“You should try to get some sleep,” she says. “I’ll refill your water.” She takes the glass and then moves toward the door, switching off the overhead light as she goes. She pauses in the doorway for a bit with her back turned to me. The light from the hallway looks fuzzy around her, and makes her features blur to black so she looks like a shadow-person, a silhouette.
“You know, Lena,” she says at last, turning back around to face me, “things are going to get better. I know you feel angry. I know you think we don’t understand. But I do understand.” She breaks off, staring down into the empty glass. “I was just like you. I remember: those feelings, that anger and passion, the sense that you can’t live without it, that you’d rather die.” She sighs. “But trust me, Lena. It’s all part of the disease. It’s a sickness. In a few days you’ll see. This will all feel like a dream to you. It was like a dream to me.”
“And you’re happier now? You’re glad you did it?” I ask her.
Maybe she takes my question as a sign that I’m listening and paying attention. In any case, she smiles. “Much,” she says.
“Then you’re not just like me,” I whisper fiercely. “You’re not like me at all.”
Rachel opens her mouth to say something else, but at that moment Carol comes to the door. Her face is flushed and red and her hair is sticking up at strange angles, but when she speaks she sounds calm. “Everything’s all right,” she says in a low voice to Rachel. “Everything’s been settled.”
“Thank God,” Rachel says. Then, grimly: “But she won’t go willingly.”
“Do they ever?” Carol asks drily. Then she disappears again.
Carol’s tone of voice has frightened me. I try to sit up on my elbows, but my arms feel like they’ve been turned to Jell-O. “What’s settled?” I ask, surprised to hear that my voice sounds slurry.
Rachel looks at me for a second. “I told you, we just want you to be safe,” she says flatly.
“What did you settle?” Panic is filling me, made even worse by the simultaneous heaviness that seems to be creeping over me. I have to struggle to keep my eyes open.
“Your procedure.” That’s Carol. She has just stepped back into the room. “We managed to get you in early. You’ll have your cure on Sunday, first thing in the morning. After that, we hope, you’ll be okay.”
“Impossible.” I’m choking. Sunday morning is less than forty-eight hours from now. No time to alert Alex—no time to plan our escape. No time to do anything. “I won’t do it.” My voice doesn’t even sound like my own now: It’s one long groan.
“Someday you’ll understand,” Carol says. Both she and Rachel are advancing toward me, and then I see that they are holding, stretched between them, coils of nylon cord. “Someday you’ll thank us.”
I try to thrash out but my body is impossibly heavy and my vision starts to blur. Clouds roll through my mind; the world goes to fuzz. I think, So she was lying about the Advil—and then I think, That hurts, as something sharp digs deep into my wrists, and then I don’t think anything at all.
Chapter Twenty-Six
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
—From “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in,” a poem by
e. e. cummings, banned, listed in the Comprehensive Compilation
of Dangerous Words and Ideas, www.ccdwi.gov.org
When I wake up again it’s because someone is repeating my name. As I struggle into consciousness I see wisps of blond hair, like a halo, and for a confused moment think maybe I’ve died. Maybe the scientists were wrong and heaven isn’t just for the cured.
Then Hana’s features sharpen, and I realize she’s leaning over me. “Are you awake?” she’s saying. “Can you hear me?”
I groan and she sits back a little, exhaling. “Thank God,” she says. She’s keeping her voice to a whisper and she looks frightened. “You were so still I thought for a minute that you—that they—” She breaks off. “How do you feel?”
“Shitty,” I croak loudly, and Hana winces and looks over her shoulder. I notice a shadow flitting just outside the bedroom door. Of course. Her visit is being monitored. Either that or someone is on 24/7 guard duty. Probably both.
My headache is slightly better, at least, although now there’s a searing pain in both of my shoulders. I’m still pretty groggy, and I try to adjust my position before remembering Carol, and Rachel, and the nylon cord, and realizing that both of my arms are stretched above my head and secured to the headboard, like a real honest-to-God prisoner. The anger comes again, waves of it, followed by panic as I remember what Carol said: My procedure has been moved to Sunday morning.
I swivel my head to one side. Sunlight is streaming in through the thin plastic blinds, which have been drawn down over the windows, lighting up dust motes in the room.