The Lost Girl

12

Mines



I leave the house on my birthday. Hanging around will only remind Amarra’s family of the day their daughter and sister won’t have. Instead Lekha takes me to lunch at a place called Koshy’s, a Bangalore landmark. The food’s amazing and we have fun, but she has to leave straight after and meet her father. “He’s going to pick me up at the corner there,” she says as we stand outside. “Sigh. I can’t wait to be old enough for a real license.”

“Ray drives,” I say. “So does Sonya. They’re not eighteen, are they?”

Lekha rolls her eyes. “I might be the only one who cares about having a real license before getting on the road. Ray and Sonya know how to drive. I know how to drive. But we’re too young to do it legally.”

“And Ray didn’t get in trouble for that after the accident?”

“His lack of a license didn’t cause the accident,” Lekha points out. “So it wasn’t hard to pay a police officer to ignore that teensy-weensy circumstance.”

I will never understand how this city works.

“Are you okay?”

The question makes my face feel hot. I put on my best poker face. “Well, it would be nice if someone dropped a bucket of cold water on my head. How can it be this hot? I’m wilting.”

“Oh, no,” says Lekha. “Don’t even try that innocent, ooh-I’m-a-delicate-flower thing with me. You’ve been quiet all day.” She points a finger at me. “I thought I gave you specific instructions not to think about that Sleep Order boondocks today.”

“I’m not sure boondocks is—”

“Eva!”

“I can’t help it,” I say quietly. “It’s like my brain is counting down.”

Lekha’s face softens. She’s been remarkably tough since she found out, apart from bursting into tears when I first told her. “You have a year,” she says, regaining her brisk, no-nonsense manner almost at once. “You’re going to find a way to stop this. We’ll find a way. Now I admit I know next to nothing about the Loom and these wretched laws you’re always going on about, but I am a troubadour and I will help however I can.”

I bite back a laugh. “You meant trouper, didn’t you?”

“Trouper, troubadour, quite frankly it’s all the same to me. Should someone who has the Grim Reaper waving his sickle-scythe thing at her really be so concerned about words?”

“Fine,” I say, defeated and smiling in spite of myself. “You’re a regular troubadour.”

She smiles and gives me a hug. “I won’t let them kill you,” she says. “I’ll smuggle you away and stick you on my mother’s coffee plantation if I have to.”

“Thank you,” I say, hugging her tight and feeling a bit more hopeful. “I may hold you to that.”

After Lekha heads off to the corner, I walk the other way to the main network of streets, MG Road and Brigade Road and Church Street. I trace the roads, beating an invisible path into concrete so hot the air is rising off it, glittering like diamonds. In a couple of weeks, the first showers and storms will cool the country down.

Amarra’s phone rings. I squint at the screen. The number’s blocked, but there are only a few people it could be.

“Hello?”

“Happy birthday,” says a voice I know well—oh, so well.

I stop, electrified, cemented to the concrete. The sounds of laughter and traffic and horns blur into stillness.

Sean.

“S-Sean?” I whisper in disbelief.

“I know it’s been a while,” he says lightly, “but have you really forgotten the sound of my voice?”

“Hardly. I never forget things.”

He laughs. It sears through me. After all this time, all these months, it’s like the earth has just exploded in fire and smoke.

“You’re not supposed to call” is all I can say. “If they—”

“I thought you might like to hear a voice from another time and world. Even if it was just for a minute or two.”

My body thrums with aliveness. It is agony, but I can’t remember ever being so happy. I try to swallow a lump in my throat, but it won’t go.

“Sean—” My voice cracks.

There’s a pause, which lengthens. Then Sean says, “How are you?”

His voice is strange, as though someone has spread it like cheese over bread, spread it too thin. My heart pounds. Too fast. It makes me giddy.

“I’m all right,” I say.

“That’s a lie.”

“So you’ve heard.”

“Yeah,” he says woodenly. “I’ve heard. We’ve all heard.”

“Is Mina Ma . . . is she—”

“She’s angry,” says Sean. “She’s swearing to cut off Matthew’s unmentionable parts if he so much as hurts one hair on your head. Which means she’s not yet sad. Look, we don’t have to talk about this.”

“I want to come home,” I say very quietly.

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” His voice is so expressive for a minute that I can see him. His jeans are creased, his shirt rolled back to the elbows and rumpled. He looks tired. He hasn’t shaved in a couple days, his jaw’s rough, his hair is messy. He looks . . . sad.

I want to see him so badly I could break something.

We’re quiet again. It’s not that I have nothing to say to Sean. There’s just so much to say and I don’t know where to begin. There’s something fierce and silent blazing across the line.

“I’d better go,” says Sean at last. “It’s morning here. I’ve been in London, visiting this theater, and I only just got home. I need some sleep.”

I know this is the last time he’ll call me. This might be the last time we ever speak. I want to say something that tells him how I feel, but I don’t know how.

“Eva,” he says, and my eyes tear, “do you still dream of cities?”

“Yes,” I say.

I hear the sound of him swallowing. “Do you dream of me?”

“Yes.”

“I thought things might have changed.”

“I haven’t changed.”

“No,” he says. “I haven’t either.” He hangs up.

I put my phone back in my pocket but keep gazing ahead at the hot shimmering concrete. If I blink or move, the concrete will change, time will fracture, and I’ll lose this, this moment with the sound of Sean’s voice and the feel of him close to me. If I concentrate on the concrete hard enough, on that exact spot, I can feel his breath on my hair, his fingers on my skin. I can feel myself running off that train and into his arms.

But my eyes grow raw and blink against my will. I draw myself reluctantly back to the city, to the real world. I fiddle with the bracelet of shells that he gave me.

I keep walking. There’s nothing else to do.

As I turn the corner, I realize my assessment of the Indian climate was off by a few days. It’s beginning to rain. Within seconds it has turned into a torrential shower.

Around me, people are shrieking as they run for cover. The rain is warm. Before I can find a rickshaw, a car pulls to a stop beside me. A Scorpio, dark and faded and severely battered in places.

The passenger door opens. Ray and I stare at each other for a minute. He nods at the rain. “Do you need a ride back to the house?”

I hesitate, then climb in. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” he says. His jaw seems to be under severe strain.

“Are you following me?”

“Obviously,” he says. “Didn’t you see me outside your window last night with the night-vision goggles?” I laugh. He doesn’t smile back, but his face twitches like he almost wanted to. “I was on my way home and saw you.”

“Thanks for stopping. I’m impressed.” I add mildly, “You still drive.”

Ray’s hands jerk on the wheel.

I could kick myself. “I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “I was only surprised. If I’d been in your place, I probably wouldn’t want to drive ever again.” Ray glances at me. I look back earnestly. “It was an awful thing to say, but I really didn’t mean it that way.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to cry myself to sleep,” he says. He hesitates. “Not that it wasn’t true. I did kill her.”

“It was an accident,” I remind him. “The guy on the motorcycle was going too fast, you didn’t have time to do anything. Besides, she should have put her seatbelt on.”

“It wasn’t her fault,” he snaps.

“I didn’t say it was,” I snap back. “I’m only saying you could blame anyone if you wanted to. The motorcycle driver, you, Amarra. I think losing someone is bad enough without blaming yourself for it, too.”

He’s quiet for a minute or two. Then: “How do you know all that? About the bike coming? That she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt? Did someone tell you?”

“No.” I hesitate before telling him the truth. “I saw it happen. I kind of dreamed it while it was happening.”

Ray’s face is a mixture of disbelief and fascination. His hands grip the wheel very tightly. “I didn’t know that was possible. How does that work?”

“Well, you know how Alisha told you that echoes are imperfect? The Weavers are trying to fix that. One day, if they figure it out, we’ll be spare bodies. And if our others die while they’re still young, they’ll wake up in the new body.”

He nods. “That’s why she thought Amarra was still here?”

“Yeah. And she was right in a way. I don’t think she’s here the way Alisha believed she was,” I add quickly, “but when they made me, they had to put some of her cells, some of her consciousness, into me. To make me grow the same as her. A small part of her was always part of me. It meant that sometimes, usually when I was asleep and my mind got quiet, I would dream bits of her life.”

“Jesus,” he says, “didn’t that feel weird? Like you were spying?”

“There was nothing I could do about it.”

“Did you ever—” He stops.

I get it. He wants to know if I saw them. Together. “No. I saw you once. Just your face. And I saw the accident. That’s all.”

We sit in uneasy silence for a few minutes. The rain has soaked me, and without the sunlight, it’s cold. I huddle up. Ray flips a switch near the wheel. The air-conditioning turns warm. He doesn’t say anything, but a little color creeps back into his face. His hands don’t loosen on the wheel. His eyes are far away, following Amarra through the mist she vanished into. His anger and his grief fill the car like cigar smoke. I have no idea how to pick my way through it. I can only step cautiously, one step at a time.

I study his profile for a minute. A long minute. And I realize something.

“It was you,” I say.

“What?”

“You’re the reason she decided to get rid of me.”

The lack of surprise on his face confirms what I’d guessed. He’s known all along. “I thought you didn’t know,” he says.

“I didn’t until about a week ago. But you did. You said something to me, months ago. You said I shouldn’t even exist anymore. You thought I’d be long gone; you didn’t think I would turn up.”

“You weren’t supposed to,” he says, but not unkindly. “She said she’d done this thing where they’d get rid of you so that you wouldn’t replace her if anything happened to her.”

“She did it because of you. She wouldn’t share you. I wondered. She put up with me all her life, but one day it was too much? I couldn’t figure out what tipped her over. It should have been obvious. It was you.”

Ray doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, carefully, he asks, “So does that mean you’re going to . . . you know . . . that they’ll—”

“Yes,” I say, my voice flat as paper, “when I turn eighteen.”

He glances at me. He doesn’t say anything, but the expression on his face is almost one of regret.

Another difficult, awkward silence fills the space be-tween us.

“We haven’t gotten off MG Road yet,” I say, looking out through the rain. “Is the traffic going to be this bad the whole way back?”

He nods. “It’ll be jammed long before we get to Amarra’s house. Could be over an hour before you get there. Do you want to stop somewhere and change clothes?”

“Where?”

“My house is about five minutes away. You’re a bit shorter than my mother, but her clothes should fit you.”

“Won’t your mother mind?”

“Nah. She’s in Paris with my grandparents this week.”

“Have you been there?”

“Where, Paris?”

I nod.

“We used to go every summer,” he says, “until a couple of years ago. I loved it. But with A-levels and everything, I have a much shorter summer break, so I don’t get to go as often.”

My phone buzzes and my heart leaps, but it’s only a text from Lekha. I squirm guiltily. It was silly to hope it would be Sean again. I shouldn’t be thinking about him at all, but I can’t help myself. I can’t stop picturing him living a normal life. Does he think of me much? Does he tell himself I’m the wrong person to be thinking about?

Ray pulls in through a pair of open gates and stops his car in front of a tall white house. It seems quiet, except for a dog barking.

“There’s no one home,” he says, “unless you count Sir Jacques.”

“Sir Jacques?”

“My mother named him. He has some stray dog and some husky in him, so hell if I know what she was thinking. If you’ve ever seen a dog that looks less like a Sir Jacques . . .”

I follow Ray to the front door. He unlocks the house and leads me in. He glances at me, at the wet clothes, and then looks quickly away again. They’ve stuck to every line and crease of my body. I’m suddenly self-conscious.

A dog bounds into the room, padding toward us. He’s a powerful animal, shaggy like a wolf, his teeth bared in a grin as he gambols around Ray. He’s dark gray with white patches on his belly. The sound of his barking makes me want to step away, but I stay where I am.

After nuzzling Ray and sniffing me suspiciously, Sir Jacques licks my hand and wags his tail. I scratch behind his ears.

“Weird,” says Ray. “He doesn’t like strangers.”

“Animals like me better than people do,” I say truthfully. “They don’t look at me and sense something’s wrong.”

Ray mutters something in French, too low for me to hear, and marches away. “I’ll get you some clothes.”

He returns in a couple of minutes with a silk shirt and tight blue jeans. “I don’t think she’s worn these in years, but they’ll fit.”

I thank him.

“I won’t look,” says Ray. He begins to turn away but jerks to a stop. I stop as well, my wet T-shirt halfway up my torso. I lower it back down. His expression has changed. “You don’t have her scars from the dog bite,” he says.

“Scars were one of the few things I didn’t have to copy.”

“But you have her tattoo?”

I move my watch a bit up my wrist to show him. The little snake gazes up at us. Ray shakes his head. “It’s so strange how like her you are. You could be her.”

“That was the point,” I say.

He doesn’t move, but I see his hands tighten into fists, his expression clear as the brightest of days. In many ways, Ray and I are alike. We can’t usually hide what we’re feeling. We have impulsive faces, voices that express everything.

I can see everything on Ray’s face now, the agony, the thoughts rushing through his head. I see him marvel at how like Amarra I look. I see him remember that he’s kissed my cheek and held my hand and touched my skin and it felt so like she did. I see him realize that, if he wanted me and I wanted him, I wouldn’t feel any different from her. His expression flickers, tempted, angry, and rigid. I swallow.

“You’re not her,” he says. “You’re only an echo of her.”

“Only an echo,” I agree, “and you’re a minefield. I have to step around you so carefully so you don’t blow me up.”

He comes closer and reaches out to me. I wait, watching him, not breathing. After an eternity, his hand falls to his side again.

“You’re not her,” he says again.

“Turn around,” I tell him softly. “I need to change out of these clothes.”