face, which was somewhere between a smirk and a laugh that didn’t quite get out. I could tell it affected him, but not as intensely as me, because he took new things on so much more easily than I did. It didn’t send him into a spiral of wonderment and sadness; he could accept it into his head like it had always been a part of him.

“
Do you have your own music, too? Like a favorite song?” I asked.

Matthew
’s eyes creased and a flash of pain crossed his face. I had upset him.

“
Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“
No, it’s fine, Rosa. Like you’ve just experienced, music can evoke strong emotions. My favorite song is hard for me to hear; it brings up memories of the people I have lost.”

“
I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I could say something more meaningful but there was nothing.

Matthew told
us that he had a wife. At the very beginning of the building of the settlement, people emerged from China. They had been hiding in the hills around the edges of a bombsite. He told me, his eyes going soft and distant, that she was beautiful, smart, and fierce. She was very protective of her people and it took him a long time to convince her that he could be trusted.

Joseph
silently chuckled. “What?” I asked.

“
Oh, just sounds like someone I know,” he whispered.

When
Matthew finally won her over, it didn’t take long before they were married, or what Survivors’ called being married. It basically meant living together.

His favo
rite was the song they played at their union party. It was
their
favorite song, and that’s why he couldn’t listen to it anymore. He didn’t need to continue—I understood. This is what life was like, not just here but everywhere. There were no happy endings, just endings. Things rarely seemed to work out the way they should.

“
I knew she was sick when we got together. Perhaps I should have kept my distance but then…” he smiled sadly, “I think it was better to have had those short months with her than nothing at all.”

I tipped my head gently, a
greeing. Even though it was more painful than I could possibly have imagined, I would never want to give up knowing Clara. Her loss stung me a thousand times a day in a thousand different ways. Even though I was barbed and ridden with holes from her, I couldn’t regret our friendship.

Deep in
thought, I didn’t notice we were slowing down until we started rolling backwards, clanging gently against the other carriages like marbles on a slide.

“
We’re here,” Matthew said, satisfied, full. He was happy to be home.

It was about lunchtime when we stepped out of our carriages
onto a concrete platform in timid shuffles, like we were stepping onto thin ice that might crack at any second. Our group of newcomers was quiet and anxious.

The S
urvivors looked relaxed. They were home.

All I could
see as I scanned the vicinity was the curve of a metal shelter reaching up like a wave. It was similar to what we had seen when we’d approached the ruins of the city, but more sophisticated.

The cold still bit into us with gnawing teeth.
We were told to put our jackets on and follow them.

Gwen was half
-skipping, half-walking. “Why are you so excited?” I asked distrustfully, listening to her hum a repetitive tune.

She turned to me and smirked
. “It’s my bros birthday. I thought I’d miss it. I’m gonna sneak up on him and surprise him.” I tried to return her smile but it came off looking forced and confused. Siblings were allowed, of course. So much was new. It filled me up to the point where I felt like one more piece of new information would make me burst like a bubble or that I would float away like one.

I saw Bataar unloading the dogs and wondered what he was going to do with them. At this point
, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d miniaturized them and put them in his pocket with his pipe. 

Our little group looked
like a herd of startled deer. Survivors pushed us this way and that, our legs skittering across the concrete, our eyes wide as we searched for clues, skimming over everything, looking for one shred of similarity we could hold onto. Where was this settlement?

As we were
steered past the shelter, something close to a convulsion went through me. We found that shred of similarity we were looking for… though I wish we hadn’t. It hit us like a sledgehammer, so much so that we all stopped still and the Survivors in the back bumped into us. Apella shot forward and her thin hand gripped my arm like a bird claw. I heard Alexei whimper. Joseph wrapped his spare arm around my shoulder protectively. I tried hard to breathe but the air felt thin, laced with fear. Not again.