Girl One(103)

I’d never see my mother again. I’d come so close to finding her, but at the last minute I’d failed. That loss was unimaginable. I couldn’t believe I’d ever accepted my mother as a simple person, somebody to move beyond and outgrow. A woman so one-dimensional and explicable that I could tuck her into the background of my own ambitions. Now, wherever she was, I’d never be able to tell her that I finally knew her.

That message on the Strouds’ answering machine, a lonely echo playing to a house where no one lived anymore. It would be the last time I heard her. I remembered standing there in that abandoned home and realizing for the first time how much my mother sounded like me. How much I sounded like her. Her voice still lived inside me. Everything I’d ever said held an echo of her, hidden there, whether I heard it or not.

I drew on that. My mother’s voice, wound throughout mine. “Stop,” I said, and this time, the weakness left my voice: it rang clear and pure as a struck bell.

But the noise kept on around me, murky and thick, penning me in. Isabelle screamed. Heavy breathing—whose? The violence around us took on a new shape, a roughness that made my belly clench. I was too aware of our three bodies, powerless and hurting.

My mother’s face. My mother’s voice. Standing on the bright brink of the future. I’d held on to Bellanger’s letters for so long, but there’d been a time before my memory was formed when she held me for the first time, my skin damp and waxy, skin designed for another world. And she leaned down to whisper into my ear, Welcome to the world, my daughter.

“Stop,” I called. “Now.”

And the world halted. The rest of the noise ceased and stilled. It was such a relief to be in the quiet that I just lay there, panting, for a small lifetime. I mentally mapped out the pain in my body. The tender softness in my belly, as bruised and soupy as a dropped piece of fruit. The sharper pain at my wrists where they’d been tied together. A hot, raw scrape of pain where I’d fallen onto the ground, my cheek cut by stones or the jutting, delicate bones of a bird.

Into the darkness, I spoke, and I felt their minds out there. Mapped like a constellation. I reached into the nearest one. “Untie me,” I said. My mother’s voice still there underneath mine, holding it steady when it threatened to crumple inward.

After a second, fingers scrabbled at the knots. It took longer to undo the knots than it had to secure them. I listened for Cate and Isabelle, tried to feel out their specific minds. Cate, wounded and cautious; Isabelle, blank and smooth as dark glass. The ropes slithered away from my wrists. “Take off my blindfold,” I said. My hands ached. I shook them out, feeling the reassuring starry pain of pins and needles as the blood crept back.

Fingers at the back of my skull, pulling at my hair, stinging. The blindfold fell away and I could see everything. I almost wanted to shut my eyes. Not just against the tender brightness of the sun, but the ugliness of what had been revealed to me: the men statue-still or collapsed, Isabelle bandaged and tear-soaked, Cate. Cate.

Cate lay very still, curled into a rough fetal position, one eye bloodied and bruised. The strap of her top was pulled off her shoulder, her jeans unbuttoned, and I went to her, kneeling in the grass. Carefully, I fixed her clothes again, slipping her strap back into place against her collarbone. Just a few hours ago, we’d been in the motel room, and I’d been laughing and hungry as I’d tugged her clothes off.

I looked a question at her, and Cate shook her head, her eyes barely lightening. But coming even that close was too much. The careless greed—feeling like they were owed any part of her miraculous self—

“How are you doing this?” she asked under her breath, where nobody else could hear. “Your eyes. You were blindfolded.”

I shrugged. I didn’t want to waste words. My power felt stronger here, rooted in my breath, than it had when it was tied to my gaze. I gripped Cate’s shoulder once, a reminder that I was here with her, and stood.

Across from me, Isabelle’s face was sticky with tears, eyes blotted and swollen. Her arms were bandaged, bulky and white and distorted, spotted with blood—but no. It was the stranger’s shirt—the stranger Isabelle had attacked first, now lying in the grass, not moving, his tender, graying skin exposed. Orange Shirt must’ve ripped it from his back and used it to blunt Isabelle’s touch. Just like I’d been blindfolded.

I was rattled by their efficiency. How quickly they’d looked at us and charted out our softest spots. The places where our power could be extracted, muted, and stripped from us.

Orange Shirt stood too close to Isabelle. The other two men were arranged in a loose semicircle, watching me. They didn’t talk. They didn’t move. Their faces held only a dulled, distant panic, the fear of dreamers. There was a strange silence suspended over everything, everybody just waiting, held still by my voice. Like game pieces waiting to be rearranged.

I went to Isabelle and untied her myself. The knots were harsh and tangled, hard to pick loose. The insects kept keening as if nothing at all had changed. I couldn’t tell whether any of the blood was hers.

“I’m sorry,” Isabelle whispered. “I thought we were stronger.”

“We are stronger,” I said, unraveling the last knot. Pulling away the bloodied T-shirt, I examined Isabelle’s arms. Unwounded. She flexed her fingers reflectively. “You’re okay?”

A quick nod. “What are you going to do to them?” she asked.