Sever (15 page)

The static overtakes the voices until they’re gone.

Everyone is watching me. Their eyes bore into me, but I can’t face them.

The heavy feeling in my stomach has moved to my chest, and it’s hard to breathe. I need to get outside,
where there are breezes and stars and no walls. I’m moving even before I realize I’ve stood up.

I stagger out to the porch. Dizzy, I sit on the top step and try to catch my breath. There are so many thoughts whirling through my head that I can latch on to none of them. I never thought I’d hear my parents mentioned again, much less in a discussion that involves my ex-father-in-law. It’s true they all have genetic research in common, but Vaughn is the madman. My parents only wanted to make things right. Didn’t they?

How did those men on the radio know about my brother and me?

Rowan said that he was the only surviving member of our family?

What theory that the virus could be duplicated? What are Chemical Gardens?

The questions are bits of blackness, arranging like puzzle pieces until I can hardly see, can hardly think.

And for what? What answers do I hold? My brother and I—the apparently famous Ellery twins—aren’t an urban legend. We exist. But we hold no keys, can’t offer even a vague promise of a cure.

The screen door slams behind me, making me flinch.

Reed’s heavy footsteps make the planks in the porch creak. He’s never without his boots, even at night, as though he’s always prepared to run at a moment’s notice. He’s not so different from the people I knew back home, before the sheltered life I led in the mansion.
He’s not so different from my brother and me.

He sits beside me, reeking of cigar smoke, although he hasn’t had a cigar in hours. Cecily throws a fit if the smoke comes anywhere near the oxygen Bowen breathes. It only enrages her more when Reed counters that the smoke is totally harmless. It used to cause ailments that no longer exist, and a little coughing won’t kill the kid, he says.

“You’re in some real trouble, aren’t you, doll?” Reed says.

I draw my knees to my chest, and my voice comes out broken and small. “I don’t know what any of it means.” I can hear the static in the kitchen as Linden and Cecily try to bring the station back.

“Does my brother know the Ellerys were your parents?” Reed’s expression is unsettlingly grave.

The notion is overwhelming. It’s terrible enough that I was ripped from my home, but to have been a specific target rather than a random victim of Gathering? It puts Vaughn’s madness into a whole new light. He could have been looking for me all my life.

No. No, it couldn’t have been that. Like the men on the radio were saying, there are plenty of scientists, plenty of theories. My parents hadn’t broken any new ground. Vaughn wouldn’t have heard of them until my brother said what he did, about being their only surviving twin.

My brother, with his unmistakable resemblance to me.
With his eyes that are heterochromatic just like mine. All Vaughn would have to do is look at him to know we’re related.

“I don’t know,” I whisper. “If Vaughn does know, he’ll come after my brother, too.”

I’m too stunned to process any of this. Too stunned even to cry, though my eyes are starting to ache. My legs are trembling.

“No matter what, you’re safe here,” Reed says.

“Am I?” I say. “Or is your brother just letting me think that while he plans his next move?”

“He’ll never get through my door,” Reed says. I want to believe that. Just as Reed never goes without his boots, he never goes without the handgun that’s holstered to his belt. But Vaughn has his ways. He comes peacefully, never raises his voice, never draws a weapon, and he wins virtually every time.

Strange new voices from the radio are coming toward me. Cecily carries the thing out onto the porch. Her face is solemn and sympathetic. “We couldn’t get that station to come in again, but there’s a news broadcast. There was another bombing yesterday; that’s what those men were talking about.”

Linden comes after her, frowning. “Why don’t you take that back inside, love? Leave her alone now.”

“She needs to hear this,” Cecily insists. She holds the radio in her hands like an offering. The news is telling a horrible story.

“Fourteen are confirmed dead and at least five wounded following yesterday’s bombing in Charleston, South Carolina.” The same state where Madame’s deranged carnival is. This of course would mean nothing to the newscaster, who goes on, “The trio of bombers has made no secret about their activities, and though they haven’t disclosed their next target, they have spurred public rallies and spoken openly on camera about their actions.”

There’s a sharp pain in my head, like a kite string has lassoed my brain, tugging me to the speakers. And I know that I am about to hear something I have not heard in a very long time. A simple thing, the absence of which has parched something deep within me.

My brother’s voice.

He’s riled up, shouting into the crowd. The tape recorder that captured the sound is buried somewhere in all the cheering and jeering voices, rustling, picking up the rush of wind. But Rowan is the maestro of this cacophony. I concentrate on my brother, imagining him standing someplace high, and I hear him say, “—research is pointless. All this madness trying to find a cure is more dangerous to us than the virus itself. It kills people. It killed my sister.” There’s a devastated pitch when he says that last word. The word that symbolizes me. “It’s gone too far, and it must end!”

The clip is over, and he’s gone.

A sound comes out of me; something like a choke or a whimper.

There’s no doubting it now. He thinks I’m dead. He’s given up on me.

“Rhine?” Linden shoves past Reed and kneels on the step before me. He pushes the hair from either side of my face and cradles my skull with his fingertips. His eyes are searching mine, like he’s checking a vase for chips and cracks.

“It was my brother,” I manage to say. My voice is strained, like I’m only inhaling, which maybe I am. I can’t tell. I’ve never felt like this. There was the adrenaline and terror of being thrown into the Gatherer’s van, and again in the back of that truck with Gabriel, but in the darkness all of that melted down to a sort of malaise after a while. Then came the planning. I’d kept myself together with logic. I’d been taken. I’d escape. I’d make it home, and my brother and my house would still be waiting for me. But my brother has made a crater of our house. He has made a crater of himself and everything he touches.

“You have to breathe,” Linden says softly. He’s always so careful with me, even when I’ve hurt him. Bright spots move around him like someone shook the stars from a blanket and they all went flying.

“This is my fault,” I say. “We were supposed to look out for each other, and I left him. He’s gone now. I’ll never get him back.”

“Sure you will,” Linden says.

“I know the guy who runs that first broadcast,” Reed
offers. “I could take you to him. Maybe he’ll know something.”

Linden moves to sit between Reed and me. “Is it safe?” he asks. “He sounded like he was deranged.”

“Linden, you’ve been bred to think everything is dangerous,” Reed says.

“You have to talk to him,” Cecily says. “You have to find out about the Chemical Gardens. Maybe your parents knew something real, Rhine. Maybe there is a cure. Maybe it has something to do with you and your brother. You have a responsibility to find out.” The hope in her voice is unbearable.

“Cecily,”
Linden snaps. “Now isn’t the time to make demands. Could you try to be a little sensitive?”

“Sensitive?” she says. “Sensitive! When I was pregnant with our son, you told me that he was my job. You said, ‘Don’t you see how important it is?’ Well, I do! Maybe this is a dead end—who knows? But we have to find out. I brought him into this world thinking he’d have a shot at surviving, and I’m not going to just sit here and wait to die if there’s still a chance.”

Everyone is looking at her now. She seems bigger in the moonlight. Hardened by tragedy. But I see the way the now-silent radio is shaking in her hands. Her jaw is clenched. No matter how realistic Cecily has become, something within her will always ignite at the thought of hope. Even if we all know that hope is pointless, who am I to take it away from her?

Linden opens his mouth to speak, but I put my hand on his arm. “She’s right,” I say. “We should talk to him.”

“You’re sure?” Linden says.

His pity and Reed’s pity and Cecily’s intensity have all become too much. I look away from them and toward the tall grass bending sideways on a gust of wind.

“Yes,” I say. “Can I please be alone now?”

Reed is on his feet immediately. “Show’s over, kiddos,” he says, herding Linden and Cecily back inside.

The windows are open upstairs, and a few moments later I hear Bowen start to cry, and then Cecily singing to him. Linden asks her what she’s done with his suitcase, and she tells him it’s under the bed.

They’re all going to die too soon. I want to be the thing to save them, but I can’t.

I sleep, but my dream is a vivid hallucination of Vaughn’s hands snatching Bowen out of his bassinet while Cecily and Linden sleep in a bed five feet away. And then Vaughn steps into a shred of moonlight, and he’s not Vaughn at all. He’s my brother.

I open my eyes, heart pounding. I won’t close them again. I rise from the divan and move to the open window. It’s so motionless out there. If I don’t look behind me, if I look to the horizon, I could believe that the line where the earth meets the sky is the end of the world. And in the quiet I think I hear my father calling something to me.

My mother said I had a different kind of strength, and that’s why I needed to look out for my brother. But maybe she didn’t know me as well as she thought, because while my brother is starting disturbing revolutions and making fire in the sky, I’m struggling just to catch my breath. I’m not very strong by anyone’s standards, especially my brother’s.

When we were eight, he and I found a fallen star.

It wasn’t really that. I guess it was just some scrap metal that had blown into our yard on a windy night. But in the early morning, when we first saw it, the edges caught the rising sun at odd angles, and it appeared to be on fire. We ran outside in our pajamas, the fire dying more with every step, until we saw that it was just a crumpled piece of metal. My father came running after us, warning us not to touch it. He said it might be dangerous, and I knew that he was right. I saw all the jagged edges and rust, understood the treachery of the dark crevices it bore. Still, I wanted to think there was something special about it.

My brother nudged it with his foot, and almost immediately I could see the red dominating his white sock. He didn’t move. He just watched as his blood spread out, until my father grabbed him and carried him inside. Next, I remember him sitting on the kitchen counter while my mother fussed and dabbed at his foot with wet dishrags and antiseptic that hissed and crackled when they touched skin.

I remember looking out at the metal star in the yard, seeing the bright line of blood where it had cut him. I felt betrayed that something so fascinating and pretty had hurt my brother.

“It’s okay,” he told me later, when his foot was all bandaged. “It’s probably a piece from a bomb. It was designed to hurt people.”

He was so cool about the whole thing. That’s the last time I ever saw him get hurt. He understood very early the ways of war. Approaching weaponry and touching it out of curiosity would never work. No. He had to understand its purpose and then find a way to utilize it.

Maybe he’s always been leaning toward this. Maybe our parents’ death made him view the virus and all attempts to cure it as his enemy, and maybe I really was the only thing keeping him docile. Maybe my mother knew exactly what she was talking about when she told us to always stay together.

I rest my elbows on the window frame and let that thought sink in.

When the thoughts turn painful, I seek respite in one of Reed’s books. I would love a book of American history, but Reed doesn’t keep them. He has some silly theory that history was doctored shortly before the first generations were born. He says we can’t trust any of the information we’re given. His conspiracy theories have become a comfort to me. I like everything about Reed and his strange little world.

The dictionary happens to be the first thing I grab, and I take it back to the divan and start on the first page, working my way from the
A
s. Whenever I encounter a word I’ve never had cause to use, I whisper it aloud, just to have said it in my lifetime.

I’m two pages into the
A
s when the door creaks open and Cecily peers in. She’s gotten better about avoiding the noisier floorboards, and I didn’t hear her coming.

“I saw the light on,” she says softly. “Bad dream?”

She knows me well. “Lots to think about,” I say.

“Want to talk about any of it?” she says. “I could make some tea.” Much as she scoffs at Reed’s strange menu, she loves his homemade tea. He grows the herbs in cans and cardboard boxes.

But tea or no tea, I don’t want to talk about what’s on my mind. It’s exhausting enough just trying to sort it out. And it’s painful enough to know how much hope I’ve given her, and how devastated she’s going to be all over again when she realizes it’s false. “I’ll pass,” I say. “Thanks, though.”