Chosen Ones (7 page)

Chapter 9

I was shaking. Somehow I could hear my father’s voice as I read his letter. Ten years later, I could still hear him. It was yet another reminder of all the things I kept locked away. I knew my people’s history, but sometimes it was easier to let the council rewrite it all.

I couldn’t change the council or this life. My father was wrong—I wasn’t strong enough to be the kind of fighter he thought I was. The only thing I wanted to defeat was my own weak self. And I couldn’t even do that lately.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. And then I waited for whatever was going to come next.

When I sensed it was near morning, I crept out of the room and headed toward the showers. I hoped the rest of the compound would still be asleep. I needed just a little more time to myself.

I turned the water as hot as I could get it. It burned, and I found comfort in the pain. It was strange that sitting in the shower, the blazing heat causing my naked skin to erupt in blotches of red, I thought of Emma. My sister. The girl my father said was filled with compassion. What were those last moments like for her? Did she cry out? Did she ask for me at all? Or was it all about him? Did her eyes simply close or did her body lurch, fighting against the darkness that was attempting to claim it?

My heart began to speed up, and I leaned against the wall of the shower. Breathing in and out. In and out. In and out. The letter made me weaker, not stronger like my father had hoped. It would be so easy to just cry, to give in. In frustration I slammed my head against the cement wall. The pain vibrated from my head down to my toes. And I liked it. My heart stopped beating so wildly. I could focus on this new pain. I threw my head back again into the wall. And again. And again. Again. Again. Again. My head was throbbing. I reached my fingers to the back of my scalp and found blood.

Always blood.

When I arrived at work, my head still throbbing from the morning, Gwen was waiting. She looked me up and down. Whatever she saw, she was not impressed. I knew she could find no fault with my appearance; I’d made a point of ensuring my uniform was perfect. No wrinkles. No dirt. No sign of the laziness that consumed the people of the compound.

I was perfect.

With a heavy sigh, my supervisor turned and began to walk down the hallway. When I didn’t follow, she snapped her fingers at me without stopping to make sure I understood her directions. She knew I would follow. She knew I would have to.

We didn’t speak to each other as we climbed the marble staircase to the upper levels of the Templeton mansion—the servants’ quarters. Women, girls, who had received two slash marks were forced to live at Templeton. While I could go home to my family, or lack thereof, every night, the double-slash girls had to serve out their sentence twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. One day for rest, of course—that is what the Bible demanded.

I was still unsure what happened when one received the third mark.

When we stopped, my supervisor pulled a skeleton key from the pocket of her skirt. It struck me as odd that the doors of the servants’ quarters were locked from the outside, as if one of them would try to escape. No one would be that stupid. If a girl ran from her punishment and life at the compound, the next oldest female in her family would not only have to finish the remainder of her sentence, but would be punished for the new transgression as well.

Besides, the minute someone left, the council’s promise of protection was null and void. In the early days of my life at the compound, back when my mother was still alive, a group of women and Henry ran off. It was before I knew him. The women were unhappy with the council’s system of punishment—why should the females be forced to serve for the sins of all? Why must we be responsible for the morality of a people who just didn’t give a damn anymore? At the time, I remember asking my mother why we didn’t leave with them. She asked me if I knew where to score some booze. She didn’t give a damn anymore, either.

Three weeks later, the council found the bodies of these women. They had been attacked. Barely identifiable. The council was unclear if it was Easterners or the Isolationists—men and women who had run into the darkness of the forest before the construction of the compounds—were responsible for the deaths.

Sure, it’s terrible. The whole system. But the funny thing about mankind is we have a natural need—a natural will to live. So many of us would rather have a life of nothingness than risk not living at all. And the council knows this.

As the click of the door unlocking stirred me from my recollections, I noticed my supervisor staring at me. Something about the look on her face, the weariness of it, caused me to take a step back.

What was waiting behind that door?

“Now you listen to me, girl. When we go in there you are not to say a word. Nothing. You will not speak of this to anyone. If she says something to you, you will ignore her. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Somehow I couldn’t find the courage to speak to this woman as we entered the room.

Lying on the bed was a young girl with her back toward me—the two glaring red slash marks standing out against the pale skin of her neck. She was curled into a ball, her hands pressed against her heart. Spots of blood covered the sheets. As I stepped farther into the room, I began to see how wild this girl looked. Her nightgown barely clothed her body, and she made no attempt to cover herself as we approached.

“Help me get her up,” Gwen commanded.

As my hands made contact with her arm, the girl shrieked. She began to blindly lash out, hitting me in the arms.

“Calm down, child,” I heard Gwen say from somewhere in the darkness. “Damn it, girl! Make yourself useful and help me hold her down!”

I applied as much pressure to the girl’s body as I could muster. I was barely able to hold her in place as she continued to squirm with a force that seemed unnatural coming from someone so small. How old was this girl? She couldn’t be sixteen. And yet one was not allowed to take on someone’s punishment until she was of age.

My supervisor pulled a syringe from her pocket and without hesitation stuck it into the girl’s arm. I felt her body begin to convulse. Tears ran down her face and she attempted to yell out, but all she could do was grunt.

Slowly, the girl became still. I could hear her breathing return to normal. She was mumbling something as the contents of the syringe lulled her to sleep, but it was difficult to make much sense of it.

“Stay with her. Don’t let her move. I will be right back,” my supervisor said coldly. She was beginning to be a mystery I knew I would never want to understand.

The girl continued to mumble, and I felt the need to hear what she was saying. Maybe it was my endless fascination with other people’s pain, my constant need to know I was not alone in feeling the world offered me little else. I sank to my knees and leaned closer to the girl. Without warning, she clamped her hand onto my arm. In her grip existed a strength that didn’t seem possible.

“I thought I said no,” she gasped. “I thought I said no.”

She began to cry again. I tried to pull my arm from her grip. I knew my supervisor would be back any minute, but she held on tightly. She kept muttering the same words over and over.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

My supervisor stared down at me with contempt. I couldn’t find my voice. I yanked with all my strength, stumbling and landing on my backside.

“Get up and help me wash her,” she snapped, throwing me a rag.

I felt uncomfortable as I helped my supervisor undress the girl. The sight of her nakedness caused my skin to erupt in patches of heat. I couldn’t imagine ever being so vulnerable. The girl had slipped into unconsciousness; I wondered, had she been awake, if she would have protested our actions.

Her words still rang in my ears:
I thought I said no
.

Her body was so marked up, the attempt to destroy it, own it, rewrite it so painfully obvious. I wanted to ask what had happened. But I couldn’t speak.

I helped to clean the blood that was smeared on the insides of her thighs. I wiped down her arms that appeared to be covered in newly formed bruises. I washed her neck, which was strangely covered with bite marks.

I cleaned it all away.

It wasn’t so different from the blood I’d helped clean down below. It was just another Templeton secret that I was helping to keep hidden. And for some reason, I felt terrible doing it.

When we were done I followed my supervisor out of the room. My head was throbbing in a way that had suddenly become unwelcome. I didn’t want the pain anymore. I had felt enough pain for one day.

Enough for a lifetime.

“Wait,” I whispered as my supervisor moved to go down the stairs.

She stopped, keeping her back toward me. “I didn’t think you would ever speak.”

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why did you bring me in there?” I knew I shouldn’t care, but the question sat burning in my throat. My pulse sped up as I waited for her answer.

I watched as her hand reached for the banister. Her fingers curled around it. “I needed help.”

“But you could have asked any of the girls. Why did you choose me?”

Finally she turned to face me. She offered a thin smile. “I asked you because out of all the girls, you are the only one who would see something like that and not care. I knew it the moment I met you. The way you just sat there. Sullen. Self-centered. That’s why you’ll do so well here. You don’t care about anything or anyone.”

No
. Self-centered? How could I be self-centered when I didn’t even know who the hell I was anymore? Everyone was trying to fix me into some place. My father’s letter begged me to rage against the life created for me by others. Gwen wanted me to be some silent drone that did her bidding. And while I was so busy working on becoming nothing, everything fell apart. I couldn’t be nothing here. The mangled body downstairs. The broken girl upstairs. What would happen to me if I continued to stay silent?

I didn’t know who I needed to be to survive this place. All I knew was the rules had changed.

Chapter 10

Gwen left me as soon as we reached the main floor, after saying I was free to report to James now that I was considered his personal servant. She left me standing alone with no explanation of what I had just seen.

My head continued to throb, but a new pain accompanied it now. Even within the silence of the hall, I could hear the girl crying out for someone to care. She was screaming for me. I could feel it in the grasp of her hand on my arm. She needed someone to help, to
want
to help.

Could I continue on with my day as if I had never seen her bruised and battered body? With my sister it had been different. She’d known the consequences of her choices. Part of me would always feel she deserved what she got. Maybe it was a screwed-up way of thinking, but I didn’t believe I would ever be able to come back from that.

I knew in my soul, if I still had one, that the girl was a victim. Something had been done to her. Someone had damaged her. And I was not the sort of person who could watch it and feel nothing. I wasn’t a monster.

I wasn’t.

I attempted to find my reflection in one of the windows that faced the gardens of Templeton. Nothing about the image was clear; it only whispered a sense of what I really was. Even in the murky shadows, I didn’t like what I saw.

When James opened the door, he wasn’t alone. Another chosen one. They were both dressed in clothes much too fine for the boys of the compound—starched white button-up shirts with black trousers and a fitted black jacket. While the second chosen one was handsome, as they all were, I soon realized he didn’t fascinate me the way James tended to. Was this because I had caught a glimpse of James beyond his physical being? I’d seen something behind those mismatched eyes that didn’t belong to all chosen ones. And it wasn’t just the scar. There was life behind those eyes, and it was alluringly dangerous.

“If you will excuse me, Tess, I have to help Frank back to his room,” James said as he placed his friend’s arm around his shoulder.

I nodded and moved to let the two pass. The other boy, Frank, looked a bit ill. Could the chosen ones get sick?

“You go on in. Sorry about the mess,” James said, motioning to his room. He attempted a smile as he gave me one last look before heading down the hallway. I knew it was fake.

I wondered if I would ever figure him out.

James hadn’t been lying—the room was a disaster. It had only been two days since I had last been here, yet it looked worse than before. The books I had so carefully put away were thrown about the room. The floor was littered with multiple balled-up pieces of sketching paper. There was a pile of clothes lying in a corner.

With a heavy sigh, I began to straighten up. An hour must have passed before I realized James still hadn’t returned. The room was presentable, and I wondered if I was supposed to wait around for him. Did he want me to?

The last time I had been in his room he’d seemed distraught. A little wild in his ramblings. So unsure.

My head continued to hum with pain.

I was about to leave when something caught my eye. Underneath a pile of papers on his desk laid the novel he’d snatched from my hands during my previous visit—Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. I pulled it out and held it in my hands. It wasn’t clear to me what was so secret about this book.

Cautiously, every so often glancing at the door, I began to flip through the novel. It had been years since I’d read one. But it didn’t feel like a moment of freedom; it felt like an invasion. Something about this book was so private to James he hadn’t wanted me to see it, even when he was so willing to share the rest of his library and music. Perhaps something in this book would reveal why James seemed so different from the rest of the chosen ones.

The binding was worn, evidence that James had read this on multiple occasions. Inside, on the fading white of the pages, he had underlined numerous quotations, writing notes in the margins. Within this story of a man created from the body parts of the working class by a scientist obsessed with producing life, James had attempted to define himself.

One page of the novel was folded in. On it he had circled lines with an evident passion: “I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.”

Around this quote he had written the same sentences over and over again:
I know what she is supposed to be for me. What part of me wants her to be. But I won’t be a monster. I can’t.

My skin erupted in goose bumps as if it recognized something my mind couldn’t quite comprehend. I forcefully pushed out the image of the girl upstairs that briefly entered my mind. Why I thought of her, I’m not sure. But beneath the fear was something else. The tiniest part of me was desperately curious to know who this girl he wrote of was. Did I want her to be me? It would be impossible. And besides, what would cause me to desire that at all?

Did James feel some connection to these words? Did he feel alone? Miserable? Was it even possible for one of them to feel any of these things at all?

I didn’t hear the door open. As I moved to put the book back under the stack of papers, I saw James standing in the doorway. His expression was emotionless, but his hand had begun to twitch. I saw his face slowly transform into fear, then anger.

“I thought I told you to never touch that.”

I dropped the book and scrambled away from his desk. I didn’t know how to apologize, not correctly. It wasn’t something I regularly practiced. James looked devastated, horrified that I had read something so private.

I wanted to know this boy who could play music so beautifully. The boy who smiled despite knowing I was a natural. The boy who took me away from the laughing chosen ones. The boy who was miserable and alone.

The boy who I sensed wanted to know me, too.

The boy who perhaps felt the things I felt.

The boy who could maybe convince me it wasn’t wrong to feel them.

“Leave. Now.” How strained his voice sounded.

“Please,” I begged, “I can explain.”

“Just go.”

“I meant no harm, I swear it. I saw it lying there and—”

He slammed the door shut, causing me to jump. James moved to his desk, sat down, and started scribbling furiously on a sheet of paper.

“James,” I said, caught off guard by the way his name sounded issuing from my lips.

He stiffened. Did hearing it cause him to feel something as well? He slowly put down the pencil, keeping his back toward me.

“I had no right to read that. None at all. But…I liked it. The book. I mean, I can understand it. At least the parts I read. They made sense to me.”

I sounded like a rambling idiot. I didn’t know how to do this. The pain in my head intensified.

He finally turned to face me, and I breathed a sigh of relief. If he could look at me, face me, maybe we could talk this out. I needed to make things right.

“I told you not to touch it. When I tell you to do something, you are to do it. Or have you forgotten why you’re here?”

His words stilled everything inside of me. They were empty. In that moment, he sounded like every other chosen one. I bit my lip and shifted from foot to foot. It took everything in me to control myself. There were so many things I wanted to say in response.

His hand reached for the book and he pulled it to him, looking down at it. For the briefest of moments, in the seconds where he didn’t think I was watching, I saw him caress the cover before he put it into a drawer.

When he looked back to me I could see the man he had trained his whole life to become. If I could ignore the shaking of his hands, I might have believed that this was who he wanted to be in life. But I
did
see his hands shake. And I had read the notes in the margins of the books:
What am I capable of? Is there life outside of this place? Do I have a soul?

“I need you to leave. Go. Report to your supervisor. I’m done with you for today.”

“No.”

The word had slipped out of me without warning. I felt my heart beat with approval; I felt strength. Excitement. I felt a little like the me I had forgotten.

“Excuse me? This isn’t some game, Tess. You can’t just go around sneaking into piano rooms and defying direct orders and expect nothing to happen. There are always consequences.
Always
.” James curled his hands into fists, placing them against his knees. His words sounded more like a plea than a reprimand.

“So what? Are you going to report me? I can afford another slash mark,” I replied with a laugh. I could handle two slash marks. I would never do anything to earn three.

“Stop.”

I couldn’t. Not now.

“Tell me you want me to leave.”

“I already told you.”

“Say it again. Say you want me to leave.”

The pain in my head was getting worse. It had been a hell of a day. But I couldn’t back down.

I watched as he fought with himself. But he couldn’t say the words. Instead he looked up at me and asked the question I had been asking since the morning, since forever: “What do you want?”

I took a deep breath. And then I answered him. “I don’t want to be a monster, either.”

“Tess,” he replied, the tone of his voice altering suddenly.

“Yes.” I shut my eyes to keep the room from spinning.

“You have blood on your collar.”

And then everything went black.