Once We Were

<What was it like?> I asked.

Addie stared blankly at the television screen. Kitty had called us out to watch a movie, and we’d joined her, but neither Addie nor I could concentrate.

<Like dreaming> Addie said. <But deeper. I can’t explain it. It’s . . . it’s a bit like being under Refcon, but without the lingering effects.> Refcon had always taken a few minutes to wear off, even after Addie woke, leaving her woozy and unsteady on our feet.

Back in Lupside, Addie had asked Hally about other potential side effects. There hadn’t been anything very serious, which meant it beat the other drugs Addie and I had taken as a kid, all in attempts to get us to settle.

Still, Hally had whispered an apology one afternoon. For not telling you, she said. I just—I still wasn’t sure if you would do it. And I thought, if Eva just got one chance to know what it could be like to be free, she . . .

Addie had just looked away, and nodded. They hadn’t been friends then. They hadn’t had reason to be.

Funny, how things changed.

Addie absentmindedly touched Kitty’s hair. A key rattled in the lock, and our fingers stilled.

“Hey,” Sophie said cheerfully, throwing open the front door. “Have you girls eaten yet?”

“Not yet.” Kitty smiled and seemed to lose all interest in the movie. “Can you bring us something from that last place?”

“Which place is that?” Sophie hung up her purse and slid out of her heels, laying them neatly on the shoe rack. “There’s a meeting in a few minutes, so I can’t go too far.”

“There’s a meeting with Peter?” Addie jumped up and followed Sophie into the kitchen. It was Saturday, so Sophie couldn’t mean anything for work. “Why now?”

Sophie shrugged and pulled a box of crackers from the cabinet. “Rebecca had something to do later, and —”

“Dr. Lyanne’s coming?” Addie said. “Is she bringing Jaime?”

“I don’t think so.” Sophie’s eyes scrutinized us. Again that look like she was afraid we might break. Emalia wore it more often, but Sophie wasn’t immune to over-worrying about us. “I wouldn’t think she’d want to bring him into the city, now that—well, you know.”

“Is she at Peter’s apartment already?”

“Actually, we’re meeting at Henri’s.”

Addie didn’t bother hiding our relief. If the meeting had been at Peter’s, we’d have to fight Sophie about leaving the building, and I was almost positive she wouldn’t have yielded. “When’s it start?”

“In about ten minutes,” Sophie said, but rushed to add, “Addie, it’s not a general meeting. You’re—”

“I just want to talk to her.” We were already halfway to the hall.

“Wait and go up with me,” Sophie called after us. “She might not even be there yet.”

“She’ll be there,” Addie said. “She likes to be early.”

Sophie smiled weakly. For a moment, the worry faded from her face, replaced by some emotion I couldn’t name. “You talk like you know her well.”

I thought about Dr. Lyanne watching Jaime pass in the gurney. Her soothing him in the darkness. Telling us the code to the basement doors. Showing up in the Ward holding Kitty’s hand. Out with us on the fire escape at Peter’s apartment, watching the cars below.

“Well enough,” Addie said.

Addie was almost right. Dr. Lyanne wasn’t at Henri’s apartment yet, but we’d only gone up a flight of stairs when we heard the rapid click of heels echoing below us. It was ridiculous to say we recognized Dr. Lyanne by the sound of her footsteps, but instinct made us pause in the stairwell.

Little by little, she came into view. Her ash-brown hair was longer now than it had been at Nornand. It might have been the humidity in Anchoit, but her hair seemed a little less straight, as well. She wore it coiled over her shoulder, strands floating around her face.

She’d grown thinner. The delicate planes of her face were sharper, her limbs birdlike. We’d learned that she was a couple years younger than Peter, so she could have only been twenty-eight or twenty-nine at most, but she looked so much older as she came up those stairs.

Dr. Lyanne had played a hand in helping us escape from Nornand—had tried, in fact, to rescue all the kids there. For that, she’d given up nearly everything. Emalia managed to rustle up enough falsified documents to get her a job at a clinic, but I got the impression that it was basic work, something Dr. Lyanne was immensely overqualified for.

Maybe she enjoyed it, though.

Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she regretted everything.

“Hi,” Addie murmured.

Dr. Lyanne’s head whipped up. For a moment, she didn’t reply, just studied us as we’d studied her. Had we changed, too, in the past weeks? Or was she comparing us to an even earlier version of ourself? The girl who had arrived at Nornand in a shiny, black car, dressed in a school uniform and her parents’ last hugs and the tattered remnants of her naivety?

“Hi,” Dr. Lyanne said. She closed the remaining distance between us. “Where are you going?”

Dr. Lyanne was not a comfortable-looking woman. She was all angles. She hardly ever smiled. She and Emalia had never gotten along, though Dr. Lyanne had stayed with her for a little while before finding her own place. Still, there was something I found comfortable about her. Maybe it was what Addie had told Emalia—we knew Rebecca Lyanne. We’d seen her when she sat shattered apart at Nornand, when her world lay in pieces and she had to choose how to put it back together. We’d watched her make the decision that brought her here, liaised with a hybrid resistance led by her brother.

There’s a connection that’s made when someone sees you at your lowest. But connection or not, Dr. Lyanne had told us the government would bury Nornand, and Jenson had done anything but bury it in his speech.

Our voice was a whisper. “You were wrong. About Nornand.”

The warning in Dr. Lyanne’s eyes read loud and clear. She moved past us. “We’re not talking about this in the stairwell.”

“You said they were going to bury it,” Addie hissed, following on her heels. “You said they thought it was a complete failure!”

“I got it wrong. It happens.”

“It happens?”

Upstairs, someone slammed a door, and we both flinched. Shouting drifted down, angry voices lifted in some unknown argument. Dr. Lyanne gave us a pointed look.

“Is he safe?” Addie didn’t need to specify who. This, finally, stopped Dr. Lyanne’s ascent. For a moment, the stairwell was silent again.

She looked down at us over her shoulder. “As safe as I can make him.”

Did we trust her? She’d failed before. She’d let Jaime down. She might again.

It would be too cruel to point this out. But perhaps cruelty could be excused in a situation like this? Perhaps when something was so crucial, it was okay to be ruthless. The government would stop at nothing to get Jaime back. There had never been another person like him: a hybrid surgically stripped of his second soul. A thirteen- year-old boy who’d had doctors slice into his brain and rearrange it to their own liking.

But in the end, we weren’t that heartless.

“Is he all right?” Addie said.

In the weeks between our escape from Nornand and his moving away, Jaime had gotten better in some ways and worse in others. On good days, he’d watched television with Kitty, helped us make sandwiches, and laughed like laughter was a language itself—one he hadn’t lost. On bad days, he’d grown so frustrated with his inability to say what he wanted to that he’d flown apart in rages. On the worst days, he acted like the rest of us weren’t even there. He wouldn’t look at us, wouldn’t try to speak, wouldn’t even move.

He’ll get better, Addie and I used to tell each other. Today’s just a bad day, and it wasn’t as bad as the last bad day. Tomorrow will be better.

We hadn’t even wanted to consider the alternative . . . that Jaime might get worse. That whatever those doctors at Nornand had done, the full extent of the damage hadn’t yet made itself known, and Jaime would