Michael Grant - Lies

He sat down in the deep armchair by Bowie’s bed.

There was a goosenecked floor lamp that arched over his shoulder and shone a small circle of light on the book he opened. It was a war novel. About Vietnam, which was a country next to Thailand, where he’d been born. Evidently there had been a war there a long time ago, and Americans had been in that war. That wasn’t what interested him. What interested him was that they used a lot of helicopters and this particular novel focused on a soldier who flew a helicopter.

It wasn’t much, but it was all he had. The author must have done some research, at least. His descriptions sounded good. Sounded like they weren’t just made up.

This was not the way to learn how to fly a helicopter.

Bowie flopped his head angrily to one side, as if he was having a bad dream. Sanjit was close enough to put his hand on Bowie’s forehead. The skin was hot and damp.

He was a good-looking kid, Bowie was, with watery blue eyes and goofy teeth. So pale that sometimes he looked like one of the white marble gods Sanjit had seen in his long-lost childhood.

Those were cool to the touch. Bowie, not.

Leukemia. No, surely not. But it wasn’t a cold or flu, either. This had gone on way too long for it to be the flu. Plus, no one else had gotten sick. So it probably wasn’t that kind of thing. A catching thing.

Sanjit really did not want to have to see this little boy die. He had seen people die. An old beggar man with no legs. A woman who had died in a Bangkok alleyway after having a baby. A man who’d been stabbed by a pimp.

And a boy named Sunan.

Sanjit had taken Sunan under his wing. Sunan’s mother was a prostitute. She’d disappeared one day; no one knew if she was alive or dead. And Sunan had found himself on the streets. He didn’t know much. Sanjit had taught him what he could. How to steal food. How to escape when you were caught stealing food. How to get tourists to give you money for carrying their bags. How to get shop owners to pay you for guiding rich foreign tourists to the shop.

How to survive. But not how to swim.

Sanjit had pulled him out of the Chao Phraya River, too late. He’d taken his eyes off the boy for just a minute. When he turned back…too late. By the time he’d fished him out of the silty water it was too late.

Sanjit sat back down. He turned back to the book. His hands were shaking.

Peace came in wearing footie pajamas and rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

“I forgot Noo Noo,” she said.

“Ah.” Sanjit spotted the doll on the floor, picked it up, and handed it to her. “Hard to sleep without Noo Noo, huh?”

Peace took the doll and cradled it to her. “Is Bowie going to be all right?”

“Well, I hope so,” Sanjit said.

“Are you learning how to fly the helicopter?”

“Sure,” Sanjit said. “Nothing to it. There’s some pedals for your feet. This stick thing called a collective. And another stick called…something else. I forget. But don’t worry.”

“I always worry, don’t I?”

“Yeah, you kind of do.” Sanjit smiled at her. “But that’s okay, because the stuff you worry about almost never happens, does it?”

“No,” Peace admitted. “But the stuff I hope for doesn’t happen, either.”

Sanjit sighed. “Yeah. Well, I’m going to do my best.”

Peace came and hugged him. Then she took her doll and left.

Sanjit returned to the story, something about a firefight with “Charlie.” He skimmed along, trying to glean enough clues to figure out how to fly a helicopter. Off a boat. Next to a cliff.

Loaded with everyone he cared about.

SEVENTEEN

15 HOURS, 59 MINUTES

“MOTHER MARY? CANI get up and be with you?”

“No, hon. Go back to sleep.”

“But I’m not tired.”

Mary put her hand on the four-year-old’s shoulder. She led him back to the main room. Cots on the floor. Filthy sheets. Not much she could do about that anymore.

Your mother says that you have done enough, Mary.

Mother Mary, they called her. Like she was the Virgin Mary. Kids always professed admiration for her. They admired her all to pieces. Big deal. Not really very helpful as Mary trudged through the daily, nightly, daily, nightly grind.

Sullen “volunteers.” Endless battles between the kids over toys. Older siblings constantly trying to dump their brothers or sisters off on the day care. Scratches, scrapes, sniffles, bloody noses, loose teeth, and ear infections. Kids who just wandered off, like Justin, the latest. And endless, endless series of questions to be answered. A demand for attention that never let up, ever, not even for a second.

Mary kept a calendar. She’d had to make her own, carefully drawing it out on a big piece of butcher paper. She needed big spaces to write endless reminders and notes. Every child’s birthday. When a kid first complained of an ear infection. Reminders to get more cloth for diapers. To get a new broom. Things she needed to tell John or one of the other workers.

She stared at the calendar now. Stared at a note she’d made to give Francis a day off in honor of three months’ worth of great work.

Francis had given himself his own time off.

On the schedule a note from weeks earlier to find “P.” That was code for Prozac. She hadn’t found any Prozac. Dahra Baidoo’s medicine cabinet was just about empty. Dahra had given Mary a couple of different antidepressants, but they were having side effects. Vivid, absurd dreams that left Mary feeling unsettled all day long and made her dread sleep.

She was eating what she was supposed to.

But she had started vomiting again. Not every time. Just some of the time. Sometimes it came to a choice between not eating and allowing herself to stick her finger down her throat. Sometimes she couldn’t control both impulses, so she had to choose one.

And then sobbing, filled with hatred for her own mind, for the little cancers that seemed to eat at her soul night and day and night and day.

Your mother misses you….

On the calendar, Mother’s Day was a mark in red, “15th b’day!” She twisted Francis’s watch around and checked the time. Could it really be that late? Sixteen hours now. Sixteen hours until she would be fifteen years old.

Not long. Had to be ready for that, the big fifteen.

Had to be ready to fight the temptation that came to each kid in the FAYZ as they reached that deadly date.

Everyone knew by now what happened. Time would seem to freeze. And while you hung in a sort of limbo, a tempter would come to you. The one person you wanted most to please. The one you wanted most to be reunited with. And they would offer you escape. They would beg you to come across with them, to step out of the FAYZ.

There were a hundred theories of why it happened. Mary had heard numerological theories, conspiracy theories, astrological theories, every variation on aliens, government scientists….

Astrid’s explanation, the “official explanation,” was that the FAYZ was a freak of nature, an anomaly no one could understand, with rules the kids inside the FAYZ should try to discover and understand.

The weird psychological effect of the big fifteen was just a distortion in the mind. There was no reality to the “tempter” and no reality to the demon that followed it.

“Just your mind’s way of dramatizing a choice between life and death,” Astrid had explained with her usual slightly superior tone.

Mostly kids didn’t think about it. To a ten-or a twelve-year-old, age fifteen seemed a long way off. When your fifteenth started getting closer you started thinking about it, but Astrid-back when they still had electricity and printers-had actually printed up a handy little instruction sheet called “Surviving 15.”