Kat Zhang - Once We Were

Addie’s disquiet weighed heavy against me. She hesitated.

There was no way to know.

The rest of the meeting passed in a blur. By the time I managed to refocus on something other than my own tumbling thoughts, the room had broken up into more private conversations. I didn’t notice Sabine heading toward us until she’d almost reached our side.

“Hi again,” she said to us and Devon. There was a casual warmth to her voice, as if we’d met more than once. “I’m glad you ended up making it.”

“Yeah.” Addie didn’t bother making our voice sound anything but dull.

The look in Sabine’s eyes said she understood. Hally broke the awkward silence that followed by smiling and introducing herself. As the two of them chatted, I snuck another glance at Peter. He was still seated at the dining table, deep in a conversation with Henri and Emalia.

I said.

How could I demand Peter rush into a rescue after what had happened at Hahns?

Still, I couldn’t help my impatience. Every day we didn’t act was another day those kids had to suffer. We’d survived Nornand. We knew what it was like.

Peter didn’t notice our furtive looks, but Henri, sitting across from him, met our eyes. He smiled and nodded in acknowledgment.

Jackson had told us Henri’s story early on. Ryan and Hally only looked foreign, but Henri truly was foreign. He hadn’t been born here—hadn’t grown up in the Americas, hadn’t even learned English until he was in his twenties.

He and Peter had met nearly five years ago, when Peter made his first trip overseas. Then a fledgling journalist, Henri got to hear firsthand about a locked-down country, one that few had entered or left in decades, since the first few years of the Great Wars. The two kept a clandestine correspondence even after Peter’s return to the Americas. And a few short months ago, Henri made the trip here himself.

I couldn’t imagine the danger he’d put himself in, sneaking into a country that hated him, where the ebony-dark gleam of his skin and the strange lilt in his words could so easily give him away. The latter was the real problem. There were people who looked like Henri in the Americas—many more, in fact, than there were people who looked like Ryan and Lissa. But no one spoke like Henri did. He couldn’t open his mouth without ruining the ruse.

Henri wasn’t even hybrid. And yet he’d come all the way across an ocean to try and help. Addie and I had seen the drafts of his articles, pages filled with strange sequences of letters, some with odd additions—extra marks where they didn’t belong. French, Henri had explained, and read us a little, the syllables sliding and flowing into one another.

They’d spoken French once, in parts of the Americas, especially far to the north. But languages other than English had been officially stamped out before Addie and I were born.

“How often do Peter’s plans fail like this?” Devon said abruptly. He was looking toward the dining table, too.

Hally sighed. “Devon . ”

“Not often,” Sabine said. “He’s meticulous.”

“Peter knows what he’s doing.” Hally looked to Sabine, as if for confirmation. “He’s been at it for years.”

“Almost five, now.” Sabine smiled, just a little. “I was in the first group he ever rescued—me and Christoph.”

“Long time,” Devon said.

A long time to be free, and yet not really free.

Sabine and Devon observed each other like careful statues. Devon was a couple inches taller, but somehow Sabine made it seem like they were exactly eye to eye.

“Yeah,” she said finally. And listening to that one word, I could hear the long, trembling echoes of every one of those years.

Addie and I were still awake that night, thinking about Hahns, and Nornand, and dying children, when the nightmares came for Kitty.

At first, it was just a restlessness in her limbs. An inability to keep still. Then she cried out—not a scream, but a whimper, as if even asleep she knew she had to hide.

I hurried from our bed. It was too dark to see much, but Kitty had curled up into a ball beneath her covers, her breathing erratic.

“Kitty?” I whispered. “Kitty, wake up.” I gripped her shoulders as she rocketed upward. Her eyes snapped open. “ Shh . . . shh . . . It’s all right.”

There were no tears. No screaming. Just two wide, brown eyes and five dull fingernails digging into our hand.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re okay.”

She pressed her face against our shoulder, a blunt, animal need for warmth and safety. I wrapped our arms around her. For a long time, neither of us said anything. Sometimes, the sight of Kitty in the bed next to ours—or just the feel of her in our arms—shocked me back in time to another shared bedroom. One where the beds were made of metal, not wood. Where the floor was cold and nurses came at intervals to check on us in the night.

Kitty spoke, her voice thick. “Eva, are Sallie and Val dead?”

“What?” The word dropped, a startled, black stone from our mouth.

Kitty’s hand tightened around our wrist until it hurt. “Our old roommate at Nornand. Sallie and Val. The one we had before you and Addie. The one—the one they said had gone home. Like Jaime.”

I shifted, trying to see her face, but Kitty resisted. Our shirt muffled her words. “You rescued Jaime. And Hally. You would’ve rescued Sallie and Val if they’d been down there, right?”

I couldn’t speak. I could only think Oh, God. Oh, God.

Kitty and Nina having nightmares was nothing new. But neither had brought up their old roommate since leaving Nornand. Had the meeting earlier tonight sharpened old memories? Or had they been silently wondering all this time, too frightened to ask?

I’d forgotten that they didn’t know Sallie and Val’s fate. I hadn’t stopped to imagine what it might be like for them, not knowing.

Still, I didn’t want to answer.

Go back to sleep, I wanted to say.

It was only a dream, I wanted to say.

But sleep wouldn’t solve anything, and this—this horror that had happened at Nornand—was not a dream.

How were we supposed to tell an eleven-year-old girl that her friend was dead?

That she had been, for all intents and purposes, murdered?

That no justice had been exacted?

But Kitty and Nina were waiting.

Addie whispered.

I crushed Kitty against us, not knowing if we were doing the right thing, if we were doing it the right way. “Yes, they are.”

She didn’t reply. Her hands tangled in our shirt.

I said helplessly.

But she hadn’t been all right, any more than we’d been all right, or Ryan, or Hally, or Jaime. We’d been out of Nornand for six weeks, and sometimes, I wasn’t sure what all right really meant anymore.

Kitty and Nina weren’t the only one with nightmares.

“You’re safe,” I whispered fiercely in Kitty’s ear. “Nothing will happen to you. I promise.”

I stayed with her for nearly an hour in the darkness, until she drifted back to sleep.

Henri had given us a world map three weeks ago, when Addie and I first arrived at Emalia’s apartment. Since you love it so much, he’d said in his lilting, accented voice, and laughed when Addie fixed it above our bed with sticky tack. He’d brought the map from overseas, so it was like no map Addie and I had ever seen. We’d been fascinated since we first found it rolled up in a corner of his apartment.