Malorie(46)

He points up the hall as the train shakes, and for a second he looks blurry to Olympia. Out of focus.

Then he bows. He holds one hand to his belly and extends the other arm out, as if he’s just wrapped a performance.

Olympia knows the word: theatrical.

“Thank you,” Tom says.

Henry winks.

Then he steps out of sight, and Olympia hurries to the door and slides it closed.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says. “Giving him your real name.”

“Oh, stop it,” Tom says. “Mom doesn’t have the same hold on us out here.”

“What does that mean?”

But she doesn’t feel like arguing. Instead, she looks to the closed door.

Her stomach swirls uneasily.

“There are bad people out here,” she says.

“Come on.”

“I mean it, Tom. And that one…”

“That one what?”

“That one acted just like the kind of person Mom says we need to watch out for.”

“Oh, really? You think so?”

“Yes, I do. She’s told us a million times to watch out for theatrical people. Mom says those people wear masks.”

Tom scoffs. “Now you sound like her.”

“Oh? And what’s so bad about that? You really need to think about what you’re saying before you say it.”

But Olympia’s eye is on the closed, sliding door. Her ear, too, listening. Is the man Henry still on the other side? Did he go back to his own room yet? Can she hear him moving up the hall?

“Hey,” Tom says. “I’m not gonna freak Mom out. Don’t worry about it. Okay? I just…there’s a lot more to the world than Camp Yadin. And we’re seeing that for ourselves. Right now.”

It doesn’t matter what Tom’s saying. Olympia’s listening to the hall.

Does he move out there?

She hears nothing. She steps to the door.

“The only way we’re gonna get anywhere,” Tom says, “is if we—”

“Close your eyes, Tom.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

He does.

Olympia slides the door open, quickly. She expects to see the silver-haired man standing, staring back.

But the hall is empty. She closes the door.

“What’s going on?” Tom asks.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

Tom scoffs again. “And you don’t think you’re starting to act like Mom? Jeez. The only difference is you don’t always wear your fold! Even when we’re outside!”

Olympia feels exposed. How does he know this?

“How would you know?”

“Are you kidding? I can hear the cloth against your skin when you wear it,” he says. He gets up and stands behind her. Both of them are reflected in the glass now. “And I know when there’s no cloth on that face of yours. So don’t get all dramatic on me. You break rules, too.”

She’s trying not to look him in the eye.

Don’t get all dramatic on me.

Dramatic.

Malorie has used the word a thousand times. Always a warning.

Is there a type? Are the ones who perform on this stage, the new world, the maddest?

“Anyway,” Tom says. “Get ready to close your eyes. To pretend to go along with the rules. Mom just left the dining car.”





SEVENTEEN


As the door to the dining car closes behind her, Malorie walks with her arms outstretched.

She brushes shoulders with someone.

“Excuse me,” she says.

She hears a woman whisper to someone else, “Why is she still wearing her fold?”

She hears fear in the question and knows the woman wonders if she should be doing the same. But there’s mockery, too. The same tone she heard so often at the school for the blind. She feels it. With each person she passes, with each conversation she momentarily halts, she knows the people on this train are wondering about her.

Paranoid.

But this train is set up to be wrecked. She knows this. Just like the house where she gave birth to Tom was set up to be wrecked. And the school for the blind. And, possibly, Camp Yadin, had they stayed there any longer.

This train will go mad.

There are more people here than lived in the house. But fewer than the school.

“Excuse me,” she says, as her gloved fingers nick what is probably the top of somebody’s head.

The first car is like the one she rode in with Shannon a lifetime ago, with people seated like they used to be.

She moves fast.

Tom and Olympia have been alone too long.

This train will go mad. She knows this. Eventually, the metal sheets Dean secured to the train’s side will come loose. Eventually someone crazy in an old-world way will lower something onto the tracks, too late for the man Michael to clear them. Eventually someone will see something and someone will go mad. A crazy person will be allowed onto the train. Someone who doesn’t believe in the creatures. Someone who will want everyone else to think the same way he does.

She reaches the end of the car. She opens the door.

In the moment between cars, she thinks of a blink. Perhaps, the inverse of one. Darkness, darkness, darkness, a blink of the world, darkness, darkness, darkness. She thinks of Shannon pointing out the dilapidated buildings and weird city names. Malorie laughed at her sister’s jokes, and soon they were making up stories, giving names to the people they saw out in the fields on the horizon. Giving them lives and interests, relationships and problems. Malorie remembers their mother, across the aisle, smiling at them. She wanted to impress Mom in that moment, wanted Mary Walsh to think her daughters funny. There was a boy at school, a writer already, whom everybody called imaginative, and Malorie wanted Mom and Dad (Sam and Mary Walsh) to say the same about her.