There’s yelling all around me, maddening movement, but all I can think about is the young man by the tree. I know him. I need him.
But the fire is growing. The entire tree in in flames. Black smoke closes around him.
The last thing I can see is the topaz glow of the crystal around his neck, and the burning glow of his amber eyes.
Second child eyes.
I WAKE UP in the black gel pool, with my mother looking down at me.
I yelp, biting it back just before it becomes a full-blown scream! The second I see her, images from the dream come back to me, tormenting me. For an instant I’m strapped down again while a woman who looks and talks just like my mother performs terrifying experiments on me. I cringe away from her.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
Everything! I want to jump up and run away. But I suddenly realize I have to play this very carefully. “Oh,” I say breathlessly. “Sorry, you just startled me. And the bright light hurts my eyes.”
She looks at me suspiciously, and I do my best to act normal, but inside I’m panicking. Part of my brain is telling me that it was just a dream, that I’m shaken by those bizarre—and surely false—images of my mother experimenting on me. But something deeper tells me to fight, to flee this monster who is staring down at me.
But she’s my mother, my protector, my friend. The one who loves me more than anything. How can I tell my own mother that I’m terrified of her? She’s the same small, serious blond woman. But she feels like a different person. I should be able to tell her about my dream, so we can both laugh about it. But somehow I can’t.
Find out the truth, a voice seems to demand in a harsh whisper inside my head. There’s something going on here I can’t quite see. I need answers. But I know I’m not going to get them from my mom.
“Are you okay?” my mom asks.
No, no, no! I’m not okay at all. “Of course,” I manage to say. “We had a late night, and . . . I might not have shown the best judgment. But my friends got me here.” That’s just a guess, but slowly the events of last night are beginning to filter back into my consciousness.
Wait, did Lark kiss me?
“Was Pearl one of those friends?” Mom asks.
“Yes, of course. We’re always together. She’s . . .” I gulp, but some instinct tells me I have to say it. “She’s my best friend.” The words almost make me choke. She drugged me, and then she almost killed me! Then she ran away. I want to punch her right in that perfect face.
“Did you do anything unwise?”
“I had a few drinks,” I admitted. “And there were these bubbles filled with powder. They had something in them, some kind of drug, maybe. I’m fine, really. I just need some sleep. And maybe some under-eye concealer!” I try to laugh, but my throat is dry and it comes out as a cackle.
I have to get out of here—now! The Center has always been a sanctuary for me. Now it feels like a trap.
“You seem so upset,” Mom says. “How about I give you a little something to help you sleep.” Mom might be the chief of intelligence, but she has a background in neurosurgery. It’s common for her to give me vitamins or sleeping pills or something to help me study. I’ve always taken whatever she offers without question. Now, remembering those needles coming straight for my eyes, I refuse to let her put anything into my body.
“No!” I say much too loudly. Her eyes widen, then narrow. She looks like she’s getting angry. “No,” I say again in what I hope is a more rational voice. She’s still looking at me with suspicion. “I really don’t need to take anything.” Oh, great Earth, if she drugs me, there will be needles in my eyes as soon as I’m unconscious, I just know it.
She gets a syringe out of a cupboard and taps the tip to free any air bubbles.
“No!” I say, again. “I . . . I have class tomorrow. I need to get up early to study for a test. If you give me anything, I might sleep too late.”
She kneels down and takes my hand where it rests on the edge of the black tub. For an instant her touch is gentle, soothing, and I think that I’ve been a fool to pay attention to my dreams. But then her grip tightens like a vise and she’s trying to pin my arm down on the ledge.
I jerk my arm away and scoot to the far edge of the pool. I can’t disguise the anger and fear in my voice. “I said no! I don’t want that.”
There’s a heavy moment of uncertainty where I’d swear she’s weighing the merits of grabbing me and holding me down. The tension hangs in the air. “You ungrateful little . . . ,” she begins, in a malicious voice I’ve never heard before.
Then I have an idea. I put on my sweetest voice and interrupt. “I’m sorry, Mom. I know you’re just trying to help. And you’re totally right—I do need something to help me relax. Only, could I have something to eat first? I haven’t eaten all day and I think it’s making me snappy.” I bow my head contritely. “I didn’t mean to yell at you, Mom. It’s just been a long night.”
She studies me for a long time before finally saying, “Whatever you want, sweetheart. You wait here, and I’ll get you some soup. Then you can have a nice rest. When you wake up, you’ll feel like a different person.” Her voice is sweet, but to me it is like an artificial, factory-made synthetic strawberry—too sweet, and unreal. We smile at each other, but it is more like animals baring teeth than an actual show of affection. We both know something isn’t right, but I don’t think either of us knows how much.
As soon as she’s gone, my veneer of calm collapses and I’m gasping, my hand on my chest, tears trickling down my cheeks. If I’m here when she gets back, something terrible is going to happen to me. I know it.
I climb out of the pool, the black gel sliding slickly from my limbs to pool at my feet, leaving no residue on my skin. I run to the door and press my ear to it. It is thick, and I can’t catch much, but I hear my mom talking to someone right outside the door. She says something like flood the room with gas . . . easier.
Without my will, my hand flies to my throat. Frantically, my fingers fumble for a cord that isn’t there, trail down lower and find nothing. I look down at my empty hand, and remember the necklace in my dream. Wait, I own that necklace! Long ago I shoved it in some box or back drawer when Pearl mocked it. A garish hunk of rock, she’d called it. So I ignored the wrench I felt when taking it from around my neck, and put it away. I haven’t thought about it since. Why was I dreaming about a magical cave covered with crystals like the one I own? It can’t be a coincidence. I have to find that necklace!
As soon as I hear her steps go down the hall, I sneak out of the room, out of the lab, out of the Center. All the while I feel like a prey species must have felt back in the pre-fail days—as if something might pounce on me at any moment. Tackle me to the ground, tie me to a table, stick needles in my eyes . . .
Even when I’m safe back in my room at Oaks, I’m trembling. Something isn’t right. But I don’t know if it’s with me, or the rest of Eden.
I start tearing my room apart. Those fancy clothes that used to matter to me so much now mean nothing. They’re strewn around the floor, ripped and wrinkled as I search for the one thing that suddenly means more than anything else. I step on fine synthetic silks, the softest imitation doeskin, tear apart expensive necklaces to find that little hunk of rock.
When at last I find it, wedged in a crevice at the back of my closet, I clutch it to my chest and feel an almost palpable warmth emanating from it. A sensation of peace washes over me. Something strange is happening to me. A disjointed, separate sensation, as if there are parts of me I’ve been ignoring. It sounds crazy to say, but I almost don’t know who I am.
But now that I hold this pale pink crystal in my hands, I know with absolute certainty that whatever happens, whoever I am, I am not alone.
I hear footsteps approaching again, another knock.
Automatically, I hide the necklace under my shirt, and co
wer in the corner of my room. Oh no, it’s my mom, or Greenshirts come to drag me back to the Center. I try to hush my breathing, and hope whoever is out there goes away.
They knock again. Very quietly, I pick up a stiletto shoe and hold it like a weapon. Some fierce, irrational animal thing inside me growls that I won’t let them take me.
“Ro, are you in there?”
I almost collapse with relief. It’s Lark.
I open the door and pull her quickly inside, looking down the hall, paranoid, before slamming the door shut behind us.
“Look at this!” I say, pulling the necklace out and holding it in Lark’s face at the length of the cord. “Where did I get this? Is there a place . . .” I break off, realizing I sound crazy.
But Lark takes my hands and says, “Go on.”
And I do, brokenly and incoherently, ranting about my dreams and a tree that lives underground and a boy with golden eyes and a crystal cavern.
“It’s just a dream,” I say, with tears welling in my eyes. “But it means something. I know it does. And this necklace. It’s important. I just don’t know why!” I collapse on my bed, and Lark sits beside me, putting an arm around my shoulders. “Wait, was I horrible to you last night?” I sniffle. “I can’t remember, but I think maybe I was.”
She smiles forgivingly. “It was a hard night. Don’t worry, I didn’t take offense. But now, you’re starting to remember,” she says. “Last night . . . and more. Much more. In your dreams, at least. Maybe it’s a good thing that Pearl drugged you. It opened your mind. Freed places that the Center locked up.”
“I’m ready to hear what you know now, Lark. You have to tell me. Everything. Please, Lark!”
She presses her lips together, thinking. Then her face softens.
“You’re right. I think I owe it to you to tell you the whole thing. Only, promise you won’t run away, or scream, or hit me?”
I give a rueful little laugh. “That bad?”
“That bad,” Lark confirms. And then . . . silence.
I clear my throat.
“I know,” Lark says with a sigh. “It’s just hard to tell someone something you think they won’t believe. Do you promise you’ll keep an open mind?”
And then, my world turns upside down. Inside out.
“I’d hoped once you saw me, spent some time around me, it would all come back to you. And I can tell it’s getting closer all the time. But not nearly close enough. You just can’t remember.”
“Remember what?” I ask. That missing thing, it seems so near.
“Who you are.”
I almost laugh. “I know who I am. I’m . . . Ro.” I frown in confusion at that nickname Lark gave me, which feels so much more comfortable than my own name. “I’m . . . I’m me. That’s all. Who else could I be?”
She takes my hands in hers. “Do you know why that name, Ro, feels so comfortable? So familiar? No one here ever called you that, did they?”
“No. Only you.”
“But it feels like you, doesn’t it? It’s because that’s your name. Or almost. Your real name.”
She waits for my reaction. I feel a curious tingling along my arms, down my shins.
A prickling of premonition. Everything feels so close, as if there is a paper-thin barrier in my brain that could be burned away with the tiniest spark. “That name you called me last night,” I say. “Rowan.” I just barely breathe the name, a whisper of air, but it seems to fill the world around us.
“Your name is Rowan,” Lark confirms at last. “You are a second child.”
No, this is a trick, a lie Lark came up with to separate me from everything that is important to me. From Pearl, my mother, my school, my life. Those things call out to me, begging me to return to their easy predictability with a call I almost can’t resist. But Lark is pulling me in the other direction, toward uncertainty, sadness, danger.
Truth.
I’m silent, my brain awhirl, and Lark goes on, thinking I’m paying close attention, but really there’s a deafening litany of no no no shouting over and over again in my head. I want to scream at her, but I feel frozen, numb, and she talks on.
“You were—you are—a second child. You have a brother, a twin. Your mother hid you away for sixteen years, and then she arranged for you to have black market lens implants, so you could pass unnoticed. And she found you a family to live with. She was doing her best to make sure you had a normal life.”
The word “mother” pierces my internal screams. I feel my tense face softening, my wild mind calming, just at the thought of my mother. But then it hits me, Lark isn’t talking about my mother. My mom is at the Center. Who is this person she’s talking about? Someone who loved me. Protected me. Gave me a future. But it’s the wrong person. My mind reels . . .
“You met me just before your surgery,” Lark continues. “I was best friends with your brother.”
I feel like electricity is running through my body. A brother? I try to imagine his face, but all I can see is my own. I have a brother! I’m not alone in this world!
“You snuck out, and we became . . . friends.” Her voice is tight with emotion. “Then a little while later, your mom was taking you for your surgery, and everything went horribly wrong.”
The chorus of denial inside my head picks up again. I want to cover my ears, keep out whatever is coming next.
“Your mother was killed.”
I’m like a statue.
“You escaped. You met Lachlan.”
I gasp at that name. But why, I don’t know. If I could reach out my hand I could touch him, touch the knowledge, the memory of him, whoever he is. He’s that close.
“He took you to the place where he and the other second children live. Where they hide away from the government. You got your lenses, and you were going to help the second children with an important mission. But your brother got arrested, and when we went to rescue him, you were captured. After that . . .” She breaks off, and I see tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I thought they’d killed you! For weeks, I thought you were dead. Then later our sources found out that you were alive . . . but changed. You were someone else. You didn’t seem to have any memory of your past life. You thought you were the daughter of Eden’s chief of intelligence. And what’s more, so did everyone else. You and everyone else who knew about you seemed to accept that you had always been Yarrow.”
She swallows hard, and wipes the tears from her face. Her eyes are shiny, and she looks at me so eagerly, so hopefully.
“But we know. The second children. And me. I know who you are. We think they can brainwash people through their eye implants. But second children don’t have them. And my epilepsy seems to be the kind of brain glitch that keeps them from having much effect on me. We want you back, Rowan.”
I both cringe and thrill at that name.
“We have the neurocybersurgeon who did the original procedure on you. She thinks she can reverse the effect. Sever the connection that the EcoPan seems to have with all of Eden’s citizens. She says that might give you your memory back. It’s risky, but it will be worth it if you remember who you are. And . . .” She hesitates a beat, and I notice. “And for other reasons. We need your help, Rowan.”
I’m still sitting there, almost unmoving, even my breath so shallow that my chest hardly expands. Very carefully, I’m trying to construct a wall between myself and everything Lark has told me. I’m gathering up all the reasons why this cannot possibly be true, as if they were stones, and building them up into impenetrable ramparts. But no matter how hard I try, my construction is flawed. Her words find a way in.
What she said is impossible. At the same time, what she said is plausible.
The very fact that it is so totally unbelievable somehow makes it all the more likely. If Lark was going to lie to me, surely she wouldn’t select a lie so extravagantly
unlikely, would she? A lie has to be believable, and the fact that this isn’t—not at all—perversely lends credence to it. No one would dare say such an outlandish thing unless it was true.
But it can’t be! I know who I am.
I find that my hand has strayed to the pink crystal. I’m clutching it so tightly that I’m pulling the cord painfully into my neck.
“Lachlan gave you that crystal, when you were in the Underground,” Lark says. I meet her eyes, and there is a mysterious pain there.
I want to tear it off, but the cord is strong, and pulling only causes me more pain. I let my hand flop to my lap, and the crystal bounces against my sternum.
No, it can’t be true. I know one thing absolutely, above all else. I love my mother. I trust my mother. My mom would never hurt me. She’d die for me.
Your mother was killed. That’s what Lark said. She died protecting me, trying to give me a better life. Of course she would, I want to scream. But she’s not dead. She’s not some other woman. She’s in the Center now. I can see her anytime.
Suddenly Lark’s last words pierce my confused brain. We need your help, Rowan. And just before that she mentioned a mission.
This isn’t true. She’s made all this up to use me somehow. I don’t know how, but this is all an elaborate trick. Or she’s like Pearl, ambitious and manipulative, and she thinks this is a way to sow discord, to separate us.
It worked, damn her! I think of my happy life before Lark walked into the classroom. School and friends and boys, clothes and hair and a bright, beautiful, successful future looming ahead of me. I want that back. I want what Lark is trying to snatch from me with her supposed revelations. She’s ruining everything!
Fury rises up in me. It’s so much easier than the confusion, the sadness, the fear that are threatening to overwhelm me. Anger makes me strong. I know what to do when I’m angry.