Morning is my least favorite time of day. Even in June, the air outside my bed is cold and damp. I rush to dress, rush to wash, rush downstairs to make breakfast for Paul and me.
This morning my brother is nowhere to be seen.
“Paul! We’re going to be late!” I call up the stairs as I scramble about, stuffing leathery apples into lunch bags-paper, not plastic. My father doesn’t allow plastic in the house.
Eventually Paul wanders down the stairs. His hair is a mess and his eyes remind me of thunderclouds. He’s still in his pajamas. “We’re not going,” he says.
Paul never wants to go to school. He’s always made excuses, ever since he was a little boy-the school smells, it’s too hot, he has a stomachache, he doesn’t learn anything anyhow. Over and over again, and I’m the one who ends up having to tell my father. “Do we have to do this again? Really? Do we?”
“So don’t, then.” He slumps in his chair and stabs his spoon into his porridge.
It’s a flippant answer, one that would normally set off an argument between us, but today it doesn’t. Today it twists my stomach into a knot. There’s a reason Paul doesn’t want to go, a reason that extends beyond his black eye or the bullying from the other kids or just plain not liking school. “Tell me why,” I say. “What is it?”
“Your hair is falling out of your braid.”
“Don’t change the subject.” I touch the back of my head anyhow and sure enough, a strand of hair drifts free.
“Told you.”
“You’re still changing the subject.” I rip the hair band from my braid and start to retwist it, but Paul takes it from my hands.
His long fingers weave themselves into my hair, dividing it into three new strands. “I had a vision,” he says.
I bite my lip. He’s done this deliberately, trapping me like this so I can’t whirl around and glare at him. We both get visions, Paul and I, but Paul’s are different than mine. Mine are like dreams, surreal, strange. Sometimes, when they come while I’m awake, they show me the stories of people’s lives, whether I want to watch or not. But Paul’s? They’re like prophecies, terrible and violent and brutal. They leave him broken in their aftermath. “When? Of what?”
“Does it matter?”
“You know it does.”
“There. Not quite as good as what the Corridor girls do with theirs, but not bad.” He takes the hair band from me and he snaps it around the end of my braid. “Just let it go, Cass.”
I should, but I can’t. Paul has always shared his visions with me-up until recently. One more item on the growing list of things he won’t talk to me about anymore. “Come on,” I say. “Tell me. You always feel better when you do.”
“Do I?” He snorts. “Do I really? Since when do you know how I feel about anything?”
“Paul,” I say, because what else is there to say? It’s not about figuring out what his vision means. It’s about dividing its weight in half so we shoulder the burden together.
“Cass,” he says, “would you quit trying to be my mother? I had one. She’s gone. I don’t need another.”
“That’s not fair, Paul. You know that’s not fair.”
And like that, he snaps. “Damn it all, Cass!” His fist pounds down on the kitchen table, sending a glass flying. It shatters across the floor. Sunlight catches on the fragments skating toward me, casting prisms around the room. My vision blurs, and it takes everything I have to make sure I stay here, attached to the earth. Spirit is coming for me. Spirit wants to take me under.
Slowly the world settles back into place as I bend to pick up the shards of glass. My hands are shaking-from anger? From fear? I’m not sure. Both, maybe.
Paul must sense this. He crouches beside me and slips the glass carefully from my hand. “Let me do this,” he says. “Go outside. Do what you need to do.”
I feel myself nod and will my legs to move. My head is light, fuzzy, like it always is when spirit comes to call, as if a veil has descended in my mind, detaching me from my body. I hate this feeling, like I’m no longer part of myself. Paul hates it too, because sometimes when this happens, it’s not just spirit that takes me. When I was younger, I’d have seizures-another reason why we still live here, close to medical help-and though I haven’t had one in years, every time this happens, I brace for them, for the loss of myself, for the force that takes hold of my body and shakes me free of it.
For some reason, setting my hands on the earth, digging my fingers deep into her soil, as if I might grow roots myself, staves off the seizures. Keeping spirit away, though, isn’t so easy. If it wants me, nothing I do will stop it from taking me under into a world of blackness and shadows and monsters.
This is my problem, my curse, the counterpoint to Paul’s visions. My mother said it was a gift, but I think she was wrong.
Later, after the glass is swept up, after I’ve come inside to wash the dirt from my hands, Paul makes tea. This is his way of making amends.
Our tea isn’t really tea at all, but an infusion of minced dandelion root-not what anyone would drink by choice, but real tea hasn’t been imported into the UA since continental quarantines were implemented after the first outbreak of Plague. Since my father refuses to deal with the Band-controlled black market, we’re left with our sorry substitute. Puts hair on your chest, my father always says, to which we reply: Gee, Dad. Great. Just what we’ve always wanted.
“It needs to steep,” Paul says. He refuses to look at me. “I’m going to the tree.”
I want to tell him it’s okay, that I know he didn’t mean to break the glass or upset me. Instead I just go upstairs and get a basket of found things, add it to the tea tray, and head outside for the telling of Paul’s vision.
Vision doesn’t really describe what happens to Paul. Sometimes the lost whisper to him in his dreams, telling him their sorrows, their grief, as if he’s their confessor. Occasionally they ask him to release them. These encounters leave Paul worn and grim, but it’s the other visions, the ones that foretell the future, that trouble us both. We decode them together, trying to make some sense of the bizarre symbols, the totems, the omens. Most times we don’t decipher what they mean until afterward, when it’s too late, but we still try, hoping that one day we’ll unlock the code. This is what torments Paul, that he has the power to stop things, terrible things, if he could only decipher what he sees. I understand how he feels. What good is a gift when you don’t know how to use it?
We settle under the apple tree, the one where we spread our mother’s ashes, school long forgotten. Paul builds a fire as I take the basket in my hands and ask the items inside what they want to be. The keys whisper to me, and so does a length of twine. As I wait for Paul to speak, I begin to twist the twine into knots, stringing the keys between them. I will give it to Paul once I’m finished, and knowing him, he will feed it to the fire. But that’s okay. I know these things I create with my hands aren’t for me to keep. It’s the giving that’s important.
Today I don’t have to wait long for Paul to speak. He rushes into the words as if he can’t stand to keep them inside himself any longer. “I was a raven, and I was flying,” he says.
I close my eyes. Key and knot, key and knot. A key to open the door of Paul’s vision, and a knot to close it firmly behind him.
“I was above our house,” Paul says, “circling over and over again, waiting for you to come home, but I knew you wouldn’t. No one would, except me because I was already here, and every time I tried to fly away to find you, to find anyone, I couldn’t. It was like there was an invisible rope tying me in place. And then someone shot me and I fell.”
“Oh.” The keys drop from my fingers, falling on the earth with a metallic clatter. I know Paul is waiting for me to say something, but I can’t find words. They’re trapped in my heart. This is not a good vision. I don’t know what it means, but I feel the warning in it. Something bad is on the way. I grapple for the keys, as if they really do open another place, a place where we might be safe, but they keep slipping out of my grasp.
“Here,” I say when I finally get ahold of them. “Put them on, Paul. You need to wear these.”
But before he can take them from me, our father’s truck rattles down the driveway, going fast-far too fast.
Paul gets up first, and when he breaks into a run, I follow. Our father leaves for work before dawn, long before we wake for school. He gets off after dark. He would never come home from work so early unless something terrible had happened. The worst kind of terrible.
We draw to a halt just as the door groans open. My father slides out. If he’s surprised to see us at home, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he’s pale. “You two get in the house. Now!”
Paul arches an eyebrow at me, but we do what our father asks, springing away like frightened deer. Once inside, we hover behind the front door, peering out the window. As the dust cloud dissipates, we see my father’s not alone. A woman gets out of the truck, hauling an ancient leather bag with her. She’s about my father’s age, judging from the gray at her temples; squat, but not fat, and grim.
“Who is she?” Paul whispers.
“I don’t know.” I feel as if I should, though.
“Do you see anything?” Paul asks.
I let my eyes drift out of focus and scan the sky, but it’s free from anything hinting of spirit involvement. “Nothing. Nothing spiritual, anyhow.” Our father draws an old rifle, still as lethal as any modern weapon, from behind the seat of his truck and glances our way. “Searchers?” I say.
“Maybe.” Paul turns away from the window. “I haven’t seen him like this in ages.”
“Me neither.” My heart flutters at the thought of the last outbreak, when we were almost taken in a search. The searchers caught up to us at the mag-station on the edge of the reserve, only a mile from our home, at the same time the Band men found us. For three long hours the Band hid us in the bowels of the mag-station, safe beneath the layers of earth blocking the searchers from tracing the signals from our chips. When they finally escorted us home, we found our father sitting on the porch, cradling his rifle. He pressed us to his chest, and then pushed us inside so we wouldn’t see him cry. He wears the same look now-ashen faced, jaw clenched tight, a worried pallor framing him. The sight of his frailty hits me in the gut.
His footsteps are heavy on the porch. He heaves the door open as if it weighs as much as the world itself and looks at both of us slowly, as if time is winding down. “Pack your things. Only what’s absolutely essential- clothes, food, tools.”
Paul makes for the tool shed. I dart upstairs and begin pulling things from drawers, my mind spinning as I try to decide what we need. Clothes. Needles. Thread. Soap. Underwear. Socks. Shoes. What else, what else? I run from room to room and back again, frantic, panicking at the idea that today, this very afternoon, we are leaving. What if we never come back?
When I finally come downstairs, I set the boxes next to a sack of potatoes and a duffel of tools. Will this be enough? What have I forgotten? What would my mother have taken, if she was here? The china? The curtains? The photograph of my grandparents? I don’t know, I just don’t know.
“Cass.”
I turn to find my father standing there, looking like he’s on the verge of tears.
“That’ll do, starshine,” he says. “Come into the kitchen.”
I follow him, and then wish I hadn’t. An array of surgical instruments is spread over the kitchen table. The woman from the truck stands at our sink, washing her hands. She doesn’t look up.
“Cassandra,” my father says, “this is Madda.”
I should acknowledge her, but I can’t. All I see are needles and scalpels, a neat row of silver. My throat’s so thick with fear that I can’t even ask what’s happening.
“Cass?” my father repeats. “You okay?”
Slowly, I raise my gaze to meet his. “What is going on?”
“Tell her,” the woman says. “The short version. We need to get this over with if we want to make the tide.”
“Plague,” my father says. “A new strain. Airborne, they think, because it’s jumped the quarantine grids.”
I close my eyes. In my mind, I see Paul’s raven circling our house. Is this what his vision was trying to tell us? My father is still speaking about the searches, how there aren’t enough full bloods in the Corridor, how the UA is now rounding up half-bloods, how we’re not safe. I hear him say these things, but what he’s really saying is we’re leaving. We’re leaving our home, the only home we’ve ever known, the one we’ve worked so hard to keep.
“You know what happens to the ones the searchers take,” he says.
I do. Every Other does. We die.
“Where are we going?” Paul asks. He’s standing just outside the kitchen, as scared as me, but at the same time practically shaking from excitement. He knows the answer to his question already. There is only one place to go.
“The Island,” my father says. To treaty lands. To the Band.
“We’re removing your chips,” Madda says as the kettle starts to whistle. “No chip, no way to track you. Besides, best you have nothing of the Corridor left on you. They don’t look kindly on that sort of thing on the Island.”
“I’ll go first,” I say, but Paul pushes past me, rolling up his sleeve, exposing the chip in his forearm that allows us to connect to the UA etherstream. He takes a seat at the table and offers up his arm like a sacrifice to the gods.
Neither of us makes a sound as Madda slices our skin and digs out the chip, but we’re both pale and shaking afterward. My father and Madda load the truck while we sit on the porch, wrapped in blankets, sipping at Madda’s flask of whiskey. I hate alcohol, but when the only thing to cut the pain is willow bark tea, even I will allow myself a sip-but just one. Paul cradles his bandaged arm close to him. I hold mine out to the wind, letting it cool the heat rising from the wound. Later we’ll both have scars. This is how they’ll know where we came from when we get to the Island, that we weren’t born there, that we weren’t raised native. The Band might open its arms wide to us now, but they’ll never, ever let us forget that we came from the Corridor first.