Where (10 page)

“That isn't home.”

“I know.”

Then he looks at me straight on and says to me, like we are two grownups, “I don't know how we got here or what did it.” His voice is all cold and so still that it scares me silent. “I don't even know what this place is.”

 

12

Merrill

Anywhen

Time blurs in this place— no clocks or calendars, no phones and no other ways to check the time, just light and dark and food in the dumbwaiter three times before the sun goes down, which we have to assume marks real days and real nights. As though this is no state in no known nation, just a state of mind.

So I can't say exactly when Ray Powell and I finally reconnected, only that the other night I heard somebody whistling in our dead little world of epic silence and when I came outside, it was Ray.

My shadow house here sits exactly where my real house did on Kraven island. It's laid out in the same footprint, but unlike my place with its long front porch and jigsaw trim, this one turns a blank white face to the barren street. As I opened the door, the whistling stopped. I slipped outside the circle of light on my front walk and there was Ray.

I whispered, “You're outside!”

“I am.”

“Then it's all right.”

“So far.” He drew me out into the middle of the street, too far from the lampposts for their spyware to pick up anything we muttered in the dark. In our situation, you pre-suppose watchers stationed somewhere, studying a hundred monitors. Ray and I leaned close, for reasons. Let them think we're lovers sneaking out, not the only two prisoners sharp enough to collude.

Yes I said prisoners. What do you think we are?

Ray's even older than Father but he doesn't look it. Unlike Father he comes in smiling and he's aggressively fit. He hates argy bargy, so he ducks town meetings, but things work better because of Ray. Like his father and grandfather, he works behind the scenes. For generations, the Powells have shaped Kraventown, moving generations of hardheads like Father so smoothly that they don't even know.

If the intelligence monitoring our displaced lives found out who Ray really is and that we're in this together they'd lock him up, shut us down or worse, ergo the faked assignation. Our town's been hijacked. We have to figure out what's going on and what comes next. That night I put my arms around Ray's neck because I trusted him and romance seemed like the best disguise. In the real world, Ray's safe as houses. No. Ray Powell is safe as a temple of stone. I stood quietly in his arms, waiting for him to start. He bent as though we were kissing, muttering into my ear, “We need a plan.”

“I know.” Even standing close like that, we were shivering. The night chill penetrated to the bone.

“As in, find a place and call a meeting.”

“A meeting,” I said bitterly. “After what came down last time?” Resentment hung in the air between us like frosted breath.

Ray rubbed my arms, but it didn't help. It was so cold that his voice rattled. “We can't do this alone.”

“We can't do it with them, not the way they are.” I could still taste the blood in my mouth.

“Were.”

“It was awful.”

Blood in my mouth and blood in the meeting hall; it was disgusting. Filthy smears on the walls after Ray broke up the fight and the others left. That night we cleaned up in silence and walked away from certain indelible stains. We were done for the night. Done with them. Done in.

“They're our people, Mer.”

“They're awful.”

“Were. This place,” Ray said, without explaining. “They've changed.”

The rest rolled in and hit so hard that I fell back a step, couldn't breathe. Then it came in a rush. “We've changed.”

Ray said, “You OK?”

“Not really.” I swallowed pain. Ray had promised. “Is Ned?”

He nodded. “So far. Merrill, we need the others.” He put his big hands on my shoulders and leaned hard, grounding me. “Don't ask me how I know this, I just know it. Either we all go or nobody goes.”

The next day we went from house to house in the blistering sunlight, trying to rally them. We kept knocking on doors until it got too hot to be outside. We thought our neighbors would be jonesing for another meeting with questions answered, questions raised, but what can I say?

They blew us off.

They blew us off, one after another.

The few who opened their doors were passive and glassy-eyed. Stunned, as if they'd just been hit by a truck. They don't go out and they won't let us in, not kind, responsible Ray Powell, that the community admires and respects and
owes
in a lot of ways, and, even though we all have history— we grew up together!— not me.

It didn't matter who I tried or what I said, I got back flat refusals shouted from behind closed doors, with one or two whispered apologies leaking out between the cracks. Every day was harder, probably because every day the sun burned hotter than it had the day before. The few who opened their doors to me were friends like Kara Maxwell and Betsy Till, people I thought I knew but don't, not really, not the way they are.

Seeing Kara was the hardest. “Oh,” she said and her voice sank, “I thought you were here about Bill.”

“Bill's missing.”

“So am I.” Her face crumpled and she wailed, “How is he going to find me here?”

“Oh, sweetie!” I put out my arms but I couldn't reach her.

“Don't,” she said. I knew that look:
Some day they'll come marching down our street.
It meant,
don't say anything more.
My best friend Kara shoved a bottle of water at me. Her eyes were spinning like marbles and she fell against the door, shutting me out.

A guard in high school basketball, Betsy Till stood in her doorway waving her arms, waiting for me to feint, and Selina Crane? She snarled like a tigress shielding her cubs. Old Mrs. Tanner and the Weisbuchs were nicer because they remember me when, but they're too shaky to come out in this heat and terrified of letting anything in. I was touched that Tappy Deloach even got out of his chair and made it to the door. I guess they felt sorry for me, soldiering on, all dehydrated and anxious and trying to smile, parched and panting in the heat.

Ray did no better.

I have this fear that mysteriously whisked off-island and set down in a rigidly structured landscape so far from the Inland Waterway that we can't see the ocean or hear it or even smell the salt, the displaced population of Kraven actually likes being contained.

Ray thinks they're all in shock. He says removal and alienation took apart people we used to know and put them back together differently, although that doesn't explain him or me. Even the town loudmouths like Errol Root and Wade Tanner won't come out. This place made them get a lot smaller, apologizing from behind half-closed doors. Rebel shot his big arms across the opening like bolts. Trauma keeps them inside. These houses are designed for comfort. Contained, our people are safe from unknown hazards— their neighbors and their enemies, scary outside entities that they don't know about.

I think they're victims of the design. Whoever did this to us built the compound with security and comfort in mind. Then they set it like a trap and sucked us into it. Uproot a group and while you've got them flailing and terrified, enclose them. Keep them clean and fed and they've settled in: snug houses secured against the elements, everything we need supplied so we'll forget our
wants.
Hermetically sealed calm. New food appears in our kitchen compartments at mealtimes, fresh linens show up in the cubby next to the basin once a week— more often if needed. There are fresh scrubs in our closets every morning, neatly folded on shelves above the chutes where we dumped our ruined clothes from home at the end of that terrible first day.

Maybe there really is some strong drug in the food or air or in the water, but if that's it, how come Ray's still Ray and I'm still anxious, fucked-up me?

When all about us have lost it, why are Ray and I still functional? Why, in a community of one hundred, are we the only ones with the guts— no, the psychic energy— to come outside? Granted, the sun burns hotter every day and nights are cold and dark and, OK, scary. Nobody with any sense wants to come out in this, but Ray and I are driven, and not just by our wants, I don't think.

We're driven by need.

I need to get back to Davy or to get Davy back, I'm not sure which, all I know is that to settle this, to talk it through, we need to stand so close that we can see inside each other's heads.

Ray won't tell me what, exactly, pushed him to the edge where he balances so neatly, taut as a ropewalker. “Urgent business at home,” he told me the one time I asked. He wouldn't specify, only, “Tell you about it after. Not here.” He was tendering the unspoken agreement.

I signed and sealed it. “Not here.”

OK then. We'll keep at it until we beat the game, crack the code, uncover the plot or trap one of our keepers and shake the truth out of him. We'll arm ourselves, fight to the death if we have to— whatever it takes to crack out of this weird existential jail.

We meet at the tag end of most days, after the desert plunges into darkness but before the deep night chill drives us back inside. We scope out new areas. We speculate and collude, and for whatever reasons, the organizers of this— what, experiment in living? Psychological study? Sadistic peepshow?— let it play. The organizers or monitors or keepers, whatever they are, don't interfere. Unless they don't notice. Or they notice and don't care. Unless this is part of their plan. Speculation feeds on itself and we worry the question to death: if there's a plan, what, exactly, is the plan?

Shrouded in the blankets from our narrow beds, Ray and I look like a couple of kids out playing ghost, so it's not like we're hard to spot. In the territory beyond the plaza, there are cameras in every block. Clearly they know we're out here, but in the last three weeks nobody, armed or unarmed, has come out to stop us and no automated
thing
has rolled out to intercept and herd us back inside.

After that first venture we cut holes in our blankets and made ponchos so we could come out in the dark without turning to ice and shattering on the spot. Fresh blankets appeared in our cubbies the day after we vandalized ours, but the makeshift ponchos stayed where we put them, along with the layers we've added since. Neatly folded replacements show up on our beds with creepy regularity. Are they trying to warn us or encourage us or reprogram us, organize us, or what?

The cameras can follow us, but only up to a point. There's an island of shadow on every street, the place where circles of light don't quite meet, and Ray Powell and I take a different route to a new island of darkness every night. We meet regularly for tense, whispered exchanges and so far, nobody's intervened, not our neighbors cowering in their houses and none of our handlers— if there are handlers— and nobody in the audience— if there is an audience.

We talk in circles. Speculation and escape plans chase each other's tails so fast that like time, everything blurs. Sometimes I think we're contestants picked from some vast studio audience and called onstage, front and center, to star in some monstrous reality show. “Like, they'll give us all cars and lifetime cash prizes if we win.” I hear my voice cracking, “You know, push the right button, take down the enemy, break out.”

Ray says, “Unless they're running us like rats in a maze.”

“Or we're stuck in a gigantic RPG.”

“A what?”

“Role-playing game.” Oh, Ray, how old
are
you? “You know, like giant kids with joysticks are operating us?”

“You mean messing with our heads.”

“Oh shit, Ray, what if they end this show or whatever by putting you and me in the plaza and we have to fight to the death?”

Good old Ray grounds me. “We won't.”

“But what if…”

“No. It's an experiment. Either they study us and dissect us or it's a psych thing where they evaluate us and write a report, and when they're done, we go home…”

“Changed.” I don't know why this comes out as a groan.

“We're already changed.” This is how he brings me down. “We can sit here mizzling or we can plan.”

So these nighttime encounters boil down to figuring out what comes next: mounting an escape or, worst-case scenario, getting a message out so no matter how this ends or what becomes of us, somebody will know.

Until then, there's this. We go out every night. Whatever our days are like in those sterile houses, Ray and I are free in the night-time world, at least for now, plying back and forth in the dark, exploring our changed lives, and like everything else, this operation runs on hope. Maybe tonight we'll find one of our handlers or suppliers— whoever keeps this operation running— surprise the bastard at work. In the kitchens, which we have yet to find, or in an office chair in the blockhouse, fixed on banks of monitors. We'll stalk him and nail him down and hold him until we get answers.

We search, but the barren desert streets give me the sad, sick feeling that everything is automated here in the bland magic kingdom where days and nights run like clockwork, with everything supplied and everybody but us either scared to go out or drugged or what passes for happy, resolutely staying inside.

Once we thought we saw a figure darker than the shadows whip around a corner in front of us.
Neddy!
I had to swallow my heart. I wanted it to be him, I wanted it not to be him because he's just a kid, not tough enough to be all by himself out here in the cold. I've kept him at arm's length because I have to keep him safe. He's big for his age but he's still my baby brother, and too damn young to be trapped in this awful, preternaturally clean place.