I forced myself to hold my ground. If I showed an ounce of fear, it was over. I said, “Do you know me?”
Uncertainty altered his face. He squinted at me like he almost saw something, almost thought something. Then he bit out, “How the hell would I know you?”
He advanced, and I couldn’t help it: I stepped back. This might be my last chance to ask, so I spoke quickly. “On February 16, 1997, I was left outside the West Armitage firehouse in the Alter. I was five years old. How did I get there?”
Kellford halted, rubbing at his brow like he’d walked into a spiderweb. A new expression dawned on his face.
I gathered the shreds of my courage and put some backbone in my voice. “Soon before that, I was arrested by the IBI. Do you know why? Tell me. Tell me, please.”
Kellford sagged. He shuffled to an overstuffed chair in the corner and lowered himself into it. He was too big for it, and he let his arms hang down over the chair’s sides as he looked up at me with resigned eyes.
Sad eyes.
“You,” he said. “It’s you.”
“But who’s me?” I cried. “Who am I?”
He gave a gusty sigh. “You were arrested, along with your parents, for the murder of 763 people at the Ravenswood Medical Center.”
His words poked a hole deep inside me, and some feeling began to slowly leak out. Something that felt like poison. It was filling my lungs. I was drowning in it. “No,” I whispered.
Yes, said my memory.
“Who were my parents?” I said. “Tell me their names.”
He gave me a strange look.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t remember anything.”
“Mistral and Hart.”
Yes.
“Who am I?” I begged again.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Your name is Skylark.”
That strange feeling gushed through me. “Yes.” The word spilled past my lips. “But everybody calls me Lark.”
And I remembered.
39
“But I want to go, too!” I shouted at my parents.
“You can’t,” said my mother.
My father sank to his knees and looked straight into my eyes. “Lark.” He tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “Wild girl. You need to learn patience. Someday we will be proud to take you with us, but right now you’re too little.”
“I’m almost five.” My birthday was in a few days.
“Lark, you can’t even ghost.”
“Yes, I can.”
“Stop pouting,” my mother told me. To my father she said, “We need to leave, Hart. We don’t have time for this.”
“But…” I wanted to wash that look away from my mother’s face. Hard and bright, the way she stared at me whenever she brought me cold, chewy little squares of human food called ravioli. My favorite. I would almost swallow them whole, I was so hungry, and then she would look at me and the food would get stuck in my throat because I knew what she would say, and she did: “You’re too old for food.”
I knew what made her happy. So now I made my voice sweet and clear, and said, “But I want to do something for the—the glory of the Society. That’s what you said. I heard you say it last night, when I was supposed to be asleep.”
“Did you?” She went still, and I liked that, because it meant she’d stay for a little while longer. She didn’t like to manifest, which was sad because she was so pretty that it calmed my insides just to look at her. If we were human, people would think she was my sister, not my mother, because she seemed so young, and sometimes I would play a game in my head where I pretended she was my sister, and I would wonder if things might be better that way.
“What else did you hear?” My father’s voice was stern. This surprised me. He was the one who’d explained that humans eat ravioli when it’s hot, and then he stole a strange box for heating up food so I could try it that way.
“Nothing,” I said.
They exchanged a look. I guessed what it meant, because as soon as I saw it, my face relaxed in the same way. Relief. That’s what I felt, because my lie had worked, and that’s what they felt, because they believed it.
“Sorry, little bird,” said my father. He kissed my cheek. “Goodbye.”
They ghosted.
It always hurt when they did that, and sometimes I would chase after their shadows. This time, though, it hurt worse, and this time I let their shadows float away.
I could ghost. I’d been practicing. I would show them, I would help them, and then they would be proud.
* * *
I’D HEARD SOMETHING ELSE stand out from their whispers the night before: Ravenswood Medical Center. I knew where that was, and that’s where they must be going.
No one noticed me as I left the Sanctuary. I cast a small shadow when I ghosted.
I didn’t know the medical center was so big. I mean, I knew, because I’d followed my father there last week and watched his shadow wait across the street from the building, hovering until I realized that he wasn’t waiting. He was looking. He was studying the building. So I did, too, my shadow buried in the bigger one thrown by a mailbox.
But now I was inside the building, and I didn’t feel so brave anymore. It had many floors and was busy and noisy and crammed with humans. I would never be able to find my parents in this mess. My shadow flickered with fear.
No, I told myself. Not again.
That day I’d followed my father, he’d finally drifted away from the medical center, down the street. I was going to go after him when a man smoking a cigarette walked up to the mailbox and dropped in a letter. His thumb flicked against the end of the cigarette and its flaming tip sparked and fell off, hissing down to where my feet should have been.
And then they were there, and I yelped and jumped back from the little hot coal, tangling into the man’s legs.
He yelled in surprise, then cut the sound short, gazed down at me, and clamped his hand over my arm. I was expecting worse, but he was a brave human. He had a look on his face like how I’d felt when I went to the zoo to see the baby tiger.
I held my breath and tried to ghost again. I tried to be light. I tried to free myself from my body, like my mother always said I should, but my heart was rattling in my chest and it was too hard to do.
The man laughed, then glanced around to see if anybody had noticed us. No one did, and he let me go. “Scat,” he said.
I did.
My father always said there was no such thing as a kind human, but I thought maybe this man was.
Now I hovered invisibly in the lobby of the medical center, watching all the humans walking, getting on elevators, talking. They made so much noise. Even when Shades are manifest, we never thump around like that. Thinking that made me feel better. I could do this. I would find my parents’ shadows. I wished I knew why they were here, though. It would help if I knew what they were going to do.
But I didn’t know, and if I’d had shoulders I would have shrugged them like I had seen my uncle Bear do sometimes. He was a great shrugger, and when he lifted his shoulders and scrunched his mouth he looked like he wasn’t afraid of anything.
Floor by floor, I decided. I would look for my parents floor by floor.
I didn’t see their shadows on the second floor, or on the third, or the fourth, or the fifth. The fifth floor was full of children. Some were strapped to beds on wheels that were pushed by nurses, and I watched them roll by. There was a room with children who looked so sick it was hard to tell they were still alive. They were skinny and had no hair and their eyes looked like bruises. This was strange to see, because Shades never get sick. We only get hurt.
Humans don’t live long, I knew that. But when I looked at the sick children I thought this was unfair. They should at least live longer than this. I felt something inside, something like a balloon filled with heavy water. It grew, and got heavier, and pushed at where my heart and throat and stomach would have been. I realized it was sad
ness.
I didn’t want to stay in that room.
A long hall brought me to a sort of cheerful place. There were bright chairs and sunny windows and children tumbling around with toys. They were sick, too, but not very sick. Some of them made coughing sounds, like dogs barking, and smeared runny stuff from their noses across their faces. Parents read magazines. A woman looked at the clock and made an angry sigh. She tossed aside her magazine and walked up to a man behind a desk. “We’ve been waiting for over an hour!” she told him. “My son had an eleven o’clock appointment!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we’re backed up. It’s flu season, and we had several walk-ins today. Would you like to reschedule?”
She sighed again, sounding angrier this time, and returned to her seat. She sat next to a woman rocking a baby. The baby was the smallest person in the room. The loudest, too. The baby screamed and screamed.
“Shh, my little girl,” the mother said. “Shh, Moira.”
The baby was pink and dimply and waving her arms like she had no idea what to do with them.
A man walked up, holding a steaming cup. He smiled at the mother. “Trade you,” he said, and offered the cup.
She smiled back. “Thanks, honey.” She passed the baby to the man, who cuddled her into the crook of his arm. He was the baby’s father, then. “Coffee’s just what I needed. Did they have anything else in the cafeteria?”
He made a shudder that was supposed to be funny. “Nothing you’d want. Why don’t you take a break and read for a while? I’ll walk around with Moira. Maybe that’ll calm her down.”
It did. I floated after them. I shouldn’t have wanted to look at the baby. She had reddish hair, almost like the palest color of fire, the very edge of a flame. I shouldn’t have liked to see anything that reminded me of that. But then I decided that no, her hair was the color of a flower petal. More pink than red. I was surprised at myself, that I had been able to change my mind and think of a flower instead of flames. I realized that I wanted to look at this baby very much.
It was because of how her father held her. That was why.
He was very tall, with eyes that were sort of blue but not really, and hair the dark gold color some leaves turn in autumn. I watched him hold the baby and wondered if my parents had held me like that when I was that small.
I followed the father down the hall until he reached the end, where he stood in front of a person-sized window that was like all the windows in the medical center, with no latches or any way to open them for fresh air.
I decided to go to the sixth floor, the last floor. My parents had to be there. I might have missed them, but I didn’t want to think that, and I didn’t think my parents would try to hide their shadows like I had hidden mine from my father last week. Humans almost never see our shadows, and my parents didn’t know I was there, so why would they hide?
I was right. I was on the sixth floor for only a minute when I saw two shadows darting over the shiny floor tiles. They were going fast, so fast that I worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up, and suddenly I was desperate to see their faces, even if they were mad at me, even if it was stupid of me to have come here.
That longing was a mistake, because it poured me back into my body.
I heard someone scream. A human had seen me.
“Wait!” I cried, running toward the shadows.
They stopped. They turned and rushed back to me. My parents manifested, and then the world seemed to speed up and break apart at the same time. There were more screams now, louder ones, and shouts for the IBI, and an alarm began blaring as humans fled.
When I saw my mother’s face, things got worse, because I saw something I had never seen there before: fear.
I looked at my father. It was on his face, too.
Everything inside me began to tremble.
“Lark.” My mother gripped my shoulders. “You’ve got to ghost.”
I tried.
“Lark!”
“I can’t!”
“Yes, you can,” my father said. I could hear the effort it took for him to speak calmly. “I didn’t see you a minute ago, did I? But you were here. Think back to a minute ago.”
Someone flung a chair at us. My father yanked me to his chest and blocked the chair with his back.
I began to cry.
When my father spoke again, he had lost his fake calm. “Mistral,” he said to my mother, “we’ve got to get her out of here.”
She did something strange. She sniffed the air.
I did, too. A bitter smell itched at the back of my throat.
“There’s no time,” she said in a low voice like a sob. “It’s too late. We blocked the fire escapes. We’re on the top floor. We’ll never make it to the lobby in time.”
In time for what? I wanted to ask, but instead I gripped my father’s shirt and pretended I was that baby on the fifth floor and that I was safe.
“There’s got to be a way,” my father said, and I heard the desperation. He did not think there was a way.
The smell in the air grew stronger, and I coughed, and that cough turned into a choke. I saw a human at the far end of the hall fall down, and at first I thought he’d tripped, but then another one fell, and another.
My father pressed my face against his shirt. “Hold your breath,” he told me, his voice raspy and tight. He coughed, too.
“The window,” my mother said suddenly. I looked up at her, and my bones went watery with relief, because her face was fierce now, her eyes almost sparking with urgency. She looked at my father, and he glanced back, and in that split second I saw he understood whatever she wanted to do. He nodded.
She grabbed the chair that had fallen to our feet, ran at the large window at our end of the hall, and beat the chair against the window until it cracked and large chunks of glass fell at her feet. She stuck her elbow into the frame and raked her arm against the shards. A piece of glass flew through the air and cut my neck.
Cold air rushed in, the pain in my throat got better, and I saw some humans lift their heads from where they lay on the floor. They began to crawl toward the window.
“Go,” she told my father. “I’ll catch her.” Then she ghosted.
My father held me tight against him, pinning me so that I couldn’t even squirm, and ran at the window. My mind had been foggy from that ugly smell in the air, but now it cleared up fast as I realized what he was about to do. “No!” I struggled against him. “We’ll die!”
He jumped.
We fell, and it was cold, so cold, and the air filled my ears and I would not look, I could not look at the ground. Then my father disappeared and I was alone.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Lark!” I heard my mother call, and I opened my eyes to see her standing on the ground below me. I smacked into her arms and heard one of her bones break. I sobbed with terror, even though I wasn’t falling anymore, I was on the ground, she was holding me, and my father appeared and wrapped his arms around both of us. He touched my chin. “Breathe, Lark. Breathe. You’re all right. Everything’s fine.”
But my breath hitched and hiccuped and I was right to cry, because everything was not fine, not fine at all. When I raised my eyes I saw we were not alone.
We were surrounded by the IBI.
* * *
THEY SEPARATED US. At first I thought my parents would fight them, but the IBI had flamethrowers and they pointed them at me. A woman stiff and tall in her gray uniform wrenched me out of my mother’s arms and put firecuffs on me. I went still. I had heard about them. I knew what they could do.
My mother’s mouth opened, and I saw that she was going to say something to me, but then a man twisted her broken, bloody arm behind her back.
She clamped her lips shut. She didn’t cry out.
But I did.
* * *
THEY SHOVED ME INTO A SMALL, dark cell where the only light was the flame flickering in the firecuffs. It made me rigid with fear, but I couldn’t stop staring at
it. My eyes were sore, but I didn’t close them and I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to sleep, because I didn’t want to wake up here.
The cut on my neck closed. Time passed. I wasn’t sure how much time, but it was enough for my body to start to trick me. My fingers relaxed and my legs went heavy, even though I told them they had to be ready. Ready for everything I didn’t know was coming.
But things went fuzzy. I had one last thought before slipping into sleep.
This was all my fault.
* * *
I WOKE UP TO THE SOUND of voices outside the door. They murmured at first, and I caught only a few words.
“… vox her?”
“… unusual situation … child … orders … we wait.”
“Wait?”
The voices got louder, because they were angry, and they rang clear.
“My cousin died in that attack! Everybody in that building died except for a few people on the sixth floor, and that’s only because the Shades blew out the window!”
“I know the casualties. You better know how to follow orders. Director Martinez told us to wait. So we wait.”
Before, when the flame in the firecuffs seemed to burn my brain, I used to pretend that it was that baby’s hair, the one from the fifth floor, and then I would pretend it was a flower, and then I felt better.
I stopped doing that.
* * *
THEY STARTED TO COME IN, one by one, to ask me questions. There were five of them, and I began to know their faces.
Who else was involved in the plot? they asked.
What was your role in it?
Where do Shades live?
What other crimes have your parents committed? They are your parents, right?
What is your name?
Come on, you can at least tell us that.
We can be very nice to you. You know that, don’t you?
Are you hungry? Thirsty?
I was, but I didn’t say so.
They asked, How old are you?
My birthday had come and gone, I was pretty sure, even though I couldn’t really keep track of the days. I was five years old, but I didn’t tell anyone.
I had my own questions for them.