“Are you awake?” he asks. His voice is creaky, almost inhuman.
“Yes,” I say, straightening up, blindly pushing back his hair.
Somewhere else in the truck I hear the sound of bags crinkling, Kettle chips crunching. But Maddie’s snacking on the truck’s cargo is the least of my worries right now.
“You’re in withdrawal,” I say.
His rattling gasps are made all the more terrifying by the fact that I can’t see him. “Gabriel?” The response is a pitiful groan. “Where does it hurt?”
It takes him a while to get up enough breath to say, “It’s like someone wrapped twine around all of my organs, and pulled.”
I touch his arm and am frightened by the tension of his muscles. I swear I can feel his veins. “Keep talking to me,” I say.
“I can’t.” He jerks away from me when I touch his hand, and I hear the thump of his clenched body hitting the floor.
“Gabriel?”
“You have to give me more angel’s blood,” he whimpers, actually whimpers, and it’s so terrifying that I actually want to do what he’s asking. “Just a little. Just for the rest of the way.”
“I can’t.” I lie beside him and pretend that I can see him as I stare into the darkness. His cold breaths are brushing my face. They smell like blood and something sour. “I wouldn’t be able to see what I’m doing with the needle. I could kill you.”
“I don’t care,” he whispers.
I pretend I didn’t hear that.
“It won’t be much longer,” I say gently. “Try to rest. I’ll keep watch. It’s what my brother and I used to do, to protect each other.”
Gabriel makes a sound that could be a groan or a laugh. “Jenna was telling the truth,” he says. “You think it’s your job to take care of everyone.”
“What are you talking about? When did she say that?”
“Before,” Gabriel says. His voice is trailing off. I am sure he’s delirious with pain and withdrawal.
“Before what?”
“Before she got sick.”
I sit up, knocking over a box of snacks and creating so much noise that for a second I see white. “What did she say?” My voice is high, anxious. There’s tightness in my chest.
He doesn’t answer me, and I shake his shoulder. He grumbles protest, shifts away from me. “She said you were so busy trying to be brave that you just didn’t realize. But Housemaster Vaughn did, and that put you in danger.” His voice is fading as sleep begins pulling him down.
“Realize what?” I say. I’m getting desperate. I knew Jenna was keeping secrets from me, but they died with her, and I never thought I’d know any of them. But now, to hear her words from Gabriel’s lips, it’s almost, just a little, like having her back with me.
This was probably a conversation Jenna and Gabriel had in confidence, or else he would have told me about it when he was more lucid. But the withdrawal and the delirium have made him suddenly honest, and maybe I’m wrong for taking advantage of this, but I can’t stop myself from asking the question again. “What didn’t I realize?”
He answers me, just before I lose him to sleep. “How important you are.”
Chapter 13
THE TRUCK STOPS. I don’t know how long it has been. Hours. A day, maybe. I reach out into the darkness and find Maddie’s small body and draw it to me. Thankfully she doesn’t scream.
Gabriel’s head is in my lap, and for the last several miles his measured breathing has told me he’s been asleep, but now he jerks upright. “Shh,” I tell him. “Stay low. We’ve stopped.”
We huddle together behind piles of boxes. A bag crinkles in Maddie’s hand; I close my fist over hers to silence it.
The sound of muffled voices makes my heart leap into my throat. Gabriel wraps his arm around my shoulders and stops breathing.
The door opens. I’m biting down on my lip, and there’s a scream beating around the inside of my throat like a moth. I can hear the rustle of Gathered girls moving away from the sudden light, can hear their frightened murmurs.
The clang of hard shoes on metal, the truck shuddering with someone’s weight.
“—could make it to West Virginia by morning to drop off the rest if we drive straight through.” A young man’s voice.
Boxes are being lifted, carried out.
Another voice says, “We could stop for the night.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“One of us could sleep in the front, and the other could sleep in the back.”
A riot of laughter, fading as it gets farther away.
I crane my neck over the boxes and see the sharp yellow of the sun setting behind bare trees. The drivers have disappeared into a building with a pink neon light that reads FLAMINGO SIX in cursive letters. Below that a handwritten sign reads OPEN.
“Come on,” I whisper, shuffling Maddie ahead of me. Gabriel is so out of it that he has to crawl after me on all fours. I try to be careful about helping him out of the truck, but I wind up pulling him a little harder than I mean to, worried the drivers will be back before we’re out of sight.
Maddie is holding her mother’s bag, stuffed full now with bags of Kettle snacks. I don’t know why Madame thought this child was stupid; so far she’s been a step ahead of me at every turn.
We wind up hiding behind a Dumpster while we watch the truckers unload box after box of Callie’s Kettle Snacks & Soft Drinks. It’s a good thing we got out when we did, because the boxes that were hiding us are gone. One of the men slides the back of the truck shut, and the other gets behind the wheel.
Gabriel stares blankly at his lap, heavy-lidded, not minding the fly that’s buzzing around his face. Maddie offers him a can of warm soda, and he brushes her off, muttering something I can’t understand.
The graying light matches his skin, and dark bags are sagging under his eyes; his lips are chalky and pale; there’s a ring of perspiration around his collar.
I don’t want to allow myself to think about just how bad this situation is, but I have to face it. Though there’s no snow on the ground here, it’s cold. And nearly dark. We have no place to stay. I have a very sick person and a child to think about. Our only possible ride from one town to the next is about to leave. I squint and can see the hand gestures of one driver talking to the other.
“We’re getting back into the truck,” I say.
“You’ll have nightmares,” Gabriel says, so softly and with such a slur that I have to replay the words in my head before I understand them. “You . . . In your sleep you told me.”
“I’ll be fine. Come on.”
Gabriel doesn’t fight me when I pull him to his feet, but we don’t move fast enough. The truck is gone before we even get close to it.
Maddie huffs indignantly, her hair fanning up around her forehead.
The door to the Flamingo Six opens, bursting with a laughing crowd of first generations who then scatter into cars. We must be near a wealthy area if people own cars, because only first generations can afford them. They seem to colonize in places, as though the rest of society is too difficult for them to face. There are those that boycott the birth of new children, pro-naturalists who intend to carry out the rest of their own lives without trying to bear or save us new generations, who are dying the day we are born.
Sometimes I envy them, to have lived seventy years already, to be so at peace with death.
I can hear distant city noise, and for the first time I look at what’s around us. The Flamingo Six appears to be a type of restaurant, and we’re standing in its parking lot. Farther off, down a little slope, there are buildings and streetlights and roads. “Look,” I tell Gabriel. It is the first hopeful place we’ve encountered, and I want him to see that there is life worth living outside of the mansion.
But his eyes are unfocused, his hair jagged and a deeper brown with sweat. He leans against me, and I can actually smell the illness on him. I frown, murmur his name sympathetically; he closes his eyes.
“What are you kids doing, standing there?” a woman calls out to us from the open doorway. She is surrounded by warm light and the smell of sweet things. A man comes up behind her, and Maddie darts behind me, clutching at my shirt hem.
The man, Greg, and his wife, Elsa, drew the conclusion that Gabriel is sick with the virus, and I didn’t correct them. I suppose the symptoms could look the same, and they probably wouldn’t have been so generous about feeding us if they’d known about the angel’s blood working its way out of Gabriel’s veins. Some first generations are opposed to our existence enough without thinking we’re all addicts.
They take us through the kitchen, which is bursting with steam and wonderful aromas, and they let us sit at a small foldout table in the break room, and give us bowls of chicken noodle soup and grilled sandwiches. Gabriel doesn’t eat. I can tell he’s trying to stay alert, but his shoulders erupt with spontaneous convulsions and his eyelids are so heavy.
“We started this restaurant thirty years ago, if you can believe it,” Elsa says, bringing us glasses of lemonade. Maddie gulps hers eagerly. “What a sweet thing,” Elsa says. I suppose she wants an explanation, because Maddie clearly is not my or Gabriel’s child.
“She’s my niece,” I say simply. Elsa doesn’t ask for more than that. In fact, she seems more interested in Gabriel. “You should eat something, sweetheart,” she tells him, sadness all at once filling up her dark eyes. “Tastes good. It’ll give you strength.”
“He just needs to rest. We’re trying to get home to West Virginia,” I say, thinking of what one of the truckers said. I’m assuming we rode as far as Virginia in the back of the delivery truck. “His family’s up there. We thought it’d be best if—you know, if he’s with them.”
I immediately feel bad about my lie when Elsa’s eyes fill up with tears and she excuses herself from the room.
“You’re too good at lying,” Gabriel murmurs, nuzzling his head against my shoulder. “You didn’t even flinch.”
“Shh,” I tell him. “Try to eat something.”
But a few seconds later he’s snoring.
When Elsa checks in on us, she frowns at Gabriel’s sleeping form. “Don’t you have anyone you could stay with tonight?”
Maddie, mouth full of sandwich, looks at me inquisitively.
I weave a lie, and I’m so tired and my mind is so muddled that I’d be surprised if it makes any sense. Something about a bus breaking down, and there not being another ride out until morning, and no, we have no place to stay. But Elsa believes it, which is when I truly begin to suspect that something is a bit off about her.