More Than This (36 page)

“That easy?” his father asked.

“I could manage it within the week,” the woman said. “You could see your son again, and all this pain you feel now would be gone.”

His mother and father were silent for a moment, then they looked at each other. His father took his mother’s hand. She resisted at first, but he held on and eventually she let him.

“He wouldn’t be real,” his father whispered. “He’d be a program.”

“You wouldn’t know,” the woman from the Council said. “You’d never ever know.”

“I can’t take this, Ted,” his mother said. “I can’t live in a world where he’s gone.” She turned back to the woman. “When can we start?”

The woman smiled again. “Right now. I brought the paperwork. You’ll be amazed at how quickly we can get things moving.” She took three large packets out of her briefcase. “One for you, Mrs. Wearing. One for Mr. Wearing. And one for young Seth.”

His parents turned to look at him, and Seth was certain they were surprised to find him sitting there.

“The woman from the Council must have been right,” Seth says after he’s told Regine and Tomasz this story. “There was some kind of tipping point, when the final parts of it happened faster than they expected. No one ever moved me out of my house to the prison.” He looks at Regine. “Or you, either. And no Driver ever came to guard me
or
you. Whatever systems they meant to set up, they obviously didn’t get all the way done. They had to protect what they could and hope for the best. The world must have been right on the point of collapse.” He breathes. “And then it collapsed.”

“But,” Tomasz says, “you cannot just replace a whole person. Your brother –”

“Yeah,” Regine demands, heat in her voice. “Why would my mother marry my bastard of a stepfather if she could have had my father back?”

“I don’t know,” Seth says. “It’s like you said, every time we find something out, there are a hundred brand-new things we
don’t
know.” He turns back to the grave. “But you can imagine what happened, maybe. It started as a fun thing to dip in and out of. And then people began staying there, leaving the real world behind, and the governments of the world think,
Hang on, this could be useful.
Then people started being
encouraged
to stay, because hey, you’ll save us money and resources and maybe, as a bonus, we’ll try offering you things that aren’t even there anymore. But then maybe everything just got too bad too fast. People were
forced
to stay, like the woman said, because the world became unlivable.”

“And now
everyone
is there,” Tomasz says. “Even the ones who wrote the programs that made your brother. No one to fix it. No one to make it better.”

“No,” Seth says, “he never did get better.”

“But no one there knows any different,” Regine says, still sounding angry.

“I’m not sure that’s true, actually,” Seth says. “I think they do know, on some level. They feel something’s not right but refuse to think about it. Haven’t you ever felt like there has to be
more
? Like there’s more out there somewhere, just beyond your grasp, if you could only get to it . . .”

“All of the time,” Tomasz says quietly. “All of the time I feel this.”

“Everyone does,” Regine says. “Especially when you’re our age.”

“I’ll bet my parents knew,” Seth says. “On some level. That he wasn’t real, no matter how real he seemed. How can you truly forget making a choice that awful? It was there in how they treated me. Like an afterthought. Like a burden, sometimes.” His voice drops. “And I thought they just didn’t forgive me for being there when Owen was taken.”

“Ah,” Tomasz says. “When you said it was little bit your fault.”

Seth places his hand on top of Owen’s grave. “I’ve hardly ever told anyone. The police, who told my parents, but no one else.” He looks up into the sunshine and thinks of Gudmund. “Not even when I could have.”

“What can it matter now, though?” Regine asks. “The truth as you knew it isn’t true.”

He turns to her, surprised. “What do you mean,
what can it matter
? It changes everything.”

Regine looks incredulous. “Everything’s
already
changed.”

“No,” Seth says, shaking his head. “No, you don’t understand.”

“Then help us to understand,” Tomasz says. “You have seen my worst memory, after all, Mr. Seth.”

“I can’t.”

“Won’t,” Regine says.

“Oh, yeah?” Seth says, growing angry. “How did you die again? Freak accident falling down the stairs?”

“That’s different –”

“How? I just found out I killed my brother!”

A small group of pigeons flaps out of the grass nearby, startled by Seth’s raised voice. Seth, Tomasz, and Regine watch the birds fly off, too small to be a flock, disappearing deeper into the cemetery, into overgrown trees and shadows, until they’re nothing but a memory.

And then Seth begins to speak.

He was still holding Owen’s hand. Their mother had said, “Don’t move!” and they’d obeyed her almost to the letter, sitting down on the floor next to the dining-room table when they got tired.

And then came the knocking. Not at the front door, but on the kitchen window at the back, in the garden that led nowhere except to fence after fence.

Where a man in a funny-collared dark-blue shirt was now looking at them.

“Hello, lads,” he said, his voice dampened by the glass. “Can you help me out?”

“Seth?” Owen said, worried.

“Go away,” Seth said to the man, trying to sound braver than he was. But he was eight and never sure why adults did any of the things they did, so he also said, “What do you want?”

“I want to come in,” said the man. “I’m hurt. I need help.”

“Go away!” Owen shouted, echoing Seth’s words.

“I won’t go away,” said the man. “You can count on that, lads. I will never, ever go away.”

Owen gripped tighter onto Seth. “I’m scared,” he whispered. “Where’s Mummy?”

Seth had a sudden inspiration. “You’ll get in trouble!” he shouted at the man. “My mum will catch you! She’s here. She’s upstairs. I’ll go get her now!”

“Your mother left,” the man said, unbothered. “I watched her go. I thought she might pop back in, because who would leave two youngsters like yourselves on their own, even for a few minutes? But no, it really does seem like she’s gone. Now, I’m going to ask you again, lads. Unlock this back door here and let me in. I need your help.”

“If you really needed help,” Seth said to him, “you would have asked for it when Mummy was here.”

The man paused, almost as if acknowledging this mistake. “I don’t want her help. I want your help.”

“No,” Owen whispered, still panicky. “Don’t do it, Seth.”

“I won’t,” Seth said to him. “I never would.”

The man’s face was half in shadow from the sun, and Seth had a moment to think how short he must be, if all they could see was his shoulders and head. When their father looked in, he nearly had to lean down.

“I don’t want to have to ask again,” the man said, his voice a little stronger.

“You have to wait until our mother comes back,” Seth said.

“Let me put it this way,” the man said calmly, “so that you understand me, okay? If you let me in, all right? If you let me in, then I won’t kill you.”

And at that, the man smiled.

Owen’s little hands squeezed Seth’s hard.

The man cocked his head. “What’s your name, boy?”

Seth answered, “Seth,” before he was even aware he could have refused.

“Well, Seth, I could break that door down. I’ve done worse in my time, believe me. I could break it down and I could come in and I could kill you, but instead, I am asking you to let me in. If I really meant you harm, would I do that? Would I ask your permission?”

Seth said nothing, just swallowed nervously.

“And so I’m asking you again, Seth,” the man said. “Please let me in. If you do that, I promise not to kill you. You have my word.” The man put his hands up to the glass. “But if I have to ask one more time, I will come in there and I will kill you both. I’d prefer not to, but if that’s the decision you make –”

“Seth,” Owen whispered, his face pulled tight with terror.

“Don’t worry,” Seth whispered back, not because he knew what to do but because that’s what his mother always said. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll count to three,” the man said. “One.”

“No, Seth,” Owen whispered.

“You promise not to kill us?” Seth asked the man.

“Cross my heart,” the man said, making the motion across his chest. “Two.”

“Seth, Mummy said no –”

“He says he won’t kill us,” Seth said, standing.

“No –”

“I’m about to say three, Seth,” the man said.

Seth didn’t know what to do. There was threat everywhere, crackling through the dead, stale air of their house, a place where harm and danger seemed impossible. He could feel it shining from the man like a fire.

But he didn’t understand the threat, not fully. Was it a threat if he didn’t do what the man said or if he
did
? He didn’t doubt that the man could break down the door – adults could do that sort of thing – so maybe if he just did what the man said, maybe he would –

“Three,” said the man.

Seth leapt into the kitchen, suddenly urgent, fiddling with the lock, shifting its weight so it would open.

He stepped back. The man moved from the window and around to the door. Seth saw that the funny-collared shirt was actually a dark blue jumpsuit. The man was stroking his chin, and Seth saw scarring on the man’s knuckles, a strange white puckering like he’d been burnt there.

“Why, thank you, Seth,” the man said. “Thank you very much indeed.”

“Seth?” Owen said, edging around the doorway from the main room.

“You said you wouldn’t kill us if I let you in,” Seth said to the man.

“That I did,” said the man.

“We’ve got bandages if you’re hurt.”

“Oh, it’s not that kind of hurt,” the man said. “It’s more a dilemma than an injury, I’d say.”

The man smiled. It wasn’t friendly. At all.

“I need one of you lads to come with me on a trip.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees, so that he was down on Seth’s level. “I don’t care which one of you. I really don’t. But it has to be one. Not both, not neither.” He held up a single finger. “One.”

“We can’t go anywhere,” Seth said. “Our mum is coming back for –”

“One of you is going to leave this house with me,” the man interrupted. “And that’s the end of the story.”

He stepped fully into the kitchen now. Seth backed into the oven, never taking his eyes off the man. Owen still held on to the door frame, his face bunched up, his skin white with fear and amazement at the stranger in their kitchen.

“Here’s what I’m going to do, Seth,” the man said, as if he’d just had the best idea in years. “I’m going to let you choose. I’m going to let you choose which of you two comes with me.”

“Oh, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says. “That is too, too terrible.”

“I thought,” Seth says, not able to meet their eyes. “I thought if I said he should take Owen, I’d be able to raise the alarm better. I’d be able to explain what happened faster and they could go after the guy and catch him. Owen was only four. He barely had any language at all, and I thought . . .” He turns back to the tombstone. “Actually, I don’t know what I thought. I don’t even know if that’s true or if it’s a story I told myself.”

“But it was impossible,” Tomasz says. “You were a boy. You were
little
boy. How can you choose this?”

“I was old enough to know what I was doing,” Seth says. “And the truth is” – he stops, having to swallow it away –“the truth is, I was afraid. Afraid of what would happen to me if I went, and I said . . .”