THIRTEEN
AT FIRST I PANIC. I tug on the door frantically, and when it doesn’t give, I sink to the floor and bury my face in my hands. I shouldn’t have trusted these people. Maybe this was Marco’s plan all along. Maybe he never had any intention of helping us. My stomach twists at the thought of Emma also in a cell, trapped somewhere in this massive building, and me, powerless to help her. I lash out in frustration, punching the door behind me.
“That won’t do any good, you know,” a voice croaks from the corner, “losing your temper.” I’d forgotten I had a cell mate. I can’t see his face and I don’t really care.
“You’re new,” he remarks, his fingers tapping against stone in the dark. They create a funny little rhythm, an awkward beat that is always just a hair off, as if a finger has darted out against his will and struck rock prematurely. “Which group did you come from?”
“I’m sorry?” I don’t feel like talking, especially not to some man so gone he’s been given a nickname that induces ridicule. Clown means nothing to me, but I heard the way Marco pronounced it, saw the way his lips curled around the word.
“Group,” the man says again. “What group are you from? A? B?”
“Look,” I snap, unsure what he’s talking about, “I’m not from any group. And I’m not from Taem, either.”
He shuffles out of the corner, crouching beneath the low ceiling, and into the little light that filters through the window of our cell door. The man is gawky, thin. There are creases and wrinkles on his face, and he has a gray beard that grows in haphazard patches. His eyes appear as if he has not slept in weeks, and his dark clothes are tattered and worn.
“An outsider, eh?” He flashes me a crazed grin. “You like it there? Outside the city?” His fingers dance over the stonework again, tapping frantically as he speaks.
“It was better than here,” I admit.
The man breaks into a terrible cackle at this comment, throwing his head back like a wild dog and howling deeply. “I like you,” he says. “Quite a sense of humor.” I don’t tell him I wasn’t trying to be funny. He laughs until he’s worn himself out, and then his fingers are back to tapping.
From behind us, somewhere down the hall, there is the sound of footsteps approaching and then guards talking. I try to make out what’s being said, but Bozo’s tapping grows louder, as if he is deliberately trying to block out the conversation. He rocks back and forth on his heels, and mumbles—no, sings—to himself.
“Five red berries in a row, sown with love so that they’ll grow. Five red berries in a row, sown with love so that they’ll grow.”
He repeats it, over and over, his voice raspy. It almost sounds like a lullaby. Almost. The words are echoing in our tiny cell, and soon I can’t tell which are his and which are just bouncing back to me off the walls.
“Will you shut up?” I snap. He freezes, looks at me, tugs at the hair on his head. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying. At the end of the hall.”
He doesn’t seem to care. The tapping continues, as does the singing, the same two lines and nothing more. His hands are moving across the stones so quickly that they become a massive blur of flesh. I notice the faded imprint of a triangle on his dark, fraying top. Was this madman once like the uniformed men in Taem? Like Marco and Pete?
“Five red berries in a row, sown with love so that they’ll grow. Five red berries in a row, sown with love—”
“So that they’ll grow! I get it. Enough already.”
He stops tapping and sits bolt upright, nearly banging his head on the low ceiling. And then he’s scuttling across the floor like a spider, until he’s right before me, his face so close I can smell his sour breath.
“Do you know that song?” he asks, his nose practically touching mine.
I push him away. “I’ve got the first two lines memorized, thanks to you.”
He deflates. “And the rest?”
I shake my head. He starts tapping and singing, but doesn’t move back to his corner. I lean away from him, put my ear to the door, and listen for the guards. I hear nothing but footsteps. They are growing louder and louder, until they come to a standstill just outside our cell. Someone is wrestling with the door. Bozo clutches his knees and rocks. “Five red berries in a row, sown with love so that they’ll grow.”
There’s the click of the plate and then light floods the cell.
Bozo chants louder. “Five red berries in a row, five red berries in a row.”
“You there, kid,” a voice calls to me from the hallway. “They want you upstairs.”
The guard steps into the cell and grabs my wrist. Bozo starts screaming, mostly to himself, “Five red berries in a row, five red berries, five red berries, berriesberriesberries!”
“Hey!” the guard yells, kicking at the old man. His boot connects with the faded triangle on Bozo’s chest and sends him tumbling into the corner.
The guard slams the door shut and tugs at my arm. “Shall we?” It’s quiet for a moment, and then the frantic tapping picks up again, followed by Bozo’s eerie melody. We turn a corner. I can no longer hear Bozo, but I know he is still singing—about berries and love, two things that will never, ever save him from that damp prison cell.
Frank’s office is an oblong room that has so much decoration I am unable to tell what is functional and what is for show. The guard tells me to sit in one of the chairs that face a massive desk, its wood a deep red, and wait. I lean back to admire the ceiling as I do.
I never knew ceilings could be so intricate. Square panels impressed with patterns fill the space above my head. In the center of the room is a massive, hanging object. It has perfectly spaced arms that each hold a candle, only the candles don’t flicker or melt. Instead, they transmit an even and unfading glow about the room.
Everything is carefully positioned; a coatrack beside an immense window, a plant near rich purple curtains. Even the papers that are spread about the desk match up, their edges aligning beneath a stone weight. Artwork hangs on the walls, framed in materials that glisten under the light. One piece shows a family, two parents and two young boys, standing with their backs against a shiny black car. It’s not like the other art, which is clearly the result of a paintbrush on canvas. This image looks like the maybe-drawing of Harvey in Taem, stunningly authentic. The mother has an arm slung over the younger boy’s shoulder, while the second child eyes something of interest beyond the frame. It looks sunny where they stand, and windy, too, given the way the mother’s hair whips into her smile. I’m wondering if the father depicted is Frank when the doors behind me swing open.
The man who enters is too old to be the parent in the maybe-drawing. His skin is softly leathered, as if he spent one day too many in the sun. Cheeks droop delicately into the corners of his mouth and his lips are chapped. The little hair he has is a brilliant white, wispy and thin about the tops of his ears. He is built lean but not very tall. Nothing about him indicates that he would be a man in charge. A man with answers.
“Gray, right?” he says, smiling as he extends an arm toward me. Dozens of fine lines bloom around his lips. His voice is soft like cotton, smooth like butter. It instantly makes me confident that I might finally find the truth here. This man, with his unassuming face and organized papers, might have answers.
But even still, I hesitate to shake his hand.
“Ah, yes. Why trust me? We swiped you from the Outer Ring, explained nothing, threw you in a cell.” He puts a finger to his lips and sits. “I cannot apologize enough for how you were treated when you arrived here, Gray. You and your friend . . .”
“Emma.”
“Yes, Emma. You are the first we’ve been able to save, so our procedures are not quite ironed out. Marco reacted rashly to some very interesting information that you shared with him. I want you to know that if I could do it all over again, a jail cell would have absolutely no place in your entrance to Taem. None whatsoever.”
He pours two cups of water from a clear pitcher and hands one to me. Not having had anything to drink since dawn, and not knowing how much water exists in Taem, even for someone like Frank, I take it and drink eagerly. Frank sips his with equal parts grace and formality. He doesn’t smile, but his eyes do.
I put the water down. “So you’re Frank,” I say.
“Dimitri Octavius Frank.” He extends his hand once more, and this time, I shake it. His fingers are long and slender, but his grip, firm.
“Gray Weathersby.”
“Ah, I see.” Again, a finger to the lip.
“See what?”
He puts his elbows on the desk, aligns his hands so that pinky is to pinky, ring finger to ring finger, and so on. They move in a steady wave as he thinks. He looks not at me but through me, deep in thought. My patience runs out quickly.
“Look, forget the cell and Marco and all that. Apology accepted. But I can’t just sit here while you tap your fingers. I need to find Emma. And then I need to go back to Claysoot. I need to tell them there’s more and I need to get them out. You can wait with those car things while they all climb and then we can—”
“We’ve tried, Gray,” he says softly. His eyes stay focused on something behind me, some item of interest that must lie square between my eyes on the far side of the room. “We’ve . . . how do I put this?”
I feel like throwing my cup into the wall and watching it shatter. “Just say it. I can handle it. Just tell me already.”
“There is no easy way to explain.” He stumbles, pauses, stares at the top of his desk. “God, you’d think it would get easier, but each time is as hard as the first.”
He looks at me now, not through me. His face appears as broken as my mother’s did the day she closed her eyes for the final time. Frank’s eyes have gone dark, too, just like hers.
“You saw some posters on your way in. Wanted posters.”
It’s a statement, but he waits for me to nod in confirmation.
“Harvey Maldoon is a scientist, and one of the best that this country has seen since the Second Civil War. Many years ago, Harvey started something—an experiment, if you will. He wanted to study human nature and the building of societies and I’m not certain what else. We only know so much. I’m sure once upon a time he had good intentions, but his work was unethical. When we discovered what he was doing, we tried to arrest him. He ran. But the experiment, the things he started, it’s as if they are on autopilot. Pieces of it continue to function even though it has been a long time since he set foot in Taem.”
A knot has formed in my throat, so coarse and stubborn I can barely swallow. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Claysoot . . .”
I think I know. But it can’t be true.
“It’s not what you think it is.”
No.
“Everything you know—your world, your people . . .”
This can’t be happening.
“It’s Harvey’s experiment. Claysoot was, and is, an experiment.”
No. No. “No.” The last one escapes me. “So it’s all . . . Someone made it like that? Someone built the Wall? And put us in there?” My hands are shaking.
Frank grimaces, his eyes downturned. He takes a piece of paper from his desk and writes six letters on it. LAICOS. “Claysoot is nothing but an experiment, Gray. Harvey called it the Laicos Project in the little documentation we’ve managed to confiscate. We don’t know much else. I’m so sorry.”
My hands are in fists, my knuckles whitening. “I’ll kill him,” I say, without realizing the thought had even entered my mind.
If Frank is surprised by my reaction, he doesn’t show it. “I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same, son. Taem has suffered much at Harvey’s hands. When we tried to arrest him, he killed our men rather than come quietly. After he ran, he stole resources from his own people and slit throats for good measure. Things are bad enough here, far from perfect. We don’t need Harvey making them worse. Perhaps it will help you to understand a bit of our history, here, and how Harvey fits into it.”
He takes another sip of water and then continues. “Before the earthquakes and the flooding and the Second Civil War, this country was a large, sprawling, united thing. We are now two rifts, two pieces: AmEast and AmWest. Here in AmEast, and especially in Taem, I’ve tried to restore order, and I’ve done a decent job. It’s taken me most of my life to bring Taem to its current state. This country lost so many lives in the war that the precious resource we once fought over, freshwater, is now plentiful enough if carefully rationed. I give my people water. I give them safety by way of the Franconian Order.” He places a palm against the red triangle on his uniform.
“We keep the traitors of AmWest at bay, Gray. They started the war years ago. They attacked us first; and even with the worst of the fighting behind us, they still attack us today. And Harvey, as if the injustices he’s done are not great enough, helps them. He sells them trade secrets and weapons and information in exchange for safety. He thinks I will forget his crimes if he can scare me enough. He uses fear as a weapon, but I will not bend. He will be punished for all he’s done, to our people as well as Claysoot’s.”
Frank pinches the bridge of his nose and I realize that my mouth has gone dry. Too much is happening too quickly and I can’t comprehend it all. I try to picture the divided country that Frank mentioned. Taem seemed large in comparison to Claysoot, and the thought that something even larger exists—land that is exponentially greater than them both—is impossible to fathom. The massive war he speaks of is foreign, too, a concept so different from the carefree game I played as a child: Blaine and me against Septum and Craw, shooting imaginary arrows until someone scolded us to stop. Frank’s story is not a game.
And then there’s Claysoot, an experiment. The original children that Emma and I had debated over were never stranded in the ruins of a town. They didn’t lose their mothers to a terrible storm. It was just Harvey, picking up people as though they were playing pieces in a game and placing them where he wished. Suddenly, anything I’ve ever done, anyone I’ve ever known, everything I’ve ever said seems like a lie.
“So the Wall? The burned bodies? The Heist?” I blurt out. “That was all Harvey? It’s all just part of this Laicos Project?” The name feels dirty on my tongue.
Frank nods.
“And even though he’s in hiding, you can’t stop it? You can’t just climb over the Wall and free Claysoot?”
“We’ve tried. But we’ve lost so many men to the thing that patrols the Outer Ring.” I want to ask him what that thing is, but Frank continues before I have the chance. “We have no means of fighting what Harvey set in motion beyond your Wall, so we focus instead on saving the climbers. We spot them from observation towers, but we’ve never reached them in time. You and Emma are the first.” He leans back in his chair and smiles kindly. “But there may be hope, Gray. Marco was an idiot, putting you in a cell, but he did so because you said something very, very interesting. Something he thought too valuable to treat lightly.”
I’m almost afraid to repeat the statement since it landed me in a cell the first time, but Frank’s voice is so reassuring. He almost reminds me of my mother, calm and concerned.
“I’m a twin,” I say. “I’m eighteen and I wasn’t Heisted.”
Frank leans forward and points at me. “Exactly.”
“What does it mean?”
“You tell me,” he says. “I find it incredibly fascinating. Not lock-you-in-the-prison fascinating, but this means something. If we can figure out how or why you escaped the Heist, we may have the slightest chance of saving the rest of your people.”
I could easily tell him what I read in Carter’s notebook, but I’m caught wondering how Marco and Frank already know so much about the Heist.
“And if you don’t know what it means, that’s fine, too,” Frank says in my silence. “We can figure it out together. I’m extremely busy, but I promise you that Claysoot remains one of my top priorities. You are important, Gray—to unraveling this mystery. I can feel it. You can stay in Taem, right here in Union Central, even. You and Emma. It’s really the very least I can do if you are going to help me crack this. What do you say?”
What can I say? There is nowhere else for Emma and me to go. I picture Carter behind the Wall, longing to be reunited with her daughter. This is a chance to make that possible. Maybe I am the key to figuring everything out and ending Harvey’s project. I’d be both selfish and dense to not see this through.
“We’ll stay,” I say. “And thank you.”
Frank smiles, lines again racing over his cheeks. “The unHeisted boy, staying right here in Union Central. I feel honored to be in the presence of such mystery and hope.”
When he mentions the Heist, I get that feeling again, the sense that he knows more than I ever shared.
“About the Heist . . . If Emma and I are the first climbers to be saved, how do you know so much about the Heist?”
“I told you much of the Laicos Project still continues, running as though on autopilot. We know boys are Heisted at eighteen because they end up on our training field in the dead of night, claiming as much. Poof, and there they are, as though they’ve sprouted from the grass like dandelions.”
My face must look shocked because Frank chuckles.
“I don’t understand it, either,” he says. “It’s as much a mystery to you as it is to us. Maybe your unique situation will shed some light on things.”
I nod, baffled, and then freeze. The thought hits me like a punch in the stomach.
“Wait? Here? The Heisted boys appear here?”
“Weathersby you said, right?” Frank flips through some papers he’s pulled from his desk. He finds what he is looking for and winks at me. “Blaine. He’ll be in the cafeteria this time of day. Breakfast.”
I almost forget to breathe. Frank motions for me to stand and places a hand on my shoulder. His palm is warm, reassuring. He is shorter than me and raises his eyes to meet mine before saying, “Come. Let’s go find your brother.”