“Others.” She points to the Iceling side of the marina. “That’s just what some kids are calling the Orphans their siblings are pairing off with.”
“Oh,” I say.
“It’s like they’re . . . sisters,” says Emily. “They look so much alike.”
“I know,” I say, and I can tell she feels maybe as bad as I do about all of this.
“What do you think they’re doing? Are they talking to each other?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But they definitely seem to understand each other.” I almost add, “Like I guess in all the ways we never could,” but I don’t. Something tells me, though, that I maybe could have.
“Yeah,” Emily says, then turns from Callie and Tara to fix her gaze on me. “Am I a terrible person for feeling jealous?”
“If that makes you terrible, then I’m the poster child on a series of propaganda ads celebrating war crimes,” I say, and she laughs a little.
“Yeah. I mean, my heart’s totally broken. But I’m also happy for her,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, this is all I ever wanted for her—a language she can understand and someone who can understand her. I just wanted it to be me.”
“Yeah,” Emily says. “Same.”
“Hey,” I say, “you and me, we could slice our palms open and become blood sisters or something, you know?” She stares at me like I’m some sort of crazed freak.
And then she bursts out laughing, and I do too, and we’re so tired from traveling, and sitting for hours and hours and hours, and the ground is so slick that we almost let our legs give way and fall down, but then we hold on to each other and just collapse a bit into the laughter.
“That was funny,” she says, her face kind of breaking with this smile, one hand on her stomach and the other still on my shoulder, and if I hadn’t just seen her laugh, I don’t think I’d believe her. “You don’t even know how much I needed to laugh like that.”
“Not a lot of laughs lately, huh?” I say, my own smile receding back into the furrowed face of concern I’ve been wearing since we got here.
“Have you heard these voice mails going around? My dad called the other day, right after that completely insane checkpoint. I didn’t pick up, obviously. But he left this voice mail that was like, Emily, return yourself and that Orphan at once. If you cannot or will not return Tara, then at least return yourself. I am warning you. The government is warning you. There will, my child, be consequences.”
“I had a pretty similar conversation with my mom,” I say. “I’ve never heard her so . . . scared before. It was this terrible combination of serious and scared that I never want to hear again. Except the scariest part isn’t that she sounded like that. It’s that I haven’t heard from her—or my dad—since.”
“Oh my God—same. Actually, I’m a little less freaked out now that I know it’s the same for you . . .”
“Likewise,” I say. I spot two Icelings on the other side of the marina. They start running at each other. Gradually, they slow down, until they come to this eventual, almost eternal halt. They’re face-to-face. They look like one guy transformed into two by a mirror, but there’s no mirror. One guy moves his arm. The other guy moves the same arm. They do this for maybe a minute, moving different limbs identically, then they stop, and they sort of smile and just stand there.
“They’re all so . . . different,” I say. “From each other. I mean, that probably sounds really stupid, right? Like, that’s like being surprised that a whole bunch of humans who grew up in the same place aren’t exactly the same.”
“No,” Emily says. “I know what you mean. And then our sisters—they’re so alike. It’s like they’re different and alike, but to crazy extremes.”
“Exactly,” I say, and I feel some kind of strange relief, because it’s nice to look around and see a whole bunch of people who know you without you ever having met them.
But it’s short-lived. Because, yes, it’s nice to look around and see a whole bunch of people who you know without ever having met them. But the reason you feel that way is that you’ve all spent your whole lives with these siblings who happen to look alike, and move alike, and none of them can communicate with anything approaching the sounds and gestures and inflections we interpret as language, and apparently the government thinks they’re maybe some sort of weapon, and you know that the only reason you know that is because your parents told you, because your parents have known it for maybe as long as you’ve been alive, maybe longer, because your parents are colluding with or in the employ of the government and have been spying on your siblings since forever.