Miracolina takes off her earphones. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“Stay here,” orders Chauffeur-Claus, no longer jolly, and he jumps out of the van.
Timothy already has his nose pressed against the window, looking out. “This can’t be good.”
“No,” agrees Miracolina. “It can’t.”
Just off the road in a ditch is another Wood Hollow Harvest Camp van, but this one is overturned, wheels to the sky. There’s no telling how long it has been there.
“He must have blown a tire or something, and skidded off the road,” says Timothy. But none of the tires look blown.
“We should call for help,” says Miracolina—but no one brings a phone to harvest camp, so neither she nor Timothy has one.
Just then there’s a commotion outside. Half a dozen people dressed in black with faces hidden by ski masks come leaping out of the woods from all directions. The chauffeur is hit with a tranq bullet to the neck and goes down like an overstuffed rag doll.
“Lock the door!” shouts Miracolina, and doesn’t wait. She pushes Timothy out of the way to get to the driver’s unlocked door—but she’s not fast enough. Just as she reaches for the lock, the door is pulled open, and the assailant hits the button that pops all the locks. All the van’s doors are pulled open at once by the masked attackers. Clearly these attackers have done this before and have gotten good at it. Timothy screams as hands reach in, pulling him out. He tries to wriggle free, but it’s useless. If his fear is a web, then the spiders have got him.
Two more figures reach for Miracolina, and she drops to the floor, kicking at them.
“Don’t you touch me! Don’t you touch me!”
Her fear, which had been so well under control, explodes from her now, because this violation of her journey is a far greater unknown than harvest camp. She kicks, and bites, and claws in terror and outrage, but it’s no use—because in the end, she hears the telltale pffft of a tranq gun firing. She feels the sharp jab of the tranq bullet as it embeds itself in her arm, and the world goes dark as she spirals helplessly into that timeless place where all sedated souls go.
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“You don’t know me, but you know someone like me. I was diagnosed with liver cancer the same week I got my acceptance letter to Harvard. My parents and I didn’t think it was a problem, but when we talked to our doctor, we found out there was an organ shortage, and livers were in short supply. They told me I’d have to be on a waiting list. Now, three months later, my name still hasn’t come up, and that acceptance letter? Well, I guess my education is going to have to wait.
“And now the same people who lowered the age restriction on unwinding want to have a six-month waiting period once parents sign an unwind order, in case they change their minds. Six months? I won’t be here in six months.”
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Waking up after being tranq’d is not a pleasant experience. With consciousness comes a splitting headache, a terrible taste in one’s mouth, and the disturbing feeling that something has been stolen from you.
Miracolina awakes to the sound of someone crying beside her, begging for mercy. She recognizes the voice as Timothy’s. He’s definitely not the kind of boy built to handle something like this. She can’t see him, though, because her eyes are covered by a thick blindfold.
“It’s all right, Timothy,” she calls to him. “Whatever’s going on, it’s going to be okay.” Hearing her voice makes his pleas and sobs settle into whimpers.
Miracolina shifts to feel the position of her body. She’s sitting upright, and her neck aches from the position in which it had hung while she slept. Her hands are behind her back, tied together. Her legs are tied to the chair she sits in. Not painfully, but tight enough to ensure she won’t break free.
“Okay,” says the voice of a boy in front of them. “You can take off their blindfolds.”
Her blindfold is pulled off, and although the light around her is not bright, it’s still painful to keep her eyes open. She squints, slowly letting her eyes adjust and focus.
They’re in some sort of grand, high-ceilinged ballroom. Crystal chandeliers, artwork on the walls—it looks like the kind of place where French royalty would have entertained high society before getting themselves beheaded. Except that this place is falling apart. There are holes in the ceiling through which pigeons freely fly in and out of the daylight. The paintings are peeling with weather damage, and the rank smell of mildew fills the air. There’s no telling how far they’ve been taken from their destination.
“I’m really sorry we had to do it this way,” the boy sitting in front of them says. He’s not dressed like any sort of royalty. Even moldy royalty. He wears simple jeans and a light blue T-shirt. His hair is pale brown, almost blond, and too long—like he hasn’t had a haircut in recent memory. He seems to be her age, but the tired look around his eyes makes him appear older, like he’s seen many more things than anyone ought to see at their age. He also seems a little bit frail in some indefinable way.
“We couldn’t risk you getting hurt, or figuring out where we were taking you. It was the only way to safely rescue you.”
“Rescue us?” says Miracolina, speaking up for the first time. “Is that what you call this?”
“Well, it might not feel that way at the moment, but yes, that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
And all at once, Miracolina knows who this is. A wave of rage and nausea courses through her. Of all the unfair things to happen to her, why did she have to face this? Why did she have to be captured by him? She feels the kind of anger, the kind of hatred she knows is not good for her soul, especially this close to her tithing—but try as she might, she can’t purge herself of the bitterness.
Then Timothy gasps, and his watery eyes go wide.
“You’re him!” he says with the kind of enthusiasm boys like Timothy usually save for encounters with sports stars. “You’re that tithe who became a clapper! You’re Levi Calder!”
The boy across from them nods and smiles. “Yes, but my friends call me Lev.”
3 - Cam
Wrists. Ankles. Neck. Strapped down. Itching. Itching all over. Can’t move.
He flexes his hands and feet in the bonds. Side to side, up and down. It scratches the itch, but makes it burn.
“You’re awake,” says a voice that’s familiar, and yet not. “Good. Very good.”
He turns his neck. No one. Just white walls around him.
The scrape of a chair. Closer. Closer. The person who spoke comes into blurry view, moving her chair into his line of sight. Sitting. Legs crossed. Smiling, but not smiling. Not really.
“I was wondering when you’d wake up.”
She wears dark pants and a blouse. Pattern of the blouse too blurry to make out. And the color. The color. He can’t put a finger on the color.
“ROY-G-BIV,” he says, searching. “Yellow. Blue. No.” He grunts. His throat hurts when he speaks, and the words come out raspy. “Grass. Trees. Devil puke.”
“Green,” the woman says. “That’s the word you’re looking for, isn’t it? My blouse is green.”
Can the woman read minds? Maybe not. Maybe she’s just clever. Her voice is gentle and refined. There’s an accent to it. Slightly British, perhaps. It automatically makes him want to trust her.
“Do you recognize me?” she asks.
“No. Yes,” he says, feeling his thoughts cinched in bonds tighter than the ones that secure him to the bed.
“Fair enough,” says the woman. “This is all very new to you—you must be frightened.”
Until that moment, it hasn’t occurred to him that he should be frightened at all. But now that the crossed-legged, green-shirted woman says he must be, then he must be. He tugs against his bonds in fear. The burning itch begins to hurt even more, and it brings forth a jagged shattering of memories that he must speak aloud.
“Hand on stove. Belt buckle—no, Mom, no! Falling from bike. Broken arm. Knife. He stabbed me with a knife!”
“Pain,” says the cross-legged woman calmly. “ ‘Pain’ is the word you’re looking for.”
It is a magic word, for it calms him down. “Pain,” he repeats, hearing the word as it spills from strange vocal cords, and over unfamiliar lips. He stops struggling. The pain fades to burning, and the burning fades to an itch once more. But the thoughts that came along with the pain are still there. The burned hand; the angry mother; the broken arm; and a knife fight that he never fought, and yet somehow did. Somehow, all these things happened to him.
He looks again to the woman, who studies him coolly. Now that his focus is better, he can see the pattern of the blouse.
“Paste . . . palsy . . . hailey.”
“Keep trying,” says the woman. “It’s in there somewhere.”
His brain twitches. He struggles. Thinking feels like a race. A long, grueling Olympic race. What is that race called? It starts with an M.
“Paisley!” he says triumphantly. “Marathon! Paisley!”
“Yes, I imagine this is as exhausting as a marathon for you,” says the woman, “but it was worth the effort.” She touches the collar of her blouse. “You’re right, it does have a paisley pattern!” She smiles, this time for real, and touches his forehead with her fingertip. He can feel the tip of her nail. “I told you it was in there.”
Now that his thoughts are beginning to settle, he realizes that he does recognize the woman, but has no idea from where.
“Who?” he asks. “Who? Where? When?”
“How, what, and why,” she adds with a smirk. “Your question words have all returned.”
“Who?” he demands again, not appreciating the joke at his expense.
She sighs. “Who am I? You can say I’m your touchstone, your connection to the world—and in a sense your translator, because I can understand you, where few others can. I’m an expert in metalinguistics.”
“Meta . . . meta.”
“It’s the nature of the language you speak. Metaphoric associations. But I can see I’m confusing you. It’s not for you to worry about. My name is Roberta. But you wouldn’t know that, because I never told you my name in all the times you’ve seen me.”
“All the times?”
Roberta nods. “You can say you’ve only seen me once, yet you’ve also seen me many, many times. What do you think of that?”
It’s a marathon again as he searches through his mind for the word he wants to say. “Gollum in the caves. Answer, or you can’t cross the bridge. What’s black and white and red all over?”
“Work for it,” says Roberta. “I know you can do it.”
“Riddle!” he says. “Yes, marathon but worth it! The word—riddle!”
“Very good.” Roberta gently touches his hand. He takes a long look at her. She is older than him. He knows this, even though he has no idea how old he actually is. She’s pretty, in a motherly sort of way. Blond hair with a hint of brown roots, and just a little makeup. Her eyes seem younger than the rest of her face. But that blouse . . .
