Mira and I flinch. I’ve never seen Father lose his carefully controlled temper so completely. We stand side by side, shaken and quiet, eyes fixed to the ground. We pushed too far. I quickly glance up and notice lines on my father’s face that weren’t there before.
“It’s getting late,” he says in a gentler tone. He takes a long, deep breath. “You have exactly one hour to finish debriefing each other on your day.” He addresses Mira. “Afterward, you are to go straight upstairs to Ava’s room for the night. I will be checking.”
Later, when Father leaves the basement, he will sit motionless on the living room couch for hours. A hologram of our smiling mother, so realistic and detailed, will float in front of him. He likes the video of her simply walking around our house the best. She’ll wander through the kitchen, giving a tour of our newly built home, before Mira and I were born. She’ll laugh and hold out her hand, eyes playfully saying to him, “I love you.”
But right now Father reaches out to wrap his arms around Mira, then gathers me into the embrace against his chest. He hugs us tight, his palms resting protectively on the tops of our fiery heads.
“We were lucky tonight,” he says.
Mira’s face now forced next to mine, I see something I don’t understand in her eyes. More happened than what she’s revealed to father, but I can’t read what it is.
Our father glances at his watch and pulls away, smoothing out the wrinkles our bodies created on his stately uniform. He turns, lifts his heavy shoulders, and walks, formal and composed, from the basement.
He must miss Mother—with her same blazing-red hair and stubborn green eyes—every time he looks at us.
Mira sits on the piano bench absently playing the melody of the song from choir. I sit close beside her, a frown creasing my brows. “Did you learn a new verse today?” she asks me.
The question is a diversionary tactic. She feels closed off and distant in a way that makes me feel angry and hollow in the pit of my stomach. Secrets never separate us.
I reach over and place my hand on hers, stopping the music. “Tell me what else happened at dinner.” My skin immediately tingles with the curious vibrating sensation, like a field of energy, that sometimes happens when we touch. In these random, fleeting moments, I can physically feel the inexplicable bond between us.
Mira’s eyes lock onto her right wrist. I’ve seen her do this several times recently, and I’m about to ask if her imitation chip is bothering her when she admits all at once, “I shoved Halton in the garden. He stole Mother’s flowers, and I shoved him to the ground.”
I close my eyes, taking in her surprising confession with a sort of numb disbelief. “You laid hands on the governor’s grandson?”
Mira looks up at me for the first time. “I know it’s serious. Halton’s agent aimed his taser at me, Ava.”
I rise from the piano bench, and we both stare at the security screen projecting a picture of our front lawn. Astonishingly, all is well.
Why wouldn’t the agent report an assault on such a valuable charge? Recently people have been taken away for much less. Last month, a neighbor was arrested for filming a State Guard beating a man on a public street. No one has seen him since.
“Halton stopped his agent from arresting me,” Mira says.
I turn away from the screen to look at her. “Why?”
She lifts her shoulders in a half shrug. “It might be because of the governor’s plan to marry him to us. To you.”
“An arranged marriage,” I say. “There’s no way in hell we are agreeing to such a disgusting political move.”
I pace the room restlessly, the heated feelings from earlier bubbling back up to the surface. Right now I want to run uncontrolled and wild like a big cat in the Serengeti of the past. In the history videos I watch with Mira, I’ve seen the creatures roam free through the vast grasslands. I have no sense of what that sort of freedom must feel like. I’ve lived in a congested urban sprawl my entire life. I’ve never even stepped foot on open land. I wish I could find some for us, and that I could keep Mira there, safe.
Father’s words burn past my throat and erupt off my tongue: “Keep quiet. Keep hidden. Don’t stand out; blend in.”
I circle the room, round and around our cage. “We must always follow the rules. But not Father. He can do whatever he wants.”
“And say whatever he wants. Even to the governor,” Mira interjects.
Governor Roth and our father have always had a give-and-take relationship, because they need each other. But the leash the governor has around Father’s neck is short, and he can only go so far without being pulled back. From the look in Mira’s eyes, I’m afraid tonight Father may have cut the cord entirely.
A memory flashes unbidden into my mind of my father and me strolling through the gardens at the Governor’s Mansion. In the middle of Father’s reelection ceremony, a beaming Governor Roth led an impromptu tour of his enormous renovated grounds. Mira could not attend the lavish high-security event, even though it was her day up. Too many Guards and chances for a microchip scan.
I imagine no one in the world has more luxurious personal gardens than Roth. He modeled them after Versailles in the classical French style: imposing order over nature. The precise symmetry and regality of his gardens scream wealth and power, especially when most things outside the mansion grow yellow or barren. I still remember the tight line of Father’s mouth that barely held in his disdain for such an arrogant display of riches, but he did hold it in. Afterward, he swore a solemn oath to protect and uplift Texas and its people, the governor adding the sixth Texas Public Health Service badge to Father’s uniform cordially, even affectionately.
The two men ended the ceremony with respectful salutes. Yet something in the way Roth’s stare lingered before he firmly turned on his heel was a silent threat: Remember who is really giving you this honor—the man with enough power to build an Eden in the middle of a wasteland. Why would Father risk breaking such a carefully constructed relationship?
I emerge from my musing to find Mira staring at the monitors. Still sensing nervousness, I eye her critically. “What are you thinking about, Mira?”
“Should we tell Father I pushed Halton?”
“Of course not. We are on a tight enough leash as it is,” I say without hesitation.
We don’t have much time left before she has to go upstairs and prepare for her day at school tomorrow, but a nagging feeling tells me I should ask again, “Did anything else happen in the greenhouse that I need to know?”
Mira looks straight into my eyes. “No.”
I give a confident nod. “Stop worrying about Halton. If he were going to tell his grandfather, he would have done so straight off. And he’d never admit weakness to the governor.”
I rejoin her at the piano, turning my back on the video surveillance. “But we should stay away from him.”
“What about the Gala?” Mira asks.
“Either Father will find a way to get us out of it, or I will.”
The bench emits a soft creak as I move closer to my sister, a wicked smile tugging at the corners of my lips. “Did you at least get a punch in?”
She manages a half smile but hides it by saying, “Teach me the new verse.”
“Right. The entire song must be memorized. Then we’ll go over our chemistry and Spanish before I finish detailing the day in our journal.”
I begin the first verse on the piano and both our faces gradually settle into concentration. Our unified voices blend together perfectly, singing to celebrate One Child, One Nation.
MIRA
My mind hangs in the space between consciousness and sleep. I toss fitfully in the large queen bed in Ava’s room, the covers entangling me like chains. Exhausted, I kick them off, giving up any hope of rest. I open my eyes and find the room as dark as my mind.
It did not happen. There’s no way he knows. Before I left the greenhouse, I repeated these words like a mantra. After the two-hundred-and-forty-fifth time, the words rolled easily off my tongue, and I reentered the dining room fully believing it. It was all just a miscommunication, a fabricated memory born from my own paranoia.