But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.
Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.
“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.
Hana
Before going home, I spend some time zigzagging through the streets near Old Port, trying to clear my head of Lena, and the guilt; trying to clear it of Fred’s voice: Cassie asked too many questions.
I bump onto the curb and pedal as fast as I can, as though I can push out my thoughts through my feet. In just two short weeks, I won’t have even this freedom; I’ll be too known, too visible, too followed. Sweat trickles down my scalp. An old woman emerges from a store and I barely have time to swerve, jump the curb, and skate back into the street, before I hit her.
“Idiot!” she shouts.
“Sorry!” I call over my shoulder, but the word gets lost in the wind.
Then, out of nowhere—a barking dog, a huge blur of black fur, leaps for me. I jerk my handlebars to the right and lose my balance. I tumble off the bike, hitting the ground hard on my elbow, and skid several feet as pain rips up my right side. My bike thuds next to me, screeching across the concrete, and someone is yelling, and the dog is still barking. One of my feet is entangled in the spokes of my front wheel. The dog circles me, panting.
“Are you okay?” A man speed-walks across the street. “Bad dog,” he says, smacking the dog’s head roughly. The dog slinks several feet away, whimpering.
I sit up, extracting my foot carefully from my bike. My right arm and shin are cut up, but miraculously, I don’t think I’ve broken anything. “I’m all right.” I pull myself carefully to my feet, rolling my ankles and wrists slowly, checking for pain. Nothing.
“You should watch where you’re going,” the man says. He looks annoyed. “You could have been killed.” Then he stalks off down the street, whistling for his dog to follow. The dog trots after him, head down.
I pick up my bike and wheel it onto the sidewalk. The chain has come off the stay, and one handlebar is slightly crooked, but other than that, it looks okay. As I bend down to adjust the chain, I notice that I’ve landed directly in front of the Center for Organization, Research, and Education. I must have been circling it for the past hour.
The CORE keeps Portland’s public records: the incorporation documents for its businesses, but also the names, birth dates, and addresses of its citizens; copies of their birth, marriage, medical, and dental records; violations against them and report cards and annual review scores, as well as evaluation results and suggested matches.
An open society is a healthy society; transparency is necessary to trust. That’s what The Book of Shhh teaches. My mom used to phrase it differently: Only people who have something to hide make a fuss about privacy.
Without consciously making the decision, I lock my bike to a streetlamp and jog up the stairs. I push through the revolving doors and step into a large, plain lobby, decorated with gray linoleum floor tiles and buzzing overhead lights.
A woman sits behind a fake-wood desk, in front of an ancient-looking computer. Behind her a heavy chain is hung across an open doorway; from it, a large sign is dangling: PERSONNEL AND AUTHORIZED CORE EMPLOYEES ONLY.
The woman barely glances at me as I approach the desk. A small plastic name tag identifies her as TANYA BOURNE, SECURITY ASSISTANT.
“Can I help you?” she asks in a monotone. I can tell that she doesn’t recognize me.
“I hope so,” I say cheerfully, placing my hands on the desk and forcing her to meet my gaze. Lena used to call it my Buy a bridge look. “See, my wedding’s coming up, and I completely flaked on Cassie, and now I have barely any time to track her down. . . .”
The woman sighs and resettles in her chair.
“And of course Cassie has to be there. I mean, even if we haven’t spoken . . . well, she invited me to her wedding, and it just wouldn’t be nice, would it?” I let out a giggle.
“Miss?” she prompts tiredly.
I giggle again. “Oh, sorry. Babbling—it’s a bad habit. I guess I’m just nervous, you know, because of the wedding and everything.” I pause and suck in a deep breath. “So can you help me?”
She blinks. Her eyes are a dirty-bathwater color. “What?”
“Can you help me find Cassie?” I ask, squeezing my hands into fists, hoping she won’t notice. Please say yes. “Cassandra O’Donnell.”
I watch Tanya carefully, but she doesn’t appear to recognize the name. She heaves an exaggerated sigh, pushes up from her chair, and moves over to a tiered stack of papers. She waddles back to me and practically slaps it on the desk. It’s as thick as a medical intake form—at least twenty pages long. “Personal Information Requests may be sent to CORE, attention Census Department, and will be processed within ninety days—”
“Ninety days!” I cut her off. “My wedding’s in two weeks.”
She draws her mouth into a line. Her whole face is the color of bad water. Maybe being here day after day, under the dull, buzzing lights, has begun to pickle her. She says determinedly, “Expedited Personal Information Request Forms must be accompanied by a personal statement—”
“Look.” I spread my fingers flat on the counter and press my frustration down through my palms. “The truth is, Cassandra is a little witch, okay? I don’t even like her.”
Tanya perks up a little.
The lies come fluidly. “She always said I’d flunk my evaluations, you know? And when she got an eight, she went on about it for days. Well, you know what? I scored higher than she did, and my pair is better, and my wedding will be better too.” I lean a little closer, drop my voice to a whisper. “I want her to be there. I want her to see it.”
Tanya studies me closely for a minute. Then, slowly, her mouth hitches into a smile. “I knew a woman like that,” she says. “You’d think God’s garden grew under her feet.” She turns her attention to her computer screen. “What’d you say her name was again?”
“Cassandra. Cassandra O’Donnell.”
Tanya’s nails click exaggeratedly against the keyboard. Then she shakes her head and frowns. “Sorry. No one listed by that name.”
My stomach does a weird turn. “Are you sure? I mean, you’ve spelled it correctly and everything?”
She swivels the computer screen around to face me. “Got over four hundred O’Donnells. Not one Cassandra.”
“What about Cassie?” I’m fighting a bad feeling—a feeling I have no name for. Impossible. Even if she were dead, she would show up in the system. The CORE keeps records of everyone, living or dead, for the past sixty years.
She readjusts the screen and click-click-clicks again, then shakes her head. “Uh-uh. Sorry. Maybe you got the wrong spelling?”
“Maybe.” I try to smile, but my mouth won’t obey. It doesn’t make any sense. How does a person disappear? A thought occurs to me: Maybe she was invalidated. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. Maybe her cure didn’t work, maybe she caught the deliria, maybe she escaped to the Wilds.
That would fit. That would be a reason for Fred to divorce her.
“. . . work out in the end.”
I blink. Tanya has been speaking. She stares at me patiently, obviously expecting a reply. “I’m sorry—what did you say?”
“I said that I wouldn’t worry too much about it. These things have a way of working out. Everyone gets what’s right for them in the end.” She laughs loudly. “The gears of God don’t turn unless all the pieces fit right. Know what I mean? And you got your right fit, and she’ll get hers.”
“Thanks,” I say. I can hear her laughing again as I cross back toward the revolving doors; the sound follows me out onto the street, rings faintly in my head even when I am several blocks away.
Lena
The sky doesn’t set so much as break apart. The horizon is brick-colored. The rest of the sky is streaked with shock-red tendrils.
The river has slowed to a bare trickle. Fights break out over water. Pippa warns us not to leave her circle, and posts guards around its periphery. Summer has already split. Either Pippa doesn’t know where she has gone, or won’t share her plans with us.
In the end, Pippa decides that smaller is better: The fewer people we involve, the less chance of a screwup. The best fighters—Tack, Raven, Dani, and Hunter—will be responsible for the main action: getting to the dam, wherever it is, and taking it down. Lu insists on going with them and so does Julian, and even though neither one is a trained fighter, Raven relents.
I could kill her.
“We’ll need guards, too,” she says. “Lookouts. Don’t worry. I’ll bring him back safely.”
Alex, Pippa, Coral, and one of Pippa’s crew, nicknamed Beast—I can only assume because of his tangle of wild black hair and the dark beard that obscures his mouth—will form one diversionary force. Somehow I get roped into heading up the second one. Bram will be my support.
“I wanted to stay with Julian,” I tell Tack. I don’t feel comfortable complaining directly to Pippa.
“Yeah? Well I wanted bacon and eggs this morning,” he says, without glancing up. He’s rolling a cigarette.
“After all I did for you,” I say, “you still treat me like a child.”
“Only when you act like one,” he says sharply, and I remember a fight I had with Alex once, a lifetime ago, after I had first discovered that my mom had been imprisoned in the Crypts my whole life. I haven’t thought about that moment, and Alex’s sudden outburst, in forever. That was just before he told me he loved me for the first time. That was just before I said it back.
I feel suddenly disoriented and have to squeeze my nails into my palms until I feel a brief shock of pain. I don’t understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.
“Look, Lena.” Now Tack raises his head. “We’re asking you to do this because we trust you. You’re a leader. We need you.”
I’m so startled by the sincerity of his tone, I can’t think of a response. In my old life, I was never a leader. Hana was the leader. I got to follow along. “When does it end?” I say finally.
“I don’t know,” Tack says. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him admit to not knowing something. He tries to roll up his cigarette, but his hands are shaking. He has to stop, and try again. “Maybe it doesn’t.” Finally he gives up and throws the cigarette down in disgust. For a moment we stand there in silence.
“Bram and I need a third,” I say at last. “That way if something happens, if one of us goes down, the other one still has backup.”
Tack looks up at me again. I’m reminded that he, too, is young—twenty-four, Raven once told me. In that second, he looks it. He looks like a grateful kid, like I’ve just offered to help with his homework.