EVERETT’S HANDS WERE ON MY FACE. THE BACK OF MY SKULL WAS POUNDING again, and there was pandemonium around me. I winced as I opened my eyes, too weak to move.
“She’s coming around,” Everett said.
“Answer the phone,” I said feebly as I swallowed, trying to erase the taste.
“What phone?” Ginny asked, exasperated.
Then Adelaide’s phone rang, and everyone froze. “Hello?” she asked. I opened my eyes and closed them again. I saw spots. My body felt hot even in the snow, but nothing like the fire at the base of my skull.
“Who is it?” Anthony asked her. She held up a finger and listened.
“The security company. The alarm is going off at the house in California,” she told him.
“But how did Sadie...” Anthony trailed.
“It’s happening now,” I managed. “They’re there.” I reached for Everett to pull myself into a sitting position. “They just killed eighteen of your neighbors.”
They all stared at me in horror.
Anthony rubbed his face with one hand, then ran it through his hair. His tell of stress. “Patrick, Madeline, you go. Find out what happened. Now,” he snapped. The pair took off running immediately. “Sadie, I’m sorry...”
I said, “Now you know I was telling the truth.”
“Anthony, go with them. You should be there. The police could...” Adelaide said.
“Oh damn, police,” Mark said. “That will not make this any easier.”
“Go with them,” Adelaide insisted. Anthony hesitated, looked at me, and I nodded. He sighed and quickly caught up with Patrick and Madeline.
“What happened?” Everett asked.
I closed my eyes and collapsed back in the snow, the burning pain in my head still raging. “Ginny can tell you,” I said.
“No, I can’t,” she said. “When you blacked out, your mind went blank.”
I screamed. “Damn it! I hate this!”
Lizzie broke through the Winters and came to my side. “Are you all right, child?” she said, both hands on my face.
“No,” I admitted.
“Maybe she should rest,” Lizzie suggested to the hovering crowd. “We have to know what’s happening,” Everett said. His voice forceful and as icy as the snow I lay my head in.
“We can give her some time,” Andrew said, coming to Lizzie’s side. “No,” Everett barked. “We need to know now.”
I looked at him, incredibly surprised. Ginny stared at him in disbelief, and spoke softly, “Everett...”
“Am I the only one who takes this seriously?” he snapped. In the dim light of the old street lanterns lining the lane, I had to squint to see that his eyes were a glowing crimson red.
“Everett!” Adelaide snapped.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. It wasn’t fine, really, but I had no idea what was going on.
“Let’s go to the church room,” Andrew said. “There’s better protection against sound.”
I was unsteady on my feet. “May I?” Mark asked, reaching to scoop me up. I nodded. Everett had already begun to walk toward the church, and he didn’t turn around or offer to help. Mark tucked me against his chest, but I tensed. Seeming to understand that I hated this display of weakness, he threw me over his shoulder in a flash, like he was giving me a piggyback ride. I appreciated him for that.
Inside the church room, I recounted it all in gory detail, nauseous as I talked about the smell and taste of blood, about the horrified looks on the families’ faces. But I didn’t tell them Noah kissed that girl’s neck before he killed her. That detail was just too eerie.
Andrew spoke. “We must find them, if only to stop them. Even if it means our family will fall apart. Even if it means we’ll lose ourselves in the process. Even if we have to kill them all.”
Hannah looked uneasy. “Do you mean that?” she asked Andrew.
“They’ve brutally murdered 156 people that we know of,” Andrew said. “We will have to risk everything.”
“He’s right,” Lizzie added.
I put my head on the table, just wanting to be anywhere but here, living anyone’s life but mine.
I’d be lying if I said the first image that came to mind was anything other than Cole Hardwick’s sun-kissed face.
“We need to let Sadie rest,” Andrew said, rising to his feet. “Come on. Out with you all.” He opened the door and we filed out of it. Everett went on ahead without me.
“Everett,” I called him, but he didn’t turn around.
Not good, Ginny said in her mind.
“Everett!” I called again.
He snapped around. “What?” he screamed.
“Shhh! Everyone will hear us!” Ginny snapped.
“What do you want?” Everett repeated, this time quieter but not by much.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked, only slightly stronger now. I rubbed the spot on the back of my head where the fire had finally started to subside.
“With me? What’s wrong with you? You think it was easy to sit there and listen to you talk about how disgusted you are by my kind? How sick we make you? It’s good to know what you really think of me.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, unable to process what was happening. He had never been like this before.
“Ev, man. Shut up,” Mark said. His voice was even, cooling.
“Am I talking to you?” Everett shot at Mark.
“Everett, I was just telling them what I saw. Something I didn’t want to do, might I add, but you forced me,” I countered, now close to him.
“Like that’s an excuse for the shit you just said about me?” he argued.
“About you?” I asked incredulously.
“Okay, we need some space apparently,” Mark said, realizing no one was listening to him. “Let’s walk,” he said, and he grabbed Ginny’s arms and mine. But Everett followed. He was picking a fight.
“You are being ridiculous,” I said. My eyes began to sting, and my throat tightened as if I were crying.
“What do you want, an apology?” he spat. He was on my heels.
“It would be a nice start,” I said quickly. We cleared the city gates and stopped a few feet outside of them. I stopped to look at him then. The fury in his face terrified me. Paired with the hurtful words, it was as if he were an entirely separate person from the one I’d come to love.
“Why should I apologize? This shit is all your fault to begin with,” Everett said coldly. “We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you, right?” He paced back and forth a few feet from us, one hand scrubbing his face and running through his hair. Just like his father.
It was suddenly hard to breathe. “You don’t mean that.”
“You’re the one who’s always saying none of this would have happened if you hadn’t left this place. Maybe you’re right,” he said callously. What he was saying, the way he was acting — these were possibly my worst fears coming to fruition: The last loyal ones turning on me; the tragedies happening around us blamed on me.
“You need blood,” Ginny said. She grabbed her brother’s arm.
“Sadie, I’m sorry. We’ll be back, and he’ll be more polite, I promise.”
Everett shrugged her off. “I don’t need a babysitter, thanks,” he spat, turning toward the woods.
“No way you’re going alone like this,” Ginny said, chasing after him. She grabbed his arm again, but he took her wrist and pushed her, hard.
Mark was between them faster than I could see him move, his hand on Everett’s throat. “You do not touch our sister that way. And you don’t talk to Sadie that way either. Say you’re sorry, and then we’re going to go get your head straight. You understand?” Mark demanded.
Everett fought Mark for a minute, but then he relented. “Sorry,” he choked.
“Good,” Mark said. “You okay?” he asked Ginny. She nodded, frustrated. “We’ll be back by morning, Sadie. Sorry one of us can’t stay, but we need to be there to watch out for him.”
“Just go,” I said. And they did.
Alone, I sank in the snow, pulled my knees to my chest, and put my head down. Things were going very poorly for me.
I took a pen out of my pocket, rolled up my sleeve, and began to make marks down my arm. From the crease of my elbow, down toward my wrist, over smooth skin and faded scars, I wrote a thin line of fifty tally marks. Below it, another line of the same. And another. I started a fourth line and wrote only six marks on that row. 156 marks in all. One for each of the dead I felt responsible for.
I hated that I knew what Everett and his siblings were doing.
Just then, I heard Ben call my name. He was standing inside the city gates, looking out on me.
I got up and went to him. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to talk to you,” he said.
“Of course,” I said. I opened the gate to let him out. He walked through effortlessly. I assumed that since I had been the one to open the gate, he could get through it.
I hadn’t spoken to him much since we’d returned, but he spent a lot of time with the Winters.
“Walk with me?” he asked. I nodded and we began to saunter into the forest. “How are you managing, Sadie?”
“Being back, you mean?” I asked.
“Being hated,” he said.
Oh, that. I chose my words carefully. “I’m handling it, I suppose. I’m
not sure what I’d do without the Winters here and those few of you who are good to me.” The last hour made me question just how helpful the Winters — or one in particular — were. “And I miss my life out there a lot,” I said. “But I’m okay. How are you dealing with all of this?”
He shrugged. Of all of the people in my generation, Ben was the most dedicated to my family’s way of life. He’d had his youthful indiscretions — like the time he made his own wine and sneaked Noah and I out to drink it with him — but most of that was a century behind him. Now he was loyal Survivor. His presence — even his mind — reminded me very much of Andrew’s. He had a gentle but powerful nature. He was a traditionalist, though, the way that Andrew was, so I feared he would hate me over this mess more than he actually did. “I pray about it a lot. The trouble is, I don’t seem to know what’s right. Do I like to see our family split apart, as they are now? Of course not. But do I want the rogue ones to come back and start a war? Obviously not. It seems there is no easy answer.”
“One thing I learned out there is that there usually isn’t,” I said.
“But that’s the thing, Sadie. It used to be simple here. That was what made it such a paradise. We’ve had no conflicts. No tragedy. No trouble at all. Then you came back here with that family of Others and told us that our brothers and sisters are killing humans? And that they’ll come back here to start a war, presumably to kill us? How did we get here?” he asked.
I couldn’t tell if his question was rhetorical, so I answered it. “It’s my fault, of course. I’m sorry, Ben. I’m sorry this has happened. If I had stayed, it wouldn’t have been this way,” I said. Ben did not respond, but in his mind, he was trying to decide whether to comfort me. He didn’t want me to blame myself, but he saw it the way I saw it. He was feeling guilty, too, though, which was out of place among his thoughts.
“They sent Noah and me after you when you left,” he said quietly. “They did?” I was stunned.
“As soon as they’d realized you’d gone. Lizzie went to Bigfork, and when you weren’t at your bookstore, she came back here and told them she thought you had gone,” he said.
“But you couldn’t find me?” I asked.
“Of course we could have. Your trail was easy to pick up,” he said, offended I had suggested such a thing.
“Then what happened?” I pressed.
“We couldn’t do it, Sadie. Noah knew what you wanted, that you had wanted to go for so long. And it killed him to see you go, but he couldn’t make you come back here. So we cleared the city gates and got far enough away to talk, and we decided we couldn’t steal your freedom from you. If they wanted to bring you back, they couldn’t use us to do it,” he said. His face was in his hands as he said this. I could see now that he blamed himself for having let me go. The same guilt I was carrying, he had been carrying, too.
“Did you tell the elders that you wouldn’t track me?” I asked.
“Of course not! We couldn’t disrespect them like that. If we had, they would have found another way. Your freedom would still have been in jeopardy. We pretended we tried and failed. This was the best we could do to protect you,” he explained.
“Where did you go?” I asked, enthralled in his story and still in disbelief.
“We headed east where we weren’t in the path of any humans. We were afraid of them, I suppose. We found some beautiful waterfalls and landscapes we had never seen. We rested there for a while, enjoying being outside the city walls. We came back about three weeks later.
They never sent anyone else. They figured if their only trackers couldn’t find you, no one would,” he explained.
“You let me...escape,” I said. Hearing it aloud didn’t make it seem any less unbelievable. “How did you and Noah know what I wanted?” I asked.
Ben sighed again. “I suppose it doesn’t matter if I keep his secrets now seeing as he’s abandoned us, too,” he said. He angrily snapped off a large branch from a tree we passed, snow falling off it onto the ground around us. This was a rare display of emotion for Ben. “He can see inside your mind,” he told me.
“What?” I stopped walking.
“Not always. But for a long time he’s known what you’re feeling, and sometimes what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Can he do this to everyone?” I asked.
“Only with you. Only sometimes,” Ben said. “But after 140 years of living with you and trying to protect you, he understood the basics. You wanted to get out. You want to be a human. You want to die.” I looked at Ben, surprised and scared that he knew about my shameful search for mortality. “Don’t be alarmed. We’ve known this for a while. We’ve never told anyone. We’re good at keeping secrets.” A faint, sad smile crept into the corners of his mouth as he said this. “There’s no reason to expose you now. They all hate you enough,” he said.
“Thank you,” I managed.
“For what?” he asked.
“For keeping my secrets,” I said. “And protecting my freedom,” I added. I was so surprised to learn that there were people in my family willing to sacrifice what they believed in for my happiness. For 141 years, I never knew anyone gave a damn. All this time I had felt so alone. It was a shock to learn how wrong I’d been.
Ben smiled at me. “If I could have one thing in this life, do you know what it would be, Sadie?”
I shook my head.
“I want my family to be happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
I felt a pang deep in my stomach. Had I ever done something only because it would make my family happy? “You’re a better person than I am,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he said. “I will admit I am a better Survivor. You, of us all, know the distinction.”
I felt guilty again. That’s all I was supposed to be, wasn’t it? A Survivor? All I had to do was survive. And what did I want to do? Become a human. And die.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“This shouldn’t be so hard for me — to stay here and be with my family,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. What could he say? He agreed with me.
I continued. “But there’s more to this world, Ben. More that I wish all of you could see. Things I miss since I’ve had them and now I don’t.”
“I’ve read our three books, Sadie. I know there is more from Beowulf, Macbeth, and Theogony. It just doesn’t interest me,” he said.
“They don’t do it justice. You can’t understand it because you’ve never seen it. All you know of the outside world, you learned from looking down on a town many miles from here. A town that is smaller than any other town I’ve been to, so I can’t explain how little that tells you.”
I tried to explain. “To you, the world is something you see from afar, like a line on the horizon. But what if the horizon isn’t a line? What if it’s a flat shape, like a circle or a square? You can see that from where you stand. You’d only see the edge of the shape and think it was a line. What you see of the world outside, it’s the smallest edge of the smallest shape. There is so much more.”
“I imagine you are like a sphere, then,” he said.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“There’s no edge to a sphere — it’s three dimensional and continuous. We could always see the sphere and know it was different. That was you in here,” he said, rubbing his hand along the city wall we were walking around. “And out there, I’m sure you are different. That’s what upsets you the most. So they, the narrow-minded ones out there, can see you too. If you were a sphere, we’d all be able to see you, and we’d all be forced to realize our perceptions were wrong. A three-dimensional, continuous entity could never hide in a world of two-dimensional shapes. So you’ll always stick out. It would be the same with the Winters. You’ll never be able to hide,” he said.
“Comforting,” I muttered.
“But there is an advantage. With any of you who have learned to live in this world and that one, you’ll always have a vantage point that others won’t. But you’ll never be able to hide. The question, of course, is how you became a sphere because a sphere would be the most enlightened of us all, able to see everything — all the shapes, as you say — on the ground below. You know about our world and the one beyond our walls. You know everything, by comparison.”
This caught me off-guard. Ben was describing a philosophy I’d read about in the human world — Abbot’s notions from Flatland — only he had come up with it on his own. My family, despite having such little world experience, had powerful things to say. I do not know why I believed that they were incapable of seeing the world as I did. That wasn’t it. Although some would never want to know a world unlike their own, some of them could if given the chance. But I was not so special among them. They were as intelligent and gifted as any human I’d met. It was out of immaturity or ego, perhaps, that I had assumed this wasn’t the case.
“So you think that what I learned out there isn’t all bad?” I asked.
“I think anything a person can learn can’t be bad, as long as you don’t let it change you. Sadie, sister, I realize that you are not like us in every way, but you are like us in the ways that count. We all came from the same place. You’re still a Survivor, and we still love you. Even the ones who don’t show it,” he said.
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“It’s what one expects of one’s family. And if it is any different out there, I hope you haven’t let that color your perception of your own family. We will always love you, even when we cannot understand you. I realize that lack of understanding might be the challenging part for you — it is for us all — but I cannot imagine that the Winters understand you any better than we do. They seem even less human than we are, despite having lived in a human world,” he said. He was right, of course, but I hated to admit it or to give any Survivor another reason not to like the Winters. “Might I suggest that you find a human to talk to, Sister? Surely in your travels, you’ve met one you can trust with your truth?”
“Maybe,” I said. I was grateful for Ben’s suggestion, and that he understood he could not provide what I needed. But had I met a human I could that much of? It didn’t feel like it. Except Corrina. But now I had alienated her terribly. I was sure she hadn’t forgiven me. I wasn’t even sure she’d let me in if I arrived at her door.
But there was one human who would always answer the door for me, I was sure.
Cole Hardwick.
I stopped where I was and pulled my cell phone from my pocket, as Ben wandered on. I pulled up Cole’s number, stared at it, and the I put the phone away. I couldn’t do this in a phone call. He deserved better than that if I were going to ask him to let me back in his life. It wasn’t fair to ask this of him, but he had once promised me — before I walked out on him in London — that he would listen to anything I wanted to tell him.
This time, I acted quickly, so as not to allow myself the twenty- minute deliberation that would end in me leaving Cole alone.
“Ben, Everett and the rest of them will probably be back tomorrow. Can you tell them I’ll be back in a day or so?” I said.
“You mean can I lie for you and not tell them you are going to see some human they don’t want you to see?” he asked.
I bit my lip and nodded.
“What is it that Ginny always says? Done and done.”