Then, like the strange visions, but even clearer, I seem to see a flash of soft lilac before my eyes.
“Lark,” I say decisively. “Lark will take me in.”
SHE TOOK ME by her home on one of our nights out. I remember gazing at the small, comfortable residence. Most houses in Eden are connected, apartments built around a courtyard, or rows of upper-story apartments in commercial districts, but hers was like ours, detached from its neighbors. It was much smaller than ours, but as we stood outside, our shoulders touching, her lilac hair brushing my dark locks, I thought that it looked so warm and homey. Even at that late hour there was a golden light in one of the windows, where, she said, her father was working far into the night.
This is where Lachlan and I go when we flee Serpentine.
“Are you sure you’ll be able to stay?” he asks. “She’ll let you, and keep you safe, and secret?”
“I’m positive,” I say. “Will you make sure Flint’s order that we never see each other is rescinded?”
“Of course. I’m not completely happy about this . . .”
“What choice do we have? It’s not like I have a lot of first child friends.”
“Take this, just in case.” He tugs up his shirt and pulls his gun out of his waistband.
I back away a step. “I can’t,” I stammer. “My mother . . .”
“I know,” he says, so gently, and he brushes a strand of hair from my cheek. “But if the worst should happen, maybe this will keep you from sharing her fate.”
I squeeze my eyes closed . . . but reach for the gun. “I don’t know how to use it,” I say as I heft its unfamiliar weight. It is small, but dense.
He shows me how to slide the gun from its form-fitting holster (I’m so ignorant I think it’s part of the gun) and where the trigger is. “Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire, like this.” He demonstrates, cupping my hand, laying his forefinger over mine.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to use it,” I protest, but he shakes his head.
“You don’t know what you’re capable of. None of us do, until we’re put to the test. But you’ve been tested a lot lately, and you’ve shone. Back in Serpentine when that Greenshirt was going to kill me and you—”
“Don’t!” I say sharply. I can still smell the blood. I think I will forever. I don’t want to think about what I did. I try to tell myself that it wasn’t really my fault, that I would have only threatened the Greenshirt, that he only died because Lachlan shoved him upward. An accident. Forgivable.
But I know in my heart that if he hadn’t dropped the weapon, if I really thought he was going to ignore my threat and kill Lachlan, I would have plunged the knife into his throat deliberately, an act of will.
The knowledge frightens me. So does the way I don’t make Lachlan take the gun back, but instead slip it under my own shirt, where it presses, cold and hard, against my belly.
I have things inside of me I don’t understand. Things I don’t like.
But they’re things that are useful, that will keep me, and the people I care about, alive.
When he’s about to leave, I experience a moment of panic. “Stay with me.”
He shakes his head. “You can pass with Lark’s parents. You’ve got the eyes for it.” He winks his own second-child eye at me.
“I haven’t even seen them yet,” I say. There wasn’t exactly time to look for a mirror when we were under fire. “How are they?”
I expect him to say they look just fine, maybe even to call them beautiful. Call me beautiful. Instead he cocks his head and ponders far too long for comfort. “They’re . . . not you.”
I feel myself crumble. I don’t want the stupid lenses. I just want to be me, safe and happy. I hang my head so he can’t see my eyes.
Lachlan takes me by the chin and makes me lift my head, makes me look at him. “Rowan is inside. You’re not all this.” He makes a sweeping gesture that encompasses my body from head to toe to head again. “You’re this.” His palm comes to rest on my heart. I can feel it beating wildly against him.
He pulls me closer . . . but only kisses me on the forehead.
“It’s almost dawn. Get inside. I’ll come back for you after dark.”
Without another word he strides purposefully away, and in a moment he’s lost in the night’s last darkness.
I turn to knock, and as I do so I see a light in one of the rooms, softened by a curtain. It’s not the same window I saw illuminated before, Lark’s father’s room. The curtain moves, and I see a glimpse of a face. Is that Lark? Did she see Lachlan touch me, kiss me?
I knock, and wait. And wait.
When the door finally opens, it’s not Lark, but a woman in her forties, face a little puffy from sleep, her long fair hair tied in a hasty knot on the top of her head.
“Yes?” she asks, more in curiosity than concern.
“I . . . I’m a friend of Lark’s,” I manage to choke out. Even though I know I cleaned myself thoroughly in a public convenience on the way here, I feel an overwhelming desire to check for telltale smears of dark red dried blood. I force myself to look at her, to look pleasant, normal.
“An odd hour for a social call.” Her voice has that bit of a twang common in the outer circles. I never noticed it in Lark, but of course she’s been going to school here. “Are you early or late?”
“What?” I ask, confused.
“Up early to study for tomorrow’s test, or out late from last night’s party?”
“I . . .” I gulp. “Early?”
“Right,” she drawls. “Don’t worry, none of the parents talk to me, and I’m sure yours are no different. I won’t be blabbing to them. Was it a good party?” I can’t think of an answer, and she laughs, standing aside to motion me in. “Get your story straight before you try it on your parents.”
When I’m inside, I feel a heavy pressure pushing against my eyes. I’m going to cry. I can’t cry ever again. If I do, I’ll never stop.
It’s just . . . I know I don’t have a lot of experience. Maybe every house feels like this. But Lark’s place is somehow so obviously a home. There’s a warmth, a smell of last night’s cooking. There’s a feel to it that I can’t define. An aura of love, of safety, of family.
“It’s not much,” Lark’s mom begins, almost apologetically.
“It’s . . . it’s perfect,” I say, so ardently that she laughs.
“Let me see if Lark is awake. She probably is, just like her namesake. I feel like she never slept for the first three years of her life. Up with the larks. Lark!” she shouts. “Your friend is here!”
I flinch at the sudden volume of her voice. “Won’t you wake her dad?”
“No, he’s night manager at Water Reclamation. Water flows by sun and moon, he always says.” She rolls her eyes, but she’s grinning, thinking about her husband. I bet they love each other, and get silly together. I bet they’re completely and totally happy. I’d like to see them together.
Lark comes out, looking fresh-faced and awake. The only sign of her ordeal is the fact that she’s wearing long sleeves. I know they hide the bruises she received during her capture and interrogation.
“I forgot we were going to . . .”
“Study,” I fill in, and then before she can accidentally introduce me by my old name, I hold out my hand to her mom and say, “I’m Yarrow.”
“River,” she replies.
“I can call you by your first name?” I ask, surprised. I’ve been tutored in politeness, for the day I would finally be out in the world, and I wasn’t expecting to be so informal.
She gives a little shrug. “Outer circle folk like us don’t tend to be sticklers for the rules.” There’s a note of defiance in her voice. She wants to remind me that she and Lark aren’t privileged inner circle people.
It makes me wonder again why there are poor and rich, why there are inner and outer circles, why some have everything they could want and more, and some are literally starving. Eden isn’t just suppo
sed to be a shelter against the dead world, a place of survival and hibernation. It should be a utopia. There’s no reason for inequality.
But Lark drags me away to her room and that conundrum slips away.
The second the door closes behind us, she has her arms around me, her head resting between my neck and shoulder. “I remember,” she says. “They said I wouldn’t, and it was all a bit blurry for a while, but when it wore off I remembered everything.” She turns her head, pressing her lips to my throat. “You were so brave. So strong. You saved my life.”
She pulls back, looks into my eyes, and gasps.
“Your eyes! They . . .”
She doesn’t say any more, but I can see disappointment in her face. Was I just something exotic to her, a strange-eyed second child? Even though she lived in the inner circles she mingled with the poor, the Bestial, the odd . . . Was I just another oddity on her list? A way for her to feel special?
Now that I can pass as a first child, am I just like everyone else?
Lark seems to sense my mood. “I have just the thing to cheer you up. So you lost a little color in your eyes. We’ll just have to give you more color somewhere else!”
She sits me down on her bed and takes a contraption out of a small chest.
“I used to change my hair color all the time. Now I’m pretty set on this shade.” She twirls a lock of her lilac hair. “But sometimes I put a streak in for something different.” She sits me down on the floor, and perches on her bed, a knee on each side of my shoulders, my hair in easy reach. “Now, do you want to pick for yourself, or do you trust me?”
I stiffen. Stop asking me that, I think. But once her hands start to caress my hair I lean back into her and relax. She takes this as assent. “Ultramarine, I think, with a bit of turquoise and jade. Nothing overwhelming, and mostly underneath. I want your natural dark hair to dominate.” She strokes the machine along strands of my hair, combing it out with her fingers. I wish this could last forever, me with my head on her lap, safe under her care. But nothing lasts.
“There!” she says finally, and jumps up to bring me a hand mirror. At first I hardly notice any difference. “Shake your head,” she instructs me. I do, and the colors suddenly emerge, vivid streaks in my dark hair.
“I love it,” I say honestly. But my gaze keps being drawn back to my dull, flat, lifeless eyes. The hair can’t make up for that. But I don’t want to say that to Lark after she’s been so kind.
She must be looking at my eyes, too, though, because as she looks at my reflection from over my shoulder she asks, “How did you get them?”
“I . . . It’s probably better if I don’t get into it. The more you know, the more they’ll think you’re a dangerous liability.”
“Are they going to kill me for having contact with you?”
“No. Lachlan will take care of that.”
“Lachlan.” She repeats the name as if tasting something bitter. “Where did he come from, anyway? How well do you know him?”
“He saved my life.”
“You don’t know him as well as you know me, though, do you?” She sounds younger, smaller, weaker, not her usually vibrant and confident self.
“Do you trust him?”
I resent her questioning. “He’s not the one who let the Center know about my mother,” I snap before I can stop myself. “He’s done everything possible to keep me safe. Can you say the same?”
“How dare you!” she seethes, stepping back from me. “I’m taking you into my home. I’m putting my father—my whole family, myself included—at terrible risk to help you! I made a mistake trusting other people, I know, and there are no words to tell you how sorry I am. But I meant well, and I’ll never trust anyone again. No one except you.”
Her voice has grown steadily softer, her anger dissipating. She glides closer to me, but this time I’m the one who takes a step back. Trusting anyone is dangerous.
“You can trust Lachlan, too,” I say.
“Oh, really? What did you have to do to get those lenses, then?”
“Nothing! What do you mean?”
“I saw you from my window. He looked like he owned you. You looked like you didn’t mind being owned. That’s not the Rowan I know.”
“Is that what this is about? Me and Lachlan?”
I don’t want to fight. I’m tired, so incredibly tired, and I hardly even know why she’s mad. If anyone should be mad, it’s me. But I’m here, because I need her to help Lachlan and me save Ash. “I’m not the Rowan you know. I’m not Rowan anymore. I’m Yarrow. And I’m going to bed.”
Before she can say another word, I throw back the deep plum-colored covers of her bed and slide in. I pull them resolutely up almost all the way over my face as I turn toward the wall. “We’ll meet Lachlan after dark,” I mutter, and close my eyes. “Be ready to put your plan into action.”
“Rowan, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. It just never seems to be the right time.”
What could she tell me? How sorry she is, again? Exactly what she feels for me? I really don’t want to hear it now.
I pretend to fall asleep quickly. All the while, I don’t hear Lark move. Finally I do fall asleep. I know, because at some point I’m awakened by another body sliding under the sheets beside me. She doesn’t embrace me, doesn’t touch me. But she is there, the warmth of her body filling the bed.
But against my stomach the gun is still cold as death.
I SLEEP ALL day, and at night I take Lark to the location I told Lachlan we would meet him—an innocuous little take-out place with enough traffic to make us completely inconspicuous. But when we arrive, there’s no sign of Lachlan.
As we wait, I look longingly at the takeout, kebabs redolent with salt and synthetic fat, because I haven’t eaten in forever. I feel like at any moment we’ll be too obvious even here, standing for a long time without buying anything. It is apparent that Lark and I are waiting, impatient.
“I thought you said you trusted him,” Lark snaps.
“I do,” I assure her. “Maybe . . .” But the list of maybes is too long, and for the most part too terrible to articulate. Maybe he was captured. Maybe Flint turned against him.
Maybe, now that he knows that Flame can make convincing lenses, he’s decided not to risk his life helping me save Ash. Maybe he’ll convince her to help the second children. Maybe he’ll even turn her over to Flint for his particularly unpleasant brand of “convincing.”
“We can’t wait any longer,” I say at last. So with great reluctance I leave the rendezvous site and make my way to my house.
I know the heart is just about pumping blood, an engine and nothing more. It’s not the seat of emotions, the repository of love and hope and happiness. All the same, when I stand at the base of my courtyard wall at the sheltered side where no one else can see, and look up at the walls that held me in all my life, the walls that held everything I knew and loved, I swear it is my heart that hurts. A pain, that must be physical, seems to stab me in the chest.
Home.
Without Mom and Ash inside it is really nothing more than an empty shell. Still, it was my shell.
“Give me about ten minutes,” I tell Lark. “Maybe fifteen. With luck he’s not home. He used to work late all the time, but now, I don’t know. I’ll let you in the front door.”
“What if he is home?” Lark asks.
“I don’t know.”
“I do,” Lark says, and I’m surprised at the fury in her voice. “If he’s there, he needs to be punished for what he did to Ash . . . and to you.”
My father, who hated me, who betrayed his own son to the Center, deserves to be punished. If Lachlan were here, so strong and capable, with so much violence lurking just beneath his usual joking exterior, he would willingly be the one to mete it out. But could Lark? Could I?
I find myself hoping he’ll be out. Not because I wouldn’t relish the sight of Lark beating his face to a bloody pulp . . . but because I would. That frightens me
. What am I turning into?
“Whether he’s home or not, I can get in silently. I’ve spent a lifetime doing it. Then after I let you in we can get his credentials. With them, we’ll be able to move anywhere inside the Center.”
When my fingers curl around the first handhold, I feel that stab again, but I take a deep breath—which turns into a sigh—and start to climb. I can feel her eyes on me, but I don’t dare look down. I’m barely holding on. Literally.
The outside of the wall isn’t as intimately ingrained on my memory, my fingertips, as the inside. But still it is connected to some of the happiest moments of my life, the bittersweet ending to each clandestine night with Lark. All the more bittersweet because of what came of our friendship. Each touch of a new rock beneath my hands seems to spark a new memory. Lark showing me the stars from the rooftop. Lark’s kiss.
After tonight, I may never see her again. I’ll be embedded in my mission, under my new identity. It’s probably for the best. I can’t look at her without thinking how her careless trust of the wrong person cost my mother her life, and ultimately condemned Ash to his death sentence. I know she didn’t mean to, that it tears at her almost as much as it does me. Still, it might be best that we’re going our separate ways.
At least I’ll still have Lachlan, helping me with my mission.
Don’t cry, I tell myself firmly as I climb down on the inside. All your tears are already shed. Now is the time for strength.
My feet hit the moss inside the courtyard, and in an instant I feel caged again. What if I’d never ventured outside of my familial prison? What would have been different? Would I have found a way to grasp at happiness? I manage to walk across the springy moss Mom tended to so lovingly without a single salty drop falling. Sure, my eyes are already heavy and wet, but that’s just from the surgery.
I let myself into the house. Everything is just the same, as if I’d never left. I half expected new locks, a regiment of Greenshirts stationed inside. At the very least, some sign of chaos. Broken knickknacks, an overturned chair. An unwashed dish left on the countertop in a moment of grief, or even distraction. Dust.